This from b!X’s site (who got the whole thing from here.) And if this just ain’t the Supremist irony!
“How much do you actually know about where the Pledge came from?
A Christian socialist who turned his back on religion. That’s the guy whose handiwork politicians of both parties and religious right leaders rushed to defend this past week.
Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister in upstate New York who sermonized against the materialism of the Gilded Age and who resigned from his church after businessmen cut off funding because of his socialist activities and lectures, wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892. Now his words, composed for a magazine-sponsored school program celebrating the quadricentennial of Columbus Day, are treated as a sacred writ.
Originally, he was going to place the word ‘equality’ in there with I ‘liberty’ and ‘justice’ but realized he’d get resoundingly berated, since most people didn’t at the time believe that blacks or women should be equal to white men.”
If you don’t check b!X’s site every day, you’re missing the best way to keep up with the ongoing sagas of our country’s most current embarrassing ironies.

All of this blogging about the “pledge” and b!X’s post about the time he refused to say it in high school reminds me of my checkered pledge past.
When I was a young student, we were a nation “indivisible” and not “under God.” No problem there for me. By the time I was a teacher and had to stand up with my class to say the pledge, the “God” thing had been inserted; no one ever noticed that, while my lips were moving, I wasn’t saying anything. Then came the Viet Nam war, and I was an Assistant 4-H Leader of a group of a half-dozen girls that included my daughter. I was protesting the war and refused to say the pledge. I’m probably the only 4-H leader that ever got fired for political insubordination. Heh.

Got this off Aussie Alan Moult’s page. He got if off SatireWire. And it did make me laugh.
Exclusive: Band of roving Chief Executives spotted miles from Mexican border.
El Paso, Texas (SatireWire.com)

(I posted this on Blog Sisters, but if it’s good enough for there, it’s good enough for here):
Halley Suitt’s candid and candied comments to probing interviewer Frank Paynter prove that she’s anything but.
Paynter’s latest interview of the blog’s most fascinating women (heh — that’s my arrogant editorial sidebar, so don’t attribute that to Frank) is a portrait of Halley that reveals her complex, creative, productive human mind, her wittingly raunchy female soul, and her attitude toward body that — well, go and enjoy the view yourself. Move over ol’ Madonna and Britney. We’ve got our own Madonna of the Blog.

Wow. It looks as though my new site, thanks to b!X’s energy and creativity, is at this moment #26 on the Daypop 40. And I think that I also have to thank much-read Gary Turner for much of that, since it looks as though it is his announcment and link to me that is helping me to get all those hits. That’s a first for me, so thanks to two of the really good guys!!
And while I giving thanks, thanks also to all of you who posted comments on complimenting this new design. Apparently it loads fast too, and that’s surely a good thing. I’m also interested to know how the type size works. I had b!X make it larger than usual, since I know that I have a hard time reading small type. Like, I love Mike Golby’s stuff, but boy is it hard on my eyes to read!
And, while b!X hasn’t made the Daypop 40, he’s poppin’ as well, tuning up his own blog design. There must be something in the air.