letter to the Red States

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Got this in an email. Don’t know who the author is, but it’s a great piece, so I’m sharing it here.
Dear Red States:
We’ve decided we’re leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we’re taking the other Blue States with us. In case you aren’t aware,that includes California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all the Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.
To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Dollywood. We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom. We get Harvard. You get Ole’ Miss. We get 85 percent of America’s venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama. We get two-thirds of the tax revenue, you get to make the red states pay their fair share.
Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition’s, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms. Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we’re going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they’re apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don’t care if you don’t show pictures of their children’s caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq , and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we’re not willing to spend our resources in Bush’s Quagmire.
With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the country’s fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92 percent of the nation’s fresh fruit, 95 percent of America’s quality wines, 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools plus Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT. With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia. We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.
Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred unless we’re discussing the war, the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61 percent of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals then we lefties.
Finally, we’re taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt weed they grow in Mexico.
Peace out,
Blue States

listings

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Over the years, I’ve accumulated a following of various catalogs. Clothes, especially, but there are other kinds as well.
But the catalog I got in the mail today is one of a kind in my long list of order offers. And I don’t know how or why they got my name. I can’t help wondering if someone put my name on their mailing list just to annoy me.
I mean, this is what this slick catalog is selling:
— a 20 CD set of lectures entitled “The Hand of God in the History of the World.”
— a read-aloud series for children: “How God Sent a Dog, Stopped Pirates, ande Used a Thunderstorm to Change the World.”
— a book: “Passionate Housewives Desperate for God.”
WTF!!! I guess their marketing guru never got a look at the sidebar of this blog.
Oh, and then there’s “The Wise Woman’s Guide to Blessing Her Husband’s Vision.”
Now I’m grinding my teeth!
In between all of this, pages of miltary, detective, construction, outdoor, and battle costumes and tools for boys. And what do the girls get? Equal pages of cutsy dresses and dolls, baking sets and aprons, tea sets and crochet gloves AND a book on “How to Be a Lady.”
Groan. Nausea. Twitches.
And. AND. This, and I quote from the blurb on “Return of the Daughters”:

For the first time in America’s history, young ladies can expect to encounter a large gap between their years of basic training and the time when they marry…if they marry. Now Christian girls all throughout our country are seriously asking: What’s a girl to do with her single years?

This documentary takes

… viewers into the homes of several young women who have dared to defy today’s anti-family culture in pursuit of a biblical approach to daughterhood, using their in-between years to pioneer a new culture of strength and dignity — and to rebuild Western Civilization, starting with the culture of the home.

I have to admit, the writing in this catalog is good, the presentation skilled. And that even makes it more scary. I am not linking to its website because I don’t want to give it any additional visibility.
Finally, the back cover:

A Creation Celebration. … each episode will build your appreciation for the brilliance of God’s design and will teach you how to dispel evolutionary myths…

Evolutionary myths!!!
This is one catalog that I’m going to feel great pleasure in throwing into the recycle pile. That is, after I rip off the address label and stick it in the mail with an order to take my name off their !@#$% list.

Myrln Monday: Last Day

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For a while before his death in April 2008, non-blogger Myrln (aka W. A. Frankonis, i. frans nowak), posted here on Kalilily Time some kind of rant or other every Monday. Our daughter, who has salvaged his published, performed, and none-such writings, continues to send me some to post posthumously.

Last Day
Last day means overs
(but not the do-overs of child games)
Mother ocean left soon behind
return to land’s hard facts
imminent.
Overs
hang in the air
like haze
hiding blue sky
and eyes.

a buncha backs

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Back #1: It was just a matter of time, I guess. Several nights ago, as I tried to lift my mother’s legs back onto her bed, I felt as though someone shoved a knife into the right side of the lower spine. It was a long night for me, as I painfully made my way to a chair, only to find it hurt too much to try and sit. Lots of Excedrin Back and Body later, I’m relatively OK as long as I don’t twist sideways or make a sudden move. I have a long history of problems with the right side of my body, including developing “drop foot” on my way to Harvard’s first BloggerCon five years ago. And it’s been all downhill from there.
Back #2: Despite the above, I wrapped an Ace lumbar support belt around myself, put on the cruise control, and drove out to see my daughter and family, who, I knew, would give me some TLC — which I needed for more reasons than my out of whack back. Luckily, I had left my new quarterstaff there, and that surely came in handy for limping around the yard.
staff.jpg
[Side note: Ronni Bennett has a section of her blog dedicated to the “Quarterstaff Revolution,” and I will be sending my photo to add to the growing collection.]
Back #3: Last week, I took a little trip back in time and finally got together with my college roommate and her husband, who live about a half-hour’s ride from here. Both she and her husband were good friends of mine all through college. She and I were the same size and coloring We shared a room and later an apartment right through grad school, and we also shared our wardrobes. She is still slim.. Our lives are about as opposite as possible these days, but the memories of all of the crazy college experiences we shared (including driving down to Daytona Beach for Spring break with three of our male classmates) are still ties that bind.
Back #4: Thanks to the Bush regime, this country is so democratically backward that we can only hope that the new president will have the strength and stamina to haul us back to where we belong. The latest indignity is PBS stalling about widely airing Torturing Democracy. It is, however, being aired by individual public stations, and you can watch it online.

red-faced redneck

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Caught in the act of being an a**hole.

Documented by CBS News:

After Palin finished her remarks this morning, the man holding the stuffed monkey seemed to notice that a video camera was pointed at him, at which point he removed the Obama sticker from the doll’s head and crumpling it up in his hand. He then handed the doll to a young boy who was watching the rally from his father’s shoulders. The boy’s parents later told CBS News that they weren’t acquainted with the man who gave their son the stuffed monkey.


If you’re embarrassed by the way you protest, there must be something wrong about the way you protest.
This guy deserves all the ridicule he gets. Pass it along.

old bones

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She has old bones. And they hurt. Wrist, elbow, shoulder neck. Hip, knee, ankle, toe. They all hurt.
I give her two Tylenol, and she sleeps. I hear her whimper. “Please,” she whispers. She’s never been able to tell me “Please what?”
Her old bones hurt. Teeth. Fingers. Time makes old bones. Her bones have had too much time.
My bones are starting to hurt too.

is the second American Revolution almost here?

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From here

In October 1, 2008, the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team was redeployed for 12 months on what is expected will be a permanent mission to respond to the threat of terrorist attacks on American soil and perform crowd control of unruly American citizens in the case of civil unrest. The force was renamed CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force and is now under the the daily control of United States Northern Command’s Army North, whose mission is to protect the United States homeland and support local, state, and federal authorities.

From here

[Congressman Brad Sherman] revealed that United States Congress was threatened with martial law if George W. Bush’s Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 was not passed.

“…the only way they can pass this bill is by creating and sustaining a panic atmosphere. That atmosphere is not justified. Many of us were told in private conversations that if we voted against this bill on Monday, that the sky would fall, the market would drop two or three thousand points the first day, another couple thousand the second day. And a few members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted no. That’s what I call fear fear-mongering, unjustified, proven wrong. We’ve got a week, we’ve got two weeks to write a good bill. The only way to write, to pass, a bad bill: keep the panic pressure on.”

On October 4, 2008, political consultant Naomi Wolf issued a statement on KEXP 90.3 FM Seattle, arguing that the deployment of several thousand American soldiers to perform crowd control on American soil, along with the threats of martial law reported by Brad Sherman, was in fact part of a coup d’état which has taken place in the United States. She called for the immediate arrest of George W. Bush. Watch the entire interview and get really scared.

Wolf connected her statements to the point of her new book: Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.
Naomi Wolf is exactly my daughter’s age and is considered one of the leaders in the third wave of feminism. Her writings are provocative and put forth extreme points of view as a way of broadening the debate and forcing deeper examinations of the issues she explores. She calls herself a “liberal feminist” rather than a “radical feminist,” and I’m right with her on that distinction.
Now, she warns that America is already a police state and intimates that only a revolution can give us back our liberties. In her previous book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, she listed the 10 steps necessary for a state to take control of individuals’ lives:
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy.
2. Create secret prisons where torture takes place.
3. Develop a thug caste or paramilitary force not answerable to citizens.
4. Set up an internal surveillance system.
5. Harass citizens’ groups.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release.
7. Target key individuals.
8. Control the press.
9. Treat all political dissidents as traitors.
10. Suspend the rule of law.
In her interview, above, she explains the ways these 10 steps have been completed in America.
This election needs to be our second Independence Day, the day the American people revolt against the coup d’etat carried out by the Bush administration and his Republican supporters.
We need to make Barack Obama the George Washington of a Second American Revolution.

the real author of the McCain vacation piece?

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On October 3, I posted material about a “My Holiday with John McCain” piece that has been circulating via email.
Today, this comment was left on that post:

(Note from a friend: This shocking account was written by Ana Dubey, a friend of my cousin and her husband, who have known Ana for many years. Ana has a PhD in psychology and has a private practice in San Francisco. My cousin’s husband went to business school with Ana’s husband, who has since started and sold a number of successful companies. Ana’s husband is currently a Managing Director of a private equity firm in the Bay Area. Ana and her husband are not political activists and don’t have any personal ax to grind. In fact, in writing this account of her experience with John McCain, Ana is acting outside of her own economic self-interest as she and her husband are among the top 3-5% of our population who would benefit from the McCain tax/economic policies. Please pass this on to anyone you know who might vote for John McCain.. Also please post it on blogs and send it to newspapers and radio stations).

Actually, many blogs have been posting about the vacation account, including what is known about the originator. A post on Telling Thoughts.com, where John Hay tried to track down the author, pretty much covers the information that is so far available. And according to that blog post:
Update 3* 17/9 – NB. Am now advised that the author is Anasuya Dubey PsyD. Apparently Ana is a highly regarded person and a Clinical Psychologist who was operating and studying in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2005. We are trying to contact her. If anyone can supply me with her email address it would be most appreciated. Please send details to john@tellingthoughts.com
Update* 18/9 – NB. Received an email this morning 18/9/08 @ 6.32 am from a Dr Michael Bower who claims to know Ana personally. He claims she has informed him that she has been speaking to a magazine which has requested her not to contact other media until a decision is made as to whether to go to print with Ana’s story.
If the story is true, it should be widely circulated before election day. If it’s not, that fact needs to be verified soon and the story buried.
Fair is fair.

calling all friends of mine — and b!X’s

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How about doing something really nice for b!X, whose recent employment ended when a wall in the old building where he was working fell down, revealing a substantial lining of black mold. That was sort of the final obscenity in a work environment that had gotten steadily worse over time.
B!X birthday is October 25, and when I asked him what he wanted, he responded by saying that he wished all of my friends would by one of his photographs, which he has for sale here. They come 8X12, matte finish, unframed, and printed by a professional photography shop.
This is “Broken Circle,” one of my favorites. I even bought a copy for my new living quarters:
broken.pngFlickr photostream list of subjects and pick one of those — for example, from his cemetery series , or his green door series, or his central east side (Portland) series. If you want one from there, just let him know and he’ll move it to his storefront so that you can buy it.
It’s never a great time to be out of a job, but this time it has to be the very worst.
Actually, if you know anyone who owns a bookstore and needs someone who can do just about anything that needs to be done — from ordering to inventory to cataloging to shipping to stocking shelves — give them b!X’s web site, where he posts his resume (of sorts) under “about,” which I quote here, just in case…. (He says he’s even willing to relocate.)

About The One True b!X

An eleven-year resident of the Portland of Oregon, born nearly forty years ago in upstate New York, he is a devout agnostic and misanthrope who aspires to be an at least passable rationalist. He believes that cynicism only results from first believing people are capable of better and then repeatedly being proven wrong.
If events were pictures and emotions were sounds, his memories would play as silent movies.
•

When he was very little, he learned the all-important lesson that adults don’t always know what the Hell they are doing, when he revealed to a number of grown men that the reason the ramp on the U-Haul truck his father was using to move out of the house was not steady was because they had failed completely to attach it properly.
During his senior year in high school, in response to an uncooperative student newspaper, he published several issues The Myra Stein Underground Press (named for an infamous teacher who one day disappeared without explanation), which despite being an anonymous publication he later saw sitting in his file on the guidance counselor’s desk.
His brief college career in the main was marked by the eruption of controversy over the playing of a bronze Henry Moore sculpture with percussion mallets, a debate which landed him in The New York Times and ultimately led to him writing (the night before it was due) a well-received term paper on social drama.
Prior to moving to Portland, in 1995 he helped organize the S. 314 Petition, one of the first large-scale Intenet petition efforts, which sought unsuccessfully to prevent passage of the Communications Decency Act, although it did yield him an appearance in Rolling Stone.
Shortly after moving to Portland in 1997, he become co-owner (and then sole proprietor) of the Millennium Cafe, which he then ignominiously proceeded to run into the ground, but not before holding two successful July 4th events at which people read aloud the Declaration of Independence.
From late 2002 through late 2005, he published the critically-acclaimed Portland Communique, an experiment in reader-supported independent journalism whose departure is still lamented by some today, although likely not by the people who falsely accused him of taking bribes in exchange for coverage.
Sometime in 2003, he discovered The Finger, a zine apparently published by Swan Island shipyard workers during World War II, which he made available online and for which he has perpetually-delayed plans to make available as an on-demand reprint.
In early 2006, he founded Can’t Stop the Serenity, an unprecedented annual global event consisting of locally-organized charity screenings of the Joss Whedon film Serenity to benefit Equality Now, which to date has raised more than $200,000, making it far more important than any of the many other Whedon-related fan efforts or websites for which he’s been responsible.
Late in the Fall of 2007, he helped launch Fans4Writers, a grassroots effort to support the Writers Guild of America in its strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, although he was involved only long enough to get the website up and running.
He no longer is employed at The Great Northwest Bookstore, and would not necessarily object to working at another independent bookstore if a full-time opportunity presented itself, and in fact might even be willing to relocate for it.
•

He neither bikes nor dances nor dates nor drives nor drugs nor swims. He does, however, drink. Oddly, he no longer smokes. He is a life-long resident of Red Sox Nation who, when not wearing his baseball cap, enjoys wearing a porkpie.

Rolling Stone outs McCain

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In a ten-page mini-biography, the current issue of Rolling Stone exposes McCain for what he is and always was: a conscience-less and undisciplined self-promoter.
The article, an indictment of McCain, not only as a manipulative politician, but, perhaps more importantly, a soulless human being, includes information like the following:

The reckless, womanizing hotshot who leaned on family connections for advancement before his capture in Vietnam emerged a reckless, womanizing celebrity who continued to pull strings.

Even McCain admits to an “immature and unprofessional reaction to slights” that is “little changed from the reactions to such provocations I had as a schoolboy.”

During his 1992 campaign, at the end of a long day, McCain’s wife, Cindy, mussed his receding hair and needled him playfully that he was “getting a little thin up there.” McCain reportedly blew his top, cutting his wife down with the kind of language that had gotten him hauled into court as a high schooler: “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.” Even though the incident was witnessed by three reporters, the McCain campaign denies it took place.

And this account of McCain’s first war-time plane crash (he crashed planes several times before that) reveals that he probably fools himself better than he fools others:

As the ship burned, McCain took a moment to mourn his misfortune; his combat career appeared to be going up in smoke. “This distressed me considerably,” he recalls in Faith of My Fathers. “I feared my ambitions were among the casualties in the calamity that had claimed the Forrestal.”

The fire blazed late into the night. The following morning, while oxygen-masked rescue workers toiled to recover bodies from the lower decks, McCain was making fast friends with R.W. “Johnny” Apple of The New York Times, who had arrived by helicopter to cover the deadliest Naval calamity since the Second World War. The son of admiralty surviving a near-death experience certainly made for good copy, and McCain colorfully recounted how he had saved his skin. But when Apple and other reporters left the ship, the story took an even stranger turn: McCain left with them. As the heroic crew of the Forrestal mourned its fallen brothers and the broken ship limped toward the Philippines for repairs, McCain zipped off to Saigon for what he recalls as “some welcome R&R.”

Later, these observations:

If heroism is defined by physical suffering, Carol McCain is every bit her ex-husband’s equal. Driving alone on Christmas Eve 1969, she skidded out on a patch of ice and crashed into a telephone pole. She would spend six months in the hospital and undergo 23 surgeries. The former model McCain bragged of to his buddies in the POW camp as his “long tall Sally” was now five inches shorter and walked with crutches.

By any standard, McCain treated her contemptibly. Whatever his dreams of getting laid in Rio, he got plenty of ass during his command post in Jacksonville. According to biographer Robert Timberg, McCain seduced his conquests on off-duty cross-country flights — even though adultery is a court-martial offense. He was also rumored to be romantically involved with a number of his subordinates.

Although McCain stresses in his memoir that he married Cindy three months after divorcing Carol, he was still legally married to his first wife when he and Cindy were issued a marriage license from the state of Arizona. The divorce was finalized on April 2nd, 1980. McCain’s second marriage — rung in at the Arizona Biltmore with Gary Hart as a groomsman — was consummated only six weeks later, on May 17th. The union gave McCain access to great wealth: Cindy, whose father was the exclusive distributor for Budweiser in the Phoenix area, is now worth an estimated $100 million.

In 1989, in behavior the couple has blamed in part on the stress of the Keating scandal, Cindy became addicted to Vicodin and Percocet. She directed a doctor employed by her charity — which provided medical care to patients in developing countries — to supply the narcotics, which she then used to get high on trips to places like Bangladesh and El Salvador.

Tom Gosinski, a young Republican, kept a detailed journal while working as director of government affairs for the charity. “I am working for a very sad, lonely woman whose marriage of convenience to a U.S. senator has driven her to . . . cover feelings of despair with drugs,” he wrote in 1992. When Cindy McCain suddenly fired Gosinski, he turned his journal over to the Drug Enforcement Administration, sparking a yearlong investigation. To avoid jail time, Cindy agreed to a hush-hush plea bargain and court-imposed rehab.

Ironically, her drug addiction became public only because she and her husband tried to cover it up.

Following his failed presidential bid in 2000, McCain needed a vehicle to keep his brand alive. He founded the Reform Institute, which he set up as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit — a tax status that barred it from explicit political activity. McCain proceeded to staff the institute with his campaign manager, Rick Davis, as well as the fundraising chief, legal counsel and communications chief from his 2000 campaign.

There is no small irony that the Reform Institute — founded to bolster McCain’s crusade to rid politics of unregulated soft money — itself took in huge sums of unregulated soft money from companies with interests before McCain’s committee.

And if the following don’t convince you that McCain is NOT the candidate to vote for, well….

At least three of McCain’s GOP colleagues have gone on record to say that they consider him temperamentally unsuited to be commander in chief. Smith, the former senator from New Hampshire, has said that McCain’s “temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him.” Sen. Domenici of New Mexico has said he doesn’t “want this guy anywhere near a trigger.” And Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi weighed in that “the thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded.

Indeed, McCain’s neocon makeover is so extreme that Republican generals like Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft have refused to endorse their party’s nominee.

“I’m sure John McCain loves his country,” says Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar under Bush. “But loving your country and lying to the American people are apparently not inconsistent in his view.”

After reading the whole of the Rolling Stone piece, one can’t help wondering if the email to which I refer in my post below is true. One also can’t help wondering how Fundamentalists and and others who say they value morality, ethics, and other requirements of the Ten Commandments can support the ego-centric McCain. I guess he spins well, and so they rationalize because they are mesmerized.
This issue of Rolling Stone also includes a harsh indictment of Sarah Palin in an article entitled “Mad Dog Palin”. This from that:

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she’s a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power. Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV — and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.

I think that if you quoted the above to a Palin admirer, he/she would give the response that Brian Williams (on the Letterman show last night) said that he expected to get from those individuals: “So….. your point is?”
Maybe this is going to be one of those times when most of the people do get fooled.