A Dog with Two Bones

That would be me, of late, the first bone being Ann Coulter's use of the word retard and the discussion that cropped up around it, the second being the looming threat of a Romney win and his promised repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

Some dogs chew more effectively on their bones, though, and my friend and fellow writer, Jeneva Stone is one of the big dogs. She re-posted one of her best this morning on Facebook, and I think it's not only required reading, it's imperative reading. I so wish the 24 people on my Facebook page who've checked LIKE on Mitt Romney's page would read Jeneva's essay. I wish many of my relatives would read Jeneva's essay. I hope that those of you indifferent to the Affordable Care Act will read Jeneva's essay and ponder on it a bit.

Here's an excerpt, but please read the entire, brilliant and impassioned plea.

A few years ago, I read most of T.R. Reid's book, The Healing of America, in which he suggests that universal healthcare arose in other countries through some sense of national commonality or other community sensibility: the Brits pulled together after WWII, the Germans rallied round the idea of the common German man (or person, I suppose), and I don't recall what drove the other countries' reasoning. Fairness, I suppose. Cost savings. Desire to improve quality of life. You know, all that reasonable stuff.
Well, not here. In his first chapter, Reid says, "Americans generally recognize now that our nation's health care system has become excessively expensive, ineffective, and unjust." Note that word "unjust." Read the status update above again. "Unjust" because, apparently, that's the way we like it. In his conclusion, Reid notes that "the American reliance on private, for-profit health insurance companies for the bulk of medical coverage is in accord with American values of capitalism and freedom."
As Americans, we value not only capitalism and freedom, we also value merit and "hard work." Because our health insurance system developed as a jobs benefit, we have become accustomed to associating access to health care with the ability to hold a job. People who can't hold jobs don't deserve "benefits" like health care. Because they are lazy, apparently.
Or at least that's the way Americans tend to think when we think at all. Most of the time we're too busy being independent pioneers and starting our own businesses and raising our children according each to her own individual belief that we really don't have time to think. Or when we have time to think we mostly think that Americans who whine about health care are lazy or have government jobs, otherwise known as "sucking on the government teat." Or some less polite spelling. I see that in comment threads all the time, which my husband constantly tells me to stop reading.

As my little sister says, I hear you barking, big dog.

Pasquino the Protester -- a Sunday Sermon

Before you read the following rant (IF you read the following rant!), click here to see where I'm coming from.

I know a number of quite reasonable people who like and will probably vote for Mitt Romney in November, who believe that Obama is a good man but a terrible leader and that Romney's personal business acumen will enable him to lead the entire country to financial prosperity. Some of these reasonable people are close family members, and I've learned over the years to not go there.

That being said, I can say whatever I like here, knowing full well that many of these people and family members come and read what I write, feel angry, feel hurt, feel horrified or like they need to pray to Jesus for my damned soul, and that's all right with me, too. Today I read about Paul Broun, a Republican Congressman from Georgia (my home state) who claims that evolution and the Big Bang theory are lies straight from the pit of Hell. Congressman Broun is also an M.D. (holy shit!) who despite his medical and scientific training, believes that the earth is actually only around 9,000 years old and was created in six days by God and that said scientific training are all lies said to keep him and other folk like him from understanding that they need a savior. Congressman Broun is a member of the House Science Committee.

Holy shit, is what I say, no pun intended. And I know that some of my relatives and a few of my friends are reading this right this very instant, shaking their heads at my negative, unpatriotic, heretical soul, and while there's a teensy tinesy part of me that feels hurt by that, there's a much bigger part that has decided being connected by blood gives me no more commonality with some than the filtered water that comes out of our respective faucets in the various states we call home.

And if you're wondering where this rant is going, I just feel compelled to say that a vote for Romney is not just a vote for a billionaire to transfer his acute business acumen on a macro scale. It's a vote to confirm that the Bible and religion, of whatever ilk, trump reason and centuries of beautiful and breath-taking labor by human beings to move forward. It's a vote for a man whose base includes Congressman Broun, whose base, I'd venture to say, is dominated by people like Congressman Broun and others of his ilk, including the asinine Congressman Akin who parsed out the differences between legitimate and forcible rape. It's a group of people who believe that anyone other than Jesus Christ is a false prophet, that a woman's constitutional right to determine what happens to her body is akin to baby-killing, that men and women who love one another and want the same rights and privileges as everyone else are abominations, that women who apply for food stamps to feed their families while working three jobs are lazy-assed moochers and not working hard enough, that President Obama is a half-black, half-white man not born in this country who favors Muslim terrorists and who is bent on overtaking the country and turning it into some kind of Stalin-like dictatorship. It's a vote to use torture on our enemies in the name of liberty and even, peace. And even if you strip away all of my own hysteria, it's a vote for a pretentious, condescending man who bullied his peers as a young man and continues to do so as he campaigns and debates, a  lying billionaire whose character was evidently shaped by forced Mormon modesty and obscene amounts of privilege.

I completely understand why someone of a moderate bent sees appeal in a successful businessman like Mitt Romney, particularly when we're still mired in a financial quagmire. But I really don't believe that the office of the President is just about business. If it is, we're fucking lost and might as well appoint General Electric as president. You know those people who denounce those who honestly call out what is shameful in America (I've got them on my Facebook page, in my high school class, in my family), who scream U S A! the loudest and the shrillest? I think they're all scared shitless by progress, to tell you the truth, scared to move forward in a world that is rapidly changing in ways that we can't even begin to understand. Whether they're in my family, from my high school, my college dorm or my neighborhood, I just can't stand by them right now and walk that moderate path. I just can't.

Le Petit Paquet (Drug Mule, Part V)

That's what arrived on my doorstep today, all the way from Vancouver -- a neatly taped, little brown petit four of a package with the words le petit paquet on the top. Inside was a three month supply of Frisium or clobazam or Onfi, the benzodiazepan that costs $2,970 in the United States and $279 in Canada and is currently the best drug for Sophie. It doesn't control her seizures, but it does help them considerably, and after trying nearly eighteen different anti-epileptics with little to no seizure control and hideous side effects, I'd become a prostitute (high class, of course) to pay for it. Whether I make trips up to Vancouver periodically to get the drug or wrestle Anthem Blue Cross into adding the drug to its formulary remains to be seen.

In the meantime, I'm dreaming of Mitt Romney (honestly, I had a dream about him last night that was as boring as he is), feeling bewildered that Sophie and I, according to Mitt, are part of the 47% (or is it 49%?), the lazy moochers, completely dependent on the government.

Keep digging, Mitt, keep digging.

I need a title for this post, and make it witty

Don't read any further if you don't want to read about politics.

Gone?

It's about a million degrees in Los Angeles today, and I've felt kind of queasy for about two weeks for no apparent reason. Evidently there were some more earthquake clusters out in the desert, but I didn't feel anything -- or maybe I did on some deep tissue level. I woke up at three in the morning, worried, for no apparent reason, so I went into the den and found The Husband watching television where he'd been sitting since returning from The Mistress. I chastised him for not taking care of himself and watched him stumble off to Sophie's room, where he lay down beside her and promptly fell asleep. I then went into the kitchen and mopped the floor, ate a Liberte coconut yogurt and climbed back into bed to read a bit of Joanna Brooks' memoir Mormon Girl. I went back to sleep and woke up a couple of hours later to get Sophie ready for school and then drove her to school. I then drove back to my house, did some work for my job at a non-profit, cleaned some more and washed mountains of clothes and then finished another job and took care of my boys and then, and here's the dumb part, wasted entirely too much time in a back and forth conversation on Facebook about Ann and Mitt Romney with a guy I went to high school with and a motley assortment of his friends who I don't know and who don't know me.

Why?

Why would I do this other than to satisfy my primitive urge to rant?

I can't tell you, although there's a small part of me that sort of enjoys the back and forth, particularly when it's not personal (my high school friend is always gracious, even if I disagree with everything he says). That part gives me hope.

What irritated the hell out of me, though, were some of the friends' comments which sounded, for the most part, like they were plucked out of the bosom of the Republican birthing machine, maybe even Ann Romney's outstretched arms in her oh-so-red suit (why? why are Republican women always in red?). 

What started the exchange was a fairly innocuous comment by my friend on his FB page about how much he admired Ann Romney for loving America as opposed to hating it like Michelle Obama. I think he might have called her a "class act."


Here was my response:

Ah, yes. Ann Romney: proud working mom who is worth 1/4 of a billion dollars and employs five nannies/maids. Her America is definitely something to be proud of as opposed to the America where my friend Mirtha, a legal citizen, works three jobs to support her family and recently needed my help to file for food stamps and is called lazy by the RNC.

And here was his:

Well that is unfortunate about your friend Elizabeth. Hopefully she can work her way out of her situation. No doubt millions of Americans are hurting. Obviously she has not improved over the last 4 years either. Politics aside, the country has not improved over the past 4 years and we need a dramatic change.

And here is mine:

 it's silly to think that the last four years is why this country is in a recession or that during the last four years we should have somehow snapped our Democratic fingers and fixed all the problems of the world. The Congress has been

 in a deadlock with extreme obstruction for the last four years, with the far right wing of the majority party hell bent on dictating who should marry whom and parsing out the distinctions between rape and forcible rape, while their moderate counterparts flail ineffectually. The Obama administration has disappointed many of us who had hoped for universal healthcare and a serious end to the obscene, lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it has passed the Affordable Care Act that ensures tens of millions of people and, in my case, guarantees that my daughter can have healthcare despite her pre-existing condition. He also ended state-sanctioned torture, one of the greatest evils ever perpetrated by the United States and something that I am unembarrassed to be ashamed of my country for justifying. When Michelle Obama said that she was ashamed of America, she spoke of its history of slavery and torture and the FACT that nearly a quarter of our children live in poverty. It's disingenuous to smear her as a person who hates America. I know nothing of Ann Romney but have listened to her speak and shrink at her condescension. As for her husband, tell me one thing he says that isn't pat jingoism.

And after that tirade, I'm going back to posting videos of babies.

Which I did. I posted that video of the twin girls dancing while their father played the guitar.

Then I got the notice that a friend of my friend had posted a comment to me:

 The difference in the two parties, is a Republican who starts from nothing makes his way on his own, investing his own time, energy, and money: and a Democrat feels he needs help from a program in order to do the same thing.

I KNOW! I should have let that sad little ball just drop right there. Let those be the last words.

But, no. Think of me, your friend Elizabeth as a sort of fly, lazy in the southern California heat, in the backyard, where the dog has just -- well -- here's what I said:

 Your theory doesn't hold up well given that Romney is decidedly not a self-made man, but Obama most certainly is. Way too simplistic -- 

And then my friend responded, still gracious:

Wait a second Elizabeth... what do you mean Romney's not a self made man?? Its a given he grew up in wealthy household, but have you ever read or heard of the extrordinary success he had at Bain? He started at Bain and Company at age 30, 

later started Bain Capital, then later returned and ran Bain and Company, growing both firms phenomenally. He may have inherited a few million fro papa, but the over $200 million he has is money he made. Yes, he did build it!!

 I don't have this kind of cash just yet, but certainly I'm not bitter that he has it. I congratulate and embrace successful stories like this. This is the kind of mindset we need to grow our ecomony back to prosperity. By doing so, we all, incluidng health insurance for your daughter and job opportunities for your friend, benefit.

And dumb old, fly-like me:

I'd hardly call "inheriting a few million from papa" "starting from nothing." Maybe it is nothing to you, though, and I'd argue that NO ONE makes that much money completely on their own. Read Elizabeth Warren's statements on wealth. Read about the myth of the self-made man.

Are you still with me? Because this is when the attack started by my friend's friend, and not only did it get personal, but it wasn't particularly intelligent.

Obviously, you have never started a small business. I think he started his own successful business before his father died and left him anything. You have a chip on your shoulder about anyone who has been more successful than you. So sorry

 for you. Obama is self made using everyone else's money except his own, hardly self made. That is how he has become president, other people's money, Romney at least has put some of his own money into his campaigns.

Well, bless her heart.

I asked the friend of my friend to not personally attack me when she knew nothing about me. I told her that The Husband and I are actually owners of a small business and that she didn't know what she was talking about when it comes to me. I think I then gave some links to an interesting article I read about the myth of the self-made man and then I stopped. My original friend had some things to say, but I didn't respond and I guess I won't anymore.

Instead, I lay on the bed with Sophie who had just come home from school and I thought about the Alps in Switzerland. I thought about The Husband and me and Sophie and Henry and Oliver with hands entwined and arms outstretched weaving in and out of grass and flowers, the peaks behind us, The Mistress (that business I know nothing about) out of our minds, all of us, weaving in and out and on our way to freedom from flies and bullshit. I know that's just a dream, and I'll be buzzing around again, but doesn't it sound nice?

Now I need a title for this post. I'd love to work the phrase sister wives into it.

56 Million People with Disabilities Live in the United States

Sophie, 2007

I know I read somewhere that this year's election is costing something like 10 gazillion dollars -- all money that goes toward television ads, giant billboards, staffing, plane rides, dinner parties and barbecues and vote-buying, I imagine. Or influence-buying or whatever. And yeah, I know that some of that influence peddling is for causes that I support and believe in. But, whenever I hear the numbers -- from whatever side -- I feel nauseous for obvious reasons that I'm not going to talk about here. When the DNC calls me on the phone, asking for money, I hang up. I have donated absolutely nothing this year to the Obama campaign, NOT because I don't want him to win the election, but rather because I'm making, albeit ineffectually, a tiny little protest about the obscene amounts of money thrown around. I want to be able to say, in my heart, that I haven't contributed to the oligarchy -- at least in any meaningful way.

Allow me to be a bit narrow-minded in this space and pluck one issue out of the ether -- the issue of disability -- and judge the candidates running for President.

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan's economic and social platforms, particularly Ryan's Medicaid plan, spell disaster for children and adults with disabilities. Nearly every major disability policy expert, as well as non-profit foundation censures the Ryan plan.  I don't pretend to understand the complexities, although when I hear the word "voucher," I imagine myself shopping for healthcare for Sophie in the "free market" which makes me think about poking my eyeballs out with ice-picks. You can read about them (not my eyeballs -- the Ryan Plan and what it means for the disabled) HERE  and HERE.

“For each of the two years that Paul Ryan has been chair of the House budget committee, he’s produced budgets that we’ve opposed,” said Katy Neas, senior vice president for government relations at Easter Seals. “The pick of Paul Ryan gives people another opportunity to look at the policies that he and the other candidates have proposed.”

The website disabilityscoop.com  has good discussions about disability and politics, if you want to explore the issue further.

President Obama recently met with a group of youth with disabilities to discuss the needs of the community. While there was no one there with a severe disability, like Sophie, the issues addressed -- unemployment, inequality, access, inclusion, healthcare and medication -- were met by the President with seeming sincerity and seriousness. Aside from the Affordable Care Act, which is far from ideal but makes inroads for those with disabilities, it remains to be seen what progress will be made. Something tells me that true awareness and empathy for the most vulnerable in our country is a great step forward.



I'm waiting anxiously as are 56 million others in this great country.

First day of school, "libtards," Ayn Rand, and Other ramblings

It's the first day of school for Sophie, but she's at home, sleeping off Diastat that I had to give her on Sunday night after a day of six gigantic seizures. I haven't the foggiest idea why she had so many seizures -- was it the heat? was it the moon? was her brain taking a riff off the flurry of small earthquakes we had? I'll never know, and neither will you. In any case, I left her at home with The Husband so that I could bring her paperwork to school, the boxes of educational stuff and her wheelchair and other accouterments. I was overjoyed that the aide assigned to her will be Millie, the same fantastic person who accompanied her to Communicamp the last two summers. It's almost too good to be true. It might even be a great year.

I walked the halls of the giant high school, tried not to wince at the boy with those giant earlobe stretcher thingamabobs who walked past me, or his friend who wore a black tee-shirt with giant white lettering that spelled out: LEGALIZED POT GANG or something like that. They had backpacks on and skate shoes and were laughing together, typical teenagers despite their off-kilter appearance. I am glad that I only wince when I see this and am not affronted, but I have no idea why this is so.

The other day, I stupidly engaged with a person who goes by the name Skunkfeathers when he comments on a conservative blog that I periodically check on to see what's up in that otherland. Skunkfeathers likes to refer to people of the liberal or left persuasion as libtards, of which I am one, and when I objected to the term, he kept at it. In the ensuing exchange, he claimed You may call the term 'libtard' an attack on a class of handicapped; you're free to do so. A person with a condition from birth, I don't consider 'retarded'. They have a disability. Many of which overcome it with hard work and guts. I promptly told him that his comment was not factual and, actually, ignorant, but the last sentence is the one that I've been perseverating on for nearly a week. Many of which overcome it with hard work and guts. I think it's the word overcome that stops me short and helps me to make the segue to the vast space, ever increasing, between those on the "left," and those on the "right," those that think the recent appointment of Paul Ryan as VP contender is depressing as hell and those that think his government-slashing, Ayn Randian group-think is the answer to the question of the legion of lazy, shiftless folks, including the disabled, who persist in exhausting government monies and leeching from what really matters: a powerful military and the promulgation of American exceptionalism, shoved down the throats of those who just don't know better. Sophie's seizures began for no apparent reason shortly after her initial vaccinations at two months of age. When the seizures didn't stop, her development sputtered along with periodic plateaus, and despite hard work and guts for over seventeen years, she can't talk, can only walk with assistance, wears diapers and must be fed. The other night, when I snapped off the plastic top of the syringe that holds the Valium, dipped it into the foil packet of lubricant, lay Sophie gently on her side and inserted the drug into her rectum, I wondered if she -- and I -- worked hard enough and had guts enough to keep going.

I won't pretend to understand the finer points of Ryan's famous budget proposal, but I do know that if enacted, it will decimate, completely, the already weak supports that people like Sophie and her family (The Husband, me, Henry, Oliver) and other libtards -- as well as conservatives -- depend upon to give our lives a modicum of sanity.  At best, I'm thinking this potential decimination is due to ignorance and fear of The Other, and I'm not sure what to do about it other than keep bleating when I can.

When I told Oliver about the Republican operative in Pennsylvania and his comments about the retarded, Oliver burst into tears. He then uttered the F word, which, I'm certain, some might call an example of the deteriorating values of our young people. I told Oliver that he shouldn't use that kind of language although it might, perhaps, be fitting in this particular circumstance. I then told him that people are ignorant and afraid of what they don't understand. Sometimes, I told him, they're just stupid.

The Perils of Adolescence, My High School and Mitt Romney

I know everyone has heard, by now, about Romney The Homophobe who bullied a young, effeminate boy many, many years ago, sadistically pushing him to the ground and cutting off his hair, that he didn't like because it was bleached and someone had to stop him. Evidently, Romney The Prankster also laughed when a near-blind teacher almost walked into a plate glass door. Those are the two instances that several people described as indications that the all-perfect presidential contender isn't the moral paragon he claims.

I'll jump into the Romney Fray with just that note: the man as boy mocked a disabled person.


Let's talk about junior high and high school. Let's talk about the cliques: the bullies, the popular people and the jocks, the nerds, the band members, the rich ones, the blacks, the Jews, the Christian Young Lifers, the drama and theater kids, the weird, the trashy, the smokers. These were just some of the groups that existed at my relatively small, very exclusive private prep school in Atlanta, Georgia. I spent six years at that school in probably several of those groups over the years: the nerds, the band members, and the popular (eventually). During the nerd years, I was made fun of, periodically, for being ugly, for wearing large glasses, for being smart and for being flat-chested. I remember in the seventh grade, walking down the hallway after an honors program where I'd received an honor for every subject and hearing some of the cooler people whispering brain, brain, brain and giggling together. That I was smart, even brainy, was something to be ashamed of, and I felt ashamed that year. Ashamed and ugly and flat-chested. As the years went by and the braces came off and I got contacts and learned to tamp down the brain until it was cool to be smart, I gained more confidence, but I never forgot, obviously, those who said those things and those who laughed. I wonder if they remember. I imagine that if I were to accuse them, they'd remember and for the most part they'd apologize or, at the very least, feel chagrin, maybe embarrassment.

Evidently, Mitt Romney doesn't remember a lot of those incidents, and if he does, he has deftly relegated them to the hi-jinks of adolescence.

Here's another thing. I can't remember specific instances, but I imagine that when the tide turned for me, when I began to emerge from the nerd cocoon and become more accepted and popular, I must have snubbed someone, must have hurt someone, along the way, because the pressures of adolescence and the grappling for place almost came down to a sort of psychic survival. If someone were to approach me today and tell me that I'd hurt them once, long ago, I'd believe them and I'd probably cringe and feel terrible.

I'd be ashamed, and I'd say that I was sorry and I wouldn't make excuses.

Mitt Romney bullied and mocked a different person. He forcefully cut off that person's hair. He mocked a disabled person. O.K. It was forty years ago, and we know that he wouldn't do the same today. But when accused, a person of character will apologize for his behavior in the past. A person whose character has been forged by immense privilege and repression -- well, he'll act like Mitt Romney did this week. He's a tool and an asshole, and he's running for the presidency.

Grumpiness

Lately, I've felt so grumpy and worn out by my own petty concerns that when I hear the pundits talking on the radio or see the latest in stupid comments by the likes of Rush or Geraldo or Gingrich or Santorum or Romney, I can only think of one thing:

Shut the hell up!


Actually, instead of the fiery inferno, I think the f word, but I'm not going to disgrace myself. Remember the movie Do the Right Thing by Spike Lee? I wish he'd make one called Shut the Hell Up.

The Middle Road

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can 

without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things

 you can't see from the center.**

-- Kurt Vonnegut 

In politics, there's always talk of the need for a middle road, a proverbial path where extremes are blended into some sort of equanimity. People who cry for moderation maintain that there is great virtue in being moderate, that the voices of the left and the right are "too extreme," "irrational," "out of touch with normalcy," etc. My father, a very wise and intelligent moderate bemoans the lack of civility in modern politics and abhors extreme positions on either the right or the left, but as a moderate, his viewpoints are often mysterious to me. I don't know, really, where he stands.  I'm not moderate and would never claim that my way is the right way. It's just my way, I think. I try to temper my beliefs and listen to those whose beliefs are dissimilar, but I feel a weird pressure to somehow move to the middle, to recognize commonalities, to embrace what binds us together  to use some common expressions and exhortations from seemingly more reasoned people than myself. And I'm finding this to be nearly impossible. Frankly, I don't think the middle is that great of a place. Even more frankly, I don't want to move to the middle.

I thought about these things this morning as I drove back from Oliver's school and listened to NPR's coverage of the Republican primaries in Alabama. A nice-sounding guy told the reporter that he was still undecided on whom he would be voting for in today's primary. I'll paraphrase his comments and put my own in parenthesis):

Republican Primary Man: I like Romney for his financial acumen. (He used the word acumen, so I'm assuming he's thoughtful and well-educated, a plus, but there's controversy about just how Romney ran his businesses and acquired his vast wealth. I believe voting for him is like voting for a corporation to be president).

Republican Primary Man: I like Gingrich for his foreign policy views. (Okaaaay. Bomb Iran?)

Republican Primary Man: I like Santorum for his social views and emphasis on family values. (Okaaaay. Hatred of homosexuals, stripping women of reproductive rights, blending church and state, religion and politics?)

Now, where am I going to find commonality with this guy and where is he going to find commonality with me, other than the obvious fact that we're both humans and good enough people (although I really think that anyone who espouses the social views of Santorum is NOT a good person). Why do I have to walk some middle road with the likes of him?

I don't have any answers and am thinking aloud, obviously. Have you heard of the word sheeple? I guess it refers to people who flock together like sheep. That's how I currently see the middle road. I'm going out on a limb and saying, f*^$ that. I'm walking on the edge.

** Thanks to Erika for leaving a comment on this post with this quote! It's just so perfect that I had to add it.

It's Time for Another Round of -- Part 5,652

Yes, I know there are many of you that are going to click off right about now, because you just don't like the controversial stuff, the ugly stuff, the politics. But I know there are many more of you that enjoy the dialogue and the conflict, the choir and the perverse, so I'm just going to continue until it's time for me to click off and do something constructive, like the laundry and the bed-making and the calling the insurance company.

Today I read that Mitt Romney spent $18.7 million dollars on his campaign last month. Okay. It's said that his money-making machine is drying up, and he might have to delve into his personal fortune (which is, I believe numbered in the billions, but correct me if I'm wrong) to keep going. Okay. I'm going out on a limb here and stating that I'm perfectly aware that this sort of obscene money is being spent and raised by the Democrats, too. Okay?


That's why when I read about the State of California and other states round the nation cutting programs for the disabled because there's no money, I smell bullshit. And when people argue about welfare queens and corruption and complain that food stamp collectors are just lazy and have enough money for manicures and pedicures and flat-screen televisions -- well -- I smell bullshit. And when people dismiss all of it and say that the government is bad and all politicians lack integrity and in so doing (dismissing all of it) absolve themselves of fighting for what they know is right, well -- I smell bullshit. And when the Catholics, the Orthodox Jews, the evangelical Christians and the Mormons claim their religious liberty and freedom is being threatened and trampled upon because the government of the United States, (of the people and for the people), insists that women's preventive health and  reproductive freedom is paramount over the insurance industry, I smell bullshit. I'll go out on another limb and say to these religious people, Are you out of your minds? Is your faith in God  and your Church so fragile that you feel under siege when you can't shove your beliefs down every throat?


I might be stupid (I did receive a C in Economics 101 in college, but damn, that was a boring class), but there's money enough in this country to keep caring for the disabled and the elderly, to keep educating the children and young adults and to ensure that every person has a flat-screen television. Just kidding on the last one -- I'm not sure anyone is reading this, by now.

Here's a great video of John Stewart's I Smell Bullshit:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Now I'm off to do my chores and refill my aerosol can with some sort of air freshener.

Bless Their Hearts

photo: Charles Dharapak

The man is dull to me. He might as well be a corporation in bodily form. Corporation: A company or group of people authorized to act as a single entity (legally a person) and recognized as such in law. In bodily form, corporeal. The photo is, at first glance, dull, too, but if I pay attention and really look, I see the man, his hair so like hair, embrace his wife, so like his wife. I see the backs of the heads of five sons, FIVE SONS! and I don't know what archetype that might be -- FIVE SONS! hair so like hair, dullness in corporeal form.

Small Stone 11

Have another drink

via Gojee.com

I'm having a salty dog.

Remember last week's post? I wrote about Gail Collins and her brilliantly funny posts about the current political campaigns in The New York Times. I mentioned that it's a fun game to find the sentence in her column about Mitt Romney tying his dog to the top of the station wagon for a family trip to Canada and marvel at how she does it. Then make yourself a drink.

Play here.


Cheers!

(and if you live in the southern California area and want a couple of passes to the upcoming college basketball tournament in Anaheim, I'm giving them away here)

Gail

via Drudge

From here on out, I'm going to read Gail Collins and participate in the game that I read about somewhere on the internets -- it's sort of like a drinking game without the drinks, a game for the literary nerd, perhaps, or, at the very least, the word nerd.

Basically, you read her very incisive, very funny yet not snarky (think Maureen Dowd when you think snark) columns in the The New York Times and wait for/marvel at her sneaking in a sentence about Mitt Romney and the dog he tied to the roof to travel to Canada. No matter what she's writing about, she manages to include this interesting, it's-a-big-world and everyone is weird and has their own literal baggage fact.

It's the Kevin Bacon game for the election year. Maybe it should be a drinking game -- to help us get through it.

Here's today's column.

Since it's only 8:06 am here in threatening-rain Los Angeles, I'm off to mix myself a mimosa with the oranges in the backyard.