I am a first-year law student at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. You may know us from our football team. (No, I still don't want to talk about the Arkansas game.) But what you may not know about Louisiana's capital is that this place is full to the brim with unmitigated right-wing christofascist whackjobs of the first degree. Follow me below the jump for the ridiculous pseudo-controversy that's drawn me away from my studies and into the company of people who understand...
My husband and I are moving to Louisiana in three weeks, and we're moving right into the middle of a gubernatorial race. I was expecting weirdness in politics; it is Louisiana, for heaven's sake. But I have never faced the kind of political dilemma we have on our hands here...
From the first-floor apartment of Guest C&J Regional Outpost #612, in the northernmost reaches of the Commonwealth of Virginia...
In honor of the 4th of July, a thought about war, courtesy of Hawkeye Pierce:
"I just don't know why they're shooting at us. All we want to do is bring them democracy and white bread. Transplant the American dream. Freedom. Achievement. Hyperacidity. Affluence. Flatulence. Technology. Tension. The inalienable right to an early coronary sitting at your desk while plotting to stab your boss in the back. That's entertainment."
Cheers and Jeers Tuesday starts after the jump... (swish) right NOW! (ding!)
In 1990, when I was nine years old, my mother volunteered for Don Siegelman's first gubernatorial campaign. Since I was old enough to be of some help, I was enlisted to do the little things around the campaign office: stapling signs, stuffing envelopes, etc. It was my first dose of political activism, and I was addicted from day one.
This is usually what I say to people who say to me, "So, did you hear what Bush said today?" I mean, we all know what fresh hell the charlatan-in-chief unleashes on us every day. But last night it was personal: he was in my personal hometown, Mobile, Alabama.
From dictionary.com, "helpmeet," a bastardization of "helpmate:"
help·mate –noun
a companion and helper.
a wife or husband.
anything that aids or assists, esp. regularly: This calculator is my constant helpmate.
Sounds like a pretty nice concept, doesn't it? A companion, a helper, anything that aids or assists. We should all be so lucky in our lives. But lately, I've encountered a situation in my own life that's reinforcing every ugly, nasty connotation of the word, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around it...
Last night, I caught a small piece of Matthew Rothschild's editorial on the death of Gerald Ford while driving home from work. Also, last night, Keith Olbermann devoted nearly his entire show to an analysis and retrospective of Ford's presidency. The two pieces were radically different in tone and tenor, though the conclusions were basically the same.
My husband and I are way behind on watching The Daily Show on our DVR. We just watched the episode with former Governor McGreevey, and Jon Stewart said something during the interview that really struck a chord with me...
I had to go to California for business this week. I left Sunday afternoon from Dulles Airport here in the metro DC area, and returned yesterday afternoon. In between, I had something confirmed to me that I'd known all along, but didn't really 100% believe until I saw it in practice.
I know this makes the husband and me latte-sipping, freedom-hating, ivory-tower elitists, but we're going on our Pope Benedict-approved vacation over Labor Day weekend. I am extremely excited, because we're visiting our neighbors to the North, Canada. I've never left the country before. Follow me for why I'm wasting your time with descriptions of my plans.
UPDATE - if anyone else sees fit to comment here, I'd like to ask that no one else call my husband and me prostitutes. It's just not very cool. Thank you. Now, on with the show:
My husband and I have a very dear friend with a VERY wingnutty dad. We spend a lot of time with their family, and are quite fond of them. Lately, though, we've found ourselves in a bit of a social/moral pickle. It's been a pretty hefty bone of contention between the husband and me, so I thought I'd throw it out there and ask my favorite group of 'net denizens.
We've been getting a lot of media attention over the last few months with our little chat-site over here. But I got confirmation today that we've really hit it big. Move over, Ann Coulter; we've got the best exposure ever!
The following meditation comes to you courtesy of my husband, who prefers to remain safely ensconced in the background. He sent this to me as a token of encouragement, because frankly I've been ready to take to a shack in the hills with a tinfoil hat and a store of provisions. It lifted my spirits to such an extent that I felt obliged to share it with you. Below the jump, a little ray of hope courtesy of Ben in VA:
I've loved Tom Tomorrow since I was a kid, reading him in our local alt-weekly in Mobile, AL (The Harbinger - RIP). I just popped over to This Modern World to clear my head, and I read the following entry:
After reading Douglas Brinkley's "The Great Deluge" and seeing the coverage of the rape of that poor little girl in Iraq, I'm more than a little overwhelmed by the sheer incapacity of the man running our country to feel empathy for his fellow man. Right after all of this war foolishness started, I found this essay somewhere. Follow me...
We watched a documentary on Logo last night called "The Elephant in the Room." The show followed gay Republicans as they lived their lives: one woman in Louisiana dealing with the aftermath of Katrina, a Log Cabin Republican organizer working against the Texas anti-gay amendment, and a city councilman in California looking for love. Watching these people go through their lives made me think of a strange consequence of the wingnut attack. Follow me after the jump...
i love it here, i really do, but i am just a tiny bit tired of the way some people have a tendency to scream from the rafters that "if x says y, he's the antichrist." akin to this is the "why are x like y?" mentality used by others. i thought we were supposed to be the thoughtful ones, the side that thinks things through, the side that stands for something more than empty rhetoric.
i'm so freaking sick and tired of hearing about this non-controversy over the damn da vinci code movie. it's such a ploy to keep people away from what's really going on out there. the christofascists are going to agitate, so we should ignore them. if i see one more "news" story about this non-event, i'm going to scream.
even something that should ostensibly be serious, like immigration, has turned into this giant dog-and-pony show to keep our minds off war dead and wiretapping. why do we put up with this stuff?
