First: News

Nope, not mine this time — I literally mean “the news.” Jim Wallis (Sojourners) and Tony Perkins (Family Research Council) will be on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric this evening to discus the “Moral Direction of our Country.” I’m recording it, and if there’s anything worth talking (or ranting) about, you’ll see it here tomorrow. Or late tonight, since Mike’s coming in late, and I’ll want to keep myself up. Then again, I might just watch Grey’s Anatomy.

Second: Being told who you are

After knocking off one more of the seemingly endless list of wedding to-dos (finding shoes), I emailed Mike with an FYI that the ones I’d picked would be sent to the dress shop for me to try on, and buy them if I like them. He replied, You are so organized. Meanwhile, I keep looking at my to-do list for the next 3 hours and wondering how it will all get done.

Me? Organized? Oh, right. I actually *am* organized. So, how is it, that I’ve spent years playing the familial role of the flighty one who can’t be pinned down? And how is it, then, that even though I KNOW I’m capable of pulling multiple long-eared rodents out of numerous items of headwear, that I still sometimes in my head don’t see myself that way, after years of being told who I’m supposed to be (but am not)? Confused yet?

No answers here…just musing and indulging myself in some serious run-on sentences.

Now, off to cross some more things off my list that might actually pay the bills. I hate that part. That post (work/worth) is still brewing in my head. Someday, I might even get myself *organized* enough (snort) to write it.

I recently wrote a post, Our nation is falling apart. As commenter Stevo has pointed out, there’s very little factual truth in the email I received as a forward (what, am I supposed to be surprised, or something?) and grumbled about in this space.

I still agree with my assessment of (and agreement with) the first portion of the spammail, but that’s something I can’t defend with any academic precision. As for the second portion, I do vaguely recall thinking it odd that some quite conservative-leaning commentary would be coming from a professor in liberal St. Paul, NM. Turns out, it wasn’t:

DISCLAIMER: There is an e-mail floating around the internet dealing with the 2000 Bush/Gore election, remarks of a Scotish philosopher named Alexander Tyler, etc. Part of it is attributed to me. It is entirely BOGUS as to my authorship. I’ve been trying to kill it for 3 years. For details see: http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/tyler.asp.

The rest of the snopes article is worth a look, including their evaluation of the accuracy of the demographic data for the counties voting for Bush and for Gore.

For what it’s worth (and to my eternal embarassment), I voted for Bush in 2000. Of course, voting in El Paso County, Colorado, that meant…nothing. Bush would have won here (in both elections) regardless of my ballot. Anyway, I’m just one of the millions of dupes who thought that “compassionate conservatism” might actually mean something.

For more embarassment, I can’t believe I didn’t at least poke through Snopes before responding — this is the sort of mistake a newbie would make! I know better, people. Argh!

I haven’t yet explored the local public radio stations (but doubt I’ll ever find one I love as much as KRCC), but I found a decent commercial station while driving yesterday. When I’m north of Monument Hill in Colorado (ie, out of El Paso County), I listen to KBCO, a Clear Channel station out of Boulder that’s remarkably good, and doesn’t tend to play the same crap again. And again. And again. Well, okay, they repeat some, but not the way that typical commercial stations do.

Anyway, here, there’s Radio Free Santa Fe / KBAC, which seems to be an exact clone of KBCO.

I’ll try to not annoy myself too much with the idea of “radio free” and “Clear Channel” being related to the same station. As if.

I really should just bite the bullet and get an XM receiver, huh?

As if *that* is a newsflash?

I received this as an interesting forward (as opposed to the annoying variety) from a girlfriend:

Subject: Civilizations – VERY INTERESTING

About the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution, in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years prior. “A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”

“The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years.

During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence

1. From bondage to spiritual faith;
2. From spiritual faith to great courage;
3. From courage to liberty;
4. From liberty to abundance;
5. From abundance to complacency;
6. From complacency to apathy;
7. From apathy to dependence;
8. From dependence back into bondage “

(Allison note: My agreement with the text wains at this point.)

Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning the 2000
Presidential election.

Population of counties won by:

Gore: 127 million

Bush: 143 million

Square miles of land won by:

Gore: 580,000;

Bush: 2,427,000

States won by

Gore 19;

Bush: 29

Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by

Gore: 13.2

Bush: 2.1

Professor Olson adds: “In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won
was mostly the land owned by the tax-paying citizens of this great country. Gore’s territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in
government-owned tenements and living off government welfare…”

Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the
“complacency and apathy” phase of Professor Tyler’s definition of democracy, with some 40 percent of the nation’s population already having reached the “governmental dependency” phase. Our European friends have over 70 percent of the population in most European countries reaching the “governmental dependency” phase due to opening their immigration to allow poor immigrants into their countries.

The United States originally opened their immigration policy to people that had a required skill or profession. Somewhere along the timeline, probably in the 1970′s, that policy slipped to allow anyone into the United States. It didn’t matter if a person had a skill or profession.

Pass this along to help everyone realize just how much is at stake, knowing that apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom.

PS: If the Senate grants Amnesty and citizenship to 20 million criminal invaders called illegal’s and they vote, then goodbye USA in less than 5 years.

My reply to my friend:

The beginning of this text is interesting, but the remainder seems to imply that having Bush in office is a good thing, and that following the Republicans’ agenda is what’s in the best interest of the country. I couldn’t disagree more.

If anything, it’s the loose (and reckless, even) fiscal policies of the current administration that are wrecking our country from the inside out — not the potential for allowing immigrants to gain legal status.

Just my two pennies’ worth…

I don’t have a whole lot of time for more comment — as you can tell from the lack of posting this past week — but I’d be curious to hear others’ perspectives on this. I find the implication that people who voted for Gore (even though I didn’t) to be murderous leeches an insulting and inaccurate assertion.

Tell me your thoughts in the comments, whether you agree or not.

courtesy Sojourners (via email):

“I love my church, and I’m a Catholic who was raised by intellectuals who were very devout. I was raised to believe that you could question the church and still be a Catholic. What is worthy of satire is the misuse of religion for destructive or political gains. That’s totally different from the Word, the blood, the body, and the Christ. His kingdom is not of this earth.”

- Stephen Colbert, of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

(emphasis added)

Hear, hear.

Amanda posted about an article in Details magazine — an article in which (according to Amanda) some curvier actresses both past and present were called “fat.” I read Amanda’s post earlier and found myself (without having even clicked through to the details article) just certain that I’d find the article an atrocity.

Not so, not so.

After reading the article, (really, go read it) I see it a different way. When saying “fat is back,” the folks at details aren’t calling the women fat, but rather saying that they have fat on their bodies, a normal, healthy thing for all women. Frankly, I love seeing the return of curves, but I’m biased in that direction. Even when I’m a size four, I have very curvy hips. Since having a baby, I might even have boobs at a size four, too — but I don’t expect to ever learn whether that’s true or not.

It took me years to get here, but I realize now that in MY body, I simply don’t look good at any size lower than a six. Even a six is pushing it a bit. Comparing myself to someone with a stick-straight figure and naturally narrow hipbones is insane. Of *course* that person will wear a zero or two! That’s what their bone structure demands! A size zero on me would look positively anorexic — a strong-boned skeleton in motion. Ick.

True story — the other night, my father commented that I looked great, and asked if I’d lost some weight. After I gave him grief about his phrasing (What? I looked awful before? Perhaps you might say instead, ‘you look thinner; have you lost weight?’), I mentioned that yes, I’d dropped perhaps eight pounds over the past few weeks, and told him what my weight had been at the endocrinologist’s appointment on August 2. His jaw dropped, as did my (bird-boned, narrow-shouldered, no-hips) grandmother’s. You couldn’t *possibly* have weighed that! Where did you put it? And you weight what now? Anatomy lesson time, folks… I carefully explained to both of them that I am naturally quite muscular and strong. I would wear a smaller size now at 130 (not my actual weight…yet) than I did in high school at 110-115 — and look better, too.

Back to my initial point — I now find myself vaguely irritated at Amanda’s initial post. It, in my opinion (YMMV, as always) was misleading as to the nature of the actual article, which expressed hope that a trend toward more healthy, round female bodies will continue.

I’ll drink to that.

I will say this, though — the pig/sparkly shoes photo? Tacky and in bad taste.

This freakin’ cracks me up:

This? Not so much. It’s not because of the text. Honestly, I think I might have found it wryly amusing to wear while I was pregnant…IF IT WEREN’T SO GRAMMATICALLY WRONG.

“Whose my daddy?” Whose? UGH. C’mon people. If you’re going to sell something via a big-box mass merchandiser, please, please at least check to ensure you’re not looking like an idiot on a grand scale. Repeat after me: Whose = possessive. Who’s = Who is.

Then there’s this one, which I just find plain annoying, even though it is grammatically correct.

(/rant)

hat tip: Pandagon