A Different Street

I assume that your intent was to simultaneously delight your base and upset your opponents. Well, I’m officially upset that you, a Republican candidate for governor of Idaho, have essentially threatened the President’s life, and that despite your insincere “apology,” you have continued to joke about it.

How far will the extreme eliminationist right be permitted to go? And to think we were labeled traitors to our country simply for opposing the war in Iraq.

OK, this is weird: about a week ago, I very suddenly developed a strong distaste for meat. S’pose God’s trying to tell me something?

Let me count the ways:

While supporters [at a health insurance reform town hall meeting in Reston, VA] dominated inside the auditorium, opponents made a splash outside the high school gymnasium with street theater.

The Moran town hall was the last stop on a 10-city tour for Randall Terry, the anti-abortion activist known for his extreme tactics.

Terry’s colleagues put on a skit with a man in an Obama mask pretending to whip a bloodied woman, who kept saying, “Massa, don’t hit me no more. I got the money to kill the babies.”

Terry himself dressed in a doctor’s lab coat and pretended to stab a woman in a gray wig.

“There’s no way to pay for this thing without killing granny,” Terry explained.

Via Pandagon.

I can’t believe this needs to be explained, but Dave Neiwert does it perfectly:

… these gun-toters want to assure us they pose no threat whatsoever to either the president or his supporters by bringing these guns. They’re just ordinary citizens standing up for their rights, right? The Secret Service need have no fear about their motives.

But then we find out that at least one of them ardently admires a pastor who preaches how much he hates Obama and wishes him dead, in order “to save this country.”

And we’re supposed to tell these “innocent” gun nuts from the people who might actually aim their weapons at the president how?

PoochSpouse is on a mission to show the kids all of the movies he’s ever loved, or even liked. Tonight the wonders of Netflix brought them “2001: A Space Odyssey.” A few minutes ago I heard him cheering, “Look! The monkey made a tool! Smart monkey!”

“Two scientists suggest that depression is not a malfunction, but a mental adaptation that brings certain cognitive advantages.”

Go Go Gadget brain!

In my house growing up, laughter was an uncommon sound. (In a family with a raging alcoholic father and a neurotic co-dependent mother, this is no surprise.) So when I heard my mother laughing uproariously one day, I had to go see what it was all about.

She and my father were sitting at the dining room table, and in front of them was an opened package — picked up that day from the Sears or Penney’s catalog counter — containing several pairs of men’s boxers in colorful patterns. (Probably paisleys. It was the 70s.) What was so funny, I wondered? Well, it seems that for all of the 30 or so years of their marriage to date, my father had always worn plain white boxers, but this time the catalog company had sent these wild interlopers.

I eyed my dad nervously. One just did not laugh at him, or indeed take any emotional stance other than submissive obedience in his presence, much less talk openly about subjects like underwear. But, uncharacteristically, he was chuckling. And, even more uncharacteristically, he kept the boxers, and when they wore out he got more. As far as I know he wore patterned underwear for the rest of his life.

In case you’ve ever wondered about this, Adam Franz at the Monterey Bay Aquarium has some words for you.

I could easily develop a full-fledged case of cephalopod-phobia. If those creepy bastards figure out how to survive on dry land, we’re hosed, is all I’m saying.

Via tweet from Shannonrosa.

OK, I’ll say it: sometimes the world just freaks me right flat out. The response of the right wing to the (as yet quite loosely defined) health insurance reform proposal has my brain careening around like a break shot in billiards.

In the middle of all that, a voice for sanity from the estimable Pastor Dan, writing at Religion Dispatches:

As satisfying as it is to see the conservative movement come apart at the wheels, liberals should not pride themselves on puncturing right-wing certainty. We embrace negativity too. We, too, may succumb to the temptations of separatism. As brilliant as it is to watch Barney Frank shut down extremist hecklers, in the long run, avoiding the risk of connection to broken people is not helpful.

This perilous moment in the life of our collective enterprise is not a time to meet division and hostility with more of the same. It is a time to surround one another with compassion; to recognize the real pain and discomfort of others; and to welcome them with open arms into the shared project of finding freedom, justice, and power together.

That, as I always say, does not mean surrendering core principles or compromising them away. The truth, after all, is the truth.

But I would love to see a sign at the next health care town hall meeting declaring WE SHARE YOUR PAIN AND WE NEED YOUR HELP. I would love to see Barney Frank or any other Congressperson say to a protester, “I will not allow you to disrupt this meeting out of consideration for the other citizens who have come here to engage in the democratic process. But I grieve with you the simpler days that we seem to have lost. What are you afraid of, and how can we address your fears?” That, it seems to me, is the only way we are going to change the dreadful national script we have written for ourselves this summer.

San Francisco’s Lombard Street (“The Crookedest Street in the World”) is temporarily transformed into a giant game of Candyland: