“What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull?”

“The pitbull doesn’t quit.”

Sorry, I just couldn’t resist passing that along.

I was writing something somewhere else this morning, and this was a thought that got cut from the final product. It didn’t fit with the other thoughts I was writing down and exploring, but it felt like something that shouldn’t be tossed in the recycle bin or lost. It’s one bit of my life philosophy, and I want to share it with you.

Death is a fact of life. Each and every one of us is on the path to our own personal extinction. There’s no avoiding death. We are all going to die. How we face our own death is at least as important as how we face our own life, and it’s just as important consider our own death as it is to consider how we want to spend the years that lead up to it.

Living and dying are inevitable matters of fact. It’s how we face both living and dying that makes each of us who we are and brings meaning to both. I no more fear death than I do life. They are merely two sides of the same coin.

All I want for my death are the same things I want for my life: to go through it with some measure of grace, in peace and calm, and with as little emotional and physical pain as possible. I am as comfortable with my own mortality as I am with living my life.

“How is holding them in a prison in Guantanamo that meets all the standards here or holding them in a prison in your neighborhood, your hometown, New York, Chicago, or Cleveland? What’s the difference? If they are in jail, they’re in jail. What the real difference is we have a place where we can secure them even if the military commission that tries them doesn’t find them guilty.”
–Representative Michael Rogers (R) - Michigan

Why would we need to detain or secure someone in a prison, if said person was found not guilty? What an idiot. No, not an idiot … an evil, small-minded, and un-American moron. The legal systems of both our country and our military don’t imprison people who are found not guilty at the end of their trial/commission. Not saying innocent people don’t end up in prisons, but we usually take the time to falsely find them guilty first. When I heard Mr. Rogers saying this last night, I had a serious WTF?! moment.

The Daily Show bit from which I grabbed the above quote was funny and worth watching. Well, funny in that sad sort of way Daily Show bits tend to be. Stewart makes it funny, but it’d be even more funny if this kind of stupid crap wasn’t going on out here in reality.

“Are we supposed to be sitting and waiting, watching for the possibility of a new Holocaust? Who’s going to take the responsibility to keep America, I mean Israel, safe? I’ll tell you why this really scares the hell out of me. Everything Obama has recommended has turned out to be disastrous.”

“Obama really thinks he is a soft-spoken Julius Caesar. He think he’s going to conquer the world with his soft-spoken sweet talk and really think he’s going to bring all of the enemies of the world into a little playground, where they’ll swing each other back and forth.”

“We and we alone are the right frame of mind to free this nation from this Obama oppression. Let’s give thanks to (Republicans) for not giving up and staying the course to bring an end to this false prophet, Obama.”

Those are the words of John Voight.

New Holocaust? Oppression? False prophet? What’s this guy been putting in his coffee?

As a long-time Republican (and then a swing-voter), it makes me sad on some level to see the Republican Party is such a state of disarray and confusion, wandering ever further to the right. I think my political leanings would be best described as being centrist in nature. I voted for people, not parties, at least until Bush happened and I saw we needed to equalize the balance of power a little. I’m not entirely thrilled by the idea of one of the two major political parties rolling over and dying, but the Republicans seem determined to push away anyone who won’t follow them out onto their extreme far right-wing branch, which looks to me like a very tiny twig holding fewer and fewer people every day.

Newt Gingrich had something to say last night too:

“I am not a citizen of the world. I think the entire concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous!”

He might want to have a seance and chat with Reagan about being a citizen of the world. Better yet, if Mr. Gingrich doesn’t want to be a member of the society of humans living on this planet, he could leave. I wouldn’t miss him.

Maybe some third political party will rise up and fill in the gaping hole where true centrist thought used to be. I don’t see that happening any time soon, but if the Republicans don’t get their act together soon and start making sense to more than just the basest of their base, they stand to be considered irrelevant far into the future.

Doesn’t make me happy to consider that, but it would make me less happy to have their current incarnation holding any sort of power at all. They are so full of hate and anger, and they seem so lost and clueless. To be honest, I don’t even know how to react to the things spewing from the mouths of Republicans and their supporters these days. I suppose I could react the way they did when people who didn’t agree with the Bush Administration and its policies spoke up about their displeasure and call them un-American (and declare the argument over).

But that wouldn’t be nice, now would it? I’m sure, somewhere deep down, they really do have the best of intentions and truly do want America to be a great country, but they aren’t expressing that very well. Their rhetoric and thoughts are all too wrapped up in hate and anger, as if the only way they can prove they are the better party is to slash and burn anyone who doesn’t agree with them.

Didn’t they ever learn that to demonstrate you are a better person (or organization), you build yourself up, not tear other people down? Otherwise, you just come across as being a bully … or a cry-baby … or crazy.

Tonight, I ran across a web site I was certain had to be a parody, a spoof, being completely preposterous on purpose, someone having some fun. What I was reading was so diametrically opposed to the universe and reality I happen to live in, it could be nothing but a joke. A bad one, but still something meant to be entertaining in some odd funny way. I didn’t find it terribly funny, so I went to Google to make sure I had this person’s official web site. Surely not. It had to be someone spoofing that person and trying to make them look like complete and total moonbats.

But no … I was in fact reading the web site of an internet broadcaster, and he is completely and totally for real.

For example:

“Tonight at 9:00 PM, “The Hal Turner Show” will talk about the recent killing of an abortionist and what the shooter did wrong. No, not the shooting itself; but rather what he did wrong that got him caught!

We’ll talk at length about how to carry out such an act and significantly reduce the chances of getting caught.”

Or…

“Let me be the first to say this plainly: These Judges deserve to be killed. Their blood will replenish the tree of liberty. A small price to pay to assure freedom for millions.”

And finally…

“It is our intent to foment direct action against these individuals personally. These beastly government officials should be made an example of as a warning to others in government: Obey the Constitution or die.

If any state attorney, police department or court thinks they’re going to get uppity with us about this; I suspect we have enough bullets to put them down too.”

His name is Hal Turner. I should hope it comes as no surprise he’s been arrested. What I find surprising is how many people on the internet seem to think he’s getting a raw deal, because “Free speech!!! Rah! Rah! There can be no limits on free speech!”

Well, there are all sorts of limits on freedom in the USA, and if there weren’t, we wouldn’t have prisons full of people who had broken “laws” of some sort. Freedom is just a steady state where the majority of people are at least content with the way things are going, and when the majority is no longer pleased with their particular flavor of freedom, they change the way things are going until it is pleasing again. We are only as free as our personally applied chains allow.

One of the things we, as a society and civilization have agreed upon is it is generally a very bad thing to kill someone, except under very specific circumstances. Another thing we have agreed on –or so I thought– is it is also a very bad thing to convince, persuade, entice, provoke, or incite others to kill or harm someone. Not to mention publicly stating you have enough bullets to “put down” state attorneys, police officers, and members of the court is, to put it in overly mild terms, is never ever considered wise.

I feel sorry for Mr. Turner, not because he got arrested for speaking his mind, but because he must be suffering from some kind of mental condition. No rational and sane mind would post and say things like the above and then be surprised or outraged about being arrested.

“What happened to society? I go into business, I don’t make it, I go bankrupt. I’ve been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No. No.”
–Craig T. Nelson

Really? Mr. Nelson got no help at all from anyone? Then what the hell does he call food stamps and welfare? Personally, I call that getting help from a whole lot of someones … like every tax payer in the USA.

And since I am posting that idiotic statement, let me post this one too:

“Hispanic polls, Hispanic surveys, indicate that Hispanics think just like everyone else. We’re not like African-Americans. We think just like everybody else.”
–Manny Miranda

Who is everybody else? White people? What does that make African-Americans? Aliens from Planet X? What a freaking moronic and racist ass, and the sad fact is he probably doesn’t even realize how offensive and obnoxious that statement is to anyone with a brain cell or two.

My gods, the stupid … it hurts my head!

Speaking of stupidity and idiots, I have found a book a simply must read: Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (Hardcover).

Question: Is there a specific turning point where, as a country, we moved away from prizing experience to trusting the gut over intellect?

Charles P. Pierce: I don’t know if there’s one point that you can point to and say, “This is when it happened.” The conflict between intellectual expertise and reflexive emotion—often characterized as “good old common sense,” when it is neither common nor sense—has been endemic to American culture and politics since the beginning. I do think that my profession, journalism, went off the tracks when it accepted as axiomatic the notion that “Perception is reality.” No. Perception is perception and reality is reality, and if the former doesn’t conform to the latter, then it’s the journalist’s job to hammer and hammer the reality until the perception conforms to it. That’s how “intelligent design” gets treated as “science” simply because a lot of people believe in it.

Yes, I need to scrape together some spare cash to get this book ASAP, if only to validate the feeling I have had since the mid-80’s that Americans have been getting more and more stupid with every passing year. It’s always nice when I don’t feel like I am alone in realizing this sad fact.

Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s [Sotomayor] menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then.
–G. Gordon Liddy

I find myself incapable of even responding to something like that in any way other than my jaw dropping and hitting the floor with a resounding thud.

I’ve grown up in an interesting time for women. I’ve had the chance to see, partake in, and benefit from the slow advances women have made to be seen as equal to men and not the weaker, lesser, more fragile and stupid gender they had previously been viewed as. Hearing anyone say anything like the above statement makes my skin crawl and my blood boil. It reminds me all too clearly that as far as women have gotten, we ain’t there yet if people who believe and say things like that are still able to get airtime and are taken seriously by anyone, rather than laughed at by everyone.

True equality won’t happen for women (and everyone else) until the current generation of older people have left this world or at least stop spewing their outdated sexist views publicly.

Disgusting.

“We don’t want to be a Pflugerville … when it’s totally 100 percent blue collar,” said Tom Crawford of Sun City at an April 15 meeting. Other board members disagreed with him. He said it was “all right” with him if local workers could not live in the city; others at the meeting said they wanted a community that is “integrated and inclusive.”

“When that happens,” Crawford said, “the enrollment of the schools go up. The IQ goes down. The crime goes up. No question about it. … We’ll never have an exemplary high school if we get a lot of that particular demographic.”
– Tom Crawford, Sun City, Georgetown, Texas

While scanning things I had open in tabs to determine if I needed to add them to my list of things to read later, I ran across the above gem of a quote in a story about the affordable housing battle in Georgetown.

Since I am far past too tired to rant about this, let me just say Mr. Crawford is not alone in his feelings, the City of Georgetown sucks, and what the f*ck is wrong with people?! Who says sh*t like that out loud?! What a pompous, classist, arrogant and bigoted attitude.

Marks Sun City and the whole of Georgetown off list of places to move my mother.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: The vice president is suggesting that there was good information obtained, and I’d like the committee to get that information. Let’s have both sides of the story here. I mean, one of the reasons these techniques have survived for about 500 years is apparently they work.

ALI SOUFAN: Because, sir, there’s a lot of people who don’t know how to interrogate, and it’s easier to hit somebody than outsmart them.
–source (YouTube)

I can think of a number of things humans have been doing for 500 years or more that don’t work and shouldn’t be done, not only because they don’t work, but they are also morally repugnant. It’s a shame that Senator Graham thinks just because humans have been doing something for a long time it works and is also obviously a right and good thing to do.

Ali Soufan’s reply was priceless, and truer words have rarely been spoken.

“I just wanted to see how much of an insult it was to be called an ‘ignoramus’ … since I didn’t know what it meant, I just Googled it. It’s an ‘ignorant lawyer’! We all know Barack Obama is a lawyer, so Chavez was saying he was an ignorant lawyer.
–Gretchen Carlson, Fox & Friends - Fox News

Gretchen Carlson needs to Google the difference between the etymology^† of a word and its definition^††. I know, I know, the first entry at Google for “ignoramus” has a lot of words and symbols before it gives the definition, so I can see how the feeble-minded, unaccustomed to reading information out of a dictionary might be confused, but the definition is most certainly there. “Ignoramus” according to the page she read at Merriam-Webster states quite clearly that the meaning of the word is an utterly ignorant person or a dunce. Perhaps Ms. Carlson didn’t know the meaning of “ignorant” or “dunce” and couldn’t be bothered to look those words up.

I would however suggest that any adult speaker of English who doesn’t know –without looking it up on Google or in a dictionary– what kind of insult the word “ignoramus” is or what it means may very well be an ignoramus.

1. † While Merriam-Webster only gives the etymology of the word from its recorded usage in a 17th century play of the same name (Ignoramus) about an ignorant lawyer, that is not the word’s definition. In fact, it’s not even the correct and full etymology. “From New Latin, a grand jury’s endorsement upon a bill of indictment when evidence is deemed insufficient to send the case to a trial jury, from Latin, we do not know, to be ignorant.” I trust my much better paper dictionaries over anything she could possibly find as the first link of a single word search on Google, thank you very much. [↩]
2. †† What the word means, dear Gretchen, in common parlance … not where the word came from. If we used the historical use of words to define their present usage, “preposterous” would still mean “in the wrong order” rather than “absurd” … which is what not knowing what ignoramus means is: utterly absurd or preposterous. Didn’t Gretchen go to grade school? Has she really never been called an ignoramus before or even heard the word somewhere in her 43 years of life?! [↩]

Since the Civil War, it’s [secession of states] been sort of a dead issue, but he [Governor Rick Perry of Texas] brought it up. It stirred the media and believe me, it really stirred some of the liberal media where they started really screaming about what is going on here. “This is un-American”, I heard one individual say, “This is treasonous to even talk about it.”

Well, they don’t know their history very well because if they think about it, it’s an American tradition. It’s very American to talk about secession. That’s how we came into being. Thirteen colonies seceded from the British and established a new country, so secession is very much an American principle.
– Ron Paul

All due respect to Mr. Paul, but it’s simply not possible for a state to want to remove themselves from the United States of America and consider that intention in any way pro-America. He’s not the only one I have heard saying that secession isn’t un-American or could even be seen as patriotic. It’s completely ludicrous to think one can want to not be a part of an entity yet still be supportive of said entity. If a state were to secede from the Union, its citizens would no longer be Americans, and what is more un-American than willfully giving up your American citizenship?

Quite frankly, I am growing tired of all the ongoing babble, outrage, and general laughing and pointing about Rick Perry’s remarks on secession. Look … our governor may be an idiot, but the majority of us here in Texas know full well that we would be no better off as our own country and would never in a million years support such a crazy notion. We may joke about it. We may even brag about once having been our own country. But … most of us are very happy to be Americans.

Of course there is a small minority of morons who seem to think if we weren’t a member of the United States, we wouldn’t be paying so much in taxes, and life would be just peachy if we went our own way. Of course, these people have apparently not stopped to think about where all the money would be coming from to pay for roads, schools, and other public services funded by the federal tax dollars we pay. I’ll tell you where the money would come from: the taxes –most likely higher taxes– we’d have to pay to our new country’s government, or Texas could just not pay any taxes to anyone and become a third world country overnight.

If this Texas secession insanity were to ever get to the point where it was seriously being considered, rest assured, I would be protesting until I got arrested for it, and it’s something I would even go to armed conflict to fight. I happen to like living in Texas, I don’t plan on moving any time soon (especially not being forced out because my state wants to stop being American), and I also happen to like being an American with all the rights, privileges, and benefits it affords me (usually). I’m pretty sure it won’t ever get to that point though, because as I said, the majority of Texans think the minority that thinks succession is a great idea are all on crack or in need of serious therapy (and history classes).

Please forgive us for having an idiot for a governor. I swear, we are trying to do something about it.

“It’s OK, as an artist, to put aside the thing you have been doing forever and begin doing something you have never done before.”

“In fact, I strongly suggest it.”
–Orb

“Have you ever watched weeds grow over the course of a long, hot, Texas summer? I mean really watch them grow and propagate themselves and live their little plant lives to the fullest!”

“I have, and it made me feel alive.”
–Orb

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” State Rep. Betty Brown [R-Terrell, TX] said.

“Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”

If not for the thickness of my skull, I am certain, without a doubt, that reading the above statement by an elected member of my state legislature would have made my brains explode all over the walls of my den. As it is, I believe the speech centers of my brain have been fried, as I can’t even come up with anything to say about it. The stupidity of that statement is so unbelievable, what response can there be other than exploding heads and maybe some laughter (at Ms. Brown) and outrage?

Once my brain cells have recuperated, I will be sending off a brief email missive to Ms. Brown stating what I would hope would be obvious, and pointing out the one thing I actually found most offensive about what she had to say.

If these people with hard-to-pronounce Asian names are voting, then wouldn’t it be safe to say that they TOO are Americans? Or are Americans only white people with big eyes and easily pronounced and spelled generic names … like Brown?

I have to stop thinking about this ignorance right now. The pressure in my skull is already maxed out, and I am sure Lin doesn’t want to clean up the aftermath of my head exploding … nor listen to me rant about this for a minute longer^†.

1. † When he’s home and I am writing a ranting post, I rant in between sentences. No doubt, it makes his head want to explode, but bless him, he (almost) never tells me to shut up. [↩]