A couple of nights ago around 10:45 pm, I kept hearing "meow, meow, meow" outside my window. I'm up on the 2nd story, so I was wondering where exactly the mews were coming from... I peered out and couldn't see; kept hearing mews, so turned off all of my lights and computer and TV to see... There was a cat perched on the tree closest to my 2nd-story window, looking in at me! :)
What a pleasant and welcome surprise, a cat visit! (Since my cat Gracie died on April 15, 2009, I haven't had another cat, and miss the cat spirit so.) I talked to this visiting cat ("Hi honey! You sure are a pretty cat! What are you doing up there?") for a couple of minutes before she disappeared again...
FAMILIAR: "a spirit often embodied in an animal and held to attend and serve or guard a person."
(The cat was sitting in the nook of the tree pictured here.)
A marketing firm just advertised the following temp job (only 2 weeks!). What I liked about it was the last part:
"...If you are interested, please tell us something about you and, as a skills test, please write your own 1-sentence witty sayings (like what would be found in a Fortune Cookie) about the following 5 topics and include them in your email...
(1) organic farming, (2) golf, (3) the ocean, (4) Saab and (5) sales."
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I already sent in my "skills test" but I'm curious: What would you guys have written for the above 5 items?
When did "family values" start coming up as an actual electoral issue among Republicans? It's not so big this year, except with Rick Santorum, who has made "family values" a big thing for probably more than a decade now.
Santorum and other religious people define "family values" as a "man married to a woman." These folks say that "a man married to a woman" equals a happy family life AND a good America.
I beg to differ.
My mother and father were married for 15 years (1962 to 1977). I was born in 1965. During their marriage, I remember very little but hate.
One early memory was when I was 4, and my dad was trying to teach my mom how to drive a stick-shift. They didn't have a baby-sitter, so I had to go out with them... He screamed abusively at her constantly. After a few driving sessions and listening to him, I remember screaming myself at both of them: "I don't want to go! I don't want to go!" I still had to go.
That was at age 4. There were dozens of shitty things and moves in between then and the end.
The end of the marriage came when I was 12: Dad went out for the evening in his suede jacket. Came home. Wanted my mom to go to the bedroom and have sex with him. She refused. I was ordered to my room. Peeked out to see them grappling, her pulling his gold chain off, her on her knees before him and him then ordering her to PICK IT UP.
The next thing I knew, my mother was running off into the woods while my dad shot after her.
I closed my bedroom door that I'd been peeking out of. I got lucky that my drunken father went and passed out rather than choosing to shoot me.
How many families has something like this happened to.
To Rick Santorum and any other asshole claiming "family values" just because there was a "man and a woman" in the equation: It has NOTHING to do with "man and woman." Male/female marriages are at the 50% rate of failure. How dare anyone say that these things, just because they're "male/female," are what anyone should be aiming for? (Especially when what I knew as a kid as "aiming for" was my father shooting at my mother?)
I will never forget the night that my father shot at my mother. Aside from that most-major trauma, I will also never forget the time that my father gave my mother a black eye because she got home late from the dentist. I will never forget every possibly happy thing that he did with me that he turned into shit:
Like a high-school football game that he took me to... My dad taking me to a game! Only, he spent the whole time pointing out which girls looked like sluts.
And then there was my dad driving me to a skating rink: Per his instructions, I had to keep my hair in a pony-tail and I had to keep my coat on the whole time.
And then there was the one Dallas Cowboys game I got to go to: My dad got drunk by the end of it, and I, at age 12, had to steer the car home because he was so fucked up.
And the above were the supposedly GOOD things that I experienced while I was a kid. I'm not talking about the times he hit my mother or the times he terrorized me.
So don't talk to me about "family values" featuring a positive male figure. I had the shittiest male role model imaginable. That political figures are claiming that such "male-female-marriage" is automatically the ideal is psychotic to me.
Spent most of this Saturday night watching the Republican returns from South Carolina! Which reminded me...
In the summer of 1980, when I was 14, I stayed up til all hours to see who Reagan would pick as his VP (back when such things were excitingly up for grabs 'til all hours): Gerald Ford or George H.W. Bush. When the decision was finally made, my mother -- with whom I'd been noshing in daylight hours -- was asleep, yet I was so excited that I slipped a piece of paper under her door, so she'd see it first thing in the morning: "IT'S BUSH!" (Imagine getting excited about such a thing!) :)
From Wikipedia RE what was going on that night in 1980:
VICE PRESIDENTIAL SELECTION:
Ronald Reagan's choice for vice presidential running mate had been a subject of speculation since the end of the primaries. When former President Gerald Ford revealed in a CBS interview with Walter Cronkite that he was seriously considering the vice presidency, Ford garnered a great deal of interest. However, after Ford suggested the possibility of a "copresidency" and, in addition, insisted that Henry Kissinger be re-appointed as Secretary of State and that Alan Greenspan be appointed as Secretary of the Treasury, negotiations to form a Reagan-Ford ticket ceased. Less than twenty-four hours before Reagan formally accepted the Republican nomination, he telephoned George H. W. Bush to inform Bush of his intent to nominate him. The following day, July 17—the final day of the Republican National Convention—Reagan officially announced Bush as his running mate.
I really do seem to get off on stuff like this. For instance, when I was 3, my mother notes in my childhood scrapbook that I would --- as a 3-year-old --- stop and watch Richard Nixon whenever he was on TV! (At 3, I was apparently a weird savant of some sort.)
By the time I was 9, I was watching Nixon's resignation on TV and later writing the man a sympathy letter...
My only later political claim to fame came in 1984, when I was 18, driving in the motorcade of Gary Hart when he appeared at UT-Austin. The pollster Pat Caddell (now on Fox) rode in my back seat. Wooo!
[FOX NEWS REPORTER JUAN] WILLIAMS: Senator Santorum, the Obama administration has not specifically addressed high levels of joblessness and a 25 percent poverty rate in black America. They say they want to fix the economy for all, but given the crisis situation among a group of historically disadvantaged Americans, do you feel the time has come to take special steps to deal with the extraordinary level of poverty afflicting one race of America?
SANTORUM: It’s very interesting, if you look at a study that was done by the Brookings Institute back in 2009, they determined that if Americans do three things, they can avoid poverty. Three things. Work, graduate from high school, and get married before you have children. Those three things… (APPLAUSE) SANTORUM: Those three things, if you do, according to Brookings, results in only 2 percent of people who do all those things ending up in poverty, and 77 percent above the national average in income....
This was followed only a couple of minutes later by Newt Gingrich's now-famous standing-ovation moment in response to Williams asking Gingrich if he was somehow "belittling" minority teenagers by suggesting that they work at any menial job. (Gingrich points out that his own -- white -- daughter worked as a janitor when she was 13 to earn money.)
Santorum was right, and Gingrich was right. Hate to say it. I hate both men's ignorant views on gay rights (and I dislike Gingrich back from the '90s when I was a huge Clinton fan), but their views on why some people are poor are right on target. It's not racist, it's just a fact that blacks, for instance, have a higher rate of unwed mothers, have a lower rate of high school graduation, and have a higher rate of unemployment than either whites, Hispanics, or Asians --- regardless of the current economic conditions of the country as a whole. As Santorum pointed out with his stats from the Brookings Institute, if you drop out of school, get pregnant while a teen, and don't work... you're most likely going to be poor. Duh.
Juan Williams asked Santorum if "the time has come to take special steps" to deal with the "extraordinary" level of black poverty... Not sure what he meant by "the time has come"! How long have we had "Affirmative Action" in the US now? Maybe the "time has come" for people to understand the cause/effect relationship of their actions: get pregnant while a teen, drop out of school, don't work... poverty. Why should the government be even ASKED to take "special steps" to help with a continuing problem that's based a good deal on personal behavior?
As for Gingrich's speech a minute or so later: We lower-middle-class whites started out working minimum wage jobs without complaint. I personally wasn't a janitor, but I earned the same minimum wage working numbingly boring jobs at a local drugstore and then the local K-Mart as soon as I turned 16, up 'til I graduated high school. Once in college, I worked a minimum-wage job at the school library to help pay for school. As Gingrich points out in response to Williams' suggestion that Gingrich was somehow "belittling" minorities by suggesting they -- gasp -- WORK: What's so insulting about suggesting that kids learn responsibility from working?
And then on to Gingrich on Thursday's SC debate... Again, I'm not a Gingrich fan, have never been; I was around when he, as it turned out, hypocritically went after Clinton in the '90s for fooling around. I saw him, rightly, voted out of power by his own party members. But... In the below he has a very good point: CNN's John King opening a presidential debate with a question about an ex-wife's allegations from 14 years ago is COMPLETELY ridiculous.
In both of the Gingrich clips, I admire his balls for calling people on their BS. It's a huge dilemma for me. I can't vote for Obama in 2012 simply because he's done a terrible job. Bush was bad and inept (I have never voted for Bush); Obama has continued the trend of bad and inept. Except Obama is more well-spoken, and, kind of, tows the accepted social line ("kind of" but not actually for gay marriage, for example) so he gets points... but why? His money-men are exactly the same money-men who back the Republicans. (Only, the Republicans admit it, while Obama does not. Obama is especially creepy because he pretends to be "purer" than the Republicans, who just outright admit their corporate loyalties! With Bush and the Republicans, you at least knew/know exactly what you're getting!) I can't in good conscience vote for someone who's allowed the country to deteriorate EVEN FURTHER than Bush did.
But who's the alternative? Romney, I think, would make a very good manager of the economy. And that is, actually, what we need... Kind of. But it's beyond a "good manager" problem right now. Things really have gone off the rails. Outsourcing is a serious problem for American workers, and Romney did just that with Bain. (As Obama has also allowed.) I'm all for "cleaning up" and "tightening up," but...no one is mentioning that Americans are losing jobs because we're allowing corporations to outsource jobs to foreign workers who earn $2 an hour!
Romney/Obama/Gingrich are all pro-corporation. Ron Paul, whom I like the best because of his intellectual honesty, is pro "let capitalism be capitalism" and is against "big capitalism" --- But, even with him... If we "let capitalism be capitalism," then we'll likely all (unless we're shareholders of a corporation) be making $1.00 an hour unless the government somehow checks their innate greed! (Seriously... When have workers EVER received a slightly-more-than-living wage under a capitalist system? One is post-WWII in the US and in Europe. The only other that I can think of is after the PLAGUE in the Middle Ages, when so many people died and the worker shortage was so acute that the plebes finally had a little leverage!)
