Credentialing

You can learn all you need to know about a person's politics through a simple game of Marry, F---, Kill.

It's simple: You name three celebrities. The other player(s) decide who to marry, who to sleep with, and who to kill.

The list I gave the boyfriend: Roseanne Barr, Ann Coulter, Margaret Cho.

I'm sorry, Ann fans. It's lucky you're all armed to the teeth so you can exact your revenge on him. Believe me, I tried to talk him out of it:

Me: You're going to marry a self-confessed fag hag who has sworn to stick her finger up your rectum during oral sex.

Boyfriend: I'll get her a gay pool boy. A whole cabana of them, whatever it takes.

The list he gave me: O.J. Simpson, Michael Moore, Michael Jackson.

Me: Let's see: We know all too well what the consequences of marriage to O.J. are, so that's out. I'll have sex with him and marry Michael Jackson. It's not like marriage to Jacko involves actual sex anyway.

Boyfriend: You're going to marry a pedophile just so you can kill Michael Moore.

Me: We'll need a prenup. I'm not paying the bills at Neverland when he goes to jail.

Hours of fun, hours of horror.

But I'll never look at him the same since he admitted he'd have sex with Eleanor Clift--not that the other choices were much better.

Being on a Topic Not Generally Mentioned Here

Babies.

First of all, congratulations to the Esmays, Dean and Rosemary, on the safe and happy arrival of Rosemary's Baby. (I couldn't resist the idiotic joke, but, oh, all right; I suppose Dean had a hand in it too. Well, not a hand, exactly . . . .) I'll be first to tell you I'm not generally an ooher-and-aaher over babies, but this is indeed an adorable baby. Believe it!

I have been reading more than I usually do about babies and pregnancies since I found the infertility blogs. (One is linked at left.) I've thought about writing about some of the things I have learned by doing so, but I have any number of reasons that always crop up and change my mind before I do--first among them being, I don't want to link to an infertility blog and have some spoilin'-for-a-fight blogger find it and, fingers trembling in anticipation, rush off to type a manifesto about how women who don't learn to "just accept" their infertility are Thwarting God's Will.

No, no thank you.

I'll just say I don't look at pregnancy and childbirth the same way anymore. People who describe babies as Little Miracles used to give me, I admit it, a real pain in the tushie. "Anyone," I would think dismissively (where obviously "anyone" meant "any woman"), "can pop out a baby. Watch Jerry Springer sometime and prepare to be appalled at how easy it is."

But they kind of are little miracles, really. And the things a woman's body can withstand when she is determined and able to bring one into the world are simultaneously horrific and amazing.

So with a much deeper and more heartfelt appreciation for the whole mysterious process than I once had, I'll just say again: Congratulations, Esmays. Nice one.

(And thank goodness I type accounts of caesarean sections often enough not to be grossed out by this!)

My Fellow Texans

This is the woman who wants to grade your children by obesity.

Just so you know.

(Via Hubris.)

Minimum Wage Eating

Listen up, internet: You people have to quit writing interesting stuff because I have things to do today. I'm late on writing thank-you letters. I have masses of laundry to be done. I have four bags of trash to take out. I need to vacuum, and I'm out of bread flour. PLEASE STOP WRITING SUCH INTERESTING STUFF.

Thank you.

Now, bread flour . . . that reminds me. I've been thinking about how being poor changes one's food choices for some time now, off and on, but I haven't quite known how to write about it. I suppose if I were a journalist, I would say I haven't quite found "the angle," but (a) I'm not a journalist and (b) I hate journalistic jargon like "the angle."

When my brother came over for New Year's Eve, I made a pizza. I mean I made the dough--all right, the bread machine did that--and rolled out the crust and made the sauce and sliced the toppings--I mean I made a pizza.

I don't really come from a cooking background. My father's relatives cook a lot, but while my mother certainly can cook, she doesn't really like to cook, and so I wasn't exposed much to the art of cooking growing up. Chocolate chip cookies, peeling potatoes, and how to brown a pot roast--that was about it. That's not meant in any way as a slam on my mother, who would probably tell you that I was also pretty lazy about wanting to help in the kitchen, which is true. I got grossed out at the sight of raw chicken or hamburger. I can remember telling her, "I could never stick my hands in that," while watching her form raw ground round into meatballs.

I'm just saying, I didn't do a lot of cooking growing up. The first thing I ever tried to make on my own in a kitchen was stuffed peppers, and I flubbed it--it turns out it's really important to brown the meat first. Yes, I stuffed the peppers with a mixture of raw hamburger, rice, and vegetables.

Hello, E. coli! Thank God my boyfriend at the time took one look at my pitiful efforts and said, "We're not eating that. Get dressed; we're going out."

But back to New Year's. My brother asked, "What got you into this? What turned you into someone who makes pizza from scratch?" And in truth, there are many reasons, but the one I gave my brother is probably the primary one. I said:

"Losing my job."

See, I like to eat well. I love restaurants. But I can't afford to go out to restaurants. No, not even to the chains that run specials now and then. Besides, I'm a snob trapped on a proletarian budget, meaning: I hate the Olive Garden.

I had a choice: I could learn to cook tasty things as cheaply as possible at home, or I could renew my relationship with ramen noodles. I have eaten my share of ramen noodles, people, and as God is my witness, I will do everything in my power never to make ramen noodles a mainstay of my diet again. (I still buy them, for the record. I just don't want to live on them.)

All of this is a long-winded way (do I have any other?) of getting to two articles I've read recently about food and poverty. The first, from Serenity, is actually about much more than that, but it's the topic of food and living expenses I want to focus on here. Serenity is someone who knows the working poor experience in a way that, I'm sorry, too many Republicans remain ignorant, dismissive, or simply downright arrogant about:

That is why so many Americans will pass up [minimum-wage jobs]. Because they can’t fricken live that way. It was extremely difficult for me and I was single, no kids; only had to worry about providing for myself. I lived in a box apartment, I had the absolute cheapest phone plan one could get, (I believe it is a necessity to have a phone as emergencies may arise. This should not be looked upon as a luxury item...and it wasn’t a cell phone), and dined on Top Ramen for much longer than I care to remember. I did not go out, I did not get my hair cut, I did not rent movies, I did not buy things whether I needed them or not. I wore clothes for 10 years despite the fact that they were falling apart from so many washings. I cut open tubes of toothpaste and lotion bottles to get every last bit of residue from them that I could. When I got paid, I would “splurge” and buy Kool-Aid, 10 for a dollar and not only did I drink it without the sugar, (too expensive), I would also keep adding water to it until all the color was gone.

And that is how I lived when my job paid me minimum wage. This is how a lot of people live. A lot of those people have families. They have kids who need new clothes and shoes and a proper diet. So the parents work 2-3 jobs in an effort to give their kids what they need.

I was very relieved to read this because it helped me understand why I just can't seem to lose a little chip I have on my shoulder. I try and I try and I try, but when it comes right down to it, I cannot shake the belief that if you've never had to take a calculator to the grocery store*, you have no idea what you're talking about, and you should be disqualified from all discussions about the minimum wage on that basis alone.

Go on, flame me. Go on. I can take it. I've survived a lot worse than listening to some jackass who's never known rock-bottom living bray at me. Heeeee-haw! That's all I'm going to hear from you until you put your money where your mouth is.

Like this family is doing:

. . . we're tracking our grocery spending this month to see how hard it is for us to stay within the limits of USDA's Thrifty Food Plan, which allows up to $434.40 per month for a family of our size.

For the record, I don't think this gives us a real feel for what it's like to be poor, any more than making teenagers carry around an egg or a sack of flour for a month gives them real insight into what it's like to be a parent. I know that it makes a huge difference not to really have to worry that my kids are going to go hungry if I don't leave enough money for the last week. But it's a useful consciousness raising exercise.

A million thank-yous to feministe for the link. You should read the whole thing; as tempted as I am to give you another excerpt, it would be doing a disservice to the author to do so. Read it. For all I admire the effort, they buy some things I would never buy: Ice cream?--Instant pudding's cheaper. The boxes, of course, not the prepackaged pudding cups. And if you can make muffins and coffee cakes from scratch, graduating to actual cakes should be, uh, a piece of cake. Think how many cakes you can get out of a bag of sugar and a bag of cake flour, versus a box of Duncan Hines. Buying rolls? Buying rolls? Forget it. To someone like me, that is an enormous waste of money.

But normally, when we're making a decent living, we all indulge in enormous wastes of money in our food choices all the time, "time" being the key word there. The tradeoff to making things from scratch, to buying whole roasting chickens instead of boneless, skinless parts, to making your own chicken stock instead of buying bouillon cubes or (shudder) canned broth--the tradeoff to all of this is TIME. What you save in dollars you spend in time. Unfortunately, a family in which one or both parents works multiple jobs doesn't have any more time than they do money. In fact, they may well have less.

There's another article excerpted within the last one linked above that I wanted to talk about briefly. In it, a woman follows a pregnant, homeless teenager through the store as she selects items she'll pay for with food stamps. In particular, this:

I stood, stunned, as she reached for the individual-portion cartons of juice -- with their brightly colored miniature straws -- ignoring the larger, economy-size bottles. No calculation of unit price, no can'ts or shoulds or ought-not-to's, no keen eye to the comparative ounce. By the time her stuffed cart reached the checkout line, my unease was turning into anger. Didn't she know she was poor?

Trust me on this if on nothing else: Poor people know they're poor. What's missing here is an education about choosing food wisely. I know; I was on food stamps for several months. It took me awhile to figure out how to stretch them, because I had no education in that. (I know how tempted some of you must be right now to add, "And, you were dumb." Fine, I was dumb.) My parents had generally (that I could remember, at least) bought whatever they liked, with price being secondary.

On one of my first outings with the stamps, I came home with a package of boneless, skinless chicken breasts. At the time, the stores still sold chicken breasts with the bones still in and the skin still on. Boneless and skinless breasts were about $4 a pound. Breasts with bones and skin were HALF that.

The man I lived with at the time had not grown up like I had. The man I lived with at the time had grown up poor. And he saw the boneless, skinless chicken breasts--the package of four of them, because heaven forbid we buy the economy-size pack and save a few more cents per pound--and he pretty much lost it on me. My only defense was, "I didn't know"--because I didn't. I didn't know they listed unit prices on the price labels on the shelves. I didn't know about the time/money tradeoff you need to make when there is less money than time in the house. I didn't know, I didn't know, I didn't know, because no one had ever told me.

But believe me, I know now. I know that the one of the most giddily happy moments of my life was the first time I realized I was making enough money to just throw things in the cart. Anything, anything at all. The store was MINE. Buffalo mozzarella at $9 a pound? Throw it in. Red bell peppers at $2.99 each? I'll take six of those. Frozen dinners? Organic butter? Steak? Throw it in, throw it in, throw it in!

Those of you who have never known any other way to shop: All I'm asking is that you show a little sensitivity. A little gratitude for what you've got would be nice, too, but it's not necessary. Just a little sensitivity will do. You never know who you're talking to or what he or she has been through; you never know. Maybe leave some of the "that's what they get for not going to college" talk out of the discussion? A little sensitivity. That's all I ask.

And for those of you who have at least a nodding acquaintance with the kind of living I'm talking about: What were or are some of your favorite "poor foods?" You know what I mean--the stuff that will stretch and keep and last, the stuff that was both tasty and gave you bang for the buck. (Cheese enchiladas, for example, are one of my favorites.) What do you eat when you've really got to watch what you spend on it?

*Or had to add the dollar amounts in your head. Me, I had to use a calculator, because, I swear this is true, I can work out a triple integral for you, I can solve linear algebra matrices, and I can keep track of pointers to pointers to pointers, but I cannot add or subtract in my head. It is a slow, painful process that invariably either leaves me with the wrong answer--and I mean way off--or having to start all over again from the beginning.

Other Remarks on the Thread That Would Not Die That I Never Got to Because I Was Too Busy Arguing with That Dickhead Muslim Deity

Regarding this post, of course.

I cannot be the only one who thinks "Purple Fury" would make a really good male porn star name. At least use it in erotica somehow:

He pounded her repeatedly with his throbbing, purple fury, until her moans of ecstasy reached a frequency only dogs could hear.

The guy who said "the secret is finding a mate who enjoys cunnilingus" might as well have said the secret is finding a mate WHO IS BREATHING. That guy will never spend Saturday night going, "SNL . . . or MadTV? SNL . . . or MadTV?"

LabRat brought up an evolutionary theory--because you can't have these discussions without evolutionary theories; don't you people know anything?--that points out that, if you're talkin' evolution and the drive to create a diverse population to ensure the species survives . . . it's actually in the interests of both sexes to cheat (without being caught, of course). (Helen, I think you sent me a link to a study on this very thing long ago, am I right?) Anyway, I await the day when the dozens of Republican men who have told me "all women want x and are y and do z, because evolution," will march on Washington, demanding a constitutional amendment to abolish monogamy. Because evolution!

Michele didn't appreciate the commenters who said, "Oh, super-thin is in because gay fashion designers want women to look more like boys," but you know who first floated that theory to me? Right: A gay man. I don't think it's "gay-bashing" to point out that gay males tend to have different physical criteria than straight ones when it comes to beauty. When's the last time you met a straight man obsessed with Judy Garland?

If I hear one more man exclaiming gleefully to his brethren that his marriage improved the minute, the very minute, he accepted that women are irrational fluffy creatures who need to be placed on pedestals, to be taken down only long enough to "coddle them and protect them from the dragons that are out there," I will fwow up. Dude, don't punish the rest of us because you married a ditz. And I should say that really it's that I would fwow up, were I not certain in my bones that it's actually the same one guy who can't seem to make this point often enough under his own name, and so has to go making up alter egos to convince others he has a "movement." Anyway, it's pretty giggle-inducing the way one guy will finally figure out how to get out of the shithouse at home, then run around excitedly sharing the news with other men, as though women were all one lock to which he'd just found the key. "And I turned the corner and it was right there, the master key, lying right there on the floor of our 'NO GIRLZ ALOWED' treehouse the whole time!" Not that guys like this ever ask my advice, but here's some anyway: Don't get divorced.

On the post overall: I'm still pretty stunned that a woman can ask, "Hey, isn't having the sternum and rib cage be the most protruding part of a woman's chest a little sick and wrong?" and a goodly percentage of men will hear that question as, "Do I look fat in these jeans to you?" Those are completely different questions.

Posted by Ilyka at 02:08 AM | Comments (25)

How Lazy? THIS Lazy

Never underestimate my ability to blow things off.

I dreamt last night that the boyfriend and I were sitting around talking to a couple other people, when suddenly I asked, "Wait, is today Saturday?"

"Yeah," answered the boyfriend.

"Saturday the 25th?"

"Yep."

I looked at my watch. It was 4:25 in the afternoon. I said, "Ohmigod, our wedding is at 5:15 at my parents' house."

"Oh, that's right," said the boyfriend.

"I really don't feel like going."

"Me neither."

"We'll never make it on time anyway. It's 45 minutes to my parents' house from here."

"We'd be late to our own wedding."

"I know!"

"Can't we reschedule?"

"My parents would have to reschedule everything then. The caterer, the band, the decorators . . . it would cost them a fortune. They'd kill me."

"Shit."

"Yeah. Hey, and I don't know what I did with my engagement ring."

"Did you look on the bookshelf? You leave everything on the bookshelf."

"I know, but it's not there. I checked already. Did you ever pick up the wedding bands?"

"Uh, no."

"Oh crap. What are we going to do?"

"Well, I think we have to go."

I started thinking about getting into the shower, doing my hair, my makeup, having to put on the damn dress . . . and I said to the boyfriend:

"We should have just gone to Vegas some weekend."

"We should have," he agreed.

"I really don't feel like getting married today. What's wrong with me? This is supposed to be the happiest day of my life, a day I'll treasure forever, but I'm not feeling it at all. I just don't care. I'd rather sit here and hang out some more."

"I know," he replied, "but maybe you should at least get in the shower."

Happy Holidays?

You think Christmas is a stressful time of year now? Implement this little imaginary custom and see what happens:

I had a cup of coffee with one of my guides in Ghadames, Libya back in November. He sheepishly wanted to know if a particular rumor about us was true.

“I have heard,” he said, “that European and American men have sex with other men’s wives on Christmas. Is it true? Libyan people don’t like that.”

“American people don’t like that,” I said. “No, it isn’t true. We don’t do that. Europeans don’t do it either.”

“You don’t do it? Really?” he said.

“No,” I told him. “Where did you hear that?”

Then again, starting that tradition might make the holidays less stressful for some; I guess it would depend on whether one felt he or she had "traded up" in the deal or not. Then again again, I doubt the Libyans imagine the wives to have any say in the matter, so we're back to increasing stress for at least half the participants after all. What we heathenish unmarrieds are supposed to do during that time, I hate to think. Probably prepare the pre-adultery banquet and (shudder) wash all the sheets afterward.

To me it's one of the saddest things to consider about countries governed with an iron fist--that their citizens' knowledge of the world is at roughly the level mine was back when I thought there "might be something" to talk of rock musicians employing backwards masking to get me to--yes!--worship Satan. You know? My excuse is, I was 12 years old. That's not nearly as good an excuse as, "My dictator told me so. And if I don't believe everything he says, he might put an even bigger picture of himself on my apartment building."

I Tried, Honest, I Really Did

I have been a bad blogger, a lazy blogger, a bad lazy bad bad blogger. This is likely to continue; I always hate January and do my best to hibernate during it.

Still, I tried several times this week not to be such a bad lazy bad bad blogger; I tried to do better, because isn't that what January is supposed to be all about, doing better?

And it just didn't come off. Therefore I present: Things I Thought of Blogging About This Week, but Then Was All Like, "Enh:"

Biscuits, and the art of making good ones, and the impossibility of making good ones in my boyfriend's ultra-primitive kitchen, but then again didn't the pioneers manage it with fewer utensils than my boyfriend has? So what's wrong with me? I know in my heart that dry, crumbly biscuits never happen to Bree Van De Kamp. You could lock her in a room with one rusted fork and a thimble of milk, and come back an hour later to a five-course meal, freshly-pressed laundry, and new window treatments. Bree is like the pretend Martha Stewart, meaning she never has to go to jail unless the writers put her there and, best of all, I don't have to hate her domestic goddessness because she's not real. I am free to envy and revel and aspire.

The English are correct that Americans use the word "biscuit" to describe things that, well, aren't, if you're the sort to worry that "biscuit" means "twice-cooked" while American biscuits (again) aren't. Here's the sort I am: I'm the sort who wants a magic ray gun that I can use to instantly transport all the Limeys who care about this distinction back in time with me, to a little lonely campfire somewhere in the American West, so they can proceed to tell the cowboy baking biscuits over it that he's using the word "biscuit" incorrectly to describe what he's cooking. Go on, now, you weedy little porridge-gobbler: Tell the nice man WITH THE GUNS HANGING OFF HIM that he's wrong about the word "biscuit." Tell him. Please.

And then I worked up a good head of steam about this really nasty proposed bill in Virginia but quickly got overwhelmed with the part where it's just just, just . . . just a truly revolting idea, frankly, and so maybe someone else can find a way to get the message through to Representative Cosgrove that a miscarriage is not a crime better than I can.

Conservatives will be truly conservative again, at least in the sense of preserving some sort of aesthetic order, when they start demanding Kid Rock be removed from the inauguration festivities not because he uses dirty words, but because he sucks. Oh, I'm not saying he isn't a fine and decent human being; I'm just doubting his entertainment value. And please, someone remind Michelle Malkin that the last time pop music entertainers used clean language and were deemed family-friendly, it resulted in some jackass giving them a variety show, and the world suffered a lot more from that than it could ever suffer from Kid Rock.

Finally, while I'm nagging: Don't count on people getting a super-convenient case of amnesia whenever your side spends a few years making a case for lefties as (and I think this is a phrase I'm borrowing from Tim Blair, but I'm not sure) "joy-killing funsuckers," and then later behaves like . . . a bunch of joy-killing funsuckers. Which is not to imply that Kid Rock ever gave anyone a moment's joy, or fun, or even seasons in the sun for that matter, but you know? No one outside D.C. cares about the inauguration anyway, for the love of humanity.

Wait, wait, I may not care about this exactly, but look, I really could have got an entire post out of this topic, because I thought of one last thing. Politics, in practice, is the art of mixing principles and pragmatism or, as that delightful Zen koan "The Gambler" teaches us, the art of knowing when to hold 'em, knowing when to fold 'em, knowing when to walk away, etc. So listen: When your average citizen can give you a better response than--

"Uh, Bo Derek . . . and that guy, who's that guy?--Ferris Bueller, and that guy, he was like the teacher in that movie? You know the one? Ben Stinefeld? . . . and, uh . . . well Schwarzenegger still counts, right? So that's three . . . ."

--to the question, "Name as many Republican entertainers as you can and, please! Take your time, take all day if you need it!"--look, when Americans can get beyond three in that task, THAT'S when you bludgeon them over the head with the principles. Until then: Pragmatism.

(Thanks to Andrea Harris for the biscuits (and tea and maybe a little cake) link. Thanks to getupgrrl and Democracy for Virginia for the Cosgrove link.)

I SUPPOSE AN UPDATE IS WARRANTED, 01/09/2005: Blogging is not like riding a bicycle; you can forget how to do it, and the first thing I usually forget is to credit, credit, credit--so belated credit to Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom for pointing me to the WorldNetDaily article about disinviting Kid Rock in the first place. Holy crumb, has that comment thread mushroomed. Like all lengthy comment threads, it eventually degenerates, but the bulk of it is still good reading. I thought a few comments were worth cherry-picking from it, so I hope Jeff doesn't mind if I excerpt one or two or three or four little things.

First, I think Allah summarizes the social conservative argument neatly, and in his usual levelheaded fashion:

. . . libertinism isn’t something most Republicans want to promote, particularly in conjunction with a presidential inauguration. Besides, any kids who are turned on to the GOP by seeing Kid Rock perform are in for a rude awakening the next time Santorum and co. introduce a piece of socially conservative legislation. “Wait, dude, what? I thought Republicans liked pimps.”

And, on whether disinviting Kid Rock signals a demand from the White House that all Republicans "walk in lock-step:"

No one’s saying he shouldn’t be allowed to perform because he supports gay marriage. We’re saying he shouldn’t be allowed to perform because he goes around calling himself a fucking pimp.

Allah, bottle whatever it is you've got that allows you to argue in favor of things I'm against without being an arrogant, sanctimonious prick about it. It'll sell.

Bill of INDC Journal issues a plea for perspective I'm partial to:

I think everyone needs to unwind their panties and keep their eye on the ball of killing terrorists and cutting taxes, instead of organizing boycotts and letter-writing campaigns over stupid shit like this, which is a bid to fracture the fragile coalition of libertarians, moderates and conservatives that allow us to do the first two, vastly more important things.

Now if only we all could get past the very natural human tendency to demand our information in bite-sized, digestible chunks of light, fluffy, trivial goodness. Sure, that'll happen.

Bill also wants to remind people who the swing voters are, and why we need them, filthy language and all:

The majority that voted Republican was a coalition of others beyond conservatives. And the conservatives that insist on making shit like this a big deal will overreach and swing the balance of power back to leftists one day, you watch.

You can't eat the cake and have it too; that is, you can't spend weeks debunking "the mainstream media" and "liberals" for their bad-math observation that many voters chose "moral issues" as their deciding factor during the election . . . and then insist that "moral issues" are the deciding factor in determining whether someone's really Repbulican or not. One or the other, folks.

Jeff himself also makes good swing-voter points:

What the Republicans need to shed (in my opinion) is this reputation they have for being humorless moral scolds.

My brother and I had a good conversation along those lines over New Year's. When I think "humorless moral scolds" nowadays, it tends to be directed at people who call movies like Team America "funny in parts, I guess, but ultimately so hateful." (That, unfortunately, is a paraphrase from a blog I'll likely never be able to find again, so I can't be more precise or even link it.)

But both my brother and I are old enough to remember when the tsk-tsking came almost wholly from Republicans, while Democrats were the party of FUN! We like the fun in my family. Jeff likes the fun too, not to mention the boobies, and he reminds a social conservative which of them has more to lose if the Republican "big tent" starts a-shrinkin':

You have more to lose than I do. Because at least under Dems I can see boobies and hear naughty words. And worship Satan.

Unfortunately for Satan (or . . . is it?), Jeff has since decided that Pat Boone is his master.

Read the whole thing, or most of it. What else are you going to do?

Andrea, meanwhile, wants Republicans to be the party of adults and hire some entertainment that doesn't suck--or at least some entertainment that doesn't use the word "suck" as often as I do. As she puts it:

This is a Republican administration, and that should mean uptight and dignified, not "just like the Democrats only pro-gun."

As one who's guilty of wishing the Republicans sometimes were "just like the Democrats only pro-gun," (and "pro-give-me-back-my-tax-money, you bastards"), I can see her point.

Finally, the best religious conservative argument in favor of letting Kid Rock perform comes from Baldilocks:

It’s interesting that some conservative Christians would rather bar this man, as if he were a leper, rather than teach him, lead him and embrace him. It’s almost as though he’s been asking to be embraced by his countrymen—especially including those of us who are justified by faith--by celebrating things American rather than spitting on them as well as all things Christian.

The guy has long been reaching out. Somebody ought to grab his hand, rather than slap it away. Besides, I doubt that he’ll sing “F*ck You Blind” at the ceremony.

People, that is true compassionate conservatism--not to mention just plain good sense.

Final update, not Kid-Rock-related, and aren't you the lucky reader for that! Regarding the bill proposed in Virginia by state representative John Cosgrove, requiring a woman to report all incidents of "fetal death" to law enforcement within 12 hours of same, it seems Mr. Cosgrove has responded appropriately to the outpouring of concern by women of all political backgrounds; see getupgrrl for the short version, or Democracy for Virginia for the full. Good for you, Mr. Cosgrove. Sometimes the wording of a bill is everything.

Posted by Ilyka at 01:53 PM | Comments (8)

Happy New Year

We're all still alive and well, I take it? Good, good. I'll settle back in to work here, ah, tomorrow, probably. Right now it's Sunday, and Sunday is a day of what again? That's right: REST.

Oh, and gift-card spending. I'm pretty sure there's something about gift-card spending in that commandment, too.

Meanwhile, enjoy Jim Peacock's recipe for Macho Dip and Andrea Harris' new blog. (I love the "new year, new blog" thing.) I have really been taking time off from all things web-related, so that's all I have for you at present.