I have had it.  I have just been over at Salon and read some letter attached to an article and there is some yahooette calling herself TexasKitty or somesuch making a Tex-ass out of herself (if indeed she is a she, on the internet who knows) by stringing a line of bs with an extreme right bend to it.  And I am tired tired tired of it.  Every loud mouth rightwing denizen of the state of Texas has to put where they are from in their damned monikers and it's pissing me off.

I'M A TEXAN! OK?  But I have my own opinions and thoughts and beliefs and I don't try to present myself as somehow speaking for an entire state.  And they don't speak for me or even for most of the state.  They just make Texans look even more loutish and ill-informed than we are.  

I know there are some posters here who have "Texas" in their monikers who are not rightwing and well where I once believed that it is dubious to do so, I think I've changed my mind.  Because obviously something has to be done to counter the Tex-asses.  So, I'm going to change my moniker to TexTexanTexaslassgirlchickipoo and counterpost every rightwing screed posted by any Tex-ass I see.  And I encourage all liberal and progressive Texans to do the same.

Yeeeha!

Around this time of year I get to thinking of my Dad.  He died over 10 years ago in the Spring.  My Dad was career military. Army Infantry.  Whenever the subject of the Air Force or any kind of military pilot (aside from helicopter pilots who he revered) came up he'd sneer and mutter "flyboys."  He was particularly snide about bomber pilots.  I finally understood that he had issues with men, however brave they might have been in certain respects, who dropped bombs from way up high then flew back to relatively clean comfortable environs while men like my Dad slogged it out on the ground, dirty and afraid and often surrounded.  

I'm an Edwards woman.  Recently, I got into it with a co-worker's relative that I met at dinner.  She's voting for Hillary by gum!  Because, she doesn't want to die before a woman becomes president.  I said, "But Edwards is the most progressive of the democratic candidates."  And she said, "It will be history making if Hillary is elected."

I was too stunned to really react at that moment.  I couldn't quite process the sheer triviality of her reasoning.  There were many things I could have said.  I could have talked about Margaret Thatcher and her "history making" and how it damaged her country.  But I didn't.  I could have mentioned that she would probably "die" sooner than expected if President Hillary doesn't address the healthcare crisis as she probably should and probably won't.  But I didn't do that either.  

I simply looked at her across the table as she smiled that same bright chipper smile that I saw on the faces of two University of California co-eds as they were interviewed on tv and they said they were voting for Arnold because then his signature would be on their diplomas and "WOW" that was gonna be soooo cool!

For me, more than anything, it means that Americans want their checks and balances.  And they understand the concept very well for all the bellyaching that goes on about the "sheeple" and the unaware public.

I work in a public library that served as a polling place for its precinct.  All day I was directing people to the voting booths.  One guy came in and said, "I'm a dyed in the wool neo-con and I'm voting the straight democrat ticket.  The Republicans are out of control."

I answered without a pause, "There was a reason that the founding fathers constructed our government with separation of powers"

And he replied, "Damn straight."

Got your attention?  Good.  Here it is a couple of weeks after the fifth anniversary of 9/11 and I have observed the emergence of a yearly ritual in what can be loosely termed the liberal blogosphere.  I call it the Ritual of the Naked Screaming Virgins.  Pretty catchy, huh?

Hang in with me here.  This is going to be a pretty extended, maybe even distended, metaphor.  

Every year around 9/11, I usually run across a liberal blogger or two who like naked virgins dancing around a volcano actually dance right up to the rim to just sort of peak over the edge.  He and/or she will write an opinion piece entitled, oh, something like, "Are Bush and Bin Laden in Cahoots?"  And after doing a bit of dancing with the flames of inevitable conclusions, they rear screaming back from the rim shouting out a ritual chant like "Oh, no, it's unthinkable!"

Many years ago a I had a political science teacher who traced for us the devolution of the Athenian state from democracy to oligarchy to tyranny.  He said it was an inevitable process.  

He did the same for the Roman state; from republic to dictatorship.  He said eventually the democratic state becomes corrupted in one way or another and that power tends to flow into fewer and fewer hands through this process of corruption.

Is that happening now?  Is it inevitable?  What is your opinion?  Should we simply surrender to an inexorable force of history?  Is there such a thing as an inexorable force of history?  Are there really laws of nature governing the rise and fall of states?  Was my political science teacher full of it?

Proposition 2 passed in Texas and I can't sleep.  I had hoped against all reasonable odds that Texans wouldn't do this.  And I can't go to sleep till I've said what I think.

It is a shame.  I am not gay but I've known more than one gay couple.  And they just want to live and have some happiness with those they love.  I cannot comprehend any mindset that wants to stop that from happening and is threatened by it.  It is too much for me, I tell you.

I am a Christian and I find nothing, nothing in the teachings of Jesus that condemns homosexuality.  I said that to an acquaintance.  And you know how that person replied?  He said that Jesus condemned homosexuality because he condemned any adulterous sex, that is, any sex outside of marriage.  And I had to laugh.  I said, "Well, that's easily solved.  Let them marry."

From "The Great Hunger" by Cecil Woodham-Smith.

"English newspapers represented the Irish, not as helpless famine victims, but as cunning and bloodthirsty desperadoes.  Punch, for instance, published cartoons week after week depicting the Irishman as a filthy, brutal creature, an assassin and a murderer, begging for money, under a pretence of buying food..."

The response of the government of Britian to the Irish potato famine, was in its own way as slow (arguably so slow as to be galacial), as ideologicaly driven, as heartless, as racist, as incompetant as the Republican government's response to Katrina's devastation of our southern gulf states.

For the desperate, abandoned, citizens of New Orleans, we ask pitiously, why, why?  Why the slow response?  Why the seemingly depraved indifference? Why the need to demonize the hapless victims.  And "The Great Hunger" answers us.

Read this book.