Red States Mooching Off Blue States While Carping about Big Government

My dear Monte (you’ll find him in the blogroll under Christians Worth Knowing) made this excellent post.

Please Don’t Divorce Us! Stand Up for Love (and Sign this Letter)

Look at these lovely, loving people and tell me they don’t have the right to pursue happiness like anyone else.

Go to this link and add your name to this letter to the Supreme Court.

We, the undersigned, share President Barack Obama’s view
that for too long, issues of LGBT rights have been exploited
by those seeking to divide us. It’s time to move beyond
polarization and live up to our founding promise of equality
by treating all our citizens with dignity and respect.”

Yet, on December 19, 2008, Ken Starr and the Prop 8 Legal
Defense Fund filed legal briefs defending the constitutionality
of Prop 8 and seeking to nullify the marriages of 18,000
devoted same-sex couples solemnized before Prop 8 passed.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in this case on
March 5, with a decision expected within 90 days.
We, the undersigned, ask that the Court enforce the equality
promised to each of us by our constitution and invalidate Prop
8. So doing will protect all loving, committed couples in
California — including the 18,000 who said “I do” last year –
and prevent the initiative process from being a tool for
stripping vulnerable minorities of precious constitutional rights.

As Americans who believe in the rule of law and fundamental
civil rights, we know that Ken Starr and the Prop 8 Legal
Defense Fund’s shameful attempt to nullify equal protection
and all these bonded unions will be condemned in the eyes of
history. We know that, ultimately, love will prevail, no matter
how hard they try to fight it.

Thanks again, Nan.

What Do You Fear from an Obama Presidency?

The number of people arriving at my blog searching for terms having to do with Obama and the Illuminati have skyrocketed now that he’s won the presidency. And I’m curious…just what is it that people fear?

I tried to allow an “Other” in the poll, but couldn’t get it to work, so please feel free to voice your fears, if they’re not included in the poll, in a comment.

What a Relief! And Now the Real Work Begins

Obama won, and with a wide enough margin that there will be no disputes. Now we’ve got to dig out of the mess the last eight years has landed us in. Let’s get to it, America.

Here’s his acceptance speech, Part 1:

And the rest of it:

McCain a War Hero? I Think Not!

I just came across this most disturbing video on YouTube. I’d heard rumors from some vets my husband works with that McCain wasn’t quite the war hero he likes to pretend he was, as well as some statements from generals, etc., to that effect, but I’d had no idea of the scope of his anti-heroic actions during the war and afterwards. The information he volunteered to his captors, simply to get medical treatment, before any sort of torture, cost many American lives. Treason. Watch this.

Not only should this man not be president, he doesn’t belong in the Senate, either. He belongs in a jail cell. It’s a testament to his astounding arrogance, the admiral’s son that he is, that he ran for President. Did he think this truth wouldn’t come to light? It usually does, eventually, no matter how hard you try to keep it under wraps.

Mamas For Obama!

Here are two great ads created by the the group Mamas for Obama. They lifted my spirits enough to want to share them with you. In the first, Family Values, we’re reminded that though the Republicans pretend to have a monopoly on concern for family values, their policies are actually pretty destructive to families. In the second, A President to Be Proud Of, the lady could so have been me. I’ve felt exactly the same way.

The Republicans really do need a time out. I hope they use it to think deeply about what they’ve done.

Sarah Palin Linked to Second Witch-Hunter and Spiritual Warfare Network That Sees Catholics As Demonic

Nevermind Hindus, Muslims, or Jews. Even most Protestants don’t have it right, and a civil war among the protestants will be necessary to purge the churches of demonic influence before Jesus will come again. I just read this article over at HuffPo, and I have to say that I think Sarah Palin should be kept as far away from power as possible, not just in this election, but for forever.

These do not seem like nice people.

Although the terms ‘intercessory prayer’ and ‘prayer warrior’ are widely used in Christianity, Sarah Palin has been been claimed, as a member, by one very specific and well defined prayer-warfare network: the Global Apostolic Prayer Network, formerly called the “Spiritual Warfare Network”. This ‘prayer warfare’ network considers Catholics, and everyone else who does not share its particular interpretation of Christianity to be under demon influence and damned to hell; it hunts witches and is mapping out “demon influences” in cities and towns across America.

Global Apostolic Prayer Network leaders compare Catholicism to Freemasonry and have conducted prayer warfare which they claim may have helped to kill Mother Theresa. One top leader and apostle of this spiritual warfare movement endorses the activities of church-based Central American death squads.

On September 6, 2008, Norwegian Spiritual Warfare leader Jan-Aage Torp confirmed that Sarah Palin was currently a ‘prayer warrior’ in Mary Glazier’s prayer-warfare network.

Glazier has claimed that in 1995 her network drove an employee of the Alaska State Prison System, whom Glazier had accused of witchcraft, out of Alaska with ’spiritual warfare’. As Glazier told Spiritled Woman Magazine,

“As we continued to pray against the spirit of witchcraft, her incense altar caught on fire, her car engine blew up, she went blind in her left eye, and she was diagnosed with cancer.”

And just in case any of you kind, forgiving Catholics want to pray that these people actually hear Christ’s message of the brotherhood of man, don’t bother:

The Global Apostolic Prayer Network…claims that a planetary-level demon spirit blocks prayers of Catholics from reaching Heaven.

All I can say is, wow. What century is this? Even after this election (which I’m pretty optimistic will NOT land Sarah the Prayer Warrior anywhere near the White House), I think we need to be vigilant that this Global Apostolic Prayer Network not continue to subvert democracy and rationalism around the world.

Joe Sixpack Changes His Name

Humor, I’m reminded by my psychiatrist husband, is on the Mature List of Freudian defense mechanisms, so here’s a little levity to counteract some of the ugliness of this campaign season.

MORAINE, Ohio, Oct, 15…Sixpack has been a proud name in the Ohio River valley for seven generations.

But that will end today.

Joe Sixpack VI, the great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of the original settler is changing his name.

“We Sixpacks have been mocked and humiliated by the media and by unscrupulous politicians,” he says. “I won’t stand for it any longer.”

The family put down roots in 1760 when French fur trapper Joseph Sespaque settled here, fleeing the English victory in Canada. He set his traps along an Ohio River teeming with otter. He fought off poachers, haggled with the trading companies and built a small fortune.

Sespaque dropped his pelts in 1776 to fight the English again. Joe holds up a rusty fowling piece. “This is the rifle he used to defend the Ohio Territory at Fort Laurens during the Revolutionary War. The Indians called him Sixpatches because of all the regimental badges he wore and the name stuck.”

Driven out of the trapping business by farmers and fishermen, the Sixpatches became itinerant peddlers traveling along the Ohio River with their goods in gigantic packs on their backs

“My great-great-great-great grandpa was a big guy and the local jokesters called him Joe Sixpack for all the packs he could carry,” Joe says. He gets a defiant look. “We had this name long before it meant cans of beer.”

The name stuck right up to the Civil War when Joe’s great-great grandpa put down his pack to fight for the Union in the 48th. regiment. When he returned the railroad and the steamboat were delivering goods faster than a wandering peddler ever could. He opened a small store outside of Moraine, Ohio.

He called it “Sixpacks” and offered six of any item for the price of five.

“People came from all over the state,” Joe says. “He opened a little diner and then a camp ground…”

Great-great-grandpa Joe took off his apron to join up with the 147th. Infantry during World War I. When he returned the Volstead Act had been passed, prohibiting the sale of alcohol. His cousin Nate had built a still in the woods behind the store and was selling bootleg booze, six quarts for the price of five. They changed the diner into a speakeasy roadhouse. They made booze for the Cleveland Mob.

It was the “Roaring ’20’s.” Prosperity was here to stay. Great-grandpa Joe Invested in the booming stock market. He bedecked Great-grandma Edna with diamonds and bought himself a Pierce Arrow.

Then, the market crashed. The Sixpacks were wiped out. Great Grandpa Joe’s mobster pals moved in and took over the booze business. They kept him on as a front man for a few dollars a week. He lost that job in 1932 when Prohibition was repealed.

“He and Great Grandma shot squirrels, lived off the land, anything to stay off Relief,” says Joe.

In the midst of the Depression the auto industry was booming. Great-grandpa got a job at the plant in Janesville, Wis. Pay was low and conditions were brutal.

“He was no socialist, but he could see that the union was the only way to protect the workers,” says Joe. “He became a charter member of the UAW, participating in the first strike at Flint, Michigan, fighting Henry Ford’s hired goons at the “The Battle of the Overpass…They called him Sixpacker for the Colt. 45 he had in his belt.”

Joe’s grandpa was working at the GM plant in Lima, Ohio when World War II broke out. He dropped his tools and enlisted in the Marine Corps. His job was waiting for him when he returned and he stayed at it, turning out trucks until retirement.

Joe’s dad, Joe Sixpack V worked at the plant all his life, taking time out to serve with the First Air Cavalry in Vietnam.

Joe continued the tradition, going to work at the Moraine plant after high school. Except for a twenty-four month stint in Iraq with the Ohio National Guard, he stayed at the SUV Assembly plant, turning out GMC Envoys and Chevy Trailblazers.

Joe doesn’t remember how it happened. “It’s like one day I woke up and my name was the butt of a joke,” he says. “Joe Sixpack was a bigoted jerk with a beer belly, a guy who gorged junk food and only cared about NASCAR.”

Joe took the jokes good-naturedly. In the small town of Moraine, pop. 6800, everybody knew his family—his son, an Eagle Scout off to Annapolis, his daughter, a gymnast, known as “Little Sixpack” for her perfect abs.

Then, in June, GM shocked the town by announcing it was closing the plant, laying off 2,400 workers. Joe says he should have seen it coming. With 19,423 jobs lost in the first three months of 2008, Ohio is the fourth highest state in mass layoffs, behind California, Michigan and New York.

Ohio politicians scrambled to keep the plant open. They offered hundreds of millions in tax breaks to GM, but were turned down. Gas prices and green politics had destroyed the SUV market, they were told.

“It was the end of an era,” Joe says. “GM had mismanaged its business and we were paying the price…”

Joe was putting together three hundred years of family memorabilia for a trip to the Antiques Roadshow when one of his friends called, laughing. “Sara Palin wants you to be Vice President, Joe.” He You Tubed the VP debate and heard Palin say: “It’s time that normal Joe Sixpack Americans were represented in the position of Vice President.”

He doesn’t know why, but he just snapped.

“This little twit was patronizing me,” he said. “I was the blue-collar sucker who you could talk into fighting your wars and working in your factories…Who you could dump when he was no longer useful…”

Next day, Joe was in court petitioning for a name change.

What’s his new name going to be?

“I don’t know yet,” Joe says. “Maybe Warren Harding…? Lebron James? Somebody from Ohio.”

Campbell Brown Nails It Again: So WHAT if He WAS an Arab?

I’m really starting to love Campbell Brown. When the ignorant lady at a McCain rally recently said she couldn’t trust Obama because he’s an Arab (she didn’t quite manage a sentence as complex as that, but it’s what she tried to say), McCain corrected her by saying that no, Obama is a decent family man (that’s the opposite of Arab?). Ms. Brown decided that the underlying assumption that Arab and Muslim are slurs finally needed to be addressed:

Now, anyone who reads this blog knows I’m not keen on religion, and that one of the things I am keen on is the separation of Church and State. And key to that separation is the idea that it shouldn’t matter what religion someone is (despite the fundies’ paranoia and Turkey’s misunderstanding of what secularism means, it does not mean getting rid of religion entirely) when they run for public office. It also shouldn’t matter what ethnicity someone is, which is more to the point with the word Arab, though I know for the ignorant folk like this McCain supporter Arab and Muslim are synonymous, since they’re clueless of the fact that there are actually secular and Christian Arabs, and, for all I know, Buddhist and Hindu and Wiccan and Zoroastrian Arabs, as well, especially here in America where they are free to choose.

America is not a Christian country. America is a free country where people of all religions or no religion can and must coexist, and I’m glad some people in the media are starting to speak up about it.

Yes We Can

I’ve been reading too much news, reading too much about anger and hate and fear, reading and seeing too much that could lead me to despair. But I’ve also come across this incredible video, which I just showed to my daughter who, even at her young age, understands too well that our nation, our world, has some hard times ahead, and even is a little cynical about the men and women in power who have helped land us in this mess. It’s a great work of art, this, as well as a great weapon against the sort of hate and divisiveness that has been used to keep us afraid and angry. I hope it makes you feel better, too.

The speech excerpted in the video was given when he conceded New Hampshire to Sen. Clinton in the primaries.

We know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change.
We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics who will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks to come. We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check. We’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we’ve been told that we’re not ready, or that we shouldn’t try, or that we can’t, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people.

Yes we can.

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.

Yes we can.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom through the darkest of nights.

Yes we can.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.

Yes we can.

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.

Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this world. Yes we can.

And so tomorrow, as we take this campaign South and West; as we learn that the struggles of the textile worker in Spartanburg are not so different than the plight of the dishwasher in Las Vegas; that the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of LA; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people; we are one nation; and together, we will begin the next great chapter in America’s story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea – Yes. We. Can.

Yes, we can.