I'm not watching the debate, because I'm already sick right now. We're watching a movie instead. But Twitter exploded with the news of Scalia's death (I will not give the title "Justice" to the man who wrote that actual innocence is not grounds to overturn a death sentence), and I'm fucking appalled at the number of elected officials who took ( Read more... )

A professional acquaintance of mine, a fellow with over 30 years of Texas politicking under his belt, just posted this in a public status on Facebook, quoting from this post at Esquire.com:

See, here's the deal. We have two parties in this country right now. One party is a center-right party that believes that it is unseemly to let old people die in ( Read more... )

I had to stop reading Facebook and pretty much any news for a full day because I was so triggered by all the "legitimate rape" horseshit. I feel like sending the Republican National Committee my therapy bill for the week.

Group of people I am personally most frightened of in the US: Republican primary voters. They are the ones who have ( Read more... )

- I did not expect to like Vienna so much, but I really did. Apparently I watched too many movies about WWII as a child (this may sound like I'm kidding, but I'm not - my father made us watch a zillion of 'em), so I have this deep-seated, irrational resentment of Germany and Austria. I realize that it's been 60 goddamn years. I realize that there ( Read more... )

So I will probably never live outside the US. I want to stay close to my brother and sister-in-law and their kids, my BFF and her kids, my friends. He wants to stay relatively close to his family. And fundamentally, my partner does not like change, and that is just WAAAAY too much fucking change for him ( Read more... )

So my Facebook feed is full of appalling jubilation right now. So many people I know are expressing joy that Osama bin Laden is dead. CNN is showing crowds of people gathering in front of the White House and at the site of the Two Towers, cheering, waving the US flag, chanting, "USA, USA." I was particularly nauseated to read that some of those ( Read more... )

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So on the way home from seeing the new Harry Potter, which we liked, we stopped to get our mail.

In our mail was an invitation to donate to George W. Bush's presidential library.

...wow. Somebody did not do their database vetting very well.

As I try not to think about the huge number of intelligent, well-qualified incumbents who got tossed out for no good reason and the mass of idiots who won races (seriously, Kentucky? SERIOUSLY? Rand Paul? Really?) in yesterday's US elections, I'm reading this blog about stupidity in customer service transactions and taking some solace in the fact ( Read more... )

- I can't remember from whence I was pointed at this, but it's a smart, thought-provoking, easy-to-read bit of thinking about relative wealth: It's not your money.

- I'm completely freaked out that the US government is paying contractors to spy on groups that engage in civil disobedience. So COINTELPRO is not dead; apparently it's just been ( Read more... )