Ten Things I Am Proud of

I have screwed up plenty in my life, but there are a few things I have done (and not done) that I am kind of proud of.

1. In my first national election I voted for George McGovern.
2. I rebuilt two Volkswagen engines (a Beetle and a Bus) all the way from splitting the crankcase and back up.  The rebuilt engines actually started in both cases! (Well, on the first one I had the intake and outflow tubes to the fuel pump switched, but once I figured that out it started.)
3. I have never watched American Idol or Survivor.
4. I have never had a speeding ticket.
5. Every car I have owned has cost less that $20,000, including six new ones.
6. I finally read War and Peace (at age 65).
7. My daughters both grew up to be progressives.
8. I think I was one of the first stay-at-home dads (1978+).
9. I read Godel, Escher, Bach from beginning to end (and plan on a second read while snowbirding on the Gulf of Mexico in January and February).
10. I never gave money to any PAC of any company for which I worked.

Christmas Music

Hymn #54, Christian Worship: A Lutheran Hymnal
Text by Jaroslav Vajda
This hymn is almost chokingly beautiful with the setting by Carl Schalk.

Where shepherds lately knelt and kept the angel's word,
I come in half belief , a pilgrim strangely stirred;
But there is room and welcome there for me,
But there is room and welcome there for me.

In that unlikely place I find him as they said:
Sweet newborn Babe, how frail! and in a manger bed,
A still, small voice to cry one day for me,
A still, small voice to cry one day for me.

How should I not have known Isaiah would be there,
His prophecies fulfilled? With pounding heart I stare:
A child, a son, the Prince of Peace for me,
A child, a son, the Prince of Peace for me.

Can I, will I forget how Love was born, and burned
Its way into my heart unasked, unforced, unearned,
To die, to live, and not alone for me,
To die, to live, and not alone for me.

We sang this last night in our Christmas Eve Service.  I am still baffled trying to understand what war Sarah Palin and Fox News think they are waging.  It seems to be something about the Second Amendment and whether Santa Claus is black or white.  Such a "war" just trivializes Christmas all the more.  As for me, I know what I need:  a Christ child whose love "burned its way into my heart unasked, unforced, unearned" and whose voice will "cry one day for me."  Sarah and Fox and the rest of the Neo-Pharisees can have their phony war. The battle is already over.  Christ already won it without their help.

Happy Holidays

To any real people who actually read this, I wish you Happy Holidays.  I used to say Merry Christmas, but Sarah Palin, Bill O'Reilly, most of Fox News, etc., have ruined that for me.  I don't want anyone to think I want to be associated with that brood of vipers.  So Happy Holidays to all.

(Partial) Book Review

Review of Sarah Palin's book  here. Warning: the reviewer wasn't able to get through the entire book and I don't think I would be able to either.

Some Things I Wonder About

• I wonder why any journalist takes seriously anything that Darrell Issa tells them.  Time after time stories have been written that turned out to be utterly false (Fast and Furious fiction, Benghazi nonstory, Healthcare.gov security nonissue, IRS nonscandal, etc., etc., etc.).  But they keep running with the stories anyway to their own embarrassment.  He is a man who is not to be trusted.  Why do you keep listening to him?
• I wonder why anyone pays attention to Charles Krauthammer (he's really just my proxy for the whole brood of chickenhawk neo-con vipers).  Not only does he think the Iraq war was a good idea-- he also thinks we won.
• I wonder when we will be given the details of the "Replace" part of "Repeal and Replace".  (Warning: if the term "tort reform" appears anywhere in your answer, the judges will disqualify it)
• I wonder why the Tea Partiers act like the NSA and drones were invented by Obama.  We could have used some of your vehemence during the Bush years.
• I wonder how the NFL can be a nonprofit organization.
• For that matter, I wonder how the NCAA can be a nonprofit, since I don't think there's anything it wouldn't do for money.

Quote(s) of the Day

'There is also free speech that you don't agree with. You are not some sort of "Patriot, fighting for the First Amendment rights of all Americans" if the only time you get upset about a person's "rights being trampled" is when it happens to people who think exactly like you. If you think of the First Amendment when hearing people saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," you are very, very confused. And if the only free speech that you support is speech that you agree with, that doesn't make you a "patriot." It makes you a hypocrite. And that's something completely different.'

and....

'This is not religious persecution. I cannot stress this enough. He did not get suspended for his religious beliefs. He was suspended because what he said was completely offensive. There are plenty of Christians (many of my friends, in fact) who believe that being gay is a sin and marriage should only be between a man and a woman, yet they could have still answered those questions with love and humility. Someone might use Bible verses to claim that interracial relations are an abomination and say, "Anyone who commits the sin of miscegenation is heading straight to Hell" and call it freedom of religion, but really... It's just old-school hatred. Hatred is not a biblical belief.'

Chris Boeskool, blogging about A&E and ducks
You can read the entire post here.  It's worth it.

Quote for Today

(Thanks to Bill in Portland, Maine)

"Regarding the 'trickle-down theories' which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and social inclusiveness in the world: the promise was that when the glass was full, it would overflow, benefiting the poor. But what happens instead, is that when the glass is full, it magically gets bigger---nothing ever comes out for the poor."

Pope Francis

Surprise! Lots of People Are Saving Money Thanks to Obamacare. http://t.co/1zHdcVjsVO

— Kevin Drum (@kdrum) December 18, 2013

Great Flow Chart Here

Are you being persecuted!? #waronchristmas pic.twitter.com/gANjAWsvqe

— isaacw (@isaacw) December 2, 2013

Mandela

My picks for notable writing on Mandela's death:

From Charles Pierce on those Reaganite hypocrites who came too late to the Mandela dance and now think they can jump on the bandwagon:

It's too late now to seek absolution at the bier of Nelson Mandela, who is dead and can't speak for himself.  Back in the era in which you all opposed him, all you chickenhawk bastards, keeping your campus sandwich joints safe from the Sandinistas, you did so because your politics and your world view were formed in an abattoir, built on the bones of butchered civilians in El Mozote and a hundred other places, steeped in the blood of people like Sister Jean Donovan. You opposed Mandela when it really counted for the same reason you cheered on murderers in this hemisphere. Ronald Reagan was a dim hack who did horrible damage to almost everything he touched. You can own him and be welcome to him, but you don't get Nelson Mandela.

And from Hunter writing for Daily Kos:

Jerry Falwell was against him. Pat Robertson was against him. Dick Cheney was against him, and William F. Buckley was against him, and George Will was against him, and Grover Norquist travelled to South Africa to be against him, and the Heritage Foundation was against him, and of course Ronald Reagan was steadfastly and famously against him.

Everyone would agree that apartheid was wrong, mind you, but Nelson Mandela and the others who fought against the system were just so ... uppity? In the rancidity of Jesse Helms' behavior towards the man it would be impossible to not detect the lingering fury of our own nation's not-that-distant civil rights battles, a fight that many of the same segregationists were still eager to fight, a fight where everyone could agree on the inherent unacceptability of institutional racism but who were forever finding reasons why those who stood up against those things could not be trusted and would not be supported. When his government declared him a terrorist, compliant American forces declared him a terrorist. When his government warned that he was a communist, vast portions of our own country nodded and understood that being a suspected communist was an obviously more troubling thing than the proven violence of apartheid.

Quote of the Day

"Apparently the tweaking of health care law regulations by health care law regulators jumps a constitutional bar that crushing a child's testicles as interrogation device does not."

'Hunter", on Daily Kos  writing on Michele Bachmann's latest Constitutional Crisis ridiculousness.