More for Blog Against Theocracy

Thanks to Chris Martin of Potlach Celebration for the idea on this one.

Friday song?

Today has been an away from internet day. (That's not a bad thing.) 70's Elton again, my friends.

I'm telling you, the economy is not as bad as we think.

Because Pammy is obviously still going to the medi-spa. And she can afford CPAC, even though "Here we are at the largest attended CPAC ever - close to 8,000 people and there is not one panel or speaker on Islamic supremacism, freedom of speech, or foreign affairs save one panel."

My sense is a CPAC Panel on "Our Epic Fail at Home and Abroad" would kind of be a downer for people who, let's face it, have rejected all interventions and insist on sucking down the wingnut koolaid until the bitter end, because, HEY, I DON'T HAVE A PROBLEM! I CAN STOP ANYTIME, BUT THIS IS THE GOOD STUFF! IT HELPS ME BE ME! BOLTON! USA! Do you wanna go upstairs and discuss Islamic supremacism?

Oh, sorry, didn't mean to get carried away there. But I'm really, truly, all for Pammy's freedom of speech, oh g-d yes, even though I won't link her. The crazy is really entertaining when it isn't outright dangerous. I wonder how it feels to have Amnesty International against you?

I also wonder if the Senate Republicans found any Facebook friends at CPAC? I suspect everybody at the true-believers convention hates those guys.

UPDATE: The whole CPAC thing is giving Mika Brezinski hives? For real?

Happy Birthday to my FIVE year old

Light posting today I must rush about smartly accomplishing cupcakes. This photo is from younger years, and of course her sister is not to be outdone in the Fancy Department.

She is the baby, though, and I hear "Mommy?" from her more than the other two combined. May I never forget the blessing in that, while the forty-fifth "mommy?" of the ten-minute car ride to school sometimes makes me sigh, just a bit.

Happy Birthday, sweetie.

All my plans are ruined?

I was going to make a video against the nineteen GOP Senators up for re-election in 2010...but too many of them are retiring. I'm almost gonna miss Kit Bond and Sam Brownback, except David Vitter and Jim DeMint are said to be running.

I hate resorting to internet algorithms, but...

LOL!

It must be hard switching from majority to minority party, not to mention switching from SOTU with a batshit lying inarticulate Preznit who only asks you stand up and cheer the ideology, versus a reasonable President who wants you to, like, get stuff done and have ideas and contribute and shit.

The Republican National Senatorial Committee is looking for 2000 Facebook supporters.*** Good luck with that.


***clicking the link does not make you a supporter, pinky-promise.

OH Nevermind! Clicking the link again, I see they're looking for two POINT zero zero zero facebook friends. That's more like it. Rock on Dick Cheney and Michael Steele! Inclusivity!

PS thanks for the linky love, Wonkette. xxx

Bad feminist, no panties (in this post).

Okay, I registered for BlogHer. It's a bloggers conference that takes place in Chicago at the end of July when I'm actually kid-free. Trust me, I'll be coming to the well and asking for donations that month specifically to get me there. (July is also my birthday month, and hopefully we'll see some economic signs of Spring by then).

So I sent the following email to the organizers:

Dear Friends:

I just registered for the BlogHer panel and I'd be happy to participate in the panel on Womanhood post-Sarah Palin.

I write for several blogs, most notably Crooks and Liars, which was just named one of the top 25 blogs in America by Time Magazine.

I was a finalist for "Best Liberal Blogger" at the 2008 Weblog awards for my own blog, Blue Gal.

I am also a noted YouTube filmmaker, and my video "A blogger responds to Sarah Palin" currently has over 19,000 views.

Feel free to contact me if you need any other information.

With all good wishes,

So I sat in front of the laptop for a minute and read that. Welp, thank the good Lord I have to wash "pee-pee accident" sheets and mop floors today, otherwise I might get a swelled head.

PS. I found out this conference is in Chicago again from an attendee at Salon last night: Jezebel of Evil Slutopia, who also might be attending BlogHer. I swear, BlogHer and Chicago will never be the same if both of us are there, babe.

Tonight's Salon (sorry for delay)

Tiny Chat worked really well. We'll use that in the future. A special welcome to all the Twitter folks who showed up last night. I had a great time.

PS. I'm making a major effort to attend the BlogHer Conferences in Chicago in late July.

Star Wars...We NEED it.

My ten-year-old son has a NEED greater than pizza. Star Wars novels, comics, compendiums, omnibus compendiums, etc. etc.

It turns out the world he is about to enter is inhabited with young men just like him, ha....

Reading the online reviews by one Star Wars fan cracked me up:

"It's not really that great of a book but you should read it just to be informed."

"If you start the young Jedi Knights series, do not stop (14 part series). They are not a necessity, but they expand and provide much needed light on the Solo children and other academy Jedi."

Wait, some of these books are NOT "necessities"? Don't try telling that to Junior Dude.

Also, whoever designed Gmail spellcheck is one of them. Because if you don't capitalize "Jedi," the spell checker catches it. Just saying.



PS. There's obviously a Higher Power/Force at work here, because I didn't have to photoshop a thing (or even search very long) to find and post this image:

Why I left Alabama, part 846

Yeah, TPM already has this story, let me just add how happy I am to have Roland "Fucking Corrupt" Burris as my [temporary] Senator instead of this jackass. Politics is so often the choice between two evils, but given that choice, I'll take the crook over the idiot every time.

Senator Shelby questions Obama's citizenship.

This at a meet-the-constituents event, where some "natural born citizen" of the United States, um, prompted the Republican Alabama Senator to be more publicly stupid than usual.

Another local resident asked Shelby if there was any truth to a rumor that appeared during the presidential campaign concerning Obama’s U.S. citizenship, or lack thereof.

“Well his father was Kenyan and they said he was born in Hawaii, but I haven’t seen any birth certificate,” Shelby said. “You have to be born in America to be president.”

Setting aside the whole "they said" bullshit, who knew Shelby was bilingual? He seems to speak English very well for someone whose NATIVE language is Klanese. And, by the way, everyone in that formerly whites-only, betcha, restaurant, knew the code. What does "born in America" really mean, Senator?

According to the Associated Press, state officials in Hawaii checked health department records during the campaign and determined there was no doubt Obama was born in Hawaii.

Well, yeah, but does Hawaii really count? You know, even Cokie Roberts thinks Hawaii is kinda, you know, exotic. And pass the pork rinds, we all know what THAT stands for.

And hey, when Obama was born in 1961, that's before the Civil Rights Act.

"They said" you had to be white to vote in Alabama in 1961. You remember, don't you Senator? The good old days?

And then there's that whole Obama's white mother thing. I mean, what's worse that being, um, a pure-blooded "exotic" "Kenyan"? Really Senator, I gotta laugh so I don't cry. While federal law trumped the state in the 1960's, the Alabama state constitution was not amended to allow blacks and whites to get married until...wait for it...

2000. Not making that up.

Shelby will get re-elected anyway because the R after his name means he doesn't kill unborn white babies. Seriously. Alabama, I didn't leave soon enough.

h/t WriteChic via Twitter

Today's Blue Gal Sermonette (ha)

'What wouldn't Jesus do?' thong from Betty Bowers's underpants store, of course.

So I just want to start by reminding everyone that Blog Against Theocracy is not 'Blog Against Religion'. There are other blogswarms/movements that deal with the latter, and I'm not afraid to link them.

Carnival of the Godless

and

Atheist Bloggers (social network)

are just two. Feel free to join there AND participate in Blog Against Theocracy.

For Blog Against Theocracy, we have to be careful we're not motivated by anti-religion hate on this one, even when it's deserved. Some participants of BAT (including yours truly) are church-goers who actually get it that separation of church and state blesses everybody. They're on our side, and there's no good to come from alienating anyone. I don't have any problem with a minister who keeps his theology in the church and doesn't want federal tax dollars or school vouchers. And, um, not raping little kids is also up there.

No matter whether you are an atheist, believer, or don'tgiveashit, you are welcome to Blog Against Theocracy, and God bless you, er, whatever.

So at church this morning I got the little blue brochure on all the stuff I can do during Lent. It may sound counter-indicated and selfish, but I'm giving up perfectionism for Lent. I have found the past couple of weeks that after a solid cleaning frenzy where the house looks really good, and then I'm confronted by three messy munchkins...

...I am the nastiest bitch of a mom you've ever seen.



I don't want to put plastic on the furniture or make my kids think I put having a clean dining room ahead of turning it into their personal art studio. So I'm going to use the Lenten Season as a time of spiritual practice where the goal is a home filled with Peace, which means cleaned up and organized enough(so we can function), but also happy (so we can function).

In the past I've gone off to a little side room in this mini-mega church (United Methodist) to have my own personal silent Quaker Service. Last week I just sat there and cried from loneliness, when the thought occurred: "you can't feel sorry for yourself feeling lonely when you isolate yourself on a regular basis. There are three hundred people in the next room who'd love to shake your hand." I reject that kind of contact a lot as superficial and not worthwhile. (Don't ask me to mention "Aspie" here it's self-evident.) Anyway I picked up my butt and went into the service and it wasn't half bad. And this week was good too, the sermon was about Jesus glowing on the mountain top but he only did that for a moment and didn't respond to Peter's suggestion that they build a monument to the event, just get back to the valley (and our valleys are divorce, job loss, loneliness, fear, and a sense of no help with the laundry) and get to work. I suspect the minister finds me a bit of a threat, something about my three screen email to him expostulating on one sermon he did, but wev, and after church I did walk up to him and thank him for the sermon and also mentioned in passing the zen proverb, "after enlightenment, the laundry" and he was all, oh yes WE acknowledge that Christianity is first an Eastern religion, not a Western religion, and I walked away thinking, you keep that sense of personal ownership in your ministerial ziploc bag, Baby.

And the only job that really matters long-term is that one where we wake up every morning and are grateful for another day, and spend the rest of our day proving our gratitude by doing that thankless task of forgive, forgive, forgive ourselves and everyone forever and ever, Amen.

Saturday Song

A lovely version of a silly country tune, from HBO's "Big Love" which I haven't seen.

As Doctor Zaius says...

No time for blogging today! Thanks for the linky love, Dr. Z. I had a start up scare with my laptop which proved to me that Yes, Bluegal, you Do Need Anti-Virus Software. So that took a chunk of time to download and then the trusty minivan needed a new headlight. All done.

I've got three ideas for new movies swimming in my head.

Not to mention next week is the start of Lent. I'm giving up perfectionism. No, Really.

Glad to see Paul Krugman has taken some assertiveness training. Calling Boehner on "stupidity" is a lovely start. Baby steps, my friend.

All this, and she knits too?

Dang, Ravelry alone wasn't enough to satisfy her yarn lust.

Update.

The Blog Against Theocracy website is now updated for 2009. Things will be fine-tuned as we get closer to April 10-12, but I wanted my readers to have it on their radar. Thanks.

Information overload?

So if I wasn't following the artist/director David Lynch on Twitter I wouldn't know the weather in Los Angeles and I wouldn't care. But because I follow David Lynch on Twitter the opposite is true.

That what you CAN know becomes what you MUST know and trumps what you SHOULD know or even WANT to know...wow that's so very David Lynch.

But really, don't sugarcoat it, my tweet:

Lucky for you, Wonkette, the sidebar at Feministing was full.

I blocked out the name of the advertiser because, speaking purely as a "Democratic, liberal, and progressive activist", this dot org (really) and its advertising team are, well,

mindless sex-starved completely unimaginative fuckers.

And I mean that in a totally sex-positive way.

Also, speaking as a starving blogger, I don't blame Wonkette one bit for taking the fuckers' Ka-ching. I just hope it was a lot of money. Women who are smart enough to read Wonkette will go back to their own fine blogs, "take action" and make fun of...oh yeah, right.

More on Blog Against Theocracy

It looks like for Blog Against Theocracy we might be up against the current administration. From Americans United, which is an excellent resource as we all start thinking about this year's blogswarm:

President Obama has failed to deliver on his campaign statements. When creating his Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Obama failed to adequately prevent harmful discrimination on the basis of religion by government grantees. Although President Obama had originally proposed a new take on the Faith-Based Initiative, one that will not maintain the constitutional and civil rights pitfalls of the Bush Administration, the executive order he signed last week leaves the entire architecture of the Bush Faith-Based Initiative intact - every rule, every regulation, every executive order. And thanks to an aggressive anti-civil rights push from the Department of Justice near the end of the Bush Administration, nearly every social service tax dollar distributed by the government can be used for discriminatory hiring. In a time of unprecedented need, this is even more unacceptable than ever.

We have some lovely submissions for Blog Against Theocracy logos. Please keep them coming! Email me at bluegalsblog gmail.

From Mark Hoback at the revived and reviving Fried Green Al Quedas:



And here at long last is Tengrain's, which is available in different sizes on his Flickr page (suitable for sidebars and such):



And then here's a little thang I crayoned this afternoon:

Wapo must suck on purpose...

...is all I'm saying. As I commented elsewhere, someone high up at Wapo really hates the new business model and has decided they will allow nothing but crap on their op ed page forever until the paper dies in three weeks or so. It's clearly a conscious decision. Hiring Kristol just made it obvious.

Just send me one of everything.

And hell yeah, the clothes start at size 14. What's YOUR problem, skinny mini fashionistas?



Anybody else remember Vaughn Meader's The First Family?

"Rip the top button off those five thousand 'First Ladys', and put'em-on-a-rack!" I loved that.

Happy Birthday to my Dad.

With Dad in 1969. Good times. Happy Birthday xoxo.