I clicked on a link from my Google homepage to a news article about the teabagger convention’s deciding it would put together an organizing strategy for national elections.

Generally speaking, I’m a marketing department’s worst nightmare: I ignore context, up to and including ads, banners, and in this case, even the website I was on. But as I read the article, I began to think that perhaps it was a bit clumsy for a news article linked from the front page of Google, the glaring apostrophe in it’s where it didn’t belong was a clue, so I glanced up at the top.

Foxnews.com. Oh. And then I got to the last sentence:

Don’t let anyone tell you this is not a big deal. If this gathering is unimportant and this movement is a mirage, why are it’s detractors so upset and it’s participants so upbeat?

Wow. Let me count the ways: second person direct address, editorializing (based on schoolyard logic, no less), and two incorrect it’s. The only thing missing is the phrase liberal media.

Honey, please.

A young friend of mine just announced his engagement, and we’re all thrilled for him.

Isn’t that nice, you’re thinking, but why is Dale blogging about this?

This young friend just announced his engagement. To his boyfriend. In Georgia.

This delights me. I have no idea if this is the new “thing” in the marriage equality movement, but if it’s not it needs to be.

Think about it: we have no laws governing engagements, there are barely any social rules any more, and being engaged certainly has no religious overtones in our society. A steady progression of gay engagements is perfectly designed to make the right wing froth at the mouth. I mean, what are they going to do to stop it? Constitutional amendments?

So to all my gay friends out there, if you have someone to whom you would be married if we were a sane society, not that we ever were or ever will be, then go ahead and announce your engagement. Send it in to the paper. Have an engagement party. Tell everyone you know. Introduce your partner as your fiancé.

And when someone says, “Have you set a date?”, just reply, “Not yet. But we will.”

I thought this was a rather interesting story. (Short version: law professor advises mortgagees whose properties are “underwater” simply to walk away from their homes and stop paying for them.)

The most interesting part was where he chastises the “social control” of homeowners by the power structure, who has hit the public hard about the “morality” of stiffing the banks. Predictably, the banks have thrown up their hands in dismay that anyone would be so wicked:

[Brian Faith of Fannie Mae] said, “there’s a moral dimension to this as homeowners who simply abandon their homes contribute to the destabilization of their neighborhood and community.”

If there is in fact a moral dimension to homeowners acting in their own self-interest, wouldn’t you agree with me that it’s absolutely horrific that the poor bankers are completely powerless to prevent it happening? Powerless, I tell you! All they can do is to sit by helplessly and get nothing of their investment back, rather than, I don’t know, a moderately reduced amount just by agreeing to negotiate with the terrorists homeowners.

And so the banks are forced to “contribute to the [immoral] destabilization of their neighborhood and community.” Personally, of course, I blame ACORN.

Sometimes I believe the Flying Spaghetti Monster has too much time on his appendages.

From the What?? Dept., the Church of Latter Day Saints has thrown its support behind a Salt Lake City measure that would bar landlords and employers from discriminating against gay people. Yes, the same folks that paid huge bucks to pass Proposition 8 in California are not as heinous in the day-to-day press of real life, apparently. And now they’re backing a statewide bill to the same effect.

But that’s not what has caught my eye. One Chris Buttars, state senator, explained his support of this bill but continued opposition to marriage equality by saying that while he doesn’t “mind” gays, he doesn’t want them “stuffing it down [his] throat all the time. Certainly not in my kid’s face.”

Sen. Buttars (I swear I have not made this up) has also stated in the past, however, that gay men and women are “the greatest threat to America going down.”

Praise be to the FSM!

Oh my. Sarah Palin is proof that the Flying Spaghetti Monster loves us and wants us to drop our jaws in stunned disbelief.

Here she is being interviewed by Bill O’Reilly, who seems to be skeptical but, because of the clause in his contract that requires him to share an amygdala and at least part of his cerebellum with the rest of the FOX crowd, is doing his best to let the woman shine out. He asks her, finally, “Do you believe you are smart enough, and incisive enough, intellectual enough, to handle the most powerful job in the world?”

And I believe I can say without contradiction that she, bless her little moose-shooting heart, gives the definitive answer to that question:

I believe that I am because I have common sense, and I have, I believe, the values that are reflective of so many American values. And I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the, um, the, ah — kind of spineless — a spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with elite Ivy League education and — fact resume that’s based on anything but hard work and private-sector, free-enterprise principles. Americans could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership. I’m not saying that that has to be me.

Praise be to the FSM!

I had already purchased my Cheney/Palin 2012 bumper sticker:

I do have one modification to make to it before I put it on my van, though:

Heavens. One has to love a column which contains the sentence, “For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.” It’s just so adorable. You can read it here.

You will notice that this is a cached version. By the time I had read the snarky summary at Huffington Post and decided that I would brave the original, Christian Broadcasting Network had taken it down. You would think such a devout organization would have firmer principles.

Shakespeare, as usual, gives us the exact phrase for this kind of thinking: “so excellently ignorant.” This woman has absolutely no evidentiary structure on which to base her world-view other than her belief in her own fictive lenses. Notice I do not say faith. This is not faith, it is narrative.

I can just imagine the firefight that broke out when this got “reprinted” at CBN. While many of CBN’s readers probably agree with her that Halloween is of the devil, I would bet about half of them looked askance at her hysterically ahistorical take on Harvest Home.

This is the kind of mindset with which it is useless to argue: the jargon, the fictive structure, the blinkered dichotomous worldview—this is a person who has settled into a dopamine fix which rewards the thrills most of us feel when we’re seven years old and nestling in a cardboard box while the monsters roam the backyard around us. This author wouldn’t even understand anything I have just said. She is a Flatlander, and any sphere who approaches her will be greeted by shrieks of “She’s a witch!”

Bless her heart.

I can save the Republicans Party.

No, really, I can. My plan is super easy, and it’s a win/win/win situation.

Here’s the deal. I don’t know if you’ve been following it, but the New York 23rd District special election has gotten pretty strange. The official Republicans Party candidate is one DeDe Scozzafava. She has been endorsed by such luminaries as Newt Gingrich; Michael Steele says, “I support the Republican nominee, as a Republican Party chairman,” Steele said. “And that’s the way to go, right?”

However: Palin, Pawlenty, DeMint, Rohrabacher, Tiahrt and other heavy-hitters have endorsed Doug Hoffman, who does not list any party affiliation on his site, nor does Scozzafava, if it comes to that, but is in fact the candidate of the Conservative Party.

Well.

It seems to me that this is a perfect opportunity for the old-guard Republicans to seize the control of their party back from the conservative whackjobs who currently hold it hostage. They have money, right? Aren’t they the rich people? Pay people to switch to the Conservative/Teabagger/Nutjob Party.

You can’t tell me that those rich white a-h’s don’t know how to do this surreptitiously. They’ve been funding “think tanks” and “fair and balanced” networks and “grassroots movements” for decades now. This ought to be a piece of cake. Just pay Glenn Beck enough money, and he can trigger a mass exodus of the 28%ers from the Republicans Party over to the newly powerful Conservative Party.

And there’s the win/win/win: the nutjobs have their own party that can cater to their anger and prejudice; the Republicans have their party back; and the Democratic Party might have some sane opposition.

Because, and here’s the entire point, the Nutjob Party is made up of barely 28% of the voters. They will never again influence an election. And that, my friends, is change we can believe in.

I know how the nation feels about secession, but is there any reason we can’t just expel Texas?

I was behind a pickup truck this morning with a bumper sticker that floored me:

If you must burn our flag,
please wrap yourself in it first.

What is wrong with you people?

This was a brand new bumper sticker, not an old, faded tatty one. The W04 sticker was old and tatty, and I noticed a decided absence of any McCain/Palin stickers, but the brave stand the person in the truck was taking against the damned commie hippies was fresh on his mind, and apparently, fresh from someone’s emporium.

Much has been made of the resurgence of this mindset amongst the right since the election of President Obama, who is naturally going to take our guns away as well as, presumably, our white women, but to actually encounter it first thing in the morning was a bit much.