Marriage

The Public Service Administration strikes again with a positively not safe for work (NSFW) video about McCain and his most egregious quote about his wife.

You can find the uncensored video here. The SFW version is here.

Am so ambivalent about the reporting of this incident that, honestly, I won't publish about it here on my blog out of respect for Cindy McCain. I don't see the need to repeat or even make public this incident unless you want to play dirty politics.

I don't care either if you are a so-called progressive like Clift Schechter bringing up the dirt. It's still dirty and still further debases the political process into who gets to digg up and sling more dirt at their contender.

What do you all think?

The traditional marriage ceremony in Western Culture ends with the bride carried over the threshold by the husband. How many modern couples realize that this ancient custom symbolizes rape and the unwilling capture of women for breeding purposes.

The myth of the founding of ancient Rome included the so-called "Rape of the Sabine Women" where women from a neighboring community were forcibly captured and forced to join the nascent Roman polity. These women were not, according to tradition, given any choice in the matter, but were the founding women of Rome's aristocricy.

The custom of carrying the bride over the threshold dates back to this ancient Roman myth. It is meant to symbolize the UNWILLINGNESS of the woman in the marriage. To quote from the Chronicle of the Roman Republic by Philip Matyszak:

To symbolize the fact that their first brides did not come willingly, later Roman men carried their brides into their new homes--a tradition continued in Western countries today.

I bet few couples today who participate in this ancient custom realize that the symbolism is the unwillingness and rape of the women forced (according to legend) to participate in the founding of ancient Rome.

2008 started "off" to say the least, for The New York Times. First it was the hiring of Bill Krystol as an Op/Ed columnist. Then it was their craptacular endorsement of both Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

Yet, if we're going to cast aspersions, let's not forget the embarrassment and disgrace Judith Miller's aiding and abetting of the Bush Administration brought to the paper's credibility not so long ago.

So it's just amazing that they'll come out with a hit job against John McCain. In an allegedly "investigative" report of John McCain's ethics, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk is a thinly vield gossip piece about whether he was lobbied hard, really really hard, by a woman called Vicki Iseman.

I am of two minds about this. Let me start with the deep and ponderous one first :

Look, anybody who has been married ought to never take anybody else's private life as a barometer of their professional shortcomings. Especially when you have someone like Hillary Clinton in the running.

Hi Ms. Clinton,

This is an awkward note to write to you. Although I voted for you twice to represent me as Senator of New York, from the first rumors I heard in political circles here in New York City, I was vehemently opposed to your running for president.

As I said to many party insiders in New York, this had nothing to do with your abilities and all to do with where the country stands now.

We are at a point in which our democracy is in shreds. Nothing has been so damaging to our democracy than the attitude that has fueled Washington all these years : That "The People" are just an inconvenient obstacle to the Washington elite's road to power.

This country needs a movement willing to tearing down the walls of dynastic entitlement that George Bush has built around the White House during his eight years of quasi-imperialistic rule. This country needs a leader and a party and the people to bring it back from the place where Iraq, FISA, New Orleans, Read ID, racist immigration laws, the sub-prime lending fiasco are all seen as just the consequences of doing business in Washington DC.

This country needs a healing period and a new start.

A Hillary Clinton candidacy would have made sense in 2012. 'Hillary 2012' would have given us 8 years of healing the country, of bringing it back to its democratic roots and it would given you enough time to distance yourself from the Washington corruption that made eight terrible years of Bush possible in the first place.

But no.

It's all about Billary.

Not Hillary and Bill, but Bill and Hillary.

Billary is the reason why it will never be enough for your husband to modulate his tone throughout the campaign. Your candidacy is looked on by many as the loophole that'll bring your husband not just back to the White House but also to the Oval Office.

I have been meaning to write this one for a while now, but it's not just my blogADD that has kept me away from this discussion. I just so get emotionally pissed off about this subject that it becomes unbearable to try to write everything that comes shooting by my brain. Yet Nance here point to a post by Amanda Marcotte that has pissed me off so royally that I have to respond to it.

In the comments Amanda insists that she allegedly has no problems with either stay at home mothers or homeschoolers; yet in her writing she betrays herself. When she opens up her post with and I quote, "This interview in Newsweek with Laura Derrick, the president of the National Home Educator’s Network, was even fluffier than I expected it would be when I opened the link", you know that her expectation was to see a piece excoriating the "different path" of homeschooling.

It goes downhill from there because she conflates her contempt for xian fundamentalists with homeschooling:

I didn’t expect the interviewer to hammer at Derrick about the issue of whether or not it’s wise for people to homeschool their kids if they are doing so with the intention of teaching them that Noah had a pet dinosaur or that Jesus founded America (and therefore feed them into upper echelon jobs in the Justice Department), but I figured it would at least come up. No luck, though.

In the next paragraph her cluelessness about homeschooling shows with flying color when she claims to know that homeschooling is gaining steam in the left. Ahh ... hmmm ... see ... no!

Homeschooling has never been an either/or proposition for people in the left or right. It has been always a proposition for radicals; especially radicals who have a strong libertarian political background. There's conservative libertarians, Christian libertarians and then people like me, who Chris Nolan has most famously described as Social/Progressive Libertarians.

The problem is that christian fundamentalist homeschoolers in this country have had a well funded public relations machine. That's it. That's all.

The HSDLA was the pet project of Michael Farris, one of the signers of the Manifesto for a Christian Church; which really should be read as a manifesto for a extremist American theocracy.

But you already suspected as much.

I was doing some voogling and I stumbled upon one of the funniest "educational" videos I have seen in a long time.

“The TRUTH About Marriage” is an over-the-top satirical look at the current gay marriage debate. Presented in the style of 1950’s ... all » educational films, “The TRUTH About Marriage” asks the question: How far HAVE we come in the last forty years?

This is definitely not for the politically faint of heart. If you are missing the IHG (irreverent humor gene), you should steer clear of this video.

Enjoy.

The judges of New Jersey's Supreme Court should have a ticker-tape parade:

TRENTON, New Jersey (Reuters) - Saying that times have changed, New Jersey's highest court on Wednesday guaranteed gay couples the same rights as married heterosexual couples but left it to state lawmakers to define how the state wants to define marriage.

"Times and attitudes have changed," the New Jersey State Supreme Court said in a nuanced 90-page ruling that was neither a clear victory nor a defeat for gay marriage, which is currently legal in the United States only in Massachusetts.

"Despite the rich diversity of this State, the tolerance and goodness of its people, and the many recent advances made by gays and lesbians toward achieving social acceptance and equality under the law, the Court cannot find that the right to same-sex marriage is a fundamental right under our constitution," the ruling continued.

But saying that gay couples must have the same rights as other couples, the court said gay advocates must now "appeal to their fellow citizens whose voices are heard through their popularly elected representatives."

I love, Love, LOVE the wording of this decision.

Let me go on the record as saying that I don't believe marriage is all that. I don't understand why the fuck gay people want to call themselves married. Seriously: why! Why! WHY!

The only way I can understand this craziness is that they're fighting for the right to get a divorce.

If the new fascism has a pretty face, it may very well be the face of Zach Braff. That, perhaps, is one of the more painful lines I've ever written. I'm an admirer of Mr. Braff--Garden State was well-crafted, and Mr. Braff's ability as creator of mix tapes was sealed with the soundtrack. It was the soundtrack to The Last Kiss that drew me in the door: the music is a heady collection of mellow reflections on love and betrayal and all that affairs of the heart encompass (and I'm listening to it as I write this). So, why, 15 minutes into The Last Kiss was I ready to start chucking my shoes at the screen? And why, at the end of the movie, was I so infuriated that I wanted to walk up to Mr. Braff and cold cock him?

I'm not the kind of person who is unable to differentiate betweeen an actor and a role. I have singled out Zach Braff because chances are, most of the audience for this movie is going expecting some further installation of Garden State. There are some parallel themes—men in their 20's who haven't quite found their way being the most obvious. In The Last Kiss, however, there's a new element: the women all have vagina dentata Every single one of the women has only one object in mind: to castrate the man she's with so he will never, ever stray.

[via Is baby Suri Cruise living the Scientology life? - Gossip: The Scoop - MSNBC.com]:

"While on his worldwide promotion of Mission Impossible III, I am told, his behavior was, in a word, paranoid," says Ross. "He was obsessed about the purity of the air and at one point, he was convinced he was being followed and insisted on taking longer routes to places. He was also quite concerned about whether locks worked and had them checked. Scientologists are not only afraid of creating engrams, they're also afraid of the effects of those around them who they call Suppressive Persons or SPs. It's possible that Tom Cruise is being overcome by his Scientology training and that's leading to a paranoid world view that is being reflected in his behavior with baby Suri."

I really was not going to write an article about Tom Cruise's bizarro family life but I have to. This privacy and religion thing is cutting too close to the bone for me.

You see, I am living my little invasion of privacy hell because the father of my children has convinced them to try going to school this next September. The privacy that we were afforded with our homeschooling life is gone, dead, kaput and now I have to contend with prying noses of school teachers, principals and administrators in a way that is invasive and crosses the line of being not just rude but anti-constitutional.

This is a total navel-gazing moment but eff it, it's my blog!

I'm in a lot of physical and emotional pain. Forty has hit me like a frying pan on a toon's nogging and it has taken me almost a month to write about my passage into official middleagehood because ... well ... it's painful.

I don't like it.

It sucks.

I hate being old.

Not because I look old but because I feel old. Every bone and muscle in my body has started to sink into decrepitude. I don't feel emotionally older than 30 yet here I am seeing my body crash and burn further and further away from my self.

What is worse than the pain is the horrible, terrible fear that keeps me awake at night : Four years ago I woke in a pool of sweat, smacked with the horrible realization that I would be cursed with ... the gift of longevity.