We often make heroes out of sports stars, yet there's really nothing heroic about being able to run fast, pass well, shoot baskets, or hit balls. Tillman, though, is something who I think should be considered heroic - as should all of the other men and women who made difficult choices and sacrifices in order to follow their conviction that this country is something worth fighting for. May their names - and Tillman's - be added to the roles of the Einherjar and remembered for their honour and courage.
I've pointed out before that the issues regarding the problems with electronic voting machines is something that everyone should be concerned about because they could cause problems (or be misused) in any electoral race, in any location, at any time, without any regard for party. It's still a bit disquieting, though, that so many of the companies making these machines have ties to a number of Republicans. As a result, this cartoon made me giggle.
Taking a bit of a break from the book to try and find something to make me laugh, and I sure succeded:
Of course, the good news is now that he's got a cell phone, he can call me from the store if he forgets what he's supposed to get or not sure what exactly I meant when I said what I needed, so he doesn't have to go back so often, but still....
[What's worse? Even if I give him a written list, he doesn't always remember to actually LOOK at it.... ::sigh:: Guys? Care to explain yourselves? ::giggle::]
I found this site courtesy of Uggabugga - it's a fairly new political cartoon site, called The Gotham City 13. Stop by and check 'em out - they're good :)
From Jan at Secular Blasphemy we learn that starting November 23, The Washington Post (and Washington Post Writers Group) will be publishing a new, Sunday-only comic named Opus by Pulitzer Prize-winning Bloom County cartoonist Berkeley Breathed. I can hardly wait!
As you've probably noticed, I've been reading old Bloom County strips and have posted a few that are, sadly, still relevent all these years later. It will be wonderful to have his voice available again to speak on current matters.
Sometimes, its kind of scary to be reading the old Bloom County strips (available at My Comics Page.com) and see just how little things have changed in, what, 20 years? ::whistful sigh::
We get TV shows, movies, pop songs and romance novels that all have been known to make adultery "romantic". I remember once when I was younger sitting in a mall while Whitney Houston's "Saving All My Love For You" was playing on the speakers. A couple girls - no more than 12 or so - were sitting on the bench right behind mine and started talking about how they couldn't wait until they were old enough to be someone's lover and how exciting it would be to know that the guy was sneaking away from his wife just to be with them. I almost gagged.
If we truly are concerned about keeping marriage "sacred", then we need to make a few more changes than just codifying marriage as the union between one man and one woman. We should start by outlawing civil marriage all together. What's the point of having a marriage if God isn't involved in it, right? I mean, for it to be sacred, it has to be blessed by God, and the Justice of the Peace is no minister, so it has to be a church wedding or nothing.
Then we need to make pre-marital counseling mandatory for all couples. We want to make sure every sacred marriage has the best chance possible to succeed, and that it provides the best home for the kids to be raised in, so make the bride and groom study about how to do just that before letting them get married. We should throw in a test, too, so we can be sure they get it before they get hitched.
Of course, every married couple should be required to have children - and, no, infertility can't be an excuse. We can get around that now, you know. Protecting the sanctity of marriage is so important because marriage is the "foundation" of the family unit - which, obviously, has to include children, or it'd just be called a "couple" - and the family is the "foundation" of our society. So if a couple hasn't produced a child within, lets say, 5 years of getting married (that seems like a reasonable amount of time), then we have to declare that marriage null and void and have them find new partners that they *can* have children with.
With the above exception, we'll also have to outlaw divorce. Can't have something as sacred as a God-blessed marriage getting thrown aside just because you chose badly or decided you can't stand the creep, now, can we? That just wouldn't be right. You get one chance and that's it. Once you're married, you're stuck for life.
As for women who are abused by their husbands, well, we'd probably have to make an exception in the "no divorce" policy for that, but only if there's sufficient evidence that abuse actually occurred and then neither the man or woman gets a second chance at marrying. I mean, if the woman has such bad judgment as to pick someone who would brutalize her the first time around, what's to say her second choice would be any better? As for the man, well, he beat her up - that's not taking the sanctity of marriage very seriously. No need to give him a chance.
Lastly, adultery will have to be criminalized. Cheating on your spouse is, of course, a violation of the sanctity of marriage, and we just can't have that. If you're caught having an illicit affair with someone, you have to be punished because, obviously, you just don't get the concept here. And, of course, it should go without saying that adulterers shouldn't be put into positions of power. We certainly don't want to trust people who can't keep their sacred oath to be faithful to a single spouse to keep their promises to the general public. That would just be foolish.
No, if keeping marriage sacred is as important as the opponents of gay marriage say, then we should be willing to promote "sacred" marriages at any cost. We can't let those filthy gays, blasphemous unbelievers and deviants who don't want children, foul adulterers, and other miscreants mess up what's holy and ordained by God. That would be un-American!
We'd also be likely to see more couple choosing to live together rather than getting married, which would probably increase out-of-wedlock births, and we know conservatives consider that to be a bad thing. To keep in line with the whole "marriage is the foundation of families which are the foundation of our society" thinking, kids born out of wedlock would probably have to be taken away from their parents and adopted out to couples with "real" marriages, which *might* let those couples off the hook on the "breed in five years or go your separate ways" idea.
The thing is, unless conservatives are really willing to go to some extremes (and I admit that some of the above are pretty ridiculous - that's the point) to protect the sanctity of heterosexual marriage, then using the "sanctity of marriage" argument to oppose gay marriage is hypocritical - and, as far as I'm concerned, it's a violation of the First Amendment prohibition on creating a state religion.
If you get rid of all the religious-based arguments against homosexuality or homosexual marriage (which would include ALL variations of the "marriage is sacred" argument), what you end up with is that there really aren't any. Some will argue that it's "unnatural", but that's contradicted by scientific studies that show that homosexuality isn't unique to humans - there are gay members in most (if not all) species. It sound quite "natural" to me.
While I do very much feel that Americans in general should take marriage much more seriously than they often do, I don't see that as any reason to restrict who is allowed to get married and who isn't. If gays want to get married, let them! There's no compelling state interest that I can see in preventing it, and since this nations civil laws aren't based on the tenets of any one faith, I can't see how the Bible's view on homosexuality as any part of being involved in the argument. No church should be forced to marry gays if it goes against their beliefs. I think pretty much everyone agrees on that. But no gays should be forced to remain unmarried just because their relationship goes against some churches' beliefs, either.
Marriage is as sacred as the people involved in it make it. If someone else's marriage isn't "sacred" enough for you, tough. Just make sure your own is.
My Dad was a huge Bob Hope fan, and has, himself, always been a very, very funny person. I think Hope had a very strong influence on my Dad - who grew up during some of Hope's biggest years. Dad has that same kind of dry wit that Hope had; the kind you don't always see coming, and I don't think it was by accident that he ended up that way. (Up until maybe the last two years, he has always been a very large man. One day at the church, when he and my Mom were at choir practice, the choir director gave them a new song to work on, containing the line "And God rained fatness on the land." During a pause in the rehersal, shortly after having sung that line, my Dad just very quiety comment "I think I must have gotten caught in a cloudburst". The choir ended up laughing so hard every time they came to that line in the song that they ended up being unable to perform it.)
So, Thank you, Bob, for all the good memories you're a part of, and for the humour you brought to my life - both through your own work, and through the influence you had on people like my Dad. You certainly made your time here worthwhile!
July 20th, the LA Time published this cartoon by Michael Ramirez.
Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the Secret Service owed Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Michael Ramirez an apology "and the public is owed an explanation both of how this happened and why it will not happen again."It's a bit amusing that Cox singles out the attempt to influence someone working for the Los Angeles Times, almost as if he worked for some other newspaper it would have been ok.
The use of "federal power to attempt to influence the work of an editorial cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times," Cox said in a letter to U.S. Secret Service Director Ralph Basham, "reflects profoundly bad judgment."
The question I really want an answer to, though, is would anyone be calling for an apology or asking "how this happened" if the cartoonist had been a liberal?
I remember talk a while back about Fox possibly having an "American Idol"-like competition for a potential Presidential candidate. The more I think about it, the more I have to wonder if that's not such a bad idea after all. I can't imagine that process could come up with anything worse that what we've got now... [Yes, we're having another "totally disgusted with the government" day]
My Comics Page, a great resource for comic strips and editorial cartoons, has been re-running Berkeley Breathed's classic "Bloom County" strips from the 1980's (Man, talk about making me feel OLD!). Frighteningly, they still seem just about as relevant today as they were when they were first published. Change a few of the names and he could almost be writing them now.
I couldn't upload cartoons for a couple days because of a hard drive failure, so pardon me while I get a bit caught up. :)
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