Salt City Sinner

There's very little I find more fascinating than the good people at WorldNetDaily . WND is a website so right-wing that it makes Glenn Beck sound like Terry Gross . To get any further right or any more nationalistic, you have to pretty much start looking through the remainders bin for white supremacist or overtly Nazi sites, and I prefer not to go there. WND is worth giving a perusal every so often, however: when they aren't promulgating ridiculous conspiracy theories that have even fellow travellers in the wingnut community calling them out , they feature a colorful refugee camp of pundits that can be highly entertaining. If you're such a nut that Fox usually won't touch you with a ten foot pole (let alone, god forbid, the liberal media), WND has a place for you. A place right next to Chuck Norris ! One such refugee is Jason "Molotov" Mitchell, a loathesome little moron who produces a series of low-tech video rants for WND (where have I seen that font befor...

Andrew Sullivan , reflecting on conservativism in the 1990s: A society able to devote itself to the core question of perjury in a civil suit and to enjoy Seinfeld and the Simpsons: isn't that kind of era what conservatives really want? Not all of them, I found out. For those conservatives deeply troubled by modernity and its pleasures, for those who see war and conflict as key motivators for civic virtue, a society pretty happy with itself, and a government actually running a surplus with no wars, is a problem. It saps "national greatness"... There are conservatives who are always girded for war or suspect all peace as some kind of hidden war; and those who are happy at peace, grateful for its blessings and hopeful that it will last. This split in the character of conservativism sounds strangely familiar ... Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York; And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house In the deep bosom of the ocean buried....

Today I bought thermal underwear to donate to the Road Home tomorrow - the handout specified that they wanted sizes 2XL and up. I turned on the radio and learned that one out of eight Americans are on food stamps, now renamed the SNAP! program because of the shame that certain radio blowhards have managed to attach to "food stamps" over the last two decades. One out of four American children, right now, are fed by SNAP! (the exclamation point is for jazz, I guess). The "unemployment" rate (which doesn't count Americans who are under-employed or who have stopped seeking employment) is over ten percent. It's cold outside in Salt Lake City right now - in the teens yesterday morning and about that low tonight as well. I feel sick. I see a lot of people facing hard times right now, and a lot of people donating their money or time to try to make things better, but god damn it, this is America, and people shouldn't be forced into these circumstances.