Mail Call!

Letters? I don’t get
no stinking letters!

Actually, I’ve been getting emails – from folks I know who are reading this blog but apparently had difficulty posting comments. So they emailed them, and I figured they deserve some attention here.

We’ll start with my former very good neighbor Ed, who is still very good – but has moved to a condo and sold his house to a Republican.

(The new guy, whose name is Dave, put up a McCain/Palin sign on his lawn last week, leaving me no alternative but to beg the Obama campaign’s Baltimore office for help. Now I’ve got two Obama/Biden signs on my lawn, and a political arms race is likely to ensue.)

Anyway, Ed disagrees strongly with my views on Obama, and my journalistic instinct toward fairness requires that his views be heard:

I read “Dreams from my Father” by Obama from cover to cover and found it to be a very revealing look into his psyche, I suggest that everyone should read it. I started reading “The Audacity of Hope,” but in the introduction when he said that perhaps he had been too honest in his first book I figured now that he's become a politician and perfected his lying techniques I would be wasting my time. It's so good of you to invite us independents to participate in your blog. I'm thinking we're all feeling impaled, but not by Sarah, but by the far left supporters of the Carter administration that lobbied for the CRA, the Clinton administration and the community organizers with the backing of the government that coerced the lending institutions into making loans to people that they knew would default. Throw in ACORN, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and Chris Cox and the other dingbats we pay to govern our country to top it off. So now we should elect the fox to guard the hen house.

And from longtime friend Steve comes this response to a movie review here:

I hope to see "Religulous" either in the theater or on DVD one of these days.

For one thing, hard as it may be to believe, I've never seen Bill Mahler, having successfully weaned myself off most tv (except for the escapist junk, of course...)

For another thing, I think the experience of viewing it will be a form of psychological revenge for me: My own religious convictions run to non-literal and liberal, but, from what I can see in the world today, it seems that it's the right wing fundamentalists who are the tail that wags the dogs of their religions and governments. And they haven't been making the world a better place...

In our own country I've had a lifetime of seeing the religious right have their Neanderthal way (Whoop! Maybe wrong metaphor!) with concepts and ideals I hold dear. In Israel small Orthodox parties have a stranglehold on that largely secular country, again insuring that right wing policies will prevail.

And as for Islam, I'm currently reading my third biography of Muhammad -- as with the previous two, my hair stands on end.

So it will be a catharsis of sorts to see these schmucks get a pie in the face for a change....


Worries, we got worries...

OK, so the stock market has plunged and plopped like a bad toilet, and I’m scared to death to so much as peek at my 401K account. My bank is getting swallowed up by another bank. The bathtub tiles are coming loose. Some of the wood below the back porch is rotting. The birds ate all my strawberries. Something is making ring grooves around the tops of the tomatoes that the deer didn’t eat.

So what to do?

I’ll take inspiration from this bit of dialog featured in the movie ‘Animal House’ and lifted from WikiQuote:

Boon: Jesus. What's going on?
Hoover: They confiscated everything, even the stuff we didn't steal.
Bluto: They took the bar! The whole fucking bar!
[Otter grabs a bottle of whiskey and throws it to Bluto, who chugs it all]
Bluto: Thanks. I needed that.
Hoover: Christ. This is ridiculous. What are we going to do?
Otter & Boon: Road trip.

Road trip!

So look for occasional blog entries as we drive toward the southwest in search of autumn scenery, wacky politics, and tales of the unexpected. Replies to emails (if you didn't know it: david.ettlin@comcast.net) will be a little less prompt, but sometimes ya just gotta get outta here.

By the time we get home, the Dow will be back around 12,300, Obama will have a 12-point lead in the polls, and gasoline – as I always suspected would happen as Election Day nears – will have dropped below $3 a gallon. (This gasoline drop was a Republican conspiracy, of course, but one that didn’t count on everything else in America getting so screwed up that even it wouldn't save the Grand Old Party.

See, there it is – the middle name of the Republican Party: Old.

I’m out the door!