Very Cool

Today the city of Scappoose held its annual festival. Which bring the entire community to the blocks right outside the door of my café.

But what we learned from enduring the past two years' Sauerkraut Festivals is this:

Yes, the entire city parties right outside the doors…but they bring their own food.

So, this year, we decided to just…be open. And let the citizens of our fair town feel obligated to buy a cup of coffee so that they can use our bathrooms. Sigh!

Business being what it was, husband and I had the opportunity to "do" the festival. Which took all of about ten minutes. We did, however, come up with one incredible find.

An original oil painting, entered into the fine art contest at the library: 


Look familiar?
 
Probably not.
 
Hint: The painting is titled "Café in the Heat of the Day."
 
My café. On the right. Tables on the sidewalk and all.
 
Very cool.

Our Worst Nightmare

Sarah Palin is our worst nightmare.

She’s not, as she claims, a pit bull with lipstick.

She’s George W. Bush with lipstick.

She’s everything we’ve loathed, everything that has gone wrong with this country for the past eight years. She’s an uncurious, uninspired, unflinching Fundamentalist. She has deep, deep ties to the oil industry. She’s uneducated to a laughable degree…at least Bush’s rich family made sure he was availed of an undistinguished tenure at Yale. You want to talk inexperience? She’s lorded it over the less than 700,000 souls that inhabit America’s largest and most remote state for just short of two years. Before that, she spent ten years in the city government of Wasilla, Alaska—with a population of not even10,000. Foreign affairs? Here is a woman who freely admits that she has not spent much time thinking about the War in Iraq. Though she seems to have guessed enough about it to call it “God’s work.”

Put a dick on her and she could BE George W. Bush.

Do we want, need or under any circumstances hanker to be saddled with four moreyears of this sort of character in high office in Washington, D.C.?

Not on your life.

She’s an insult to women, an insult to democracy, and an insult to government in general.

And when I think of all the worthy women who have toiled and fought and cajoled and struggled in American government for the past 100 years—women like Bella Abzug and Madeleine Albright, Elizabeth Dole and Hillary Clinton, and, yes, even Condoleeza Rice—I swear that if this, this person becomes the first woman to be elected to high office in this country, I will have to seriously consider renouncing my citizenship and moving to Canada. Or Europe. Or any nation that couldn’t so disregard the good work of so many and award the prize to a hand-picked charlatan from the Evil Empire.

If Sarah Palin is elected Vice President of the United States, it will be the death blow for my faith in or respect for the American people.

We may not be able to change the minds of those who have allowed their pastor or their bible or their red-neck neighbors to dictate their vote. But we can and we must energize any and all voters likely to sympathize with the Obama ticket to VOTE. Don’t take for granted that the other guy is going to make sure thecountry is put in safe, sane hands. Without every possible opposing vote, there could be just enough nut-jobs to give the nod to a McCain/Palin victory.

We’ve weathered so many Bush-generated disasters that perhaps we are desensitized to them. But, mark my words, we haven’t begun to witness the kind of destruction a Sarah Palin administration—should Mr. McCain die in office—would visit upon this country and the world.

Stand up. Vote. Throw these ignorant good ole boys--and gals--out of Washington to the back of beyond, where they belong…

On Poor Choices and Sarah Palin

I’m sure Sarah Palin is a very nice woman. And she is probably even a competent governor. Of a very large state. With very few people. And a budget fat with oil and gas revenues.
I have to wonder what exactly John McCain was thinking with this pick. Palin has no national credentials. No one has ever heard of her or the dinky Alaskan town in which she cut her political teeth. Her main claim to fame seems to be a strong tie to that mystical, magical, black substance that currently rules the fate of the free world. Isn’t that just exactly what we need? Four more years of someone intrinsically connected to the Big O plunging fingers into pies in Washington D.C.?

And now…we find out she has a seventeen-year-old unmarried daughter who is five months pregnant. Okaaayyyy…exactly what was that little factoid supposed to bring to the national political table? Oh, yeah….that’s another thing for which our nation has been crying out: More validation for teen-agers to have careless, unprotected sex, get knocked up, and give birth to the next generation of young people with dysfunctional moral compasses. That “one man, one woman” sanctity of marriage thing that the right-wingers claim is the basic building block of our society seems to be getting a bit of a bashing from its own side of the aisle. Looks like they can't even get their kids to swallow it.

The moral values people would have a field day with this, if it was a Democratic candidate’s daughter sporting a “baby bump.” I’m dying to see how they spin this for a (recently) prominent player in the good ole GOP.

I’ll be the first to admit that American voters have made really dumb-ass choices in the voting booth over the past eight years. In fact, we are pretty much a laughing stock on the world political scene. McCain must be counting on some truly overwhelming idiocy out here in the electorate… Apparently, he believes we don’t require experience, competency, or charisma of our female political hopefuls. Any person sporting a nice set of tits will rope in the gals’ vote. Oh. My. God.

Up until now, I had leaned toward conceding that McCain, who probably has the upper hand in the coming election due to his general whiteness, might not make an utterly objectionable chief executive. No one, I thought, could possibly be as stone stupid as the Current Occupant.
Recent events have caused me to reconsider that opinion…