In fact, they invited us.

They have raised the bar for decent human behavior in our family, demonstrating what I would call Christian virtues, except that they were Jewish virtues long before they were popularized by that nice Jewish boy from Nazareth, and except that Kirsten and Mark are atheists. But you get my drift.

It started when I was being maligned this summer by email by a Jesus-Nazi after I publicly disagreed with the group email about Obama being the Antichrist.  Kirsten jumped in and defended me to the group.

Kirsten offered to us that, while she wasn’t voting for Obama, any of her relatives who wanted to campaign for him in Ohio were welcome to stay with her while they did.

I doubt I’d've offered that, but now I have to, because she raised the bar.

She offered to pick up Kam at the airport Halloween evening, and stocked up on cottage cheese and frozen blueberries and coffee for us to eat while we were there.

The night before Election Day, they cooked steaks ordered from Omaha for us and waited dinner until very late when we got home that night.  Mark ended up grilling them in the backyard in the dark.

On Election day, Mark offered Kamilla the use of his ancient Toyota, which was great.  Kam was able, on her breaks from poll-watching, to get stuff from the local 7-11, while I flushed out voters in a heavily Democratic neighborhood across town.  Priceless.

They both got up at four a.m. with us ["It's exciting!" they said] and ran around finding Kam a thermos for her coffee. Mark ended up having to walk a mile to his polling place to vote.  And he did vote, but it wasn’t enough to put McCain over the top in Ohio.

When we got back about eleven on election night, they had gone to bed, but got up to watch McCain’s concession speech and Obama’s acceptance speech.   When we came in the front foor, we found a hand-drawn picture with the caption “Congratulations, Kam and Karah!”  It featured a picture of an elephant crying big hand-drawn tears.

Thanks to the 12apostophes contingent, Minnesotabama.

Thanks to Kam and me, Ohiobama. We’ll tell you how we did it when we recover from pounding the pavement.  We’re going to recover by some intensive interval-type shopping.
Looks like there might also be a North Carolinabama and Indianabama.

I’ve decided to rename a red state, too.  In honor of its achievements in the preservation of openly expressed racism against blacks — here’s the results of a survey of Kentuckians conducted by my local newspaper:

http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/story/568306.html

Excerpt: A survey of 600 likely Kentucky voters, which was taken Oct. 19 to 21 and has a margin of error of 4 percentage points, . . .  asked respondents to react to two statements about race in general.

More than three out of every five respondents also agreed with a statement that said “if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.” One fifth of people polled said they disagreed with the statement while 19 percent said they weren’t sure.

The 61 percent of Kentucky respondents who said they agreed with that statement is well above the 35 percent who agreed when asked the same question in a national Associated Press-Yahoo poll taken in September.

– and because I live there, I’ve decided to rename Kentucky.  From now on, it will be referred to as “Hussein.” Former Kentuckians, now known as Husseinites, need to just get the hell over it.

Cindy Jacobs, a self-proclaimed “prophet who travels the world ministering not only to crowds of people, but to heads of nations,” made October 29th “National Pray for Your 401(k) Day.”

Cindy is calling for a Day of Prayer for the World’s Economies on Wednesday, October 29, 2008. They are calling for prayer for the stock markets, banks, and financial http://12apostrophes.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/greenspan.jpginstitutions of the world on the date the stock market crashed in 1929. They are meeting at the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve Bank, and its 12 principal branches around the US that day.

“We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the ‘Lion’s Market,’ or God’s control over the economic systems,” she said. “While we do not have the full revelation of all this will entail, we do know that without intercession, economies will crumble.”

http://www.cbn.com/700club/guests/bi…

So, let me get this straight. What you’re saying is, let’s gather around a bronze statue of a bull and pray [to it] for money? Um, wasn’t that addressed in the Second Commandment? And the Old Testament?

No worries, Cindy didn’t just come up with this on her own:

[T]he Lord spoke to her, “Cindy, the strongman over America doesn’t live in Washington, DC – the strongman lives in New York City! Call My people to pray for the economy.”

The Lord also revealed the true cause of the 1929 crash:

The Lord further said, “October 29 was Black Tuesday, the day the stock market crashed, and Satan wants to do it again.”

That dastardly Beezlebub is planning to strike down the economy again! Hey, does he happen to look like Alan Greenspan?

http://wonkette.com/403920/jesus-peo…

(Thanks, sis, for finding this article!)

In Minnesota, nearly 24% of people in a survey admitted to driving drunk, compared to a national average of 15%, and the low of Utah’s 10%. This means one of two things:

1. At 6:30 in the morning and 14 degrees below zero, the only way to gather enough courage to get out of bed and layer yourself in wool and fur for the reward of scraping ice off your car and going to work in the dark is to start the day with a six-pack.

2. People in the upper Midwest are honest to a fault.

I can see arguments for either one of these contributing factors. How else to keep your sanity intact during the long, cold winter than to pour a little sunshine in your glass? Q.E.D., it snowed yesterday. Yesterday. When T.S. wrote that April was the cruelest month, he meant something else altogether, but we understand him fine up here. I would drive drunk right now if the roads weren’t so icy.

Other folks in other climes, in tropical locales like Pennsylvania and Kentucky, have had whole springs; plants have grown, flowered, and moved on; barbecues have already become passé. In Minneapolis, we just danced around the first ragweed to poke a little green through the yard.

The other argument is even simpler:

Survey: Have you driven drunk in the last 12 months?
Minnesotan: Oh ya, you betcha.

The situation, of course, is by no means simple since there has already been much violence done surrounding Satanic Verses. Starting eighteen years ago, there was a spate of riots, burning embassies, attacks on the novel’s translators, and, of course, the fatwa that, though thankfully did not ever come to death itself, meant the constant possibility of Rushdie’s own end for a good ten long years. I guess I’m trying to say that the actual material harm that has surrounded Satanic Verses came from both the insistence that the book be removed from bookshelves, and the responding insistence that book be continued to be published, or vice versa.

When asked how he felt about all that’s been done, Rushdie said that he can’t be responsible for the acts of madmen. This is, of course, undeniably true, but I can’t imagine that it’s easy for anyone to walk away from the idea that one’s own book has caused so much strife, and that his arrival on this conclusion was as simple as the manner in which he declared it.

In the same recent lecture (actually, it was more than a year ago, now) at the University of Minnesota, Rushdie made two separate, funny remarks, that have stuck with me since then. The first was an anecdote—he recollected a television interview of an imam who was reiterating all the reasons why Rushdie should be killed for writing Satanic Verses. When asked if he’d actually read the book, the imam supposedly smiled and said something to the effect of “no, because he wasn’t really much for books.” We all laughed with Rushdie at the absurdity of this man calling for a man’s death based on a book he hadn’t read.

The second one was just a pithy witticism—Rushdie asked us, riddle-fashion, what is the best way to not be insulted by a book? The answer—close it! Ha ha, we laughed, how true. How little a book affects us if we shut it.

But much later, the combined implication of these two remarks hit me—if I feel insulted by a book I haven’t read, shame on me for being hypocritical. If I feel insulted by a book I have read, shame on me for choosing to continue reading it and being hurt by it?

Rushdie, of course, has made no comments on the current controversy, except to say that he is humbled by the knighthood conferred on him. This is a fair position, for what can he say? For at least the last two decades, he’s been talking incessantly about the right to free speech (though, I feel I have to note, he has concentrated mainly on the right to make declarations and said little to nothing about two-sided debates), and once again he’s surrounded by people who strongly object to a book he wrote almost twenty years ago.

Obviously, knighthood isn’t actually an expression of free speech as much as a state’s approval of a man’s works. Still, how fair is today’s decision by “Hardline” Pakistani clerics who have bestowed upon Osama Bin Laden the religious order of “Sword of Allah” as a response to Rushdie’s knighthood? Is it a proportionate response? Unforgiveable?

To reiterate: this kid and 2-3 of his firends took pitchers of ice water and poured them on old people’s heads. Like four different times since last summer.

From the St. Paul Pioneer Press:

According to a criminal complaint, the Cloquet teenager told police he found it so funny when he dumped a pitcher of ice water on a 90-year-old nursing home resident in June that he returned and did it twice more, in December and again last month.

Cold water on old people! What will they think of next! This will be hi-larious! OK, I realize you live in Cloquet, Minnesota. There aren’t any good movies playing. You’re bored out of your skull. But can’t you just get stoned in your parents’ basement like all the other small-town teenagers? Set fire to the woods or something? Develop a harmless crush on your second cousin?

From the Star Tribune:

“They got the idea from a movie, and they thought it would be funny,” said detective Jeff Palmer, who questioned the boys. He said the teens, who were about 15 or 16 years old, said they couldn’t remember the name of the movie.

I knew it was Hollywood’s fault . . . Or maybe video games; isn’t drenching the aged with ice water one of the harder levels in Grand Theft Auto Miami?

OK, they can’t remember the name of the movie (because there brain cells are all filled up with being mean); how about you? Anybody remember that movie with the ice-soaking of old folks? Matt?

The pot smell came back today with a vengeance, and again we tracked it down to the back stairway. We just missed them — the smoke lingered in the air, cigarette butts lay on the floor, and on one step, a spilled bag of weed.

When we came back, our boss told us he’d caught them — five minutes earlier he opened the door to the stairwell and found 3 early-20s types standing around smoking.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Smoking marijuana,” one guy said. Truer words, my friend. Truer words.

Our boss closed the door and that apparently scared the misguided youths away — scared them enough even to leave behind $12.63 worth of Mary Jane. The ethical question remains: what do you do when you stumble upon some weed in the workplace? (Or “free shit” as one of my coworkers called it?)

Best thing to do, I think, is take it down to the police station and turn it in, as I’m sure they will pursue our truthful pot-smokers with all due diligence.

Here’s an update with some old news, via BoingBoing.net this week: former Yang Enterprises computer programmer Clint Curtis says that, in 2000, Rep. Tom Feeney (R) asked him to do just that — fix voting machines to spit out 51-49 splits in your favor.

Watch video of Curtis’ testimony, under oath, on YouTube.

Six years ago, Feeney was a member of the Florida legislature, as well as Yang’s corporate attorney and a registered Yang lobbyist. A year later, Curtis quit Yang. In 2002, Feeney was elected to Congress.

Curtis’ story has some holes in it. Yang Enterprises and Mr. Feeney, of course, deny the meeting ever took place. And there were no touch-screen electronic voting machines in West Palm Beach Florida in 2000 to rig at the time.

But Curtis sticks to his story, nevertheless, that Feeney asked him to write some code that could do it. He’s testified to it in court, taken a polygraph, and even staked his own Congressional bid on it, running against Feeney as a Democrat (although Curtis was a lifelong Republican).

Plus, Feeney was named one of the 20 most corrupt Congressmen in the land by a government watchdog group (the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington — good luck, guys). So there’s that.

Add my natural partisan subjectivity, the Princeton report, and I’m a believer; democracy is for sale in Florida!

This morning’s news about Florida Congressman Mark Foley checking himself into rehab for treatment of alchoholism reminded me what about the Mel Gibson incident had been so particularly distasteful. In case you haven’t paid attention to the media recently, (Republican– not that it matters) Mark Foley resigned after being accused of sexual harassment of minors through internet messaging. This is made even more awful when one learns that he was on the House caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. (There’s a running coverage on abcnews.com which credits itself with forcing Foley’s resignation. There’s a lot of sensationalist material there, the character of which is definitely worthy of its own analysis.)

What reminds me of Mel Gibson about Foley’s recent interest in rehab is the way both public figures found a way to attach their despicable acts– some might even characterize them as unforgiveable– to a “forigiveable” disease. In a rhetorical move worthy of almost-awe, Mel Gibson’s apology to the Jewish community not only trumped up the importance of humility, thereby attempting to resituate Gibson as a “true” Christian, but also drew subtle parallels between anti-Semitism to alchoholism.

The rationale, I imagine, was that if we can understand alchoholism as a disease, then surely anti-semitism could be one too? One perhaps even caused by the former? Now Foley is seeking help for his problem with drinking, which suggests to us that his sexual exploitation of his pages is somehow a result of his disease. Moves by both these figures is an expert way to side-step moral culpability (not to mention potentially diminish legal consequence), and I’m horrified by both.