Open Thread

When bats aren’t invading you bedroom, your cat is dragging some half-dead animal into your kitchen. Or a skunk gets into your garage and sets off a stink-bomb. Got any good animal home invasion stories? I suppose insects work as well.

I’m off to Steel City, so light blogging this morning.

14 Comments

robertdsc on August 13, 2009 at 8:32 am

The NYT has a funny article about the White House’s deals with the Baucus bunch and industry lobbyists.

NYT on White House intervention in HCR talks

If it’s true, then the President has wasted all of our time on a colossal failure. Truly, an embarrassment.

budr on August 13, 2009 at 8:58 am

Just followed a link from a diary at DKos to this Alternet article by Sara Robinson.

Is the U.S. on the Brink of Fascism?

It’s so easy right now to look at the melee on the right and discount it as pure political theater of the most absurdly ridiculous kind. It’s a freaking puppet show. These people can’t be serious. Sure, they’re angry — but they’re also a minority, out of power and reduced to throwing tantrums. Grown-ups need to worry about them about as much as you’d worry about a furious five-year-old threatening to hold her breath until she turned blue.

Unfortunately, all the noise and bluster actually obscures the danger. These people are as serious as a lynch mob, and have already taken the first steps toward becoming one. And they’re going to walk taller and louder and prouder now that their bumbling efforts at civil disobedience are being committed with the full sanction and support of the country’s most powerful people, who are cynically using them in a last-ditch effort to save their own places of profit and prestige.

MikeInOhio on August 13, 2009 at 9:57 am

The second installment of that article is here.

Watching this whole thing unfold is like one big horror movie. I recently read Robert Paxton’s book, The Anatomy of Fascim, and when you read it, it is as if you are looking through a crystal ball at what is taking place right now in this country.

This whole thing is ignored at our own peril. That is why it is so important to not stand idly by and watch this thing play out, because we will not like the ending one bit. The feelings of helplessness are sometimes overwhelming. But Sara Robinson gives some good advice on what can be done by people at the local level to try and stop this thing in it’s tracks. These are things that we should all take very seriously. The hidden danger that is lurking is unimaginable.
wilderness wench on August 13, 2009 at 10:14 am

‘On the brink’? With regard to the confluence of state & corporate influence, we’re already there.

What remains, I guess, is for the general landscape to get uglier.

Then again, many of us have lived in a very ugly landscape for a long time, too.
- Oui on August 13, 2009 at 11:02 am
  
  .
  All you need is a spark … It’s about gender?!
  
  “Many young men, eager to impress their girlfriends or girls they want to be friendlier with, will take up the young women’s emotional cause, like some clueless cavalier who fights for feminine affection rather than God’s truth.”
  
  Eden’s Paradise all over again?
  
  "But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
  - tampopo on August 13, 2009 at 11:30 am
    
    I couldn’t get pass this:
    
    With each new piece of bad news, with each loss of our retirement savings, with each new drop in the stock market, we are pushed closer and closer to the unthinkable: a Second American Civil War.
    
    And what has led us to all this “bad news?” “Capitalism?” “Marxism?”
    
    I found this comment at ET quite illuminating, particularly this quote from Adam Smith:
    
    Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respect a violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments; of the most free, as well as or the most despotical.
    
    Regulation?! Restraints on the greed cause it might endanger the security of the whole society?!
- budr on August 13, 2009 at 1:10 pm
  
  She makes that point in the article.
  
  This is the sign we were waiting for — the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America’s conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country’s legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America’s streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won’t do their political or economic bidding.
  
  This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It’s also our very last chance to stop it.

mainsailset on August 13, 2009 at 12:02 pm

Few years back I left my sliding glass door open to bedroom while I was out mowing lawn. Came back and a little garter snake was wiggling into the bedroom. He saw me and lit out across the carpet over to the bed and then wiggled into the covers and mattress. Had to tear the whole damn thing apart to find him. Just glad it wasn’t a rattler.

nalbar on August 13, 2009 at 12:37 pm

We once found an alligator lizard on our kitchen counter. We used to have quite a few alligator lizards. Once I was driving into my garage and an alligator lizard fell off the garage door into my windshield.

nalbar
RollaMO on August 13, 2009 at 1:50 pm

Nothing harder to get out of the house than a wayward bird. We have vaulted ceilings and I once spent half a day trying to coax a little phoebe out of the house with a broom in one hand and a paper towel in the other (panic seems to inrease poop production).

budr on August 13, 2009 at 2:19 pm

The Villager gets one right.

Much improvement is needed in the health-care bills, but I think these angry opponents are playing with fire.

Denim Blue on August 13, 2009 at 8:10 pm

We called the old farmhouse we lived in when we first married “The Zoo”. There were a raccoon or two in the attic, a groundhog that made tunnels under the house & into the “Michigan basement” a skunk in the crawl space under the bedroom, & a possum who would come in through the tunnels, up the basement steps & dine at the cats’ bowl. Those were the larger animals but we also had mice & an occasional chipmunk in the house. This was the same time in the 80s when there were repeated sightings of a black panther out near Milford that moved east. I was afraid that the panther would be our next guest.. (lol)