This country is fucking huge. Only that adjective will do. It's enormous. And even if my covered wagon is a new Saturn Vue, and I only drove 7 or 8 hours a day, and we took a leisurly 8 days from LA to upstate NY, it is still impressively large.

No wonder some people stopped in Ohio. Or Utah.

We loved Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills. It was great to look up and think that Presidents could, indeed, be figures worthy of high praise.

Each night, in a hotel that we could only hope would have a decent mattress, I would think over the terrain, the roads, the wildlife (or lack of it), and I would dream of car wrecks. Each day, fleeing Los Angeles at 10 to 15 over the posted speed limit, we got a little further away from the entertainment machine that used up my spinal cartilage and spit me out.

I went on disability last September. The hope was to sell the house and move on to cheaper environs, where my disability check would at least pay for food and shelter. We cleaned the place up, fixed some things, and put it on the market.

In the John Steinbeck novel (and great Henry Fonda movie) The Grapes of Wrath, the agribusiness thugs wanted to start a fight with the farm workers inside the federal camp during a dance, so the club-wielding cops could enter the camp, warrantless, under the auspices of quelling a riot.

In the Straits of Hormuz today, according to the Pentagon, Iran's Revolutionary Guard's "fast boats"¹ charged US Navy ships.

In the book, the camp residents see the plot unfold and concoct a group abduction of the agitators. In Iran, perhaps a few more people realized that the people running the Revolutionary Guards aren't exactly helping them. In America, perhaps a few more people realized something similar about the Bush administration.

It's actually a true story. My Grandfather tells it like it happened to him yesterday, even though he was a little boy, during the depression, riding his horse home from school...

My Grandfather was UDT (underwater demolition team) in WWII. They were the beginnings of today's Navy Seals. As he puts it, he spent WWII in his underwear, with a knife between his teeth, and a pack full of explosives on his back. When he got back from the war, he finished college at the University of Arkansas, where on 01-01-1947, 61 years ago today, the Razorbacks tied LSU, 0-0. He went on to play for the New York Giants for a while, into the early 1950's. As he puts it, when they were done playing, they folded up their helmets, put them in their back pockets, and rode the subway home. He went on to become an successful man, and still (thanks to the miracle of modern heart devices) tells that joke when he's feeling up to it.

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.--Eric Hoffer, the Longshoreman Philosopher

When my daughter, who's about to cast her very first vote for Barack Obama, was 6, she told me I couldn't be an atheist, because I had no faith. What I have, dear girl, is a healthy cynicism.  So healthy, in fact, that it often too vigorously cares, and should shut up.

No, not him. The Bush Administration's contributions to history can be summed up nicely with the Dick Cheney quote to Senator Leahy on the floor of the US Senate:

"Go fuck yourself."

I mean the other President who's Dad was President, John Quincy Adams. Movie fans will remember the role in the mostly historically accurate Spielberg movie Amistad, in which Anthony Hopkins again makes you forget that he's Anthony Hopkins. After his presidency, Adams served in the US House of Representatives and was known as a friend of the Abolitionists. In one of his greatest scenes, Hopkins captures the intensity and genius of former president Adams when he argued for the defendants in the case of United States, Appellants, vs. Cinque, and others, Africans, captured in the schooner Amistad.

Seems Mike Huckabee never heard of the NIE.

   DES MOINES - Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said Tuesday he was unfamiliar with the National Intelligence Estimate that reported that Iran had not had a program to develop nuclear weapons since 2003, and he questioned the intelligence work behind it.

   Asked by reporters if he had been briefed on the summary of the report, which was declassified and released Monday, Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, said "No." Informed of its content by reporters, he said he agreed with President Bush, who said that Iran remains a threat.

They're going to nominate this guy.

An otherwise regular person I know, someone with no obvious racial hatred of bigotry, forwarded an email calling for a "boycott" of a Muslim "Christmas" stamp. The mail itself, one of many we've all gotten, didn't really surprise me. The person who sent it did.

My response to her below.

Our new AG announced today that the FBI's Gun Ban List Doubled since the Virginia Tech shootings. The WaPo story explains that "...the FBI's Mental Defective File has ballooned from 175,000 names in June to nearly 400,000." This is part of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS. Seems enforcement of this law has been, uh, lax.

Not that lax enforcement has been a theme for the last, oh, six years....

A stagehand friend of mine sent me this story about a typical Broadway stagehand, who's on strike. It reminded me a of great period in my career as a stagehand, and got me thinking about this crazy career.

My Canyon Country home was on the market for one week. Last week. We watched the fires burn from our back window on the day that our first and only potential buyers came by. I had cleaned the pool the day before. The pool, the great reminder of a house we've raised a two kids in, borrowed money from, and now can't sell with enough profit left for a moving van.

But enough of my woes. I'm angry at Glenn Beck right now.

AFP just put this story up: Double US air strike kills 25 in Iraq.

An AFP photographer saw at least four trucks, each carrying several bodies from the village, being driven through Baghdad to the Shiite holy city of Najaf for burial. One of the dead was clearly an elderly man.

So, it's this again. They say we hit civilians. We have someone there saying no we didn't. The key here is that using air strikes against "terrorist" Iranians is becoming common place. We already know that George and Dick think they can attack "terrorists" anywhere. And away we go...

The longer this marathon presidential campaign goes on, the more I've liked Edwards. So, when I got my Daily Grist email this morning, I was surprised to see this story: Edwards not as green as you thought.

During the ground zero workers' health story on 60 Minutes tonight, Katie Couric actually said to Christie Todd Whitman:

But with all due respect, your job as the head of the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, is to protect people from the environment. Did you really do it?

Seriously.

Sorry if anyone diaried this already.

The job numbers out today were not good. I guess the Bush people were too busy with their fuzzy calculators on the Iraq numbers.

Yesterday I diaried that my son's teacher in an independent study program made it clear, in a very awkward way, that he does not believe in evolution. I was chastised in the comments (by some) for a response that, thanks to my wife, was much nicer than I would usually be to a young earth creationist. Anyone wants to bitch at me about how angry I am at these nut cases please don't bother. I don't need any preaching from anyone about how I'm raising my kid. We're atheists, we believe in evolution. My kids know they can believe whatever they want. When my son wants to hear the religious side of this argument, he knows he can go to church. The Methodists are right around the corner.

Anyone, like this teacher, who thinks children should hear both "sides" of this issue in school should let me send an evolutionary biologist to teach my side to their kids in their church.

Today I received his reply. I have yet to answer him. I'm hoping for help from you guys before I do.

My son entered an independent study program yesterday. His first assignment for English is 11,000 Years Lost. I put on my best sarcastic voice for the teacher and said, "How can it be 11,000 years when the world's only 6000 years old?" He laughed, but a little later, he leaned in and said "I agree with you about the 6000 years, so you can just think of this book as fiction."

I was shocked. I immediately said, "I was being sarcastic. We are firm believers in evolution." He was pretty quiet for the rest of the orientation.

This morning, I found this email in my inbox:

There are many disturbing things about this story. The fact that it will get lost in the news of the day is, of course, too bad, because this is a story that says a lot about this war.

This is the story of the Marines who went out to get an insurgent. Got the neighbor - who they knew wasn't the right guy, put him in a ditch, and shot him, and then planted a weapon on him and lied about it. Another marine was given a discharge, others plead guilty and testified against Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins.