WOUNDED WIND DUCK

After the high winds we've had all week, our poor wind duck lost his wings.
Here he is after surgery. We'll wait until the winds die down before putting him out again.

MONDAY CATBLOGGING

Shadow at his usual post on the couch.

Diamond waits for dinner.

Daisy in her afternoon nap.

MORE DEMOCRATIC ARROGANCE

Katie Allison Granju writes on Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary about Republican angst during the presidential campaign. In an interview about her documentary, Pelosi (daughter of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi) spoke in detail about her identification with her interviewees’ sense of exclusion. Now Katie Allison Granju:

But then she reveals how little she actually "gets" where her subjects are coming from when she says this:

Respectfully, I wanted to say to them, I live on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. I am on the winning side of capitalism. I work for HBO, corporate America. The Man has been good to me. You, on the other hand, are driving a truck that says, "Obama is a socialist idiot," and you're in a much lower tax bracket than most of the people in Manhattan that are voting for Obama. So the times I would actually get into it would be like, "OK, explain to me why you think he's an idiot. He's trying to give you a tax cut. You understand you're voting against your own self-interest?"

Surely she can see that it's just this kind of maternalistic, elitist filter that these folks in Pelosi's documentary object to. They don't necessarily want to live on 5th Avenue or work for HBO; they like driving a truck and living in Peoria. They don't want what she thinks they want or should want.

And that, for me, is the key point ... what the Democrats know I want and what I really want are diametrically opposed.

Hat tip Instapundit

FEMINIST NONSENSE

This was written on a feminist weblog.

Along with the emancipation of women, sexual liberation has become very much a part of politics around the world. To the conservatives, both these issues challenge ‘family values’.

But what if there were no families? What if we say no to reproduction?

My understanding of reproduction is that it is the basis of the institutions of marriage and family, and those two provide the moorings to the structure of gender and sexual oppression. Family is the social institution that ensures unpaid reproductive and domestic labour, and is concerned with initiating a new generation into the gendered (as I analyzed here) and classed social set-up. Not only that, families prevent money the flow of money from the rich to the poor: wealth accumulates in a few hands to be squandered on and bequeathed to the next generation, and that makes families as economic units selfishly pursue their own interests and become especially prone to consumerism.

So it makes sense to say that if the world has to change, reproduction has to go. Of course there is an ecological responsibility to reduce the human population, or even end it , and a lot was said about that on the blogosphere recently (here, and here), but an ecological consciousness is not how I came to my decision to remain child-free.

I’ll let Protein Wisdom respond:

I say to author “freethinkr” and some of her sisters in the comments ... please, do not get married, do not have children. By all means, do not pass on your genes nor inflict yourself on any rational human being.

The author “freethinkr” must be a university student or graduate; for only on a university campus can such incredibly arrogant post-modern pap be found.

And President Obama wants to increase spending on education?

via Instapundit.

THE LOYAL OPPOSITION - 2009

Now that President Obama has been inaugurated, Andy Levy presents his “To Don’t List” for those of us on the right side of the political spectrum. Here are my favorites:

DON’T question the motives - question the policy.
DON’T make it personal.
DON’T pretend you’re being brave when you criticize your government.
DON’T use the phrase “speaking truth to power.”
DON’T say or do everything in your power to drive this country apart and then claim you want unity when it’s your guy in power.
DON’T automatically think people who disagree with you are stupid or evil.
DON’T use the fact that many on the left behaved abominably for the past eight years as an excuse to behave the same way.

Read the whole thing. It’s a good list, and one worth keeping in mind. But also read the comments. A common thread is the feeling I’m struggling with – after 8 years of Bush Derangement Syndrome and several months of Palin Derangement Syndrome from the Left, an intense desire to pull out the Clue Bat and start swinging.