And We're Back!

And it's been a long, dull couple of weeks around these here parts, which is why I haven't been posting...if my life is boring ME, for God's sake, I can only imagine what it must do to my readers.

However, things are looking up.  Tomorrow I'm back at the law firm (which admittedly doesn't do a whole lot for the boredom factor), and Friday, Tuesday and Wednesday I get to do a featured role in The Wolf of Wall Street, the new Leonardo DiCaprio movie. 

And I even got a few things done around the house!  Not nearly enough, but a step in the right direction.  I bought new garbage bins...I can hear you all just panting with excitement here, but really, I'm quite pleased.  My old ones were white, you see, and old, and life is too damn short to spend half my time scrubbing down grubby white plastic garbage bins.  So now I have nice new shiny black ones, and if they don't get wiped down for a few days (or, you know, a few months...we all know about my hideous housekeeping habits), nobody will notice.  I also bought a nice set of little divider bins for the kitchen drawers so I don't spend half my time hunting utensils, twist ties, paper clips...all that stuff that ends up in the kitchen drawers and is so often never seen again.  Of course, I haven't unwrapped them yet...

What I've really been doing is hanging out on the computer becoming more and more horrified at what's coming out of the mouths of Republicans.  I do realize that there are perfectly nice Republicans with brains out there.  It's just that they're not the ones who are being quoted.

Ban ALL abortion, including in cases of rape and incest?  The Holocaust never happened?  A woman's body has a method of cutting off its own reproductive system if she gets raped?  And my favorite, in Arizona, where they have just decided that pregnancy begins two weeks before conception.

This is beginning to be frightening.  Paul Ryan...that adorable young man...referred recently to rape as a method of conception.  Well, yes, that is strictly true...but...um...

We all know about Todd Akin, who was responsible for the fascinating notion that a woman somehow secretes birth control when she gets raped, so she won't get pregnant.  Why are the Republicans so fixated on rape, for heaven's sake?  I would truly hate to think it has to do with their deep unspoken desires.

And then there's Art Jones, who is running for a congressional seat in Illinois, who said, "As far as I'm concerned, the Holocaust is nothing more than an international extortion racket by the Jews."  This gentleman (for want of a better term) is an avowed racist who runs, among other unsavory activities, "family-friendly neo-Nazi gatherings."  What on EARTH can a family-friendly neo-Nazi gathering be like?  Adorable little Aryan babies in tiny onesies printed with itsy-bitsy swastikas?  Young John 's very first Ku Klux Klan outfit, and doesn't he look cute?  Get a picture for the album, Martha...and let's blow it up so we can hang it on the wall next to our prized shot of Darlene lighting the first cross last year!  Yay!

I would love to think that these people are in the minority, and to be fair, I'm sure they are.  But the notion that even the vice presidential candidate is so completely clueless that he can refer to rape as a method of conception is enormously disturbing.  And the GOP platform completely bans abortion under any circumstances and, of course, gay marriage.  What they're going to do about all the gay people who are ALREADY married is somewhat beyond me...annul their marriages?

And here's the problem.  We forget, we liberal, well-educated urban people, that we are distinctly in the minority.  There is a whole lot of America out there, people, and there are a lot of God-fearing Americans who sincerely and deeply believe that homosexuality and abortion are against the laws of God and that rape happens because women ask for it (well, come on...if you're coming home at 10 o'clock at night and you're wearing a skirt, OBVIOUSLY you are).  I said almost exactly this in 2008, and we won that time.  Let's try to do it again, shall we?

So I am not sleeping terribly well these nights.  Get out and vote...early and often, as we used to say in Chicago.

Love, Wendy (who seems to be twitching a lot these days)