And this is the point that I felt like I had to say something to the interwebs.

My reactions looking this over were thus:

#14- *Yawn*

#13- Hehe, that’s clever

#12- What the fuck? Someone’s bitter over a breakup. Must be some kid.

#11- *shakes head* Couldn’t think of something funny, could we?

#10- Hehe- and kudos for sucking up to the site.

#9- Rude, but funny after I found out that those were the right translations (what can I say, I’m a nerd).

#8- Lol

#7- Hehe, way to destroy a kid’s love of astronomy.

#6- HAHA!

#5- Hehe, I agree

#4- At first, I thought this was a clever way of pointing out how ubiquitous boobs were in advertising. Then I read the newspaper, and was completely irritated. The fact that a woman was reading it (suggesting that she should take the hint and show her boobs too) bothered me even more. Those “polls” about stress being down clearly didn’t think about what women would feel about this.

#3- *urg* flash. *Waits* oh, hehe.

#2- *yawn*

#1- Okay, what the fucking hell? Not only is the number one slot given over to a flash (which I hate) but it’s not even clever, and it’s completely cruel. You have a picture of someone, clearly taken when you were intimate, when it’s supposed to be for your eyes only, and to punish her for not dating you anymore, you’re going to share it with the world. The worst part is, I suspect that this is actually someone’s ex-girlfriend’s picture: they didn’t have a million dollars, but they could at least let a million people see it on the internet. The only way that this is “funny” is if you think getting back at a woman by sexually humiliating her is an appropriate punishment for cheating on you. Yeah, it sucks if that’s what happened, but suck it up and act like an adult.

In the end, it wasn’t so much that three of these were really, really sexist: that’s bound to happen when most of the women are completely chased out of the site (commenting, writing, whatever). It’s the fact that Cracked.com decided that this was the best out of all of their submissions- this is what deserved money, and the number one slot.

So yeah, I sometimes, I really think guys hate us. When there are so many that are willing to humiliate women, and so many that think it’s funny to the point where they REWARD it, I sometimes wonder if they can even SEE me as a human being.

I always hate getting a new job; mostly because I have to beg to get a job that I know is going to make me miserable. It always seemed wrong to me; I have to do all the work of constructing an advertisement for myself so I can submit to giving up the bulk of my waking hours doing menial shit that I’m never going to see the point of. But, unless this lottery ticket pays of, and since I’m awful fond of being able to pay for the rent on this new place and eating (and paying off the jackals at student loans) I’m searching for someone who wants my skills.

Probably the worst thing about job searching is the advice that I should take the first job someone is willing to give me. I am sick to death of people saying a company “gives” you a job. I am also sick to death of pundits saying that tax cuts means that more “investors” will “give” people a job. I’m also sick to death of companies seeming to think that employing people is a barrier to their wealth and growth, and talking about it as if employing people was some sort of altruistic action.

It isn’t. This goes double for the government. When they’re debating this “stimulus” package, they need to know that this is them investing in the health and growth of our own country.

Employees are where owners get their money. I realize that this sounds counter-intuitive to some, and completely “duh” to others. But without employees, businesses don’t DO anything, don’t produce anything, and surely don’t make money.

Take, for instance, the airline industry. Airline travel has decreased 7 percent, or so it is projected. Now, a bunch of different airlines have laid of employees, and shut down whole wings of airports. What is the result of this? Well, first and foremost, it means that their quarterly stock price goes up 2 percent*. In the mean time, it means a few different things. First and foremost, getting a plane down, unloaded, and off-again (called “turn arounds”) are much, much longer. This means that customers have a greater level of irritation with the flight (because no one likes waiting in a plane). But, I suppose, more importantly for the businesses, this means that they are losing money by the boatloads. Take 350 lbs of jet fuel/ hr, per side for an engine at idle on a CRJ-200, one of the most common commuter jets. Axillary power unit unit, extra 150 lbs fuel/ hour. Then there is battery power, or an external power source.

To sum; you have four different places you can get power for a plane; the engines, the APU, a battery, or the external power source. If you have people on the plane, you want some source of power, (you need lights on). Ideally, if you’re on the ground, you want to be connected to an external power source as opposed to burning fuel of any kind. But, in order to get connected to the external power source, you need a ground crew to maneuver you into position, and to hook you up. If you have very few ground crew people, each plane’s going to be going off the APU or an engine longer. A rampie costs $12/hr (if they have some seniority time; I believe they have been advertising a starting wage of $9/hr). Jet fuel costs 4 dollars a MINUTE (240 dollars per hour- this is a Hubby and Captain calculation, and they should know). A time savings of 3 minutes pays for the rampie’s wage for that whole hour. This is just one example in one industry of how less people means less money.

Additionally, having less employees also means that traveling is going to be more uncomfortable, with longer lay-over times (because of fewer flights) and more crowded planes. In the long term, this is going to mean that less and less people will be inclined to fly commercially if they have other options (like businesses deciding it’s in their best interest to get private jets) and other people foregoing the vacations entirely. So, to me, it looks as if they’re trying to fix a cut by cutting off their whole leg. If you cut off your employees, you’re cutting off the people who make your whole company run.

That’s why I say we should change the entire look of jobs; these aren’t gifts, and you shouldn’t be grateful for your company for hiring you. If I’m grateful to a company, it’s what they gave to me that they didn’t need to (additional training above the job I was hired for, flex-time, and actual interest in my well-being, bennies that weren’t there in lieu of a pay-check raise), not the stuff I contracted to do for them.

*Can anybody explain to me where these prices come from? Seriously, I’m nearly convinced that these numbers are voodoo and magic but I never went beyond microeconomics in class, and people frequently say the same things about other “soft” sciences, which I know isn’t true because I learned about them.

“A hopeful society has institutions of science and medicine that do not cut ethical corners and that recognize the matchless value of every life.

Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms; creating or implanting embryos for experiments; creating human-animal hybrids; and buying, selling or patenting human embryos.

Human life is a gift from our creator, and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale.”

Former president George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, January 31, 2006

I’ve always liked that quote, especially the part about creating human-animal hybrids. I’ve been facilitating the mass production of human-animal hybrids since 2000–thousands of pounds of them at this point. But others are way ahead of me–the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, for example, has been pumping ‘em out at the commercial scale since I was in grade school. But I don’t think that former president Dubya really understood that when he made the above remarks. I don’t think he really understands what “human-animal hybrids” are. I suspect he meant he’d been reading too much science fiction and got really emotionally involved in one of those stories where innocent humans are force-fed wolf genes as part of a secret government plot to create super-soldiers. I figure Dubya has no problem suspending his disbelief when it comes to the idea of the government doing stuff behind its citizen’s backs in the name of national security. It seems likely that he’s absolutely unaware that all the insulin, for instance, that has been distributed in the United States since 2006 has been derived from human-animal hybrids, and was the majority of it for a long time before that.

The reason I’m contemplating this fairly old quote anew is the most recent installment via the Texas Board of Education of the ongoing drama that is the attempt to teach only science theories in science classrooms. People like Dubya really can’t cope with science at all. In the majority of cases, and certainly in his case, that’s because they haven’t taken a single science class since whatever general crap they were forced to sign up for in high school to obtain the absolute minimum number of science credits required in their state to graduate, or possibly they copped into one of those “Physics is Phun!” courses that fulfill similiar minimum science credit graduation requirements in college. (I am so not making up that course name, by the way.) But that’s not always or exclusively the case.

Back to Texas:

Dueling theories of how the universe was created got a split decision Friday night from the Texas Board of Education, which required examination of “all sides of scientific evidence” in new science standards, but rejected language requiring teachers to teach the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories.

The debate pitted proponents of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution against supporters of religion-based theories of intelligent design, or creationism.

“Science loses. Texas loses, and the kids lose because of this,” board chairman Don McLeroy, a creationist, told the Dallas Morning News.

“A creationist.” Is that some kind of career, now..? A small bit of Googling reveals that Creationist McLeroy is actually Dr. McLeroy, a dentist, and got a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Texas A&M. Now, I don’t know what’s changed exactly in the past several decades since he attended college, but while electrical engineering degrees are not pure-sciences heavy, they do require a bit of college-level science courses, namely some freshman- and sophomore-level physics and chemistry. So we can’t really assume in his case a lack of real exposure to the knowledge that the world, not to mention the rest of the universe, isn’t made of magic and senseless acts of beauty. (Maybe that scared him off the electrical engineering track and onto dentistry, though–that’d make sense.)

But really, I can sort of empathize. The clear thread running through the anti-teaching-science-only-in-science-class camp is that knowing too much about the world and all the things in it from a science standpoint destroys the mystical and terrifying awe of what could possibly be the cause of rainbows, tsunamis and how a real live baby pops out of a woman’s body nine months after a man shoots some stuff from the pee hole in his penis that resembles nothing more than papier-mache glue into her vagina. The more you learn about how and why things work, first at the macroscopic level and then the microscopic level and even beyond, the less mysteriously gorgeous those little everyday miracles start to look. In other words, the less and less likely you are to believe the explanations and rationales for these things provided by the Holy Bible instead.

And in our public schools? Religion doesn’t get taught. Only, for example, biology gets taught. One might adopt the line of reasoning that, since public schools are required by law to remain silent about religion, then the only input that children receive on the subject is from their parents, whereas the school’s version of biology has no such monopoly–parents are free to instruct their children in biology as well as religion. However, the fact that the deck is already stacked in religion’s favor this way doesn’t sway these folks–they don’t want their children being taught biology in school at all if the answers that biology provides about the world around us disagree with the ones the Bible does. Since they usually can’t swing quite that, they strive to have the gaps and unsureties, no matter how major or minor, in scientific theories dwelt on and debated in the biology classroom. This, they say, is teaching the controversy.

You know, I’m willing to buy into this. Really, I am. I would absolutely go for this, if we get to do the same thing with Intelligent Design, which huge swathes of the folks of McLeroy’s ilk swear up and down isn’t religion and therefore, should not be a problem in public schools. I recommend we institute a mandatory new class for all high schoolers, that must be taken before they can graduate, and call it Evolution and Intelligent Design: Teaching the Controversy! The theory of evolution would be thoroughly explored, what it can explain as well as what it can’t…and the idea of an Intelligent Designer would also be explored, and what it can explain as well as what it can’t. The two course textbooks could be Of Pandas and People for the evolution controversy side, and The Blind Watchmaker for the intelligent design controversy si—

…yeah, like any of those people would ever let their kids anywhere near that book.

But if they’re willing to deal, I am.

I leave you with this thought from our beloved Onion: The Theory of Intelligent Falling

This isn’t a real FOX screenshot, right? Please tell me someone made this up.

The AP is in the running for best headline of the year:

Everything seemingly is spinning out of control

WASHINGTON (AP) — Is everything spinning out of control? Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.

Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.

The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country’s sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.

Evidence that the end is nigh includes natural disasters, man-made disasters, rising gas prices, the TV writers’ strike, and steroid use in sports.

This, incidentally, is not presented as an editorial. It is FACT, people. News item: We’re screwed.

Head over to Fengi’s for the original screenshot of the piece, which emphasizes the objective fact that Michelle Obama is the Antichrist.

Well, it did start out that way.

However, it switched gears rather spectacularly about three-fourths of the way through:

An alternative: perinatal hospice
Directly across a parking lot from Dr. Tiller’s clinic is a facility with a different take on what to do about ill-fated pregnancies. Choices Medical Clinic, a privately funded nonprofit, opened in 1999 and is one of as many as 2,500 “crisis pregnancy centers” nationwide that exist to persuade pregnant women to avoid abortion. Choices was one of the first centers to offer perinatal hospice: end-of-life services for fetuses akin to the standard hospice care available to the sick and the elderly.

The facility doesn’t provide primary medical care; deliveries or inductions are done at local hospitals. But women who enlist its hospice services are invited to have free sonograms every day of their doomed pregnancy and, if they find it a comfort, can have free professional pictures taken of them and their dead or dying children after they are born. “Our job is to start from the womb to the tomb,” says Scott Stringfield, M.D., a family physician in Wichita and medical director of Choices. “We try to comfort women and facilitate greater closeness to their child.”

Whoa! Run that by me again..?

Kim Ortmeier, a 35-year-old stay-at-home mom, first learned about perinatal hospice from her obstetrician. She was 16 weeks pregnant with her second child and living in Wichita in December 2006 when routine testing revealed the fetus had holoprosencephaly, a condition in which the brain doesn’t develop properly.

She started working with the center in her 28th week of pregnancy, when delivery seemed imminent. She had two sonograms taken of the baby, a girl they named Madeline, and made plans for both her birth and her funeral. “They offered me constant support in an environment that was very pro-life,” she says. The staff’s positive approach cheered her: “They would be happy when they saw my baby, not all gloom and doom.”

Byron C. Calhoun, M.D., medical director for the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates in Fredicksburg, Virginia, helped conceive the idea for perinatal hospice. In hopes that women facing pregnancy with an adverse diagnosis will choose to carry to term, Dr. Calhoun determined to make spending time with those children — before and after birth — a more compassionate experience. Today some 60 U.S. hospitals, hospices and crisis pregnancy clinics offer perinatal hospice services; in Minnesota, women seeking to abort fetuses with fatal anomalies are required by law to be informed about hospice as an alternative. “Women appreciate the grieving process and being able to spend time with their babies,” says Dr. Calhoun, vice chair of obstetrics and gynecology at West Virginia University School of Medicine in Charleston. “Perinatal hospice gives women an alternative that is a better choice than abortion.”

Happy when they saw her dying and malformed baby? Not all gloom and doom? Because why on earth would the sight of a deformed stillborn baby make anybody all gloomy and doomy? That isn’t what Do-Bees do! They sing and dance and praise the Lord! Celebrate that tiny, twisted corpse being shoved out its mother’s vagina!

In hopes that women facing pregnancy with an adverse diag–oh, I have no time for bullshit weaselwords.

In hopes that women pregnant with a rapidly dying or dead fetus will choose to carry to term–

What term? It’s dead or as good as dead. Fruitful development has ceased. The term is over. All that’s left is how long it takes your body to biochemically figure out it’s sucking up your resources to nourish a tiny human corpse and eject it from you. Carry why..?

But, you know, I am pro-choice. Really pro-choice, which means that if there are women out there that want this…service…I would never remotely contemplate standing in their way. However, the thought of trying to force or coerce in any way, any woman who does NOT want this…Barney-esque circus of septic pregnancy celebration inflicted upon her…makes me really want to vomit.

Pregnancy’s hard. Labor and delivery are REALLY hard. Hard! To endure it all for the reward of a dead, crushed, baby or one that is going to suffer hideously in its few minutes of life after birth, then die?

Anybody who tried to make me would really, really regret it.

But I am pro-choice. So, by all means, sickoes! have your ghoulish death parties. But you’d better not try to legislate them into my life.

However, if you’re going to be none of those things ever, and you’re going to claim to be a part of an educational clearinghouse – implying that you are kind of on top of your subject matter, an not, say, a month behind and tickled pink on the more obvious developments – could you at least do us the favor of not writing a melodramatic 14-year-old girl’s diary entry?

Young People of Today
Published by HotMama247 May 19th, 2008 in Abstinence

Young people of today are overtired, anxiety-ridden, compulsively active, and constantly depressed with recurring fits of paranoia and becoming more promiscuous and irresponsible. The pro-aborts tell us this is normal.

I don’t expect Betty Smith, here, but your passage does bear striking resemblance to something she wrote:

“Intolerance,” she wrote, pressing down hard on the pencil, ‘is a think that causes war, pogroms, crucifixions, lynchings and makes people cruel to little children and to each other. It is responsible for most of the viciousness, violence, terror and heart and soul breaking of the world.”

She read the words over aloud. They sounded like words that came in a can; all the freshness was cooked out of them. She closed the book and put it away.

Ok, maybe you can’t sound like the author of one of the Great American Novels, however, you can avoid sounding like her thirteen-year-old protagonist, and should, considering that even unworldly, teenage Francie knew she was writing crap that day.

Francie, of course, wrote a true statement (“Intolerance is bad; it causes the following bad things”) and realized that the appropriate response to her self-righteous little screed was “Yeah, so what? Tell me something I don’t know.” Your situation is a little different. You take a statement that is arguably true in some communities (“Kids are over stressed”), apply it to all kids, and then somehow try to make the whole thing pro-choicer’s fault. I’m sure there’s a hope chest full of assumptions there, but you’ve lost me and you’ll have to fucking prove it. Once again, let’s do this in list form:

1. Link, for the love of Christ, link to something that supports your argument. Otherwise, you’re just rocking on your porch, muttering about kids these days and ordering them off your lawn.
2. “Pro-aborts”? Pardon, educational clearinghouse, your slip is showing.
3. At least link to the pro-aborts who are saying it is right and natural to make the children who slipped through their abortiony grasp into neurotic stressed-out slutbags with no sense of responsibility. Seriously, do these people exist anywhere but in your head?
4. Take a writing workshop at your local community college or adult education center. Please.

I guess something in the ending credits reminds you not to talk about that bit. And it almost worked.

You can only watch Samantha Jones bed so many gorgeous guys before wondering if 4-inch heels and sky-high confidence would allow you to do the same.

At least that’s what happened to “Lisa” (not her real name). She got hooked on “Sex and the City” when she was a 14-year-old growing up on Long Island, N.Y. It was the same year she lost her virginity. She soon graduated to ordering cosmopolitans at bars she snuck into and cheating on her boyfriend with up to seven other guys — in one week.

Not that this article is saying that Sex in the City turned Little Lisa into a Teenage Sexbot in the City (“To be clear: “Sex and the City” can’t be blamed for creating a generation of sluts.”) but…

Lisa left her “Samantha” ways behind at 19, when she moved to Utah, became a Mormon, married a man within the church and gave birth to two children. For the first year of her marriage, her husband forbade her to watch “Sex and the City” for fear that it would lure her back to her habits of sex, drugs and one-too-many cosmos.

“I had to sell my DVDs on eBay,” she said. “But now it’s OK. It took a while to get here.”

Hmm, troubled teenager raises hell for five years, then in three years manages to find religion get married and have two kids. Well, I’m convinced. I’m ready to take her word on pretty much everything. Nothing fishy going on here. I suppose she could at least give SatC credit for teaching her efficient time-management skills, at least.

So is there really danger here? Let’s ask Perfectmatch.com’s Dr Needspublicity:

“It did have some impact given that it was a sea change in how women talked about sexuality and what was shown on a network — full frontal nudity, talking about affairs, vibrators, etc.,” said Pepper Schwartz, a University of Washington sociology professor and relationship expert for Perfectmatch.com. “If it’s not permission giving, it at least demystifies and normalizes what goes on in women’s lives in a more than snickering way.” (emphasis mine)

Ah, I see. Can’t have that now, because the day women learn to admit they cheat as much as men and vibrators are freely available in all 50 states is the day our society drowns in a sea of fuck-me pump wearing cosmo snorking child whores. Not that I’m saying this will happen if Sex and the City reaches number one in the box office, but basically we’re doomed. Doomed.

That’s what Angela Hwang, 24, found when she started watching the show in cable syndication, after it went off HBO. She and her girlfriends routinely compare their experiences to “Sex and the City” episodes.

“My girlfriends and I, every single guy we’ve been with we can relate to one of the guys on the show,” she said. “We’ve all had Samantha moments. We’ll say, ‘Remember the guy I saw last week? He was exactly like the guy in episode 15.’”

Oh, my God: women are identifying with the characters and situations of a well-written show. We’re all going to die. And since I’m not a SatC fan, maybe I’m unaware of this, but do these fabulous young fans of Samantha and Whatshername actually refer to the episodes by a single number? Is it possible someone’s making quotes up here?

But Dr. David Greenfield, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut’s School of Medicine, believes there’s danger in taking “Sex and the City’s” so-called lessons off the small screen and applying them in the real world.

“With teenagers and young adults, there’s a certain degree of role modeling that goes on. There’s a certain ‘if it’s done on the screen then it’s OK, it’s normal,’” he said. “You watch ‘Sex and the City,’ you see these women go out for dinner, come back, and wake up in satin sheets with a gorgeous guy. Who wouldn’t like that? But it doesn’t show what goes on under the surface in real sexual relations. Sex is an extraordinarily complex, emotional process. No one wants to talk about that. They’re not going to see the reality.”

And the circle is complete: we are now back to the bullet theory of media consumption,meaning that Sarah Jessica Parker has actually torn the fabric of space and time, and the 1960′s are leaking into today, and soon we’ll all be burning cheap sweaters from Steve and Barry’s for warmth before death comes for us all. Great fucking job, Samantha.

Love me.

Americans abroad can thank George W. Bush

For ruining our reputation. For reminding them why they left. For making the locals around them feel like the good guys, no matter where they live. For not causing global thermonuclear war (yet)?

for sharpening our survival skills.

Does this mean that all the international asskickings brought on merely by mentioning you’re American have been by design? I suppose we were getting soft in our hegemony.

We have weathered a sea of anti-Iraq war protests and had the intelligence of our president and those who voted for him questioned more times than we care to remember.

False assumption #1: That Americans abroad are “weathering” these insults as opposed to lobbing them.
False assumption #2: That our president’s intelligence has been “questioned” as opposed to demonstrably proven false.

In my hometown of San Francisco,

See? Liberal. This is totally going to turn out liberal.

Bush supporters are called all sorts of names, and I rarely bother with defending them.

Rarely? Hmm. Rarely is code for sometimes. Sometimes this person defends George Bush. Less liberal, but I suppose that was the title of the article.

When abroad, however, I feel a patriotic duty

WOOOOP! WOOOOP! Alert! Irrational behavior about to be justified by the invocation of patriotic duty! Batten down the hatches, there’s no way this is a liberal!

to try to explain the political views of those with whom I adamantly disagree.

Huh? You are a liberal? The sense is making none. Please continue so I can fail to compute.

Over the years, I’ve grown skillful at mounting semicoherent explanations of support for the invasion of Iraq, though I do a less stellar job when it comes to explaining his opposition to abortion rights and gay marriage.

Skillfully mounting semi-coherent explanations. That explains a lot.

Living in San Francisco has ill-prepared me for playing devil’s advocate. It is not just because the city is overwhelmingly Democratic. The real problem is that the Democrats here are often closed to having a constructive debate.

Shenanigans. Straight up shenanigans. Let’s see, we’ve got a person who hates hearing our president insulted, justifies actions with patriotism, bags *Democrats* (especially the evil ones in that bastion of liberal hell called San Francisco) as the side refusing to debate fairly, and yet supposedly “adamantly disagrees” with the actions of this administration. Uh huh.

Opponents of affirmative action are dismissed as “racist,” and the Iraq war is immediately labeled “criminal.” This neither helps Democrats understand the views of Republicans, nor change them. More often than not, the conversation either abruptly ends or escalates into a meaningless shouting match.

The anger is real and its roots are varied. The 2000 Florida election debacle ensured that the Bush administration was not going to bask in Democratic goodwill. The war in Iraq, meanwhile, ensured that many Democrats are literally counting down the days until a new president takes office.

I’m glad that the author made it clear she’s got skillz, because this is a fucking opus of semi-coherence.

Many reasons for the animosity, however, predate Bush.

You don’t say. In all of my textbooks, we read only of The Before Time, from the Big Bang to 1999, when everyone was nude and frolicky, awash in the glow of nature and free from the tyranny of close-minded San Franciscans.

Amazingly, the author argues, these turf wars extend alllll the way back to the ’60s. Then she says the internet makes it easy to ignore voices of opposition and that YouTube makes life awful hard on those poor li’l politicians. Semi-coherent? We’re just getting started, peeps.

Voters’ complex lives have been reduced to ludicrous stereotypes. Latte-drinkers are liberals, while NASCAR fans are conservatives. The former buy bulk at Costco and hug trees while the latter fill their carts at Wal-Mart and hug guns.

I can’t think of a single reference to “latte conservatives,” although I have certainly witnessed Republicans and independents enjoying the coffee beverage.

I remind the jury that this article began as a defense of having Bush’s back abroad. So let’s just jump back into that topic without adequate transition.

Explaining the complexities of America’s little red vs. blue war to foreigners isn’t easy and when I get tired of it, I always have an out: I wasn’t born in the United States and came here as a child from Soviet Ukraine.

Whoa. A twist of M. Night Shyamalan proportions. One minute I’m reading something from a regular ol’ American, but then I learn that it’s from a Russian-American! This has completely distracted me from realizing that the topic of international discussion somehow transformed from defending George Bush to explaining why Americans have opposing sides with different philosophies arguing over how to use political power (this is different from the rest of the world how, again?).

Never mind. Let’s trot out some conservative storylines about America to explain why it’s okay to be a big obnoxious American Patriot when abroad:

It is natural to feel defensive when something you love is being criticized, even when the criticism is justified. My deep unhappiness with the current administration, however, hasn’t influenced my appreciation for my adopted country’s rowdy democratic system of government, the incredible social mobility it affords to those without connections, and its ability to successfully integrate immigrants from all over the world.

As much as I find her work inscrutable, I’m happy that our author has achieved success in this country. But, y’know, and I hate to nitpick, but just because it happened for you doesn’t mean there aren’t a whole lot more people for whom there are all kinds of social and economic barriers to freedom/mobility. To universalize your own personal success story is, well, kinda [shhh] Republican of you. Just, y’know, saying.

Okay, we’re in the stretch run here. So let’s take this borderline-incoherent piece and raise it back to the level of semi-coherence for which the author is known by tying all of this together somehow!

Americans are rightly known as a hopeful bunch. And so, come this election season, I hope that regardless of the outcome, fierce partisan debate won’t preclude bipartisanship.

We can begin to transform the caustic political climate by choosing our words of criticism more carefully and realizing conservative and liberal common ground on issues such as electoral college reform.

Uh, nope, that’s not so much tying it back together. Still not sure why you defend George Bush abroad when you supposedly hate him so much.

Many of us may be breathing a sigh of relief because Bush will soon be out of office, but we need to keep the survival skills he helped traveling Americans sharpen, and use them at home.

From the war in Iraq to the environment, the stakes are too high for a political stalemate at home or the failure to engage our allies abroad.

Sigh. Let me see if I have your story straight: It was important to be defending our genocidal war criminal in chief abroad because it will help us come home and play fair with those who found their political ideology on ignorance, fear, and hate, who have all the money and power, and who have been systematically dismantling the Constitution for funsies. That sounds both fair and balanced!