Are you pondering what I’m pondering?

Ok, grab a beer.  What am I drinking?  Sierra Nevada Celebration.  It’s ok, I guess.  Probably a growler of something from Triumph in Princeton would be better but what the heck.

Anyways, I was watching something called Property Brothers on the HGTV site tonight.  Have you ever seen it?  This is the kind of mindless drivel I like to watch before I go to bed.  There’s nothing deep about it.  And yet….

So the concept of this show is that you get a married couple (somewhere in Canada) who want to move out of their (perfectly adequate, by my standards) little digs where each of their rugrats doesn’t have his or her own room to some kind of palatial McMansion. And for some strange reason, this youngish couple has something like $700K to spend on their new Taj.   These two tall dudes with perfect physiques and too many teeth take them to what they consider to be a perfect house for them.  It’s gorgeous, in their humble opinion.  It’s got a modern kitchen and a pool and a master suite to end all master suites with a multilevel 26 showerheaded steam cabinet and a Titanic sized soaking tub that fills itself from a faucet in the ceiling and chromo therapy.  It looks like a spa in Tucson meets the Bellagio in Vegas minus the Cirque de Soleil high hoop acrobats.

And the Smiths fall in love.  “Look, honey”, she coos, “I could have my office here”, about a room that is already set up as an office.

Then, the two toothy dudes hit them with L’addition.  It’s usually two times their budget and they get all offended and huffy and the wife says to the camera once toothy guys are out of earshot, “I don’t even know why they brought us here.  CLEARLY, this is way over our budget”.  Harummmmph, resentful look at the cameraman.

Then the dudes take them to some real fixer uppers.  You know, the kind where the grunge still lingers in the bathroom tile (note to self: clean bathroom tile tomorrow morning) and there is an inch of carbonized material in the oven (and start the self-cleaning cycle) and the carpet in the family room has pee stains from some animal or small human.  And the dudes tell them, “Remember that house you really, really liked but couldn’t afford?  Well, we can fix this one up for you!”.

And then this couple walk around the house that even *I* can see needs some new carpeting, a new paint job and a Smallbone kitchen and all they keep saying is stuff like, “I can’t live with that 70’s mirror” or “That color paint is hideous”.

At this point, I want to smack them, smack them very, very hard for being completely unable to imaginate anything other than what they see before them.  It makes me so mad when people are unable to envision even the teensiest things.  I want to throw something at the display and scream, “What’s WRONG with you people??  When it’s your house, you can do whatever you want with it.  Don’t like the baby diarrhea colored carpets?  CHANGE them!”

But they never hear me.

And then there is this obsession with privacy.  Is that a code word for something.  When the toothy dudes show them the backyard and say, “There is no one in the back of this lot, you have complete privacy”, are they really saying, “The minute the kids are asleep, you and the yoga instructor from the fitness center around the corner can have a threesome in the pool and no one will see you” or “You can do as many tokes over the line as you want.”  Because, you know, I do not have a lack of imagination and when those toothy guys are extolling the virtues of privacy, I try to picture that mousy looking couple doin’ it in the deep end.

Oh,wait.  Did I say that out loud?

Well, anyways, is it just me?

Shame! Shame! Shame!

UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi goes on trial in the court of public opinion today for allowing campus police to pepper spray at will.  To be fair, she’s not the only authority that has acquiesced to an overwhelming and disproportionate display of police force against peaceful protestors.  It’s just that in this case, helicopter parents are involved.  When it happened to Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Oakland, and Occupy Seattle it was just a bunch of dirty f%&*ing hippies.  And 84 year old women.  And Iraq War vets.  And pregnant women.  And people who were protesting while black.  And, you know, liberals.  Nobody important.

In this video, Katehi does the walk of shame between phalanxes of seated protestors.  In absolute silence.

If that doesn’t humble you, nothing will.

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Spain has a change election and throws out the socialists in favor of conservatives in the hope that there will be some relief.  This is the equivalent of jumping into the fire from the frying pan.  Maybe they have a contingent of older seniors who still remember the good old days under Franco.  i don’t know.  But if I were the Democrats, I’d be worried.  Because they really screwed up after 2008 and I smell another change election coming.  So far, we’ve seen Spain and Ireland go for the more conservative option.  Maybe it has to do with the fact that they are both Catholic countries and feel like they deserve it.

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Speaking of Catholics, it looks like the Democrats are getting worried about their base.  Obama appears to be ready to create a broad exception for religious institutions to the requirement that insurance companies provide contraception for their employees. Once again, Catholic bishops and fundamentalist groups have been pressuring him to do it.  But let’s face it, Obama went out of his way to court these people in the 2008 election.  He needed them to win.  He can’t piss them off, can he?  All they want is to deny women the right to their own consciences.  Is that *so* much to ask?  Democrats went along with it in the last election cycle when they scrubbed reproductive rights issues from their campaign web pages?  Why not do it again?  Oh, that’s right.  Women make up 51% of the population.  It looks like Democrats have finally learned to count.

And the right’s new talking point “religious liberty”, gets rolled out:

The issue resonates at the local level, as Catholic priests around the country have urged parishioners to tell federal officials why they object to the new mandate.

In a letter to the administration, the bishops’ conference said the requirement for coverage of contraceptives and sterilization was “an unprecedented attack on religious liberty.”

Yes, men are entitled to religious liberty.  But not women.  I’m not sure how anyone’s religious liberty is damaged by a healthcare requirement.  People are not required to take contraception.  Or Cialis.

Democrats need us next year and can’t afford to piss us off.  I can almost hear their panic and disbelief.  “What is he doing?!  I can’t win my election if he’s going to piss off more women.  Who talked us into supporting this bozo in the first place?  Jeez, why didn’t we stick with Hillary?  At least she wasn’t afraid of neanderthal pro-lifers.”

See??  THAT’S the way you do it.  That wasn’t so hard, was it?  You explain to your voters what you value and that you will forcefully defend those values and you give them a choice.  They can vote for you or the other guy.  You do not expect your base to give up what they value in order to attract the more conservative voters from the other party.  Next year  is an economy election.  If your positions on the economy are good, your voters will have to take the whole package.

Well, I’m holding on to my vote until I see results.  BIG results.  Yes, I want them to kiss up to me.  They’d better make it good.  And forget about me ever voting for Barry.  He’s not a very good president and I’m not over the primary of 2008 where the DNC dehumanized the Clintonistas in order to dismiss our votes.  If women were smart, they’d vow to never vote for him and then stick to that vow.  I might vote for a Democrat for Congress.  But Obama?  After we’ve gotten proof of his capabilities (or lack thereof) and his absolutely disgraceful tolerance of shitty treatment of women in the White House?  Never.

Never, ever, ever.