No news; working on a Project

The news is: fascinating, troubling, confoundingly stupid, entertaining, amusing, cautionary, worrying, dysfunctional, encouraging, discouraging, predictable, mind-boggling, wholly engaging and completely addictive and I would rather not pull myself away from it, but a deadline looms and I have to do it.

I’d much, much rather be talking about how President Obama is going to put a lot of people out of work and make life much more difficult for the auto industry and the oil industry by allowing state-by-state emissions regulations, how his ideas for “children’s safety” will destroy small cottage industries and larger businesses. Not quite a stimulus, eh? I’d rather be talking about how White House/DNC Twittering and White House/You Tube data mining are the sorts of things that – had George W. Bush tried them – would have had Olbermann, Matthews and the rest of the left press screaming “this is fascism!”

But I have to work.

Here we read about The last hope of a 1600 year-old prayer

Get your Valentine’s Orders in, while there is still something to feel romantic about. Do you think Nancy I-have-five children Pelosi is heading toward a one-child policy?

Hebronics: Actually as a student of Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish, I’d say it’s a Yiddish form and call it “Yidbomics.” I have a favorite not written here, that I used to hear from a neighbor: (after not rushing to supper when my mother bellowed for me) “What, you need an engraved invitation? Go, eat! Come back, we’ll play Crazy 8’s!”

Shine, Perishing Republic.

Obama has not even been in office a week and I have gone from a cautious hopefulness that maybe, maybe things would look better to watching him do everything Jimmy Carter would have done and spout rhetoric that really makes me believe he might well be a socialist, after all.

Someone asked me the other day what we can do? Well, we can write to feckless, cowardly representatives, but mostly, we can resist any moves to take away free speech – in any form – because as long as we can speak freely, we still have some power as a people. And then…pray.

Lent is coming. It’s a time of penance and prayer – not Frank Richian penance (scroll down to the updates for it) but real penance. Prayer changes things. So does introspection, admission of wrongdoing, contrition and penance; those things enhance and fortify resolve and bring grace, which does astonishing things.

So…I’d better get working on my Lenten project. Quite different from my Lenten stuff of a year ago, thank goodness for that.