Saturday Night Muses

This is an open thread because, frankly, there’s nothing much going on unless you’re interested in football, national crass consumerism season, or rehashed republican politics.

Start with Jindal. An alleged policy guy, he published an almost embarrassingly empty op-ed this week that had all of two ideas: a Balanced Budget Amendment and term limits. In other words, the same old ideas that Republicans have been trotting out since …well, certainly since the Reagan administration. Okay, granted, Jindal’s version of the BBA is the souped-up one that Republicans have been pushing recently, but that’s even worse than the old-fashioned variety – it seems to track what Bruce Bartlett called “the dopiest Constitutional amendment of all time” when Tea Partying members of the House were pushing it in early 2011.

So not much there.

Marco Rubio? His big rollout speech was given while accepting a Jack Kemp Foundation award. His big idea, as Dave Weigel reported this week, turns out to be the exact same policy ideas that Republicans have been giving for some time now but labeling each one as a benefit for the “middle class.” Which mainly involves reciting the words “middle class.” A lot. A whole lot. As Weigel counted, 35 times.

Not much in the way of new ideas there, either.

Paul Ryan, meanwhile, also spoke at the Kemp shindig, and he continued the theme he evoked late in the campaign. It boils down to rejecting Mitt Romney’s rhetoric of “47 percent” and arguing forcefully that Republican policies are actually just what the poor should have always wanted. But as Jonathan Chait put it, Ryan has “no policy to offer the poor other than the incentive of being hungrier and sicker.”

Now, it’s true that Paul Ryan cannot be fairly accused of simply echoing back the same stale policies Republicans have been running on for three decades. Unfortunately, what he has replaced them with is a shell game; as Paul Krugman has long pointed out, Ryan – the Eddie Haskell of the GOP – is more con man than policy wonk.

Again: there’s nothing about either the Republican Party or conservative movement politics that makes it impossible to develop and run on serious policy proposals.

I suppose we could also discuss  Bernie Saunders who considers the obstruction going on in the US Senate as deliberately unpatriotic.

“In a time of disfunctionality in the Senate, and all kinds of absurdity, this probably takes the cake when you filibuster your own” bill, the self-described “democratic socialist” lawmaker told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz Friday evening. “The American people want action and it is undemocratic, it is unAmerican when a small minority can deny the majority from going forward.”

However, I’m in a girl power kinda mood tonight so …

Here’s a few links and an open thread.

Read this heart warming story about “My Life with Two Moms” at Jezebel.

My moms raised me, my sisters, and my brother the best way they could. Much like the opposite-sex families my peers grew up in, we all had our issues. I was a difficult child to handle. I was angry at the world, angry at myself, angry at my friends, angry at my biological father. I was sad most of the time and had a massive chip on my shoulder. I fought with my moms every chance I had because I couldn’t get a grip on my teenage years-or the clinical depression I was diagnosed with. I was a handful, as they say.

And there were mistakes on both our parts, as one can expect in any family raging with teenage hormones. My moms couldn’t understand why I felt or acted the way I did-not that I gave them much opportunity to-and they were sometimes disconnected from the reality I was struggling with. But they tried. And they love me, flaws and all. They love me even when I throw on my comedian hat and use them as the source of my jokes at holiday dinners.

They pushed me to follow my dreams of being a journalist, even when that meant I’d take a year off from college after graduating high school-even when it meant I’d take a detour and attend art school to misguidedly pursue a career in painting. They never restricted my creativity, and taught me how to be a strong, independent woman. They supported me every inch of the way, even when I made my mistakes with boys and jobs. They didn’t bat an eye when I decided to convert to Wicca at the age of 14. They don’t bat an eye when I get a new tattoo or piercing even if it doesn’t sit well with them. They gave me advice when I wanted it-and advice when I never asked for it.

Here’s a great interview with writer/illustrator  Maurice Sendak on his family and the holocaust. His thoughts on his grandmother are highly inspiring.

MS: Yes. But that was in Europe. America was protected by an invisible shield. Nearly all my relatives died in the concentration camps, except my parents. They came here willy-nilly; my father came because he was chasing a girl. My mother was coming because her mother couldn’t bear her anymore. They came here and picked their way through life. But as far as I was concerned, winning the war was such an amazing and happy moment. We thought Hitler might just win. When the war ended—this was simplistic of me—I thought, That’s the end of all evil.

The world is as disheveled as it was then. But I was a child then. The shock of thinking of the people I will never know was terrible. The photographs my father had of his younger brothers, all handsome and interesting looking, and the women with long hair and flowers. And who were they? I tried to give them back to my parents when I illustrated some short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Marvelous stories. And I went through the album and picked some of my mother’s relatives and some of my father’s and drew them very acutely. And they cried. And I cried. So there was that. And there still is that.

BLVR: Could your parents talk about it?

MS: No. The only one who talked about it was my grandmother, who was a very fierce woman. The only grandparent I had. She was the only one who came over [from Europe]. Who was brought over by her idiot daughters, my aunts. And idiot uncles, her sons. They were deficits, all of them. She was the strongest. And she had an aversion to her children—not a very good mother, but a wonderful grandmother. And she could hate them, and I could hate them, too, because Grandma hated them! She had such contempt, and I loved her for it. She was so bitter and sharp. And she would sit by the window with her little prayer book and daven and daven and pray. And I would sit on her lap. She was like the bridge from the old country to the new country, and she liked me, and I wanted to be liked. I felt certain that my mother did not like me. A lot of parents don’t like their kids. It’s a terrible thing. I think people should take a test: you should or shouldn’t have a child.

BLVR: What would the criteria be?

MS: Well, you should be as sane as possible. You should have had a childhood that was as decent as possible. A mother and father who cared about you. If you don’t have those components of compassion and love and curiosity, don’t do it.

Have a great night and share some fun things if you get a chance!!!