Tasty Tidbits 9/11/11 minus 1

1. What it takes to turn Democrats against immigration.
2. Back to the land …
3. reel mower in hand.
4. Shopping list.
5. Texas executions, again.
6. Creationism and the liberal elite.

1

New York Assemblyman David Weprin, a Democrat, in a 3/4 Democrat Congressional district, hopes to replace Rep. Anthony Weiner (he of the errant sense of personal sexual allure via Twitter).

But Weprin voted to redefine marriage in New York, and his district, full of atavistic immigrants who have not (yet) suffered American amnesia about marriage, mightily resents it. Orthodox Jews have abandoned Weprin, a Jew, to endorse his Catholic Republican rival. State Senator Pastor Ruben Diaz has done so as well, though he’s a Democrat.

The ball is teed up for them to elect a Republican. CatholicVoter.org covers it with link to New York Times background.

As support for same-sex marriage (as all other aspects of the sexual revolution) becomes obligatory for Democrats with national ambitions, will we see a new wave of defections, this time from immigrants and ethnic groups, to the GOP? Probably, though it increasingly looks to me like a choice between the dissolute and the certifiably insane.

2

I missed this in Kunstler’s Monday blog until Jason Peters at Front Porch Republic quoted it Friday:

I’d like to hear Mr. Obama tell this country that Job Number One for us is getting more Americans into agriculture at the small, local scale. Translation: dismantle agri-business. Otherwise, we’re going to have a lot of starving people across this land. That might seem like a strange destination for America, but I suppose that’s why there’s all the kicking and screaming.

Kunstler, whose blog cannot even be cited by name in a family blog like this, actually made his point less emphatically then Peters had made it early in the week:

I began with a sneer about empty farms and jam-packed casinos. If I could, I think I might forcibly remove everyone from the blackjack table, put him on some black earth near the Chief Executive Thieves already forcibly placed there alongside their minions and accomplices clumsily wielding hoes superglued to their soft unwrung hands, and tell them all to do some meaningful work before a pitch-fork to their ass-cracks forces them to.
For the underpopulated farm and the crowded casino remain for me our enduring emblems of hope and despair, respectively.

I’m pretty conflicted about this notion myself. My contempt for Monsanto is reflected in my sobriquet. I’m buying lots of Amy’s Kitchen organic “No GMO” dishes for ascetic fasting days (although her Pesto Tortellini is hardly a hardship). But I shudder at the thought that the cost of trimming Monsaton’s sails may be, as conventional agriculture assures us, third world starvation.

But I don’t really believe them. We’re burning the third world’s food in our cars and lawnmowers, instead of feeding the Third World, already now …

3

except that I mowed with my new Fiskars Momentum reel mower today.

I’ve long preferred sailing to powerboating. Although I still find motorcycles alluring, my wife and I agree that the loud, classic Harley-Davidson exhaust sound is obnoxious.

But I’d kind of forgotten that one needn’t tolerate roars and exhaust fumes – the likes of which you haven’t otherwise smelled since maybe the 1960s – just to mow your yard.

What I’m saying is that the purchase of a new reel mower for me was as much an aesthetic choice as a grand environmental gesture. But if you want to give me an Oscar or something, I’ll take it.

4

If “stop and smell the roses” is on your “to do” list, are you really stopping to smell the roses?

Just my idiosyncratic reaction to today’s Writer’s Almanac poem. Your mileage may vary.

5

John Payne at The American Conservative took the time to be a bit more analytical than I about Rick Perry’s death penalty debate answer and found in the Governor an odious presumption of guilt amounting to “in Texas, we give murderous bastards all kinds of damn due process before we fry ’em.”

Oops! There I go being visceral again. My bad.

6

Also at The American Conservative, Paul Gottfried has a pretty bad day in a piece on how media bias against Evangelicals is helping Rick Perry. Contra Gottfried, Perry’s advocacy of teaching Creationism along with evolution in schools is fair game, and attacking it is not ludicrous.

Tipsy’s thoughts on this grew like Topsy, so they’re yonder.

Bon appetit!