Daily Archives: June 10, 2008

Jun 10

What If I Can’t Find Everything?

I’m about having a stroke.  I don’t know.  Maybe it’s too much caffeine, but this house stuff is making me sick to my stomach.  I mean, I have no reason to doubt that everything’s fine.  It’s just that there’s so much to pull together, so much stuff I don’t know if I can put my hands on quickly.  Or at all.

I’m a disorganized mess.

Mess, mess, mess.

Why doesn’t someone make a list of all the crap you’ll need?

Why, even if someone made that list and taped it to me, would I have procrastinated about bringing it all together until this very moment?

Why can I not more better that this have my shit together?

Why is that last sentence so clearly not in English and yet I can’t figure out how to fix it?

How, even if we buy a house, will we afford to move?

Or paint?

Or buy gas to get to the house?

I want to run around with my hands thrown up over my head-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggggggggggggggh!

Whew.

Okay.

I think I’m better.

Jun 10

Birth Certificates

1.  You can’t get on your child’s birth certificate in this state unless you can prove you’re here legally.  So much about this pisses me off, I can’t even tell you.  For one thing, we have all this bullshit rhetoric about how men need to step up and be dads to their children.  And here we are making it harder for them to take legal responsibility for those kids.  What a nice contradiction that is!  And I can’t wait for the anti-immigration folks to go on about how illegal immigrants come to this country and burden us with their children, since we, here in Tennessee, make it impossible for them to to otherwise.

Second, these men are just here illegally.  There is no other crime that, if you wanted to be on the birth certificate and the mother wanted you on the birth certificate, could keep you off.  But to me, this looks like part of a larger effort to deny legal personhood to undocumented immigrants.  It’s as if we are shifting from an argument of “They don’t belong here” to “It’s as if they’re not real people here.”

Isn’t it obvious what a bad idea it is to say “Well, there’s this group of people who, if they can’t produced the right papers, can’t be legally recognized as a parent?”

No one in the whole fucking state legislature sat back even for a second and thought “Gosh, isn’t it problematic that we’re saying ‘These men can never be legal fathers of their biological children?  They have no rights when it comes to their own children.”

And what about these kids?  US citizens and residents of Tennessee?  Are they just a bunch of legal Aphrodites?  Sprung from the foam of the sea?  All this bullshit about protecting kids and we won’t even let these kids have dads.

Where are the Fathers’ Rights Activists about this?

2.  Every once in a while someone will send me an email or ask me in person why I’m not nicer to the folks on their side.  Why I just can’t engage respectfully in a dialogue with any of the more flamboyantly conservative bloggers in the state.  I try to point out that, in spite of our vast, vast differences, I learn a lot from Say Uncle and find his posts challenging and engaging.  But for some reason, folks like Uncle, Coble, and Sarcastro don’t seem to count.  Maybe if I got them some feather boas to wear around or something…

My strategy lately has just been to ignore what I cannot not seethe about.

But this post is so incredibly stupid and vapid and, I think, disingenuous, I want to point it out as an example of why there’s never going to be some Kumbaya moment where I walk hand in hand with the Conservative Tennessee Blogosphere, even on the rare occassion when we share goals.

I call this move the “Controversial Non-Controversy.”  See, Terry Frank is not a stupid person.  And so she knows that a person doesn’t just “release” their birth certificate, the same way a candidate releases their tax returns.  There’s no mechanism in place for a county government to open one birth certificae to public scrutiny, when all others must be legally kept private and she knows damn well that any birth certificate released by the Obama camp would still be suspect to the “he’s got a fake birth certificate!” crowd.

And, in fact, in her own post, she herself says “The St. Petersburg Times in Florida addresses some of the issues regarding a Kenyan letter that states Barry O’s name also includes that of Muhammed.  They can’t find any evidence to substantiate that, though again, the Barry O campaign won’t release the certificate.”

and “Joe wonders about Barry’s citizenship, though I don’t have any reason to doubt that Barry is a citizen.  I do however have to wonder why Barack just won’t produce the certificate.  What’s the problem?”

So, see, in a post in which she repeatedly, coyly, says “I don’t see any reason to doubt”, “No one can find any evidence of wrong-doing,” she still goes on and on about it as if there’s any validity to him not being a citizen or him having some mysterious middle name.

So, why doesn’t Obama just whip out his birth certificate?

Because it’s stupid.  It’s so stupid the fact that it can get up off the ground and move around, even to slither through Frank’s blog is like some anti-miracle.

Obama has a passport, you jackasses.  You have to produce a birth certificate to get a passport and the name on the passport has to match the name on the birth certificate unless you have some paperwork to prove that you legally changed your name.  Does Obama’s passport say “Barack Hussein Muhommad Adoph Pol Pot Beelzebub Stalin Nero Obama?”

You don’t think anybody in the whole history of the TSA would have noticed if the name on his passport were different than the name he was giving the world?

Hello?

This kind of shit is embarrassing.  I mean, come the fuck on.  If you’re going to sit over there engaging in woo-woo giant Muslim conspiracies to take over our country with the help of Democrats (who, I might remind you, produce much of the decadent Western culture conservative Muslims [oh, and Christians] hate so damn much), could you try just a little harder to make it reasonable?

Do you really want to advertise to the rest of the country that we’re too damn stupid to come up with something more shocking to say about Obama than “He’s got a funny name?” A conspiracy deeper than “He’s got a funny name and he’s hiding the fact that it’s funnier?”