I'm dreaming of a white halloween!

It's 37 degrees outside. It's 48 degrees inside. This is what happens when a bad knee slows down the renovation process. This project is taking longer than I would like it to for a number of reasons, but the knee is definitely an impediment. Oddly enough, I view this situation with considerably more aplomb than I do a lot of other challenges in my life. I also find that it makes me much more aware of the plight of the homeless and others who have somehow not made the $250K necessary to gain entry into the McMiddleclass. I mean I'm sitting here eating my Generi-O's with a banana and some raisins and drinking a nice hot cup of coffee, my jeans are heating up on the portable radiator and I'm waiting for 8:00 AM to roll around so that I can start making noise. I'm not toastee, but I'm okay. I have a full belly (well, maybe a bit more than that) pretty decent health (no insurance, though), relatively acute mental faculties and a shrinking but still visible cash cushion. On the one hand: I am not wearing $300K's worth of nomination duds or even $150K's worth of campaign couture; flying around on an executive jet; being courted by the movers and shakers of american business and religiopolitics or lionized/demcnized by the various news and fauxnews organizations. OTOH: I am not sleeping under a bridge; driving a busted down shopping cart; being rousted from a heating grate by the cops; being vilified/pitied by the various news and fauxnews organizations or being used as an object lesson/cautionary tale for the young and impressionable. Okay--I'm not so sure about that last one. But, hey, I'm a big boy, I'm doing what I said I wanted to do these last many years. As usual, per my brilliance, I have elected to walk the highwire, blindfolded, on crutches while someone shakes the pylons. But I CHOSE this. Many of the poor, the uninsured sick, and those yearning to breathe free (I'm speaking about non-violent offenders in overcrowded prisons,here) did not choose to be born into their situations and "fail" in life anymore than a gay person chooses to be gay; It just happened. So for that we should hate and fear them? Apparently so, if you're a reptilican. I am sick and disgusted to hear the GOP's candidates campaigning, as usual, with the only two tools which they seem to know how to use--fear and hate. I guess they are limited in their selection of tools by the fact that they have no coherent policy for changing the downward direction of the economy or the nearly eight year long train wreck of Bushco policy, both foreign and domestic. They hate "the other", they hate science (except that related to fast food and weaponry), they hate non-KKKristians and, it appears, they hate black americans with the temerity to run for the highest office in the land. Fuck them. Fuck their attitudes, their platitudes and their false "GODLY" gratitude. If Jesus were to suddenly show up at a mPALINccain rally and start preaching his gospel of love and forgiveness he would be evicted, arrested, beaten or worse. The GOP has been reduced, by it's association with the religionationalists to a shrill, keening shell of the party that once had room for Rockefeller, Goldwater, Eisenhower and a host of other men/women who actually cared about their nation and its people and not just fulfillment of their own delusional dreams of conquest and rapture. GOP, God's Own Phobics.