Damn it I lost my draft! Here's it in a nutshell:
Laughing gas goooood - will look forward to going to dentist in the future. Don't know why they don't sell this in bars. All the fun of getting drunk but it's out of your system 5 minutes after you quit inhaling it, with no hangover!!!!
We got our Christmas tree last night - just a little one for a table top. Will finish setting up and decorating as soon as Curt gets a tree stand that will work with the small diameter of the trunk. Must be stable enough to withstand Mach 3 Kittlin attacks.....
Had a nice chat with my brother. He finally informs me that yes, he *does* plan on coming back to the NW periodically to visit after relocating to Houston with his new wife (as soon as the Coast Guard will transfer him). Contrary to all other recent rants, he doesn't hate all that is Oregon - just the political & educational system. Whatever. Though I was cringing when he was trying to convince me that the Shrub is obviously more intelligent than your average millworker just because he went to college and somehow became President. He's under the misunderstanding that politicians are smarter than the rest of us. How the fuck did that happen?
All of this rhetoric regarding the "10 Commandments Judge" in Alabama and the Shrubites professing that "America is A Christian Nation founded on Christian Ideals" has been pissing me off lately, and I finally did some research and identified why. The Fucking Founding Fathers were NOT Christian! They were Deists, dammit! (That may need to be a bumper sticker). I mean I knew Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were Deists but I didn't realize that ALL SIX of the first six presidents, were too. George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe and John Q. Adams Jr. were all Deists, as were later Presidents John Tyler, Millard Filmore, Abraham Lincoln and William Taft. Besides Franklin, other non-Presidential revolutionary figures who happened to be Deist were Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, Ethan Allen and two other framers of the Constitution, Hugh Williamson and James Wilson.
That's a pretty damned big chunk of "Founding Fathers" who did NOT believe the laws of our new country should be based on the Bible, or any other "manual" espoused by any organized religion. They confirmed this specifically in 1797 when America made a treaty with Tripoli , declaring that "the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." This reassurance to Islam was written under Washington's presidency, and approved by the Senate under John Adams.
