Oooh, nuance!

This is the view from our balcony. You can see a lot of the resort and the beach peeking out in the background. (I had more, but the sun made the picture quality fuzzy. Have I mentioned my camera is only 2.1 megapixels? And that I'm a sucky photographer?)



Here are a couple of beach shots. Eagle Beach is considered one of the most beautiful beaches in the entire world. I'm sure you can see why.



Here are hubby and me on the beach. We're under a palapa, which is like a beach umbrella but quite large and made of wood and branches. You need the shade after a little while under the incredibly hot sun. (Notice my JewFro is being blown around by the strong trade winds, which make the Aruban climate bearable for humans.)

LIZARD ALERT!!!! I love iguanas, and they're everywhere here in Aruba. However, if the prehistoric creatures freak you out, cover your eyes and scroll down to the pix of me and hubby at Salt & Pepper, a fun outdoor restaurant in the high-rise district where all the tourists hang out.


The trees in front of the hotel are where all the iguanas congregate. They're usually quite well-camouflaged, but I think you can see this one pretty well.


This saucy specimen was quite unafraid of us, and allowed me to take his picture while I was looking down at him from the staircase leading up to our room. He even looked at the camera! What a natural!



Finally, here we are at the restaurant. We got a lot of sun today, especially hubby, who is so red-brown he looks Native American at this point. (He's now musing on his imaginary relatives who bravely strode the plains and hunted wild buffalo.)

Hope you enjoyed them - I'll probably post a few more before returning home next week!

Greetings from the most relaxing place on earth! This is the first day I've even turned on my computer since we arrived, short of sleep and energy, on Monday. (FYI: JetBlue's planes are great, but we really didn't appreciate standing in the free-form International line at Kennedy for an hour and 45 minutes!)

We're off to gamble, eat, and finally see Ocean's 13. I did take some lovely beach and iguana shots...now if only my old-ass camera can upload the pics, I'll share them with you tonight. :-)

Not to worry - it's a planned disappearance. I am off to bake my brains away in the hot Aruban sun.

Pictures of iguanas, chameleons, stunning beaches and possibly myself and hubby will be appearing, so feel free to check back if such things interest you. Otherwise, I'll be back to politics on Monday, July 9....

When I was a tiny tot, my mom and dad taught me about the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

In order for you to put the Golden Rule to work, you must have a quality that has fallen out of favor in today's hyper-masculine, over-militarized age: empathy.

I believe that people who lack empathy are capable of accepting almost any outrage without feeling the slightest twinge in their complacent minds. As long as they feel that whatever it is - poverty, hunger, torture, illegal wiretapping, imprisonment, irradiation with depleted uranium, PTSD - is not happening personally to them, they just couldn't care less. In other words, these unfeeling people are the hard core of today's Republic Party. Thus, they are able to support the President no matter what he does.

Remember when Bill Clinton's refrain "I feel your pain" was relentlessly mocked as being somewhat, er, effeminate? Now, Republic candidates like Mitt "Magic Briefs" Romney (h/t Sinfonian) scream that they want to DOUBLE GITMO!!! More torture! More war! I'm so manly, I can only grunt!!! ARRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!

If you're going to be President of the United States, you are presiding over hundreds of millions of people. Anyone who can't follow the Golden Rule should not, and must not, get the job.

There is much murmuration and grunching in the mainstream media about the current left-right polarization of our politics. "Why, WHY can't the American people come together in the CENTER in a BI-PARTISAN way?" the Broders, Goldbergs and Cohens wail.

It appears to me that Beltway pundits are extremely disingenuous about their desire for centrism. According to their oft-expressed beliefs, those of us who consider ourselves left-leaning simply MUST move to the right in order to reach the "center".

Yet most of America agrees on the issues that currently appear to divide the country. In almost all cases, such as allowing stem cell research, keeping abortion legal, acting to save the planet from global warming, and ending the occupation of Iraq, the people are squarely on the side of the liberals and progressives. So why do the Wise Ones of Washington never suggest that those on the right should be the ones to move to the left, since that's where the center IS?

The Purity Pundits often claim that America is hungry for bi-partisanship. But what we are REALLY hungry for is for the conservative movement to admit its defeat. The Republics are a minority party for a reason: THEY ARE THE MINORITY, and getting smaller every day. They have been taken over by relentless ideologues whose tether to the reality-based community snapped a very long time ago. Those ideologues need to float away to Bushbotonia and never come back. Let their much-deserved marginalization become complete.

I say, let the Republics become who they once were; folks that were wrong about many things, but who would never push "intelligent design" over evolution, never try to impose their own rules on a woman's body, and most of all, never cheer the destruction of habeas corpus and the imperial overreach of the Executive Branch. And let the Democrats allow the progressives in their midst to pull them gently over to the left, where most of the American people are waiting. Once that happens, we get universal health care, public financing of elections, no more wars of choice, investments in education, infrastructure and alternative energy, the re-elevation of science over faith in public policy, and oh, so many other wonderful things.

Now that's a bi-partisanship we can all get behind.

"George Bush isn't REALLY a conservative."

Type "is George Bush a liberal" in your favorite search engine and watch the hit count go up (3,893,000 on Ask.com). Who in the name of the Giant Green Lizard do they think they're kidding?

I understand that George W. Bush is not an old-style conservative. By that I mean, he does not support the pre-1994 agenda of lower taxes, smaller government and "strict interpretation" of the Constitution, whatever that means. In fact, the only thing he has done that remotely relates to that type of conservatism is lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy; however, the taxes on the middle and lower classes have remained the same or, directly and indirectly, become higher.

But has he betrayed the current version of conservatism? Yea, even crossed the murky waters to the evil Other Side of *gasp* liberalism? That idea is simply laughable.

George W. Bush is the poster boy for the modern movement conservative, a la Viguerie, Norquist and Gingrich. He is 1) authoritarian, 2)"faith"-based, 3) desirous of privatizing all areas of government, and 4) always right because he is a Christian. (My main source for these assertions is the excellent John Dean book, "Conservatives without Conscience".)

I'm so tired of the victim mentality of the Republics. Listen up, folks, you voted for this guy. If you're deserting him because of the immigration bill, it's because you feel he's not racist enough for you. Own it.

Just don't try to push him onto our side.

Believe me, we don't want him.