Amazingly, I'm doing another post a mere day after my last post. That's probably not something to dwell on though.

Yesterdays was a rather long post but I think I still left some stuff out so I'll cover some more.

I know there was once some famous saying about the struggle to draw strength enough to cope with the things we have no control over. Or something. And I think this is very much related to a lot the frustrations we're currently seeing in the news.

There's these Tea Party people who, as far as I can tell, don't necessarily split down any party lines, don't like all the spending. There's nothing any of them can do about but form rallies and express thier dissatisfaction.

Then there's the people on the other side who get really creative with the criticism of these tea party people by calling them "tea baggers" and grouping them all together as right wing racists. Which doesn't really seem constructive as far as criticism. It seems like spending 11 trillion dollars over ten years, money we don't have, might be a bit exccessive. So there's people with signs expressing dissatisfaction.

The people on the other side just see these dissenters as people who disagree with them and therefore having nothing what-so-ever valid to say. I think these are mostly college students who spend much of their day watching MSNBC (and possibly the daily show/colbert report). I think I would describe them them as close minded and naive.

Of course, I haven't actually attended any such tea party events. It's not like I have anything else to do so I may as well. Or I could.

I have just come across something called citizens' assembly on craigs list. I have seen a little sign on a corner for a few weeks now but kept forgetting to look it up. Finally I found a reference to it. The craig's list ad also links to a Word document (really? Word? File-Save As->HTML is too had for you?!) that has more information. It's too bad the document could not have been shorter and more appealing to a larger audience. I think I agree with just about all of the statements on their but it started tipping toward a more libertarian boiler-plate at some point with the Fed stuff and the "is income tax legal" lines. Feels like some kind of Ron Paul re-creation to me. So probably I will not go. Don't want poeple writing down my license plate number anyway. Next thing you know by "coincidence" I'll be audited by the IRS.

Wow, that sounded really, really paranoid. Of course it wasn't that long ago there was a tea party event in Sacramento and even though the local police have literally NEVER enforced any such rules EVER they were shutting down some protesters holding signs in a local intersection full of tea party people. Not for the war protesters, not for the give-illegals-free-shit people, not for the firemen guys raising money people, never. So am I really paranoid for thinking there'd be concequences, direct or indirect, for showing up to the citizens' assembly thing? Really?

Yes? Ok fine.