Cynthia Yockey, A Conservative Lesbian – Page 12

Census results on gay couples

Dear libertarian Bruce Majors at Big Homo posted about a Washington Post piece in August on the release of Census Bureau results on the number of gay couples in Maryland and Virginia (the results on D.C. came out a week later). I recommend clicking to read the whole thing, but here’s a sample:

[Washington Post, Aug. 10, 2011, “Census shows surge in gay couples in D.C. area; officials cite more honesty“] The number of people who identify themselves as part of a same-sex couple has soared over the past decade in what demographers say is the product of an aggressive outreach effort by the Census Bureau and growing cultural acceptance.

Census figures released Thursday show 17,000 same-sex couples live in Maryland, a 51 percent increase over a decade ago. That accounts for 1.5 percent of couples in the state, including married couples and heterosexual partners living together.

In Virginia, the census counted 20,500 same-sex couples, a 49 percent increase that amounts to 1.2 percent of couples in the state.

[snip]

Del. Michael J. Hough (R-Frederick) said the numbers reinforce one of the arguments he and other opponents of same-sex marriage have been making.

“We’re talking about radically redefining marriage for what is a very, very small subset,” he said.

My reaction to Del. Hough is that since marriage equality won’t change his own marriage, or anyone else’s, or force any religion to change its definition of marriage, and the subset is small, then he is making the argument in favor of marriage equality, not against it. Marriage equality defined by the state is required to ensure religious freedom — which is why religions are trying to grab the power to be the sole definers of marriage from the state. Plus, I’m pretty sure that if you paired any other minority or religious group with numbers like “1.5 percent,” Del. Hough would be consumed with zeal to protect their rights from threats by a majority to force them into second-class citizenship because they are “a very, very small subset.” And, just to remind you, when the legislature has been co-opted into violating the rights of a minority, thanks to our system of balance of powers, it is the judicial branch that steps in. When it does, it is doing a job it was created to do, not legislating from the bench.

There’s more:

State Sen. Richard S. Madaleno Jr. (D-Montgomery), an openly gay man raising two children with his partner, said the statistics show how many people might choose to marry if it becomes legal.

“It demonstrates that there are a significant number of same-gender families in our state, and we are everywhere in the state,” he said. “It also shows that in the end, we’re not talking about a lot of people. The other side’s predictions of doom and gloom are oversized.”

Del. Heather R. Mizeur (D-Montgomery), a gay lawmaker who has a wife, said the census numbers show the changing face of what is now considered family.

“There are 9,000 Maryland children that have two moms or two dads, that are looking to the General Assembly and saying, ‘Protect my family, like everyone else’s,’ ” she said.

By the way, not only do same-sex couples need to carry healthcare powers-of-attorney on them at all time — which I did for my late life partner, who was quadriplegic the last 10 years of her life due to MS — but also they need to have proof of their authority to care for and transport their same-sex spouse’s biological child. Without it, if they are stopped by the police for so much as a burned-out tail light, they will have to wait at the police station until the biological parent can verify they were lawfully accompanying the child.

Cracked.com explains ‘why so many vehemently anti-gay politicians and religious leaders are creepy sexual deviants’

Because:

Experiments show power and hypocrisy are linked in the brain

[snip]

No matter how the researcher went about instilling the feelings of power, the results were the same: Within minutes, a feeling of power flips a switch in the brain that says, “The rules now do not apply to me. BRING ME A WHORE.”

And this next point goes a long way toward explaining the passivity and victim psychology of the Left:

But even stranger, the people induced to feel powerless went the opposite way — they actually were more self-critical than they’d normally be. Think about what that says about society: The people who are already powerless, as a result feel like they’re less worthy to be in power and thus stay powerless.

Gov. Palin won’t run — Palin for president in 2016

I was dismayed, but not very surprised, last night when I heard that Gov. Palin announced she has decided not to run for president in this election cycle. I was hoping she was hanging back to let the field thin out. Allahpundit at Hot Air says it’s a smart call and links Charles Krauthammer saying the same thing. Allahpundit has the following consoling observation:

Maybe she’ll focus now on challenging Begich for Senate in Alaska in 2014, which would be a huge first step back towards national viability down the road. She’s 47 years old, fully 25 years younger than McCain was when he was nominated three years ago. No rush.

However, as Prof. Jacobson points out at Legal Insurrection, Red State’s Erick Erickson went a different way:

At a moment when Erickson could have shown himself to be a mensch he showed himself to be a schmuck. And of course, managed to make it about him. As pointed out in the comments, he is asking “Can we all be friends now?” The answer is no.

Click the link to see why.

Thanks to a post by GOProud’s Christopher Barron at his new personal blog, The Real Red Barron (an homage to the Twitter handle of conservative bisexual singer Sophie B. Hawkins, @therealsophieb), I may see my way clear to supporting Herman Cain:

Finally, far from attacking gay people, Mr. Cain has made it clear that he is willing to be a President for all Americans – including gay people. Mr. Cain does not support a federal marriage amendment, will not reinstate Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, supports policies like the Fair Tax, free market healthcare reform and social security personal savings accounts – all of which would benefit gay and lesbian Americans.

I believe that if Herman Cain wins the Republican nomination, he is now the only candidate we have who could beat Obama. The most important reason is he is a real fiscal conservative, while the other candidates are primarily social conservatives. We can only win by showing how fiscal conservatism will restore America to prosperity because our most serious problems for the foreseeable future are economic, not social. If we run a social conservative who is consumed with zeal to solve problems that loom small in the minds of most Americans, the Left and independents will stick with the devil they know. The promise of religious tyranny coupled with fiscal sacrifice is not going to sell.

Two more important reasons Herman Cain can beat Obama are that he would remove the race card from Obama’s bag of tricks and could split the black vote. How much fun is that going to be to watch? I am gleeful at the prospect.

However, I think there’s a kind of laziness, which I don’t understand, among the wealthy Republican donors, the RNC and campaign strategists that will result in Romney being the nominee because they believe he can win, regardless of Romneycare and multifarious other fundamental failings, because he is handsome and rich. This is a miscalculation of epic proportions. But it does help me understand why frustrated Republicans call it “the non-smart party.” I think the best we can hope for is winning Republican control of both houses of Congress in 2012 so we can thwart as many of Obama’s fell initiatives as possible in his second term.

With regard to Gov. Palin, I do hope she sets her sights on running for president in 2016 to succeed Obama. When Gov. Palin spoke on Sept. 3 to a Tea Party audience in Indianola, Iowa, she laid out the most positive and practical path for restoring America to prosperity of any of the candidates. She has the ability to make people believe in themselves and their ability to overcome their greatest challenges, which is not only required for a nation to prosper but also is the most powerful cure for the pathological desire to depend on the government to solve every problem. If she does what she has to do to overcome the objections that establishment Republicans had to her candidacy this time around, she is exactly the person most capable of cleaning up the mess that Obama will leave.

P.S.

Dear Stacy McCain has poll results and more insights on the surge in support for Herman Cain.

Update, 10/8/11, Sat.: Today American Thinker published an essay by Robert Eugene Simmons, Jr., who arrives at the same conclusion as mine, “Palin’s Withdrawal Means Obama Wins.” Simmons adds the point that Gov. Romney is the father of Romneycare, which was the model for Obamacare, so Obama will shellack him with that. I also want to note that Republicans would lose the issue of repealing Obamacare if Romney is the nominee. I don’t know why the Republican establishment is so hot to make the 2012 election a contest between Obama and Obama Lite. Like me, Simmons thinks the best case scenario, with Gov. Palin out of contention, is to keep the House and win the Senate so we can thwart Obama’s socialist agenda, while the worst case would be Obama with a Democratic Congress and not-much-better would be Romney with a Republican Congress.

Dr. Krauthammer, the expression you’re looking for is …

… paradigm shift. When a new discovery does not make sense in the current paradigm, it’s time for a new one, as Thomas Kuhn explains in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And those times are golden ages in science. So CERN is trying to make sense of neutrinos apparently traveling faster than light — impossible in our current paradigm. Good. Those 60 nanoseconds are our century’s advance in the perihelion of Mercury by 43 arc seconds in a century: tempting to dismiss, but taken seriously, the foundation of a revolution in our understanding of the universe.

H/T: @jpodhoretz.

P.S.

I pounced on this story because one of the reasons I started this blog is to explain to conservatives the nature of the paradigm shifts now within our grasp in the fields of human potential, health and national security. This knowledge is why I am optimistic when others are not about our ability to restore America to prosperity, health and invincibility. But it’s not the kind of thing you can spring on people who don’t know you. However, I feel like my gentle readers and fellow bloggers know my character well enough by now to create the foundation of trust required to be willing to listen to ideas that are so different from the ones we currently accept, so I can begin to write about them more.

Steve Jobs has upgraded to heaven

Photo of Steve Jobs, noting he lived from 1955 to 2011, from a screen capture of the home page of Apple Computer, the company he co-founded. — Steve Jobs on the home page of Apple.com, Oct. 5, 2011, the day he died.

Steve Jobs died yesterday. He personified what fiscal conservatism can do to generate wealth from ideas that create new products, new industries and transform the world. How fitting his name was “Jobs” — he was the embodiment of a jobs creator. The stimulus he needed was not exacted by force from taxpayers. He raised the money to start Apple Computer by selling his VW van and grew it by selling great products at a profit and attracting investors.

My first computer was a 512K Macintosh that my father bought in November 1984 to help me with my writing career. I’d seen a Mac demo at a Washington Independent Writers conference. The beauty of its fonts took my breath away. I often tell my father this was one of the best investments of his life because my Macintosh let me be an entrepreneur as a writer, desktop publisher and computer consultant. I would not have been able to hold down a job and take care of my late life partner, who had multiple sclerosis, so the Macintosh was a godsend. I also taught my dad, brother and nephew how to use the Macintosh so we were all early adopters. My father wrote his second and third books on Macintosh computers.

For my birthday this week, with the IRS tax levy, I got some of the bitter medicine that Jobs talks about in his 2005 commencement address at Stanford after he survived a rare form of pancreatic cancer. Here are the excerpts that are the most meaningful to me now at this crossroads in my life (boldfacing mine):

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

[snip]

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Dear gentle readers, I urgently need your donations

Last night the IRS put a levy on my father’s bank account and zeroed it out. They got the money before I could pay any bills. My father is a federal retiree and receives his retirement annuity and Social Security payments by direct deposit at the beginning of the month. The money didn’t clear until yesterday. I spent the morning working out and the afternoon and evening clearing viruses off my computer. So I didn’t find out about the levy until I logged onto my father’s account around midnight.

I need to raise at least ~~$6500~~ $1500 to do the following:

~~Cover the mortgage and bills for October. I just got a call that our phone and Internet service are scheduled to be turned off today.~~ Keep the phone and Internet on and buy food for us and the cats.
Hire a CPA or tax attorney to stop future levies and help me sort out our tax situation. Updated, 3:57 pm: I just got a letter that if we come to an agreement with the IRS, we may get all or part of this money back. So we can probably make it with enough money to keep the phone and Internet on, buy food for us and our five cats, and put a down payment on the fees of a CPA or attorney to help us sort this out.
~~To get my thyroid medication prescription renewed for the next year, I need to see my doctor, get a blood test and buy my medication. I have about two weeks of pills left.~~

I will update this post with an explanation of how I got my father into this mess. My plan for getting us out of it is to write books and sell them. For my first book, I will tell the story of how I became a fiscal conservative and explain why gay equality is necessary and will come from the Right. My gift to all my donors will be a digital copy of this book.

Your gift will be especially meaningful to me because today is my birthday. I am 58.

By the way, I am aware of the irony that I am trying to raise lots of money fast while advertising Stuart Lichtman’s e-book, How to Get Lots of Money for Anything — Fast. The health problems I will explain in my update to this post have been my biggest blocker in applying everything I’ve learned from Stuart to the fullest. But the book and Stuart’s other programs do provide a uniquely comprehensive and powerful program for achieving even seemingly impossible goals. Since June 2010, I leveraged just one concept — certainty of achievement — to lose over 60 pounds. (Last year I realized I had to set health objectives to get healthy enough to achieve my financial objectives. This crisis has hit just as I’ve started feeling well enough to make money with my writing.) If you buy from Stuart through links here, you will be doing yourself a favor and I will receive an affiliate commission about ~~six weeks~~ 10-to-12 weeks after your purchase at no extra cost to you.

My heartfelt thanks to everyone who donates, prays for us or even sends positive thoughts.

Update, 10/4, 2:07 pm, EDT: I am very grateful to report one subscriber and four donations for a total of $196. That’s $6,304 to go.

One person also has purchased a copy of How to Get Lots of Money for Anything — Fast using my affiliate link. I sent him some bonus info explaining how to get the most out of the book and invited him to participate in a membership group that I’m planning to create here of people using Stuart’s system for achieving goals. Its purpose will be to demonstrate that ideas and action create wealth and progress in life so we can show Lefties the alternative to redistribution of wealth and class warfare. I will send this bonus info to the e-mail address in the receipt of anyone who buys this book using my affiliate link.

Update, 10/4, 4:03 pm, EDT: The total donated is now $246, so $1,254 to go.

Update, 10/6, Thurs.: The total donated is now $1,517. I’ll be able to keep our phone and Internet service on and we’ll have money for food for people and cats, and most of the medicine we need to buy in October. However, the IRS rep told me they usually keep the money levied. But thanks to everyone who donated, we’ll have food while I solve the tax situation and figure how to earn more money. I have some ideas — wish me luck. I am very grateful to my donors and to the bloggers who sent them: dear Stacy McCain (whose birthday is today — he is 52), dear Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings, dear Joy McCann and Dan Collins at The Conservatory, dear Peter Ingemi at DaTechGuy’s Blog, and dear John Hawkins at Linkiest and Right Wing News, Dear Melissa Clouthier and dear Lisa De Pasquale also re-tweeted this post, but somehow Disqus didn’t get the message. For tweeting about this post, I also thank @OneFineJay, @ZillaStevenson, @vermontaigne (Dan Collins), @jimmiebjr (Jimmy Bise of The Sundries Shack) and @JustPlainBill. I could swear dear Chris Smith of The Other McCain, @smitty_one_each, RT’ed, also, and I thank him, too, and wish him happy birthday tomorrow.

‘Get ready for the nastiest political campaign season you’ve ever seen’

“From the people who brought you hope and change“: White House reporter Keith Koffler explains how Obama is now setting up the Republicans to take the blame for all his failures:

Obama must make his proposals as big a deal as possible, so that everyone knows how hard he’s “trying to help.” That’s why he’s scheduled an address to Congress. No higher profile than that.

And he must calibrate his ideas as carefully as possible so that they seem like they should be palatable to the GOP. He’ll offer ideas that some Republicans have supported, but which in the current high-deficit environment will be rejected.

Then he will talk about his largely meaningless initiatives every chance he gets. And then later, every chance he gets, he will talk about how Republicans rejected them and ruined his noble crusade.

As a sociopath, Obama takes advantage of the fact that honest people believe everyone is honest and don’t check out everything they’re told, especially when they believe the media will check for them. Since the mainstream media almost never check anything Obama says and ignore and suppress the reporting of the people who do, Obama confidently told one of his biggest whoppers this week, “I have continued to underscore the importance of reducing regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty, particularly as our economy continues to recover.” Jazz Shaw at Hot Air supplies a convenient list of the job-killing regulatory burdens and uncertainty imposed by the Obama administration:

This is the same administration which is about to cause rolling blackouts and skyrocketing energy costs in Texas because of cross state emission standards. It’s the same president who is jacking up the CAFE standards to the point where automobile prices will rise, assuming Detroit can meet them at all. This is the president who used overly burdensome regulations to create a de facto permitorium on gulf coast drilling costing us tens of thousands of jobs and God only knows how much domestic energy stores. And this administration has used the regulatory powers of the NLRB to effectively shut down an entire new production plant for Boeing.

Andrew Stiles at National Review Online has a more detailed list of “Ten Job-Destroying Regulations.” In addition, the withdrawal of Constellation Energy from a project to build a nuclear power plant in Maryland explained in this letter is another example of how the Obama administration uses regulations and bait-and-switch tactics to create uncertainty to advance an anti-jobs, anti-cheap-energy agenda with plausible deniability.

Last week Allan Lichtman, a professor at American University, renewed his 2010 prediction that Obama will win in 2012. Prof. Lichtman developed a system of 13 keys to winning the presidential election in 1981 that has correctly predicted the winner of the last seven elections. According to Prof. Lichtman, only six keys are needed to win and Obama has nine (or eight, if the $500 million squandered on Solyndra becomes Obama’s Enron scandal, as it should).

I think Prof. Lichtman is correct, although for different reasons. My observation is that the GOP field is more concerned with the social conservative determination to use government to deny equality to gays and lesbians and pregnancy choice rights to women. However, neither of those issues threatens the economy or the republic. I think the Left is correct in asserting that the social conservative agenda is identical to a promise to impose theocracy. The inability of the Right to see the totalitarian nature of social conservatism when it is a political agenda to use government force where persuasion has failed mirrors the inability of idealistic Leftists to grasp that you can’t have free markets (aka capitalism) and socialism at the same time because there is no correct way to have a socialist planned economy that isn’t immediately both totalitarian and corrupt.

Currently the Right is treating these concerns with dismissive contempt — much to its peril — see Kathy Shaidle, Sister Toldjah and Byron York — perhaps because nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Progressives fear theocracies, not socialism. Since they believe the forces that create prosperity are unknowable and have a cargo cult mentality, they will never believe that Republicans reject Obama’s proposals based on sound economic principles of how wealth is generated. As for independents: they hate theocracies and have a childlike faith that the media are unbiased and will warn them when any candidate or politician is lying. Plus, they only tune in to the political process to find out who is the highest bidder for their vote. Add in the social conservatives who love big government and therefore won’t vote for fiscal conservative Republicans and Obama has his winning coalition.

Update, 9/16/11, Fri.: My thanks to M. Simon, who blogs at Power and Control and Classical Values, for writing about this post and linking it. I particularly appreciate that the text chosen chosen for emphasis is, “The inability of the Right to see the totalitarian nature of social conservatism when it is a political agenda to use government force where persuasion has failed ….”

Note: This was originally posted on Sept. 3, 2011. My web host lost it on Sept. 17, so I am manually restoring it. The following are the comments from the original post:

Liz, 9/4/2011, 2:15 am:

“…to use government to deny equality to gays and lesbians and pregnancy choice rights to women.”

Piece of friendy advice: don’t equate abortion and marriage equality. From personal experience, I know many lovely, hardworking people, especially in my extended family, who happen to be the saner brand of socons. And, particularly among the young, they’re having a hard time seeing what’s so bad about gay people and same sex marriage. They also can’t see how it *wouldn’t* strengthen the family.

They do, however, genuinely see abortion as murder, and putting the two together as equal rights just weakens the arguments for marriage. As does the idea that the leftists promulgate: that to support one, you have to support the other.

Plus, I know a lot of pro life, traditionally minded gays who simply want the same lives as the rest of their communities. (To be virgins until marriage; marry at around 20,21; have a big family and stay married and work hard all their lives.) This is especially true since the mainstream pro life movement has stopped whining about “The Homosexualist Agenda”. And these gays find it incredibly alienating when *some* people fighting for marriage equality try to tack on something they find completely abhorrent.

I’m pro choice as well, and I’m not trying to rag on you. But I’m approaching this from the perspective of someone who is a small town red stater, and I have to work with these people in order to gain equality. It’s a problem I have with a lot of people fighting for marriage equality who don’t have to spend Thanksgiving with these people as family and friends.

My reply to Liz, 9/4/2011, 1:59 pm:

Megan McArdle also pointed out this week that younger voters increasingly support marriage equality because they see the good of it, but have not increased their support for abortion rights because it is easy to see that abortion kills the fetus.

I’ve gone back and forth on choice because of the members of the pro-choice movement who try to extend their arguments to rationalize assisted suicide, especially for vulnerable people like my late life partner, who was quadriplegic. I oppose assisted suicide because assistive devices, assisted living, the right to refuse heroic measures and hospice care eliminate all the arguments advanced for assisted suicide.

I am pro-choice and want abortion opposed through voluntary measures that respect the liberty of women to control their own bodies. That means birth control must be legal, teenagers must receive sex education (subject to their parents’ permission), religions are limited to the realm of persuasion and welfare is reformed so parents aren’t being rewarded for having babies they can’t support.

There is no middle ground where religions are concerned. They must rule all. Only secular governments can preserve liberty. Without choice, and the fetus as a hostage, at least until it can survive outside the womb without intensive care, women will never have equality and liberty because religions view women as baby makers created to service men and be subservient to them. Only choice secures equality and liberty for women.

It is the relentless determination of religions to control the reproductive lives of everyone to serve their own greed and lust for power that is the common ground for gay equality and choice. Their goal is always a theocracy and nothing less will satisfy them. I want liberty and equality and nothing less will satisfy me. However, while the two issues have the common ground of who gets to control whose reproductive life, you are correct, they must be separate issues at the ballot box and the dinner table. Thank you for pointing that out.

Clear skies after the storm

Thanks for the prayers and good thoughts, dear gentle readers — we made it through the storm without losing our electricity. It stopped raining around 11 am. By early afternoon the skies were clear and it seemed like all the trees and plants were sparkling. So we are safe.

Note: This was originally posted on August 28, 2011. My web host lost it on Sept. 17, so I am restoring it manually. I could not recover the comments.

How we’re handling Hurricane Irene

I’ve spent most of the last few days figuring out how to cope with Hurricane Irene. My biggest concern is that we could lose our electricity because my father and I both have obstructive sleep apnea and use respirators to keep our airways open while we sleep. Dad is 95 and could die. I will be injured — there’s no “might” about it — and lose executive function I’ve worked hard to regain. A power outage that struck at 11 pm this winter when we were snowed in was a heartbreaking setback. So I was very motivated to find a solution in our price range.

My first move was based on an assumption that turned out to be wrong. Motels and hotels do not all have back-up power to run lights in the rooms and elevators during a power outage. I only found one that did. It’s about 20 miles away and out of our price range. It still would not have been totally safe for my father, though, because he is on a low sodium diet. No restaurants serve meals he can eat safely. (We do go out occasionally but he would not get away with a whole day of high-sodium restaurant food without really dire consequences.) The ideal hotel would have back-up power and rooms with full kitchens. I didn’t find one with both.

I also checked out generators but they also were out of our price range. However, a generator will be our next big purchase because we have frequent power outages even on calm, sunny days for no obvious reason. Apparently you can use generators by either running extension cords from them straight to your appliances or by getting an electrician to install something that lets it power selected circuits in your home. The quality of the power they put out also is an issue, according to a review on Amazon. Some of them can fry delicate electronics, which is exactly what I want to run. Apparently the Generac XP line was designed to solve that problem. I now covet the Generac 5604 XP Series XP4000 5,000 Watt 220cc OHV Portable Gas Powered Generator, yea verily, even above an iPhone or iPad2.

Yesterday the county robocalled with an announcement that a nearby high school would be the county’s emergency shelter. I went over this afternoon to check it out. The cot they are providing is too low for my father to be able to stand up from it without assistance. I am an expert in how to provide this assistance, since I did it so often for my late life partner, who was quadriplegic, but I have a lumbar vertebra that’s badly out of place. Helping my father to stand so I could take him to the restroom would be dangerous for me.

So it looks like the safest thing is to stay home and hope that the road to the high school is clear so we can get to it if the power goes out. The winds in our area as the hurricane passes will be in the 25 to 40 mile per hour range. This is enough to knock out power and block the roads with fallen branches and trees, but we might get lucky. (If we do lose power, it is likely to be back on within 24 hours.)

Dear Instapundit, who is celebrating his birthday today, provides a useful round-up of tips on preparing for hurricanes and power outages. Dear Melissa Clouthier has a comprehensive list she has developed from experience. The Anchoress and Michelle Lancaster at Big Government also have handy lists on how to prepare for a hurricane. However, they all assume their readers have the resources to follow their suggestions. If you want to help people who don’t, please donate to the American Red Cross. I love the Red Cross with all my heart. The Red Cross is working with our county to operate the shelter we would use. Donations now help the Red Cross be prepared for the next time they are needed — click here for more info. Or, to donate $10, text “REDCROSS” (without the quotes) to 90999 (I think it’s charged on your cell phone bill).

If you want to follow the track of the hurricane, the best tracker I’ve found is at Weather.com.

P.S.

I’m still working on a follow-up post about Marcus Bachmann. I was not just calling him bad names out of spite, as some commenters appear to have assumed. I will explain.

Note: This was originally posted on August 27. My web host lost it on Sept. 17, so I am restoring it manually. I could not recover the comments.