The link here (Our Little Chatterboxes: TSA – Sexual Assault) will take you to a blog site by a prominent mom-blogger.  She flew recently with her child to run a marathon.  Without TSA full-body scanning machines at the airport from which she flew, she was subject to a full body scan for which she was not aware she had to be subject to.

I’ll leave the rest of the story up to her to tell, but please read her full story and forward her site onto who you feel should know about this:

Here is why I was sexually assaulted. She (the TSA screener) never told me the new body search policy. She never told me that she was going to touch my private parts. She never told me when or where she was going to touch me. She did not inform me that a private screening was available. She did not inform me of my rights that were a part of these new enhanced patdown procedures.

I’ve often described myself as “spiritual but not religious” knowing that it sounds to others like I’m hopping onto  a bandwagon, but, the thing is, it’s exactly what I mean.

Evidently there are people who despise SBNR.  They say that it’s inherently selfish, that it cuts off community, that it reinforces our country’s individuality problem.

I guess there are some SBNR’s who may live out their spirituality in that sort of selfish way, but my guess is that there are other SBNR’s like me who feel their spirituality is the very thing that connects them to community and to the world in an even more profound way then any  religious community would ask or demand of them.

To anybody who sees anything wrong with “spiritual but not religious”, I’d say, where did you get that rule?

Are there dangers in being ‘spiritual but not religious – CNN.com

Wherever I posted it, that was weeks ago.  The oil is still gushing.  Americans were convinced in 2008 that he would finally be a President who would fight for them.  Represent them.  Get angry and passionate for them.  They must now feel stranded.  I’m disappointed to say the least.

President Barack Obama has effectively and with great skill, marginalized himself through all of this–the oil spill, health care, Afghanistan.  For all of the things he’s done in his more than 1 year as President, what his non-reaction to and seeming internal confusion about each of these major issues suggest is that he’s lost the command he so easily gained during his campaign.

During his 2008 campaign he was a warrior.  Now he looks like a man defeated.

During his campaign he convinced me that he was one who was too smart to use political propaganda–who knew that Americans were tired of political posturing.  He seemed to me to be above it all.  He was a clear break from the normal politician–he was here for the people and not to protect his own political viability.  He was the American President.

Maybe he would be one of those Presidents who didn’t care who he offended as long as he defended the American people from politics run amok.

That’s what I hoped then.  That’s not at all what I see now.  What I see now is a President too scared to offend anybody at  all.  A President who confuses diplomacy with being a doormat.  Who isn’t taking charge at all, but is being blown away by the harsh political winds of Washington DC.

At the risk of saying something that sounds like it’s from the intro to MTV’s “Real World”, President Obama needs to stop being careful and start leading this country.

Here’s a part of Peggy Noonan’s peice:

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They’re in one reality, he’s in another.

Here’s her complete article:  Peggy Noonan: He Was Supposed to Be Competent – WSJ.com.

Eyeballing is taking shots of vodka  not through their mouth–no, that would make too much sense–but through their eyes.

I wonder what my optometrist thinks of this.

Teens Take Vodka Straight Up – Through Their Eyes – TIME NewsFeed.

A piece:

Where does that leave religion? Well, it depends what you mean by religion. When religion (or more likely its fundamentalist adherents) begins to make claims in the complete absence of evidence and in a manner that is not falsifiable, and when those claims are passed off as scientific, the record must be set straight. Creationism, in all of its guises, including intelligent design, regularly makes claims of exactly this sort. Rather than addressing evidence, creationists simply make faith statements and expect that those faith statements be taught in science classes.

Zimmerman goes on to praise the United Methodist Church, for one, for making this particular assertion at its quadrennial conference in 2008:

Be it resolved that the General Conference of the United Methodist Church go on record as opposing the introduction of any faith-based theories such as Creationism or Intelligent Design into the science curriculum of our public schools.

Unfortunately, the UMC and other more progressive denominations are in the minority when it comes to inviting science into theology.

Intolerance towards science abounds in other, more fundamentalist strains of  all faith traditions.

On a more personal note, I have heard a story from a former fellow seminary student who said the administrative assistant at the church she did her summer internship at told her she believed that Satan planted dinosaur bones in the ground to mislead us all into thinking that the world was older than creationists say it is.  I other words: dinosaurs never existed; they are fabrications of satan.  This coming from a Presbyterian.  And I’m sure she’s not alone in her cosmic conspiracy theories.

As long as this sort of ignorance exists within the Church–within faith at all–the entire Church, as well as faith itself, looses out on the very thing it says it possesses: the Way towards Truth.

Allen Ginsberg: Poet And Photographer : NPR.

Why Is Anyone Still Catholic? | Belief | AlterNet.

Should More People Skip College? – Business – The Atlantic.