So I guess this is “a thing” now. Three days of the week down, four to go!

First off, today is September 11, and that will be news for the rest of my life. We all have our 9/11 stories, some prosaic, some profound, but everyone who was alive that fateful day will remember what they were doing when they found out that America was truly under attack and two massive skyscrapers plus the Pentagon were destroyed.

My story is twofold. The prosaic : I found out what was going on because a friend contacted me via instant messenger and told me to turn on the news. I spent that morning trying to figure out just what was going on by going all over the Internet and watching the TV. It was a terrible day.

The profound : at the time, my brother in law Dean was working in the World Trade Center. If he had been on time for work that day, my sister Anne would likely be a widow today. As is, he was one of those people engulfed in the massive dust cloud that flooded the area when one of the towers came down.

So that tragedy cuts a little closer to home for me that for most, but only a little, and only in the sense of what might have been.

And I am a little sad to see the whole thing become a political issue in the opinion sphere today, but considering the political atmosphere in the USA this election year, hardly a surprise, and probably entirely inevitable. So be it.

And speaking of harsh political language, Barney Frank is standing by his denouncing of gay Republicans as Uncle Toms of the worst kind.

And while I often find Representative Frank fairly hard to like (he is shrill, he has an unpleasant demeanor, he has an annoying voice), I have no problem agreeing with him on this statement, and saying I admire him for being a rare Democrat who is willing to talk tough and stand by his words.

If there were more Democrats like him, maybe the Democrats would not get pushed around so much and would not have adopted the emotional response patterns of a beaten spouse constantly trying to placate an abusive partner instead of standing up to them.

The accusation of being Uncle Toms (or in my opinion, quislings) is fair and accurate. I cannot imagine another situation in which a group that is toadying up to people who clearly loathe them would not be met with similar vitriol.

Can you imagine a group of black people wanting to belong to a party that was segregationist and supported Jim Crow laws simply because “you know, other than the viewing us as inhuman savages thing, they have some pretty good ideas”?

I am not saying gay people cannot be conservative (in some ways, I am conservative myself) , I am just saying that nobody can respect anyone who takes that kind of abuse from people who clearly do not want them around, and frankly, hate them.

Maybe at another time, being a gay Republican would not seem like such a profound sacrificing of self-worth, but this Republican party?

Take a hint. They don’t want you around. Leave them and join the side that wants you.

Over in the good news column, there is this heartwarming column, Confessions of a Former Republican.

I am struck by how detailed Jeremiah Goulka’s account is, and how willing he was to not just make it a revival tent confession but to try to explain where he was coming from and how he made the transition.

I had my own disillusionment from what is still laughably called conservatism, although in my case, it was when I was a teenager and only just beginning to be aware of the world of politics and how I might fit into it. Yes folks… I was a teenage conservative.

And part of me still longs for the conservatism that I thought existed for a brief time as a teenager. One that represents pragmatic thinking, caution, careful spending of the public purse, sanity, a focus on solutions instead of ideals and outcomes instead of ideological conformity, and most of all, people who believe passionately in the possibility of good government.

And it says something about the insanity of these times that this sort of thinking is only found amongst relatively centrist liberals these days.

And part of me will never be entirely comfortable with that, and will always long for a party that believes in those things positively, not simply because the other side had gone completely insane.

Finally, a story that I kept meaning to get to recently but somehow it never made it in to anything : Black religions leaders in the USA are rallying black voters to counter those bogus Voter ID laws.

This is exactly what I was hoping (and predicting) would happen, and I am gratified that I have confirmation that is indeed going on.

Advocates for all the groups that the Republicans do not want to see at the polls should do the same, and I sincerely hope they are. As the article states, any attempt at voter suppression makes for an invaluable tool to use in order to get people to register to vote.

People will value their vote more if someone seems to be trying to take it away. That is just human nature, we value assets more when they are under threat.

So hopefully, the rather blatant and extremely offensive GOP voter suppression tactics will backfire on them tremendously and actually result, in the final count, in a net increase in votes for Obama.

Couple that with the very real possibility that none of these insulting measure will survive the legal attacks against them, and the scumbag Republicans might very well lose much from their underhanded and pathetically obvious attacks on democracy, and gain absolutely nothing from them but ignominious defeat and a tainting of the Republican brand for years to come.

And that’s all from the news for me today.