"Compassionate Conservatism"? It sounds like a venereal disease without the benefit of having gotten it while having sex. Compassionate is laughable. Taking away money from people who can't afford it to give to people who can is completely gross. Cutting childcare programs and giving vouchers to folks to pay for private schooling is up there on the list of my buttblisters.

A $4000 voucher doesn't begin to cover the expense of private school and would realistically only benefit people who were sending their kids to religious private school and the wealthy. I can't say I support that lovely little mix of church and state nor that abhorrent ignorance of poor people.

Everyone says we need to reform the education system, but what they don't say is how little time they are investing in their kids' lives at school. The paradigm of the American education system is an triangle that has equal parts contributed by teachers, parents and the community. Equal parts -- not 'hey let's blame it all on the teachers' -- means that parents and the community have to pitch in, too. I do my part, but I know for a fact that not every parent is doing their part.

I correct the papers of the second graders in my son's class. That's part of my contribution to his schooling, not to mention my advocacy for assisting him with his developmental delays. There are so many parents who don't sign, check over or otherwise participate in their kids' homework. I guess they're expecting the community and the teachers to pick it up.

But then where's the community? A lot of those community programs were gutted long ago by presidents like Reagan or require, you guessed it, money. Childcare is damned expensive. Childcare could use some subsidization in this country and some standardization, too. There are no standards for keeping track of childcare particularly other than administrative ones. We had all these standards for our schools, but not for our preschools and our afterschool programs. I find that ranging on evil.

So yeah, I'm depressed that Bush is president.

And then there's this whole "visit the in-laws" thing that's driving me to distraction. I swear I'm grinding my teeth while I'm awake as well as asleep. Just the thought of it all is enough to bring on a migraine the size of the Pacific.

Oh, and good lord, I tried to go shopping at the mall today. Mind you, I'm thinking "it's monday, it's after lunch...I'm good." I have never seen so many fucking cars in my life. A woman knocked my 6'7" husband, who was at the head of the line, out of the way at Burger King, in order to cut off him and 20 other people.

I came >< this close to telling her to fuck off, but I didn't. I behaved. I didn't cuss her out. I wanted to, though. Desperately, but I figured I'd cussed out some of the drivers on the way into the freaking parking lot, so I'd had my 5 minutes of daily cussing quota met.

Then we went to Toys R Us to look for a gift for Mike's brother. We couldn't find the one game he had still listed on his Amazon wish list there. They had about every other game known to the universe, but that one. I finally found a Dr. Suess game and it was pretty cute looking, so we bought that. Cute, cheap...hey, I'm there.

And I have discovered that while WWF paraphenalia is everywhere all the time normally, that when you're looking for it, you can bet the only place you can find it is at