Welcome to your Monday open thread. I am on vacation this week and I’m visiting my family so posting may be spotty.
I know one thing I’ll be doing – watching the lunar eclipse. For the first time in nearly 500 years, a lunar eclipse will coincide with the winter solstice. It will be visible to the whole of North America.
If you step outside late tonight into early Tuesday morning, you may notice the moon looks like a luminous rotten orange. It’s a total lunar eclipse that will be visible to everyone in North and Central America, including Alaska and Hawaii.
…
The total eclipse will last for 72 minutes, a deeper “night within a night,” as he puts it. The moon will be partially eclipsed for about an hour as it goes into and out of the Earth’s shadow. The total eclipse will last from 2:41 to 3:53 a.m. ET.
“It’s going to take a long time to watch the whole eclipse, about 3½ hours,” says Rebecca Johnson, editor of StarDate magazine.
I’ll be in Kentucky, so I’ll be able to go somewhere with less light pollution.
digby at Hullaballoo catches this bit of crazy from the American Family Association. Bryan Fischer writes about the DADT repeal:
We are now stuck with sexual deviants serving openly in the U.S. military because of turncoat Republican senators.
…
The armies of other nations have allowed gays to serve openly in the military. The reason they could afford to do this is simple: they could allow homosexuals to serve in their military because we didn’t allow them to serve in ours.
They knew they could count on the strength, might, power, and cohesion of the U.S. military to intervene whenever and wherever necessary to pull their fannies out of the fire and squash the forces of tyranny wherever they raised their ugly heads around the world.
Those days are now gone. We will no longer be able to bail out these other emasculated armies because ours will now be feminized and neutered beyond repair, and there is no one left to bail us out. We have been permanently weakened as a military and as a nation by these misguided and treasonous Republican senators, and the world is now a more dangerous place for us all.
The world is going to end! Be afraid, be very afraid. Also, according the John McCain, soldiers limbs will fall off.