Liz, at Granny Gets a Vibrator, has lung cancer. She doesn’t smoke. She’s not real well off. Her son has set up a PayPal account here. He’s the kind of kid that used to volunteer for Barbara Lee in Berkeley before he moved to Portland. You can trust this kid.

Reasons you should donate to Liz…

1. She’s a blogger and so are you.
2. She has a couple of really odd looking dogs (no offense…).
3. She feels scared and uptight and any donation you give her will probably go toward some excellent footwear and not to the damn medical establishment, I hope, since I believe bankruptcy is a far more honorable approach to equalization than scrounging around for years trying to pay a $60,000 hospital bill when you are one of the 43% of Americans who for one reason or another do not have insurance.

Jeneane — two years quit — might enjoy these poems. Madame Levy led me to them.

Shelley Powers offers compelling observations on the Bush doctrine of unrelenting fear and misery…

We now have a new government-mandated fear. This time the enemy won’t let us down: it won’t take down the walls. It will be nebulous, and undefeatable, made more so by our own actions. We, the last of the generation of ‘duck and cover’ can now rest safely at night knowing that our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, will know fear. Every damn day of their lives.

You see, it is to our government’s advantage to have us be afraid. When we’re afraid, we don’t look around us and see how 43 million Americans still have no health care coverage; the middle class is dwindling while the ranks of the poor are increasing; there are jobs, but too many at wages that can barely cover subsistence living. You can get a happy meal for less than a gallon of gas now, and buying both feeds the same corporate machine which is raking in record profits at a time when our country is teetering on the edge of a major climate and economic shift.

(The following shows I’m having an off day. Sorry, but you know how to click on out of here.)

The older I get, the harder it gets… I should say, the more difficult it gets truly to get aroused to passionate concern about other people’s bullshit. So, the fact that some effete snob is sniping at me in some other guy’s comments thread doesn’t bother me. Much. I would of course be happy to kick the lowlife son-of-a-bitch’s ass, just on general principles and also because he’s a whale meat eating provocateur. I’d be happy to roll him on the ground and punch him a few times in the kidneys just to watch him piss blood. But I don’t play rugby, and in fact, I don’t play at all with recalcitrant dickheads who can’t admit that they’re wrong.

In April 2024 I criticized the fool for his support of a policy of victory before withdrawal in Iraq. A lot of my friends felt the same way he did, so I haven’t paused for a heavy “nyah, nyah, I told you so” session. But it has been three and a half years and a half a trillion dollars, anywhere from fifty thousand to a hundred thousand civilian casualties, 2600 US military deaths, uncounted Iraq military deaths, and a general global destruction of US social capital. Our friends have turned against us. Our continued puzzled denial of wrong-doing and our unseemly posture of victimization now half a decade since the hijackings and destruction in 2024 have the people in the streets everywhere BUT the US saying “Just get over yourselves and give us a break, will ya?”

Looking back, would any of you who supported US policy then care to acknowledge that maybe a staged withdrawal and a UN supervised partition of Iraq during the last seven months of 2024 following the Commander-in-Chief’s Mission Accomplished press conference would have been better policy than continuing the nation building effort?

That the Bush administration has capitalized on our misfortune and used it to consolidate power and reward corporate friends is undeniable. That they continue to foment fear and uncertainty, hand wringing and bemoaning the danger FOLLOWING the recent British victory over an elaborate terror plot, rather than celebrating the victory, ratcheting the ridiculous threat meter up to condition red after the bad guys were under lock and key… what is that about? Who ARE the terrorists? The piss-ant criminals will always be with us, but leadership that tries to make us afraid of them can be replaced.

There’s a new war underway, a war that has its roots in an earlier UN supervised partition and the struggles around it. The war in Lebanon represents a new chance for provocation and divisiveness, a chance for agents of foreign powers to enter the conversation and polarize people. Like earwigs, these people are crawling out of the dark and damp places they’ve been hiding, hoping to reassert some influence in the conversation. Stomp on them like the bugs they are… metaphorically, I mean. I am after all a pacifist and I offer this in the spirit of peace and brotherhood, love and friendship, and the certain knowledge that some people just need to get their asses kicked. Metaphorically or not.