Live from New York: GOP applauds homosexuality!

In a surprise turn of events Monday night, the entire Republican convention came out of the closet on national TV! My jaw just dropped.

"Thank God that George Bush is President," said Rudy Guiliani -- and the crowd went wild!

Republicans? Supporting the man who is supporting sodomy? How can this be?

George Bush has gone on record in strong support of -- not gay marriage -- that's too tame. He is in full support of US policies that would make even a Harley-driving leather-bar "girly-man" biker boy blush.

For example, the Bush group has spent billions on aid to Afghan warlords whose henchmen rape and sell young boys. And EVERYONE knows what goes on at Abu Ghraib. We are talking ABOMINATION here! Definitely.

Yet when the man who put the Sodom in Sodom and Gomorrah got his name touted onstage Monday night, all these supposedly anti-gay Republicans applauded like crazy. "Four more years! Four more years!" I was totally surprised. Do they not realize that if Bush policies continue at their present rate, by 2008 the entire US Army and half the Middle East will be playing "Drop the soap" bigtime!

Usually I always carry a book with me to read whenever I'm waiting in supermarket lines or something. In New York, the book I'm carrying to read on the subway and while waiting to monitor marches is Azar Nafisi's "Reading Lolita in Tehran". On page 47, Nafisi stated, "Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies." That explains everything! The neo-cons are offering America fairy tales -- in order to deny the grubby little reality offered by the Bush gang: Lies, fraud, corruption, perversity, murder, bankruptcy. It is their "Once upon a time..." approach to our post-Bush reality. And the Repubs in New York simply couldn't get enough of it on Monday.

I would like to suggest that, instead of hiding their heads in fairy tales that sound wonderful but mean nothing, Americans need to look truth in the eye and deal with it constructively and creatively. Why? Because it is always a good idea to remember that ostriches in neo-con leather bars are not in a good position to ignore reality!

Report from New York City: Is this going to be another Summer of Love?

I thought that New York during the RNC would be a good place to see the latest fashions in riot gear. But wouldn't it be wonderful if a miracle took place and all the 50,000 Repubs and the 250,000 "demonstrators" all just got along? Good grief! Well, after all, we used to be one nation.

What if Mayor Bloomberg drugged the water? What if, instead of getting beat over the head by New York's finest and by power-tripping Repubs, we all just loved and laughed and told jokes and smiled? All the Green party guys and the illegal aliens and the Republican greeter girls and the blue-haired ladies and the cops and those guys in three-piece suits and the middle-aged hippies such as myself -- all suddenly discovered their American-ness? And we all stood around and sang the Star-Spangled banner off key and shook hands and hugged!

Wouldn't Bush and Rove be pissed off.

Fear and loathing in New York: My report from the RNC

Here is my first report from the Republican National Convention -- and I haven't even been there yet!

We all know how successful political strategist Karl Rove has been these last ten years -- mostly due to his "Fear and Smear" campaign techniques. The politics of fear have been very good to our Karl. They have gotten his political candidates where they are today!

Now Rove has focused the full spotlight of his considerable genius on creating fear (and loathing) in hearts of Republican National Convention delegates. To this end, he has created an Enemy to truly be afraid of!

And who, you may ask, do those already-quaking-in-their-boots Repubs have to fear now? Me!

I, Jane Stillwater, am now the new Republican boogie-man bugaboo. It used to be bin Ladin could scare the socks off America but nowadays he's passe and Rove needs something a bit more upscale. This is how I got the job as America's new Freddie Krueger.

But, you may be saying, "You're joking, Jane. You don't LOOK all that scary." You got that right. I'm a mother of four and a legal assistant too! It doesn't get more drab than that. Me? The RNC's worst nightmare? Ha!

Why are Repubs terrified of ME? Rove has told them. "Be afraid. Be VERY afraid." He's told them again and again: That me -- and thousands of other patriotic Americans like me who object to economic failure and corruption and endless war -- are coming to New York and we will be UP TO NO GOOD.

According to Greg Palast, the GOP.com website http://rnc.org/ says that I and my ilk are planning to be the worst villains ever to endanger New York since The Joker invaded Gotham. With all kinds of scary things up our sleeves. Such as:

"NEXT WEEK, people who hate Republicans plan to release swarms of mice in New York City to terrorize delegates to the National Republican Convention.

"Republican-haters plan on dressing up as RNC volunteers, and giving false directions to little blue hair ladies from Kansas, sending them into the sectors of New York City that are unfit for human habitation.

"They plan on throwing pies and Lord knows what else at Republican visitors to the city. Prostitutes with AIDS plan to seduce Republican visitors, and discourage the use of condoms ...."

RNC delegates to New York will be like babes in the woods. An endangered species. Sweet innocent "Christians" loose in Sodom and Gomorrah. Thrown to the wolves. According to Rove, NYC is going to be like The Night of the Living Dead. And guess who their savior is going to be? Karl Rove.

Also on the official RNC website http://www.gop.com/news/Cartoon.aspx?id=677 -- not to be missed! -- is an animated cartoon of George Bush dressed in a Superman costume!

Perfect solution to the Darfur crisis:

Let's ask the UN to divide Sudan into two countries: The north would be called Sudan and it would be governed by the current George Bush/Saudi family/oil company/Janjaweed alliance in Khartoum. The south would be called Darfur and its new oil discoveries would be controlled by the people who have lived there before oil was discovered.

End of problem!

"Why is death like a wedding?" Or like sex?

Last week, I came back from the dead. It was awesome! Even the New York Times interviewed me. "So. Ms. Stillwater. What was death like? And what was it like to be dead?" Did I have a nice funeral? How big was the burial plot?

I am about to give you the full 411 on death. Everything you've EVER wanted to know. So shut up and listen.

There are only two things that a human being MUST do. We must get born. And we must die. There's not much we can do about our birth but there's hecka lot that we can do about how to die.

So. What is death like? Death is like sex.

"How would you describe the exact moment of death?" You either have an orgasm, you endure it or you get raped.

What causes a death experience to be orgasmic? Creative foreplay! Our death can be our life's very best high. Wanna see stars and find out first hand if the earth really moves? Then you gotta use the right techniques.

We all wonder what will happen to us when we die. Most of us are scared of death. Don't be. Apparently God has created a sure-fire way to make our deaths even more enjoyable than our wedding night!

But getting back to the New York Times guy. He was not all that pleased with the sex analogy. Then let me put it another way. "Death is like a wedding." The NYT guy shrugged. Was this all the news that was fit to print? I clarified. "What do we know about weddings? One can elope. Or one can have a civil ceremony with the Justice of the Peace. Or one can go all the way -- and have a big lavish fabulous wedding that everyone will remember for the rest of their lives! Death is like that. And the way that we can change the moment of our own death into some wondrous thing -- LIKE A BIG LAVISH WEDDING -- is to..." Watch it now. Here comes the secret of having a REALLY COOL death! "...to have done good deeds in life."

Sorry, guys. Nothing else will do it. It's not about who has the most power or the most Federal Reserve Notes or even the most oil. And committing genocide disqualifies you from even a Vegas quickie wedding. Arranging for other peoples' deaths totally eliminates you from even being allowed to catch the bouquet (No preemptive strikes, no Rapture-made-easy-by-blowing-up-the-world-early, no Wellstone, no JFK. Won't GWB be surprised.)

"Before I died," I told the Times, "I was a crotchety old curmudgeon at heart. So how did someone like me end up winning the moment-of-death lottery? Good works. Mitzvahs. Good deeds. I gave money to the homeless. I protested the Iraq war. I was nice to teenagers! I worked my butt off. I DESERVED this death."

"Got any other good advice for the just-about-to-die?" asked the New York Times. Here's one more sure bet: Don't try it yourself! When things go wrong and you get depressed and you wish you were dead, just listen to that voice within you that says, "Wait. Stay around. If you commit suicide now, you'll miss the Big Bang." And it is well worth the wait.

Since 1968, an estimated 150,000 Vietnam vets have committed suicide. They didn't have to commit suicide. They could have made up for what they'd done. As long as we are alive, there is always a chance to make up for what we've done. Iraq vets need to know that too. And the Mujahideen. And the IDF. And even the Mafia if they really really try.

What else have I learned? Besides that the very best (and cheapest) funeral involves being buried in your back yard under the apple tree? I have learned that when future dead people (That's ALL of us, folks) understand this simple concept of death, terrorists can have no hold over us because WE WILL NOT BE AFRAID. We will just look at terrorists as yet another opportunity to do good deeds. We will just smile at them and say, "I gots an extra turkey sandwich. Would you like some lunch?" Nothing spoils a terrorist's day like having people not be afraid. Americans need to stop acting like wimpy chickens with their heads cut off and get a grip. Stop cowering in the closet with code colors and duct tape. Eleanor Roosevelt was not afraid.

"But," said the NYT guy, "if good deeds are so fabulously good for us, why are we so reluctant to do them?" Why are folks so much more interested in cutting federal aid to education, stealing lunch money from school kids, watching grisly movies, joining gangs, flying airplanes into the World Trade Center, committing adultery, raping schoolgirls in the Sudan, setting off Armageddon and sodomizing children at Abu Ghraib than they are in, say, taking flowers to shut-ins or helping little old ladies across the street? Why indeed.

"The first time I killed a man it was such a rush!" said one US Marine in Iraq. And my own father, who was too old to fight during World War II, begged the Navy to help him get himself into harm's way. The man would much rather go kill total strangers than be forced to stay home with the wife and kids.

According to http://costofwar.com/, my home town alone spent over 50 million dollars on the war on Iraq. For that amount of money, we could have hired over a thousand teachers -- or at least kept the libraries open on Sundays. So why don't we? Because good deeds are basically boring.

Can somebody PLEASE figure out ways to make doing good deeds exciting and fun? Surely we are smart enough to do that. For instance, we could do good deeds by protesting George Bush's attempts to bankrupt our country. We'd probably get beaten, tear-gassed and jailed for trying to utilizing our right to free speech in the process but we'd be doing a good deed. And it certainly would be exciting and fun.

Aside from that, if we really want to experience death as the perfect climax to life, we gotta settle down, grit our teeth and start grinding out those boring, mundane, every-day good deeds. There's no way around it. Sorry.

So," said the NYT. "You died once already. What do you do you plan to do for an encore?" Me? I want to volunteer in soup-lines this Christmas. I want to babysit for harassed mothers, to hand out spare change. Good grief, that last death was fun! I want to store up enough Mitzvahs so that I can do it again!

American Afghanistan's three major crops: Opium, human organs and children

I just heard an eye-witness account of life in Afghanistan that curdled my blood. Have you heard similar reports? "Since the American takeover of Afghanistan, the major crops there are now opium, human organs and children." What is the lowest denominator that human beings can sink to? It's all happening in American Afghanistan.

Of course we know about the secret torture chambers that American and Pakistani contractors have set up there. But do you know why they are there? "People are being grabbed off the street and tortured in order to get information out of them. These torturers think that somehow, if they torture enough people, they will get lucky and discover information that the Americans might be willing to pay for."

We already know about Afghanistan's opium trade. Under American supervision, Afghanistan has become the world's number one heroin supplier -- even outdistancing Burma's infamous Golden Triangle. "Since America has taken over, there is more opium being grown in Afghanistan than there are vegetables." How to relate it to our own experiences? It would be as if our great California central valley was now devoted solely to growing opium. If that were to happen here, what would Californians eat? Ask that same question in Afghanistan. The answer is, "Not much."

It's clear to anyone who is up on current events in this region that Prime Minister Hamid Karzai is pretty much a puppet. "He is hardly more than the Mayor of Kabul. If that."

Besides these well-known incompetencies, corruptions and crimes against humanity, what else is new in American Afghanistan? "Children in Afghanistan are being kidnapped -- from off the streets and even from out of their homes. According to the Pakistan News Service, http://paktribune.com/news/index.php?id=69548, one Afghani father was asked to pay $4,500 in ransom for his kidnapped son. At first the kidnappers sent the distraught father his son's finger -- with a note attached saying "Next time it will be his head." The father payed the ransom money. The boy was returned naked and drugged.

In American Afghanistan, young girls are being sold to American contractors to use for sex. Even the American-sponsored hospitals are not safe. There have been instances of girls and young women going there, being anesthetized for one reason or another and then, when they come out of the anesthesia, discovering that they have been raped."

In America, George Bush supporters are trying to instigate a Constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage. Instead, let's instigate an amendment making it illegal to give US taxpayer money to support Afghani warlords who participate in the rape and sale of young boys.

If we want to pay big bucks for nation-building, let's stop giving tanks and dollars to sleazy warlords and start giving books and food to RAWA, the only organization that effectively fought the Taliban and is now in a position to actually HELP the people of Afghanistan http://rawa.fancymarketing.net/index.html

Children have become a cash crop in American Afghanistan. Bad guys there are harvesting children the way that we in America are harvesting wheat.

In American Afghanistan, there is another all-too-familiar harvest: Human organs. "It is a common occurrence for the bodies of young people to be found with their hearts, kidneys, livers and even their eyes carefully and surgically cut out." No organ is wasted. What would you call this? Recycling? Ecology? Organic farming?

This is our "Christian" government's finest hour? America's presentation of democracy to the world? This behavior sickens me. Usually I like to suggest some upbeat answer to every problem but I don't even want to talk about it any more.

Politics made easy: Would you bet your life on dinosaurs or mammals?

I have a friend who went out into the forest and, under the watchful eye of a Native American elder, took hallucinogenic plants. "Wow!" said I. "What happened?"

"Clutter," said he. "I learned about clutter. I went home and threw out half the stuff in my house."

I wanna take peyote! I wanna dump out half the stuff in my house! I have WAY too much stuff. How did I get all that junk? I was brainwashed! Too much TV.

"You really really need this new Barbie doll!" the television told me. I do? "The War on Iraq is a necessary thing," said the TV. It is? "Tide gets your laundry really, really clean." It does? My eyes took on this glazed look. "Consume, Jane. Consume!"

I've got a great idea. Instead of selling us all this clutter, why doesn't Big Media sell us stuff that we really need?

Instead of telling us to blindly consume more and more inconsequential junk on the crazy assumption that all this clutter will make us happy, let's start selling Americans stuff that will REALLY make us happy. Like wonderful forest places, clear rivers and streams, peace, freedom and DEMOCRACY.

Who were the most content people in history? Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Gandhi. What did they all have in common? A two-car garage? Not hardly.

Oops. I just had an epiphany (even without peyote!) Big Media -- and the bladerunner corporate welfare queens they work for -- are like the dinosaurs. They ruled the earth. They thought they owned everything. They were big, big, big. Then there were those tiny little mammals. What were the mammals compared to dinosaurs? Nothing!

Then the comets hit. The dinosaurs all died. And the mammals survived.

We're like that, we poor maligned progressive untouchables who silently hope for a better world. Raytheon and Fox News and GE now think that they are the tyrannosaurs. "What's good for us is good for the USA." They have nothing to worry about from those weird little sandal-wearing progressives. But we know better. We have God on our side! Plus we have the Internet. We don't need the Big Media corporate queens to tell us what to think. We got other little mammal things. TruthOut. MoveOn. CLG News. The ACLU. Jewish Voice for Peace. And people like Dennis Kucinich too.

Big Media thought that just because Dennis's face never appeared on prime-time TV that we would forget that he had a message of hope for the working guys. That he had a message about what it once was like to be free. Like in the movie, "the Last Unicorn" when Schmendrek was talking to the skeleton.

"You can't taste wine. You're dead!"

"Sure, I can no longer taste it. BUT I REMEMBER."

I remember the ideals I learned as a kid. I remember what Jesus actually said. I remember the Constitution. "We the people..." People are hungry for truth. Why do you think Fahrenheit 9/11 was so popular? It was a breath of fresh air, a perspective that had been carefully kept off the evening news. And now there is "Control Room" and "The Hunting of the President" and "Orwell Rolls in his Grave" and "Hijacking Catastrophe" and "OutFoxed" and "9/11 in Plane Sight".... All the wonderful documentaries coming out now? They are slipping in under Big Media's radar screen because us little mammals want to be free!

So. How are we -- the little people, the mammals -- going to survive? By spreading the word. By telling our kids, by having pot luck dinners and house parties, by spending our money on what is meaningful instead of what is not. By subscribing to CLG News and KPFA instead of to Fox. By learning the truth. By burrowing from within. We CAN win the fight for survival, the fight for democracy. Why? If for no other reason than because, even though we are smaller and have less of a roar than the dinosaurs, there are many many more of us than there are of them!

According to John Machado, we no longer live in a capitalistic system. "Capitalism" is when you bet your money that if a new and exciting idea comes along, people will all run out and buy it and you will get your nest egg back. In corporate America, however, new and exciting ideas are discouraged in favor of dinosaur things. But no one can stop us from investing in -- and marketing and even buying -- new and exciting ideas on how to make our country a better place. That kind of capitalism is carefully squashed by dinosaurs but never forget -- us mammals have pocket change.

The political bottom line? Voting at the polls is fine but Americans REALLY vote with their money. Dinosaur George Bush spends HIS money blowing up children throughout the world while mammal Dr. Paul Farmer spends his money helping starving children in Haiti. How would you rather vote? Who would you rather be?

I heard some caller on KPFA the other day. He said, "We must take the money we would have spent on buying consumer goods and put that money toward buying back democracy." Great idea! Instead of buying oil, chrome and plastic, let's donate to KPFA and TruthOut and True Majority and the ACLU and CLG. And in New Hampshire, Granny D is running for the Senate against a heretofore-unopposed Republican. Donate to her! If enough of us little guys add together enough of our pennies, watch out all you corporate welfare queens! You are just about to get kicked out of Jurassic Park!

Here is one way to invest in mammals (not dinosaurs!): Let's all call our cable companies today, disconnect our TVs and donate the money we save to someone on this list. THAT will make us happy! And let's stop rotting our teeth by buying soft drinks too.

Jewish Voice for Peace: http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/

Code Pink: http://www.codepink4peace.org/

CLG News: http://www.legitgov.org/index.html#contribute

I Want Change.org: http://iwantchange.org/

Information Clearinghouse:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/support.htm

KPFA (A Pacifica station):http://www.kpfa.org/

True Majority: http://www.truemajority.org/homepage.cfm

People for the American Way: http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/

ACLU: http://www.aclu.org/

Democracy Now: http://www.democracynow.org/

Truth Out: http://www.truthout.org/

Online Journal: http://www.onlinejournal.com

Granny D for Senate: http://grannyd.com/donations.htm

Dennis Kucinich: http://www.kucinich.us/

Read the Muslim perspective on the news: http://www.aljazeerah.info/

Dr. Paul Farmer and Partners in Health: http://www.pih.org/index.html

Black Commentator: http://www.blackcommentator.com/

*****
"Imagine a world where EVERY child is wanted, nurtured, protected and loved: World Peace in one generation!"

Life is a competition. The winners are the ones who do the most good deeds. Here's an opportunity to do one: In October, I will be walking in the Susan G. Komen 3-day walkathon to benefit breast cancer research. Donate $5 and I will put you on my prayer list! (You are on there already but hey...) To donate, please go to http://www.the3day.org/faf/home/default.asp?ievent=30112 Click on "sponsor a participant" and type in my name.

Another way to fight breast cancer? Women exposed to pollution develop breast cancer first -- so let's fight it by dumping those money-grubbers in the White House who are allowing toxic polluters to endanger the lives of our wives, mothers and sisters.

Another cancer prevention technique: Outlaw depleted uranium! In just one service unit, 8 out of twenty returning troops have developed malignancies. 40% of just one unit sent to Iraq and exposed to DU have become cancerous only 16 months after exposure. Our troops deserve better than to rot away so that Bush can have fun playing armchair soldier for fun and PROFIT.

Why I am a Conservative (and proud of it too)

Good grief! I always thought that I was a liberal. Now I've discovered that I am conservative AND I'M PROUD OF IT!

In my world, if people aren't doing their job, they get fired. Bush failed to protect America on 9/11. He lied about the war on Iraq. Why is he still in the White House? If Congress were conservative, they would fire his ass -- if not put him in jail

In July alone, my country went $69.16 billion dollars further into debt. I don't believe in debt. I don't even have a credit card. But apparently Congress has gone to the mall bigtime with its Visa. That's fiscal irresponsibility! Only liberals do that. A conservative would take away ALL Congressional charge cards.

"We need to send more aid to Israel," said Paul Wolfowitz. Who is this guy? Another liberal bleeding heart? We already gave Israel 90 billion dollars. We've given Israel more aid than any country in the world -- and probably more than we give to Rhode Island. If those wimps in Israel can't control a few Palestinians with 90 billion dollars, why should they deserve welfare from us? They should go out and work and get a job like everybody else. Forget all that liberal talk. I AM A CONSERVATIVE!

Get this straight. I didn't like it when the Marines went to Tripoli. And now I don't want them in Iraq. I am an isolationist. Let's mind our own business. That makes me a conservative. And proud of it too.

While we're on the subject of the war on Iraq, how about those death statistics? If a Marine dies in combat, he's counted. If he dies on the way to the hospital, he's not. Out of the 22,000 GI casualties, how many of those have died without being counted? Are we being lied to? George Washington would never do that.

I want to go back to the good old days. Before corporations became neo-Welfare Queens. The Republicans say that they stand for fiscal responsibility? They're liberals! They are giving all of our tax money away to their PAC landlords (and not to us).

Jesus? Who ARE these so-called Christians who can't even read their Bibles? What would Jesus do? Lie? Kill? Defile our flag at Abu Ghraib? Not Him. Not me. When it comes to religion, call me old-fashioned but...I believe in the Bible!

Income tax? Those liberal Repubs in Congress and the White House are hijacking our treasury. And if their hanger-on friends in Big Busniess were true capitalists, they would LOVE paying taxes. It would demonstrate to everyone that they had just made tons of profits. These losers would never be able to make profits at all if the government wasn't shoring them up. That's liberal talk! And all that IRS tax bureaucracy? Dump that. Forget income tax. A1% federal sales tax is much more conservative.

And what's with all this government debt and paper money with no gold in Fort Knox. What happened to all the gold in Fort Knox? Ask the liberals like Richard M. Nixon. Me? I'm a conservative.

I believe in states' rights. The feds are telling us what to do and when to do it. Take Florida, for instance. What? The Supreme Court thinks that Flor-a-duh is too dumb to count votes by itself once they run out of fingers and toes?

Speaking of government, Big Government is not a conservative thing. Those liberals in the White House have hired more government employees than anybody in the history of this country. But instead of teaching our children and fixing our roads, the "New Bureaucrats" being hired are being hired to spy on US. That sucks eggs. I'm a conservative. I want to go back to the old days when there was no FBI and no CIA and no "Homeland" security rifling though my bank account and organizing a more powerful IRS and bringing in cocaine for our young -- treating us like WE were the enemy. Maybe the militia are right. Without justice, it's just us.

Why else am I a conservative? I wanna go back to the days when we actually honored the Constitution. This Patriot Act nonsense is driving me nuts.

The environment? Adam and Eve were instructed to tend the Garden of Edan. Me too! And no more government give-aways in our national forests. That's liberal talk.

To hell with those liberal Republicans. Maybe I should join John Birch. The American Independent Party just told my friend Sonya, "The war in Iraq is un-Constitutional, we should never have gone in and we need to get out fast!" And what about Palestine? "I don't know anything about that so I don't have an opinion." My God. An honest politician!

I'm sick and tired of liberals like Halliburton getting a free ride. I'm sick and tired of having the bleeding hearts in the White House yell "Terror" every time they want to give more of our money away. I'm sick and tired of schools that don't offer our children a classic education. Thomas Jefferson would be shocked. I'm proud to be a conservative. I like it when people have to be elected to live at the White House. Give me the good old days!

In the name of Jesus, PLEASE revoke GWB's license to kill.

In the name of Jesus, I can't stand it any more. How many MORE people will our government blow up and maim and kill? Thousands dead? Tens of thousands dead? Hundreds of thousands dead? Millions dead?

When will my country's armies stop the killing in Iraq? When will they finally say, "We have won the war on Iraq." When every man, woman and child in that country is dead?

Yesterday Muqtada al-Sadr put out an impassioned plea to the nations of the world. "Help my country. They're killing us one by one." American top brass look down their noses at this man and go on killing and killing and killing -- as if Jesus Himself gave them the right to open a butcher shop in Iraq.

Where is the moral imperative, where is the moral justification for thousands and thousands and thousands of deaths? Ask Hitler. Ask Stalin. Ask George W. Bush. There is none.

****
Here's a scary on-the-scene report from Robert Fisk -- all that butchery in Iraq and the Bush gang is STILL not winning the "war": http://www.occupationwatch.org/

Inventing the future: 18 years without sex!

I'm always trying to better my life, right? And to make the world a better place. But how? Deep breath.

"Look back over your life," said Marilee Zdenek on her audiotape. "What is it you do best?" Sex? Don't laugh. I was a flower child. That's what we did.

We studied sex. We did research. We read Mantak Chia's classic instructions on how to draw the power of sex up our back bones and into our minds. We hung Tibetan Buddhist posters of Padmasambhava and his consort up on our walls. We sought inspiration from peyote and mushrooms and LSD. We found cute long-haired hippie boys, radical black men out to save the race and lonely Asian nerds FOB. We practiced on them. We studied. We learned. We thought of sex as medicine. We thought we were doing good deeds.

In Greenwich Village, London, Taos, Mexico City, Paris, Berkeley and Montgomery, we sought meaning in life through sexuality and we took our studies VERY seriously.

Now, like some steel worker whose job has been outsourced to a foreign country, we find that our skills are obsolete. A 62-year-old geisha? Vey es mir. All that training down the drain. I shoulda gone to med school instead. Then I could be off helping the poor in Haiti.

What can be worse than having your professional equipment rust before your very eyes? Ladies, don't go there. Stay in school! (Actually, forget I said that; going to Cal in 1968 was EXTREMELY educating.)

So. Here I am. 62-years-old, listening to my "Inventing the Future" tape. Thinking that it's not too late to learn new things. There are so many people out there in the world who are needy: Refugees in the Sudan, disabled vets, children without homes, taxpayers getting screwed by corporate welfare queens.... There is so much need.... I may have been downsized from my original skills -- and learned the hard way that indiscriminate sex is DEFINITELY not good medicine -- but the world still has a need for me.

While I'm trying to figure out what my new skills should be, however, I still keep that old photograph of me on the front cover of the Berkeley Barb hidden in a corner of my back closet where the grandchild won't see. I had horribly misplaced and wasted my ideals and skills -- and, in this modern world of sexual predators and AIDS, would NEVER advise any young woman to do what I did -- but, boy, do I have memories....

Ashley, me and the missing Republican National Convention

"Want to go to New York and volunteer at the Republican National Convention with me in August?" I asked my 17-year-old daughter.

"Can we buy rice pudding on Second Avenue?" Of course. Young Ashley is very fond of Lower East Side kosher food. We bought our tickets -- and got a great deal on Expedia. Flight and rooms for only $235 each! Now all we have to do is to convince the RNC to put us on their staff.

I have already sent in an application. But why would they choose us?

First of all, there's Ann Coulter. Her sense of fashion is WAY off. She needs us to instruct her on how to dress. Second of all, the Repubs need to be taught how to become Christians again and I am just the person to do it! Bible thumping is my favorite contact sport.

Third, be prepared! If we heed all the dire warnings that Bush is giving us about there being a terrorist attack in New York (God forbid), Ashley is a Girl Scout. And she knows CPR too.

Fourth and most important, when the Bush Gang announces that NYC is now too dangerous to hold the convention there and plans to move it to Iowa, we can console the thousands of Repubs who will have missed it. "Bush didn't MEAN to snub you," I will tell them. "It's just that he began to notice that real Republicans were starting to get nervous about the corruption at the White House and, well, he thought he'd do better to have a Republican convention without the actual delegates."

Don't worry, Republicans. Ashley and I will save the day! See you there!

Choosing Iraq over America? That's traitor talk.

Suppose some hot-spit economist pointed out to you that America couldn't afford the war on Iraq? "These figures in this column here indicate that..." That what? That if America continues to indiscriminately run up her credit card debt in Iraq, we are soon going to get a rather ugly visit from the repo man.

At the rate that the math-challenged party-boys in the White House continue to pour America's paychecks into Iraq, we will soon be bankrupt, have no armed forces at home to defend us and our children will be as dumb as posts.

If you had to chose between America and Iraq, which would you chose? I would chose America! To chose Iraq over our country? That's traitor talk.

If you had to chose between losing the American Dream because the installment payments on "Operation Iraqi Freedom" are going to leave us living in our car -- and letting the Iraqis battle it out between themselves without us, which would you chose?

"But," you might say, "The war on Iraq is over!" I am willing to bet you one hundred twenty five billion dollars -- plus $180,000 a minute (http://costofwar.com/) plus the145,000 American soldiers now stationed there -- that it is not.

"But," you might say, "our pride is at stake here. We can't afford to lose the war on Iraq!" You will need a better argument than that. We have already lost the war on Iraq. We lost it before the Bush Gang even fired a shot. We lost it the day that America was told to spend a trillion dollars on bombs instead of schools.

According to Jim Hightower, just one of the bribes that Bush offered Turkey to join the Iraq war was larger than the entire funding of "No Child Left Behind".

In the future, guys, let's get our priorities straight. Our country is AMERICA. Not Iraq.

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From Global Research: "Is a USA Economic Collapse Due in 2005?" by F. William Engdahl. "[Bush and Greenspan's] only short-term goal has been to keep the US economy strong enough to assure re-election [sic] for George Bush in November." http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/ENG407A.html

From Truthout: White House Posts Highest Deficit in US Historyhttp://www.truthout.org/docs_04/080104Z.shtml

From Busby Berkeley: This week, we checked "Gold Diggers of 1935" out of the library (The BPL is now closed on Sundays for the first time in 60 years by the way) and got to watch Ginger Rogers sing "We're in the Money" in pig-Latin! This movie is a jewel. It's got all kinds of tips and tricks on how to survive George Bush's gift to America -- the Great Post-Iraq Depression of 2005.