April Week 4, 2006

Neulesta shot today... another trip to Spokane, I don't mind the drive but we always take advantage of the availability of all the stores.

We bought some raspberry and blackberry plants and five fruit trees... I came home and pulled down the fence out front and Christian and I cut it up and stacked it for firewood. Monica mowed the lawn and Christian and I gathered up about a half ton or more of metal to take to the dump... busy day... I am tired.

I went to the dump with all the metal stuff that lumpy and I loaded and noticed a pair of Bluebirds flitting around the car parked out front. I talked to the owner (Judy, she manages the place) and asked her about them "Did you notice that those two Bluebirds are vandalizing your car?" she said that they were regulars, they were there all last year and even had babies in the bird house nailed to the pillar out front.

I went home and picked up Christy for breakfast and then loaded up the truck with trash and went back to the dump.

While Christy and I were shopping at the Market we noticed a sign saying "Raspberry plants for sale 2' to 5 ' tall $2.00". We went out on Sullivan Lake Rd in 'Icicle Canyon' and tolf the folks there, Frank and Katherine, that we wanted $20.00 worth, they gave us about 60 plants... pretty good deal.

I came home and Christian and I planted the 7 fruit trees I bought and some of the Raspberry plants I had bought in town yesterday.

I filled up the trailer with wood and other junk on top of the dirt from the holes. Pulling the trailer down hill put so much weight against the hitch that it caused the bolt to pop out of the hole holding the trailer on the back of the tractor and the arm came forward, caught the tire and the forcr of the tire and the weight of the trailer punched a hole in gas tank. I got it down the hill and tilted the tractor so the hole was above the level of gas (I had just filled it). I removed the wheel and went to see George at the Metaline Falls Trading Company. I got some goop to put in the tear and filled it back up... no leak... cool

As I was cleaning up the trash over by the shed I went to dump out a bucket of junk and found Christy's keys just where I had lost them... must have fallen out of my coat pocket.

A cop came by to talk to Mike about his driving... someone had filed a complaint about him driving his truck on their property. Mike gave the cop a bunch of "Why me." and "It's not fair." and "But's" and "What-if's"... when will he ever learn to just say "Yes Sir. I won't do that again"

We have a Family Therapy session today, our Dr feels that we should see a therapist to help us deal with Christy's cancer... I am having a hard time accepting this as a positive move, I am trying to have an open mind on the subject but I have partaken of Family/Marriage Therapy before and though I enjoyed the input and the process.. to be honest I even liked the outcome but it is another dynamic added to an already dynamic situation... I just don't really want to give up a lot of time on this... Therapy is nice, it can be helpful and it can even be fun but it can also be brutally time consuming. I know there is a lot of anger and self-pity and denial going on, I can see it in the kids and I can see it in Christy and I but that stuff is happening for a reason, it's natural and necessary... and we are coping [for the most part] and adapting to the situation. Christy is totally involved and fighting this with literally every bit of strength she has and, though I wish she had more support from the kids, for one reason or another they are just not capable of thinking very far past their own circumstanced.

Well... I don't want to go into this Therapy thing with preconceptions and negative bias, If it will help smooth out some of the peaks and valleys then I will do my part to the best of my ability but already it is a hassle. Two kids are involved in WASL testing and one is 18 and another has CP and I don't know what she is comprehending about what's going on. I will write more tonight.

Predictable... unfortunately. We got a little validation, kids got a little bored and angry, Mike walked out, Christian walked out, Monica got rude, Calie ? not sure, Cindy was almost oblivious... Autumn got bored and cranky... all and all it was a waste of time...

Let's see... today I drove to Colville to get Grandpa's hearing aides, Bought a 30-06, planted sixty raspberry bushes, lost my BMW motorcycle key and found it again

I took the Hayabusa to Spokane to watch Calie play baseball. They use her as a pinch runner and she scored three runs. The ride was exhilarating but it tired me out pretty good my hands and wrists were killing me when I got back... ankles too for some reason. I decided to ride at the last minute and didn't clean the bike at all, I wish I had taken the time to at least rinse it off a little, it's a pretty bike.

Grandpa took off for Southwest Spolane to try out the Casino down there... he was not impressed

I figured out why I was so sore when I got back from the bike ride yesterday, I forgot to take my arthritis medicine in the morning...

I read an article in the Spokane paper that sort of dismayed me. The author was giving serious consideration to some self agrandizing CoEd twit who sued Georgia Tech statues against intolerance for not allowing her to speak out against Gays and Lesbians, not being able to speak her venom violated her rights as an Evangelical Christian to denounce alternative lifestyles.

Not once was it suggested that reciprocating in kind by liberal-minded progressive anti-Evangelists would then also be allowed. In this poor girls simple minded world it is OK to lash out at any aspect of the world you dislike but it is not OK for others to speak out against her nasty, intolerance and hysterical theatrics. Why are some people threatened by things they don't understand and others intrigued and still others tolerant enough to just say, "That's not for me." and just walk away.

That really cracks me up... Leftist "bias" and Conservative "Ideals"... why not Liberal ideals and Rightist bias? Her vision of Academic Freedom is apparently to vilify any aspect of society that she has deemed to be 'un-christian'.

Note the lower case 'c' above. My belief is that to be a follower of Christ you must follow his teachings, he taught tolerance, love, compassion and not hate. He fought against elitism and intolerance. Christ has been appropriated as the guiding light for thousands of religious organizations from Mother Teresa's Sisters of Mercy to McVeigh's Christian Militia and the KKK, I presume that you [the reader], if you are religious, fall somewhere in-between. More power to ya, if you have found someone else's belief that you can support, go for it. Religion can be a comfort, it was to my father, less so for my mother I suspect, it was even a comfort to me for a while, but no longer.

I am not a 'theist' I do not believe in religion... nor am I anti-religion, I just don't care... unless someone tries to inflict me with theirs... then I care... I believe in God, I just don't necessarily believe in 'your' God. I can live with that... I wish everyone could.

"Forks is a small town near the northwest edge of Olympic National Park, one of Washington state's most popular attractions for hunters, anglers and other nature lovers."

I have nothing against Hunters or Fishermen, and I have actually hunted and fished but I never considered those pastimes to be 'Nature Loving'. I learned that I don't like to kill things and I am not fond of the taste of fish so there is no reason for me to do either. I do consider myself a 'Nature Lover' though...

Maxine says, “Always keep several get well cards on the mantel..... so if unexpected guests arrive, they will think you've been sick and unable to clean.

Grandma went to the hospital today... Christy called 911 She seems to be OK but she needs to be checked out/over. She got dizzy and nauseous and wasn't coming out of it. Christy and I will follow the ambulance.

Contact Molly Ivins, a nationally syndicated columnist, through Creators Syndicate, info@creators.com.

My Morning Song

By William Rivers Pitt

t r u t h o u t | Perspective Friday 21 April 2006

Dizzy found me last night,

Saw some kind of new light,

I woke up in a whirlwind,

Just you watch my head spin.

The spectacle that made you cry,

It's a thrill a minute plane ride,

It's overtime at ring side, No lie ...

-- The Black Crowes

The bar was mostly empty when I slipped onto my usual stool on Wednesday afternoon. The sun was out and a warm breeze blew through the city. Only a fool would be inside a dark saloon during such a beautiful day, I thought to myself as I took off my sunglasses. John, the bartender, shook his head at me and flashed a smile that carried just a hint of condescension; he had to be here, and was probably wondering why I would waste my day like this.

He did have a point. Spring comes to Boston about as often as honesty comes from the White House, and so far, my city was actually having one. The trees were bursting with blossoms, and the new leaves were so bright that, it seemed, if you touched them, your hands would come away coated in green. I even had my first near-bee experience of the season on the way there; a huge bumblebee had done a fly-by across the bridge of my nose, sounding like a truck passing on the highway.

The reason why I was there walked through the door a few minutes later dragging a huge suitcase and wearing a bright pink IMPEACH BUSH t-shirt. Cindy Sheehan had been at an anti-war event at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst the day before, all the way across the state, after coming from Austin and Crawford before that. She was flying out of Logan Airport that night to catch up with the Raging Grannies in New York on Thursday, on the eve of the huge anti-war protest that will be taking place in the city next weekend.

She had some time to kill before heading to the airport, and I was happy to offer the creature comforts afforded by my local pub. I'd brought her here last summer, while she was in town with the Out-of-Iraq tour that had come out of the Crawford protest, and she had loved the place. It was a little different on Wednesday than the last time she'd been there. The last time, it had been a Saturday night with the Red Sox in town, we had gotten to the bar just as the game had let out, and it was a zoo. This day, we had the place mostly to ourselves.

The bartender, condescending smile now gone, filled my mug with my recent favorite, the Berkshire Steel Rail. Cindy got herself a Stella Artois. Ethan, the head anti-war student organizer at U-Mass who had driven Cindy to the city from Amherst, allowed himself to get talked into a pint of the Wailing Wench, an excellent IPA. My friend Tom, an architecture student, wandered in a few minutes later and joined us.

We tried to avoid talking shop. We really did. It didn't last.

Scott McClellan was out and maybe Brit Hume or Tony Snow was going to replace him. Karl Rove got demoted, or so the story went, and was going to concentrate on keeping the GOP from getting wiped out in the midterms. Or maybe they both were being moved to the side because Patrick Fitzgerald was gearing up to indict them in his Plame investigation. Is it dangerous to have generals attack the civilian government? Or maybe those generals were firing a warning shot across the administration's bow, letting them know that if they were stupid enough to try an attack on Iran, they were going to have big trouble from the brass.

A young man wandered into the bar later in the afternoon with a friend, looking to toss back a pint or two before going to the Sox game that night. He heard Cindy and me comparing our various nightmare stories about commercial air travel; I have some good ones, but on this score, Cindy wins hands-down. He jumped in with a few good stories of his own, including one where his plane landed sideways and slid off the runway. At one point, he asked Cindy what she did that had her on airplanes so often.

"Do you remember the protest last summer down at Bush's ranch?" I asked him. "The one started by the woman who lost her son in Iraq?"

"Yeah, I remember," he said.

"Cindy Sheehan," I said, cocking a thumb at the lady next to me.

His eyes popped out of his head, and he leaped off the stool. He ran over to Cindy and wrapped her in a huge hug, and then gave her the Red Sox cap he'd been wearing. Cindy took out a pink pen and wrote "Peace - Cindy Sheehan" on his white t-shirt. He left a little while later with the t-shirt open for all to see. Later that night, after Cindy had left, he came back from the game and told me that a bunch of people had complimented him on the shirt.

The day passed slowly and sweetly, and the beers went down smoothly. There was a lot of laughter and storytelling, and at one point we all found ourselves giggling at the absurdity of the Bush administration. Did they really have a page on their web site called "Setting the Record Straight?" Who did they think they were kidding? It was all too funny. But amidst all the smiles, I saw Cindy put her head down and mutter to herself.

"Yeah, it would be funny," I heard her whisper, "if my son weren't dead."

The time finally came for Cindy to get going to the airport. Before she left, she grabbed me by the shoulders. I really think this administration is coming apart, she told me. The lies they've told are being exposed on a daily basis. They are scared to death of the midterm elections, and we have to do everything we can to see John Conyers sitting as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. We have such a long way yet to go, but after all this time, the work we've been doing is starting to make a difference. I hailed her a cab, piled her stuff into the trunk, and gave her a big hug goodbye.

I woke up on Thursday morning thinking about everything Cindy Sheehan has been through. She had to bury her son, Casey, and was attacked for the way she chose to mark his grave. She questioned why her son died, what the noble cause was that ended his time on Earth, and was attacked for being a traitor. She has abandoned any semblance of a normal life to travel thousands and thousands of miles in the company of strangers, for no other reason than to demand a reckoning from the people who sent her son to his death. She has been arrested and harassed, she has been the victim of death threats, and she remains undaunted.

I decided that my morning song, my morning devotion, the prayer I will offer at the start of every day, will be simple. I want Cindy Sheehan to get everything she has worked for. I want every question she has asked to be answered. I want every tear she has shed for her son to become a flood that will wash away these last five years of horror. I want her son's death, and her life, to mean something great and good for everyone, for all the people she and her son have stood for. I want the reckoning she seeks, and I believe it will come, if the rest of us display the courage and determination that has marked her passage through these dark days.

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.

The Dismay of Our Elders Sums Up US

by Jay Bookman

Published on Thursday, March 30, 2006 by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

An eerie sense of calm has settled over the nation's affairs — a dead calm.

It's not merely that the Bush administration has run aground on its own illusions. The real problem runs deeper, much deeper, and at its core, I think, lies the fact that out of fear and laziness we insist on trying to address new problems with old ideologies, rhetoric and mind-sets.

To put it bluntly, we don't know what to do, and so we do nothing.

Run through the list: We have no real idea how to address global warming, the draining of jobs overseas, the influx of illegal immigrants, our growing indebtedness to foreign lenders, our addiction to petroleum, the rise of Islamic terror . . .

Those are very big problems, and if you listen to the debate in Congress and on the airwaves, you can't help but be struck by the smallness of the ideas proposed to address them. We have become timid and overly protective of a status quo that cannot be preserved and in fact must be altered significantly.

The Republicans, for example, continue to mouth a cure-all ideology of tax cuts, deregulation and a worship of all things corporate, an approach too archaic and romanticized to have any relevance in the modern world, as their five years in power have proved.

The GOP's sole claim to bold action — the decision to invade Iraq in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001 — instead epitomizes the problem. The issue of Islamic terrorism is complex and difficult, and by reverting immediately to the brute force of another era, we made the problem worse.

Unfortunately, the Democrats don't offer an alternative. They mouth no ideology whatsoever, their imagination, ingenuity and courage apparently having petered out 30 years ago. They can't bring themselves to acknowledge that the modern litany of problems will require us to invent new roles for government, and to rework the relationships between citizens, corporations and country.

But we can't even talk about such things. Our public discourse — which ought to be the source of renewal and energy in a democracy — has been stripped of meaning, with rudeness now mistaken for eloquence and anger substituting for insight.

All that has led to a sense of helplessness atypical of the American character. In an accurate reflection of our national mood, only 29 percent in a recent Gallup Poll said they were satisfied with the country's direction, a number that can't be explained away solely by our predicament in Iraq. The Gallup numbers haven't consistently been above 50 percent since the spring of 2002, long before most Americans were even aware an invasion loomed.

But more compelling to me than numbers are the e-mails, probably dozens of them in total, that have trickled into my in-box over the past year or so from older Americans all around the country.

"I am 79 . . . I am 84 . . . I was born in 1931," they start out. "I fought with the Eighth Army in Korea . . . We lost our oldest son in Vietnam . . . My husband served in the Pacific . . . I taught school for 35 years," they continue, each recounting their personal contributions to this country and establishing their own perspective on its history.

Then comes the statement that breaks your heart. The words vary from author to author, but the sentiment does not:

"This is not the country I wanted to leave my grandchildren . . . Is this what we sacrificed so much for all those years? . . . I really don't understand how it has come to this. . . . We took for granted that in America it would always be better for the next generation, but I can't see that's the case anymore. . . . Where did we go wrong?"

These people are concerned not for themselves, but for what they may soon leave behind. And that concern for the future is all the more remarkable because it is so rare among those of us who are their children and grandchildren.

Unlike our elders, we refuse to tax ourselves to pay for our wars, our roads, our government. We elevate leaders who promise us tax cuts and free services and cheap oil and the strongest military in the world, and we shun any who dare to suggest that sacrifice might be necessary for such things.

Of course, as a nation we have faced worse. The generation that endured the Great Depression only to be hit with World War II had to confront challenges that make our own pale in significance.

But when people of that generation express sincere dismay about where we're headed today, it's gotta make you wonder.

Jay Bookman is deputy editorial page editor. His column appears Thursdays and Mondays.

###

From the Spokane paper...

Student intolerant of tolerance

Evangelical claims she has right to speak against gays

Stephanie Simon
Los Angeles Times
April 23, 2006

ATLANTA – Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant.

Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out against homosexuality. But Georgia Institute of Technology, where she's a senior, bans speech that puts down others because of sexual orientation.

Malhotra sees that as an unacceptable infringement on her right to religious expression. She's demanding that Georgia Tech revoke its tolerance policy.

With her lawsuit, the 22-year-old student joins a growing campaign to force public schools, state colleges and private workplaces to eliminate policies protecting gay and lesbian people from harassment.

The religious right aims to overturn common tolerance programs: diversity training that promotes acceptance of gays and lesbians, speech codes that ban harsh words against homosexuality, anti-discrimination policies that require college clubs to open membership to all.

The Rev. Rick Scarborough, a leading evangelical, frames the movement as the civil rights struggle of the 21st century. "Christians," he said, "are going to have to take a stand for the right to be Christian."

In that spirit, the Christian Legal Society, an association of judges and lawyers, has formed a national group to challenge tolerance policies in federal court. Several nonprofit law firms – backed by major ministries such as Focus on the Family and Campus Crusade for Christ – take such cases for free.

The legal argument is straightforward: Policies intended to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination end up discriminating against conservative Christians.

Evangelicals have been suspended for wearing anti-gay T-shirts to high school, fired for denouncing Gay Pride Month at work, reprimanded for refusing to attend diversity training. When they protest tolerance codes, they're labeled intolerant.

"The message is, you're free to worship as you like, but don't you dare talk about it outside the four walls of your church," said Stephen Crampton, chief counsel for the American Family Association Center for Law and Policy, which represents Christians who feel harassed.

Critics dismiss such talk as a right-wing fundraising ploy.

"They're trying to develop a persecution complex," said Jeremy Gunn, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief.

Others fear the banner of religious liberty could be used to justify harassment.

"What if a person felt their religious view was that African Americans shouldn't mingle with Caucasians, or that women shouldn't work?" asked Jon Davidson, legal director of the gay-rights group Lambda Legal.

Christian activist Gregory S. Baylor responds angrily to such criticism. He supports policies that protect people from discrimination based on race and gender. But he draws a distinction that infuriates gay-rights activists when he argues that sexual orientation is different.

By equating homosexuality with race, Baylor said, tolerance policies put conservative evangelicals in the same category as racists. (Emphasis by PAD) He foresees the government may one day revoke the tax-exempt status of churches that preach homosexuality is sinful or that refuse to hire gays and lesbians.

(To me that sounds like a perfectly logical step, you can't have it both ways, either you love your fellow man or insulate yourself from him with your beliefs. Why does it never occur to those idiots that a 'belief' is just a decision you make. People can and do believe all sorts of things, 'belief' is not 'truth', it is 'opinion'.)

In their lawsuit against Georgia Tech, Malhotra and a co-plaintiff request unspecified damages.

But they say their main goal is to force the university to be more tolerant of religious viewpoints. The lawsuit was filed by the Alliance Defense Fund, a nonprofit law firm that focuses on religious liberty cases.

Malhotra said she had been reprimanded by college deans several times for expressing conservative religious and political views. When she protested a campus production of "The Vagina Monologues" with a display condemning feminism, the administration asked her to paint over part of it.

She caused another stir with a letter to gay activists who organized Coming Out Week in the fall of 2004. Malhotra sent the letter on behalf of the Georgia Tech College Republicans, which she chairs; she said several members of the executive board helped write it.

The letter referred to the campus gay-rights group Pride Alliance as a "sex club ... that can't even manage to be tasteful." It went on to say that it was "ludicrous" for Georgia Tech to help fund the Pride Alliance.

The letter berated students who come out publicly as gay, saying they subject others on campus to "a constant barrage of homosexuality."

"If gays want to be tolerated, they should knock off the political propaganda," the letter said.

The student activist who received the letter, Felix Hu, described it as "rude, unfair, presumptuous" – and disturbing enough that Pride Alliance forwarded it to a college administrator. Soon after, Malhotra said, she was called in to a dean's office. Students can be expelled for intolerant speech, but she said she was only reprimanded.

A Georgia Tech spokeswoman would not comment on the lawsuit or on Malhotra's disciplinary record, but said the university encouraged students to debate freely, "as long as they're not promoting violence or harassing anyone."