Tom Shugart is celebrating his first blogaversary and simultaneously bemoaning the slump we’re all in. That is except for a few of the more popular, prolific, and penetrating bloggers like Burningbird, who, Tom speculates, must hold the record for “comments to one post.” Well, Tom, I’m herewith inviting all my readers to leave you a Happy Anniversary comment and see if we can break Shelley’s record. Although, given the reports from my site meter, maybe I’m not the right one to extend that invitation. Hang in there, Tom. Better days are coming. Well, better blog days, anyway. At least I hope.

OK. So, it’s been too cold to go out and march in the real world. Here’s your chance to use this technology to join your voice to all of the cold, weary, and brave protesters who actualy took to the streets. Bush says he’s ignoring those protests. Let’s try another tactic.
MoveOn.org is hosting an online action center to help organize a Virtual March on Washington on February 26th, sponsored by The Win Without War Coalition. You can register here to join the virtual march.
They are also launching a massive, coordinated, grassroots PR campaign, placing signs in windows, bumper stickers on cars, billboards along the streets, and ads and letters in the newspaper.
Download a poster to put in your own window.
At least register as a virtual marcher.

This has definitely been lost in the war news and I thought it worth knowing.
Whether you’re Right or Left on the issue of women’s reproductive rights, please consider the following…
President Bush has announced his plan to appoint Dr. W. David Hager to head up the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee. This position does not require Congressional approval. The FDA’s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee makes crucial decisions on matters relating to drugs used in the practice of obstetrics, gynecology and related specialties, including hormone therapy, contraception, treatment for infertility, and medical alternatives to surgical procedures for sterilization and pregnancy termination.
The committee has not met for more than two years, during which time its charter has lapsed. As a result, the Bush Administration is tasked with filling all eleven positions with new members.
Dr. Hager’s views of reproductive health care are far outside the mainstream of setback for reproductive technology. Dr. Hager is a practicing OB/GYN who describes himself as “pro-life” and refuses to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women.
Hager is the author of “As Jesus Cared for Women: Restoring Women Then and Now.” The book blends biblical accounts of Christ healing women with case studies from Hager’s practice. In the book Dr. Hager wrote with his wife, entitled “Stress and the Woman’s Body,” he suggests that women who suffer from premenstrual syndrome should seek help from reading the bible and praying. As an editor and contributing author of “The Reproduction Revolution: A Christian Appraisal of Sexuality, Reproductive Technologies and the Family,” Dr. Hager appears to have endorsed the medically inaccurate assertion that the common birth control pill is an abortifacient.
Hagar’s mission is religiously motivated. He has an ardent interest in revoking approval for mifepristone (formerly known as RU-486) as a safe and early form of medical abortion.
Hagar recently assisted the Christian Medical Association in a “citizen’s petition” which calls upon the FDA to revoke its approval of mifepristone in the name of women’s health. Hager’s desire to overturn mifepristone’s approval on religious grounds rather than scientific merit would halt the development of mifepristone as a treatment for numerous medical conditions disproportionately affecting women, including breast cancer, uterine cancer, uterine fibroid tumors, psychotic depression, bipolar depression and Cushing’s syndrome. Women rely on the FDA to ensure their access to safe and effective drugs for reproductive health care including products that prevent pregnancy. For some women, such as those with certain types of diabetes and those undergoing treatment for cancer pregnancy can be a life-threatening condition.
There is widespread concern that Dr. Hager’s strong religious beliefs may color his assessment of technologies that are necessary to protect women’s lives or to preserve and promote women’s health. Hager’s track record of using religious beliefs to guide his medical decision-making makes him a dangerous and inappropriate candidate to serve as chair of this committee.
Critical drug public policy and research must not be held hostage by antiabortion politics. Members of this important panel should be appointed on the basis of science and medicine, rather than politics and religion.
American women deserve no less.
WHAT CAN YOU DO?
1. SHARE THIS INFORMATION WITH EVERY PERSON WHO IS CONCERNED ABOUT WOMEN’S RIGHTS.
2. OPPOSE THE PLACEMENT OF THIS MAN BY CONTACTING THE WHITE HOUSE AND TELL THEM HE IS TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE ON ANY LEVEL.
Please email President Bush at president@Whitehouse.gov or call the White House at (202) 456-1111 or (202) 456-1414 and say:
“I oppose the appointment of Dr. Hager to the FDA Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee. Mixing religion and medicine is unacceptable. Using the FDA to promote a political agenda is inappropriate and seriously threatens women’s health.”
While all of our attention is riveted on Bush’s global warmongering, we in the homeland are in danger of being defeated by this subversive effort.. TAKE ACTION AGAINST BUSH’S WAR ON AMERICAN WOMEN

My mother is 87 years old today. I’m making her a birthday pie because she likes the yoghurt/jello refrigerator pies that I concoct. I usually make Key Lime, but today it will be with Peaches and Creme yoghurt and peach jello — with some peach slices lining the bottom. Shrimp Alfredo for dinner. Food is love, right?
I trimmed her hair this morning. I have to figure out how to have a life while she’s waiting for hers to end. I wonder if she’s going to still be around at 97, and I wonder where I’ll be when I’m her age.
Such are my thoughts on a gloomy snow-bound Tuesday with stuffy sinuses and a hunger for something that I keep satisfying with food.
Meanwhile, Molly Ivins adds to my gloom. She says
The news is not good. Osama bin Laden wants us to invade Iraq. We’re at orange on the alert code. The economy is tanking. We’re spending $1.08 billion a day on the military.
The president wants a $674 billion tax cut. In the first year, 50 percent of that tax cut would go the richest 1 percent of Americans and three-quarters of it would go to the richest 5 percent. In the years beyond that, the concentration at the top actually gets worse, according to Citizens for Tax Justice. To pay for that, he wants to raise the rent on subsidized housing for the poorest people in the country and break up Head Start, sending it down to the states, where governments are frantically cutting everything they can. Money to pay for everything from cleaning up Superfund sites to leaving no child behind is being slashed to pay for this obscene tax cut.
We’re about to got to war with a country that hasn’t fired a shot at us or anyone else. Our war plan calls for us to “shock and awe” Iraq by smashing 800 cruise missiles into Baghdad in the first 48 hours of the war. That’s one every four minutes night and day. According to Harlan Ullman, the “defense intellectual” who advocates the “shock and awe” tactic, it’s supposed to work like the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. That worked, all right.
During the last Gulf War, we killed 13,000 civilians directly and another 70,000 died in the aftermath from no water, no food, no electricity, no medical care, etc. I’d like to get rid of Saddam Hussein myself, but how many lives is it worth? And do they get to vote on it?
I wonder if any of us will we be around to celebrate my mother’s 88th.

So, yesterday, while friends and family are emailing me links to great pieces like this about Laura Bush and the Poets Against War effort, and this by Breslin about his moving experiences with the NYC anti-war protesters, and this in the Village Voice about the impact of the anti-war marches, I’m driving my mother 85 miles in minus-four-degree weather to visit my brother, her son, who has not been feeling all that well.
I’ve been having “discussions” with my mom about her starting to take Alzheimer medication in hopes of slowing down a process that I see starting but she refuses to acknowledge. Her brother, two years older than she, is (again) in the hospital with pneumonia because he keeps going outside in below zero weather without his coat. The really bad thing is that he now believes he is a kid back in Poland, keeps pulling his IV out, and rarely recognizes his daughter. This kind of stuff runs in families. I worry about that.
Of course, we “discuss” this most of the way down to my brother’s, so when my brother comes out to help my mom out of the car and, in her usual disfunctional way, she starts yelling at him for going outside without a coat, we are off to our usual bickering start.
I’m immersed in battles — planetary and familial, with the weather, with myself. (We’re in the middle of another really bitch of a snowstorm.) I’m out of energy, out of motivation.
Today, one of my best friends calls (she’s retiring next month) and tries to get me to sign up for a program at the community college where a bunch of retirees will be getting together once a week to take day trips to cool places in the region — every Thursday for five weeks beginning the middle of May. She and I always have great times together — used to go out and dance every Friday night — “out on a tear” we would say — watch out world!
Living with my mother drains me. Just agreeing to do the program with my friend makes me feel like I’ve climbed a mountain. But I’m going to do it, because I know that doing it will be like sledding down the other side.
Breathe, I tell myself. Have a cup of tea and a Peppridge Farm Milano (double chocolate, of course.) There will be a spring. There will be a spring.

Cold and tired as she is, Dorothea Salo — who was out marching for peace — found time to help me figure out (or rather remember) how to do a trackback. So this is a test run, as well as a kudo to Dorothea, who braved the cold to lend her voice to the cause of peace. I didn’t make it out anywhere myself, so I appreciate her effort.

It

Well, maybe not exactly 10 million, but there most certainly are millions of Earth

I humbly accept the honor bestowed upon me by two feisty and formidable (and much younger) bloggers, Camilo and Robin, who named kalilily.net in their Friday Five