Remember the music of theme song for the Beverly Hillbillies? Heh.
Come and listen to my story ’bout a boy named Bush.
His IQ was zero and his head was up his tush.
He drank like a fish while he drove all about.
But that didn’t matter ‘cuz his daddy bailed him out.
DUI, that is.
Criminal record.
Cover-up.
Well, the first thing you know little Georgie goes to Yale.
He can’t spell his name but they never let him fail.
He spends all his time hangin’ out with student folk.
And that’s when he learns how to snort a line of coke.
Blow, that is.
White gold.
Nose candy.
The next thing you know there’s a war in Vietnam.
Kin folks say, “George, stay at home with Mom.”
Let the common people get maimed and scarred.
We’ll buy you a spot in the Texas Air Guard.
Cushy, that is.
Country clubs.
Nose candy.
Twenty years later George gets a little bored.
He trades in the booze, says that Jesus is his Lord.
He said, “Now the White House is the place I wanna be.”
So he called his daddy’s friends and they called the GOP.
Gun owners, that is.
Falwell.
Jesse Helms.
Come November 7, the election ran late.
Kin folks said “Jeb, give the boy your state!”
“Don’t let those colored folks get into the polls.”
So they put up barricades so they couldn’t punch their holes.
Chads, that is.
Duval County.
Miami-Dade.
Before the votes were counted five Supremes stepped in.
Told all the voters “Hey, we want George to win.”
“Stop counting votes!” was their solemn invocation.
And that’s how George finally got his coronation.
Rigged, that is.
Illegitimate.
No moral authority.
Y’all come vote now.
Ya hear?
In the email I in which I received the above from a friend, it looks as though it was written by
Roger Owen Green
Librarian, NYS Small Business Development Center
R.Green@nyssbdc.org
If I’m wrong, I apologize to the actual lyricist.
Nevertheless:
“Patriotism means being loyal to your country all the time and to its government when it deserves it.” – Mark Twain

Watch out for Community! Marek J writes. Because Community Makes Ends Meet!
He’s talking about the community enabled by technology — the one that gives each person with a computer a voice that can be sent and heard and responded to ’round the world. But this is a community of literally untouchables. It is real but has no tangibility. And in this community, it’s too often so hard to tell what’s true and what’s camouflage, what’s real and what’s illusion, what’s factual and what’s just wishful thinking or self-deception.
In this blog community some connect with honesty and some hide behind fantasy. We can use our voices to sound like a community, but we really don’t have much of a chance to act like actual members of a real community.
When you live alone and you’re vomiting and fainting and have to get to the emergency room (as happened to one of my local friends this weekend) the virtual community is not much help. She needed someone to get over to her house, help her call an amulance, clean up the messes she left on her bedding and floor. Someone in her real, actual community of physical friends went over and took care of it all. And then I went to the emergency room to pick her up, take her home, and make sure she had what she needed.
When widely loved blogger and “virtual” friend Burningbird went into the hospital for gall bladder surgery, none of us from the virtual community was there to hold her actual hand, drive her back and forth — do all of those things that we might have wanted to do and what one usually looks to her community to help her with. But we weren’t there; couldn’t be there except in thought, in voice. When the currents of real life knock us off our feet, leave us in a tangible mess, “voice” can’t do anything to help beyond giving moral support.
We need more than this community of voices in our lives. We need real, actual, people with bodies as well as hearts and voices to help us with the things that life is really, physically, actually about.
For those of us who live alone, this blogging community is an important connection to other voices, other minds. But the process of actual, physical, tangible living requires so much more than that kind of connection, that kind of friendship, that kind of community.
Watch out for (virtual) Community! Don’t expect more from it than it can give.

I’m exhausted. But I’m pissed about being used. I’m really tired. Got back from working a big craft fair for two days and found out that one of my best friends was in the emergency room and needed to be picked up and brought home. So I did. And then set her up so that she could get through the night all right.
I’m really tired. And I’m sick and tired of RageBoy’s inability to move on past his perennial arrested development stage. I’m a little late picking up on this, but, even though I ignored his effort to get lots of us to join his childish and hurtful prank against Dave Winer, he managed to post a comment on my weblog that, for all practical purposes, enlists me in his anti-Winer campaign. I resent that. And I’m tired. But not tired enough to edit the comment to negate his devious manipulation of Google on my unsupported behalf.
I’m really tired. My feet hurt, my back aches, and Locke’s sneakiness a big pain in my neck, which a motrin and an edit will get rid of. Too bad he can’t get rid of that nasty streak of his. And too bad his other blogger friends don’t stand up to him as well.
I’m really tired.

I just got home from the first day of the two-day craft fair that I do once a year to sell my shawls. It’s held at a huge apple farm/orchard run by a young woman who was an eighth grade student of mine back in the ’70s. I’m tired. My back hurts. I’m asking myself why I do this, since I barely break even. I like making the stuff, so I have to do something with it all. Sell it at a craft fair once a year. Groan.
And while I’ve been finishing up, packing up, driving out, unpacking, standing, selling, sitting, selling, driving ….., all kinds of neat stuff has been going on in the lives of my blog neighbors.
Moj przyjaciel, Marek J. became a citizen of the U.S. Maybe there’s hope for this country yet. You go, guy!
Frank Paynter launched a brilliantly visual interview with Burningbird/Shelley, who is probably still in the hospital after her surgery. Jeneane posts a poem to Shelley that echoes how so many of us feel about Bb. You go, Bb!
Jeneane and George took a tough stand on behalf of their daughter Jenna and her right to be educated as an individual. You go, guys.
And Thierry Robin, a free-lance reporter from France has gone to Iraq…
…in the company of three female members…. My favorite subject is the condition of women and girls in Iraq. I’m going to listen to their words, silences, claims and hopes. I will try to seize their glances, to catch a moment in the life of these women, of these girls in the turmoil of this war which does’nt finish. I’m going to meet them as if I were visiting the members of my own humane family. That’s the main thing. It does not matter what these women will dare or be able to tell me, what they will reveal about their life or inner feelings. Try to decipher the language of the human heart in such a situation will give all the depth to this work, like a unique testimony of our time.
She’s supposed to be reporting back in her weblog. You go, girl!
And now, back to my crafty life beyond the blog — not anywhere near as relevant as the rest. But it’s the only one I have right now. I’m going.

In his comment to my post below, RageBoy (with whom I briefly shook hands at BloggerCon) says I seemed to him like a “Nice Lady.”
Now, those are two words I won’t mind seeing coming out of the mouths of grandson’s future friends. But, c’mon, is that what a 63-year-old former funky disco queen who purposely wears tight jeans wants to hear?
I used to be delighted when my own kids’ friends called me a “cool mom.” I’ve also been called “arrogant,” “nasty,” and “hot” by various friends at various times. But “nice?” And “lady?” (shudder) Is that how far I’ve fallen?
I often tell my friend P that she’s too nice, and she knows that I don’t mean that as a compliment.
Call me a “screaming-mimi careening-out-of-control psychotic wolverine,” and, in a strange way, I feel validated. Call me a “nice lady” and I start wondering where I lost my edge and if I should put in my order for the rocking chair now.

I didn

According to this:
On the alleged Iraqi program to develop nuclear weapons, at the most the evidence points “very tentatively” to a restart of a program “at the very most rudimentary level,” [CIA advisor David] Kay said. “But it clearly does not look like a massive resurgent program, based on what we’ve discovered now,” he said