I bought a set of beepers and put one on her keys and the other in her purse. I keep the third. That way I can always track down her keys and purse when she can’t find them. Which is just about every day. Sometimes twice. Tonight it was as I was falling asleep and she called me because someone has stolen her purse. Beep Beep. It was right where she hung it in the closet — not that she remembers doing that.
Her brain scan shows moderate to severe atrophy.
She hugs me a lot. Tells me that I’m her beautiful daughter. Thanks me often for what I do for her. Begs me not to leave her.
She doesn’t realize how fast I have to run just to keep up. Beep. Beep.

We’re being duped at every turn. No wonder we don’t know where to turn.
Half of the time that we think we’re watching news reports, we’re really watching video news releases prepared by public relations firms for organizations promoting their own agendas, and that includes the Bush administration. What we are led to believe are news reports are really propaganda.
There is, at least one voice in the PR industry who is calling attention to this unethical practice. Richard Edelman, president and CEO of the world’s largest independent public relations firm, blogs the following, as he refers to an article published in the NY Times:
“Under the Bush Administration, the federal government has used a well-established TOOL of public relations; the pre-packaged, READY-TO-SERVE news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations…” It is a world where all participants benefit…Public relations firms secure government contracts worth MILLIONS of dollars…”In three separate opinions in the past year, the Government Accountability Office has held that government-made news segments may even constitute improper covert PROPAGANDA…” An FCC decision in year 2000 states that “Listeners and viewers are entitled to know by whom they are being PERSUADED…” (Note that the capital letters are my own so that you get the full effect of the words being used).
Edelman goes on to say:
What can be done? Let’s start by revealing the size of our US government contracts. We have heard in the media that PR agencies are receiving $250 million from the US Government each year to promote its programs. I’m skeptical of this number. At that level, Government contracts would constitute 10% of the fees of the top ten agencies in the world. At Edelman, our fees from the US Government (we have one account, from the US Department of Commerce to promote travel to the US from the UK) are $400,000, out of our global total of $240 million in fees. I understand from another top-ten firm that they only have 3% of its fees from Government contracts. So a useful first step toward transparency is to end the mystery of size of fees by having each firm reveal total spending by US Government-related accounts.
From www.prwatch.com/spin:
VNRs are produced for the government by private contractors and the State Department’s Office of Broadcasting Services, the Agriculture Department’s Broadcast Media and Technology Center, and the Defense Department’s Pentagon Channel, among others. We’ve been criticizing VNRs used as propaganda for more than a decade. For example, our 1995 book Toxic Sludge Is Good For You described how VNRs were used to sell the first Bush administration’s Persian Gulf war.
The New York Times editorial (repeated in Truthout.org) lays it all out:
As documented this week in an article in The Times by David Barstow and Robin Stein, more than 20 federal agencies, including the State Department and the Defense Department, now create fake news clips. The Bush administration spent $254 million in its first four years on contracts with public relations firms, more than double the amount spent by the Clinton administration.
Most of these tapes are very skillfully done, including “interviews” that seem genuine and “reporters” who look much like the real thing. Only sophisticated viewers would easily recognize that these videos are actually unpaid commercial announcements for the White House or some other part of the government. Some of the videos clearly cross the line into the proscribed territory of propaganda, and the Government Accountability Office says at least two were illegally distributed.
I wonder how much Hitler spent on his propaganda machine?
And then there’s the propaganda aimed at keeping the white boys off the front lines:
“The U.S. Army is adjusting its marketing pitch to minorities as the war in Iraq hurts recruiting efforts among Hispanics and, especially, African-Americans,” reports Advertising Age. Leo Burnett is the Army’s lead marketing agency, with Cartel Creativo doing Hispanic, and Muse Cordero Chen & Partners and Vital Marketing Group doing African-American, outreach. The Army will “maintain a minority presence in general-market advertising, craft minority-specific messages,” and “focus Spanish-language messages at parents and ‘influencers.'” Political science professor Peter Feaver expressed skepticism, saying, “If the problem is Iraq, there’s not much in the short run that the Army recruiters can do.”
“Outreach” in this case is just another word for propaganda.
Wal-Mart’s television commercials are propagandizing really hard to off-set what everyone knows is really going on — that women employees are concentrated in lower-paying jobs, are paid less than men on the same job, and are less likely than men to advance to management positions? These gender patterns persist even though overall women have more seniority, lower turn over rates, and higher performance ratings in most Wal-Mart positions than their male counterparts.
And that’s just Wal-Mart’s Little Picture. In the Big Picture:
The giant retailer’s low prices often come with a high cost. Wal-Mart’s relentless pressure can crush the companies it does business with and force them to send jobs overseas. Are we shopping our way straight to the unemployment line?
Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible prices to its customers. At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don’t change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.
“You won’t hear anything negative from most people,” says Paul Kelly, founder of Silvermine Consulting Group, a company that helps businesses work more effectively with retailers. “It would be committing suicide. If Wal-Mart takes something the wrong way, it’s like Saddam Hussein. You just don’t want to piss them off.”
It’s a killer American capitalist success story. Read it and weep.
And then start paying a lot closer attention to how we’re all being hoodwinked every time we turn around.
Especially watch how Dumbya tries to hoodwink us into believing that he’s not making every effort to undermine Constitutional checks and balances. Watch as Senator Harry Reid fights the good fight, pointing out the fallacies and dangers of the Republican effort …to use extraordinary parliamentary tactics allowing the Republican majority to rubberstamp the handful of nominees already rejected and all future Bush nominees.
Keep an eye on that effort of Bush to do still another endrun around the law of this land.
And as Factcheck.org so clearly reminds us, Bush’s propaganda machine is still churning out lies about Social Security:
In a new TV ad, Progress for America exaggerates the true state of Social Security’s finances by comparing it to the Titanic. The ad claims the system will go “bankrupt” if nothing is done and that we must rescue the program “before it hits the iceberg.” Actually, neutral experts predict the system can pay between 70 and 80 percent of currently scheduled benefits even if the Trust Fund is exhausted, which isn’t predicted to happen for another 37 years, at least.
The ad also touts Bush’s plan for “voluntary personal retirement accounts” as though that would improve the system’s finances. But even the White House now acknowledges that individual accounts alone do nothing to fix the system’s long-term financial shortfall.
I’m not sure how we Americans can keep ourselves from being hoodwinked over and over again by all of those working so hard to turn this country into something it was never meant to be so that they can reap one kind of out-of-whack profit or another.
Checking these non-partisan sites can help us to keep our eyes open:
www.factcheck.org
www.prwatch.org/spin
and also www.truthout.org
It’s that price of freedom, right?

Today I mailed out some poems to a university poetry contest for poets over 50. I’ve been procrastinating for a month, trying to decide if I should do it or not. The deadline is March 15, so if I was going to do it, they had to go in the mail today. Maybe mailing them on my birthday will bring me luck.
Then there’s the other side of the coin.
I haven’t been lucky with some of my weblogger friends who have tried to leave comments on my weblog but are blocked. b!X says that I seem to have blacklisted anything that comes from blogspot.com. I probably wreaked a lot more havoc with my blacklisting than that; he’s trying to figure it out. Bleh.
And I left my mom home to made a quick run over the the little post office in the mall so that I could mail in the poetry by Priority Mail. Mall customers are not supposed to use the post office parking spaces, but it was snowing, so of course people did (the post office was almost empty but the parking spaces were full up) so I kind of created an extra space next to the last car and was in and out in just about five minutes. Of course, the security patrol left a warning sticker on my car. That pissed me off, so I just mailed the Security Office a pissed off letter, the warning sticker, and my receipt from the post office. It probably won’t do any good, but it made me feel better.
What really made me feel better was a message on my phone left by my 2.5 years old granson while I was out. “Happy Birthday, Grammy,” squealed his little-boy voice. “I love you.”
And then I got a call from a friend whom I’ve known for 40 years. Our paths cross periodically. She didn’t know it was my birthday and called just to check in. We’re going to see “Aviator” tomorrow and catch some dinner. She reminded me of how, twenty years ago, it was I who called around and rounded people up to go out and party. So much of who I am has faded into the past. At least for now. And at least for now I have friends who continue to return my past favors.
And I made myself a chocolate cream pie with Oreo cookie crust.
The good always seems to more than balance the bad.

65.
I’ve got my Medicare card, but it still doesn’t seem possible. How could I be that old? I watch some middle-aged couple demonstrating basic ballroom steps on my public TV station and think how much I loved dancing and how much I’d like to get back into that someday.
Someday? How many days for ballroom dancing do I think I have left? And first, I’d have to drop the 20 pounds I put on over the past three years of taking care of my mother and turning to tasty food as my one consistent sensual comfort.
I went out yesterday and had lunch with a couple whom I’ve known snce college, but, as my mom continues to slip away, I’ll have even fewer opportunities than I have now to indulge is freedom and comfort. I have to believe, however, that I will have another life to create for myself when she’s no longer around. She’s already 89. Chances are that I’ll live to at least that age. Hell, Chita Rivera is in her seventies and still going strong on the dance floor. Well, I’d still have to lose at least those 20 extra pounds.
On every birthday since I started blogging in 2002,I’ve posted a photo of myself. I started blogging about the same time my mother began to become more dependent on me. She changed. I changed.

So, I was born on March 11, 1940 at 3:42 a.m. My early birthdays were big parties with lots of friends and relatives. We were a part of a large extended family. Yesterday, my mother unearthed this photo from my seventh birthday:

There will be no party for me today. I’ll take my 92 year old neighbor on our usual Friday grocery run. Maybe I’ll rent a video. Pick up some kind of special dessert.

The comment left on the previous post deserves being here up front:
One thing I’ve noticed even about generally positive TV reports on blogging is that they end right when the subject gets juicy and interesting.
Last night’s Nightline came to a close with the hanging and open question about, in essence, the editorial process — in part inspired by the legislator from Virginia complaining about not having the blogger’s story “run by him” first.
To me, that’s precisely the point at which the meaty discussion happens, and we need to get into the whole issue of blogs “outing” the editorial discussion that normally happens prior to a story’s publication in traditional media, and conducting that discussion out in the open as the story evolves.
When I worked as an “Editorial Associate” at the New York State Legislature (I’m talking 30 years ago), legislative staff made a point of befriending reporters who covered that beat. On the positive side, we wanted the reporters to make sure that they had the facts, had right information when they wrote about proposed legislation. We wanted to make sure that they understood the intent and the planned outcome. On the dark side, of course, hopes were that the reporters would not print something that the legislators did not want printed.
The legislator who appeared on Nightline seemed pretty put-out by the fact that, while reporters always run their stories by him before submitting them for publication, the blogger who stirred up opposition to his one piece of legislation didn’t do that. Well, yeaahhh!
Power players usually understand that one hand washes the other. “You keep this information off your newspaper’s pages, and I’ll give you other inside information that you can use.”
Independent bloggers don’t need to accept those kinds of understandings. Independent bloggers can have the freedom to do what other news media should also do, but all too often don’t — dig out and stir up the actual truth. In complex issues, it’s often a matter of “truths” — examining them, analyzing them, comparing them. And then bloggers have the freedom to add their own conclusions, their own opinions.
Nightline only began to approach that difference between mainstream media journalists and blogger journalists. And it’s an issue that makes all the difference in the world of reporting.

It was great to see some of the people that I met at the first BloggerCon (Jim Moore — for whom my daughter worked when he still had his GeoPartners company –, David Weinberger — who, I notice, has kept me on his blogroll) still there in the middle of things at the Berkman. I think that last night’s Nightline program demonstrated just how difficult it is to capture — in such a short time — the vast potential of blogging for the individual and for the culture. The one point that did get through, however, is what a potent force it is to help an individual make a difference, especially when it comes to government, where individuals seem to have so little power.
I can’t seem to find, online, information about the former teacher/current blogger who was profiled on Nightline regarding her succesful effort to keep a bill from going forward in her state’s legislature. She and b!X are good examples of how one person can affect the workings of government.
Bloggers like those two have done a good job of proving their credibility as reporters/journalists as well as activists by doing the research, making sure both their reporting and linking are accurate.
While there’s still a lot of discussion going on about ethics and blogging, it seems pretty obvious to me that the cream rises to the top. Those blogger/journalists who infuse their personal ethics into their reporting will gain respect and readership. The others will fall by the wayside.
Bloggers as journalists are in the media spotlight these days because their writing can have broad and deep public influence. Bloggers as diarists, like me, are a mixed bag and we don’t have much influence. But we do have fun being on the fringes of this cultural and technological phenomenon.
If I lived closer, still had my young-years’ energy, I would be right there on Thursdays at the Berkman Center. Meanwhile, I watch from a distance and keep blogging.

One Democratic image maker admiringly predicts that our two most relentless blondes will outlast everyone: “When the world ends, there will be left only a few cockroaches, Cher, Hillary and Martha.”
So ends Maureen Dowd’s column “Alpha Gals Can Prosper as Victims” in my local newspaper today, a column that begins with:
Every culture has its own way of tamping down female power, be it sexual, political or financial. Americans like to see women who wear the pants be beaten up and humiliated. Afterward, in a gratifying redemption ritual, people like to see the battered women rewarded.
Unless, of course, you’re a version of Condi Rice, who, Dowd suggests
does not need to play the victim to make people feel better about her power because she was never seen as a termagant, pushing people around and bending them to her will. She always seemed subservient to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, a willing handmaiden and spokesman for their bellicose bidding.
When men fall from grace, it’s almost impossible for them to regain any kind of stature (except if you’re someone like Rush Limbaugh with a neo-conservative base that’s expert in denial, or if you’re one of the good ‘ol boys and your buddies keep you afloat in the background). When women fall from grace, it’s a different story — as Dowd goes on to explain:
Obviously, many men are uncomfortable with successful women, so when these women are brushed back, alpha men can take comfort in knowing alphettes are not threateningly all-powerful and they had better soften those sharp edges.
The double standard is alive and unwell.

Sitting Saturday with an 18 pound cat holding onto my lap for dear life while I watch “Sylvia” on my computer screen because the DVD player that’s part of my TV doesn’t work.
“Poets are Shamans,” he says to woo her. “What are rituals and incantations but poetry.” How could she resist?
Without the seratonin uptake inhibitors, would I have been another Sylvia? With them, would she have been another me?
I remember the darkness and lying, exhausted, across my unmade bed while my daughter and son worried and did what they had to.
There is a power in that darkness. Words crawl around like snakes slowly curving themselves into dark meanings. The trick is not to fall into the pit.
I am no Lady Lazarus. I am no Sylvia.
I am, however, fond of snakes.

A Kentucky high school student who wrote a story about Zombies invading a high school has been arrested and jailed.
Winchester police say William Poole, 18, was taken into custody Tuesday morning. Investigators say they discovered materials at Poole’s home that outline possible acts of violence aimed at students, teachers, and police.
Poole told LEX 18 that the whole incident is a big misunderstanding. He claims that what his grandparents found in his journal and turned into police was a short story he wrote for English class.
“My story is based on fiction,” said Poole, who faces a second-degree felony terrorist threatening charge. “It’s a fake story. I made it up. I’ve been working on one of my short stories, (and) the short story they found was about zombies. Yes, it did say a high school. It was about a high school over ran by zombies.”
Some reports say that he didn’t mention “zombies” in the story that his grandparents unearthed from his journal.
Thanks to the tenor of the times established by the Bushites (who perpetrated the WMD PR fiasco)and the pressures of their fear-inspiring Patriot Act, some Americans no longer can distinguish between fact and fiction, between creative writing and terrorism.
Grandparents turning in grandchildren! Don’t they talk to each other??!! Oh wait, it’s Kentucky — a really RED state, where they blindly follow the country’s blind leader and don’t hesitate to Rush to judgment
I guess none of the adults in Kentucky have every watched Buffy.

Here’s a little brain teaser for all you smart and literate people out there. (I know the answer because I cheated.)
Last year, a man went on vacation to Key West. He spent most of his time either sport fishing on the high seas or carousing on Duval Street. A friend of his prefered a very different kind of vacation. He liked hiking and camping and using stone-age toilet facilities. So he spent most of his vacation in the woods in California and the Pacific Northwest.
When both men returned from their trips, they compared notes. The first man explained that on his vacation he saw something that, when written down, has all five vowels, and the vowels make up five of the seven letters in the word. ( A-E-I-O-and-U were all in the same word) In fact, he saw not just one, but a few of these things.
His friend replied: “When I got to Key West, I also saw something that when written down has all five vowels in its seven letters. In fact, I saw quite a few of these as well.”
Each man wrote down his seven-letter word, and then they exchanged papers. Both men had written down the same word. But what they saw were very different things.
What did each man see?