In a 5-to-4 decision announ-ced Wednesday, the high court upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. The move comes nearly seven years after the Supreme Court declared a similar Nebraska law unconstitutional because it lacked an exception to protect a woman’s health.
On Larry King Live tonight, ex-pres Bill Clinton offered some excellent observations on the issue and recalled his vetoing the same bill for good reasons. The following is verbatim from the interview transcript:

The Fundies continue to impose their will on the rest of us, moving us closer and closer to a theocracy. All we can hope is that whoever is elected our next president will insist on following the intent of our Constitutional Democracy.

….there are valleys. And often there’s also a river.
There’s one bridge across the Wallkill River that I can cross to get into town. The road to that bridge is still closed because of flooding. Of course, it’s nowhere near as bad as other parts of New York State..
This is the first week since I started that I won’t have done my three weekly sessions at Curves. And I needed to get to Rite Aid to pick up a prescription. So,, today I decided to drive all around in a circle to get to a bridge that was not closed and take care of all of those things. I put more than 40 milies on my car for a trip that usually is less than ten.
I shouldn’t complain. There’s a definite advantage to living on higher ground.
There are also advantages to living on a higher plain; unfortunately, our current government leaders have no idea where that is.
As I continue to find out about Cho, his background, and his frustrations, I can only believe that there are more balancing-on-the-edge young people out there in this counry. After all:

….the social gap in America has widened in the past decade. By 2005 the top one-tenth of 1 percent of the US population earned nearly as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Those 300,000 wealthy individuals each received 440 times as much income as the average person in the poorest half of the population, nearly doubling the divide from 1980. The rich lord it over everyone else, piling up fortunes that come directly at the expense of wide layers of working people. Society is divided starkly into “winners” and “losers.” For the latter, the future is bleak.
[snip]
More generally, the past twenty-five years have witnessed a sharp lurch to the right by the American political and media establishment, driven by its relative economic decline, and an accompanying coarsening and degeneration of the social atmosphere. Brutality in language and action is now the preferred policy of the powers that be.
The proliferation of violence, the continuous appeals to fear, the incitement of paranoia—all of this has consequences, it creates a certain type of climate. American society has for so long tried to cover up or ignore its most pressing problems. What are the official responses? Punishment first, then the invocation of the deity. The suppression of contradictions, however, doesn’t make them disappear.
The culture as a whole has suffered. Without giving any ground to the right-wing morality police, the prevalence of video games, popular music and films that celebrate rape and killing can hardly be taken as a sign of social well-being. Every effort has been made to atomize people, to render them callous and inured to the suffering of others. Human life has been devalued and often held in contempt.
Clearly, there have been consequences. The ability to kill one’s fellow students methodically in cold blood reveals a terrible level of social anomie. A doctor at Montgomery Regional Hospital, where the injured were treated, commented: “The injuries were amazing. This man was brutal. There wasn’t a shooting victim that didn’t have less than three bullet wounds in him.”

We need economic, social, and moral systems that operate on a higher plain.

He says they were in the wrong place at the wrong timeThe appearance of George W. Bush at the convocation held on the Virginia Tech campus Tuesday afternoon was especially inappropriate. Here is a man who embodies the worst in America, its wealthy and corrupt ruling elite. As governor of Texas, Bush presided over the executions of 152 human beings; as president, he has the blood of thousands of Americans, tens of thousands of Afghans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on his hands. His administration has made unrelenting violence the foundation of its global policies, justifying assassination, secret imprisonment and torture.

The rest of that piece from the San Francisco Bay Indie Media says it all and puts it all in painfully clear perspective.
For some reason today, I can’t help thinking about the parents of the young student who went on that bloody rampage. How do they reconcile the image of that angry, deluded , and troubled young man with their memories of the baby boy they rocked to sleep, the toddler whose hand they held walking down the street, the boy they hugged and held and loved and sent out into a world beset by violence?
I think about my grandson and the America in which he is growing up.
Today there were 6 car bombings in Baghdad; the latest numbers cite 160 killed, at least as many or more wounded.
It seems to me that Bush has purposely placed our American troops in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not a single tactic he’s proposed has come near to working, but it’s everyone else who’s wrong.

Yes, well, this weather is making us all a little squirrely, but this post is about actual squirrels.
I purposely bought bird feeders that are squirrel proof because any weight more than birds on the feeder closes down the food openings. One of the feeders hangs from a bracket right outside a window.
The squirrels figured out that if they scale the side of the house and crawl up the screen, they can get to the feeder. Of course, they couldn’t get to the seeds. With incredible ingenuity, at least one of them figured out that she had to keep her weight off the feeder in order to keep the food accesses open. (I really don’t know if it was a “she” but I’m choosing to call it that.) So, she hooked the claws of her back legs into the screen, held onto the bracket with one paw, and used the other to scrape out the seeds. When I tapped on the window to scare her, not only did she rip the screen, she peed on the window.
It wasn’t bad enough that the squirrels had eaten every budding bulb I planted last fall, but now one has torn the screen. Enough.
My brother has a “have-a-heart” trap, and, so far, he managed to trap four squirrels and take them to a field about three miles from us. To get back here, they’d have to go across several roads, around a small lake, and through some pretty thick woods.
Today, there was one squirrel climbing up the screen again. We don’t know if it was one of those he trapped or if there’s some kind of weird “hundredth monkey” squirrel thing going on.
Whatever it is, we are not giving up. I told my brother, the next time he catches one, take it to the other side of the mountain and let it loose there. Of course, the world is full of squirrels, and I’m sure others will take their places.
I have tried every spray on the market to keep those critters off my budding plants. Nothing seems to deter them.
Of course, there are deer around as well. Three of them were sauntering across our septic field just this afternoon. I bought some packs of coyote urine that’s supposed to keep them away from the garden. We’ll see.
I might have to accept the fact that, unless I invest in very expensive fencing, my garden will feed everyone but us all summer.

See, this is just one more reason why I love the Net, and why blogging keeps me going.
Andrea James of Runcible Spoon is a young woman I met (virtually), more than six years ago, when she lived in the U.S. and posted comments on my son’s original weblog (long since defunct). Now she lives in, and recently became a citizen of, Australia. She is also learning how to spin and dye wool.
Andrea knew that I’ve been contemplating a new http://www.freeformcrochet.com/ project, and I told her I would love to have some hand spun and died yarn to use as a main ingredient. And so she whipped up a skein for me and wrapped it in the label, the image of which is above.
You can see the color of the yarn on her site.
Of course, I can’t get going on any new project until I take care of the dozens of sprouting seedlings that are going to need a better home until this blustery Northeast weather calms down. Feh.

Sounds like a strange combination to me, but that’s how I tested.
I was doing a little blog hopping last night, and I wound up at Deep Thoughts, where there was a link to a test to determine what philosophy you follow. Here are my results:

You scored as Existentialism. Your life is guided by the concept of Existentialism: You choose the meaning and purpose of your life. “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.” –Jean-Paul Sartre “It is man’s natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.” –Blaise Pascal More info at Arocoun’s Wikipedia User Page… Existentialism 100% Hedonism 65% Kantianism 50% Justice (Fairness) 45% Utilitarianism 45% Strong Egoism 40% Nihilism 5% Divine Command 0% Apathy 0% What philosophy do you follow? (v1.03) created with QuizFarm.com

What really bothers me is that my sense of justice came out at 45%. Something’s wrong here. But then, again, it’s all relative.

Kurt Vonnegut has gone.
And, in Vonnegut’s honor, b!X posted the best quote of all from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater:

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

And speaking of having to be kind, not everyone is being unkind to unkind Imus. As I indicated in my previous post, there’s a lot more sexism and racism going on around us every day, both in words and deeds.
Personally, I have conflicting opinions about the Imus thing. I don’t think he should have been fired. Rather, he should have been put on probation so that he could figure out how to put his wit to work without using words that hurt. Maybe he would have served as a good example of how you don’t have to be cruel to be a successful satirist.

Imus is unplugged by MSNBC. I purposely have never listed to Imus. Or Howard Stern, for that matter. But the truth is, there is worse miscogeny out there in rap music and MTV and in any number of other venues that are based in a destructive culture.
Some bloggers are calling for “rules of conduct” for those who communicate publicy over the Internet. Since its inception, the Internet has been rife with wordy evidences of the worst of human nature. It also carries an awful lot of good stuff along its mind-boggling byways.
While it’s coincidental that these two media-shaking occurrences happened at the same time, it shouldn’t surprise anyone. There always have been those in the communications media, mainstream and otherwise, who have worked very hard to skirt both censorship and civility.
The challenge has always been to find that free speech place in the middle — to avoid the suppression that is censorship while also avoiding the repression that shadows civility.
That line, I believe, will always be a fine one.

ADDENDUM: As I post this, I begin watching Countdown, during which NBC President Steve Capus explained why they fired Imus. One point comes out that makes Imus’ “abominable” comments so bad. It’s one thing to satirize, criticize — even demonize — adults who are public and powerful figures involved in politics and other activities with which we disagree. It’s another to do those things to unknown young women struggling to get an education and win a basketball game.

It wasn’t funny. And yet it was. It reminded us of the old “Who’s on first?” bit that Abbot and Costello make famous.
She got a phone call from someone she knew back in her home town. It was Janey, calling to see how my mom was doing and to let us know that her husband had died. Their non-sequitur conversation ended with mom handing the phone back to my brother, who explained that my mom was feeling a little disoriented.
And then it began, with mom:

And that went on until my brother and I were laughing so hard that even my mother started giggling.
And so seem to more frequently go the conversations on this mountain — absurd comedy sketches that make you laugh so that you don’t cry.

That’s what my piles of seeded pots are asking as they begin to sprout under my hopeful tending.

I also have a little greenhouse set up next to that mass of pots. With all of the money I spent on seed starter mix, sphagnum moss, grow lights,seed starter pots, seeds, etc. etc., it would have been cheaper to wait and buy decent sized plants from the greenhouse down the road.
I seem always compelled to have new projects starting. That’s why my living space looks like it does right now, with various yarns and needles and fabrics and clothes-in-need-of-alteration scattered all over. And then, of course, there are those seedy things.
I’ve never been this bad, but I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I never have a sustained amount of time to really immerse myself in any one thing. I get these ideas that I begin to implement and then there’s my mom needing me.
These days, she has bouts of incoherence; bouts of ice cold hands, nose and feet; bouts of stubborness, of paranoia, of total despair. “I’m dying, I’m dying,” she pants. And then she has a bout of seeming just fine.
And I have bouts of despair as well. At least I’m getting out to exercise (even though, I have been told, Curves donates money to the Repubilican Party). The local Curves for Women place is close and do-able for me. OK. So, I’m compromising my integrity — or at least that what some might say. As far as I’m concerned, I’m just struggling to keep my sanity and my health.
And so I start projects. Like planting more seeds for more growing things than I will ever be able to replant outside. I’ve warned my daughter that in a month or so, I will arrive bearing budding gifts.
That is if there’s ever going to be another spring.