Today I saw the remarkable documentary film, "No End In Sight."  I left the theater in a state of near-despair.  The film goes into painful detail about the mismanagement of the Iraq invasion.  It boggles my mind that the whole endeavor, as misguided as it was in the first place, was allowed to get so badly out of hand.  The thought that these criminals are walking around free, with no threat of having to answer for what they have done, just kills me.  So, after the jump, please read the letter that I sent to several democratic campaigns.

When I was living in Texas, GWB's campaign worked very hard to keep people like me miles away from his royal highness.  I guess that was a good idea for them, because I don't know how well he would have handled the kind of heckle that I made at Rudy Giuliani on Friday.
Allow me to set the scene, and then follow me over the jump:
Imagine a bright Colorado Springs day. Two of my friends were flying in from New York City, and we decided to stop in town for breakfast at a restaurant downtown before driving on to my home.  I settled on a place called the Olive Branch, because they do stuff with potatoes and cheese.

Dear NY Times Magazine:
I remember clearly, the day in 1994, that I first understood the depth and strength of the Republican electoral wave.  At the time I was working in the circulation department of my college's library.  It was my job to check in magazines and journals, and to put them out on the shelves.  I was the person who put newspapers on sticks.  One of the perqs of this jobs was that I got first crack at all of the magazines that came through the library.  And I distinctly remember seeing your feature on America's Most Adorable Conservatives.

I have to say that I've had enough of the "Enough already" diaries.  At this point, they're just as tiresome as the BREAKING tag, or the reminders not to be such pottymouths.  DailyKos should be a site for creating a community and part of that is getting to know each other.

And I appreciate that we are all deeply motivated people here for a variety of reasons, some of them spiritual, some of them social, and if you're like me, you're here because you feel compelled to tap into a collective sense that deeply troubling events are shaking our worlds, and that together we can turn the tide.  We need to be familiar with each other, to be free to share ourselves, in our obscenity, our profanity, our humor and our abstractness.

That said, I would also like to say that I am completely freaking bored with the continuing "Why I am the religion I am" series.

I've never had a baby.  But I have had the wonderful privelege of having nieces and nephews, and of watching my colleagues and friends start families.  And although I might have kids of my own one day, I have to say that I don't envy mothers for much.  When and if I have kids, I am going into it with my eyes open.

There has been a lot of rhetoric and accusation on this board for the past week or so, surrounding the ethics and actualities of abortion.  What has disturbed me most about it is that it seems so little informed by a sense of what having a child really means.  For the right wing, a fetus is an individual, a tiny citizen who just happens to be leaching all life support from another human being.  If that human being fails to give up all sinful chemicals for a steady diet of folic acid, that person is guilty of inviting the evil eye onto separate, developing citizen.  Having watched other people rear infants, I have to say that this  model of separate people sharing one body is utterly simplistic, and undermined by the very nature of human pregnancy.

Now, I know that James Guckert is a person.  He strikes me as a venal, sad person, but he exists.  There are pictures, his whereabouts are documented, he's whimpered for Wolf Blitzer.  Existence demonstrated.
There has been some discussion whether Guckert's professional choices are relevant to our discussion of his role in this scandal.  And happily, we are beginning to delve further into "Jeff Gannon's" role in the takedown of Tom Daschle in South Dakota.
Which has me wondering, is there any indication that Guckert was ever in South Dakota?

Today was the second or third day of early voting, and I got there just as the lunch rush started.  I waited about 45 minutes to get through the door.  Standing in front of me was an elderly woman with her daughter, and they were having a cheerful conversation with everyone around them.  It turns out that the elderly woman was voting for the very first time, and she was voting for Kerry!  Out of the group of four of them, only one was voting for Bush.  In this heavily Hispano neighborhood (I voted at the H & R Block on north 4th, for those who care) this is an important if anecdotal bit of evidence-- New Mexico Hispanos enjoy being wooed, but we're hard to fool.  Look out, Mr. Rove. Anyway, just hearing her say "Makes you feel like an American, huh?" in that lovely North Valley accent made me mist up-- I voted today, and change begins now.
Tonight, I'll see Kerry at this rally thing, but I think that I've already reached my political peak for the season.

This is inspired by the earlier thread about the frustrations of loving and talking to family members who are pro-Bush and who will not hear a word against him.

I have known my brother-in-law since 1991.  We have never agreed about politics, and the last gift he gave me for Christmas was some P.J. O'Rourke screed about paving Alaska or something.  I find him intolerable, emotionally fragile in that way that if you don't bend over backwards for him he calls you humorless and sulks.  In his tiny life drama, he is Homer and I am Patty and/or Selma.  I spent the year he and my sister were dating praying for them to break up.

But he is the father of my nieces, and this week I am going to visit them.

I must admit, as one raised Catholic, that my knowledge of Islam is woefully inadequate.  Tonight, at a second night seder at a friend's house, I was fortunate enough to be seated next to a professor in out university who's work specializes in Sufi poetry.  Now, since we were well past the part of the evening where you drink wine, a lot of that conversation is now escaping me.  But the pith of what she told me is that Sufi poetry, through out the centuries, has blossomed in response to turmoil and war, and that Sufi scholars have always made poetry their means of commenting on the powerful and violent, and bringing war to its end.

I can't remember how to link to stories, I'm too upset.  Of course they waited until Friday afternoon to announce this, how typical, but Pickering has been given a recess appointment, and the SCOTUS has refused to block Texas redisticting while they consider it's legality.
these are the new headlines at the New York Times.

I feel despair.  I don't expect anyone to respond to this entry, and some slack jawed creep in search of a frontal lobe will probably giggle himself to sleep tonight over it.  But I needed to somehow put the anguish that I feel over these events out into the world, instead of letting them screech along as I try to get on with my day.  I feel despair.  They do what they want to do-- these barbarians define impunity.

So, would those of you who are biting each other's heads off over the Iowa Primary please get a clue and remember what is at stake here?  Please, do not kill the candidates, any of them with the death of a thousand cuts.  We'll need a candidate that is strong enought to win this thing when all is said and done. Please. Pretty please.  This is important.

An earlier diary (I forget the name, I am sorry) asked for references on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Would some one in the know who has read Sacco perhaps inform me if they consider it a good point of reference?

Someone mentioned in one of the threads that Bush pere might be suffering from retired executive syndrome.  This got me thinking, how would I use the international players in the recent conflict to cast Shakespeare's King Lear?
I'm no Shakespeare expert, so I can only really just get started, but here are some ideas that I had:
Lear: Poppy Bush
Regan: Tony Blair
Goneril: Dubya
Cordelia: Lots of options here.  Chirac might be perfect, though, seeing as Cordelia went to France for help.
Poor Tom:  Maybe Saddam? Or just an American reservist, who just wanted to pay for college?
The Fool: Osama bin Laden? Ronald Reagan? Brent Scowcroft? Pat Robertson? So many choices...

I know that this list is missing a couple of major characters (Edward or Edmund? I always forget Tom's real name).  If this really gets stuck in my head, I'll pull down the old Riverside and try to work out a complete list...