I am a patient advocate with Planned Parenthood. It is my job to calm a patient waiting for her abortion procedure, hold her hand, distract her, tell her to breathe during the procedure....whatever it takes to get through the most difficult 10 minutes of her life. If you are interested in what happens in a Planned Parenthood clinic, without the right wing spin, read my diary on the subject here.

More over the fold....

Why can't I get excited about this election?

I'm a dKos old-timer (UID: 8093). I signed on here during the Dean campaign. I was IN to that election...I couldn't leave it alone. I'd get into shouting matches with friends and relatives over the merits of Kerry over Bush. No dinner party went by without some spittle-flecked invective flying out of my mouth directed at one of the guests. I read every blog, newspaper and magazine for election news. I wanted to know every detail of what each candidate said and did. I fumed over every insane rant from Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, plotted in my imagination all the wonderful, horrible ways someone could off Karl Rove and his ilk. I posted regular diaries on dKos. My husband was so irritated with me and my obsession I swear he was inches away from leaving.

Are you catching the very public smackdown of David Brooks by Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert? This has been incredible reading. It started with Brooks column entitled "History and Calumny". Here's how Brooks steps into the fray:

Does abortion hurt women? Should women be protected from future regret for choosing to have an abortion?

This is the question anti-choice activists are asking in their new front in the battle to deny women the right to choose what to do with their own bodies. Writing in the majority for the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, Justice Anthony Kennedy provided sustenance to the anti-choice movement:

“While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained. Severe depression and loss of self esteem can follow.”

Much more on the flip (this one is long...)

If you have ever traveled in the Middle East, you'll immediately notice something unusual by our standards....many men hold hands in public. I have traveled to the Middle East a couple of times in the '90s and was struck by this practice at the time. I figured since it was considered shameful to touch a woman in public (even to shake her hand in greeting) the men fill the human need for contact with each other. The pictures of Bush holding hands with the Saudi king caused quite an uproar on the blogs but men holding hands in public is apparently a sign of friendship and respect in the Arab world.

Here is a handy-dandy video that explains the custom more fully. Incidentally, the shopkeepers in the souks of Damascus are delightful. We couldn't walk 10 yards without one of them stepping out and asking us to come inside for tea.

This has been your occasional dose of cultural information concerning countries we have bombed or will bomb in future. This has been a public service announcement. Please go about your day.

Update: Thanks for all your kind comments and interesting stories. I posted an abortion related diary 3 years ago that got more than 500 comments....it seems we just want a place to tell our own tale and talk to people who have had similar experiences. I'll post again on my time as a volunteer whenever something interesting happens. Though I wouldn't name names, some of the individuals I've met have been extraordinary. Their voices should be contributed to the reality-based conversation as well.

Have you ever wondered what happens once a woman arrives at the doctor’s office for an abortion? Here at DailyKos, we talk a lot about abortion. While the discussion often centers on the moral and emotional issues of the procedure, we don’t often talk about the nuts and bolts of the surgery itself.

I am a “patient advocate” with Planned Parenthood. I am a volunteer. It is my job to be the liaison between the patient and the medical staff. If the woman is having second thoughts about what she is planning to do, she would talk to me. I am also the chief hand-holder, pillow plumper and reminder that it is important to breathe during the procedure. I have witnessed hundred of abortions and talked to every woman before, during and after the procedure.

These are my observations:

Elizabeth Edwards is fighting the good fight and I'm sure we all admire her strength and courage. I know I do. My husbands first wife died of the disease after many hard years of struggle.

Not everyone wins the war however and there is an organization out there whose mission is to see that families get some quality time together before the end by granting wishes to families in need.

If you want to do something to help women and their families currently fighting breast cancer, this organization might be just your thing:

http://www.makingmemories.org/

More on the flip....

Here in the Northwest, the Kurdistan Regional Government has been running ads touting the success of the Kurds in Iraq. They even go so far as to offer the region as a tourist destination. Have a look at their website:

http://www.theotheriraq.com/

At the bottom of the page, there is one "thank you" video clip. My cynicism has gotten way out of hand recently but when I first saw this on TV, I immediately wondered if this wasn't set up as a Pentagon-run propaganda campaign to influence public opinion before the elections.

Aside from the manipulative advertising, there's lots going on in Kurdistan right now.

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Baghdad, Iraq- In a surprise move, President Bush snuck into Iraq on sock-clad tippy-toes, penny loafers in hand, for a photo op with the troops and an announcement for a new plan for Victory^TM. In a bold and decisive move, Bush announced that the lightly armored Humvee would be replaced with unicorns and that troops would in future fight the War on Terra^TM with oil-annointed magic swords, blessed by John Ashcroft.

I got an e-mail from my sister-in-law today with this little tidbit of information:

"I was on a job site yesterday and the bulldozer guy said he was being flown up to the Canadian border to work on a government project to enlarge the small airport of a very small town up there. It goes under the cover of homeland security and is costing 200 million to make a monster airstrip out of a tiny one. This is one of many on this border alone that our government is "renovating" so big bombers can get in place in case of an invasion. What a crock of shit and waste of our money. Someone should do a story on that so people can see what's happening in places they can't see."

Anyone in the border states heard anything about this? Is this just another giant boondogle so BushCo can shovel money to his friends and cronies or do you think the paranoid-in-chief is planning to attack or be attacked by CANADA? I can't imagine why multiple airstrips on the Canadian border adds some level of security that can't be achieved with airstrips already in the U.S.

Digby has a couple of posts up that make an obvious point....if abortion is murder and a woman has an illegal abortion, what is the penalty? Digby says it better than I:

"If fetuses are human and have the same rights as the women in whom they live, then a woman who has an abortion must logically be subject to the full force of the law. It would be a premeditated act of murder no different than if she hired a hit man to kill her five year old. The law will eventually be able to make no logical moral distinction. Is everybody ready for that?"

Whether you think this ports issue, and the subsequent outcry, is racist or not...the reality is that this is the PERCEPTION.  Likely, the first thought of many Americans was "We're selling off our ports to a bunch of ragheads???" ( Pejorative courtesy of Ann Coulter) In Bush world, perception is reality. Like it or not, the corporate constituency chose to make a business deal without regard for the people that put them in power.

I'm starting to wonder if the corporate Republican oligarchy may soon regret hanging their hats with the deep-rooted racist voters in this country.  This ports deal may be the catylist for a deep divide in the Republican Party.

For a country at war, we ("we" meaning the country as a whole) are not taking any cues from the greatest generation....those that lived during WWII.  

Think about it, we were involved in a full-on war against the Axis countries.  We were attacked on our own soil by the Japenese.  Hundreds of thousand of our young men volunteered to fight.  Many gave their lives for their country and their country responded by sacrificing their creature comforts in order to further the war effort.

The president of our country, the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt stated "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" and the citizens of this country confidently marched forward and gave of themselves for the war effort.  They planted victory gardens, lived on food and fuel rations, women left their homes and took the heavy-lifting jobs that their men would have done if they hadn't been off "fighting for our freedom".

More below.....

I'm one of those people with a Type "T" personality.  Sometimes I do things just for the forbidden thrill of it.  Rather than jumping out of airplanes or having sex in public, my Type T manifests as a desire to travel to places my government considers baaaaaad.

I traveled in Vietnam before the U.S. normalized relations (got in through Canada) and Cuba just because it seems so asinine to hold a grudge against a country for 40+ years. But the trips that might get me in trouble are those I took to Syria and Iran.

For years, we've been hearing that the Republican Party is the "Party of Ideas", the big thinkers, the power behind the strategery. So why is it that here on dKos we're not giving the Republican ideas on how to end the Iraq war successfully an airing?

More on the flip.....

Just a quick tip for those not near CNN....Wolfie is reporting that the conspiracy charges against DeLay have been thrown out but he will stand trial for money laundering.  

Those pictures of Dick Cheney holding hands with Tommy tonight should be priceless.

Sorry for the short diary but no one else is reporting this at the moment....

Every time I read letters to the editor from conservatives I just want to tear my hair out.  My latest LTE is long and they likely won't print it but hey, at least I feel better now.

Letter is below the fold...

Soon after the 2004 election, the brilliant Molly Ivins told us the story of how a Texan farmer cures a dog from killing chickens.  When a dog has a taste for chicken, he takes the recent kill and ties it around the dogs neck for a few days.  This cures the dog of its taste for chickens post haste.

She concluded the story with the idea that voting Republican is kind of like the dog killing chickens.  Sometimes, you just need to live with that vote for awhile, without interference, in order to destroy the taste for voting Republican.

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