Promoted at http://www.a28.org/, a movement will officially begin on April 28 (and extend all summer) to support Kucinich’s efforts to impeach Cheney. From that site:

George Bush and Dick Cheney have lied the nation into a war of aggression, are spying in open violation of the law, and have sanctioned the use of torture. These are high crimes and misdemeanors that demand accountability. Since Congress doesn’t seem to get it, on April 28 Americans from Miami, Florida to North Pole, Alaska are going to spell it out for them: IMPEACH!

So, on April 28, tomorrow, people all over the country will be spelling out the word “IMPEACH” in some very creative ways.

It can be as small as writing IMPEACH on the sidewalk in chalk or as large as organizing 2,000 people on a beach to make a human mural. Be creative! Some of the ways that people are talking about spelling it out include: signs, gigantic lasers, toy soldiers, stencils, LED throwies, freewayblogging, banner drops, light projections, t-shirts, rocks, skydivers, skywriters, peaches, christmas lights, flags and balloons.

There are more than 100 actions and events planned across the country. Me? I’ll act right here.
Thanks to r@d@r at ex-liontamer for pointing me to the A28 site.

The most interesting thing for me about the Democratic debate among presidential contenders was how their personalities shaped their responses to the material.
It was obvious what strong and assertive personalities both Obama and Hillary are. They also are well-trained politicians, careful not to go too far over on one side or the other.
Gravel from Alaska, the gadfly, played a great counterpoint to the careful balance-beaming of the aforementioned two. He obviously is not a serious contender, but he spoke brazen truths that others are afraid to voice.
Biden, with his silver hair and elder-attractive features is a slick politician as well. He just looks so approachable, kindly, like someone’s educated and wordly grandfather. You kind of want to believe that he probably knows best.
I like Edwards, but I don’t think he came across as well as some of the others. And I got pretty tired of Richardson’s numbering every point he tried to make.
So, it was Kucinich who impressed me the most. He seemed the most human, the most humane, the most able to address the complexities of the various big pictures. I think he’d stand a better chance if he looked more like Biden.

I drink a lot of green tea, flavored and unflavored, caffeinated and non.
The following is from the side of my Celestrial Seasonings Honey Lemon Ginseng green tea box:

I used to have many moments like that when I was active and alive. At least I’m sure I did — doing a racy Salsa, putting the finishing touches on a poem, sitting on the porch of a vacation rental with my women friends. But these are things I don’t do anymore. That’s what full-time caregiving of a demanding, narcissistic parent does: robs you of the real you.
“Deeply and instensely active and alive.” I wonder if I will live long enough to be that again.
I did spend today planting flowers in between my mother’s calls for attention. Mother Earth vs earth mother. No wonder I no longer hear that voice inside me.

yes it has, although not one single robin. but the parking lot at the greenhouse was packed today, and the roadways were peppered with cute young guys in baseball caps and convertibles with the tops down. of course, my tree-pollinated sneezes have begun, and three more squirrels are eating what’s left of my budding bulbs. or maybe three of the ones we caught and let loose three miles down the road came back. it’s hard to tell. all those squirrels look alike. at least all of ours seem to.
“I wish I had a friend,” she said yesterday. Today she said, “I want to go to heaven.”
I try to sit and talk with her, as a friend would. But she can no longer carry on a conversation. Each of her sentences ends before she gets to the object of the verb.
I wish I could get sprung.

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.