A woman friend emailed me and asked me what my problem is with Hillary Clinton.
I spent almost 20 years trying to be a change agent in a government agency. What I learned was that, unless you learn the game, you can’t win. And once you learn the game, it’s hard not to get sucked into playing it the way it’s set up, the way the big money players set it up. Not your way. Their way.
Hillary Clinton knows how the politics game is played, and she has learned when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em in order to get some wins. There’s an advantage in that experience. And I would love to have a woman president of this country.
There is no doubt in my mind that Hillary Clinton can manage the machinations that underlie how this country is run. I believe that she can do a fine job as president. She knows how to work hard and make things work.
I also think that what this country needs is an inspirational leader. Barack Obama is a much better inspirational leader than Clinton. But I believe that he has not yet had enough experience with the Washington game, with knowing how and where to work hard to make things work.
That’s why I support John Edwards. I think that he is capable of inspirationally leading this country, and he is he has the experience to effectively manage the tough duties of the presidency.
Nevertheless, Gloria Steinem’s piece in the New York Times prompts me to think a little more about Clinton’s candidacy. Steinem says:
.

…So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what.

I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. That’s why Senators Clinton and Obama have to be careful not to let a healthy debate turn into the kind of hostility that the news media love. Both will need a coalition of outsiders to win a general election. The abolition and suffrage movements progressed when united and were damaged by division; we should remember that.

I’m supporting Senator Clinton because like Senator Obama she has community organizing experience, but she also has more years in the Senate, an unprecedented eight years of on-the-job training in the White House, no masculinity to prove, the potential to tap a huge reservoir of this country’s talent by her example, and now even the courage to break the no-tears rule. I’m not opposing Mr. Obama; if he’s the nominee, I’ll volunteer. Indeed, if you look at votes during their two-year overlap in the Senate, they were the same more than 90 percent of the time. Besides, to clean up the mess left by President Bush, we may need two terms of President Clinton and two of President Obama.

But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.

What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.

It would be great to have a woman president. It would be great to have an African American president.
But I still think that John Edwards would make a greater president than either of the other two.

1. My daughter finally launched her own weblog. Her brother, b!X is one of the very early bloggers, and I was close behind him. Now we are three. Hmm. “The family that blogs together….” (slogs together?)
2. My mom will be getting some oversight by a nurse and some physical therapy from a home care agency that takes Medicare. What I’ve discovered is that such agencies are authorized by Medicare to only give short-term care to deal with the results of specific illness or conditions. To get the whole home care support system for the long haul, one has to be on Medicaid, not Medicare. I’m not glad about that part.
3. David Letterman took the first leap of faith and had his production company enter into a contract that the members of the Writers Guild of America consider to be fair. Tom Cruise and his reconstituted United Artists are follow ing his lead. I would love to see all of those megamogul producers left out in left field.
4. It will be 60 degrees here today. At least that’s what the weather report is saying.
5. I didn’t lose the tooth that the crown fell off of. The dentist just cemented it back on, old root canal post and all.

The following post is by MYRLN, a non-blogger who is Kalilily Time’s guest writer every Monday.
IOWA…HUH?
This won’t be long since it basically consists of a question which has no apparent answer: Did Iowa win a lottery or something making it the most important state in the Union?
It needs to be asked since all media have been focusing our combined attentions on Iowa for what seems like forever, doing polls, interviews, debates — all because of the Iowa caucuses. Now, finally, the caucuses have been held and winners announced (sort of since 2nd and 3rd place finishers are like winners, too), and then…everybody went to New Hampshire. The caucuses amount to nothing more than a sort of public head count, but nothing is really decided. Nobody really knows who the voters of Iowa support since only those who could or bothered to attend a caucus at a specific, limited time and period of the day were counted (approximately a quarter of a million people). Anyone else had no input. And yet, everyone acts as if the State of Iowa decided something important. So again: Did Iowa win some kind of lobby making it the designated determiner of the presidential candidate leaders? Or is Iowa (along with the rest of us) drugged every 4 years into believing its caucuses actually decide something?
So maybe a more important question is this: why does everybody make a big deal out of Iowa, especially since there are another 49 states to go? In a way, it’s a lot like believing in say…well, Santa Claus?
*** ***
The only thing less interesting or informative than an alleged debate among potential Presidential candidates is a press conference with incumBENT Prezidon’t Dumbya.

Huckabee’s talking “vertical politics.”
“Vertical.” Now, that seems like a strange word to use if you’re talking (as he says he is) about discussing issues and sharing information about his position’s broadly.
“Vertical” means Situated at the vertex or highest point; directly overhead.
Hmm: “highest point.” Isn’t that, like, what/how/where fundamentalists think “god” is?
I’ll bet that Josh Marshall got it right., noting that
A few other readers suggest there’s some crypto-evangelical code wording going on with it too. And it seems like they’re definitely on to something here. Here’s one example, another and another.

BEWARE VERTICAL POLITICS
[and thanks to b!X for the tip}

The snow from the bird feeders right up the the back steps was trampled by lots of hoofs when I looked out the window this morning. I’ll bet the whole herd descended on the patch of yard where I throw out the bird food every morning. It’s sheltered on three sides. I wonder if they spent the night here. Oh how I wish I could have seen that.
Later:
It’s late at night. I hear a noise outside. I tip-toe to the kitchen window next to the switch for the outside floodlight. I pull up the blinds at the same time that I flip the switch.
Her face is right there in the window, looking right at me, blinded by the light, startled by my sudden appearance. She prances in place, not sure what to do.
I close the blinds and turn out the light.
Now I know.

they came again,
the wintering white tails —
a tableau of brown
in a wash of white

It is almost zero degrees tonight. Where do they go when it gets this cold?
Several times over the past couple of days, I startled the one young deer as she searched through the snow outside the kitchen window for what the birds left behind. She comes in late afternoon, when I’m starting to think about what to make for supper. I didn’t even know she was there until I saw her jerk back and look at me through the partially closed window blinds. She seems to be the only one of the small herd who ventures close to the house to look for food. Apparently, the others have better instincts.
I have discovered that it’s not good to feed the deer in winter.
I don’t feed the deer. I feed the birds. But if the food is there, they all go for it. So should I not feed the birds?
It’s a dilemma.
Meanwhile, the herd comes and goes across these few acres. I hope they have some shelter tonight.

So, I say to him (the sibling who is as unlike me as possible) imagine if, instead of spending money on all of these New Year’s Eve celebrations around the world, the money was put toward solving the problems of, say, world hunger and homelessness.
I should have known what his response would be, which was something like:
…what if they cut down spending for education and teachers’ salaries so that we wouldn’t be living under the threat of losing our homes if we don’t pay these outrageous school taxes…they don’t teach kids anything worthwhile anyway, just some history and lots of memorization.
First of all, I respond, that’s not all they teach kids these days. School is very different from when you went. Second of all, the kids in school today will be running this country in the future. They need to be educated so that they know what they’re doing. And kids from dysfunctional families who give their kids no guidance need that education even more so that they have alternatives to crime to support themselves. (My brother has no children and has not spent any meaningful time around any.)
Well, he says, his voice angry and belligerent, it would be a lot cheaper to give all kids computers and connect them to the internet and let them learn that way. And then they can dump all the teachers on whose salaries all of the money is wasted.
Um, I say (trying hard not to raise my voice and frighten my mother into a dementia episode) I guess you don’t know much about educational theory or practice. (I can feel my own anger rising, and I struggle to speak calmly and clearly.) Why don’t you go and spend some time in a classroom and find out what’s really going on….
He interrupts me with some additional harangue that I no longer have the patience to tolerate, so I leave quietly and go to my room, burdened by the fact that this kind of interaction is how we have spent the last two years and how we will, no doubt, spend the years until my mother’s death.
Over the past 48 hours, in an effort to keep my mother calm and functional, I have spent a more than 20 waking hours and about 20 of her sleeping hours at my mother’s beck and call. Included in my working hours was feeding her three times a day; giving her a shower; helping her in the bathroom (more times than I can count); holding her in my arms and dancing with her; setting out a week’s worth of her medications and making sure she took the right ones at the right times; and listening to her endless repetition of questions, the answers to which she won’t remember. Interspersed throughout those 48 hours was time when my brother sat with her, usually sitting in front of the television, sometimes on his laptop at the same time.
I purposely took over so much caregiving time over the past two days to demonstrate to him that it’s possible to keep her calm and relatively satisfied. But it’s a lot of work.
Apparently he doesn’t care. He’d rather harangue me. This year ends with the last conversation I’ll ever try to start with him.

The following post is by MYRLN, a non-blogger who is Kalilily Time’s guest writer every Monday.
COUNTING BACKWARDS FROM TEN TO NEGATIVE TERRITORY
So here we are, the last day of the year. My goodness, the LAST day of the YEAR? Yup, last DAY of the year — Idiots Day! Why Idiots? What else can you honestly call any day on which all sense, common or otherwise, is discarded in favor of total disregard for anything but deliberate madness? For counting backwards from 10? Spend only a few minutes to reflect on it, to let yourself picture the numbers of people worldwide who will participate in tonight’s madness — while calling it a celebration. A celebration of what? Of Idiocy, that’s what. Of a total, absolute waste of time, people, and materials.
Imagine instead, every last bit of this day’s energy and resources — human and otherwise — every iota of it expended toward some positive, worthwhile end. What might be achieved? For example, imagine if every smidgen of human energy were directed toward some need instead of wasted, if every penny expended on decorations, drinking, fireworks, confetti, security — all that plus a $10. donation by every single one of the hundreds and hundreds of millions of people who instead will tonight toss their cookies in a gutter (or whatever). What might we be able to achieve with such an effort of that caliber instead of idiot games? That one night’s effort alone could probably finance a total solution to an entire country’s problems.
But we won’t do that. Hell no. Idiots Day is too important. It accomplishes nothing. To which much of the human race is passionately devoted. Feh.
*** ***
Hopefully everyone took time Sunday night to watch “Jesus Camp” on A & E television to see how future warriors can be trained early to fight them Muslims. If the camp were a Muslim one, Homeland Security would’ve been all over it to arrest those involved.
*** ***
Another entry for the “Our Country” or “Get Yours Today” category. Might wanna sleep out in line to be first to get’em. A veterinarian in California is selling “Neuticles.” What are they? Prosthetic testicles. Why? To replace the missing ones of neutered dogs whose owners either miss the originals or feel guilty cuz their pets can’t deliver any more. And how could we know for sure they’d originate in California?

I blogged about it more than a year ago, with the title “fanatics by any other name are still fanatics.” The documentary film on the Jesus Camp is on A&E tonight at 10 p.m.
The documentary is about the “Kids on Fire” Ministry, which apparently has been closed down after much public protest. It has reopened as the Kids in Ministry International.
As I said in the post I made about this terrifying project last year:
Fanatics, whether religious or political (and they’re even more dangerous when they’re both) control their followers by only telling them what they want them to believe, leaving out all kinds of information that might shake their belief. That’s what indoctrination is, what brainwashing is.
And when you start the brainwashing when the individuals are young children — as the Jesuits supposedly say, “Give me the child before the age of seven, and I will give you the man” — you can easily mold fanatics in any way you want.
Are you scared yet? Hah. Watch this. And this.
And be afraid. Be very afraid.
______________________________________________________________________
NOTE: One or more of the links in the above are no longer valid.
However, go and read this piece about what was reported about British religious schools a few years ago. If that’s not brainwashing children, I don’t know what is.
And for contemporary twist on things, check out The GodMen and what ABC news showed about this movement’s efforts to make Christianity and Jesus’ legacy more “macho.”
Didn’t Robert Bly and his Iron John movement try this years ago?

Jim Culleny’s daily poetry email (see below) brought back the memory of my grandmother pouring the hot wax from a melted blessed candle, through strands of blessed straw, into a bowl of cold holy water and then placing the bowl under my toddler brother’s crib. The image that congealed when the wax hardened would tell my mother what was causing my brother’s nightmares.
In the morning, when we looked at the image, it was as close to the face of Mr. Bluster (of Howdy Doody fame} as a blob of hard wax could look. Sure enough, and strangely enough, my brother was afraid of the blustery Mr. Bluster.
That same grandmother saved my life, once, with her old wives’ ways, and I wrote a poem about that experience, which I blogged here.
And now, here’s the poem — actually Suzanne Vega lyrics — that prompted this post today:

_____________________________________________________
Which all makes me realize that there is another legacy left to me that I hope my daughter will want — the set of crystal cups, now probably more than a century old, that my grandmother used to save my little life.