pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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CREDIBILITY 101

295.

Pottergrrrl and I did not watch the Superbowl (although I would have cheered for Seattle if we had). Instead, we attended a wimmin�s gathering in which we formed a sacred circle and celebrated St. Brigit and our collective emergence from a dark winter into a season of new growth.

Our smudgesticks (thank you Pottergrrl) and poetry and candles lit in the four directions and laughter overflowed. I read a Mary Oliver poem when the decidedly decorative talking stick made its way into my hands and believe it was well-received. Considered sharing a round that my chorus performs at some pagan events too��The Earth is a woman and she will rise. We will live in her,� but chickened out at the last minute.

In between all our ceremonial hoo-ha, we ate really good food and drank really good wine and ate delicious, lavender-infused dark chocolate plus dark, dark chocolate with chilis and flipped on the game at halftime just long enough to dance all over the living room as we and Mick bemoaned the fact that we just can�t get no satisfaction.

I would have flipped my shirt open and exposed my breast at the end of the show myself, but Mick showed more restraint.

So yeah. Good energy abounded and the whole event reminded me of just how much I treasure women who have done their work and settled into who they are and are comfortable with themselves and aware of their power and not intimidated by mine or yours.

I did not get to see Tree this weekend even though she and Holly were also in the mountains. She had a lumpectomy and they removed two suspicious lymph nodes too and gawd do I hope the cancer hasn�t reached more nodes than those two.

This is so fucking unfair. I mean, I was living the rock-n-roll life-style when Tree and I got together in 1988 and am still staying up too late and eating bad-for-me-food more than I should eighteen years later while she has been exercising regularly and competing in triathlons and running marathons and being generally healthy all this time.

This is so unfair ... and I can�t write more than that right now because this news is just too overwhelming.

�

It seems incredibly vacuous to whine right now but nevertheless, here is my quote for the day: �We will not accept less than severing the heads of those responsible.� So said a preacher at Al Omari mosque because he and other extreme Islamitists consider it blasphemy to print the image of Muhammad and really consider it blasphemous to depict him wearing a bomb-shaped turban (extremists being so non-violent and all). I suppose they also believe that their religion gives them the right to kill anyone who sees the world differently or expresses their beliefs openly.

Maybe the cartoonist should use this priest�s comment and the actions of that homophobe in Boston who attacked three gay-bar patrons with his hatchet and revise his cartoon, shape Muhammad's turban into an axe.

It is nice to know that religious fanatics and tycoonists have not completely silenced dissent in the US though. For example, the Washington Post recently ran a cartoon that featured Dr. Rumsfeld writing �battle hardened� onto the medical chart of a quadruple-amputee soldier�s chart and promptly received protest letters from all six members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The administration is still throwing out barbs about the so-called liberal media too but hey, no comparison.

And here�s more hope. Bob Schieffer of CBS�s Face the Nation recently grilled former White House Chief Counsel Alberto Gonzales about notifying the White House about the Plamegate investigation after 5 PM one day, but waiting until the next morning to inform the White House that they had to �preserve all materials� relevant to an investigation (thus giving them time to destroy damning materials). Now �Scooter� Libby�s lawyers say that e-mails from Cheney�s office were deleted contrary to White House policy or, to use their spin (which is reversible. See? You can flip it over to the corduroy side and apply it to those electronic voting machines that registered Bush votes when voters chose Kerry): �The computer system at the White House is supposed to automatically archive emails sent by the president and his aides. For reasons that are still unclear, these emails�which may or may not be relevant to the Plame investigation�were not preserved� (from the NY Daily News). As the church lady says, how conveeeeeenient.

For reasons that are still unclear.... I mean gawddamn, how much clearer do they need to be?

And one Alternet writer accuses Gonzales of tipping the White House off 5 days earlier.

As Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson writes, �if there were justice in the world, George W. Bush would have to give his State of the Union address from Oprah�s couch.... Bush should have to face the wrathful, Old Testament Oprah who subjected author James Frey to that awful public smiting the other day.�

LISTENING TO: �Desperado� (the Eagles, not Ronstadt, version)

6:11 p.m. - 2006-02-07

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