cindy sheehan: person of the year

* i wonder what sort of garbage the radministration shovelled out on the friday b4 xmas...?

* today, my 8 year old nephew in the uk said to my mother "i dont want santa to come tomorrow, i want you to come" - if any of you have both mothers and children and are still looking for an xmas present for your mum, i suggest you somehow find a way to engineer the child to tell its grandmother that she is more important than santa on xmas eve.

* and a happy war-on-xmas to all of you, too. may your loved ones be safe and your bellies full.

* two of my brothers are coming to visit. yay.

* the weather here hasnt been very pleasant around the country. today i had hailstorms and its 100+ degree around most of the country. i wonder if the IDiots designed global warming, or if it is just blowback...

* i'm really really glad that im not participating in the sydney-to-hobart yacht race. i fear that you may see some dangerous / spectacular footage of the race on your tv screens next week.

* ive been thinking about whether i might do a year-end wrapup, for no reason. i probably wont get to it - but the story of the 'year' was undoubtedly the tsunami. i cant find it now, but the day after the tsunami, i took a photograph of the local headlines the next day. the main story was "Penguin murders, 2 charged" and the second story was "tsunami hits" or some such. (as it turns out, there is a place called Penguin and 2 people sliced another 2 people to bits with 87 slashes of a nasty knife. no penguins were actually harmed.)

* on a political note, things sure do seem a lot better than they did a year ago, dont they? 12 months ago there was only despair at the election results, tears reading sorryeverybody.com, fevered analysis of exit-polls, and the taunting, faint hope of conyers and boxer and the electoral challenge, and the magic-mushroom of democracy-dreamin in the ukraine with ice and orange everywhere. what a difference a year makes! there was still a lot of bad stuff that happened during the year - but i sure am a lot more optimistic tonight than i was at the dawn of 2005.

* i didnt really blog about cindy sheehan very much at the time but i did say at the time that it was a turning point, and i think that time will validate that position. good on her. she survived the swiftboating. she is brave and articulate with a disarming honesty that only a mother of a uselessly-dead soldier could have. i remember the campcrawford time quite well - the media was rabid and it had everything to do with blinky. cindy won, but it could have gone the other way. and its been downhill for blinky ever since.