The Women Could Still
Save the World!

....Updated:

Saint Alexa (to any Pacific Wild Salmon)

Tuesday, May 17 - 8:00 AM

Yesterday I was feeling down at the mouth and frustrated thanks to the never ending deluge of disappointments we progressives have to deal with as elections at the least deliver surprising results everywhere or worse are outright stolen through skillful use of lies, voter suppression and sometimes outright (but unproven thanks to a suspect justice system) electoral fraud. Then thanks to a couple of posts, each written by a distaff member of the bloggosphere, I felt so rejuvenated that I hammered out a tribute to the girls/ladies/women/mothers/grandmothers etc. of blogging. In such a rush to express a feeling it was impossible to not give some of these herorines short shrift, but others were unfairly left out entirely. Therefore I'm going to revise this post to correct some of these failings, fully aware that I will still undoubtably neglect to give some the credit due and still leave out entirely some whose efforts I have appreciated so much at time. During this whole exercise I will constantly be so glad that it is the age of computers and not the days, which I remember well, when one had to re-type at least an entire page to insert a single sentence into a paragraph, if not even more.

I'm a guy, and I may have, in my pushing seven decades on this plane, even been confused from time to time about what that meant and what my relationship to my own or the other main gender actually should be. I also had a very difficult relationship with my own mother and paternal grandmother (this conflict was very related to each other, BTW). But the fact remains that I love women, I love how they look, I love how they feel and I ESPECIALLY love how they can make me feel at those moments when I am with the right woman at the right moment, which has been on occasion the same woman for many YEARS, sharing quality time. But as I get older I become more aware of the different perspective on the universe in general that the feminine part of our cohort seems to have - perhaps because of their more tangible link to the next generation which comes out of their body as fully formed little people as opposed to us men whose last connection to a child can and sometimes is a few drops of fluid left behind as the result of a pleasurable moment in time.

As the picture at the head of this post shows, I think Alex Morton is close to a Saint, and I imagine I'm in agreement with damn near every Pacific natural free salmon on that one. But what I want to discuss today is the lady, girl or woman bloggers who contribute so much of value to the bloggersphere, which daily seems to becoming our last hope and resort to our abandonment by the so-called MainStream Media.

BC Mary, the patron Saint of all things BC rail related and I actually more of less started blogging together. I already had a web site elsewhere to share my music and photographs and a bit of attitude. But it was her and my shared outrage at the Campbell Crime Family and the lies buried in the BC Rail scam that turned both of us into actual bloggers. Alex T, who I violently disagree with on many issues, but enjoy as a writer and on other issues we do agree, enrages me the most when he, inexplicably to me, attacks Mary from what I consider ill-considered and bogus premises. I can only conclude he feels she challenges his self proclaimed position as the leading advocate against the BC Rail travesty. AGT has done some magnificent work on the BC Rail file LATELY, but BC Mary has been slogging in the ditches of the railroad we used to own for years and years now and to dismiss her work as petty partisan sniping is foolish at best.

But it seems that many men seem challenged when women speak up and act like men and don't just maintain their "place" and take advantage of the feminine side. I see that magnified with a still younger (though mature) still attractive female blogger like our local Laila Yuile, or the American girls like Jane Hamsher, Empty Wheel (Marci Wheeler) or the ReddHedd that between them started the best progressive Blog in the failing nation to our south - FireDogLake (and I know about Arriana and Huffington Post, but that's a whole 'nuther issue).

Laila is one blogger that I definitely didn't give enough credit yesterday. She, still a young (compared to me, my oldest boy is about her age) mother with many kids and a living to make. She is a GENUINE single mom, compared to our own phony shark smile that passes for a premier and pretends to be a single mom, thus insulting real single mothers who face challenges that she has and never will even begin to understand. Many of these challenges faced by REAL single moms, as Laila so clearly points out, were actually even made worse by our Christy when last she was in government and terrorizing the Education and Children's ministries hand in hand with Gordo the Terrible.

I never fail to be amazed at how she, Laila, can feed, cloth and otherwise take care of her family and still find the time and energy to do the superb investigative work she often brings to her writing, much less then write so clearly and passionately. Laila also tends to foster excellent comment threads. Her most recent post (as of yesterday) was barely a paragraph, simply a silly quote from Christy Clark (not a difficult thing to find) and a sentence or two from Laila about what she thought about it. That wee post had almost forty comments from all over the spectrum right, left, sane and otherwise and she herself hops in when so inspired.

I'm not gonna provide links to any of the women I love and respect so much and mentioned above. This is because they are all linked to over there on the right, and anybody not smart enough to find and follow the links is too dumb to matter. However I will link to the TWO posts that started me thinking this way this morning when I was on the verge of giving up words and keyboards and either moving up to the mountains and trying to ignore society and be happy for whatever years I have, instead of getting my own rocket launcher and putting it to use.

Kim over at Sister Sage's Musings, saved me from total despair with her uplifting post "on being human. And Mary, stepped out from her role behind the scenes as the archivist of all things BC Rail with BC Rail: If privileged people do the stealing, does that make it OK for ordinary people to keep doing the losing out part?

One inspiring bloggeress that I completely forgot yesterday was Alison, of Creekside. Sometimes, like myself, she is apparently busy with off line life and no new posts appear. But when she does decide to post about issues she always manages to really help make up for the fact that we are so poorly served by what passes for a mainstream media, especially here in British Columbia where the biggest newsroom belongs to the Public Affairs Bureau and the rest of the dailies and TV/Radio outlets seem to be little more than outsourced contractors for the PABlum Brigade.

I can't wrap up this post, which will still be incomplete and leave out some that should be here, without mentioning two amazing grandmothers - Betty Krawczyk of Betty's Early Edition and Eloise Charet of WaterWalk. These two were almost left out of this post completely, partly because I don't really think of either of them as bloggers. I think of each of them first as activists, on the ground, on the barricade, in the jail cell for refusing to sign an undertaking, in other words spending more time trying to effect change in "meatspace" than at the keyboard.

However Betty does manage to keep up with her blog as well as her more coporal activities and when I went there this morning (to check on how to spell her name) I was amazed to discover serendipity in action as her last two excellent posts tie in to exactly what I am trying to write about yesterday and today. Please go over to her place and check out both her post from yesterday THE TIME HAS COME FOR A WOMEN'S PARTY and her post for Mother's Day this year MOTHER'S DAY WITH STEPHEN.

Eloise still has a website, but her blog was running on Google Blogger while being hosted at the local co-operative Internet Society in Nelson. Google, for still unexplained reasons to me,(but I suspect the desire to control OTHER PEOPLE'S data) ceased supporting such self hosted blogs using the Blogger software, so nowadays one just goes to http://eloisecharet.ca and the most recent news will be on the front page and her voluminous archives and even the now static WaterWalk blog are all still there as well. Many years ago when Eloise was young, almost in another life time, her and her sister went to Cambodia, during the time of the Killing Fields and at great personal risk rescued and brought to Canada a group of Cambodian orphans who are all adults in Canada today, with their own Canadian famiilies as far as I know. Eloise is currently finishing a book about this time and later this year will be returning to Cambodia to participate in the making of a documentary about those days when she and her sister fought governments on both sides of the planet to save a group of children orphaned by the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge and indirectly the US under Richard, my own personal enemy at one time, Nixon.

Harridans of the Right!

It ain't (and I'm using the venacular on purpose) like the right wing whackos or regressive wing don't have female agents too. But are they women, do they really even think like any kind of woman other than a Stepford Wife at the most "feminine" or seem more like a greedy man pig in drag like say Ann Coulter (with the adam's apple so huge I won't concede her gender without a below the waist examination) or our own Christy Clark the immaculate single mother with nothing behind the shark smile. Then there is the mentally constipated Michelle Malkin, about whom the less said the better. I can't leave this stomach churning subject without mentioning the hysterical Ezra Levant, who I will concede is officially a man, but certainly manages to exhibit many of the more unpleasant mannerisms often fairly or not attributed to women. Actually, most women that I have known are much braver as Ezra the hissy fit throwing one apparently won't publish any comments on his so-called blog that are less than fawning and simpering praise for his "wisdom." Anything less and you may as well type it on newsprint and throw it directly into the circular file sitting on the floor.

A commenter over at FireDogLake challenged us all to come up with better than the following for Sarah Palin.

Bible Spice
Caribou Barbie
The Quitter
The Grifter
Hockey Mom Madness
The Wasilla Whacko
The Real Mayberry Machiavelli

Although two of those, The Quitter and Hockey Mom Madness transfer to our own Crusty Cluck Cluck as if they were made for her, I am sure we could come up with a longer list for our own gal - she who should be an insult to women and "family values" everywhere. The only way to buy into her bullshit about family etc. is to ignore her record, as embarrassing as it may be. Her family values are only about her, screw everybody else and their children and the Supreme Court of Canada even told her that. Her anti-bullying pose is belied by her own record of bullying when she was in power before, and I am really offended by her reference to herself as a poor single mom. Real single moms don't have alimony or some kind of settlement from MILLIONAIRE ex-husbands, or multi-million dollar contracts with bullshit radio propaganda stations. Real single moms, rather than sending their single child to a PRIVATE school in Point Grey, wonder how to put their, perhaps more than one, child(ren) in clean decent clothes and provide a breakfast and a lunch EVERY MORNING. AND what they are gonna do about child care until they can get home from their newly raised to the Canadian, still lowest though recently raised, minimum wage in Canada job.

Women, I love ya, and I ain't trying to hustle anybody or curry any favor with you beautiful souls..........that's just the way I see it from here!