A Belated Valentine's Day Message

I wish you all a belated Happy Valentine's Day! I hope that your February 14th was as full of love and as sweet as ours was. We had flowers, music, a special dinner, chocolates, and spent an enjoyable evening here, at home, in our wee canyon cottage.

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The photo above is of my 40-year-old solid brass peace sign. I posted an almost identical photo last year on Valentine's Day. I used these two symbols together because the heart and the peace sign are natural allies. This peace sign and I have been working for years to end America's culture of war. My peace necklace has always inspired me and I have been able to keep on keeping on because my heart is in what I do. Yep, I got "heart".

Its like the song says, "You gotta have heart!" America lost "heart" a long time ago. A century of ever rising militarism and seven years of Bush extremism plus an unnecessary war have drained the economy. Americans have been left without jobs, homes, medical care, and many of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

Yesterday there was another mass shooting. Shootings at schools, shootings at colleges, shootings in homes, shootings in malls - shootings have become common, weekly events. Think of the ever spreading epidemic of mass shootings in America as symptomatic of a society addicted to violence and war. A nation that has "heart" does not seek solutions that depend solely on guns and bombs.

A nation that has "heart" does not neglect its elderly, its mentally ill, its homeless, its hungry, its children, or its wounded soldiers. Nor does it betray its working citizens by outsourcing their jobs overseas. A nation that has "heart" does not waste the money provided by taxing its citizens to support endless wars that destroy other nations. A nation that has heart, like a family that has heart, like a person who has heart, takes care of people and extends a weaponless hand to its neighbors. A nation that has "heart" engenders mutual trust and friendship with other nations.

"You gotta have heart". Tune out the heartless drummers pounding their drums of war and listen instead to the rhythm of life that beats within your heart. Yep, "You gotta have heart...All you really need is heart!"

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Years ago when I met my husband he asked me to sing harmony with him. Later on that evening, I found myself on the stage at the La Paloma Theater in Encinitas, CA singing harmony on "Dark as a Dungeon". We were married soon after.

One of my favorite albums of all time is Spirit, the 1968 debut album by Spirit. It is timeless and a joy every time I listen to it (I have it on CD now). Anybody else out there into Spirit?


Several days before Valentine's Day, I was looking up Spirit for my daughter when I stumbled across a website page with their available albums. That's where I found the perfect album for a Valentine's gift for my ukulele playing, guitar playing, singing spouse. So I clicked on the pictured "Spirit Live at The La Paloma" and ordered it from CD Baby. If we had known that Spirit was playing a gig at the La Paloma back in 1993 we would have been there!


Anyway, it was kind of a past revisited full circle connection kind of a gift - he liked it! And I love the garden gnome couple on the bench and the garden gnome giving a heart to his love that he got for me. We will find special places for them in our yard and garden.

We have quite a few garden gnomes - they have "heart".
...................Kitchen Window Woman................................

Hillary Doesn't Get It - WAR IS A WOMEN'S ISSUE

WAR IS A WOMEN'S ISSUE. War is the number one women's issue world wide. Women and children comprise 80% of the collateral damage that results from the wars that are being waged daily all over the world. Women and their children are victims of bombs, bullets, rape and other forms of sexual violence, psychological trauma, starvation, displacement, and the damaging effects of DU-depleted uranium, the radioactive poison which is used extensively by the United States to coat its bullets, missiles and bombs.

WAR IS A WOMEN'S ISSUE. There are very few women in the world who do not suffer from the cycle of endless wars. Directly or indirectly, the fallout of armed conflict impacts or alters the lives women in every country. War is akin to the domestic violence that destroys families from the inside out. It destroys from the outside in. Just as women have worked feverishly to break the cycle of domestic violence, they must now work with equal determination to break the cycle of war.

WAR IS THE WOMAN'S ISSUE THAT HILLARY CLINTON DOESN'T GET. The woman who wants to be America's first female president has consistently supported the use of force and the continued funding, development, and use of some of the most cruel and destructive conventional weapons used in modern warfare. DU, cluster bombs, and land mines have been in the Clinton arsenal ever Bill was president, and remain there to this day, despite Hillary's sudden conversion to an "end-the-war now" candidate.

Since WAR IS A WOMEN'S ISSUE, let's look at Hillary Clinton's history as a pro-war HAWK. Most famously, back in March of 1999 when Senator Clinton was our nation's First Lady, she pressured her husband, the president, to bomb Yugoslavia. Military interventions soon became a habit for the co-presidential couple. Along with Yugoslavia, the Clintons involved US forces in the affairs of Afghanistan, Columbia, Haiti, Iraq, Somalia, the Sudan, and Iraq.


Weapons laced with Depleted Uranium were used in Kosovo and are still in use in Afghanistan and Iraq leaving all three countries contaminated with radioactive poison. Military service members and civilians have been in constant contact with the highly toxic dust. Despite an epidemic of cancers and severe birth defects in newborns, the American and British militaries continue to use DU in their various wars. Depleted Uranium has a half life of 4.5 billion years which makes it a forever killer and an invisible form of genocide.


Senator Clinton was finally forced by sick veterans to call for medical tests for our soldiers who have been exposed to DU (many vets are still waiting for testing) however, the Senator has done nothing to STOP the use of DEPLETED URANIUM, America's WMD of choice.


Senator Clinton also voted against a ban on cluster bombs and munitions. Think of a cluster bomb as a pregnant shell that delivers a litter of tiny grenades over a large area. Cluster bomblets scatter everywhere - gardens, roof tops, school yards, farm fields, markets, and under cars. It doesn't matter if the duds don't explode right away. They often remain hidden for years before being detonated by an unsuspecting civilian. Cluster explosives are very effective weapons of terror when used against civilian populations. Women and children are the primary victims. Senator Barack Obama gets it - WAR IS A WOMEN'S ISSUE. He voted in favor of the ban.

Hillary voted with the pack on October 11th, 2002 not once, but twice. First she voted against the "Multilateral Use of Force Authorization" put forth by Michigan's Democratic Senator, Carl Levin, and then she voted with the neoconservatives for the Iraq War Resolution which authorized "the decider" to start an illegal war. Hillary Clinton voted as an ambitious politician, not as woman who respects, and values the lives of others. "If I knew than what I know now" is one hell of an unacceptable excuse in the face of the massive suffering that has been caused by the illegal war against Iraq. Lately, she's been re-writing history by twisting the truth about the Iraq War Amendment.

WAR IS A WOMAN'S ISSUE but the corporateers who make up America's Military Industrial Security Complex view WAR AS A MONEY ISSUE, and so does Hillary Clinton. Is it any wonder that the weapons industry has turned away from Republican candidates to offer large sums of money to Democratic pro-war honey, Hillary? Sadly, she took blood money contributions from Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup-Grumman, General Dynamics, and Raytheon while the taxpayers continue to pay $720 million dollars a day to poison a country and kill people.

WAR IS A WOMAN'S ISSUE. Echoing George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton threatened, "Every nation has to either be with us, or against us. Those who harbor terrorists, or who finance them, are going to pay a price." She, like the current "war president", is a deliverer of ultimatums - negotiations are off the table She likes nukes, too! War brings suffering and death. Hillary just doesn't get it! War is the Anti-life.


WAR IS A WOMEN'S ISSUE because in large numbers we are the ones whose hearts break, whose family members are killed or maimed, whose homes and fields are destroyed, and whose lives are lost all due to the violent actions of others. Women bring life into the world. We are the keepers of the hearth. We love. We are nurturers. We grow children. We teach our children to respect one another, to problem solve, and to negotiate. We do not teach them to steal. We do not teach them to kill. We do not invent ways to kill other people.

Women need change. Women want change. Many women are working to make that change happen by ending militarism and the cycle of war that goes with it. It is up to us to select leaders who take into account the lives and interests of women everywhere. BARACK OBAMA GETS IT! He has worked toward change. He voted against the war that has preemptively ended over one million lives. I will cast my vote for Obama.

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*Note - I haven't slept well since George W. Bush was appointed president. I have dreaded every day during his two terms for each dawn brought more destruction and less freedom. I will not rest with Hillary in the White house. I do not trust her. She will go to war.

The time to "tear up"( if that is a ploy one uses) is before the bombs are dropped.
.......Hell No Hillary !........
...Kitchen Window Woman...