Mark Twain's autobiography is finally getting published -- almost one hundred years to the day after he wrote it.  And from what I can tell after reading the book's advance reviews, Twain was also one hundred years ahead of his time, having apparently come back from the grave just in time to give us a much-needed warning about being wary of America's oligarchs and to nail today's corporatists for what they really are -- greedy bastards.  

     And I think that it was also Mark Twain who said, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco."

     Me and my daughter Ashley stopped by Arnieville the other night, where disabled people are camping out in protest of Governor Schwarzenegger's callous cuts to their home-care workers' salaries.

     Yesterday my two-year-old granddaughter Mena and I were completely at logger-heads.  She'd already stubbornly refused to make nice at the library, a restaurant and an olive-tasting party  -- and now she was refusing to take a bath.  Ah, two-year-olds.  I'm too old for this!  

     "But Jane," someone advised me, "she's obviously rebelling against you because she is bored.  She's tired of doing little-kid things and now she wants to do big-kid things."  I'll just bet that she does.  And what kind of big-kid things does she have in mind?  Declare wars, get drunk, pollute the air and/or lobby to corrupt our politicians?  

    "What that kid needs is to go to a pre-school."  Hey, you might be right.  So I trudged off to look at pre-schools for Mena.

Is Netroots Nation Taking On The Israel-Palestine Question? Er, Maybe...

One of the most untouchable issues in America today is the Israel-Palestine situation. Whenever I blog about this subject, I seem to lose friends — not to mention getting irate e-mails and death threats. No other issue in politics today seems to have such a third rail. But now things seem to actually finally be changing.

For instance, this is the first year that Netroots Nation has actually agreed to host an Israel-Palestine caucus, which I attended — being very interested to see who would show up and also what their positions would be. Would we have right-wing rabbis screaming at us about Hamas rocket attacks? Would we have sad-eyed Palestinians in black and white checkered scarves mourning a homeland that they could never return to? Would there be confrontations or what?

A friend recently asked me how I’ve handled the solitude of my long walk around Texas.  Like the land itself, my time alone has had a changing topography, and no single answer encompasses the whole of my experience.  Nonetheless, I shall attempt to do the question some kind of justice, if for no other reason than to honor those semi-quiet moments from dusk till dawn when our civilized world reduces itself to a modest hum and surrenders the floor to nature’s conversation.

Organizers today announced the formation of the North American Truth and Accountability Commission for Human Experimentation (NATAC). The Commission, nearly eight months in the making, was first proposed after a number of people had read the recently published book by H.P. Albarelli Jr., "A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments." Albarelli’s book details a number of shocking human experiments conducted during the Cold War years. Following a number of meetings in Los Angeles and New York City to discuss both past and on-going human experiments sponsored by the government, it was proposed that a formal commission be formed to further research government-sponsored human experimentation in the United States and Canada and to advocate for the demise of all such programs.