It’s the sound of national Democrats salivating over our Senatorial race. Alaskan Democrats, meanwhile, stick their heads cautiously up from the foxholes and wonder if that light in the distance is truly the sun or a cruel trick being played on them.

There are jobs you do for money and there are jobs you do for love. It has been my luck in life to do more of the latter than the former.

There are times when I am working with kids in the state system that I wonder if I’ve stayed too long at the fair, if I should maybe consider retiring based on sheer fatigue caused by the realization that while I may win the occasional small battle or skirmish, the war will go on.
But whenever I’m feeling like I want to hang it all up, I think about other people I know in the field, people who go every day to a job where they are confronted by the kids we have so terribly failed that they are in jail before they are old enough to drink, drive or serve in the army. These are the people who work in juvenile corrections with some of the most challenging children in our state.
I had occasion to go to the McLaughlin Youth Center recently. It’s where we send our youth whose criminal behavior has already reached such an egregious state that they need to be kept separate from society. These are young men and women kept physically behind locked doors while counselors, therapists and clinicians try to unlock the closed doors they’ve erected around their mental and emotional spirit. The ultimate goal is to somehow reach them so that they do not graduate from kiddie jail to adult jail.
It’s a difficult, frustrating, sometimes unbearably sad place to enter every day. Statistics on adult inmates show that the overwhelming majority started their criminal career as teens and were never able to deviate from that course as they aged. Those same statistics also show that the overwhelming majority of adult inmates come from broken, dysfunctional homes where physical, emotional and mental abuse occurred on a daily basis. It is not a coincident that many of the kids at a place like McLaughlin began their state journey as children in need of aid through social services.
When my mother died, about 16 years after my father’s death, someone put their arms around me and whispered, “No matter how old you are, it sucks to become an orphan”.  Truer words have rarely been spoken.  Even at 50 years old, I felt lost and abandoned.
While I am sure there are children in places like McLaughlin with caring parents who did all they could to direct their child properly, those children are definitely the minority.
Most kids in juvenile correctional facilities are essentially orphans, whether or not they have living parents. Many of those parents – and I use that term loosely – were really little more than egg and sperm donors. Once the child was born, they used him or her to meet their own physical, mental and emotional needs in ways often too horrific to describe.  Their concept of parenting is based on the child meeting their needs, not vice versa. When these children reach the age of incarceration, they are usually broken and sad, with a sadness often expressed as rage.
Not that these kids could articulate that. The basic human longing to belong causes them to cling to the dysfunctional and harmful adults who conceived them long after it becomes glaringly evident that their “family” has done nothing but harm to them. Breaking the law in ways often violent and sometimes downright sadistic are the only venues some kids have for their anger, an anger usually directed at anyone other than the parents who created it.
So every day a group of dedicated and concerned adults walk into juvenile corrections facilities around this state and try to make a positive difference in a young person who has already known more pain and sorrow that most adults will know in their lifetime. These men and women go back to this every day, day after day, taking care of the victims of a social network that failed to put a net under them while their parents figuratively… and sadly, sometimes literally… screwed them up.
Society pays Lindsay Lohan a millions dollars for her tale of two weeks in jail. They should pay these counselors, probation officers and guards two million for the effort they put in to saving our throw away children.

In the primaries that occurred last week, Alaska Republicans voted for a Senate nominee who thinks we should basically end all government spending and a House nominee who is one of the kings of pork. Am I the only one who thinks that’s a little schizophrenic?

For the Oscars, I wear a tiara while sipping a smart cocktail.
For the Emmys, I wear a clean babushka while sipping sugar free juice.
And that’s the way it will remain until NCIS or CSI gets the recognition it deserves.

Today I bring Captain and CB for their favorite thing in the whole world… getting their beaks and nails trimmed. I will need to be careful the rest of the week so that they never get a chance to rip my face open as an expression of their great joy.

As far as I’m concerned, summer arrived at exactly the right time in Anchorage… after the hot weather and before the snow. I can walk without beating back mosquitoes, the sun is warm but the breeze is cool and the whole world seems big, alive, clear and clean. I watch birds getting ready for their trip south, geese practicing their take offs and landings, all our little brown birds storing food for winter, my Stellar Jays putting down impossible amounts of peanuts to stash all over the neighborhood… yep, this is definitely the way to do summer… and even as I finished those words, the rain and wind returned. Sigh.

Last year, it took me about two days to realize that the noise wasn’t the wind shaking the flue in the chimney. When I finally opened it, a bird fell into the towel I held in my hand below the flue. I put the silly little Stellar Jay outside, gave him some peanuts and a dish of water to wash off the dust while he regained his composure. He finally flew off looking fine.
So this year when I heard the noise, I knew exactly what it was. Only I forgot that I didn’t have the flue shut and, because the fireplace itself was dark and so is a Stellar Jay, when I opened the little screen to place the towel under the flue preparatory to opening it, a Stellar Jay immediately flew at me with some level of frantic purpose.
I fell over backward and hit my head, allowing the jay time to fly across my living room and up to the top of the closet door. My two parrots and cockatoo reacted as though Voldemort had entered their home. They screamed and ran frantically all over their cages while the Stellar Jay checked out the lay of the land from his lofty position.
Once I was on my feet again and my head stopped throbbing, I opened the sliding glass door to the porch. I recognized the jay as a regular visitor and figured he would recognize the porch and trees and fly to it. Only he didn’t. He just sat on the closet door.
So I got a towel and tried to grab him which led to a merry chase through my living room and kitchen with my dog Blue running around frantically at my feet and, since she’s pretty blind, tripping me up every other step. My birds continued to scream and the jay continued to circle the room in silence as though determined to ignore the open door and inviting porch until he’d seem everything he’d come to see. Then he flew straight out the door and perched in the tree for a moment before descending to the porch to get a drink of water from the dog dish out there. He completed his adventure by grabbing a peanut before heading home to tell the family about his day.
Meanwhile, I got left behind with two hysterical parrots, a cockatoo hiding in his little house and a nearly blind dog who clearly had no idea what had just happened except that suddenly his mom had started running around like a mad woman and if she went nuts, they who would be left to feed the dogs?
And then I went off to my public broadcasting board meeting and pretended I had a normal life.

Yesterday my kid sister Judy got older than I ever thought she would. And still she dreams of actually, someday when she’s all grown up, having an ass. Alas, the Sereni curse is to have none. So if you see this butt anywhere in Atlantic City or its environs today, will you please wish it a happy belated birthday.

The latest polls show that the majority of Americans think the war in Iraq was a failure. This should probably not come as much of a surprise to anyone. Once Bush and company stopped beating the drums of war and actually started one, even the most devoted partisans of his policy could not find the WMDs that were our supposed reason for being there. And despite some deliberate obfuscation by his administration, most Americans eventually came to realize that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and was, in fact, one of the most deliberately non-religious governments in the region.

None of the above is in any way a defense of Saddam Hussein, a man pretty much indefensible by any measure of humanity.  He was a horrible, sadistic, barely human being.  But so are a lot of leaders in this world, from the horror of some African dictators to the scary joke that is Kim Jong-il.
Most Americans eventually started questioning why Bush Junior was so hot to take out this particular dictator as opposed to any other.  Historians will be debating that question for a long time to come, from those who believe Junior did it to avenge a threat against his dad to those who think that oil and only oil was the real objective.
What isn’t debatable is that based on the decisions of some old men and women in Washington, a lot of our finest young men and women got sent to a war whose goal was barely comprehensible. But because these young warriors had made a pledge to their country to defend it to the best of their ability when ordered to do so, they went to war and offered all they could to make it successful, even as those old men and women back in DC were stumbling over themselves to define what success would actually look like.
Eventually, as the war went on and on and on, and our economy started tanking big time, the news of the war faded from the front pages of our papers. It was no longer the lead story. The war was replaced by news of Wall Street shenanigans and the fiscal mismanagement that would devastate the financial security of America’s middle and lower classes.
And now the war in Iraq is over. The last combat troops withdrew last week leaving behind only supposedly non-combatant military personnel. Our soldiers are coming home and their return barely rates a blip on our media screens. What began with shock and awe seemingly ends as quietly as a church mouse sneaking out of the vestry before services begin. We left with no clearer idea of why we were there or what we accomplished than we had seven years ago when we arrived.
But this is not the fault of our young men and women who went over there and did their duty with honor and integrity. They deserve better than to come home to dead silence.
In my mind’s eye I can’t help but see the scenes that followed the end of World War II – dancing in the streets, parades, that exuberant sailor sweeping a young lady into a passionate kiss on Broadway.  I don’t expect that level of enthusiasm for the ending of this war. But I do expect some level of enthusiasm for the return of our young men and women. I expect we owe them something, anything, to demonstrate that we honor their commitment to their country and the sacrifices they made.
Because let’s face it, the only reason your son or daughter didn’t go to Iraq was because someone else’s son or daughter volunteered to do so. We had no draft in this war because we had a military full of professional people proud to serve their nation.
So please allow me to say, with all humility at the ultimate sacrifice so many of our young people made in Iraq, with all compassion for those who return with wounds that will change their lives forever, and with joy for those who return seemingly intact, welcome home. We’re so very glad to have you back. And so very grateful for what you’ve done – even if we don’t remember to say it as often as we should.
Thank you.

If you read popular literature or follow popular culture, you definitely get the idea that every girl goes through a period of ripping wedding dress pictures out of magazines and fantasizing about what her wedding will be like while planning all the details in her teen years.  Am I the only one who never did this? I feel so stupid sometimes because it seems as though I’m the only person in the world who never even imagined doing that.
Maybe it has something to do with my distinct lack of taste in clothing and lack of interest in acquiring any taste in that area. Maybe I just always instinctively knew that would never happen for me. Or maybe I just had enough of a life that the thought of planning for my wedding when I was in 4th grade never really occurred to me.

When you spill an entire cup of coffee on your keyboard, you have to REALLY, REALLY make sure to dry it all off or some of the keys will stickkkkkkkk.

A friend told me she might have to have her gall bladder out. She asked me if I’d ever had mine out. I had to stop and think because I, for the life of me, couldn’t remember if they took it out when they did my gastric bypass. They might have. I just don’t remember.
How pathetic is it that I’ve reached an age where I can’t recall with any surety which body parts I have left?

I went up from my office to my kitchen to start preparing the evening meal for my little flock and two dogs. I glanced out the sliding glass door going to my porch and saw three Stellar Jays sitting on my deck chair staring in the window waiting for their evening peanuts. I guess I was late as their stares indicated a certain level of impatience with the timeliness of the service being provided. And they’re the wild birds that hang around. You don’t even want to know about the crap I get from my companion birds if the almonds aren’t on time and properly cracked.

The company that owns Fox News has apparently made a donation of about a million dollars to the some national Republican governor’s group.  And yet somehow we are supposed to think that their coverage is fair and balanced.
Somewhere in heaven, Walter Cronkite is weeping.

On what passes for a news show on Fox, Sarah Palin recently explained her opposition to an Islamic Center being built a few blocks from ground zero this way. She said that the argument for the center was that it could promote understanding and tolerance and counter extremists. If that’s so, said our lovely gal Temporary Sal, then why is it that New York City already has 100 mosques and they didn’t stop the 9/11 terrorists.
Really, Sal? Somehow mosques in NYC were supposed to affect the behavior of young men raised and schooled in the Middle East who didn’t live in NYC ever? Because unless you are privy to secret information that’s been kept from the general public, none of the 9/11 extremists was from America or NYC or anywhere near those 100 mosques.
Hmmm.... you might actually have to say that those mosques did their jobs since they did not produce one terrorist involved in the 9/11 attacks. But then, if you said that you wouldn’t be on Fox (pretend) News because you would actually have brains that you were using to think logically. And as anyone knows who watches some of the more popular fake news shows on Fox, making sense and having a brain are not half as important as using lies and half truths to rouse the rabble.