I spent many days on the Lakota Rosebud reservation in South Dakota and the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana. My father was a classic liberal in the Kennedy tradition. He graduated from college with a degree in journalism and was plagued with the guilt of giving up his dreams of saving the world when he took a corporate job to support his family.

I was around 12 when my father sat me and my siblings down and asked us if we wanted to move out west. Well, of course we did. We lived in flat, dreary, grey Ohio. We didn't fit in. We were from NY, we never blended with the local Methodists. We were Catholics, loud, Irish democrats, in a county that was 90% protestant republicans. We thought cowboys were exotic, and we had no real ties to Ohio, it's where my father's job forced us to live.

He explained that we would be poor. We thought we were poor. Though my father earned a comfortable living, he grew up through the depression, and he was very very frugal. What he didn't save, he gave to migrant farm workers, the catholic church, the socialist party and whatever charity topped his cause of the moment.

My father wanted to do for the native children, what he had done as a young adult in NY city. He worked with gangs and at risk and drug addicted youth. He coached athletics, he counseled, he kept kids off the streets and out of trouble. He wanted to do something similar for Indians. Tutor, mentor, coach the kids, and give them a chance at an education and a future that involved choices other than welfare on the reservations. If he was able to create this job for himself, his salary would have been a fraction of what he earned as a corporate hack.

He started writing proposals that he sent to tribal chiefs. He started writing grants to fund his own future employment. He did all this while maintaining fulltime employment as a Public Affairs director for a major oil company. He got to the point where his passion conflicted with his obligations to his employer, and the family started taking the steps necessary to make a major life change.

We put the house in Ohio for sale. We started spending our summers in Montana and South Dakota, where the two tribes that seemed most interested in my father's proposal were located. My parents eventually settled on Montana and the Northern Cheyenne tribe. He was going to work for the local catholic church, running a youth program. We were waiting for our house to sell and for several grants to be awarded.

This was a process that extended over two years. During the summers and vacations we spent in Montana, we became friends with the children our own age. We loved our Montana summers.

My father had given his employer notice and we were in the final stages of making a nearly 2000 mile move when my father sat us down one day and said we would not be moving. The job my father modeled and found funding for was rolled out, only they didn't give it to him, they gave it to a tribal member.

We were all sad, Montana is an incredibly beautiful place. We liked the people and the landscape. I felt sorry for my father, who worked hard to make this dream of his a near reality. It didn't take me long to realize that the tribe did the right thing. My father was bringing his white catholic values, which are not necessarily bad, to a group of people that were fighting, incredibly hard, to hold onto their cultural identity. The catholic church had stripped them of their native religion. The catholic schools imposed catholic values at the expense of embracing native religions and spirituality. Why not select a mentor for these children that was a native and of their tribe.

On this the eve of Thanksgiving, the day we celebrate conquering this rich beautiful land that belonged to others, thousands of years before visited by the first European settler, reminds me that celebrating this holiday is incredibly insensitive. I'm thawing my turkey and peeling the potatoes and serving up an obnoxious sized feast, because I'm expected to, but if I was true to my own conscious, I'd boycott this holiday, just like I should boycott Christmas. I have some work to do.

I envision one of two futures for myself. The first is a remote rural existence but the second scenario involves divesting myself of most of my possessions, buying a sailboat, and living onboard. I previously owned a decent sized sailboat and Mike has also owned a big boat so we both have some idea what that life would be like. There will be no radical changes till Maggie is a little older...and that gives me time to think this through and make some choices.

There is nothing exceptional about this shot, I have a new camera and I have to play. The camera is amazing, it has a full frame censor meaning most shots won't need cropped and it shoots hd video. (I'm testing an upload to youtube as I post this.)

About three weeks ago, during a protest, someone vandalized my camera and my best lens....I guess the joke is on the vandal because I got my camera fixed, replaced the lens with a better piece of glass and before I knew my camera would be so cheap to repair, I made arrangments to buy a new, better camera. I never would have bought this amazing piece of equipment had someone not tried to destroy my camera....thanks someone.

We tested the offroad abilities of my car. We came across a bunch of homes belonging to some Miccosukee natives. The Miccosukee tribe owns the primary interest in south Florida commercial gambling, sponsors an annual pga event and they are a sponsor of nascar. I haven't spent a lot of time in south Florida, but my impressions of the commercial Indian enterprises are it is not the natives profiting from these ventures. The natives I have seen are seemingly too poor to have a real interest in these billion dollar ventures. I have no idea who is pocketing the profits.

The homes we encountered, off a very rough, unpaved, untraveled dirt road, were huts, that were thatched, and without electricity. This colony was real and functional, in very primitive conditions.

I do not know if these homes belonged to people who purposefully choose to live in a manner very much like their ancestors or if they are victims of poverty and subjects of a system that profits from their heritage.

We were feet away from enormous and magnificent reptiles; alligators of all sizes. We saw birds that you see rarely in the parks in and adjacent to Pinellas county.

We visited a cheesy roadside attraction that contained exotic creatures that were "found" in the Everglades. There were anacondas!! flipping hell, large enough to consume small humans.

We visited two of my favorite Florida places, Everglades City and Chokoloskee, towns where you will find 6th and 7th generation Floridians living off the land and water, just like their families before them.

My good camera is in need of repairs and my best lens is inoperable, probably not repairable, so the pics are not as good as I hoped.

In the middle of this crises, at the core of this economic, political, social collapse are a whole lot of victims of a failed capitalist system. Domesticated pets are being abandoned by owners that can't afford to take care of themselves. Six weeks ago I went to petsmart to buy dog food and I came home with Mimi. A Pasco county puppy mill was raided and over 60 dogs were rescued. There were daschunds, yorkies, labs, pugs, and a bunch of dogs the same breed as my Mimi, petite basset griffin vendeens. I had never heard of a pbgv, but since getting her, I've invested some time learning about her breed.

This dog was bred because in the US, they are considered exotic or rare, and francophiles will pay ridiculous sums of money for this french breed. The tragedy is that during a down economy, people can not afford to pay 2k or more for a puppy, and breeders get stuck with unsold inventory....which have to eat, and need to see the vet, and have to be treated for fleas and parasites and worms. So, when the stock isn't moving, the kibble isn't bountiful, and vet care is abandoned, and these pups sit in cages and turn to dogs. They are essentially incarcerated. Some of them go neurotic. They are denied love and attention, they are poorly fed and denied care for their fundamental needs. The lucky ones are rescued and adopted.

Two years ago, I was in a pet store, buying a gift for a friend that had just gotten a kitten. I stopped by the area where the puppies were kept to admire their cuteness.

I had never bought a dog from a pet store, they are overpriced and I've heard all the stories about how they are stocked from inhumane breeding mills. There was one little guy in a cage by himself, with a big SALE sign, and a price tag of $400. The dogs in this store usually sold for well over a thousand dollars. I asked a clerk why he was so cheap. She was pretty direct. She told me he was 6 months old which was about 3 months older than the average age of a dog sold by a pet store. People wanted to buy baby pups, not maturing pups. By law, the store had to have a vet check him every two weeks, they had to feed him, and his age, all 6 months of him, brought down the overall quality of the stock. The clerk told me that unless he was sold within the next couple of weeks, he would be euthenized. WTF!!!

Without thought, I told the clerk I wanted to buy him. When I approached the register, I said my atheist prayer to the credit card gods that there was enough balance on my card to get him out of the store....and there was....so on this day, just about two years ago, I became owned by Quincy, the silky terrier.

My next pup was actually a gift for the boyfriend. His 16 year old dog had died and I got him a dog last year for Christmas. I bought her because at the time I was stupidly oblivious to how many abandoned and neglected dogs there are in this world right now. We all love her....adore her, so of course I have no regrets, but I can say with certainty that all future pets will come from rescue situations.

Dog number three was a rescue. She is part hound, part lab, part pit, and maybe some dalmation....but she is all love. Mimi makes number four and unfortunately, I think our home is at capacity.

I have always loved dogs but as my kids have matured and grown I have more time to learn to be a better human to my dogs. They really are remarkable creatures that make us happy and make us better people.

I sound like a broken record...I used my 28-135 kit lens...the definition comes from hdr.

When I bought my first good slr film camera years ago, I didn't know what I was doing. When I got a good shot, I felt lucky and accomplished. Then along came digital cameras, and it became almost impossible not to get a decent picture. For years, I was a film purist. I resisted the lure of digital cameras. It was cheating...too simple. With film, too many things could go wrong, so when you got a good shot, it felt like you had accomplished something.

One day, shopping somewhere, a Hewlett packard representative approached me with a point and shoot digital, he wanted to demonstrate the quality of his photoprinter. He snapped a picture of Maggie who was sitting in the shopping cart. With a usb cord, he plugged his camera into the printer and in less than a minute, he gave me a film quality photo of a three year old Maggie. I was sold. I didn't buy his printer. I bought a sony digital camera.

The camera paid for itself quickly with not having to pay film processing fees.

I can count the digital cameras I've owned on one hand. I'm loyal that way. Actually, I'm not adaptable. I figure something out, I make it work.

My first pricey digital camera was a canon rebel slr. It was full of options and settings I never used. Auto focus was good enough for me. I had a couple of point and shoots. They were simple to use and compact and easy to tote around with me.

Late last year I was ready to graduate to a semipro. I don't know why. I still favored auto settings. When I felt saucy, I would select monochrome or b&w options. I had a bonus coming from work and I could afford a better camera. Besides, my rebel had taken 10s of thousands of pictures of my kids, my dogs, my son's iguana, and protesters. It was tired, beat up and worn out.

Canon makes a camera, the eos 5d mark II. It has 25 flipping megapixels and shoots in video, and has features I will never begin to understand. It was $2700. Besides my house in Gulport, I had never spent that much on anything, not even a car.

I didn't buy that camera. I couldn't embrace the capitalist within. I'm not an artist. I don't have real talent. No overpriced camera was going to turn me into annie liebovitz.

This weekend, Maggie has gone away with a girlfriend. I'm childless. Mike works 2nd shift, and he's working Saturday this weekend. I was going to buy a piece of HDR software and play with pictures this weekend. But bestbuy didn't have any HDR software, and they didn't have any mac advanced photoedititing software, so I wandered around the store. No Maggie, no Mike, no rush to get home.

Well, best buy has the eos 5 and the new eos 7....I'm in lust. I didn't buy anything....but I did go home and download photomatix...and have been playing in HDR all night....and I'm overwhelmed...but it is pretty cool what you can do to a very average image taken by a very average photographer. 

...a rescue, adopted Saturday....fits perfectly with the rest of the family.

Taken from Ballast Point

I've heard  from both my son and comrades in the CPUSA that youth and young adults, law abiding citizens, have been plucked off the streets of Pittsburgh by the national guard. Non-violent college students pose a threat to no one and the cowardly military and law enforcement officers would rather make victims out of innocents than arrest the courageous citizens that engaged in acts of civil disobedience. Multiple millions of dollars have been funneled to the police and military to keep law and order in Pittsburgh and unless the jails and mobile cells are full to capacity, it looks like that money wasn't well spent.

Here's to the cowardly cops and soldiers that would rather make victims of innocent citizens than fulfill your charter to "serve and protect"....*&^% you all.

Viva la revolucion comrades.

Brendan is in Denver, where in his words, he has had the worst run experience of his life with cops. He filed an internal affairs complaint because he and Jeff were roughed up by police when they were doing nothing more than painting (on canvas) in a park.  They are heading towards Chicago next.