So I was pleased to see that Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund have an ad that’s being promoted on Daily Kos right now. Frankly, it’s brutal. It shows aerial hunting. And it pretty much stages a reenactment of Sarah Palin shooting a wolf from a low flying plane. (I guess that makes it another installment in WWSPD. WWSPD? Shoot a wolf from a low flying airplane. What would I do? Not shoot a wolf. Hey, I probably wouldn’t get in that fucking plane.)

But for those of you who hate Sarah Palin, it’s must see TV.

Here’s to C. for fighting the good fight long before any of us were trying to shake the image of Sarah Palin in a Wonder Woman bikini, complete with AK-47 (I’m right about that, right. Any gun enthusiasts out there want to help me out here?), from our minds’ eyes. Here’s to the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund for raising all that money for all those years so the people of Ohio could feel nauseous while just trying to unwind after a long day endless political advertising. And here’s to the the EUESGS for educating C. to become the kind of person who devotes her life to defending wildlife (and me to become the kind who can link to it).

Here’s a link to the Daily Kos diary. Beware: Daily Kos is like going to the opera. There are a lot of divas over there and the fat lady is constantly singing.

*I read C.’s first email while sitting in the Denver airport waiting for my plane on Friday evening. It was the second indication that Palinmania was going to be bad. The first was the woman on the tram who told me, unsolicited, that Sarah Palin was a bad mother. She then proceeded to tell me that no woman should put her career before her children. She had three children. She’d turned down a job with Andrew Young. She was going home to Chicago. Early 60s. African American. All this in a three minute tram ride.

“Jesse James” came on early in the show. It’s on Bruce Springsteen’s new album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. His version is pretty fun, upbeat, a little bit raucous. Kind of the opposite of the previous version in my head: me and my classmates in second or third grade music class. A bunch of little, mostly super-privileged, girls in navy blue uniforms singing our hearts out about America’s outlaw hero. Except everything that we sang at that school sounded like a dirge. Basically, we were truly old school, as in borderline medieval in nearly all song cholce and arrangement. It was like we were being trained to become the reincarnations of Elizabeth I. We were in the bleak midwinter even when sumer was a’ cumin’ in.

“Jesse James” was on the agenda for our training in American folksongs. I guess this section was intended to put us in touch with the people we would someday rule. It also carried out the school’s initiation into True Liberalism . Hard as it may be to believe, this Upper East Side girls school was something of a bulwark for radicals, or radicals of a certain economic bracket. So, we learned all the lessons taught good radical schoolgirls of 1932. It was like we were in a time machine and we landed in a production of “The Cradle Will Rock.”

For me, the mixed message of “Jesse James” was always hard to handle. I knew he was a bandit and a hero. I knew he killed people and that we were supposed to be sad he’d been killed. I knew this song was confusing. It may have been fun to sing (relatively, compared to, “I’ve got a mule and her name is Sal/Sixteen miles on the Erie Canal”), but it didn’t make any sense. Plus, we did sing it in our tiny little voices at the school-approved oarsmen -stroking-along-the-Thames rhythm that we used for every song (except this crazy speeded up one about fireflies that drove us all moth-to-light crazy), so it never really seemed like fun. And, of course, it’s an American folk song, so it’s derived from some Scotch-Irish tune that we were all singing back in the day in Merrie Olde Englande.

Truth is, I didn’t know it was a fun song until I heard Bruce singing it this morning. His version makes you want to sing along, and not just because you don’t know if you’re headed for a month of Scottish naval songs. (I’m not kidding here, people–actually, we liked those because they were rousing–and we’d be better able to command the troops once we knew all the words.) “Jesse James” may be about the fun of making a hero out of an outlaw, a crazy Confederate Missourian, crime-spree loving, Pinkerton-foiling brother who even Teddy Roosevelt called “the American Robin Hood.” Hey, there’s another little lesson in how to handle the English monarchy. No wonder we sang that song.

My pledge: If growing out my hair, flying monthly to New York, and offering my head to the High Priestesses of Highlights will make Dick Cheney die, I’m in.

There are many of you out there who may not appreciate what that statement means, so I’m going to spell it out for you. I grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. No one has to explain the power of the New York Blonde to me; I’ve been observing it and mercy to it my entire life. For me to be willing to transform myself into that which continues to haunt me (even though I have some very close friends who are indeed New York Blondes), well, that was the ultimate sacrifice.

Two days later, DeLay is out.

Some of you were a little surprised that I didn’t post immediately: Ding Dong DeLay is Dead! Well, I did post immediately (leading to the tardies earned by the Misses Em and Mazie this morning), but took it offline right away. I’d just made this big email push to people in my neighborhood and I didn’t want to scare them away with my DeLania. As the day went on, I didn’t know what I could add. My work was done and I was onto the Burnt Orange Report to freak out about how the Democrats will end up losing the Texas 22nd anyway.

But right before getting ready to go to bed, my devoted channel surfing turned up a song of the day-like gem: Elizabeth with Cate Blanchett. I’d seen it during the breast-feeding era on one of the Academy “For your consideration only” DVDs before the studios sent out special machines to go along with their encrypted promotional whoring. The second it came on, I knew I had to watch to the end because this movie concludes with the creation story of female hair-cutting superpowers. Elizabeth cuts her hair and whitens her skin to turn herself into a virgin. She then processes out to the court and mounts the throne, having declared that she is now married to England.

The screen goes black, tells us she ruled for forty years, leading to greatest power on Earth status for England, and that her reign is called the Golden Age.

I’m just sayin’ it takes an Elizabeth to be an Elizabeth.