My fellow denizen of the Fashionable Left Bank of Blogistan, Susie Madrak the Suburban Guerrilla, is experiencing some severe financial, health, and stress issues, as well as three surgeries in the upcoming months. She’s hanging on with COBRA for a few months and hoping to get things patched up enough to function in a relatively normal manner.

But she needs your help.

She has an Amazon donation button that limits individual donations to $50 a day*. But I think it would be an interesting and potentially joy-inducing experiment to see, say, ten of us contributing as a group effort. Just tell her that The American Street came and did some street theater and convinced you that you would be happy to take your cash and give it away to the suburban guerrilla.

Or tell her thanks for lots and lots of bloggy goodness, good writing, wondrous video linkage, and other sundry contributions she has made to the general welfare by being a Basic Force For Good In Our Time for quite a few years now.

Or just stop for a minute, take your hookers and blow money** for the day/week/month, and donate it to Susie. You can probably get twice as much hookers and blow for half as much money in another month anyway, if deflationary trends continue during the wondrous econonomic fantastitude of the Putsch strategery combined with an unstoppable six years of total control of all phases of Republican’t governamentering to start the millennium***.

Please - think about helping a fellow traveler get through a rough patch on her life’s journey.

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I’m completely with Thomas Nephew on this. I consider it as vital as breathing to defend and protect the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. You should be, too.

And I have to say the strategies cooked up by Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher are extremely well thought out. And very capably defended.

Just as we are our our own government, we are our party. Both have succumbed to disuse and dysfunction out of the neglect born of complacency in a society where we have become conditioned to genuflect meekly to the closest authority, to think of confrontation as unessential, or even sinful.

Liberty and freedom and justice and peace are each and collectively abnormal, rare and radical. WE must remind ourselves of this often, till we understand that none of them can be sustained by wishful thinking, by law, by custom or magic. If we want them to exist in perpetuity, we must accept being radical in perpetuity. Radical is our asset, our friend, our necessary complement to freedom’s existence. Its opposite is masochism, yielding only enslavement by the real sin, tyranny.

So the ideas of Greenwald and Hamsher and others who refuse to yield are the very essence of responsible behavior of men and women determined to be free and democratic. Damn right that’s radical. And you’d better be, too, unless you prefer the far more radical course of submission to tyrants.

“They handle really well in the sandtraps, so they should be ideal for The Surge. They’ve also got a little compartment in the back where you can stow a small cooler full of cool, refreshing Anheuser Bush Beer.”

Another Surge Sighting. They’re spacing them a couple of