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I just read on CNN that Gilberta Estrada, 25, hung herself and three of her children here in Texas. She was depressed. I am sure many of you remember Andrea Yates. She drowned her children.



This makes me think that more attention needs to be paid to mental illnesses and the people that have them. Society must stop adding a stigma to those who are mentally ill. I am sure many do not seek treatment for fear of what others will think. They suffer and sometimes take their own lives. In the worst cases, innocent children pay the price.



All the money that is being used to fund a war in Iraq could do a lot a good at home. We could provide counseling services for more people and possibly daycare for single mothers who are stressed out. Even those who are married like Andrea Yates was could benefit from programs that provide treatment and day care. This would give the mothers a break. It does not mean the mothers do not love their children. They may need time away to collect themselves. Andrea Yates did not need to care for that many children all the time. Her husband was aware of this.



We need to demand better medical care for those with mental illness. If you have ever been guilty of making fun of someone with a mental illness, do not do it again. Someone who was hiding a mental problem may have heard you. You just may prevent someone from seeking the help they need. What would you do if that someone later hurt someone you knew and loved?

-- Cindy Sheehan, the California mother who became an anti-war leader after her son was killed in Iraq, declared Monday she was walking away from the peace movement.



She said her son died "for nothing."



Sheehan achieved national attention when she camped outside President Bush's home in Crawford, Texas, throughout August 2005 to demand a meeting with the president over her son's death.



While Bush ignored her, the vigil made her one of the most prominent figures among opponents of the war.



But in a Web diary posted to the liberal online community Daily Kos on Monday, Sheehan said she was exhausted by the personal, financial and emotional toll of the past two years.



She wrote that she is disillusioned by the failure of Democratic politicians to bring the unpopular war to an end and tired of a peace movement she said "often puts personal egos above peace and human life."



Casey Sheehan, a 24-year-old Army specialist, was killed in an April 2004 battle in Baghdad. His death prompted his mother to found Gold Star Families for Peace.



But in Monday's 1,200-word letter, titled, "Good Riddance Attention Whore," Sheehan announced that her son "did indeed die for nothing."



"I have tried every since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful," she wrote. "Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives.



"It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years, and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most."



Cindy Sheehan's sister, DeDe Miller, told CNN that the group would continue working for humanitarian causes, but drop its involvement in the anti-war movement. As for her sister's letter, Miller said, "She cried for quite a bit after writing it."



Sheehan warned that the United States was becoming "a fascist corporate wasteland," and that onetime allies among Bush's Democratic opposition turned on her when she began trying to hold them accountable for bringing the 4-year-old war to a close.



In the meantime, she said her antiwar activism had cost her her marriage, that she had put the survivor's benefits paid for her son's death and all her speaking and book fees into the cause and that she now owed extensive medical bills.



"I am going to take whatever I have left and go home," she wrote. "I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost.



"I will try to maintain and nurture some very positive relationships that I have found in the journey that I was forced into when Casey died and try to repair some of the ones that have fallen apart since I began this single-minded crusade to try and change a paradigm that is now, I am afraid, carved in immovable, unbendable and rigidly mendacious marble."



My comments on this article:



I am against our continued presence in Iraq. I have stated many times that I am happy Sadaam Hussein is off the world stage and unable to hurt anyone else. We are all in a better place now he is gone. I just think things have gotten out of hand. The Iraqi government and military need to step up to the plate. Do we have to coddle them forever?



I understand Ms Sheehan's hurt when her son died. I think she is wrong to blame the Democrats for our continued presence in Iraq. That is exactly what George Bush wants her to do. That is why he pushed. prodded and basically tied the Democratic Congress' hands when it came to troop funding. He would not approve troop funding ( and put our soliders in even more danger in Iraq without the needed funds) unless the withdrawal option was out of the bill. I am sure he feels like a winner today. Bush got what he wanted. It does not matter to him how many more families buried their loved ones. I am sure he does not shed one tear for the children that will grow up without fathers or mothers. I am sure that the brother that lost his older sibling and best friend does not ever cross his mind. He was playing a political game with Congress and wanted to win. This is the same man that says he is a Christian. ( Hope no-one wonders why some refuse to believe in a God)



Bush does not care that the normal everyday Iraqi is going through hell. It is not him or anyone he loves. I am sure he does not lose one ounce of sleep thinking about the children of Iraq. Do you think Karl Rove gives a good holy damn? He is more worried about where his next meal is coming from. Cheney is counting his money made off Haliburton. I am sure he does not care that some Iraqis do not even have a stable home.



I am sure our president would say if asked that he is a better person than Joe Kennedy ever was. The father of JFK was known to play hardball to win. However imperfect he was, the man never got the United States involved in a war that was unwinnable. He liked to win in everything. His son surely did not get us into a mess like Iraq. He may have had a few things to do with Vietnam , but he was off the planet by the time Johnson got everything screwed up.



Where are the leaders like Abraham Lincoln who was known to be depressed everytime he saw the casualty list during the Civil War? Lincoln did not try to play cowboy, but Bush did. Where are the leaders like JFK and his brother, Bobby, who averted a nuclear war with the Soviet Union? We need someone like them and quickly.

I just saw this on CNN. I remember when the Berlin Wall fell. Many thought there was going to be a new era in the former Soviet Union. I know I thought there would be more personal freedom.





Boris Yeltsin may have been a drunk that kept firing his cabinet, but he really did try to have a more open society in Russia. I have not been fond of Vladmir Putin since he took office. New reports have stated that things in Russia have gone backwards in certain areas. Many fear that life will resemble life in Russia before the Berlin Wall fell.



Below is the article from CNN



Russian police detained gay protesters calling for the right to hold a Gay Pride parade in central Moscow on Sunday while nationalists shouting "death to homosexuals" punched and kicked the demonstrators.



Riot police detained gay rights activists as they tried to present a petition asking Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who has called gay marches satanic acts, to lift a ban on the parade.



Nationalists and extreme Russian Orthodox believers held icons and denounced homosexuality as "evil" while a group of thick-set young men turned up with surgeon's masks, which they said would protect them from the "gay disease." (Watch angry opponents punch protesters Video)



"We are defending our rights," said a young gay man named Alexey, with blood pouring out of his nose after he was beaten up by a man screaming "homosexuals are perverts" opposite the mayor's office. His attacker was detained.



"This is terrible but I am not scared. This is a pretty scary place, a pretty scary country if you are gay. But we won't give up until they allow us our rights," he said.



Hundreds of riot police lined Tverskaya street in central Moscow and plain-clothes police mingled with a large number of foreign and Russian journalists.



Parade organizer Nikolai Alexeyev told Reuters by telephone from a police station that about 20 people had been detained, a figure confirmed by police.



We are sitting in the police station right now. We were detained outside the mayor's office when we tried to present the petition," said Alexeyev.

Gay tolerance



Russia decriminalized homosexuality in 1993 but tolerance is not widespread.



We believe these perverts should not be allowed to march on the streets of Moscow, the third Rome, a holy city for all Russians," said Igor Miroshnichenko, who said he was an Orthodox believer who had come to support the riot police.



"It (homosexuality) is satanic," he told Reuters. One man holding a crucifix threatened to beat-up any gay person he saw.



Richard Fairbrass, a gay singer with the British pop group Right Said Fred, was punched in the face and kicked by anti-gay activists while speaking to Reuters in an interview.



"We understand this is a gay event and so we came down here today," Fairbrass told Reuters before being hit. Blood dripped from his face after the attack.



Volker Beck, a German green party politician and gay rights campaigner, was hit in the face with eggs before being detained by riot police. "We didn't do anything," he told Reuters as he was led away.



Germany's Green Party Chairwoman Claudia Roth called on German Chancellor Angela Merkel to raise the issue of rights with President Vladimir Putin at next month's G8 summit.



It has been shown once again today that human rights are systematically abused in Putin's Russia," she said in a statement. Beck was later released.



"It is very conspicuous when people are arrested in front of the mayor's office when they were doing nothing other than trying to present a peaceful petition," said Scott Long, a rights activist with Human Rights Watch who observed the events.



"There was no real attempt to separate the two sides and that led to people being beaten up," he said. "I would call on the Russian authorities to protect freedom of assembly, protect freedom of expression and protect demonstrators."





I must admit there are those in this country who feel the same way many in the above story do about homosexuality. I am not one of them. I may be a straight women, but I have no right to tell another person who to love.

This is a small snippet from speech given by Robert F Kennedy in 1968. The entire speech can be found on my profile.





" Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. "





Sounds like the current occupant of the White House to me. Remember how he sounded like a cowboy ready to take back the prairie right after 9/11. I am not saying no action needed to be taken by the United States after the attacks on the World Trade Center. I just think that our president was emboldened by how well most of the country responded to his swagger and bluster that he did not want to stop with just the Tablian. He wanted to ride that wave of support right on into Iraq. If Iraq had worked out better for him, I think he would have continued riding the rave right into Iran.



We warned in 1968 about honoring those who swagger and bluster. We did not listen.