Secondly, he thanked the firefighters, noting he had “this special sense that I was with them.” Then he went on to thank “all those who are helping making the effort work here—people are working long hours and the citizens of this part of the world really, thank you for it.”

The president then thanked the Boy Scouts for working on his “Healthy Forests” initiative. He added: “Finally, I’d like to let the people out here know that we’re paying attention in Washington, D.C., we care about you, and that we’ll respond as best as we possibly can.”

Coverage of the speech on the The White House website included comments given in Redding by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had appeared with Bush when the president made these comments. In the attribution of governor’s comments by the White House website, the governor’s name was misspelled.

As of July 18, 2008, meanwhile, the area burned in California reached 907,568 acres, according to figures provided by the CAL FIRE (the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) That’s 1418 square miles burned.

We Californians love firefighters. They save homes and lives. In fact, with the evacuations in Paradise and the recent fire threats to coastal cities and hamlets, we would like to see more of them here.

California’s National Guard reports an additional 200 of the state’s guard members have just finished training to fight fires on the ground. This brings the total number of California National Guard members called up for actual direct fire-fighting duty to 400. The figure does not include support people, according to the California National Guard’s public affairs office. Altogether some 1,300 California guards are involved in either fighting the fires or in support functions, according to the guard’s public affairs office. By contrast, there are 131 California National Guard troops currently in Iraq. A total of 1500 California National Guard troops are on “federal active duty” either overseas–including Iraq–or elsewhere outside California, according to the guard’s public affairs office.

These are not enormous numbers. They are dwarfed by the 19,706 personnel currently fighting the wildfires in the state. They are dwarfed by the sizes of the impacted areas. The website of the California Department of Forestry—CAL FIRE– reports 230,372 acres as having burned within its jurisdiction since June 20, and that 13,067 residences are threatened. When fires on Federal lands within California are counted in, the total of burned acres since June 20 rises to 702,394, CAL FIRE reported July 10 on its website.

That’s over 1,000 square miles! Maybe we need some help.

“More than 2,500 National Guardsmen continue the fight to save lives, rescue victims, and ease the suffering of those affected by the wildfire devastation in southern California,” the California National Guard last year reported in a press release dated October 26. The 2007 press release added: “More than 14,000 CNG personnel are available to the Governor if he requests additional CNG presence.”

Don’t hesitate, Governor. It’s time to pick up the phone.

As women in America, we have still not achieved equality on a lot of fronts. Anyone who disagrees need only look at her Social Security benefits statement. We can vote, we can mobilize, we can run for office. A majority of the population, we still do the majority of the housework and the low-paying jobs. We still bear the children. And some of these—the poorer ones especially—still go to war.

My husband served in Vietnam. He, like many who experienced that war, is left chilled by Republican John McCain’s joking response to a student’s question about his age. The 70-something candidate is quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 16th as responding in part: “Thanks for the question you little jerk …You’re drafted.” I, too, am chilled by this.

A woman could do better, I always told myself. A woman would prize community over its destruction. A woman would understand that it takes a peaceful village to raise children. A woman would not see war as the solution. A woman would make the connection between excessive spending on war and the squeeze on household budgets.

But perhaps that understanding is no longer a shared feminist one. While initially elated by Hillary Clinton’s spirited run for the White House, I was still troubled by the fact that her vote was among those which enabled George Bush to launch a war on Iraq based on fraudulent information. I did not like Saddam Hussein. I do not like the situation now. On the Internet, I see women mourning their dead children in the street. I see figures indicating millions of refugees–families, children.

I voted for John Kerry in 2004, despite severe discomfort with his own vote authorizing the war. Despite his lengthy clarifications, it still sounded to me like complicity. Feeling helpless, wondering whether any of those in Washington consider the consequences of their actions, I attended a candlelight vigil called by MoveOn.org. In following months, I stood in a village center close to home on Wednesday evenings with others from my rural community, protesting the war. Just before the 2006 election, I brought along the flag which had lain on my father’s casket, and we held it up as traffic passed us.

My father was no pacifist. A very private person, he served in World War II. He did not die in battle. A New Deal Democrat, he had worked to mitigate the impacts of the great depression before the war; later, after it, he labored for the success of farmer cooperatives and crop insurance. He did not live to see these times, so I cannot know what he would say today. I know that he valued his country, as do I.

I must speak for my family now. Holding up my end of the flag in 2006, I spoke to my community, to the commuters’ cars, to the bus and delivery drivers, to the headlights. Then a fellow demonstrator, who had held up the other end—for these casket flags are really long and heavy– helped me fold the flag correctly back into a triangular package, as he had learned to fold so many other flags during the Vietnam war.

Last week, a report in the Huffington Post included a tape of Senator Clinton blaming the “activist base” in her party for state caucus losses, and disavowing MoveOn, specifically. This may have seemed an expedient move in the wake of Super Tuesday defeats, but it was unwise. It made caring people into things.

The Irish poet, William Butler Yeats wrote in his iconic poem, “Easter, 1916” that “too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.” I believe that too much expediency can do things to the heart as well: It can cause a candidate to harden hers. It can fracture mine.

It can split a party wide open.

–Shelley Buck lives in Northern California. She was a founding editor of Her Say News Service. Copyright, 2008.

This may be good news for many voters concerned about the environment who have paused quietly on the sidelines throughout the current campaign with the polite demurer, “My candidate isn’t running.”

In the report by Devlin Barrett, Obama is quoted as stating that he will make a commitment that Gore–who won a Nobel Prize last year for his environmental efforts– “will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this problem.” Senator Obama reportedly did not mention a specific job post for the former Vice President, but reportedly characterized climate change is “something we have to deal with now…” Hey, it’s about time!

Has Vice President Gore agreed to this? What job might he accept? Does this mean an endorsement is forthcoming?

I decided to help out the Pope by proposing a few more sins to help the Church modernize. Here they are:

*Carbon Gluttony (CG): This sin involves using more carbon based materials–such as oil–than your planet or your national budget can afford. Employing this new concept, we will be able to characterize drivers of SUVs as sinners and breakers of the Revised Commandment, New Millenium, which states, of course: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s oil.”

*This brings us to the second sin: Absentee Warlordism (AW): Old fashioned warlords used rape, pillage, and private armies to hold onto territory after sovereign governments broke down; however, in a global era, this concept has been outsourced. The commandment should be: “Thou shalt not seize they neighbor’s oil using paid surrogates, puppet leaders, or your own country’s adolescents to conduct the battle, while you sit home.” Better yet, just say “no” to AW, and skip the W, as well.

*Closer to home is a proposed sin which is of particular concern to the buckdata blog: Buck-Passing. Banks and lenders, now that they have completed the task of blaming middle-class consumers and the houseless poor for obtaining home loans on the only terms possible to them, are currently engaged in passing the buck–or rather the lack of it–back onto the same hapless taxpayers by coaxing breaks and liquidity from the federal government. It’s a sin from the 1980s , dressed up in a new outfit, come back to haunt us again: The Sin against Accountability (SA).

*This brings us to proposed sin number four: False Attribution (FA), as in “My predecessor in office got us into this mess.” We will be hearing more of this sin, shortly. One of the correlated commandments could probably be: “Thou shalt not continue thy predecessor’s unjust war.” You can probably think of a few more.

These are just a few of the hot new sins that could be added to the Vatican’s playlist to give the church a whole new sound. I leave it to others to ponder the matter of revising penances. Hey, isn’t it about time?