TANGLED LOOSE ENDS

* Our garden is beginning to fade as fall approaches. The sunflowers are always majestic but the various kinds of squash are my favorite now after we had to pull up all of our tomatoes which were destroyed by the blight.

* I've done two radio interviews this week. The first was an hour spot on Helen Caldicott's show that soon airs on Pacifica Network. The second was with one of the best talk show hosts in the country, Peter Werbe out of Detroit. He's just a brilliant interviewer. He takes summer vacations in Maine and always mentions a little joint just north of here in Wiscasset called Red's Eats which is famous for their lobster rolls. The owner, who recently died, had a last name of Gagnon. His family is still running the place. (Tonight I do another radio interview with a Jamaica station and Friday night one from Florida.)

* The drone story here has been top bill on the local newspaper twice this week. The letters are starting to flow into the newspaper. I sent one in this week and an activist in Kennebunk had a good one in the paper yesterday. This weekend is the famous Common Ground Fair here in Maine. It is one of my favorite annual events, a real celebration and display of the growing organic farming movement in the state. Several huge tents also house all the key social justice, environmental, and peace movement groups in Maine. We will take our little neighbor friend with us and go up on Saturday. I'll help out at the Veterans for Peace table and we will be talking up the drones issue while there. As people around the state learn more about the possibility of testing drones here in the Midcoast they are going to squawk.

* Sarah Palin made her highly anticipated speech in Hong Kong yesterday and this morning I read a review of it by the great British journalist Robert Fisk. You can see it here There is no doubt that she will be running for president in 2012 and this is a warm-up trip for her so she can claim to have foreign policy experience. She concluded the speech with some slams on China and inferred that we need to "ramp up" military spending to protect America from the Reds........It's going to be a wild ride.

* Our weekly radio show at Brunswick's Bowdoin College will now be on Sunday mornings. Peter Woodruff reports that station management has once again moved our slot, this time to the 10:30-12:00 time. Each semester when the students get back they get first pick of the best times. There are a few old-timers like us that have shows year round but Peter and I seem to be the #1 step-children and they keep bouncing our show around the dial. Might it have to do with the fact that we talk politics? Impossible........