The Invisible Hand is Giving Us the Finger

Are we all agreed that socialism is drab, colorless, and boring? Good.

Does that mean the alternative to socialism has to be greed-driven capitalism? Isn't that a false dichotomy?

Couldn't we, like, you know, try to find a happy medium, or something?

Yes, greed-driven capitalism produces great abundance, but it also generates tremendous shortages (of things which are in the public interest but not very profitable, such as efficient public transportation).

Competitive capitalism is casualty-intensive. Some gotta win; they drive Mercedeses and join country clubs and live in McMansions and wear Rolex watches. Others gotta lose, and they get the shitty end of the stick. That's the worst thing about enshrining greed as the highest virtue, or claiming that it's any kind of virtue at all.

But the most annoying debris of capitalism isn't the walking wounded, it's the tastelessness and vulgarity. Anything that sells is good, so Danielle Steele, the only author who's written more books than she's read, is good.

Is there anything more tasteless and vulgar than Christmas?

Yes, there is, and I've found it: Breast Cancer M&M's.

Ready for a Comeback

A poster at Beliefnet's U.S. Politics board (sort of a political Romper Room) was recently heaping contempt on critics of Bush's war.

"By the way," he sarcastically sneered with a sneer, "do you want us to restore him (Saddam Hussein) to power there?"

Sure, why not? He looks better than he has in a long time -- sort of like Nixon did in '68, only with a beard.

And any foreign policy idea that Don Imus favors is o.k. with me.

We could lend Saddam money and sell him weapons, like we did before. Then Don Rumsfeld could go over there and shake hands with him. It'd be like old home week.

Think of the headlines: "Saddam Hussein -- Comeback Story of the New Century..." And think of the advertising revenue: "Saddam sez, "I always wear Armani when I'm gassing Kurds."

Here's Saddam kicking political detainees in his steel-toed Doc Martens. And since a re-secularized Iraq would once again allow tobacco advertising, that ubiquitous billboard picture of the dictator smoking an Angel Fart cigarette would explain that he finds them "mild, but satisfying."

With a little help from us he'd certainly repress the Shi'a. Maybe he'd even be willing to go to war against Iran again. We always seem to do better when we let someone else fight our wars for us, as in Central America during the '80's.

We'd just have to tell him, "Look, don't kill or torture too many people -- you'll make us look bad. And if the Kuwaitis get back into "slant" drilling, let us handle it. We don't want to have to come after you again."

Saddam Hussein is like a pit bulldog -- a bad dog if he belongs to your neighbor, but a nice puppy if he's yours. And he's the kind of dog you definitely want in your backyard (rather than, say, China's) in this dog-eat-dog world.

I don't think he'll hold the Iraq War against us. After all, it was all just oil, money, and politics.

Nothing personal, Saddam old buddy, just business.

Sorry about your sons.

He's Eatin' Chow Yuck

He's eatin' bagels, he's eatin' pizza, he's eatin' chitlins, he's eatin'...oh, never mind. He's trying to please everybody is what he's doing, and he's pissing everybody off.

The Pennsylvania chapter of the far-right American Family Association has warned Republican Senator Rick Santorum that he "needs to be careful" about changing his views on intelligent design.

"Senator Rick Santorum's agreement with Judge John Jones' decision (in the Dover, PA school board case) is yet another example of why conservatives can no longer trust the senator," the Association said.

Santorum's changing views on evolution indicate, if not an ability to evolve, at least an awareness of a need for adaptation. As his popularity has declined, his viewpoints on any number of issues have veered wildly.

His problem is that people of all political persuasions dislike someone who is obviously insincere. Rick's just about to the point now where he needs to tie a steak around his neck to get the dog to play with him.

Troops Out, Air Force In

As reported by media critic Norman Solomon and also here earlier this month, the planned withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq announced recently by Secretary Rumsfeld doesn't mean that the war there is ending or even being wound down.

As in Vietnam 35 years ago, as the troops come out, the bombers will go in.

The Washington Post yesterday became the first major media organ to confirm the war's new direction, and provided numbers.

The Post's Bradley Graham reported that "US airstrikes in Iraq have surged this fall, jumping to nearly five times the average monthly rate earlier in the year, according to US military figures.

"Until the end of August, US warplanes were conducting about 25 strikes a month. The number rose to 62 in September, then to 122 in October and 120 in November."

Read the whole thing here.

The Bush administration's strategy is obvious enough: they're hoping that Americans will forget about the war if they're not confronted with daily U.S. casualty statistics. They're assuming that while news of Americans killed in action upsets us, the death toll among Iraqis either won't be widely reported or, if it is, won't bother us.

After all, who cares about a few dead Arabs.

The problem is, re-tooling the war as an air campaign is dangerous in ways the ground campaign was not. These new dangers were examined in detail by the December 5 New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh that originally reported this story, "Up in the Air"

The Usual Suspects

Ever since the word got out that Bush's secret police are illegally scrutinizing the minutiae of our daily lives, the Republican spin machine has responded in its usual way, by lying.

It's their standard operating procedure. If you want to start a war, slime an opposing candidate, or justify a criminal policy, you just make shit up.

In this particular case, the standard lie, spun into cotton candy thread by the credulous and swallowed by the gullible, is that Carter and Clinton did the same thing.

Here's the warrantless search order Clinton signed:

Section 1. Pursuant to section 302(a)(1) [50 U.S.C. 1822(a)] of the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance] Act, the Attorney General is authorized to approve physical searches, without a court order, to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of up to one year, if the Attorney General makes the certifications required by that section.

Two things make this different from Bush's NSA order: 1) The AG could approve only physical searches, not electronic surveillance, and 2) the AG had to be able to certify that said searches were in compliance with USC section 50 section 302.

What does that section require? That there be "no substantial likelihood that the physical search will involve the premises, information, material, or property of a United States person."

To go on TV and baldly assert that what Clinton did is the same as what Bush is doing isn't an exaggerration, a mis-statement, or a mistake. It's an outrageous, deliberate lie.

While we're at it, here's the order Carter signed:

Pursuant to Section 102(a)(1) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1802(a)), the Attorney General is authorized to approve electronic surveillance to acquire foreign intelligence information without a court order, but only if the Attorney General makes the certifications required by that Section.

This one includes electronic surveillance, but like Clinton's order is required to adhere to the rules laid out in the same USC section, which specifies that "the electronic surveillance is solely directed at communications exclusively between or among foreign powers." Under the terms of both these orders, spying on U.S. citizens was strictly off limits.

The hopeful sign is that the people spreading this malarky aren't always getting away with it. A couple nights ago on "Hardball," some neocon Senator from one of our barbaric southern regions of cornbread and revival attempted to tell this lie, but was brought up short by Andrea Mitchell, actually doing her job for a change.

"You're leaving out the last sentence," she told him, when he recited an edited version of Clinton's order.

In a truly democratic society, GW Bush and his crew of buccaneers would be out of office and in prison right now, doing hard time for the lies they told during the runup to Iraq. But lying worked for them then, and there's no reason for them to assume that it won't work now.

The truth is, there is no precedent for the kind of surveillance we're being subjected to under Bush, and it has nothing to do with "terrism." Big Brother is indeed watching you.

Studies in Dictatorship

At least Co-President Cheney doesn't mince words. Quoted in a story by Maura Reynolds of the Los Angeles Times, Cheney blandly asserts that he and Bush want to return to the abuses and usurpations of the pre-Watergate Nixon administration (although that's my choice of words, not his). From Reynold's story:

President Bush's decision to bypass court review and authorize domestic wiretapping by executive order was part of a concerted effort to rebuild presidential powers weakened in the 1970s as a result of the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War, Vice President Dick Cheney said Tuesday.

Returning from a trip to the Middle East, Cheney said that threats facing the country required that the president's authority under the Constitution be "unimpaired."

"Watergate and a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam, both during the 1970s, served, I think, to erode the authority. I think the president needs to be effective, especially in the national security area," Cheney told reporters traveling with him on Air Force Two. "Especially in the day and age we live in, the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy."

Cheney's remarks were recorded by reporters traveling with him and disseminated by the White House under an official pool arrangement.

Cheney dismissed the idea that Americans were concerned about a potential abuse of power by the administration, saying that any backlash would probably punish the president's critics, not Bush.

His words are reminiscent of the third chapter of Edward Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," which concerns the ascent of Octavius Augustus to the throne of what was, until his arrival, a republic. Gibbon says of Augustus:

"THE obvious definition of a monarchy seems to be that of a state, in which a single person, by whatsoever name he may be distinguished, is entrusted with the execution of the laws, the management of the revenue, and the command of the army. But, unless public liberty is protected by intrepid and vigilant guardians, the authority of so formidable a magistrate will soon degenerate into despotism.

"Every barrier of the Roman constitution had been levelled by the vast ambition of the dictator...the fate of the Roman world depended on the will of Octavianus, surnamed Caesar, by his uncle's adoption, and afterwards Augustus, by the flattery of the senate.

"With its power, the senate had lost its dignity...

"Augustus…displayed his patriotism, and disguised his ambition.

"It would require the pen of Tacitus to describe the various emotions of the senate; those that were suppressed, and those that were affected. It was dangerous to trust the sincerity of Augustus; to seem to distrust it was still more dangerous...Amidst this confusion of sentiments, the answer of the senate was unanimous and decisive. They refused to accept the resignation of Augustus; they conjured him not to desert the republic, which he had saved. After a decent resistance, the crafty tyrant submitted to the orders of the senate; and consented to receive the government of the provinces, and the general command of the Roman armies, under the well-known names of PROCONSUL and IMPERATOR. But he would receive them only for ten years. Even before the expiration of that period, he hoped that the wounds of civil discord would be completely healed, and that the republic, restored to its pristine health and vigour, would no longer require the dangerous interposition of so extraordinary a magistrate. The memory of this comedy, repeated several times during the life of Augustus, was preserved to the last ages of the empire, by the peculiar pomp with which the perpetual monarchs of Rome always solemnised the tenth years of their reign.

Finally, either Hamilton or Madison (or both) wrote these words on the topic of constructing a government designed specifically to prevent the advent of the accumulation of too much power in too few hands, especially as exemplified by dictatorship. From The Federalist No. 51:

TO WHAT expedient, then, shall we finally resort, for maintaining in practice the necessary partition of power among the several departments, as laid down in the Constitution? The only answer that can be given is, that as all these exterior provisions are found to be inadequate, the defect must be supplied, by so contriving the interior structure of the government as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places. Without presuming to undertake a full development of this important idea, I will hazard a few general observations, which may perhaps place it in a clearer light, and enable us to form a more correct judgment of the principles and structure of the government planned by the convention.

In order to lay a due foundation for that separate and distinct exercise of the different powers of government, which to a certain extent is admitted on all hands to be essential to the preservation of liberty, it is evident that each department should have a will of its own; and consequently should be so constituted that the members of each should have as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the others. Were this principle rigorously adhered to, it would require that all the appointments for the supreme executive, legislative, and judiciary magistracies should be drawn from the same fountain of authority, the people, through channels having no communication whatever with one another.

(Emphasis mine.) We can infer from Cheney's words that what he and Bush have in mind would make Nixon and Reagan look like lightweights; their plan matches more closely that of Augustus.

Blogs Abuzz Over Mysteries Re: NSA Spying

The initial outrage over the revelation that the Bush administration has been using the National Security Agency to illegally spy on American citizens has given way to perplexed questions about why it happened. If the spying was conducted using the ordinary sorts of surveillance techniques -- wiretaps and so forth -- couldn't the administration have very easily obtained the required permission from the FISA Court?

Discussion on the left-leaning blogs centers on the wide latitude historically allowed for government investigations by the Foreign Intelligence Security Act Court -- the warrant-granting agency created in 1978 in the wake of Watergate.

At the influential "Talking Points Memo" blog, proprieter Joshua Micah Marshall notes that "Wiretaps are conducted around the country every day. The FISA Court alone approves something like a half a dozen a day in highly classified national security or espionage related cases."

"The only issue here," Marshall pointedly observes, "is why the president decided to go around the normal rules that govern such surveillance, why he chose to make himself above the law."

But Marshall himself had already gone a long way toward answering that question.

In a December 17 posting, Marshall reports that in its entire history, "the FISA Court has rejected (only) four government applications for warrants," but then further explains, "Only, it's not quite that simple."

The Department of Justice report Marshall cites also explains that "in 2003, the Court 'made substantive modifications to the government's proposed orders' in 79 applications out of 1727 applications made and 1724 approved."

"In 2004," the same report continues, "the number of approved warrants with 'substantive modifications' was 94 out of a total of 1758." However, before 2003, the court hardly ever demanded modifications in the government's request for warrants. There were less than half a dozen such demands from 2000 through 2002.

"2003 Is where the change comes," Marshall concludes, and implies that the Bush administration refused to submit surveillance activities requests to the FISA Court out of fear that the court would demand that the scope of those activities, or the techniques used to conduct them, be modified.

This raises the possibility that the administration is using new eavesdropping technologies they want to keep secret. The blog "DefenseTech.org" links to a December 18 Washington Post editorial, "Pushing the Limits of Wartime Powers," which quotes former Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla), who was briefed on the internal spying as saying, "I came out of the room with the full sense that we were dealing with a change in technology but not policy, with new opportunities to intercept overseas calls that passed through U.S. switches."

Likewise, New York Times Editor Bill Keller, while explaining to CNN why his paper waited a year to publish its story revealing the existence of the domesting spying operation, revealed that "...we satisfied ourselves that we could write about this program -- withholding a number of technical details -- in a way that would not expose any intelligence-gathering methods or capabilities that are not already on the public record."

At Dave Lindorff's "This Can't Be Happening" blog, a December 17 posting recalled Bush's first-term plans to assign Admiral John Poindexter, currently the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, with developing a "Total Information Awareness" program.

"TIA was officially dumped when word of it leaked out," Lindorff says, "but it bears mentioning that in fact, much of the hardware and software for realizing Poindexter's dark dream already exists. Carnivore--a software program that allows the Feds to scan all Internet communications for certain key words--is already in operation. American companies, in fact, have been honing these skills in products they have developed to help China monitor its Internet and phone systems. Don't think those fearsome capabilities have gone unnoticed in the White House."

"Without calling it TIA," Lindorff concludes, "our government too has begun massively snooping on Americans’ private communications."

Tying these various threads together yields the answer to the question the blogs are asking: President Bush, when ordering the National Security Agency to implement a new, wide-ranging domestic surveillance program, instructed the agency to refrain from requesting the warrants from the FISA court that would have made the activity legal. He did so out of fear that the court would disapprove of the extremely powerful "wide-net" technology the program subsequently employed, and would demand modifications in the government's investigatory techniques.

The Extraordinary Melancholy of Christmas

A few nights ago, on one of the increasingly rare occasions at my house when the television happened to be on, I noticed one of the networks was running one of the several versions of that ancient, cartoon feature, "A Charlie Brown Christmas," with its ageless characters and fossilized pratfalls.

I was immediately struck by the theme music, which I didn't remember ever having heard before (I had heard it, but didn't recall it). The words were all about "joy," "beauty," "cheer," and so forth, but the tone of the piece, sung by a boys' choir, was extremely sad, melancholy, pensive, and completely at odds with the images simultaneously taking place on the screen.

That aura of deep melancholy and sadness now infuses everything about this joyless season, from the post-Thanksgiving Day scuffles over deep-discount merchandise at Wal-Mart, to the sad, exhausted, and careworn faces of shoppers in the overcrowded stores, wearily fulfilling their obligation to exchange battery-operated items of useless junk with each other on the appointed day.

This is all that's left of one of the primary high holy days, as it's vestigally celebrated by the mummified remains of our dominant religion.

When you look at this sad celebration as it is, as it's evolved, it's kind of cool in a half-assed sort of way. It's a tired, played-out ritual embodying the last gasps of a dying culture.

As it turns out, I have that song on a CD -- the late Vince Guaraldi's "A Charlie Brown Christmas." I've listened to that song a lot the past few days. I enjoy the melancholy.

Mud Levees versus Tsunamis

GW is on PBS's News Hour declaring that he "only does what's legal"(referring to government surveillance of U.S. citizens) to protect the U.S. against terrorism.
--Outraged commentator

Well, he's lying, of course. So what else is new?

I may be really jaded, but I'm finding it more and more difficult to get upset about things like domestic surveillance, or the torture of detainees. These things are only what you'd expect.

As long as you permit your government to have a war machine, you'll get wars.

If we elect fascists and liars, we'll get fascism and lies.

A rotten tree does not bear good fruit.

I don't know that attacking these problems piecemeal -- swatting at domestic surveillance here, or at torture and illegal detention there -- does much good, although it's beneficial that these things are still pointed out. But what's the total effect of all these revelations? Have we figured out yet who we really are?

The rest of the world knows (excepting our little obedient poodle dog, England, of course), even if we(in the words of Conan-Doyle)have not the slightest clew!

We're not one nation under God. We're one nation on a shopping spree and a petroleum bender, and we're willing to blow up anyone who doesn't cooperate in our pursuit of this insane and increasingly hysterical way of life, recently described by our Vice-President as "non-negotiable."

So, domestic surveillance? Sure. Is it legal? Of course not. Is it to be expected from this scurvy crew? Does a bear live in the woods? Big, big deal.

I'm not giving up exactly. I just feel like we're in an extremely ominous, very revolutionary situation that's being driven by events and circumstances way beyond our control.

The way we've been living is coming to an abrupt and painful end. The Bush administration's weak and pathetic attempts to deal with this reality are a symptom rather than a cause of the enormous changes we're soon to endure.

We seem to have no idea who we are, or what part we played in creating this impasse.

I must say, in favor of Bush and the neocons, that at least they're attempting to deal with the reality of petroleum addiction (by securing more) and economic constriction (by propping up the pillars of capitalism with tax cuts), however inadequately and short-sightedly. They seem to understand the true nature of our problems, unlike most Americans who are totally unable to comprehend the enormity of what’s happened since the turn of the century, and what’s about to happen in the next few years.

What I'm saying, I guess, is that debating the legality of domestic surveillance, or the torture of detainees, or even whether we're trying to export "freedom" and "democracy" to Iraqis, is, to use a tired simile, sort of like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Black Market in Labor

The lead ediorial in the December 14 Los Angeles Times revealed that "the number of recorded workers in legitimate businesses in Los Angeles is lower now than in 1990."

The editorial did not, however, note the scope of the L.A. area's population increase for the decade and a half since 1990. U.S. Census figures show fourteen and half million people living in the L.A.-Riverside-Orange County region in 1990, and two million more than that in 2000. In the five years since, assuming the same rate of growth, the population of the area would have increased to about seventeen and a half million.

Of course, census data only provide a rough estimate, because many illegal immigrants avoid being counted due to fear of deportation.

But even the most inexact estimates reveal the explosive growth on an under-the-rader business sector that operates outside government regulation. These are the restaurants, clothing factories, car washes, beauty parlors, and gardening services that pay no taxes (including sales taxes), ignore health and safety requirements, and often pay less than the minimum wage.

Southern California has been growing faster -- at a rate of 12.7 percent a decade -- than any other metropolitan region in the U.S. except Las Vegas, and illegals from all over the world have been the most significant part of the increase. The illegal immigration and economic desperation noted by David Rieff in his incisive and somewhat prophetic 1992 book, "Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World," has generated a black market in labor which now threatens the survival of legitimate businesses facing unfair competition from the "informal" sector.

The Economic Roundtable and Milken Institute, the sources of the Times editorial, also note the severity of the increased burden on public schools and public health systems stemming from the growth of a black market in labor, as well as widespread mistreatment of workers.

Liberal and progressive Americans have expressed concern over the past few years about slave labor in countries like China, and the spread of child labor throughout the non-industialized world. These are legitimate concerns, but our attention to these critical issues should perhaps be focused more effectively within our own borders, and especially right here in Southern California.

The Last Word

The last word on the Tookie Williams execution is by LA Times columnist Steve Lopez. What makes this commentary so good is Lopez's ability to embrace the complexity of the issue(s).

I'm reproducing it in full here because you can't get on to the LA Times site without registering.

Steve Lopez:
Points West

A Barbaric End to a Barbaric Life

In an odd way, the most disturbing thing about watching a man die by lethal injection is how discreetly death creeps into the room.

No sudden jolt, no snapping of the neck at the end of a rope, no severed head.

The inmate gets a shot, he closes his eyes, he sleeps.

The room where Stanley Tookie Williams was killed Tuesday morning is set up like a theater, with neat rows of spectators sitting or standing on risers to view the execution.

Late Monday night, as one of 39 witnesses, I was ushered past dozens of guards and prison officials and into the viewing area a few feet from the octagonal death chamber.

Before us in the stuffy little auditorium, the curtains were opened, Williams was led in by guards, and the midnight show began — a dark, sinister, medieval drama in an archaic prison.

Never having witnessed an execution, I had tossed my name into the ring of potential spectators in order to see precisely what we're all a party to in a state that sanctions capital punishment. And now here I was, watching the clinical, calculated procedure used by the state of California to kill a man.

I watched the executioners struggle to tap a vein, digging into Williams' arms for minutes that seemed like hours. He was calm, if exasperated by the delay. Splayed out on his back and secured with tape and restraints, he lifted his head to study our faces, and he mouthed goodbyes to supporters who shared these close quarters with the relatives of his victims.

There was no apparent sign of suffering on Williams' part when the lethal injection did its duty. He lay motionless for several minutes before he was declared dead and the curtains were closed, show over.

"The state of California just killed an innocent man," three of his supporters shouted in unison.

That struck me as an insult to the families of Williams' victims. Of all the things Williams might have been, he wasn't innocent, and watching him die made me feel no differently about the man.

His victims, all four of them, were shotgunned as if it were a cheap thrill for Williams. And as one of the first Crips, he started something that destroyed everything in its path, bringing genocide to neighborhoods on top of all the other problems.

Williams was a tough guy in prison too, spending years in solitary confinement for his mayhem behind bars before he took a different tack. His anti-gang books and speeches from death row were great gestures, but the Nobel Peace Prize nominations were preposterous, and the marketing of Williams as a hero was offensive.

If he were truly redeemed, he would have taken responsibility for the murders, he would have rejected the duplicitous code of honor among those who refuse to tell what they know, and his dying words would have been a call for the dismantling of the gang he started.

Those who tried to cast Williams as a martyr, including the usual Hollywood rabble, once again picked the wrong man to carry the banner against the death penalty. They made a cause of Tookie Williams as others have done with Mumia Abu Jamal, the Philadelphia cop killer and death row inmate whose claim of innocence is pure fiction, despite the celebrity bestowed on him.

And yet, watching Williams put to death Tuesday morning by agents of the government — his execution sanctioned in a country where godliness and virtue are synonymous, even as torture and execution are defended — made me all the more certain that capital punishment is barbaric.

Though I don't question Williams' guilt, no one can dispute that across America, class, race and money figure prominently in the circumstances of crime and the quality of legal defense. Since 1973, in fact, 122 death row inmates have been exonerated or granted new hearings. A better poster child for abolishing the death penalty is No. 123, whoever that might be.

Twelve U.S. states no longer use capital punishment, and the possibility of a mistake is one of the reasons 40 countries have abolished the death penalty since 1990, including Mexico, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Senegal. In 2004, the United States followed only China, Iran and Vietnam in the number of executions.

Coming down the death row pike in California is a violent killer named Horace Edwards Kelly, whose wicked crimes are not in question. But he has been diagnosed as severely mentally ill, if not retarded, and was virtually tortured as a child.

Should we feel just as good about killing Kelly as we're supposed to feel about killing Williams? Will the premeditated and clinical execution of a feeble-minded man make us more civilized, more humane or any safer? Is life in a cage not enough to satisfy our puritanical beliefs or lust for blood?

Apparently not. Modern as we are, we still live by the law of an eye for an eye — as long as it doesn't get too messy.

The needle is perfect. He closes his eyes, he's gone.

It's much easier to handle that way. Not just for the person put to death, but for us.

Seven Proverbs

1. When you have a war machine, you get wars.

2. The earth -- love it or leave it.

3. They will purchase gasoline by measure and with astonishment (Ezkeiel paraphrased).

4. (We) came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity (AA, second step).

5. Before enlightment, you gather wood and haul water. After enlightenment, you gather wood and haul water.

6. At first a fool's mischief tastes sweet, as sweet as honey. But in time it turns bitter, and how bitterly he suffers (Dhammapada).

7. When life gives you lemons, squirt your enemy in the eye.

Missing Half the Story

A widely-quoted December 13 Times of London article which states that "Britain and America are planning a phased withdrawal of their forces from Iraq as soon as a permanent government is installed" has given new hope to anti-war forces in the U.S. and muted criticism of the Bush and Blair administrations.

However, the Times article and the many others which have spun off from it miss half the story: departing American and British troops will be replaced by American air power as detailed in Seymour Hersh's December 5 article in the New Yorker, "Up in the Air".

Even though the numbers of allied ground troops will drop sharply in 2006, and American and British readers will not encounter the same level of daily killed-in-action reports in their newspapers, the violence in Iraq and its impact on Iraqi civilians will not lessen, and might worsen.

The Times of London has completely missed this aspect of the developing story, as have all the major U.S. media. Author and media critic Norman Solomon, in a December 5 piece entitled "Hidden in Plane Sight" which appeared at Common Dreams website, noted that the phrase "air war" has not appeared a single time in either the New York Times or the Washington Post in 2005, and is also AWOL from the pages of Time Magazine.

"At least implicitly, news coverage has viewed the number of boots on the ground as the measure of the U.S. war effort in Iraq," Solomon observes. "And as a consequence, public discussion assumes -- incorrectly -- that a reduction of American troop levels there will mean a drop in the Pentagon's participation in the carnage."

In fact, the tempo of American bombing in Iraq has already increased "in recent months," according to Hersh's New Yorker piece which adds that "Most of the targets appear to be in the hostile, predominantly Sunni provinces that surround Baghdad and along the Syrian border."

Given its performance during the runup to the war, there is no guarantee the American mainstream media will pick up the significant details of the new developments until it is too late. "Mainstream news outlets in the United States haven't yet acknowledged a possibility that is both counterintuitive and probable: The U.S. military could end up killing more Iraqi people when there are fewer Americans in Iraq," Norman Solomon concludes.

He also quotes Joseph Gerson of the American Friends Service Committee: "This would in effect be 'changing the color of the corpses' in order to make the continuing war more palatable to the U.S. public."

Those who note parallels between the Iraq and Vietnam wars now have plenty to work with. The Bush administration's emphasis on creating an Iraqi government "able to stand on its own," and Iraqi fighting forces sufficient to protect it, mirror President Nixon's "Vietnamization" program of the early 70's. Likewise, the replacement of ground troops with air power precisely replicates the failed Nixon-Kisinger policy of that earlier war.

The end result -- Iraqi collaborators being lifted off the rooves of the Green Zone by departing American helicopters -- can be foreseen by predictors less prescient than Jeanne Dixon. History may not repeat itself, but most certainly, as Mark Twain once said, "It rhymes."

Now more than ever, an informed citizenry needs to take action to forestall the continuation of a criminal and unpopular war under stealth conditions. We need to email our Congressional representatives and senators, write letters to the editors of our local newspapers, and spread the word.

Scavenging the Blogs

While they may be competitive, bloggers are not generally jealous or overly possessive, and if they like the work of a fellow internetter they usually share enthusiastically by steering their own readers to others’ sites. That’s exactly what Americablog.blogspot.com’s proprietor, the gay activist John Aravosis did recently when he turned his readers on to the brand new crooksandliars.com.

“For political junkies, must-see TV once meant sitting through hours of ‘Crossfire,’ ‘Hannity & Colmes’ and ‘Meet the Press,’ hoping for the occasional gem,” an LA Times intro to the site quoted by Aravosis explains. “Nowadays, to catch Robert Novak turning the air blue on ‘Inside Politics’ or work yourself into an apoplectic lather over our politicians' latest truth-challenged utterances, you can point your browser to http://www.crooksandliars.com.”

Not a conventional blog, crooksandliars consists entirely of streaming video and audio outtakes of political television and radio shows. Founder John Amato, a 47-year-old Angelino and former musician, monitors all the political broadcasts so we don’t have to. So now, if you don’t have much time but are dying to see that priceless moment you’ve heard about when Bill O’Reilly defecates little bricks or Monica Crowley vomits crooked pins on the air, a la Salem, Mass., you know where to go. A minor annoyance is that you have to register to access the site, but it’s free.

Meanwhile, Ana Marie Cox a.k.a.Wonkette (wonkette.com), who runs the site subtitled “Politics for People with Dirty Minds,” posted a link to a singularly non-political Washington Post story, but one which makes readers my age feel a twinge of nostalgia for the late Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone.”

“(T)wo women, both named April and with the middle name Dawn, lived in different parts of Fairfax County and dated 22-year-old men,” the December 9 article by Jerry Markon and Tom Jackman begins ominously. “Now, both women have been charged in separate murder-for-hire plots with trying to have those boyfriends killed.”

“In what authorities called a bizarre coincidence, police charged April Dawn Shiflett, 33, with plotting the slaying of her 22-year-old boyfriend and charged April Dawn Davis, 27, with soliciting the murder of her former significant other, also 22. Police released the information yesterday, though the two were charged a week ago.”

Wonkette’s comment on this strange tale: “A word of warning: if you live in Fairfax County and are dating a woman with the first name April and the middle name Dawn, you should go to a friend or family member's house, call the police, and hide until they arrive.” She somewhat overstates the case, however, since you needn’t worry unless you’re a 22-year-old male.

Finally, a hat tip to Duncan Black’s “Eschaton” blog (atrios.blogspot.com) for linking to this truly scary story by Kevin Drum from the Washington Monthly under the title, “Kafka’s America”

the December 10 article describes a litigant contesting the Federal Aviation Administration’s requirement that airline passengers show a picture identification, only to be told that the law which specifies the requirement cannot be contested because it is a government secret.

Is it possible that in the near future U.S. citizens will be prosecuted for violating laws they weren’t aware of because the laws themselves are secret? How would such accused persons be arraigned, and how could they defend themselves against charges which cannot be fully articulated because the statute itself is secret?

You can find the answer to these and related questions at the Kafka Blog.

Cheney, Rumsfeld will resign in January

A betting person would be well advised right now to wager that both Vice-President Richard Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will resign shortly after the turn of the new year, probably the week of January second. The odds are very much in favor of it.

An NBC Nightly News broadcast piece aired at the beginning of December noted rising opposition to the Iraq War both in Congress and among voters, and ended with speculation that Rumsfeld might step down shortly after New Year's Day.

Several metropolitan dailies including the New York Daily News and the Baltimore Sun reported during the week of December fourth that Rumsfeld is expected to retire early next year. Possible replacements for Rumsfeld's post include acting Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England and the nominally Democratic Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, according to these sources.

Now Cheney's name has been paired with Rumsfeld's in the "possible retirement" category by Ray McGovern, a former CIA agent and currently a freelance writer who posts occasionally at Truthout.org.

"It is no secret that Cheney bears primary responsibility for making our country a pariah among nations by punching a gaping hole in the (until now) absolute ban on torture under international and US law," McGovern writes, adding that when the Vice-President steps down in January he will likely cite "reasons of health" as the motivation for his departure.

Ever since their ardent promotion of the decision to invade Iraq, Cheney and Rumsfeld, along with former Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, have been viewed by many as the team, or less flatteringly, "the cabal," which holds the primary responsibility for development and implementation of the administration's war policy.

McGovern claims that the result of Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice's recent overseas trip to meet with European heads of state, during which she discussed the issue of CIA-run prisons on European territory, was the final nail in the Cheney-Rumsfeld war policy.

"Never in the sixty years since World War II has an American secretary of state been received with such hostility by our erstwhile friends in Europe," McGovern says, adding that Rice's bland denial of U.S. wrongdoing -- "We do not torture," her standard response to inquiries about secret prisons and rendition flights -- was met with deep skepticism.

Rumsfeld, who is 73, will probably retire to his home in Taos. Dick Cheney will most likely return to rural Wyoming. There has been no discussion in the media concerning who might replace the Vice-President.

Good Old Mike

Good old Mike Wallace hasn't lost his punch. In a December 8 interview with the Boston Globe's Suzanne Ryan, he jumped the shark on her first question:

Q. President George W. Bush has declined to be interviewed by you. What would you ask him if you had the chance?

A. What in the world prepared you to be the commander in chief of the largest superpower in the world? In your background, Mr. President, you apparently were incurious. You didn't want to travel. You knew very little about the military. . . . The governor of Texas doesn't have the kind of power that some governors have. . . . Why do you think they nominated you? . . . Do you think that has anything to do with the fact that the country is so [expletive] up?

Yup. It's not George Bush's fault. He's not the cause of our problems, he's a symptom, like Las Vegas, Wal-Mart, and a war machine that's compelled to run an unjustified foreign invasion every 35 years or so (supposedly motivated by the need to spread "freedom" and "democracy").

The problem is not that George W. Bush is blanked up. We're blanked up. The rest of the world knows it, even if we don't.

At 87, Wallace is still conspicuously unsenile. Elsewhere in the interview, he says "There's no such thing as an indiscreet question."

And please don't ask me, "Why do you hate America?" I just told you.

Ruff Tuff Creampuff

Everybody's favorite homecoming queen, Condo Leeza, is apparently preparing to read the riot act to European governments over their desire to confront us about the torture and illegal detentions the U.S. is running on their territory.

It's a pretty stupid thing for her to do. Support for the Bush administration is running at slightly over one-third in this country, and she has even less credibility over on the other side of the pond.

As John at Americablog says, "It's time to call Condi's bluff. She has no support in this country, and certainly no mandate to go alienating (Europeans) any further."

This is the dumbest Bush move yet. You don't go into a neighborhood where people are on the verge of deciding to kick your ass anyway, and threaten them so as to make them madder than they already were.

Eye Dubya Dubya

(Note: I.W.W. = Industrial Workers of the World)

I looked at the world; the world looked round,
So I started singin' a protest song;
I belong to the I.W.W.
Eye Dubya Dubya
Dubya Dubya Dubya

Bin Laden said it, and Dubya said it too,
You'll bury us and we'll bury you;
Dubya said it, bin Laden said it too,
We'll bury us and you bury you;
So you really oughta think about joinin'
The I.W.W.
Dubya
Dubya Dubya Dubya
Indubitably I belong to the I.W.W.
Dubya Dubya Dubya Dubya Dubya

No use hangin' around waiting for a schism
Between moderate Muslims and Islamo-fascism;
No use waitin for Democrats to step on the gas;
You'll hear a pop when they heads come out they ass.
In the meantime I'll stick with the I.W.W.
Dubya Dubya
Dubya Dubya

Well I remember when I
Was a member of the Eye
Dubya
Dubya Dubya
I.W.W...

Goddammit! I'm the oldest pinko in this trailer park.

(Eternal gratitude to the Holy Modal Rounders)

Point No Point

A new month, and a new leaf.

I'm not going to write about the Iraq War any more, or talk about it, or think about it. It's too depressing.

Anyway, I don't have any influence, so what difference does it make?

A crusty old conservative Marine Corps lifer and long-time advocate of the war machine speaks for me now, as he does for many of us. Murtha also speaks for the generals in the Pentagon; of that there can be no doubt. And the generals have turned against the war, and chosen Murtha as their designated rep and point man.

God, of course, has chosen George W. Bush as his designated rep and point man. Our beloved leader is not one of God's humble organ pipes, he's God's big organ, and he's been instructed not to "pull out now" but "stay in there and get the job done."

He's as crazy as a shithouse rat.

Likewise, trying to argue with any of the 40 percent or so of the population at large who share vicariously in Bush's psychosis is pointless. As Ecclesiastes would say, "There is no profit in it." You can pile up documented evidence as high as the Tower of Babel, but for them everything remains just great in Iraq -- the economy is booming, and just look at all those purple fingers.

There's no way to stop them trying to put out the fire with more gasoline. Maybe an even better metaphor is this one from Tom Tomorrow.

So I'll just bow out of this debate until the fire has consumed us and the cliff has been driven over, until the time the war is tragic history and the wankers and morons are chanting in unison, "We would have won if it wasn't for you treasonous anti-war people."

Then it'll be time to jump back in and deliver some extremely sharp words to some very hind quarters.

Whacked Out

After stumbling across this story yesterday, one could be forgiven for grasping at a glimmer of that hope which according to reliable sources springs eternal.

So, he's going to "cut and run" after all. The coke and Jack Daniels didn't destroy so many brain cells as to render him permanently disabled. There's room for optimism.

Not.

The other shoe drops when you read Seymour Hersh's article in this week's New Yorker: "Up in the Air". It reveals that our Beloved Leader, like an earlier King George (number three), is a hopeless lunatic.

George III at least had an excuse. Medical experts today believe that when he ran naked through the hallways of Windsor Castle at night, or angrily raved incomprehensible gibberish for hours on end, he was exhibiting mental manifestations of a physical problem, a chemical imbalance, possibly porphyria.

But our George's malady is strictly mental and spiritual. He has become convinced that, like Moses and Muhammed before him, he is God's delegated representative on earth, chosen by the almighty to deliver democracy, town meetings, Diebold, and Wal-Mart to the heathen savages of Iraq.

He's completely whacked out.

Seymour Hersh writes, "Bush’s closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that 'God put me here' to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that 'he’s the man,' the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reëlection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose."

And how, precisely, does he plan to accompish this divine purpose? Not with infantry; we've already noted that he plans to pull the troops out next year. Hersh reveals he plans to replace them with air power.

Remember Vietnam, 1969-1974? As Mark Twain said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."

"Within the military, the prospect of using airpower as a substitute for American troops on the ground has caused great unease," Hersh says, after laying out the main outlines of the plan (do yourself a favor and read the whole thing). "For one thing, Air Force commanders, in particular, have deep-seated objections to the possibility that Iraqis eventually will be responsible for target selection. 'Will the Iraqis call in air strikes in order to snuff rivals, or other warlords, or to snuff members of your own sect and blame someone else?' another senior military planner now on assignment in the Pentagon asked. 'Will some Iraqis be targeting on behalf of Al Qaeda, or the insurgency, or the Iranians?'"

I'd only add to what the senior military planner asked, remember what a resounding success "Vietnamization" and the Vietnam air war of the early 70's were?

But wait! There's more!

It seems that now, as documented by the references in this article at Billmon's Whiskey Bar, that U.S. forces in Iraq have begun using "The Salvadoran Option," i.e., using Iraqi death squads to target suspected insurgents and various other troublemakers. Most of the members of these squads are Shia, so it should come as no surprise that their victims are primarily Sunni.

The random shooting of civilians by uniformed Iraqis we've been seeing on TV might be part of the work of these "Salvadorized" units.

So there it is -- "Vienamization" and "Salvadorization," and after you strip away the euphemisms, the kinds of crimes that were committed by Hitler and Josef Stalin. It seems we're determined, under the leadership of a certifiable lunatic (just like Hitler -- just like Stalin) to go down that path.

May I be forgiven for being pessemistic, and for believing that things will only get worse?

Or can we go home now?

Jazeera Bizarra

The revelation that President Bush planned to bomb the headquarters of the al-Jazeera news service in Doha, Qatar is producing potentially disastrous consequences for the administration as well as for British PM Tony Blair’s government.

The story was first published in the British tabloid The Daily Mirror on November 22. The paper claimed to possess a five-page Downing Street (U.K. Government top-secret) memo detailing conversations between Bush and Blair at a summit in Washington in April of 2004.

Bush, unhappy with al-Jazeera’s reporting of the American attack on the Iraqi city of Fallujah, insisted the U.S. should bomb the TV station’s headquarters. Blair talked him out of it, citing a potential worldwide backlash of disastrous proportions.

When asked about the story at his daily press briefing of November 23, White House Spokesnebbish Scott McClellan replied, “We are not interested in dignifying something so outlandish and inconceivable with a response.”

The same day the Mirror ran the front-page story, however, it was ordered by U.K.’s Attorney General Lord Goldsmith not to publish any further details from the memo, whose existence was undisputed by the government. Goldsmith threatened the publishers with criminal prosecution for violating the Official Secrets Act if they persisted.

The newspaper had informed the government it planned to run the original story 24 hours in advance of its appearance.

On November 24, a British civil servant, David Keogh, and an ex-employee of former Labour MP and anti-war activist Tony Clarke, Leo O’Connor, were charged under the Official Secrets Act with leaking a copy of the memo to the Mirror. Subsequently, Clarke returned the memo to the government, without explaining how he came into possession of it.

The following day Waddah Khanfar, al-Jazeera’s general manager, announced he would soon fly to London to deliver a letter to Blair demanding a meeting and an explanation of the memo’s contents.

“People should know the facts about it,” Khanfar said. “It is not a matter that can be brushed away or dealt with in very vague statements.”

By November 25, Labour MP’s in Parliament began demanding that the government publish the entire memo. Ex-Defence Minister Peter Kilfoyle’s remarks were typical: “This is not about national security,” he said, “It’s about political embarrassment."

However, on November 26, Blair’s government announced that the document will be kept secret.

Details of all these stories are available at The Daily Mirror's site.

The Mirror is one of the world's great newspapers, although not generally recognized as such. It's one of those cheap, sensational, vulgar British tabloids that people love to hate. Besides the daily page three titty shot and overheated movie and football news, it features some top-notch reporting and serious, comprehensive world coverage.

Thanksgiving

Today we'll celebrate by eating turkey, canned cranberry sauce, and mashed potatoes, in exactly the same way as the Pilgrims did with the Indians on this same day in Massachusetts so many years ago.

I have a great deal to be thankful for in my personal life as a result of good luck and several fortuitous decisions made at key points during my sixty-year meandering interval on this planet.

My country, my society, and my tribe, however, have little to celebrate today. Our vaunted prosperity has become a curse and a liability; our freedom has borne bitter fruit. Freedom entails the freedom to choose badly, and we have.

Prosperity and freedom carry awesome and frightening responsibilities. Maybe someday, we'll either learn how to handle them, or lose them altogether.

Six Degrees

Everybody’s played “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” right? OK, let’s play “Six Degrees from the Reality of the Iraq War.”

Our way of life, which VP Cheney says is “non-negotiable,” requires slightly more than 20 million barrels of oil a day, or something in excess of a billion barrels every 50 days. We produce slightly less than six million barrels a day, and domestic production has been declining since the U.S. production peak in 1970. The rest is imported; do the math. In addition, two-thirds of the world’s remaining oil is in the Middle East. That’s one degree.

At the conclusion of Gulf War I in 1991, neocon planners realized we had to either change our way of living and seek alternatives to petroleum, or control the supply of the substance to which we are addicted. They chose the latter course, and set forth their plans here and here. Military presence in the Gulf region – a petroleum-securing “Fort Apache,” if you will, was conceived as the answer. That’s two degrees.

After 9/11, Bush and the neocons saw their opening and moved to implement the PNAC plan linked above. They realized, however, that American voters would reject a war predicated on a naked power-and-resources grab, so they cooked up fairy tales about weapons of mass destruction, mushroom clouds, and the Iraqi Stalinist dictator’s supposed ties to the al-Qaida terrorists who attacked New York and Washington. That’s three degrees.

At the beginning, some people realized what the war was about, and the slogan ”No Blood for Oil”was heard frequently. However, Americans mostly swallowed the administration’s fairy tales, and at the outset public approval of the war was about 75-25. As the war progressed, however, and went badly, and then worse than badly, and eventually the public turned against it. We began to see things like people driving gigantic Suburban Attack Vehicles sporting “War is NOT the Answer” bumper stickers. Unfortunately, for them, war IS the answer. And that’s four degrees.

With support for the war unraveling, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, et. al. have commenced lying about the lies they told to take us into Iraq. Bush is now rewriting the history of his documented pre-war lies by accusing war critics of rewriting history, and that’s five degrees.

Suddenly, everyone who’s not drinking the Kool-Aid has realized the U.S. must leave Iraq as soon as possible, since the war has become a lose-lose situation (we lose, they lose). A conservative Democratic congressman, John Murtha, makes an impassioned speech pleading the case for a total American pullout from Iraq at the first practicable opportunity. The word “oil,” however, does not appear once anywhere in this speech.

That’s six degrees.

And you may ask yourself
Where is that beautiful house?

And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?

And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go to?

And you may ask yourself
Am I right? ...am I wrong?

And you may tell yourself
My god!...what have I done?

--The Talking Heads: “Once in a Lifetime”

I would humbly submit that the only solution to addiction is to stop. Anything else is nuts.

Incidentally, we need to get out of Iraq right now.

Bird Flu: Weapon of Mass Deception

Using the threat of a bird flu pandemic in the same way he used the bogus threat of Iraqi WMD’s in the runup to the Iraq War, President Bush is hoping to intimidate Congress into passing legislation that would grant blanket immunity from liability to pharmaceutical companies.

Such liability protection would extend to all instances of catastrophic health effects arising from the use of vaccines and other medications. This comes as the pharmaceutical industry faces the possibility of class-action lawsuits, similar to those brought against tobacco companies, stemming from the inclusion of the additive Thimerosal in vaccines routinely used to inoculate children against common childhood diseases.

Thimerosal contains mercury, and has been implicated by many scientists and doctors, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, in the explosive increase in the incidence of autism in recent years

"At this moment there is no pandemic influenza in the United States or the world. But if history is our guide, there's reason to be concerned," Bush said in a speech at the National Institutes of Health on November 1. In the same speech he said the government must approve liability protection for those who manufacture vaccines.

Pharmaceuticals legislation currently under consideration by Congress which would confer blanket liability protection on drug manufacturers include S. 1783, The Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act, and a similar bill in the House, H.R. 3970.

The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), a watchdog consumer advocacy group, has called the pending legislation “an end-run by Pharma's friends in Congress to take away the civil rights of the American people."

Avian flu outbreaks have occurred in Asia among people who live and work in close proximity to poultry. However, the disease in its present form cannot be transmitted from one human to another. The need for a bird flu vaccine to be developed under emergency conditions is questionable.

In addition, pharmaceutical companies already enjoy extensive protection against liability. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 protects drug companies and doctors from almost all lawsuits, and there are only a handful of vaccine injury lawsuits pending in civil courts.

However, the possibility of class action suits arising from the use of Thimerosal has the big pharmaceutical firms worried enough to push for the current legislation. . The U.S. Department of Education has documented the rate of increase in the incidence of autism between 1992 and 2000 as 435 percent.

The Kamikaze Kids

Murtha is trying to do conservatives a favor, but the Republican wingnuts in Congress are too dumb to realize it.

The old guy is perceptive enough to realize that by continuing to beat a dead horse in Iraq, and continuing to pile up ever more ominous defecits, the present government is cutting its own throat and creating what very well might be a pre-revolutionary situation.

Murtha correctly perceives that the government's present course, in its recklessness and disregard for consequences, is undermining the rule of the political establishment, the corporate business establishment, and the military establishment.

It's obvious if you read his speech of November 17 that what most concerns him is that "The American public is way ahead of us," and "Our defecit is growing out of control."

Murtha realizes that the twin spectres of massive public disaffection from the war and hostility toward the government that got us into it, combined with the certainty of fiscal insolvency and collapse, are conspiring to create an atmosphere bordering on anarchy in this country.

That doesn't mean a revolution is sure to happen, but it does mean that a situation is brewing in which anything could happen. It means loss of control.

John Murtha is a conservative, a militarist, and no enemy of big corporations. He's not some kind of liberal, pacifist weenie. He sees this country's ruling elites behaving foolishly and endangering themselves, and his concern is for the viability of the established powers.

So go for it, Republicans. Just keep on doing what you're doing. Your psychopathic fear and rage masquerading as political philosophy tells the world who you are, even if you don't have a clue.

You're the best friends a committed revolutionary ever had.

The Great Raitt---Right, Right!

(Bonnie Raitt at the Paramount Theater, Seattle, November 12, 2005)
By Dian Hassel

Bonnie Raitt gave a high-energy, musically tight, musiculturally diverse and artistically precise performance at The Paramount in Seattle last Saturday night. She was so immediately engaging that I forgot my usual routine, listing the performance catalog in my moleskine notebook. Her band includes those who have been with her for a good piece of time: George Marinelli on guitar, Jon Cleary on keyboards, Hutch Hutchinson on bass and Ricky Fataar on percussion. The opening act, Maia Sharp also provided backup vocals and saxophone on three or four songs, maybe more.

They opened with a New Orleans song, dedicated to and mostly performed by Cleary, who hails from the Big Easy---rats, can’t remember the name of the song. Then they went into God Was in the Water That Day---both songs recorded before the Katrina disaster.

Other songs included (not in order): Nick of Time (dedicated to her deceased parents),
Let’s Give Them Something to Talk About, Gnawin’ On It (for “Scott,” lucky Scott), an early early song of hers that is honky-tonk bluesy with many words including “roadmap,” Women Be Wise. She performed all of the Maia Sharp songs that are on Bonnie’s new CD, Souls Alike. Raitt is a generous lead performer---not only bringing her opening act on four or five times and singing all of Sharp’s songs that are on the CD---she also stands sideways when others in her band have solos---however, she looks GREAT playing sideways, so it’s win-win for everyone on stage, and, I might add, everyone in the audience.

At one point, playing sideways, she squatted and pointed her guitar like a good weapon and rose up easily while still playing, no hand up or anything---so how many 50-somethings can do that?? She celebrated her 56th birthday last week and told the crowd that her band and crew came out in their boxer shorts with a cake---each guy had a letter on his boxers spelling out POLES ALIKE. Later, when a crew member handed her a guitar, she quipped, “Which letter were you?”

Her only political comments were aimed at Governator Arnold and were brief. As is the norm at a Raitt concert, many pro-environmental groups were there, handing out and selling stuff. The house was sold out and ecstatic about the show---many standing ovations and two encores---the first encore she did a ballad by Sharp, and THE SONG I WAS THERE TO HEAR, I Can’t Make You Love Me---Cleary perfectly made the introduction his own, not an easy feat following the incredible Bruce Hornsby keyboard intro on the recorded version of this anthem. The last encore was a tribute song to a recently deceased bluesman (again, sorry I forgot to write it down) and regaled the late Robert Palmer by singing Doctor, Doctor, Give Me the News.

Maia Sharp is a cosmic force in the making. She opened the evening with an hour-long set, 11 songs---Maia on guitar, with a bass player and a drummer, both excellent. The sidemen’s instrumentals were lyrical. At one point, she sat at the keyboard and started a song---all of a sudden, you hear a slide guitar and yes, Bonnie strolls onto stage with her ax, no intro, and plays and sings back-up for Maia. Just as nonchalantly, she strolls off.

Bonnie, in addition to her pro-environmental advocacy, has championed the effort to get royalties for some of the now-elderly blues folks who were the foundation of a big part of what we call “rock” now. Raitt played for 1-½ hours. It seemed like fifteen minutes. Watching Bonnie on stage, she is clearly physically impacted by the music. Some of it lifts her up, some of it clearly devastates her. Ditto, the audience.

Giving Up/Giving In

Kurt Vonnegut has given up. He has relinquished all hope for the future of the United States, if it can even be said to have a future. In his eighties now, he's certain that life on earth will not long survive him. He's decided the human race is no damn good.

And he's in good company. Einstein, Gandhi, and Mark Twain all reached similar conclusions before they died.

"Why are you so deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human race?" Einstein asked himself in 1949, just a few years before his death. He answered the question with great difficulty.

"I have admitted my mistake," Gandhi grumbled bitterly in 1948, shortly before his assassination. "I thought our struggle was based on non-violence, whereas in reality it was no more than passive resistance, which essentially is a weapon of the weak."

Twain's take on the human condition was even bleaker. In 1898 when he was 63, he wrote "The Mysterious Stranger," a long short story whose premise is that the world and mankind were created by Satan rather than God.

"Strange, indeed," says the Devil to the lone human to whom he has revealed himself, "that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane -- like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short..."

In our own time Twain's cynicism seems prescient. If there is a God behind creation, why are there nuclear weapons, people burning one another with white phosphorus, and the apparent likelihood of environmental destruction snuffing out all life in his or her or its world? What kind of a God would make such a world?

Vonnegut has enthusiastically joined the chorus of cynical and pessemistic curmudgeons with his new book, A Man Without A Country. It's a book only because it consists of a few (135) printed pages between two hard covers; it's more accurately a very loosely connected melange of short essays, random thoughts, and aphorisms, guaranteed to leave any reader who's not a masochist depressed, angry, and forlorn.

On the subject of the oncoming energy catastrophe and the related topic of environmental destruction, Vonnegut is even gloomier that that Jeremiah of future energy shock, James Kunstler. "You want to talk about irresistible whoopee?" he asks in his characteristic high tone. "A booby trap."

"Fossil fuels, so easily set alight! Yes, and we are presently touching off narly the very last whiffs and drops and chunks of them. All lights are about to go out. No more electricity. All forms of transportation are about to stop, and the planet earth will soon have a crust of skulls and bones and dead machinery.

"And nobody can do a thing about it. It's too late in the game.

"Don't spoil the party, but here's the truth: We have squandered our planet's resources, including air and water, as though there were no tomorrow, and now there isn't going to be one."

Describing Americans as "proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war lovers with appallingly powerful weaponry," Vonnegut concludes, "So I am a man without a country...

(snip)

"...I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas."

I can't disagree with any of Vonnegut's conclusions, but I have problems with his attitude toward them. If it's true that there's no hope for America, and that planet earth has only a few days left, I'd rather enjoy what little sunshine remains and run up the bear flag to show I'm a patriotic Californian than give way to despair.

The problem is, people who are hopeless are also generally mean and depressed. I don't know whether Vonnegut is mean, but I know I would be if I gave up, gave in, and surrendered to hopelessness.

Anyway, Vonnegut, Twain, Gandhi, and Dr. Einstein notwithstanding, there are still a few people of advanced age and great knowledge who hold out at least some guarded hope for the future. Two that I know of are the old socialist and historian Howard Zinn, who claims that "The abolition of war is not to be dismissed as utopian," and the indefatigable crusader Doris Haddock, who still maintains, even in the face of an imperialistic and repressive neocon regime, that the real Americans "are resolved to help each other. We are resolved to represent love in the world and to follow our national dream."

In a way I find Kurt Vonnegut's pessemism and cynicism strange. If God smites atheists, he, she, or it would certainly not have omitted smiting one like Vonnegut who has been courting the undertaker, chain smoking unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes for 70 years. Something like Providence, if not a deity, seems to be keeping this octogenarian curmudgeon around for the fulfillment of some mysterious and wonderful purpose, of which he is thus far uninformed.

When he finds out what it is he'll cop a new attitude.

Directions Home

President Bush and all his crew are now caught in a tightening spiral. As the messy consequences of their reckless policies gather force and they are caught in the steel jaws of their exposed lies, their confused and frightened jefe lashes out with increasingly hysterical desperation and increasingly transparent new lies in a vain attempt to cover the old ones.

It's time for us to turn our attention away from this crippled and mortally wounded regime, because it's now obvious that the attempt to impose fascism on the United States has failed. Continuing to expend energy vilifying the fallen serves no purpose.

Instead We need to re-open the debate, not seriously contested for 70 years, concerning the essential nature of the kind of country we wish to have. This was exactly the purpose of President Jimmy Carter's op-ed piece which ran in the LA Times yesterday.

Unfortunately, Carter is a good-hearted person with limited vision, as evidenced by the ineptitude which characterized his administration. He would, of course, do away with the worst excesses of the current regime, but at the same time, would return us to the type of society and the kind of policies we had under Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Reagan: imperialism without fascism and the rule of monopoly capitalism without dictatorship.

I'm hoping that public reaction to the bankrupt and vicious policies of the present failed regime will be extreme enough to lead us in a direction not envisioned by the well-intentioned but myopic Jimmy Carter, back to the approaches, objectives, and socialist programs of the New Deal, which gave us Social Security, the G.I. Bill of Rights, subsidized home mortgages, and later on, medicare. These measures, augmented today by a single-payer system of guaranteed health insurance, would for the first time in a long time bring the U.S. government into harmony with the main principle of the Declaration of Independence, that government exists for the benefit of the governed.

I'm also hoping that we will finally, belatedly, pay attention to the warning President Eisenhower prophetically included in his 1961 Farewell address, and work actively to do away with "the unwarranted influence...(of) the military-industrial complex." Militarism, combined with monopoly capitalism, was the foundation and prerequisite of our tragic fascist episode. But now the Iraq War has shown that we'll have to find methods other than imperialistic aggression to solve our energy dilemma, as well as our other global and hemispheric problems.

I say this not as a Democrat or a liberal, for I am neither, any more than I'm a communist or a socialist. I'm a revolutionary who tries to follow the teaching of Mohandas K. Gandhi, that is to say, a person for whom revolution begins with purification of the heart, and for whom politics is a spiritual discipline.

It's time for a real change, and that doesn't just mean a retreat to the Kennedy-Johnson days and the kinder, gentler imperialism, wars, and monopoly capitalism of a time when we had better drugs and better music.

Slough of Despond

Morale among U.S. military personnel in Iraq, especially reserve troops called up to active duty, has become so dangerously low that the commanding general of the U.S. Army Reserve has expressed doubts about the Army’s ability to continue functioning.

Sinking morale parallels and is fueled by the drop-off in recruitment numbers for both the regular Army and the Army Reserve.

In an internal Pentagon memo, written last December but only leaked to the press and published in the Baltimore Sun in early November of this year, Lt. General James Helmly called the Army Reserve a “broken” force, and said the reserve has reached a point where it cannot fulfill its missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

About 40 percent of the active-duty troops in Iraq are reservists, some of whom have been forced to undergo two, three, or even four tours of duty, under the terms of the Rumsfeld Defense Department’s “stop-loss” policy.

Stop loss, the involuntary extension of active duty status of soldiers beyond their contractual obligation, has been called “a back-door draft” by Lieutenant Paul Rieckert, an Iraq veteran and Pentagon critic. Calling the policy “a band-aid solution,” Rieckert contends that “Stop Loss is destroying the very concept of our volunteer military, is terribly damaging to morale, and is yet another indication that the original plan for war was flawed.”

When asked 11 months ago whether the morale-destroying Stop Loss policy would continue, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said he has no plans to discontinue the practice because it's important to maintain "unit cohesion."

Writing recently on the New York Times op-ed page, columnist Bob Herbert described Stop Loss and multiple deployments as “a form of Russian roulette.”

One combat veteran known only as “hEkle” described the current level of morale as “pretty low.”

In an interview conducted by Socialistworker.org, hEkle said “While we were in Iraq, (morale) was pretty low. It depends on what camp or operating base you were at. If you are at a place where you didn’t go out on missions, but stayed on and provided support for others, morale was higher, because they weren’t seeing the shit. Battalions that were going out every day and doing missions--their morale was pretty low.

”You’re crammed into a 15-by-20-foot aluminum box with two other roommates--plus the heat, plus the miserable conditions, plus bad food for a whole year. You add it all up, and morale gets pretty low.”

Because of morale problems caused by Stop Loss and the Army’s rapidly diminishing recruitment rates, General Helmly says that under current procedures, and considering the inadequate numbers of recruits, his forces will be unable "to meet mission requirements associated with Operation Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom" in Afghanistan.

Helmly was especially critical of current Army use of financial incentives to attract and retain reservists on active duty, which the general says confuses "volunteers" with "mercenaries," and of the Defense Department’s practice of calling reservists to active duty at only a few days' notice.

For those reservists already on the ground in Iraq, redeployment and extension of active duty time sometimes comes with no notice at all. In his chronicle of his service in Iraq, “The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell” (Riverhead Books, 2005), combat veteran John Crawford describes how it felt to have his hitch unexpectedly extended, and the devastating effect it had on troops’ morale:

“’Sir, there are rumors of a follow-on mission. Is that true?’…

“’I’m working on that, men. I’ll get back to you.’”

“That was how it went. Vague answers and no one ever asked what we all were thinking. ‘Sir, are you fighting to get us a follow-on mission so that you and the rest of Headquarters Company can earn your combat infantry badges and you can get some leadership time in theater? Do you feel as though you missed the war and now you’re going to make up for it with our blood and sweat? Are you upset because we came over, did our jobs, and are ready to go home while you did paperwork?’

“No one asked, because we already knew the answer. It was as clear on his face as the disgust was on ours.”

White Phosphorus

One of the reasons we went to war in Iraq was because of Saddam's use of chemical weapons against Iraqis. Now the United States appears to be guilty of the same crime.

A documentary entitled "Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre," aired November eighth by RAI (Radio Audizioni Italiane), the Italian state broadcast service, focused on the U.S. military's use of white phosphorus against the civilian population of Fallujah in its November, 2004 attack on that city. It features photographs of victims whose flesh has been burned to the bone, but whose clothing is in many cases strangely intact.

The story first surfaced a year ago on the website "Islam Online," which reported that "US troops are reportedly using chemical weapons and poisonous gas in its large-scale offensive on the Iraqi resistance bastion of Fallujah, a grim reminder of Saddam Hussein's alleged gassing of the Kurds in 1988."

RAI used the Islamic site as an information and photo source for its documentary, which also features on-camera interviews with former U.S. soldiers. One of these, a veteran of the combat at Fallujah, testifies: "I heard the order to pay attention because they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military jargon it's known as Willy Pete."

"Phosphorus burns bodies," the G.I. adds in his first-hand description. "In fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone ... I saw the burned bodies of women and children. Phosphorus explodes and forms a cloud. Anyone within a radius of 150 metres is done for."

For the past year, the military's USinfo website has maintained that phosphorus shells were "fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters."

However, Iraqi witnesses report that "a rain of fire" fell on the city and killed enemy fighters and civilians alike, many as they slept in their beds.

The documentary also provided evidence that U.S. forces in Fallujah used Mark 77 incendiary bombs against the city, a new and more potent form of napalm. Mark 77 is outlawed for use against non-military targets.

American media have been predictably AWOL on this story.

The United States military and its civilian commanders in the Bush administration now stand accused of the same sorts of crimes for which Gestapo and SS personnel and Japanese prison camp commandants were hanged at the close of World War II.

Sources:
RAI 24 News (http://www.rainews24.rai.it/)
The (UK) Independent (http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article325757.ece)
Daily Kos (http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/11/9/174518/797)

39 Months

Speaking in Panama yesterday, Bush asserted that "We do not torture."

So why has he threatened to veto a bill that bans something we don't do?

Huh. Logic was never one of the president's strong suits.

The torture policy didn't originate with Dubya, though. Colin Powell's former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, claims the policy came out of Cheney's office. Bush was merely dumb enough to defend it and assign lawyers like Gonzales and John Yoo to write up rationalizations for it.

U.S. policy on treatment of prisoners is now being dictated by Cheney, a lunatic whose crimes against humanity place him squarely among history's monsters. Take a good look at Cheney's face, and you'll see echoes of his predecessors: the imbecile fanaticism of Hitler; the frozen-hearted brutality of Josef Stalin; the glassy-eyed rage of Vlad the impaler.

The American public, to its credit, supports neither Cheney nor his torture policy (his approval rating is now 19 percent). We may be collectively dumb enough to be hoodwinked by right-wing propaganda, especially during those times when a 24-hour tidal wave of second-hand lies (as in the run-up to Iraq) from corporate media are its vehicle. But as a people, we're apparently just not ready for blatant fascism.

There are 39 months left in the Bush administration's second term. I don't see how they'll ever be able to complete it, but on the other hand, I don't see any workable means for getting rid of them.

Da da da, da da da da da da, THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT!

Ever sat through one of those idiotic Hollywood movies where there's a good guy with a slightly mentally challenged sidekick and a bad guy and a helpless but very pretty girl and a bunch of barbarians or hoodlums and the bad guy goes nya haa haa and sets all the barbarians and/or hoodlums on the good guy who kills about half of them then kills the bad guy but his faithful sidekick usually a black guy gets tragically killed in this final confrontation boo hoo hoo but then the good guy gets the girl after defusing the bomb or winning the big game in the last .00000000002 second?

Of course you have. Who hasn't?

But just in case you haven't, or in any case, you owe it to yourself to check out
THANKSGIVING: THE MOVIE.

You'll never feel the same about poultrycide again.

Shaykh Yerbouti

Now it can be told!! During the runup to the Iraq war, the Cheney administration relied heavily on the testimony of a former al-Qaida operative named al-Libi.

Seem like a coincidence? No way, Buckwheat.

Bush, Cheney and others at the top of the Neo-Con food chain claimed that Iraq was providing al-Qaeda with training in chemical and biological weapons. These claims were based on statements provided by the known fabricator, al-Qaida senior military trainer Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. The Washington Post reports that al-Libi formally retracted his claims in early 2004, and reports that "In fact, in January 2004 al-Libi recanted his claims, and in February 2004 the CIA withdrew all intelligence reports based on his information."

Can there be any doubt? Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi and Irv Lew "Scooter" Libby are the same person. Furthermore, we have learned from a highly-placed and very reliable carbon-based life form that neither person actually exists. Both al-Libi and Libby are aliases concocted by the nefarious and secretive Saudi double agent, Shaykh Yerbouti.

So there you have it, with apologies to Frank Zappa.

I'm Goin' Away to a World Unknown

...is Charlie Patton's take on walking "Down That Dirt Road."

Bob Dylan echoes the sentiment: "Yes, I'm walkin' down the highway/With my suitcase in my hand..." (from Freewheeling, 1963).

I'd change a couple things about Dylan's version, though. For one thing, I'd never try to walk any significant distance carrying a suitcase. That's a good way to cripple yourself. And I'd change his tag line to, "I feel just like I'm walkin' through some unknown land."

Or as Michael Moore put it, "Dude, Where's My Country?"

It's hard to recognize the dear old U.S.A. these days, no matter whether you're driving (or walking) down one of its excellently engineered highways or watching it unravel on the evening news.

And it's impossible to describe what's happened to us over the course of the last 50 years without using the word "fascist," but launching that incendiary monosyllable causes all kinds of trouble. It triggers images of Hitler and the piles of rotting bodies being bulldozed into mass graves at Dachau.

On top of that, the word is chronically misused by people who have no idea what they're talking about. That includes everyone from adolescents who respond with "God, you're such a fascist," to a parent who has forbidden marijuana consumption in the house, to that daily passenger on the political short bus, Jonah Goldberg (a devotee of newspeak if there ever was one).

Furthermore, we're not living under a fascist government (yet). Harry Reid could never have pulled off his brilliant hijacking of the Senate two days ago, for purposes of getting a bunch of deadbeats to cough up the goods, under a fascist dictatorship, any more than the thousands of kids who walked out of classes all over the country yesterday to protest the war could have gotten away with it if the neocons had squads of storm troopers they could mobilize.

But...is the current administration a fascist enterprise? Totally. Adamantly. Enthusiastically. And the Bush administration happens to be running things right now. Its allies, hirelings, goons, and media mouthpieces, while they don't have total control, are calling all the shots.

So yeah, the U.S. today is a fascist country.

I don't want to get embroiled in a definition of fascism here, especially when other people have already adequately done so. Seattle-based journalist David Neiwert has masterfully dealt with the subject at his blog Orcinus, in an article which draws at length on a noteworthy structural analysis of fascism produced recently by a little-known Canadian lawyer, Paul Bigio.

Bigio emphasizes the role played by monopoly capitalism in every country where fascism has arisen. Indeed, it's not outlandish to say that in modern times fascism grows out of hyper-concentrated monopoly capitalism as surely as a dandelion grows from its root. It's the inevitable political manifestation of a specific set of economic conditions.

But how much of this does a person have to understand in order to realize what's happening to the U.S. today? Probably not much. How much do these little tykes protesting the Iraq war in Minnesota yesterday know about monopoly capitalism or the relationship between modern political tyrannies and mass media?

It doesn't matter. They're smart enough to know when they're being lied to, and their instincts are healthy enough to tell them when they're being manipulated. How sad it is to realize that as they begin to get ground down by life's vicissitudes, they'll change, like the people of all the generations before them.

Since I retired, I don't miss the classroom, but I sure miss the kids. I think I'll take a long walk, and maybe get re-acquainted with some of them.

And if I do -- when I do -- I'll explain to them what's happening in terms they'll understand, the way we framed things back during Vietnam. At that time, the conventional wisdom was that the life of the country, its government, commerce, and culture, were no longer controlled by human agency.

"It's a machine," we told each other, "and it's out of control."

You don't have to recognize that it's an analogy to see the truth in it.

Two from Tommy

Tom Tomorrow's latest (you might have to watch a commercial in order to get access to it) is the best concise analysis I've seen of the vital role of our supposedly independent and objective press plays in stoking the flames of war fever, and the government's use of media as a sewer pipe for its most blatant and ridiculous propaganda.

Two and a half years ago, T.T. also had the best-ever satirical take on the Neo-Con cabal's case for war with Iraq.

Peace and Freedom

In 1969, at a time quite like the present, the reigning genius of the "underground" comics movement, Robert Crumb, produced "Despair." It's an outstanding classic of the genre, intended to pummel all hope out of anyone still naive enough to have any in that dark and violent time.

I sympathized then with people tempted to despair, and I still do. We've got a million valid reasons for abandoning hope and lashing out violently against the evil people and the insane thinking that got us into this state: waging perpetual war against those countries whose people hate and oppose us, against our own people so inconsiderate as to be sunk into indecorous poverty, and even against the earth herself.

But despair produces nothing except nihilism, and what little religion I have forbids me to abandon hope. I'm not advocating naive cheerfulness or passive resignation, but the kind of tough insistence that it's only by "Keep(ing) (our) eyes on the prize," as the old civil rights slogan said, that we can salvage anything worthy out of the present situation.

The "prize," of course, is simply transforming everything we have now into its opposite: instead of war and hostility, peace and freedom; instead of class warfare, education and accommodation; instead of mindless consumption and environmental destruction, technological innovation that stresses recognition of our biological limitations; instead of incessant economic and population growth, the maintenance of sustainable levels.

Are these goals attainable? Yes, but not easily. They all depend first of all on overcoming fascism, and that's not an easy task.

Fascism, in the final analysis, is completely dependent on mass media to maintain its position. If enough people refuse to be stupefied by endless torrents of fear and hostility, such as we've seen unleashed by our corporate-owned mass media over the last three years as it acted in the service of the corporate-military state, the underpinnings of fascism collapse. Without popular support, or at least grudging submission, fascism melts like butter on a hot stove.

The other possibility is for the revolution to capture the mass media -- the ideological equivalent of a revolutionary movement getting the army to abandon the regime and come over to its side. And since the job of the media is to tell the truth, getting its guilt-ridden troops to switch sides is easier than recruiting an army to the revolution.

********************

"Fascism" and "revolution" are emotionally-laden terms, but they needn't be, if you think about it. Leached of their emotional baggage, "revolution" simply means the replacement of one form of government with another. Sometimes, as in the present-day U.S., "counter-revolution" might be a better term: restoration of a form of government which has been usurped.

"Fascism" is a technical term which refers to a strictly modern form of rule by the combined forces of plutocracy (or wealth), government bureaucracy, and the military establishment, facilitated by a conventional religious establishment and a plutocratically-owned mass media which serve as the necessary organs of the corporo-military state's propaganda.

It's time to undertake a serious and dedicated revolution against both our fascist government and the culture of fascism which has been on the rise in this country for the last fifty years. The rules for participation are simple:

*Always tell the truth. Lies are the enemy's chief instruments of repression.

*Always remain non-violent. There is never a good enough reason to engage in violence against another human being, no matter what he's done.

*Don't despair. Nothing good can come of it.

********************

It might be time for me to take a walk -- a walk for peace: peace outside our borders, peace inside our borders, peace along our borders, peace with the earth we live on.

I was thinking of walking from where I am now to Washington D.C. Doris Haddock did it when she was 90, but I'm probably not as tough as her.

Such a walk might begin next March. We'll see.