Raging Monkee

Occupy Santa Rosa

2011-10-18T07:02:00.000-07:00

Occupy Santa Rosa was a great success. People are still out on the site of Santa Rosa City Hall three days later. Stop by, see what they need and offer support.
Hopefully, this is the start of something bigger than all of us individually.

The Great Handcar Regatta

2010-09-23T13:08:00.000-07:00

Steampunk'd: The return of the Great Handcar Regatta

California Governor’s campaign heats up as Darling set to enter race

2010-02-10T20:46:00.000-08:00

by David Abbott
Sonoma West Editor

Lowell Darling in Occidental
Lowell Darling recently kicked off his campaign for governor by borrowing his ex-wife’s truck and hauling all of his possessions from Southpoint Self Storage in Sebastopol to Gallery 16 in San Francisco.

‘I took everything and set it in the middle of the gallery,’ Darling said. ‘Forty boxes containing the history of how I became an artist.’

The exhibit is entitled ‘Full Disclosure,’ and the Camp Meeker resident is inviting potential voters to dig through the detritus of his life in order to show he has nothing to hide.

All of Darling’s personal possessions in the U.S. will be on display until March 31, including his first drawing as a child, documents from his 1978 run for governor, and IRS documents proving he is not an artist.

The IRS documents go back to his fight over an $850 deduction the IRS disallowed in the early 1970s because he wasn’t making enough money to be considered an artist. That battle went on for several years as the IRS followed Darling from place to place — he collected a stack of documents several inches high — and was finally resolved when the National Endowment for the Arts gave Darling a $3,000 grant.

‘The IRS was my biggest influence,’ Darling said. ‘I was a conventional artist up to that point, and then I became a conceptual artist.’

His career as a conceptual artist included his ill-fated run against Jerry Brown — who is expected to run again this year, although he has yet to enter the race — performances of ‘urban acupuncture’ to relieve problems in American cities, and stitching together the San Andreas fault to contain earthquakes.

In the ensuing 32 years, Darling has been married four times, fathered two daughters, and spent several years in Europe. His political experience includes a stint on the Salmon Creek school board in the 1990s in Occidental.

Darling believes that running the state isn’t nearly as tough as running a school board.

‘Until you’ve been on a school board, you don’t know politics,’ he said. ‘Lobbyists show up on the playground with their special interests in tow.’

Darling has until March 11 to raise about $3,600 — 2 percent of the governor’s salary — and gather 60 signatures, which worries him more than raising the money due to the scrutiny the signatures receive.

He’ll be his own treasurer and campaign manager, which will help him contain costs, and his campaign will focus on reducing the two-thirds majority rule on state budget issues to a more simple — and in his mind, a more democratic — simple majority.

Until the two-thirds rule is done away with, Darling believes it makes no difference who is governor of the state anyway. Keeping his campaign simple has other advantages for the 67-year-old artist-cum-politician.

‘I decided that whittling it down to one thing would make it easier for me to remember my campaign promises,’ he said. ‘Although I love to make promises. I don’t know how many wings of the governor’s mansion I’ve promised.’

He’s been back from Germany for about a year, and says he’s legally and officially homeless, although he likes not having a base to maintain.

The only reason he has health insurance is because of a stint in the Coast Guard, but he doesn’t see his financial situation as an impediment.

‘It’s just disgusting that government has turned into a business,’ Darling said. ‘The corporations and the government play off of each other. Politicians should be forced to wear logos’ ala NASCAR.

Republican candidate Meg Whitman spent $30 million of her own money on her campaign, according to Lowell, and he figures that if he spends $30, it will have about the same proportional impact on his finances. Therefore, his campaign will be very minimalist. He’ll drive everywhere, won’t go over 40 MPH and will avoid freeways.

‘I like the idea of being the antithesis,’ Darling said. ‘I hate the cost of campaigning.’

Darling admits that his campaign may be absurd, but he thinks that might be the role he’ll play in the election.

‘When I sound no more absurd than them, what does that say?’ he said.

Absurdity aside, Darling did do his stint on a school board, which in his mind makes him infinitely qualified.

Occidental resident Mary Szecsey was on the Salmon Creek school board after Darling but remembers his time there.

She agrees that school boards are very complex and finds the parallels to running the state to be interesting, although she said that school boards are ‘more personal.’

‘Lowell was a great board member and represented the interests of the parents,’ Szecsey said. ‘He’s an interesting guy.’

Full Disclosure will be on display at Gallery 16, 501 Third St., San Francisco, and Darling will be on hand to discuss his work, his campaign, and anything else anyone wants to talk about.

For information, call the gallery at 415-626-7495 or go to the Web site at www.gallery16.com. Darling can be reached at lowell5@sonic.net. For more information, go to lowelldarling.com.

Published in Sonoma West Times & News Wednesday, February 10, 2010 6:39 PM PST

The REAL King

2010-01-18T21:16:00.000-08:00

Martin Luther King, Jr. outside Santa Rita prison in California, on January 14, 1968, where he had visited Joan Baez and other jailed anti-war activists and draft resisters:

"They have supported us in a very real way in our struggle for civil rights ... I see these two struggles as one struggle. There can be no justice without peace. And there can be no peace without justice. People ask me from time to time, 'Aren't you getting out of your field? Aren't you supposed to be working in civil rights?' They go on to say the two issues are not to be mixed. And my only answer is that I have been working too long and too hard now against segregated public accommodations to end up at this stage of my life segregating my moral concerns. For I believe absolutely that justice is indivisible and injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And I want to make it clear that I am going to continue with all of my might and all of my energy and with all of my action to oppose that abominable, evil, unjust war in Vietnam.

"Now let me say this: I see some very dangerous trends developing in our country, trends of oppression and repression and suppression, and I see a definite move on the part of the government to go out now and silence dissenters and to crush the draft resistance movement. Now we cannot allow this to happen ... And let us continue to work passionately and unrelentingly to end this cruel and senseless war in Vietnam. I don't have to go through all of the things that this war is doing to corrode the values of our nation.

"Suffice it to say that the war in Vietnam has all but torn up the Geneva Accord. It has strengthened the military industrial complex of our nation. It has exacerbated the tensions between continents and races. The war in Vietnam has ... played havoc with our domestic destinies. And I can never forget the fact that we spend about $500,000 to kill every enemy soldier in Vietnam and we spend only about $53 a year for every individual who is categorized as poverty-stricken in our so-called 'war against poverty,' which isn't even a skirmish against poverty. And I say that there is a great need for a revolution of values.

"And I say to you in conclusion that we must continue to stand up and we must continue to follow the dictates of our conscience, even if that means breaking unjust laws. Henry David Thoreau said in his essay on civil disobedience that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. And I do not plan to cooperate with evil at any point.

"Somebody said to me not too long ago, 'Dr. King, don't you think you're hurting your leadership by taking a stand against the war in Vietnam? Aren't people who once respected you gonna lose respect for you? And aren't you hurting the budget of your organization?'

"And I had to look at that person and say, 'I'm sorry, sir, but you don't know me. I am not a consensus leader. And I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Leadership Conference or by taking a Gallup poll of the majority opinion.'

"Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but he's a molder of consensus. And on some positions, cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expedience asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular?'

"But conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?'

"There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right. And that is where I stand today and that is where I hope you will continue to stand so that we can speed up the day when justice will roll down like waters all over the world and righteousness like a mighty stream. And we will speed up the day when men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks and nations will not rise up against nations neither they will not start a war anymore and I close by saying as we sing in the old Negro spiritual, 'I Ain't Gonna Study War No More.'"

The Winter of Our Discontent

2009-12-13T14:54:00.000-08:00

In the wake of Obama's announcement of the escalation of the "war" in Afghanistan, and the subsequent hulabaloo over his Nobel Peace Prize, I'm reposting a piece that I wrote shortly before Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the U.S. My question now is, "is this the 'hope' part or the 'change' we voted for last year"?

For another great King speech, go here.

I read somewhere a few years ago that Martin Luther King Junior’s legacy had been homogenized in the name of political expediency. The nadir of that process came about in 2001 when Alcatel used images from King’s 1963 “I have a Dream” speech to peddle communication systems.

But the piece to which I refer pointed to a speech Dr. King gave in front of a gathering of labor leaders in 1967. I revisited that speech when I heard that Pastor Rick Warren was ordained to speak at Barack Obama’s inauguration and it struck me that one of the most important voices of the civil rights movement may not have been chosen to speak at the inauguration of the first black president in our nation’s history.

I also found that King’s rhetoric was much closer to that of Reverend Jeremiah Wright than to the plump, somewhat moderate white Pastor from Saddleback Church. I will refrain from pointing out the similarities of that church’s name to a popular film about gay cowboy love.

Reading the text of King’s speech, it amazes me to see the similarities of the Vietnam era to our current Iraq era. King decried a Vietnam War that he believed “produced a shameful order of priorities in which the decay, squalor and pollution of the cities are neglected.

“It has made the Great Society a myth and replaced it with a troubled and confused society. The war has strengthened domestic reaction. It has given the extreme right, the anti-labor, anti-Negro, and anti-humanistic forces a weapon of spurious patriotism to galvanize its supporters into reaching for power, right up to the White House. It hopes to use national frustration to take control and restore the America of social insecurity and power for the privileged,” he said.

In that speech, King criticized politicians who condemned the violent turmoil enveloping urban black populations, saying that, “the users of naval guns, millions of tons of bombs, and revolting napalm cannot speak to Negroes about violence. Only those who are fighting for peace have the moral authority to lecture on non-violence.”

He said that urban blacks “are infinitely less dangerous and immoral than the deliberate acts of escalation of the war in Vietnam,” and that “even in the grip of rage the vast majority have vented their anger on inanimate things, not people. If destruction of property is deplorable, what is the word for the use of napalm on people? What would happen to Negroes if they not only set fires but killed people in the vicinity and explained blandly that some known combatants had to die as a matter of course? Negroes would be called savages if we were so callous. But for generals it is military tactics.”

When King made his speech in November 1967, unemployment had increased by approximately 15 percent in the previous few months, and tens of thousands of people were abruptly thrown out of jobs and training programs in a lousy job market. The corollaries to the first decade of the 21st century are chilling, particularly when King calls national political leaders to task for their warped spending priorities.

“It is disgraceful that a Congress that can vote upwards of $35 billion a year for a senseless immoral war in Vietnam cannot vote a weak $2 billion dollars to carry on our all too feeble efforts to bind up the wound of our nations 35 million poor,” he said. “This is nothing short of a Congress engaging in political guerilla warfare against the defenseless poor of our nation.”

King was accusing the government of terrorist acts against its own people in much the same way that Wright criticized the government in his now-famous sermons.

During his final days, King took a lot of heat for his criticism of war in Vietnam. He was subjected to “the most bitter criticism, by the press, by individuals, and even by some fellow civil rights leaders,” and told to stay in his place.

“I had only one answer for that and it was simply the fact that I have struggled too long and too hard now to get rid of segregation in public accommodations to end up at this point in my life segregating my moral concerns,” he said.

He was assassinated five months after he made that speech.

I find it ironic that on the day after MLK day, when the first-ever black president of the United States of America is set to take the oath of office, the convocation will be given by a man who supports a fiscally and morally debilitating series of wars and “separate but equal” status for a group of Americans.

It’s kinda funny in a sadly disturbing way. Obama keeps reaching out to the right political wing, but people on the left — the dreaded Lib’ruls — seem to continue to wait for representation in this budding administration.

I should probably wait until he gets into office to be thoroughly disappointed.

Published in Sonoma West Times & News, January 14, 2009

Don't be such a Dick

2009-03-25T06:28:00.000-07:00

I spent the weekend preparing to write my usual fly-by-night analysis of what I’ve come to affectionately think of as Great Depression II, wherein I was set to take the Obama Administration to task once more for its unapologetic use of the former Bushies and Clintonites who orchestrated this entire mess and their methods of printing and shoveling trillions of dollars into the collapsing financial markets, ostensibly so that we can continue to borrow and consume beyond our means, allowing the stock market to enjoy a few teensy upward ticks so a small number of investors can make off with a few more dollars, while the geniuses who stole everything in the first place walked away with “retention bonuses” and other multi-million dollar stipends with names that were euphemisms for “bonus” so the American public might not think that we’re paying them bonuses for crashing the industry that’s “too big to fail.”

I was going to castigate Obama for keeping guys like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, whose answer for our financial travails is to recycle Bush policy and purchase “toxic assets,” creating phony market values for them and hoping that some rube would come along in the future and buy them up like they were precious rocks of grade A Columbian blow.

And further, that we really don’t know what the plan is, and that we should be really upset that our tax dollars are going to pay off AIG debts to foreign banks and other financial institutions that have already received big glittery piles of bailout money from you and me, the American taxpayer. AIG posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — about $61.7 billion — in the last quarter of 2008, by the way for those interested in the track record of the clowns who are getting those fat bonuses.

But my focus changed after Obama made his appearance on the teevee game show “60 minutes,” and answered Former Vice President “Dick” Cheney’s charge that his policies are making us “less safe.”

Cheney went on a national interview show on March 15 and was allowed to blather on about the effectiveness of torture and preemptive military attacks at keeping us safe from the “terr’sts.”

CNN interviewer/hack John King encouraged Cheney to continue the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) meme and trash Obama for his stated intention to close the American-sponsored torture camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“I think those programs were absolutely essential to the success we enjoyed of being able to collect the intelligence that let us defeat all further attempts to launch attacks against the United States since 9-11. I think that's a great success story,” said the Dark Lord, about his obsession with torture. “President Obama campaigned against it all across the country. And now he is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack.”

Let’s put aside the fact that had anyone criticized the Bush Administration is such stark terms, the national media would have been in an uproar and eventually the offender would have bowed his/her head in public shame over their perceived act of treason.

But a wonderful thing happened. Obama went on the teevee and actually shot down the urban legend that Bush policy was effective, and rather than making us “safer,” torture policies likely created more terrorism and enemies to the west in the Muslim world.

"The vice president is eager to defend a legacy that was unsustainable," said Obama, adding that the policies have “done incredible damage to our image and position in the world.

“You know, I think that Vice President Cheney has been at the head of a movement whose notion is somehow that we can't reconcile our core values, our constitution, our belief that we don't torture, with our national security interests. I think he's drawing the wrong lesson from history. The facts don't bear him out,” Obama said.

And then he went to the heart of what we “conspiracy theorists” have been saying for years:

"I mean, the fact of the matter is, after all these years, how many convictions actually came out of Guantanamo? How many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney? It hasn't made us safer.”

It was doubly refreshing that Obama didn’t rush to bow down and kiss Cheney’s pasty white butt on Monday like any national Republican or many Democrats such as Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi might.

It reminded me why I voted for Obama. He’s articulate and usually the smartest guy in the room.

After more than 20 years of Kennebunkport/Hope Arkansas hillbillies and a decade of Reagan’s simplistic populism, it’s refreshing to have a hip, articulate urbanite in charge, who has his feet firmly in the “reality-based” community.

It was one of those brief moments where I gave up my bitter cynicism, and for a few moments believed that maybe things in my lifetime will be alright.

Ah, the joys of free choice

2009-03-12T07:40:00.000-07:00

It’s kinda cool being human sometimes. Not only do we have opposable thumbs, but we also have what some people consider the god-given gift of free choice.

Oh sure, we have to wear clothes most of the time and create controlled climates in order to survive comfortably in a harsh, uncaring world, but we have other advantages not shared by the rest of the animal kingdom, not the least of which is the ability to record and learn from history.

For instance, in the art of war, military planners can look at battles that have gone before and learn tactics that can give them advantages on the battlefield in order to ensure a greater chance for success.

Unless of course, said military has far superior weaponry — thanks to centuries of scientific research and collective memory — and simply “shocks” and “awes” a technologically inferior enemy into temporary submission to declare “mission accomplished.”

The devil is in the details though, so in the aftermath of that sort of military action our commanders have the ability to turn to another playbook when the subsequent occupation turns into a quagmire, and our brilliant military leadership can then show us charts and graphs demonstrating how well the invasion is going. They can also orchestrate sham elections and talk about the occupied country “taking responsibility” for its own destiny.

Think “Vietnam-ization” here, and the Kabuki Theater of such geniuses as Robert McNamara, who later took his abilities to the Ford Motor Company.

It seems as if failing upwards is another quaint advantage afforded Homo Sapiens.

But free choice, personal responsibility and historical memory can extend to the areas of finance and economics as well.

For instance, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the financial industries of the U.S. became so large and incestuous that the entire world financial system collapsed, leading to a worldwide depression.

In an attempt to stanch the bleeding, our 32nd President Franklin Roosevelt enacted the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and created major banking reforms, some of which were designed to control speculation. It also prohibited banks from owning other financial businesses such as insurance companies (think Citigroup).

Roosevelt and many other observers of human nature thought free enterprise was fine, but when greed is allowed to go on unfettered, regulation helps to preserve a fair distribution of wealth. It’s also a matter of economic survival.

In more recent history, we can observe the “boom and bust” cycles of the economic bubbles that coincided with the final destruction of financial regulation thanks to 42nd President Bill Clinton, who was impeached for the wrong reason.

In 1999, Clinton repealed Glass-Steagall, after deregulating the communications industry in 1996.

The subsequent speculation exploded the tech market and led to a series of fiscal bombs, which became larger and more destructive as the financial industry gorged on empty profits and the agencies that remained to regulate them looked the other way.

A lot of people who should have known better claim that no one could have seen our fiscal collapse coming, but I don’t believe that. Those who predicted this collapse for years were marginalized, while the people who said we couldn’t have predicted it ignored history.

But like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, people in the “reality-based community” who warned of the folly of our fiscal irresponsibility were shouted down and called un-American or Chicken Littles by Pollyannas who insisted that the stock market would always go up, even if there were little burps.

But there is historical evidence to justify the nay-sayers, and now we have reality to match. It’s much like Intelligent Design butting up against the theory of evolution. Evolution has historical records in the form of fossils. End of discussion.

So maybe if we survive this economic meltdown we can learn from the past this time. Maybe we can learn that no entity should get “too big to fail”; maybe we can learn that it’s not a good idea for major financial industries to be deregulated to the point that we have no idea what’s really going on; maybe we can learn that personal responsibility is a two-way street and we cannot count on the good faith of greedy people to police themselves in the name of the common good.

I think history’s against me on that one, though.

Fuck Wall St.

2009-02-11T06:01:00.000-08:00

I say, let the motherfucker crash....

The refreshing sound of the English language

2009-02-10T06:17:00.000-08:00

President Obama held his first press conference on Monday. It was the first presidential press conference in nearly a decade that didn’t feature slouching, sneering, and leaving me with a vague feeling that I was a 3 year old who’d just listened to a drunken father explain why mommy is such a tramp, and then forcing me to give gramps a sponge bath.

It was a pithy conference as well, with big properly used and annunciated words that seemed extemporaneous and not written back at the home office of the National Committee. Or in the bunker of an undisclosed location.

The part that really brought me out of my chair though, was when Ed Henry of CNN asked the president about his plans for Afghanistan.

Henry asked the usual questions about escalation and eventual withdrawal, but then amazed me by asking the very question I’ve been waiting to hear but never dreamed that someone would ask.

“There's a Pentagon policy that bans media coverage of the flag-draped coffins from coming in to Dover Air Force Base,” Henry began. “In 2004, then-Senator Joe Biden said that it was shameful for dead soldiers to be, quote, ‘snuck back into the country under the cover of night.’

“You've promised unprecedented transparency, openness in your government,” he continued. “Will you overturn that policy so the American people can see the full human cost of war?”

When I heard that, I jumped up off of the couch and began to pound on the table. Finally, someone was asking the president to pull back the veil of obscurity and propaganda and let Americans begin to see the true costs of the wars in the Middle East.

The policy against showing coffins returning was designed to cover a big Neo-con mistake made during the Vietnam War, and for months I’ve hoped that the first thing Obama would do on the war front would be to start showing coffins.

From there, maybe we could progress to actually attaching war costs to a real budget, and in my little dream world it could be the first step in losing the costly Bush-era “war on terr’” meme.

Public opinion of Vietnam, turned on the nightly news, when Americans were able to witness the carnage we inflicted on the peasants of that country and our (mostly) boys in uniform.

Back then we had real news reporters such as David Halberstam, who were not “embedded,” and dragged through the mud with the troops. News anchors back then weren’t beholden to the corporations that co-owned the medium and the weapons manufacturers, or stockholders who demand 18 to 23 percent return on investments.

In some corners, Afghanistan is being called “Obama’s Vietnam,” and there are thousands of pages in print and on the Internets (I do miss some things about W.) devoted to explaining why that region of the world is where empire goes to die.

Unfortunately, Obama equivocated and did a fairly cleaver soft shoe around the issue, putting out the usual platitudes about how “thoughts and prayers go out to the families.”

He did it without the cheesy arrogance of his predecessor though, so I guess he gets some credit on that front.

“People have asked me, when did it hit you that you are now president?” he said. “And what I told them was the most sobering moment is signing letters to the families of our fallen heroes. It reminds you of the responsibilities that you carry in this office and — and the consequences of the decisions that you make.”

Wow. A president talking about consequences of his decisions. I could almost forget that in the next part of his answer, and in a subsequent answer to Helen Thomas, he picked up right where the Bush regime left off.

There was the usual blather about how we’ve brought “democracy” to the region and the 9/11, “terr’ist” talking points, as well as Soviet-style references to “der Homeland.”

The majority of his news conference though, was devoted to the very real threat of an imminent economic meltdown, which is a far more real threat than some shadowy gang of oil-rich heathens waiting in the shadows to attack our way of life.

And the truly sad, and dare I say, ironic part of the whole thing is that we are chasing shadowy threats to our own doom with the very funding that could save our economy.

Obama has been accused of cutting “defense” spending, when he’s actually raising it by about $14 billion, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are still off the books. The 2010 “defense” budget weighs in at a whopping $527 billion. Most of that will go to useless Cold War-era technology, designed to fight our previous ideological enemy.

Just imagine what even a fraction of that spending could do get our economy running again.

Happy Holidays Bill-O

2008-11-19T20:19:00.000-08:00

Well, another year has come and almost gone, so it’s time to fire up the traditions that begin with Thanksgiving Day football and end in a puddle of sick on New Year’s Day.

Next week those if us who are still employed and have not lost our homes, get to sit around and enjoy our thankfultude until the end of December, when we get to think about how fattening being thankful is and vow to change our ways until the big block of pseudo-religious holidays returns next year.

I’m not much of a religious person and my holiday celebrations tend toward the secular, sans the Disney-fied, shop-o-rama that has come to mark the American celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus.

There was a day when they were downright hedonistic, but now that I am a college graduate and respectable journalist, I’ve traded in my toga and sandals for an occasional pair of pants and shoes, with a lifestyle to match.

So in the hopeful spirit of the season, I offer a partial list of the things for which I am thankful, in one handy place for ease of ridicule.

First, I’m thankful to live in a country that values education, even though now that I have a degree I’m making less than when I was a truck driver. I managed to get out of SSU just in time for the system of higher education to become a hollow shell of what it once was, thanks to several decades of Reaganomics and trickle-down economic policy.

Looking at it from the outside, one might think that we really don’t value education, what with all the talk about Liberal elites thinking they’re smarter than Joe Sixpack, but we live in America, where innovation and individual effort will pull us out of our impending economic doom. Just as soon as the next season of “American Idol” is over.

I’m also thankful for media bozo Bill O’Reilly who exposed the Liberal “War on X-mas” and gave me a place to focus my righteous secular anger every year.

O’Reilly’s right. We are trying to destroy Christmas. Who really needs time off to hang around with family anyway? Most of them end up getting too drunk and puking on the carpet anyway.

Personally, I’d like to see the holidays turn into a time when we all wear the gray uniforms of the state and celebrate by yelling hateful anti-everything slogans in front of the teevee on X-mas Eve.

Next, I’m thankful to John McCain for choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate, thus proving that the citizens of this great land of ours are not as stupid as the past few decades have led me to believe. Their loss showed me there is still hope that one day we might find our way out of this fog that we’ve allowed ourselves to descend into.

Ms. Palin may prove to be the final nail in the coffin of a wing of Republican Party that has risen to power through a 30-year campaign based on divisive social issues and name calling. Sure we still live in a one-party state, but soon I may no longer have to listen to nasty fundamentalists like Pat Robertson tell me I’m going to hell for not hating the gays enough.

In that vein, I’m also thankful to the Second Bush Administration. Sure, we may be teetering on the brink of financial collapse, and our reputation and moral authority has been shattered the world over. Oh, and environmental policy, scientific research, education and most other measures of civilization may be in tatters, but were it not for Bush II, John Kerry might be president and it would be the Democratic Party on the verge of extinction rather than the Republicans.

I am also thankful for Barack Obama. Despite the fact that I would have much rather voted for Cynthia McKinney or Ralph Nader, Obama has allowed me a brief respite from the bitter political cynicism that has practically smothered me since the long-gone days of the Dean Campaign.

I know there’s been a lot of talk about how he’s a Socialist and a Muslim — mostly by people who understand neither concept — but to me Barack Obama represents what it means to be an American.

He rose up from his humble beginnings and succeeded despite the odds against him. He was able to do that by working his way through an Ivy League school to become one of the brightest minds on the U.S. Senate.

Finally, I think we can all be thankful that it’s not next year when things are likely to be much worse despite all the change we can believe in.
Black Friday — the real traditional American holiday — has not looked so black in many years.

Fun Facts

2008-10-28T07:39:00.000-07:00

Osama hearts McCain (prob'ly wants to shtoop Palin like a goat too).

Finally

2008-10-28T06:54:00.000-07:00

Just a little bit of justice...
Sad clown doesn't even realize it's all over...
Now if only they could tie the 'ho from Wasilla to the craven old bastard...

McCarthyisms last dance?

2008-10-23T06:48:00.000-07:00

Maybe we're not fully fascist yet...

Hey Obama fans...

2008-10-21T08:07:00.000-07:00

Here's our new hero!

Viva Vietnam...

Palling around

2008-10-18T07:06:00.000-07:00

McCain is a terrorist lovin' freak.

When will this end?

2008-10-18T06:56:00.000-07:00

The Republican Party has become a cancer on this country and should be eliminated.

Here's the video.

Drill Baby, Drill...

2008-10-17T06:21:00.000-07:00

Why do we need to drill again?

Maybe OPEC is happy with the thought of a A-rab president...

From the Minneapolis Star-Trib...

2008-10-17T06:05:00.000-07:00

Get a lawn sign? Anti-McCain view expressed with dog poop
PAUL WALSH, Star Tribune

Just when you thought partisan politics couldn't smell any worse.

A 45-year-old Minnesotan who admits to hating Republican presidential candidate John McCain said he left small bags of dog feces in the back of a pickup truck sporting McCain-Sarah Palin stickers, police said today.

David Vanderlinden told police that he left his political contributions in his neighbor's the truck because "he hates McCain," police said.

He was caught after the truck owner's mother called police after seeing Vanderlinden placing the bags in the truck.

Vanderlinden's next contribution will be to the public coffers in the form of a $183 fine for littering/unlawful dumping.

The debates are over

2008-10-16T06:42:00.000-07:00

I hope we all feel better about things now.

While we've all been watching Palin and McCain flinging shit, the Bush Administration continues to duck responsibility for anything.

... and a quick nod to Joe the Plumber.

But sometimes it doesn't...

2008-10-15T17:07:00.000-07:00

... hope, that is

'New' ... 'Improved'

2008-10-14T07:37:00.000-07:00

Here we go again...

The big silent relaunch of the Raging Monkee.

Hope springs eterna l.

The War on the Economy...

2008-10-05T23:13:00.000-07:00

I don’t claim to know much about the national economy, but I have been watching the Bush Administration for the past eight years and the financial crises of the “free market” for more than 20, and it looks to me like another theft of American treasure is underway.

From the S&L bailout in the 1980s, to the spectacular crashes of the Enrons and WorldComs, the pattern has been the same. First, regulation gets neutered and then the enforcement agencies are packed with insiders who come from the industries being “regulated.”

The resulting “free market” is then sold as the greatest thing since sliced bread and a handful of people make vast fortunes that exist largely on paper. Then one day, somebody realizes that a huge con game is being perpetrated and suddenly there is panic, then fear of collapse, followed by infusions of taxpayer dollars that end up in the coffers of the very people who created the “crisis.”

It’s a beautiful ponzi scheme and, willingly or not, we keep getting drawn in and then left holding the bag.

The Bush Administration, represented by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, has been pushing Congress to quickly pass a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry.

They were last seen warning the American public that letting the problems persist would have dire consequences for the national economy, and if they don’t act now the resulting meltdown could be catastrophic.

Additionally, they tell us, Paulson is the only one who can save us from the terrorists — oops, financial collapse — at the gate.

Under the proposed bailout, Paulson will be given dictatorial powers and none of his decisions will be subject to oversight.

Section 8 of the legislation states that, “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

The White House wants its Secretary to have total power over $700 billion that will have to be borrowed and then paid back by generations of American taxpayers. This legislation will take the power of the purse away from Congress and keep it in the executive branch.

Doesn’t this sound familiar? How is it any different from the other power grabs the administration has accomplished? This is the Patriot Act and the authorization for the use of force in Iraq applied to the economy and they’re using the same scare tactics and “no one else can save you” rhetoric they’ve been using since 9/11 to cow the American public and Congress into complicity.

It’s easy to watch George Bush speak and think we’re being led by a bunch of really stupid people, but I think he’s just a sad distraction from the people doing the real work of a corrupt cabal of thieves who have managed to insinuate themselves into our government, and pseudo-free-marketize our financial institutions.

The problem with their brand of free market is that the profits are the only part of it that’s free, while the risk has been fully socialized with our hard-earned tax dollars.
In a real free market, the immoral people who have instigated this mess would have the decency to jump out of the windows of their plush offices, ala 1929.

Instead, the former leaders of Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, et al. get to drift away with hundreds of millions of dollars in golden parachutes that we get to pay for, and then they are rehired as “consultants.”

Welcome to another expensive war we have no chance of winning.

Maybe we should consolidate the two parties into one glorious party and call it the National Socialists in order to reflect the true government agenda.

I don’t have any useful answers to our leadership crisis that won’t get me tossed in a cell at Gitmo. I’m just mad as hell.

Some holiday joy for the New Year...

2008-01-01T12:52:00.000-08:00

On the eve of the announcement of record holiday payouts to Wall Street investment firms, Governor Schwarzenegger announced a fiscal emergency and a 10 percent overall budget cut that he hopes will take place immediately. The slashing is the result of the faux-free market anti-tax political ideology that has firmly taken root in the American consciousness since the advent of Reaganomics along with the spinelessness and avarice of the so-called leaders of our once-great nation.

It is the job of the Legislative Analysis Office (LAO) to go over the governor’s budget proposal after its release in preparation for the “May revise.” When Schwarzenegger rolled out his budget plan for 2007, the LAO criticized it for rosy projections that depended on revenues which never materialized due to decades of tax cuts and a precipitous economic plunge.

For anyone surprised by this, it would be instructive to remember the days of Enron and the “Dot-Bomb” era, where wildly positive fiscal predictions gave way to crisis and collapse. Millions of people lost retirement funds while the perpetrators of the crimes escaped unscathed with hundreds of million dollars in ill-gotten booty.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is not some kind of benevolent moderate, and anyone who believes that needs to drop the rose-colored bipartisan glasses. The Guvornator is pure free-market Conservative, even if he slips up and shows glimpses of a social conscience from time to time.

On May 24, 2001 as he was revving up for the recall election, Schwarzenegger met with the late former Enron Chairman Kenny-boy Lay, über-free-marketeer Richard Riordan, and corporate raider Michael “Greed is Good” Milken, who was touting a deregulation plan that purported to solve the state’s energy crisis, but was actually massive theft. From the beginning, he’s been surrounded by former governor Pete Wilson and his minions.

Schwarzenegger has been trying to privatize the public school system of California since he took office, via the Compact for Higher Education and budget cuts that have forced the K-12 system to survive on a program of bake sales and overworked teachers who spend good portions of their incomes buying school supplies.

It seems as if tax cuts for the upper levels of earners have not created the free market utopia that we’ve been promised, and our infrastructure is eroding.

This is the real agenda for “free markets”: the transfer of wealth from the public into the private sector for the enrichment of a select few, including the politicians who enable the transactions. We’re going trillions of dollars in debt to fund tax cuts and war profiteers, yet we can’t — or won’t — spend the money necessary to fund our once-great system of public education.

We keep hearing the myth about the American Dream and upward mobility, but the facts on the ground belie that faded ideal. The wealth of our nation is being stolen by a handful of über-rich, modern day robber barons, even as our schools, health care, and infrastructure crumble around our ears.

On the upside, an ill-informed and uneducated populace is a lot easier to control.

Christ on Crutches

2007-12-22T10:10:00.000-08:00

Has everyone noticed that it’s the most splendiferous time of the year, or that we are a nation of Christmas-lovin’ Americans? For those who have neglected to watch the annual Fox “News” “War on Christmas” extravaganza, our elected representatives have taken the time to remind the nonbelievers amongst us that yes, we are a nation of Christ, praise be.

Last week, just in time for the height of shopping season and in anticipation of the home stretch of a depressingly long election season, the people who make our laws busied themselves with House Resolution (HR) 847: Recognizing the importance of Christmas and the Christian faith.

HR 874 passed by a 372 to 9 vote, with 50 members of our esteemed representatives voting “present,” or not voting. On the “aye” side there were, 195 Democrats, and 177 Republicans, while all nine “nay” votes came from the few rational national Democrats. Kudos to Lynne Woolsey for being among the sane.

Many readers may think I’m just making this up. But seriously, on Dec. 10 the House of Representatives of the United States of America passed a resolution that states in part that, “on Dec. 25 of each calendar year, American Christians observe Christmas, the holiday celebrating the birth of their savior, Jesus Christ,” and that “Christmas is celebrated as a recognition of God's redemption, mercy, and Grace.”

The bill resolved that, “the Christian faith (is) one of the great religions of the world, acknowledges the international religious and historical importance of Christmas and the Christian faith,” and “acknowledges and supports the role played by Christians and Christianity in the founding of the United States and in the formation of western civilization.”

Excuse me while I swallow the bile that just rose in my throat.

We are not a “Christian nation.” We are a nation of Christians. And Muslims, and Deists, and Agnostics, and Atheists, with a few Wiccans thrown in for good measure. We even have room in the boat for Tom Cruise and the Scientologists.

I put this resolution up there with the investigation into steroid use in baseball. The people who wasted my tax dollars with this silly, yet dangerous bill are a bunch of wealthy mostly white people playing to the basest constituency, jerking each other while the rest of the world burns because of disastrous foreign and domestic policy.

We are facing crises of unprecedented scale on the home front and in the world. There’s a health care crisis, a financial crisis brought about by greed and hubris, and a multi-front war punctuated by waste, massive fraud, and the rise of private mercenary armies who will need something else to do once they desert the troops trapped in an unwinnable war. On top of this, the Justice Department has been turned into a political arm of the most crooked administration in the history of our nation.

The First Amendment to the Constitution states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” and Thomas Jefferson was in favor of “building a wall of separation between church and state.” The founders knew that religious fanaticism leads to slaughter and slavery, and engaged in a war of independence from the religious zealot King George in order to create a secular nation where people were free to worship as they saw fit, so long as they didn’t push their views onto others.

We have had Christianity pushed down our throats over the course of the past three decades, and HB 847 is continuing this dangerous trend.

I can’t help but remember the warning from philosopher George Santayana, that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. The dog and pony show of our political process has turned into a nauseating race for the bottom, while high crimes and misdemeanors continue to go unpunished.

We’ve lost the war on Christmas, my fellow secular humanists. Go out and shop as if your life and liberty depended on it.

Shopping and a gentle reminder of the carnage of foreign military adventures

2006-12-07T06:35:00.000-08:00

It seems as if a lot of people don't want to think about the war in Iraq or have anything to do with it on a visceral level. They don't read news accounts about death rates, troop levels, or the fiscal costs of the war. I suppose it may be the time of year. Everyone is preoccupied with thoughts of shopping and the annoying visits of unwanted guests, which precludes them from thinking about events of national and global import.

As a public service, I'd like to give a brief run-down of events in Iraq — as I see them — just to help the community through the stress, and the joys of stuffing our faces and buying stuff for secular holiday celebrations.

It's the least I can do to ease my readers — such as they are — into vacation mode.

There is no good news coming from Iraq. Things are deteriorating by the day. Violence is at an all-time high and we have lost control of this war of choice that was brought about by the cold warrior junta that has taken over our government. In reality, however, we never really had control in the first place.

The Bush administration is getting ready to ask for another $173 billion in order to fund a war that was supposed to cost around $17.30, and be fully funded by Iraqi oil sales.

It seems as if the only thing in Iraq that is self-supporting is the insurgency, and that is according to U.S. National Intelligence Director and merchant of Iran-Contra death, John Negroponte.

According to the United Nations, more than 7,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in September and October. Nearly 5,000 of those killings occurred in Baghdad.

In a series of coordinated bombings, more than 200 Iraqis were killed on Thanksgiving Day - the day before "Black Friday," our most sacred of holidays. Think of it this way; while we Americans were stuffing our faces - the thing we do best - some mother in Iraq was burying her children.

That just about sums up the war in one short paragraph. Innocent citizens of a country economically brutalized by world powers for its entire history are now being militarily brutalized by a country whose citizens are more interested in XBoxes and Wii.

It's not as if none of us are sacrificing for the cause though. The death toll of American troops has passed the 2,800 mark, and our military is being decimated by repeated deployments in a war that has lasted longer than our involvement in WWII. Additionally, equipment is wearing down to the tune of $8 billion a month, according to a report in USA Today.

Charles Rangel (D-NY) was excoriated recently for suggesting a return to the draft. His reasoning is that if the draft were reinstated, more U.S. citizens would actually have to share in the sacrifices being made by a very tiny number of brave people. This in turn would reduce support for the war because people would have to take part in the carnage instead of watching Ted Koppel's hairpiece recount brieft snipets of the day's bloodshed.

It's not to be though, at least for now, because we are not interested in the suffering of others - even our fellow citizens - especially when there is a dyn-o-mite sale going on at the mall, and there are so many good things to watch on the teevee.

As I sit on my fat ass prognosticating on the stupidity of U.S. policy in the Middle East, our people in uniform continue to die alongside innumerable Iraqi civilians.

When I look out of my window and see the gaudy Christmas lights and the big plastic Santa on the neighbor's house, I often wonder how many innocent lives were destroyed in some oil-rich, war-torn corner of the globe so that he could mindlessly waste the 24-hour electricity that we all take for granted.

There are about five such houses within my range of vision.

We are not sacrificing anything directly for this phony "War on Terror," but the payment will be deferred to future generations. We'll go off to the malls over the course of the next few weeks and buy cheap stuff made in China - even as we borrow more money from the Chinese government to fund the "war effort," and tax cuts - and not even think of the people who will really pay for this atrocity.

Please spare me the bullshit about fighting them over there so that we don't have to fight them over here. Al Qaeda has very little control in Iraq. Any influence they have can be attributed to the U. S. military presence there and our successful destruction of Iraqi civil structure. It doesn't really matter who's doing the killing anyway. The dead are dead.

As an aside to my readers who may wish to waste time sending me venomous e-mails about my "dangerous" ideology, do something brave for once and join the Army or Marines over the holiday break. Stop the hypocrisy. For everyone else out there, happy holidays.

Electoral process gives brief respite from utter hopelessness

2006-11-13T06:09:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the little things in life give us the most pleasure. Take, for instance, the election last week. Diminutive Nancy Pelosi, representing a political party many had written off forever, became Speaker of the House in one of the most stunning electoral victories since Arnold Schwarzenegger was re-elected as Govornator of California.

It was a pleasure to hear the punditocracy backpedal from its derision of the former minority party and jump on the Democratic bandwagon.

Even the detestable and drug-addled Rush Limbaugh distanced himself from his thuggish handlers, claiming that he felt "liberated" by Democratic victories in the House and Senate because he is "no longer going to have to carry the water for people (he doesn't) think deserve having their water carried." He also claimed that the Republican Congress has produced legislation "that (he has) just cringed at, and it has been difficult (for him) coming in here, trying to make the case for it when the people who are supposedly in favor of it can't even make the case themselves."

I'll pause now for a moment to relish in delicious reflection at the end of six years of political misery, and give in for just a moment to the sweet odor of hope.

In the wake of a major "thumpin'" — to quote the president himself — Howard Dean is being hailed as a genius. Of course, there are those who thought that back in 2003 when the same brilliant bunch of talking heads — the Wolf Blitzers and the Tucker Carlsons of the political world — painted him as angry and crazy.

The point that they missed was that a large portion of Americans were pissed off about our tragic societal tailspin, and now the larger American public has finally caught on and joined those who were already sick of the BushCo cabal and the one-party state.

Hopefully, a new era of accountability will be ushered in with this obvious message from the American public.

Many political wonks and wannabes council caution to the newly-elected Democratic majority, but I think the Democrats should take on the scorched-earth policy of the Republicans, and get this country back on track as soon as possible.

Bush should be impeached for dragging us into a foolish political war that we have lost and will continue to lose until a few remaining American citizens are plucked off the roof of Baghdad's Green Zone 10 years from now, alá Saigon on April 29, 1975.

The U.S. of A. is lucky that I don't hold a position of power, because I'd immediately bring on a constitutional crisis by frog-marching the whole lot of these bastards straight to the nearest international criminal court—although to be fair, Rumsfeld already appears to be on his way. After being canned by Bush, he is about to face repercussions for his involvement in the "war on Terr'r," as Germany's top prosecutor will seek a criminal investigation and prosecution of Rumsfeld. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet, and other senior U.S. civilians and military officers will also be charged for their alleged roles in abuses committed at Abu Ghraib and the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

The case will likely be symbolic at best, as our government will harbor these criminals and protect them from prosecution. Rummy will probably even get a Medal of Freedom out of the deal, not to mention the millions of dollars in profit he's received from steering tax dollars into the coffers of American defense contractors.

The other war profiteers, and their enablers in Congress, should be dragged off in chains for real jail terms, although realistically I know that won't happen, since many Democrats are equally guilty in this nasty episode in American history.

For the past 12 years — since Newt Gingrich and the dawn of the Republican Revolution — the Neocons, Theocons, and fringe rightwing radicals of the Republican Party have done everything they can to bring our country to its knees, from the trumped-up impeachment of Bill Clinton to the suspension of habeas corpus.

Don't get me wrong. I have no particular love for Clinton, although at least he was articulate and a much better representative of our country than our current imbecilic president. He's done more for the Neocons than Ronald Reagan ever did. When I think of stuff I would have impeached Clinton for, NAFTA and the Telecommunications Deregulation Act of 1996 are the first things that come to my mind.

He has also provided a handy target — along with Hillary — and a useful "straw man" that the mainstream press has happily perpetuated as a target of blame for Republican f--- ups.

I don't expect Democratic power to be the magic elixir that suddenly makes the world a better place. They are politicians after all, so the powerful elites of the "Iron Triangle" will get away with their ill-gotten booty, and Bush's cabal will likely get away unscathed. But at least it appears as if Bush will get his comeuppance in the annals of history as the worst president ever.

If nothing else, the election proves that maybe our electoral process is not beyond redemption after all.

The state of political discourse and the cost of empire

2006-10-19T06:33:00.000-07:00

The specter of another day of voting is rapidly approaching, and the rhetoric has become particularly vile. Even our great "Uniter" George W. Bush came out less than a month after telling the country that we must work together "to meet the test that history has given us," and intimated that anyone who disagrees with his policies or doubts his wisdom is a traitor of the highest order. Of course, that includes anyone who is not fully invested in perpetual military folly.

The Republicans have been in charge for nearly six years, and despite all the scary rhetoric coming from the Republican National Committee, there is no threat to security if non-Republicans somehow wrestle a branch of government away this November. On the contrary, if the Democrats somehow win the House there may still be hope to turn the ship of state around, even if that hope only exists in the Republican-lite 21st century version of the Democratic party.

Republican political strategists are lying when they say that Democrats are soft on national security. After 9/11, no one will ever be soft on national security again, even if it means destroying our democracy out of a paranoid sense of fear.

Our government-led by Democrats and Republicans-has turned our tax dollars into a slush fund for the Department of Defense, and the Military Industrial Complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned against in 1961 as he handed the presidency over to John F. Kennedy.

"We yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment," Ike said.

Our folly in Iraq is but the latest example of the way in which we have wasted our material progress on vague foreign military adventures that serve merely to redistribute the wealth of the nation into the coffers of the über-rich. War profiteers and Bush administration corporate cronies have used the war as a vehicle for theft, leaving generations of American children with the butcher's bill and the debt payment.There is no interest in world peace or human betterment, only empty patriotic rhetoric and fear of vague and shadowy threats to our stuff.

Under the "leadership" of the Republican Party in the past five years, our national debt has ballooned to $8.5 trillion dollars-that's trillion, with a "T"-and every man, woman, and child in this country owes $28,531.74 as of Oct. 15. Military spending has ballooned from $296.8 billion to $401 billion since the Bush cabal took over in 2001, and that doesn't even include the $300 billion that has evaporated in Iraq. The lion's share of that rise in defense costs has not gone to "supporting the troops," but to Research and Development which means defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin or Halliburton. To all the young Republicans out there who fear that there may not be enough debt and death if the Democrats somehow manage to take a sliver of power away from the corrupt and bloated GOP, fear not. There will be plenty to go around for you, your children, and your grandchildren. It is unfortunate that the rest of us will have to pay as well.

It will be easy for those who disagree with me to reduce my argument to partisan hackery, but the constitutional crisis we face today is no longer a partisan issue.

Please, spare me the letters about how it's all Clinton's fault or, "Time of war…etc." Terrorism may be real, but the "war on terr'" is a political strategist's creation used to divide this nation and justify the incremental theft of our civil rights, as the treasury is plundered in the name of national security.

The Constitution is under attack and the Executive Branch has made an unprecedented power grab that is threatening our stability as a nation. If we continue on our present course, we will become as fiscally impoverished as we have become morally bankrupt under a single-party system.

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we are stuck with our existing political parties, comprised of moneyed elites who ultimately only care about reelection. It seems as if the only reason the Democratic Party is in existence anymore is to preserve the power of the Republicans and to provide an additional bogeyman to the dual threat of terrorism.

"As we peer into society's future, we-you and I, and our government-must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow," Ike continued on that long-ago January day.

"We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow."

It is long past the time for the adults to take back our government. I wonder if there are any left anywhere who may be able to save us.

Corporate hubris, BALCO, and the repeal of Magna Carta

2006-10-16T20:02:00.000-07:00

Funny how things seem to come together every week to give me fodder for another column. Thus far, in my columned tenure, topics have been exclusive to the CSU system-but this week I'm on to bigger, better, more global issues. I'm sure that a lot of people will be happy to hear that I'm thinking more "globally."

One of the big stories going on in the Bay Area press is the fiasco that is eating up the administration of Hewlett-Packard. It seems as if former chairwoman Patricia Dunn and the rest of the HP leadership are in a bit of trouble after an internal investigation into boardroom leaks went awry and turned into a scandal that has thrown the organization into chaos.

The leaders of HP hired investigators who used techniques such as spying on directors, planting monitoring software in e-mail correspondences with journalists, and even a bizarre plan to infiltrate Silicon Valley newsrooms disguised as cleaners in order to justify rifling through garbage.

They also used a technique called "pretexting"-a colloquialism for "lying"-in order to get private records from phone companies.

So far, four executives have been ousted-including Dunn and HP general council Ann Baskins-and at least 10 witnesses have plead the fifth rather than testify in front of a House of Representatives commerce committee.

The matter is under investigation by the California Attorney General's office and is a fine example of a modern corporate boardroom acting as if it is above and beyond the law.

Dunn does not accept responsibility for a situation that, in the words of Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), looks like "a plumbers' operation that would make Richard Nixon blush."

In a rather amusing side development, Dunn recently received a "hall of fame" leadership award from a regional business lobbying and networking group known as the Bay Area Council, after she was forced to resign.

It's almost funny how shameless and unintentionally ironic modern business leaders can be. It brought to mind the Barry Munitz saga, but that's not really what I'm writing about this week.

The thing that struck me about this sick comedy is the way in which HP's leaders thought that it was okay to break the law in order to stop leaks to the press.

As I have followed the HP story over the course of the past two weeks, I can't help but think of the parallels to the BALCO story, in which two San Francisco Chronicle reporters have been sentenced to 18 months in jail for refusing to divulge the source of their information for a series of articles on the baseball/steroids issue.

The reporters-Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada-refused to give the names of their sources from a grand jury testimony leak and will sit in jail unless they agree to divulge the information. As they pay an unacceptable toll for doing their jobs well, scummy hacks like Bob Novak-a real threat to national security-walk amongst us, free to spew the corporate line.

Both of these stories represent a very real and looming threat to public access to information. In the HP case, corporate leaders felt comfortable enough in the current political climate to break the law in order to stop the leak of information. BALCO has shown us that the imprisonment of journalists has become an all too acceptable practice in the post-9/11 world.

For those of us with a scorecard, this should be a very troubling turn of events. Real journalists reporting news from around the world are being jailed, censored, and/or murdered for reporting uncomfortable or dangerous truths, while the flacks of the powerful continue to spread lies and misinformation unencumbered by accountability to the people.

Access to vital information about the way in which members of the business elite or elected officials behave is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. Whistleblower protections are eroding, and if we are not careful, soon the only information available to us will be happy press releases written by PR flunkies who assure us that everything is okay, and every decision is the right one.

That type of "reporting" has become a hallmark of modern information dissemination. Statistics that back happy claims, written by minor bureaucrats are presented as fact, even though events on the ground belie the pretty numbers. What used to be called "fuzzy math," now goes by the names of "justification for war," or "growth projections," or even "necessary capital project."

While the bean counters walk around trying to convince everyone that things are all right, people continue to die, tax dollars are funneled into crony coffers, or the massive growth in the economy goes to the top 1 percent of the population while the taxpayers get stuck paying for missed projections.

The targeting of journalists and whistleblowers has become even more disturbing in light of the recent actions by the Bush administration, particularly in regards to detainee rights in the "war on terr'r."

Over the course of the past week, our government has passed legislation that flouts the Geneva Conventions as well as the tenets of the Magna Carta, all in one fell swoop. There is now a vehicle in place to deny American citizens the right to defend themselves in a court of law.

Our government is now free to unaccountably engage in torture-which will surely come back to haunt our men and women in uniform-and the rights of human beings now exist at the whim of the president of the United States.

Add to that $800 million worth of "detention centers" that Halliburton has been contracted to build, and the shiny new "fence" that is going up on the Mexican border, and we suddenly have what looks like a great big prison where a once-mighty nation stood. If you are not with us, don't bother trying to escape.

Hang on to your free speech zone, people. We're in for a long and scary ride to the lowest common denominator of humanity, thanks to the corporate failures that run our government.

I think that next week I'm going to return to covering CSU happenings. Thinking "globally" gives me the willies.

Published October 4, 1006, SSU Star

A tale of two perverts: Fiddling (with children) while the world burns

2006-10-16T07:08:00.000-07:00

I am going to post my editorials from the archives of the SSU Star. I'm the Editor in Chief, so I can do that, right?

For fans of the trials, tribulations and public humiliation of sexual predators, last week represented something of a bellwether in the world of pedophilia. Between the story of a sad, middle-aged Republican House member's attempted peccadilloes with hot young pages, and the release of John Mark Karr - the man who did not murder Jon Benet Ramsey - there was a little something for everyone, both on the national and local stages.

The dominant story in the mainstream press last week was that of Representative Mark Foley, R-Fla., and his alleged taste for the tender flesh of underage males.

It appears that the man appointed as chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children - who introduced H.R. 3132, the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act of 2005, intended to crack down on Internet stalking and made into law as the Adam Walsh Child Protection Act of 2006 - was using the Internet and his access to nubile young congressional employees to satisfy his predilections for teenage boys.

Foley's participation on the committee follows the logic of Bush administration appointments, as a pedophile was put in charge of the office charged with cracking down on pedophiles. The story brought to mind oil companies in charge of energy policy, or drug manufacturers creating a Medicare drug plan that has siphoned billions of taxpayer dollars into their own coffers. This might be a good place for a gag about "insider's knowledge," but I'll refrain out of a sense of propriety.

A series of e-mail and instant messages between the Foley and some of the boys became public last week, and were plastered all over the newspapers and teevee news shows. There was even a dryly amusing, if disturbing, reading of a few of them on ABC news by Brian Ross, who would be well-advised to stick with reading the news, as he would never make it as a phone sex operator. (Thank you John Stewert).

House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other top Republican leaders spent the week scurrying around pointing fingers and playing the "blame game" in an attempt to deflect criticism to the pages, the Democrats, or anywhere else but the pedophilic Republican, or his prevaricating enablers. I'll forego the sordid details here, as I'm sure that unless my reading audience has been holed up in a cave in Afghanistan or detained somewhere without a warrant, we are all familiar with them in repulsive detail.

In a story that's closer to home here in Sonoma County, the dismissal of child pornography charges against the man who did not murder Jon Benet filled the empty space left over from reportage of the Foley circus.

As we all should know by now, Karr was arrested in Colorado on Aug. 17 for allegedly murdering the little girl the day after Christmas in 1996. There were many questions about the veracity of his guilt, and massive holes in the case against him, but the story took over the front pages of every newspaper in the Western Hemisphere.

Karr's embarrassing debacle made the Sonoma County District Attorney's office look incompetent when it became clear that he was not involved in the Ramsey murder, and the evidence for the child pornography case turned out to be highly suspect, if not nonexistent.

The bigger story, though, was not what was trumpeted on the front pages during the course of the week, but what was not. The same week the Foley story blew up to epic proportions, a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) informed us we are losing the war on terr'.

The NIE lays out the case that Iraq has become a training ground - and the Iraq war a recruiting tool - for a fresh-faced batch new-generation Jihadists. The Foley scandal also helped obscure the fact that the situation on the ground in Iraq is deteriorating by the day.

The Bush administration's new torture policy - which reinterprets the Geneva Conventions - and the rollback of habeas corpus for anyone deemed an "enemy combatant" by the president, were stories of equal if not more import.

Additionally, the Karr arrest made the headlines on the same day that a federal judge in Detroit ruled the NSA wiretap program unconstitutional and illegal.

Much like Orange Alerts, or the "number two man in Al Qaida," Karr and Foley appear to have served to obscure the fact that the trillions of dollars we've spent fighting terr'rists have for the most part been wasted.

I'm not saying that it's unimportant for pedophilic leaders of the Republican Party to be held accountable for their actions, or that these stories aren't really news. The point is, there's a lot of obfuscation going on in the halls of our government, and Karr and Foley were offered up as sacrificial lambs on the altar of misinformation.

A Guest Rant from Raelayna....

2006-07-12T09:11:00.000-07:00

I heard a story on the radio on Tuesday that can't pass without comment. An eleven-year-old girl was raped by 10 men on a football team. What kind of sick shit is this?! When you see the state of society today, do you really think that humanity is capable of this kind of insanity? I cannot fathom why one man would even deign to think that raping a child is okay, let alone 10 of them! Okay, okay, if I have to be the one to say it, then I guess I will. Society, we are absolutely doing the wrong thing these days. I think that whatever parents have been teaching their children really needs to change, because if an entire flock of men think it is okay to rape an eleven-year-old, what we’ve been doing is obviously not working.

And my first reaction is always, “God I hope someone kills that poor girl.” I’m sorry if that sounds cruel but I am a firm believer in allowing people to end their misery. Just think of what that poor girl will go through the rest of her life. Wouldn’t it be a mercy in the end? How would it feel, in the real world, to be that girl who was raped by 10 men? What kind of relationships will someone like that have with people? I believe this child will most likely have at least two children by 16 purely because she’ll feel like she isn’t worth more than to be a feedbag for some calf. Imagine what it would be like to wake up every day with that knowledge. Of being forced to have sex with 10 strange men. To be a cum sack for some dude with no face. Would one be okay living with that feeling, the fact that those same men most likely walked within 14 months? Could you get out of bed every day knowing that no matter what you do, there will always be that one scar, you know that one that throbs during your period, the one from that guy that shoved a pipe in your vagina? How is a person supposed to live with that? What do you expect a person to do, just ignore the memory of some man standing over you, laughing at your tears, telling you to shut the fuck up and take it? Can we really expect someone to live with that and the nightmares that someday their own child will meet him, or his son, and live the life that you dread, the sound of existence making you want to vomit every day you wake? Could you really push that same exisitnance on someone else, perhaps someone you love? How would that feel, waking at night to hear them crying in their hands, for no reason other than they’re “really sad”? How much could my son pay to not hear me weep for the innocence lost? How many men would a father destroy to keep his eleven-year-old daughter from believing that everyone in her life wants to use and abuse her?

I once heard someone say “There is no wrong, there is no right.” Let me ask something. Does the fact that a nine-month-old baby was raped to death because the man that accosted her was convinced that her virgin blood would heal his AIDs, a neutral thing? Would that be wrong? Sorry baby, I happen to believe in people accepting responsibility for themselves and their offense is what keeps us monkeys from annihilating each other. There is wrong. Raping babies is WRONG!!!!! Raping people is WRONG!!!!! And so is try to justify it by saying these men thought it was right or funny. I can tell you that the pain caused by this action is so intense, so severe that even an imbecile could grasp the simplcity of the concept. What the hell is wrong with the mental capacity of these people? Where did they come up with the idea that raping an eleven-year-old would be cool?

Okay, parents, its time to be responsible. Okay? Its time to say no. No, you can’t have that. No, you can’t keep that. No, you can’t DO that. Where the hell is the sanity in this world? Have we really come to the point where a team of football players can rape a CHILD and get a guffaw from the president? Doesn’t he worry about this? I know I do. I really wish that little girl some peace from her suffering, even if it means death. I may not know what you are going through exactly daughter, but I know some of how you feel. Someday they will grovel at our feet and they will know punishment. Let us only hope.

I’m out. R

Ken Lay

2006-07-06T10:05:00.000-07:00

Has found a new way to launder money.

Worst president ever?

2006-04-23T09:47:00.000-07:00

Many people have been saying that for five years.

But wait...
There's more!

...and...
Losing another "war on" something that never attacked us in the first place. FDA captured by fundamentalist Bushites.

Destroying Appalachia to feed our addiction

2006-04-22T18:27:00.000-07:00

Mountaintop Removal (MTR) is the practice of blowing the tops off of mountains, and in some cases taking out entire ranges, in order to get at the coal near the surface. First used in the late 1970s in the wake of the oil embargo, MTR is responsible for polluting more than 1,200 miles of streams and watersheds. Clean water for the Appalachian region is in danger of being lost forever to the practice. MTR fills valleys with vegetation, rock, and earth—called “overburden”— which is dumped, compacted and then planted with non-native plants in order to comply with environmental laws that require mining companies to restore the affected areas to “a level or gently rolling configuration.” What is left behind is a flat, barren plateau that will not support the region’s unique diversity of life.

The coal industry portrays MTR as an innocuous, even restorative practice that can enhance the area by creating recreational areas and flatland for development and construction projects, such as a prison built in Tennessee which has been dubbed “Sink Sink,” due to the fact that the unstable ground below it is shifting and causing damage to the structure. The Kentucky Coal Council and Kentucky Coal Association decry “emotional statements in the press about this form of mining that are neither based on fact nor supported by the truth,” but the evidence of the destruction can be seen in pictures of the area and the stories of people in the region who have been displaced either by flooding, blasting, or selling off ancestral homes to mining companies. The 24-hour blasting cracks the foundations of houses, rattles windows and the nerves of residents who are unfortunate enough to live near the massive mines, and there is danger of damage to health from flying debris and excessive dust in the air. Debris was the cause of the death of a three-year-old boy in Virginia, who was killed by a falling rock in August 2004. The A & G Coal Company was fined $15,000 because the incident was considered “an act of God.”

Damage to water supplies results when watersheds are filled in with the rocks and vegetation destroyed by heavy machinery. A loophole in regulation allows mining companies to dump mountaintop waste into seasonal streambeds—what the coal industry describes as “dry hollows”—that only run in rainy seasons and do not support fish. Opponents of MTR have been trying to get the US Office of Surface Mining (OSM) to enforce a buffer-zone prohibiting mining activity within 100 feet of a stream and to get the Army Corp of Engineers to regulate streambed fill. Occasional court victories by advocacy groups are set aside on appeal by attorneys for the industry or the various agencies involved, and the mining continues.

Another danger to water supplies is the process of washing freshly-mined coal, which leaves behind hundreds of billions of gallons of toxic black water and sticky black goo in impoundments referred to as slurry ponds, sludge lagoons, or waste basins that often perch precariously on the leveled tops of mountains. There have been several environmental disasters due to impoundments breaking and flooding entire communities. In 1972, two days of torrential rains in Logan County, West Virginia caused a waste storage structure owned by a subsidiary of the Pittston Coal Company collapsed and spilled 130 gallons of sludge into Buffalo Creek, washing tons of debris and even houses downstream leaving 125 dead, 1,000 injured and 4,000 homeless. The Pittston Mine Company called the disaster an “act of God.”

In October 2000, the bottom of a waste pond near Inez, Kentucky collapsed and spilled 250 million gallons of slurry into an inactive mine shaft, which then surged out through the mine’s exits into the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy and Ohio Rivers. No one was killed, but 20 miles of waterway was eventually declared an aquatic dead zone. The spill was 25 times the size of the spill in the Exxon Valdez disaster. The resulting slick eventually reached all the way to the riverfront in Cincinnati. The pond was owned by the Martin County Coal Company, a subsidiary of Massey Energy, which blamed the disaster on the rain.

Slurry waste is seeping into wells and water supplies and is causing health problems throughout areas where MTR is taking place. Massey Energy—with annual revenues of more than $2 billion—is being sued by 350 citizens in West Virginia, although Massey denies culpability for the damage. The state’s Division of Mining and Reclamations issued a memorandum that showed 500 environmental violations for the years 2000-01, more than twice the number of the next three largest coal producers combined. Their Brushy Fork slurry lagoon contains more than eight billion gallons of toxic sludge.

In Sundial, West Virginia, a battle is going on at Marsh Fork Elementary school over neighboring Sundial Mine which spews dust as coal is loaded into a silo that towers over the school. The school’s playground is often covered in black soot that also makes its way into the ventilation system. Many children at the school suffer from respiratory diseases and the school board and local government refuse to take action, claiming that the responsibility for the matter rests with the mining company. The state’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) claims that the facility poses no threat to the school, even though it lists the 385 foot high dam for the slurry pond that sits above the school as a class C facility, meaning that its failure could be expected to lead to a loss of human life. Concerned Sundial residents seek to block the construction of another silo within 200 feet of the school, and continue to fight expansion of MTR. In the summer of 2005, 18 protestors were arrested at the Massey plant and protests continued throughout the summer. Many of the protestors were participants in Mountain Justice Summer (MJS)—an advocacy group based in Knoxville, Tennessee—and were not from the area. Massey used that to their advantage and has engendered an “us versus them” mentality among their employees, which has led to threats of violence against local protestors as well as those brought in by MJS. The governor tested the school’s ventilation system in August and deemed the school to be environmentally safe. The tests came after weeks of scrubbing, and were considered to be a sham. According to Bo Webb of Mountain Watch, “if they admit there is coal dust and other mine-related pollutants in the children’s lungs, there is going to be a parade of lawsuits naming just about everyone who has been made aware and did nothing.” Others suggest the state’s economy is so dependent on coal that officials choose to look away.

The practice of MTR is spreading so fast that an accurate accounting of the affected area is not available, but more than 400,000 acres in Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia have been destroyed by the practice, and if it continues unabated, by 2012, a section of the Appalachians the size of Rhode Island will have been flattened. The massive mining equipment will often shear 300-500 feet of mountaintop in order to get a few feet of coal.

The Bush administration considers coal to be the energy of the future and the coal industry even conflates the attacks of 9/11 with the need for more coal. A section of a timeline on the Kentucky Coal Council & Kentucky Coal Association’s website entitled “The History of Coal” reads as follows:

2001 Natural gas prices increase over 50% in one year. Electricity shortages result in rolling blackouts in California. Kentucky permits two coal-fired electric power plants, first in 20 years. September 11, 2001 - America is attacked.
AMERICA'S SECURE FUEL FOR ELECTRIC ENERGY -- COAL

The industry touts the economic benefits of coal production to the Appalachians, a region that has consistently been the most impoverished section of the US. The Appalachians have been treated much like oil-rich countries around the world, in that the mineral wealth is taken from the region—7.8 billion tons of coal have been taken out of Kentucky alone in the past 130 years—and funneled into the coffers of distant energy companies, while the people who work to extract the precious commodity are left to live in poverty, and endure the environmental destruction caused by the practice. Census numbers show that the standard of living in the “coal counties” are no better, and often much worse than members of non-coal communities. Coal mining in Tennessee is not even in the top five money-making enterprises. In 2004, 154 million tons of coal was extracted via MTR from West Virginia alone, where the numbers of mine-related workers has plummeted from 125,000 in 1948, to less than 19,000 in 2005. In 1979, there were 35,902 mining jobs in Eastern Kentucky, but by 2003, there were only 13,036. For every three people who once worked the mines, two are now doing something else.

Regulations are being relaxed, and even when mining companies are fined, they often find legal loopholes that allow them to avoid payment and environmental clean up. One method used to avoid regulation and restitution is for the major coal companies to set up subsidiary companies that break the law and once charged with violations and fined, the subsidiaries declare bankruptcy leaving the mess behind and releasing the real culprits from punishment.

The Appalachians is not the only region being harmed by the practice of MTR. Wyoming, which is the number one producer of coal in the US, depends on the economically efficient practice more and more, and it is increasingly being used throughout the rest of world from Alaska to Australia.

There has been a flurry of publication regarding MTR in recent month. Several disasters—including the Sago Mine Disaster—have focused attention on the regulation of mining practices in the US. Books by Erik Reece of the University of Kentucky, and an upcoming book by Penny Loeb, an independent journalist and former editor of US News and World Report who wrote about MTR for that magazine in 1997, examine the practice from beginning to end. Reece’s book “Lost Mountain,” chronicles his year-long observance of the destruction of a mountain top in Eastern Kentucky. Another recent book entitled “Missing Mountains,” edited by Bobbie Ann Mason, Kristin Johannsen, and Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, is a collection of essays, fiction and poetry by 35 Appalachian authors who are against MTR. In-depth articles in National Geographic, Harper’s, and even the New York Times and Washington Post are bringing the issues to a larger audience of Americans, but with an industry-friendly government in control of environmental and safety regulations, it remains to be seen if the reporting will have any real effect in solving the problem.

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

Additional reading:

Mountain Justice Summer

When Mountains Move, by John G. Mitchell, National Geographic, March 2006

Moving Mountains, by Erik Reece Grist.org, 16 February 2006
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/021706EC.shtml

Resisting Mountaintop Removal in Tennessee
By Kari Lydersen, The NewStandard. Posted November 21, 2005.
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/28489/

The Coal Mine Next Door, by Peter Slavin, The American School Board Journal, March 2006.
http://www.asbj.com/current/coverstory.html

EPA chief turns coal lobbyist
Mercury foe now represents a top polluter, by Michael Hawthorne, Chicago Tribune, February 9, 2006
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0602090094feb09,1,1986710.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed

Cheney's "accident"

2006-02-15T18:09:00.000-08:00

Ha ha. Funny stuff. Now that we've stopped laughing, let's look at what should have been in the news.

Cheney cuts out middle man

2006-02-15T08:43:00.000-08:00

...And does the shooting himself, as the Rove propaganda machine spins away.

My question is; what is this ridiculous story covering up? Did Cheney really shoot a 78-year old lawyer, or is it another red herring to keep our focus off of some other terrible shit that's in the works?

From the Minneapolis Star-Trib...

I’m entitled to my own facts!

2006-02-12T11:21:00.000-08:00

I read recently that I’m not entitled to my opinion, but that I do have the right to be wrong. Following that sterling logic, if I disagree with the prevailing paradigm, my only opportunity to be right is to keep my mouth shut and go along, or be frog-marched to the nearest American gulag to have my hippie head bashed in.

If in my opinion the president has the right to spy on American citizens, detain them without charges or access to courts, use national security and blind patriotism to pummel the population into submission, and use his newly-minted unfettered powers to declare war on anyone who may displease him at any given moment, I have my “facts” straight and can feel free to spout away.

If I want to believe that we are now safer and more prosperous, and that combat veterans such as Max Cleland—who left three perfectly useful limbs in Vietnam—and decorated Vietnam veteran John Kerry are weaklings when compared to the architects of 21st century American foreign policy, such as Dick “five deferments/I had other priorities” Cheney, and George “Champagne Unit: TANG” Bush, then they I am completely within my rights as a Stepford citizen to believe that.

But as a semi-educated, thinking and voting American, it’s not in my makeup to shut up, particularly when my country has been turned upside-down by a cabal of Orwellian thugs who don’t give a whit about the constitution, social justice, or the American people as a whole.

If my opinions are right or wrong, black or white, then I’ll adopt my own truths. Subsequently, it’s my reality that Condoleezza Rice is a vampire who thrives on the blood of dead Muslim babies. Just look at the pictures in the run-up to the unjustified and illegal war in Iraq. Condi made Bela Lugosi look like Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. She is also the darling of bloodthirsty multinational oil corporations, who had her very own super-tanker named after her.

My facts tell me that there may just be a connection between the ties of the Bush administration to the oil oligarchy, and that our Middle East “adventures” have nothing whatsoever to do with “spreading Democracy.” If I mention that out loud though, I am derided as a “conspiracy theorist” by people with a different version of reality, who think I should keep my opinions to myself.

It’s the same with the attacks of 9/11. If I think that my government either willfully or through incompetence allowed those planes to fly into the towers, I am immediately labeled a nut job. But what could be more preposterous than a theory that includes a shadowy network of Muslim extremists that infiltrated civilian flight schools in Florida, then took down four airliners using box cutters. They were so sly that the Air Force never even scrambled fighters on call for the very purpose of taking out hijacked airliners, yet several months later a Cessna 182 came within three miles of the White House and was immediately swarmed by F-16s from nearby Andrews AFB.

What about Osama Bin Laden, and the infamous “number three man in Al Qaeda”? Spooky men who have evaded capture despite the multi-trillion dollar efforts of the most powerful and technically advance nation in history? That sounds like a pretty whacky theory to me.

I’m supposed to believe that there were no warning signs, such as a President’s Daily Briefing entitled, Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S. and that our intelligence community was caught completely off guard. In the words of Donald Rumsfeld, “Who knew?”

Yet for the most part, we’ve swallowed it hook, line, and sinker, as an entire population. Our national “opposition” leaders have been neutered for fear of upsetting the narrative.

My reality tells me that our electoral process is corrupted to the point that I worry we’ll never have a legitimate election again, and if we can’t maintain a true Democracy here, my facts tell me that the relatives of all the brown people that we’re bombing into a red paste in Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the other countries where we commit mass murder will see through our hypocrisy and react with violence which may not be equal in force, but will dwarf our “nation-building” efforts in intensity.

Our government has turned on us, and is using 9/11 and national security as a cudgel to keep us under control while political hacks and Bush cronies expand executive power at a frightening rate. It is becoming ever more important to speak out, before we are all herded into concentration camps that are overseen by David Horowitz’s brown-shirted legions.

Thank god—as we know him—we live in a country where we are all entitled to our opinions. But it appears that we now have the added bonus of creating our own reality. Democracy is even better when things like unintended consequences don’t get in the way of fuzzy thinking.

Mark Morford for your pleasure

2006-01-27T22:48:00.000-08:00

Good thing nobody reads this blog...

Here Is The Big Gay Agenda
Revealed! The horrifying secret plot to homo-amplify America. Also: Dig this hetero agenda!
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, January 27, 2006

I have spoken with my gay friends. I have been to yoga classes and men's health spas and Restoration Hardware, chic rug shops and the Castro Starbucks and really cute restaurants featuring mixed baby greens that cost $12. I have observed. I have taken notes. I have checked the fashions and the cars and the skin-tight T-shirts, the newsletters and the bumper stickers and the secret codes hidden within the rainbow flag.

It is time to come clean. It is time to reveal the truth. After all, the religious right has been hammering at it for years, the pseudo-Christians and the homophobes and the sexually terrified all fully and truly believing that there is a plot, a massive, deep-seated agenda among the gay community not only to decriminalize and demystify homosexuality but to actually coerce and cajole and actively lure the innocent white babies of America into the sordid and well-dressed "gay lifestyle," so much so that, much like aliens living in underground cities in Area 51, well, there must be something to it.

Just look. Look at the wanton slew of nasty e-mails I received -- intermixed like bloody shrapnel amid a huge stack of gorgeous e-mail enthusiasm, mind -- in response to my recent column extolling the virtues of the heartbreaking, perspective-altering "Brokeback Mountain" phenom, wherein I dared to suggest that this spare and potent little film might actually help deflect the savage karmic pain of people like Samuel Alito and move the human experiment forward, just a little. What nerve I had.

Mark, gay films move us back. To tell society, which includes children, that to stick a penis inside someones anus, a wholey unnatrual act is ok and normal is ubsurd. I don't hold anything against gays, I'm not one to judge people, they can do what they please, but to shove their pervertions down everyones throat, and to try to make it mainstream and teach children honosexualiy is a normal thing for people to do is sick. -- Steve W

Or this:

It is really hard to believe that people like yourself are gloating over this film and are so proud of the degradation of our country (USA) that you have joined the masses and are HELL BENT on the destruction of Christianity, family values, and everything that is decent and what out forefathers have fought and died for in this country. Your kind are the real BIGOTS! You are the enemy of everything that is decent and good, you love death and destruction (that is what the homosexual lifestyle will lead to)... -- Larry L

Isn't that sweet? Doesn't it make you feel good to be an American? Sure it does.

But you know what? Adorably rabid, misguided homophobes like Steve and Larry, they might have a point after all. Because after all my observations and when I really allow myself to be honest, I become convinced of the existence of a truly shocking gay lifestyle, an actual gay agenda far more sinister than even desperately misguided and morally lost people like Steve and Larry can comprehend.

Do you know what it is? Do you want to know the real gay agenda, what 96.8 percent of all gay couples wish for every single day including Sunday? Here it is:

From what I can glean and above all else, the gay people of America seem to want this simply inexcusable level of boundless, unchecked normalcy. It's true. For some reason, they believe the utterly disgusting idea that they should be able to live their lives in peace and trust and health, with full support and assistance from their schools and hospitals and government, just like everyone else. I know. Shudder.

It is, in fact, remarkably similar to what heteros want. And women. And black people. And immigrants. And dwarves. That is, to be able to fall in love and maybe even get married (or at least have the option) and have decreasing amounts of sex and raise a family and hold down a good job and pay their taxes and argue with their lovers over who the hell spent 200 bucks on long distance to their mother, all while not having to worry about getting the living crap beaten out of them with tire chains by Arkansas and Alabama and most of Texas, or secretly loathed by small-minded pseudo-Christians who wouldn't know Jesus' true message if it bit them on the other cheek.

Ah, the deviousness of it all, the sheer nerve to desire the same sort of lives as everyone else. But do you want to know the kicker? The true aspect of the "gay agenda" that makes the religious right's skin really crawl? Here it is: When all of that normalcy is in place, when these repulsive gay beings who like to walk around in public and eat at restaurants and drink their lattes and laugh out loud and stick things into each other's bodies for sexual pleasure, well, they want the most appalling thing of all: They just want to be left alone.

I know. It's hideous. How dare they! How dare most gays ask not to be harassed and not really care to flaunt their sexuality or convince anyone that homosexuality is cool or righteous or the only way to be, beyond reassuring children that it's OK to be whatever religion or sexual orientation your mind and body and heart and soul guide you to be. Can you imagine? What horror. Ignorant, intolerant schoolteachers should protest that nasty idea right now. Oh wait.

This is, in fact, the most sinister gay agenda of all. Normalcy. Lack of fear. Happiness. The right to be miserably in love just like everyone else and have it recognized by the culture as, well, no big deal. Safe. Healthy. Beautiful, even. What nerve.

To Steve and Larry's great dismay, gay people do not seem to care in the slightest for converting anyone to homosexuality, which of course would be the equivalent of converting a frying pan into a doorknob. It simply cannot be done. It's bitterly sad that this must be repeated so frequently in terms so simple that even Steve and Larry can comprehend, but gayness is no more a lifestyle choice than is blond hair or blood type or that knowledge, deep down in your skin, that Bush is raping the soul of the nation. It just is.

Much can be learned from this shocking revelation. Much we can glean from the gay agenda's "true" motivations -- most notably in how it contrasts with the famed and beloved Christian neoconservative heterosexual agenda, the one that instructs that you please keep your mouth shut and blindly believe in the same bitter God as everyone else, and by the way please bury your true sexuality and get married at 23 and pop out six kids and become quickly and quietly miserable and gain 30 pounds and stop having sex entirely and get divorced at 50 and wake up just in time to watch yourself die.

Oh my yes, that has proven to be just so much better, hasn't it, Steve? Larry?

Words of wisdom

2006-01-26T22:00:00.000-08:00

From the Rude Pundit.

For earlier in the broadcast, David Gregory reported on the White House shooting down a widely-supported plan to rebuild New Orleans and said it could be done more cheaply. 'Cause, you know, that hope worked so well in Iraq. Gregory also reported on the White House's refusal to give documents to the bullshit committees investigating the response to Katrina. Indeed, the entire White House response has been the same as it was for the 9/11 Commission, the same as it was for any investigation of the "intelligence failures" on Iraq, the same as it was for any questions about NSA spying, the same as it was for the Plame affair, the same, the same, the same: the President ain't gotta tell you shit 'cause he's the motherfuckin' President, bitches.

Comforting words from the idiot in chief...

2006-01-23T20:30:00.000-08:00

"Federal courts have consistently ruled that a President has authority under the Constitution to conduct foreign intelligence surveillance against our enemies. Predecessors of mine have used that same constitutional authority. Recently there was a Supreme Court case called the Hamdi case. It ruled the authorization for the use of military force passed by the Congress in 2001 -- in other words, Congress passed this piece of legislation. And the Court ruled, the Supreme Court ruled that it gave the President additional authority to use what it called "the fundamental incidents of waging war" against al Qaeda.
I'm not a lawyer, but I can tell you what it means. It means Congress gave me the authority to use necessary force to protect the American people, but it didn't prescribe the tactics. It's an -- you've got the power to protect us, but we're not going to tell you how. And one of the ways to protect the American people is to understand the intentions of the enemy. I told you it's a different kind of war with a different kind of enemy. If they're making phone calls into the United States, we need to know why -- to protect you."

But wait! There's more!!

"What I'm talking about is the intercept of certain communications emanating between somebody inside the United States and outside the United States; and one of the numbers would be reasonably suspected to be an al Qaeda link or affiliate. In other words, we have ways to determine whether or not someone can be an al Qaeda affiliate or al Qaeda. And if they're making a phone call in the United States, it seems like to me we want to know why.

This is a -- I repeat to you, even though you hear words, "domestic spying," these are not phone calls within the United States. It's a phone call of an al Qaeda, known al Qaeda suspect, making a phone call into the United States."

Here's the text of the Kansas State U. speech. Try to read it without laughing or throwing up.

One more step

2006-01-13T20:32:00.000-08:00

in the march to fascism.

Is every word that comes out of this administration a lie?

Impeach Him

2006-01-12T21:56:00.000-08:00

Great idea, but let's wait for Dick and that whack-job from Alaska, Ted Stevens, to die first since they are the next two in line for the presidency.

Oust Feinstein

2006-01-12T20:38:00.000-08:00

Several Democrats, including Nelson and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, already have said they don't think a filibuster is warranted.

Never...ever...will...I...vote...for Feinstein again!

Alito, an ardent baseball fan,

established himself as the Babe Ruth of evasion.

Voter Fraud

2006-01-12T18:28:00.000-08:00

In depth.

The Reagan defense

2006-01-11T12:03:00.000-08:00

"Uh...I don't remember."

Don't believe the lies

2006-01-10T17:54:00.000-08:00

It's a Republican scandal.
(...And this one is written by a right-wing hack).

Yet Another...

2006-01-10T17:45:00.000-08:00

...

One more reason...

2006-01-09T19:32:00.000-08:00

...to oppose Sammy A-lie-to. Welcome back to the '50s America!

Without DeLay

2006-01-07T10:33:00.000-08:00

I know it's a cliché thing to say, but that doesn't dampen the pure joy of the moment.

A New Post

2006-01-07T07:15:00.000-08:00

As we barrel into the new year, it is time to either turn this thing into a living, breathing blog or let it rest.

2005 ended on a high note for political junkies of my stripe. We saw the Cunningham Scandal, and the Abramoff Scandal which represents systemic Republican corruption, and another fiscal compromise of our political process. Unfortunately, the prosecutor for the largest political scandal of the century is a Bush recess appointment hack named Alice Fisher, who is an enthusiastic Republican donor and has never prosecuted a case in her life. I expect a few sacrificial lambs to go down, DeLay being one of them, but the entire filthy K Street Project is alive and well as is the "Contract with America."

Here in California, Ahnold promised $222 billion to rebuild California's infrastructure, but didn't really come up with a plan to pay for it other than borrowing us further into debt, but that's the way Republicans run economies in the 21st century. It's amusing to watch the "flip-flops" of Bush hacks when they realize the people really don't like the snake oil they're selling, and they try to look moderate to get the mythical "swing voters."

Look for 2006 to be a humble year for the party in power. Too bad there isn't another party that can take advantage of their glaring missteps. We may have single-party government for a long, long time.

Lest We Forget...

2005-09-03T16:46:00.000-07:00

More Pics

2005-09-02T07:27:00.000-07:00

Minneapolis skyline with the Mississippi River in the foreground on our first day out June 21.

Sartell outside of a really cool bike shop just north of Minneapolis.

Me at Lake Harriet, a popular hangout and photo-op in Minneapolis.
July 4.

The Pacific Ocean

2005-09-02T07:00:00.000-07:00

Here I am at the Pacific Ocean in Bandon, Oregon on August 14. I figured that since I rode all those miles that it wouldn't be sacrilegious to dip my tire in the Pacific, but the tide was out, so this is as near to "dipping" as I went.

Back Home

2005-08-18T13:45:00.000-07:00

Here I am back at the ol' ranch. I logged almost 3,000 miles from June 21 to August 13. It has been an interesting transition back to my life in Santa Rosa. I am honest and for true going to post some brilliant prose and analysis about my trip, but I'm going through culture shock and a serious writer's block which can only be purged by writing about the trip. Quite a conundrum.

Check back in a day or two.

Almost "There"

2005-08-05T07:31:00.000-07:00

Coming to you live from Sumpter, OR. I've been cycling through some of the most beautiful places I've ever seen, which is a nice change from the heat and dreariness of the prairies. The scenery changes by the mile, from desert to river corridor to pine forest, and any permutation one would care to imagine.

The trip will end one week from tomorrow in Bandon, OR, which is a little community on the coast that I haven't been to since 1989. Should be interesting to see the changes wrought over the past 16 years. When I get back, I will do some furious updating, but for now I have the toughest three days of the tour ahead of me. Six passes of increasing difficulty, culminating on McKenzie Pass and the Cascades on Sunday.

I Have Arrived in Mecca

2005-07-28T09:26:00.000-07:00

After a twenty year wait, I have fianlly arrived in touring-cyclist Mecca; Missoula, Montana.

Why is it Mecca? Missoula is the home of the offices of the Adventure Cycling Association (formerly BikeCentennial). BikeCentennial began in 1973 with a plan to create a cycling route across the US, and in 1976 several groups of riders crossed this huge continent on bicycles to celebrate the nation's bicentennial. There are now three major west to east routes and many other routes, including one that follows the Continental Divide.

Cyclists from all over the globe pass through every year.

Missoula is home to the University of Montana, and is a "blue" island in a very "red" state. It is one of the most wonderful cities I have ever visited, and has lived up to my expectations. It was even worth the effort of cycling 450 miles in five days to arrive in time to take two days off for R&R. The food's great and so is the beer, and there are bicycles everywhere one cares to look.

The Adventure Cycling office is a gathering spot for weary cross-country bikers. The cyclist lounge is a place to sit and enjoy cold water, free drinks, and free ice cream. With the temperatures hovering around 90 degrees, it is a welcome distraction.

Having only seen six cyclists in the past 2000 miles, it was nice to actaually talk to other people who are traveling by bike. I feel a lttle less alien when I can share adventures with others who are going through the same ordeals that I encounter on my journey.

I met two cyclist yesterday. Nick Evans from Virginia who is riding from Oregon back to Virginia on a Bontrager mountain bike with a BOB trailer. His web site is here.

I also met a guy named Dustin, who is riding a fixxer from the East Coast to the West Coast. For the uninitiated; a fixxer is a fixed-gear bicycle that is only one speed, and cannot coast. Dustin is my new hero. He gave me his web address, but I don't have it here with me. I'll post it at a later date. On his return to California, he intends to build bike frames and create a line of cycling gear that is going to be very cool.

I had two flats in the first 2000 miles of the trip. On my triumphant entrance into Missoula, I had two flats in the space of three miles. I blame it on seven ugly miles of Interstate 94, which is littered with debris and heavily traveled by lumber trucks and RVs.

Tomorrow, which is Saturday the 29th, I go forth into the Rockies and the high deserts of Idaho. Looks like another 750 miles of not very much except some of the most beautiful scenery in the country and long distances between water stops. This is a great big beautiful place. May we soon get the Corporatists out of the halls of our government and replace them with sensible people who are interested in preserving what's left of the beauty.

Relief from the Heat

2005-07-25T06:58:00.000-07:00

Well, the temperature is down about twenty degrees today, although I have about 75 miles to ride through heavy wind and occasional rain. There's only one place to stop between here and there and first thing tomorrow morning I start to do the real climbing up into the Rockies.

I've ridden 225 miles in the last three days and have about 200 more to go until I hit Missoula for a two day rest. The heat has turned my brains to mush, and the cows and antelopes are looking at me in a funny way, but as long as I keep pedaling I don't think they'll say anything bad about me. At least within my range of hearing.

I'm off to battle headwinds.

More Heat in Montana

2005-07-22T13:32:00.000-07:00

Well, the temperatures are supposed to get in the triple digits today. The long days in the saddle with the heat, are really draining. The things that keep me going are the beautiful Montana landscapes and the historical names of things along the way.

I rode through a little settlement called Terry yesterday on my way to Miles City. Interstate 94 has been my route of choice for a few days, but I found that Old Highway 10 actually parralleled I-94 for about 12 miles. The road ran between the Interstate and the Yellowstone River. I filled my water bottles with glorious ice, and pushed the bike off after lunch.

A few miles to the west of Terry, I came upon a small stand of cottonwoods between the road and a set of railroad tracks. It was a wonderful moment. Actual trees by the side of the road that I could get off my bicycle and stand next to in the wonderful shade and drink water that was not yet tepid. I couldn't even remember the last time I was able to get off the bike in shade that was not a cafe or some other sort of building.

The not-yet-hot water was refreshing, and I wandered over to a pair of signs that were posted by a bridge that crossed a small river. One of the signs told me that I was standing at the confluence of the Powder and Yellowstone Rivers and that George Custer, Captains Reno and Benteen and their men had camped on the west side of the Yellowstone eight days before their infamous battle in June of 1876. The other sign told me that 70 years earlier, Lewis and Clark had camped there on their way back from the Pacific Coast.

It turned into another of those moments that reminds me why I do this stuff. For people versed in the nuances of American history and Empire, the names of people and places call to mind events that led to Western conquest of North America. Custer, Rosebud, the Powder and Yellowstone Rivers are names that echo through our sometimes bloody and inglorious but always brave history. The land is as harsh and unforgiving as the people who fought and died for it, even now after two centuries of occupation by white Christians.

One hundred miles on tap for tomorrow, and in two more days I'll be in the Rockies.

Plugged in Montana

2005-07-21T17:47:00.000-07:00

Well here I am in Miles City, Montana. North Dakota was a windswept place with no postcards and very few public computers. Now that I'm in Montana, I seem to be tripping over the darn things.

I left the North Dakota Badlands, and now I am in the Montana Badlands. There have been many miles between things, including food and water. I've had stretches of as much as 36 miles between water stops. Good thing I'm lugging all this crap along with me, as a few extra liters of water don't make that much of a difference in weight. Hey, it's survival too.

The temps are supposed to be in the triple digits tomorrow, with thunderstorms in the afternoon. Just like the weather in Arizona, it seems. I may find a place to lay low, and I do so look forward to those Rocky Mountains.

Thanks to all who are still with me.

Rockies Here I Come

2005-07-20T12:41:00.000-07:00

Well, I am officially in Montana now, as opposed to unofficially I suppose. Lots of flat, winswept prairies behind me and some more to go, but at least the rockies await on the other side. It's been hot and humid and exhausting, but my trip through the Badlands and Theodore Roosevelt National Park made me feel as if I'm finally getting somewhere.

I hope to be in Missoula by July 28, and then its just a couple of mountain passes between me and Eugene, Oregon, which is where I will probably end the trip.

I'll do some real updating when I get back.

The camera story isn't over yet.

Now This is Bike Touring

2005-07-12T06:06:00.000-07:00

Coming to you live from Mayville, North Dakota where I've been taken in for the evening by Dr. Timothy O'Keefe and his lovely wife Bonnie. They offered me a patch of grass in their yard and plenty of food and drink and great conversation.

There have been miles and miles and miles and miles of sweltering prairie, and the sky is not crying it is sweating. Oh, and the wind is almost always blowing. I had two days of delicious tailwinds and even covered a forty mile stretch in a bit more than two hours going into Moorhead/Fargo. One can see stuff from a LONG way away and it seems to take hours to get there. Oh, and the winds are no longer at my back. "Real" cycling for sure.

Fun does not begin to describe it.

I will eventually fill in the gaps in the story, but it will probably have to wait until I have a full-time computer in front of my face.

Time to try to get ahead of the winds.

It's not the Heat...

2005-07-09T11:52:00.000-07:00

Well, maybe it is. I'm in Morris, Minnesota and the temperature is 97 degrees with comperable humidity. I've had tailwinds all day, so I will probably have my best mileage total to date.

The roads are getting increasingly desolate as I approach Fargo, which is still 110 milesor so away. I will then turn west into the headwinds and pine for the mountains in western Montana.

I've been informed that the coffee shop is closing. That's the update. I'll fill in the blanks as soon as possible.

First Leg

2005-07-07T08:54:00.000-07:00

My bicycle is packed and I’m ready to leave Minneapolis for my solo trip back to the coast. The rest of the trip will have little resemblance to the first two weeks I spent traveling with Sartell. We did a fair job of hitting just about every bar along the way. Hey, it was hot the first week and later when the weather was crappy and the headwinds crushed our spirits, we needed every bit of help we could get just to keep going.

We set out on June 21 and for the four days and 228 miles it took to get to Walker, the temperature climbed every day. On the first day we didn’t stop for beer until late in the day, but as the temperature and the miles piled up, we began to stop earlier every day for our necessary fluids. There was Chico’s, the Trophy Bar—where we learned a lot about fishing and Kamikazes—the Blue Goose Inn which was the scene of shenanigans involving several members of the Minnesota Vikings football team, and the Green Lantern just to name a few.

The miles between Garrison and Brainerd were brutal. Headwinds and temps in the upper 80s, with the only relief being beer at the Green Lantern and a photo stop at the statue of Babe the Blue Ox. Paul Bunyan was nowhere to be found. It seems they moved the famed statues of Paul and Babe from Brainerd and no one we asked knew what happened to Paul. I suppose I’ll have to watch “Fargo” again when I get home and pretend that I was there.

Brainerd was the location of the trailhead of the Paul Bunyan trail, which is a paved path stretching more than 100 miles north to Bemidji. We only used 78 miles of the trail, which sounds bizarre in a country where bicycle trails of that length are almost as rare as hen’s teeth. According to the guy at Penn Cyclery, the shop around the corner from Sartell’s place, Minnesota has more than 1300 miles of paved trails. On our trip, we used at least 200 miles of them. If only a few more states were willing to commit resources to those kinds of trails, we could change the way we view transportation in this country. But I guess that’s a silly dream in the land of interstate freeways and Nascar.

Our first night on the Paul Bunyan Trail was spent in a little tourist town called Nisswa. I enjoyed my first helping of deep-fried pickles and some delicious peach schnapps drinks. As we sat in the Olde Pickle Inn, I had my first earful of Minnesota politics. A man was sitting at the end of the bar complaining about the “bullshit war” for oil and profit that’s going on in Iraq. He also claimed that WWII was the last “good” war and every one since has been for the profit of a handful of people.

Over breakfast the next morning, I heard a bunch of golfers complaining that they were unhappy with the way the country is being run unto the ground by the Bush Administration. “I’ve been a lifelong Republican,” said one particularly bellicose man. “I won’t vote Republican in the next election, I can tell you that.”

It was heartening talk to listen to, but I must have had too many peach schnapps the night before, because when we left Nisswa, my camera stayed behind at the motel and I didn’t realize it until we were about 20 miles down the road.

During our three day stay in Walker, we managed to hit every bar and restaurant in town. Pepper’s was right down the hill from our room on the lake, so we went down to the bar and had a beer as we watched the sun set on the lake. It was nice and warm outside and the outdoor bar had a tropical feel, except there were no palm trees and we had to run for cover when the mosquitoes came out. Well, I had to run for cover. Sartell was dressed sensibly in blue jeans and I learned then why he travels in denim rather than lycra.

Sartell’s sister Renee gave us a personalized historic tour of Walker. She’s the curator of the local museum, which has been chopped in half to make room for a state liquor store. It’s a really ugly story of development and the sacrifice of history to make room for what’s generally termed “progress.” My time in Walker showed me the economic threats that may eventually destroy small-town America. On the upside of the story, a team of economic development experts has advised a long-term project to build a multi-use trail around Leech Lake, and a focus on getting the hoards of Minnesota cyclists to use the many existing trails to visit Walker and the surrounding area.

During our tour, we stopped at a bar called Huddle’s for refreshment and a respite from the damn mosquitoes. As I drank my beer, the bartender looked at the tattoo on my left wrist. After complimenting me on the tattoo she said, “I do tattoos in Walker if you’re interested in getting another one.”

I’ve been thinking about getting a bicycle-themed tattoo for a few years and the convergence of things was just too rich for me to pass up. The day before we left Walker I went to Welaya’s studio above the Beehive hair salon, and for two hours we joked around and listened to a thunderstorm as she did a great freehand tattoo on my right wrist in honor of “Tour ’05.” If you ever find yourself in Walker wanting a tattoo, I highly recommend Welaya and the Beehive.

This is a brief overview of the first leg of the trip. Unfortunately, I don’t have an editor with me, so it may be a little rough. I’ll post more as soon as I find another computer. Any feedback from the people I’ve come in contact with along the road would be appreciated.

It’s time once again to hit the road.

Back to Civilization

2005-07-04T15:11:00.000-07:00

Sartell and I just finished our 600 mile Minnesota loop. There are miles and miles of incredible bike trails throughout the state. It was difficult to find computer access, but over the course of the next few days I'll be resting up for the long slog home and writing about our two week trip. Stay tuned for much more.

2005-06-13T14:39:00.000-07:00

The Route

Pre-Trip Jitters

2005-06-13T13:28:00.000-07:00

I’m off on another “great bike adventure” in a few short days. The last one was in February of 2000, when I rode from Santa Rosa, California to Tucson, Arizona. My life is so much different now than it has been in any of my previous trips. Our lives change in profound ways, and sometimes they’re not so subtle. Aside from being past the age of 40 now and married, I’m also lugging an extra twenty pounds around my midsection, which has to go over those big hills and long mountain passes along with the 40-50 lbs. of gear hung on my bike. Hopefully by the time I get to the mountains, several pounds of Abbott will be left behind. Middle age is a thing we must wrestle with here in America, where we’re supposed to be forever young.

Time can do funny, fluid things sometimes. This trip has been far away for several months and now that it’s only a few days away, time seems to compress and every moment is valuable and has, or should have purpose. Now suddenly, there are two airplane flights and one short week between me and the day I’ll be in Minneapolis throwing my leg over the bike, with the feeling that I’m nowhere near ready physically or psychologically.

I wake up at five o’clock almost every morning and think about how many miles I have to ride in order to make it back in time for all the responsibilities I’ve acquired in the past few months. There are 2200 miles and 39 cycling days between Minneapolis and the end of the trip. My calculator smokes from overuse and the Map Point program has several different versions of the route ranging from 2096 miles to 2304. I feverishly punch numbers as my wife dreams in an adjacent room while I try to figure the distance and the number of days and the number of miles per day that need to be done in order to make it back in the allotted number of days. When one set of data is not acceptable, another set of numbers swiftly takes its place in an attempt to find the surest, smoothest and shortest route across the northern plains. I’ve calculated by dividing the number of days by the number of miles, the number of miles by the number of days, the number of miles that I think I’m able to ride in my current physical condition and the miles I think I’ll be able to do when my body gets acclimated to being in the saddle for several hours every day. My mind spins at the thought that there won’t be time to stop and smell the roses or even talk to people, but I know from experience that those things will happen and everything will be okay so long as I breathe and keep moving forward. It may seem neurotic, but neurosis is probably a large part of the makeup of a 44 year old touring cyclist.

It’s all speculation at this point and I’d be better off if I just went out and rode my bike. If history is any guide I’ll go out there and beat my brains out every day for a few weeks and end up far ahead of schedule. All the doubts and conjecture will fall to the wayside once the bike is loaded and the cranks are turning.

I Hope It is not too Late...

2005-06-08T19:57:00.000-07:00

There appears to be some opposition to corruption, demagoguery, and the fundementalist takeover of our government.

Bush on the Press

2005-06-06T14:14:00.000-07:00

"We look forward to analyzing and working with legislation that will make—it would hope—put a free press's mind at ease that you're not being denied information you shouldn't see." —Washington, D.C., April 14, 2005

2005-06-03T10:41:00.000-07:00

Bruce Under Construction

Hold Them Accountable

2005-06-02T19:24:00.000-07:00

Sign Conyers' petition

Dreams of 2006

2005-06-02T07:32:00.000-07:00

It could happen...

Bikes not Politics?

2005-06-01T11:37:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of the Runaway Bride, Michael Jackson, and now Deep Throat, I think I’ll post something that is apolitical. Writing about politics comes easily because the things happening to our Democracy arouse passions that can’t help but express themselves through my word processor. There is much to be angry about these days. Contrary to my lifelong assertions to the contrary, anger is a very good motivator. But writing about something as important as cycling or love just doesn’t come that easily to a political junkie. Different passions stir different reactions and writing is a reaction to the input we receive from the world.

The time has come for me to get physically and, more important, mentally ready to ride sixty to seventy-five miles a day for two months on a loaded touring bike. Getting in shape after a hiatus away from the bicycle is tough, and it gets tougher as the body gets older. Going back to college and sitting for hours behind this damnable computer hasn’t helped. Aside from the thirty extra pounds residing around my midsection, my mind is full of enraging and/or useless information. Long distance cycling is a way to purge that stuff from my brain and get back in touch with a solid world that is not on the internet, but it takes a lot of work.

Training is mental as well as physical. At this point it is as much about getting my mind back on the bicycle as it is to get my muscles conditioned for the wear and tear of the road. Riding a bicycle is above all repetitive, and creating a daily ritual of throwing a leg over the bike is part of the mental training. Writing is like that too.

When the term “training” precedes the word “ride,” colorful Lycra-clad cyclists riding light-weight technologically advanced machines, fueled with semi-liquid gooey pseudo-foodstuff, sucked out of tube-like non-biodegradable packaging generally come to mind. Pedaling hard and checking the clock every few moments, keeping an intensely grim, turned-down face, the training cyclist doesn’t even have time to wave to passing fellow bike riders.

When I set out for my first ride of more than fifty miles in many months it dawned on me that time is much different on a bicycle than it is in cyber-space, where anything visually, aurally or even emotionally imaginable is instantly available by the mere click of a mouse. Riding a bicycle is a study in altered time. Unlike mouse clicks, no matter how much I try to think myself miles ahead the only way to cross those miles is to pedal, and pedaling many miles takes time. Sometimes the “fun” of riding a bicycle is physical and mental torment that can last for hours. I was reminded of that simple yet elusive fact within the first few miles of that long ride, thinking about the end of the ride that was still several hours away. The moments dragged on and there was no mouse to click to take me “home.”

Aside from a few sore joints and a little sunburn, I survived that ride fairly well for an out-of-shape, middle-aged fat man. There are still mental issues and demons to deal with, and the easy temptation and the lure of cyber-space are here with my coffee every morning. The first step has been taken though, and in a few short weeks I’ll begin to post stuff from the road for anyone out there who cares to check in.

Long distance cycling is not all torment and wishing for the end of the ride. There is far too much beauty in the world for that to be the case. The tough parts make it tough but not impossible, and like any other endeavor in life, we must deal with the difficult moments as well as the pleasurable. Therefore, training for a bike trip can also help with other difficult moments in life. I think some of the rushed, harried assholes in their massive vehicles who honk and rage at people on bicycles could learn a thing or two from us.

"Reality-based" Community

2005-05-30T18:29:00.000-07:00

There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be the "man in the street." Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinant to tactics and psychology.
~Joseph Goebbels~

Riding my Bike as the World Burns

2005-05-26T08:00:00.000-07:00

Two events in the news recently came together to remind me of the tragedy of 9/11. The first happened on May 11 when a Cessna flying out of Pennsylvania went off course and flew within three miles of Whitehouse airspace, causing panic and disorder for hundreds of Caucasian residents of our Nation’s Capital. The other was the visit to the US of our Unocal-fist-puppet and oil-drenched “leader” of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai.

The former was a reminder because like our vaunted leader George W. Bush, I too was riding my bicycle and unaware that our freedom was under attack. I may as well have been sitting in a classroom reading a crappy kid’s book to a roomful of school children.

Like Dubya, I was happily pedaling through the sunshine and blissfully unaware. He was in Maryland riding his bicycle with his platoon of armed guards, and wasn’t told of the small plane which became lost in DC air space because the pilot relied on outdated maps. Of course unlike 9/11, F-16s were scrambled and Donnie Rumsfeld even authorized the planes to shoot if necessary.

The situation was deemed important enough to evacuate several buildings full of people and it was splashed all over the news ala Michael Jackson or the Runaway Bride. That filthy Liberal Media. I didn’t watch it, but I’m sure they managed to put their lefty spin on it. Poor Tom DeLay may have even been accused of causing the terror.

The joy of a bicycle cannot be overestimated here. For me the pre-9/11 world, the world where my government didn’t use fear tactics in order to try to keep me in line and steal my tax dollars, lasted for a few extra un-terrorized, sunny moments. For our vaunted “Wartime President,” the guy who weaseled his way out of Vietnam, an extra forty minutes of bliss while the “process,” aka Dick Cheney, took control of the situation

Likewise, I watched the recent visit of Hamid Karzai with a kind of cynical bemusement. Well honestly I look at everything political these days with cynical bemusement, when it’s not horror. It was sadly funny to watch our oily puppet from Afghanistan come to the U.S. and expect the Cheney Administration to give him more control of the country that he “leads.” If Afghanistan is the Bush bar of success, it’s a pretty low bar. Poppy production is up and 70% of the world’s opium is coming out of the fields of that country. Of course, when our main allies are thugs and we spend billions of dollars on graft and corruption instead of creating economic stability in a country that has been ravaged by war for centuries, we shouldn’t be surprised when oppressed and brutalized peasants do whatever they have to do to survive.

Karzai came to visit Dubya in hopes of gaining authority over U.S. troops so that he can get control of a country that is sliding into civil war. We never found Osama “dead” or “alive.” Now we are throwing hundreds of billions of dollars away on a failing foreign adventure in Iraq that has looked like Vietnam from the outset, and our brilliant civilian leaders have forgotten about Afghanistan, except when randon embarrassing facts come out about the occupation. Prisoner abuse and the Pat Tillman episode jump to mind.

Watching Bush bitch-slap Karzai reminded me of my initial opposition to the war in Afghanistan. I know, I know, “they” attacked us on 9/11. Those fifteen Saudis had something to do with Afghanistan… Oh yeah, our allies from Al Qaeda and Karzai’s Taliban trained there with Bush family friend Osama Bin Laden. Of course, they wouldn’t have had a foothold there if it weren’t for our brilliant Cold War policy of pouring money into training resistance fighters to fight the “Evil Empire,” the Soviet Union.

Funny how in order for Democracy to thrive on our shores, there must be an Evil (fill in the blank) over the horizon just waiting for us let down our guard, so that they can come to our malls and rape our navel-pierced children.

I don’t buy the argument that Afghanistan was a “justified” war. Terrorism is not an act of war. It is a crime and the only way to fight it is through police work. Police work does not mean creating a police state at home. There are many reasons that invading Afghanistan was a big mistake, not the least of which is that it is a place where empires go to die. Just ask our “coalition” friends the Brits, or our former enemies the Soviets. Better yet, read books about history. The Soviet Union spent ten years fighting U.S. funded Afghan nationalists, which contributed to its fall.

The country is on the verge of civil war, and all the positive Fox News spin about nascent women’s rights and “fair” elections will not change that. Afghanistan has been decimated by war for many, many years and has been bombed further back into the Stone Age by what they view as a hostile civilization. They have nothing to lose and will do anything in their power to get us out.

Invading Afghanistan perpetuated a cycle of violence and revenge, and revenge is not good foreign policy. It also softened public opinion to the invasion of Iraq to the shame of the American people. Have we learned nothing at all from our observations of history?

Our children and our National Guard units are stumbling around blind in a country they know nothing about, in a culture that is diametrically opposed to ours. We offend their sensibilities on a daily basis merely by being there. Anyone who does not think that our current policy in the Middle East isn’t exactly like Vietnam is not paying attention. The Domino Theory is doomed to fail once again.

So I’ll just keep riding my bike and hope that as the world falls down and burns around my ears, I’ll have that extra forty minutes of blissful indifference. Just like George W. Bush.

Harm America

2005-05-25T20:25:00.000-07:00

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful,
and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways
to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”
W. Aug 5, 2004

Chaos in the 21st Century

2005-05-25T08:56:00.000-07:00

Chaos theory describes complex motion and the dynamics of sensitive systems. Chaotic systems are mathematically deterministic but nearly impossible to predict. Chaos is more evident in long-term systems than in short-term systems. Behavior in chaotic systems is aperiodic, meaning that no variable describing the state of the system undergoes a regular repetition of values. A chaotic system can actually evolve in a way that appears to be smooth and ordered, however. Chaos refers to the issue of whether or not it is possible to make accurate long-term predictions of any system if the initial conditions are known to an accurate degree. Source: Chaos Theory and Fractals, by Jonathan Mendelson and Elena Blumenthal.

Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?

Ironic that the famous question concerns a storm in the state of Texas. If we take the theory above, and apply it to current events, it may read thus: Does the soft, war-like whisper of Donald Rumsfeld’s hot breath in George Dubya’s ear set off a firestorm in the Middle East? Does such a firestorm eventually lead to a clash of civilizations, and the eventual destruction of all that we’ve built over the past few millennia? Only time and the Chaos theory will tell.

2005-05-23T17:23:00.000-07:00

The Raging Monkey

Raging Monkey

2005-05-23T11:47:00.000-07:00

After listening to Mike Malloy and reading the news for another day, I am fully convinced that Democracy as we knew it is dead. We must fight back with the truth.