The Liberation Institute, an organization so shadowy it does not in fact exist, contacted commentator Jack Random, requesting an interview to determine the author’s qualifications as a liberator. The interview was conducted in two parts: Foreign Affairs and Domestic Policy. The following is a transcript of the foreign policy exchange.
Liberation Institute: Do you favor a timetable of withdrawal from Iraq?
Jack Random: Yes. On this issue, there are no acceptable alternatives. Iraq started a spiral descent from Shock and Awe and has continued its fall to the present day. Anyone who looks at what is happening in Iraq and says, “It’s complicated. The war was wrong. It was founded on lies, yes, but now we’re there and we have to finish the job.” is only fooling themselves.
It’s a form of mass hallucination. If we all pretend this is reality, we can keep on pretending indefinitely. The greater truth is that no one can suspend reality indefinitely without going mad. We either go mad as a nation and take much of the world with us or we give up the fantasy and begin to make amends. The problem is: We don’t know how to say we’re sorry without saying “but.”
The first step in embracing sanity is getting out of Iraq immediately and accepting the debt of a nation torn apart and decimated. It does not matter that Saddam was a brutal tyrant or even that he was our brutal tyrant for decades. We have to understand that people must rid themselves of their own tyrants and they will in time if we refuse to sponsor and assist them in pursuit of our own interests.
The game of geopolitics uses ethics as a pawn, discarded at will until it ceases to have meaning and the players lose all credibility.
LI: Do you oppose the war in Afghanistan?
JR: Yes for the same reasons. We’ve repeated the same pattern that produced the blowback of 9-11. During the Soviet invasion and occupation, we sponsored every radical jihadist on the planet. When the Soviets fell, we ended up supporting the Taliban and the people accepted the tyranny of the Taliban because at least there was some order and security. We turned to the warlords and expected the people to thank us for overthrowing the Taliban to restore anarchy. The Afghan economy may be backward by our standard but the people are not stupid. People everywhere know a liberator when they see one and they know he does not wear an American flag – not in this world.
LI: Should we allow North Korea to develop nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles?
JR: It is like asking if the sun should shine on Tuesdays. We have no choice and very little influence. North Korea is primarily a regional concern. China, Japan and South Korea are our trading partners. It is not in China’s interest to allow North Korea to attack its trading partners. Unless our relations with China dramatically change, there is no threat. North Korea lives under the Chinese thumb. What we should be more concerned with is a president who scores political points by taunting and provoking one of the world’s most dangerous governments.
We should be engaged in diplomacy at all levels but only if the purpose of that diplomacy is diffusing conflict – not enraging it.
LI: Do you support regime change in Iran?
JR: I support the right of the people to freely choose their own government in every nation – including America. I oppose the right of any other power to choose for them. I believe that when an external power attempts to affect regime change, it invariably backfires with unpredictable results.
We have a sordid history in Iran. We gave the Iranian people the tyranny of the Shah. After the Shah, the Iraq-Iran war and the latest war in Iraq, even those who want peace and cooperation with America know we cannot be trusted. If we want to influence Iran or any other nation, we have to regain our credibility.
If there were no oil in the region, would our troops be stationed there? If every American knows the answer to that question, we can be sure the people of Iran know it as well.
LI: What should we do in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
JR: We should cry for all the people caught in the crossfire. We should push our own government to act as an honest broker. It is something we have never in fact done before but at least we have always held up the façade of honest brokerage and that has been enough to subdue each crisis before it exploded into a never-ending, ever-expanding cycle of war. Our current government has dropped the curtain. We are not even pretending neutrality. With both our media and government pounding us day-to-day with the right of Israel to defend herself, without any regard for the people of Gaza or the principle of proportionate retribution, how can we diffuse the crisis?
The real question is: Do we want to diffuse it or has our government decided, with all the wisdom and foresight they have demonstrated in Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea and Iran, that ever-expanding war is in the national interest? I fear it is not the law of unintended consequences haunting this administration but a wanton and arrogant philosophy of conquest at any cost. The neocons are not dead; they are only sleeping.
LI: Do you support the Palestinian right of return?
JR: Yes but the qualifier is more important than the answer. I believe that the Palestinians possess the right of return, as any displaced people do, as a matter of principle, but I do not believe that right is paramount. Is it worth more than an independent Palestinian state? Through all the wars and negotiations, the right of return has been employed by both sides as a deal breaker. It is no different today.
Secure in the knowledge that the right of return can no more be denied than freedom of speech or the right to a living wage, let it be settled in the uncertain future. Let today belong to peace and Palestinian sovereignty.
LI: That concludes the foreign policy portion of the interview. Do you have any questions?
JR: Did I pass the test?
LI: The results will be tabulated and the findings released at an appropriate time.
JR: Does anyone pass?
LI: That information is confidential.
JR: Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE APPEARED ON DISSIDENT VOICE, THE ALBION MONITOR, BUZZLE, PEACE-EARTH-JUSTICE AND COUNTERPUNCH.
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Flashing the Hash at the Watergate: Parts 1-4 by Chris Mansel
[Editor's Note: If he isn't tamed by the system or swallowed by the beast, Chris Mansel is on his way to becoming the next Hunter S. Thompson. Give it a read and look for more from The Mind of Mansel...]
Flashing The Hash at the Watergate: Part One.
Television news crews surround the steps of the courthouse as Scooter Libby begins a slow walk to his car after another day of testimony. Down the street looking like a moth eaten turtle in a helmet of burnt hair sits Karl Rove slipping rounds into an eighteen shot clip. Cursing quietly under his breath Rove ponders erratically the choice of taking out the cause of the spotlight on him or empty the clip into his face.
Jack Random and I were strolling by having recently relocated to Virginia to research a book on terror warnings, bank defaults and their ties to the white supremacist movement. I noticed Rove slamming his weapon into the dash of the car and just as I leveled the camera lens Rove hit the accelerator and sped down the street in reverse. The press up the street hardly took notice having heard the sounds of violence in the streets of Washington before.
Scooter Libby made his way out of the courthouse to his car. The press following and asking questions but not expecting any response. Like prison guards watching the monotony of inmates coming and going they hardly notice when a guard is attacked and the alarm doesn’t sound but the alarm will sound for Rove soon enough.
We tracked him to the Watergate Hotel and down the stairs into a conference room. Jack stood by the door with a high-powered microphone to eavesdrop on whatever was going on. I questioned the hotel staff tipping those on the lowest rungs of the pay scale and threatening with expulsion those who never got their hands dirty. Jack captured the goods and came back out to the car to play back the tape and as he hit rewind secret service agents surrounded the car. We showed our hands and they drew their weapons. Exiting the vehicle we were asked for identification. Some time ago we had made two press I.D.’s that showed we worked for the Washington Times that is owned by the Rev. Sun Yung Moon, a name that would open any door in the city of Washington, certainly the beltway. As we were held against the car we noticed Libby driving by in a taxi and exiting into the Watergate.
Flashing The Hash at the Watergate (part two)
Fear looks like hope in the tall grass and that’s where we were, two inches of steel surrounded by a hard durable casing, the smell of cordite, and the kind of smell you recognize that the weapon has been recently fired. Secret Service agents who when they surround someone begin chattering on their communication devices and slamming themselves in place. They took a few minutes to analyze the fake identifications we showed them and slowly there was a look of recognition in the lead agents face. If I didn’t know better I thought the c*cksucker was going to drop to the street and begin his prostrations. I noticed a scar behind his right ear and Jack saw it too. It was the mark of a true believer, a West Pointer. Somewhere along the line he had been burned by something, he had known the smell of human flesh being singed into an emblem.
A huge crowd had gathered around us, a crowd of civilians. The agents knew he had to save face so he immediately started ordering his agents to make way for us and reducing the citizenry to a mass of insecurities. Their violent wand of intimidation about no cameras or questions led those around us to believe we were important. I could sense the onlookers squinting their eyes and trying to remember what we looked like so as to be able to identify us if we ever showed up on the news.
After the melee Jack retrieved the recorder from the car and we quickly made our way into the Watergate. Slamming into a booth in the bar we began to listen back to the tape.
We knew we had to try and hunt up Libby but first we wanted to hear what we had managed to capture on tape. The following is what we were able to transcribe.
Two or three agents will be enough.
The word is out on the limos and Duke (Cunningham) has f*cked that for us.
Hell we could get some pickup for that matter. If anyone can operate a shifter on the column it’s a hooker.
How much you think it would take to get the old Arab to squat over Durbin and piss?
Flashing The Hash at the Watergate (part three)
In the bar we met up with a photographer who had been staying at the Watergate at the behest of the manager of the hotel in order to photograph the renovation. He was paid a flat fee and given a room at the end of a hallway on the first floor. He explained to us that more than once he had been accosted by the Secret Service for what they describe as “loitering with intent.” He explained that he had overheard some of the recording and with a smile added that maybe we might be interested in some of the photographs he had taken around the hotel. Something in the way he said this made us believe that there was something more to these photos. He opened the satchel in front of him and we joined him in his booth.
The photographs were amazing. Some were of the hospital staff in compromising situations, photos of the restoration included the construction workers smoking pot and generally laying around on the job out of sight of the hotel surveillance system. As we looked Jack asked if he had anything more official, and with that question he lit up and turned towards the back of the collection to reveal covert photos of the Secret Service removing stuff from hotel rooms. In one of the photos a Secret Service agent carries a life-size sex doll made into an exact replica of G. Gordon Liddy. In another, an agent was holding a drunken Scooter Libby against the wall while he awaited the elevator.
Jack leapt to his feet and stormed over to the bar and grabbed at the phone to make a call. The bartender came down the bar and said something to Jack that I didn’t hear and Jack screamed, “If you’re mother was in this kind of situation you’d be on this side of the bar asshole!” The bartender who had seen many crazed looks like the one in Jack’s eyes (many from politicians) sulked back down to his newspaper.
“News desk! Hey. Mike! What would you do for a photograph of Scooter Libby being sodomized by an agent?”
The photographer looked at Jack and back down at the photograph and then to me.
“Well, you know the darkroom can do many things but these days a fraud can be spotted right away.”
I told him that it didn’t matter if the story was true or the photograph genuine. As long as it existed and was leaked in the right way it would show up on the news and get picked up by the wires.
I added, “If bullshit was the ration card of power the entirety of Washington would be bent over backwards digging corn.”
Flashing The Hash at the Watergate (part four)
As we left the bar we saw a group of Secret Service agents running to the salon located in the Watergate. We followed behind them to see a drunken Scooter Libby rubbing mud on his face and screaming about a free facial. Karl Rove was standing across the room talking into his cell phone. The Secret Service stormed into the room and Libby twirled the chair around at them and grabbing the terrified makeup attendant he started spitting on her neck and rubbing it in and screaming in a voice reminiscent of Truman Capote, “Isn’t it pretty, isn’t it pretty!”
The agents tackled the lady and Libby and began kicking them both. Rove sat down at the front desk and began flipping through the call caddy and copying down the names. One agent turned to secure the area and noticed us photographing the scene. The agent grimaced and started toward us but he slipped in the blood pouring from the woman’s forehead.
We ran down the hallway and were almost out of the hotel when Jack suggested we head for the conference room Rove had just left. We ran across the lobby and through the door. Down the stairs we met by a cleaning crew. We flashed our I.D.’s and took the garbage bag from them for inspection. They could have cared less why we needed it or for our identifications.
Back in the car I eased into traffic as Jack fished through the bag. He began laughing hysterically when he found a list of congressmen who had participated in the Duke Cunningham hooker scandal. Rove had the names circled and beside several of the names were amounts of money and personal phone numbers. One name in particular hit us more than others: Matt Drudge.
- Chris Mansel
SEE THE MANSEL REPORT.
Flashing The Hash at the Watergate: Part One.
Television news crews surround the steps of the courthouse as Scooter Libby begins a slow walk to his car after another day of testimony. Down the street looking like a moth eaten turtle in a helmet of burnt hair sits Karl Rove slipping rounds into an eighteen shot clip. Cursing quietly under his breath Rove ponders erratically the choice of taking out the cause of the spotlight on him or empty the clip into his face.
Jack Random and I were strolling by having recently relocated to Virginia to research a book on terror warnings, bank defaults and their ties to the white supremacist movement. I noticed Rove slamming his weapon into the dash of the car and just as I leveled the camera lens Rove hit the accelerator and sped down the street in reverse. The press up the street hardly took notice having heard the sounds of violence in the streets of Washington before.
Scooter Libby made his way out of the courthouse to his car. The press following and asking questions but not expecting any response. Like prison guards watching the monotony of inmates coming and going they hardly notice when a guard is attacked and the alarm doesn’t sound but the alarm will sound for Rove soon enough.
We tracked him to the Watergate Hotel and down the stairs into a conference room. Jack stood by the door with a high-powered microphone to eavesdrop on whatever was going on. I questioned the hotel staff tipping those on the lowest rungs of the pay scale and threatening with expulsion those who never got their hands dirty. Jack captured the goods and came back out to the car to play back the tape and as he hit rewind secret service agents surrounded the car. We showed our hands and they drew their weapons. Exiting the vehicle we were asked for identification. Some time ago we had made two press I.D.’s that showed we worked for the Washington Times that is owned by the Rev. Sun Yung Moon, a name that would open any door in the city of Washington, certainly the beltway. As we were held against the car we noticed Libby driving by in a taxi and exiting into the Watergate.
Flashing The Hash at the Watergate (part two)
Fear looks like hope in the tall grass and that’s where we were, two inches of steel surrounded by a hard durable casing, the smell of cordite, and the kind of smell you recognize that the weapon has been recently fired. Secret Service agents who when they surround someone begin chattering on their communication devices and slamming themselves in place. They took a few minutes to analyze the fake identifications we showed them and slowly there was a look of recognition in the lead agents face. If I didn’t know better I thought the c*cksucker was going to drop to the street and begin his prostrations. I noticed a scar behind his right ear and Jack saw it too. It was the mark of a true believer, a West Pointer. Somewhere along the line he had been burned by something, he had known the smell of human flesh being singed into an emblem.
A huge crowd had gathered around us, a crowd of civilians. The agents knew he had to save face so he immediately started ordering his agents to make way for us and reducing the citizenry to a mass of insecurities. Their violent wand of intimidation about no cameras or questions led those around us to believe we were important. I could sense the onlookers squinting their eyes and trying to remember what we looked like so as to be able to identify us if we ever showed up on the news.
After the melee Jack retrieved the recorder from the car and we quickly made our way into the Watergate. Slamming into a booth in the bar we began to listen back to the tape.
We knew we had to try and hunt up Libby but first we wanted to hear what we had managed to capture on tape. The following is what we were able to transcribe.
Two or three agents will be enough.
The word is out on the limos and Duke (Cunningham) has f*cked that for us.
Hell we could get some pickup for that matter. If anyone can operate a shifter on the column it’s a hooker.
How much you think it would take to get the old Arab to squat over Durbin and piss?
Flashing The Hash at the Watergate (part three)
In the bar we met up with a photographer who had been staying at the Watergate at the behest of the manager of the hotel in order to photograph the renovation. He was paid a flat fee and given a room at the end of a hallway on the first floor. He explained to us that more than once he had been accosted by the Secret Service for what they describe as “loitering with intent.” He explained that he had overheard some of the recording and with a smile added that maybe we might be interested in some of the photographs he had taken around the hotel. Something in the way he said this made us believe that there was something more to these photos. He opened the satchel in front of him and we joined him in his booth.
The photographs were amazing. Some were of the hospital staff in compromising situations, photos of the restoration included the construction workers smoking pot and generally laying around on the job out of sight of the hotel surveillance system. As we looked Jack asked if he had anything more official, and with that question he lit up and turned towards the back of the collection to reveal covert photos of the Secret Service removing stuff from hotel rooms. In one of the photos a Secret Service agent carries a life-size sex doll made into an exact replica of G. Gordon Liddy. In another, an agent was holding a drunken Scooter Libby against the wall while he awaited the elevator.
Jack leapt to his feet and stormed over to the bar and grabbed at the phone to make a call. The bartender came down the bar and said something to Jack that I didn’t hear and Jack screamed, “If you’re mother was in this kind of situation you’d be on this side of the bar asshole!” The bartender who had seen many crazed looks like the one in Jack’s eyes (many from politicians) sulked back down to his newspaper.
“News desk! Hey. Mike! What would you do for a photograph of Scooter Libby being sodomized by an agent?”
The photographer looked at Jack and back down at the photograph and then to me.
“Well, you know the darkroom can do many things but these days a fraud can be spotted right away.”
I told him that it didn’t matter if the story was true or the photograph genuine. As long as it existed and was leaked in the right way it would show up on the news and get picked up by the wires.
I added, “If bullshit was the ration card of power the entirety of Washington would be bent over backwards digging corn.”
Flashing The Hash at the Watergate (part four)
As we left the bar we saw a group of Secret Service agents running to the salon located in the Watergate. We followed behind them to see a drunken Scooter Libby rubbing mud on his face and screaming about a free facial. Karl Rove was standing across the room talking into his cell phone. The Secret Service stormed into the room and Libby twirled the chair around at them and grabbing the terrified makeup attendant he started spitting on her neck and rubbing it in and screaming in a voice reminiscent of Truman Capote, “Isn’t it pretty, isn’t it pretty!”
The agents tackled the lady and Libby and began kicking them both. Rove sat down at the front desk and began flipping through the call caddy and copying down the names. One agent turned to secure the area and noticed us photographing the scene. The agent grimaced and started toward us but he slipped in the blood pouring from the woman’s forehead.
We ran down the hallway and were almost out of the hotel when Jack suggested we head for the conference room Rove had just left. We ran across the lobby and through the door. Down the stairs we met by a cleaning crew. We flashed our I.D.’s and took the garbage bag from them for inspection. They could have cared less why we needed it or for our identifications.
Back in the car I eased into traffic as Jack fished through the bag. He began laughing hysterically when he found a list of congressmen who had participated in the Duke Cunningham hooker scandal. Rove had the names circled and beside several of the names were amounts of money and personal phone numbers. One name in particular hit us more than others: Matt Drudge.
- Chris Mansel
SEE THE MANSEL REPORT.
Friday, May 05, 2006
Maggots For The Prosecution (for Bob Kincaid)
(from The Mind of Chris Mansel)
At long last the bloody scarred hand of seething animal skin inhibition has finally escaped the last or more current beast that is America. Marchers of illegal aliens, the discussion to remove the all-seeing eye of the live feed, the camera from the White House press room and the first indecision and false start attempt to reap blood from the tragedy of September 11 have all come into view.
Pennies over the eyes of trauma victims and the incoming devastation in New Orleans this hurricane season, the requests for former FEMA manager Michael Brown for interviews, face time, leads the citizen of the world to strike back with words but not votes. It is no longer enough to kill a mockingbird; today you must define that act of violence by downed power lines and residue from discharging the weapon.
Like the German army in the Russian snow we have become the bodies thrown across ox carts like Napoleon except these bodies travel in first class with unseen American flags falling from the skies, the thread of fabric catching on every wire service radar. Bats hang in desolation waiting for darkness to jump out like political consultants, precinct captains in the mid-term elections to label the war as high gas prices and not body bags. The winning of Iraqi hearts and minds left to postmortem explanations.
- Chris Mansel (see The Mansel Report)
At long last the bloody scarred hand of seething animal skin inhibition has finally escaped the last or more current beast that is America. Marchers of illegal aliens, the discussion to remove the all-seeing eye of the live feed, the camera from the White House press room and the first indecision and false start attempt to reap blood from the tragedy of September 11 have all come into view.
Pennies over the eyes of trauma victims and the incoming devastation in New Orleans this hurricane season, the requests for former FEMA manager Michael Brown for interviews, face time, leads the citizen of the world to strike back with words but not votes. It is no longer enough to kill a mockingbird; today you must define that act of violence by downed power lines and residue from discharging the weapon.
Like the German army in the Russian snow we have become the bodies thrown across ox carts like Napoleon except these bodies travel in first class with unseen American flags falling from the skies, the thread of fabric catching on every wire service radar. Bats hang in desolation waiting for darkness to jump out like political consultants, precinct captains in the mid-term elections to label the war as high gas prices and not body bags. The winning of Iraqi hearts and minds left to postmortem explanations.
- Chris Mansel (see The Mansel Report)
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Ravaged and Bruised At Sea Level
(from the Mind of Mansel)
The great suede back split vein shiny headed fiend that is Scott McClellan left the White House the other day and strode off into the private sector as the U.S. press core gathered to cover him in spit and to urinate on the tires of his four door tan sedan as it wheeled through the traffic of Washington. A few blocks down the street away from the barricades he had enjoyed for so long and into the crime riddled streets that even the press core shies away from and he was instantly recognized as the man who had crouched in the alley behind a YMCA basement window six weeks before.
My partner and I Jack Random scuttled towards the gates of hell known as Camp David and awaited the roar of the presidential helicopter to thrush at the bending trees that scatter the garbage cans of the locals into the streets. We interviewed the locals until we were escorted to a narrow passageway through the governmental hedgerow and were exposed to the latest installments of hi-tech weaponry being used to combat the unwanted advances of the president's cabinet upon those senate and congressional pages who could not find more honest work in the Washington subways.
- Chris Mansel
The great suede back split vein shiny headed fiend that is Scott McClellan left the White House the other day and strode off into the private sector as the U.S. press core gathered to cover him in spit and to urinate on the tires of his four door tan sedan as it wheeled through the traffic of Washington. A few blocks down the street away from the barricades he had enjoyed for so long and into the crime riddled streets that even the press core shies away from and he was instantly recognized as the man who had crouched in the alley behind a YMCA basement window six weeks before.
My partner and I Jack Random scuttled towards the gates of hell known as Camp David and awaited the roar of the presidential helicopter to thrush at the bending trees that scatter the garbage cans of the locals into the streets. We interviewed the locals until we were escorted to a narrow passageway through the governmental hedgerow and were exposed to the latest installments of hi-tech weaponry being used to combat the unwanted advances of the president's cabinet upon those senate and congressional pages who could not find more honest work in the Washington subways.
- Chris Mansel
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Home Run Bonds!
RANDOM JACK – DISSEMINATE FREELY.
Aaron, Ali, Robinson, Armstrong & Bonds:
An Open Letter to Bonds Haters
You love to hate Barry Bonds and even a Giants fan has been known to throw a few curses in his direction but when the whole world turns against him, as if he were the reason for America’s decline, for an unfathomable debt, for the steady slide in working wages, for the brutal cuts in social services, for the inaccessibility of medical coverage, for the price of gasoline, for the browning of our environment, for the poisoning of our water, for the neglect of our children’s education, for the destruction of New Orleans, for the wasting of our values, for the loss of American pride, and for the catastrophes in Iraq and Afghanistan, then by god I’ll stand up for Barry Bonds.
You don’t like it when we compare Bonds to the great Babe Ruth but for the years 2001-2004 Bonds posted numbers against juiced pitchers and juiced competitors a full two standard deviations above the norm.
You don’t like it when we rate Bonds among the elite players who ever played the game but for the two decades of his career there is no one who even begins to compare.
Baseball fans are strange and fickle creatures. You love the numbers when they support your point of view but ignore them when they do not. Who among you did not marvel at Brady Anderson’s 50 home run season? Who among you did not bow to Ken Caminiti’s MVP season? Who among you did not stand and cheer the great home run chase of Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire? Are their accomplishments any less today?
Step out of baseball for a moment. The comparison that should hit home is Lance Armstrong to Barry Bonds. In the world of contemporary sports, only Armstrong, Gretsky, Jordan and Tiger Woods rise to the level of Bonds’ accomplishments. The evidence of Armstrong’s “blood doping” is every bit as strong as the evidence against Bonds. Neither Armstrong nor Bonds ever failed a drug test.
Why are there no politicians or sports writers clamoring for an investigation of Lance Armstrong? Why are there no Grand Jury witch-hunts?
You don’t like it when we compare Barry Bonds to the immortal Jackie Robinson but what Bonds is confronting today is bitter, ugly and un-American racism.
You don’t like it when we compare Barry Bonds to Mohammed Ali but the same ignorant threats directed at Bonds were once hurled at Ali.
You don’t like it when we compare Barry Bonds to Hank Aaron but even the Hammer knows: The same racist hate mongers who once clamored for his death are now out in force for Barry Bonds.
We no longer care what you think or how you explain it to your kids (what about Bonds’ kids?). You don’t like him? Fine. You don’t want your kids to admire him? Fine. But if you want to blame Bonds for everything that’s wrong with America, get real. Take a good long look at the man that 51% of you voted for to lead this nation.
He’s our player. Leave him alone.
Jazz.
Aaron, Ali, Robinson, Armstrong & Bonds:
An Open Letter to Bonds Haters
You love to hate Barry Bonds and even a Giants fan has been known to throw a few curses in his direction but when the whole world turns against him, as if he were the reason for America’s decline, for an unfathomable debt, for the steady slide in working wages, for the brutal cuts in social services, for the inaccessibility of medical coverage, for the price of gasoline, for the browning of our environment, for the poisoning of our water, for the neglect of our children’s education, for the destruction of New Orleans, for the wasting of our values, for the loss of American pride, and for the catastrophes in Iraq and Afghanistan, then by god I’ll stand up for Barry Bonds.
You don’t like it when we compare Bonds to the great Babe Ruth but for the years 2001-2004 Bonds posted numbers against juiced pitchers and juiced competitors a full two standard deviations above the norm.
You don’t like it when we rate Bonds among the elite players who ever played the game but for the two decades of his career there is no one who even begins to compare.
Baseball fans are strange and fickle creatures. You love the numbers when they support your point of view but ignore them when they do not. Who among you did not marvel at Brady Anderson’s 50 home run season? Who among you did not bow to Ken Caminiti’s MVP season? Who among you did not stand and cheer the great home run chase of Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire? Are their accomplishments any less today?
Step out of baseball for a moment. The comparison that should hit home is Lance Armstrong to Barry Bonds. In the world of contemporary sports, only Armstrong, Gretsky, Jordan and Tiger Woods rise to the level of Bonds’ accomplishments. The evidence of Armstrong’s “blood doping” is every bit as strong as the evidence against Bonds. Neither Armstrong nor Bonds ever failed a drug test.
Why are there no politicians or sports writers clamoring for an investigation of Lance Armstrong? Why are there no Grand Jury witch-hunts?
You don’t like it when we compare Barry Bonds to the immortal Jackie Robinson but what Bonds is confronting today is bitter, ugly and un-American racism.
You don’t like it when we compare Barry Bonds to Mohammed Ali but the same ignorant threats directed at Bonds were once hurled at Ali.
You don’t like it when we compare Barry Bonds to Hank Aaron but even the Hammer knows: The same racist hate mongers who once clamored for his death are now out in force for Barry Bonds.
We no longer care what you think or how you explain it to your kids (what about Bonds’ kids?). You don’t like him? Fine. You don’t want your kids to admire him? Fine. But if you want to blame Bonds for everything that’s wrong with America, get real. Take a good long look at the man that 51% of you voted for to lead this nation.
He’s our player. Leave him alone.
Jazz.
Monday, April 17, 2006
SF Jazz, Karma & Human Nature
RANDOM JACK: DISSEMINATE FREELY.
Attending a concert at SF Jazz is always a pleasure – a momentary release from the hard driving pressures of an engaging life in interesting times.
Sometimes you get more than you bargained.
This was my third SF Jazz Collective experience and each has been a memorable evening of masterful musicians finding their groove and driving it home. The concert, featuring director Joshua Redman (sax), Bobby Hutcherson (vibes), Nicolas Payton (trumpet), Miguel Zenon (sax, flute), Andre Hayward (trombone), Renee Rosnes (piano), Matt Penman (bass) and Eric Harland (drums), performing original compositions and selected works of Herbie Hancock, was superb.
Jazz played well has the power to take you to a distant landscape where none of the rules apply. It is structured anarchy, ordered disorder, and harmony in the realm of discord.
Jazz is the music of dissent and rebellion. As chronicled, it was the rhythm of the Velvet Revolution in Prague. Jazz was condemned and banished by the imperial overlords of the Soviet empire before the fall, fearful that it would lead to independent thought. Jazz is why white America could not discount the cultural and intellectual contributions of black America. Jazz is the heartbeat of the nation – its pride and its mystery – and jazz is why we can never forget what happened to New Orleans – not in a million years.
But the legacy of jazz was not what preoccupied my mind as I drove the moonlit highways home Saturday night. It was what happened before and after the concert.
As concert time approached, I was still circling off Van Ness, trying to find a parking lot. I found one close to the theatre but it was unattended and the machine refused to accept my money. A gentleman in ragged clothes approached to offer assistance. I hand him my bills and watched him fiddle with the machine unsuccessfully. He told me, if I was in a hurry, he would take care of it.
As I locked my car, I saw a sign above the entry, warning me not to trust anyone posing as an attendant. I said to the man: “You’re sure? They’re not going to tow my car, are they?” He waved me off and gave assurances.
I walked on to the theatre, figuring that I would have hell to pay. Once before, I had my car towed in San Francisco. Worse than the fees and fines are the hours of waiting in a cold and frigid building that slowly and inevitably drags you down to a level of mutual misery.
I managed to shake off the distraction, the second-guessing, the dread of that probable experience long enough to enjoy the concert. When the encore was finished, the gloom descended as I made my way to the car.
A gentleman in rough if not ragged clothes asked me if I could afford a handout. I told him truthfully I had no more ones. He offered “three for five” and I replied truthfully I had no fives. He said it was his birthday and he was thirty-six years old.
He summoned the number nine (those who understand will understand, those who don’t will not) and I offered up a ten.
Resuming my walk, I wondered if it was karmic test.
I found my car where I had parked it – much to my amazement. The gentleman who had promised to take care of it had kept his word. He found an old parking pass and placed it on my windshield. Apparently, it did the trick.
I wanted to thank him but he was not to be found. Anyway, it might be a little awkward.
Lessons learned. You cannot judge a man by his costume or station in life.
Jazz.
SEE DISSIDENT VOICE FOR LATEST CHRONICLE: Designated Fall Guy: Replacing Rummy.
Attending a concert at SF Jazz is always a pleasure – a momentary release from the hard driving pressures of an engaging life in interesting times.
Sometimes you get more than you bargained.
This was my third SF Jazz Collective experience and each has been a memorable evening of masterful musicians finding their groove and driving it home. The concert, featuring director Joshua Redman (sax), Bobby Hutcherson (vibes), Nicolas Payton (trumpet), Miguel Zenon (sax, flute), Andre Hayward (trombone), Renee Rosnes (piano), Matt Penman (bass) and Eric Harland (drums), performing original compositions and selected works of Herbie Hancock, was superb.
Jazz played well has the power to take you to a distant landscape where none of the rules apply. It is structured anarchy, ordered disorder, and harmony in the realm of discord.
Jazz is the music of dissent and rebellion. As chronicled, it was the rhythm of the Velvet Revolution in Prague. Jazz was condemned and banished by the imperial overlords of the Soviet empire before the fall, fearful that it would lead to independent thought. Jazz is why white America could not discount the cultural and intellectual contributions of black America. Jazz is the heartbeat of the nation – its pride and its mystery – and jazz is why we can never forget what happened to New Orleans – not in a million years.
But the legacy of jazz was not what preoccupied my mind as I drove the moonlit highways home Saturday night. It was what happened before and after the concert.
As concert time approached, I was still circling off Van Ness, trying to find a parking lot. I found one close to the theatre but it was unattended and the machine refused to accept my money. A gentleman in ragged clothes approached to offer assistance. I hand him my bills and watched him fiddle with the machine unsuccessfully. He told me, if I was in a hurry, he would take care of it.
As I locked my car, I saw a sign above the entry, warning me not to trust anyone posing as an attendant. I said to the man: “You’re sure? They’re not going to tow my car, are they?” He waved me off and gave assurances.
I walked on to the theatre, figuring that I would have hell to pay. Once before, I had my car towed in San Francisco. Worse than the fees and fines are the hours of waiting in a cold and frigid building that slowly and inevitably drags you down to a level of mutual misery.
I managed to shake off the distraction, the second-guessing, the dread of that probable experience long enough to enjoy the concert. When the encore was finished, the gloom descended as I made my way to the car.
A gentleman in rough if not ragged clothes asked me if I could afford a handout. I told him truthfully I had no more ones. He offered “three for five” and I replied truthfully I had no fives. He said it was his birthday and he was thirty-six years old.
He summoned the number nine (those who understand will understand, those who don’t will not) and I offered up a ten.
Resuming my walk, I wondered if it was karmic test.
I found my car where I had parked it – much to my amazement. The gentleman who had promised to take care of it had kept his word. He found an old parking pass and placed it on my windshield. Apparently, it did the trick.
I wanted to thank him but he was not to be found. Anyway, it might be a little awkward.
Lessons learned. You cannot judge a man by his costume or station in life.
Jazz.
SEE DISSIDENT VOICE FOR LATEST CHRONICLE: Designated Fall Guy: Replacing Rummy.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
BIG DADDY BOYS
RANDOM JACK: DISSEMINATE FREELY.
What Have You Got to Hide?
We all remember the Big Daddy Boys, the ones who always supported their government, the ones who christened such memorable phrases as “My Country, Right or Wrong!” and “America: Love it or Leave it!”
We remember the days when the military was welcome on college campuses and no one laughed when someone said, “He’s still the president.”
Remember what the Big Daddy Boys always used to say, whether the inquiry was about registering for the draft, marijuana or jay walking: “All you need to know is: It’s the law.”
They don’t say that any more.
They used to say you could never trust a man who looks you straight in the eyes and lies through his teeth.
They don’t say that any more.
When Ronnie Reagan, J. Edgar Hoover and Tricky Dick Nixon wanted to keep dossiers on everyone in America, the Big Daddy Boys chimed in harmony: “What have you got to hide?”
Time to turn it around: If the NSA has only spied on Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda associates and Al Qaeda affiliates, what was the problem in getting a warrant from the FISA court? I am no expert on intelligence gathering but I would guess it takes all of thirty seconds to get a warrant to listen in on an Al Qaeda member talking to someone in the USA.
How often are we expected to believe Al Qaeda calls someone in this country: Every day, a thousand times a day?
As for affiliates and associates, those are concepts that go a long way: All subscribers to Al Jazeera, anyone who tapped the news service, all who read an email from an imam in Spain, and all who tapped the website that posted it.
It is no great leap to see that the NSA warrantless domestic spying program can be used to spy on virtually anyone.
Mark it, post and save: This White House has a political enemies list and is using the NSA to destroy anyone who gets in the way. If not, what have they got to hide? Open the books. Let’s have a peek at who you’re spying on.
THERE IS NO FREEDOM WITHOUT THE RIGHT TO DISSENT.
What Have You Got to Hide?
We all remember the Big Daddy Boys, the ones who always supported their government, the ones who christened such memorable phrases as “My Country, Right or Wrong!” and “America: Love it or Leave it!”
We remember the days when the military was welcome on college campuses and no one laughed when someone said, “He’s still the president.”
Remember what the Big Daddy Boys always used to say, whether the inquiry was about registering for the draft, marijuana or jay walking: “All you need to know is: It’s the law.”
They don’t say that any more.
They used to say you could never trust a man who looks you straight in the eyes and lies through his teeth.
They don’t say that any more.
When Ronnie Reagan, J. Edgar Hoover and Tricky Dick Nixon wanted to keep dossiers on everyone in America, the Big Daddy Boys chimed in harmony: “What have you got to hide?”
Time to turn it around: If the NSA has only spied on Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda associates and Al Qaeda affiliates, what was the problem in getting a warrant from the FISA court? I am no expert on intelligence gathering but I would guess it takes all of thirty seconds to get a warrant to listen in on an Al Qaeda member talking to someone in the USA.
How often are we expected to believe Al Qaeda calls someone in this country: Every day, a thousand times a day?
As for affiliates and associates, those are concepts that go a long way: All subscribers to Al Jazeera, anyone who tapped the news service, all who read an email from an imam in Spain, and all who tapped the website that posted it.
It is no great leap to see that the NSA warrantless domestic spying program can be used to spy on virtually anyone.
Mark it, post and save: This White House has a political enemies list and is using the NSA to destroy anyone who gets in the way. If not, what have they got to hide? Open the books. Let’s have a peek at who you’re spying on.
THERE IS NO FREEDOM WITHOUT THE RIGHT TO DISSENT.
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Libertad y Justicia para Todos!
(Para mis amigos y amigas en Espanol)
El pasos debajo es necesario para aliviar el aprieto de los inmigrantes (secondario, para resolver la problema de imigracion):
1. Documentacion para inmigrantes con no documentacion. El solucion obvio para imigracion ilegal es a legalizar. El razon ese trabajadores con no documentacion es no ese inmigrantes gusto a correr desde policia. Este es ese trabajadores con no documentacion tener no derechos legal. Inmigrantes con no documentacion recibir menos que sueldos minimo. Ellos y ellas es barato y disponible. Trabajadores con no documentacion es no necesario para pagar.
Cuando el corporacions dar documentacion por el inmigrantes, ellos deber pagar sueldos decente. Ellos deber proveer beneficios basica. Ellos no deber desconocer seguridad para trabajadores.
Cuando el corporacions comenzar pagar sueldos decente, Americanos querer buscar empleos semejante.
2. Definir y establecer el sueldos para vivo en Canada, America (norte), Mexico y otro nacions en America Central y Sur. Requerir nacions en todo para sorportar regulas de sueldo para vivo si calificar por estado preferencia en comercio.
3. Demoler el pared! Nosotros tener el derecho para saber quien es adentro el nacion. Nosotros poder requirir documentos cerca de destinacions: propietarios, directors de hotels, patrons y patronas.
Es no necesario para gastar billons de dolars en el pared de la borde sur. El pared bloquear como mucho para partir como para entrar. Nosotros haber cosas mucho mejor par gastar nuestro deniro: construir New Orleans, sevicio medico, educacion, sistemas para masa tranporte, energia salvo, exploracion de espacio, y minoria empleo.
El nacion en dueda no poder malgastar su dinero. Esta es verguenza de nacional.
Viva Chavez! Viva Mexicanos! Viva Americanos!
Libertad y justicia para todos!
SEE BUZZLE.COM FOR RECENT CHRONICLES.
El pasos debajo es necesario para aliviar el aprieto de los inmigrantes (secondario, para resolver la problema de imigracion):
1. Documentacion para inmigrantes con no documentacion. El solucion obvio para imigracion ilegal es a legalizar. El razon ese trabajadores con no documentacion es no ese inmigrantes gusto a correr desde policia. Este es ese trabajadores con no documentacion tener no derechos legal. Inmigrantes con no documentacion recibir menos que sueldos minimo. Ellos y ellas es barato y disponible. Trabajadores con no documentacion es no necesario para pagar.
Cuando el corporacions dar documentacion por el inmigrantes, ellos deber pagar sueldos decente. Ellos deber proveer beneficios basica. Ellos no deber desconocer seguridad para trabajadores.
Cuando el corporacions comenzar pagar sueldos decente, Americanos querer buscar empleos semejante.
2. Definir y establecer el sueldos para vivo en Canada, America (norte), Mexico y otro nacions en America Central y Sur. Requerir nacions en todo para sorportar regulas de sueldo para vivo si calificar por estado preferencia en comercio.
3. Demoler el pared! Nosotros tener el derecho para saber quien es adentro el nacion. Nosotros poder requirir documentos cerca de destinacions: propietarios, directors de hotels, patrons y patronas.
Es no necesario para gastar billons de dolars en el pared de la borde sur. El pared bloquear como mucho para partir como para entrar. Nosotros haber cosas mucho mejor par gastar nuestro deniro: construir New Orleans, sevicio medico, educacion, sistemas para masa tranporte, energia salvo, exploracion de espacio, y minoria empleo.
El nacion en dueda no poder malgastar su dinero. Esta es verguenza de nacional.
Viva Chavez! Viva Mexicanos! Viva Americanos!
Libertad y justicia para todos!
SEE BUZZLE.COM FOR RECENT CHRONICLES.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
THE RIGHTS OF LABOR
THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES – DISSEMINATE FREELY.
The Immigration Conundrum
By Jack Random
Americans scoff at the French as they protest a new labor law making it easy for employers to dismiss young workers without cause in the first two years of employment. We long ago sacrificed the rights of labor – job security rights, the right to a living wage, the right to organize in unions, the right to fair and impartial arbitration, the right to strike – and we expect others to passively do the same.
Lurking beneath the French labor dispute, which is nothing short of an attack on an already marginalized union movement, is the European immigration conundrum: a growing dependence on a second class labor force which is routinely denied all rights.
We are so enamored with the rights of our corporate masters that we denigrate anyone who stands for the rights of the worker.
Europe is at a crossroad: Trapped between the American neo-liberal model (let the market rule, labor laws and unions be damned!) and the modern European tradition of caring for the working class, the poor, the dispossessed, the infirm and unfortunate.
Somehow, Americans have difficulty making the connection between our own loss of skilled, secure middle class jobs and the methodical stripping away of labor protections in our own and other nations.
For so long now we have been duped into advocating against our own cause because we fail to recognize that we are members of the working class. The impoverished workers of other, less fortunate nations are who we used to be not so many years ago. They are who we will become again if the neo-liberal globalists have their way. Instead of holding our foreign brothers and sisters up, we have learned to be indifferent and dismissive. We have been conditioned to accept an inevitability of globalism on the terms offered by the neo-liberal ideologues, neglecting to observe that the model has been a dismal failure on both macro and micro economic scales.
Latin America has learned the value of an economy that strengthens the working class so that they are transformed into a consuming middle class. The European model has not failed; it has simply given up the struggle to cheap labor.
Already reduced to representing less than ten percent of the labor force, the neo-liberal administration of Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin is attempting to finish the job of crushing the unions while pretending to open new opportunities for employment. Translation: Let them work in the French version of Wal Mart.
With the failure of the flawed and ultimately dishonest European Union constitution (a document that ignored the problem of cheap immigrant labor) and the revelations that both Germany and France aided the American invasion of Iraq with strategic intelligence, hope is waning that continental Europe will fulfill its promise as a counterpoint to American dominance and corporate neo-liberal globalism.
Only Spain has moved in the right direction by recognizing that labor rights are not the problem but the solution to the crisis that threatens all of European culture, its essential values and the underpinning of its social order. Spain, however, is only one nation and one nation cannot stand alone against the tidal wave of globalization.
It is apparent that Europe is no longer leading but following the American model. It is a model that has wreaked havoc all over the world and one that is doomed to failure for it eliminates the most essential component of a thriving economy: a prospering middle class.
Saddled by unimaginable debt and the debilitating combination of tax cuts for the elite and uncontrollable military spending, America will go down first. Soon America’s fate will be in the hands of its foreign creditors. When the chips are called in (as they inevitably must be), America will decline. She may well attempt to reclaim her glory by asserting her military might but, as all the world save a handful of neocons in Washington already know, the military dominance model failed decades if not centuries ago.
At that crossing, Europe will face a choice: Whether to blindly follow the American path of unrestricted, global free enterprise or to strike out in a new direction. If she chooses the former, she will inherit America’s former clientele, the international corporate monoliths, only to discover, as America did, that the clients have become the masters and the masters have become the slaves. She may suffer under an illusion of prosperity for a spell but the illusion will soon dissipate and the spectacle of spiral descent will be visited upon much of the world.
If she chooses a new path, she must discover an old friend.
America is afflicted with an impairment that Europe does not share. Americans are terrorized by words. What is cause for reflection and debate in European circles sends Americans into convulsive fits of madness. The mere mention of the word “socialism” shuts off all discourse, oblivious to the stone cold fact that America’s emergence from the Great Depression was largely a function of socialistic medicine.
If the world is to be saved from the coming fall, Europe must follow the path that is currently sweeping through Latin America in response the wholesale failures of neo-liberal globalism.
Far from the defunct Soviet model or the flawed Cuban model, we must find a way to blend the virtues of socialism with the vibrancy of capitalism. A viable economic system must be founded on an open social and political system that guarantees the fundamental rights of humankind, including the rights of labor.
It must be supported by an education system that sacrifices nationalistic propaganda in favor of the free flow of knowledge and information, a principle that must also be translated into a free and open press.
The Soviet Union did not fall because socialism failed. It fell because of its oppressive, closed political system, a system that fostered massive corruption, and an ideologically driven prohibition on free enterprise. We are now discovering that uncontrolled capitalism with an ideologically driven prohibition on government regulation and social safeguards is equally prone to corruption and preordained for demise.
If we are to avoid that failure and the catastrophic collapse that will follow, we must create a balance, a hybrid that allows for both equity and prosperity, individual innovation and social responsibility.
It begins with a rediscovery, reaffirmation and globalization of the inalienable rights of labor.
Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS).
The Immigration Conundrum
By Jack Random
Americans scoff at the French as they protest a new labor law making it easy for employers to dismiss young workers without cause in the first two years of employment. We long ago sacrificed the rights of labor – job security rights, the right to a living wage, the right to organize in unions, the right to fair and impartial arbitration, the right to strike – and we expect others to passively do the same.
Lurking beneath the French labor dispute, which is nothing short of an attack on an already marginalized union movement, is the European immigration conundrum: a growing dependence on a second class labor force which is routinely denied all rights.
We are so enamored with the rights of our corporate masters that we denigrate anyone who stands for the rights of the worker.
Europe is at a crossroad: Trapped between the American neo-liberal model (let the market rule, labor laws and unions be damned!) and the modern European tradition of caring for the working class, the poor, the dispossessed, the infirm and unfortunate.
Somehow, Americans have difficulty making the connection between our own loss of skilled, secure middle class jobs and the methodical stripping away of labor protections in our own and other nations.
For so long now we have been duped into advocating against our own cause because we fail to recognize that we are members of the working class. The impoverished workers of other, less fortunate nations are who we used to be not so many years ago. They are who we will become again if the neo-liberal globalists have their way. Instead of holding our foreign brothers and sisters up, we have learned to be indifferent and dismissive. We have been conditioned to accept an inevitability of globalism on the terms offered by the neo-liberal ideologues, neglecting to observe that the model has been a dismal failure on both macro and micro economic scales.
Latin America has learned the value of an economy that strengthens the working class so that they are transformed into a consuming middle class. The European model has not failed; it has simply given up the struggle to cheap labor.
Already reduced to representing less than ten percent of the labor force, the neo-liberal administration of Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin is attempting to finish the job of crushing the unions while pretending to open new opportunities for employment. Translation: Let them work in the French version of Wal Mart.
With the failure of the flawed and ultimately dishonest European Union constitution (a document that ignored the problem of cheap immigrant labor) and the revelations that both Germany and France aided the American invasion of Iraq with strategic intelligence, hope is waning that continental Europe will fulfill its promise as a counterpoint to American dominance and corporate neo-liberal globalism.
Only Spain has moved in the right direction by recognizing that labor rights are not the problem but the solution to the crisis that threatens all of European culture, its essential values and the underpinning of its social order. Spain, however, is only one nation and one nation cannot stand alone against the tidal wave of globalization.
It is apparent that Europe is no longer leading but following the American model. It is a model that has wreaked havoc all over the world and one that is doomed to failure for it eliminates the most essential component of a thriving economy: a prospering middle class.
Saddled by unimaginable debt and the debilitating combination of tax cuts for the elite and uncontrollable military spending, America will go down first. Soon America’s fate will be in the hands of its foreign creditors. When the chips are called in (as they inevitably must be), America will decline. She may well attempt to reclaim her glory by asserting her military might but, as all the world save a handful of neocons in Washington already know, the military dominance model failed decades if not centuries ago.
At that crossing, Europe will face a choice: Whether to blindly follow the American path of unrestricted, global free enterprise or to strike out in a new direction. If she chooses the former, she will inherit America’s former clientele, the international corporate monoliths, only to discover, as America did, that the clients have become the masters and the masters have become the slaves. She may suffer under an illusion of prosperity for a spell but the illusion will soon dissipate and the spectacle of spiral descent will be visited upon much of the world.
If she chooses a new path, she must discover an old friend.
America is afflicted with an impairment that Europe does not share. Americans are terrorized by words. What is cause for reflection and debate in European circles sends Americans into convulsive fits of madness. The mere mention of the word “socialism” shuts off all discourse, oblivious to the stone cold fact that America’s emergence from the Great Depression was largely a function of socialistic medicine.
If the world is to be saved from the coming fall, Europe must follow the path that is currently sweeping through Latin America in response the wholesale failures of neo-liberal globalism.
Far from the defunct Soviet model or the flawed Cuban model, we must find a way to blend the virtues of socialism with the vibrancy of capitalism. A viable economic system must be founded on an open social and political system that guarantees the fundamental rights of humankind, including the rights of labor.
It must be supported by an education system that sacrifices nationalistic propaganda in favor of the free flow of knowledge and information, a principle that must also be translated into a free and open press.
The Soviet Union did not fall because socialism failed. It fell because of its oppressive, closed political system, a system that fostered massive corruption, and an ideologically driven prohibition on free enterprise. We are now discovering that uncontrolled capitalism with an ideologically driven prohibition on government regulation and social safeguards is equally prone to corruption and preordained for demise.
If we are to avoid that failure and the catastrophic collapse that will follow, we must create a balance, a hybrid that allows for both equity and prosperity, individual innovation and social responsibility.
It begins with a rediscovery, reaffirmation and globalization of the inalienable rights of labor.
Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS).
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
V FOR VENDETTA: CINEMATIC COURAGE FOR THE POST 911 WORLD
RANDOM JACK: DISSEMINATE FREELY.
V for Vendetta, the Wachowski brothers’ latest entry in the futuristic action genre, is the second act of true cinematic courage of the post 9-11 millennium – the first was Kingdom of Heaven, Ridley Scott’s twelfth century crusader film. Unlike the later, Vendetta is destined to reach a mass audience.
Maybe it was still too soon for Kingdom to reach the masses. Maybe the people were not ready to accept historical truth – or maybe they just didn’t get it.
Vendetta is a masterful parable, a brilliant futuristic metaphor, and a logical projection of where current political trends may lead if allowed to grow and prosper.
The film includes four superb performances: Natalie Portman as the awakening activist, Stephen Rea as the Inspector, John Hurt as the Chancellor, and Hugo Weaving as the Shakespearean superman behind the Guy Fawkes mask.
If she had not done so already, Natalie Portman graduates from the Star Wars straightjacket to a first class dramatic actor. If you are not moved by her epiphany, you are immovable.
John Hurt oozes a menacing pathos. Stephen Rea enables us to understand the debilitating nature of mass consciousness and the liberating nature of transformation. Hugo Weaving is nothing short of astounding in conveying a depth of emotion from behind an unchanging, smiling face.
Director James McTeigue has created an astonishingly believable future that holds a mirror to our world and demands revelation. He has accomplished the most difficult trifecta of cinema: To simultaneously entertain, inform and instruct.
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”
Jefferson could not have said it better.
“Remember, remember, the fifth of November!”
Jazz.
V for Vendetta, the Wachowski brothers’ latest entry in the futuristic action genre, is the second act of true cinematic courage of the post 9-11 millennium – the first was Kingdom of Heaven, Ridley Scott’s twelfth century crusader film. Unlike the later, Vendetta is destined to reach a mass audience.
Maybe it was still too soon for Kingdom to reach the masses. Maybe the people were not ready to accept historical truth – or maybe they just didn’t get it.
Vendetta is a masterful parable, a brilliant futuristic metaphor, and a logical projection of where current political trends may lead if allowed to grow and prosper.
The film includes four superb performances: Natalie Portman as the awakening activist, Stephen Rea as the Inspector, John Hurt as the Chancellor, and Hugo Weaving as the Shakespearean superman behind the Guy Fawkes mask.
If she had not done so already, Natalie Portman graduates from the Star Wars straightjacket to a first class dramatic actor. If you are not moved by her epiphany, you are immovable.
John Hurt oozes a menacing pathos. Stephen Rea enables us to understand the debilitating nature of mass consciousness and the liberating nature of transformation. Hugo Weaving is nothing short of astounding in conveying a depth of emotion from behind an unchanging, smiling face.
Director James McTeigue has created an astonishingly believable future that holds a mirror to our world and demands revelation. He has accomplished the most difficult trifecta of cinema: To simultaneously entertain, inform and instruct.
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”
Jefferson could not have said it better.
“Remember, remember, the fifth of November!”
Jazz.
Monday, March 20, 2006
The Victim's Act of 1910
(from the mind of Mansel)
I was in the Appalachians when the mud ran down the hill
I was an unwed black mother who couldn't get served the pill
I was the wheel that turned the free press in a communist jail
I was the hammer, the sickle I was Jonah in the whale
I jumped at the crash and flew when the towers fell
I was the lion who tore the Christians from the promise land
I was in the way a woman stood over the grave of her man
I was the child of the strikers my hungry face so tanned
I wore the Vietnamese, Korean, German and Iraqi brand
I was a soldier in a wheelchair turned away from the reviewing stand
From Homer Bigart to Oscar Shindler I was the people's roar
I was the politician who kissed a baby and laid him on the floor
I dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and then I called it war
I was a drunken abusive father with a pistol in the drawer
I swallowed the barrel when I couldn't take it anymore
Chorus:
I'm leaving this earth I'm going down
Back where I came from upside down
With a hatchet and a cloven hood
I was the worst where better stood
- Chris Mansel
SEE THE MANSEL REPORT: themanselreport.blogspot.com / chrismansel.blogspot.com.
I was in the Appalachians when the mud ran down the hill
I was an unwed black mother who couldn't get served the pill
I was the wheel that turned the free press in a communist jail
I was the hammer, the sickle I was Jonah in the whale
I jumped at the crash and flew when the towers fell
I was the lion who tore the Christians from the promise land
I was in the way a woman stood over the grave of her man
I was the child of the strikers my hungry face so tanned
I wore the Vietnamese, Korean, German and Iraqi brand
I was a soldier in a wheelchair turned away from the reviewing stand
From Homer Bigart to Oscar Shindler I was the people's roar
I was the politician who kissed a baby and laid him on the floor
I dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and then I called it war
I was a drunken abusive father with a pistol in the drawer
I swallowed the barrel when I couldn't take it anymore
Chorus:
I'm leaving this earth I'm going down
Back where I came from upside down
With a hatchet and a cloven hood
I was the worst where better stood
- Chris Mansel
SEE THE MANSEL REPORT: themanselreport.blogspot.com / chrismansel.blogspot.com.
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Make the Pie Higher! by GW Bush
[Note: This is a poem made up entirely of actual quotations from George W. Bush, arranged for aesthetic purposes by Washington Post writer Richard Thompson.]
I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
and potential mental losses.
Rarely is the question asked
is our children learning?
Will the highways of the internet
become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?
They misunderestimate me.
I'm a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being
and the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope.
Where our wings take dream.
Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher!
(Pass this on. Help cure Mad Cowboy disease.)
I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
and potential mental losses.
Rarely is the question asked
is our children learning?
Will the highways of the internet
become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?
They misunderestimate me.
I'm a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being
and the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope.
Where our wings take dream.
Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher!
(Pass this on. Help cure Mad Cowboy disease.)
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Crucify Him! Barry Bonds & the Steroids Saga
By Jack Random (posted by Dissident Voice 3/10/06.)
There’s a war going on. It’s a war pitting good versus evil, us versus them, and slugger Barry Bonds finds himself on the other side of the fence.
Believe everything you’ve read – despite a heavy reliance on anonymous sources and illegally leaked Grand Jury testimony. Believe that Bonds did steroids, intentionally and repeatedly, in an effort to break what once seemed an unbreakable record held by a man who did the same.
Crucify him! Run over him with a bulldozer or, better yet, an armored Hummer. Burn him in effigy or, better yet, burn him at the stake and blame him for New Orleans, Iraq, NSA wiretapping and Monica Lewinsky.
To those who have already condemned Bonds and blocked his way to the Baseball Hall of Fame, allow me to posit a contrasting point of view: Every player has a right to claim a record within the establish parameters of the game. Remember that the unqualified and nearly universal adulation of Mark McGwire did not end when Andro was found in his locker. The summer of Sammy Sosa and Big Mac played to packed houses, media madness, and in the end, Major League Baseball cried, “All hail!”
If Barry Bonds was incensed that a hulking white man laid claim to the most glamorous record in baseball, he had a right to be. Using roughly the same method, Bonds rose far above anything McGwire ever dreamed of; he rose to the lofty level of the game’s most esteemed legends.
Neither Bonds nor McGwire were fuzzy cheeked rookies trying to establish themselves. They were mature individuals, raised in a competitive environment, who investigated the risks and rewards, and made an informed and determined choice.
There was nothing inherently wrong with the decision they made. It was a decision countless others, including pitchers, made as well, secure in the belief that baseball was indifferent at best and no one would ever know.
Contrary to the implications of the most rabid detractors, neither Bonds nor McGwire was caught injecting children. (If you raise your children with even a modicum of wisdom, you have more to fear from leading politicians than overpaid athletes.)
Contrary to self-aggrandizing baseball purists (apologies to Keith Olbermann), it does not matter whether Bonds is inducted into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot or any subsequent ballot. Baseball is a game of numbers. Over the course of a magnificent career, Barry Bonds stepped to the plate and produced numbers so far beyond the norm they defy all explanations – including performance enhancing drugs.
There are those who say that numbers tell you all you need to know. In baseball, they are very nearly correct. If you look at the numbers, Ruth and Gehrig were genetic freaks – and both (incidentally) died young. If you look at the numbers in the career of Roger Maris, 1961 was an aberration very close to statistical impossibility.
If you look at the numbers, Barry Bonds transformed himself from one of the very best speed-and-power, five tool players the game has ever known, to a pure slugger rivaled only by the legendary Babe. (Despite the numbers, it is debatable which player – the younger or the older Bonds – was in fact more valuable to his team.)
Sadly, I suspect we will one day learn that the price of that transformation was too great but the motivation was eminently understandable to anyone who has entered the arena of competitive sports.
I discovered the ultimate truth about Barry Bonds in reading a column by Joan Ryan in the San Francisco Chronicle (3/9/06): As I turned from page B1 to B5, there it was – a picture of a year-old girl shot in the back in Darfur.
The ultimate truth about the Barry Bonds saga is that, in the grand scheme, it does not matter – or rather, it matters very little. We may love the game of baseball but if you cannot teach your children that there is no relationship between athletic ability and moral, ethical or responsible conduct, then you have already failed your children. How convenient to be able to blame Bonds, Sosa or McGwire.
While I almost always agree with everything Joan Ryan writes, she is as guilty as most in oversimplifying the Bonds case. She offers the moral equivalency of Bonds’ denial of steroid use and Bill Clinton’s denial of the Monica Lewinsky affair to George W. Bush’s deceptions about weapons of mass destruction. Neither Bonds’ nor Clinton’s deceptions killed anyone or put the planet on the edge of world war.
She offers a simple metaphor: The story of little Billy informing his teacher that little Johnny cheated to ace a test. In Ryan’s story, the teacher scolds and punishes Billy for turning on little Johnny, the pride of the school.
To make the story more applicable to the Bonds case, little Billy actually found out from Johnny’s cousin that Johnny took Ritalin which enabled Johnny to focus and stay up late studying. When Billy was informed that there was nothing wrong with taking Ritalin, Billy began taking it himself.
The point is: Words like cheating, lying and betrayal are thrown around a little too carelessly these days. There was a time when cheating was something you did on the playing field. Anything you did off the field was your own business. Moreover, if you did something that was both common and within the rules of the game, no one outside your own parents could tell you it was wrong.
As for lying, as every human being short of sainthood understands: You have a right to lie, deceive and obfuscate to avoid torture, inhumane treatment or unjustified impeachment.
The Lewinsky affair has some measure of moral equivalency; the Bush lies do not.
I believe in my bones that Barry Bonds made a horrible mistake – and one that no child or adult athlete should repeat – when he decided to use steroids. If this gut feeling is correct (I hope it isn’t), there will be a terrible price to pay. It was, however, his own choice, his own crossroads, and neither I nor anyone else has a right to judge.
As a fan of the game and the San Francisco Giants, it has been a pleasure watching a modern-day Babe: Better than Disneyland, better than virtual reality. The man has supplanted the seven wonders of the earth.
So when #25 steps to the plate at Pacific Bell (I refuse to call it anything else) one more time, I’ll rise to my feet to cheer the greatest player since Willie Mays.
He may be a freak. He may be rude to the press. He may be a pain to other players. He may be prone to mental lapses on the field. Still, when he steps to the plate, he’s the Babe.
Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE APPEARED ON DISSIDENT VOICE, THE ALBION MONITOR, BUZZLE, PEACE-EARTH-JUSTICE AND COUNTERPUNCH.
There’s a war going on. It’s a war pitting good versus evil, us versus them, and slugger Barry Bonds finds himself on the other side of the fence.
Believe everything you’ve read – despite a heavy reliance on anonymous sources and illegally leaked Grand Jury testimony. Believe that Bonds did steroids, intentionally and repeatedly, in an effort to break what once seemed an unbreakable record held by a man who did the same.
Crucify him! Run over him with a bulldozer or, better yet, an armored Hummer. Burn him in effigy or, better yet, burn him at the stake and blame him for New Orleans, Iraq, NSA wiretapping and Monica Lewinsky.
To those who have already condemned Bonds and blocked his way to the Baseball Hall of Fame, allow me to posit a contrasting point of view: Every player has a right to claim a record within the establish parameters of the game. Remember that the unqualified and nearly universal adulation of Mark McGwire did not end when Andro was found in his locker. The summer of Sammy Sosa and Big Mac played to packed houses, media madness, and in the end, Major League Baseball cried, “All hail!”
If Barry Bonds was incensed that a hulking white man laid claim to the most glamorous record in baseball, he had a right to be. Using roughly the same method, Bonds rose far above anything McGwire ever dreamed of; he rose to the lofty level of the game’s most esteemed legends.
Neither Bonds nor McGwire were fuzzy cheeked rookies trying to establish themselves. They were mature individuals, raised in a competitive environment, who investigated the risks and rewards, and made an informed and determined choice.
There was nothing inherently wrong with the decision they made. It was a decision countless others, including pitchers, made as well, secure in the belief that baseball was indifferent at best and no one would ever know.
Contrary to the implications of the most rabid detractors, neither Bonds nor McGwire was caught injecting children. (If you raise your children with even a modicum of wisdom, you have more to fear from leading politicians than overpaid athletes.)
Contrary to self-aggrandizing baseball purists (apologies to Keith Olbermann), it does not matter whether Bonds is inducted into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot or any subsequent ballot. Baseball is a game of numbers. Over the course of a magnificent career, Barry Bonds stepped to the plate and produced numbers so far beyond the norm they defy all explanations – including performance enhancing drugs.
There are those who say that numbers tell you all you need to know. In baseball, they are very nearly correct. If you look at the numbers, Ruth and Gehrig were genetic freaks – and both (incidentally) died young. If you look at the numbers in the career of Roger Maris, 1961 was an aberration very close to statistical impossibility.
If you look at the numbers, Barry Bonds transformed himself from one of the very best speed-and-power, five tool players the game has ever known, to a pure slugger rivaled only by the legendary Babe. (Despite the numbers, it is debatable which player – the younger or the older Bonds – was in fact more valuable to his team.)
Sadly, I suspect we will one day learn that the price of that transformation was too great but the motivation was eminently understandable to anyone who has entered the arena of competitive sports.
I discovered the ultimate truth about Barry Bonds in reading a column by Joan Ryan in the San Francisco Chronicle (3/9/06): As I turned from page B1 to B5, there it was – a picture of a year-old girl shot in the back in Darfur.
The ultimate truth about the Barry Bonds saga is that, in the grand scheme, it does not matter – or rather, it matters very little. We may love the game of baseball but if you cannot teach your children that there is no relationship between athletic ability and moral, ethical or responsible conduct, then you have already failed your children. How convenient to be able to blame Bonds, Sosa or McGwire.
While I almost always agree with everything Joan Ryan writes, she is as guilty as most in oversimplifying the Bonds case. She offers the moral equivalency of Bonds’ denial of steroid use and Bill Clinton’s denial of the Monica Lewinsky affair to George W. Bush’s deceptions about weapons of mass destruction. Neither Bonds’ nor Clinton’s deceptions killed anyone or put the planet on the edge of world war.
She offers a simple metaphor: The story of little Billy informing his teacher that little Johnny cheated to ace a test. In Ryan’s story, the teacher scolds and punishes Billy for turning on little Johnny, the pride of the school.
To make the story more applicable to the Bonds case, little Billy actually found out from Johnny’s cousin that Johnny took Ritalin which enabled Johnny to focus and stay up late studying. When Billy was informed that there was nothing wrong with taking Ritalin, Billy began taking it himself.
The point is: Words like cheating, lying and betrayal are thrown around a little too carelessly these days. There was a time when cheating was something you did on the playing field. Anything you did off the field was your own business. Moreover, if you did something that was both common and within the rules of the game, no one outside your own parents could tell you it was wrong.
As for lying, as every human being short of sainthood understands: You have a right to lie, deceive and obfuscate to avoid torture, inhumane treatment or unjustified impeachment.
The Lewinsky affair has some measure of moral equivalency; the Bush lies do not.
I believe in my bones that Barry Bonds made a horrible mistake – and one that no child or adult athlete should repeat – when he decided to use steroids. If this gut feeling is correct (I hope it isn’t), there will be a terrible price to pay. It was, however, his own choice, his own crossroads, and neither I nor anyone else has a right to judge.
As a fan of the game and the San Francisco Giants, it has been a pleasure watching a modern-day Babe: Better than Disneyland, better than virtual reality. The man has supplanted the seven wonders of the earth.
So when #25 steps to the plate at Pacific Bell (I refuse to call it anything else) one more time, I’ll rise to my feet to cheer the greatest player since Willie Mays.
He may be a freak. He may be rude to the press. He may be a pain to other players. He may be prone to mental lapses on the field. Still, when he steps to the plate, he’s the Babe.
Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE APPEARED ON DISSIDENT VOICE, THE ALBION MONITOR, BUZZLE, PEACE-EARTH-JUSTICE AND COUNTERPUNCH.
Saturday, March 04, 2006
Mind of Mansel: Obituary of a POW
My body was lost somewhere in the blue of the flag
Riding silent on a passenger plane like a gut shot stag
Tears falling over me somewhere in a terminal chair
Leaving Afghanistan my soul was frozen in the glare
I was a coalition force asleep in the arms of the Taliban
An envoy of force impaled in a land I didn't understand
Abu Ghraid was the reason they broke all of my bones
My government couldn't have left me more alone
When I lost the light in the room, before I started to die
I felt something moving slowly across my closed eyes
I saw a Shia sunrise over a spilt open electrical cord
I thought I heard America The Beautiful miss a chord
- Chris Mansel
Riding silent on a passenger plane like a gut shot stag
Tears falling over me somewhere in a terminal chair
Leaving Afghanistan my soul was frozen in the glare
I was a coalition force asleep in the arms of the Taliban
An envoy of force impaled in a land I didn't understand
Abu Ghraid was the reason they broke all of my bones
My government couldn't have left me more alone
When I lost the light in the room, before I started to die
I felt something moving slowly across my closed eyes
I saw a Shia sunrise over a spilt open electrical cord
I thought I heard America The Beautiful miss a chord
- Chris Mansel
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Illumination: From the Mind of Mansel
"There is a room in the White House or more accurately beneath the oval office..."
In this kind of room there is light but it is not really daylight you see or nighttime. There is a constant flow of information but if you are deep in thought you can block out the noise, the flutter of immediacy. It’s a room in the White House or more accurately beneath the oval office and down a bit that carries the most weight in any national emergency. It’s not the situation room though that is where you thought we were headed; no it’s the room that doesn’t have a name. There is no portrait of a past president. There is no colorful story that passing administrations use. This is the kind of room where those who are not elected by the people decide whether or not a situation advances or suspends. You’ll notice I didn’t use the term end. No, these situations never cease.
The most secret of government agencies have their own shroud of intelligence. Their own cases for existence are based solely on past performance and [the] committee [that] funds them. What goes on in the room in question is far beyond a committee. This is the room where the light looks in and the darkness breeds illumination.
How do I know that this room exists? I don’t. But how did I know everything else I have predicted? Look back over the history of the Mansel Report and see just how wrong I have been.
Is this room where no dark or light is seen a metaphor for the collective soul that inhabits the building? Can this room be the direction from where the century of American politics started and where it is now? But one thing I do know is that the fear of the American people is bottled up inside that room and they don’t even know exactly why they are afraid or why they should or shouldn’t be.
America is more than an abandoned district where no voters will show up, it’s more than a tally of polls and it will never be anything more than the conscience of a select few guiding the light of a future that is already lit by the sun and challenged greatly by the stars in the skies and the moment when all is lost and everything is to be gained.
- Chris Mansel
See The Mansel Report (themanselreport.blogspot.com) (chrismansel.blogspot.com).
In this kind of room there is light but it is not really daylight you see or nighttime. There is a constant flow of information but if you are deep in thought you can block out the noise, the flutter of immediacy. It’s a room in the White House or more accurately beneath the oval office and down a bit that carries the most weight in any national emergency. It’s not the situation room though that is where you thought we were headed; no it’s the room that doesn’t have a name. There is no portrait of a past president. There is no colorful story that passing administrations use. This is the kind of room where those who are not elected by the people decide whether or not a situation advances or suspends. You’ll notice I didn’t use the term end. No, these situations never cease.
The most secret of government agencies have their own shroud of intelligence. Their own cases for existence are based solely on past performance and [the] committee [that] funds them. What goes on in the room in question is far beyond a committee. This is the room where the light looks in and the darkness breeds illumination.
How do I know that this room exists? I don’t. But how did I know everything else I have predicted? Look back over the history of the Mansel Report and see just how wrong I have been.
Is this room where no dark or light is seen a metaphor for the collective soul that inhabits the building? Can this room be the direction from where the century of American politics started and where it is now? But one thing I do know is that the fear of the American people is bottled up inside that room and they don’t even know exactly why they are afraid or why they should or shouldn’t be.
America is more than an abandoned district where no voters will show up, it’s more than a tally of polls and it will never be anything more than the conscience of a select few guiding the light of a future that is already lit by the sun and challenged greatly by the stars in the skies and the moment when all is lost and everything is to be gained.
- Chris Mansel
See The Mansel Report (themanselreport.blogspot.com) (chrismansel.blogspot.com).
Sunday, February 05, 2006
OPEN LETTER TO CINDY SHEEHAN
Challenging the Pro-War Democrats
By Jack Random
Cindy Sheehan, you are absolutely right.
It would have been powerful and deeply moving to see you in the gallery of the Capitol building at the State of the Union address, serving to remind the nation of the casualties of war, a reminder of the victims of unscrupulous leaders who refuse to carry the flag and parrot the party line. Instead, in your forced absence, you were a poignant reminder that, for all the hollow words, dissent has no place in American democracy.
(For those who seem to take perverse pleasure in the rejoinder that the wife of a Congressman was also ejected for wearing a pro-war tee shirt, you should take no joy in either.)
It would have been telling to see your face contrasted with the senior Senator of California, who epitomizes the party line on the war in Iraq.
You are right to challenge Senator Diane Feinstein as a willing advocate of war. When the honorable senator begins her talking points about reservations going into the war, we should remember her vote on the abdication of war powers. When she protests that she was misled by false and distorted intelligence, we should recall that no informed citizen outside the halls of power was fooled by the manipulations of the war machine in the White House.
Not one of us believed that Saddam Hussein was a threat to our nation or any of its allies. Not one of us believed that there was any connection between Al Qaeda or the events of 11 September 2001 and the government in Baghdad. Everyone from Colin Powell to the clerk at Starbucks knew the president was committed to war regardless of the facts.
The only question unresolved was whether Iraq retained any weapons of mass destruction developed with the assistance of previous American administrations. That question – an obviously false pretext for war – was in the process of being resolved by a team of determined United Nations inspectors, who stubbornly insisted on doing their job despite all efforts at obstruction by the American and British governments.
There was no cause to support the drums of war and every informed citizen of the world knew it, including the Democrats in Congress who voted to authorize the use of force. There is a profound difference between being misled by faulty intelligence and being cowed by a self-proclaimed war president in a post 9-11 nation. The real excuse (should they care to employ it) is that virtually all of their spineless colleagues were equally cowed.
Now that the false justification for war and the disaster of the war, itself, are fully exposed, Senator Feinstein and the pro-war Democrats would like us to believe that the moral path “going forward” is to continue the assault on an innocent nation, where the insurgents are only adhering to the universal moral imperative of defending their homeland against a foreign occupier. They would like us to be content with a “flexible timetable” of withdrawal, contingent on establishing order where order cannot be established as long as the occupation is in place.
What a cozy little Catch 22 the Democrats have devised for our naïve consumption.
(Note to Senator Russ Feingold: As one who was withholding judgment on your potential candidacy for president, having read your response to the State of the Union, if that is the best you can do for an antiwar platform, don’t bother. You will lose and the antiwar movement will hammer the nails in your political coffin.)
Cindy Sheehan, you have stood your ground, resisting determined attempts by waffling Democrats to usurp your cause and reduce you to a partisan.
You are right to challenge Senator Feinstein but you are mistaken to challenge her from within the establishment of the Democratic Party. At risk of being crude, while the spectacle of a leading antiwar spokesperson challenging a Democratic senator in a progressive state may concern them, they will crush you like a bothersome insect. They will smear you by proxy and cast you aside like a broken toy. They will go about their business as if it never happened.
They are not afraid of you as a Democrat. If you wish to stage a symbolic protest and capitalize on media exposure, it could be a worthwhile endeavor, but if you wish to have an impact, to shake the Democratic Party from its pro-war slumber, challenge them as an independent.
The coming election is about the war. Yes, there are other critical issues (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, trade policies, immigration, health care, tax cuts, environmental policy, alternative energy, mass transit, emergency preparedness and civil liberties) but it comes down to the war.
If you announce your intention to run as a serious independent candidate, Senator Feinstein would instantly become vulnerable and every pro-war Democrat in the land would take note. No fool to political dynamics, Senator Feinstein would reconsider her position as the Republicans scramble for a viable candidate in a three-way race, and the money begins to flow.
Cindy Sheehan, you are right. We can no longer be content to support the lesser of evils – especially when the lesser of evils is the continuation of an endless war.
In the matter of war, as in all matters of conscience, there is no middle ground: You are with us or you are with them.
Let the people have an honest choice.
RANDOM JACK – DISSEMINATE FREELY.
By Jack Random
Cindy Sheehan, you are absolutely right.
It would have been powerful and deeply moving to see you in the gallery of the Capitol building at the State of the Union address, serving to remind the nation of the casualties of war, a reminder of the victims of unscrupulous leaders who refuse to carry the flag and parrot the party line. Instead, in your forced absence, you were a poignant reminder that, for all the hollow words, dissent has no place in American democracy.
(For those who seem to take perverse pleasure in the rejoinder that the wife of a Congressman was also ejected for wearing a pro-war tee shirt, you should take no joy in either.)
It would have been telling to see your face contrasted with the senior Senator of California, who epitomizes the party line on the war in Iraq.
You are right to challenge Senator Diane Feinstein as a willing advocate of war. When the honorable senator begins her talking points about reservations going into the war, we should remember her vote on the abdication of war powers. When she protests that she was misled by false and distorted intelligence, we should recall that no informed citizen outside the halls of power was fooled by the manipulations of the war machine in the White House.
Not one of us believed that Saddam Hussein was a threat to our nation or any of its allies. Not one of us believed that there was any connection between Al Qaeda or the events of 11 September 2001 and the government in Baghdad. Everyone from Colin Powell to the clerk at Starbucks knew the president was committed to war regardless of the facts.
The only question unresolved was whether Iraq retained any weapons of mass destruction developed with the assistance of previous American administrations. That question – an obviously false pretext for war – was in the process of being resolved by a team of determined United Nations inspectors, who stubbornly insisted on doing their job despite all efforts at obstruction by the American and British governments.
There was no cause to support the drums of war and every informed citizen of the world knew it, including the Democrats in Congress who voted to authorize the use of force. There is a profound difference between being misled by faulty intelligence and being cowed by a self-proclaimed war president in a post 9-11 nation. The real excuse (should they care to employ it) is that virtually all of their spineless colleagues were equally cowed.
Now that the false justification for war and the disaster of the war, itself, are fully exposed, Senator Feinstein and the pro-war Democrats would like us to believe that the moral path “going forward” is to continue the assault on an innocent nation, where the insurgents are only adhering to the universal moral imperative of defending their homeland against a foreign occupier. They would like us to be content with a “flexible timetable” of withdrawal, contingent on establishing order where order cannot be established as long as the occupation is in place.
What a cozy little Catch 22 the Democrats have devised for our naïve consumption.
(Note to Senator Russ Feingold: As one who was withholding judgment on your potential candidacy for president, having read your response to the State of the Union, if that is the best you can do for an antiwar platform, don’t bother. You will lose and the antiwar movement will hammer the nails in your political coffin.)
Cindy Sheehan, you have stood your ground, resisting determined attempts by waffling Democrats to usurp your cause and reduce you to a partisan.
You are right to challenge Senator Feinstein but you are mistaken to challenge her from within the establishment of the Democratic Party. At risk of being crude, while the spectacle of a leading antiwar spokesperson challenging a Democratic senator in a progressive state may concern them, they will crush you like a bothersome insect. They will smear you by proxy and cast you aside like a broken toy. They will go about their business as if it never happened.
They are not afraid of you as a Democrat. If you wish to stage a symbolic protest and capitalize on media exposure, it could be a worthwhile endeavor, but if you wish to have an impact, to shake the Democratic Party from its pro-war slumber, challenge them as an independent.
The coming election is about the war. Yes, there are other critical issues (New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, trade policies, immigration, health care, tax cuts, environmental policy, alternative energy, mass transit, emergency preparedness and civil liberties) but it comes down to the war.
If you announce your intention to run as a serious independent candidate, Senator Feinstein would instantly become vulnerable and every pro-war Democrat in the land would take note. No fool to political dynamics, Senator Feinstein would reconsider her position as the Republicans scramble for a viable candidate in a three-way race, and the money begins to flow.
Cindy Sheehan, you are right. We can no longer be content to support the lesser of evils – especially when the lesser of evils is the continuation of an endless war.
In the matter of war, as in all matters of conscience, there is no middle ground: You are with us or you are with them.
Let the people have an honest choice.
RANDOM JACK – DISSEMINATE FREELY.
Saturday, January 28, 2006
7 Reasons Why the President is Lying (Again)
RANDOM JACK – DISSEMINATE FREELY.
By Jack Random
President George W. Bush went on the offensive this week, defending his authorization of spying on American citizens, within the boundaries of the nation, in direct contradiction to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. The president asserts that he is only spying on those in communication with known Al Qaeda agents or their affiliates.
Here are seven reasons why every objective observer should conclude beyond all reasonable doubt that the president is lying.
1. He lied about the war. For those who hold the reservation that the president may not have been properly informed, that he was in fact duped by bad intelligence or twisted advisors, let me take this rare opportunity to defend the chief executive. He is not a dumb as you think. He is not an observer on the periphery of Dick Cheney’s power circle. He is a fully informed, fully engaged member of Cheney’s circle. He knew about the canyon-sized gaps in intelligence and he conspired to close them with a chain of deceptions. The president lied because he wanted war. He lied because he was convinced that the little man from Crawford, Texas, could only reach historical greatness as a war president.
2. The president lied repeatedly on the very topic that should now become the basis for impeachment proceedings but, instead, is becoming the centerpiece of the Republican midterm election campaign. He told us over and over, in every public setting he could find, that wiretapping was never done without a court warrant. Just in case we did not fully understand him, he spoke slowly and with absolute clarity: Wiretapping on American citizens is never done without a court warrant.
3. If the president is telling the truth about the scope of the eavesdropping – that it only involves Al Qaeda club members – there should be only a handful of cases on file. According to published reports, the NSA domestic spying case (by any other name) involves thousands of Americans. How stupid do we think Al Qaeda is? Are we seriously to believe that they are calling the USA on a regular basis? Are they calling in complete confidence that our government will only listen in if they have a court warrant? How stupid do they think we are?
4. If the president is telling the truth, that the scope of the program is limited and that civil liberties are protected, then there is absolutely no reason to circumvent the FISA law. There is a rubber stamp at the FISA court for warrants on the communications of known Al Qaeda members. In such cases, the process would take all of thirty seconds beyond the mechanics of sending a fax. Furthermore, as any informed citizen should know by now, the spy-now-get-approval-later provision of the FISA law gives the Justice Department 72 hours to shuffle the paper work. In other words, to the extent that the NSA domestic spying program is legitimate, it is completely unnecessary. If that is the case, either the Attorney General and his coterie of legal advisors are incompetent to the point of absurdity, or the president is lying.
5. If the president were telling the truth, he would open the books on all surveillance targets that are no longer current, with the targets identified only by profession. We would stipulate that the Attorney General and the head of the NSA should certify that the list is complete and accurate on penalty of felonious perjury. Knowing generically who has been spied on would offer no information of value to our terrorist enemies – who already presume they are being monitored with or without warrants. It would be of great value to the defenders of civil liberties and would give us all assurance that our president has not simply taken the law into his own hands. I guarantee you, even without the names, the list would read like a Who’s Who in dissident politics. It is the political hit list of Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, whose name should be stricken from the FBI headquarters.
6. If former NSA insider Russell Tice, who has identified himself as a whistle-blower, is never prosecuted or held to justice, then the president was lying about conducting an investigation into a serious breach of national security. If that is the case, we must conclude that it was a deliberate leak. It bears all the markings of the twisted mind of Karl Rove, plotting to replace Plame Gate, Iraq Gate, Katrina Gate and Abramoff Gate with NSA Gate. They like the odds. They like how it plays in Middle America. They would rather take their chances as the tough guys who write their own laws in the fight against terrorism against a party still trying to decide whose hand to hold while the Republicans rip out their guts.
7. Just look at him. I mean, really look at him, leaning on the podium, chumming it up with the press corps, acting as if an impeachable offense was nothing more than a discussion of the Sammy Sosa trade back in the day. He chuckles, hems and haws, mugs and guffaws. He has all the moves of a real estate agent or a used car salesman. We should react just as we would with any other salesperson. He is not on our side. Lying is second nature to him.
Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE APPEARED ON DISSIDENT VOICE, THE ALBION MONITOR, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH AND PEACE-EARTH-JUSTICE.
By Jack Random
President George W. Bush went on the offensive this week, defending his authorization of spying on American citizens, within the boundaries of the nation, in direct contradiction to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. The president asserts that he is only spying on those in communication with known Al Qaeda agents or their affiliates.
Here are seven reasons why every objective observer should conclude beyond all reasonable doubt that the president is lying.
1. He lied about the war. For those who hold the reservation that the president may not have been properly informed, that he was in fact duped by bad intelligence or twisted advisors, let me take this rare opportunity to defend the chief executive. He is not a dumb as you think. He is not an observer on the periphery of Dick Cheney’s power circle. He is a fully informed, fully engaged member of Cheney’s circle. He knew about the canyon-sized gaps in intelligence and he conspired to close them with a chain of deceptions. The president lied because he wanted war. He lied because he was convinced that the little man from Crawford, Texas, could only reach historical greatness as a war president.
2. The president lied repeatedly on the very topic that should now become the basis for impeachment proceedings but, instead, is becoming the centerpiece of the Republican midterm election campaign. He told us over and over, in every public setting he could find, that wiretapping was never done without a court warrant. Just in case we did not fully understand him, he spoke slowly and with absolute clarity: Wiretapping on American citizens is never done without a court warrant.
3. If the president is telling the truth about the scope of the eavesdropping – that it only involves Al Qaeda club members – there should be only a handful of cases on file. According to published reports, the NSA domestic spying case (by any other name) involves thousands of Americans. How stupid do we think Al Qaeda is? Are we seriously to believe that they are calling the USA on a regular basis? Are they calling in complete confidence that our government will only listen in if they have a court warrant? How stupid do they think we are?
4. If the president is telling the truth, that the scope of the program is limited and that civil liberties are protected, then there is absolutely no reason to circumvent the FISA law. There is a rubber stamp at the FISA court for warrants on the communications of known Al Qaeda members. In such cases, the process would take all of thirty seconds beyond the mechanics of sending a fax. Furthermore, as any informed citizen should know by now, the spy-now-get-approval-later provision of the FISA law gives the Justice Department 72 hours to shuffle the paper work. In other words, to the extent that the NSA domestic spying program is legitimate, it is completely unnecessary. If that is the case, either the Attorney General and his coterie of legal advisors are incompetent to the point of absurdity, or the president is lying.
5. If the president were telling the truth, he would open the books on all surveillance targets that are no longer current, with the targets identified only by profession. We would stipulate that the Attorney General and the head of the NSA should certify that the list is complete and accurate on penalty of felonious perjury. Knowing generically who has been spied on would offer no information of value to our terrorist enemies – who already presume they are being monitored with or without warrants. It would be of great value to the defenders of civil liberties and would give us all assurance that our president has not simply taken the law into his own hands. I guarantee you, even without the names, the list would read like a Who’s Who in dissident politics. It is the political hit list of Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, whose name should be stricken from the FBI headquarters.
6. If former NSA insider Russell Tice, who has identified himself as a whistle-blower, is never prosecuted or held to justice, then the president was lying about conducting an investigation into a serious breach of national security. If that is the case, we must conclude that it was a deliberate leak. It bears all the markings of the twisted mind of Karl Rove, plotting to replace Plame Gate, Iraq Gate, Katrina Gate and Abramoff Gate with NSA Gate. They like the odds. They like how it plays in Middle America. They would rather take their chances as the tough guys who write their own laws in the fight against terrorism against a party still trying to decide whose hand to hold while the Republicans rip out their guts.
7. Just look at him. I mean, really look at him, leaning on the podium, chumming it up with the press corps, acting as if an impeachable offense was nothing more than a discussion of the Sammy Sosa trade back in the day. He chuckles, hems and haws, mugs and guffaws. He has all the moves of a real estate agent or a used car salesman. We should react just as we would with any other salesperson. He is not on our side. Lying is second nature to him.
Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE APPEARED ON DISSIDENT VOICE, THE ALBION MONITOR, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH AND PEACE-EARTH-JUSTICE.
Sunday, January 22, 2006
Comfortably Numb: The Great Malaise
THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES – DISSEMINATE FREELY.
By Jack Random
Another 19 dead, another young idealistic journalist held captive, another message from the world’s leading terrorist, another equivocation from a Senator campaigning for president, another cliché from the White House, and the distinct feeling that no one is listening, no one is watching, no one is feeling what is happening on the ground in the land of ancient wonders.
Have we become comfortably numb?
We must remember Marla Ruzicka, the young care worker gunned down on the road to the Baghdad airport. Remember how we felt when our emotions were still intact. There have been others, many others – journalists, care workers, observers, contractors – but there is something especially disturbing about the young and gifted. These are individuals with so much honest compassion that they risked the rest of their lives and all the promise, hope and dreams a full life entails.
There is no rational reason we should feel more deeply for Jill Carroll and Marla Ruzicka than we do for so many others, for literally thousands of young and idealistic Iraqis or coalition soldiers. There is no rational reason that one particular life should tear at our hearts so profoundly that we turn away and refuse to look back.
Some will find absurd reasons to dismiss the tragedy: She knew what she was getting into. Go to Baghdad, what do you expect? Walk into the lion’s den and you can’t be surprised when you don’t walk out.
Such rationalizations contribute to our malaise. With every employment, they make us less human, less admirable, less virtuous and less likely to stand up in outrage against a criminally insane war.
Another soldier back from Iraq committed suicide the other day. His name was Douglas Barber. He appeared on Doug Basham’s radio show out of Las Vegas. He served in Iraq on a supply convoy between the Baghdad airport and the American military base in Balad. Upon his return, he joined Iraq Veterans Against the War.
The police rushed to his home, sirens blaring and ambulance lights splashing memories of wartime bloodshed on a crowd of onlookers, but the national media were not there. To my knowledge, it was never mentioned on CNN, MSNBC, Fox or the networks. Apparently, it did not have the appeal of a coal mining disaster, a demolition or a high-speed chase. Douglas Barber was just another soldier, another untold casualty of war.
Have we become comfortably numb?
A friend of mine hypothesizes that those jets we so frequently see laying out trails in the morning and evening skies are actually seeding the air we breathe with a drug that breeds malaise.
Maybe he’s right.
Does anybody care?
Is anybody out there?
Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE APPEARED ON DISSIDENT VOICE, THE ALBION MONITOR, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH AND PEACE-EARTH-JUSTICE.
By Jack Random
Another 19 dead, another young idealistic journalist held captive, another message from the world’s leading terrorist, another equivocation from a Senator campaigning for president, another cliché from the White House, and the distinct feeling that no one is listening, no one is watching, no one is feeling what is happening on the ground in the land of ancient wonders.
Have we become comfortably numb?
We must remember Marla Ruzicka, the young care worker gunned down on the road to the Baghdad airport. Remember how we felt when our emotions were still intact. There have been others, many others – journalists, care workers, observers, contractors – but there is something especially disturbing about the young and gifted. These are individuals with so much honest compassion that they risked the rest of their lives and all the promise, hope and dreams a full life entails.
There is no rational reason we should feel more deeply for Jill Carroll and Marla Ruzicka than we do for so many others, for literally thousands of young and idealistic Iraqis or coalition soldiers. There is no rational reason that one particular life should tear at our hearts so profoundly that we turn away and refuse to look back.
Some will find absurd reasons to dismiss the tragedy: She knew what she was getting into. Go to Baghdad, what do you expect? Walk into the lion’s den and you can’t be surprised when you don’t walk out.
Such rationalizations contribute to our malaise. With every employment, they make us less human, less admirable, less virtuous and less likely to stand up in outrage against a criminally insane war.
Another soldier back from Iraq committed suicide the other day. His name was Douglas Barber. He appeared on Doug Basham’s radio show out of Las Vegas. He served in Iraq on a supply convoy between the Baghdad airport and the American military base in Balad. Upon his return, he joined Iraq Veterans Against the War.
The police rushed to his home, sirens blaring and ambulance lights splashing memories of wartime bloodshed on a crowd of onlookers, but the national media were not there. To my knowledge, it was never mentioned on CNN, MSNBC, Fox or the networks. Apparently, it did not have the appeal of a coal mining disaster, a demolition or a high-speed chase. Douglas Barber was just another soldier, another untold casualty of war.
Have we become comfortably numb?
A friend of mine hypothesizes that those jets we so frequently see laying out trails in the morning and evening skies are actually seeding the air we breathe with a drug that breeds malaise.
Maybe he’s right.
Does anybody care?
Is anybody out there?
Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE APPEARED ON DISSIDENT VOICE, THE ALBION MONITOR, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH AND PEACE-EARTH-JUSTICE.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Jake's Word: The West Virginia Mining Disaster
[Jake Berry's response to "Surrealistic Pillow: The West Virginia Mining Disaster" posted on Dissident Voice 1/7/06.]
Yet another vigilant and enlightened piece. I'm glad you brought up Ace In The Hole. I thought of it, too, when I saw the media descend upon the Sago mines. I couldn't remember the name of the movie, but it's a impossible film to forget because it so accurately depicts the excess of media as they transmute freedom of speech into freedom to exploit. And there was handsome Anderson Cooper, son of Gloria Vanderbilt, just like handsome Kirk Douglas, informing us of all the latest developments, speaking so emphatically that you can actually hear him draw a breath between sentences.
Democracy is in trouble indeed. The Abramoff turn suggests that there may yet be something to save and a way to save it, but its like stepping into a nest of vipers - will they wriggle away before the light hits them or will they bite you and inject you with the same poison that has saved them in the past? And there's the Bush spying scandal that was so deftly turned on its head to become a search for the guy who ratted him out - and the media followed. It is as you say. They do not report the news, they deliver sensation. They do not inform, they stimulate. I remarked to my wife a couple of weeks ago that the media seem to seek out the stories that will stimulate the fight or flight mechanism. You're either scared or angry - it doesn't matter to them. What they want is your attention. That's money to them, and money is the game.
It's always about resources. Too little or too much and how to resolve the excess or deficit. Either way, someone is bound to get hurt, usually at the business end of military weaponry.
We're close, very close, maybe eleven months close to the final test of democracy in America. Will people respond and use the vote to overturn the tables and send the thieves running, or will they be driven, by fear or anger, one last time into propping the status quo. If they choose the latter we will have to look elsewhere for any support for individual freedoms, civil liberties, or anything resembling a government of, by, and for the people.
How intoxicated are we? How long will the adrenal glands survive this continual manipulation before they collapse and take the body politic down with them? We shall see.
Ezra Pound, great poet, arrogant bigot and fool, was often wrong, but in his cantos he writes, "Fear God and the ignorance of the populace." As usual he was only half right. We have nothing to fear from God, regardless of the reality (or not) of his existence, but an ignorant populace is a dangerous animal - the most dangerous on the planet. As Jimmy wZ said, "Mass consciousness is dangerous."
We're dancing in the lion's jaws, brother (quoting Bruce Cockburn now), by the time of the next winter solstice we'll find out if there's anything left to save.
Jake Berry - Author of Brambu Drezi
[See Jake's blog: 9thstlab.blogspot.com]
Yet another vigilant and enlightened piece. I'm glad you brought up Ace In The Hole. I thought of it, too, when I saw the media descend upon the Sago mines. I couldn't remember the name of the movie, but it's a impossible film to forget because it so accurately depicts the excess of media as they transmute freedom of speech into freedom to exploit. And there was handsome Anderson Cooper, son of Gloria Vanderbilt, just like handsome Kirk Douglas, informing us of all the latest developments, speaking so emphatically that you can actually hear him draw a breath between sentences.
Democracy is in trouble indeed. The Abramoff turn suggests that there may yet be something to save and a way to save it, but its like stepping into a nest of vipers - will they wriggle away before the light hits them or will they bite you and inject you with the same poison that has saved them in the past? And there's the Bush spying scandal that was so deftly turned on its head to become a search for the guy who ratted him out - and the media followed. It is as you say. They do not report the news, they deliver sensation. They do not inform, they stimulate. I remarked to my wife a couple of weeks ago that the media seem to seek out the stories that will stimulate the fight or flight mechanism. You're either scared or angry - it doesn't matter to them. What they want is your attention. That's money to them, and money is the game.
It's always about resources. Too little or too much and how to resolve the excess or deficit. Either way, someone is bound to get hurt, usually at the business end of military weaponry.
We're close, very close, maybe eleven months close to the final test of democracy in America. Will people respond and use the vote to overturn the tables and send the thieves running, or will they be driven, by fear or anger, one last time into propping the status quo. If they choose the latter we will have to look elsewhere for any support for individual freedoms, civil liberties, or anything resembling a government of, by, and for the people.
How intoxicated are we? How long will the adrenal glands survive this continual manipulation before they collapse and take the body politic down with them? We shall see.
Ezra Pound, great poet, arrogant bigot and fool, was often wrong, but in his cantos he writes, "Fear God and the ignorance of the populace." As usual he was only half right. We have nothing to fear from God, regardless of the reality (or not) of his existence, but an ignorant populace is a dangerous animal - the most dangerous on the planet. As Jimmy wZ said, "Mass consciousness is dangerous."
We're dancing in the lion's jaws, brother (quoting Bruce Cockburn now), by the time of the next winter solstice we'll find out if there's anything left to save.
Jake Berry - Author of Brambu Drezi
[See Jake's blog: 9thstlab.blogspot.com]
Friday, December 30, 2005
Jack Random's Top Ten on Buzzle.com 2005
The following are the most read articles posted by Jack Random on Buzzle.com in 2005.
1. THE DECLINE OF AMERICA. 2/6/05 (7,211 hits). The writing is on the wall. Under the weight of unfathomable debt, bogged down in a Middle East quagmire, America is in decline. The deck of power is being reshuffled and America’s fall is the world’s gain.
2. HURRICANE KATRINA: PRAYERS FOR NEW ORLEANS. 8/30/05 (5,975 hits). Hurricane Katrina may not be as catastrophic as anticipated but it is far, far worse than at first reported. The levees of Lake Pontchartrain are giving way. Martial Law has been declared. Total evacuation is being considered. New Orleans is under siege.
3. THE POISON PILL: SOCIAL SECURITY REFORM. 2/13/05 (5,622). Cleverly disguised as reform, the rightwing domestic agenda is a prescription for the wholesale destruction of FDR’s New Deal.
4. LINES IN THE SAND: THE IRAQ ELECTION. 2/1/05 (4,068). The Promise Of The Iraq Election: While it is difficult to characterize the election in Iraq as anything but a sham, there is a chance it will mark an end to the occupation.
5. VISION OF THE BLACK ROBES. 1/29/05 (3,803). Jerico Whitehorse has a vision of the black robes bringing destruction to the land of his forebearers. He is visited by the wasichu killing spirit, who attempts to convert him. From the novel: Cries for A Vision (The Killing Spirit).
6. THE FEDERALIST COURT: BLAME THE DEMOCRATS & MOVE ON. 7/20/05 (3,673). Who is Judge John Roberts? A brilliant and ultra-conservative attorney who will rise to a position of elite power at the age of 50. Most importantly, he is a favored son of the Federalist Society and he will be confirmed as the pivotal member of the Supreme Court. Blame the Democrats and move on.
7. COLOR OR CLASS? CHARGES OF RACISM IN DISASTER RELIEF. 9/3/05 (3,641). It is now universally acknowledged that government response to the New Orleans tsunami was tragically inept. Those bearing witness to the ongoing horror could not but observe that the vast majority of the abandoned were black. Inevitably, the question had to be asked: Did race play a role in the government's failure?
8. ON LIBERTY: THE MENDACITY OF GEORGE BUSH. 1/27/05 (3,559). The Inaugural Address: On January 20, President George Bush issued an impassioned call to the cause of Liberty! Thousands of dissidents across the land rose in one voice to reply: You, Mr. President, are no friend to Liberty.
9. THE REPENTANT WARRIOR. 1/12/05 (3,516). An Apache Vietnam veteran struggles to find his footing until he seeks help from a wise elder. From Random Tales (unpublished).
10. THE STONE DREAMERS. 3/9/05 (3,470). In a vision of the Stone Ceremony, Jerico returns to Sand Creek to deliver a warning to Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle. Instead, he receives a lesson. From the novel: Cries for A Vision (The Killing Spirit).
1. THE DECLINE OF AMERICA. 2/6/05 (7,211 hits). The writing is on the wall. Under the weight of unfathomable debt, bogged down in a Middle East quagmire, America is in decline. The deck of power is being reshuffled and America’s fall is the world’s gain.
2. HURRICANE KATRINA: PRAYERS FOR NEW ORLEANS. 8/30/05 (5,975 hits). Hurricane Katrina may not be as catastrophic as anticipated but it is far, far worse than at first reported. The levees of Lake Pontchartrain are giving way. Martial Law has been declared. Total evacuation is being considered. New Orleans is under siege.
3. THE POISON PILL: SOCIAL SECURITY REFORM. 2/13/05 (5,622). Cleverly disguised as reform, the rightwing domestic agenda is a prescription for the wholesale destruction of FDR’s New Deal.
4. LINES IN THE SAND: THE IRAQ ELECTION. 2/1/05 (4,068). The Promise Of The Iraq Election: While it is difficult to characterize the election in Iraq as anything but a sham, there is a chance it will mark an end to the occupation.
5. VISION OF THE BLACK ROBES. 1/29/05 (3,803). Jerico Whitehorse has a vision of the black robes bringing destruction to the land of his forebearers. He is visited by the wasichu killing spirit, who attempts to convert him. From the novel: Cries for A Vision (The Killing Spirit).
6. THE FEDERALIST COURT: BLAME THE DEMOCRATS & MOVE ON. 7/20/05 (3,673). Who is Judge John Roberts? A brilliant and ultra-conservative attorney who will rise to a position of elite power at the age of 50. Most importantly, he is a favored son of the Federalist Society and he will be confirmed as the pivotal member of the Supreme Court. Blame the Democrats and move on.
7. COLOR OR CLASS? CHARGES OF RACISM IN DISASTER RELIEF. 9/3/05 (3,641). It is now universally acknowledged that government response to the New Orleans tsunami was tragically inept. Those bearing witness to the ongoing horror could not but observe that the vast majority of the abandoned were black. Inevitably, the question had to be asked: Did race play a role in the government's failure?
8. ON LIBERTY: THE MENDACITY OF GEORGE BUSH. 1/27/05 (3,559). The Inaugural Address: On January 20, President George Bush issued an impassioned call to the cause of Liberty! Thousands of dissidents across the land rose in one voice to reply: You, Mr. President, are no friend to Liberty.
9. THE REPENTANT WARRIOR. 1/12/05 (3,516). An Apache Vietnam veteran struggles to find his footing until he seeks help from a wise elder. From Random Tales (unpublished).
10. THE STONE DREAMERS. 3/9/05 (3,470). In a vision of the Stone Ceremony, Jerico returns to Sand Creek to deliver a warning to Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle. Instead, he receives a lesson. From the novel: Cries for A Vision (The Killing Spirit).
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