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APRIL 22, 2008
CLINTON'S DAISY SPOT Following up on the last week's psychotic eerily Thatcher-esque nuke-rattling, Clinton went even further Daisy Spot-ward this morning to put a punctuation mark on her "look-at-my-testicles" tactical assault. You've probably already seen it, but if not:

Clinton further displayed tough talk in an interview airing on "Good Morning America" Tuesday. ABC News' Chris Cuomo asked Clinton what she would do if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons.

"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran," Clinton said. "In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them."

This prompts a particularly salient question worth weighing, at very least as a lesson of the last eight years. Who in their right fucking mind thinks that the way to disarm a potentially hostile nation is to threaten in every breath it destroy it?

This, of course, notwithstanding the NIE and all other actual, y'know, evidence that Iran does not, in fact, pose a goddamn nuclear threat, as Paul Craig Roberts addressed soberly over at Counterpunch last month.

Maybe Clinton should consult Colin Powell and Larry Wilkerson on how this kind of bullshit worked out before, then explain how it involves a breath of anything resembling fresh air in these toxic times.

LUGO, PARAGUAY AND A DIFFERENT KIND OF RED/BLUE MAP I've had worse reasons to get joyously drunk than the potentially epoch-making electoral victory of Fernando Lugo in the Paraguay's presidential election.

For anybody with any rudimentary knowledge of the last 100 years of Latin American history, the norteamericano hand in economic manipulation, dirty wars, coups, undisguised fascism and a seemingly endless war upon the poor is not something for which the United States can soon atone, even were its leadership willing. Institutionally confabulated rationalizations of Cold War exigency aside — which some will surely still argue — American guns, chicanery and capital have served as an ominous, razor-wire-dressed bulwark against the merest, most modest steps towards inclusionary democracy and social and economic justice for half the hemisphere.

But capping as it has an onslaught of too long-delayed electoral redress for the machinations of gringos and their "Market"-sanctifying, pale-skinned oligarch proxies, Lugo and his coaliton's end of 60 years of reactionary one-party rule in Paraguay seems an exclamation point of sorts. What it punctuates is perhaps the best legacy the cretinous Bush administration can hope to leave us, the symbolic end to the Monroe Doctrine, and a nearly hemispheric rejection of the insidious and conspicuously a-consensual Washington Consensus (the "consensus" was arrived upon in Harvard and Yale clubs with precious few others included in the discussion)

At any rate, given the recent fascination with red and blue-hued geography in our current electoral enterprise, I wondered what this shift in Latin America might look like if similarly mapped out from the beginning of the Bush administration to yesterday. Not surprisingly, it gives me even more reason to get drunk, which I will soon.

I share this not out of any intellectual authority, I just played around with a couple maps and Photoshop and the pretty colors, and I understand there are some nuances to Lula and Kirchner versus, say, Chavez and Morales versus, say, Lugo and Colom. Obviously there are still huge problems, too many owing to corrupt institutions and indigenous economies wracked by blight long ago seeded by U.S. foreign and economic policies. But amid all these voices and these spirited victories, and in the face of ostensible Democrats like Mark Penn, Bill Clinton and Harold Ickes neolib clinging to the reactionary outlier (and coke industry legacy) Uribe, we do find some common denominators, namely trending toward social inclusion and economic populism, the kind that, if nurtured, improves economies, empowers people and makes better trading partners, no matter what the bullshit Chicago School orthodoxy says.

One other note: call any of these guys whatever names you want, one truth remains, that none of them are our enemy, or ever needed to be. Some of these might be miscolored in your opinion and, to re-emphasize, this is anything but scientific or ironclad, and if you've got suggestions, float em out there. Or just meet me at the bar.

2001



April 21, 2008:



APR. 17, 2008
DONE Two-faced Rovian fucking dick. See, when you dip into the realm of candor, you asshole, you are a Republican after all. All we ever asked, Hillary, was honesty. Would've made all this shit a lot easier.

That said, your denials of your giddiness for war with Iran aside, your Iran war plan is totally awesome. You are so tough. And here we thought your primary charm was not having a penis.

Game

fucking

over.

MAR. 17, 2008
WINTER SOLDIER - WATCH AND CRINGE I've discussed dehumanization previously, as it pertains to race versus a sense of ascendancy and entitlement among some of our fellow citizens, how the latter allows one to do things one wouldn't otherwise if he considered someone different to be human versus Other. Dehumanization requires indoctrination, in the subtle code of Otherification. Indoctrination, also called brainwashing, prompts one to blindly follow orders, even if illegal, even if it impedes the job versus smooths it. Sure, people in war will obviously come to hate their enemy, but to cavalierly dismiss whole populations, their anguish, the horrors wrought against them, their very humanity, is worse, because it enables unimaginable acts such as My Lai and Haditha. In our Philippine conquest, American soldiers dehumanized Filipinos en toto with the imported epithet "nigger," in Vietnam they used "gook," in Iraq "haji," all with the guttural vindictiveness of hatespeech. Such subjugative mindsets, of us against All Around Us, yielded the most ugly, unconscionable crimes against humanity — not just, as some will inevitably, mincingly argue, the inevitable collateral damages, the bugfuck insanity, of war — but the acts of an oppressor, routine torture, summary mass executions, concentrations camps by other names that smell as fetid. This becomes especially problematic when you're dehumanizing, and making enemies of, the people you are ostensibly liberating. This always and ever can not, by any whit of logic, work. It hearkens to the old, dark joke that infamously circulated among soldiers in Vietnam: "The way you win the war is, you load up all the friendlies onto ships and send em out into the Gulf of Tonkin. Then you bomb the country flat. Then you sink the ships." Wrong wars stem from wrong policy, which, falsely justified and endlessly rationalized, results in wrong actions. Wrong actions, blessed by both chain-of-command and cover-up after the fact, beget more wrong actions. Do not fucking even take my word for it, because it is also what brings well-meant, conscience-rent soldiers home to do the theretofore unthinkable, question that for which they fought and suffered. Iraq Veterans Against the War this past weekend held a series of unofficial hearings in DC under the aegis of "Winter Soldier," so called because of a similar program staged by Vietnam vets in 1971. If you haven't heard of it — as it has yet to get a remote spark of interest from the mainstream media even as they continue forwarding the fiction that John "100 years in Iraq" McCain is not just fucking batshit nuts — go here and watch these soldiers' testimony. Watch all of it, click the links, read more, however uncomfortable it makes you. It fuckwell should. Appreciate it. McCain, I think, would call these men traitors.

FEB. 26, 2008
THE STDS WE CONTRACT WHEN LADY JUSTICE IS MADE A WHORE No doubt a lot of Americans gave only passing attention to Alberto Gonzales' repeated, contemptuous and contemptible testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee last spring, unsure why the wonkier firebrands amongst us were worked up into a lather by it all. What was at issue, in sum, was the notion that Americans, all Americans, are governed by the same rule of law, or whether some can simply make up new rules to suit them and their friends, to maintain power and to make inordinate profits by gaming the system. It is the equivalent of most people in your office working their asses off every week to do their jobs well, maybe get a raise and a promotion, then the boss's smirking fratboy son graduates college and get appointed your middle-manager, and there isn't shit you can do about it.

Except in this case, when the law meant to make us equal get tossed out the window, it portends much more insidious ramifications. It ends up with a guy, former Alabama governor Don Siegelman, getting set up for crime, imprisoned for seven years for doing pretty much nothing but thinking in ways Karl Rove didn't like. And it drives a pattern of corruption and criminal behavior designed specifically to stack the political deck, to forcibly eliminate all opposition in Machiavellian fashion, to destroy their means of competing in our life's-blood marketplace of ideas, and to, in the end, yield a one-party nation, a Republican nation, under God, with liberty and justice for the wealthy and pious.

And maybe even more egregiously, when news of their agenda threatened to reach the people it most affects via a 60 Minutes broadcast this past Sunday night, someone reached out and cut off the signal. Nearly a third of the state of Alabama saw their screen go blank during the highly rated CBS show's long-delayed and Bush-filibustered story on Siegelman, and only during that segment of the program. When it hits home, see, you, dear citizen, will not even be allowed to weigh the evidence for yourself. Somebody will do that for you.

When you put people above the law, able to manipulate it as they see fit and bear no consequences for doing so, you get injustice without redress, or, in a word, authoritarianism. You render the binding common denominator of the Constitution inert. In doing so, you in effect destroy that which makes a society of a nation-state. There is no greater crime, not murder, not genocide, than subverting the social compact made by the consent of the governed, for doing so effects widespread dehumanization of those whom constitutions are written to empower and protect; doing so, in fact, is the thing that allows and abides murder and genocide and lets those responsible go unpunished.

The first such social compact in recorded history, Hammurabi's Code, circa the 18th century BCE, stated its purpose as "to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; [to] enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind . . ." The evolution of democratic processes has been specifically to give the governed a hand in governing, effectively giving them a say in their own fates, which most of us have deemed a good thing. This is why the first vow the president speaks in his oath of office is "to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Society has broken down in Alabama, which might not surprise anyone at face value. It's where they "hope ol' Neill will remember, a Southern man don't need him around anyhow," as Lynyrd Skynyrd famously defended "the governor" and his stalwart championing of institutional racism. Not only did the Bush administration and Justice Department and the Alabama Republican leadership railroad Siegelman, they did so as part of a relentless ongoing imperative to populate the Justice Department's regional offices with U.S. attorneys more amenable to doing the party's bidding than enforce the Constitution, which is to say, to not do their jobs.

This, recall, was the crux of the Congressional investigation last May into the Bush/Gonzalez's firing of eight U.S. attorneys across the country, Republicans all but not Republican enough, thus requiring replacement by "loyal Bushies," as administration officials put it. Monica Goodling, a dipshit little Rove flunky, came to the fore at that time, testifying in essence that she had broken the law in pretty much doing exactly what Rove had tasked her with, vetting U.S. attorneys for their True Believer bona fides and making up the hit-list. I wrote at the time:

This pinched little deb graduated from Messiah College and got her Law Degree from Regent University, an "educational" institution run by Pat Robertson, the billionaire diamond magnate and a lifelong friend of the most racist neo-Klan white supremacy groups that continue to dull and cow the minds of that stolid, unmovable, unthinking 24 percent [now 19 percent], oh, and also an influential Christian "leader." Getting a law degree from fundamentalist Christians is like getting a degree in quantum physics from Barnum & Bailey Clown College.

That these assholes decided to fire Republicans they didn't deem neocon enough is an egregious enough example of zealotry, but look at who they've got doing the dirty work:

All the tightwound uppercrust prigs we all fucking hated in high school! We have yielded our guidance as a society to everyone who never fucking invited us to the party, because we weren't white enough or weren't Christian enough or weren't Country Club enough or weren't jock enough . . . Nerds-in-crime Rove and Gonzalez and their pale, sexless True Believer henchkids Sampson, McNulty, Monica Fucking Goodling -- [t]hese were the people whose intrepid mission in the service of God and wealth and privilege allowed them to bypass anything resembling the actual life as experienced by the grand masses they hoped to lord over, to usher us unto their grand Christian design, removed of the plague of reason and science that might otherwise guide us on, um, any other course but fucking national and global disaster!

. . . . These are the stolid tie-wearing/sweatervest fucks in your political philosophy classes who raised their hands all the time and rationalized Machiavelli, who bitched at you to turn down your stereo and who had jobs waiting for them when they got out of school -- people who never once had a second-thought of openmindedness, who never once re-examined their worldviews, who never struggled with meaning and purpose, you know, like fucking people do.

These were people who went on to be the footsoldiers of campaign chicanery and dirty tricks, accusing McCain of having a black bastard child, fucking with voter rolls in Ohio, justifying any scurrilous means to subvert actual democratic processes in the name of their Godly agenda. Hell, one of the pricks Rove/Gonzalez/McNulty/Goodling put into a US Attorney's job was Tim Griffin, a Machiavellian little Bush True Believer who helped the administration winnow minority soldier's absentee ballots out of voting pools, via a patently illegal process called voter "caging." Goodling testified to her and her bosses' knowledge of Griffin's involvement in the process on the Hill, dimwittedly blowing the whistle on a criminal felony, which, ahem, Griffin, in his new ill-gotten job, would now be charged with investigating. So, yeah, all their bullshit about "supporting the troops" only goes as far as those troops' constitutional right to vote, a fetid little administration secret laid bare by Greg Palast, who actually obtained hundreds of the subpoenaed emails the White House has still somehow "misplaced."

In addition to being wonkish ranting, this skimmed the basic seeding of Bush/Rove/Kristol's crusade to create their vaunted "permanent Republican majority," as has been documented by Larisa Alexandrovna at RawStory.com. The Griffin piece, however, gave us a peek into how those seeds would bear fruit in the most odious perversions and manipulations of justice.

Smash cut to Arizona, where Congressman Rick Renzi, McCain's Arizona campaign co-chair, just found himself indicted on 35 counts of corruption. Those stem from typical Republican wheeler-dealing with wealthy pricks for campaign donations in exchange for favorable legislation. But the imminent trial will reveal that Renzi's office, while campaigning for re-election in 2006, called the the U.S. attorney for Phoenix, Republican Paul Charlton, to attempt to influence the ongoing investigation favorably for Renzi, an outcome also being urged at the time by the Gonzales DoJ. When Charlton refused to play ball, Gonzales fired him, making him one of the eight and delaying case being made against Renzi.

The failure to stave off, finally, the prosecution for such glaring crimes can't obviate the malign intent of Gonzales and company. If they had their way, they would've killed the case outright, leaving scumbags like Renzi to continue to rubberstamp any little war or rendition any innocent Muslim Bush's black little heart desired, all his corrupt coffers intact.

Gonzales' eventual resignation in disgrace only deflected the Senate Judiciary's Committee, because its vast mission of rooting out the Bush crony cancer from the DoJ could not be made more evident than with Siegelman's case. However wonky the U.S. attorney "massacre" hearings may've seemed to non-wonks, the undercurrent plague they exposed was the overt politicization of the Justice Department, something the laws of the nation guard rigorously against to prevent the DoJ from becoming a thug arm of any sitting political party. Lady Justice, after all, has long worn a blindfold for a profound symbolic reason.

But as Siegelman's frame-up attests, Bush et al. have shanghaied us far down the road in the opposite direction. Two Bush-appointed U.S. attorneys in Alabama, one with direct ties to the Governor's mansion, made two separate tries at nailing Siegelman, one of the few successful and popular Democrats' in that Third World country of a state's recent history, and the first was thrown out by a judge after opening arguments. The second stuck, but, as 60 Minutes' story pointed out, not without some flashing red-neon question marks over:

a) coerced testimony;

b) Karl Rove's roll in a Get-Don-Siegelman crusade, directed from the White House;

c) unabashedly cronyist conflicts of interest on the part of GOP True Believers in the U.S. attorney's office and the trial judge on the case;

and d) a crime that may not actually be considered a crime in normal American chit politics, this according to 52 former Attorneys General from 40 states, including Grant Woods, the former Republican attorney general of Arizona, whom 60 Minutes interviewed at length, all of whom have signed a letter to the Judiciary Committee.

As to the latter, Siegelman is doing his seven years ostensibly on the questionable testimony that he made a political appointment based on a contribution of a donor not to him personally, but to a state campaign to legalize a lottery. Even throwing out a growing body of doubts being cast on whether that happened as the prosecutors say it did, even just assuming it did, by the estimates of Woods and his fellow ex-AGs, it isn't a fucking crime.

No, according to Grant Woods, again a Republican, Siegelman's real crime: "They could not beat him fair and square. This is a Republican state and he was the one Democrat they could never get rid of."

Harper's reporter Scott Horton, who has lead on coverage of the Siegelman case put it this way: "So how many Bush-Cheney donors in amounts of one hundred thousand and more were appointed to government offices or to positions in the Bush-Cheney transition team? The answer is one hundred and forty-six (146). And in how many of those cases did the Justice Department initiate investigations of corruption? The answer is zero (0). The Justice Department's rationale is that this crime is one that can be committed by Democrats alone. When a Republican does it, it's normal campaign fundraising."

That, of course, is the logic of the ubermenschen, those who deem themselves super-citizens by dint of whom they know and what strings they can pull — say, people like the Bass family of Texas, owners of Oak Hill Capital Partners, which owns one WHNT-TV, the CBS affiliate out of Huntsville, AL. The Basses are infamously linked to George W. Bush's resumé of failures in the private sector, most notably riding in on a white horse to bail out Bush's abortive Enron-esque Ponzi scheme Harken Energy, which also had close ties to the criminal Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Rove bestowed the Basses with the title of Bush "Pioneers" for raising, according to RawStory, "more than $100,000 for the Bush-Cheney campaigns in both 2000 and 2004." Any CBS affiliate can choose to air any CBS show, or not, at any time, but when the 60 Minutes broadcast began on Sunday night, just as the Siegelman story rolled, the signal of WHNT, the Basses' TV station in Alabama, went black.

WHNT claimed technical difficulties, initially on the end of the CBS signal, then with its own receiver, before the picture resumed at the tail end of the Siegelman story. CBS told Horton: "There is no delicate way to put this: the WHNT claim is not true. There were no transmission difficulties. The problems were peculiar to Channel 19, which had the signal and had functioning transmitters." Horton added, "I was told that the decision to blacken screens across Northern Alabama 'could only have been an editorial call.'"

Called on its bullshit, WHNT aired the Siegelman segment the next day on its local news broadcast, though no-doubt hardly garnering the kind of audiences 60 Minutes draws. And as with Renzi, the Basses' failure at corruption in no way obviates the intent. If you want more visceral evidence of their purer intent, it's worth noting what was not mentioned in the 60 Minutes story, that whistleblower Dana Jill Simpson, a Republican attorney who attested to Karl Rove's role in the Get-Siegelman crusade, had her house burned down just before she gave similar testimony to the Congress last year.

The inevitable irony is, if the law still, really applies in this country, or if it is made to ever again, these men and women, from Bush to Rove to Gonzales to Goodling, to the Canarys and Griffins at the U.S. attorney level, these people need to be the first up in the dock, praying to their White God they look good in prison orange. When Obama becomes our next president, I'm all for his creating coalitions, bridging this polar divide largely contrived by bullshit non-issues like patriotism, family values and gay marriage, but only up to this point: justice has to again assume its actual meaning in this country before we can even start to heal from these last seven years.

We need a Nuremberg on the Potomac. We need it not for vengeance or spite, but because justice requires justice for our Constitution to be made whole again. Those who so maliciously infected this country with their syphilitic master race primacy, their machinations of perpetual, unquestioned predominance, who sought to subvert the very Constitution they swore to uphold to get it, must be made to atone, to be shuffled off in whole phalanxes of perp-walks, and branded forever as pariahs who have no place, role or legitimacy as arbiters of what is right and good in a nation of laws.

FEB. 5, 2008
THE SECRET WAR FOR THE SOUL OF THE PARTY It would be a egregious mistake to read recent weeks' acrimony between Barack Obama and the Clintons, for the latter can only truly be perceived as a two-headed beast, as merely the political tit-for-tat expected in any down-and-dirty political campaign. This has merely been the scent of gunpowder escaping through cracks in the decorum and into public consciousness, wafting up from a roiling semi-secret civil war now being waged for the future of the Democratic Party, and the country.

The end of John Edwards' campaign serves a blow to my side of it. His viability aside, he, like Kucinich before him, kept the conversation on point, or what should be the point, about how a society must be judged by the least of its citizens, and how that's more and more of us. And while progressives can well harbor reservations as to some of Obama's advisors, tepid Wall Street-friendly and neo-liberal planks, and an at least competitive share of corporate donors greasing the wheels of his bandwagon, we can still read some more optimal tea-leaves in whom his enemies have revealed themselves to be. Would that their recent, sniping, chicane, cynical power plays against Obama at long last put the lie to the notion that the Clintons, including the venerated Bill, ever represented anything but their own version of Old Boy, money-entrenched, right-wing power politics.

After the Clintons' attempts to shanghai hospitality workers' caucuses in Vegas, after their union endorsed Obama, a headline at the influential blog DownWithTyranny summed up pithily:

REPUBLICANS ALWAYS TRY TO CUT DOWN VOTER PARTICIPATION, DEMOCRATS ENCOURAGE VOTERS — SO DOES THAT MEAN BILL AND HILL ARE...

Let their own bullying words be the epitaph on their utterly mundane stamp on the Republic, and let Obama, or preferably Obama/Edwards, and an overhauled, progressive-stormed Democratic Party shovel the dirt over it. It is time and it is vital — it is indeed what the party's progressive insurgency has been fighting for and what the Clintons are desperately fighting against — to move the party back to where it responds to the wants and needs of the vast majority of the people, the put-upon, the downsized, the oil-raped, the toxified and post-trauma-stressed, instead of just taking them for granted and glad-handing through Big Business-as-usual.

Not to count the Clintons out — that would be wishful thinking at best — as upper-tier party hacks, the ones who have all but ignored the progressive mandate of Nov. 7, 2006, continue to adhere white-knuckled to the hollow establishment catchphrase of Hilary's "experience." But even lateral-thinking-challenged MSM like Time have registered "a general revulsion to the Clinton's[sic] campaign tactics now settling in."

I've heard the counterpoint from too many friends, whom I respect but question their critical analysis/nostalgia ratio, that, geez, maybe Bill was kind of a cock, but he was so good at what he did, and he got you 12 weeks paid leave and . . . and, well, come up with something positive here, because I'm drawing a blank. He greenlit the most neo-colonial-friendly trade pacts since our actual colonial epoch, I remember that, and helped deliver precious publicly owned airwaves into the manicured hands of cloistered, soulless robber barons, I remember that too, and he hobnobbed with venture capitalists and sat idly while real value-challenged bubble economies inflated and popped. The economic boom of Roaring Twenties, after all, had everything to do with the Depression, and not for nothing did David Greenspan, the Grand Arbiter of the Fake Economy, consider Clinton the best Republican president since Bush41, as I and many bonafide progressives have long posited. Greenspan said it glowingly. We didn't.

I won't go too deeply into the Case Against Bill Clinton — documented exhaustively elsewhere, including Mena, and, by the way, lying about a blowjob is the utter, abject least of them — but suffice to say I do not mourn the shattering of the myth of his/their earnest, heartfelt populism, and must appreciate the cosmic justice of his/their own hand in the act. The man, and the couple, did much destroy the Democratic Party and its one-time distinct point of difference as being the party that spoke for everyone who wasn't a plutocrat or a plutocrat's fundamentalist foot-soldier, that spoke to solving those people's problems versus blind adherence to arcane orthodoxies.

Was it ever purely that? No. Did it go off the rails at times? Sure. Did it work, since FDR, effectively toward giving vastly more people a greater hand in guiding their own destiny, as "democracy" promises, than at any time in this Republic's bloody history? There is no fucking question it did.

But they sold us out, the ascendent pseudocon "New" Democrats of the 1990s, codified in the guise of the Democratic Leadership Council, but more colloquially referred to as the party's Clintonista wing. They went where the money was, they "compromised" on the "free trade" that has continued apace and now threatens to bankrupt the country, they coopted the Republican pro-business raison d'etre, they reshaped the party as a distinctly more corrupt, swaggering and mean thing than at anytime since it buoyed Jim Crow.

Here's how current DLC chairman Harold Ford once put it: "Remember what Bill Clinton did: He figured out what Republicans were doing well, and instead of complaining about it, he figured out a way to do it better."

Please understand, I celebrated in November 1992, I got righteously drunk, for we had ended the Reagan Era once and for all, thank fucking karma — except we didn't. The Reagan Era, for all its glowing feel-good chauvinism masking a single-minded commitment to the primacy of a vainglorious wealthy Elect, has yet to end. The New Democrats soon adopted the deluded Republican talking points, that The Market would guide us better than our own unenforced laws, that the State no longer need fulfill its natural role as arbiter of good business and mediator against the predations of bad business. The New Democrats, though speaking with more purported empathy, would resume the elites' faith in economic down-trickling, would empower a purer kind of democracy, that of the Unseen Hand. "Do-as-thou-wilt" would come back to us cheaper Chinese and Indonesian goods, and if our proxies and sanctions murdered thousands people along the way, so fucking be it.

Machiavellian horseshit, this flies in the face of anything resembling common sense. It is in and of itself an indictment of the path the party took, because the Democratic Party was ostensibly the party of measured pragmatism, of science as non-heresy, of progress, of reason over dogma. It was the Wagner Act and the WPA, the Voting Rights Act and OSHA and CAFE standards. It was the alternative energy imperative that Carter mandated but that Reagan scuttled — at the behest of industries who would go on to become huge Hillary bankrollers — that would have saved us endless fiscal austerity, a criminal war, and a tenuous future as a species that the last 27 years have ushered unto our midst, '92-'00 included.

They paid us, so we can at least take their viewpoints into account in policymaking, even if their viewpoints are bullshit and based thoroughly on path-of-least-resistance profit-at-all-costs, and even if we won't be taking into account the viewpoints of those who can't afford to tithe them into the appropriate ears.

This literal and odious power-brokering ushered unto the party the Clintonian modus of triangulation, a cynical practice of political chit cost/benefit analysis, by which one gauges how much or little one can do per a given policy pending what one can get away with by pissing off the least mount of people. Talk of class, of haves and have-nots, the great undeniable chasm between the two parties, became impolitic and unseemly. Its defenders call this "compromise," toward the end of, as Hillary defenders often mewl, "getting things done"; what it renders down to, however, is a policy mish-mash bereft of vision, passion or anything resembling a sense of right and wrong, bereft of, in sum, principled leadership.

Sure, we can maintain strangling economic sanctions on Iraq for eight years, at the cost of 500,000 Iraqi innocents, because, for the liberals, it's not overt war and for the war-mongers, it's seems "tough."

Sure, we can open the "trade" floodgates to turn Mexico and China into cheap labor plantations, enabling authoritarian assholes as our overseers, with international treaties written wholly by orthodox neoclassical economists and corporate lawyers. Sure, we can hollow out the manufacturing infrastructure because what're they gonna do, go Green?

A lot of us did, of course. Some of you, I know, got pissed off at us, as if you were owed our votes. But if you expected us to stick around the trailer home waiting to get beat on again and call it "love," you're a bad fucking feminist. Our return to the party has not been one of loyalty, obviously, but of bitter, grinding exigency, desperate circumstances made, sadly, by that self-same triangulation. Triangulation led directly to capitulation on one of the greatest disasters in the nation's history, the Bush War on Islam. The Clintons' "success" and their sponsorship of the DLC, or New Democrats, or, in my parlance "pseudocons," led to a raft of Clintonista congresspeople, more interested in power for power's sake, not ideals, not of an unapologetically activist government helping to make things better for more people. It gave us triangulated hem-and-hawing presidential candidates like pre-progressive Al Gore and John Kerry, guys so incapable of articulating vision that they couldn't discursively eviscerate a linear-thinking dullard.

Triangulation led to these people to give sweeping war powers to that self-same linear-thinking dullard, the equivalent of handing a safety-off AK-47 to a rabid chimp in an elementary school. Many of them knew better — millions of their constituents warned them, loudly, futilely — and if they didn't, they had no place speaking for thinking human beings. But they did it anyway, because triangulation suggested they must cover their asses so as not to look unpatriotic, so as not to have seemed plagued by reason amid mobilization for Crusade, for that would look weak. Supposed leaders, supposed agenda-makers, they let the agenda be set for them and they swam right along with a bloody tide.

Triangulation gave us a pseudocon mafia, led by Rahm Emanuels, Chuck Schumers and Dianne Feinsteins, the party's wheedling, conniving Uncle Toms, Vichy Dems, who not only giddily cheerlead Hillary, who not only mainline the same corporate dollars and dogma, who not only dissemble about their own role in ushering the nation to calamity. No, insult to injury, they work actively against those who posit real remedies to the nation's ills, who understand the cause-and-effect wrought by their leadership's capitulation.

Edwards and Gore, once swimming with that tide, have undergone their own catharses and at least taken steps towards atonement. That Edwards was so ignominiously shunted into also-ran role by the major media, given the resonance of his message to any who heard it, bespeaks an institutional party scrambling to winnow class out of the American dialogue. Edwards tried, according to Progressive Review editor Sam Smith, "to change things back to the way Democrats used to do it. And what happens? Yes, those with power move to keep him in the background. Yes, from the start the establishment media gave him as little coverage as possible. But more significant was the reaction of average members of the liberal — really post-liberal — establishment. Ridicule and disgust combined with a stunning disinterest in Edwards' issues that told much about the Democratic Party today."

To both their credit, Edwards' message pressed Obama left, the latter adopting necessary, galvanizing class-conscious language in the final weeks here in Iowa. That in no small part helped the crystallize the passion of Obama's rhetoric, given such fervent voice at the Jefferson-Jackson gathering here in December, which, combined with his disarming personal magnetism, has kept him buoyant against the fusillades of the Clinton war machine.

Down in the trenches, however, those working to reclaim these districts where votes have too long been squandered and taken for granted by the Clintonistas, meet similar, buffeting opposition from the party's "leadership." Illinois' Emmanuel, the DLC's internecine wartime consigliere and the controller of the DLCC's campaign purse, has been conspicuous in his efforts to gun down real progressives, read "democratic" Democrats, in favor of more Vichy-flavored ones. As DownWithTyranny's Howie Klein has aptly pointed out, in the face of the gargantuan progressive, economic populist mandate of Nov. 7 — which years from now, one hopes, will be marked down as a signature date in American history — Emanuel is this year again marshaling a rogue's gallery of pseudocon "Democrats" against real progressives like Donna Edwards (MD-4), Victoria Wulsin (OH-2) and John Laesch, whose primary eve rally my band played last night at the UAW Hall in Montgomery, IL.

This is not to completely demonize Bill and Hillary, they may well be decent people at heart — I know decent people who know them and who say they are — and they might wield slightly more sense as pertains to treating their fellow citizens than those who do demonize them from the right. But this admonishment from the unrepentant left is to say, to wish fervently, to urge into reality, that their time has come and gone, that their brand of Democrat has proven itself co-opted and inert, if not completely facile. If Obama's appeal is now generational, then fine, good, let the fucking torch be passed, now, goddammit, before it's too late. My friend Mike, who is as critical an analyst as you'll meet, argues that this is no infinitesimal matter, that Obama is the closest thing to a Generation X candidate we have entertained as a viable presidential candidate, and that the portents of this are profound.

Even at the surface of Obama's personality and platform, nothwithstanding his inspired rhetoric, Mike posits, lies a distinctly, palpably different way of looking at the world, and our neighbors. And I can see this. The Clintons were the definitive baby boomer presidency, and, if you'll forgive the admittedly sweeping generalizations here and to come, their co-optation mirrors generational trendlines: that we can be selfish, consumer crap-hording, bourgeois control freaks, but still want a green world; we can tolerate poor people, but be surly bitches when they come into our pristine condofied neighborhoods; we can sell our souls to go-go careerism, but still flip a coin to poor people after work and feel it mitigates our spiritual apostasy; we can be— bazooka barf — "Reagan Democrats."

The trade-offs have been so myriad, the messages so mixed, no wonder the simple, essential moral center gets misplaced. And no wonder the kind of youth vote Obama is pulling, by speaking to something better for all of us, across lines, across race, across economic strata, across oceans.

Not to imply he is Arthur leading us into a Golden Age, nor is he simply that now hollow MSM buzzword, "change." But, as Mike points out, what a GenX ethos might well inform is an implicit mistrust of the ancien regime, of sold-out "grown-ups," of the status quo that have proven themselves utter failures at the task at hand, namely solving the problems they have created. This is not just the "anti-Beltway Insider" thing that so often informs "populist" campaign strategems, Mike argues, but a genuine tabula rasa of worldview, that is, how to go about re-envisioning the world and our role in it, as a part of it, not as a virus feeding upon it. Post-Nam, post-Watergate, post-New Day In America, post-lies, post-outsourced industry, post-the-utter-moral-system-crash-that-has-been-the-Bush-administration, indeed post-American Dream for all but the Elect, he may be the best candidate (left, anyway) to disengage the system from the addictions that make it do stupid shit.

I brought up the term "post-American Dream" to Laesch in Montgomery and he did a barely perceptible double-take. Something flickered in his eye, a recognition of the unhappiness of the term, and he said, "That's a good way of putting it."

It is worth restating, over and over again: "Experience" in a corrupt system doesn't do anybody any good. Except, duh, the corrupt.

The Clintons, of course, nor the Emanuels or Schumers, will never admit they did anything wrong. Ask a 12-stepper how quickly that mindset makes shit better. Take a look at Laesch and the Dems endorsed over at Howie's Blue America PAC ActBlue fundraising site, which vets and endorses candidates for true blue platforms and credentials. Now stack those up with the record of Emanuel's lapdogs, as run down in an email from Howie to colleague blogger Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake.com:

As for Rahm's recruits strengthening what some call "centrist" positions-- and what I call reactionary positions — just look at how they vote.

The freshmen voting most frequently abandoning the Democrats in order to vote with the Republicans are Heath Shuler (personally recruited by Rahm), Jason Altmire (not a Rahm candidate), Joe Donnelly (a Rahm candidate), Brad Ellsworth (a Rahm candidate), Baron Hill (relentlessly pursued by Rahm to run), and Nick Lampson (I hope some Texans will make public how Rahm made this happen; I'm bound to silence).

Emanuel and the pseudocons' dream of the reactionary, corporate-felating DLC subsuming the DNC, with Vichy Dem poster boy Harold Ford supplanting the architect of Nov. 7, Howard Dean. Then everything old is New Democrat again. A bridge to the 20th century indeed.

We're just too wiggy out here on the fringe left. Rahm will hear none of this anti-NAFTA, corporate-bashing, anti-neoliberal (read "anti-neocolonial"), soft-on-terrorism (not bombing our problems away-and-by-the-way-creating-more). Nothwithstanding all this might cut to quick of the nation's problems, it all, by Emanuel's beshitted thinking, is just too off-putting to, um, the Republican Democrats out there . . . or something. Which is unqualified bullshit, because, since his own pseudocon dogma seemingly precludes his reading any research, it is worth stating here: "progressive" has become the mainstream.

In fact, Media Matters for America (MMA) and the Campaign for America's Future in June issued a report that positively guts the pseudocon "centrist" artifice, with aggregated data from non-partisan sources such as American National Election Studies (NES), maintained by the University of Michigan, General Social Survey (GSS), maintained by the University of Chicago, plus data from the Pew Research Center, Gallup, Zogby, CBS/New York Times and NBC/Newsweek polls.

At its broadest, versus the underlying conservative presumption that government must be winnowed down to nothing, the MMA report found that 58% think the government should be "doing more" — such as, say, assuring Americans of healthcare. It cites a February CBS/New York Times poll that found 76% of Americans willing to roll back Bush's vast tax cuts in order to assure all Americans get access to healthcare, and that 82% would be willing to pay $500 more in annual taxes to insure all Americans. It tracked only 20% of Americans who think government services should be cut, and, citing Pew, and 69% who think "the government should care for those who can't care for themselves, steadily trending upward every year since 1994. And 58% disagree with the statement that "corporations generally strike a fair balance between making profits and serving the public interest.

A rolling NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll tracked Americans thinking corporate-counseled "free trade" agreements harmful to the US economy growing 16 points to 46% between 1999 to 2007, while those who thought they "helped" fell to just 28%. As to organized labor, its lot winnowing for years, '92-'00 included, amid and onslaught of government and corporate attrition, downsizing and job exportation, Pew found 56% of Americans held a favorable opinion of unions, just 33% unfavorable, corroborated by Gallup's 59-29% ratio. As to the past four administrations' institutional coddling of our wealthiest citizens and corporations, Gallup in April found 66% considered taxes on upper income people "too low," 71% percent thinking the same of corporations.

A full 86% of Americans want the government to invest in the research and development of alternative fuels for cars, 84% want it to impose higher pollution standards for businesses, 82% favor stronger enforcement of existing environmental law, 81% want it to invest in developing solar and wind power resources and 79% want stricter federally-mandated auto emissions standards.

In short, the triangulators seem intent upon triangulating on a demographic that doesn't exist. Laesch addressed it pointedly at his rally in Montgomery, where he noted that, somehow, in the face of the above metric reality, a local newspaper endorsed his pseudocon opponent Bill Foster, suggesting Laesch would need to "move to the middle" to win the district. At the end of the night, shed of his suit-jacket and just finished personally wiping down the bar at the UAW Local 145, he told me pointedly, "The progressive agenda is the middle . . . What we're doing here is representing what the majority of Americans are all about. [Mainstream institutions] have defined us, and we've let em do it. But we're going redefine the middle. The middle's fair trade, the middle's single payer, the middle's getting the hell out of iraq."

Given the stark empirical evidence for this sentiment, one must necessarily ask, what could possibly be the counter-argument? If grand majorities of people agree with wiggy, out-there, passionate, plainspoken, utterly common-sensible guys like Laesch, then what could the voices of "moderation" be suggesting counter-balances the will of the people? This seems to presume 40-to-15 percent of the people who disagree with great progressive majority, the rank-and-file that delivered Nov. 7 to the party, wield some kind of super-vote that trumps those of what they might call "common folk."

And herein lies the difference between the two sides of the party, the progressives and those desperately trying to quash their campaigns and voices. The Vichy Dems weight non-progressive minorities unequally, not necessarily their opinions but their money. The Clintonista/pseudocon/Vichy "wing" are not a wing, they are machine-minded high functionaries who recognize a primacy of some citizens over others — a notion one might well call "Republican." They see nothing intrinsically bad about the system other than they don't have the reins.

Ask them to put ideal ahead of their own real politick, say, the dough they might get for their next campaign, ask them to quash the odious plague of rich people's money in politics. Then watch as they babble out some obfuscation, as Hillary already did at AFSCME's candidate forum last year, suggesting all that money buys nothing, and that lobbyists were good Americans too and deserve to be heard, even if, refer to above, you and I don't get to be. Public campaign financing is the vital epoch-making next step to fixing this country, and it doesn't take a genius to see Obama as more amenable, as uncorrupted enough, to send that kind of shockwave into the status quo. It is a sensibility, or promise of it, that could be summed up in his simple statement at the last debate, that he doesn't just want to end the war, he wants to end "the mindset" that led to it.

That mindset is no small matter. Where money goes, where dogma goes, principle does not follow; folly does. As Prorev's Sam Smith, no great fan of either candidate, put it, "a great difference between the two remaining major Democratic candidates: Obama has integrity, the Clintons do not; only one alleged crook has showed up on the Obama big backer list; with the Clintons they litter the place like packing peanuts on the floor after opening a package."

Maybe we need to dream a fairy tale right now, because at least the dream gives us a new star to set our sights on, even if we only make it to the moon, um, so to speak. We goddamn well need somebody unafraid to at least pose a vision for saving the fucking world. I don't want to beat the Kennedy thing too much, because I've read too fucking much to think of him as anything close to a "good" president, but it may be worth a bit of sentiment from his brother Bobby, when he famously quoted George Bernard Shaw: "There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not."

Why the fuck not. My measure of any candidate, every two years, is how much I have to keep their feet to the fire, to stay on their ass, for all my emails and phonecalls and blog rants are worth — and the more they dissemble, the more they whore themselves, the more corporate money they mainline, I can see my workload increasing. I'm fine with that, such that the work is necessary, even if I am working for a day in America when it isn't. But with people like Laesch, Wulsin, Edwards, with our own Bruce Braley and Dave Loebsack here in Iowa, and a growing vanguard of congresspeople that recognize what the Nov. 7 mandate meant, not just that it gave them power, I know we will have people representing people, not money, and not just ones who would vote like I want them to, but who will raise holy hell if the party leadership continues along its collaborationist path. Because that, goddammit, Nancy, Harry, Steny, Hillary, is what actual leaders do.

And with Obama, at very least, they would have an amenable ear in the Oval Office. "We'll have to keep on him," Laesch said. "I get that assured sense that I will have allies in the Congress doing the same. And with Obama, at very least, I have a sense he's listening."

That, in and of itself, would pose a stunning blow to the status quo, because it might, maybe, possibly, I wish from the depths of my black little soul, begin again to resemble what democracy was supposed to look like.

DEC. 26, 2007
SNOWBALLS IN HELL In a world furiously bombarded by man-made horror and the skulking avarice that informs it, Palast actually found an uplifting story for the holiday season. It is something that bespeaks a real lesson that might be heeded by the blind, doctrinaire jackals running for president fueled by blood-sopped corporate dollars. It is about Ecuadorian presidente Rafael Correa Delgado, and how, not just spouting "change" as a hollow catchphrase, he actually looked into the heart of a corrupt, Wall Street-written international money game that had victimized his people, dared declare the game fixed, said fuck the game, and then fucked it.

That, motherfucker, is change. For his honesty, and real sense of justice, and fortitude, and courage, Correa is considered a dangerous terrorist-supporting Commie by the establishment cabal in Washington and New York, as are a whole wave of real, idea-driven leaders whose people have swept them to power across Latin America, largely in response to American hegemony and its ruinous effects on their countries over the course of the last century.

I'm excerpting some of it below. You can read the whole story here, and, if you want more background, Pilger's exhaustive documentary The War on Democracy remains viewable here.

Correa is one of the first dark-skinned men to win election to this Quechua and mixed-race nation. Certainly, one of the first from the streets. He'd won a surprise victory over the richest man in Ecuador, the owner of the biggest banana plantation.

Doctor Correa, I should say, with a Ph.D in economics earned in Europe. Professor Correa as he is officially called - who, until not long ago, taught at the University of Illinois.

And Professor Doctor Correa is one tough character. He told George Bush to take the US military base and stick it where the equatorial sun don't shine. He told the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which held Ecuador's finances by the throat, to go to hell. He ripped up the "agreements" which his predecessors had signed at financial gun point. He told the Miami bond vultures that were charging Ecuador usurious interest, to eat their bonds. He said 'We are not going to pay off this debt with the hunger of our people. " Food first, interest later. Much later. And he meant it.

It was a stunning performance. I'd met two years ago with his predecessor, President Alfredo Palacio, a man of good heart, who told me, looking at the secret IMF agreements I showed him, "We cannot pay this level of debt. If we do, we are DEAD. And if we are dead, how can we pay?" Palacio told me that he would explain this to George Bush and Condoleezza Rice and the World Bank, then headed by Paul Wolfowitz. He was sure they would understand. They didn't. They cut off Ecuador at the knees.

But Ecuador didn't fall to the floor. Correa, then Economics Minister, secretly went to Hugo Chavez Venezuela's president and obtained emergency financing. Ecuador survived.

And thrived. But Correa was not done.

Elected President, one of his first acts was to establish a fund for the Ecuadoran refugees in America - to give them loans to return to Ecuador with a little cash and lot of dignity. And there were other dragons to slay. He and Palacio kicked US oil giant Occidental Petroleum out of the country.

Correa STILL wasn't done.

I'd returned from a very wet visit to the rainforest - by canoe to a Cofan Indian village in the Amazon where there was an epidemic of childhood cancers. The indigenous folk related this to the hundreds of open pits of oil sludge left to them by Texaco Oil, now part of Chevron, and its partners. I met the Cofan's chief. His three year old son swam in what appeared to be contaminated water then came out vomiting blood and died.

Correa had gone there too, to the rainforest, though probably in something sturdier than a canoe. And President Correa announced that the company that left these filthy pits would pay to clean them up.

But it's not just any company he was challenging. Chevron's largest oil tanker was named after a long-serving member of its Board of Directors, the Condoleezza. Our Secretary of State.

The Cofan have sued Condi's corporation, demanding the oil company clean up the crap it left in the jungle. The cost would be roughly $12 billion. Correa won't comment on the suit itself, a private legal action. But if there's a verdict in favor of Ecuador's citizens, Correa told me, he will make sure Chevron pays up.

Is he kidding? No one has ever made an oil company pay for their slop. Even in the USA, the Exxon Valdez case drags on to its 18th year. Correa is not deterred.

Christians still go all tingly when they speak of how their early saints defied the empire, often going to martyrdom, but Correa's defiance of empire, most of their American fundamentalist adherents will tell you, is positively heretical. This is a mitigation, of course, because, in spite of their protestations of the "secular progressive war" on their fucking holiday, they have come, like Popes of yore, to claim both secular and spiritual primacy over the world. My friend Spike, a local progressive activist, drew a a deft and inspirational analysis of this phenomenon in his holiday greeting this year, which is worth relaying:

A couple thousand years ago, back when Mother Nature was god, the winter solstice was the big celebration this time of year. Days getting longer are cause for a party, I believe.

Before about 300a.d., Jesus was the anti-Roman Empire guy. "Heaven is within us," Jesus said. Good to look within, since the Romans had conquered their lands, and were occupying, taxing, killing, and doing all the things imperial warlords usually do.

Then the Roman Empire started to crumble, so Emperor Constantine became a Christian. And the Roman Empire became the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Christianity became the vehicle of Empire. And the internal struggle of what Christianity is really about continues to this day.

Well, heaven is within us. So says Jesus, Buddha, the Dali Lama, and many others. Somedays I touch heaven. Most days I forget it's so close.

Constantine didn't really become a Christian -- he just legalized the religion, but it's a common Church-ratified myth, and it did lead to the Church and eventually Christianity itself becoming anathema to the actual teachings of Christ, seeing as how Popes soon strutted about in their garish vestments declaring themselves both secular and spiritual Last Word on All Things Everywhere. They did so to keep people in line, at the behest of themselves and their kingly benefactors/benefactees. Power begets assholery, though it doesn't always have to.

As Spike says, and as the evolution of society has proven, realizing the capacities within us, as individuals, as communities, can disperse power and make it work for everyone, not just latter day kings, or at least moreso, step by step. This coming year affords us at least a small say in effecting not just "change," but in realizing and exposing this stupid, corrupt, venal game for what it is, in rewriting the fucking rules, in making certain people's words and intentions match up to their actions, impossible though it seems as they play free and loose all around us, with the same money that fucked up Ecuador for way too many years. But it requires due diligence, of our own hearts and minds, measured against those of people who claim to speak from theirs and so rarely do.

Fuck New Year's resolutions about diets and smokes. Supervillains run the world. There are no James Bonds. Maybe a few people can resolve to be inspired, like Correa, to defy machinations of those who have stacked the deck against the rest of us -- because, really, until we do, there's no point playing.

NOV. 16, 2007
DENNIS K'S BIG FUCK-YOU . . . conveniently glossed over by the Clinton-fawning-all-over CNN or anybody else MSM. Kucinich is dead-nuts right, on everything, down the line, as he nailed the Whack-a-Moles last night on CNN's D-bate.

BLITZER: "Congressman Kucinich, I believe you're the only person on this stage who had a chance to vote on the Patriot Act right after 9/11 who voted against it right away."

KUCINICH: "That's because I read it."

[BIGASS CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]

EAT SOME FUCK, CLINTON. Not even the Clinton-machine-stacked heckler-batallion in the audience could shout down that one. (She didn't read it before she voted FOR it, it was reported in her recent bio, and never fucking denied.)

KUCINICH CONTINUES: "You've seen here tonight people who voted for the war, voted to fund the war, now they have a different position. People voted for the Patriot Act. Now they have a different position. People voted for China trade. Now they have a different position . . . Just imagine what it will be like to have a president of the United States who's right the first time. Just imagine."

IF IT WEARS A SUIT AND DISSEMBLES LIKE A SUIT . . . Awesome story here on why Clinton is a cynical sold-out power-whore and Obama is at best seriously deluded by his more (sadly-chosen) Clintonista advisors on this endless string of corporate welfare programs under the guise of "free trade."

Too bad because the latter finally kicked up some shit here in Iowa over the weekend. Cautionary tale here, if you agree with Clinton on pretty much of anything, you're probably fucking wrong.

WHERE WOULD JESUS DROP A DEUCE? Oh, no, get ready for more sanctimonious allusions to Roman persecution of Christians and the odious pall of progressive secularism steering this righteous nation straight into the bowels of Hell.

Iowa's asshole senator, Chuck Grassley, has actually initiated this investigation into televangelist and megachurches' finances, including the icky and apostate Pastor Joyce Meyer's purchase of a $23,000 marble toilet for her ministry's headquarters in Fenton, MO.

Oh, "values voters," you never cease to be fucktarded braying marks for sanctimonious pricks whose only "values" are unabashed avarice and charlatanry.

Why Grassley, whose party has benefited exclusively from these ministries exploiting and abusing their tax exempt status to bray a toxic mutant strain of Christianity and Libertarian orthodoxy, would choose to bite the hand that bankrolls the Republicans' grass-roots mobilization apparatus is curious.

"We want to make sure the tax exemption is not abused," Grassley told CNN. Which, the deeper he goes into this, he'll find in spades, since megachurches are just basically recruiting/cash-sucking factory outlets for the GOP. "Non-profit" status doesn't much gibe with fleets of Rolls-Royces and private jets, much less crappers-fit-for-a-God -- and if the Republican Great God of The Market applies here, whup, there goes your tax exemption, fucko!

All this shit, notwithstanding Matthew 19:24, which, for all their "actual living word of God" bullshit, Christian Nationalists conveniently, cynically and pathologically read right past.

In Meyer's case, she basically guarantees that Jesus will bestow economic fortune upon you the more money you shovel into her $8,500 handbag (one for each pantsuit!). Wonder how that's sitting with all those fear-based McMansion dwelling Stepford People who mainline her bullshit and have nevertheless seen their property value hollowed out by the predatory laissez-faire buzz-saw of the last 25 years.

Grassley's usually a fuck, but big fat kudos, and good luck getting RNC money for his next campaign.

And hey, Pat Robertson just endorsed Giuliani. Awesome, it's like a super-villain team-up! "Just think of how many people we can marginalize and kill . . . together!"

NOV. 13, 2007
GOODBYE, AL My friend Al is dead. I got the call from a buddy of mine at The Mill, at around 12:30 in the morning, could barely understand him, but the news had messed him. Al, only 54 when the mailman found him in his house on the southeast side, turned out to be the second guy he knew who kicked it that week. And here I should qualify, I should only really call Al a friend-in-passing. I didn't know him all that well.

We didn't. I shelved my work and lit out that night for The Mill, to talk my drunk-ass buddy down, to help him make sense of death, pointless as that notion will always be. But we had to be that honest.

Al Achtner, in his time in Iowa City, served as vice president of the local AFL-CIO chapter and president of the Iowa City Labor Party. He traveled all over the Midwest, helping locals organize. He still believed that the movement could be rescued from almost three decades of Republican, Clinton Democrat and corporate austerity. And still, most of us knew him as the owl-looking guy who came to shows at The Mill. In fact, if Al showed up, you could feel pretty good, since he only went to the best shows in town, usually Americana, rootsy stuff, sometimes even my band.

He sat at the far booth, nearest the soundboard, all mop of salt-and-pepper hair and a thick mustache and big bespectacled eyes and that hyperarticulate way of talking that made him sound like an English Lit professor. He drank wine. He smoked foul-smelling foreign cigarettes that he specialty-ordered, usually at a particular tobacco shop he went to when he visited his mom back in Long Island, but he only smoked a few of them, usually in bars, not enough, really, to even be called a smoker. He died, according to his two-line obit, after a short illness, which none of us knew about. We took him for granted.

We take people for granted. Everybody does. My drunk friend beat himself up over it that night. But you can't.

He said, "I'd see that guy and I'd think, that guy'll be here forever."

But that's a lie he told himself. Nobody sees anybody and thinks that. We do take people for granted, not because we're bad, but because you can't go around every fucking day telling every goddamn person you like how much you like them. You can't. It would exhaust you like the air going out of a balloon. And if it didn't, if you did, you would probably be fucking annoying, all hugging everybody arbitrarily all the time.

The mailman, is all we knew that night, looked into his house after his mail had stacked up for a few days. Saw something. Al turned out to be dead. We didn't know any more. I Googled. We had a guy call a guy. The world doesn't start and stop on Al, but, y'know, fucking respect. I played "Honea Path," on the jukebox at the bar, for him, a story about a South Carolina textile strike, where townspeople working for the company gunned down townspeople demanding a decent living for their labor.

"The old men just holdin' their own 'gainst the union,
the one Mr. Roosevelt says is our right."

FDR saved us. Al tried to keep his ghost haunting us, the way some of these people traipsing around Iowa should. We need them to, in these days when the Old Men see fit to keep taking from us. My hand shook with the smoke in it, just for a verse and a chorus, while I watched the stray car go by on Burlington. It shook because I felt it for the first time, because that, the stuff in the song, is what Al spent his life in service of, the unions and what they were supposed to mean for all of us.

That doesn't just mean working people, fuck you if you think that. However they went astray, the unions, at their best, worked for everyone, and still can, and he knew that, and never stopped trying. Priorities, motherfucker. Don't you fucking forget it. Don't you goddamn dare.

The best people understand that shit isn't all about them.

I tell Al, knowing he can't hear and that it's a stupid symbolic act, that I try to, and that I know there is still work to be done.

NOV. 3, 2007
PSEUDOCON WHORES FEINSTEIN AND SCHUMER SELL US, AND RULE OF LAW, OUT If you live in California or New York, your lip-trembling, Jello-spined, triangulating, steaming heaps of "Democratic" senators are about to roll over, arch their asses and present, once again, to the most odious, venal, bloodthirsty and a-moral presidential administration in the history of the republic.

Pseudocon douchebags Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer have said they will vote to confirm Michael Mukasey as the top law enforcement officer of the land, a man who has unabashedly equivocated on whether water-boarding, a form of torture, is torture and whether it can be employed by agents of the United States in spite of the law of the land prohibiting its use; and, worse, a man who intimated, upon committee questioning, that the president of the United States is not subject to the law of the United States.

Olbermann offers the best breakdown of it here.

Lest there be any doubt as to what constitutes torture -- as if it is not a fucking indictment of this nation's leadership that a supposedly civilized society is even having this conversation -- in that report, John Dean, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative and former Nixon administration counsel, refers to precedent law in the wake of World War II. In one particular case in 1947, the US tried and convicted Japanese officer Yukio Asano with war crimes for waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. In that case, according to the Washington Post, "the subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk." For this crime, Asano received a sentence of 15 years of hard labor.

Here's the deal: if it has been found to be illegal and a crime against humanity by our own legal system, applying international law, it doesn't become un-illegal just because some drawling Yalie fuck in a suit says so.

And to simply infer that someone, much less some drawling Yalie fuck in a suit, somehow is immune from said law, can in fact supersede law that this fucking nation has signed off on and been protected by, this is to posit some kind of superhumanity. In essence, this whole round of bullshit, then, is to establish, engrain and enforce a stratum of master-race, unanswerable to any authority, unaccountable to any law, freed by some kind of divine right to rape, pillage, imprison, bomb, invade, occupy the Sudetenland, at whim.

Go visit a foreign country, find a child, rape it bloody, eviscerate it with a hunting knife, murder its family, then burn its village to cinders, leaving nothing but carbonized corpses. It's okay. You're American. You can get away with it, long as you wear the right tie and know the right handshake and wear a flag pin on your lapel. Laws don't apply to you. The president will get the attorney general he wants, one who will use the Constitution to wipe proper Yalie shit from proper Yalie asses. The Geneva Protocols remain "quaint."

We are roundly fucked, moreso than ever before, and have been ushered knowingly to the Wrong Side of History, thanks in no small part to the craven kowtowing of sniveling sell-out bitches like Schumer and Feinstein -- whose crimes are worse, because they know better and nevertheless do its opposite.

If anyone finds this as unacceptable as all common sense dictates they might, and if you live in California or New York, or even if not, contact Feinstein here and Schumer here. Make it clear that you will encourage your state party to field an actual Democrat to replace them at the next opportunity, and that they fucking suck.

OCT. 30, 2007
BUSH, RUMMY, CHENEY, WELCOME TO YOUR WELL-DESERVED FUTURE Rumsfeld runs from detainment on war-crimes charges like the chickenhawk chickenshit he is. What's the old fascist law-and-order catchphrase? "If you didn't do anything wrong, you've got nothing to fear."

BWAH-hahahahahahahahahahaha!!! Ah, neocons, retirement will not be kind to you. You are about to enter the rarified realm of Kissinger, Pinochet and Barbie. Live in fear, you fucks!

RUMSFELD FLEES FRANCE, FEARING ARREST

IPS News. Posted October 29, 2007
Former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fled France today fearing arrest over charges of "ordering and authorizing" torture of detainees at both the American-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the U.S. military's detainment facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, unconfirmed reports coming from Paris suggest.

U.S. embassy officials whisked Rumsfeld away yesterday from a breakfast meeting in Paris organized by the Foreign Policy magazine after human rights groups filed a criminal complaint against the man who spearheaded President George W. Bush's "war on terror" for six years.

Under international law, authorities in France are obliged to open an investigation when a complaint is made while the alleged torturer is on French soil.

According to activists in France, who greeted Rumsfeld, shouting "murderer" and "war criminal" at the breakfast meeting venue, U.S. embassy officials remained tight-lipped about the former defense secretary's whereabouts citing "security reasons".

Anti-torture protesters in France believe that the defense secretary fled over the open border to Germany, where a war crimes case against Rumsfeld was dismissed by a federal court. But activists point out that under the Schengen agreement that ended border checkpoints across a large part of the European Union, French law enforcement agents are allowed to cross the border into Germany in pursuit of a fleeing fugitive . . .

Maybe he'll be able to catch one of those extraordinary rendition flights to the relative safety of Syria or Romania, where the helpful CIA asset staff greets you by hooking a field-phone hooked up to your balls.

OCT. 22, 2007
THE MORE SHIT DOESN’T CHANGE: WATCH PILGER’S NEW DOCUMENTARY NOW I started calling this shit the "new Cold War" back in 2002 -- an institutionally fear-galvanized permanent war economy, spectral villains hiding in every shadow, carte blanche for cynical, rapacious, war-profiteering capitalist shitheels -- just all fucking kinds of nostalgia.

Pilger draws the parallels deftly in his new doc The War on Democracy, which you can watch for free here. Note ex-spook Phil Agee's testimony in particular.

This should be required viewing by the time your punkass children are in high school. If we ever actually addressed the issue of this country's institutional Alzheimer's, we wouldn't have to wake up and smell the bullshit 3,800 uniformed corpses and half a million civilian ones into the enterprise.

OCT. 19, 2007
ONE DEM FINALLY DARES CALL A TURD "SHIT" There is not one goddamn whit of difference between the Republicans' craven veto of the SCHIP bill and their trillion-dollar boondoggle in Iraq. One informs the other.

Pete Stark (D-CA) finally nailed it from the floor of the House, and naturally, *gasp* the fascist fucks are bellowing "treason" because somebody with a public microphone finally drew the dotted line that a freshman social studies student with rudimentary grasp of cause-and-effect, not to mention of motive, could draw in a two-page handwritten report.

It is the explicit intent of the dogmatic right in this country, stated over and over again, to erode even categorically successful government social programs down to nothing, and if they have to do that by braying the "exigency" of funding a perfidious war, all the better.

Giuliani's longtime shadow cabinet, the Manhattan Institute, is such a fanatical engine of regressive Chicago School orthodoxy that it would privatize the fucking fire department and city parks if it could get away with it. While aping selfsame calls for winnowed government, the architects of the Bush administration, the Project for a New American Century, advocated curiously expensive agenda. As the Project for an Old American Century blog summed up recently, PNAC as early as 1997 advocated: "'pre-emptively' attacking countries that were of no imminent danger to the U.S., abrogating treaties when they conflicted with U.S. goals, making sure no other nation (or organization, such as the United Nations) could ever achieve power-parity with the U.S., installing U.S.-friendly governments to do America's will, expressing a willingness to use tactical nuclear weapons . . . All of these extreme PNAC suggestions, once regarded as lunatic, were enshrined in 2002 as official U.S. policy in the National Security Strategy of the United States of America . . ."

Cut taxes on the wealthy, invade, bolster military budget above Cold War levels, cut more taxes on the wealthy, cry poverty on social needs, harvest impoverished children to do more invading. If you've read that book before, it's called The Prince and it is shit.

No fucking wonder the world hates us, we let James Bond villains run the fucking country. Note to candidates roaming my state: If you're not as pissed off as Pete Stark and willing to state as much, you don't fucking deserve the Democratic nomination.

SEPT. 26, 2007
BUSH CHALLENGES NATIONS OF WORLD TO KICK HIS ASS Yesterday at the UN, titular US president George W. Bush issued a challenge to the nations of the world:

"This great institution must work for great purposes," Bush said, "to free people from tyranny and violence, hunger and disease, illiteracy and ignorance, and poverty and despair. Every member of the United Nations must join in this mission of liberation.

"First, the mission of the United Nations requires liberating people from tyranny and violence. The first article of the Universal Declaration begins, 'All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.' The truth is denied by terrorists and extremists who kill the innocent with the aim of imposing their hateful vision on humanity. The followers of this violent ideology are a threat to civilized people everywhere. All civilized nations must work together to stop them."

Inspired by his speech, UN delegates applauded roundly, then formed a circle around Bush and beat the shit out of him.

In my brain.

I fucking love shit like this. It's like Emperor Palpatine calling for a ban on Death Stars.

GIULIANI 9/11s the 9/11 for 9/11, SHOULD KILL SELF Just when you thought you could never see a more cretinous, cynical, exploitive, corrupt self-dicklicking errant-sperm of a Republican . . .

Olbermann reports that a Giuliani fundraiser in Palo Alto, NM, was charging $9.11 a plate. Get it? Heh. Jon Stewart just made fun of him for his shameless, hackneyed exploitation of the fucking cosmic accident of his mayoralty during the plane bombing of New York. But that this little blackshirt fuckfist can one-up satire at his expense only shows he isn't fit to be elected lunch-helper at a group-home.

Awesome, Rudy. Trumpet yourself as the champion of the firefighters who died, only to have the union take a giant shit on you in public for your textbook "conservative" austere underfunding of them, before and after. And why stop there -- now you put an actual price on each body turned to ashes in the flames of Lower Manhattan, because, dammit, yay for you, you talk tough and happened to be there.

This, according to the my friend Megan, "is equivalent to a rape victim using coverage of her rapist's trial to pick up men."

Just an FYI, I lived three miles away back then, under the plume, all of the three-to-four months it wafted over Brooklyn. My lungs most likely still host the toxic particulate matter that will probably kill me, eventually, the stuff that is even now killing selfless workers at the pile, the ones who have been short-changed by "conservative" austere government, who decided that all the money earmarked for New York after the attacks would be better spent killing the Muslims who had fuckall to do with them, like Rudy wants to keep doing. And you know about the toxic particulate matter, the stuff killing all those people, right, Rudy? It's the stuff that you and the EPA told everybody, in the months after the attacks, wasn't there.

Yeah, here's some more insider info: up to September 11, 2001, most everybody thought Giuliani was a draconian, officious, self-righteous, corporate-asshole-spelunking prick. Even if "9/11 changed everything," guess it couldn't change that.

Would that he were a few blocks southwest that morning.

SEPT. 23, 2007
HEY, I WOKE UP TODAY SO I'M 400 BUCKS POORER Dear Democratic Candidates Now Touring My State:

A quick note to point out that insurance companies suck. Mine, for example, just upped my premium $400 a year out of the blue, citing as the reason that I just got older from my current age to my current age, which actually occurs every fucking day I wake up. I understand this is an inconvenience to them, so I've decided to make it it an inconvenience for you, you mealy-mouthed dissembling prostrate wussbuckets.

All your proposals to help the 47 million Americans now uninsured, whose ranks I am about to join, and those, like me at the moment, getting cornholed by the occasional form-letter, seem to run through insurance companies and make them more money. This seems curious given the fact that you're taking money from them like any other Republican whose tonsils have been battered like punching bags by corporate cocks. This seems even funnier, as your frontrunner, the Blessed Lady of Our Sell-out Pseudocons, the one ostensibly to offer us a "change" from kleptocrat business-fellating coozebanes who have run the fucking country into the ground, seems to mainline insurance company money like a heroin addict with a poppy-field inheritance and access to an IV-drip setup.

As of the first quarter of 2007 [Clinton] was the recipient of more health-care-industry donations than any presidential candidate—Democrat or Republican—according to a recent study by the Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy.--Newsweek, Sept. 17, 2007

My suggestion is you actually let Kucinich debate you so you imaginationless dicktoasts might understand that "change" would actually involve proposals to fucking end current, destructive patterns of behavior instead of just, say, doing a little less heroin.

Put another way, I'm not sure how you solve a fucking murder by recruiting the fucking murderer to help investigate it.

I know, I know, you're busy and all, but, um, I don't know if anybody's pointed this out, but, y'know, there's a world to be saved from the forces of fucking darkness! Get checked out on the basic tenets of reason and step up to the plate or fuck off.

Thanks

Matthew

SEPT. 20, 2007
GOP BROWNSHIRTS KEEPING AN EYE ON OUR "KIND" The following is a letter I sent to the website of the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, the Stepford Candidate.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR, CONCORD MONITOR - On Sept. 3, I attended a house party for Mitt Romney in Ashland. While standing quietly waiting for Romney to appear, a gentleman approached me and said if I started any trouble I would be thrown out of the event.

He stated that although the event was open to the public, it was still private property and I could be asked to leave at any point. He reiterated I would be tossed out because my "kind" weren't welcome at such an event.

I am an independent voter who was wearing a pair of jeans and a gray Bedford, Mass., sweatshirt to show my hometown pride. I was offended this gentleman would make such a blanket assumption about me. When I asked where he got the idea I would cause trouble, he stated it was his "intuition." He said he would keep his eye on me. All the while, he used his 6-foot frame to intimidate my 5-foot-4-inch body.

MICHELLE CUNHA
Hill, NH

Just wondering what her "kind" might be. Any explanation welcome. Thanks.

Let you know if I hear anything back.

SEPT. 13, 2007
CAUSE & EFFECT, 3 YEARS AFTER
[SOMETHING I WROTE IN MY OLD BAND THE HANGDOGS' BLOG, BACK IN 2004. I'M REPOSTING IT BECAUSE I-TOLD-YOU-SO-YOU-DOUCHE CANNOT BE REITERATED ENOUGH IN DAYS LIKE THESE.]

Well, a somewhat enlightened civilization was fun while it lasted. But if we read the writing on the wall, we can only really speak of it in fond remembrance at this point. The Christians might as well pool their celebrated numbers and rename the place New Jerusalem and the Department of Fatherland Security the Ministry of Inquisition.

We, as loyal opposition, now have a duty to fall in line with whatever Malthusian evisceration of society our leaders command so they can afford sending more of your kids and neighbors off for more bloody subjugation of more countries full of people who don't think like our leaders. Good fucking luck. Good luck reversing the Scopes-Monkey Trial and your delusions that children and Ready Reserve insurance salesmen are being harvested to fight for "democracy" instead of rich guys' stock portfolios, cross your fingers and rub splinters of the True Cross -- doesn't matter. Actions have consequences, and millions of chanting, braying, mindwiped minions doing whatever stiffs in suits tell them most likely won't work out any better for us than it has any of the other God-blessed empires of history. And there's MILLIONS of us to make your life a living hell in the meantime.

Do your worst. Racist Christian fanatic Bob Jones bids you! "Don't equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ . . . Undoubtedly, you will have opportunity to appoint many conservative judges and exercise forceful leadership with the Congress in passing legislation that is defined by biblical norm regarding the family, sexuality, sanctity of life, religious freedom, freedom of speech, and limited government. You have four years -- a brief time only -- to leave an imprint for righteousness upon this nation that brings with it the blessings of Almighty God. . . If you have weaklings around you who do not share your biblical values, shed yourself of them. Conservative Americans would love to see one president who doesn't care whether he is liked, but cares infinitely that he does right."

Jones, president of racist Christian fanatic college Bob Jones University, wrote this to the president not long before the latter indeed shed himself of weaklings like Colin Powell, y'know, the national hero. Coincidence? He's right that I despise him, though I'm not sure how Christ became Bush's in particular, since he doesn't seem to follow Jesus teachings any more than any other Christian. And in spite of the (still tentative) 49 percent of American voters who maybe have some small issue with Jones' sentiments, post-election posturing has made it clear: we're second-class citizens. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, the thinly veiled lobby for rapacious capitalist assholes, suggested that, by dint of Bush's blockbuster 51 percent mandate, the opposition's natural course is to know their place. Once Democrats are "comfortable in their minority status," Norquist said, "they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they've been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don't go around peeing on the furniture and such."

And by peeing on the furniture, he of course means allowing reason to weigh into human discourse. No threat of that as dusk of the new American Dark Ages descends. Federally-bankrolled youth abstinence advocacy programs now teach that touching someone's genitals can result in pregnancy and perspiration and tears can transmit HIV. Homosexuals are to be bashed liberally, as it were, and further legislated against. Bush buddy Gerald Allen, a state representative in Alabama, is now waging a campaign to have all literary works with even intimations of same-sex ardor stricken from public school and university libraries -- no more Tennessee Williams, T.H. White, Oscar Wilde for you, literature students, who knows if you'll read it and ass-fuck a boy the same way you play your video games and then go kill people with plasma rifles. Shit, while we're at it, might as well burn anything even written by queers, because who knows what fag code Truman Copote and Gore Vidal and a third of anybody who ever wrote anything might've inserted in the subtext. Best not take any chances with the "homosexual agenda," as Allen calls it, since they've apparently gotten more organized since getting the shit beat out of them in high school by troglodyte thugs like, well, Gerald Allen.

Not only that, according to a Newsweek poll, the "moral values" that (still tentatively) won the election for Bush seem to show a bipartisan consensus on turning the clock back to the days of a geocentric universe. Sixty-two percent Americans, the poll found, favor teaching "creation science" along with evolution in public schools, and 43 percent favor teaching creation science INSTEAD OF evolution in public schools, and presumably this is a national poll, not just of hillbillies and stoic Krauts from Georgia and Kansas. But just for good measure, Georgia politicians hope to stamp new science text-books with a sticker admonishing them that evolution is "only a theory" -- which it isn't, its apparent suspension in America not withstanding.

The fun bit of sophistry here is "Creation Science." Creation SCIENCE. Bless you your wide-eyed adherence to your fairy tales, but here's an idea for 62 percent of Americans and I mean this sincerely: fuck YOU. Really, fuck you. Fuck you, you fucking child. You wanna smear shit on the walls and call it your God, fine, just don't smear shit on MY walls because I pay the rent here and my nose still works, dumb fucking shaved monkeys. You can call creationism "science" all you want, it's the same thing as calling voodoo "practicing medicine." You want to argue some kind of Christian mandate as your justification, fuck you TWICE, because the sheer number of people drowning women in the river to prove they aren't witches doesn't validate the act.

Unless Bush, Rove, et al. say it does, right? One senior White House aide admonished Times magazine reporter Ron Suskind for living "in what we call the reality-based community, [where people] believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality . . . That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

John Steinberg deftly deconstructed this beshitted purview at Rawstory.com. "A core tenet of post-Enlightenment Western society is that a rational person will drop a hypothesis that is contradicted by good empirical evidence," Steinberg wrote. "It is the scientific method enshrined by Descartes and Bacon, and, for good or ill, it has given us every scrap of technology and science. But . . . fundamentalist religion rejects reason. Reason embraces the possibility of error; absolutist religion must deny it. By definition, Fundamentalists maintain belief by rejecting the data . . . [F]undamentalists create belief systems that banish critical thinking. As the Catholic Church learned hundreds of years ago, reason cannot be tethered to dogma, and inevitably contradicts it. Fundamentalist leaders know this, and tie reason to the devil instead . . . The decision to invade Iraq is now the most obvious assault on reality-based decision-making, but there are many others. Global warming is denied in the face of virtual consensus among scientists; billions of dollars have been transferred to defense contractors building missile defense systems that most experts agree will be useless; energy policy assumes infinite resources; environmental policy suspends belief in cause and effect. The old separation between church and state has become a separation between church and reality, and government increasingly stands opposite reality."

But, hey, go nuts. Not that you already haven't. I prowl around conservative message boards now and then, so I know the shrillest of these still consider all who oppose them some kind of remnant fifth column from the Cold War. Without resources of a monolithic communist apparatus or even hot Russian chicks to seduce us, we're still somehow doing Joe Stalin's bidding, and not just because we don't want some capitalist asshole privatizing our waterworks, and not just because we think you need to have reasons, not just flags, to go to war -- according to the international laws we drafted and signed off on -- but because they can't parse a world without someone to hate. And they, the message-boarders, have made it clear that those who don't fall down the line of order, decency and piety have no place in their America, and only because of our "freedom" are people like me free to be a godless, reasonable asshole who doesn't believe every hunk of bullshit his pale white uberklass tells him. Or, that is, I'll be free until the next terrorist act, when martial law will be declared. Then I'll get mine, won't I? That's what they say. They can taste it. So what's the difference to me between "the terrorists" and white American Christians? They both think what they're told, have God on their side, hate me and want me dead.

So I say it loud, fuck you. Loyal opposition? In your dreams, cooze. Until the First Amendment disappears from history -- most likely wiped away in the night like something on the Animal Farm barn -- fuck you, in song, in verse, on the radio, from the mountaintops. Mindfuck your children, keep them away from the horrible radio, rational thought in books and images of death on TV, let them listen only to Radio Disney, they will still hear these words, "fuck you," and when they dare repeat them, they'll be astounded and awakened to find God didn't strike them dead. It's called cognitive dissonance. Look it up. As Stanhope says, when you spot some bullshit, you start spotting it all. They will curse you, eventually, for your lies and your repression, for telling them state violence is noble and clean and then watching their buddy come home from Iraq in gobbets, and they'll listen to non-government-approved music and they'll vote for anybody you don't. Loving Gods and noble causes won't match up with "nigger" jokes and concentration camps at Guantanamo and arbitrary military adventures to fill your fucking SUV tank and beating up queers, and we'll be whispering these unqualifiable dichotomies into their ears at night, suggesting that perhaps reason and common sense would better ground a society than hatred, fear and superstition.

We don't need to take up arms, or secede to Canada, to fuck you -- corrupt systems rot themselves. People figure it out when they get hungry and their sons die for no good fucking reason. Actions have consequences. Viva la Resistance, bitches.

SEPT. 6, 2007
CAN BUSH BE INDICTED UNDER RICO STATUTES AS WELL AS WAR CRIMES?
This man's name is Stan Goff. He will discursively kick your ass, eloquently positing measured, studied and prescient warning to all young people considering military service in the current national milieu. He is a left activist, author, blogger and a retired Special Forces master sergeant, serving from 1970 through 1996 in Vietnam, Guatemala, Grenada, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, Somalia and Haiti.

Just for edification, when we wacky lefties refer to our reigning corporate-whore leadership as "fascists," it is not unconsidered, nor screedish hyperbole. Policymaking in the blind interest of a lordly golf-happy uberclass, ceding them rapacious economic privilege at the expense of the balance of the population, not to mention to the nation's very infrastructure (saayyy, mines, bridges, Louisianan cities), activist government reduced to nil -- these formed the very specific mission statement of the coup d'etat plotted in the early 1930s by the creme de la U.S. business community.

The net yield of the coup, as recorded in Congressional investigation, was to be FDR's murder and the establishment of a fascist government in the United States. Its alleged sponsors were the House of Morgan, DuPont, General Motors, Remington Arms and sundry Wall Street brokerages.

That's just history, which you can read more about here, among other places, or hear the recent BBC radio recollection of it here, which both accesses the Congressional Record of the investigation and raises the specter of the involvement of one Prescott Bush, grandfather to the current president.

This is worth unearthing in this context because of the man who the business community chose to lead the coup, and also the man who blew the whistle on it, Smedley Butler. The retired Marine general and two-time Congressional Medal of Honor-winner would seem a curious candidate for the barons of industry to pose dictatorial straw man, given his own catharses as to his storied multi-decade career.

Butler, after his retirement, in the throes of the Depression, began giving speeches to veterans groups, which he later put down in the short book War Is a Racket. He dared make this remarkable, curiously non-commie analysis of what, and whom, he fought for all those years, curiously before the latter came to woo him to destroy that which he was supposedly fighting:

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints."

Juxtapose this with Goff's own remarkable words, see how little fucking juxtaposition one actually needs to do. Then go back in and fill all the above mentioned company names with Halliburton, KBR, Enron, Exxon, Rand, Diebold, Occidental, Carlyle, Blackwater, ad nauseum.

Then you tell me what's changed, particularly as to the agenda of the uberclass.

JULY 22, 2007
OMFG, CAPITALISM IS SOOOO FUCKING AWESOME!Read this shit and god bless motherfuckin America.

Guess all that stuff that was supposed to "trickle-down" from our beknighted lairds, per the long-beshitted orthodoxy, is trickling down to the Caymans. To whore my own shit: "Didn't say capitalism doesn't work. Just gets fucked up by capitalists."

PRE-EMPTIVE COMMENT RESPONSE TO OBJECTIVISTS: Shut the fuck up.

--------------

MUSIC UPDATE: Speaking of which, if anybody gives a shit, I've posted a rough demo of a new song called "One Big Union" here on the myspace profile page.

IRAQ-MINUS-64, TONKIN-MINUS-25 You decide the relevance of this:

On August 31 1939, Gestapo operatives raided a German radio tower in the German state of Upper Silesia. They had commandeered a German citizen, Franciszek Honiok, arrested previously for suspected Polish sympathies, dressed him in a Polish army uniform, and brought him with them to the town of Gleiwitz, near the Polish border. There, at a German radio station, they gave Honlok a lethal injection, then discharged several rounds into his corpse.

The murder was one component of Operation Himmler, a deliberative and "patriotic" execution of 21 separate, concurrent but similar missions, undertaken by the Hitler administration and very soon to become the "spark" that ignited World War II, according to the sworn affidavit of the Gleiwitz operation's commander, Gestapo officer Alfred Naujocks, at the post-war war-crimes trials in Nuremberg.

Hitler's men had primed the milieu with months of false stories, planted with Germany's major media and reported dutifully, about the Polish government's oppression of ethnic Germans within its borders and incitement of ethnic Poles in German territories like Silesia.

The Nazis in Gleiwitz, Naujocks stated, seized the radio station and broadcast a Polish-language message calling for Poles in Silesia to rise up against German rule. The prisoner Honlok's staged lifeless husk was presented to the press as proof-positive of a Polish military raiding party carrying out "Polish aggression."

On Sept. 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. According to Wikipedia, "Against all the evidence, pro-Nazi Germans believed they were fighting a justified defensive war until the last days of the Second World War."

Weigh.
Measure.
Discern.

OLD ROADSIGNS TO BETTER DAYS

Whenever you advise a ruler in the way of Tao,
Counsel him not to use force to conquer the universe.
For this would only cause resistance.
Thorn bushes spring up wherever the army has passed.
Lean years follow in the wake of a great war.
Just do what needs to be done.
Never take advantage of power.

Achieve results,
But never glory in them.
Achieve results,
But never boast.
Achieve results,
But never be proud.
Achieve results,
Because this is the natural way.
Achieve results,
But not through violence.

Force is followed by loss of strength.
This is not the way of Tao.
That which goes against the Tao
comes to an early end.

-Tao Te Ching, Chapter 30, as translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English

With props to Simply Appalling.

JULY 11, 2007
THE MAJORITY BY THEIR SILENCE WILL PAY FOR DAYS LIKE THESE And these kids will get caught in the crossfire, or end up in Guantanamo. This gave me a tingle and made my cheeks burn a little. I want to hug every one of these little monkeys. This by way of the ever-awesome Amy Goodman over at Truthdig:

President Bush got a lesson from a group of recent high school graduates. They were Presidential Scholars, a program designed "to recognize and provide leadership development experiences for some of America's most outstanding graduating high-school seniors."

The 141 Presidential Scholars were being honored at the White House. One of them, Mari Oye, from Wellesley, Mass., describes what happened: "The president walked in and gave us a short speech saying that as we went on into our careers, it was important to treat others as we would like to be treated. And he told us that we would have to make choices we would be able to live with for the rest of our lives. And so, I said to the president, 'Several of us made a choice, and we would like you to have this,' and handed him the letter." It was a letter Mari had handwritten. It read:

"As members of the Presidential Scholars class of 2007, we have been told that we represent the best and brightest of our nation. Therefore, we believe we have a responsibility to voice our convictions. We do not want America to represent torture. We urge you to do all in your power to stop violations of the human rights of detainees, to cease illegal renditions and to apply the Geneva Convention to all detainees, including those designated enemy combatants."

The letter was signed by close to 50 of the students, more than a third of the Presidential Scholars.

Mari described Bush's reaction to the letter: "He read down the letter. He got to the part about torture. He looked up, and he said, 'America doesn't torture people.' And I said, 'If you look specifically at what we said, we said, we ask you to cease illegal renditions. Please remove your signing statement to the McCain anti-torture bill.'

"At that point, he just said, 'America doesn't torture people' again."

In fact, after Bush signed the bill that outlawed the torture of detainees last year, he quietly issued a "signing statement" reserving the right to bypass the law, as he has more than 1,100 times, issuing more signing statements than all other U.S. presidents combined.

Mari knows a little bit about detention . . . "I [told the president] that for me personally, the issue of detainee rights also had a lot of importance, because my grandparents had been interned during World War II for being Japanese-American."

Her mother, Willa Michener . . . was a Presidential Scholar—40 years ago, in 1968—and had wanted to confront President Lyndon Johnson with her opposition to the Vietnam War. She deferred to a teacher, who Mari said "stressed it was important to stay quiet when you're in the presence of the president." Willa Michener has regretted it since, Mari said.

Mari called her mother as soon as she left the White House to tell her what she had done. "She was actually in the Holocaust Museum in the last room when I called her to say that we had given the letter. She didn't know there was a letter beforehand. ... And she said that she walked out into the bright sunlight with tears streaming down her face, but since a lot of people walk out of the Holocaust Museum that way, you know, no one noticed anything out of the ordinary."

Another Presidential Scholar, Leah Anthony Libresco, from Long Island, N.Y., [who] helped write the letter, [said] "If I'm going to be in the room with the president, I've got to say something, because silence betokens consent, and there's a lot going on I don't want to consent to" . . .

Afraid that Mari's letter would be confiscated before she was able to deliver it to the president, Leah had a handwritten copy of it—yes, up her sleeve. She handed it to a reporter, as she said later in a blog, "at The No Child Left Behind photo op for which the Scholars were apparently supposed to be a backdrop."

The kids are no doubt on a watchlist now, but if that shit doesn't make you feel your own heart for at least a couple beats, you're either dead, a Nazi or a fucking accessory.

JUNE 23, 2007
MEIN TOTAL KAMPF, OMG! I'm going to try to do the math as I go along here, because it still confounds me: some of the wealthiest douchebags in the world, seeking to capitalize on the criminal behavior of their douchebag daughter, who was born into inordinate wealth and is now world-renowned for nothing other than squandering her inordinate, unearned wealth on shitty clubs, getting tagged by the cops and fucking on camera in probably the least erotic porno ever made, were seeking to ransom up to a million bucks more out of venerable US "news" organizations to tell of her "experience" in stir -- in complete contravention of said news organizations' reputed journalistic ethics -- because her 45-day multiple DUI/parole violation sentence (with email privileges!) is, what, our post-modern remake of Chekhov's The Cell?

The networks discovered some integrity only after their unctuous bullshit got leaked, and yet they still wonder how we increasingly think they're a fucking joke and Jon Stewart is fast becoming the most respected newsman in the country. Let's go to the blockquote, courtesy of my buddies at Prorev:

STEVE GORMAN, REUTERS - Paris Hilton appeared to be a celebrity without a spotlight on Friday after two major U.S. television networks snubbed the hotel heiress they initially fought over for a first post-jail interview. An ABC executive said his network declined interview offers from the multimillionaire socialite after Hilton and her mother, Kathy, personally sought to secure a deal in a flurry of telephone calls to ABC News veteran Barbara Walters.

Meanwhile, rival network NBC issued a statement saying it, too, had informed Hilton's representatives that it was "no longer interested in pursing an interview with her." Contrary to reports of a $1 million deal in the works, NBC said it was "never going to pay them any money." CBS News, which had not been deeply involved in the initial tug-of-war for a Hilton interview, likewise said it was not interested. . .

Paid interviews, while routine in some countries, are taboo in U.S. journalism because they might be an incentive for news sources to embellish or fabricate information. But "licensing" deals providing compensation for the rights to personal material such as video footage or photos have grown more common. Both ABC and NBC News have insisted [lying in the fucking process-MG] they do not pay for interviews and that neither had a deal in place with Hilton.

But an ABC executive who spoke on condition of anonymity said the Hiltons informed the network earlier this week that they had opted for NBC because of a more lucrative offer to license accompanying family photos and video for up to $1 million, compared with $100,000 offered by ABC.

Wonder how much she'll get for the book rights? And how many fucking people will starve to death in the time it takes her to write it entirely in Txtmsg. Wait, who am I kidding, she has people to write shit for her entirely in Txtmsg. Either way, it'll totally be like MLK's Letter from the Birmingham Jail, except, y'know, with the whole anti-masterrace, progress-through-struggle message utterly reversed.

Yeah, the Bolsheviks did some stupid shit, but you gotta hand it to em, least they lined up their Romanovs against a wall and slaughtered them.

MAY 30, 2007
ONCE MORE UNTO THE REICHSTAG On the last stretch of drive home, through a Nebraska and Western Iowa downpour, I finally got to hear some radio clips of Monica Goodling's testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, and I have to say, are you people on fucking drugs?

I'm gone five fucking weeks, and you haven't yet stormed the steps of the fucking Capitol and demanded impeachment not only of Bush but the banishment from public service and subsequent indictment of every kowtowing Christian psychotic crony who ever shook his fucking hand?

Who the fuck is Monica Goodling, and how does this sorority-giggle-voiced bimbo ever get into a position to weigh, much less judge and vet, the highest practitioners of LAW in this fucking country? Even given the growing evidence that Bush has yet to actually win one fucking election in his epic Gibbon-esque Decline-of-the-Roman-Empire evisceration of this Republic, how could we have devolved to where even 24 percent of the populace, much less 49, said, "Yeah, these gibbering cultist, armband-adorned, flag-draped fascist baboons are really good people to give license to guide the lives of 300 million people and access to unquantifiable ordnance to wield against their neighbors?"

Who the FUCK is this Neocon Barbie? Who the fuck has been given control of "justice" in this country that this babbling dissembling Overland Parkish cheerleader princess is a lawyer, much less one given immeasurable influence over the future of federal prosecution in this country, instead of some fucking Desperate Housewife real estate agent bumbling and jerking her Village-of-the-Damnedesque master-race children through the mall parking lot in an H2? [Settle down, feminists, we're talking about their women, not women in general; think Ann Coulter and seethe with me] This pinched little deb graduated from Messiah College and got her Law Degree from Regent University, an "educational" institution run by Pat Robertson, the billionaire diamond magnate and a lifelong friend of the most racist neo-Klan white supremacy groups that continue to dull and cow the minds of that stolid, unmovable, unthinking 24 percent, oh, and also an influential Christian "leader." Getting a law degree from fundamentalist Christians is like getting a degree in quantum physics from Barnum & Bailey Clown College.

That these assholes decided to fire Republicans they didn't deem neocon enough is an egregious enough example of zealotry, but look at who they've got doing the dirty work:

All the tightwound uppercrust prigs we all fucking hated in high school! We have yielded our guidance as a society to everyone who never fucking invited us to the party, because we weren't white enough or weren't Christian enough or weren't Country Club enough or weren't jock enough!

Republicans, I dearly love some of you fuckers out there -- you know who you are -- but is that what you were shooting for? All those wealthy pricks who, back in the day, knew exactly what they wanted to do and grade-grubbed and applied to all their dream colleges early their junior year and had their whole fucking course curriculum and grad school planned before they got or gave their first handjob, the ones who shat on your lo-brau beer parties while they scored their Yalie older brother's coke, but it was okay because God loved them and they believed Jesus died for their sins -- if not those of others, of lessers -- -- these cunts are the ones you thought it would be a swell idea to give unchecked fucking power to?

Nerds-in-crime Rove and Gonzalez and their pale, sexless True Believer henchkids Sampson, McNulty, Monica Fucking Goodling -- these were snooty pricks you wanted to beat up in school, and I know because I was kind of one of them (without the money!) These were the people whose intrepid mission in the service of God and wealth and privelege allowed them to bypass anything resembling the actual life as experienced by the grand masses they hoped to lord over, to usher us unto their grand Christian design, removed of the plague of reason and science that might otherwise guide us on, um, any other course but fucking national and global disaster!

They had pictures of Ronald Reagan on their dorm-room walls! Next to the ones of Jesus! And Ivan Fucking Boesky! I don't even care if you like Reagan and Jesus -- I kind of like Jesus, I think, just the one I read about is different from the one they worship -- the point is they didn't have rock stars and naked chicks on their walls, and these are people you trust to understand the plight of the hoi polloi? These are the stolid tie-wearing/sweatervest fucks in your political philosophy classes who raised their hands all the time and rationalized Machiavelli, who bitched at you to turn down your stereo and who had jobs waiting for them when they got out of school -- people who never once had a second-thought of openmindedness, who never once re-examined their worldviews, who never struggled with meaning and purpose, you know, like fucking people do.

These were people who went on to be the footsoldiers of campaign chicanery and dirty tricks, accusing McCain of having a black bastard child, fucking with voter rolls in Ohio, justifying any scurrilous means to subvert actual democratic processes in the name of their Godly agenda. Hell, one of the pricks Rove/Gonzalez/McNulty/Goodling put into a US Attorney's job was Tim Griffin, a Machiavellian little Bush True Believer who helped the administration winnow minority soldier's absentee ballots out of voting pools, via a patently illegal process called voter "caging." Goodling testified to her and her bosses' knowledge of Griffin's involvement in the process on the Hill, dimwittedly blowing the whistle on a criminal felony, which, ahem, Griffin, in his new ill-gotten job, would now be charged with investigating. So, yeah, all their bullshit about "supporting the troops" only goes as far as those troops' constitutional right to vote, a fetid little administration secret laid bare by Greg Palast, who actually obtained hundreds of the subpoenaed emails the White House has still somehow "misplaced."

Yup, your little blackshirts have done you proud, you fucktards (even the ones I love). If this mincing pack of pseudocon Royal Democrats had any balls, the actual Democrats in the party would be set loose tearing these fratwonks' throats out in Committee and measuring them for prison greys, notwithstanding making their Eva Braun-wannabe patsies like Goodling break just like a little pep squad betty.

MAY 27, 2007
TEEING OFF ON NAZI PIGFUCKERS We've got new HATEMAIL! And from some "white pride" schmuck. Click here for the blistering deconstruction of his tired and hackneyed hatespeech.

MAY 10, 2007
FUCKED AGAIN, AND HE KNOWS EXACTLY WHY: SUITS SUCK Drove out to Hy-Vee at about 1:30 this morning, to stock up some shit for the tour, saw the gas prices jacked up to $3.09. That's what it was in LA a month back, and figuring that California gas prices are always about 40 to 50 cents higher than here, and that I'm on my way to the West Coast, I am utterly fucked. Clubs don't pay guarantees anymore, or even percentages off the drawer (THANK you, Mardi Gras in Dallas, Texas, you are champions of Old School rock & rolldom), and nobody buys records. I'm still in debt up to my eyeballs and going deeper cause I gotta tour the record that put me in debt, and I gotta pay guys to do it and the assholes insist on eating.



The oil companies say it's because they're refitting refineries for summer blends or some shit, which is bullshit, because they've been doing it for two months. It's not Iran, because Iran's not a threat to anyone—according to Pentagon fucking intel—and it's not increased overhead from petro-terrorists like Chavez because he's not a terrorist and he's not a threat to anyone once you get past the rhetoric spewed forth as truth by the capitalist mouthpieces in the mainstream media, not to mention inveterate douchebag Rudy Giuliani.

There is fucking nothing that mitigates this kind of pump-gouging except collusion, which is illegal, and pure fucking profit, which benefits options markets and Bush cronies and almost no one else. Once again, they're jacking us because they can. And like an asshole I gotta drive the band-van and I gotta pay the besuited pricks.

Anybody with kids who want to play rock & roll, give them my email. I'll have a talk with them.

MAY 8, 2007
SPRING TOUR PHOTOS AND MUSINGS AND STUFF ABOUT BASSES SHIT Check out Mick's