REAL ART NEW YEAR'S MUSIC VIDEO PARTY!

Well, with most of my classmates out of town, and no party invitations in my mailbox, I'm spending a quiet New Year's Eve at home this year. Don't worry about me, though. I'm frying up some chicken, and have a bottle of champagne to crack open at the right moment, and I've been watching football all day, which will continue, of course, tomorrow.

But here at Real Art, things are just swinging! I've been hanging onto some cool Youtube music video links for a while, and this seems like the perfect opportunity to post them. So let's rock out for New Year's Real Art style!

First, a rockin' Gypsy-style frenzy from my favorite frenzy band Gogol Bordello! Click here for some Eastern European punk rock, more specifically the song "I Would Never Want to Be Young Again."



Next, everybody's favorite Sesame Street hipster, Mahna Mahna (a.k.a. Bip Bipadotta), singing everybody's favorite hip Sesame Street tune called "Mahna Mahna." Did you know the song first appeared in a European soft-core porn flick? God, I love the weird irony on that! Click here for Muppet hipness.



There's no beatnik like a Muppet beatnik, if you ask me.

Next, a live performance of the Grateful Dead's "US Blues," taped in 1985, on a tour which I got to see when it came through Houston. It's one of my favorites, with a strong hippie-country twang, one of the things I like most about the Dead. Check it out here.



I got for Christmas the album French Kiss by former Fleetwood Mac member Bob Welch. I had been grooving to his stuff on the radio recently, did a little reading about him, and just had to have what's considered to be his best album. Unfortunately, his trademark fusion of late 70s disco and rock isn't quite as good as the critics might suggest. Not bad, really, but not great either. However, I do have for you videos for the best two tracks on the CD, which are great, and with which you may already be familiar.

Click here for "Ebony Eyes."

Click here for "Sentimental Lady."

You know, not only is this second one great, I would go out on a limb and place it in the all time top five for love songs, right up there with "Yesterday" and others. It just makes me melt whenever I hear it, even when it's the backdrop for a caveman commercial.



And what would New Year's be without some jazz? Here's a great performance of Louisana's own Louis Armstrong doing the Brecht and Weill tune "Mac the Knife." God I love this song!



And how about some classy stuff? How about some Miles Davis playing with the Gil Evans Orchestra? Here's a fantastic performance of a song dedicated to one of America's greatest composers called "The Duke."



And while we're talking about the Duke, and just to up the ante on New Year's classiness, here's the man himself, Duke Ellington and his Orchestra, performing the big band standard "Satin Doll." Check it out here (it cuts off during the bass solo, but I think you get enough to get the idea...). Man, if all those dinner jackets the band is wearing doesn't get you into the New Year's spirit, nothing will.



Okay, that's enough for now. Time to go fry up my New Year's chicken! Happy New Year!

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Spring soldier's death raises Iraq toll to 3,000

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

The death of a Texas soldier, announced today by the Pentagon, raised the number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq to at least 3,000 since the war began, according to an Associated Press count.

The grim milestone was crossed on the final day of 2006 and at the end of the deadliest month for the American military in Iraq in the past 12 months. At least 111 U.S. service members were reported to have died in December.

And

Three thousand deaths are tiny compared with casualties in other protracted wars America has fought in the last century. There were 58,000 Americans killed in the Vietnam War, 36,000 in the Korean conflict, 405,000 in World War II and 116,000 in World War I, according to Defense Department figures.

Even so, the steadily mounting toll underscores the relentless violence that the massive U.S. investment in lives and money — surpassing $350 billion — has yet to tame, and may in fact still be getting worse.

A Pentagon report on Iraq said in December that the conflict now is more a struggle between Sunni and Shiite armed groups "fighting for religious, political and economic influence," with the insurgency and foreign terrorist campaigns "a backdrop."

And

Asked about the 3,000 figure, deputy White House press secretary Scott Stanzel said today that the president "will ensure their sacrifice was not made in vain."

Click here for the rest.

Spring isn't too far from Kingwood, where I grew up. When I was in high school, I went to speech tournaments and one act play contests in Spring. I had lots of friends from Spring when I was in college. I even did a couple of shows for a community theater group in Spring in the mid 90s. Like the death of the marine from Kingwood a week or two ago, this guy's death, moreso than the 2,998 other deaths of US service personnel in Iraq, makes me sad. He could have been me if this had been going on twenty years ago, or any of my high school or college pals. His parents and family could have been mine.

As I and others have observed before, the relatively low number of deaths has much more to do with improved field medicine and evacuation technology and procedures--lots of guys who were simply wounded in Iraq would have been dead in past wars. But that doesn't help the people we have lost. Further, for a better idea of how bad things are over there, consider the more than ten thousand wounded, many of whom are disabled or maimed for life. Consider the thousands, many of whom are still on duty, who are now suffering from the very real ravages of post-traumatic stress disorder, which is often incurable, and greatly lowers the quality of life for people suffering it--ever met any crazy Vietnam vets living in the streets?

This is all a travesty. If only these guys really were fighting to protect our freedom, instead of being pawns in an imperialist grand game--Bush really is twisting the knife when he speaks of their "sacrifice;" it was preordained that their deaths would be "in vain." And it's not even our war anymore. As the article observes, it's all about civil war now, with our troops in the crossfire, with the insurgency itself being downgraded to simply "a backdrop"--with that reality in mind, how on earth can anybody even imagine that this somehow has something to do with fighting terrorists?

The reality is that our occupation of Iraq does nothing but create terrorists by pissing off countless Muslims worldwide.

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CONSPIRACY THEORY ROCK

Not being a viewer of Saturday Night Live since around 1981 or so, I completely missed this clip the one and only time it aired. That's the thing about SNL: they can still be sublimely funny from time to time, but you have to wade through great mounds of crap in order to get to the rare good sketch. Here's what the website Milk and Cookies has to say about it:

"Conspiracy Theory Rock" by Robert Smigel was shown on "Saturday Night Live" during the March 14, 1998 broadcast but edited out of reruns.

The title and the style of the animation are a takeoff on the educational tv series, "Schoolhouse Rock," which was shown as a public service in-between network entertainment cartoons on Saturday mornings in the 1970s. "Schoolhouse Rock" would teach about grammar with a song which asked "Conjunction Junction, What is Your Function?," for example.

"Saturday Night Live" is broadcast on NBC, which is owned by General Electric. GE let them broadcast this cartoon just once. GE also partly owns MSNBC.

What's amazing about this animated short isn't that it's funny, which it is, but that it's very much close to being dead-on in describing the overall corporate news media environment in which our society is currently drowning. Definitely one of those "funny because it's true" things. But then, you've got to wonder why GE allowed it on the air in the first place. GE is a big part of what President Eisenhower once called "the military-industrial complex," and NBC's running of a cartoon that directly attacks the mega-corporation's usage of its own entertainment and news media divisions to sow support for policy that makes use of its war-making products is at the very least confusing. Maybe it just slipped by, which explains why it hasn't been broadcast since it first aired. Maybe it's clever disinformation, "the old double bluff" as CONTROL agent Maxwell Smart might have put it, which kind of makes sense because the cartoon ostensibly seems to be ripping on left-fringe conspiracy nuts. Or maybe it's doing what Noam Chomsky has always suggested the news media should do with him: present far-left views without any explanation or context so that viewers have no choice but to dismiss them as lunacy.

At any rate, lots of weird post-modern ironies going on with this thing. Check it out here, via Throw away your TV.



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FROM THE REAL ART SPORTS DESK
McCoy ties freshman TD mark in Horns' Alamo Bowl win

From the AP via ESPN:

Colt McCoy was supposed be a placeholder for Texas at quarterback this season. Now, he's a record holder.

The redshirt freshman who replaced Vince Young turned in another gritty performance with two touchdown passes to rally the No. 18 Longhorns to a 26-24 victory Saturday over Iowa in the Alamo Bowl.

McCoy had been cleared to play just a week earlier after suffering a severely pinched nerve in his neck in each of Texas' last two games -- both losses. He also ran 8 yards on fourth down to set up a 2-yard touchdown run by Selvin Young early in the fourth quarter that proved to be the game winner.

And

Tate was just the opposite, passing for 184 yards in the first half. He played high school football in Baytown, just outside of Houston, and his final college game was his first back in his home state.

Click here for the rest.

Just a few thoughts:

It's been really nice, actually, these last two years since I downgraded my cable tv service to a bare minimum "limited basic." I spend much less time watching shows I don't even really like. However, during football season I've found that I sorely miss having the cable sports channels. That's how I missed this one, having to keep up with it via internet stats and the like. It's just not the same. What really sucks is that I only got to see the 'Horns on tv three times this year, and those were all of their losses.

It's cool that Texas snapped its two game losing streak, but beating a 6-6 team by two points spells trouble next season for my beloved Longhorns. Doctor McCoy is definitely great, and will no doubt be better still next year, but our defense really needs to sharpen up if we're going to make another run at the Big 12 Championship. Yeah, that's right, I'm not even going to let myself think about a national championship. Until we're playing for it, that is.

Finally, even though I didn't actually know personally Iowa's kickass quarterback when he was playing in Baytown for my school's crosstown rival Lee, I do remember how excited everybody was that he was going to be playing bigtime college ball. Some of that excitement, of course, came from the fact, at my school Sterling at least, that everyone was happy that he wasn't going to be beating up on our team anymore. Anyway, Tate's final game being a loss notwithstanding, I'm sure he's going on to the pros and will probably do pretty well there.


Head Coach Mac Brown and QB Colt McCoy bask in their win. (Photo by Brett Coomer, Houston Chronicle.)

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REAL ART BREAKS 50,000 HITS!

Mood midi file here.

Okay, that was fast.

Early Friday evening I made it to 50,000 hits. I've been counting hits here at Real Art since about February of 2003, and in nearly thirteen months I've managed to double the hit total for my first three years. Pretty wild. Of course, this is nothing compared to the big boys like Kos or Eschaton, who count daily hits in the millions, or even the mid-size guys like Rob Salkowitz over at Emphasis Added, who get hundreds everyday. Further, some three quarters of my visitors are coming in on Google and other search engines, often for image searches, so they're definitely not fans--all that reminds me that maybe I should try to soak the phenomenon a bit and post more pictures; you guys like cool and famous paintings? Anyway, the point is that this isn't really that big of a deal. On the other hand, blogging is something of a labor of love for me, so it's nice to sit back and congratulate myself from time to time.

So congratulations to me.



You know, that champagne picture is a bit obscene if you think about it for a moment, which makes my choice for mood music, "Afterglow" by Genesis, all the more appropriate. Well, I guess it won't hurt to sex things up a little--I mean, it's just a bottle of bubbly after all.

I'll celebrate again at 100,000. I wonder how quickly I'll get there?



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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Phil



Paz



Sammy



Frankie



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging!

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Government watchdogs under attack from bosses

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

During 2006, several inspectors general felt the wrath of government bosses or their supporters in Congress after investigations cited agencies for poor performance, excessive spending or wasted money.

For instance:

—The top official of the government's property and supply agency compared its inspector general to a terrorist, hoping to chill audits of General Services Administration regional offices and private businesses.

—Directors of the government's legal aid program discussed firing their inspector general, who investigated how top officials lavishly spent tax dollars for limousine services, ritzy hotels and $14 "Death by Chocolate" desserts.

—Administration-friendly Republicans in Congress tried to do away with the special inspector general for Iraq, who repeatedly exposed examples of administration waste that cost billions of dollars. Among the contractors criticized was Halliburton Corp., once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney.

—The Pentagon has been making its inspector general use lawyers picked by the defense secretary instead of independently hired attorneys.

"It's hard to believe that the government is serious about policing itself when it's whacking the people who are actually minding the store," said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project On Government Oversight, a nonpartisan group that tracks government waste and fraud. "These people are our security officers who help guard tens of billions of dollars. It's ridiculous to prevent them from doing their jobs."

And

Congress created the inspectors general jobs during the post-Watergate era to ensure federal agencies had independent oversight and accountability. The IGs audit how money is spent and also play a critical role in investigating allegations of wrongdoing and protecting federal whistleblowers.

Click here for the rest.

You know, I'm really glad that this made the news, but I'm pretty disappointed that the article's general slant is such that it ignores that Bush has been pulling shit like this for years. That is, this attack on the inspectors general is clearly part of an overall context of White House power expansion, which includes, but certainly isn't limited to, appointing industry sympathizers to key regulatory positions, and levels of executive branch secrecy that would have made Nixon blush. The system of governmental checks and balances enacted by our founding fathers wasn't simply something patriotically clever: the three branches of our federal system are pitted in opposition to one another in order to keep any one of them from becoming too powerful and taking over, which would end democracy as we understand it.

Bush's ongoing power grab is essentially playing with fire in a room full of gasoline soaked rags, and it really pisses me off that the political class and the press refuse to call it what it is.

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FAREWELL JAMES BROWN

I'll admit it: I'm not a huge James Brown fan. I mean, I think I've only got like one JB album, and that's just something that I ripped into MP3 format from somebody else's CD. I suppose it's because I didn't really learn how great he was until I was well into my twenties, at which point I was buying almost exclusively jazz albums--I've meant for years to bolster my music collection with bunches of Soul's Godfather, but I've never gotten round to it.

He was great, however, my own indifference as a music collector notwithstanding. It's pretty hard to listen to him without recognizing not only his influence on other musicians, but that he was a genius in his own right. Further, his band was always as tight as a jazz combo, or Frank Zappa, or Steely Dan, in an era when hippie sloppiness was too damned common. They call him "the Godfather of Soul" but without Brown we wouldn't have funk, no Bootsy Collins or George Clinton. Hell, hip-hop, for that matter, would be much less interesting if there had never been a James Brown. And one should never forget what a fantastic dancer he was, either.

But like I said, I've only come to understand all this within the last decade or so. However, that doesn't mean I didn't have JB touching my life before I really knew what he was about. Like this totally bizarre performance of "Living in America" from the film Rocky IV. Or his role as the grooving and singing Reverend Cleophus James in The Blues Brothers. Great stuff that, I'm sure, affected my own personal aesthetic development in multiple ways.

While I'm at it, here's another Youtube JB clip, a black and white television performance of "Sex Machine" segueing into "Soul Power." It's well worth watching, if only so you can see how totally tight and funky his band was back then. You know, he would dock his musicians' pay if they screwed up during performance; obviously, it did the trick.

One thing troubles me, though. Throughout all the rightly deserved media praise JB's getting after his death a few days ago, very few talking heads and reporters seem to be mentioning his song "Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud," which is probably the hippest civil rights anthem ever put on record, which makes him unarguably a Real Artist. Anyway, here's a video of a live performance of the song, where JB gets a mostly white audience of youthful hipsters onstage with him to recite repeatedly the phrase "I'm black and I'm proud." You gotta love that.



Farewell James Brown.

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SLEEPY TIME FOR RON

From the Houston Chronicle:

Naps can help you catch up on sleep, alleviate stress

"We're biologically programmed to take a nap in midafternoon," says Max Hirshkowitz, an associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine who also directs the Sleep Center at Houston's Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Medical Center. "It's the Industrial Revolution that separated us from siesta, because it was too expensive to shut down big machines in the middle of the day and turn them back on."

Even so, napping gets a bad rap, particularly in the current 24/7 culture.

"In the United States, we have this drive to be busy all the time," says Anne Frey, a dream practitioner and instructor at the University of Indianapolis. "If we nap, we're seen as lazy or trying to avoid something. In part, I blame it on economics. People are so driven for the dollar that taking a nap is considered wasting time."

Click here for the rest.

I also think that the divorce rate, illegetimate births, anxiety, depression, and a whole host of other modern problems also come from our ruthless and dehumanizing system of economics, but that's another story. The point is that I wholeheartedly agree with napping as a way of life, and try to do so whenever I've got the time. I'm just not the same for the rest of the day if I can't get a little shuteye in the afternoon, especially because I'm such a night owl. And it sounds like I've got medical science on my side here. But hey, I'm only listening to what my body's telling me. You should, too.

Go take a nap right now!

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PRESIDENT FORD

I'm sure that pretty much anybody who follows the news knows that our longest living President, Gerald Ford, finally died a day or two ago. As with Nixon and Reagan, the TV news organizations have gone out of their way to lionize the old fellow, running clip after clip, playing up especially his pardoning of his predecessor as an extremely good thing.

Atrios over at Eschaton is all over it:

As we all know, because everybody on the teevee will keep repeating it, Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon was perhaps the wisest and awesomest thing anyone has ever done in the history of presidenting. Never mind that it wasn't popular at the time. Never mind that it set an awful precedent which led to the pardoning of the Iran Contra figures and transformed corrupt Nixonites into distinguished elder statesmen and Bush administration officials.

Click here for the rest.

And again from Eschaton:

The important thing was to find out the truth. Our elites repeatedly redefine "getting past it" as "sweeping it under the rug" based on their apparent opinion of themselves as necessary moral and spiritual leaders for the riffraff.

Click here for more.

The reason it was important to find out the truth is because Watergate was only the tip of the iceberg. Actually, all Watergate was is the screw-up that let everybody at the time know just how powerful and corrupt the Nixon White House had become. As Noam Chomsky has observed numerous times, Watergate was almost nothing compared to Nixon's real crimes: the impeachment proceedings were allowed to continue because Tricky Dick had amassed so much power in so much secrecy that the powerful and wealthy elites, the ones our leaders actually represent, got nervous.

Here is a CounterPunch essay going into further detail on that issue.

So Ford really screwed up, destroying any real chances this country had for "healing" after Nixon resigned. Indeed, America's failure to deal decisively with the fallout from Watergate allowed pretty much the same system Nixon played to remain intact, which, obviously, set the stage for the gross abuses of the current White House. I'm not saying that Ford had some sort of deal with Nixon, as many alleged at the time of the pardon. But I am saying that old Gerry gets a cut of the blame for the sad and sorry state the nation is in today.

On the other hand, I've always liked Ford. He really was a "regular guy" President, shunning the anti-democratic Presidential mystique fostered by every President, including Carter, since then. And you've just gotta love the Chevy Chase stuff on SNL. And Ford wasn't really all that conservative by today's standards--of course, given the extremism that passes as conservatism today, a strong majority of old school Republicans would probably rate as closer to moderate.

How I miss the 70s!

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HAPPY CHRISTMAS FROM REAL ART
Here, Have a Shitload of Cool Xmas Vids!

I'm hitting the road for Houston early tomorrow, so this is going to be my last post until the 27th or so. Until then, I'm leaving you with plenty of time wasting Christmas videos, with both old and recent favorites. My favorites, that is, but I'm sure you'll like 'em, too. So, without any further ado, let's go to the links...

First up, Snow Miser's theme song from Rankin-Bass' The Year without a Santa Claus. Click here for frozen Christmas merriment!



And what would a Snow Miser performance be without hearing from his grumpy brother, Heat Miser? Click here for some stop-action Christmas anger!



Next, a video for the song that RetroCRUSH called "the worst Christmas song of all time," Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime." I strongly disagree with RetroCRUSH, but couldn't help but wonder why all the reasons they offer for it being the worst are pretty much the things I like about the song. Ah well. To each his own. Click here for Paul in a silly Yuletide mood.



And what would a Paul McCartney performance be without hearing from his grumpy brother John Lennon? Click here for a clever posthumous video for "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)."



And while we're dealing with 60s Brit rockers, I might as well hook you up with the Kinks' "Father Christmas," a marvelous latter-day offering from the band, bashing the consumerism that's come to nearly drown out traditional messages of peace and love. Click here for the video.



Remember Billy Squier? I sure do, and I also remember him rocking out for Christmas back in the early 80s with the original MTV VJ's. For me, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the cheesiness, the video holds up well. Click here for Billy Squier's "Christmas Is the Time to Say I Love You."



Here's yet another Brit Rocker, one of my faves Greg Lake of the prog-rock band Emerson, Lake and Palmer, insisting, in pleasant song form, that Father Christmas (the English Santa Claus) actually exists! That, and video imagery that suggests that Israelis and Palestinians can make peace, if only they'd celebrate Christmas instead of Hannukah and Ramadan. Click here for "I Believe in Father Christmas."



Ach! Too many Brits for Christmas! But then, I've heard a compelling argument that the Victorian era English pretty much shored up our current understanding of how to celebrate the holiday, what with Dickens and all. Nonetheless, it's time for more Americans. Rolling back again to the early MTV era provides one of my favorite Christmas rock songs, the Waitresses' "Christmas Wrapping." I was unable to find on Youtube an actual band video for the song, but I did find an amateur thingy that a teenaged girl made in her bedroom at home, which, once you've seen it and understand what I mean, is somehow appropriate. At any rate, you get to hear the song...

Click here for the video.



How about a Brit and an American together? Everybody loves David Bowie and Bing Crosby! Rumor has it that after they shot this performance of "Little Drummer Boy" they went to a sleazy Los Angeles motel and had gay glam-rock sex for hours on end. Who knew? Click here for some intergenerational Christmas love.



Enough of the music videos. How about some story? How about some scatological humor? How about a little South Park? Click here for the original "Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo" episode in full. Just for shits and giggles.

Howdy ho!



And finally, as a nod to all the other holidays besides Christmas celebrated around this time of year, I give you the classic Seinfeld episode "The Strike Festivus." Okay, I know it's a fictional holiday, but it's well worth watching, especially if you've never seen it. Click here for Festivus.



Okay, that's all for this time, except for this shitty but fun "Decorate a Christmas Tree" site, a very nice time-waster. Okay, now, for real, that's all for this time. Oh, except for the old great Christmas poem, "A Visit from Saint Nick," you know, the one that starts "Twas the night before Christmas..." Okay, NOW, for real, that's all for this time.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a goodnight! God bless us, everyone! Peace on Earth! And all that jazz...

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Paz



Frankie and Sammy



Phil



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging!

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THE END OF THE CHRISTMAS ORGASM

From the Austin Chronicle courtesy of AlterNet:

37th Street Lights

Randy Thompson, a 37th Street resident since 1980, said, "Most years I wouldn't say the [Zilker Park] Trail of Lights is better than ours, but this year it is." Thompson said he opted against putting up lights due to spousal pressure and reported overhearing upset and belligerent onlookers bemoan his lack of lights as well as his next-door neighbor's lackluster illumination effort.

"It's unfair that we're somehow responsible for entertaining the city of Austin," said a 37th Street resident of four years who asked not to be named for fear of darkening relations with neighbors. We'll refer to that source as Rudolph. "The story ended last year. You can observe what happened now that the people who started the tradition aren't here any more," Rudolph said. "It's not the new people's fault that they didn't buy into the lights, they simply saw a house that met their needs." Many of the new homeowners are professionals who come home late and rarely socialize with neighbors, he added.

While the new folks can't be held responsible for upholding the tradition, "We're trying to get the community kicked back in," Rudolph said. The famously intertwined displays had always been dependent on kinship, camaraderie, and bonding on the street – an effort for neighbors, by neighbors. "All the characters involved didn't necessarily like each other," he explained, "but we got along and could stand in the street together and have some beers."

Click here for more.

Years ago I lived on 35th street for a few years, which is just a block over from all the now missing hooplah--yeah, yeah, I know; it's very weird that there is no 36th street between 35th and 37th, but what can you do? Indeed, I moved into my Hyde Park neighborhood apartment right around the time that the whole thing was starting to take off. When I first saw it in December of '88, I was like, "Wow! This is a Christmas orgasm!" And that's what I've called it ever since, the Christmas Orgasm.

No, I'm not kidding. These people have gone fucking nuts on Christmas lights for years and years. Here, check it out:



Click here for more Christmas Orgasm pics.

It was incredible to just cut through from the back of my apartments and end up in what amounted to a real live Emerald City in only moments. It was like being on LSD. Actually, there were a few times that it really was like being on LSD, but enough about that--I've said too much already. The point is that the Christmas Orgasm was flamboyant evidence of what makes Austin so unique. That is, the 37th Street lights weren't something put together by some corporation or entertainment company out of New York or Los Angeles: they were created and maintained by average ordinary Austinites for no other reason than that they wanted to do it. The Christmas Orgasm was a magnificent manifestation of honest and authentic human culture, no plastic about it.

And now it's gone, apparently thanks to gentrifying yuppies who are too caught up in their careers to participate in a cherished neighborhood tradition, something else for which we can blame the corporations.

You know, a lot of Americans can't seem to get their hands around why the destruction of New Orleans, and the possible non-return of many of its citizens, is such a terrible thing. "They'll rebuild eventually. It'll be better than before with new people," they say. Well, yeah, that's true. But many of those New Orleaneans who can't or won't return were just like the people who used to live on 37th in Austin: they were the backbone of a totally unique local culture, an island of honesty and creativity in an ocean of artistic apathy and prefabricated cultural swill. And that's something one can never understand if one hasn't ever personally experienced it.

I often fear that the vacant and meaningless way of life in the suburbs is going to drown us all.

Farewell, Christmas Orgasm. I hope you return someday.

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THE WAR ON SEX

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Miss Nevada USA fired over racy pictures on the Internet

Miss Nevada USA was stripped of her title Thursday after racy photos of her appeared on the Internet, pageant officials said.

Some of the photos show Katie Rees, 22, kissing other young women, exposing one of her breasts and pulling down her pants to show her thong underwear at a party in Tampa, Fla.

"Katie Rees has been relieved of her duties as Miss Nevada USA 2007," said Paula M. Shugart, president of the Miss Universe Organization, which owns the Miss USA pageant and others.

Rees' dismissal comes two days after Miss USA Tara Conner was allowed to keep her tiara when she admitted underage drinking at New York bars and agreed to go into rehab and undergo drug testing.

Click here for the rest.

So, just to make sure I understand the sense of morality in play here, underage drinking and illegal drug use are forgivable; partial nudity and lesbian kissing photos uploaded to the internet, however, are unforgivable. Well, okay. I mean, the Miss Universe people have a perfect right to do whatever they want with their representatives; it is, after all, a business. But this event so utterly fits in with what I'm seeing as a major heating-up of right wing anti-sex forces that it's hard to ignore. Don't get me wrong; Donald Trump is no sexual Puritan himself, and neither is NBC, but it seems to me that they're running scared in terms of trying to manage an anticipated reaction from the sex police. On some levels, I can't say that I blame them--they're trying to make money, and scandals hurt the bottom line.

On the other hand, this is totally fucked up. The former Miss Nevada has a perfect right as a human being to sex up her life, and even to show her freak side to the entire world via the internet, if she so desires. It doesn't matter what sort of contracts she's signed: it's bullshit, both individually and culturally, to demand that anybody must put aside sexual self-expression while on their own time. It's bullshit, too, that the Miss Universe pageant lives so in fear of anti-sex forces that they include such a clause in their standard contract. All this does is bestow legitimacy on their Victorian crusade.

You know, I could conceivably get behind some kind of reprimand for the drunken Miss USA, especially if she kept on showing up for gigs while soused. That's not unreasonable. But this thing takes me back to the whole Vanessa Williams debacle back in the mid 80s. She got screwed, too, and it's really pissing me off that our culture seems to have not moved forward a single inch in over two decades. Goddamned right-wing Christians.

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BASHING OBAMA

From Media Matters for America courtesy of Eschaton:

In a December 18 column headlined "Barack Hussein Obama: Once a Muslim, Always A Muslim" and posted on her website, right-wing pundit Debbie Schlussel argued that because Sen. Barack Obama's (D-IL) middle name is Hussein, his late, estranged father was of Muslim descent, and he has shown interest in his father's Kenyan heritage, Obama's "loyalties" must be called into question as he emerges as a possible Democratic presidential candidate. In the column, Schlussel asked: "So, even if he identifies strongly as a Christian ... is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father's heritage, a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?" She ended her column by asking if Obama becoming vice president instead would be acceptable. Answering her own question, she wrote: "NO WAY, JOSE ... Or, is that, HUSSEIN?"

Click here for more.

And this Schlussel pundit-person isn't the only one jumping on the smells-Muslim bandwagon. The Media Matters piece lists something like nine more instances of corporate news media robots either directly stating or implying some kind of connection between Obama and Islamic extremists, and I think it's safe to expect a whole lot more to come. Obviously, this is extraordinarily trashy and wrong, nothing but bullshit below the belt mud-slinging, worse, even, than the kind of shit they threw at Kerry because it has massive overtones of racism.

You know, I don't even like Obama. As far as I've been able to tell, he's just too conservative, too religious, for my tastes, much more of a scolder than a man who can inspire a nation--I mean, this is all on a sliding scale, of course; he's waaay better than pretty much anything the Republicans are going to be offering up in '08, but for what I want out of a Presidential candidate, he doesn't really fit the bill. But who knows if he's even going to get the nomination? I suppose the conservatives think they know, so here I am having to defend a candidate I don't like. But, what the fuck, this smear attack is just fucking awful. I'd be condemining this shit even if it was directed at a Republican.

One further thought: if Obama seems too Muslim to be President, does that mean that the people making this "argument" disagree with Article Six of the US Constitution which states that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States"? It sure sounds like that's the case. Bunch of fucking anti-American fuck-heads.

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Who Wrote the Bible?

A very cool and respectful Bible documentary from Britain's Channel 4:

The answer to 'Who wrote the Bible?' turns out to be complex. For a start, the Bible isn't a single book, but contains 66 separate books which were collected over something like 1,200 years. Christians and Jews have usually been careful to say that the scriptures weren't delivered from a passing cloud, but were, they believe, written, edited and compiled by human beings under the inspiration of God. Even so, what Robert Beckford discovers on his biblical road trip is much more complex than anything he learned in Sunday school.

Take the Five Books of Moses, which open the Bible and include the world-famous stories of the creation, the Garden of Eden and Noah's flood. Known in Hebrew, the language they were written in, as the Torah, these books contain the foundations of Judaism and Christianity. It turns out that the Books of Moses weren't written by Moses at all, but by four anonymous writers, each with his own particular view to promote. These writings were only brought together when an Israelite king found them useful to promote his political agenda, many centuries after the time of Moses. Says Beckford: 'King Hezekiah turned the Bible into a party political manifesto for monotheism. He definitely knew something about spin.'

And

There have been many TV programmes that have tried to bury the Bible – but this is no hatchet job. We get a clue about this when we see Robert Beckford at the tomb of Christ, inside Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre. As he stoops to leave the tomb, he wipes tears from his eyes. 'I was really moved by the experience,' he says. 'I am a Christian; I believe in the teachings of Jesus, so to be in a holy place, contemplating life, moved me.

Click here for more on the program.

Of course, I say "respectful" because Beckford treats his subject matter with the reverence of a believer, but he ultimately concludes, and deftly illustrates, that the Bible cannot possibly be taken as literal truth: for some parts of Christiandom, like my former denomination the Southern Baptists, such a point of view is tantamount to blasphemy. I guess it all depends on your point of view. But this really is good stuff. I really love the documentary's assumption that, even though we know for sure that the Bible is far more allgorical, far more mythological, than it is historical record, there is still a great deal of important human meaning contained within its covers. Of course, the skeptic in me says that there's lots of meaning in Greco-Roman mythology, as well as the tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, or Spider-man for that matter, but that doesn't invalidate the point.

Actually, given my own past association with Christianity, I found this show, which debunks even while it finds deeper truth, to be somewhat inspiring, almost as though it gives me permission to love the Bible again, to stop viewing it as a document of ideological hatred.

Go check it out here, courtesy of Throw away your TV.

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Most Americans have had premarital sex

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past.

"This is reality-check research," said the study's author, Lawrence Finer. "Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades."

And

Even among a subgroup of those who abstained from sex until at least age 20, four-fifths had had premarital sex by age 44, the study found.

Finer said the likelihood of Americans having sex before marriage has remained stable since the 1950s, though people now wait longer to get married and thus are sexually active as singles for extensive periods.

The study found women virtually as likely as men to engage in premarital sex, even those born decades ago. Among women born between 1950 and 1978, at least 91 percent had had premarital sex by age 30, he said, while among those born in the 1940s, 88 percent had done so by age 44.

Click here for the rest.

You know, after yesterday's post about the horrors of freak dancing, it's almost as though I'm favored by God for this study to have dropped in my lap like this. It really does prove my point: the mainstream American culture is, and has been for many years, extraordinarily pro-sex, and all attempts to get people to stop having sex are utterly doomed to fail. Indeed, I think that as long as we have advertising and mass entertainment, we're going to be a pro-sex society, and if you want to take those industries down, you might as well be trying to destroy our entire understanding of business. But I digress. What's important about this is that, even though everybody's doing it, we have an educational system, numerous state governments, and the federal government all operating in a different reality. They're trying to roll back the clock, which is impossible, but along the way they're fucking up real people's lives. All this abstinence bullshit, all these anti-condom lies, the suppression of the morning after pill, and on and on, all this crap gives people STDs, gets people pregnant when they don't want to be. Instead of playing like it's the Victorian era, our leaders ought to get down to the business of making government more sex-friendly. 'Cause what we have now is truly fucked.

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'The Real America,' Redefined

Courtesy of the Daily Kos, the Washington Post's liberal guy, E.J. Dionne, declares victory:

It wasn't all that long ago that Democrats and liberals were said to be out of touch with "the real America," which was defined as encompassing the states that voted for President Bush in 2004, including the entire South. Democrats seemed to accept this definition of reality, and they struggled -- often looking ridiculous in the process -- to become fluent in NASCAR talk and to discuss religion with the inflections of a white Southern evangelicalism foreign to so many of them.

Now the conventional wisdom sees Republicans in danger of becoming merely a Southern regional party. Isn't it amazing how quickly the supposedly "real America" was transformed into a besieged conservative enclave out of touch with the rest of the country? Now religious moderates and liberals are speaking in their own tongues, and the free-thinking, down-to-earth citizens in the Rocky Mountain states are, in large numbers, fed up with right-wing ideology.

Click here for the rest.

Personally, I think it's a tad bit early to declare victory for liberalism, especially because what now passes for liberal is often just a rehashing of old-school conservatism, and, consequently, what passes for conservative these days is simply traditional right-wing extremism. Further, if liberalism is now victorious, it's only due to happenstance; that is, conservatives did it to themselves. Contrast that with the triumph of the conservatives back in 1994: they were organized and on a mission; the Democrats still haven't quite figured out what hit them. Today's liberal "triumph" has very little to do with the Democrats as a party and more to do with regional and internet activists pushing them to take advantage of a narrow window of opportunity. In other words, the Dems have stumbled into power.

Like I said, it's waaay too soon to call the US a liberal nation.

But I think it is fair to say that America has been recently revealed as not conservative. I know, I know, the right wing for years has been screaming that conservatism is mainstream and all that but they were as wrong as Dionne is in proclaiming the nation to be liberal. My take lately is that Americans are pragmatists: they want the state to function effeciently; they want social services but believe people should work for a living; they want security but not global dominance. For some fifteen years or so the American people have chosen Republicans, believing that they could achieve these goals better than the Democrats, who had, admittedly, become soft and bloated after decades of power.

But just because we now know that the Republicans don't have the answers doesn't mean that everybody thinks the Democrats do. For now they're the only other store on the block, so they're necessarily going to get our business. If I were a betting man, I'd say that there's a fifty-fifty chance that the Republicans are able to reinvent their image enough to get some wins by November '08. I mean, I hope not, but the Democrats really do have some pompous morons running the show, and they really look like easy pickin's in the long term.

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Stop the music, please — freak dancing over the top

From the Houston Chronicle op-ed page, some syndicated columnist freaks out:

Freak dancing must be stopped.

Freak dancing is not new. It has been appalling chaperones for several years now. What has changed is that it's no longer a limited phenomenon. It is showing up in high schools all over the country, and even in the tender middle-school grades.

What is freak dancing? Well, it's a representation of anal sex set to hip-hop music. The boy makes thrusting moves at his partner's rear. Sometimes the girl hikes up her skirt to facilitate contact. And if she's feeling athletic, she may assume the doggy-style sexual position, bending over and putting her hands on the floor. One variation has two males surrounding a female and rubbing at her front and back. Other names for this dance are "grinding," "the nasty" or just "freaking." For further reference, consult MTV.

This is not a case of only the bad kids doing something. Intense social pressure can drag down even carefully raised adolescents. Teri Poff, the principal at Capital High School in Olympia, Wash., told a local newspaper that students report "feeling coerced into inappropriate dancing."

Tar me as one of those cranky ladies who says things like, "This time they've gone too far." But this time they've definitely gone too far.

Click here for the rest.

Okay, this is just laughable. Indeed, I'm laughing right now.

Given the media environment in which we live, which is utterly drenched in sexual imagery, it comes as absolutely no surprise that today's teenagers would behave in a seemingly more sexual manner than my peers did when we were teens. That is, it's waaaaay too late to worry about freak dancing, which is only a result of where the mainstream culture is at the moment--if you want to stop freak dancing, you've got to take on Big Media, and stay at them for a couple of decades, while at the same time waging a massive PR campaign in hopes of replacing these devil-spawned sexual attitudes with something more Puritanical in nature. You know, you've got to change the culture. In other words, this columnist should shut the fuck up because nothing constructive can come of opposition to teens simulating sex on the gym floor. Unless you count the soothing of conservative righteous indignation, but really, who gives a shit about that? They're just going to get mad about something else, anyway.

Frankly, I don't even see that there's actually anything about which to be concerned. I think some anxiety would be in order if these kids were actually having sex at school dances, but that doesn't appear to be happening in any significant numbers. Speaking of sex, as far as I know, the overall numbers on teen sex, real sex I mean, are about the same as they were when I graduated high school twenty years ago!!! In other words, there's just no problem. All freak dancing does is give teens some much needed fun and excitement while pissing off authoritarian adults, which is always a noble pursuit.

If these moronic Puritans were actually concerned about the sexual health of teenagers, they'd end their foolish support for "abstinence based" sex education, roll up their sleeves, pick up a dildo, and demonstrate for as many teens as possible how to put on a condom.

I'm so sick of these people's shit.

In honor of freak dancing, I'm posting some appropriate Snoop Dog lyrics:

G Funk Intro

[Intro:]

Yeah....
This is another story about dogs
For the dog that don't pee on trees, is a bitch
So says Snoop Dogg, get your pooper scooper
Cuz the ni$$a's talkin shit
Aroof! [echoes]

[Verse One: Rage]

I'm sippin on Tanqueray
with my my mind on my money and my mouth in the ganjahy
R-A-G to the motherfuckin E
Back with my ni$$a S-N double O-P
[Dre] Yeah, and ya don't stop
Rage in effect I just begun to rock
[Dre] I said yeah, and you don't quit
[Snoop] Hey yo Rage would you please drop some gangsta shit
I rock ruff and stuff with my Afro Puffs
Handcuffed as I bust bout to tear shit up
Oh what did ya think I, could never think I
Would be the one to make you blink out, I catch you like Inca
Never will there ever be another like me
Um you can play the left, cuz it ain't no right in me
Out the picture out the frame out the box I knock em all
Smack em out the park, like A Friendly Game of Baseball
Grand, slam, yes I am
Kickin up dust and I don't give a god DAMN
Cuz I'm that lyrical murderer
Pleading guilty, you know for my skills I'm about to be
Filthy large, Rage in charge
You know what's happenin don't try to play large
this ain't no Rerun, see hun, don't ya wanna be one
A cover, word to wreck ya, cause I never get my vocals
I'm loco, close to Constatanople, uhhh!
I'll make 'em go coo-coo for my Cocoa
puffin stuff, aiyyo Snoop, you're up
Let these ni$$az know that ni$$az don't give a fuck!

[Verse Two: Snoop Doggy Dogg]

This is just a small introduction to the G Funk Era
Everyday of my life I take a glimpse in the mirror
And I see motherfuckers tryin to be like me
Every since I put it down with the D-R-E

[Outro:]

Foamin at the mouth and waggin his tail
Searchin through the yards with a keen sense of smell
Lookin for the business in heat
And when he find it he'll be sniffin her seat
We travel in packs and we do it from the back
How else can you get to the booty?
We do it Doggystyle, all the while we do it Doggystyle
Yo motherfuckin hoes!!!
He fucked the fleas off a bitch
He shaked the ticks off his dick
And in the booty, he buries his motherfuckin bone
And if there's any left over
He'll roll over and take a doggy bag home

Damn, that Tanqueray is talkin to a ni$$a
I ain't bullshittin, one of y'all ni$$az gotta get it
Man I got ta piss
Breath test?


WWSD: what would Snoop do?

In your face, you anti-sex assholes!

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Torture Is Now Part of the American Soul

From AlterNet:

The results are much as you would expect. As National Public Radio reveals, 10% of the isolation prisoners at Pelican Bay are now in the psychiatric wing, and there's a waiting list. Prisoners in solitary confinement, according to Dr Henry Weinstein, a psychiatrist who studies them, suffer from "memory loss to severe anxiety to hallucinations to delusions ... under the severest cases of sensory deprivation, people go crazy." People who went in bad and dangerous come out mad as well. The only two studies conducted so far -- in Texas and Washington state -- both show that the recidivism rates for prisoners held in solitary confinement are worse than for those who were allowed to mix with other prisoners. If we were to judge the United States by its penal policies, we would perceive a strange beast: a Christian society that believes in neither forgiveness nor redemption.

From this delightful experiment, US interrogators appear to have extracted a useful lesson: if you want to erase a man's mind, deprive him of contact with the rest of the world. This has nothing to do with obtaining information: torture of all kinds -- physical or mental -- produces the result that people will say anything to make it end. It is about power, and the thrilling discovery that in the right conditions one man's power over another is unlimited. It is an indulgence which turns its perpetrators into everything they claim to be confronting.

Click here for the rest.

I'm still totally amazed that the US now gleefully supports torture. Of course, as the above linked essay implies, we've gleefully supported torture my entire life and longer--the reason I didn't really realize this until recently is because when we're doing it to US citizens we don't call it "torture;" we call it "prison." I continue to be at a loss for words. A simple condemnation doesn't seem to be nearly enough. I could speculate as to why we're now a totally immoral nation on par with, say, the Uganda of Idi Amin, or the Gestapo, but that's obvious: 9/11 scared Americans so much that they're willing to publicly support absolute evil in order to make themselves feel safer. And really, that's the only possible upside of torturing people; it makes Americans feel good--it is well known to psychologists that torture, especially the kind we're using, is wildly unreliable as far as intelligence-gathering is concerned.

But then, listen to me going on like this.

For some reason I feel compelled to explain why torture is so totally wrong. I shouldn't have to do that. It's completely self-evident that torture is an act of absolute evil. Beyond worrying about the moral decline of our nation's soul, I should also be worrying about why so many Americans are so fucking daft that they just accept this shit.

How is it possible that torture is now acceptable and desirable among Americans? This, more than anything else, truly makes me afraid that our civilization will soon collapse.

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ART AND NUDITY UNDER FIRE
School extends suspension of posterior painter

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

A high school art teacher suspended for moonlighting as a self-proclaimed "butt-printing artist" will apparently have more free time to work on his cheeky creations.

Stephen Murmer was told last week that he was being placed on paid administrative leave for five days from his job at Monacan High School after Chesterfield County school officials became agitated over his unique brand of artwork.

And

Outside of class and in disguise, Murmer creates floral and abstract art by slathering paint on his posterior and pressing it against canvas in the manner of a stamp.

And

Earlier this week, she said teachers were expected to set an example for students through their personal conduct.

Click here for the rest.

Reading between the lines, it sounds like this guy's kind of doing a performance art thing, wearing a mask, and painting with his butt publicly. Sounds a bit silly, if you ask me. But that doesn't matter. Like all good art teachers, this man is an artist in his own right. What he's doing is clearly for artistic purposes and therefore legitimate. Punishing him in any way at all for this is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Frankly, in spite of the fact that I think butt-art is a bit goofy, this teacher is setting "an example for students through...personal conduct." A good example. When I was teaching high school theater, I believed that it was extraordinarily important for me to continue working as an actor and director on my own time, if only for credibility's sake--I also found that continuing to act gave me all kinds of insights into the subject I was teaching. But I don't really need to say all that: it is self-evident that a teacher should stay active within his field.

Beyond all that, I'm really starting to be disturbed by what is now clearly some kind of puritanical anti-art movement in this country. This is the fifth high profile incident of which I've heard this year in which artists have been attacked and punished by self-proclaimed arbiters of morality. First there was the incident where an art teacher was fired because topless art photos of her appeared on the internet. Meanwhile, a Church of the SubGenius performance artist lost custody of her children because a family court judge didn't like the anti-religious content of her art. Then a police chief had to resign because of topless photos his wife uploaded to the internet--okay, I'm not sure if this woman was an artist, sounds like a weird biker thing, but it's along the same lines; someone was punished harshly for self-expression. Finally, an art teacher lost her contract because some kids she took on a field trip to an art museum saw some nude art.

Now this shit about the butt-painter.

If you look at all this in the context of the "abstinence based" sex education movement, condom misinformation coming directly from the federal government, as well as the fed's new abstinence propaganda for people in their twenties, it's pretty damned hard to not conlude that something's afoot here. Despite their defeat at the ballot box last month, the narrow minded and dim witted forces of religious fundamentalism are on the move, and they're taking people down. That's pretty fucked.

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MY WEIRD SANTAS

Six or seven years ago I started buying these things in dollar stores. You know, they're cheap and weird, the perfect thing to collect. After a couple of Christmases, I had a nice little collection going, which seems to get a little bigger every year because I pretty much always include some dollar store action for the Yule. For the last couple of years, I haven't really bothered with getting them out for lack of space, but this year I've brought them back.

And boy are they weird. For instance, this 1950s looking evil Santa.



Or this Gandalf-as-Santa model.



Some are less weird and more whimsical, like this one that looks like it's riffing on children's book art.



Some of these things just challenge my brain. What the hell's going on with this one? It's a candle holder, yes, but what's up with the design? It's a big floating Santa head, but buried in his beard is a sort of English looking Father Christmas guy. Why?



Here's another whimsical Santa, a candle, but it's still pretty damned bizarre, what with its cone shape and single dot eyes.



This one may be my favorite. It's something of an Arabic Santa, perched on a flying carpet, arms crossed like I Dream of Jeannie. Of course, Christmas isn't particularly Islamic, and this "Arabic" Santa is as white as yogurt, but I suppose these strange contradictions are what makes it so neat.



Finally, here's a group shot of about a third of the overall collection. Some weird stuff, for sure.



Maybe I can post a few more pics of these strange pieces of pop trash before the Xmas magic starts to fade.

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Study Detects Recent Instance of Human Evolution

From the New York Times courtesy of AlterNet:

The principal mutation, found among Nilo-Saharan-speaking ethnic groups of Kenya and Tanzania, arose 2,700 to 6,800 years ago, according to genetic estimates, Dr. Tishkoff’s group is to report in the journal Nature Genetics on Monday. This fits well with archaeological evidence suggesting that pastoral peoples from the north reached northern Kenya about 4,500 years ago and southern Kenya and Tanzania 3,300 years ago.

Two other mutations were found, among the Beja people of northeastern Sudan and tribes of the same language family, Afro-Asiatic, in northern Kenya.

Genetic evidence shows that the mutations conferred an enormous selective advantage on their owners, enabling them to leave almost 10 times as many descendants as people without them. The mutations have created “one of the strongest genetic signatures of natural selection yet reported in humans,” the researchers write.

The survival advantage was so powerful perhaps because those with the mutations not only gained extra energy from lactose but also, in drought conditions, would have benefited from the water in milk. People who were lactose-intolerant could have risked losing water from diarrhea, Dr. Tishkoff said.

Click here for the rest.

Yay! I finally got the word "diarrhea" into one of my posts.

This looks very much like a smoking gun in the evolution versus creation "debate." For real scientists, evolution has already been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, but creationists like to mix things up, taking laymen down fool's paths in terms of logic, sounding reasonable, but being anything but. That is, creationists fraudulently insist that science deals only with direct observation; because the overall evolution of human beings took millions of years, it's generally impossible to directly observe the process--by creationist debating rules, one can't prove that evolution is a fact. People who have even the most minimal understanding of how science actually functions know that evolution is a fact because of hundreds of thousands of concrete scientific inferences, but, obviously, that's not good enough for the creationists. This news comes much closer to direct observation. A whole lot of argumental bullshit can now be avoided by pulling this story out. What the hell can they say to refute it?

I mean, it's fucking DNA, and Johnny Cochran is dead. What can they do?

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Kingwood Marine dies in Iraq

From the Houston Chronicle:

A 20-year-old Marine from Kingwood was killed in Iraq Thursday, only months after he had finished basic training, his family said.

Lance Cpl. Luke Yepsen was a Marine Corps infantryman who had just completed boot camp in August before leaving for Iraq in October. He was shot during combat Thursday in Anbar province.

"He looked trim and fit and healthy, and he was real proud of his new uniform," said Jim Bailey, remembering the last time he saw his nephew. "It's all so sudden, and he was so young."

Click here for the rest.

This hits home. Forgive the pun, but Kingwood is where I grew up. Back in the day, I was fairly patriotic myself. Obviously, I never joined up, but then we weren't in an extended war in the mid 80s when I was this kid's age. Who knows? He could be me, or any of my buddies with whom I went to high school--most of us were pretty conservative and patriotic; like Cpl. Yepsen, many of my pals went to Texas A&M, which is extraordinarily pro-military. I know we've lost nearly 3,000 servicemen since this thing began, but this one really makes me sad.

We've got to get out of there.

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PAUL MCCARTNEY: ROCK STAR

No, really, I mean it.

It seems like these days Paul's reputation is pretty much that of ex-Beatle who does the occasionally decent pop song. They roll him out from time to time at big events like the Super Bowl, or the 9/11 patriot bash, whatever, to do some of his old Beatle favorites mixed with a few from his solo catalogue, which are politely tolerated by the crowds. Paul hasn't helped much over the last couple of decades to change this bland boomer image, releasing crap singles like "Biker Like an Icon" or "Freedom" or that awful theme song for that awful Tom Cruise movie Vanilla Sky.

But trust me, Paul has always had the ability to rock as well as Led Zeppelin or the Who, and still does. Case in point: Paul's little remembered late 70s period. That was when, in my humble opinion, Paul was in his best form.

From Wikipedia:

Back to the Egg

Back To The Egg is the final studio album by Wings and was released in 1979...After the release of London Town, following the exit of both guitarist Jimmy McCulloch and drummer Joe English, McCartney hired two new members with a view to recording a raw rock and roll album after the soft rock of London Town and getting Wings back on the road.

And

On 3 October, Wings recorded two tracks, "Rockestra Theme" and "So Glad To See You Here" with many celebrity guests under the heading of Rockestra. The Who's Pete Townshend, Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones and John Bonham (in one of his last performances) all took part. Paul McCartney in a 2001 interview with VH1 said that Keith Moon was to have taken part in "Rockestra" but died one month before the recording sessions took place. A highlight of the album, "Rockestra Theme" would win the 1980 Grammy for Best Instrumental Performance.

And

Unfortunately, the critical reaction was not warm upon the album's release.

Click here for the rest.

Fuck the critics. Back to the Egg is a masterpiece. My old pal Ken once told me that his take on the album's lack of success is that it was up against some pretty stiff competition. For instance, here are the top Billboard albums for 1978:

1 Bee Gees/Various Artists/Soundtrack-Saturday Night Fever RSO

2 John Travolta/Olivia Newton-John/Soundtrack-Grease RSO

3 Fleetwood Mac-Rumours Warner Bros.

4 Billy Joel-The Stranger Columbia

5 Steely Dan-Aja ABC

And for 1979:

1 Billy Joel-52nd Street Columbia

2 Bee Gees-Spirits Having Flown RSO

3 Doobie Brothers-Minute By Minute Warner Bros.

4 Cars-Cars Elektra

5 Supertramp-Breakfast In America A&M

Say what you want about Paul, that's some pretty stiff competition; all of these are fantastic albums, even the Bee Gees stuff and the Grease soundtrack, and those weren't the only great albums out around that time either--don't forget about Pink Floyd's The Wall, or Fleetwood Mac's Tusk. Indeed, one could seriously argue that the late 70s was something of a golden age in terms of rock and pop in this country--punk was doing alright, as well, and new wave was just starting to come into its own.

Anyway, the point here is that Paul's most rocking era was kind of buried under it all. I mean, I remember hearing some tracks from Back to the Egg on the radio at the time when I was a kid; it's not like nobody knew what was going on, but nobody seems to remember today that Paul was a legitimate rocker in his own right, worthy of sharing the stage with the likes of Pete Townshend and Robert Plant.

Actually, that's just what he did back in '79, during a benefit concert he put together for the people of Cambodia, who were at that point enduring the minor genocide so dramatically recounted in the film The Killing Fields. Several Brit bands participated, doing their own sets, but the whole thing was capped off by a massive band using all the musicians involved that Paul decided would constitute the revival of Rockestra.

Here is a clip of them performing the old rock and roll standard "Lucille." Pay close attention: at a particular point in the song, Paul, while singing, flips off Townshend, apparently because the angry guitarist didn't want to wear the official silver Rockestra tail coat--Pete gives Paul an appropriate dirty look. Here is a clip of them performing the "Rockestra Theme," a tune written by Paul for Back to the Egg, as the Wikipedia article observes. Again, there is more interplay between Paul and Pete about Townshend's reluctance to wear the appropriate suit. Great stuff.

But wait, there's more. Here is a video for the Back to the Egg track "Old Siam, Sir." It really rocks. And, finally, here is a video from the same album of the song "Getting Closer," yet another cool McCartney rocker.

Anyway, I think I've made my point. When he wants to be, Paul's solo music is as relevant as anything in the overall classic rock cannon, and I'm proud to call myself a McCartney fan. Take that "Ebony and Ivory." (No, no, I totally agree with that song's anti-racist message; it's just that it's so damned sappy...)


Cover for the album Back to the Egg


Rockestra performing "Lucille," only moments after Paul flips off Pete

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie



Paz



Phil



Sammy



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging!

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Lobbyists swarm around Democrats

From the big guy himself over at the Daily Kos:

Now I don't want to oversimplify this issue. It's actually complex. There's nothing inherently wrong with lobbyists -- at their best, they help elected officials understand complex issues. For example, the net neutrality folks have to "lobby" members of Congress about the importance of the issue, and how it affects consumers. All issue groups, friendly or not, employ lobbyists to promote their agenda.

The problem is the appearance (and oftentimes fact) that government is for sale to the highest bidder.

Click here for the rest.

Kos, who is often described as a far-left liberal in the mainstream news media, strikes me as being much closer to the center than is popularly understood. His support for lobbying, in principle, is a case in point. Yes, legislators do, indeed, depend on lobbyists for information, but that's a big problem. The information provided by lobbyists is always biased, no matter what the ideology of the lobbying group is. Consequently, legislators get a distorted view of issues. It seems to me that legislative bodies, and especially Congress, have the resources and ability to do their own research, which would hopefully provide a more balanced view of reality. That is, I think lobbying should be banned. Given the way that the entire lobbying system appears to provide massive incentives for bribery and campaign finance shenanigans, I don't think I'm suggesting anything over the top: the practice of lobbying makes me really worry about democracy in our nation. Besides, legislators supposedly represent citizens, not corporations and special interest groups--it really pisses me off that these groups get more democracy than I, a plain and ordinary citizen, do.

Okay, how's this? I'll support lobbying if I, and all other Americans, get the same kind of access to legislators that lobbyists get. That seems only fair.

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4-year-old suspended after hugging teacher's aide

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

School administrators gave a 4-year-old student an in-school suspension for inappropriately touching a teacher's aide after the pre-kindergartner hugged the woman.

A letter from La Vega school district administrators to the student's parents said that the boy was involved in "inappropriate physical behavior interpreted as sexual contact and/or sexual harassment" after he hugged the woman and he "rubbed his face in the chest of (the) female employee" on Nov. 10.

DaMarcus Blackwell, the father of the boy who attends La Vega Primary School, said he filed a complaint with the district. He said that his son doesn't understand why he was punished.

Click here for the rest.

Now, of course, anybody with half a brain is going to condemn this. I think that any reasonable standard for what constitutes sexual harassment is going to exclude four year olds simply by virtue of the fact that, as articulated by his father, the kid "doesn't understand why he was punished." That is, I think an individual has to have some kind of understanding of sex in order to actually sexually harass someone. Like I said, it's a no-brainer; conservatives and liberals both can probably agree on that.

I'm more concerned about why this happened. It's a safe bet that the standard conservative take on this would be something to the effect that suspending this boy is an example of political correctness running wild. But then, to me, that's not very likely if only because this took place in Waco, Texas, which is not at all known for its leftist ways--indeed, Waco, a.k.a. "Jerusalem on the Brazos," a Southern Baptist enclave, is one of the most conservative towns in the Lone Star State. If p.c.'s going to be running wild someplace, I certainly wouldn't be trying to find it in Waco.

A liberal take on the event might see it as an example of paranoid school officials overreacting for fear of lawsuits or other legal action. That's possible, I suppose, because we've seen the same thing happen again and again on the issue of prayer and other religious observances in the schools--numerous teachers and administrators seem to have very little understanding of church-state issues, and it's not surprising that sometimes they err on the side of what they perceive as being caution. But busting a four year old for sexual harassment is pretty damned cautious. Stupid, even.

Might I suggest that this is actually evidence of what I've been saying for years now about public schools? If the schools' main function is to indoctrinate children into the culture of obedience and authority, and I strongly believe that to be true, then enforcing the letter of the law, no matter how harsh it is, comes as absolutely no surprise. The schools are utterly driven by rules and mandated procedures--all this "zero tolerance" bullshit we've been hearing about for so long is simply an extreme manifestation of the obedience mandate. Teachers and administrators are deeply immersed in this philosophy, day after day, year after year. It makes complete sense that common sense would sometimes lose out in such an environment. To me, this kid's bust in Waco walks hand in hand with the way that goth kids dressed in black were rounded up and harassed at schools across the nation for months in the wake of the Columbine killings. Sure, it makes no sense to you and me, but a rule's a rule, and the schools are all about obedience and authority, so kids have got to face the consequences and all that crap. Pretty twisted, but that's business as usual.

Man, quitting teaching was the best decision I've ever made.

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Tinker Bell, Pinochet And The Fairy Tale Miracle Of Chile

From ZNet, my favorite muckraker Greg Palast on the "market" reforms brought down to Chile by the so-called "Chicago Boys," students of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, that ruined the nation's economy:

The Chicago Boys persuaded the junta that removing restrictions on the nation's banks would free them to attract foreign capital to fund industrial expansion.

Pinochet sold off the state banks - at a 40% discount from book value - and they quickly fell into the hands of two conglomerate empires controlled by speculators Javier Vial and Manuel Cruzat. From their captive banks, Vial and Cruzat siphoned cash to buy up manufacturers - then leveraged these assets with loans from foreign investors panting to get their piece of the state giveaways.

The bank's reserves filled with hollow securities from connected enterprises. Pinochet let the good times roll for the speculators. He was persuaded that Governments should not hinder the logic of the market.

By 1982, the pyramid finance game was up. The Vial and Cruzat 'Grupos' defaulted. Industry shut down, private pensions were worthless, the currency swooned. Riots and strikes by a population too hungry and desperate to fear bullets forced Pinochet to reverse course. He booted his beloved Chicago experimentalists. Reluctantly, the General restored the minimum wage and unions' collective bargaining rights. Pinochet, who had previously decimated government ranks, authorized a program to create 500,000 jobs. In other words, Chile was pulled from depression by dull old Keynesian remedies, all Franklin Roosevelt, zero Reagan/Thatcher. New Deal tactics rescued Chile from the Panic of 1983, but the nation's long-term recovery and growth since then is the result of - cover the children's ears - a large dose of socialism.

Click here for the rest.

Upon the occasion of his recent death, much has been written about the brutality of Augusto Pinochet's bloody reign, and America's complicity in the coup that installed him, and these writers are absolutely right to trash as many of the involved parties as possible. Far less has been written, however, about the failed economic experiment under him that casts great doubt on the philosophy of free market fundamentalism that so captures the US establishment's mind today. In short, as Palast observes in his article, laissez faire capitalism in Chile was a total disaster, and the nation's economy had to be bailed out by further reforms that would make the free trade set shudder.

Amazingly, the failed market reforms in Chile are understood in the US these days as a success, somehow supporting the idea that we need to deregulate here even more. I'm strongly reminded of President Reagan's false reputation as the great tax cutter: rarely do politicians and pundits acknowledge that after the Gipper had successfully cut taxes more than any of his predecessors had ever done, he then was forced to raise taxes more than any of his predecessors had ever done. That is, his tax-cutting legacy is a lie, as are all of the economic gains they supposedly stimulated. Like the Chile myth, however, free market fundamentalists get teary-eyed discussing how great his example was in this area, and use it as support for doing more of the same today.

All of this leads me to believe more strongly that the whole neoliberal, supply side, free market thing simply doesn't work in the real world: supporters are forced to fabricate historical "evidence" to support their views. And most Americans swallow it. Pretty sad if you ask me.

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America's Injustice System is Criminal

From CounterPunch:

Before jumping to the conclusion that an innocent person would not admit guilt, be aware of how the process works. Any defendant who stands trial faces more severe penalties if found guilty than if he agrees to a plea bargain. Prosecutors don't like trials because they are time consuming and a lot of work. To discourage trials, prosecutors offer defendants reduced charges and lighter sentences than would result from a jury conviction. In the event a defendant insists upon his innocence, prosecutors pile on charges until the defendant's lawyer and family convince the defendant that a jury is likely to give the prosecutor a conviction on at least one of the many charges and that the penalty will be greater than a negotiated plea.

The criminal justice (sic) system today consists of a process whereby a defendant is coerced into admitting to a crime in order to escape more severe punishment for maintaining his innocence. Many of the crimes for which people are imprisoned never occurred. They are made up crimes created by the process of negotiation to close a case.

This takes most of the work out of the system and, thereby, suits police, prosecutors, and judges to a tee. Police do not have to be careful about evidence, because they know that no more than one case out of twenty will ever be tested in the courtroom.

Click here for the rest.

Like the police, whose mission most people think is one of public safety but is actually about making busts, the courts aren't really about truth and justice, which is what most Americans believe. Rather, the court system is about getting convictions. It's a subtle difference in emphasis, but counts for everything in terms of day to day reality. Yes, justice is often done by our court system, but seemingly just as often, injustice is done, too. As long as the system has built-in incentives for the people who run it to ignore and deemphasize critical evidence that would free defendants, we're not really a free nation.

And this is the kind of "democracy" that we would impose on Iraq and Afghanistan? No wonder they're fighting back.

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Is Bush’s Intransigence Clearing the Way for Impeachment?

Rascally Rob Salkowitz over at Emphasis Added dares to think the unthinkable in the wake of Bush's apparent rejection of the Iraq Study Group's recommendations:

The fact is, Bush is extremely unpopular in the country, has no friends among the Democratic majority in Congress (with the exception, as always, of Lieberman), has shown himself to be ballot-box poison for Republicans outside the Deep South, and is visibly losing his handpicked war. He and Vice President Cheney, along with various members of the Administration, have left six years of ticking Constitutional timebombs that could constitute a lengthy bill of particulars if explored fully by an Investigatory Committee, or could very easily precipitate a Constitutional crisis (by, say, failing to comply with a subpoena) wherein Congress would have Impeachment as a recourse.

Against that eventuality, Bush could, up until last week, count on the institutional support of the power Establishment. Whatever their problems with him, their fear of populist uprising was always great enough to rise to the defense of the institution of the Presidency.

Now that it’s clear Bush has no use for an Establishment that was clearly sticking its own neck out to give him cover, it’s no longer certain that moves toward removing Bush and Cheney from office would be met with such unanimous and authoritative opposition. In fact, I’m sure there are many conservative, partisan Republicans making cold-blooded calculations about the value of propping the obviously-unfit Bush up for another two years – to say nothing of those who are actually concerned that our national interests will be irreparably harmed if Bush isn’t stripped of his destructive and obstructive powers.

Click here for the rest.

So I've been calling for impeachment for years now, but then, that's pretty easy for me to do because, you know, I'm a crazy leftie who doesn't really mind if society is upended as long as we get some justice out of it all in the end. Rob, however, while definitely a liberal, is much closer to the political center than I am, and most likely more intelligent, to boot: when you have somebody with his smarts politically positioned the way he is calling for impeachment, it, for me, constitutes the beginnings of the proverbial writing on the wall.

As I said, Rob's no flaming leftist - for instance, he's blasted Noam Chomsky on his blog on at least one occasion - but his analyisis reminds me greatly of something the bespectacled and politically explosive linguistics professor once said about Nixon's near-impeachment. Chomsky's view, in contrast to the standard narrative about Watergate and all that, is that Nixon so offended the ruling elite, or "power Establishment" as Rob puts it today, by slowly but surely whittling away at their piece of the power pie that they essentially allowed the impeachment movement to proceed--this assumes, of course, that such forces had the ability to shut it down whenever they desired, but I don't really think that's too much of a stretch to believe.

(Here is an essay written in 1973, before Nixon's resignation, where Chomsky lays out the power dynamic, but prematurely concludes that the establishment so needed a powerful presidency that they would never allow an impeachment to happen. Chomsky later admitted that he underestimated how strongly Nixon had pissed these people off.)

If Rob's right, that may very well be what's happening right now. Bush's utter rejection of the ISG report has conceivably so offended the "power Establishment" that it is within the realm of reason to imagine that they will soon get out of the way, and allow the current impeachment movement to go ahead unimpeded.

History repeats. I hope.

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Nobel winner: Fight poverty to attack terrorism

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Economist Muhammad Yunus accepted the Nobel Peace Prize today for his breakthrough program to lift the poor through tiny loans, saying he hoped the award would inspire "bold initiatives" to eradicate a problem at the root of terrorism.

Yunus, a 66-year-old Bangladeshi, shared the award with his Grameen Bank, which for more than two decades has helped impoverished people start businesses by providing small, usually unsecured loans known as microcredit.

"We must address the root causes of terrorism to end it for all time," Yunus told hundreds of guests at City Hall in Oslo, Norway. "I believe putting resources into improving the lives of poor people is a better strategy than spending it on guns."

And

Yunus is the first Nobel winner from Bangladesh, an impoverished South Asian country on the Bay of Bengal. Nobel Committee chairman Ole Danbolt Mjoes said the award was partially intended as an outstretched hand to the Islamic world in an era when Muslims are often demonized because of terrorism.

Click here for the rest.

I'm not sure, but this may be the first time I've read, heard, or seen this point of view expressed in the mainstream US news media, and it took a Muslim Nobel laureate to point out the obvious. Of course, that's no surprise: it only makes sense that an individual from the Islamic world would have better insight as to why the terrorists "hate us." As for me, I've been saying from almost the beginning that the real reason we have to put up with terrorism is because Western businesses and the governments they control exploit the hell out of the world's weaker nations, treating their peoples and resources as stuff to steal, hoarding the lion's share of their wealth. Ever wonder why we spend so much money on Israel? They're our enforcer over there, continually beating the hell out of their subjugated Palestinian population as surrogates for the rest of the Middle East. You know, to make the oil business function more smoothly.

If we're really interested in ending terrorism, we're going to have to end this big rip off and start using our national power to help the world rather than exploit it. I can't claim credit for this point of view, though. It goes back to at least the mid nineteenth century when Marx was writing, and probably earlier. Heck, by the time socialist playwright Bertolt Brecht was writing in the 1920s and 30s, it had been articulated into art.

Here are the lyrics to Brecht and Kurt Weill's song "What Keeps Mankind Alive" from their musical The Threepenny Opera:

You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge us of the seven deadly sins
Should first sort out the basic food position
Then start your preaching, that's where it begins

You lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well
Should learn, for once, the way the world is run
However much you twist or whatever lies that you tell
Food is the first thing, morals follow on

So first make sure that those who are now starving
Get proper helpings when we all start carving
What keeps mankind alive?

What keeps mankind alive?
The fact that millions are daily tortured
Stifled, punished, silenced and oppressed
Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
In keeping its humanity repressed
And for once you must try not to shriek the facts
Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts

Ain't that the truth. Here's a link to a free download of Tom Waits taking it on, quite masterfully--be sure to scroll down to find it.

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ANOTHER MEL GIBSON MOVIE I WON'T SEE
'Apocalypto' does disservice to its subjects

From the San Francisco Chronicle by way of my buddy Mark:

Problem is, there exists no archaeological, historic or ethnohistoric data to suggest that any such mass sacrifices -- numbering in the thousands, or even hundreds -- took place in the Maya world.

Third, once Gibson paints this bloody picture of 15th century Maya civilization, the ultimate injustice is handed the pre-Columbian Maya. As the jungle hero escapes the evil city and is chased to the edge of the sea by his antagonists, with literally nowhere else to turn, Spanish galleons appear, complete with a small, lead boat carrying a stalwart friar hoisting a crucifix. For Gibson, the new beginning for these lost Mayan people, the Apocalypto, evidently is the coming of the Spaniards and Christianity to the Americas.

Although this film will undoubtedly create interest in the field of Maya archaeology by way of its spectacular reconstructions and beautiful jungle scenes, the lasting impression of Maya and other pre-Columbian civilizations is this: The Maya were simple jungle bands or bloodthirsty masses duped by false religions, resulting in the ruin of their mighty but misguided civilization, and their salvation arrived with the coming of Christian beliefs saddled on the backs of Spanish conquistadors.

As archaeologists struggle to accurately reconstruct ancient Maya society, obstructed by their decimation via Western diseases; destruction of their books, art and history by Spanish friars; and their subjugation and exploitation by the conquistadors, such films as "Apocalypto" represent a significant disparagement of that process.

Click here for the rest.

Jeez, what is it with this guy? For a mediocre actor, he's one hell of a culturally backward asshole director. After ripping on the Jews in his Jesus snuff flick The Passion, and then after ripping on the Jews during his drunk driving arrest a few months ago, he comes back with this shit? You know, the Mayans are oppressed to this day: the Zapatista movement in Mexico is strongly supported by some of the poorest of the poor within the borders of our neighbor to the south, and it is no coincidence that they are Mayans. Nonetheless, conservative Catholic Gibson wants to push the idea that the arrival of the Catholic Conquistadores in Central America was somehow good for them. What a nut! That's almost along the lines of telling African-Americans that slavery was good for them.

But then, Mel Gibson is a racist, which we know for sure, so I have no right to be surprised by any of this.

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FROM THE REAL ART SPORTS DESK
Texas gets the best of LSU

From the Houston Chronicle:

The game was a rematch of last year's NCAA regional final, won by LSU 70-60 in overtime. The teams feature different lineups, with a combined seven starters gone, including the Longhorns' starting lineup that has been replaced by four freshmen and a sophomore.

Abrams, a sophomore guard, hit his two 3-pointers during a wild 42-second spurt. His last — which came from beyond the NBA 3-point arc — gave the Longhorns (6-2) a 76-75 lead with 1:04 remaining.

After Damion James missed two free throws with 17 seconds left, the Tigers had one final chance to win. Following a timeout, Garrett Temple missed a wide-open 3-point attempt from the top of the key, and James grabbed the loose ball as time expired to send Texas to its third straight win over a top-10 foe.

"Tonight we took a big step," Barnes said.

Click here for the rest.

Okay, I normally don't deal with basketball here at Real Art. Actually, I normally don't deal with basketball at all. To this day, I can still hear from back in seventh grade Brad Smith's voice yucking it up on our church's court at my expense: "Yuk, yuk! Reeder can't make a layup! Yuk, yuk!" Whatever. Brad's downhome adolescent humor ultimately did a disservice to what appears to be an exciting sport; it made me shun basketball to this day. But I digress. I break my basketball silence for the occasion of my undergraduate school, to which I have the most loyalty, upsetting my gradute school, to which I am loyal, but not when those loyalties are directly at odds with one another. That is, and this is for my fellow Longhorn Matt over at Caffeinated, I've got burnt orange blood, not purple.

So, I just have to say, for the record, "Hooray! We beat LSU!"

Hook 'em 'Horns!

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President slips to all-time low in the Zogby
Poll as key demographic groups jump ship

From the Zogby webpage courtesy of AlterNet:

The poll showed that Bush’s troubles clearly stem from trouble with the war in Iraq. Just 24% give him positive marks for his handling of the war, down from 39% who gave him a positive rating six months ago for his handling the way. Even among Republicans, a minority – 47% – think he has handled the war well (52% of Republicans gave him negative marks for his leadership on the war in Iraq). Not a single demographic group in the Zogby poll gave the president a majority positive rating for his handling of the war.

Asked whether the Iraq war has been worth the loss of American lives, just 34% responded positively, equally the lowest percentage recorded in a long series of Zogby polls on the question. The poll comes on the heels of the announcement that more than 2,900 Americans had been killed in the war.

Click here for the rest.

Well, I suppose that definitively answers the question about whether the recent election results were about the war: apparently, only the hardcore right-wing has the stomach for this bullshit anymore. Unfortunately, the wildly unpopular and incompetent President Bush still has two more years as Commander-in-Chief, which means at least two more years of meaningless death and destruction in the Fertile Crescent.

You know, if Bush is so utterly loathed by so many Americans, why the hell are the Democrats so shy about impeachment? Damn it! I want my fucking impeachment!

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TOM DELAY'S GOING TO HAVE A BLOG!

From US News and World Report courtesy of AlterNet:

Tom DeLay's back, this time on the Internet. Friends tell us that the powerful former House majority leader, dubbed the "Hammer" for his tough persuasion tactics, this week unveils TomDeLay.com, where he'll blog—DeLay's Daily—on newsy issues and build a coalition he's calling Grassroots, Action, and Information Network.

Click here for the rest--it's not much more, just a blurb actually, but go there if you must.

Oooooohhhhh. I'm licking my lips right now. DeLay might have been great at twisting arms and funneling illicit cash to and from crooked cronies, but he generally did all that behind the scenes. As far as I could tell, whenever he actually waded into the rhetorical fray he tended to be about as nuanced as his "Hammer" nickname might suggest. That is, taking down Tom's blog posts ought to be about as easy and fun as shooting fish in a barrel. Or Dick Cheney's buddies in the face, take your pick. Nothing like tearing apart an asshole retard. Maybe I'll make a weekly feature out of it, "Taking Down Tom" or something along those lines.

He hasn't made any posts yet, but the page is up already. Click here for some goooood blog trash. Heh. I can't wait. I really do need a whipping boy these days and the deposed Lizard King is just perfect for the role.

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Richest tenth own 85% of world's assets

From the London Times courtesy of AlterNet:

The richest 2 per cent of adults own more than half the world’s wealth, according to the most comprehensive study of personal assets.

And

Although global income was distributed unequally, the spread of wealth was more skewed, according to the study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the UN University.

“Wealth is heavily concentrated in North America, Europe and high-income AsiaPacific countries. People in these countries collectively hold almost 90 per cent of total world wealth,” the report said.

And

In terms of wealth distribution the US was among the most unequal, whereas Japan had one of the lowest levels of inequality. Britain ranked with Russia, Indonesia and Pakistan in wealth inequality.

James Davies, Professor of Economics at the University of Western Ontario, and one of the authors of the report, said: “Income inequality has been rising for the past 20 to 25 years and we think that is true for inequality in the distribution of wealth.

Click here for the rest.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this isn't about jealousy, or the "right people" using wealth in the "right way" in order to expand the economy, or any of the other classic conservative justifications for economic inequality: it's about the ability for an individual to control his own destiny; it's about democracy. That is, there are two kinds of power, political and economic, and, when you get right down to it, there's very little difference between the two because wealth is easily translated into governmental influence. That so few people have so much money stands in utter contradiction to the democratic principles we so greatly value. Freedom and self-government are simply impossible when private power is so intensely concentrated. This situation is intolerable.

Not to mention the fact that so many people worldwide live in squalor while their "betters" live it up in the lap of luxury. That's intolerable, too, but really, I shouldn't even have to point it out. Like my post a couple of days back observes, our economy is sinful.

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WATCH THE BEATLES' YELLOW SUBMARINE RIGHT NOW

From Wikipedia:

Released at the height of the psychedelic pop culture period of the 1960s, the movie Yellow Submarine was a box-office hit, drawing in crowds both for its lush, wildly creative images, and its soundtrack of Beatles songs. The original story was written by Lee Minoff, based on the song by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and the screenplay penned by four collaborators including Erich Segal.

As with most motion picture musicals, the music takes precedence over the actual plot, and most of the story is a series of set-pieces designed to present Beatles music set to various images, in a form reminiscent of Walt Disney's Fantasia (and foreshadowing the rise of music videos and MTV fifteen years later). Nonetheless, the movie still presents an entertaining modern-day fairy tale that caters to the ideals of the "love generation".

The dialogue is littered with puns, double entendres, and Beatles in-jokes, many scripted by Roger McGough. "Blue Meanies" is sometimes used as a slang term for the police, although many viewers will have missed this (see List of slang terms for police officers). The term "Blue Meanies" is actually a metaphor for bad people in government and corporate, who force their wills on good people (Pepperlanders), and carelessly deplete and ruin the natural environment, resources, colour and landscape. They are carefree about their destruction ways and will do whatever necessary to crush those (The Beatles) who oppose them.

Click here for the rest.

Without a doubt this film continues to be the weirdest and most psychedelic cinematic experience I've ever encountered. And, man, what kind of staying power it has: I've loved this movie at virtually every stage of my life, as a young child, as an older child, teenager, twentysomething, and now in my late thirties, which is appropriate, I suppose, because it was released the year I was born, 1968. It really is a great deal of fun. How could it not be with all those cool Beatle songs, weird sound effects, and George Martin incidental music? Not to mention the fact that it's got some pretty good politics driving the plotline. Anyway, the John Lennon post yesterday wasn't enough, I feel, to adequately memorialize his death twenty six years ago, so why don't you go feast on the recently pirated and uploaded full length Yellow Submarine, courtesy of Throw away your TV.

Click here to see the film.



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JOHN LENNON

October 9, 1940-December 8, 1980

"Gimme Some Truth"

I'm sick and tired of hearing things
From uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocritics
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth

I've had enough of reading things
By neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth

No short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of tricky Dick
Is gonna mother hubbard soft soap me
With just a pocketful of hope
Money for dope
Money for rope

No short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of tricky Dick
Is gonna mother hubbard soft soap me
With just a pocketful of soap
Money for dope
Money for rope

I'm sick to death of seeing things
From tight-lipped, condescending, mama's little chauvinists
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth now

I've had enough of watching scenes
Of schizophrenic, ego-centric, paranoiac, prima-donnas
All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth

No short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of tricky Dick
Is gonna mother hubbard soft soap me
With just a pocketful of soap
It's money for dope
Money for rope

Ah, I'm sick to death of hearing things
from uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites
All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth now

I've had enough of reading things
by neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians
All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth now

All I want is the truth now
Just gimme some truth now
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth

That's exactly how I feel today. Here's a cool video for the song.



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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Sammy



Frankie



Phil



Paz



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging!

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IRAQ STUDY GROUP REPORT:
MEET THE NEW BOSS, SAME AS THE OLD BOSS

From the American Prospect courtesy of Eschaton:

No Middle Ground

The trouble is that the Iraq Study Group is ultimately providing false hope for an extended war. Its assessment is appropriately bleak. For example, "Key Shia and Kurdish leaders," the commission finds, "have little commitment to national reconciliation." Now, given that these leaders comprise the Iraqi government, one might think that would lead to the conclusion that Iraq is doomed to an intensifying sectarian conflict, and unless one believes it is in the United States' interest to pick a side in someone else's civil war, that means it's time to go home. Instead, the commission, despite its own better judgment in its report, is gearing up for what Hamilton called "one last chance at making Iraq work." It's hard to see what's responsible about this.

And

But take a closer look. First, the commission isn't actually calling for withdrawal; it's calling for a reorientation of military effort -- troops won't conduct combat missions, they'll just be helping Iraqi forces conduct them. This is new lipstick on a very old pig. Despite what the commissioners said at today's press conference, it's just a marginal tinkering with the years-old strategy of "putting an Iraqi face" on security operations.

Second, the commissioners say that we "must not make an open-ended commitment to keep large numbers of American troops deployed in Iraq." But that's exactly what the commission's recommendation entails. I asked the Iraq Study Group how many troops the training mission would require, and for how long. Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese gave the vaguest of answers, but he did say that it would necessitate "a considerable force" for logistics, training, force protection, and special operations. "We don't say specifically how long it will last," but it will require a "sustained period of time." There's a reason why the Pentagon is calling this the "Go Long" option.

Finally, it's unrealistic to suggest that with such a U.S. force in Iraq for such an indefinite timeframe, forces won't respond to insurgent or death-squad attacks if either directly fired upon or if their Iraqi counterparts aren't up to the challenge. Indeed, if U.S. troops are in a combat situation but are not positioned to respond as such, the Iraq Study Group's wishful thinking -- and the Pentagon's -- will put them in the worst of all possible situations.

Click here for the rest.

So, after trying to digest these ISG recommendations for the last couple of days, my own take is that this pretty much amounts to the Washington political establishment trying to head off some serious civil unrest over the war here in the US, more of a change in rhetoric than any actual change in policy, all for the purpose of making American voters calm down a bit over the endless killing and dying. The bottom line is that, if their suggestions are adopted, American soldiers are still in harm's way and still propping up a corrupt puppet government which does more to cause sectarian fighting than to end it: apparently, the "bipartisan" elder statesman consensus is that the US must dominate Iraq in the long run. It's like I keep saying. We'll never leave--the ability to influence oil markets, and therefore the global economy, by sitting right smack dab in the middle of petroleum central is just too much to give up on, and both Democrats and Republicans understand this.

You know, the notion that the extraordinarily weak Iraqi government is ever going to have the ability to take control of the desert nation is laughable at best, which is why it's pretty damned stupid to take seriously what these grey-headed fools have to say. Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly what both the mainstream media and politicians are doing, taking the ISG report seriously. So the whole Iraq fiasco has some cover for maybe a year or two while we wait to see if the Iraqi government can get it together. But I can tell you right now that it won't.

I suppose by then we'll have to convene another panel of grey-headed elder statesmen to cobble together some new rhetorical bullshit to keep us there for a few more years. Man, this shit sickens me.

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QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
Means "Who Polices the Police?"

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

LA officer held in cuffed teen assault

A police officer suspected of assaulting a handcuffed 16-year-old boy in a partially videotaped attack at a police station was arrested Thursday, authorities said.

Sean Joseph Meade, 41, was arrested for investigation of assault under the color of authority, Police Chief William J. Bratton said. The boy was not injured and remained in custody after Tuesday's attack, while police tried to find his guardians, Bratton said.

Meade, a 13-year member of the Los Angeles force, has been suspended, Bratton said at a news conference. The chief said he "felt that there was sufficient justification for an arrest" after he watched enhanced footage from the videotape Wednesday night.

Click here for the rest.

A thirteen year veteran did this. I can't help but wonder if the guy just cracked up for some reason or if this is business as usual with the only difference from the day-to-day grind being that it was video taped this time. Of course, as you probably know, I'm pretty much of the opinion that, generally speaking, this isn't unusual at all for cops. The only time we ever hear about it is when the abuse is particularly egregious or they get caught red handed, like this one--in such instances, the police establishment is forced to deal with the situation or face intense public scrutiny. But how often does internal affairs spring into action if no one's going to look bad? Yeah, you know what I think: not that often at all.

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Scientists see evidence of recent water on Mars

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

A provocative new study of photographs taken from orbit suggests that liquid water flowed on the surface of Mars as recently as several years ago, raising the possibility that the Red Planet could harbor an environment favorable to life.

The crisp images taken by the Mars Global Surveyor do not directly show water. Rather, they show apparently recent changes in surface features that provide the strongest evidence yet that water even now sometimes flows on the dusty, frigid world. Water and a stable heat source are considered keys for life to emerge.

Until now, the question of liquid water has focused on ancient Mars, and on the Martian north pole, where water ice has been detected. Scientists have long noted Martian features that appear to have been scoured by water or look like shorelines, and have tried to prove that the Red Planet had liquid water eons ago.

"This underscores the importance of searching for life on Mars, either present or past," said Bruce Jakosky, an astrobiologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who had no role in the study. "It's one more reason to think that life could be there."

Click here for the rest.

Wow. I don't really have much to say about this that the excerpt doesn't already say, but this blows me away: there is a distinct possibility that there is liquid water on the red planet right now!!!!! That means that there may very well be life on Mars even while I type these words. Probably not intelligent life, I know, much more likely that it's microscopic in nature, but who cares? There's a damned good chance that we may soon discover that we are not alone! At the very least, the possibility of colonizing the fourth planet, in our lifetimes, has just increased astronomically.

I'm a geek, yeah, but this really is a big deal.

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WHY I'M SO BUSY LATELY

From LSU's student newspaper the Reveillee:

The Exception to the Rule

LSU Theatre holds a microscope to world issues through the work of an acclaimed German playwright. Bertolt Brecht's play, "The Exception and the Rule," will be the program's final fall production.

Theater professor John Dennis directs a cast of 11 actors, comprised of graduate and undergraduate students. He said during a rehearsal that he thinks the actors believe in the play's message.

"They are here today because they believe, I think, in what they have to say -- not just how many lines they have," Dennis said.

Click here for the rest--it's not a review, just a sort of public interest piece, but worth a look just the same.

Hell yeah, we believe in the message. Not a single conservative in the cast, all of them open to this kind of left-wing agit-prop theater. Of course, I'm probably the most far-left actor in the group, so I'm totally digging what we're doing, even if it's keeping me too busy to devote as much time as I'd like to blogging. But what the hell! I think I'm a much better theater artist than I am a blogger, so that's just fine. If you're curious about the ideology involved, I did a little post on the show a couple of weeks ago, here. If you're in Baton Rouge and want to see the show, look here for info. Also, I've loved Brecht for years and made a more generalized post about his work and theories back in 2003, here.

One last thing. I got my picture in the paper yet again. Kind of.


That's my sliver of face over to the left. Photo by Wallace Levy.

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TWO FROM BUZZFLASH

Busy night. Here's a couple of good articles courtesy of BuzzFlash.

American paralysis in the face of the declining dollar

From the American Prospect:

The longer an adjustment is delayed, the more serious will be the eventual crash. And if the dollar crashed, the Federal Reserve would be torn between raising interest rates to restore foreign confidence in the dollar (and creating a domestic recession) or lowering interest rates to stimulate a domestic recovery (and scaring off even more foreign lending on which we depend).

The alternative to this mess is a more assertive trade policy, so that other countries stop playing protectionist games at America’s expense. If we exported more and imported less, we would not be so dependent on foreign borrowing to finance the trade deficit. But that strategy is off the table, and in any case it would take time to work.

The precarious dollar is also weakened by the big federal budget deficits and the increasing role of hedge funds, which operate like a herd and exaggerate normal swings in currency markets. But Secretary Paulson wants even more tax cuts and more financial deregulation.

Click here for the rest.

Alps are warmest in 1,300 years

From the AP via Yahoo:

Europe's Alpine region is going through its warmest period in 1,300 years, the head of an extensive climate study said Tuesday.

"We are currently experiencing the warmest period in the Alpine region in 1,300 years," Reinhard Boehm, a climatologist at Austria's Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics said.

And

The unseasonably warm weather this autumn has caused concern in Austria's ski resorts, where slopes are still largely covered in green grass instead of snow. Many, such as St. Anton am Arlberg, have had to postpone the start of their skiing season and some have tried attracting tourists with alternative programs, such as hiking.

Austrian ski resorts usually open at the end of November or early December.

Click here for the rest.

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Facing a hostile Senate, Bolton
quitting as ambassador to U.N.

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

President Bush, in a statement, said he was "deeply disappointed that a handful of United States senators prevented Ambassador Bolton from receiving the up or down vote he deserved in the Senate."

"They chose to obstruct his confirmation, even though he enjoys majority support in the Senate, and even though their tactics will disrupt our diplomatic work at a sensitive and important time," Bush said. "This stubborn obstructionism ill serves our country, and discourages men and women of talent from serving their nation."

Click here for the rest.

Again, the Republican-in-Chief shows that irony is now completely dead. Bolton was appointed to his post in order to obstruct the UN--opposing him was simply a vote in favor of multilateral diplomacy, which is the only way to go with foreign policy in this day and age. Why else would the President pick a man who is on record countless times as saying he wanted the UN disbanded? Why else would Bush pick a man who is widely considered by former employees to be a dictatorial tyrant? Clearly, Bolton went to New York to bully the world, subverting greatly the concept of "ambassador" in ways that continue to boggle my mind.

Good riddance to the fucker. Also, his mustache looks like shit.

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Our Sinful Economy

From the Progressive:

Average real incomes fell by 3 percent between 2000 and 2004.

Looked at over the past 25 years, things don't get any better. From 1979 to 2004, 'the bottom 60 percent of Americans, on average, made less than 95 cents in 2004 for each dollar they reported in 1979,' the Times reports. For those on the top 95th to top 99th rungs of the income ladder, the past quarter century was splendid: Their income went up 53 percent. And those on the top 0.1 percent rung? Their income went up 348 percent.

That is obscene.

We have a plutocracy in this country, not just of the rich or the very rich but of the unbelievably rich. This 0.1 percent are the ones who benefit most from the George Bush economy.

As he once put it, “Some people call you the elite. I call you my base.”

Meanwhile, the poorest 60 million Americans “reported average incomes of less than $7 a day.”

Seven bucks a day! That barely gets one meal at McDonald’s.

Our economy is a sin.

Click here for more.

And there you have, in brief, what is probably the biggest and most compelling reason that I now consider myself to be a progressive, or a leftist, or more simply a liberal, whatever you want to call it. Years ago, I was a conservative, at least on economic issues. I understood and bought fully the whole pro-business, right-wing, "classical liberal" economic point of view: the market knows best; governmental economic regulation is almost always bad for the economy; a thriving economy ultimately raises the poor out of poverty; most poor people are poor because they don't take advantage of the many opportunities afforded them by our great nation. Yadda, yadda, yadda. It was extraordinarily easy to accept these economic "truisms" while ensconced inside the cushy and well-to-do suburban bubble in which I grew up. After all, almost every adult to whom I was exposed in such an environment seemed to be living proof of the these ideas.

It wasn't until much later that the whole edifice came crashing down. I met people who had worked their asses off for years and got nothing for it. I met people who didn't have the family resources to get them into college, to get them moved into a place of their own, to get connections for career building. I came to realize that the conservatives, who claimed that pro-business politics would eventually help the poor, didn't really give a rat's ass one way or another whether that actually happened. I came to realize that I had been fed a bunch of bullshit myths about the way the world works, that there were just enough people living out the "American dream" to make it appear as though it was available to everybody. I came to understand that the "economy" is simply a giant winner-take-all game rigged in favor of the people who had already won. It became self-evident that most Americans were never going to get much for their hard work.

Elementary moral principles make it obvious that this is an unacceptable situation. Our economy is, indeed, sinful as all get out. At the age of 38, a time of life when many white males in the US traditionally turn more conservative, I'm becoming more liberal. On the one hand, it's extraordinarily depressing and disillusioning to realize that much of what I once believed is a lie. But I wouldn't have it any other way: despite this loss, I now believe myself to be a more moral person--it's much easier this way, actually; I don't have to do mental gymnastics in order to dismiss the economic injustice in this country.

At the very least, I have a cause for which to live, and that beats the hell out of shopping at the mall or buying a fishing boat.

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Scientist Fights Church Effort to
Hide Museum's Pre-Human Fossils

From LiveScience.com courtesy of AlterNet:

Famed paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey is giving no quarter to powerful evangelical church leaders who are pressing Kenya's national museum to relegate to a back room its world-famous collection of hominid fossils showing the evolution of humans' early ancestors.

And

Leaders of Kenya's Pentecostal congregation, with six million adherents, want the human fossils de-emphasized.

"The Christian community here is very uncomfortable that Leakey and his group want their theories presented as fact," said Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, head of the largest Pentecostal church in Kenya, the Christ is the Answer Ministries.

"Our doctrine is not that we evolved from apes, and we have grave concerns that the museum wants to enhance the prominence of something presented as fact which is just one theory," the bishop said.

Bishop Adoyo said all the country's churches would unite to force the museum to change its focus when it reopens after eighteen months of renovations in June 2007.

Click here for more.

This encapsulates why fundamentalism, as an intellectual attitude - it's just plain wrong to call fundamentalism a "philosophy" - must be wiped off the planet. It's bad enough that these forces of academic darkness have gone after the teaching of evolution at the public schools here in the US, which does nothing but diminish the thought capacity of young Americans, but this move in Kenya is illustrative of what fundamentalism really wants. Like the backward-ass Catholic Church of Renaissance Europe, these zealots want nothing less than to destroy any line of inquiry that does not adhere to their primitive and barbaric orthodoxies. I'm all for tolerance of different points of view, but these people don't play by those rules. Personally, I think it's pretty easy to respect a particular religion or denomination as a culture while utterly rejecting, scorning even, their insistence that demonstrably invalid beliefs become mainstream. The stakes are pretty high: advancement versus devolution.

It's time for anybody with half a brain to start trashing these psychos every chance they get.

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THIS MONTH'S STAR TREK CALENDAR PICTURE IS...



...from left to right and back to front, Sulu, Chekov, Chapel, Uhura, McCoy, Scotty, Kirk, and Spock!

So, where the hell is Riley? That's what I want to know.

Oh! Here he is:



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When Denial Goes Pathological

From CounterPunch, an essay from former Reagan administration assistant Treasury secretary Paul Craig Roberts:

The president of the United States is so deep into denial that he is no longer among the sane.

Delusion still rules Bush three weeks after the American people repudiated him and his catastrophic war in elections that delivered both House and Senate to the Democrats in the hope that control over Congress would give the opposition party the strength to oppose the mad occupant of the White House.

On November 28 Bush insisted that US troops would not be withdrawn from Iraq until he had completed his mission of building a stable Iraqi democracy capable of spreading democratic change in the Middle East.

Bush made this astonishing statement the day after NBC News, a major television network, declared Iraq to be in the midst of a civil war, a judgment with which former Secretary of State Colin Powell concurs.

The same day that Bush reaffirmed his commitment to building a stable Iraqi democracy, a secret US Marine Corps intelligence report was leaked. According to the Washington Post, the report concludes: "the social and political situation has deteriorated to a point that US and Iraqi troops are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar province."

Click here for the rest.

So, even though it's clear that we can't simply leave Iraq high and dry, a point of view that I've signed onto recently because of some of my buddy Matt's writings over at Caffeinated, I think it likely that stability will never happen as long as US troops are part of the mix. That is, our presence literally allows the insurgency and civil war to continue. It's obvious as to why US troops promote the insurgency, but less obvious is how we fan the flames of civil war. As long as we back the corrupt puppet regime we put in place, Sunnis and Shiites, neither of whom really accept Iraq's new government, are never going to get if figured out. US forces create an unbalancing and artificial power dynamic that essentially keeps the two rival factions in check: neither side can win outright, nor is there much incentive for them to truly negotiate, but they can kill each other, and us, repeatedly. That's going to continue for as long as we're there.

The only way out of this, as Henry Kissinger recently asserted, is to bring in the UN and regional powers to broker a cease-fire and then move on from there, completely abandoning the governmental structure we've already set up. I think the US can probably be a voice in the negotiations, but we cannot be the muscle, nor can we have the final say. But then, what am I saying? We'll never leave. Bush won't leave, and his replacement, neither Democrat nor Republican, isn't likely to give up the greatest imperial prize in national history.

We'll have troops there twenty years from now.

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He's The Worst Ever

From the Washington Post courtesy of Eschaton:

Despite some notable accomplishments in domestic and foreign policy, Nixon is mostly associated today with disdain for the Constitution and abuse of presidential power. Obsessed with secrecy and media leaks, he viewed every critic as a threat to national security and illegally spied on U.S. citizens. Nixon considered himself above the law.

Bush has taken this disdain for law even further. He has sought to strip people accused of crimes of rights that date as far back as the Magna Carta in Anglo-American jurisprudence: trial by impartial jury, access to lawyers and knowledge of evidence against them. In dozens of statements when signing legislation, he has asserted the right to ignore the parts of laws with which he disagrees. His administration has adopted policies regarding the treatment of prisoners of war that have disgraced the nation and alienated virtually the entire world. Usually, during wartime, the Supreme Court has refrained from passing judgment on presidential actions related to national defense. The court's unprecedented rebukes of Bush's policies on detainees indicate how far the administration has strayed from the rule of law.

One other president bears comparison to Bush: James K. Polk. Some historians admire him, in part because he made their job easier by keeping a detailed diary during his administration, which spanned the years of the Mexican-American War. But Polk should be remembered primarily for launching that unprovoked attack on Mexico and seizing one-third of its territory for the United States.

Click here for the rest.

Of course, some historians were calling him worst ever as early as 2003, and the arguments in favor of such a stance have picked up speed within the last year or so (see here or here). Personally, I think it's a "slam dunk" that Bush is the worst President ever. Ignore, for a moment, and if you can, the thousands dead due to his actions, the unwashable blood on his hands (as Lady Macbeth said, "Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand"), and just consider what he's done to dismantle the delicate system of Constitutionally mandated checks and balances that makes our democracy actually function. His numerous illegal "signing statements" alone, which brazenly signal to the nation that Congress has no legislative power when it contradicts the will of the executive branch, are prima facie grounds for impeachment, and that's just one of his many transgressions.

Indeed, that's what I'm really driving at. It really pisses me off that the incoming Congressional leadership has declared impeachment to be dead on arrival because "it won't help the country" or "the country doesn't want another impeachment." It will help the country if only for the single reason that it makes the Constitution reign supreme. We are a nation of laws, not men, and refusal to punish a President who would be king is serious dereliction of duty. Further, impeaching such an awful, even evil, President is simply the morally just thing to do. It doesn't really matter whether the country is tired of impeachments or not. This isn't about the popular will; it's about reestablishing the law of the land by the simple act of obeying it. The Constitution demands impeachment.

And that's what needs to happen.

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ENRON THE MUSICAL GETS MASSIVE PRESS PUSH

The show my buddy Stephen Foulard, who plays Ken Lay, is doing opened in Houston earlier this evening. I'm sure they did well, especially because I know from personal experience that Foulard is such a good actor. And they're received lots of pre-show kudos. Enron - The Musical is getting massive amounts of press attention at the national level lately, which is why it strikes me as weird that they're only running for three peformances. Maybe if they sell out and get good reviews, they'll extend the run. Maybe take it on the road or something. I mean, how could they not try to suck this thing for all it's worth? In the wake of Fox's coverage a couple of weeks ago, NBC's Today show ran a bit on it this morning, and then MSNBC ran it over and over again the rest of the day. They'd be fools not to take advantage of all this bigtime publicity.

On the other hand, I suppose an amusing musical is more "newsworthy" these days than the news about the rollback of post-Enron corporate legal reforms looming on the horizon, although my buddy Matt over at Caffeinated tells me this is probably not nearly so sinister as it sounds. Nonetheless, it strikes me that overall coverage of the actual continuing story of Enron has suffered a bit, replaced by this more viewer-friendly and uplifting story of pain turned to fun-art.

But what the hell! The news industry's loss is H-Town theater's gain! Congrats to Stephen and his fellow actors.


My pal Stephen on the Today show--he's going to be insufferable now!

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Sammy



Frankie



Paz



Phil



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging!

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