Royal rip-off

From the Houston Chronicle editorial board:

For about a year, officials at Halliburton have insisted that the purchase of overpriced fuel in Kuwait was not their decision. According to Halliburton, the Army Corps of Engineers insisted Halliburton's subsidiary, KBR, buy Kuwaiti gasoline that was $1 a gallon higher than Turkish suppliers were offering. Newly released State Department documents tend to support Halliburton's account.

According to the documents, the U.S. ambassador to Kuwait, Richard Jones, and other senior officials pressured KBR to make a deal with Kuwait and not ask any questions. Not only was KBR ordered to buy from Kuwait, but from a single company in Kuwait --a company whose shadowy ownership has ties to the ruling elite.

Click here for the rest.

Just another day of old-school crony capitalism for the amazingly corrupt Bush administration. Is anyone actually surprised by this? I mean anyone who doesn't have his fingers in his ears and a blindfold over his eyes. You know, anyone who didn't vote for the chimp.

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ROCK IS DEAD IN HOUSTON
KLOL suddenly speaking Spanish

From the Houston Chronicle:

In a clear signal of the growing media clout of Houston-area Hispanics, radio behemoth Clear Channel Communications has yanked legendary rock station KLOL-FM (101.1) off the air and replaced it with a format that radio insiders call "Spanglish Top 40."

The switch took place Friday morning when the new station — now called Mega 101 FM (with the tag line "Latino and Proud") — began playing 10,101 songs in a row.

The new format is a mixture of Spanish hip-hop, reggaeton and pop/dance music aimed at listeners between 18 and 34 years old. Music in Spanish by artists ranging from the rapper Pitbull to pop star Shakira will be accompanied by DJs using a combination of English and Spanish.

And

Once known as "The Texas Rock 'n' Roll Authority," KLOL went on the air in 1970 and has featured rock music ever since.

Through the years, the station has been known for its bad-boy disc jockeys, including the morning duo of Stevens and Pruett and evening DJ Moby.

Click here for the rest.

This is kind of sad. I really cut my rock teeth on KLOL when I was a kid. Those were the days, filled with the sounds of AC/DC, Loverboy, Billy Squire, and others. But that was then. I must admit that I haven't really listened to KLOL since the late 80's because, on the whole, commercial rock has sucked for a long time--okay, the grunge era was cool, but just a flash in the pan, when you get right down to it. This is notable because there is, as far as I know, no longer any station in Houston dedicated to playing new rock music. Rock is now dead in the bayou city.

Actually, I'm almost tempted to say that rock is dead in general, but I don't think we're there just yet.

Anyway, long live rock!

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INSIDE THE AMERICAN EMPIRE:
Confessions of an Economic Hitman

From Democracy Now:

AMY GOODMAN: You're actually called economic hit men --e.h.m.’s?

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, it was a tongue-in-cheek term that we called ourselves. Officially, I was a chief economist. We called ourselves e.h.m.'s. It was tongue-in-cheek. It was like, nobody will believe us if we say this, you know? And, so, we went to Saudi Arabia in the early seventies. We knew Saudi Arabia was the key to dropping our dependency, or to controlling the situation. And we worked out this deal whereby the Royal House of Saud agreed to send most of their petro-dollars back to the United States and invest them in U.S. government securities. The Treasury Department would use the interest from these securities to hire U.S. companies to build Saudi Arabia–new cities, new infrastructure–which we’ve done. And the House of Saud would agree to maintain the price of oil within acceptable limits to us, which they’ve done all of these years, and we would agree to keep the House of Saud in power as long as they did this, which we’ve done, which is one of the reasons we went to war with Iraq in the first place. And in Iraq we tried to implement the same policy that was so successful in Saudi Arabia, but Saddam Hussein didn't buy. When the economic hit men fail in this scenario, the next step is what we call the jackals. Jackals are C.I.A.-sanctioned people that come in and try to foment a coup or revolution. If that doesn't work, they perform assassinations. or try to. In the case of Iraq, they weren't able to get through to Saddam Hussein. He had -- His bodyguards were too good. He had doubles. They couldn’t get through to him. So the third line of defense, if the economic hit men and the jackals fail, the next line of defense is our young men and women, who are sent in to die and kill, which is what we’ve obviously done in Iraq.

Click here to either read the interview, listen to it, or watch streaming video.

The Saudi royal family governs both corruptly and brutally. There are no free speech rights in Saudi Arabia, and torture is practiced in their prisons and jails regularly. Dissent is crushed with an iron fist. The only criticism tolerated by the house of Saud comes from the nation's puritanical Wahabi clerics, so if you are a Saudi subject and you want to criticize the government, the only avenue for doing this is within a religious context. In other words, the home of hotbed extremism in Saudi Arabia is the mosques, and this all results from the fact that the US, for economic purposes, has been keeping the Saudi royal family in power for three decades.

Are you starting to see a pattern here?

All but two of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi subjects. Osama bin Laden is from Saudi Arabia. Massive sections of the Congressional report on the 9/11 attacks were censored by the White House, and these sections are presumably about Saudi Arabia's connection with the terrorists.

And about our connection with Saudi Arabia.

This is what I have been saying here at Real Art for almost two years now: the only way to end terrorism is to stop treating the nations and peoples of the world as resources to be exploited, to start using our wealth and might to help people live better lives. Military action only makes things worse. Obviously, the people most responsible for 9/11 were the hijackers and their leaders. However, our leaders, from both government and business, who send "economic hitmen" to meddle in the affairs of other nations for their own profit, share that responsibility.

The people of America did not deserve to be attacked the way they were three years ago, but our leaders most certainly did.

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Arafat Died Years Ago

From CounterPunch, courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe, longtime British Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk on the ineffective life of Yasser Arafat:

Those were the days when he promised to return all the refugees of pre-1948 Palestine to their homes, when he deliberately sacrificed thousands of Palestinian lives in the Tel el-Zaatar camp to earn the world's sympathy, when he tolerated aircraft hijacking and talked about "democracy among the guns" and eventually left his people in Beirut to Israel's murderous henchmen in the Phalange.

The Arafat mug was never going to find its way on to university walls like Guevara or even Castro. There was -- and still is -- a kind of seediness about it and maybe that's what the Israelis saw too, a man who could be relied on to police his people in their little Bantustans, another proxy to run the show when occupation became too tiresome. "Can Arafat control his own people?" That's what the Israelis asked and the world obligingly asked the same question without realising the truth: that this was precisely why Arafat had been allowed back to the Occupied Territories -- to "control" his people. The only time he did stand up to his Israeli-American masters -- when he refused to accept 64 per cent of the 22 per cent of Palestine that was left to him -- he returned in triumph to Gaza and allowed the Israelis to claim he was offered 95 per cent but chose war.

When he started negotiating with the Israelis, he had not even seen a Jewish settlement but he put his trust in the Americans -- always a dangerous thing to do in the Middle East -- and when Israel began to renege on the withdrawals, there was no one to help him. Israel broke withdrawal agreements five times.

Then came intifada two and the Palestinian suicide bombings and 11 September 2001, and it was only a matter of time -- about six hours, to be exact -- before Israel said Arafat was linked to Osama bin Laden and that Ariel Sharon, too, was fighting world terror in his battle with the "terrorist" Arafat.

Click here for the rest.

I have a great deal of sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people, and a lot of anger toward the Israeli government that oppresses them. However, that doesn't mean I liked Arafat. He purposely took his people down a path of self-destruction, playing into the hands of Israeli hawks again and again. Then Arafat simply became corrupt. Hopefully, but doubtfully, things will improve now that he's gone.

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THE TRAGEDY OF TODAY'S GAYS:
An address to the gay community

An excerpt from a recent speech by the most radical and outspoken gay activist in history, ACT-UP founder Larry Kramer, courtesy of David E's Fablog:

I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we're better than other people. I really do. I think we're smarter and more talented and more aware and I do, I do, I totally do. And I think we're more tuned in to what's happening, tuned into the moment, tuned into our emotions, and other people's emotions, and we're better friends. I really do think all these things.

To us it defies rational analysis that this incompetent dishonest man and his party should be re-elected. Or does it?

I hope we all realize that, as of November 2nd, gay rights are officially dead. And that from here on we are going to be led even closer to the guillotine. This past week almost 60 million of our so-called "fellow" Americans voted against us. Indeed 23% of self-identified gay people voted against us, too. That one I can't figure.

The absoluteness of what has happened is terrifying.

And

Bill Moyers recently said this in a speech on October 20, 2004 at the Palace Hotel

"For years now, the corporate, political, and religious right -- this is documented from 1971 on -- the religious and political right has been joined in an axis of influence whose purpose is to take back the gains of the democratic renewal in the 20th century and restore America to a rule of the elites that maintain their privilege and their power at the expense of everyone else. For years now, a small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented levels of economic and political power over daily life."

"Take note," Moyers continues. "The corporate, political, and religious conservatives are achieving a vast transformation of America that only they understand because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest inequality in America since 1929, they have saddled our nation, our States, and our cities and counties with structural defects that will last until our children's children are ready for retirement, and they are systematically stripping government of all its functions, except rewarding the rich and waging war."

In other words, our country has been taken away from us by a cabal that includes all the people who hate us.

These people make the rules. They are rarely elected officials. They may or may not know each other. They have several things in common. They are very rich or have strong connections to money or power. They are in agreement on what they do not want. They believe fervently in their God. And that they are doing all this for Him. And they stay in constant touch.

I hope you realize that all these people Bill Moyers is talking about hate us. Thriller writers write better histories of our times than actual historians.

Anyway, it is done. What Moyers is talking about. It's already happened. On a scale of such magnitude that it is difficult to see how we can ever take it back. It's all in place now, this cabal of power. It almost doesn't make any difference who is president.

You want to know why AIDS was allowed to happen. This is your answer. You want to know why gay people have no power and are unlikely to get any. This is your answer.

Click here for the rest.

It's quite long (it took me over a half hour to read), but well worth the read. Kramer understands, better than anybody else probably, the political situation for gays in America, and he spells it out quite bluntly in his speech. He doesn't withhold his wrath from the gay community, either--he also blasts gays for their political state of suspended animation, as well as their return to risky sexual behaviors. If you are gay, or care about gay people at all, this is must reading.

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NOAM CHOMSKY ON THE ELECTION

From his blog:

As to fraud, etc. I don’t think it is a major issue, even if true. The election had about the significance of tossing a coin to pick a king. If the coin was slightly biased, that’s unfair, but not the main issue. The much more important point is that the opinions of the majority of the population were excluded from the political arena on major issues. People voted for the imagery concocted by the PR industry. Exit polls reveal that clearly. But to discover whether the imagery is accurate, we have to compare people’s attitudes and beliefs with the actual programs. There’s plenty of interesting and credible evidence on this, and when we investigate it, we discover that people were hopelessly misled. Voters for both candidates assumed, overwhelmingly, that the candidates held their views, which is demonstrably false. In fact, voters recognized that they could not vote on agenda/policies/programs/ideas—about 10% gave that as their reasons—but only on imagery. And in a society based crucially on deceit (what is advertising?), it is quite natural that the political managers and the PR industry will run elections the same way. To repeat, there is overwhelming evidence that the opinions of the majority of the population on major issues were simply off the agenda, either within the political parties or in mainstream discussion, with rare exceptions. That democratic deficit seems to me far more important than the possibility that the coin that was tossed was biased.

Click here for the rest.

I guess that kind of puts it all into perspective: this is the one thing that the self-righteous Democrat Nader and Green haters just don't get; it's not really about electoral politics in the long run. It's about educating the population, organizing, and pressuring our leaders to do the right thing. Nonetheless, exposing any possible Republican electoral fraud would score a lot PR points inasmuch as symbolizing to most people how much of a sham our "democracy" actually is. Chomsky's right on the issues, but, if the allegations of a GOP vote-scam are true, he's missing out on a valuable line of strategy.

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LIBERAL DESPAIR

I'm continuing to notice a lot of left-wing blogger depression in cyberspace this week. For some reason, the outcome of the election hasn't really emotionally affected me that much. Maybe it's because I think that Kerry would have been only marginally better than Bush. Maybe it's because I know there's much, much more that needs to be done before we can call America a just and righteous nation--I mean, Kerry or Bush, either way the corporations still run the world, and things will continue to get worse, not better, for working people. I don't know. I'm even a bit optimistic: perhaps, by the time Bush is finishing his second term, conservatism will be irrevocably discredited--it could happen, right?

Anyway, here's a sample of the despair I'm noticing from Rob Salkowitz's Emphasis Added:

Not Really Getting Over It

It makes me sad, though, because I truly loved this country and what I thought it stood for. I thought it was special and wise, and even if it went through periods of misguided policies, that it had the strength within itself to correct its path, to opt for right over wrong when given a clear choice.

Now I see that’s not my country. My new country will cross the street to spit on a bum, pick fights with the weak then laugh and brag at its victories, revel in tasteless displays of its own wealth, and laugh derisively at people who read books. My old country would bounce back from 9/11 with an affirmation of liberty and rise to the task of leading the world. My new country staggers wildly around like a madman who received a blow to the head, swinging its fists at passers-by and shouting wild nonsense through spittle-flecked lips.

Sorry, I can’t be proud of that. And I miss my pride like a phantom limb.

Click here for the rest. It's actually a pretty poignant essay, just depressing.

Here's what I wrote on Rob's comment board:

Of course, it's still your country, Rob. When you choose to think that way, you're forgetting that nearly half of the electorate voted against Bush and everything he stands for. The right-wing weirdos do, indeed, hold power now, and they do, indeed, have a great deal of popular support, but that has not yet translated into a fundamental metamorphis of America character. My take on the whole thing is that most of those Republican voters have been wildly misinformed by way of brilliant political strategy--remember that a large percentage of Bush supporters believe that Iraq had WMD and that they were cooperating with Al Qaeda; in their minds, this is enough to justify Bush's Draconian governance. And, hey, if Saddam really was about to launch nuclear suitcases at New York City, that point of view would have a bit more validity (only a bit more, mind you). America is experiencing dark days, to be sure, but now, more than ever, Americans whose minds aren't addled by GOP fear mongering need to turn their amps up to eleven and remind the other half of the country of what it means live in the land of the free. Don't despair; these are exciting times.

Hours after writing that comment, in one of those weird twists of synchronicity, I happened upon this really uplifting essay by radical historian Howard Zinn, via WorkingForChange:

The optimism of uncertainty

There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.

What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth. Let's go back a hundred years. A revolution to overthrow the tsar of Russia, in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial powers, but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Given the Russian Revolution, who could have predicted Stalin's deformation of it, or Khrushchev's astounding exposure of Stalin, or Gorbachev's succession of surprises?

And

Looking at this catalog of huge surprises, it's clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience-whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union itself. No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just.

Click here for the rest.

We do live in exciting times. Anything could happen. Maybe it's just that the direction of my personal life has changed dramatically for the better, but for the first time in many years, I'm optimistic. I've never seen the lines between right and wrong in our country so clearly drawn. I've never seen so many people reject what the Conservative Movement stands for. Change may very well be right around the corner, and I want to help make it happen. The opportunities for participating in staggering historical events are practically endless.

Cheer up, liberals. This is only the beginning.

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Fundamentalists and free-marketeers make unholy allies

From WorkingForChange:

Jim Wallis, an evangelical Christian activist, editor of Sojourner's Magazine and author of the book "The Soul of Politics," points to what I'm talking about. It's worth quoting him at length.

"The word 'evangelical' is a good word, although it's got lots of baggage and people have all these images and fears," he said. "I understand all that, what people think it means, but the word harkens back to a wonderful biblical word, the 'evangel,' which means the good news. So it's supposed to be good news. The fact that evangelicals aren't often thought to be good news is part of the present problem," he says.

But what kind of good news? "Jesus, in his first sermon -- his Nazareth manifesto, you might say -- said, 'The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.' To be evangelical means to preach and live and act in a way that is good news to poor people."

And

Progressives, liberals and leftists can't engage them on this because they don't have the vocabulary. They've allowed their fear and ignorance of the Bible to prevent them from seeing that it contains some of the most radically egalitarian, progressive ideals in Western civilization.

Click here for the rest.

Well, having been raised as a Southern Baptist, I have the vocabulary. The bottom line is that, when one considers the plain language of the Gospels, it's completely clear that Jesus was a total radical, purposely living in poverty, among the poor, healing the sick, befriending the tax-collectors, feeding the hungry, rescuing the condemned. Fundamentalists completely ignore this and continue supporting the Republicans.

It's time to rub their noses in their Bibles.

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ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Bush steadfast on rejection of global warming

President Bush is holding fast to his rejection of mandatory curbs on greenhouse gases that are blamed for global warming, despite a fresh report from 300 scientists in the United States and seven other nations that shows Arctic temperatures are rising.

And

"President Bush strongly opposes any treaty or policy that would cause the loss of a single American job, let alone the nearly 5 million jobs Kyoto would have cost," said James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Headed into his second term, Bush continues to believe he "made the right leadership choice" by repudiating the U.N.-sponsored pact negotiated in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, Connaughton said.

Former President Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, negotiated the treaty for the United States and had a major role in its final form.

"Kyoto was a bad treaty for the United States," said Mike Leavitt, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Click here for the rest.

The notion that reducing greenhouse gasses would cost the US five million jobs is very debatable, especially when you factor in the numerous economists who believe that compliance with the Kyoto treaty would actually create many jobs that would offset any losses. Even so, we're talking about an eventual environmental catastrophe that would render moot the entire question of job loss.

Read on.

From the Los Angeles Times, again via the Houston Chronicle:

Report cites rapid Arctic warming

The Arctic is experiencing some of the most rapid and severe warming on the planet, according to a new, eight-nation report — the most comprehensive assessment of Earth's fragile northern cap to date.

The report, a four-year effort involving hundreds of scientists, describes vast areas of melting ice, declining species and fading indigenous cultures.

"It's affecting people up there now," said Robert Corell, the American oceanographer who led the project. "And there are very serious consequences for people on the rest of the planet."

The report states that climate change is accelerating sharply, spurred by human production of greenhouse gases, which have increased in the atmosphere by nearly 30 percent since the Industrial Revolution.

Click here for the rest.

We are in deep doo-doo.

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AMERICAN CULTURAL DIVIDE: A Very Old Story

Courtesy of Emphasis Added, Digby over at Hullabaloo tries to figure out what the hell's wrong with half the country:

History suggests that the southern culture has always been as defined by it's resentment toward the rest of the country as much as anything else.

And

One thing this little historical trip should show everyone is that it is nonsense to think that this cultural resentment and cultural contempt was created by Hollywood movie stars and limosine liberals from New York City. Indeed, this has been a problem since the dawn of the republic. And it isn't a problem that will be solved by the Red States gaining and maintaining power. They have held power many times throughout our history and they were still filled with resentment toward "the north" (now "the liberal elites.") And, it won't be solved by adopting different stances on "moral issues," or telling the current Democratic southern constituencies to suck it up. Maybe it's time we looked a little bit deeper and realized that this tribal problem isn't going to be solved by politics at all.

The "liberal elites" will no doubt be making more compromises in the direction of heartland values for pragmatic reasons. But, judging by history, it won't change a thing. Neither will Republican political dominance. So, maybe it's time for the heartland to take a good hard look at itself and ask when they are going to adopt the culture of responsibility they profess with such fervor. It sure looks to me as if they've been nursing a case of historical pique for more than 200 years and that resentment no longer has any more meaning than a somewhat self-destructive insistence on maintaining a cultural identity that's really defined by it's anger toward the rest of the country. They are talking themselves into a theocratic police state in order to "crack the whip over the heads of the northern men" and it's not likely to work out for them any better this time than it did the first time. The real elites in the church, the government and the corporations will take them down right along with us when that comes to pass.

Click here for the rest.

Digby's got a good point: historical resentment of rural America towards urban America, South towards North, "Red" states towards "Blue" states, continues to exist. What he misses is that this resentment need not be as politically enflamed as it is today. The United States was once, during the mid twentieth century, a fairly progressive country. What has happened is that determined conservative ideologues, armed with butt-loads of cash, have been making a concerted effort to fan the flames of these cultural resentments for over three decades.

By establishing conservative "think tanks" such as the Heritage Foundation, which offers a ready and endless supply of "experts" to give the mainstream news media conservative opinions at a moment's notice, by creating a now-dominant alternative news media that caters exclusively to conservative tastes, by playing the campaign finance laws like a fiddle, along with other political tactics, conservative leaders have masterfully turned relatively minor cultural differences into what President Bush now calls "political capital." Meanwhile, the Democrats have gotten fat, scared, and lazy, continually retreating in the face of what appears to be an unstoppable opponent.

Like I said, these resentments do exist, but, by themselves, they're not enough to turn America into the redneck nation that it has now become. America can once again become a progressive nation, but it's going to take a lot of work and a lot of strategy. I think the energy exists to do the work. The real question is if liberals are willing to mount an effective counter-offensive in the war of ideology. Given that the Democrats continue to be running scared, I'm not going to hold my breath.

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VOTESCAM 2004: Two From Common Dreams

Both by author Thom Hartmann, courtesy of Dr. Menlo.

The Ultimate Felony Against Democracy

The hot story in the Blogosphere is that the "erroneous" exit polls that showed Kerry carrying Florida and Ohio (among other states) weren't erroneous at all - it was the numbers produced by paperless voting machines that were wrong, and Kerry actually won. As more and more analysis is done of what may (or may not) be the most massive election fraud in the history of the world, however, it's critical that we keep the largest issue at the forefront at all time: Why are We The People allowing private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to their officers and boards of directors, and loyal only to agendas and politicians that will enhance their profitability, to handle our votes?

Maybe Florida went for Kerry, maybe for Bush. Over time - and through the efforts of some very motivated investigative reporters - we may well find out (Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org just filed what may be the largest Freedom of Information Act [FOIA} filing in history), and bloggers and investigative reporters are discovering an odd discrepancy in exit polls being largely accurate in paper-ballot states and oddly inaccurate in touch-screen electronic voting states Even raw voter analyses are showing extreme oddities in touch-screen-run Florida, and eagle-eyed bloggers are finding that news organizations are retroactively altering their exit polls to coincide with what the machines ultimately said.

Click here for the rest.

Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked

When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.

"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.

And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.

Click here for the rest.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY REAL ART!

Mood music.

Today, November 7th, is Real Art's second birthday. It's hard to believe that I've been doing this for two years now. Woo-hoo! Have a piece of cake.

Here's my first post, written shortly after the Republicans took the Senate:

You know, I wonder how it felt in 1930's Germany when the Nazis came to power. The House is Republican; the Senate is Republican; the White House is Republican; the majority on the Supreme Court is Republican. Maybe if we're all lucky this is the deathknell of the Democrats leaving the way open for a true people's party like the Greens or something. But I'm not feeling too lucky right about now...I don't even feel like the trains are going to end up running on time.

And, after two years, I must admit that things seem to be pretty much the same now as they were then. It's obvious now: Real Art hasn't changed the world. But I won't let a triviality like that stop me. Oh, no. I've got too much to say and not enough people to hear it. So expect my pontificating to continue for as long as I'm a gasbag, which ought to be a very long time, indeed.

Heh, heh.

Okay, if you really want to know why I've been doing this for two years see the post below.

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WHY DO I BLOG?

My wife's best friend's husband is a photojournalist who spent many years working for the New York Times. Currently, he's working as a picture editor for a paper in the midwest. In other words, he's firmly ensconced in the business that I spend a lot of time talking about. Recently, he checked out my blog and sent me some feedback via email:

Ron,

So I have checked into your blog....and well, as a journalist who reads far too much, there's not much new for me to digest. The whole blogging issue makes me feel that too many people are spending too much time talking at each other rather than with each other.

http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/showcase/la-op-billmon26sep26.story

Of course, some journalists feel that blogs can help the business:

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=53&aid=71447

Others try it instead of straight news:

http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=66794

and of course here's even more:

http://www.poynter.org/search/results_article.asp?txt_searchText=blogs&txt_searchScope=all

See, I joined a listserv or community to share and mentor in the business, and try to add a reasoned and balanced voice to my shitheel excuse of a newspaper but after that, sadly, I have learned that rhetoric and discourse, especially in politics, have been replaced by shrill tv clowns yelling at each other and bloggers lamenting out of some remote corner.

Perhaps the reason your blog attracts so little feedback may be due to the steady stream of left, leaning commentary. Your friends who agree with you, have little to add and maybe every now and then you can have a dissenter to debate with.

I think it is laudable how we are starting to see playwrights crafting politically inspired productions. I know that exercising my creative wherewithall in my craft is more satisfying than just floating my opinions in cyberspace.

Given your talent, I think you could scrub the blog and devote that energy into a politcally inspired play. I mean, the issues with National Guard troops on extended deployment, prisoner abuse, outsourcing of jobs, students who can't learn, healthcare and those who can't afford it......go to legion halls and vet hospitals, talk to the war wounded and the soldiers families who are struggling....there's people there with real problems whose thoughts, situations and dialogues are the kind of ingredients with which a Tony Kushner could make a hell of a stage meal. You could probably spend time in one small parrish and find a rich subject area.

just some thoughts, from an underutilized picture editor in a town that is an ugly collision of the Rust Belt and Appalachia and has the chutzpah to think it is midwestern because everyone goes to church once a week, to make ammends for their selfishness and bigotry the other six days....nah, I don't have any issues.

regards,

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"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." - Hunter S. Thompson

He raised some very good points, which got me thinking, once again, about what I'm trying to do with Real Art. Here's my response to him:

Dear $$$$,

Thanks for visiting my blog, and thanks for your thoughts and suggestions. I must admit that I was slightly disturbed to have you poking your nose around my little corner of cyberspace simply because of who you are. That is, you're a journalist, and the thought of having someone from the business looking at my missives is intimidating at the very least. However, after having been studying acting in graduate school for the last six weeks, I'm growing more accustomed to feeling like I'm under a microscope, so your email was only the cause of some mild anxiety. Maybe my skin is getting thicker.

At any rate, I think your analysis of the whole blogging phenomenon and right/left dialogue is right on the mark. I don't really think my blog is doing much at all in the way of adding anything significant or noteworthy to what passes for national political discourse, especially because I receive so few hits. For that matter, I don't really look at many blogs, myself. I check out Eschaton and This Modern World pretty regularly, and a couple of others, but generally, I prefer actual news sources--I mean, bloggers are typically just guys at their keyboards like me, so why should I even care? It seems like there are millions of blogs out there, and I don't really feel like I have the time or inclination to even try to check them out. As a weird cyber-trend, I find blogs to be interesting, but that's about it. Ultimately, I think that only a few key bloggers, with huge audiences, make any real difference, and I expect many of them to be absorbed by the more traditional forms of news media as the years go by. I'm reminded of successful independent film makers, or indie rock bands finally getting big contracts after some years of trudging away in the trenches.

Why, then, do I have a blog?

That's hard to say. The most simple answer is that I seem to get some kind of personal satisfaction from it. People commenting, a blog with a larger audience linking to my blog, an upturn in hits for a day or two, all these things are nice, but really just frosting. The cake, for me, is having my own little soapbox. Also, after blogging for nearly two years, I've come to see some other personal benefits. I've found that my writing, and thus, my thinking, has become clearer and more succinct. Disciplining myself not only to follow news and other topics on a daily basis, and usually writing a brief bit of commentary on what I encounter, has made me a better conversationalist, especially with the likes of our mutual acquaintance, $$$$$$$ $$$$$$$. I also think I might be stoking my own vanity by creating a record of my thoughts and feelings about what I believe to be important--I've always wanted to have a diary or journal, but I've never been able to keep it going for more than a couple of weeks: the blog-form seems to have gotten me beyond the apathy or laziness that always seemed to doom my previous efforts. Maybe feeling like I have an audience motivates me more.

Now, having said all that, I also have to say that I actually do believe that my blog makes some small bit of difference in the lives of a few people. Years ago, I pretty much gave up on my youthful desire to change the world for the better--I suppose it's simply reaching a certain level of maturity, but somewhere along the line, I decided that an individual effort was pretty much futile, which, I assume, has been obvious to you for many years. However, at the same time I reached this conclusion, it also occurred to me that I can conceivably change the people around me, and hope that they will change the people around them. Even though I haven't noticed massive waves of social change emanating from my own sphere of existence, I have noticed that my words, both written and spoken, have led some people to consider things differently. My six years of teaching sucked, on the whole, but this particular aspect, trying to open up people to seeing the world in a new ways, was pretty satisfying. To some extent, my blog is a sort of unencumbered, free-form extension of my work in education.

As for your suggestion that I turn my energies to playwriting, I'm right with you. Indeed, after about a year or so of teaching, it hit me that I would end up with enough material to eventually put together a one man show about my experiences in the classroom that could be a sort of rhetorical platform for discussing social issues in general; I've got a lot of ideas bouncing around in my head: it's pretty amazing how public school both affects and is affected by society at large, and I think I could put together a pretty cool and relevant show once I'm able to put my mind to it. Of course, my blog has been helping these ideas to coalesce.

Thing is, grad school is pretty hardcore, and I don't think I'll be able to sit down and hack this thing out until I've gotten my degree.

Speaking of grad school, I wanted to mention that I think you've encountered my blog during something of a down-time; I'm so damned busy. I would totally love it if you could find the time to check out some of the posts I've written in the past that have pleased me. For instance, my post on economics. Or my post on good, evil, and Christianity. Or my post on Scalia's dissent in the Texas sodomy case.

Finally, a couple of questions. First, would it be okay if I posted some or all of your email and my response on my blog? There's nothing like a bit of self-referential navel contemplation, I always say. Second, is your new town really that lame? Could it possibly be worse than Houston's east side? And, by the way, good Dr. Thompson quote, although I must admit that I'm more fond of the quote on the back of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; you know, the one with the list of drugs and the comment about a man on an ether binge? It was like a call to arms when I was an undergrad.

Anyway, I've rambled far too long. Thanks for bearing with me, and thanks again for your input.

Ron

Actually, my photojournalist friend never got back to me, so I'm running his email without permission. I got tired of waiting, and I think it's a pretty good exchange. Hopefully he won't be enraged or anything.

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STOLEN ELECTION 2004
Still think I'm crazy?

From Wired courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

E-Vote Glitch Inflates Bush Total

An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.

Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.

Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told the Columbus Dispatch.

And

In the Ohio precinct in question, the votes are recorded onto a cartridge. On one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in the recording process, Damschroder said. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred.

I'll just bet. Click here for the rest. Then wonder how many more times this happened, but wasn't caught. Then do some hypothetical math. I may be wrong to assert that this election was stolen like the 2000 election, but I'm definitely not crazy to think so.

Read on.

From BELLACIAO, again courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

Too many voting ’irregularities’ to be coincidence

4. The amazing ’coincidence’ that exit polls were accurate in non-swing states, but were way off in key states like Ohio and Florida. I can understand that exit polls may be flawed, but how odd that they’re only flawed in swing states that Bush needed to win... and of course the final results are always skewed towards Bush.. which is exactly what would happen if Bush were losing, then a repub vote thief dialed in to the central tabulators and activated a script that would fix the count. How easy it is to steal an election with modern technology.... no need to haul ballot boxes to the lake- all you need is the secret phone number and the election could be fixed from a home computer. (Election officials ’unknowingly’ gave out the secret phone # in a stack of requested papers)

Click here for more "irregularities."

But, wait, there's more! From News Target, courtesly of Dr. Menlo:

States with electronic voting machines
gave Bush mysterious 5% advantage

Is Bush trying to pull a fast one? It's not fooling bloggers over at DemocraticUnderground.com, who have put together some fascinating numbers showing that a mysterious "5% advantage" goes to Bush only in those states using electronic voting machines. Or, put another way, all the exit polls showed Kerry winning, and the exit polls asked people who they actually voted for. But strangely, the "official" count appears to have been boosted in favor of Bush.

And

Just to make things even more frustrating for Democratics, the e-voting machines have no way to offer a meaningful recount of votes. As this WIRED article explains, the machines leave no paper trail. The votes are recorded as mere bits and bytes, meaning there's really no way to tell how the people actually voted in the first place. (Only in America could we decide our national elections with the aid of voting machines that leave no paper trail.)

Click here for the rest.

Finally, from VotersUnite again courtesy of Dr. Menlo, check out this massive list of reported voting problems from last Tuesday.

Like I keep saying, I could be mistaken, but there's enough here to set off numerous red flags, and because we already know that the Republicans are prone toward this sort of thing, well, make up your own mind. Just because the Democrats are a bunch of weasels that have put themselves in a position that makes election theft possible doesn't make it okay for the GOP to actually do it. This is wrong, and it looks like these criminals are going to get away with it again.

Damn it.

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MY OLD SCHOOL BEATS MY OLD SCHOOL
Baytown Sterling 28, Kingwood 25

This is only significant because I attended Kingwood as a student back in the 1980's and taught at Sterling in the late 90's and early...what the hell do we call this decade? Anyway, the Sterling Rangers sucked bigtime the entire time I was there which was a drag because I desperately lusted for a win against my old school. It only figures that, now I'm gone, Sterling finally pulls off the upset.

From the Houston Chronicle:

Jeremy Williams compiled 305 all-purpose yards and scored two touchdowns to pace the Baytown Sterling Rangers to a slim victory over the Kingwood Mustangs at Stallworth Stadium.

Williams hauled in a 56-yard strike from Mike Marcontell to give the Rangers a 14-7 lead in the second period.

Williams later stretched a narrow 21-18 lead to 10 points when he returned a kickoff 95 yards as a retort to a Kingwood score.

Kingwood mounted a rally late in the game but fell short despite a one-yard TD by quarterback Johnny Whittleman that capped a seven-play, 69-yard drive.

Actually, that's the entire article. I mean, there are hundreds of high schools in the Houston area, and only a relatively few people really care about this game, anyway. So, um...click here for the article in it's original format, complete with a link to the box score.

Here's a link to the Baytown Sun's pre-game article. It kind of gives you an idea of how sucky the Rangers have been:

The Sterling Rangers still have a lot riding on the 2004 season. They can avoid having a losing record for the first time in years if they beat the Kingwood Mustangs tonight.

The Rangers enter their last game with a 4-5 season record and are 1-5 in District 22-5A. Kingwood is 3-6 overall and 2-4 in district.

Of course, it sounds like the Mustangs haven't been doing that well lately either. You know, it's totally weird that I have any interest in this at all. I really have awful memories of my time at Sterling. What kind of a sicko am I?

Go Rangers.

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Kerry Won. Here Are the Facts.

I've been waiting for this. From the man who broke real story of how Bush stole the 2000 election, Greg Palast:

The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.

And not all votes spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every official report, come from African-American and minority precincts. (To learn more, click here.)

We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn't match the official count. That's because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded 179,855 spoiled votes. In Florida, as in Ohio, most of these votes lost were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn't punched through completely—leaving a 'hanging chad,'—or was punched extra times. Whose cards were discarded? Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks. (To read the report from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, click here.)

And here's the key: Florida is terribly typical. The majority of ballots thrown out (there will be nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's election) will have been cast by African American and other minority citizens.

So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes" in the voting biz). Nor are they demanding we look at the "overvotes" where voter intent may be discerned.Ohio is one of the last states in America to still use the vote-spoiling punch-card machines. And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, wrote before the election, “the possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity.”

Click here for the rest.

This is no surprise at all. The vote scam in Ohio is exactly as the Republicans wanted it--Blackwell, like Katharine Harris in Florida before him, is a Republican; even though he knew of the potential for voting mayhem, he did nothing. The Republicans stole this one, too. Given that the GOP has already stolen a presidential election, given all the reports of Republican vote-fixing leading up to this election, the aura of unbelievability is gone. It's happened again.

And this time, the scope may very well be much bigger, as this statement from Black Box Voting suggests:

If you are concerned about what happened Tuesday, Nov. 2, you have found a home with our organization. Help America Audit.

Black Box Voting has taken the position that fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines. We base this on hard evidence, documents obtained in public records requests, inside information, and other data indicative of manipulation of electronic voting systems. What we do not know is the specific scope of the fraud. We are working now to compile the proof, based not on soft evidence -- red flags, exit polls -- but core documents obtained by Black Box Voting in the most massive Freedom of Information action in history.

We need: Lawyers to enforce public records laws. Some counties have already notified us that they plan to stonewall by delaying delivery of the records. We need citizen volunteers for a number of specific actions. We need computer security professionals willing to GO PUBLIC with formal opinions on the evidence we provide, whether or not it involves DMCA complications. We need funds to pay for copies of the evidence.

Click here for their site. They've got some pretty interesting stuff, including some proven examples of how electronic voting machines have already been tampered with in previous elections.

America as we know it is over.

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HOW THE DEMOCRATS BLEW IT

A left-wing round up.

First, from ZNet, an analysis of Kerry's lackluster campaign:

Why Kerry Lost

Kerry ran a tactical campaign, devoid of vision or explicable alternatives, utterly lacking in message discipline, and riddled with misjudgments -- it was one of the most incompetently run presidential campaigns by a Democrat in my lifetime.

Kerry's biggest blunder was his failure to focus like a laser on the economy in the final weeks of the campaign, despite polls showing it was the number one issue on voters' minds. The lethal character of Kerry's scatter-shot, flailing, themeless campaign close can be clearly seen in the Ohio exit polls. In the Buckeye State, 62% of the voters said the economy was "not good" -- BUT asked who they'd trust with the economy, they were evenly split between Bush and Kerry, 48-48%. The national number on that question actually favored Bush, who got 48% on the economy to Kerry's 46%.

By not focusing on the economy, even in a state that had lost 250,000 jobs on Bush's watch Kerry couldn't make the case that he'd do better.

Click here for more problems with Kerry's campaign.

Next, from Slate, courtesy of This Modern World, political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow opines on...well, just read the title:

Why Americans Hate Democrats

This is not to suggest that the sole problem for Democrats is an inability to articulate a message, as if the entire Democratic Party simply needs to overcome its regrettable awkwardness around strangers. There also needs to be a message. At the start of this forum, Robert Wright described John Kerry's campaign as "ultra-risk-averse." The same might be said of the Democratic Party as a whole right now. Many of the issues for which Democrats stand are highly divisive—stem-cell research, gay rights, abortion—and in their attempts to finesse that divisiveness, they often seem to stand for nothing at all. In their eagerness to appear reasonable and moderate—and to avoid at all costs being tarred with the dread epithet "liberal"—they become the enablers, the loyal opposition seeking common ground (even as the opposition is doing its best to destroy them and scorch the very earth where they once stood). Gosh, they say, maybe we should go to war in Iraq for no apparent reason, and maybe gay people don't deserve full and equal rights. And so on and so forth.

Republicans don't have this problem. Republicans are perfectly comfortable with what they are and what they stand for ("pure evil," the provocateur in me is compelled to suggest).

Click here for the rest.

Finally, from Corporate MoFo courtesy of my old friend Matt, yet another area where the Democrats come up short:

WHY BUSH WON

Say what you like—that at least Bush finally got elected, that the Red Sox swept the World Series because Kerry had to borrow the curse, that America deserves what it gets—but, in my humble opinion, this perceived American crisis of masculinity is the real cause of what happened November 2. Like watching action movies or professional sports, participating in the Bush victory was a psychic restorative, giving back some semblance of a sense of manly honor that has been stolen away by time clocks, Dr. Phil, and Zoloft. Bush's message speaks directly to the heart of the emasculated modern man: stick with me, and we'll stand tall, provide for our families, and kick terrorist ass.

Click here for the rest.

Spoken like Susan Faludi. There's a great deal of truth to this.

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ELECTORAL HANGOVER

Lots of gnashing of teeth on the left side of the blogosphere today. I'm not quite sure what Rob Salkowitz is getting at over at Emphasis Added, but he certainly sounds depressed. David Neiwert over at Orcinus suggests that the Democrats need to spend more time reaching out to rural America, and I think he's got something there, but I wonder how this can be done in the face of a conservative lock on down-home "traditional values;" if we've learned anything from this election, it's that gay-bashing and war-mongering trump economic insecurity. Atrios is also bummed, of course, and trying to come to terms with this new reality, but he makes a pretty good observation with which I mostly agree:

Democrats and liberals have spent too many years running away from the Right's caricature of what it means to be a liberal that they've managed to obliterate from the public consciousness any coherent concrete narrative. It isn't as many seem to think about precisely where on the Left/Right spectrum a candidate or the Party chooses to position itself. I'm not arguing that Democrats need to be "more liberal" or "less liberal" or anything like that at all. But, they have to be something other than "not Republicans."

The Democrats have absolutely no sense of vision. They have no clear agenda, simply an eclectic crazy-quilt of social issues and ineffective band-aids for the gaping wounds caused by corporate capitalism. They're not trying to take the nation anywhere new: on the contrary, all they seem to have been doing for the last twenty years is trying to stop the Republicans from erasing the previous fifty years of social and economic advancement in America, and they've been failing miserably.

Atrios is absolutely correct when he says that "not Republicans" doesn't cut it. Why? The Republicans offer an agenda, a grand vision, as wrong-headed as it is. Grand visions inspire people; nay-sayers don't. Face it, the Democrats are uninspiring and lame.

On the other hand, I disagree with Atrios' assertion that this isn't about being more or less liberal. The only way to embody what most Democrats seem to believe in, political, social, and economic justice, is to turn to the left. In the quest for money and votes, the Democrats have lost any sense of ideology. They stand for nothing now because they try to stand for everything. They cannot support gay rights while opposing gay marriage. They cannot support both economic justice and the existing corporate system, but they sure as hell try. They cannot support both war and peace, but, somehow, pro-war Kerry was presented and perceived by many as something of a "peace" candidate. The Democrats split hairs all over the place and it makes them look like a bunch of weasels. Hell, they are a bunch of weasels.

I should have voted for the Greens this time, too. But nooooooo. "Anyone but Bush." I won't get fooled again, no, no.

I seriously doubt that the Democrats will turn to the left; their institution just won't allow that to happen: they're stuck in their mind-set, appealing to everybody, taking the corporate cash. But if they did, there could be a major payoff many years down the road. Some day, when I'm old, the Democrats could offer a truly inspiring, truly competitive, vision of an America that could be, a vision that could, by comparison, make plain the Republican view of our nation as the dog crap it is.

Of course, if the Democrats continue to swim in the lukewarm waters in which they currently slosh, there won't be a Democratic Party when I'm old. Fuck them, I'm Green from here on out.

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BIDING ELECTORAL TIME
Real Art Big Geek Edition

I just heard on PBS' News Hour that the Ohio polls may very well be open until midnight due to a huge turnout; I've also heard that Florida has a backlog of absentee votes in the hundreds of thousands. Given that, we may not know who our next President is until tomorrow, or even later. So, what's a blogger like me to do? I'm not much of a wonk, so there's no need to split hairs over electoral nuances, moment-by-moment, and virtually every political issue that I usually talk about (except for, maybe, authoritarianism in education) is deeply tied to the election. At the moment, I don't really have much to say about politics in America.

That's why I'm going to indulge myself with some geek stuff.

From Chicago comic shop Atlas Comics courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

THE 25 ALL-TIME GREATEST
COVERS OF AMERICAN COMIC BOOKS

The comic book cover--along with her stylistic antecedent, the Pulp cover--is one of America's most instantly satisfying pictorial entertainments. Precisely because of their need to appeal to an unsophisticated audience, they are often shocking, lurid, exciting, powerful, grotesque or titillating. As a result they elicit an immediate response from the reader, one which eschews the intellectual reaction so often required of other visual arts.

The very thing which, until recently, divided the Comic Book cover from traditional illustration--unselfconsciousness--had long been a crowning virtue of the medium. No shame, no guilt and no embarrassment were in evidence--no awareness of the social force or influence which comics exerted, however subtly, in our society. Lacking the pretense of civility and conformity found in other media, they were allowed to develop and change apace, stripped of any mitigating influence until all that we were left with was pure, unadulterated sensationalism. In the end, in spite of the low critical esteem accorded to art which appeals to our more base and hedonistic nature, there is something to be said for the momentary thrill of discovery, or shock, or horror. For comic books, they, especially reach back to our youth, and innocent days when those were our only possible reactions to the world we knew.

Click here for the rest of the introduction and the criteria for selection. Click here for the covers. Click here for the the 12 Dumbest Covers of All Time (I actually have one of these, the issue Lois Lane in the bottom left corner).

Here's my favorite, Detective Comics #31 from 1939:



Next, for my buddy Shane, a report on one of my favorite movie monsters from the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Scholars taking Godzilla seriously

Yoshikuni Igarashi, director of east Asian studies at Vanderbilt, sees Godzilla films as important cultural artifacts.

For example, the first Godzilla film came only eight months after the United States tested a hydrogen bomb in the South Pacific.

The movie -- in which H-bomb testing disturbs Godzilla's undersea habitat and transforms him into a behemoth with fiery, radioactive breath -- reflects anxiety and a feeling of helplessness in the face of a nuclear threat, Igarashi said.

The franchise was widely known for its campy special effects. Godzilla films featured men in dinosaur suits stomping around miniature urban landscapes and some monster battles that, Tsutsui acknowledged in his book, seem more like professional wrestling matches.

When an American version of the first film was released in 1956 -- re-edited to include new scenes featuring Raymond Burr of "Perry Mason" fame -- the New York Times dismissed it as "cheap cinematic horror-stuff."

"It is true there were some bad, bad films produced, particularly in the late '60s and early '70s," said Igarashi, who plans to lecture at the conference on the 1964 movie "Godzilla vs. the Thing," in which Godzilla battles the giant moth, Mothra, and its offspring.

Click here for the rest.

Actually, scholars have been taking Godzilla seriously for at least a decade. I remember the subject coming up in a film and video theory course I took in the early 1990's: Godzilla, the terrible monster spawned by radiation from a nuclear bomb, is a cultural manifestation of Japanese anxiety about being the only country ever to be attacked by nuclear weapons. I wonder why the news media is reporting that academics are only now treating the big lizard as worthy of study.

Whatever. Here's a pic:



Really, this is a pretty good representation of what Bush plans to do to the country if re-elected. However, I think Godzilla looks more like Tom DeLay, if you ask me.

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