Plucky ACORN staff show compassion for demonstrably stupid crackers

Posted on September 18, 2009 by Eric Verlo

Congress has sadly overreacted to the Fox News video sting operation to discredit ACORN. Over the summer, most of the community activism offices did run the Giles/O’Keefe whore/pimp act straight out the door, but invariably some staff member was going to take pity on the inadvisably-dressed, street-smart-deficient pair.

What are you going to do, tell someone they’re too stupid to a) turn tricks b) mortgage a whorehouse c) traffic in child prostitutes?

Nor can you put the word out to all your offices to be on the lookout for two dopey white kids, dressed for success based on Quentin Tarantino characters, who appear to be trying to effect an undercover sting. Because that would be racial profiling. Community activists aren’t like the CIA, prepared to entrap the least idiot who voices aspirations to be an outlaw. Because American idiots abound.

I used to have a telephone number listed in the Yellow Pages under Science. Long story, but we’d get calls from uneducated white people looking for laboratory equipment, specifically beakers and measuring devices, for manufacturing Meth. Regularly. I didn’t tell them to get lost, or to turn themselves in. I referred them to the public library where a reference librarian would be able to redirect their wild hair with trained gentleness.

At yesterday’s Teabag Constitution Day Rally, I was reminded about interacting with idiots. There wasn’t an angry white person there who’d graduated high school. Someone was speaking about the constitution, and asked the crowd which amendment protected their right to free speech. The response was silent.

Arguments broke out between “patriots” and counter-protesters. Here’s how they devolved: “Have you read the Constitution?” “HAVE YOU?” “Have you?” “HAVE YOU?” “Have you?” Ad infinitum ignoratum.

The best sign was held aloft, directly in the center, by a young cracker daughter. It read, in giant, meticulously markered bold letters: LIEIR!

The is no talking sense with dumb bastards. You can only be nice, advise them to look things up, read, get an education. Why step on their dreams? If they think their best chances in life lay in prostitution and pimping, who are you to stand in their way. Their inglorious venture will be thwarted by law enforcement soon enough.

Teabag Constitution Day, Acacia Park

Posted on September 16, 2009 by Eric Verlo

THE NOT-WITH-MY-TAXES PATRIOTS are holding another tea party tomorrow, to mark Constitution Day Sept 17, 11AM downtown in Acacia Park, where two friends got permission to table there tomorrow to represent the Special Olympics and pass out applications.

It’s a terrible joke, but these teabaggers bring out my inner idiot. WE ARE TOMORROW going to don robes and false beards and circulate like multi-gendered Jesuses, through the throngs of angry Christians, passing out business cards on which we printed the passage from Matthew, what you did for the least of your brothers…

But I’d really like to recruit an intrepid African American male to help me with a hypothesis. I’m pretty sure that at the height of the crowd’s passions tomorrow, a single black voice raised against them, without his appearing to have allies nearby, will result in a spontaneous lunge to try to lynch him. Then we’ll pounce, with the on-duty portion of the CSPD who aren’t attending the event, and arrest the bigots. There won’t be anybody left in the park.

Act Blue is not going to stop Joe Wilson

Posted on September 15, 2009 by Eric Verlo

Progressive websites are raising money to defeat GOP Tourette’s poster child Joe Wilson in the next election. Is it going to work? No. You can’t stop populist assholes like Wilson, or Vitter, or Delay, or Gingrich, or Lieberman, can you? Incumbent embarrassments have legions of loyal constituents. That’s who you have to stop. If you want to stop Wilson you have to insist the South Carolina prosecutor’s office isn’t dropping charges of domestic violence, disorderly conduct, child truancy, poaching, littering, lying about sales use tax, and loitering at nursing homes trying to register voters. Shroud that crowd in red tape and Joe Wilson’s base will head for the hills.

Who owns images of American dead?

Posted on September 6, 2009 by Eric Verlo

AP photographer Julie Jacobson was reticent to publish her picture of dying US Marine Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard. Though his father was opposed, the Associated Press overruled. But this was no victory for the public’s right to see a true reflection of war. The D.o.D. is still indignant, but I suspect Jacobson’s report was ultimately vetted in their favor. Military propagandists need to represent America’s growing losses in Afghanistan. Jacobson’s image provides their limited hangout. Like the other photographs of casualties which have escaped through embeds, the image of Lance Corporal Bernard is desaturated of blood, and the surrounding events fit the military endorsed narrative.

Have you noticed that all combat images coming out of today’s wars are drab and lifeless. Obviously this motif is not being applied to the PR shots of jets and military hardware, but scenes of soldiering in Iraq and Afghanistan are dusty and grey, like scenes from a dark virtual world.

The colors in Jacobson’s controversial photo are similarly under saturated. Earlier casualty pics have even been rendered as black and white, and this is no exercise of artistic license. Colorless images telegraph little resemblance to our real world lived in color. An emotional distance is created, most obviously like the detachment we feel looking into the past. Everything before the late sixties happened in monocrome. Early color photographs always shock children with the prospect that lives in generations past might have been been lived in a world of contemporary vibrance.

The photographs from Vietnam were helped by that nation’s lush tropical greens. Images of the wounded were all the more gripping –and demoralizing from the military’s point of view– because unlike in Korea and WWII, the blood was red.

Most images taken in Vietnam came through the military staff photographers. The unapproved subjects, which subverted the official face of the war, emerged from the cameras of independent journalists.

Julie Jacobson facilitated the release of this picture, by letting slip two details pertinent to the official US narrative in Afghanistan. Would you believe, just prior to this engagement, friendly Afghans came out of their houses to tell the US soldiers where they could find the Taliban? Probably to ensure Corporal Bernard’s squad pointed their guns away from their homes, but that’s not how the story was spun. Jacobson recounts that these Afghans were eager to inform on the Taliban.

The jocular Jacobson records another telltale crowd-pleaser in the aftermath of the Taliban “ambush,” when she found herself flanked by Afghan National Army troops. When the firing started, Jacobson sought immediately the ranks of US soldiers, because the freakin’ ANA Afghans “aren’t very good.”

Today’s media embeds are basically a privatized signal corps. Their photos should belong to the taxpayers. Insinuations that military families should dictate what images can be used, in the event of death, is a cruel irony. Are the families consulted about what Uncle Sam wants to do with their loved one when he’s still alive? Millions of federal tax dollars are spent on our soldiers, all the more when they die. I have little sympathy for the families who couldn’t stand up for their children and protect them from the capricious whims of our military. There is absolutely no reason to ask their permission about what happens when their little soldier meets his/her calculable fate.

Atomic’s one handed coders rebrand Fallujah game as Six Hours in My Lai

Posted on August 30, 2009 by Eric Verlo

NMT has obtained screenshots from Atomic Games ‘Six Days in Fallujah,’ traded p2p and remarketed as Six Hours in My Lai. There was no budget to modify the OIF coalition uniforms to resemble the Vietnam GIs, but who’s looking at the clothing? Nostalgic vets will find the rape reenactments unremarkably familar. In reality the mayhem of My Lai and My Khe lasted 28 hours, not six, but industry research indicates that cyber ejaculators rarely have more than a six hour window before a landlady looks in on them.

Gaming studies remain inconclusive about whether virtual sex stimulation augments with cumulative scorekeeping. It will require a scientific leap before computer health levels can fortify a real-world refractory period. Otherwise virtual serial binges cannot build on themselves like the longer pyramid games of Civilization or World Of Warcraft.

Japanese game publisher Konami, forced by civilian outcry to drop a distribution deal for Atomic’s Fallujah first person shooter, is pleased that the salient gangbang modules will find their way to end-user Marine Corps wannabes. Konami already has a bestselling Raper II title, an Okinawa schoolgirl adventure for American servicemen. Konami’s own one-handed programmers are set to adapt the Atomic code for the Japanese market. The human trafficking of Iraqi orphans into US contractor Army brothels becomes Korean Comfort Women; US combat depravity becomes The Rape of Nanking.

Deprived of being able to cash in on the Fallujah atrocity allure, Atomic Games is looking for sympathy from the Support the Troops crowd. Atomic laid off the soldiers on its staff, issuing this statement:

“We wish to assure the dozens of Marine veterans who have collectively invested hundreds of hours in this project that, while we have been badly wounded, we will fight on. The stories of your brothers’ courage and sacrifice in Fallujah must be shared with the world.”

By historical accounts, are they referring to the virtual sequences between the levels of action which act like silent movie inter-titles to link the running and jumping to a bigger story? Where the plot points are inviolate can be the only teaching moments in an otherwise chose-your-adventure killing spree. Where will there be opportunity for gamers to show courage and sacrifice with only a menu of rape and murder?

Let’s be clear. The Fallujah video game was not about soldiering. It did not mean to replicate the experience of 99.9% of the American soldiers who served in the battle for Fallujah. A first person shooter is not about following orders, falling in, or self-sacrifice. An FPS is about four wheeling a personal path of personal destruction. Atomic’s Six Days in Fallujah was a spring break for Grand Theft Auto sex tourists.

NMT is equally concerned about the lost Fallujah stories which may have been the narrative of the gameplay. The world should hear of the turning back all male refugees, of the White Phosphorous and sniper Free Fire Zones. The lost Fallujah action sequences no doubt exploited the armored vehicles crushing the Iraqi wounded, and the role of the helicopter gunships over the river, Red Bridge and the Fallujah hospital.

Antiwar COS -report from the front line

Posted on August 29, 2009 by Eric Verlo

COLO. SPRINGS- Well, that wasn’t so hard. Our message was warmly received by soldiers who shook our hand in the staging area, and afterward we were thanked by others for what we are trying to do. Antagonism came from the crowd, but not as fiercely as we’d braced ourselves for. Eight years of horror has taken the edge off the “these colors don’t run” mentality. Hence the military imperative for parades like these. Our antiwar presence was all the more important to show the soldiers that some at home are fighting to rescue them. The rest of the attendees were giving them a “welcome home” as they did in 2004, and will keep doing only to redeploy them. The soldiers need to see more real support: a determination to stop these wars.

Compatriots of ours were circulating along the sidewalk with this flier:

We ask that you consider the costs of war
as you take part in this celebration.

War kills people. War hurts people.
War kills animals. War destroys things.
War devastates the environment.

This parade is a propaganda exercise
promoted by those who profit from war.

The money spent on war could go to
making friends instead of enemies.
Many of us are mourning today not celebrating.

Note the “American Furniture Warehouse” is the most prominent part of that “thank you” handout.

This woman was trying to drown us out with cat whistles, until I took her picture.

More of our HEALTH CARE NOT WARFARE contingent stood further south on the corner, just out of frame.

Also not pictured:
LET’S NOT WORSHIP WAR, and U.S. OUT OF AFGHANISTAN,
and my banner backdrops WAR NO MORE and PEACE NOW.

A young group made threats and tried to crowd us out, until the police intervened.

We were most appreciative of the officers’ prompt interventions, although one officer’s method was hardly comforting. He told one young lady, in a voice for us to overhear: “I know. If it were my choice I’d rip them from the sidewalk, but they have a right to be here.” We took that more as an expression of sympathy than an attempt to intimidate us.

Five officers all told, protected us, from leaping unto the parade route.

Weiss TABOR reform has votes to pass!

Posted on August 24, 2009 by Eric Verlo

COLORADO SPRINGS- I attended a COS city council meeting today, lured by the prospect that Vice Mayor Larry Small was going to call the CS Independent publisher a liar to his face.

I’m always excited at the prospect of differences of opinion reaching a level of incivility. Do we care about these issues? Or is it all about liking each other, regardless who’s oppressing whom? We gentlemen debaters, after all, are never those affected by the injustices in question.

To the city’s credit, Small made it a point at the very start of the meeting to make a public apology. He and John Weiss shook hands and that was that. What’s more, he cast his vote with Weiss’s proposal, a deciding vote, to put repeal of the city’s TABOR restrictions on the next ballot.

Small is not saying he’s for it, simply considering that it might be germane to consult the voters. Where it stands, the city council members declared their intentions on how they will vote tomorrow, and 5-4, they intend to back the proposal.

Without any name calling.

That said, some pyrotechnics can very easily be a bore. For example, there were grunts from the peanut gallery at this meeting, in particular from ex-editorial page tyrant Sean Paige. The silver-locked loudmouth, now shilling for Local Liberty Action, sat in the back and harrumphed as Weiss gave his reasons for reforming TABOR. Although Paige is no longer with the Gazette, I’ve seen him gesticulating at local Teaparty rallies. Like his Norquesque mentors, the editorial bully is set on strangling the baby in the bathwater.

How satisfying then to see Paige grovel before city council to urge them “not to throw [his TABOR] baby out with the bath water.”

Paige spoke as if “TABOR proponents” need to be consulted in any ongoing discussions about reforming it. Just because those idiots got the law passed, and doomed municipalities to impoverished services, who is to say their voice should have a grandfather clause? Here’s a chance for city council to hear the cries of outrage from Colorado Springs residents who want the damn thing repealed. They want their public services back.

TABOR was an initiative which asserted that a citizen couldn’t trust their representatives with tax dollars. What does it mean to have councilmen say they “believe in TABOR.” They know they shouldn’t be trusted? Did they run for election on that slogan?

Here’s a chance for the city pols to grab the reins. What else are they supposed to be deciding at their jobs?

And they took it, with four dissenting opinions. First, Bernie Herpin, who doesn’t see any reason to rush to address TABOR’s ratchet lunacy.

Another no vote comes from Jerry Heimlicher. The meeting’s highlight was Councilman Jerry Heimlicher’s kiss-fest with Sean Paige. Let Westside voters who rejected Democrat Dave Gardner as an alternative, note what Heimlicher can be very obstinate when he’s decided he’d rather give in to the Teabaggers.

Two more NOs came from Glen and Purvis. Purvis took the chance to compare proponent Richard Skorman’s voice to the sound of a belt sander. He explained how Skorman had interrupted his weekend of fixing his deck.

Tom Gallagher was the councilman who brought the issue for his colleagues to decide. He spoke about how incredulous it was that he was siding with Weiss on an issue, and hesitated greatly to defy his conservative friends. “I live on their side of the playing field.” But he lead the support. With Hente, Small, Martin and Rivera joining him.

Did I say Rivera? Yes.

We all looked at each other in surprise, but there it was, Mayor Lionel Rivera saying he thought it was a capital idea to give the citizens of the city the last word on whether to reform TABOR.

Scott Hente made the day’s most noteworthy remark. He thanked the assembled crowd for having upheld a civil discourse. He was impressed that it was unlike the many town hall meetings he’s been seeing on the news. I took this to be acknowledgment that he recognized the sawdust floor populism emanating from Sean Paige’s back corner.

“Where techology meets mahem” in Chino Prison, have fun!

Posted on August 11, 2009 by Eric Verlo

Uh.. we’re hearing nothing about a violent prison riot quelled this weekend in California. The rioting involved 1,300 inmates out of 5,900 crowded in the California Institute for Men, East of Los Angeles, otherwise know as CHINO. Why the silence? Correctional officers got the uprising well in hand, minus one burned facility, thanks to the annual industry trade show called MOCK PRISON RIOT. Its slogan is “Where Technology Meets Mahem.”

Training is offered to law enforcement and military too. Register Now! “We hope your experience as a role player is educational, informative, and most of all exciting and enjoyable!”

One good thing about Colorado Springs

Posted on August 8, 2009 by Eric Verlo

I’m going to tell you something great about Colorado Springs, because sometimes it’s pretty hard not to hate it. On odd summer afternoons, today it’s Saturday, downtown at the Southwest corner of Acacia Park, across the street actually, there assemble seven or so male gospel singers, who sit against a cement planter and sway, harmonizing to an incredible lead vocalist, through song after energetic, soothing song.

Sometimes a crowd assembles, sometimes there is clapping. Often passersby make a point to greet the line of singers, shaking hands with them before walking on. Of all Colorado Springs cultural offerings, this is my favorite.

Because isn’t it pretty hard sometimes not to hate Colorado Springs for the ignorant, artless, soul-killers who populate it? The climate may be top of the line, but the cultural atmosphere brings on endless waves of despair, thoughts of suicide, or a determination to emigrate. And it’s hard to argue against the logic of splitting. Jason Zacharias decided to seek his fortune elsewhere. To have tried to change his mind would have meant a lot of selfish reasons on our part, and telling lies about this place.

Many who chose emigration eventually return. Why? I’ll posit it’s because the region is where we have our roots. I was always sure the solution was to build the environment we prefer to inhabit. I’m no longer so sure it can be done with our too few hands.

Damn the greedy, incurious, time-theving idiots who’ve moved into our midst. Or who’ve grown like uneducated weeds between the crack of what we thought were good school systems. How do we urge them to emigrate? We might have to build a Mall-of-America-sized Walmart a half-day’s drive away, and offer that they can live in it. Imagine, McDonalds in bed, someone to greet your friends at the door. Make the parking lot big enough to accommodate all their gasoline powered vehicles.

Obama’s coming post beer summit plummet

Posted on August 1, 2009 by Tony Logan

Barack trivializes all serious issues (is he competing with Sarah Palin in the category of doing that?), and the so-called ‘Beer Summit’ is case underlined and in point. He trivializes War and Peace, he trivializes Health Care Reform, and he has now utterly trivialized Race Problems in America with his Bud Light schtick! What’s left for him to trivialize next? CHANGE itself? Nah, WAIT! He’s done that already!

The Beer Summit is the peak show performance for The Main Man, and he did it Jerry Springer like by balancing the total color profile with Joe Biden present, beer in hand, too! Now what happened to Jerry? They made him stop, didn’t they? It just got old, and it was way too violent for us! America can’t handle more of Barack’s style of Jerry and Dr. Phil!

Men, what happens when you drink a beer too many? Don’t you then afterwards sometimes have a beer summit plummet? It’s embarrassing, but I think that Obama just reached that point. He’s going down,,,, this point and out.

He simply never should have had that beer party for the press to record. Now we, America, have a bad hangover, and PLUS, it was just plain wrong. If a less pompous prick than Gates had gotten charged as he did by Cop Crowley, it could have meant many years in prison for him. Why should a President trivialize such a thing? He simply shouldn’t.

Gates v. Crowley Case is black and white

Posted on July 25, 2009 by Eric Verlo

While pundits pit Professor Gates against Police Sergeant Crowley, I recommend a white man’s refresher course in Black v. Cop. The above photograph depicts the officers of the law who came from all over Alabama in 1965 to prevent the SNCC civil rights marchers from leaving Selma. Most of the images we recognize from this day were taken seconds after this one, as the southern gentlemen eagerly bludgeoned the kneeling marchers. It took the interference of the President of the United States to send Federal troops to defend the peaceful protesters from the police. Have things changed?

Now they use tasers?

If you are not African-American, ask an African-American.

President Obama’s interference, tiptoeing with niceties for the boys in blue, couching his criticism as if his words carried no more authority than Uncle Tom, falls well short of representing the complaints about still overwhelming racism which black Americans face from law enforcement. Still Obama’s opinion has not been welcomed by the police department which arrested Professor Gates for being uncooperative in his own home.

Policeman Crowley and his superior and his buddies on the force and police unions across the country are telling the president he should not butt in? And they’re assuring us that they’re not racist? Let’s poll the LAPD on the matter, or any of the squads who’ve been caught on video tape beating their charges, (double-entendre intended) usually black.

We need to give equal time to the majority of our prison population. Or the people of New Orleans.

Sergeant Crowly et al are positive they are not racist. They’ve taken the courses, they’ve given the cross-racial CPR. They do not believe they are racist, and I believe them. I don’t believe I am racist either, although clearly I am. I am uncomfortable about being racist, and I’m not sure what to think about the degree of comfort I take as well.

And now the insolent bastards are second guessing the president for second guessing them.

This is that what comes of the post-9/11 theme of deifying First Responders. They’re big galoots –brave, no question– who rush up high-rise stairwells with no premonition the steel structure would be coming down, and next thing patriots are hawking chatchkes of firemen and policemen raising the Stars and Stripes over the rubble, as if they’re under fire in Iwo Jima. So now they’re qualified to tell the president he’s unqualified to make a judgment?

I can criticize the president because he’s not delivering what he promised. What basis do his employees have for grievance?

Crowley and ilk are none too bright, obviously, and they’re racist. They offer their own proof. What would a dutiful policeman’s reaction have been when a white president deigned to weigh in on a matter. I’m guessing deference. To the Commander in Chief.

I did my duty as I knew best, I am open to criticism, and welcome certainly anything the highest executive office holder might offer by way of suggestion, I am most humbled that he might have granted his attention to my personal case, which to guess from the offense people have taken was evidently a lapse in judgment on my part.

Deference. And that’s not what’s being shown their Boy in the White House.

You had a good home but You Left (You’re Right!)

Posted on July 9, 2009 by Brother Jonah

Your Recruiter LIED to you so you Left (You’re Right!) Classic Basic Training marching cadence chant.
You’re all supposed to be “in step” because if you have a single person planting his left foot forward while everybody else is planting the Right, a Column Left or a To the rear, March! command or any other won’t work out correctly.
If The Military is such a good career move, why would the Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo and others have to donate the proceeds to “Military Charities”?

Go on Craigslist and in Barter and Free classifications, and Rants & Raves you find military families, especially right before payday, begging for FOOD. Food which is subsidized at the Commissary, the Post Exchange and the Base Exchange.

And, these families, they’re not kidding. They actually ARE hurting.

But the Recruiters still Lie through their teeth. Daily.

They even have special programs TARGET-ing poorer kids, Minorities…

In Hispanic and Black neighborhoods the recruiter drives around in a “tricked-out” Hummer with a sound system blaring Hip-hop, the recruiter himself is going to be Ethnically Matched to the neighborhood or barrio, and a younger guy, and even with that will be TRAINED in Street Talk as though it were a foreign dialect.

Are they foolin’ the 18 year olds (17 and dropped out of school if yo’ Momma signs you in)? Apparently not. They give out their pamphlets to pre-teens.

Recruiting Children for a Later Date With Death.

For the 17 and 18 year olds, they break out the Economic Opportunity and the closely related Educational Opportunity bullshit.

But then, the U.S.O., Red Cross, Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo… they come right along and spoil the lie. Because those organizations have to scramble to raise funds, beg a little less obviously…

But the Recruiter Lies are spoiled only if the kids see or hear or read something like this.

All y’all young dudes who want to sign up, try this first… when you turn 16 and can legally do it, volunteer at the VA hospital.

Hang back a little, don’t crowd, let the Human Misery speak for itself. And the humans who are suffering that misery. Go around emptying the wastebaskets and dry-mopping the floor in the waiting rooms, listen to the guys and ladies talking to each other, listen to their stories about how the VA is screwing them.

Volunteer at the U.S.O. and there are others, fill out forms for the guys and Ladies.

See people and talk to them and try your best to help them when the VA screws them.

When a guy is dying from a service related cancer like you get with Agent Orange or from the Uranium Poisoning, that the VA officially denies even exists, try to help him get his basic medical needs tended to.

Volunteer to read or sing to the guys in a Persistent Vegetative Coma. Or the guys who can’t communicate, can’t see, but are conscious under the bandages.

Keep in mind when you’re doing it that some of these guys are laying there with half their body mass taken off by American fire.

Then when you see the Recruiter rolling through the ‘hood jamming some tunes…

See all the young kids flocking around eager to be part of the next Children’s Crusade…

Eager to be lied to, eager to be seduced into the Glorious War.

Listen to the commercials again, watch with fresh eyes as they Army/Navy/Air Force/Marines tell the parents of kids too young to legally join on their own to go ahead and sign the papers for their sons and daughters.

Telling young guys who are dropping out of High School that somehow the Army is going to pull off a magic trick that will get them into College and a highly paid profession.

Because you KNOW, don’t you, that if Yo Momma is signing you in, that means you’re not 18 and there’s very little chance that you completed High School.

And that those commercials are aimed at the guys who are having trouble in school and about to drop out anyway.

When the Recruiter rolls through the ‘hood blasting the jams, walk up to him and tell him, in front of his intended victims, that he’s a damned liar. Print this up and make your OWN pamphlets.

I’m not saying commit acts of violence against him, or vandalism.

That perpetuates the Hate cycle and nothing more.

Even though it would be entertaining to watch one get dragged out of his tricked out Liar-Mobile and having a case of Advanced Whoopage liberally applied, don’t do it.

Confront Hate with Hate and everybody loses. Confront the Hate and the Lies with truth.

It’s our only weapon, and it’s more effective than all their bombs, and guns, and Air-shows, and “see how many chinups you can do” demonstrations, all their pamphlets and commercials and their Tricked Out Humvee can ever be.

You know how I can tell? Because they’re having so much trouble trying to recruit people that they’re going after the young kids now.

The kids are getting smarter and asking more questions. The Army loses. Too bad, so sad. They shouldn’t be trying to convince Kids to go and kill for the “super-patriots” so the “super-patriots” can make money off their lives, and deaths, and the lives and deaths of those people whose countries are being stolen for their resources.

The “super-patriots” who like Bush and Cheney and Wolfowicz and Limbaugh and O’Reilly, aren’t going to enlist and when they had to do so, they had their parents buy their way out of the Draft.

They expect YOU to die for THEIR comfort and riches. And pay you so little for it that your families will literally have to Beg in order to survive.

Addict, pederast dies, much fanfare

Posted on June 29, 2009 by Eric Verlo

But let’s look past the innuendo and unproven transgressions, to celebrate the man’s contribution to the cannon of Western popular music product. Please!

I hear celebrities dismiss the allegations of Michael Jackson’s pedophilia like too much water under the bridge, which would be true I suppose, if Jackson’s victims were more like John Wayne Gacy’s, buried under Neverland, instead of tucked into San Fernando Valley homes, divvying multimillion-dollar payoffs with their enterprising panderer parents. Will the confidentiality clauses stand between the public ever knowing which pederast was the more prolific? That innuended, I do concur those bottoms were small fry compared to Jackson’s true sick imprint on America.

The Michael Jackson TM projected a perversion of role models. Not even a cynical anti-hero, the self-crowned King of Pop was the nul-idol. Jackson rejected his skin color, his sexuality, even his place of belonging among mortals. Other than pathos for the sick dance-cyborg who never had a childhood, what humanity did Jackson share to communicate? To be fair, it wasn’t Jackson who kept the spotlight trained on his black/white Icarus act, foisting the unnatural deception that man can soar with a single glove.

Now dead, Jocko is heralded as among the greatest. But MJ was an internationally recognized poster child for enfeebled humanity, a glorified counter-renaissance man, resembling a human being like a drag queen pretends femininity. He may have channeled vinyl High Fructose Corn Syrup like no other, walking backward while dancing and such, but worth what legacy exactly? Jackson shares the ignobless of the Big Mac, the Lucky Strike cigarette, and DDT. Iconic and good riddance.

Michael Jackson did nothing for black emancipation, or acceptance of homosexuals, or the plight of the children of poverty. The vast majority of the world’s children are “robbed of their childhoods,” you narcissistic rich dumb-ass, and that didn’t stop you from amassing your vast fortune at their expense.

Jackson probably did more to amplify the phobia against pedophiles, the single minority he did incarnate, by denying the preponderance of indicators, by vilifying his accusers, instead of taking his riches to Dubai right from the start, to show the world into what true debauchers wet their willies.

He might even have championed sympathy for plastic surgery binge-purgers, but he lied about that worm-hole until his nose literally fell off. I remember when Jackson made public appearances in surgery masks, feeding the fiction that he was a germophobe. Meanwhile everyone in Hollywood knew from their own rhinoplasties about the actual face-saving purpose of those masks.

Perversely, it was Jackson’s least aberrant eccentricity that killed him. Drugs. Even as TV viewers watch Jackson’s body pass from helicopter to ambulance, over a red carpet no less, Big Pharma makes sure that the talking heads refer to Jackson’s narcotics as “pain-killers.” Jocko was in constant pain, apparently, like Rush Limbaugh and all overachievers etc, hence their susceptibility to addiction. You’d think the alibi would eventually defy credulity.

Prescription drugs circulate among the well-to-do, with the same ease with which the rich have access to good lawyers. The difference between street and medical drugs is that no one cares about the heroin or crack addict’s “pain.”

All the celebrities speaking in tribute to Michael Jackson want to minimize the ugliness Jacko paraded, even, and especially his drug habit. Some who profess to have been close friends express their utter shock at Jackson’s passing, at his frail condition and the magnitude of his drug use. How close could they have been?! Or how culpable are they still on Big Pharma’s not-yet-upped jig?

Jackson was the King of Sick Culture. His collaborator eulogizers are its second tier whores. What contemptible shills, who’ve got theirs, behind their Beverly Hills gates and their own golden narcotics tickets. Even at the premature passing of a unique creative soul, due without question to drug abuse, his peers don’t want to aggravate the corporate forces which continue to pervert the human social animal to beyond self-recognition.

Little Eichmann Country-Western anthem

Posted on May 8, 2009 by Brother Jonah

Of course, that describes most of the Pseudo-patriotic crap infesting the airwaves now…

But there’s one I heard “that’s the way things were and still ought to be”

Like honoring our preachers, leaders, teachers and heroes and believing everything they said

Charlie Manson was a preacher. Preached Armageddon really really strong.
Cotten Mather was a Preacher who gets quoted a lot by the Reich Wing, (Like Chuck Norris and Dawg the Bounty Hunter, just another couple of Wannabe Pigs) whenever they say that America should be a Religious Dictatorship…

Who also said that Native Americans were a construct of Satan because we’re not specifically mentioned in Genesis, that we had no souls and should be exterminated.
And that the people who allowed their kids to play with dolls were practicing witchcraft and should be killed.
And the Kiddoes themselves…

Imagine, if you will, somebody offing your rug-rats because you gave them a Teddy Bear or let them watch Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny….
And the Good Pastor Mather also owned Slaves.

Leaders? McCarthy, for instance, with all the Liars, Murderers and Thieves who were and are his Fellow Travelers, like Reagan, Nixon, Bush (all the Bush Klan), Billy Sunday who was one of Their Crowd and also a Nazi Sympathizer (and, leave us not forget, a Preacher), People who could feel at ease at a Country Club or a Klan Rally?

We should believe everything they said or say?

Really?

We’re supposed to (here in Colorado Springs) Revere and Honor “heroes” like Custer and Chivington and Palmer…

Racist SCUM who tried to wipe a whole race of Americans from the face of the world.

When Custer is quoted in the book (and film) Little Big Man as saying

It’s more important to kill the women and children, because if we let them breed there wouldn’t be any point killing the men

It’s an accurate representation of what the punk murdering bastard actually DID say.

And we’ve got an Idol of his disciple William Jackson Palmer parked right in the middle of a busy intersection.

By the way, Custer and Chivington and Palmer also believed in and quoted Cotten Mather…

And the “War on Christmas” loudmouths should remember this, Cotten Mather was a Puritan… whose family had been run out of England for criticizing their Religious Dictatorship and, importantly, pissing off King James by opposing the celebration of CHRISTMAS because it’s a Catholic holiday

I don’t remember the name of the singer, but it’s one of those redneck punks who offers to beat up on anybody who disagrees with him.

Yep, real Role Model for a working Civilization.

The kid who sings the song is (to me) a youngster. Mid twenties, maybe thirties.

No way in HELL could this dude remember anything at all about the 70s even.

Far Less the 40s, 50s and 60s that’s he’s so nostalgic about.

When Apartheid was the Official Law of the Land in 20 states. People of “color” could be arrested or even hanged for not stepping off the sidewalk to let the Master Race walk past.

THAT’S the way things were, and I for one actually remember some of it…

So, is the stupid bastard really sure “that’s the way it still should be”?

Or is he merely hoping that WE are simple-minded enough to believe that?

Next to the White House

Posted on May 6, 2009 by Eric Verlo

While visiting Washington DC in March, I found it interesting to note the edifices closest to the White House.

EAST, WEST
The neighbor to the immediate East of the Obama’s White House is the Department of the Treasury. Is that any surprise? Of course not, but how bourgeois! I could imagine Scrooge McDuck sneaking across the White House garden twice a day to check his reserves. To the West is what we now call the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building. It’s the site of the suspicious office fires which may or may not have masked a recent vice-president’s misdeeds. The edifice looks straight out of A Series of Unfortunate Events, and check out the plaque which commemorates what the building used to be called:

Probably that should be no surprise as well: the White house sandwiched between Treasury and War. “State, War and Navy.” How so much less duplicitous than the “Department of Defense.”

SOUTHWEST
Behind the former War offices, to the Southwest of the White House, lies the war memorial to end all war memorials. It’s the WWI Memorial, of considerably diminutive size compared to those commemorations of subsequent wars which have spilled unto the Mall, but its form followed the convention of the typical Great War monuments erected throughout Europe among the nations who had participated.

Except the American version is dedicated to the “Expeditionary Forces” which I just love. That’s what WWI was about for the US. The trenches of Europe were no place Americans needed to defend their freedom. The troops we sent, to relieve France and England, represented a foreign expedition, exactly that. More precisely, our troops were an R&D expedition for our blustering capitalists.

(This may be no time or place to note that history books do not link America’s WWI experience with the Influenza outbreak of 1917-18, which began in the barracks of US soldiers being mobilized for war. American soldiers took their flu to Europe and ultimately killed 50 million people. Those were not the days before we knew better to stay home to prevent infecting others.)

The US entry into WWI was bitterly opposed by a peace movement which the war-opportunist-profiteers maligned as isolationist. Selfish globalization-denying isolationism has been the slander ever since, used against anyone who tries to block military interventions in all their guises.

Ultimately WWI was no affair of ours, had the Huns emerged victorious, American foreign affairs would hardly have changed. Our foreign trading partners would have numbered more Germans, that’s all. But it’s useless to compare alternative outcomes of WWI, all things staying constant, because America participated and profited wildly.

If American investors had not jumped in Over There, the greatest business opportunities of blossoming industrialism would have been missed. The opportunities offered by the Europeans fighting amongst themselves, proved to have been momentous.

And here was the monument to those lost American lives, sacrificed so that American industrial might, in particular the new banking monopolists, could seize the European spheres of influence throughout the world. Of course the lost lives of the American Expeditionary Force were remembered thus:

“…WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE WORLD WAR THAT LIBERTY AND THE IDEALS OF OUR COUNTRY MIGHT ENDURE”

It would take another World War for the US to appropriate the colonies and oil fields by means of contracts and loans, with the leverage of coming to their aid again, this time armed with lend-lease bills.

SOUTHEAST
To the Southeast of the White House, across the back lawn, lies the monument antecedent to the Great War. It’s the Civil War Memorial, atop which rides the triumphant General William Tecumseh Sherman. (Who, to be fair, presided over the War Department for a long stretch after the Civil War, actually this nation’s longest peacetime period.)

Curious that I chose to crop his personage from my pictures, but my eyes were drawn to the lesser figures around the base of the monument, in particular, a half naked woman.

The memorial seemed to include various uniformed Civil War participants. How egalitarian to include a woman. But this woman was no French Revolutionary with breast bared oblivious as she rallied her comrades to victory. This delicate woman was unarmed and stripped to the waist, her children in tattered rags at her feet.

Could this statue be offering another conceit to the reality of war, to Sherman’s March to the sea, to the burning of Atlanta, to the shameful destruction he visited on the secessionist South? Was this a nod to the real role given to Women in war, their sons and husbands taken from them, a non-combatant left helpless to defend her children or herself. Did the shirt torn from her body confess to the woman’s rape?

More probably the feminine likeness personified man’s attraction to war, a soldier’s predilection for her beauty. How many war monuments memorialize as they also beacon?

Much of the terrain around the White House grounds is blocked off by secondary and tertiary security perimeters. But for the arrival of bus unloadng its visitors to see it, the Civil War Monument is normally cordoned off. When I had passed it earlier, a balaclava-clad guard was blocking the only entrance.

SOUTH
The grassy expanse immediately South of the White House, permitting the First Family an uninterrupted view of the National Mall, has actually been given over to parking permits. The loop of asphalt across the lawn, with cars strewn diagonally along the edges, gives the unfortunate impression of overflow event parking. In any other neighborhood, the crowd of cars would be a dead giveaway that someone on the block was having a party.

Instant Pentagon Slaughter on the way

Posted on May 5, 2009 by Tony Logan

LBJ Borrowing a page from the recent Israeli military slaughter in Gaza, Residents asked (by the Pentagon and CIC Barack Obama) to leave homes in Pakistan’s Swat …Well you warned them, didn’t you, Barack Baby? You told them to leave and if any of their children now get in the way, you have washed yourself of all their blood in responsibility, now haven’t you Mr. First Black President? What a change you are from the Dubya crowd!

President Asif Ali Zardari, widower of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, is due to meet U.S. President Barack Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Washington on Wednesday for talks on the growing militant threat in the region.

” We’re acting with restraint because they’re using civilians as a shield but we’ll go after them if the situation gets worse,” said the military official, who declined to be identified.

Barack and The Democrats are ready to BOMB THEM BACK TO THE STONE AGE just like Lyndon once did! These are exciting times for the Democratic Party voter! LBJ Lives!

How Stupid do they have to be?

Posted on May 1, 2009 by Brother Jonah

You remember, if you have been paying attention, that mini-controversy a couple of months ago where all the Corporate Sucks were calling us STUPID and/or CRAZY for daring to suggest that a commercial extolling WalMart and Halls Cough Drops being in collusion to force employees to work even while packing contagious diseases?

The same Corporate Sucks or their demented twins who derided any suggestion that the overcrowded overmedicated animals in the Meat Factories aka Concentrated Animal Feeding Enterprise system could possibly be a huge breeding pool for Viral diseases, such as for instance Influenza and resistant bacterial strains like the MRSA and Tuberculosis SuperBugs which are resistant to every antibiotic known.

Or that feeding them antibiotics, which kill bacteria but not Viral infections, leave the immune systems of the Future Hamburgers and Kentucky Fried weakened, thus more susceptible to, oh, let’s seeeeee…. Bird Flu and Swine Flu.

There was another series of commercials a couple of years ago, where a hideously deformed troll gets on a city bus, hacking and sneezing and wheezing, everybody recoiling in fear….

Then he takes an over the counter Flu remedy and gets “all better”…

Asymptomatic but, still contagious.

Same scenario in a crowded office building and in a crowded school…

But, hey, that’s all just Amusing and Entertaining commercials, right(wing)?

Then there’s the deregulation imposed on first US and now Mexico, forcing all those bad ol’ naughty wicked Socialist State programs like meat inspection, Environmental Protection, Occupational Safety and Health Administrations…

To quit meddling with businesses.

Let the marketplace regulate itself and no harm done…

Oh, yeah, that sounds like a workable plan.

See, this system is So Very Superior that we owe it to the rest of the world to place their economies and ecologies under the Benign Dictatorship of Unbridled Capitalism.

It’s for their own good, dontcha know.

Next thing you know, they’ll be trying to build an economy based on Adjustable Rate Mortgages and selling them off as though they were real cash…

Online vigilantes of Manatee County FL

Posted on April 15, 2009 by Eric Verlo

Upstanding citizens Michael Quinn and Carole Atkins maintain a website in Bradenton Florida to ensure that if you get arrested in their neck of the woods, Manatee County and environs, the whole world will have access to your mugshot, and the details of your crime. Or alleged crime, since the accounts are posted in advance of court hearings, guilty verdicts, or even a minor’s turning 18. Legal? D’ya think?

Townships and counties around America are setting up online databases where residents can acquaint themselves with the sexual offenders living in their neighborhoods. Regardless what you think of the merits of that sort of neighborhood watch, isn’t it quite another thing to broadcast the pictures of ordinary people who’ve run afoul of the law?

The Manatee County collection represents a repository of sad persons whose lives are going to be forever bound with citations, fees and parole officers. Just knowing that their likenesses are being broadcast far and wide, what is their sense of their own prospects for being offered a job or credit, or any kind of fresh start? The majority of these cases site confessions to detectives, and end reassuring the reader that the arrestee is presently in jail unable to post bond.

Working against the inevitable recidivists is the unfortunate talent of the Bradenton Police Department photographer. There’s an irresistible quality to the pictures themselves, which are not the usual dull mugshots, but are curiously real emotive portraits.

Then there’s the absolute pathos of the crime descriptions themselves. Manatee County is determined to hound even the lowest of evildoers who siphon gas, even from an outboard engine boat fuel tank.

Here are some sample crimes:

Angry Boys, 12 and 14, Arrested for Breaking Car Windows and Stealing Golf Clubs

Young Man Threatens Sister with Fire Poker, BB Gun, Throws CDs at Mom

Man Argues with Other Man Over Baseball Teams While Playing Golf

Bradenton Police Arrest Man for Burglary After He Entered Family Residence Where He’s Not Welcome

Woman Found Hiding in Closet in South Manatee County
(charged with breaking into an Unoccupied Dwelling)

Man Cuts Friend’s Hand in Argument Over Beer

Man Rented Out Home He Didn’t Own

Man Arrested for Threatening to Kill Woman and “Everyone Who Did This To Him”

Local Crime Watch Group Shuts Down Mini Pot Growing Operation
(two marijuana plants growing in a white pot.)

And there’s this item, which we reprint in full, with the name changed to protect the innocent until proven guilty:
Thief with Conscience Arrested After Burglary

According to a report from the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office, at about 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday, James Denton, 42, who lives at the Crown Mobile Home Park, broke into a friend’s mobile home and took a play station, camping roll, hair dryer and other miscellaneous items, the report said.

… Denton confessed to a deputy that he was trying to get in touch with the victim of the burglary to help him because Denton’s girlfriend had been arrested and he was trying to get money for her bail of $500, he told the deputy. That’s why he took the items from his friend’s home after he discovered his friend was not there.

Denton was arrested and charged with Burglary to an Unoccupied Dwelling.

The stolen items were all returned.

Denton remains in the Manatee County Jail on a $25,000 bail bond.

Tea Party Tax Revolt ignorance-mongers rally their usual Republican supporters

Posted on April 15, 2009 by Eric Verlo

COLORADO SPRINGS- The corporate media led by Fox News, local talk radio led by KVOR, and the Gazette editorial page itself, herded their red sheep into Acacia Park today for lunch-time speeches full of hate, ignorance, and good old-fashioned unapologetic self-interest. They didn’t understand my sign, but knew enough to scowl.

Gazette representative Maria St. Louis-Sanchez was live-blogging the event, sitting on the ground beside the stage, which gave her an appropriate lack of perspective for the coverage she intended. For example, this online exchange:

12:33 [Comment From Guest] Is it basically an all white gathering?

12:34 Tough to tell. There seems to be a good mix of people here.

Oh my goodness. The crowd was ALL WHITE! With the lonely exception of deposed-councilman Ed Jones, who delighted the crowd when he proclaimed he was not an African American, he was an American, and derided those critics who would call him an “Uncle Tom.” The crowd cheered Jones, there were even chants exhorting him to run for governor. But if this had been nightfall, and one depression earlier, this is the mob that would have lynched him.

And I’m inclined to imagine that had Jones been Hispanic American, judging from the anti-immigrant rhetoric, they would have jumped him in broad daylight today.

These were ugly Americans, led by their representative uglies, hate-radio DJ Richard Randall, representative Doug “Porky” Lamborn, the illiterate Quixote Douglas Bruce and business-homophobe Ed Bircham. All pure archetypes of disgruntled white males.

The demographics in my estimation were all white, mostly male, with ugly carved into everyone’s faces from years of being disagreeable and bitter. And a plentiful predominance of pasty obesity.

Oliphant the Islamofascist?

Posted on April 12, 2009 by Tony Logan

oliphant gaza israel cartoon
Pat Oliphant might be the world’s best known cartoonist. A recent cartoon of his has got the Jewish State First crowd all up in arms about its supposed antisemitic (read anti Jewish) character! See Oliphant Gaza cartoon denounced by Simon Wiesenthal Center

Has this cartoonist, Pat Oliphant, all along been a sneaker cell Islamofascist? You be the judge. What do you think? Also see Focus on Gaza – The Spin Battle – 10 Apr 09 – Part 1 on youtube.

Informal Denver bloggers convention

Posted on April 2, 2009 by Eric Verlo

DENVER- Blog wonks filled the courtroom today to witness the closing arguments of Freedom of Speech on trial. The twin Rocky Mountain News fiends were on hand, as were plenty of their blogosphere stringers. Can you help us put names to some of these faces? Confidential emails to editor@notmytribe will serve just fine. We have a most benevolent motive to shed light on nocturnal anti-socials.

Isn’t it awkward, that those in support of Ward Churchill, to draw the battle lines in terms of this trial, have no qualms being represented publically, but those opposed, even as they think themselves to represent the mainstream, are fiercely protective of their anonymity? How weirdly weak of them.

PART DEUX
Alright, it didn’t begin innocently. During the first courtroom break today, I was aiming my camera at the video media grotto, because my earlier photo had been taken with a cellphone, but also so that I might have a pretense to shoot wide and grab an image or two of some heretofore faceless note-takers, when a woman in the vicinity strode over to ask that I not take her picture.

I noted that I was sure her back had been turned, if even she was in the frame, but it mattered not, and she insisted that I show her the picture and then delete it in her presence. I acquiesced reluctantly, only because I had better things to do than argue with a “lawyer” about what right she had to ask me to do anything. But it didn’t end there. When I moved to intercept a friend with whom I urgently needed to speak before the break was over, the woman followed me, insisting that I prove that I hadn’t other exposures in which she was featured. She wouldn’t stop interrupting until I had found others, and deleted them, after which she walked away, her head turned back, facing me with a mock smile and wave, as if to verify that I wasn’t trying to take another picture of her back.

I thought the strange episode was over, until I reentered the courtroom to see the woman point me out to a companion, both of them seated in the front row reserved for the press, from which they alternated giving me cold stares and taking snapshots with a cellphone. WTF? At the finish of that session, the woman approached me again, wanting to apologize for the rude tact she’s taken. I accepted, but it seemed she also wanted to explain.

I had pressing contacts to pursue, but she followed me again, and grew vocally agitated anew, this time that I would not stop to hear her story. By the time we exited the courtroom, her harangue had grown embarrassing. I no longer had her image on my camera, she knew that, what claim did she have to detain me a moment further and impede what little courtroom social time remained?

When I finally turned, I had my camera in hand and began to take flash pictures as I asked her to please leave me alone. Instead she and her friend closed in, trying to block my lens, yelling until you could call it a melee and others were taking our picture, and Ward Churchill was emerging from the courtroom on the sidelines.

Now I had plenty of head shots, and shouted explanations –coordinated between the two friends– that the original objection was due to her sensitivity about her fat butt, and a fresh request that I show sympathy for her awful complexion. In the light of the crowd’s scrutiny I was able to walk away, but next they sought out the courtroom officer to request that I surrender my photographs. He wasn’t unprincipled enough to assert that I was obligated to do that, and he was satisfied that I wield my camera with more discretion lest I accidentally record an image of a juror, giving cause for a retrial. I accepted his advice, but the two shrews kept up their complaining to him until we left the courthouse for lunch.

After lunch the strange woman kept to the media circles. I’d noticed a lanyard about her neck, but whatever ID hung upon it she’d stuffed into a front pocket, perhaps to conceal an identity, perhaps to pretend it was a press pass. Later in the courtroom I noticed her again, this time beyond the audience area, across the banister, chatting with two courtroom workers.

I’ve no idea her story. Does it strike you odd? Why would anyone presume their photograph was going to end up online. Now, with ample cause, in response to harassment.

DC March on the Pentagon was fueled by a promising alternative energy: youth

Posted on March 21, 2009 by Eric Verlo

WASHINGTON DC- Speakers were still entertaining an impatient crowd, and coffin carriers were mobilizing for the March to the Pentagon, when from the west came the Black Bloc. Bicycle cops in royal blue lycra scrambled to shepherd the group’s healthy gallop as they appeared from over the hill to kick the parade to a sudden start. They virtually led the parade over the bridge, until organizers prevailed upon the interlopers to allow the veterans groups to resume the lead, as planned. But it would not be the last initiative from the Anarchists.

(Click on image for better quality, wider crop)

1. THE MARCH

Black Bloc gallops into lead position, abruptly starting parade.

International Socialist Organization pass Lincoln Memorial

Peace groups from Vermont to Georgia

Youth and Student A.N.S.W.E.R.

West from the Washington Monument

Hezbollah crosses Arlington Memorial Bridge

Campus Antiwar Network

Across the Potomac

To the Pentagon

Code Pink paraded the parade

To military industrial complex in Crystal City

2. INTERRUPTION

At a narrowing of the route at the Boeing building, several students blocked the march with a plastic barrier.

Raising questions about the gentrified nature and self-policing demeanor of the event organizers and participants.

The Black Bloc honored the picket line, thus the Campus Antiwar Network and following groups were brought to a halt.

When the Black Bloc decided to move on to next actions, the march resumed.

2b. INTERRUPTION

At the first hint of misbehavior, stocky 40-something “videographers” in undercover protest garb were pointing their cameras into the noses of the black-clad participants.

3. MESSAGE VARIETY

Why explain? You won’t listen.

4. COUNTER PROTEST

On the Pentagon lawn, near signs pointing to the “Pentagon Memorial,” white folk waited with the usual anti-antiwar slogans.

Megaphone versus megaphone.

That simple.

5. CONFRONTATION

Police in riot gear await march destination at KBR.

6. COLORADANS FOR PEACE

(Still more photos to follow…)

Onward Christian Cowards

Posted on March 19, 2009 by Eric Verlo

You can hold forums attended by the faithful, or beat your breast where only the choir can hear, but when there’s a crowd, you’re a regular shrinking violet. The meek don’t inherit the earth, they inherit the dirt. Last Saturday the Colorado Springs PPJPC didn’t tell its members about the opportunity to participate in the city’s biggest parade. And it declined to lend Coloradans For Peace the green flags with which it had marched the year before. What exactly are local citizens supposed to think is happening in the local peace community?

Boulder Daily Camera editorial and CU campus Colorado Daily are unanimous

Posted on March 8, 2009 by Eric Verlo

BOULDER- All the Denver TV news vans were standing by as Ward Churchill retook the CU campus podium. Local coverage of the Glenn Miller Ballroom event was front page and immediate, in both the students’ Colorado Daily and the Boulder Daily Camera. The surprise wasn’t just that the articles were unflattering, but that they were the exact same.

I’m sure it’s not news to the CU students that their free campus paper is none other than the reformatted local daily. You might wonder which is the more student-inclined. The news section of the student paper is titled CU AND THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC, as if to differentiate the student body from their “Leftist” township. The same article in the local daily Bill Ayers backs Ward Churchill, was retitled NOTORIOUS DISSENTER BACKS UP EMBATTLED PROF for the kids.

Keep in mind, this is not the work of the students.

While it might look perfectly transparent to publish a student-focused edition, full of campus-life related ads, what would be the purpose of two distinct internet facades for the same content? If not to reinforce the notion that the editorial content was distinct.

Maybe the TWIN DAILIES reporters had time enough only to write their articles before hearing the speeches, because their stories reflected none of the convivial humanism presented by all the guests. The other article published the next morning was: Crowd faces tight security for Ayers, Churchill talk at CU. A follow-up article the next day was more in depth, but not about the subject of Thursday’s event, neo-McCarthyism. The Saturday article redraws the battle lines of the Churchill-CU dispute. If you’d like to judge for yourself, both do have a video of the Thursday Forbidden Education rally.

Pretense of separate publications is dropped when you click Full local coverage of Ward Churchill and his trial against CU, where you get all the accruing coverage courtesy of the BOULDER DAILY CAMERA.

The only real alternative news in Boulder comes through the Boulder Weekly. But neither is it student run.

By its actions against Ward Churchill, and certainly by its grip on student communication, the CU administration appears bent on rotting Boulder’s promise of higher education from its academic core.

College Republicans not brightest bulbs

Posted on March 7, 2009 by Eric Verlo

BOULDER- A favorite photo from Thursday night’s event. This is the president of the CU College Republicans, who got up to object to student funds being spent on terrorists and frauds. Even after Ayers and Churchill spoke about how neither education nor students should be treated like commodities, sweaty dope Andrew Crown asked why a university could not do like any well-run corporation, and fire whomever it wished.

The crowd booed, but the panel of guests calmly encouraged us to let everyone have their say. It’s a reserve and graciousness of which I am in short supply. These guys shout down activists, attack progressives, remember the RNC Kicker, and the Protest Warriors? They have the ear of the mainstream corporate press. Why would we need to tolerate a single of their blimp-necked peeps at a discussion for intelligent people?

If you think I am assessing someone’s intelligence level based on whether he agrees with me, I am. On academic matters, it most certainly is appropriate. In classes, assessments of the retention and comprehension of man’s accumulated understanding of the subjects are called tests.

Does the University of Colorado have no admissions standards?

Mr. Crown’s questions was answered well beyond his ability to understand, and he returned to his seat shaking his head like the whole lot of us were incorrigible. I hope so.

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