65, 85, 100, how many more?

Just surfed by yahoo again… 100 + people killed in market blast in Baghdad. Gaza television station bombed… and something from yesterday, our Favourite Asswipe Tancredo is actually thinking of running for President in ’08.

The F.A.T. as i will probably start calling him, ain’t got a chance. His Zani buddies, (Nazi spelled sideways, sort of) don’t even trust him.

Me, I just love the way he speaks (in milder terms, but not much milder) of things like ethnic cleansing and Relocation & Detention Centers and how glorious the New World Order will be once the liberal dissenters are silenced. Or “learn their place and stay in it”.

Here’s a Couple of Clues, F.A.T., old boy, YOUR last name ends in an “O”.  Your English Only buds just don’t like that. They are gonna use you until you are not of any more use and then put you “in your place”.

When that happens you had better pray to God Almighty that there are a few anarchists still outside of your Relocation Centers that you might be able to hide behind.

The rebellion isn’t about Liberals and Conservatives, there isn’t going to be a huge victory over the Tree Huggin’ Hippies, the hippies started packin’ guns a looonnnnggg time ago, and a lot of them because they were taught how to do it in the Army, into which they were drafted.

You and your Masters want to draft people like for instance ME?

And you REALLY think that’s a good idea, don’t you?

The worst single incident of non-government-sponsored home grown terrorism in our History was pulled off by Army Veterans. Who were pissed off, and righteously so, because of the way the your government treats the people. Specifically it was a Government terror-bombing of a Church in Waco Texas that set them off.

And if you are gonna give me that tired old CRAP about the Chuch being heavily armed, skip telling me and tell it to the Chaplain. You know the ones, the guys who sell their personal priesthood to be cheerleaders for your killing machine? Your friends glorify and almost worship the Crusaders. Get a grip, son.

The killings in Baghdad, today? They are all about YOUR government policy of bombing Churches. Or Mosques. The Israeli people ought to be investing in extra toilets, cause when your Master starts bombing synagogues they are all going to shit.

And you want this to happen here, too. Or so you and the groups you mouthpiece for think you do.

I have to stop reading Yahoo news…

In the past two days, Scotland is thinking of seceding from the UK. Not too bad but I remember from my history that it had a lot to do with who was going to be the Rightful King than an anarchistic, freedom type of thing, when the two Kingdoms were combined in the first place.

The Chimp is critcizing Iraqis for the latest hangings. Like he didn’t have a thing to do with it.
Yesterday the Pentagon said that Iran has been continually buying military hardware through Surplus Auctions.

They mentioned a Pakistani arms dealer who was convicted in 1987 of dealing to Iran…. and who is now facing charges of doing it again as soon as he made parole… They throw a lot of names around but strangely not Ronald Reagan nor his merry band of pirates. The Pentagon has taken the Tomcat fighter out of service, so there is concern that, since Iran is the only other air force in the world which uses that particular model, might want to get their hands on some choice spare parts at a reasonable price.

They didn’t have a usable internet back then, but when Reagan got selected for president the first time, after spending four hundred plus days talking all kinds of smack about the Iranians and Jimmy Carter is a Wimp and he would handle things differently if he were president or by gosh his name wasn’t John Wayne ooops another Right Wing Hawk who never wore a uniform except in the movies.

Then the Ayatollah, who had sworn to bring down Carter with the hostage crisis just handed over the hostages as soon as Reagan took office, and we had this huge embargo on high tech stuff like airplane parts for the Iranians.

But then, for several years afterward they kept on flying Tomcat fighter jets, and anybody who mentioned the fact that news reports from the Iraq-Iran war kept showing Iranian Tomcats indicated that they were getting parts from america, specifically the General Dynamics plant in Ft Worth Texas.

But we ain’t supposed to go and get all nosey about these deals, no sir.
If we do we are conspiracy theorists and nuts.

Texas football

The Park Cities, University Park and Highland Park, get Dallas city services, water supply, at no city tax cost to the residents. Super rich neighborhood, one of the richest in America. To add insult to injury, the Dallas Police department routinely patrols the “border” of these neighborhoods, to keep out the riffraff from the surrounding townships of Dallas, Oak Cliff, DeSoto and South Oak Cliff. Some of the most dirt poor areas of Dallas County. But the people and businesses in these townships, even though they also have the distinction of being separate municipalities, DO pay Dallas municipal taxes.
 
In Texas, Football is worshipped. It is their lower case g god. They sold the design to the State Legislature, which has to approve taxpayer subsidized business deals such as the New Improved cowboys stadium in Arlington, with a sliding roof over the hole , so God could still look down and watch His team play. One democratic legislator said quote “Well, if God approves of it, who are we to say different?” and voted yes to the proposition.

So now the Cowboys are no longer not in Dallas, they aren’t even in Dallas County, they are across the county line in Arlington, Tarrant Co. Texas. Just south of the Ballpark which his royal dumbness forced the City of Arlington to buy. For his team.

And the College football teams, and the high school teams, and even the Middle School teams, are considered a farm where the NFL gets to hand raise its candidates for the pro teams. Where one high school team star in a thousand gets a chance to even try out for a professional slot.

They worship the oblong ball. There was one Governor, Mark White. He was Attorney General under Republican Bill Clements, until Bush the most active death penalty freak governor in Texas, (mark white helped him along) then lost the next election to Bill Clements. One of the few powers the Governor of Texas actually has is in deciding the school curriculum. What lost Mark White the Job wasn’t his Zero Tolerance, wiretapping, warrantless searches, death death kill them all bwaaahaaahaaahaaa attitude, and laws, no sir. It was football. Specifically the No Pass, No Play law. Which is as simple as it sounds, failing grades, no extracurricular activities.

Whut do you-all mean Bubba cain’t play no more football jes cause he’s dumb as a sack of dirt? That’s downright on-American!

One thing they used to protest the law was suspending the star player of the Chess Club for failing PE at one middle school. That’ll larn them sissy-boy eggheads not to fuck with our football.

But there is one and only one good thing about the way the laws are set up.

You know the difference between an Air Force recruiter and a NCAA recruiter? The NCAA recruiter isn’t allowed on high school campuses.

The good thing is I get to use that as an example for arguing with people like our good friend Ray. Whoever he is.

Thank you, President Bush

The Dallas, Texas business community, my mother, and President Bush have teamed up to help me out financially. For years my liberal mother has threatened her sons with the possibility that she would donate a sizable sum of money to Dallas’s Southern Methodist University in her will. SMUShe went to school there and it was the best time of her life. But, she says, the university has changed, and instead of being a center of learning as it once was for her, in short it has become a creature captured by the Dallas super-rich.

Corruption seems to swirl around this university. Edwiin L. Cox Jr., son of the man whose name is attached to SMU’s now acclaimed Cox School of Business, had to be pardoned by George Bush Sr. for financial crimes he was convicted of. In return, Cox Sr. donated a hefty sum of money to that president’s Texas A&M’s presidential library shortly thereafter. But that is not what SMU is most noted for in the field of corporate corruption.

The most notable example of it, was when the Dallas business rich increasingly began to buy football players for the team. This went on despite repeated warnings and sanctions from the NCAA through the years, but the business community, alumni, and SMU coaches kept at it. Eventually, the shit hit the fan when the NCAA made SMU the first ever university to receive its ‘death penalty’. The varsity football program was closed down entirely for several years, and a program with a rich history has now become a minor player in college ranks.

But the latest scandal there is the decision by the big Whigs to make SMU the site of the George Dubya Bush presidential library. This is the type of thing that Dallas’s already most sorry political reputation certainly doesn’t need. Even some of the university’s conservative Theological Department are quite aghast and have protested this decision. The local daily paper has tried to play down the public reaction to the recent announcement that this ‘honor’ had been granted the city and Soutern Methodist, but the site of the library will be quite appropriate IMO. Southern Methodist sits inside a rich, White segreGated, suburban enclave, entirely surrounded by multicultural Dallas. Isn’t this the purest essence of Bush though? So what’s to protest? lol

Still, my mother sees this insult as the straw that breaks the camel’s back. She has written the university and told them that she has now taken them out of her will. Thanks, Mom! And thank you, George W. Bush Mom, you’re doing the right thing!

See, there is some justice still in the world. And maybe also some day, both Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush (both Texas Oilys) will be publicly hung for their crimes on the steps of the George W. Bush presidential library, of Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas? We can only hope that their heads will soon roll, and in what better place than within the segreGated Park Cities enclave of Dallas, Texas, at Southern Methodist University? It would be presidential! Go Mustangs!

Smell Paso Texas

Antique postcard of Franklin Canal in El Paso TexasMexico is falling apart worse than I remember. I used to haunt downtown El Paso/slash/Juarez. The two cities are really one, but Juarez is about 6 times bigger and the poor side of town, and there are armed guards keeping the poor from the rich side of town.

The colonias described, they are on this side of the border as well. And just as illegal.

In 1991 there was a story on one of the El Paso stations, on the video news, a guy emptied one of those honey wagons, the Port-o-potty emptying trucks, into the canal on the mexican side. There are two main canals, the Franklin canal as it is called in El Paso and downstream, and the (don’t dear God hold me to this name) La Victoria canal on the Mexican side. Mind you, this kind of literally “shit” goes on everyday. Only this particular day there was a Mexican news crew hiding in the bushes.

They filmed him for forty-five minutes nonchalantly emptying the crap into the PEOPLES DAMN DRINKING WATER. Then the cops moved in and arrested him AFTER aaaaarrrrrrrrggggggggg. Then they shot some scenes where women and children were getting their water downstream from the incident. To show us how noble the government was in protecting them I suppose. Of course, it might have been a little bit nobler if they had gone up to the people and at least warned them that they were drinking feces. Guess they just figured they would watch it on the TeeVee news in their cardboard shacks which have no TeeVee, which is kinda good because they don’t have any electricity to run a TeeVee anyway.

But in downtown El Paso, you can go to Alameda street and actually just look across the creek, in its concrete-lined bed, looks like a drainage ditch actually, with the concertina-wire topped 12 foot cyclone fence, and see the maquila sweatshops. There are supposedly designed to be modern and convenient and comfortable and all, but the strangest thing about them is that there, a mere hundred yards from the line where things like OSHA and the EPA are such bad wicked naughty whiners that they actually insist on workplace safety(sometimes) and environmental protection (sometimes) as I said dear friends a hundred yards away… in these wonderful modern factories and warehouses, the other side of PRI, used to be the dominant party there, the Unions, are forbidden to organize, and since every worker in Mexico pre-nafta was a card carrying member of the labor unions, the people working there are ordered to disavow their union membership.

You know, I would almost bet that some of those workers were in the video of the women and children drinking shit out of an irrigation canal.

Oddly enough, there was a cholera epidemic that year. as in most years. The epidemic was spread to this side of the border as well. In colonias on the Franklin canal.

The Alamo and the war on terror.

This one is a blatant insult to everybody’s intelligence. It’s one of those “c’mon, man, you’re shittin’ me” type deals.

I was watching teevee a couple months ago, really bad habit and fortunately I never developed it into the stupor addiction that seems to be running across our land like a horrible Biblical plague.

There was one of those History Channel shows, Histories Mysteries or some bullpoopoo title, examining the myth, legend and whatever evidence remains from the battle of the Alamo. One of the most controversial things about the show, they spent 15 minutes of air time(about a third of the entire show) on the subject of the evidence that Davey Crockett didn’t fall in a hail of bullets and flashing swords as depicted so often in the romantic press.

The theory has been, since the seventies, that Mr Crockett and a few others actually surrendered, but were lined up and shot anyway. Which would have been an atrocity, right? Even more so than the order to give No Quarter.
But this one Texas historical society (and there are a lot of them running around, we just usually manage to keep them confined to Texas, where they are safe) insists that the Very Idea of Crockett Surrendering was slander against Mr Crockett. And the others who were apparently shot with their hands behind their backs.
They pointed to the source of the Slander, a Mexican lieutenant, as being proof positive that the thing was made up. Ignoring that the only Anglo types who survived were some women, children and Colonel Bowie’s slave Moses, who was manumitted (legally set free) in Bowie’s will.
And they were held in the chapel until the bodies were disposed of, so there was no way for them to witness whether or not the killing stopped before or after, lacking or in spite of, a surrender by some of the men.
This account was also written down by some of the women in their journals.

And in Texas it is traditional to treat General Antonio Jose y Maria Lopez de Santa Ana as the worst kind of villain, and it is also generally thought that Fannin and his men surrendering at Goliad and then being massacred took naught away from their status as Heroes.

But here is the sicker kicker….
The spokes-dude for the historical society went on and on about the 70s being a time when it was acceptable to question the (undoubtedly) spotless history of morality of the US military.
(and ignoring the fact than neither the Alamo nor Goliad was officially a U.S. military endeavour.)

And then said that not fully believing and accepting at face value the John Wayne portrayal of Davey Crockett’s last stand was so anti-patriotism that it actually encouraged al Qaeda to attack America….

I know, I know…just take a few deep breaths, pick your jaw up off the floor… breathe in, out, relax. ommmm calmmmm ommmmm…

And said that Americans needed the absolute faith in these legends to keep up the Morale of Our Troops while they face down the relentless brown hordes. And made the insinuation that “historical revisionists” were traitors and complicit in the terror America is so bravely fighting now….

And this show has aired at least twenty times in the past year.

This is the mindset facing us.

DG3K, Saddam and New Years Eve

As you might remember, Dead Guy 2K was a Texan. DG3K was also. There is a lot of significance to that, to me at least. While Justin, 22, Specialist, of Spring Texas was being killed Mr Bush was having our own Cindy arrested AGAIN. In Crawford.

At the ranch where he pretends to be a commoner.

An old term for that would be “gentleman farmer”. Somebody who does farming when and if the urge strikes him, … sort of like a hobby.

Oh yeah, I kind of noticed the coincidence (you know our Gubmint would of course never ever lie to us or anything like that) between the rapidly (then) approaching DG3K Before New Year’s event and the sudden hurry-up-and-hang-Saddam event.

But the latter would not and could not have been any kind of diversion to take our eyes off of the former, right?

I can’t really pretend to cry for Saddam, he was after all just another torture freak in the pay of Our Leaders until he decided to go independent on them.

But killing him made a martyr out of him. If they had let him rot in jail for the rest of his life, it wouldn’t have taken much longer, he was after all nearly 70 years old, and he would have been just another old prisoner dying a slightly accelerated natural death.

Instead he has become a rallying point.

They are dumber than a box of dirt.

Borders & Ignoble

Retail citadelI found myself inside one of these boxes again, waiting for my wife to finish up some mall shopping I had tried to talk her out of. These 2 chains of supposed bookstores are like the Democrats and Republicans almost. Nobody can tell any real difference between the two of them.

Usually, I can pull up a chair, and browse their discount picture books for a bit, but this time they had the music (Christmas oriented for the season) cranked up double the usual volume, and it began to drive me a little crazy. It was really annoying, giving some, I guess, an incentive to buy quick and get out of there. I didn’t have that incentive though. These places aren’t really bookstores so much, and I have a hard time even finding anything much of interest to read inside, let alone for puchase.

What do I mean about Borders and its chain competition not really being bookstores? Well, I happened to come across what B & N describe themselves as being to explain some. Here it is…

“Our mission is to operate the best specialty retail business in America.”

This little pearl of thought sits upon all the computer screens as a screen saver, and also is meant to be personal inspiration for the mechanized robots, I meant customer assistants that work there. Nothing about books about these places really. It’s about specialty retail business.

Still, people who enter are most often confused. They do seem to believe that they are in a real bookstore. Actually, meany of the customers have nere seen an actual bookstore, or at least not close up between the shevles. Or even if they happened to stroll through the shelves of a real bookstore, have never really looked much to see what was on the shelves. So it’s kind of easy to see how so many get confused about thinking that they are inside an actual living breathing bookstore. But they aren’t!

They are inside a specialty retail business, that’s all. A good place to sit at a table with a laptop sipping coffee. A good place to buy some pop music crap for some demented teenager one might know. Or a place to pick up a calendar, or some blank sheets of paper for correspondence or a blank diary perhaps? Sure there are books there, but not so many real ones. Many are dedicated to computer programming, or things like Manja (6 shelves alone for that Japanese cartoon stuff and ‘role playing’).

There are categorized sections of everything, well almost. Theses stores are marked off like a MS windows filing system and give sort of a superficial encyclopedic appearance. But little old stupid me. The category that interest me most is Foreign Literature. But look around? I saw about 55 shelves titled Fiction and Literature, but strangely enough there’s hardly a book of foreign literature in this group! One would think upon browsing there, that only dimwitted American authors were alive today? Oh, and maybe a dimwitted Brit, or two.

Oh sure, maybe I should go over to the Science Fiction (20 shelves), Mystery (14 shelves), or Romance (10 shelves) sections. Nothing. Everybody is an America. Apparently they never write mysteries or SF in Italy or Spain, Brazil or Africa? If they do, certainly you can’t find it at an American specialty retail store, as opposed to a bookstore. Despite their supposed thoroughness, Borders and B & N apparently don’t carry certain stuff. Like foreign fiction. Go figure.

They also don’t carry current affairs (3 stacks) commentary much, unless it is Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, that sort of gag-us quality of thought. One does find 13 stacks of Christian babble, too. 6 stacks of Tarot/ New Age 1 1/2 stacks of ‘Eastern Religions”. I am an atheist myself, so I looked for that stack? If you really want to befuddle employees in these stores, go up to one and ask to be directed to atheist oriented non-fiction. It’s great fun!

Or better yet, tell them that you have found the 10 stacks of Romance novels, but that you are a man and would like to see some male oriented porn instead. In book form. They might direct you to a shelf entitled Erotica (in some stores less regionally influenced by Dobson’s minions)? But then, you will see only gay ‘erotica’ there. Tell the clerk that you are not gay and would rather see their collection of porn books for heterosexual men. “Sorry, Sir, we only have magazines in that genre.” My reply is always, “What? The adult entertainment business is a multi-trillion dollar one, and yet your retail establishment carries not a porn book at all, outside of the gay ones!” And in Colorado Springs, not even much of that. Moo.

So, as an atheist heterosexual porn seeker who loves foreign lit, I am kind of out of luck at these specialty retail establishments. If I was a gay person, ‘spiritually inclined’, and didn’t know that a word was ever written outside US national boundaries, I might be in better shape, it seems. Or, if I could just get more interested in reading romance novels or military history, which is where the multiple stacks are. Yes, these stores don’t really seem to know that history has been passed through, unless it circled on a planet other than USA and has been interpretted by a Republican minded citizen. Not true, you can find some Democrats, too. Like Michael Moore, perhaps? But you’ll be much better off if you like books with names like ‘Semper Fi’, etc.

All in all, these retail establishments are more Americana than a retro Fifties Diner would be. But they are not quite being bookstores by doing that. In short, your prospective reading material is being grossly censored, and that’s why so few are purchasing from the shelves, and more just seem to be sipping their Lattes and Mochas, or talking on their cell phones while inside. Borders and Ignoble seems more like a telephone booth at times, than an actual bookstore.

At this point, one might object to my comments. “‘Erotica’ should be censored by B & N. Go to an ‘adult store’ if you want such filth!” But they don’t carry books there, I will moan. “And as an atheist, go to Hell and get some books by atheists.” Or to the philosophy stacks, as I have been directed by employees. As if all philosophers were automatically atheists, lol. Sorry, I’ll just order my atheist books from the Sceptical Inquirer magazine folk, thank you. And for a good porn book, I’ll just have to write my own, it seems. Though it’ll never get published, let alone make it to the B & N.

And if I might want to know how the French care about life, I will just have to confine myself to Agatha Christie, it seems. That is after I get through with the latest from Ann Coulter I purchased at the specialty retail store. She tells it like it is about the French. And she is informative about the Arab mind, too.

Nobody reads anymore, no publishers publish anymore, and no specialty retail establishments even stock what little is still around. The last time I have seen much of interest in a bookstore/ specialty retainl establishment was in a University of Texas dorm building. They had a little used bookstore that had some used books of African writers that had been published by the African Studies Dept of the UT.

Americans once wrote great literature back before the ’50s. Unfortunately, all those works are out of print and unavailable mainly. The lit was too red, it seems. Efforts to get them reprinted have flopped miserably. We have become a specialty retail people, and not a literate one. Oops, my wife is back from the mall. Got to end my rant. Bless her heart, she bought nothing at all. Or, maybe she did and is just hiding it away from Scrooge?

Tom Tancredo, my old homebase is in the news again, You Dope

Idyllic Mexican cultural heritageI have spend a lot of time in Tamaulipas, Mexico. And I once lived in Laredo across the river from this story, too. If you have never imagined such a place, Laredo is America’s largest inland port. That would make where this story occurred, Nuevo Laredo, Mexico’s largest inland port. Just one shallow river that flows from Colorado’s mountains, divides the 2 cities. Subcomandante Marcos (now going by the name, Delegate Zero) of the Zapatistas visited there last month. Here is what he saw, amidst the garbage of Tamaulipas.

I have to tell people about any real info written about Tamaulipas. It is really about America, too. Ask my daughter. She has spent much of her young life there.

Now, let me mention that I am offering our idiot Colorado Representative, Tomas Tancredo, free transportation with my family to visit in Tamaulipas. He can go fishing down there with the family, and doesn’t have to walk the same barrios that Marcos just did. Wouldn’t want the poor guy to get hurt. That is when he gets back from his ‘Third World’ Miami vacation that he passed at a swank hotel..

What a dummy this twerp is. He heads the House Immigragion Reform Caucus, and he is just about as knowlegable on immigration matters, as Silvestre Reyes is about Shia and Sunni divisions. In other words, he is a totally ignorant dumbass. If he thinks that Miami is ‘the Third World’?, duh, then come along, Fool, and let me show you.

Tom Tancredo was in the news last week embarrassing even the Bush Klan by his uniformed and stupid remarks that Miami was just like the Third World. Duh? Then why is much of Latin America trying to get there then? Not too many are trying to get to South Texas, though.

Maybe we can get this dummy a job at the Swift and Co meatpacking plant in Greeley? If he’s smart enough to even do the work right on the kill floor there even? I have my doubts. He’s only smart enough to be the Big Boss Man.

The Moon Fades- the beauty of the oud

If I had any ability as a musician, my instrument of choice to play would be the oud. In the US it is rare to have the opportunity to ever hear a live oud concert. Luckily, as a student at the University of Texas, I was able to attend several concerts of the legendary Sudanese oudist, Hamza El Din. I have been hooked on this instrument ever since.

A good introduction to the oud also can be found at Naseer Shamma’s website. He is Iraq’s master oudist. His site has seven albums by him showcased, with very good musical clips of one piece from each album. My favorite is the clip from the second album listed, The Moon Fades. Beautiful cover, beautiful melody, beautiful instrument, the oud. Go and enjoy.

If you are curious about the politics of this master musician from Iraq, check out an article about him at the newspaper, al Ahram.

The Pigs love their new cattle prods, they do

Long time ago, I once did a psych rotation at Terrell State Hospital in Texas. The big question posed for us students by our teachers, was whether or not it was right for administration to be using a cattle prod on a patient that was gutteral, scatalogical, and aggressive? I was the lonesome minority of one amongst the teachers and students that said that it was absolutely disgraceful to be doing this.

The big argument for using it at Terrell, was that this was supposedly more humane than allowing the patient to wallow in his own shit. My the great claims for electricity through the years! Always in vogue. But in my youthful innocence, I thought then, that it was just the particular regional backwardness of where I was at (Texas), and that this debate was a vestigal remains of a former primitive psychiatry along with the use of ‘insulin therapy’ and ‘hydrotherapy’. Alas, but one can see today that ‘hydrotherapy’ is now back in vogue with the likes of Dick Cheney, Ricardo Sanchez, Alberto Gonzalez, and Donald Rumsfield runnning the wards. And so is the cattle prod. They now call it The Taser, and it has become the fascistmindeds’ favorite tool of torture, both at home and abroad.

An Alternet article looks at The killers’ alternative to guns

Saddam Hussein Show Trials Highlight US as Land of Kafkaesque Law

How many show trials must the US engage in to totally make itself an international mockery? The American government specialty seems to be to illegally invade another country like Panama, Grenada, Yugoslavia or Iraq, and then to have a farcical trial of the deposed leaders afterwards. And the trials keep getting more bizarre and despicable. Milosevic died during his trial under somewhat shady circumstance, but that is nothing compared to the charade of justice that Hussein has been subjected to. Three defense lawyers murdered, judges shuffled in and out every other month, and the torture of being force fed through the nose for several weeks during a hunger strike. Even his ‘arrest’ was hyper hype, as he was caught by Kurds and then put in a hole disheveled so that the Americans could claim to have caught him living like a troll! Photo op time, embeds! And now, 2 days after receiving the death penalty he’s put back on trial in another court to defend himself from receiving the death penalty yet again.

I don’t know if Dick Cheney would consider that torture, but most people would certainly feel that it was. Even in the despicable US death rows like in Texas, there has not been this sort of nonsense seen before. Are two trials enough here? What next, the lynching done with KKK robes designed for the executioners and a burning cross on display? And how about a thousand and one trials for Hussein, and not just two? A move for dismissal now, Judge. He just got executed from Trial Number Two, or was it Trial Number One? Imagine if Nuremburg had been run this way!

3 Fort Carson snipers die, no reason to cry

Probably one of the most disgusting lines of work the Pentagon arranges for ‘our troops’ to do, is the role of sniper. And three of these Fort Carson trained assassins just got blown up yesterday in Iraq, according to The Gazette headline today. The article had sort of a tearful quality to it, and this is part of the neo-con rehab for the reputation of snipers, torturers, and thugs of all stripes and varieities.
 
Cybersniper.com will give you even a musical rendition of this sniper rehab propaganda, and another sniper.com site had a collection going to help out US military snipers to get better equipment to shoot down Arabs with. Kind of a Toy for Tots thing, Bless their damned souls. But when most Americans think of snipers, they generally still think of Lee Harvey Oswald, and Charles Whitman, who shot down close to 50 people from the University Tower at the University of Texas in Austin. Let’s hope that people also remember that both got their training in the US Marine Corp, but they might not, I guess?

These three soldiers who just died in Iraq all trained as snipers at Fort Carson, but their dead bodies will head back to their hometowns, where no doubt the local press will talk about how proud their families are of them, how proud their local communities are of them, and how proud America is that they gave their lives in service to Bush and Cheney and the oil companies they represent. Hahaha, that last part is just untrue. The local press won’t mention that part of their ‘sevice’ for sure. My bad. They will be called hereoes, ‘sniper heroes’ even! Tears will wash ashore in remembrance of what fine men they were to choose this fine line of endeavour.

But the time to cry was when they joined the military and began to have the aspiration to train as long distance killers. They threw their lives away THEN, plain and simple. No reason to cry now. RIP, you three made the wrong turn in life. I’m crying for the orphan children of Iraq instead.

Kill Bush, Part Two

I wrote a commentary here a couple of days back, that was titled “Kill Bush”. It went something like this… Kill Bush, Kill, Kill, Kill! I also called for the violent overthrow of our American way of life. I did stop short of advocating that we spit on images of Christ, or that we batter down church doors with neon crosses. I would like to ammend that, and now call exactly for such things to be done (being an atheist, why not?) So far, my appeals to organize such mayhem have gone relatively unheeded.
 
Still, I feel it is just a matter of time before others, like Julia of California and the al-Quaeda organization of Karachi, Pakistan, join together with me to carry out our attacks on the cartoonish Bush Adminstration. They should be fleeing to their bunkers even as I write this. We will do all this without the ass..istance of the Democratic Party though. They too are in the bunkers, hiding in fear.

Some have told me, “Tony, you are breaking the law by saying KILL BUSH!”. I would like to assure them, that not yet. I am still waiting for the delivery of my surface-to-air missile launcher I ordered from eBay to be delivered. Some have said, “Tony, you cannot shout Fire! Fire! Fire! in the theater. You cannot call for the shotgunning down of Dick Cheney!” But this is the age of NetFlix, and indeed, shouting Fire! Fire! Fire! in the context of watching a film at home is not yet determined by the 9 wise farts of the Supreme Deciders Club.

Some have worried that maybe I am a government agent provacateur, seeking to bring doom down upon our planet of the scattered wanderers without tribe race? That may be. They are everywhere in our matrix of FASCISM these government sperm. One can truly only be safe at the shopping mall these days.

I have heard it said, too, that one can legally call for KIlling Anybody, except but not for calling for the killing of our sainted President from the heavenly state of Texas. In that case, I didn’t say it. But let me just add, that I think we ought to blow up the Exxon Mobil cartel, located in my hometown of Irving, Texas, and start buying more gas from Venezuela’s demon-led CITGO to do it with . Conspiracy buffs might note that Oswald also hung around Irving back when I was growing up there. And I too, have held a copy of the Militant newspaper in my hand. In fact, I went to the school by the Texas schoolbook depository. Coincidence that we both have turned to terrorism? I don’t think so.

So render me if you will? Neighbor, call a torture taxi for me right now! And what a convenient place to have me flyed off from; Colorado Springs. How dare you threaten the King, King George. Heck, we might have let you off if Slick was still in, but this is a crime of immense proportions calling out KILL BUSH.

KIll, Kill, Kill Bush! Shall I soften this for delicate folk and call out only KILL BUSH POLITICALLY!??? Nah. It just doesn’t sound right. And besides, you know you want to do it too, just like Julia and I have done. So stick with your IMPEACH BUSH shtick as you will, and let them call for the terror taxi for me and Julia. Free Speech was once protected in our country. It was allowed to shout OFF WITH HIS HEAD!, even Bush’s. And I think it still is.

Seriously, people. Check out this commentary about Julia and the Visit Counterpunch Maybe it says it better than I do?

Kill Bush

Kill Bush! Kill, kill, kill. Let’s do it, Julia. In case people don’t know by now, Julia is a 14 year old school girl in California who had posted a photo of Bush with the words ‘Kill Bush’ onto her My Place website. Despite the fact that months went by and Bush had visited her city twice during that time unprotected from Julia, all of a sudden the Secret Service came by. Two big beefy ones, too. Julia had posted this material when she was 13 years old, so their visit was not exactly that of a speedy response team. And it seems that despite the Zillions already spent on Homeland Security bureaucracy, that nationally we still got basically what New Orleans has… which is A Confederacy of Dunces on the security job. So just who called the cops?

Well, we personally don’t know the answer on that one. No doubt, some self righteous super zealot of the Right, since they are all crawling out of the woodwork these days. We got the self-hating red diaper baby, David Horowitz, outing liberal professors all around the country. We got the racist Anglo ‘Minutemen’ calling up cops with info about people not speaking America’s official language, English without acent…. as they compare themselves to Neighborhood Watch, chuckle as you will. And Barnes and Noble has stacks of the excremental works of Bill O’Reilly as you go in. He’s watching you, American liberals! And we got lynch mobs here in Colorado trying to hang Ward Churchill from a pole. If they can’t do that, they’ll probably send him a blanket with small pox on it. And we got the airport security branch of the US military waging war everywhere on our behalf at the airports. Of course, they do do a little collateral damage from time to time. But heck, if you don’t like the gated community called America, then get out, ay?

Just 4 months ago, my high school buddy who I had lost contact with for years and I, reestablished a correspondence. But it got torpedoed for me when he got on the case against a University of Texas prof, an international specialist in lizards, no less! My friend was aghast that this evilutionist expert, Professor Eric Pianka, had just said in a university talk that bacteria deserved to live, whereas mankind really didn’t, since our species was working night and day to destroy the planet. Good Lord, what a crime!

MY high school buddy had heard about it on the Drudge Report. And they had heard about it from some Southern Baptist scientists (yes, unbelievable, isn’t it?) who had called the government alleging that Pianka was advocating biological warfare! And they had called all their Intelligent Design friends, and Drudge, too. So, Homerland Security again went to work. You see, they take our security quite seriously, so they marched out to the Univ of Texas to check out this liberal terrorist. And they examined, under a microscope, all his words of wisdom ever uttered about evolution and lizards. Clear it was, that this non-Creationist had a greater love for lizards and bacteria than he did for humankind. Yet he had not started a biological warfare lab at the U.

Well, in short, both Professor Eric Pianka and Julia remain free. After all, America doesn’t burn witches yet. But Homeland Security does take reports from an alert citizenry, and that’s a citizenry full of finks, evidently. And they do take seriously any jokes at the airport about bombs. We may even begin to see signs saying that ‘This School is a Gun Free School’ posted at our kindergardens. So, Liberals, please join me in my effort to give these nice folk all something to think about.

Kill Bush. Shotgun pellet Donald Rumsfield. Deny Habeus Corpus to Alberto Gonzales. Put Condaleeza in bondage… no… I mean a ‘stress position’. Nuke Washington DC! Go after them in their bunkers, and blow the whole crew to smithereens! Please, do it now.

Liberals, start advocating violence (including the violent overthrow of America’s government) everywhere. If you can’t beat them, then join them. Oops, you do that already by voting for the Democratic Party. So try advocating violence instead. Let it out of your Gandhian souls. Kill, Kill, Kill!

Kill Bush.

Humor

I once had to break up with a perfectly good boyfriend. He was 6’5″, 240 pounds, Denver Broncos tight end, straight-A student, fast car, cool apartment….blah, blah. We had dated for two years, discussed marriage and children, a serious deal. But I knew that it was time for me to pull the plug. Why, you ask? Here’s the honest truth. He thought the Three Stooges were HILARIOUS.
 
pictureThis may seem a ridiculous reason but, really, when your man is curled up in a fetal position night after night, laughing convulsively at Larry, Curly and Moe, a feeling of separateness, a moat that no drawbridge can span, envelops you and leaves you completely alone, bereft, devoid of vision and hope.

I’ve often said that my sense of humor has saved me as I’ve weathered the storms of life. Don’t laugh. I’m very serious about this. I think the ability to see irony or absurdity, the ability to be self-effacing, has enabled me to cope with all that has come my way. A sense of humor is more therapeutic to me than Prozac or Valium or crack cocaine (it was only that one time, I swear).

This past weekend I stumbled across VH1’s 100 Best Saturday Night Live skits. I think I may be one of the only people on the planet who has watched SNL religiously, season after season, since its inception in 1975. I was in the 8th grade when SNL began. I’m 44 now. In a good year perhaps 30% of the skits could qualify as funny. But those that are change our perspective, change our lives really. Do you remember when the old George Bush overcame the wimp factor to become our 41st president? Do you remember when he drew a line in the sand…daring the Iraqis to mess with the US of A? His approval rating was higher at that time than almost any president in history. Enter Dana Carvey. His affectionate, yet biting, parody of George Bush allowed us all to breathe a collective sigh of relief. Yes, we elected him, we like him….but we have reservations. Na Ga Da…what the hell does that mean?

Now we have president number 43, Dubya. Shit, hell, fuck. Please give us something to laugh about because he’s letting us down big time. This war sucks. At least let us mock his laugh. Hehehehe. My goodness, can’t we make fun of his fraternity boy demeanor….his inability to speak in complete sentences? If not, how about those daughters of his? Texas girls…tequila-swilling, blow-job-giving hose bags. Well…nothing that I wasn’t but who cares? I wasn’t in the public eye so too bad presidential daughters!

And Hillary. You went to Wellesley like all smart lesbians do. You could be our next president if only you didn’t have cankles! Look it up in the dictionary you’ll see a picture of Hillary Clinton’s lower leg. Hahahahahahaha! No credibility with me because no differentiation between your calves and ankles! Universal health care?! SHUT THE HELL UP, FATTO!!!

Thank you, Lorne Michaels, for sticking with SNL. Thank you for being politically incorrect (a phrase that didn’t even exist back then). You’ve given wings to a whole new generation of political satirists…..Dennis Miller, Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert. We hunger for someone to interpret our global reality. It sucks. But it’s funny. Yes, there’s terror in the world but there is also laughter, my friends. Tell me that there isn’t something humorous about tall skinny Osama hiding in a cave needing dialysis. Poor Osama. Just the name Osama doubles me over. O-S-A-M-A.

Back to you, my Stooge-loving former sweetie pie, I know you married not too long after we parted. I imagine that your wife is beautiful, your children perfect. I picture their prowess on the field, their superiority in the classroom. But mostly I picture grubby hands, erect across the bridges of freckled noses….avoiding the inevitable double eye poke. It’s a life that I could never be a part of. Nyuk, nyuk! Woo, woo!

Showing fealty

Demonstrating fealty to the SaudisJon Stewart parodied the Bush-Ahmadinejad face off at the U.N. on Thursday, characterizing George Bush’s address as a Mafia don trying to intimidate his subjects.
 
In this light, the significance of Bush holding hands with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah earlier this year finally hit me. Bush is probably taking out on us what he’s getting from his masters. The public hand-holding was none other than a show of fealty.

At first I thought Bush could have been helping the not-so-elder along a Texas trail. Or maybe hand-holding might be a Saudi custom between friends. I laughed a bit at the gay innuendo, thinking about Jeffrey Gannon/Guckert, the gay prostitute who frequents the White House but nobody knows for whom, keeping in mind Stephen Colbert’s chiding White House Spokesman Scott McClellan for retiring to “spend more time with Andrew Card’s children.”
 
What does it mean to kiss the Don’s ring? Or the Pope’s? Or to touch another’s feet? It isn’t affection, it isn’t submission. It’s the literal origin of what it is to kiss ass. An act which both parties agree to be distasteful and beneath one’s dignity, but necessary to demean oneself to show deference.

It means subjugation, to humiliate yourself, in the original sense of humility, to abase yourself before your superior, before everyone’s eyes, to demonstrate your allegiance.

Holding Prince Abdullah’s hand was not about kissing up to the Saudis to cement an oil deal. It was an offer George W. could not refuse. Who owns a major share of the US treasury bonds? Who could break the US economy at will? To whom does Bush owe his fortune and ascendency? “Hold my hand.”

What could it mean for the President of the United States to be demonstrating his fealty to the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia?

Sheehan power

Cindy Sheehan has no peer in the world. She can travel to any country and be received by their governments as a dignitary. Few celebrities or politicians can expect such treatment, and when they do, their entitlement comes from being plugged into the establishment.
 
Cindy Sheehan’s power comes from the people. It comes from our belief that an outsider could make a difference in the turn of events. The American media could easily have ignored Cindy Sheehan’s stand in Crawford Texas, but Sheehan had captured the public’s fascination. Why? Because she reflected the public’s idealism. As long as the ordinary people of the world believe that there exists someone who could call President Bush to the carpet, Cindy Sheehan will be imbued with her power. Who other than one improbable woman could face off the man who holds the fate of the world in his hands?

This Easter Cindy Sheehan is returning to Crawford Texas to lay siege one more time to President Bush in his lair. Since initiating her movement in August last year, Sheehan has participated in diverse actions, including a Thanksgiving reprise in Crawford which led only to several prompt arrests. The media has learned that as public attention wanes, it can ignore or temper their enthousiasm for Cindy Sheehan when it wants to. Again, Sheehan’s power comes only from us.

Perhaps it is again time to rally to Sheehan’s side. Maybe joining Sheehan’s vigil in Crawford for Easter can once more focus the world’s hope that the peace movement can plant itself before George Bush’s eyes.

We can rally in large numbers all over the world, but because the media can typify the effort as lacking cohesion, it can certainly pretend that the peace movement is peopled by malcontents who offer no alternative.

Cindy Sheehan offers a real alternative, and I think she has hit on an ideal strategy. Not just withdrawal from Iraq, but an appeal to Bush’s conscience. He may have one.