Notes of a Personal Nature, Directed to those in the Wilds of the Nebraska Wilderness

To all in the Land of the Runza Eaters, greetings and salutations!  We who are about to be socially dead and on professional life support salute you!

Summer 1993: I move to North Alabama, my step-father has cancer and I drive him to chemo every day for six months and deal with my mother’s resulting nervous breakdown.

Spring of 1995: I get Alabama residency and start college full-time at the University of North Alabama, living in an apartment one block from campus, majoring in History and minoring in Spanish. I work various “boy jobs” to make the cigarette money and tuition and rent.

Spring 1999: I graduate cum laude from UNA and am awarded a teaching fellowship at the Unviersity of Alabama Graduate History Department.  I am a PhD candidate there, learning historiography, reading everything, teaching 80 students a week every semester in  Western Civ 101.  I learn to read critically and to use primary sources, give a paper to the Annual Conference on Race at the University of Memphis which is entirely made up of primary archive sources and the EX-slave narratives by the WPA.  I write and publish a paper on the religious beliefs and social activism of Rabbi Morris Newfield and use his own sermons at the American Jewish Archives at Hebrew University in Cinn., Ohio. I publish three book reviews over the next few years.

2002: I begin to get tired and burnt out.  I start to argue with an advisor over my role as a white African-American historian.  She is all about gender per se, I am not.  I decide to take a break.  I go to library school and get my MLIS in the spring of 2003. I go to the ALA Midwinter Convention that year and forget that I have registered there as a job applicant.  I get a call to come for an interview that summer and accept it as a mere money-making venture and resume padder in Montgomery at Alabama State.

2003: All starts out well at ASU.  I renovate the interlibrary loan department, develop the turnkey Electronic Reserve system from being told “We bought it a few years ago, now you start it up, write the procedures and the policies, and they had better follow the federal copyright law.”   I master federal copyright law, database administration, draft all my procedures and policies and provide “best practice” examples for each of them.  It is well received.

2004: Go to Tuscaloosa and have a long sitdown with advisor.  She apologizes for having sat on my last work for so long.  I see she is now on a psychotropic and the results are pleasant: no more mood swings.  I agree to put in her changes and get my MA later that year.  I get really tired and short tempered.  Work sucks.  I am treated like a clerk and not a member of the faculty.  The city sucks.  I cannot stay awake at my desk at work. I cannot read or write at home.  I only want to sleep.  I begin to get paranoid after being robbed at pistol point a block from my house, across the street from the resident agent of the FBI.  I am scared to walk the steets at night, even a block to walk the dog.  This neighborhood is supposed to be “high class!”  What gives?  A girl is driving in a Jeep a block away and stop for a light.   She is carjacked at pistol point. I am really getting scared now.  I want to move!  I want to know why this crime wave is going on and why crap like that never happened in NY or Omaha or anywhere else I have lived. Paranoia rises to new heights, and I start to lose a lot of weight.  Rumors at work spread by management have it that I am a drug addict and/or a drunk. In fact, I have one bottle of beer in my fridge and it is going stale.  I have no drug stronger than OTC generic sinus medication in my system.

Late 2004: I lose it.  Begin to just not bathe, change clothes, mind races, body sleeps. I get yelled at by a clerk in front of 2 dozen students — my students when I hang up on her and say I am teaching and will get back to her after my class.  I get censured for being rude.  My reply: “You obviously do not know what rude is!”   I take exception on being asked to dust book stacks when there are a dozen student workers doing nothing around.  I say that I have a lesson plan to prepare before four hours in Special Collections rearranging the silly method of cataloging the microfilm which is impossible for users to find unless they go into the long record, which they are not able to do as they are users and not staff.  I get censured again, can’t stay awake.  Start to have vivid daydreams and they are scary.

January 2005: I am fullly fledged insane now.  I am seeing stalkers that aren’t there.   I am having grandiose thoughts alongside delusions of persecution.  I am very very sick, barely 135 lbs. when I ought to be 175. I go to Tuscaloosa and get lost.  I try to get into my friend Joe’s house where I had crashed two weeks in 2003 after graduation.  I, for some odd reason, do not have a key.  I break out the window, fearing the stalkers have followed me.  Joe awakens, thinks I am a burglar and throws me down the steps, breaking my arm.  I am recognized.   Soon I am in a hotel room with my family there, wearing a sling made out of a sweatshirt.  I am soon on my way to the hospital at home.

2005-6: They obviously think I am crazy.  I get my arm set and the doctor keeps me in the hospital until neurology gets there.  I get poked, prodded, a spinal tap, MRIs, CAT scans, etc. for a day.  I take them well. The MRI makes a funny “thump-thump-thump” sound and I can feel vibrations in my chest when it runs. The neurologist does exhaustive tests. Finally a diagonosis: I have an advanced case of HIV manifested with brain lesions.  I am not crazy.  I am going to get better — if I do not die first.  I do not. Die, that is.  I slowly get my mind back, and gain weight and my strength.  I am not happy though, feeling as if I have let down my students.  I apply for Social Security disability and exhaust all my money saved. My sister puts me up at a rental property she and her husband own.  I am stuck in the country now.

2007: My stepfather has died.  My mother  is no longer crazy nor am I.  I start to write again and lose the naps four or five times a day. I have no HIV viral load that can be detected and my immunity system starts to rise. My memory is back. I work for my sister and mom as they finish the new house, “THE COMPOUND” for us all to live. Then I have an adverse reaction to my meds and have a stroke which paralyzes my right hand for six months.  I rehab myself, the SS stuff drags on, I have a hearing where I am humiliated by a judge who asks why I not become a WalMart greeter.  I cry in front of the court and cannot reply. I have never felt so insulted in my life.

2008: I am much better, stonger, and my blood now runs with ice in it. I am a bona fide cynic now.  I am still at odds with the SS system, wanting the back pay which I deserve from the two years I spent in bed and weighting 135 lbs. I apply to jobs and get one phone inteview out of them all. I wonder if I am being blackballed from my old management?  I contemplate going back to Tuscaloosa and finishing my PhD or a new on in library and information sciences if they will have me.  I am owing over $50K in student loans, I cannot get a job and am stuck in the country. So what do I do?  I hike. I play with the dogs. I watch Democracy Now with Amy Goodman and fight ignorance and bigotry with my pen. It is OK, not what I had planned, of course, but tolerable, as I am not found dead a John Doe under a bridge somewhere.

Yesterday: I hear from Holly. It was so good. She does not know it, but I have kept her address under a paper weight on my desk for three or four years.  I haven’t had the courage to write until today. I fear failure more than anything, and I am embarassed at what I have become: a forgotten footnote in the book of life.  But, given enough time and no crimes grave enough, that is what we all become, ultimately, isn’t it? I get up and start work on an article on “echo chambers” and how talking points that are construed from a false pejorative worst case reading of matters of fact become a meme. I feel good.  The dog is asleep and Amy Goodman is about to come on the TV.

nealmhughes@gmail.com

256-229-6849

Iran appears to be a no-go. Sorry Mr. Bush.

It would appear that the National Intelligence Estimate has verified that which many outside the corporate media and Foggy Bottom have known for some time: Iran has no nuclear weapons program, that they have not been in pursuit of nuclear weapons since at least 2003, and that all the “wait for the mushroom cloud” saber rattling was precisely that.

We note that this news was not received well at 1600 Pennsylvania, Dana Perino going so far as to declare that “The president wasn’t given the specific details” of the revised intelligence estimate, even though President Bush was told in August that Iran’s nuclear weapons program “may be suspended,” the White House said Wednesday, which seemingly contradicts the account of the meeting given by Bush Tuesday, according to CNN.

We must wonder just “what Mr. Bush knew and when he knew it” to paraphrase a line made famous in the 1970s during Mr. Nixon’s Watergate hearings. We must also wonder from what mental dysfunction he suffers: tertiary syphilis, perhaps? Or could it be that the boy is simply out of his league, and that a nice bump or two of the old Peruvian nose candy might tide his thought processes along a bit, albeit with grinding teeth and an inability to shut up.

Yes, our First Family is rapidly approaching Velazquez’s famous series now at the Prado. All we lack is a dwarf and court costumes to recreate the blank decadence of the Borbon y Borbon family then regnant here in Byzantium-on-Potomac.

The Republic must be restored.

Tom Paine wrote that “these are the times that try mens souls,” and the time is apt for those to be repeated often and loudly. The basic premise of government, as realized by Hobbes, Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers was that government was a contract: the people gave up certain rights (such as absolute control of all their wealth and profit and a the right to mete out justice) in return for the government being not merely derived from the consent of the governed, but as an agent for the mutual protection of the people under whom the government was established.

The Divine Right of Kings, of Might Makes Right, and that government is an oligarchy set up to maintain and increase the power and wealth of a few is long passed in theory. But these days, here at the dawn of the Twenty-first Century, a new rise of a tyranny masquerading as a Security State. Cloaked in a flag dripping blood from the innocent spewed out by the acts of a few religious fanatics, holding a Bible in one hand and the threat of peine fort et dure along with the threat of indefinite detention with no due process or even our ancient right of habeus corpus, a man with little wit and slim to nothing to recommend him alongside his cabal of toadies and henchmen has been allowed to ride roughshod over our entire Republic.

We find ourselves embroiled in another Asian Adventure, after having failed to learn our lesson from the Vietnamese Fiasco in Iraq. Iraq! A state which was our ally against the Iranians after their Islamic Revolution! Iraq! A state which had not threatened any of its neighbors save the decadent al Sabbah tyranny of Kuwait for over ten years. Yes, that Iraq.

Why? We still do not know the whole truth. Every reason offered has been proven to either be a lie or changed. After the 19 religious fanatics from ARABIA not Iraq flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and allegedly aimed for the Capitol itself, “everything changed” according to the official account of this Administration.

Indeed, it did, as we were set back further in our quest for a government by, for, and of the people in one fell swoop with a rubber stamp Congress and a tyrant in the White House and another at the Naval Observatory in the city of Washington.

Perhaps we are saddled with the nincompoop Bush and the evil Cheney and Chertoff until 2009, but they can be thwarted at every move by a strong Democratic Congress and a handful of Independents and Republicans who can keep additional spread of the cancer of cronyism, backslapping and lust for absolute power, the Constitution and our contract be damned!

Now is the time for the people to stand firm and speak out! Are you as tired of being in a civil war as am I? Are you sick of having dissent equated as treason? Do you want the Constitution restored? Then erect your verbal barricades and arm yourselves with the truth and then join the battle to save the Republic by restoring Constitutional Rule to our nation.

A Statesman’s Call for US-Iranian Dialog

Here is the text from an email I received today from Gen. Wesley Clark re: Is War with Iran Inevitable?

 

Dear Neal,

Read my diary at DailyKos and the ensuing dialogue it generated!

Yesterday, I posted a diary on DailyKos detailing my thoughts on the situation concerning Iran. You can read the entire post below, and I invite you to visit the diary at DailyKos so that you can also read the dialogue I had with members of the site’s community discussing this critical issue.

Is War with Iran Inevitable?

As the President fights for public support of his troop surge in Iraq, he is also ratcheting up the pressure on Iran. A second aircraft carrier battle group (with Newsweek reporting a third group likely to follow), Patriot missiles to protect our allies, arresting Iranian personnel in Iraq, releasing additional information about Iranian involvement, appointing a Navy Admiral to command forces in the region, even seeking diplomatic support from Sunni Arab friends in the region — Yes, the Iranians are interfering inside Iraq and seeking nuclear capabilities. Yet the President’s recent actions give the US little additional leverage to engage and dissuade Iran, and, more than likely, simply accelerate a dangerous slide into war. The United States can do better than this.

Since 9/11 the Iranians have tried on several occasions to open a dialogue with the United States. They, of course, had their own interests at heart, not ours. Yet, from dialogue some common interests might have emerged. The Bush Administration would have none of it, and branded Iran a member of the Axis of Evil.

During that period, with most of the world on our side, we had enormous diplomatic, economic and military leverage over Iran. Now, deeply committed militarily in Iraq, more isolated diplomatically, increasingly indebted to some of Iran’s crude oil customers, only modestly successful in gaining UN sanctions against Iran, the Administration has refused to change our approach, and has instead chosen to augment the least effective element of US power in the region – air and naval.

We are already totally dominant in air and naval power over Iran. Even with Iran’s new Russian antiaircraft equipment, no one should doubt that US forces could penetrate these defenses and strike with precision with minimal losses. Iran’s naval countermeasures in the Gulf can be largely preempted. The Iranians no doubt recognize this.

But the Iranians perceive American weaknesses on the ground, with an American Army too small to invade and occupy Iran, and too engaged inside Iraq even to threaten it. They see our soldiers through sniper sights, and from behind the triggers of improvised explosive devices, while they see themselves as a nation that gained considerable strength from a war with Iraq that cost a million casualties, took eight years, and involved withstanding missile strikes on cities and the use of chemical weapons. They no doubt believe that, whatever the current alignments of Sunni states, a US strike against Iran would bring outpourings of sympathy, public support, and waves of impassioned volunteers from throughout the Islamic world. They would see themselves as the heroic martyrs uniting Islam. The Iranians may believe this reaction would enforce on the United States a rapid, humiliating withdrawal from the Persian Gulf, leaving them military savaged but strategically victorious.

In this they might very likely be proven wrong. US power is far more sustainable in the region than Iran would like to believe, and the military humiliation Iran would suffer at the outset could well deter any outside assistance. The US does have a military option. But this is a struggle that will be costly for all involved, will further isolate the region, and whose ultimate outcome is likely to be decided by future incumbencies. Leaders on both sides should recognize that war is the most unpredictable of human endeavors, and that unanticipated consequences almost always follow.

I believe some in the Administration have seen this confrontation as inevitable – or have sought it – since late 2001. At that time a Pentagon general held up to me a Defense memorandum which he described as a five year road map to the conflict. But surely we have learned by now that, particularly in this region, force and the threats of force should be the last, last, last resort.

Military power aside, the US has enormous economic leverage over the Iranians through our influence on world financial institutions, international commerce and capital flows. While the latest actions against Iran’s banking system show the sharp stick of US power, the potential carrots are enormous, too. Islamic pride cannot be purchased, but neither can a proud nation ignore a more hopeful vision of its future.

The American troop surge is not likely to impact Iran’s on-the-ground influence in Iraq. Their presence serves the interests of some in Iraq; and they are deeply embedded and widely active. Only their perception of new interests and opportunities is likely to do this. They would need to see their situation through a different lens. It is asking a lot. But, cannot the world’s most powerful nation deign speak to the resentful and scheming regional power that is Iran? Can we not speak of the interests of others, work to establish a sustained dialogue, and seek to benefit the people of Iran and the region? Could not such a dialogue, properly conducted, begin a process that could, over time, help realign hardened attitudes and polarizing views within the region? And isn’t it easier to undertake such a dialogue now, before more die, and more martyrs are created to feed extremist passions? And, finally, if every effort should fail, before we take military action, don’t we at least want the moral, legal and political “high ground” of knowing we did everything possible to avert it?

Whatever the pace of Iran’s nuclear efforts, in the give and take of the Administrations rhetoric and accusations and Iran’s under-the-table actions in Iraq, we are approaching the last moments to head off looming conflict. Surely, it is past time to ask our elected officials in the White House and Congress to exercise leadership: recognize the real strategic challenge we face, and start to work now to avoid an escalation and widening of conflict in the Mideast.

Thank you for reading my thoughts on Iran. Again, I invite you to read the important discussion that followed in the comments section of my DailyKos diary.

This is a critical issue for our nation, and it is essential we continue to speak out.

Sincerely,

Wes Clark

General Wesley Clark could not be more astute in my opinion,
as he represents the thoughts of both a scholar and a statesman.
The world need well heed his words lest we find ourselves in a Third World War over nothing but failure to talk.

Swords into Plowshares: an Opportunity to help establish the Dept. of Peace!

Department of Peace Conference, 3-5 February 2006

Dr. Dorothy Maver, Executive Director of the Peace Alliance, a dear ally and friend of PDA, is inviting people from across the United States to a two day conference in Washington for educational workshops and then direct lobbying members of our Congress to establish a Department of Peace. The two days of education and activism will be the Third through the Fifth of February, 2007. This is an excellent chance for us all to interact with religious, political, educational and conflict resolution leaders and joining with Rep. Kucinich, along with Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson (two international best selling authors and world-celebrated thinkers) and people from faith, justice, peace, and activist communities in this conference, the culmination of which will be reintroduction of the Dept. of Peace legislation on the House Floor!

A Dept. of Peace is not a new idea, but was introduced during debate on the original US Constitution and the concept of peaceful conflict resolution and arbitration has been a hallmark of recent human civilization, dating from at least 500 BCE in India. The Department of Peace would also include a Peace Academy and address domestic issues such as teaching nonviolent conflict resolution to our children and youth, and addressing such longstanding problems as domestic violence (particularly towards women and children), gang and drug violence, as well as international issues.

The Peace Alliance and its allies include a wide range of individual legislators such as Dennis Kucinich, Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee, Bernie Sanders, and organizations as diverse as the Catholic Pax Christi USA, Amnesty International, American Muslim Voices and the Jewish group Tikkun!

A Dept. of Peace would only be about 2% of the present US DOD budget…2% for peace and conflict resolution rather than wars of choice and further financial engorgement of the military-industrial complex President Eisenhower warned us of in 1961 upon leaving office. Rep. Kucinich has introduced this legislation twice before, and it has never got out of committee, much less been debated on the Floor of the US House of Representatives. However, the people in theory are represented by our Congress, but only by making our feelings known, can Congress be educated and hopefully swayed in the establishment of a new model of conflict resolution and we the people will rest securely in the knowledge that noone bears us collective ill will and consequently address all the other pressing issues that face us such as: alternative and renewable energy, environmental stewardship, tackling Global HIV, and the other problems in the world which war does not solve, but aggrandize them.

By peace, we free ourselves and our resources for the advancement of ourselves, our progeny, and the present as well as our future heritage as members of the human community. Please contact your legislators in Congress and urge them to cosponsor or at least vote for a Dept. of Peace in this 110th Congress.

Whistling Dixie in Congress and on the Golf Links

Dixie is the colloquial term for southernmost Utah, so called from its warm climate — palm trees grow there — and a failed 19th Mormon Church experiment in cotton planting. St. George in Washington County is the heart of this Dixie, not Alabama. Like its close neighbor, Las Vegas, the area has been booming. One never really knows why an area booms. Is it word of mouth alone? Boosterism, a desire to be in on the ground floor, or a lemming-like advance? Now, Washington County, Utah is a gem. Only 110 miles of Las Vegas, it has two colleges, a major medical facility and more scenic beauty than anyone not familiar with the area can imagine. It is home to the Red Rocks area of Utah — a pristine desert landscape that borders the world famous Zion National Park and the Mojave Desert. An odd place for a city of mega-mansions and golf courses, certainly, this driest county in the second driest state in the Union, but so was Las Vegas.

Some in the local county and city government was the Las Vegasification to continue, minus the casinos and bars — this is Utah, after all, and the polygamist Fundamentalist Latter Day Saint sects run out of Hildale (and its neighbor, Colorado City, Arizona) is in Washington County. Washington County has been a very popular place for financially secure people in the Salt Lake area to retire: lots of sun, palms, little snow or ice, golf galore, and as always, location, location, location. This is an area of unfathomable beauty: red sandstone formations, and a safe, secure, family friendly place.

But boosterism has come at a price, socially, environmentally and politically. The local three man county commission has been boosting more growth at public expense masked in “environmentalism” in the disingenuously named S. 3636/HR 5769, the “Washington County Growth and Conservation Act” sponsored by Senator Bob Bennett and Rep. Jim Matheson. This bill was thankfully dead with Hastert’s recent last gavel bang, but it has a chance of rearing its head again in the new Congress.

This bill seeks to redefine pubic lands, the majority of which are already under the protection of the Zion National Park, while failingto protect over 70% of the land that is of “wilderness quality” and to give away land to the highest bidders and carve out water, utility, transportation and off road vehicle track corridors. Yes, corridors, not corridor. The bill sought to sell off 40 miles square of public land — with no methodology of determining where as well as to give away land to the County outright!

Just coincidentally, one of the county commissioners, Alan
Gardner happens to have a large interest in “The Ledges” an “upscale” housing and golf development on the edge of the Zion National Park in St. George, along with his St. George city councilman brother Larry. Both also own grazing contracts with the Bureau of Land Management in the wilderness area outside the city for their cattle business. Equally coincidentally, another county commissioner, Jay Ence, who is pushing these bills happens to be the former head of a development company whose three nephews now own the company following his retirement. The Salt Lake Tribune, notes that just for starters,

Environmentalists, some local officials and residents oppose the plan, which also outlines a route for a new highway through tortoise habitat in the Red Cliffs Desert Preserve that potentially could link a development in which the Gardner brothers havea financial interest and land they own to Interstate 15.

but adds that

To their credit, Ence and the Gardners seem to have scrupulously followed Utah law concerning conflicts of interest while in public service. They’ve certainly done some good as public servants and undoubtedly feel that election to office is a mandate for their pro-growth agenda.

 

One might term the SL Tribune‘s corrolary to be “damning with faint praise,” at best. The local St. George newspaper, TheSpectrum, has also exposed the connections between the developers and city/county “fathers” of Dixie with less word mincing.

Seldom has such legislation been met by such outrage by the press, environmental and citizens groups and even business as this fiasco. The SierraClub; Peter Metcalf, the head of Black Diamond Equipment, Ltd., and a board member of the Outdoor Industry Association; the Zion-Mojave Wilderness Organization , the Southern Utah Wilderness Association (SUWA), and thousands of individual Utahans and lovers of nature and proponents of intelligent growth/conservation strategies have joined in opposing these bills. Even the Bush Administration’s own Department of the Interior, in the person of Chad Calvert , Principal Deputy Asst. Secretary of the Interior, Land and Minerals Management opposed these bills!

The proposed public highway through the desert (near The Ledges luxury housing development partially owned by the Brothers Gardner) happens to be a sanctuary for the desert tortoise. The “water developlment corridor” aspect is a proposed 90 mile cross country pipeline from Lake Powell to St. George, to feed the thirst of the golf links and 200,000 new homes that the local developers want to see. Over 25 Million people downstream of Lake Powell on the Colorado River would be affected by these bills if the water development was allowed! ATV trails! High lines! Squashed tortoises! Land giveaway! Corporate welfare! How about a pony and a Mercedes for the each member of the Washington County Commission and St. George city council while we’re at it?

The people of Washington County don’t want unbridled growth.
They want wise oversight. They want to see the Red Rocks and hike the canyons unimpeded, not a New Las Vegas. As a matter of fact, had these two bills not died in the House and Senate committees where they sat ready for action on the floor, this may have been a new low in corporate welfare and disingenuity. Luckily they died, but they may return…

And if you think that is bad enough, wait until you learn about the gas development proposed in Dixie…..

WTF? BushCo, Inc.’s EPA to close regional EPA libraries!

Earlier last week, the Wicked Trio received an email from a professional colleague at the NIH libraries in Maryland about a proposal by the EPA admin to close a number of regional libraries, including the main one in DC… All we can ask is WTF?

Here is PEER’s take on the news: and here.

For Immediate Release: February 10, 2006
Contact: Carol Goldberg (202) 265-7337

BUSH AXING LIBRARIES WHILE PUSHING FOR MORE RESEARCH — EPA Set to Close Library Network and Electronic Catalog

Washington, DC — Under President Bush’s proposed budget, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is slated to shut down its network of libraries that serve its own scientists as well as the public, according to internal agency documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). In addition to the libraries, the agency will pull the plug on its electronic catalog which tracks tens of thousands of unique documents and research studies that are available nowhere else.

Under Bush’s plan, $2 million of a total agency library budget of $2.5 million will be lost, including the entire $500,000 budget for the EPA Headquarters library and its electronic catalog that makes it possible to search for documents through the entire EPA library network. These reductions are just a small portion of the $300 million in cuts the administration has proposed for EPA operations.

At the same time, President Bush is proposing to significantly increase EPA research funding for topics such as nanotechnology, air pollution and drinking water system security as part of his “American Competitive Initiative.”

“How are EPA scientists supposed to engage in cutting edge research when they cannot find what the agency has already done?” asked PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, noting that EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson is moving to implement the proposed cuts as soon as possible. “The President’s plan will not make us more competitive if we have to spend half our time re-inventing the wheel.”

Frankly, those in the know should have seen it coming down the proverbial path. Health Canada is doing the same thing in defunding at appropriate levels the various libraries that serve as a de facto national health library. One supposed that the Rt. Hon. Mr. Harper is assuming that the NIH libraries will take up the slack…

We have no idea what Mr. Bush is doing. Supposedly this will save $2 Million (US) out of a total $2.5 Million library budget. Frankly, this pittance is astonishing — one assumes that a single trip to the Brush Ranch or Kennebunkport costs at least that for a week of “deciding.”

Evidently this was a pure EPA decision, and it was done in order to court favor with the “faith based” environmental policy which BushCo, INC presently exercises, that is to say “I have faith that I shall still have breathable air and potable water for long enough for me to die of old age in bed.” In other words, a retake on “the public be damned” only add “the researchers working on public policy” along with “the public” and we have Neo-conservative policy at its worst.

We assume that reading the The Fountainhead again along with an appropriate Bible passage will function for researchers basic needs. What more could they possibly need?

Cal Thomas is Insane

There can be no other excuse for his recent column entitled “Purge by Taliban Democrats” in the Washigton Times last week and then nationally syndicated. He took the defeat of Senator Lieberman as a “loss for the entire country.” I beg to differ. His hyperbole aside, it was merely democracy in action within the registered party members of a single small state. Or was it?

Thomas seems to try to coin the meme that the anti-war, anti-DLC wings of the Party are “ultra-leftists such as George McGovern, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry” which he then goes on to claim will lead those on the ultra-left [I wonder who they are, as the people on the left wing of the Democratic Party are about as radical as a spinster’s bridge club in a provincial town] to ensured defeat as did the platforms of McGovern, Dukakis and Kerry. Thomas sees Lieberman’s defeat as a purge of the non-Jacobins. I say if it is anything, then it is a shift of a single policy on the adventure in the Middle East while Osama bin Ladin remains in his palace in Karachi or cave in Tora Bora or in Mekkah, or wherever he is. I see it as a rejection of the DLC, spoon-fed focus group oriented “but the polls say we need a war” crowd enablers of BushCo’s policies.

The DLC free traders, pro-war, pro-Patriot Act, “I’m more electable than you” crowd has had its triangulating heyday. Noone died and left them in charge of the Party. This is our party. It belongs to all Democrats…not one small big business bossed clique. This is also the party of Senator Dorgan, Senator Feingold and Representatives Waters, Conyers and Kucinich. This is also the party where a huge number of nominal Democrats will vote for Bernie Sanders for senator this year. It is also the party of the DLC and the Blue Dogs.

But I digress, let us return to Cal Thomas: in Thomas’ rant, he caled the defeat of Lieberman an example of the “kill[ing] of one of their own, if he does not conform to the narrow and rigid agenda of the party’s kook fringe.” Rigid? Kook fringe? Hardly!

The meme of the importance of this election is getting tired. It needs retirement of a permanent nature. An upswing of progressive writing and voting is in force. It will soon become a juggernaut and those not on the bandwagon will need wait twenty years, after the disastrous neocon policies the DLC has enabled right themselves and a rehab of those elements can be undertaken. It is the natural political tide: left, right, left, hard right, center left, center right… ad nauseum. Of course those who are mere politicians and able to wear as many cloaks as required will survive. Charmeleons appear to be nearly as resiliant as cockroaches. “Hillary Clinton as the new Vicar of Bray,” if one will. But these are mere politicians, neither statesmen nor authentic representatives of the people, nor even especially brilliant, merely sharp at knowing when to change cloaks and convince us that the coat is not new — they had always really worn it, just not in public…and then change the topic rapidly.

But back to Thomas. He alleges that Lieberman has correctly seen that “the consequences of American failure in Iraq would be catastrophic.” Well, Messrs. Lieberman and Thomas, word to the wise: our policy has failed and the result has been catastrophic. But not catastrophic in the sense I feel they meant. It has been a catastrophe in that it has riled up the Turks, one of our strongest allies for the blank check that the US has handed the Kurds’ attempt to enlarge Kurdistan at Turkey’s expense. Now we see them riled in return at the puppet government in Baghdad and failure of Washington to rein in their extremists. So now Turkey is angry at the US and Iraq as well as Kurdistan…fantastic! Who wins here? Iran. Next, the British occupation in the south of Iraq are not able to handle the massive influx of Shiite refugees from the center and north of Iraq towards Basra and Iranian NGOs take up the slack of relief for the Shiite refugees. Who wins? Iran. Next, Baghdad has a Green Zone and who even knows how many skirmish lines dividing neighbors as Shiites battle Sunnis and the fake Iraqi army that Washington so disastrously disarmed and demobilized. Utter chaos. The numbers of fatalities are so staggering that they no longer are considered breaking new. If that is not civil war, then heaven preserve us if that should come. Who wins? Noone.
Only Iraqi Kurdistan has a semblance of normalcy, yet wardrums threaten in the distance. Most of the Christians have fled their traditional homes of Mosul and Baghdad for unknown parts… No reliable electricity in the country, no potable water, no sewage treatment, a morgue filled with a thousand dead from bullet fire. This is Iraq. And so far, Mr. Cal Thomas, if that does not qualify as a catastrophe, then I do not know what does. It looks as if Iran, if anyone, has won a war between the Baathists and the United States.

The current exposure of torture and mass killings at US hands do not even need be addressed here to cement the point that Cal Thomas is insane, and that Joe Lieberman’s defeat was the loudest warning bell heard by a politician in many a year.

This is the link for Thomas’ rant — WARNING NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART OR THE YOUNG! WASHINGTON TIMES.

Screeching Rats: a Quest for the Regaining of Reason

The title, Screeching Rats, comes from a comment I made this August of 2006 regarding the defeat of an ultraconservative candidate in a school board race in the state of Kansas. Not an important election, one might presume, but her tirade against the “liberals” in the Republican Party who shot her candidacy down was what prompted the remark: she was shrill and bitter, to which my reply was, “The rats always screech the loudest and most shrill as the sinking ship’s waters engulf them.”

That is my hope: for the neo-conservative, paleo-fundamentalist anti-Enlightenment antilabor movement will be sunk as deeply as the Titantic. That it will become a mere relic — a fossilized historical curiousity of which much is legend, but ultimately merely an obscure wreck.

This writer sees current U.S. administration as being held hostage to a small group of disparate individuals who have often-competing aims, yet have managed to form a grand coalition. These are the people who worship at the altar of Ayn Rand and Paul Wolfowitz; the people who think there is a reason for the United States to back stab its former ally Iraq in the back and try to foist a “democracy” upon the Iraqi people which is nothing more than a rewording of Mussolini’s fascism. These are the people who toss out phrases such as “terrorist enabler” to describe a candidate who opposes continuation of a military adventure in Iraq and claim that the bright sunny future is merely around the corner, when the Iraqi people suffer random sectarian violence that makes an Orange Day parade in Derry look like an eucumenical picnic in comparison. These are the people who want to restrict our most cherished liberties in order to keep us free. These are the people who want to make conservative fundamentalist Christianity our state religion in all but name and whose eschatology is truly frightening in its implication, the raputurists, the tribulationists, the Dominionists and the “World is six thousand years old” crowd.

Even more frightening, for their present power, per se, and not mere electoral power, are the neo-conservatives: the Trotskyites of conservatism, those for whom “Ayn Rand in one country” is not allowed, rather, permanent war in order to keep the barbarians at bay in order to form a single world of a permanent underclass of ill clothed, underfed and nonmedicated workers who are allowed no dissent under penalty of retribution, that is, the denial of their daily bread given in exchange for their long hours of labor with a permanent uberclass of corporation leaders in charge of them all. This is an Orwellian, Huxleyesque vision of the future with billions of epsilons and two minutes of daily hate for all.

While all these people are frightening in their goals, what distresses me the most is the direction the Democratic Party has turned towards becoming enablers of that lot. A party of Jackson and Jefferson become a party of Miller and Lieberman. A party in which its brightest leaders with some of the largest followings becomes a party of back benchers, silenced by the corporate media, save occasional snipes at Kucinich, Conyers, and Feingold. A party where HR Clinton has been “anointed” the leading candidate yet was hobnobbing with the minions of corporate media power and when a true alternative candidate for her Senate race is running, is unable to have his voice heard.

Our party is sick, but not terminal, unless the status quo continues. It is up to the people to read, and then analyze what they have read along with the votes that are cast and follow the debates. It often seems that the debate has little connection to the vote, as some are willing to say one thing then explain it away when voting the other, coerced by the monied powers of the corporate lobbies. It is a sad day when it takes a lone elderly man hobbling on two canes, hands trembling to denounce the destruction of the Constitution, while dozens of able-bodied men and women do not even grace his presence in the chamber. It is a sad day when claims of necessity and fear of the corporate funds drying up allow only a single senator to vote against the adventure in Iraq and the horrid Patriot Act. It is a sad day when the Senate cannot stop a thug from becoming a federal judge. It is a sad day when there has to be a blog dedicated to this topic.

But in fairness, it is always darkest and coldest before the dawn.