December 17, 2007 archive

Dec 17 2007

Sky of Memory and Shadow

Prominent progressive bloggers always emphasize that we should be polite when contacting Democrats in Congress.  With good intentions, they write their “action” posts, list contact numbers, and send us on our way with instructions to be respectful.  In addition to providing this assistance, our well-intentioned Netroots leaders include handy links in their posts which provide pertinent information, so I’m returning the favor with a handy link for them to ponder.

I hope the next time they feel the urge to advocate politeness, they wait until the urge passes and advocate something actually useful.

Good intentions and polite appeals to Democrats are not going to get us off this road to Hell we’ve been on since 2001.  It’s not going to end this ordeal, it just paves another mile of that damn road. And then another mile.  And then another one.  When BushCo Republicans actively betray us every chance they get and Democrats passively betray us by never doing anything about it, limiting ourselves to polite expressions of concern is not a solution, it’s part of the problem.  It just empowers these refugees from reality to take us one more humiliating, flag-waving, fascist-enabling mile closer to Hell.  

Dec 17 2007

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

Dec 17 2007

The Stars Hollow Gazette

Well, I’m kind of upset tonight because I’ve encountered some people with an attitude that is inexplicable to me.  Privately I call them Tories because the exhibit all of the classical features of Toryism.

Perpetually gloomy about the prospect of liberty they sulk inflicting their pessimism on morale.  They derive bitter satisfaction from their self-fulfilling prophecies of doom.  Openly aristocratic and monarchist they are content that their new insect overlords beat them and cheat them, panting for scraps like a common cur except a dog has too noble a soul to accept such offal.

But the worst offenders are those who think like this but still expect our votes, money, and effort as if they had some God anointed right to join the gated Village and get away from the foul smelling rabble.

What country are you from?

You have no right to my labor, property, or allegiance.  You are not the boss of me.  I am in fact YOUR boss, I gave you that job and I sign your damn check and I expect respect from my employees otherwise I fire their sorry ass and hire somebody else.

I can’t understand how the admission of several Congress people that their vote on the August FISA was influenced by fear for their personal safety because of White House lies about a potential attack on the Capital is anything but craven cowardice.  It is exactly the same thing as desertion in the face of the enemy.  Brave men have died for our freedom.  Do you have some special lucky charm that makes your miserable existence worth more than any of the 3892 that died for a lie in Iraq?  Would you sell your child for $10 million?

That’s the going rate you know.  I know what you are- now we’re just negotiating about the price.  Unless you just give it away.

Oh wait, that’s what you do.

You should be afraid of me because I know what you are…

A weakling.

Dec 17 2007

Audioblog: Seasonal

I heard from a little bird a request we do some Holiday Cheer stuff here at Docudharma.

Well, I don’t know how cheery this is, but it is one of my favorite spiritual prayer/songs.  Ava Maria.  The Shubert version.  I read he wrote this in devotion to the Virgin Mary when he was a young man.  The melody is one of the loveliest I have ever heard.

But I also think about Mary (in my own idiosyncratic way).  She may have been a young girl when she gave birth to Jesus, but when he was crucified, she was no longer young.  If she was 16 when she gave birth, then 33 years later she was 48.

To watch your son die just when you are entering middle age and facing your own mortality, that is a story in itself,  I think.

Anyway, enough of my odd meanderings.  Here is my version, just a fragment of the song as I couldn’t find lyrics which would teach me the entire version.  As usual, please remember to turn the volume down, or the distortion won’t be purty.

So, a fragment of Ava Maria.  Merry Christmas to all, in the real spirit of the holiday.

Gabcast! Auld Manhattoe #5

Dec 17 2007

Update 2 – Join John Nirenberg in NYC on Wednesday as he walks from Boston to DC for Impeachment

Update 2:  A key point from a comment on the Wexler diary by John’s former student ctrenta:

… and one other VERY important thing for all…

… call Nancy Pelosi’s office and politely ask her to meet with Nirenburg when he arrives in Washington, DC. That’s going to be the toughest thing of all. Not the walk, not the weather, but whether or not Pelosi will have the audacity to meet him when he arrives. She better.

Call Pelosi’s office today and ask her to meet with him,

(202) 225-4965

Update:  Just heard that John will be on the Morning Show on WWRL 1600 AM (flagship station of Air America) with Mark Riley and Richard Bey Tuesday morning at 7:05 AM.  Tune in and call in and mention the rally!

John Nirenberg, a retired academic from Brattleboro, Vermont is walking the 458 miles from Boston to Washington, DC to reclaim his rights as a Citizen and ask Nancy Pelosi to put impeachment back on the table.  He will arrive in Manhattan this Wednesday, the 19th.  

A group of New York’s grass roots, anti-war, pro-impeachment and civil liberties activists will gather to greet John at 125th Street and Broadway at 10 A.M.  and proceed downtown to a rally at 4:30 p.m. at the Parish Room at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. Sharing their views on impeachment with John Nirenberg will be Elizabeth Holtzman, Denis Moynihan from Democracy Now!, Clarice Torrence, President, NY Metro Area Postal Union, APWU, AFL-CIO, and others.  

If you can make it – Wednesday, 4:30-6:30 at the Parish Room at St. Mark’s in the Bowery, 131 East 10th Street – we’d love to see you.  And if you do – Pfiore8, I’m looking at you – please come up and introduce yourself! If you’d like to join John on his trek through Manhattan, you can either meet up with him at 10 am at 125th and Broadway or call Dave at 917.446.6686 and he will tell you where you can meet up with the group.

In case you would like to know more about John….

During his entire 40-day journey which began in Boston on December 1st, John Nirenberg is urging people to speak out on the Constitutional crisis we face and will explain why he thinks it vital to impeach Bush and Cheney. He is collecting signatures on impeachment petitions, as well as pictures and testimonials from citizens, hoping to give the Speaker a human connection to the numbers echoing his call.

A former Professor of Organizational Behavior and a college Dean, Nirenberg started his career as a Social Studies and American History teacher during the Nixon administration, “I’m shocked that the laws Congress passed in the 1970s to prevent Presidential abuse of power are being so ignored by Bush/Cheney.”

Nirenberg explains, “The Bush/Cheney administration must be held accountable for their high crimes and misdemeanors and their complete disregard for the U.S. Constitution. That’s why I’m going to Nancy Pelosi’s office, why I have to ‘walk my talk.’ I’m marching for the millions of citizens who can’t but who feel betrayed because our safeguarding system of checks and balances is so out of balance.” Nirenberg wants to encourage citizen action, “I hope some people will  march with me – even for a mile or two,” he says – “but I hope everyone will march whenever they can and go to or contact Speaker Pelosi (202 225-0100) and House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers (202 225-5126) to tell them it is unacceptable to the American people that Congress is not yet holding this administration accountable for its egregious law breaking.”

Along the way, Nirenberg will meet with students, interested citizens, impeachment groups, and media representatives. It is groups such as the one in New York City who feel that it is time for Speaker Pelosi to put impeachment back on the table!   Nirenberg believes that they will help raise the consciousness of yet other people who might feel as discouraged as he had once been. Those who can’t walk along beside him can follow his progress on his website, MarchInMyName.org.  

In Nirenberg’s own words: “I want to move the impeachment effort forward and to save our Constitution. Nothing can destroy it faster than collective indifference.” John Nirenberg is convinced that, with a little help from his friends, his march can, indeed, make a difference – he has faith that “right makes might.”

Dec 17 2007

A Pharaohship to Forget

He thought he knew better than his people; thought he could, through sheer force of will, change a public mindset centuries in the making.  He was an iconoclast (literally) 2000 years before the term would be coined by medieval Byzantines, but within a couple of decades after his rule, the enemies he’d created had obliterated nearly every trace of his reign, as well as the monotheistic religion he had promulgated as a state faith.  A victim of an histoicide of staggering proportions, his name was virtually excised from the public record, his monuments altered and defaced, and he was forgotten for almost three millennia.

Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we’ll take a look at the sort of thing that would cause a civilization to try to erase one of its own leaders from history.  With all the talk of Romney’s misunderstanding of the nature of freedom and religion in America, not to mention the ongoing historical embarrassment that is the Bush Administration, it only seems appropriate.  It’s not meant, however, to assert that either the clearly-megalomaniacal President, or his would-be successor is the mental or spiritual equal of the thoroughly remarkable “heretic pharaoh” Amenhotep IV, who called himself “Akhenaton” and whom history sometimes terms the world’s “first individual.”

Dec 17 2007

Pony Party: Sunday music retrospective

That’s Righteous



Righteous Brothers:  You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’

Dec 17 2007

Kucinich: Dialogue on Democracy as we speak!

Live on http://kucinichtv.com as I write.

Dec 17 2007

It Tattoos Everything

It’s pretty obvious that a decision has been made.

I don’t know exactly when, or where, or who participated; I don’t know what was said during what phone calls.  And I don’t exactly mean to suggest that a conspiracy was involved, other than the ordinary everyday sorts of conspiracies involved in Washington cloak-room negotiations, in gentlemen’s agreements made in the back seats of Manhattan taxicabs, and most of all, perhaps, in the ebb and flow of conversations on the balconies overlooking shorelines and forests behind million-dollar homes during dinner parties in Nantucket, Massachusetts and MacLean, Virginia.

But it’s pretty obvious that somewhere in the midst of all of that a new normal was decided upon by people who don’t care about you or me: the new normal of the 21st century.

Consider this article from The Cleveland Examiner, Sept. 24, 2007.  In fact, consider it very carefully.

“Look, I’d like to make as many hard decisions as I can make, and do a lot of the heavy lifting prior to whoever my successor is,” Bush said. “And then that person is going to have to come and look at the same data I’ve been looking at, and come to their own conclusion.”

As an example, Bush cited his detainee program, which allows him to keep enemy combatants imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay while they await adjudication. Bush is unmoved by endless criticism of the program because he says his successor will need it.

“I specifically talked about it so that a candidate and/or president wouldn’t have to deal with the issue,” he said. “The next person has got the opportunity to analyze the utility of the program and make his or her decision about whether or not it is necessary to protect the homeland. I suspect they’ll find that it is necessary. But my only point to you is that it was important for me to lay it out there, so that the politics wouldn’t enter into whether or not the program ought to survive beyond my period.”

The decision – and I don’t even mean to say, here, that I know what the grammar of the decision was, or what it means to those who made it, or even that it was ever exactly articulated – can be seen everywhere in the news.  To see it, you need only read recent news stories and keep one thing in mind: The Bush Administration only has one year left in office.

Dec 17 2007

Cool Yule

For reasons of timing and geography, I’ll be celebrating the holidays this week. One of the things I’m repeating from last year is that several people will recieve cd’s of music I’ve put together for them as gifts. Today I’ve been finalizing all those and thought it might be fun to share some of the music with all of you here.

I’ve made a holiday playlist that I’m calling “Cool Yule” after miss Bette’s recent rendition:

How about a little coolness from the great Luther Vandross?

Dec 17 2007

…

Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Dec 17 2007

Doing something beats doing nothing every time

(An op ed column from Sunday’s Wisconsin State Journal, in Madison.)

The fifth Christmas with U.S. troops in Iraq is upon us, with no end in sight.

It’s a time to remember those families who are missing a loved one this season, especially those who are facing the first holiday of the rest of their lives without their loved ones. It’s a time to remember and honor the troops who are away from home.

It ‘s also a time to ask: How can we stop the war? And it’s a time to do something — even if it ‘s something small — to say we want it to end.

President Bush will not be moved, despite the fact that every poll says a solid majority, perhaps two-thirds, of the American people want to end the war and bring our troops home.

The Democratic Congress, elected a year ago with a mandate to end the war, is too chicken-hearted to confront the bull-headed president. Next year’s presidential election offers precious little hope, as the leading candidates refuse to commit to having our troops out by 2013.

Opponents of the Iraq war have become the new Silent Majority. They tell the pollsters they ‘re against the war, but do nothing — perhaps because it seems fruitless.

It is understandable if they are disheartened. They spoke out in huge numbers before the war began, and were ignored. Four years of beating their heads against the wall may have worn them out.

But it’s not a time to give up. Doing nothing is not a viable option.

That’s why I have joined many who have signed on with the Iraq Moratorium, a decentralized but growing national grassroots effort that asks individuals to take personal responsibility to do something — anything — to show their opposition to the war.

The moratorium asks people to take some action, individually or collectively, on the third Friday of every month, from wearing a black armband or button to participating in a large-scale protest, or many things in between.

The group’s website, IraqMoratorium.org ,has ideas, information and reports on past and upcoming actions.

The fourth monthly Moratorium Day is Dec. 21, four days before Christmas. It is guaranteed to be ignored by the media, George Bush and the Congress.

The cynics say nothing we do matters, so why do anything?

The answer is obvious: Doing something is infinitely more likely to have an impact than doing nothing. That’s what the Iraq Moratorium is all about.

Buttons and armbands won’t stop the war by themselves. Neither will rallies and marches, or letters to the editor, or phone calls to Congress, or speeches or civil disobedience. There ‘s no single magic solution.

Those who want to end this war need to do everything to keep the flame alive until the silent majority catches fire and demands an end to this senseless war.

That’s why I will do something for Iraq Moratorium No. 4 on Dec. 21. And you?

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