TV Party

Obscure celebrity sighting: Waiting for an uptown #2 train last night, I spied Randolph Mantooth who portrayed LA paramedic/firefighter John Gage on the Jack Webb-produced TV show Emergency).

Not exactly like spotting Bill Clinton on the A train, but I’ll take it.

Sing a Psalm

Probably a billion people have posted this ditty on the internet already, but for the few of you who haven’t read it...

The 23rd Sigh

Bush is my shepherd; I dwell in want.
He maketh logs to be cut down in national forests.
He leadeth trucks into the still wilderness.
He restoreth my fears.
He leadeth me in the paths of international disgrace for his ego's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of pollution
and war, I will find no exit, for thou art in office.
Thy tax cuts for the rich and thy media control, they discomfort me.
Thou preparest an agenda of deception in the presence of thy religion.
Thou anointest my head with foreign oil.
My health insurance runneth out.
Surely megalomania and false patriotism shall follow me all the days of thy term,
And my jobless child shall dwell in my basement forever.

(- An anonymous internet scribe)

Go forth and eat your turkey in peace (if you can).

What’s so Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love, and Understanding?

Monday nights suck. For whatever reason (placement of hydrants, parking restrictions in front of private schools?), they’re the hardest night of the week to find a parking spot that’s legal for Tuesday. So, last night at 11:00, as I was circling the same batch of primo Upper East Side real estate that I’d been trawling for the past half an hour (you’d think all these super rich people could pay for a garage, dammit – with Dubya’s magnificent tax cuts, they surely can afford it!), I did something that I’m really ashamed of.

Long story short, as I was passing this giant SUV that clearly had stopped to back up into a parking spot (that wasn’t good for Tuesday, btw), I tooted my horn because he didn’t see my little Toyota and was beginning to back up – and the front end of his vehicle was starting to swing into mine. He hit his brakes and, as I looked over at him while driving by, he gave me the stink eye. So, in an embarrassing lapse of civility, I flipped him the bird. Blasting his horn in response, I’m sure he caught the “Teach Tolerance” bumper sticker on my back window as I sped away…

Oh, don’t tut-tut me too much -- he was probably a Bush-loving Republican. The message – and irony – would have been lost on him anyway.

* * *

Soon, the alternate side of the street nightmare will be but a distant memory. We’re donating our car to Habitat for Humanity, and signing up with Zip Car, for when we need to escape from New York and head for the hills.

I'm in a Time Zone

I’m almost finished reading Philip Roth’s new historical novel The Plot Against America, which is pretty amazing. Essentially, it envisions the rise of a fascist state in America, where famed aviator Charles Lindbergh manages to be elected president on an isolationist platform in 1940 (preventing FDR’s third term in the Oval Office). The Lindbergh administration forges an “understanding” with Hitler that America will remain neutral and not supply Britain with arms in exchange for being left out of the war. On the home front, we begin to see the subtle (yet easy to explain away) plans unfold for the persecution (elimination?) of Jewish Americans through the pre-teen eyes of a certain Philip Roth from Newark…

The parallels between this imagined past and the real now (as our government uses fear and propaganda to manipulate its citizens and the press -- and insists that its lies are the truth) are really, really creepy. Few novels outside of the serial killer genre (Thomas Harris and Patricia Cornwell novels in particular) have created so palpable a world that fills me with so much damn dread.

Also, I love alternate time lines…it’s the Star Trek geek in me.

All that Money Wants

With all the conservative/right-wing hoopla over mifepristone, AKA the abortion pill (and I truly do not mean to trivialize the deaths of the two or three women who may have died from taking this drug, though even the FDA cannot make a direct connection between their deaths and the medication), you’d think women across America were dying in droves. Yet it takes over 27,000 deaths – yes, twenty-seven thousand people killed as a direct result of taking this arthritis pain medication – for Vioxx to be pulled off the shelves. And they tell us that we need to be worried about imported drugs from Canada?!? Oh, by the by, Merck was raking in over $2.5 billion a year in Vioxx sales.

So political pressure is used to create unnecessary fear of medication abortion, while gobs of money flowing from the pharmaceutical companies to politicians keeps things quiet about a real killer drug until the stench of all those deaths is too hard to cover. Is it just me, or shouldn’t the FDA act independently of politics and regulate the industry/make sure that drug that’s supposed to heal you doesn’t kill you?

Just a crazy thought. Go back to being an oppressed/depressed blue state person now. Which color pill takes me back to the Matrix?

It Ain't What You Do (It's the Way that You Do It)

Some more thoughts on the Bush administration's supposed "moral values" and their perverted view of Christianity:

Here's what Republicans of conscience have to understand about the machinations of Karl Rove and company. Fear isn't some emotion that can be easily bottled back up after it's been -- viciously -- unleashed. It isn't a once-every-four-years vehicle that can be wheeled out for a few months, then stowed back in the garage to be retooled for the next election cycle. Encouraging fundamentalist preachers to pound their pulpits and inveigh against gay people has consequences. It puts men and women in communities across this country at personal and professional risk. There's nothing more despicable than creating a phony political issue (just how many gay couples are clamoring for marriage certificates in the state of Ohio, anyhow?) and preying on people's prejudices.

So now it's up to discerning Republicans to wrestle with this quandary: You won all right, but at what cost? What happened to the party that once shared Abraham Lincoln's faith in the "better angels of our nature"? That fifth-grade teacher taught me to appreciate how -- through Lincoln's resolve -- our nation overcame a cataclysm of hate to stop the Union from dissolving. Back then, certain avatars of ignorance were called Know-Nothings, which, come to think of it, is an apt description of more than a few right-wingers today.

"Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid," Lincoln wrote in the years leading up to the Civil War. "As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except Negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

There are a lot of Republicans troubled by their party's exploitation of contemporary know-nothingism. You know who you are. And before your party's degeneracy is complete, you ought to do something about it. Because camouflaging the fear and loathing of gay people as "moral values" isn't the base alloy of hypocrisy. It's hypocrisy itself. (Timothy Gay in the Washington Post, November 16, 2004)

Also consider these thoughtful words from Barbara Ehrenreich in The Nation:

Mainstream, even liberal, churches also provide a range of services, from soup kitchens to support groups. What makes the typical evangelicals' social welfare efforts sinister is their implicit--and sometimes not so implicit--linkage to a program for the destruction of public and secular services. This year the connecting code words were "abortion" and "gay marriage": To vote for the candidate who opposed these supposed moral atrocities, as the Christian Coalition and so many churches strongly advised, was to vote against public housing subsidies, childcare and expanded public forms of health insurance. While Hamas operates in a nonexistent welfare state, the Christian right advances by attacking the existing one.

Of course, Bush's faith-based social welfare strategy only accelerates the downward spiral toward theocracy. Not only do the right-leaning evangelical churches offer their own, shamelessly proselytizing social services; not only do they attack candidates who favor expanded public services--but they stand to gain public money by doing so. It is this dangerous positive feedback loop, and not any new spiritual or moral dimension of American life, that the Democrats have failed to comprehend: The evangelical church-based welfare system is being fed by the deliberate destruction of the secular welfare state.

Gee, all these "love thy neighbor" moments courtesy of Bush and the evangelical "Christian" right are giving me a such a warm fuzzy head rush that I might. Pass. Out.

The Blind Leading the Naked

Even though Bush’s private little war in Iraq is looking more and more like his own Vietnam (razing Falluja to save it, for example), the lack of news and visuals from the frontlines of our so-called “war on terror” continues to help tamp down the level of outrage and shame all Americans of good will should be feeling. Yes, it is particularly dangerous for non-Arab reporters to venture out of their compounds in Baghdad to independently witness and document what is really going on in that country (and the vengeful nature of the current administration apparently helps to keep news editors stateside in check, too), but shouldn’t we be demanding much more from the news agencies (and our own government), so we can at least be aware of what the rest of the world, particularly the Arab world, is seeing on their TV screens and thinking about us?

To state the obvious that still needs stating, this is not a bloodless or victimless war, and we can’t keep pretending that everything is fine and dandy there because Rev. Bush and Grandpappy Rumsfeld tell us so. Innocent people continue to maimed and killed in our names (for what?). And many people in the Arab world will want to exact their revenge on us. Having seen some of the horrifying images of the dead and wounded in Falluja – pictures rarely printed or broadcast here – I can’t say that I blame them. If it were my kid (and I have two young ones) lying in that hospital bed with one leg blown off by an American bomb…well, let’s just say that it’s not hard to image how easy it is for the Iraqi insurgents to sign up new recruits every day.

By the way, did you know that as of November 15th 38 American soldiers have been killed in the Battle of Falluja (and 275 wounded)? I didn’t, as this bit of news was buried in this NY Times article. Are we honoring their sacrifice by keeping them largely out of sight (and mind)?

And did you know we have no reliable information about how many insurgents were killed in Falluja (or escaped), or how many civilians perished in the fighting (hopefully most fled the city prior to the shooting)?

We only know what the Pentagon and White House want us to know. And that's not good for our democracy.

Anger is an Energy

We liberals like to pride ourselves on our tolerance and inclusiveness, but in light of the “kill-'em-all, let god sort them out” attitude of the evangelical “Christian” right and Republican conservatives towards us, I’m feeling less forgiving than ever, and apparently I’m not alone. My favorite bug-eyed rant (so far) comes from The Stranger, a left-wing rag out of Seattle, in their “Urban Archipelago” piece, which urges all of us city dwellers (who live in “islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion” across the U.S.) to tell the red state/rural/non-urban folks to piss off and advocate for public policies that solely benefit cities (“urban identity politics”). Oh, and we should kill any legislation and/or funding that helps rural America. Yes, it’s ugly to wage war on our fellow Americans, and it goes against our country’s proud, pluralistic tradition, but what choice have the conservatives and evangelical "Christians" left us?

And for those who don’t mind an incredible abundance of potty language, the screed F*ck the South is a brilliantly guilty pleasure for us effete, intellectual, snobby, but incredibly ANGRY, Yankees.

Divide and Conquer

Let’s just admit it. As a nation, we really don’t have any “values” or follow any common set of religious or secular-based morals. Sure, we like to think that when we collectively look in the mirror each morning we see decent, god-fearing folks (and there are some among us), but we really don’t give a damn about anything other than cold, hard ca$h, baby. To bastardize Abe Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to reflect our sorry times, our government is “of big business, by big business, for big business.” (The one “for the people” has certainly perished…)

All the sanctimonious babble about morals and values vomited forth by our “leaders” and TV talking heads is simply bread and circuses (present day: super-sized fries and “Fear Factor”) for the common people, and, as bad as some of thing Dubya’s administration will do during their second term, Dubya will not deliver on all of his promises to the evangelical Christian/conservative voting block (though coming up with the boogeyman to blame will be kinda sticky, as they have the choke hold on every branch of our government). It's the same old story. Corporations and the rich will continue to rake in the benjamins through tax-cuts and environmental, workplace, and industry deregulation (see all pesky barriers to massive, super-wealth happily vaporized by Congress and the White House), while the rabble (that means us, kids!) duke it out over fetus love, gays shacking up, and prying guns from the kung-fu death grip of Charlton Heston. The politicians stay in power, the rich become richer, and we pay the price (does the largest deficit in our nation’s history sober you up?). C’mon, the “culture wars” have worked so well over the past 20 years, why should the powers that be “solve” these issues and satisfy the bloodlust of their right-wing base of voters? Then, the people might actually demand that the politicians do something to about health care, unemployment, education, and the environment!

And don’t you think that a nation of our extreme wealth with its wonderfully resourceful citizenry could have figured out by now how to house, feed, clothe, educate, provide health care, and employ the poorest among us? The only governmental mechanism that comes close to doing all this is our increasingly gulag-like prison system. So, let’s not even take the “values and morals” bait that the crazies are using to browbeat us. No, we evildoers and elitists need to fight back by fighting for real societal change and real social justice. It’s not going to be easy, but it will be the right and moral thing to do.

Revolutionary? You bet. Just like their revered JC.

Truth Hits Everybody

No doubt Judge U.S. District Judge James Robertson (a former Navy man and Clinton appointee to the bench) will be crucified by the right-wing echo chamber and the GOP as an activist judge for shutting down the military trial of Osama bin Laden’s Yemini driver by declaring that the U.S. government has violated the Third Geneva Convention in its handling of 550 Afghan war prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay (all but four of whom have been held without charges, trial, or any legal recourse for more than three years). Judge Robertson is an all-American hero in my book -- a true Patriot. Thank god he as the cojones to stand up to the Bush administration and uphold both domestic and international law. Check out these choice tidbits from the Boston Globe:

“The Geneva Conventions were ratified by the US Senate in the 1950s, making them "the highest law of the land" under the Constitution.

In addition, the Republican-led Congress in 1996 passed the War Crimes Act, which President Clinton signed. That law makes any "grave breach" of the conventions committed by a US official a domestic felony for which punishment could mean the death penalty. Not giving a prisoner of war the fair trial prescribed by the conventions is one of a short list of violations considered to be a "grave breach."

In a once-secret memo written on Jan. 25, 2002, by White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, Bush's top lawyer warned that prosecutors in a later administration could bring "unwarranted charges" against high-level Bush administration officials for war crimes as a result of their treatment of Al Qaeda members captured after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Gonzales noted in the memo, leaked to the media earlier this year, that a critical advantage in declaring that Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters did not have protections under the Geneva Conventions is that it "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act."

The memo, lawyers for Guantanamo Bay detainees have contended, demonstrates that the administration was aware of the laws of war but sought to avoid them.”

The Constitution and Bill of Rights (which are worth reading over in these troubled times) are the sacred precepts of this nation, and the brilliant Founding Fathers would be OUTRAGED by King George’s abuse of his power. The president is not above the law, but sworn to defend the Constitution, which he has clearly violated in regard to the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and by authorizing the use of torture at Abu Ghraib. If there is any justice in the world, Bush will be impeached for violating the War Crimes Act!

(I’m not declaring that we shouldn’t be capturing and prosecuting terrorists that want to kill Americans. But we must follow the law in doing so, or our democracy means squat.)

I Love a Man in a Uniform

So, let’s just lay it out in the sun for all to see. As defined by Karl Rove and the evangelical Christian right, moral values equals a hatred of gay people and an insistence on subjugating women and controlling their sex lives. It’s all kind of ugly, isn’t it. Tarting it up with apple-pie-Americanism and clothing it in fundamentalist Christianity (ever so select in its reading of the Bible) managed to snare the votes of less than a third of our citizenry (some “mandate”), but who knew there were so many Americans out there actually afraid that gay people and women can somehow destroy our country by getting married or having non-procreative sex?

Hmmm…I wonder if deep down Turd Blossom, as Bush is fond of calling Karl Rove, is gay himself? (Not that there is anything wrong with being gay, but the ones yelling most loudly for a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage may be protesting too much, if you get my drift!) I mean this is what Rove had to say when recalling when he first met Dubya:

"Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma - you know, wow."

Sounds like he’s describing a hunk in Honcho or one of the Village People, doesn’t it?

(Sincere apologies to the Village People for even thinking of comparing them to Bush.)

Make a Circuit with Me

On this day in 1966, at around 3:20 in the afternoon, I was born. So, if you or someone you know happened to be in Boston that fateful day to give birth to me, let me know! We’ve got some catching up to do!

Let's Have a War

While Dubya runs victory laps on his treadmill (and Cheney recharges his pacemaker and has his blood replaced), there’s yet more to add to the mountain of evidence detailing the Bush administration’s incredible bungling of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And it all boils down to the fact that the White House and Pentagon didn’t have enough troops on the ground to keep law and order. There is now a report from a group of soldiers who were at al Qaqaa after the invasion who said they were completely outnumbered by looters and could not prevent the mass theft of munitions (one GI compared it to the looting in LA after the Rodney King verdict). Requests for reinforcements went unanswered, too. And Human Rights Watch has issued a report that the U.S. may have compromised its case against Saddam Hussein because they failed to protect crucial evidence against this murderous dictator: government files were stolen or destroyed by Iraqis, and mass grave sites were dug up by relatives of the regime’s victims. But, hey, eleven states have outlawed gay marriage and the man in the White House worships the “right God.” So all must be good in the world… Remember to smile and be ready to smite the baby killers and sodomites!

We Gotta Get Out of this Place

Since we're stuck with this insane electoral college system, let’s launch some grand scheme to manipulate it in anticipation of 2008. I propose that the Dems and progressive groups start a massive relocation effort aimed at moving all the liberals, gays, Democrats, etc. who currently live in the red states (that we’re never going to win) to new homes in the key electoral battleground states (Ohio, Florida, Iowa, etc.). This way, we can consolidate our power and win, dammit!

That is, if there is an America left after Dubya is through with it…

I Wear Black on the Outside Because Black is How I Feel on the Inside

To my fellow Americans who voted for Bush, I firmly believe that you fully deserve what you’re gonna get. If that means that your sons and daughters will be drafted to be slaughtered in Iraq, so be it. If that means that contraceptives, medically-accurate sex ed, and abortion are not available to you, your wife, or your children, so be it. If that means that your job is sent overseas and your unemployment benefits don’t even begin to cover your bills, so be it. If that means that our country burrows itself deeper into record deficits in order to lavish even more tax breaks on the rich and corporations while shifting the tax burden onto the middle class and poor, so be it. If it means that you or your company cannot afford health insurance so you and your kids go without health care, so be it. If it means that your local public school becomes little more than a holding pen for your kids during the day, so be it. If that means the judge in your trial favors corporations or the government over your individual civil liberties, so be it. If that means that the air you breathe, the water you drink, and the land you live on poisons you and your family, so be it. If that means that you can be discriminated against because of your gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or country of origin, so be it. If that means that their ends justify their means, so be it.

But don’t kid yourselves folks, Bush and the GOP don’t represent your interests, and never will. They don’t want to solve our problems. And they don’t really care about your values. They worship power and wealth and will do anything to consolidate their hold on both.

No One Ever is to Blame

In the grand Dubya/GOP tradition of never admitting you’ve made a mistake, it seems that the new CIA Director, Porter J. Goss, has asked the CIA inspector general to modify his report on CIA failures relating to 9/11 so as to omit naming names. Well, since no one else in Bush’s administration got the boot for the greatest security failure in the history of the United States, why not?

No doubt this tidbit will be conveniently lost in all the election coverage:

"Explosives used in some of Iraq's major terror bombings were the same type as those missing from a dump monitored by the UN, the Daily News has learned.

Forensic tests by a joint task force at the Quantico, Va., Marine base show the bombers who leveled the United Nations and Jordanian missions in Iraq, and who staged other big attacks, used RDX and HMX military-grade high explosives, said a government source briefed on the findings. Both types of munitions were under seal at the Al Qaqaa site near Baghdad."

The Daily News article kind of omits the fact that the United States failed to guard the Al Qaqaa weapons site right after the invasion, despite repeated warnings from UN inspectors before the invasion. Now, just where does the buck stop in this administration?

Ghost in the Machine

Well kids, I did my patriotic duty as a proud bleeding-heart liberal and voted early this morning. God, it felt so good to cast my ballot for John Kerry and John Edwards, as well as Chuck Schumer and Carolyn Maloney – all along the Working Families Party line. As Paul Krugman points out in today’s New York Times, no matter what the outcome of the election and all the dirty tricks and voter suppression shenanigans that are likely to take place, this simple act of voting is a confirmation of our faith in democracy, in America.

And, just for moment, all the spin and lies and sniping of the last year becomes white noise…what really matters is what millions of us are doing in the sweet refuge of voting booths across the country…

Everyone at work I’ve talked to spoke of feeling choked up or electrified (someone mentioned they felt almost spiritually “renewed”) as they walked into the public school gym or community center and waited in long, snaking lines to cast their ballot on one of those wonderful old voting machines they have here in New York City (they’re still the same type that my Mom used when she would take me along to vote in my elementary school gym in Yonkers back in the ‘70s). The “click” the machine makes when you pull down the small levers and the “X” that appears in the window next to your candidate, and the “THWAAK”(thanks, Kimdog for the right sound effect) the large lever makes as I pull it and all these hidden gears turn and record my vote, are so integral to my voting experience that I hope they never replace them with the cold, silent digital ones and zeros of touch screen voting.

Let’s just hope that the voter turnout is greater than all of our wildest expectations – and that John Kerry is the clear, unambiguous winner of this election.

What are we gonna do now?

When Osama bin Laden's tape was broadcast on Friday on CNN, my wife told me that the blurb running underneath this mass murderer's latest video was "Osama bin Talking." Hmmm...it's nice that they're not trying to scare the poop out of us, like usual, but doesn't it seem like things are gettin' a tad too casual around the old "newsroom?" I mean, after all, Osama was finally copping to killing over 3,000 people in the 9/11 attacks, and taunted Bush for his bumbling indecisiveness ("My Pet Goat") that gave his al Qaeda goons all the time they needed to complete their mission...

How telling is it that the public discussion is not over the Bush administration's failure to nail Public Enemy #1 for 9/11, or whether outsourcing the Tora Bora operation to Afghan warlords instead of using our Special Forces units was a good idea (would we have captured OBL and many of his accomplices?), or if it was prudent to divert our intelligence and military resources to Iraq (which, according to the 9/11 Commission, for those of you living in the red states, did not have any connection whatsoever with the 9/11 terrorist attacks) while al Qaeda was regrouping after the Afghan war. Instead, we head to spin alley with all of its bluster and posturing about which political camp will reap the benefits of Osama's cameo appearance in our tawdry drama.

On the flip side, a friend mentioned a rumor that Bill Clinton may be in the running to replace Kofi Annan, when he steps down as United Nations Secretary-General in 2006 (this is based on a report in United Press International -- owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his Moonies -- which is widely circulating on right-wing internet sites and surely meant to conjure up paranoid visions of blue helmeted troops marching down Main Street, Everytown, USA). If true, I think Bill could do a lot of good in the world (and, boy, would it just boil the blood of all the wacko Clinton haters out there...).

****

On Saturday night, Channel 13 aired "The Candidate," the 1972 political campaign satire with Robert Redford. Great movie, but quite depressing to realize how little things have changed: style trumps substance/ad men shape the message and product; polls dictate public policies; winning is valued far more than maintaining one's ideals and principles; and all the key issues -- poverty, racism, unemployment, public education, health care, the environment -- remain pretty much unaddressed 30 years later.