"Kkkarl writes the lies. I read 'em off the telemaprompter - an' I been practicirizin!!" - GWB - from an early draft of the State of the Union address
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
UNBELIEVABLE!!
Hey Folks!!
Bush is such a scumbag!!
At my first chance I'll elaborate. I'm a little "under the weather" at the moment, but the Uke Man will bounce back.
Drive Bush out!!!!
- Uke Man
Bush is such a scumbag!!
At my first chance I'll elaborate. I'm a little "under the weather" at the moment, but the Uke Man will bounce back.
Drive Bush out!!!!
- Uke Man
TODAY/TONIGHT January 31 Drown out / Drive out the Bush Administration
Hey Folks!!
Today is a BIG day & evening!!
Tell Bush to shut up and stand down!!
Join with THE WORLD CAN'T WAIT !! and
drown Bush out!
Here’s what Gore Vidal said :
"One way that a majority of citizens can help open the road back to Crawford is by heeding the call of a group called the World Can’t Wait (see their website, worldcantwait.org).
They believe that the agenda for 2006 must not be set by the Bush gang but by the people taking independent mass political action.On Jan. 31, the night of Bush’s next State of the Union address, they have called for people in large cities and small towns all across the country to join in noisy rallies to make the demand that “Bush Step Down” the message of the day. At 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, just as Bush starts to speak, people can make a joyful noise and figuratively drown out his address. Then on the following Saturday, Feb. 4, converge in front of the White House with the same message: Please step down and take your program with you.
Here’s what’s happening locally:
BUSH LIED; BUSH SPIED;
BUSH STEP DOWN!
Columbus, OHIO will step up and participate in a nationwide protest on Tuesday, January 31st, beginning at 11:00 AM. The DAY OF ACTION will begin at the OHIO STATEHOUSE, and from there people will be encouraged to walk to various downtown locations in unison, and present a clear message to our elected officials, and the community at large.
Bring noisemakers, signs, and friends. NO WORK, NO SCHOOL, NO SHOPPING!!!
SCHEDULE FOR TUESDAY JANUARY 31, 2006:11:00AM-OHIO .STATEHOUSE (High St,) 11:45 AM- COLUMBUS DISPATCH (Third St.)
12:15 PM –THE FEDERAL BUILDING. (High and Spring Sts.) 12:45 PM - RECRUTMENT CENTER (On Long St.)1:00 PM - REPUBLICAN HEADQUARTERS (Rich St.)
2:00PM - FLYER AT THE STATEHOUSE (High St.)
Evening events will take place at Victorian's Midnight Cafe, at
251 Neil Ave. (5th and Neil). Gather together as we drowned out George Bush's State of the Union address. We encourage others to get involved in raising awareness in their own communities. STAND-UP AND FIGHT BACK!
Tuesday January 31, 2006 -The People's State of the Union Address. Join local activists, musicians, speakers, and concerned citizens, SPEAK - OUT!
The Ukulele Man,Victoria Parks, Connie Harris provide the music - Activities start at 7:00 pm.
The World Cant Wait, DRIVE OUT THE BUSH REGIME!!!
Saturday February 4, 2006
Protest in Washington, D.C.
There are buses leaving from Cleveland. For more info contact:
http://www.worldcantwait.com/
Today is a BIG day & evening!!
Tell Bush to shut up and stand down!!
Join with THE WORLD CAN'T WAIT !! and
drown Bush out!
Here’s what Gore Vidal said :
"One way that a majority of citizens can help open the road back to Crawford is by heeding the call of a group called the World Can’t Wait (see their website, worldcantwait.org).
They believe that the agenda for 2006 must not be set by the Bush gang but by the people taking independent mass political action.On Jan. 31, the night of Bush’s next State of the Union address, they have called for people in large cities and small towns all across the country to join in noisy rallies to make the demand that “Bush Step Down” the message of the day. At 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, just as Bush starts to speak, people can make a joyful noise and figuratively drown out his address. Then on the following Saturday, Feb. 4, converge in front of the White House with the same message: Please step down and take your program with you.
Here’s what’s happening locally:
BUSH LIED; BUSH SPIED;
BUSH STEP DOWN!
Columbus, OHIO will step up and participate in a nationwide protest on Tuesday, January 31st, beginning at 11:00 AM. The DAY OF ACTION will begin at the OHIO STATEHOUSE, and from there people will be encouraged to walk to various downtown locations in unison, and present a clear message to our elected officials, and the community at large.
Bring noisemakers, signs, and friends. NO WORK, NO SCHOOL, NO SHOPPING!!!
SCHEDULE FOR TUESDAY JANUARY 31, 2006:11:00AM-OHIO .STATEHOUSE (High St,) 11:45 AM- COLUMBUS DISPATCH (Third St.)
12:15 PM –THE FEDERAL BUILDING. (High and Spring Sts.) 12:45 PM - RECRUTMENT CENTER (On Long St.)1:00 PM - REPUBLICAN HEADQUARTERS (Rich St.)
2:00PM - FLYER AT THE STATEHOUSE (High St.)
Evening events will take place at Victorian's Midnight Cafe, at
251 Neil Ave. (5th and Neil). Gather together as we drowned out George Bush's State of the Union address. We encourage others to get involved in raising awareness in their own communities. STAND-UP AND FIGHT BACK!
Tuesday January 31, 2006 -The People's State of the Union Address. Join local activists, musicians, speakers, and concerned citizens, SPEAK - OUT!
The Ukulele Man,Victoria Parks, Connie Harris provide the music - Activities start at 7:00 pm.
The World Cant Wait, DRIVE OUT THE BUSH REGIME!!!
Saturday February 4, 2006
Protest in Washington, D.C.
There are buses leaving from Cleveland. For more info contact:
http://www.worldcantwait.com/
Monday, January 30, 2006
Yeah, the economy's great and profits are up - so fuck the worker
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Kraft Foods Inc. (NYSE) on Monday said it would cut up to 8,000 more jobs, or 8 percent of its work force, through 2008 as the food company, hammered by higher commodity costs and sluggish sales volume, looks to save more money.
The announcement came as the maker of Oreo cookies, Jell-O gelatin and a host of other well-known brands, posted a 23 percent increase in net income.
Kraft, like many packaged food companies, has been struggling with a range of commodity cost increases in recent years and is still being pressured by high fuel and packaging costs.
The company posted a profit of $773 million, or 46 cents a share, for the fourth quarter, compared with $628 million, or 37 cents a share, a year earlier.
The announcement came as the maker of Oreo cookies, Jell-O gelatin and a host of other well-known brands, posted a 23 percent increase in net income.
Kraft, like many packaged food companies, has been struggling with a range of commodity cost increases in recent years and is still being pressured by high fuel and packaging costs.
The company posted a profit of $773 million, or 46 cents a share, for the fourth quarter, compared with $628 million, or 37 cents a share, a year earlier.
Twain
Hey Folks,
I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 24th entry) .
His insights remain pertinent to this day. We haven’t changed much from Twain’s day – or from King Arthur’s, for that matter.
Chapter 40 - “Three Years Later” - Having vanquished night-errantry, the Yankee steps out of hiding.
“I no longer felt obliged to work in secret. So, the very next day I exposed my hidden schools, my mines, and my vast system of clandestine factories and work-shops to an astonished world.”
He knew the knights would realize he’d been bluffing in the lists; so he repeated the challenge:
“I said, name the day, and I would take fifty assistants and stand up against the massed chivalry of the whole earth and destroy it.
I was not bluffing, this time. I meant what I said; I could do what I promised. . . this was a plain case of ‘put up or shut up.’ They were wise, and did the latter. In all the next three years they gave me no trouble worth mentioning.”
- Uke Man
I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 24th entry) .
His insights remain pertinent to this day. We haven’t changed much from Twain’s day – or from King Arthur’s, for that matter.
Chapter 40 - “Three Years Later” - Having vanquished night-errantry, the Yankee steps out of hiding.
“I no longer felt obliged to work in secret. So, the very next day I exposed my hidden schools, my mines, and my vast system of clandestine factories and work-shops to an astonished world.”
He knew the knights would realize he’d been bluffing in the lists; so he repeated the challenge:
“I said, name the day, and I would take fifty assistants and stand up against the massed chivalry of the whole earth and destroy it.
I was not bluffing, this time. I meant what I said; I could do what I promised. . . this was a plain case of ‘put up or shut up.’ They were wise, and did the latter. In all the next three years they gave me no trouble worth mentioning.”
- Uke Man
Sunday, January 29, 2006
Ted Lewis - the Museum's unique architecture
Hey Folks!
“Is Everybody Happy ???”
This is the 6th installment of a continuing tribute to the remarkable Ted Lewis.
The Ted Lewis Museum is housed in the one remaining building to ever stand “on the Circle.” Circleville was originally founded around a circular “Indian mound” - hence the name.
At some point, foreshadowing the provincial “wisdom” of today’s civic leaders, the town’s ginks and swells decided to “get with it” and re-built the town - its name notwithstanding - as a square. It’s been square (believe me) ever since – except for Ted Lewis and his museum – notice the distinctive, non-square angles observable from the rear of the building (the result of being oriented to a circle, which dictated "odd," pie-shaped lots).
The Ted Lewis Museum is in Circleville Ohio, at 133 W. Main St., just off State Route 23. It is open Fridays and Saturdays 1:00-5:00 P.M. and by appointment. Call 740-477-3630 for details.
- Uke Man
“Is Everybody Happy ???”
This is the 6th installment of a continuing tribute to the remarkable Ted Lewis.
The Ted Lewis Museum is housed in the one remaining building to ever stand “on the Circle.” Circleville was originally founded around a circular “Indian mound” - hence the name.
At some point, foreshadowing the provincial “wisdom” of today’s civic leaders, the town’s ginks and swells decided to “get with it” and re-built the town - its name notwithstanding - as a square. It’s been square (believe me) ever since – except for Ted Lewis and his museum – notice the distinctive, non-square angles observable from the rear of the building (the result of being oriented to a circle, which dictated "odd," pie-shaped lots).
The Ted Lewis Museum is in Circleville Ohio, at 133 W. Main St., just off State Route 23. It is open Fridays and Saturdays 1:00-5:00 P.M. and by appointment. Call 740-477-3630 for details.
- Uke Man
Faith-based bumper sticker: "Get pregnant whether you want to or not - Your grandmother did!"
Religious Groups Get Chunk of AIDS Money
By RITA BEAMISH, Associated Press (excerpts)
President Bush's $15 billion effort to fight AIDS has handed out nearly one-quarter of its grants to religious groups, and officials are aggressively pursuing new church partners that often emphasize disease prevention through abstinence and fidelity over condom use.
. . .
Conservative Christian allies of the president are pressing the U.S. foreign aid agency to give fewer dollars to groups that distribute condoms or work with prostitutes.
. . .
Among those winning grants were:
_Samaritan's Purse, which is run by [Billy] Graham's son, Franklin. It says its mission is "meeting critical needs of victims of war, poverty, famine, disease and natural disaster while sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ."
_Catholic Relief Services. It was awarded $6.2 million to teach abstinence and fidelity in three countries;
.
_World Relief, founded by the National Association of Evangelicals. It won $9.7 million for abstinence work in four countries.
* * *
Yeah!! That'll work !! Hell, if God can control who wins every football game, he ought to be able to keep a few babies out of the end zone. Don't ya think?
- Uke Man
By RITA BEAMISH, Associated Press (excerpts)
President Bush's $15 billion effort to fight AIDS has handed out nearly one-quarter of its grants to religious groups, and officials are aggressively pursuing new church partners that often emphasize disease prevention through abstinence and fidelity over condom use.
. . .
Conservative Christian allies of the president are pressing the U.S. foreign aid agency to give fewer dollars to groups that distribute condoms or work with prostitutes.
. . .
Among those winning grants were:
_Samaritan's Purse, which is run by [Billy] Graham's son, Franklin. It says its mission is "meeting critical needs of victims of war, poverty, famine, disease and natural disaster while sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ."
_Catholic Relief Services. It was awarded $6.2 million to teach abstinence and fidelity in three countries;
.
_World Relief, founded by the National Association of Evangelicals. It won $9.7 million for abstinence work in four countries.
* * *
Yeah!! That'll work !! Hell, if God can control who wins every football game, he ought to be able to keep a few babies out of the end zone. Don't ya think?
- Uke Man
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Hey Folks!!
The BEST GUY IN THE WORLD, Mr. Bob Hite
(the extraordinary key-board/accordion/slide-whistle Prodigal Son)
now owns the BEST VIDEO STORE IN THE WORLD!!
Grandview Video !!!
The BEST GUY IN THE WORLD, Mr. Bob Hite
(the extraordinary key-board/accordion/slide-whistle Prodigal Son)
now owns the BEST VIDEO STORE IN THE WORLD!!
Grandview Video !!!
It's in the strip mall - West 5th Ave. at Northwest Blvd.
Check it out!! Stop by!!! I do !!! You’ll be glad you did!!!
And tell Bob, “Uke Man” sent ya!!!
- Uke Man
Friday, January 27, 2006
Challenge Assumptions # 6
Hey Folks,
Columnist Kathleen Parker is at it again. This time she isn't as bad as usual; she does give a little hell to Wal-Mart - probably because her information comes from a book written by "a friend and former editor" (The Wal-Mart Effect - by Charles Fishman).
But she does show her ignorance or ill-advised assumptions by writing: "Fishman argues that critics are wrong when they say that Wal-Mart puts little people out of business. We (consumers) put little people out of business, he says. We vote with our wallets, and we're the ones who choose Wal-Mart over local stores. Wal-Mart, in that sense, is the ultimate model of democracy."
Well, if people who are hard-pressed by low-paying jobs, incredible medical bills, and – as W might say - “putting food and clothes on their families” feel it necessary to buy sweatshop items at Wal-Mart to save a buck, it seems like a pretty big stretch to assume they are VOTING for anything, much less for the elimination of long-standing local enterprises run by their friends or neighbors!
They are unable to vote against their situation – there are few if any candidates standing up for them; they have few options. Suggesting that folks are voting for Wal-Mart by spending their degraded resources there is like calling the company store of the Peabody Coal Co.the ultimate model of miners’ democratic choice.
Parker writes on:
“Wal-Mart not only changes the way we buy, but the way we think,” Fishman says. If Wal-Mart charges $5 per pound for salmon, then shoppers wonder why a restaurant charges $15. We expect salmon to cost only $5. Or a microwave to cost only $39. The Wal-Mart effect first changes our expectations, then changes the quality of merchandise, which is cheap, because it isn’t always well- or ethically made.
Take salmon. Wal-Mart, which buys all its salmon from Chile, sells more than anyone else in the country and undersells all other retailers by at least $2 per pound. That’s a lot of market power, which prompts Fishman to ask, "Does it matter that salmon for $4.84 a pound leaves a layer of toxic sludge on the ocean bottoms of the Pacific fjords of southern Chile? "
Salmon in Chile are raised in packed underwater pens – as many as 1 million fish per farm – and fed prophylactic antibiotics to prevent disease. Here’s a fact you’d rather not know: A million salmon produce the same amount of waste as 65,000 people. Combine that waste with unconsumed food and antibiotic residue, and you’ve got a toxic seabed.
Does it matter?
Only if consumers say it does, says Fishman. Wal-Mart listens to ‘voters.’ If shoppers say they won’t buy salmon until Wal-Mart insists on higher standards from suppliers, then Wal-Mart will make those demands. Incentive is the engine that drives the company that promises low prices – ‘always.’ “
Well, have YOU ever bought salmon? Anywhere? If so, has the place you bought it ever offered information as to what it was being offered for elsewhere, by other stores? Much less, has it offered you information as to the environmental, sociological, or any other sort of ramifications following from its price per pound?
If not, then how could you be said to be “voting” on anything? Your actions might have some clearly demonstrable effect, but indicting YOU as a result of that effect is as sensible as arresting insane people for crimes of which they are unaware.
The answer to Parker’s question is pretty simple: "No, it DOESN’T matter." No one here has heard of all that shit at the bottom of a deep sea off the coast of a country far, far away, where they speak some “stupid” language we can’t understand. And now that Parker has mentioned it, we still don’t care. That’s way too far removed from me and from my taking care of mine while working more for less to give it much thought. No, the decision is a foregone conclusion. It DOESN’T matter!!!
The people who “vote” by spending what little money they are able to earn at the place that has the lowest prices - because they screw their workers harder than anyone else in the world - are coerced into their actions. Their behavior is all that anyone could rationally expect; so when Parker asks, “What kind of country are we going to be?” it is a rhetorical question, answered before it is asked; if, indeed, Parker is correct in asserting that “It is a worthy question that consumers will have to answer. “
Officially, in a democracy VOTERS “answer.” If in reality consumers, rather than elected and informed representatives, “answer,” the result has been determined for some time. We'll get by in the short term, but in the long run, we're fucked!
Big time.
Challenge assumptions!
- Uke Man
Columnist Kathleen Parker is at it again. This time she isn't as bad as usual; she does give a little hell to Wal-Mart - probably because her information comes from a book written by "a friend and former editor" (The Wal-Mart Effect - by Charles Fishman).
But she does show her ignorance or ill-advised assumptions by writing: "Fishman argues that critics are wrong when they say that Wal-Mart puts little people out of business. We (consumers) put little people out of business, he says. We vote with our wallets, and we're the ones who choose Wal-Mart over local stores. Wal-Mart, in that sense, is the ultimate model of democracy."
Well, if people who are hard-pressed by low-paying jobs, incredible medical bills, and – as W might say - “putting food and clothes on their families” feel it necessary to buy sweatshop items at Wal-Mart to save a buck, it seems like a pretty big stretch to assume they are VOTING for anything, much less for the elimination of long-standing local enterprises run by their friends or neighbors!
They are unable to vote against their situation – there are few if any candidates standing up for them; they have few options. Suggesting that folks are voting for Wal-Mart by spending their degraded resources there is like calling the company store of the Peabody Coal Co.the ultimate model of miners’ democratic choice.
Parker writes on:
“Wal-Mart not only changes the way we buy, but the way we think,” Fishman says. If Wal-Mart charges $5 per pound for salmon, then shoppers wonder why a restaurant charges $15. We expect salmon to cost only $5. Or a microwave to cost only $39. The Wal-Mart effect first changes our expectations, then changes the quality of merchandise, which is cheap, because it isn’t always well- or ethically made.
Take salmon. Wal-Mart, which buys all its salmon from Chile, sells more than anyone else in the country and undersells all other retailers by at least $2 per pound. That’s a lot of market power, which prompts Fishman to ask, "Does it matter that salmon for $4.84 a pound leaves a layer of toxic sludge on the ocean bottoms of the Pacific fjords of southern Chile? "
Salmon in Chile are raised in packed underwater pens – as many as 1 million fish per farm – and fed prophylactic antibiotics to prevent disease. Here’s a fact you’d rather not know: A million salmon produce the same amount of waste as 65,000 people. Combine that waste with unconsumed food and antibiotic residue, and you’ve got a toxic seabed.
Does it matter?
Only if consumers say it does, says Fishman. Wal-Mart listens to ‘voters.’ If shoppers say they won’t buy salmon until Wal-Mart insists on higher standards from suppliers, then Wal-Mart will make those demands. Incentive is the engine that drives the company that promises low prices – ‘always.’ “
Well, have YOU ever bought salmon? Anywhere? If so, has the place you bought it ever offered information as to what it was being offered for elsewhere, by other stores? Much less, has it offered you information as to the environmental, sociological, or any other sort of ramifications following from its price per pound?
If not, then how could you be said to be “voting” on anything? Your actions might have some clearly demonstrable effect, but indicting YOU as a result of that effect is as sensible as arresting insane people for crimes of which they are unaware.
The answer to Parker’s question is pretty simple: "No, it DOESN’T matter." No one here has heard of all that shit at the bottom of a deep sea off the coast of a country far, far away, where they speak some “stupid” language we can’t understand. And now that Parker has mentioned it, we still don’t care. That’s way too far removed from me and from my taking care of mine while working more for less to give it much thought. No, the decision is a foregone conclusion. It DOESN’T matter!!!
The people who “vote” by spending what little money they are able to earn at the place that has the lowest prices - because they screw their workers harder than anyone else in the world - are coerced into their actions. Their behavior is all that anyone could rationally expect; so when Parker asks, “What kind of country are we going to be?” it is a rhetorical question, answered before it is asked; if, indeed, Parker is correct in asserting that “It is a worthy question that consumers will have to answer. “
Officially, in a democracy VOTERS “answer.” If in reality consumers, rather than elected and informed representatives, “answer,” the result has been determined for some time. We'll get by in the short term, but in the long run, we're fucked!
Big time.
Challenge assumptions!
- Uke Man
Gore Vidal
Listen to this man! And join us at Victorians' Midnight Cafe Tuesday, Jan. 31st to protest! Details soon!!
President Jonah - by Gore Vidal (protest in Columbus Jan. 31 at Victorians Midnight Cafe)
While contemplating the ill-starred presidency of G.W. Bush, I looked about for some sort of divine analogy. As usual, when in need of enlightenment, I fell upon the Holy Bible, authorized King James version of 1611; turning by chance to the Book of Jonah, I read that Jonah, who, like Bush, chats with God, had suffered a falling out with the Almighty and thus became a jinx dogged by luck so bad that a cruise liner, thanks to his presence aboard, was about to sink in a storm at sea. Once the crew had determined that Jonah, a passenger, was the jinx, they threw him overboard and—Lo!—the storm abated. The three days and nights he subsequently spent in the belly of a nauseous whale must have seemed like a serious jinx to the digestion-challenged whale who extruded him much as the decent opinion of mankind has done to Bush.
Originally, God wanted Jonah to give hell to Nineveh, whose people, God noted disdainfully, “cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand,” so like the people of Baghdad who cannot fathom what democracy has to do with their destruction by the Cheney-Bush cabal. But the analogy becomes eerily precise when it comes to the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico at a time when a president is not only incompetent but plainly jinxed by whatever faith he cringes before. Witness the ongoing screw-up of prescription drugs. Who knows what other disasters are in store for us thanks to the curse he is under? As the sailors fed the original Jonah to a whale, thus lifting the storm that was about to drown them, perhaps we the people can persuade President Jonah to retire to his other Eden in Crawford, Texas, taking his jinx with him. We deserve a rest. Plainly, so does he. Look at Nixon’s radiant features after his resignation! One can see former President Jonah in his sumptuous library happily catering to faith-based fans with animated scriptures rooted in “The Simpsons.”
Not since the glory days of Watergate and Nixon’s Luciferian fall has there been so much written about the dogged deceits and creative criminalities of our rulers. We have also come to a point in this dark age where there is not only no hero in view but no alternative road unblocked. We are trapped terribly in a now that few foresaw and even fewer can define despite a swarm of books and pamphlets like the vast cloud of locusts which dined on China in that ’30s movie “The Good Earth.”
I have read many of these descriptions of our fallen estate, looking for one that best describes in plain English how we got to this now and where we appear to be headed once our good Earth has been consumed and only Rapture is left to whisk aloft the Faithful. Meanwhile, the rest of us can learn quite a lot from “Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire” by Morris Berman, a professor of sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
I must confess that I have a proprietary interest in anyone who refers to the United States as an empire since I am credited with first putting forward this heretical view in the early ’70s. In fact, so disgusted with me was a book reviewer at Time magazine that as proof of my madness he wrote: “He actually refers to the United States as an empire!” It should be noted that at about the same time Henry Luce, proprietor of Time, was booming on and on about “The American Century.” What a difference a word makes!
Berman sets his scene briskly in recent history. “We were already in our twilight phase when Ronald Reagan, with all the insight of an ostrich, declared it to be ‘morning in America’; twenty-odd years later, under the ‘boy emperor’ George W. Bush (as Chalmers Johnson refers to him), we have entered the Dark Ages in earnest, pursuing a short-sighted path that can only accelerate our decline. For what we are now seeing are the obvious characteristics of the West after the fall of Rome: the triumph of religion over reason; the atrophy of education and critical thinking; the integration of religion, the state, and the apparatus of torture—a troika that was for Voltaire the central horror of the pre-Enlightenment world; and the political and economic marginalization of our culture…. The British historian Charles Freeman published an extended discussion of the transition that took place during the late Roman empire, the title of which could serve as a capsule summary of our current president: "The Closing of the Western Mind." Mr. Bush, God knows, is no Augustine; but Freeman points to the latter as the epitome of a more general process that was underway in the fourth century: namely, ‘the gradual subjection of reason to faith and authority.’ This is what we are seeing today, and it is a process that no society can undergo and still remain free. Yet it is a process of which administration officials, along with much of the American population, are aggressively proud.” In fact, close observers of this odd presidency note that Bush, like his evangelical base, believes he is on a mission from God and that faith trumps empirical evidence. Berman quotes a senior White House adviser who disdains what he calls the “reality-based” community, to which Berman sensibly responds: “If a nation is unable to perceive reality correctly, and persists in operating on the basis of faith-based delusions, its ability to hold its own in the world is pretty much foreclosed.”
Berman does a brief tour of the American horizon, revealing a cultural death valley. In secondary schools where evolution can still be taught too many teachers are afraid to bring up the subject to their so often un-evolved students. “Add to this the pervasive hostility toward science on the part of the current administration (e.g. stem-cell research) and we get a clear picture of the Enlightenment being steadily rolled back. Religion is used to explain terror attacks as part of a cosmic conflict between Good and Evil rather than in terms of political processes.... Manichaeanism rules across the United States. According to a poll taken by Time magazine fifty-nine percent of Americans believe that John’s apocalyptic prophecies in the Book of Revelation will be fulfilled, and nearly all of these believe that the faithful will be taken up into heaven in the ‘Rapture.’
“Finally, we shouldn’t be surprised at the antipathy toward democracy displayed by the Bush administration…. As already noted, fundamentalism and democracy are completely antithetical. The opposite of the Enlightenment, of course, is tribalism, groupthink; and more and more, this is the direction in which the United States is going…. Anthony Lewis who worked as a columnist for the New York Times for thirty-two years, observes that what has happened in the wake of 9/11 is not just the threatening of the rights of a few detainees, but the undermining of the very foundation of democracy. Detention without trial, denial of access to attorneys, years of interrogation in isolation—these are now standard American practice, and most Americans don’t care. Nor did they care about the revelation in July 2004 (reported in Newsweek), that for several months the White House and the Department of Justice had been discussing the feasibility of canceling the upcoming presidential election in the event of a possible terrorist attack.” I suspect that the technologically inclined prevailed against that extreme measure on the ground that the newly installed electronic ballot machines could be so calibrated that Bush would win handily no matter what (read Rep. Conyers’ report (.pdf file) on the rigging of Ohio’s vote).
Meanwhile, the indoctrination of the people merrily continues. “In a ‘State of the First Amendment Survey’ conducted by the University of Connecticut in 2003, 34 percent of Americans polled said the First Amendment ‘goes too far’; 46 percent said there was too much freedom of the press; 28 percent felt that newspapers should not be able to publish articles without prior approval of the government; 31 percent wanted public protest of a war to be outlawed during that war; and 50 percent thought the government should have the right to infringe on the religious freedom of ‘certain religious groups’ in the name of the war on terror.”
It is usual in sad reports like Professor Berman’s to stop abruptly the litany of what has gone wrong and then declare, hand on heart, that once the people have been informed of what is happening, the truth will set them free and a quarter-billion candles will be lit and the darkness will flee in the presence of so much spontaneous light. But Berman is much too serious for the easy platitude. Instead he tells us that those who might have struck at least a match can no longer do so because shared information about our situation is meager to nonexistent. Would better schools help? Of course, but, according to that joyous bearer of ill tidings, the New York Times, many school districts are now making sobriety tests a regular feature of the school day: apparently opium derivatives are the opiate of our stoned youth. Meanwhile, millions of adult Americans, presumably undrugged, have no idea who our enemies were in World War II. Many college graduates don’t know the difference between an argument and an assertion (did their teachers also fail to solve this knotty question?). A travel agent in Arizona is often asked whether or not it is cheaper to take the train rather than fly to Hawaii. Only 12% of Americans own a passport. At the time of the 2004 presidential election 42% of voters believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. One high school boy, when asked who won the Civil War, replied wearily, “I don’t know and I don’t care,” echoing a busy neocon who confessed proudly: “The American Civil War is as remote to me as the War of the Roses.”
We are assured daily by advertisers and/or politicians that we are the richest, most envied people on Earth and, apparently, that is why so many awful, ill-groomed people want to blow us up. We live in an impermeable bubble without the sort of information that people living in real countries have access to when it comes to their own reality. But we are not actually people in the eyes of the national ownership: we are simply unreliable consumers comprising an overworked, underpaid labor force not in the best of health: The World Health Organization rates our healthcare system (sic—or sick?) as 37th-best in the world, far behind even Saudi Arabia, role model for the Texans. Our infant mortality rate is satisfyingly high, precluding a First World educational system. Also, it has not gone unremarked even in our usually information-free media that despite the boost to the profits of such companies as Halliburton, Bush’s wars of aggression against small countries of no danger to us have left us well and truly broke. Our annual trade deficit is a half-trillion dollars, which means that we don’t produce much of anything the world wants except those wan reports on how popular our Entertainment is overseas. Unfortunately the foreign gross of “King Kong,” the Edsel of that assembly line, is not yet known. It is rumored that Bollywood—the Indian film business—may soon surpass us! Berman writes, “We have lost our edge in science to Europe...The US economy is being kept afloat by huge foreign loans ($4 billion a day during 2003). What do you think will happen when America’s creditors decide to pull the plug, or when OPEC members begin selling oil in euros instead of dollars?...An International Monetary Fund report of 2004 concluded that the United States was ‘careening toward insolvency.’ ” Meanwhile, China, our favorite big-time future enemy, is the number one for worldwide foreign investments, with France, the bete noire of our apish neocons, in second place.
Well, we still have Kraft cheese and, of course, the death penalty.
Berman makes the case that the Bretton-Woods agreement of 1944 institutionalized a system geared toward full employment and the maintenance of a social safety net for society’s less fortunate—the so-called welfare or interventionist state. It did this by establishing fixed but flexible exchange rates among world currencies, which were pegged to the U.S. dollar while the dollar, for its part, was pegged to gold. In a word, Bretton-Woods saved capitalism by making it more human. Nixon abandoned the agreement in 1971, which started, according to Berman, huge amounts of capital moving upward from the poor and the middle class to the rich and super-rich.
Mr. Berman spares us the happy ending, as, apparently, has history. When the admirable Tiberius (he has had an undeserved bad press), upon becoming emperor, received a message from the Senate in which the conscript fathers assured him that whatever legislation he wanted would be automatically passed by them, he sent back word that this was outrageous. “Suppose the emperor is ill or mad or incompetent?” He returned their message. They sent it again. His response: “How eager you are to be slaves.” I often think of that wise emperor when I hear Republican members of Congress extolling the wisdom of Bush. Now that he has been caught illegally wiretapping fellow citizens he has taken to snarling about his powers as “a wartime president,” and so, in his own mind, he is above each and every law of the land. Oddly, no one in Congress has pointed out that he may well be a lunatic dreaming that he is another Lincoln but whatever he is or is not he is no wartime president. There is no war with any other nation...yet. There is no state called terror, an abstract noun like liar. Certainly his illegal unilateral ravaging of Iraq may well seem like a real war for those on both sides unlucky enough to be killed or wounded, but that does not make it a war any more than the appearance of having been elected twice to the presidency does not mean that in due course the people will demand an investigation of those two irregular processes. Although he has done a number of things that under the old republic might have got him impeached, our current system protects him: incumbency-for-life seats have made it possible for a Republican majority in the House not to do its duty and impeach him for his incompetence in handling, say, the natural disaster that befell Louisiana.
The founders thought two-year terms for members of the House was as much democracy as we’d ever need. Therefore, there was no great movement to have some sort of recall legislation in the event that a president wasn’t up to his job and so had lost the people’s confidence between elections. But in time, as Ecclesiastes would say, all things shall come to pass and so, in a kindly way, a majority of the citizens must persuade him that he will be happier back in Crawford pruning Bushes of the leafy sort while the troops not killed or maimed will settle for simply being alive and in one piece. We may be slaves but we are not unreasonable.
One way that a majority of citizens can help open the road back to Crawford is by heeding the call of a group called the World Can’t Wait (see their website, worldcantwait.org). They believe that the agenda for 2006 must not be set by the Bush gang but by the people taking independent mass political action.
On Jan. 31, the night of Bush’s next State of the Union address, they have called for people in large cities and small towns all across the country to join in noisy rallies to make the demand that “Bush Step Down” the message of the day. At 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, just as Bush starts to speak, people can make a joyful noise and figuratively drown out his address. Then on the following Saturday, Feb. 4, converge in front of the White House with the same message: Please step down and take your program with you.
Originally, God wanted Jonah to give hell to Nineveh, whose people, God noted disdainfully, “cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand,” so like the people of Baghdad who cannot fathom what democracy has to do with their destruction by the Cheney-Bush cabal. But the analogy becomes eerily precise when it comes to the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico at a time when a president is not only incompetent but plainly jinxed by whatever faith he cringes before. Witness the ongoing screw-up of prescription drugs. Who knows what other disasters are in store for us thanks to the curse he is under? As the sailors fed the original Jonah to a whale, thus lifting the storm that was about to drown them, perhaps we the people can persuade President Jonah to retire to his other Eden in Crawford, Texas, taking his jinx with him. We deserve a rest. Plainly, so does he. Look at Nixon’s radiant features after his resignation! One can see former President Jonah in his sumptuous library happily catering to faith-based fans with animated scriptures rooted in “The Simpsons.”
Not since the glory days of Watergate and Nixon’s Luciferian fall has there been so much written about the dogged deceits and creative criminalities of our rulers. We have also come to a point in this dark age where there is not only no hero in view but no alternative road unblocked. We are trapped terribly in a now that few foresaw and even fewer can define despite a swarm of books and pamphlets like the vast cloud of locusts which dined on China in that ’30s movie “The Good Earth.”
I have read many of these descriptions of our fallen estate, looking for one that best describes in plain English how we got to this now and where we appear to be headed once our good Earth has been consumed and only Rapture is left to whisk aloft the Faithful. Meanwhile, the rest of us can learn quite a lot from “Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire” by Morris Berman, a professor of sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
I must confess that I have a proprietary interest in anyone who refers to the United States as an empire since I am credited with first putting forward this heretical view in the early ’70s. In fact, so disgusted with me was a book reviewer at Time magazine that as proof of my madness he wrote: “He actually refers to the United States as an empire!” It should be noted that at about the same time Henry Luce, proprietor of Time, was booming on and on about “The American Century.” What a difference a word makes!
Berman sets his scene briskly in recent history. “We were already in our twilight phase when Ronald Reagan, with all the insight of an ostrich, declared it to be ‘morning in America’; twenty-odd years later, under the ‘boy emperor’ George W. Bush (as Chalmers Johnson refers to him), we have entered the Dark Ages in earnest, pursuing a short-sighted path that can only accelerate our decline. For what we are now seeing are the obvious characteristics of the West after the fall of Rome: the triumph of religion over reason; the atrophy of education and critical thinking; the integration of religion, the state, and the apparatus of torture—a troika that was for Voltaire the central horror of the pre-Enlightenment world; and the political and economic marginalization of our culture…. The British historian Charles Freeman published an extended discussion of the transition that took place during the late Roman empire, the title of which could serve as a capsule summary of our current president: "The Closing of the Western Mind." Mr. Bush, God knows, is no Augustine; but Freeman points to the latter as the epitome of a more general process that was underway in the fourth century: namely, ‘the gradual subjection of reason to faith and authority.’ This is what we are seeing today, and it is a process that no society can undergo and still remain free. Yet it is a process of which administration officials, along with much of the American population, are aggressively proud.” In fact, close observers of this odd presidency note that Bush, like his evangelical base, believes he is on a mission from God and that faith trumps empirical evidence. Berman quotes a senior White House adviser who disdains what he calls the “reality-based” community, to which Berman sensibly responds: “If a nation is unable to perceive reality correctly, and persists in operating on the basis of faith-based delusions, its ability to hold its own in the world is pretty much foreclosed.”
Berman does a brief tour of the American horizon, revealing a cultural death valley. In secondary schools where evolution can still be taught too many teachers are afraid to bring up the subject to their so often un-evolved students. “Add to this the pervasive hostility toward science on the part of the current administration (e.g. stem-cell research) and we get a clear picture of the Enlightenment being steadily rolled back. Religion is used to explain terror attacks as part of a cosmic conflict between Good and Evil rather than in terms of political processes.... Manichaeanism rules across the United States. According to a poll taken by Time magazine fifty-nine percent of Americans believe that John’s apocalyptic prophecies in the Book of Revelation will be fulfilled, and nearly all of these believe that the faithful will be taken up into heaven in the ‘Rapture.’
“Finally, we shouldn’t be surprised at the antipathy toward democracy displayed by the Bush administration…. As already noted, fundamentalism and democracy are completely antithetical. The opposite of the Enlightenment, of course, is tribalism, groupthink; and more and more, this is the direction in which the United States is going…. Anthony Lewis who worked as a columnist for the New York Times for thirty-two years, observes that what has happened in the wake of 9/11 is not just the threatening of the rights of a few detainees, but the undermining of the very foundation of democracy. Detention without trial, denial of access to attorneys, years of interrogation in isolation—these are now standard American practice, and most Americans don’t care. Nor did they care about the revelation in July 2004 (reported in Newsweek), that for several months the White House and the Department of Justice had been discussing the feasibility of canceling the upcoming presidential election in the event of a possible terrorist attack.” I suspect that the technologically inclined prevailed against that extreme measure on the ground that the newly installed electronic ballot machines could be so calibrated that Bush would win handily no matter what (read Rep. Conyers’ report (.pdf file) on the rigging of Ohio’s vote).
Meanwhile, the indoctrination of the people merrily continues. “In a ‘State of the First Amendment Survey’ conducted by the University of Connecticut in 2003, 34 percent of Americans polled said the First Amendment ‘goes too far’; 46 percent said there was too much freedom of the press; 28 percent felt that newspapers should not be able to publish articles without prior approval of the government; 31 percent wanted public protest of a war to be outlawed during that war; and 50 percent thought the government should have the right to infringe on the religious freedom of ‘certain religious groups’ in the name of the war on terror.”
It is usual in sad reports like Professor Berman’s to stop abruptly the litany of what has gone wrong and then declare, hand on heart, that once the people have been informed of what is happening, the truth will set them free and a quarter-billion candles will be lit and the darkness will flee in the presence of so much spontaneous light. But Berman is much too serious for the easy platitude. Instead he tells us that those who might have struck at least a match can no longer do so because shared information about our situation is meager to nonexistent. Would better schools help? Of course, but, according to that joyous bearer of ill tidings, the New York Times, many school districts are now making sobriety tests a regular feature of the school day: apparently opium derivatives are the opiate of our stoned youth. Meanwhile, millions of adult Americans, presumably undrugged, have no idea who our enemies were in World War II. Many college graduates don’t know the difference between an argument and an assertion (did their teachers also fail to solve this knotty question?). A travel agent in Arizona is often asked whether or not it is cheaper to take the train rather than fly to Hawaii. Only 12% of Americans own a passport. At the time of the 2004 presidential election 42% of voters believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. One high school boy, when asked who won the Civil War, replied wearily, “I don’t know and I don’t care,” echoing a busy neocon who confessed proudly: “The American Civil War is as remote to me as the War of the Roses.”
We are assured daily by advertisers and/or politicians that we are the richest, most envied people on Earth and, apparently, that is why so many awful, ill-groomed people want to blow us up. We live in an impermeable bubble without the sort of information that people living in real countries have access to when it comes to their own reality. But we are not actually people in the eyes of the national ownership: we are simply unreliable consumers comprising an overworked, underpaid labor force not in the best of health: The World Health Organization rates our healthcare system (sic—or sick?) as 37th-best in the world, far behind even Saudi Arabia, role model for the Texans. Our infant mortality rate is satisfyingly high, precluding a First World educational system. Also, it has not gone unremarked even in our usually information-free media that despite the boost to the profits of such companies as Halliburton, Bush’s wars of aggression against small countries of no danger to us have left us well and truly broke. Our annual trade deficit is a half-trillion dollars, which means that we don’t produce much of anything the world wants except those wan reports on how popular our Entertainment is overseas. Unfortunately the foreign gross of “King Kong,” the Edsel of that assembly line, is not yet known. It is rumored that Bollywood—the Indian film business—may soon surpass us! Berman writes, “We have lost our edge in science to Europe...The US economy is being kept afloat by huge foreign loans ($4 billion a day during 2003). What do you think will happen when America’s creditors decide to pull the plug, or when OPEC members begin selling oil in euros instead of dollars?...An International Monetary Fund report of 2004 concluded that the United States was ‘careening toward insolvency.’ ” Meanwhile, China, our favorite big-time future enemy, is the number one for worldwide foreign investments, with France, the bete noire of our apish neocons, in second place.
Well, we still have Kraft cheese and, of course, the death penalty.
Berman makes the case that the Bretton-Woods agreement of 1944 institutionalized a system geared toward full employment and the maintenance of a social safety net for society’s less fortunate—the so-called welfare or interventionist state. It did this by establishing fixed but flexible exchange rates among world currencies, which were pegged to the U.S. dollar while the dollar, for its part, was pegged to gold. In a word, Bretton-Woods saved capitalism by making it more human. Nixon abandoned the agreement in 1971, which started, according to Berman, huge amounts of capital moving upward from the poor and the middle class to the rich and super-rich.
Mr. Berman spares us the happy ending, as, apparently, has history. When the admirable Tiberius (he has had an undeserved bad press), upon becoming emperor, received a message from the Senate in which the conscript fathers assured him that whatever legislation he wanted would be automatically passed by them, he sent back word that this was outrageous. “Suppose the emperor is ill or mad or incompetent?” He returned their message. They sent it again. His response: “How eager you are to be slaves.” I often think of that wise emperor when I hear Republican members of Congress extolling the wisdom of Bush. Now that he has been caught illegally wiretapping fellow citizens he has taken to snarling about his powers as “a wartime president,” and so, in his own mind, he is above each and every law of the land. Oddly, no one in Congress has pointed out that he may well be a lunatic dreaming that he is another Lincoln but whatever he is or is not he is no wartime president. There is no war with any other nation...yet. There is no state called terror, an abstract noun like liar. Certainly his illegal unilateral ravaging of Iraq may well seem like a real war for those on both sides unlucky enough to be killed or wounded, but that does not make it a war any more than the appearance of having been elected twice to the presidency does not mean that in due course the people will demand an investigation of those two irregular processes. Although he has done a number of things that under the old republic might have got him impeached, our current system protects him: incumbency-for-life seats have made it possible for a Republican majority in the House not to do its duty and impeach him for his incompetence in handling, say, the natural disaster that befell Louisiana.
The founders thought two-year terms for members of the House was as much democracy as we’d ever need. Therefore, there was no great movement to have some sort of recall legislation in the event that a president wasn’t up to his job and so had lost the people’s confidence between elections. But in time, as Ecclesiastes would say, all things shall come to pass and so, in a kindly way, a majority of the citizens must persuade him that he will be happier back in Crawford pruning Bushes of the leafy sort while the troops not killed or maimed will settle for simply being alive and in one piece. We may be slaves but we are not unreasonable.
One way that a majority of citizens can help open the road back to Crawford is by heeding the call of a group called the World Can’t Wait (see their website, worldcantwait.org). They believe that the agenda for 2006 must not be set by the Bush gang but by the people taking independent mass political action.
On Jan. 31, the night of Bush’s next State of the Union address, they have called for people in large cities and small towns all across the country to join in noisy rallies to make the demand that “Bush Step Down” the message of the day. At 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, just as Bush starts to speak, people can make a joyful noise and figuratively drown out his address. Then on the following Saturday, Feb. 4, converge in front of the White House with the same message: Please step down and take your program with you.
Challenge Assumptions # 5
Hey Folks,
Certain examples of the bullshit we are fed appear again and again, over and over, but SELECTIVELY. When it suits someone's purpose, the "wise" observation is trotted out. Otherwise it is suppressed - as explained in my letter to the Dispatch editor below.
- Uke Man
To the Editor,
Friday's front page reported, "Cardinal Health to pay SEC $35 million / Penalty considered small enough that stock price goes up."
Interesting that when a corporation is fined on the basis of fraud its stock price increases. Human beings often aren't so lucky.
In any case, as a long-time reader, I've heard the "Dispatch" say many, many times, "Corporations don't pay taxes; consumers do."
I anxiously await the forthcoming editorial explaining that "Corporations don't pay fines; consumers do."
Yours - Tom Harker
Certain examples of the bullshit we are fed appear again and again, over and over, but SELECTIVELY. When it suits someone's purpose, the "wise" observation is trotted out. Otherwise it is suppressed - as explained in my letter to the Dispatch editor below.
- Uke Man
To the Editor,
Friday's front page reported, "Cardinal Health to pay SEC $35 million / Penalty considered small enough that stock price goes up."
Interesting that when a corporation is fined on the basis of fraud its stock price increases. Human beings often aren't so lucky.
In any case, as a long-time reader, I've heard the "Dispatch" say many, many times, "Corporations don't pay taxes; consumers do."
I anxiously await the forthcoming editorial explaining that "Corporations don't pay fines; consumers do."
Yours - Tom Harker
Challenge Assumptions - Part 4
-Hey Folks,
In an earlier post I wrote:
“As long as corporations are squeezing workers and taxpayers, all is right with the world. As soon as the worm turns and profits are squeezed, the world is sliding down a dangerous slippery-slope to doom. And it doesn’t require elimination of profits to elicit hemorrhages of outrage – any reduction in profits will suffice!
The assumption, the myth we are all supposed to swallow (in order to maintain the prerogatives of the few) is that the wealthy come first, that WE depend upon THEM. They have to be afforded the lives of royalty so that we can obtain enough to subsist. And if we have to get by on even less in order that they have more, that’s just the way it is and always has been, the way god wants it. Besides, if we resist, it will cost us jobs and put us on a slippery slope.”
The local “Country Club Republican” newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch, weighed in with an editorial laden with the usual assumptions. It starts with the headline:
“Unhealthy lawmaking
Maryland legislature has no business telling Wal-Mart how to manage benefit plans”
As I noted above, this myth makes the people dependent; their elected representatives – it insists - have “no business” telling Wal-Mart or any other business how to do anything.
The editorial admits that “Too many Americans have too little health insurance” and that “Wal-Mart’s health plans aren’t as generous as those offered by some other companies, but Wal-Mart is well-known for following a business model of restraining expenses in order to hold down the prices of goods.”
Yep. People need insurance and WAL-MART’s insurance is not good, but that's tough since “Wal-Mart is well-known for following a business model of restraining expenses in order to hold down the prices of goods.” If the corporation prefers low prices to workers’ health, the government should give its blessing.
This assumption, this myth, is in clear conflict with “government of, by, and for the people [not corporations].”
The Dispatch also makes the argument I’ve addressed in earlier posts: i.e. taking proper care of workers causes loss of jobs – we won’t have any WAL-MARTS or Burger Kings or Convenience Stores unless workers are abused. Right!
It also warns that the wealthy corporation “can be expected to use every legal means to challenge this mandate. Wal-Mart doesn’t want this government requirement spreading to other states.” Sure! WAL-MART is loaded, and will spend the money they could have used to benefit its workers – as much money as it takes – to get the politicians and courts it owns to return things to “normal.” And I won’t be surprised if it happens.
Just the same, the assumption that this is OK, “in the American tradition,” what god wants, the only way that can or will work, or the way it’s “sposed” to be is bullshit.
Challenge assumptions!
More on this in later posts.
- Uke Man
In an earlier post I wrote:
“As long as corporations are squeezing workers and taxpayers, all is right with the world. As soon as the worm turns and profits are squeezed, the world is sliding down a dangerous slippery-slope to doom. And it doesn’t require elimination of profits to elicit hemorrhages of outrage – any reduction in profits will suffice!
The assumption, the myth we are all supposed to swallow (in order to maintain the prerogatives of the few) is that the wealthy come first, that WE depend upon THEM. They have to be afforded the lives of royalty so that we can obtain enough to subsist. And if we have to get by on even less in order that they have more, that’s just the way it is and always has been, the way god wants it. Besides, if we resist, it will cost us jobs and put us on a slippery slope.”
The local “Country Club Republican” newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch, weighed in with an editorial laden with the usual assumptions. It starts with the headline:
“Unhealthy lawmaking
Maryland legislature has no business telling Wal-Mart how to manage benefit plans”
As I noted above, this myth makes the people dependent; their elected representatives – it insists - have “no business” telling Wal-Mart or any other business how to do anything.
The editorial admits that “Too many Americans have too little health insurance” and that “Wal-Mart’s health plans aren’t as generous as those offered by some other companies, but Wal-Mart is well-known for following a business model of restraining expenses in order to hold down the prices of goods.”
Yep. People need insurance and WAL-MART’s insurance is not good, but that's tough since “Wal-Mart is well-known for following a business model of restraining expenses in order to hold down the prices of goods.” If the corporation prefers low prices to workers’ health, the government should give its blessing.
This assumption, this myth, is in clear conflict with “government of, by, and for the people [not corporations].”
The Dispatch also makes the argument I’ve addressed in earlier posts: i.e. taking proper care of workers causes loss of jobs – we won’t have any WAL-MARTS or Burger Kings or Convenience Stores unless workers are abused. Right!
It also warns that the wealthy corporation “can be expected to use every legal means to challenge this mandate. Wal-Mart doesn’t want this government requirement spreading to other states.” Sure! WAL-MART is loaded, and will spend the money they could have used to benefit its workers – as much money as it takes – to get the politicians and courts it owns to return things to “normal.” And I won’t be surprised if it happens.
Just the same, the assumption that this is OK, “in the American tradition,” what god wants, the only way that can or will work, or the way it’s “sposed” to be is bullshit.
Challenge assumptions!
More on this in later posts.
- Uke Man
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Ted's Theme Song & the title of Two Movies
Hear my solo version at:http://www.ukuleleman.net/2006/01/teds-theme-song-when-my-baby-smiles-at.html
- Uke Man
Ted Lewis - 5th Installment
Hey Folks,
Ted Lewis - as you know if you've been reading right along with this series - was quite famous in his day. So much so that he was repeatedly asked to play before presidents and kings. He was sought out by Las Vegas and Hollywood as well and appeared in many movies, including a fictionalized account of his life, “When My Baby Smiles at Me” made in 1929 and remade in 1943.
Interestingly, he played a part in the establishment of Abbott & Costello. When their first film was getting under way, the studio was nervous about the attention an unknown comedy team might arouse. So, they wrote Ted Lewis and the Andrews Sisters into the script to cement public interest. It worked, and Abbott & Costello were on their way.
Many of Ted’s movies can be seen in the screening room of the Ted Lewis Museum in Circleville, Ohio. Open Fridays and Saturdays 1:00 - 5:00 P.M. (and by appointment) in Circleville Ohio - call 740- 477 - 3630 for details.
Hear another Ted ditty at: http://great-song-stylists-uk.com/Ted%20Lewis/TedLewisHaveYouEverBeenLonely.mp3
- Uke Man
Ted Lewis - as you know if you've been reading right along with this series - was quite famous in his day. So much so that he was repeatedly asked to play before presidents and kings. He was sought out by Las Vegas and Hollywood as well and appeared in many movies, including a fictionalized account of his life, “When My Baby Smiles at Me” made in 1929 and remade in 1943.
Interestingly, he played a part in the establishment of Abbott & Costello. When their first film was getting under way, the studio was nervous about the attention an unknown comedy team might arouse. So, they wrote Ted Lewis and the Andrews Sisters into the script to cement public interest. It worked, and Abbott & Costello were on their way.
Many of Ted’s movies can be seen in the screening room of the Ted Lewis Museum in Circleville, Ohio. Open Fridays and Saturdays 1:00 - 5:00 P.M. (and by appointment) in Circleville Ohio - call 740- 477 - 3630 for details.
Hear another Ted ditty at: http://great-song-stylists-uk.com/Ted%20Lewis/TedLewisHaveYouEverBeenLonely.mp3
- Uke Man
Twain
Hey Folks,
I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 22nd entry) .
His insights remain pertinent to this day. We haven’t changed much from Twain’s day – or from King Arthur’s, for that matter.
Chapter 39 – In my last report the Yankee’s plan for a bloodless victory over knight-errantry had gone well, defeating all with just the use of a lariat. But then another challenger is announced. It is Sir Sagramour with blood in his eyes and determined to have another go at it, but this time with his broadsword rather than a lance. In the meantime:
“Next, I noticed Merlin gliding away from me; and then I noticed that my lasso was gone! That old sleight-of-hand expert had stolen it, sure, and slipped it under his robe.”
Although Lancelot objects and the king is concerned, the arguments of Sagramour and Merlin, in the end, force the Yankee to face the angry night without apparent defense.
“The bugle made proclamation, and we turned apart and rode to our stations. There we stood, a hundred yards apart, facing each other, rigid and motionless, like horsed statues. And so we remained, in a soundless hush, as much as a full minute, everybody gazing, nobody stirring. It seemed as if the king could not take heart to give the signal. But at last he lifted his hand, the clear note of the bugle followed, Sir Sagramour’s long blade described a flashing curve in the air, and it was superb to see him come. I sat still. On he came. I did not move. People got so excited that they shouted to me.
‘Fly, fly! Save thyself! This is murther !’
I never budged so much as an inch, till that thundering apparition had got within fifteen paces of me; then I snatched a dragoon revolver out of my holster, there was a flash and a roar, and the revolver was back in the holster before anybody could tell what had happened.
Here was a riderless horse plunging by, and yonder lay Sir Sagramour, stone dead”
The blood had started to flow.
- Uke Man
I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 22nd entry) .
His insights remain pertinent to this day. We haven’t changed much from Twain’s day – or from King Arthur’s, for that matter.
Chapter 39 – In my last report the Yankee’s plan for a bloodless victory over knight-errantry had gone well, defeating all with just the use of a lariat. But then another challenger is announced. It is Sir Sagramour with blood in his eyes and determined to have another go at it, but this time with his broadsword rather than a lance. In the meantime:
“Next, I noticed Merlin gliding away from me; and then I noticed that my lasso was gone! That old sleight-of-hand expert had stolen it, sure, and slipped it under his robe.”
Although Lancelot objects and the king is concerned, the arguments of Sagramour and Merlin, in the end, force the Yankee to face the angry night without apparent defense.
“The bugle made proclamation, and we turned apart and rode to our stations. There we stood, a hundred yards apart, facing each other, rigid and motionless, like horsed statues. And so we remained, in a soundless hush, as much as a full minute, everybody gazing, nobody stirring. It seemed as if the king could not take heart to give the signal. But at last he lifted his hand, the clear note of the bugle followed, Sir Sagramour’s long blade described a flashing curve in the air, and it was superb to see him come. I sat still. On he came. I did not move. People got so excited that they shouted to me.
‘Fly, fly! Save thyself! This is murther !’
I never budged so much as an inch, till that thundering apparition had got within fifteen paces of me; then I snatched a dragoon revolver out of my holster, there was a flash and a roar, and the revolver was back in the holster before anybody could tell what had happened.
Here was a riderless horse plunging by, and yonder lay Sir Sagramour, stone dead”
The blood had started to flow.
- Uke Man
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Charity - It's a Rope-a-Dope *****(tell the Pope)
Hey Folks,
Earlier in a Mark Twain posting ( http://www.ukuleleman.net/2006/01/twain-on-nature-of-charities.html ) I shared the author’s view of charities:
“Remember, the proceeds go to a great and free charity, and one whose broad benevolence stretches out its helping hand, warm with the blood of a loving heart, to all that suffer, regardless of race, creed, condition or color – the only charity yet established in the earth which has no politico-religious stop-cock on its compassion, but says Here flows the stream, let all come and drink!”
Now, the Pope has weighed in with his first Encyclical ( http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060125/ap_on_re_eu/vatican_pope_encyclical ).
I’m with Twain!
We’ve all been raised with warm-fuzzies regarding charity, but if we actually think about it, charity is NOT a good thing.
Our hierarchical economic system creates levels of poverty and disadvantage and then blames the victims of the system for their predicament – “anybody can be rich in America – if they’re poor, it’s their own fault.” Convenient - - for those who exploit the poor.
Then since the system actually REQUIRES these levels of disadvantage – i.e. if poverty were eliminated, much of the lop-sided distribution of wealth* would also be eliminated – poverty and disadvantage – far from being eliminated – must be maintained. One of the levers of maintenance is charity.
Although discrimination and abuse are necessary, our rulers must walk a tightrope. The people must be kept in their exploited position while they are squeezed as much as possible but WITHOUT causing an explosion. Hence “charity,” which ameliorates the situation WITHOUT really changing it. Take everything you can, and give as little as possible to keep the lid on.
Twain recognized that, and so did Oscar Wilde who said:
“We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so.
As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them.”
Unfortunately, the Pope is all for charity and for letting government do its thing. He’s less interested in pushing for a just and humane world than he is in demanding government’s endorsement of the Church's charity WITHIN the corrupt system.
What is Jesus doing?
Turning over in his sepulcher, twisting in the stained polyester shroud he picked up at the Thrift Store for $1.29.
- Uke Man
Earlier in a Mark Twain posting ( http://www.ukuleleman.net/2006/01/twain-on-nature-of-charities.html ) I shared the author’s view of charities:
“Remember, the proceeds go to a great and free charity, and one whose broad benevolence stretches out its helping hand, warm with the blood of a loving heart, to all that suffer, regardless of race, creed, condition or color – the only charity yet established in the earth which has no politico-religious stop-cock on its compassion, but says Here flows the stream, let all come and drink!”
Now, the Pope has weighed in with his first Encyclical ( http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060125/ap_on_re_eu/vatican_pope_encyclical ).
I’m with Twain!
We’ve all been raised with warm-fuzzies regarding charity, but if we actually think about it, charity is NOT a good thing.
Our hierarchical economic system creates levels of poverty and disadvantage and then blames the victims of the system for their predicament – “anybody can be rich in America – if they’re poor, it’s their own fault.” Convenient - - for those who exploit the poor.
Then since the system actually REQUIRES these levels of disadvantage – i.e. if poverty were eliminated, much of the lop-sided distribution of wealth* would also be eliminated – poverty and disadvantage – far from being eliminated – must be maintained. One of the levers of maintenance is charity.
Although discrimination and abuse are necessary, our rulers must walk a tightrope. The people must be kept in their exploited position while they are squeezed as much as possible but WITHOUT causing an explosion. Hence “charity,” which ameliorates the situation WITHOUT really changing it. Take everything you can, and give as little as possible to keep the lid on.
Twain recognized that, and so did Oscar Wilde who said:
“We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so.
As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them.”
Unfortunately, the Pope is all for charity and for letting government do its thing. He’s less interested in pushing for a just and humane world than he is in demanding government’s endorsement of the Church's charity WITHIN the corrupt system.
What is Jesus doing?
Turning over in his sepulcher, twisting in the stained polyester shroud he picked up at the Thrift Store for $1.29.
- Uke Man
Challenge Assumptions - Part 3
Hey Folks,
Just as almost every novel, movie, or play describing Medieval life concentrates on the nobility - the wealthy few - as opposed to the serfs – the masses from which wealth is derived - almost everything we receive comes from the perspective of our modern royalty. Moreover, this perspective is presented in absolute terms – i.e. as if it is innately-obvious, unquestionable reality – whereas it is actually nothing more than self-serving propaganda.
Hence, large layoffs are good because they please Wall Street. Stagnant wages for workers are good because it helps increase profits. WAL-MART policies that force workers to use the emergency room and/or Medicaid for their health care are good because it increases profits and the masses as a whole, as opposed to WAL-MART, pay for the care.
Recently the State of Maryland took a step to address this by requiring large employers like WAL-MART to spend at least 8% of their payroll on worker health care (or give the difference to the state in taxes). Well, the royal toadies came out in full force attacking Maryland’s legislature with their sacred, self-serving “realities.”
A WAL-MART executive moaned that it "could be the beginning of a slippery slope" – i.e. other states might do this to WAL-MART or other irresponsible businesses. We are supposed, I guess, to be against “slippery slopes,” but it really depends on who slips, doesn’t it. In this case, corporations that have been sailing smoothly along on the backs of their workers might have to start spending some of their profits on their workers. Sounds fine to me. WAL-MART might also “slip” into paying its own share toward their workers’ health needs instead of sticking the rest of society with it.
According to the AP, “Critics of the legislation called it a dangerous precedent that ultimately would cost Maryland jobs” – the same argument they make against raising the minimum wage. Right! If WAL-MART has to quit screwing their workers and robbing the taxpayers, they’ll take their Super Stores and go home (if so, K-Mart/Target/etc. will move right in). As with minimum wage, this has nothing to do with losing jobs. It has to do with WHO GETS SQUEEZED!
As long as corporations are squeezing workers and taxpayers, all is right with the world. As soon as the worm turns and profits are squeezed, the world is sliding down a dangerous slippery-slope to doom. And it doesn’t require elimination of profits to elicit hemorrhages of outrage – any reduction in profits will suffice!
The assumption, the myth we are all supposed to swallow (in order to maintain the prerogatives of the few) is that the wealthy come first, that WE depend upon THEM. They have to be afforded the lives of royalty so that we can obtain enough to subsist. And if we have to get by on even less in order that they have more, that’s just the way it is and always has been, the way god wants it. Besides, if we resist, it will "cost us jobs" and put us on "a slippery slope."
Challenge assumptions!!
More about this in future postings.
- Uke Man
Just as almost every novel, movie, or play describing Medieval life concentrates on the nobility - the wealthy few - as opposed to the serfs – the masses from which wealth is derived - almost everything we receive comes from the perspective of our modern royalty. Moreover, this perspective is presented in absolute terms – i.e. as if it is innately-obvious, unquestionable reality – whereas it is actually nothing more than self-serving propaganda.
Hence, large layoffs are good because they please Wall Street. Stagnant wages for workers are good because it helps increase profits. WAL-MART policies that force workers to use the emergency room and/or Medicaid for their health care are good because it increases profits and the masses as a whole, as opposed to WAL-MART, pay for the care.
Recently the State of Maryland took a step to address this by requiring large employers like WAL-MART to spend at least 8% of their payroll on worker health care (or give the difference to the state in taxes). Well, the royal toadies came out in full force attacking Maryland’s legislature with their sacred, self-serving “realities.”
A WAL-MART executive moaned that it "could be the beginning of a slippery slope" – i.e. other states might do this to WAL-MART or other irresponsible businesses. We are supposed, I guess, to be against “slippery slopes,” but it really depends on who slips, doesn’t it. In this case, corporations that have been sailing smoothly along on the backs of their workers might have to start spending some of their profits on their workers. Sounds fine to me. WAL-MART might also “slip” into paying its own share toward their workers’ health needs instead of sticking the rest of society with it.
According to the AP, “Critics of the legislation called it a dangerous precedent that ultimately would cost Maryland jobs” – the same argument they make against raising the minimum wage. Right! If WAL-MART has to quit screwing their workers and robbing the taxpayers, they’ll take their Super Stores and go home (if so, K-Mart/Target/etc. will move right in). As with minimum wage, this has nothing to do with losing jobs. It has to do with WHO GETS SQUEEZED!
As long as corporations are squeezing workers and taxpayers, all is right with the world. As soon as the worm turns and profits are squeezed, the world is sliding down a dangerous slippery-slope to doom. And it doesn’t require elimination of profits to elicit hemorrhages of outrage – any reduction in profits will suffice!
The assumption, the myth we are all supposed to swallow (in order to maintain the prerogatives of the few) is that the wealthy come first, that WE depend upon THEM. They have to be afforded the lives of royalty so that we can obtain enough to subsist. And if we have to get by on even less in order that they have more, that’s just the way it is and always has been, the way god wants it. Besides, if we resist, it will "cost us jobs" and put us on "a slippery slope."
Challenge assumptions!!
More about this in future postings.
- Uke Man
George & Adolph
Hey Folks,
It's not just me!!
- Uke Man
From Capitol Hill Blue
(a ukethanks to Phyll)
The Rant:
An American Hitler and his Gestapo
By DOUG THOMPSON
Publisher, Capitol Hill BlueJan 23, 2006, 09:15
The U.S. Department of Justice, led by Alberto “The Constitution is an outdateddocument” Gonzales, wants to know if you’ve been looking at any racy material onthe Internet.
Yahoo and MSN have already complied with subpoenas from Gonzales’ storm troopersdemanding records on who is using their search services to look at porno siteson the Internet.
Google, to their credit, said no and is now caught in a tough legal fight against the George Bush’s Gestapo.
Ohmigod! Did he say Gestapo?
Damn right I did. If you don’t think the rights-robbing, privacy-invading,Constitution ignoring administration of George W. Bush is anything less than aHitler-style Gestapo then you’ve got your head stuffed so far up your ass thatall that brown stuff is blinding you.
America, once hailed as the land of the free, has – under the tyranny of KingGeorge – become Amerika, reviled as a global thug that doesn’t give a damn aboutanyone’s rights, especially those of its own citizens.
Protest if you want. Spout the Republican Party line is you can without gagging.I don’t give a damn. If you believe George W. Bush is anything less than an American Hitler then you’re too damn dumb and stupid to argue with anyway.
Bush is an evil man, a power-grapping despot who believes in absolute rule, amadman so wrapped up in his perceived role as “a wartime President” and“Commander in Chief” that he believes no law applies to him or his rotting,corrupt, administration. The Constitution? Why it’s just “a goddamned piece ofpaper” to this insane megalomaniac.
Legal scholars agree that Bush blatantly broke the law by ordering the NationalSecurity Agency to spy on Americans without warrants or court review. The onlycretins who support this dictator are the brain-dead Republicans who put power above the law and party loyalty above their country.
Bush is a traitor to his country. As a traitor, he should be led from the WhiteHouse in chains and tried as one. Since he insists he is a “wartime President,”then let’s try the son-of-a-bitch as a wartime traitor, a Benedict Arnold who turned on his country and gave aid and comfort to its enemies. Bush has done far more damage to the freedoms and security of American than Osama bin Laden.In fact, I’m starting to believe the traitorous asshole is in league with binLaden and others who want this country destroyed.
No true American would treat the Constitution with the contempt that spills like toxic bile from the lips of George Bush. No true American would continue to support this maniac as he continues to dismantle what once was the greatest country in the world.
Bush is clearly guilty of high crimes against the Constitution of the United States. It’s time to give this reincarnation of Adolph Hitler exactly what he deserves.
It's not just me!!
- Uke Man
From Capitol Hill Blue
(a ukethanks to Phyll)
The Rant:
An American Hitler and his Gestapo
By DOUG THOMPSON
Publisher, Capitol Hill BlueJan 23, 2006, 09:15
The U.S. Department of Justice, led by Alberto “The Constitution is an outdateddocument” Gonzales, wants to know if you’ve been looking at any racy material onthe Internet.
Yahoo and MSN have already complied with subpoenas from Gonzales’ storm troopersdemanding records on who is using their search services to look at porno siteson the Internet.
Google, to their credit, said no and is now caught in a tough legal fight against the George Bush’s Gestapo.
Ohmigod! Did he say Gestapo?
Damn right I did. If you don’t think the rights-robbing, privacy-invading,Constitution ignoring administration of George W. Bush is anything less than aHitler-style Gestapo then you’ve got your head stuffed so far up your ass thatall that brown stuff is blinding you.
America, once hailed as the land of the free, has – under the tyranny of KingGeorge – become Amerika, reviled as a global thug that doesn’t give a damn aboutanyone’s rights, especially those of its own citizens.
Protest if you want. Spout the Republican Party line is you can without gagging.I don’t give a damn. If you believe George W. Bush is anything less than an American Hitler then you’re too damn dumb and stupid to argue with anyway.
Bush is an evil man, a power-grapping despot who believes in absolute rule, amadman so wrapped up in his perceived role as “a wartime President” and“Commander in Chief” that he believes no law applies to him or his rotting,corrupt, administration. The Constitution? Why it’s just “a goddamned piece ofpaper” to this insane megalomaniac.
Legal scholars agree that Bush blatantly broke the law by ordering the NationalSecurity Agency to spy on Americans without warrants or court review. The onlycretins who support this dictator are the brain-dead Republicans who put power above the law and party loyalty above their country.
Bush is a traitor to his country. As a traitor, he should be led from the WhiteHouse in chains and tried as one. Since he insists he is a “wartime President,”then let’s try the son-of-a-bitch as a wartime traitor, a Benedict Arnold who turned on his country and gave aid and comfort to its enemies. Bush has done far more damage to the freedoms and security of American than Osama bin Laden.In fact, I’m starting to believe the traitorous asshole is in league with binLaden and others who want this country destroyed.
No true American would treat the Constitution with the contempt that spills like toxic bile from the lips of George Bush. No true American would continue to support this maniac as he continues to dismantle what once was the greatest country in the world.
Bush is clearly guilty of high crimes against the Constitution of the United States. It’s time to give this reincarnation of Adolph Hitler exactly what he deserves.
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Twain
Hey Folks,
I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 22nd entry) .
His insights remain pertinent to this day. We haven’t changed much from Twain’s day – or from King Arthur’s, for that matter.
Chapter 39 – In my last report the Yankee’s plan for a bloodless victory over knight-errantry had gone well, defeating all - one after the other - with just the use of a lariat. But then another challenger is announced. It is Sir Sagramour with blood in his eyes and determined to have another go at it, but this time with his broadsword rather than a lance. In the meantime:
“Next, I noticed Merlin gliding away from me; and then I noticed that my lasso was gone! That old sleight-of-hand expert had stolen it, sure, and slipped it under his robe.”
Although Lancelot objects and the king is concerned, the arguments of Sagramour and Merlin, in the end, force the Yankee to face the angry knight without apparent defense.
“The bugle made proclamation, and we turned apart and rode to our stations. There we stood, a hundred yards apart, facing each other, rigid and motionless, like horsed statues. And so we remained, in a soundless hush, as much as a full minute, everybody gazing, nobody stirring. It seemed as if the king could not take heart to give the signal. But at last he lifted his hand, the clear note of the bugle followed, Sir Sagramour’s long blade described a flashing curve in the air, and it was superb to see him come. I sat still. On he came. I did not move. People got so excited that they shouted to me.
‘Fly, fly! Save thyself! This is murther !’
I never budged so much as an inch, till that thundering apparition had got within fifteen paces of me; then I snatched a dragoon revolver out of my holster, there was a flash and a roar, and the revolver was back in the holster before anybody could tell what had happened.
Here was a riderless horse plunging by, and yonder lay Sir Sagramour, stone dead”
The blood had started to flow. - Uke Man
I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 22nd entry) .
His insights remain pertinent to this day. We haven’t changed much from Twain’s day – or from King Arthur’s, for that matter.
Chapter 39 – In my last report the Yankee’s plan for a bloodless victory over knight-errantry had gone well, defeating all - one after the other - with just the use of a lariat. But then another challenger is announced. It is Sir Sagramour with blood in his eyes and determined to have another go at it, but this time with his broadsword rather than a lance. In the meantime:
“Next, I noticed Merlin gliding away from me; and then I noticed that my lasso was gone! That old sleight-of-hand expert had stolen it, sure, and slipped it under his robe.”
Although Lancelot objects and the king is concerned, the arguments of Sagramour and Merlin, in the end, force the Yankee to face the angry knight without apparent defense.
“The bugle made proclamation, and we turned apart and rode to our stations. There we stood, a hundred yards apart, facing each other, rigid and motionless, like horsed statues. And so we remained, in a soundless hush, as much as a full minute, everybody gazing, nobody stirring. It seemed as if the king could not take heart to give the signal. But at last he lifted his hand, the clear note of the bugle followed, Sir Sagramour’s long blade described a flashing curve in the air, and it was superb to see him come. I sat still. On he came. I did not move. People got so excited that they shouted to me.
‘Fly, fly! Save thyself! This is murther !’
I never budged so much as an inch, till that thundering apparition had got within fifteen paces of me; then I snatched a dragoon revolver out of my holster, there was a flash and a roar, and the revolver was back in the holster before anybody could tell what had happened.
Here was a riderless horse plunging by, and yonder lay Sir Sagramour, stone dead”
The blood had started to flow. - Uke Man
This Guy Passed the Proficiency Test
At merit-pay schools EVERYONE does well -
the teachers take the tests
(at least in Texas)
the teachers take the tests
(at least in Texas)
Dispatch Editorial on Merit Pay
Hey Folks
“Merit pay”for teachers is unworkable as a means of improving student performance. In fact, it degrades student performance.
It IS an excellent way to break unions and reduce tax support of schools – which explains why the Columbus Dispatch finds it appealing enough to editorially praise it.
Ironically, the editor, while criticizing schools, stumbled over his own writing skills.
- Uke Man
To the Editor,
I hope whoever wrote the editorial on “merit” pay isn’t on merit pay himself. If so, this month’s check might be cut. His proofreading skills were not meritorious*.
Yours - Tom Harker
* “Together, schools can shape this important idea into a plan will do what everyone wants it to do: encourage improvement and reward the best.”
“Merit pay”for teachers is unworkable as a means of improving student performance. In fact, it degrades student performance.
It IS an excellent way to break unions and reduce tax support of schools – which explains why the Columbus Dispatch finds it appealing enough to editorially praise it.
Ironically, the editor, while criticizing schools, stumbled over his own writing skills.
- Uke Man
To the Editor,
I hope whoever wrote the editorial on “merit” pay isn’t on merit pay himself. If so, this month’s check might be cut. His proofreading skills were not meritorious*.
Yours - Tom Harker
* “Together, schools can shape this important idea into a plan will do what everyone wants it to do: encourage improvement and reward the best.”
Monday, January 23, 2006
Ted Lewis
Hey Folks!
“Is Everybody Happy ???”
Ted Lewis, an entertainer born and raised long ago in Circleville, Ohio went on to true Fame & Fortune in New York, Hollywood, and the world!! This is the 4th installment of a continuing tribute to Ted:
From the internet:
Ted Lewis was signed to Columbia Records, not yet the giant it was to become but still an important label, in 1919, and released his first single, "Wond'ring" b/w "Blues My Naughty Sweety Gives Me," in October of that year. The following year, he introduced and made the first of several recordings of "When My Baby Smiles at Me," which became Lewis' theme song. By the mid '20s, he was one of Columbia's top selling artists and one of the world's top entertainers and band leaders.
Although Lewis often took the role of singer himself, mixing his mournful voice with a pleasing personality, there were some notable exceptions -- Ruth Etting cut sides with him, as did Fats Waller, and in 1926, with Sophie Tucker as vocalist, Lewis had one of the most popular records of the year, "Some of These Days," which became a million seller. A tour of Europe, including engagements at the Hippodrome and the Kit Kat Club in London, solidified his standing internationally, and the band played all of the top venues in Europe on a subsequent tour.
By the end of the '20s, Lewis was so popular and distinctive a musical personality that Columbia devised a customized label design for him, and the silhouette of the bandleader in his top hat now embossed his records. In December of 1929, he signed a new contract with the label guaranteeing him $42,000 plus a royalties on each record pressed, each year for two years. It seemed a bargain to Columbia, for they were getting a great band as well as a popular one.
Hear Sophie Tucker
with Ted's Band - 1926
Click here: http://great-song-stylists-uk.com/Ted%20Lewis/TedLewisSomeOfTheseDays.mp3
“Is Everybody Happy ???”
Ted Lewis, an entertainer born and raised long ago in Circleville, Ohio went on to true Fame & Fortune in New York, Hollywood, and the world!! This is the 4th installment of a continuing tribute to Ted:
From the internet:
Ted Lewis was signed to Columbia Records, not yet the giant it was to become but still an important label, in 1919, and released his first single, "Wond'ring" b/w "Blues My Naughty Sweety Gives Me," in October of that year. The following year, he introduced and made the first of several recordings of "When My Baby Smiles at Me," which became Lewis' theme song. By the mid '20s, he was one of Columbia's top selling artists and one of the world's top entertainers and band leaders.
Although Lewis often took the role of singer himself, mixing his mournful voice with a pleasing personality, there were some notable exceptions -- Ruth Etting cut sides with him, as did Fats Waller, and in 1926, with Sophie Tucker as vocalist, Lewis had one of the most popular records of the year, "Some of These Days," which became a million seller. A tour of Europe, including engagements at the Hippodrome and the Kit Kat Club in London, solidified his standing internationally, and the band played all of the top venues in Europe on a subsequent tour.
By the end of the '20s, Lewis was so popular and distinctive a musical personality that Columbia devised a customized label design for him, and the silhouette of the bandleader in his top hat now embossed his records. In December of 1929, he signed a new contract with the label guaranteeing him $42,000 plus a royalties on each record pressed, each year for two years. It seemed a bargain to Columbia, for they were getting a great band as well as a popular one.
Hear Sophie Tucker
with Ted's Band - 1926
Click here: http://great-song-stylists-uk.com/Ted%20Lewis/TedLewisSomeOfTheseDays.mp3
Challenge Assumptions - Part 2
Hey Folks,
In an earlier posting ( http://www.ukuleleman.net/2006/01/wal-mart-maryland-and-health.html ) I wrote:
“A culture, a society, a civilization are all built on assumptions – arbitrary assumptions that may or may not be based in reality. As long as the assumptions are accepted by almost everyone and as long as they at least appear to be valid, business continues as usual. Those who benefit from the assumptions continue to benefit, and those at the mercy of the assumptions continue to suffer in ignorance and peace, perhaps accepting their lot as god’s plan, or the way it's always been, or the way it’s 'sposed' to be.”But one can challenge assumptions."
Many of the prejudicial assumptions at work in the US of A today present their ugly and arbitrary faces in connection with the situation reported by the AP below.
In future posts I’ll discuss this situation and try to point out a few of the precious little turds our "betters" pawn off as gemstones.
- Uke Man
Jan 13, 10:20 AM EST
Md. Wal-Mart told to boost health care
ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) -- Maryland has become the first state in the nation to require Wal-Mart to spend more on employee health care or pay the difference into the state's Medicaid fund. Similar laws may be coming elsewhere.
The measure approved Thursday requires companies with more than 10,000 Maryland employees to spend at least 8 percent of their payroll on employee health care or pay the difference into the state-supported Medicaid program. Of the state's large employers, only Wal-Mart spends less than 8 percent on health care.
Labor unions, who heavily pushed for the bill, said they would pursue similar legislation in at least 30 other states, focusing first on Colorado, Connecticut and Washington.
"The tide is turning because working people are not just fed up - they are ready to get active to set our country in a different direction, one state at a time," AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said in a statement.
Maryland's Democratic-controlled Legislature overrode a veto by Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich.
Critics of the legislation called it a dangerous precedent that ultimately would cost Maryland jobs.
The company employs about 17,000 Maryland residents at more than 40 Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores, and about 1.3 million people nationwide.
A Wal-Mart executive called the bill a poorly worded mandate for a single company. Mia Masten, a director of corporate affairs, said the bill "could be the beginning of a slippery slope."
In an earlier posting ( http://www.ukuleleman.net/2006/01/wal-mart-maryland-and-health.html ) I wrote:
“A culture, a society, a civilization are all built on assumptions – arbitrary assumptions that may or may not be based in reality. As long as the assumptions are accepted by almost everyone and as long as they at least appear to be valid, business continues as usual. Those who benefit from the assumptions continue to benefit, and those at the mercy of the assumptions continue to suffer in ignorance and peace, perhaps accepting their lot as god’s plan, or the way it's always been, or the way it’s 'sposed' to be.”But one can challenge assumptions."
Many of the prejudicial assumptions at work in the US of A today present their ugly and arbitrary faces in connection with the situation reported by the AP below.
In future posts I’ll discuss this situation and try to point out a few of the precious little turds our "betters" pawn off as gemstones.
- Uke Man
Jan 13, 10:20 AM EST
Md. Wal-Mart told to boost health care
ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) -- Maryland has become the first state in the nation to require Wal-Mart to spend more on employee health care or pay the difference into the state's Medicaid fund. Similar laws may be coming elsewhere.
The measure approved Thursday requires companies with more than 10,000 Maryland employees to spend at least 8 percent of their payroll on employee health care or pay the difference into the state-supported Medicaid program. Of the state's large employers, only Wal-Mart spends less than 8 percent on health care.
Labor unions, who heavily pushed for the bill, said they would pursue similar legislation in at least 30 other states, focusing first on Colorado, Connecticut and Washington.
"The tide is turning because working people are not just fed up - they are ready to get active to set our country in a different direction, one state at a time," AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said in a statement.
Maryland's Democratic-controlled Legislature overrode a veto by Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich.
Critics of the legislation called it a dangerous precedent that ultimately would cost Maryland jobs.
The company employs about 17,000 Maryland residents at more than 40 Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores, and about 1.3 million people nationwide.
A Wal-Mart executive called the bill a poorly worded mandate for a single company. Mia Masten, a director of corporate affairs, said the bill "could be the beginning of a slippery slope."
Yep!! The Economy is Great !!
Ford to Cut 25,000 to 30,000 Jobs by 2012
AP - 23 minutes ago
DEARBORN, Mich. - Ford Motor Co., the nation's second-largest automaker, said Monday that it will cut 25,000 to 30,000 jobs and idle 14 facilities by 2012 as part of a restructuring designed to reverse a $1.6 billion loss last year in its North American operations. The cuts represent 20 percent to 25 percent of Ford's North American work force of 122,000 people. Ford has approximately 87,000 hourly workers and 35,000 salaried workers in the region.
AP - 23 minutes ago
DEARBORN, Mich. - Ford Motor Co., the nation's second-largest automaker, said Monday that it will cut 25,000 to 30,000 jobs and idle 14 facilities by 2012 as part of a restructuring designed to reverse a $1.6 billion loss last year in its North American operations. The cuts represent 20 percent to 25 percent of Ford's North American work force of 122,000 people. Ford has approximately 87,000 hourly workers and 35,000 salaried workers in the region.
WAL-MART, Maryland, and Health
Hey Folks,
When I was 12 or 13, a kid about my age walked down the alley behind my house. I didn’t know him – we went to different schools.
Well, for reasons known only to the “Intelligent" designer of mankind this kid thought it would be fun to fuck with the "fat boy." Without any introduction he started in on me, grinning like the self-satisfied monkey he was.
I was used to such crap, but cruelty always surprises me just the same. The perpetrator was often surprised too - if I could get my hands on him.
The young Republican in question here had correctly guessed that he could outrun the fat kid and, as it turned out, make it safely home ahead of my wrath.
His house was on the next street over, at the end of the block, and he managed to stay ahead of me - spouting nasty taunts all the way - until he triumphantly vaulted up the porch stairs and into his living room - slamming the front door in my face.
I found out later that my new pal was a Boy Scout, but the salute he gave me from behind the door was two fingers short of official. I considered breaking the glass.
Then I tried the door.
The dumbshit hadn’t locked it.
I went in, grabbed him, dragged his nasty self out to the porch, down the stairs, rubbed his cry-baby face in the mud of his mommy’s flour garden, and went home.
* * * *
Now the moral of this story is that people make assumptions. A culture, a society, a civilization are all built on assumptions – arbitrary assumptions that may or may not be based in reality. As long as the assumptions are accepted by almost everyone and as long as they at least appear to be valid, business continues as usual.
Those who benefit from the assumptions continue to benefit, and those at the mercy of the assumptions continue to suffer in ignorance and peace, perhaps accepting their lot as god’s plan, or the way it's always been, or the way it’s “sposed” to be.
But one can challenge assumptions.
The little Eagle Scout* of my story assumed that god made fat boys to torment, and that skinny boys could get away from fat boys by running, and that no one would DARE open the door of one's house – locked or unlocked - and blaspheme the sanctity of sanctuary.
Well, little Lord Skippy was wrong. And he paid for it.
A lot of assumptions are made today about the economy, businesses and employees, capital and labor. These assumptions are arbitrary and benefit certain, small sections of society at the expense of the rest of us. As long as we accept THEIR assumptions, the Skippy’s of the world will be safe in their magic bubbles.
A recent case in point involves health insurance, the state of Maryland, our old pal WAL-MART, the Columbus Dispatch, and George “the Twit” Will. Watch for a commentary.
- Uke Man
* I was an Eagle Scout too; so I had nothing against the Boy Scouts - until I discovered recently that they discriminated against gays and atheists.
When I was 12 or 13, a kid about my age walked down the alley behind my house. I didn’t know him – we went to different schools.
Well, for reasons known only to the “Intelligent" designer of mankind this kid thought it would be fun to fuck with the "fat boy." Without any introduction he started in on me, grinning like the self-satisfied monkey he was.
I was used to such crap, but cruelty always surprises me just the same. The perpetrator was often surprised too - if I could get my hands on him.
The young Republican in question here had correctly guessed that he could outrun the fat kid and, as it turned out, make it safely home ahead of my wrath.
His house was on the next street over, at the end of the block, and he managed to stay ahead of me - spouting nasty taunts all the way - until he triumphantly vaulted up the porch stairs and into his living room - slamming the front door in my face.
I found out later that my new pal was a Boy Scout, but the salute he gave me from behind the door was two fingers short of official. I considered breaking the glass.
Then I tried the door.
The dumbshit hadn’t locked it.
I went in, grabbed him, dragged his nasty self out to the porch, down the stairs, rubbed his cry-baby face in the mud of his mommy’s flour garden, and went home.
* * * *
Now the moral of this story is that people make assumptions. A culture, a society, a civilization are all built on assumptions – arbitrary assumptions that may or may not be based in reality. As long as the assumptions are accepted by almost everyone and as long as they at least appear to be valid, business continues as usual.
Those who benefit from the assumptions continue to benefit, and those at the mercy of the assumptions continue to suffer in ignorance and peace, perhaps accepting their lot as god’s plan, or the way it's always been, or the way it’s “sposed” to be.
But one can challenge assumptions.
The little Eagle Scout* of my story assumed that god made fat boys to torment, and that skinny boys could get away from fat boys by running, and that no one would DARE open the door of one's house – locked or unlocked - and blaspheme the sanctity of sanctuary.
Well, little Lord Skippy was wrong. And he paid for it.
A lot of assumptions are made today about the economy, businesses and employees, capital and labor. These assumptions are arbitrary and benefit certain, small sections of society at the expense of the rest of us. As long as we accept THEIR assumptions, the Skippy’s of the world will be safe in their magic bubbles.
A recent case in point involves health insurance, the state of Maryland, our old pal WAL-MART, the Columbus Dispatch, and George “the Twit” Will. Watch for a commentary.
- Uke Man
* I was an Eagle Scout too; so I had nothing against the Boy Scouts - until I discovered recently that they discriminated against gays and atheists.
Sunday, January 22, 2006
Ted in 1921
It reads: "Hello Folks: You've seen my act here. Now come out after the show and dance to my music at the Edelweiss Gardens from 11:00 P.M. until closing." - Ted Lewis 1921
Ted Lewis
Hey Folks!
“Is Everybody Happy ???”
This is the 4th installment of a continuing tribute to the remarkable Ted Lewis.
- Uke Man
Born Theodore Leopold Friedman in Circleville, Ohio, in 1890 (some sources say 1892), Ted Lewis was the son of the owner of a large clothing emporium. His parents hoped he would go into business, but the younger Friedman, to the horror of his parents, was an indifferent student, and, worse still, was drawn to the life of a performer.
It all started when he discovered the circus as a boy, and by the time he was in his teens, he had some definite ideas about showmanship, and had acquired some above-average basic musicianship with the clarinet. A stint in business school did nothing to make him forget an entertainment career.
By 1906, at age 16, he'd begun working in vaudeville, playing tent shows and other bottom-of-the-bill engagements, and gradually built a reputation for himself. His name change came about through an accident involving his partnership with a fellow named Lewis--an erroneous marquee billing as "Lewis and Lewis" seemed an omen, and he kept the new name imposed on him.
Ted Lewis labored in relative anonymity for most of the '10s, even after arriving in New York. He put his first band -- a five piece called Ted Lewis & His Nut Band -- together in 1916, initially as part of a comedy act. By 1917, he was playing in a band led by pianist Earl Fuller, and then fate played a hand with the arrival of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in New York.
Suddenly, not only was Lewis opened to a new brand of music, but a new opportunity presented itself. The success of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band at a cafe called Reisenweber's turned the latter into the place to be. By sheer luck, Lewis, as part of Fuller's band, was hired by a rival venue, Rector's, to help bring back the customers. It turned out that he not only loved Dixieland jazz, but that, for all of his limitations as a singer, he was appealing in that role, even more so than as a comedian.
The two final ingredients to his new persona were his distinctive top hat -- reportedly won in a bet with a carriage driver -- and the catch-phrase, "Is everybody happy?" He began posing it to his audience at Rectors, and it stuck -- and when Lewis and his band (and he soon had his own band) were playing, the answer was a resounding "Yes!"
50 years later, he was still wearing the top hat and asking the question.
Hear an early recording of Ted's clearly influenced by the Dixieland craze !
Click here:
http://great-song-stylists-uk.com/Ted20Lewis/TedLewisLimehouseBlues.mp3
“Is Everybody Happy ???”
This is the 4th installment of a continuing tribute to the remarkable Ted Lewis.
- Uke Man
Born Theodore Leopold Friedman in Circleville, Ohio, in 1890 (some sources say 1892), Ted Lewis was the son of the owner of a large clothing emporium. His parents hoped he would go into business, but the younger Friedman, to the horror of his parents, was an indifferent student, and, worse still, was drawn to the life of a performer.
It all started when he discovered the circus as a boy, and by the time he was in his teens, he had some definite ideas about showmanship, and had acquired some above-average basic musicianship with the clarinet. A stint in business school did nothing to make him forget an entertainment career.
By 1906, at age 16, he'd begun working in vaudeville, playing tent shows and other bottom-of-the-bill engagements, and gradually built a reputation for himself. His name change came about through an accident involving his partnership with a fellow named Lewis--an erroneous marquee billing as "Lewis and Lewis" seemed an omen, and he kept the new name imposed on him.
Ted Lewis labored in relative anonymity for most of the '10s, even after arriving in New York. He put his first band -- a five piece called Ted Lewis & His Nut Band -- together in 1916, initially as part of a comedy act. By 1917, he was playing in a band led by pianist Earl Fuller, and then fate played a hand with the arrival of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in New York.
Suddenly, not only was Lewis opened to a new brand of music, but a new opportunity presented itself. The success of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band at a cafe called Reisenweber's turned the latter into the place to be. By sheer luck, Lewis, as part of Fuller's band, was hired by a rival venue, Rector's, to help bring back the customers. It turned out that he not only loved Dixieland jazz, but that, for all of his limitations as a singer, he was appealing in that role, even more so than as a comedian.
The two final ingredients to his new persona were his distinctive top hat -- reportedly won in a bet with a carriage driver -- and the catch-phrase, "Is everybody happy?" He began posing it to his audience at Rectors, and it stuck -- and when Lewis and his band (and he soon had his own band) were playing, the answer was a resounding "Yes!"
50 years later, he was still wearing the top hat and asking the question.
Hear an early recording of Ted's clearly influenced by the Dixieland craze !
Click here:
http://great-song-stylists-uk.com/Ted20Lewis/TedLewisLimehouseBlues.mp3
Ted's Hat & Clarinet on display at the Ted Lewis Museum
Open Fridays and Saturdays 1:00 - 5:00 P.M. (and by appointment) in Circleville Ohio - call 740- 477 - 3630 for details.
Quite a time!!
Hey Folks!
The Uke Man is tired!! But happy!!
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday I was playing, singing, and ranting away!!
Two of those nights I was with my musical friends!! It was great to see Pete Cassani again and to hear his music!!
Saturday Pete English, Ty Barnes, and Bobby Starker backed me up and we had a GREAT set!!
The Old Uke Man was pleased!!
Thanks to those of you who were able to come out one of those nights!! And for those who couldn’t, I’ll keep you posted of any future plans.
- Uke Man
The Uke Man is tired!! But happy!!
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday I was playing, singing, and ranting away!!
Two of those nights I was with my musical friends!! It was great to see Pete Cassani again and to hear his music!!
Saturday Pete English, Ty Barnes, and Bobby Starker backed me up and we had a GREAT set!!
The Old Uke Man was pleased!!
Thanks to those of you who were able to come out one of those nights!! And for those who couldn’t, I’ll keep you posted of any future plans.
- Uke Man
Saturday, January 21, 2006
Twain
Hey Folks,
I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 21st entry) .
His insights remain pertinent to this day. We haven’t changed much from Twain’s day – or from King Arthur’s, for that matter.
Chapter 39 - The plot thickens. The Yankee had intended to defeat Sir Sagramour and the other knights who would inevitably enter the lists against him, one after the other, by the harmless use of a lasso. And so he does until Lancelot, the greatest of them all, and the last remaining challenger, takes the field and begins his charge.
“In that moment, down came the Invincible, with the rush of a whirlwind – the courtly world rose to its feet and bent forward – the fateful coils went circling through the air, and before you could wink I was towing Sir Launcelot across the field on his back, and kissing my hand to the storm of waving handkerchiefs and the thunder-crash of applause that greeted me!
Said I to myself, as I coiled my lariat and hung it on my saddle-horn, and sat there drunk with glory, ‘The victory is perfect – no other will venture against me – knight-errantry is dead.” Now imagine my astonishment – and everybody else’s, too – to hear the peculiar bugle call which announces that another competitor is about to enter the lists!”
I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 21st entry) .
His insights remain pertinent to this day. We haven’t changed much from Twain’s day – or from King Arthur’s, for that matter.
Chapter 39 - The plot thickens. The Yankee had intended to defeat Sir Sagramour and the other knights who would inevitably enter the lists against him, one after the other, by the harmless use of a lasso. And so he does until Lancelot, the greatest of them all, and the last remaining challenger, takes the field and begins his charge.
“In that moment, down came the Invincible, with the rush of a whirlwind – the courtly world rose to its feet and bent forward – the fateful coils went circling through the air, and before you could wink I was towing Sir Launcelot across the field on his back, and kissing my hand to the storm of waving handkerchiefs and the thunder-crash of applause that greeted me!
Said I to myself, as I coiled my lariat and hung it on my saddle-horn, and sat there drunk with glory, ‘The victory is perfect – no other will venture against me – knight-errantry is dead.” Now imagine my astonishment – and everybody else’s, too – to hear the peculiar bugle call which announces that another competitor is about to enter the lists!”
Friday, January 20, 2006
Ted Lewis
Hey Folks!
“Is Everybody Happy ???”
Ted Lewis, an entertainer born and raised long ago in Circleville, Ohio went on to true Fame & Fortune in New York, Hollywood, and the world!! This is the 3rd installment of a continuing tribute to Ted:
From the internet:
It's difficult to believe, based on a paltry pair of compact discs of Ted Lewis' music that exist, that from the beginning of the '20s until the mid-'30s, he was one of the most popular music acts in the world, cutting million-selling records when those scarcely happened more than once a year. It's even harder to comprehend that Lewis maintained an active recording, radio, movie, television, and concert career for 50 years, 1917 to 1967, and enjoyed respect from members of the jazz community that was unique for a leader of a dance band. Ted Lewis was never considered a great, or even a good jazz player -- though he was a better player than he got credit for being -- and wasn't taken seriously as a singer (even by Ted Lewis), nor was most of the music that he recorded considered good jazz. For most of the '20s, his biggest decade for record sales, he favored dance and novelty numbers that today evoke the zanier side of the era. Even his catch phrase -- "Is everybody happy?" -- seemed by the end of '30s to be a quaint echo of the so-called Roaring Twenties. He was a figure like Paul Whiteman, but more of a musician, and also resembled Al Jolson, as a personality as much as musician. Lewis also employed an extraordinary array of talented musicians and even a few future legends -- the men who passed through the ranks of his band included Benny Goodman, Jack Teagarden, Muggsy Spanier, Jimmy Dorsey, Frank Teschemacher and George Brunies, and even Fats Waller did a turn with the band.
Hear Fats Waller on piano and vocals with Ted's band !! Click below!
- Uke Man
http://great-song-stylists-uk.com/Ted%20Lewis/ImCrazyBoutMyBaby.mp3
“Is Everybody Happy ???”
Ted Lewis, an entertainer born and raised long ago in Circleville, Ohio went on to true Fame & Fortune in New York, Hollywood, and the world!! This is the 3rd installment of a continuing tribute to Ted:
From the internet:
It's difficult to believe, based on a paltry pair of compact discs of Ted Lewis' music that exist, that from the beginning of the '20s until the mid-'30s, he was one of the most popular music acts in the world, cutting million-selling records when those scarcely happened more than once a year. It's even harder to comprehend that Lewis maintained an active recording, radio, movie, television, and concert career for 50 years, 1917 to 1967, and enjoyed respect from members of the jazz community that was unique for a leader of a dance band. Ted Lewis was never considered a great, or even a good jazz player -- though he was a better player than he got credit for being -- and wasn't taken seriously as a singer (even by Ted Lewis), nor was most of the music that he recorded considered good jazz. For most of the '20s, his biggest decade for record sales, he favored dance and novelty numbers that today evoke the zanier side of the era. Even his catch phrase -- "Is everybody happy?" -- seemed by the end of '30s to be a quaint echo of the so-called Roaring Twenties. He was a figure like Paul Whiteman, but more of a musician, and also resembled Al Jolson, as a personality as much as musician. Lewis also employed an extraordinary array of talented musicians and even a few future legends -- the men who passed through the ranks of his band included Benny Goodman, Jack Teagarden, Muggsy Spanier, Jimmy Dorsey, Frank Teschemacher and George Brunies, and even Fats Waller did a turn with the band.
Hear Fats Waller on piano and vocals with Ted's band !! Click below!
- Uke Man
http://great-song-stylists-uk.com/Ted%20Lewis/ImCrazyBoutMyBaby.mp3
A 3rd Uke Man VIDEO PREVIEW for
Big Show Friday, Jan. 20
Victorians' Midnight Café
(5th Ave. @ Neil)
8:00 - Free/All Ages
Hey Folks!
Here’s a NEW, 3rd video clip of one of the songs on Friday’s set list
http://www.ukulelecabaret.com/?clip=whitehouse#whitehouse
The two previously posted videos are:
http://www.ukuleledisco.com/godbless
http://www.ukuleledisco.com/ukesanity_tom
and check out Pete Cassani’s sounds at:
http://www.thepeasants.net/
Learn about Bob Starker’s Whoa Nellie at:
http://www.whoanellierocks.com/
and check out Bob Fitrakis at:
http://freepress.org
Friday!! Victorians’ Midnight Café*!! Free ! All Ages!!
Ukulele Man and Bob Starker (Whoa Nellie) bring you---Pete Cassani----------extraordinary singer/song-writer/guitar-player ---------Direct from Boston Mass.!!!------AND!!! We are promised an address during the evening by Ohio’s most renowned orator, Columbus’s own Bob Fitrakis, the Green Party candidate for governor, HIMSELF!!
Be there!!!
- Uke Man
(If you can't make this show and are of age, we do it again Saturday at Andyman's Treehouse - 10:00/cover/Whoa Nellie backing Pete)
Victorians' Midnight Café
(5th Ave. @ Neil)
8:00 - Free/All Ages
Hey Folks!
Here’s a NEW, 3rd video clip of one of the songs on Friday’s set list
http://www.ukulelecabaret.com/?clip=whitehouse#whitehouse
The two previously posted videos are:
http://www.ukuleledisco.com/godbless
http://www.ukuleledisco.com/ukesanity_tom
and check out Pete Cassani’s sounds at:
http://www.thepeasants.net/
Learn about Bob Starker’s Whoa Nellie at:
http://www.whoanellierocks.com/
and check out Bob Fitrakis at:
http://freepress.org
Friday!! Victorians’ Midnight Café*!! Free ! All Ages!!
Ukulele Man and Bob Starker (Whoa Nellie) bring you---Pete Cassani----------extraordinary singer/song-writer/guitar-player ---------Direct from Boston Mass.!!!------AND!!! We are promised an address during the evening by Ohio’s most renowned orator, Columbus’s own Bob Fitrakis, the Green Party candidate for governor, HIMSELF!!
Be there!!!
- Uke Man
(If you can't make this show and are of age, we do it again Saturday at Andyman's Treehouse - 10:00/cover/Whoa Nellie backing Pete)
Thursday, January 19, 2006
It's Not just the Uke Man! The Establishment is getting nervous about the Dictator in the White House
Congress should step in to assess abuse-of-power charges against Bush
Thursday, January 19, 2006
DAVID BRODER
Former Vice President Al Gore has turned himself into a one-man grand jury, ready to indict the Bush administration for any number of crimes against the Constitution. Whether you agree with Gore’s conclusions or not, the speech that the 2000 Democratic nominee for president gave earlier this week in Washington was as comprehensive a rundown of President Bush’s ventures to the limits of executive authority as anyone could hope to find.
Gore is hardly an objective observer. Having outpolled Bush in the popular vote only to see his apparent victory taken from him by a divided Supreme Court, Gore cannot be expected to be dispassionate about the way Bush is operating as president. His speech is only an indictment. The proof of the charges can come only in congressional hearings and, ultimately, in the courts.
But even after discounting for political motivations, it seems to me that Gore has done a service by laying out the case as clearly and copiously as he has done. His overall charge is that Bush has systematically broken the laws and bent the Constitution by his actions in the national-security and domestic anti-terrorism areas. He is not the first to make that complaint. My e-mail has included many messages from people who have leaped far ahead of the evidence and concluded that Bush should be impeached and removed from office for actions they deem to be illegal.
Gore stops well short of that point and contents himself with citing the cases that cause many others concern. The first and, to my mind, weakest instance is the claim that Bush took the nation to war on the basis of false intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. But there is no clear evidence as yet that Bush willfully concocted or knowingly distorted the intelligence he received about Saddam Hussein’s military programs. Interpretations of that intelligence varied within the government, but the Clinton administration, of which Gore was an important part, came to the same conclusions that Bush did – and so did other governments in the Western alliance.
It is a reach to attempt to make a crime of a policy misjudgment.
But the other cases cited by Gore are more troubling. The Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal, for which only low-level military personnel have been punished, traces back through higher and untouched levels of command to the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the White House, all of which failed in their duties to assure that the occupation forces were adhering to recognized international standards for the treatment of prisoners.
Similarly, the administration’s resistance to setting and enforcing clear prohibitions on torture and inhumane treatment of detainees in the war on terrorism raises legitimate questions about its willingness to adhere to the rule of law. From the first days after 9/11, Bush has appeared to believe that he is essentially unconstrained. His oddly equivocal recent signing statement on Sen. John McCain’s legislation banning such tactics seemed to say he could ignore the plain terms of the law.
If Judge Samuel Alito is right that "no one is above the law," then Bush’s supposition deserves to be challenged.
Gore’s final example, on which he has lots of company among legal scholars, is the contention that Bush broke the law in ordering the National Security Agency to monitor domestic phone calls without a warrant from the court Congress had created to supervise all such wiretapping. If, as the Justice Department and the White House insist, the president can flout that law, then it is hard to imagine what power he cannot assert.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter has summoned Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to a hearing on the warrantless wiretap issue, and that hearing should be the occasion for a broad exploration of the willingness of this administration to be constrained by the Constitution and the laws.
The committee should keep the attorney general on the witness stand as long as it takes – as long as it spent examining the qualifications of Judge Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts, if it comes to that. The stakes for the country are that important.
Gore is certainly right about one thing. When he challenged the members of Congress to "start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of government you’re supposed to be," he was issuing a call of conscience that goes well beyond any partisan criticism.
David S. Broder writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.
davidbroder@washpost.com
Thursday, January 19, 2006
DAVID BRODER
Former Vice President Al Gore has turned himself into a one-man grand jury, ready to indict the Bush administration for any number of crimes against the Constitution. Whether you agree with Gore’s conclusions or not, the speech that the 2000 Democratic nominee for president gave earlier this week in Washington was as comprehensive a rundown of President Bush’s ventures to the limits of executive authority as anyone could hope to find.
Gore is hardly an objective observer. Having outpolled Bush in the popular vote only to see his apparent victory taken from him by a divided Supreme Court, Gore cannot be expected to be dispassionate about the way Bush is operating as president. His speech is only an indictment. The proof of the charges can come only in congressional hearings and, ultimately, in the courts.
But even after discounting for political motivations, it seems to me that Gore has done a service by laying out the case as clearly and copiously as he has done. His overall charge is that Bush has systematically broken the laws and bent the Constitution by his actions in the national-security and domestic anti-terrorism areas. He is not the first to make that complaint. My e-mail has included many messages from people who have leaped far ahead of the evidence and concluded that Bush should be impeached and removed from office for actions they deem to be illegal.
Gore stops well short of that point and contents himself with citing the cases that cause many others concern. The first and, to my mind, weakest instance is the claim that Bush took the nation to war on the basis of false intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. But there is no clear evidence as yet that Bush willfully concocted or knowingly distorted the intelligence he received about Saddam Hussein’s military programs. Interpretations of that intelligence varied within the government, but the Clinton administration, of which Gore was an important part, came to the same conclusions that Bush did – and so did other governments in the Western alliance.
It is a reach to attempt to make a crime of a policy misjudgment.
But the other cases cited by Gore are more troubling. The Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal, for which only low-level military personnel have been punished, traces back through higher and untouched levels of command to the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the White House, all of which failed in their duties to assure that the occupation forces were adhering to recognized international standards for the treatment of prisoners.
Similarly, the administration’s resistance to setting and enforcing clear prohibitions on torture and inhumane treatment of detainees in the war on terrorism raises legitimate questions about its willingness to adhere to the rule of law. From the first days after 9/11, Bush has appeared to believe that he is essentially unconstrained. His oddly equivocal recent signing statement on Sen. John McCain’s legislation banning such tactics seemed to say he could ignore the plain terms of the law.
If Judge Samuel Alito is right that "no one is above the law," then Bush’s supposition deserves to be challenged.
Gore’s final example, on which he has lots of company among legal scholars, is the contention that Bush broke the law in ordering the National Security Agency to monitor domestic phone calls without a warrant from the court Congress had created to supervise all such wiretapping. If, as the Justice Department and the White House insist, the president can flout that law, then it is hard to imagine what power he cannot assert.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter has summoned Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to a hearing on the warrantless wiretap issue, and that hearing should be the occasion for a broad exploration of the willingness of this administration to be constrained by the Constitution and the laws.
The committee should keep the attorney general on the witness stand as long as it takes – as long as it spent examining the qualifications of Judge Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts, if it comes to that. The stakes for the country are that important.
Gore is certainly right about one thing. When he challenged the members of Congress to "start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of government you’re supposed to be," he was issuing a call of conscience that goes well beyond any partisan criticism.
David S. Broder writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.
davidbroder@washpost.com
Hey! I'll be doing a few songs at the Vic's open stage tonight to promo the Fri. Show
Open Stage starts at 8:00 (W. 5th at Neil)Drop by tonight if you can't make it Fri. or Sat
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Twain - The trouble begins
Hey Folks,
I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 20th entry) .His insights remain pertinent to this day. We haven’t changed much from Twain’s day – or from King Arthur’s, for that matter.
Chapter 39 – The trouble begins. This novel has been called “the longest sustained invective in the English language.” To this point Twain has been savagely critical of innumerable human traits, most often as demonstrated by those benighted folks around the Yankee, but also as demonstrated now and then by the Yankee himself.
If you’ve been reading along with this continuing saga of excerpts, you may remember from the #8 posting:
“I rather wished I had gone some other road. This was not the sort of experience for a statesman to encounter who was planning a peaceful revolution in his mind. For it could not help bringing up the ungetaroundable fact that, all gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in this world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed, must BEGIN in blood, whatever may answer afterward. If history teaches anything, it teaches that. What this folk needed, then, was a Reign of Terror and a guillotine, and I was the wrong man for them.”
The Yankee wanted a bloodless revolution. Throughout the story he had taken steps to bring down the nobility and knight-errantry via subtle ridicule and debasement – having some wear sandwich boards advertising mundane things like tooth brushes, having others riding about selling stove polish (before stoves even existed), selling soap, and having others sell top-hats – which they wore instead of helmets. The idea was to gradually work them away from all the class, superstitious, and prejudicial aspects that oppressed the vast mass of people which actually WAS the nation.
In the Yankee’s confrontation with Sir Sagramour Le Deserious, the Yankee’s intentions are made perfectly clear and the stakes are raised as well:
“Up to the day set, there was no talk in all Britain of anything but this combat. All other topics sank into insignificance and passed out of men’s thoughts and interest. . . there was abundant reason for the extraordinary interest which this coming fight was creating. It was born of the fact that all the nation knew that this was not to be a duel between mere men, so to speak, but a duel between two mighty magicians; a duel not of muscle but of mind, not of human skill but of super human art and craft; a final struggle for supremacy between the two master enchanters of the age. . . Yes, all the world knew it was going to be in reality a duel between Merlin and me, a measuring of his magic powers against mine. . . Merlin had been busy whole days and nights together, imbuing Sir Sagramour’s arms and armor with supernatural powers of offence and defense. . .
So the world thought there was a vast matter at stake here, and the world was right; but it was not the one they had in their minds. No, a far vaster one was upon the cast of the die: THE LIFE OF KNIGHT-ERRANTRY. I was a champion, it was true, but not the champion of the frivolous black arts, I was champion of hard, unsentimental, common-sense and reason. I was entering the lists to either destroy knight-errantry or be its victim.”
I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 20th entry) .His insights remain pertinent to this day. We haven’t changed much from Twain’s day – or from King Arthur’s, for that matter.
Chapter 39 – The trouble begins. This novel has been called “the longest sustained invective in the English language.” To this point Twain has been savagely critical of innumerable human traits, most often as demonstrated by those benighted folks around the Yankee, but also as demonstrated now and then by the Yankee himself.
If you’ve been reading along with this continuing saga of excerpts, you may remember from the #8 posting:
“I rather wished I had gone some other road. This was not the sort of experience for a statesman to encounter who was planning a peaceful revolution in his mind. For it could not help bringing up the ungetaroundable fact that, all gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in this world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed, must BEGIN in blood, whatever may answer afterward. If history teaches anything, it teaches that. What this folk needed, then, was a Reign of Terror and a guillotine, and I was the wrong man for them.”
The Yankee wanted a bloodless revolution. Throughout the story he had taken steps to bring down the nobility and knight-errantry via subtle ridicule and debasement – having some wear sandwich boards advertising mundane things like tooth brushes, having others riding about selling stove polish (before stoves even existed), selling soap, and having others sell top-hats – which they wore instead of helmets. The idea was to gradually work them away from all the class, superstitious, and prejudicial aspects that oppressed the vast mass of people which actually WAS the nation.
In the Yankee’s confrontation with Sir Sagramour Le Deserious, the Yankee’s intentions are made perfectly clear and the stakes are raised as well:
“Up to the day set, there was no talk in all Britain of anything but this combat. All other topics sank into insignificance and passed out of men’s thoughts and interest. . . there was abundant reason for the extraordinary interest which this coming fight was creating. It was born of the fact that all the nation knew that this was not to be a duel between mere men, so to speak, but a duel between two mighty magicians; a duel not of muscle but of mind, not of human skill but of super human art and craft; a final struggle for supremacy between the two master enchanters of the age. . . Yes, all the world knew it was going to be in reality a duel between Merlin and me, a measuring of his magic powers against mine. . . Merlin had been busy whole days and nights together, imbuing Sir Sagramour’s arms and armor with supernatural powers of offence and defense. . .
So the world thought there was a vast matter at stake here, and the world was right; but it was not the one they had in their minds. No, a far vaster one was upon the cast of the die: THE LIFE OF KNIGHT-ERRANTRY. I was a champion, it was true, but not the champion of the frivolous black arts, I was champion of hard, unsentimental, common-sense and reason. I was entering the lists to either destroy knight-errantry or be its victim.”
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
David Brooks unintentionally spills the beans on Republicans
Hey Folks,
Yeah, at the polls Republicans are winners, and Democrats are losers – just ask David Brooks, conservative dullard of the New York Times – and he’ll tell you why – and he won’t even blush. He’s so deluded by his right-wing rhetoric that he’s blind to the inhumanity, callousness, and “Un-American”/”Un-Christian” nature of his position.
Simply put, Brooks explains the Democrats’ historical problem as losing the support of late 60’s ethnic middle-class and lower-middle-class whites who were, as HE says, “anti-Negro” and “anti-youth.”
According to Brooks, Democrats “repelled” these voters by opposing police brutality, challenging Archie Bunker type biases, advocating peace rather than war (the Viet Nam war), questioning authority, seeking a just society, and working to overcome poverty. The Republicans wisely avoided such nonsense.
According to Brooks the “problem” continues through today and was apparent in the Alito hearings. By his analysis “police brutality,” what he calls the “hawk-dove divide,” race, and – saints preserve us - deportment are the issues explaining Republican “superiority.”
Evil Democrats at the hearings worried about innocent Americans being harassed; worried about Gestapo tactics and star-chamber justice; they were concerned by the threat of overzealous counter- terrorists trampling our constitutional rights. Republicans didn’t care about that. According to Brooks, they were more concerned with cracking heads - to make an omelette you have to break a few heads!
Pretending, then, that there was no way to fight terrorism without abuses - those feared by Democrats and benignly ignored by Republicans, Brooks writes:
“If forced to choose, most Americans side with the party that errs on the side of the cops, not the criminals.” Again, Republicans wisely avoided any "nuance" over whether cops might be able to do their jobs while also behaving responsibly. Nope. To make an omelette, you gotta break a few heads!
He goes even farther-out trying to equate concern over the degree, nature, and effect of the “anti-terrorist” police action with the “hawk-dove” issue. He again assumes a mutually-exclusive choice:
“ If forced to choose, most Americans want a party that will fight aggressively against the terrorists, not the National Security Agency.” As if those concerned with maintaining our rights are unconcerned about our safety or with fighting terrorists.
The most outrageous sophistry, however is his comment on race:
“Then there were the old accusations of bigotry. Kennedy misleadingly and maliciously asserted that Alito had never written a decision on behalf of a black American. But those wild accusations don’t carry weight any more. Rich liberals have been calling white ethnics bigots for 40 years.”
Right! If “rich liberals” accuse Republican bigots of bigotry, it CAN’T be true (never mind the facts or what poor liberals say). Moreover, he brazenly makes this assertion after claiming earlier that Democrats weren’t “anti-Negro” enough to compete with Republicans.
Then there’s deportment and “demeanor”:
“Finally, and most important, there is the question of demeanor [MOST important???]. Alito is a paragon of the old-fashioned working-class ethic [does Alito remind you of any “old-fashioned working-class” person you’ve ever known?]. In a culture of self-aggrandizement, Alito is modest [hiding his true colors]. In a culture of self-exposure, Alito is reticent [hiding his true colors]. In a culture of made-for-TV sentimentalism, Alito refuses to emote [cold blooded, Alito has delegated “emoting” to his wife]. In a culture that celebrates the rebel, or the fashionable pseudorebel, Alito respects tradition, order and authority” [yep, keep the rabble in its place – walk softly and carry a big stick].
Well, there you have it – straight from the horse’s orifice. Democrats are losers because they aren’t enough like Republicans.
In his naiveté Brooks lays out what Republicans truly DO represent, and it’s not a pretty picture. Unfortunately, if he is correct in his analysis of the electorate, how many W-supporters will see themselves in that picture?
If the American people are as stupid as Brooks claims they are, Mencken was way too easy on us.
- Uke Man
The Brooks op-ed piece:
Democrats’ transition to minority views separates them from Alito
Friday, January 13, 2006
DAVID BROOKS
If he’d been born a little earlier, Samuel Alito probably would have been a Democrat. In the 1950s, the middle-class and lower-middle-class whites in places such as Trenton, N.J., where Alito grew up, were the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.
But by the late 1960s, cultural politics replaced New Deal politics, and liberal Democrats did their best to repel Northern white ethnic voters. Big-city liberals launched crusades against police brutality, portraying working-class cops as thuggish storm troopers for the establishment. In the media, educated liberals portrayed urban ethnics as uncultured, uneducated Archie Bunkers.
The liberals were doves; the ethnics were hawks. The liberals had "Question Authority" bumper stickers; the ethnics had been taught in school to respect authority. The liberals thought an unjust society caused poverty; the ethnics believed in working their way out of poverty.
Alito emerged from his middleclass neighborhood about that time, made it to Princeton University and found "very privileged people behaving irresponsibly."
Alito wanted to learn; the richer liberals wanted to strike. He wanted to join ROTC; the liberal Princetonians expelled it from campus. He was orderly and respectful; they were disorderly and disrespectful. The experience was so searing that he mentioned it in the opening of his confirmation hearing 37 years later.
In 1971, Fred Dutton, an important Democratic strategist, acknowledged the rift between educated liberals and the white working class. In a short book, Changing Sources of Power, Dutton argued that white workers had "tended, in fact, to become a major redoubt of traditional Americanism and of the anti-Negro, anti-youth vote."
The New Deal coalition, including Catholics and white ethnics, was dying, he argued, and should be replaced by a "loose peace coalition" of young people, educated suburbanites, feminists and blacks.
That plan wasn’t stupid, but it didn’t work. The party has been in a downward spiral ever since. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., lost the white working class by 23 percentage points. He lost among his fellow Catholics. He lost the election.
After every defeat, Democrats vow to reconnect with middle-class whites. But if there is one lesson of the Alito hearings, it is that the Democratic Party continues to repel those voters just as vigorously as ever. The Democrats have amply shown why they remain the party of gown, but not of town.
First, there was the old subject of police brutality. If you listened to the questions of Sen. Jeff Sessions, RAla., you heard a man exercised by the terror drug dealers can inflict on a neighborhood. If you listened to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., you heard a man exercised by the terror law enforcement officials can inflict on a neighborhood. Kennedy railed against "Gestapo-like" tactics. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., accused Alito of rendering decisions in a "light most favorable to law enforcement."
If forced to choose, most Americans side with the party that errs on the side of the cops, not the criminals.
Then there was the old hawk-dove divide. If you listened to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., you heard a man alarmed by the threats posed by anti-American terrorists. If you listened to Leahy or Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., you heard men alarmed by the threats posed by American counterterrorists. The Democratic questions implied that American counterterrorists are guilty until proved innocent, that a police state is being born.
If forced to choose, most Americans want a party that will fight aggressively against the terrorists, not the National Security Agency.
Then there were the old accusations of bigotry. Kennedy misleadingly and maliciously asserted that Alito had never written a decision on behalf of a black American. But those wild accusations don’t carry weight any more. Rich liberals have been calling white ethnics bigots for 40 years.
Finally, and most important, there is the question of demeanor. Alito is a paragon of the old-fashioned working-class ethic. In a culture of self-aggrandizement, Alito is modest. In a culture of self-exposure, Alito is reticent. In a culture of made-for-TV sentimentalism, Alito refuses to emote. In a culture that celebrates the rebel, or the fashionable pseudorebel, Alito respects tradition, order and authority.
What sort of party doesn’t admire these virtues in a judge?
The big story of American politics, which was underlined by every hour of the Alito hearings, is that sometime between 1932 and 1968, the DNA of the Democratic Party fundamentally changed. In 1932, the Democrats had working-class DNA. Today, the Democrats have a different DNA, the DNA of a minority party.
David Brooks writes for The New York Times.
dabrooks@nytimes.com
Yeah, at the polls Republicans are winners, and Democrats are losers – just ask David Brooks, conservative dullard of the New York Times – and he’ll tell you why – and he won’t even blush. He’s so deluded by his right-wing rhetoric that he’s blind to the inhumanity, callousness, and “Un-American”/”Un-Christian” nature of his position.
Simply put, Brooks explains the Democrats’ historical problem as losing the support of late 60’s ethnic middle-class and lower-middle-class whites who were, as HE says, “anti-Negro” and “anti-youth.”
According to Brooks, Democrats “repelled” these voters by opposing police brutality, challenging Archie Bunker type biases, advocating peace rather than war (the Viet Nam war), questioning authority, seeking a just society, and working to overcome poverty. The Republicans wisely avoided such nonsense.
According to Brooks the “problem” continues through today and was apparent in the Alito hearings. By his analysis “police brutality,” what he calls the “hawk-dove divide,” race, and – saints preserve us - deportment are the issues explaining Republican “superiority.”
Evil Democrats at the hearings worried about innocent Americans being harassed; worried about Gestapo tactics and star-chamber justice; they were concerned by the threat of overzealous counter- terrorists trampling our constitutional rights. Republicans didn’t care about that. According to Brooks, they were more concerned with cracking heads - to make an omelette you have to break a few heads!
Pretending, then, that there was no way to fight terrorism without abuses - those feared by Democrats and benignly ignored by Republicans, Brooks writes:
“If forced to choose, most Americans side with the party that errs on the side of the cops, not the criminals.” Again, Republicans wisely avoided any "nuance" over whether cops might be able to do their jobs while also behaving responsibly. Nope. To make an omelette, you gotta break a few heads!
He goes even farther-out trying to equate concern over the degree, nature, and effect of the “anti-terrorist” police action with the “hawk-dove” issue. He again assumes a mutually-exclusive choice:
“ If forced to choose, most Americans want a party that will fight aggressively against the terrorists, not the National Security Agency.” As if those concerned with maintaining our rights are unconcerned about our safety or with fighting terrorists.
The most outrageous sophistry, however is his comment on race:
“Then there were the old accusations of bigotry. Kennedy misleadingly and maliciously asserted that Alito had never written a decision on behalf of a black American. But those wild accusations don’t carry weight any more. Rich liberals have been calling white ethnics bigots for 40 years.”
Right! If “rich liberals” accuse Republican bigots of bigotry, it CAN’T be true (never mind the facts or what poor liberals say). Moreover, he brazenly makes this assertion after claiming earlier that Democrats weren’t “anti-Negro” enough to compete with Republicans.
Then there’s deportment and “demeanor”:
“Finally, and most important, there is the question of demeanor [MOST important???]. Alito is a paragon of the old-fashioned working-class ethic [does Alito remind you of any “old-fashioned working-class” person you’ve ever known?]. In a culture of self-aggrandizement, Alito is modest [hiding his true colors]. In a culture of self-exposure, Alito is reticent [hiding his true colors]. In a culture of made-for-TV sentimentalism, Alito refuses to emote [cold blooded, Alito has delegated “emoting” to his wife]. In a culture that celebrates the rebel, or the fashionable pseudorebel, Alito respects tradition, order and authority” [yep, keep the rabble in its place – walk softly and carry a big stick].
Well, there you have it – straight from the horse’s orifice. Democrats are losers because they aren’t enough like Republicans.
In his naiveté Brooks lays out what Republicans truly DO represent, and it’s not a pretty picture. Unfortunately, if he is correct in his analysis of the electorate, how many W-supporters will see themselves in that picture?
If the American people are as stupid as Brooks claims they are, Mencken was way too easy on us.
- Uke Man
The Brooks op-ed piece:
Democrats’ transition to minority views separates them from Alito
Friday, January 13, 2006
DAVID BROOKS
If he’d been born a little earlier, Samuel Alito probably would have been a Democrat. In the 1950s, the middle-class and lower-middle-class whites in places such as Trenton, N.J., where Alito grew up, were the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.
But by the late 1960s, cultural politics replaced New Deal politics, and liberal Democrats did their best to repel Northern white ethnic voters. Big-city liberals launched crusades against police brutality, portraying working-class cops as thuggish storm troopers for the establishment. In the media, educated liberals portrayed urban ethnics as uncultured, uneducated Archie Bunkers.
The liberals were doves; the ethnics were hawks. The liberals had "Question Authority" bumper stickers; the ethnics had been taught in school to respect authority. The liberals thought an unjust society caused poverty; the ethnics believed in working their way out of poverty.
Alito emerged from his middleclass neighborhood about that time, made it to Princeton University and found "very privileged people behaving irresponsibly."
Alito wanted to learn; the richer liberals wanted to strike. He wanted to join ROTC; the liberal Princetonians expelled it from campus. He was orderly and respectful; they were disorderly and disrespectful. The experience was so searing that he mentioned it in the opening of his confirmation hearing 37 years later.
In 1971, Fred Dutton, an important Democratic strategist, acknowledged the rift between educated liberals and the white working class. In a short book, Changing Sources of Power, Dutton argued that white workers had "tended, in fact, to become a major redoubt of traditional Americanism and of the anti-Negro, anti-youth vote."
The New Deal coalition, including Catholics and white ethnics, was dying, he argued, and should be replaced by a "loose peace coalition" of young people, educated suburbanites, feminists and blacks.
That plan wasn’t stupid, but it didn’t work. The party has been in a downward spiral ever since. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., lost the white working class by 23 percentage points. He lost among his fellow Catholics. He lost the election.
After every defeat, Democrats vow to reconnect with middle-class whites. But if there is one lesson of the Alito hearings, it is that the Democratic Party continues to repel those voters just as vigorously as ever. The Democrats have amply shown why they remain the party of gown, but not of town.
First, there was the old subject of police brutality. If you listened to the questions of Sen. Jeff Sessions, RAla., you heard a man exercised by the terror drug dealers can inflict on a neighborhood. If you listened to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., you heard a man exercised by the terror law enforcement officials can inflict on a neighborhood. Kennedy railed against "Gestapo-like" tactics. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., accused Alito of rendering decisions in a "light most favorable to law enforcement."
If forced to choose, most Americans side with the party that errs on the side of the cops, not the criminals.
Then there was the old hawk-dove divide. If you listened to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., you heard a man alarmed by the threats posed by anti-American terrorists. If you listened to Leahy or Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., you heard men alarmed by the threats posed by American counterterrorists. The Democratic questions implied that American counterterrorists are guilty until proved innocent, that a police state is being born.
If forced to choose, most Americans want a party that will fight aggressively against the terrorists, not the National Security Agency.
Then there were the old accusations of bigotry. Kennedy misleadingly and maliciously asserted that Alito had never written a decision on behalf of a black American. But those wild accusations don’t carry weight any more. Rich liberals have been calling white ethnics bigots for 40 years.
Finally, and most important, there is the question of demeanor. Alito is a paragon of the old-fashioned working-class ethic. In a culture of self-aggrandizement, Alito is modest. In a culture of self-exposure, Alito is reticent. In a culture of made-for-TV sentimentalism, Alito refuses to emote. In a culture that celebrates the rebel, or the fashionable pseudorebel, Alito respects tradition, order and authority.
What sort of party doesn’t admire these virtues in a judge?
The big story of American politics, which was underlined by every hour of the Alito hearings, is that sometime between 1932 and 1968, the DNA of the Democratic Party fundamentally changed. In 1932, the Democrats had working-class DNA. Today, the Democrats have a different DNA, the DNA of a minority party.
David Brooks writes for The New York Times.
dabrooks@nytimes.com
Ted Lewis
Hey Folks!
“Is Everybody Happy ???”
Ted Lewis, an entertainer born and raised long ago in Circleville, Ohio went on to true Fame & Fortune in New York, Hollywood, and the world!! This is the 2nd installment of a continuing tribute to Ted:
From the CD Cover/book “Ted Lewis – The Pied Piper of Happiness”:
Ted Lewis was an unlikely success. Although he considered himself a jazz musician, his clarinet and alto playing never rose above the primitive level. He was thought of as a singer yet Lewis generally spoke rather than sang the lyrics. While the public in the Twenties may have considered him to be one of the symbols of the Jazz Age, Lewis’ sentimental narratives looked nostalgically back at an earlier era. Yet despite his limitations, Ted Lewis became a millionaire early on (at least as far back as the Thirties), and was a major attraction for over thirty years. His most famous physical trademarks: tuxedo, top hat and cane are still remembered today.
From the Uke Man:
I believe it was Ted Lewis’s warm and caring persona that made him a millionaire. "Sentimental" and "nostalgic" or not, he was just what everyone (at least the masses of "regular folks") needed during those very hard times.
And here’s some evidence. Give a listen:
http://great-song-stylists-uk.com/Ted%20Lewis/IsEverybodyHappyNow.mp3
“Is Everybody Happy ???”
Ted Lewis, an entertainer born and raised long ago in Circleville, Ohio went on to true Fame & Fortune in New York, Hollywood, and the world!! This is the 2nd installment of a continuing tribute to Ted:
From the CD Cover/book “Ted Lewis – The Pied Piper of Happiness”:
Ted Lewis was an unlikely success. Although he considered himself a jazz musician, his clarinet and alto playing never rose above the primitive level. He was thought of as a singer yet Lewis generally spoke rather than sang the lyrics. While the public in the Twenties may have considered him to be one of the symbols of the Jazz Age, Lewis’ sentimental narratives looked nostalgically back at an earlier era. Yet despite his limitations, Ted Lewis became a millionaire early on (at least as far back as the Thirties), and was a major attraction for over thirty years. His most famous physical trademarks: tuxedo, top hat and cane are still remembered today.
From the Uke Man:
I believe it was Ted Lewis’s warm and caring persona that made him a millionaire. "Sentimental" and "nostalgic" or not, he was just what everyone (at least the masses of "regular folks") needed during those very hard times.
And here’s some evidence. Give a listen:
http://great-song-stylists-uk.com/Ted%20Lewis/IsEverybodyHappyNow.mp3
Monday, January 16, 2006
Twain on the nature of Charities
Hey Folks,
I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 19th entry) .
His insights remain pertinent to this day. We haven’t changed much from Twain’s day – or from King Arthur’s, for that matter.
Chapter 39 – The Yankee is forced to joust with Sir Sagramour Le Deserious who has been festering for years over an imagined insult. The newspaper (another of the Yankee’s innovations) covered the story. In promoting the event it offers commentary upon the nature of “charities” (which also expresses why the Uke Man thinks society as a whole – not charities – should address society’s ills).
The box office will be open at noon of the 13th; admission 3 cents, reserved seats 5; proceeds go to the hospital fund. The royal pair and all the Court will be present. With these exceptions, and the press and the clergy, the free list is strictly suspended. Parties are hereby warned against buying tickets of speculators;they will not be good at the door. Everybody knows and likes The Boss, everybody knows and likes Sir Sag; come, let us give the lads a good send-off. Remember, the proceeds go to a great and free charity, and one whose broad benevolence stretches out its helping hand, warm with the blood of a loving heart, to all that suffer, regardless of race, creed, condition or color – the only charity yet established in the earth which has no politico-religious stop-cock on its compassion, but says Here flows the stream, let all come and drink!
I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 19th entry) .
His insights remain pertinent to this day. We haven’t changed much from Twain’s day – or from King Arthur’s, for that matter.
Chapter 39 – The Yankee is forced to joust with Sir Sagramour Le Deserious who has been festering for years over an imagined insult. The newspaper (another of the Yankee’s innovations) covered the story. In promoting the event it offers commentary upon the nature of “charities” (which also expresses why the Uke Man thinks society as a whole – not charities – should address society’s ills).
The box office will be open at noon of the 13th; admission 3 cents, reserved seats 5; proceeds go to the hospital fund. The royal pair and all the Court will be present. With these exceptions, and the press and the clergy, the free list is strictly suspended. Parties are hereby warned against buying tickets of speculators;they will not be good at the door. Everybody knows and likes The Boss, everybody knows and likes Sir Sag; come, let us give the lads a good send-off. Remember, the proceeds go to a great and free charity, and one whose broad benevolence stretches out its helping hand, warm with the blood of a loving heart, to all that suffer, regardless of race, creed, condition or color – the only charity yet established in the earth which has no politico-religious stop-cock on its compassion, but says Here flows the stream, let all come and drink!
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
When Dr. King demanded racial justice, they attacked his followers – men, women, and children – with vicious German Shepherds, fire hoses, and clubs. They arrested Dr. King, jailed him, smeared him, tapped his phone, and sabotaged his efforts.
When Dr. King demanded economic justice, they murdered him.
If the Second Coming is nigh, as some say, they’ll murder Jesus too.
- Uke Man
When Dr. King demanded economic justice, they murdered him.
If the Second Coming is nigh, as some say, they’ll murder Jesus too.
- Uke Man
Sunday, January 15, 2006
Bush & Hitler the comparison some don't want made
Drawing Lessons for Today from Hitler's Rise
Sunsara Taylor
Revolution #029, January 8, 2006, posted at revcom.us
"People look at all of this and think of Hitler, and they are right to do so. The Bush regime is setting out to radically remake the world, in a fascist way, and for generations to come."
---From the Call for The World Can't Wait - Drive Out the Bush Regime
"The Bush Administration is the most dangerous force that has ever existed. It is more dangerous than Nazi Germany because of the range and depth of its activities and its intentions worldwide. I give my full support to the Call to Drive Out the Bush Regime."
----------------------Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate of Literature
Each time people attempt to draw lessons for today from the rise of Nazi Germany, hysterical pundits and politicians break into a chorus of condemnations. When Congressman Dick Durbin suggested that the accounts of Guantanamo could easily have been describing Nazi prisons, he was forced to tearfully apologize on the floor of the Congress. And not long ago, when The World Can't Wait Drive Out the Bush Regime ran a paid full-page ad in the New York Times, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly blew a gasket and argued that the Times should have refused the ad because it included this comparison.
Even among those who hate the Bush regime, many feel that making this comparison is too extreme.
But the question must be asked, is it true? Are there similarities that merit recognition? How did a nation of millions come to widely embrace and otherwise go along with Hitler's openly genocidal, brutally misogynistic, virulently racist, hatefully anti-gay regime?
FOLLOW THE LOGIC OF THE LOGIC
It is easy to look back today and believe that the Nazis were a unique evil without parallel. But during their rise it was very controversial for people to correctly identify the direction and the logic of society as it became dominated by the Nazis, a once-fringe group of extremists. Even after the first nationwide action where Nazi Brownshirts were posted at Jewish businesses, it was still the case that, in the words of one observer, "the majority of the people on the street were inclined to treat the matter as more or less of a joke."
And despite the Nazis increasing dominance over society and their long history of fierce anti-communism and anti-Semitism, when the escalation of terror would taper off for a while people would tell themselves that the worst was over. For instance, while 60,000 Jews left Germany during 1933 and 1934, by mid-1935 10,000 of them returned. All the way to the gates of the death camps, people took false comfort in the assumption that such things "could never happen here."
People also told themselves that the traditions of a nation that had given the world Beethoven, Kant, and Marx, could never do such a thing. They told themselves that the real powers in Germany were merely using Hitler and would never let him do anything really destructive.
While the Nazis certainly didn't harbor any moral qualms with it, they did not actually start out with a plan for mass extermination of Jews. Their first years of terror were aimed at annihilating the communists (whom they correctly saw as a political threat) and other political dissidents and at forcing Jews out of public life. It was not until 1941, eight years after Hitler became Chancellor, and after Hitler launched WWII, that the Nazis began systematically killing prisoners and Jews. It wasn't until January 1942 that the "Final Solution" was discussed by the Nazis at the Wannsee Conference and another six months before the gas chambers were in operation that took the lives of millions. Still, the logic and moral justification for such a program was discernible even in the early days.
Today, as in Nazi Germany, when political rhetoric is extreme and even barbaric, this is not a reason to dismiss it but to take it on all the more seriously, especially when it is gaining influence.
FALSE CLAIMS OF VICTIMHOOD
When he was still a marginal figure, Hitler would openly rant about his desire to kill Jews and to "purify the German Volk." But when he became Chancellor he was acutely aware that this would alienate many. So he retooled his public image, dropping almost all references to race and instead focusing on the cause of uplifting the German people and defending them against all enemies.
The vicious anti-communism and anti-Semitism continued throughout Hitler's Party, but Hitler was seen by millions as much more reasonable and moderate! When Hitler orchestrated the first boycott against Jews he projected it as a defensive action, taken to stop an international Jewish campaign against German products and the Nazi regime.
By creating a false sense of victimhood, Hitler was able to put his political opponents on the defensive and confer a sense of selfless bravery on his Nazi thugs who fought forcefully, often cruelly, to impose absolute Nazi authority.
A MATTER OF LEGITIMACY
Nazi Germany is known for its brutal Brownshirts and its virulent anti-Semitism. But while these were integral to the establishment of the Third Reich and in gluing together the base of the Nazi Party, there was another dynamic at play which helped secure the active support or tacit compliance of millions more.
In The Nazi Conscience, Claudia Koonz describes: "A fateful pattern was established: after devastating physical violence against Jews, the regime curbed unsanctioned racial attacks and in their place enacted anti-Semitic laws. Many victims and bystanders failed to appreciate the threat of these bureaucratic strategies that in the long run proved far more lethal than sporadic attacks."
The worst crimes committed by the Nazis came when they changed the laws and when Hitler grabbed unrestrained power unto himself. This legality and the sense of order it provided imbued the Nazis use of force with legitimacy, and disarmed many who otherwise would have objected. But ease of mind was the last thing that any moral person should have found in the tightening grip of the Nazis repressive laws.
Today, just as in Nazi Germany, the restructuring of laws and institutions should provoke more alarm, more resistance, and fiercer opposition because it is these structural changes that are the most absolute and which could take the greatest toll.
HISTORY WILL JUDGE US SHARPLY SHOULD WE FAIL TO ACT DECISIVELY
There is also little understanding about the resistance that was waged against the Nazis. It was neither the case that no one objected, nor was it the case that the Nazis were just too powerful and that their victory was inevitable.
During his rise, Hitler and his regime were filled with vulnerability. Large sections of people were turned off by his hateful rhetoric and aggressive tactics. Many thousands poured into the streets to protest and object. But, too many people either waited too long to resist or confined their objections to the effect of the Nazis only in one sphere of society.
Martin Niemöller was a pastor who originally enthusiastically supported Hitler. Besides his unconscionable support for Hitler, Niemöller made a second major error. When he did finally oppose Hitler, he restricted it to trying only to prevent the Nazis from interfering with his church. The idea that any arena of society could be protected from Nazi influence without driving out the whole Nazi regime proved false.
After eight years in Nazi prisons and camps, Niemöller spoke around the world, teaching the lessons he had learned. He is famous, in part, for this poem: "First they came for the communists, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then, they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up."
This poem explains the situation that prevailed by 1943, when a brave student resistance arose called The White Rose. Though they were heroic, these students were up against a regime that had consolidated its fascist state apparatus. And such a chill had set in throughout society that their movement couldn't take hold on a scale large enough to challenge the Nazis. Tragically, the leaders of the White Rose were hunted down and killed.
It is urgent that we deepen our understanding of what allowed the nightmare of Nazi Germany to destroy so much and so many. There are parallels to the situation we face in the U.S. today. And there are invaluable lessons we must draw and act upon that can shape the future for hundreds of millions worldwide.
The point is not that Bush is exactly the same as Hitler in some arbitrary or mechanical sense. Nor is the point that Bush and his program today are the same as Hitler and his Nazis in their most gruesome end years.
No. As it says in the Call for The World Cant Wait Drive Out the Bush Regime, "The point is this: history is full of examples where people who had right on their side fought against tremendous odds and were victorious. And it is also full of examples of people passively hoping to wait it out, only to get swallowed up by a horror beyond what they ever imagined. The future is unwritten. Which one we get is up to us."
Saturday, January 14, 2006
Big Show Friday, Jan. 20 at Vic's 8:00 Free/All Ages
Hey Folks!
This Friday!! Victorians’ Midnight Café*!! Free ! All Ages Show !!
Ukulele Man and Bob Starker (Whoa Nellie) bring you
-----------Pete Cassani---------
-extraordinary singer/song-writer/guitar-player -
--------Direct from Boston Mass.!!!------
This is his second coming to Vic’s – the last show we blew the roof off !!
The Uke Man will be doing his thing starting sometime after 8:00 with his political set list and maybe a rant or two; and then Pete & Bob Starker (original founders of the Peasants) will team up on guitar, sax, and vocals to burn the house down.
AND!!! We are promised an address during the evening by Ohio’s most renowned orator, Columbus’s own Bob Fitrakis, the Green Party candidate for governor, HIMSELF!!
Be there!!!
* W. Fifth at Neil
Check out Pete’s “The Peasants” website at: http://www.thepeasants.net/
- Uke Man
(If you can't make this show and are of age, we do it again Saturday at Andyman's Treehouse - 10:00/cover/Whoa Nellie backing Pete)
This Friday!! Victorians’ Midnight Café*!! Free ! All Ages Show !!
Ukulele Man and Bob Starker (Whoa Nellie) bring you
-----------Pete Cassani---------
-extraordinary singer/song-writer/guitar-player -
--------Direct from Boston Mass.!!!------
This is his second coming to Vic’s – the last show we blew the roof off !!
The Uke Man will be doing his thing starting sometime after 8:00 with his political set list and maybe a rant or two; and then Pete & Bob Starker (original founders of the Peasants) will team up on guitar, sax, and vocals to burn the house down.
AND!!! We are promised an address during the evening by Ohio’s most renowned orator, Columbus’s own Bob Fitrakis, the Green Party candidate for governor, HIMSELF!!
Be there!!!
* W. Fifth at Neil
Check out Pete’s “The Peasants” website at: http://www.thepeasants.net/
- Uke Man
(If you can't make this show and are of age, we do it again Saturday at Andyman's Treehouse - 10:00/cover/Whoa Nellie backing Pete)
Check it out !!
Listen to a Ted Tune at:
http://great-song-stylists-uk.com/Ted%20Lewis/TedLewisDarktownStruttersBall.mp3
- Uke Man
http://great-song-stylists-uk.com/Ted%20Lewis/TedLewisDarktownStruttersBall.mp3
- Uke Man
Friday, January 13, 2006
A New Continuing Segment !!
Hey Folks!
“Is Everybody Happy ???”
Do you know who made that phrase famous? It was Ted Lewis, an entertainer born and raised in Circleville who went on to true Fame & Fortune in New York, Hollywood, and the world!!
The Ted Lewis Museum is here in Circleville where I live, and thanks to Polly Miller the sweet lady who tends to Ted’s memory, I can share a bit with you. There’s a lot to share; so, I’ll offer a little bit at a time, periodically, as I’ve been doing with Twain’s “Connecticut Yankee.”
- Uke Man
“Is Everybody Happy ???”
Do you know who made that phrase famous? It was Ted Lewis, an entertainer born and raised in Circleville who went on to true Fame & Fortune in New York, Hollywood, and the world!!
The Ted Lewis Museum is here in Circleville where I live, and thanks to Polly Miller the sweet lady who tends to Ted’s memory, I can share a bit with you. There’s a lot to share; so, I’ll offer a little bit at a time, periodically, as I’ve been doing with Twain’s “Connecticut Yankee.”
- Uke Man
Twain on the "quality" of a King
Hey Folks,
I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 18th entry) .
His insights remain pertinent to this day. We haven’t changed much from Twain’s day – or from King Arthur’s, for that matter.
Chapter 34 - The king and the Yankee, still disguised as peasants, are sold into slavery and marched away. Everything depends on perspective: Einsteinian/ Hans-Chritian-Andersenian relativity.
The slave dealer bought us both, and hitched us onto that long chain of his, and we constituted the rear of his procession. We took up our line of march and passed out of Cambenet at noon; and it seemed to me unaccountably strange and odd, that the king of England and his chief minister, marching manacled and fettered and yoked, in a slave convoy, could move by all manner of idle men and women, and under windows, where sat the sweet and the lovely, and yet never attract a curious eye, never provoke a single remark. Dear, dear, it only shows that there is nothing diviner about a king than there is about a tramp, after all. He is just a cheap and hollow artificiality when you don’t know he is a king. But reveal his quality, and dear me, it takes your very breath away to look at him. I reckon we are all fools. Born so, no doubt.
I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 18th entry) .
His insights remain pertinent to this day. We haven’t changed much from Twain’s day – or from King Arthur’s, for that matter.
Chapter 34 - The king and the Yankee, still disguised as peasants, are sold into slavery and marched away. Everything depends on perspective: Einsteinian/ Hans-Chritian-Andersenian relativity.
The slave dealer bought us both, and hitched us onto that long chain of his, and we constituted the rear of his procession. We took up our line of march and passed out of Cambenet at noon; and it seemed to me unaccountably strange and odd, that the king of England and his chief minister, marching manacled and fettered and yoked, in a slave convoy, could move by all manner of idle men and women, and under windows, where sat the sweet and the lovely, and yet never attract a curious eye, never provoke a single remark. Dear, dear, it only shows that there is nothing diviner about a king than there is about a tramp, after all. He is just a cheap and hollow artificiality when you don’t know he is a king. But reveal his quality, and dear me, it takes your very breath away to look at him. I reckon we are all fools. Born so, no doubt.
What'd I say !!
Hey Folks,
It's not just me who sees a dictator in D.C.
- Uke Man
January 12, 2006
New York Times
The Lawbreaker in the Oval Office
By BOB HERBERT
(a ukethanks to Phyll)
The country has set the bar so low for the performance of George W. Bush as president that it is effectively on the ground.
No one expects very much from Mr. Bush. He's currently breaking the law by spying on Americans in America without getting warrants, but for a lot of people that's just George being George. Forget the complexities of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act, or even the Fourth Amendment's safeguards against unwarranted (pun intended) government intrusion into matters that we have a right to keep private.
On his frequent trips home to his ranch in Texas, the president likes to ride his bicycle. He's not studying the Constitution.
"People are changing phone numbers and phone calls, and they're moving quick," said Mr. Bush, as he defended his authorization of warrantless eavesdropping by the National Security Agency on phone calls and e-mail
into and out of the U.S.
As the president put it, "If somebody from Al Qaeda is calling you, we'd like to know why."
Well, that's true, Mr. President. But Congress and the Constitution have spoken as clearly as a bright sun on a cloudless afternoon about these matters: if you're going to eavesdrop on Americans in the U.S., you'd better run out and get a warrant.
You have to act fast? O.K., do what you have to do - but you then have to apply for a warrant within 72 hours. If, after three days, you can't explain to a court - a secret court, at that - why you need to be spying on somebody, then you need to stop that spying.
It has become fashionable to say that this controversy is about
the always difficult problem of balancing civil liberties and national security. But I think the issue is starker than that. The real issue is President Bush's apparent belief - stoked at every opportunity by that zealot of zealots, Dick Cheney - that he can do just about anything he wants (mistreat prisoners, lock people up forever without filing charges), and justify it in the name of fighting terror.
"There's an enemy out there," said Mr. Bush.
That's also true. But this is not China or the old Soviet Union. The United States should be the one place on the planet where even a devastating terror strike by Al Qaeda is unable to shake the foundations of the government, which is grounded in the rule of law, the separation of powers and a constitution that
guarantees the fundamental rights of the citizenry.
A group of former government officials and law professors from some of the nation's most distinguished universities sent a letter to Congressional leaders on Monday expressing their deep concern about the president's domestic spying program. They said:
"Although the program's secrecy prevents us from being privy to all of its details, the Justice Department's defense of what it concedes was secret and warrantless electronic surveillance of persons within the United States fails to identify any plausible legal authority for such surveillance. Accordingly, the program appears on its face to violate existing law."
Among those who signed the letter were William Sessions, the former F.B.I. director, and Philip Heymann, a former deputy attorney general who is now a professor at Harvard Law School.
The Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, also took issue with the administration's defense of the warrantless eavesdropping. Its analysts searched diligently but apparently in vain for a legal justification of the spying authorized by the president. Their detailed report on the constitutional and statutory issues raised by the program said, "It appears unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has expressly or impliedly authorized the N.S.A. electronic-surveillance operations here under discussion."
The administration's attempt to justify the program, the analysts said, "does not seem to be as well grounded" as the administration seems to believe.
President Bush and others in the administration have repeatedly argued that the president's wartime powers trump some of the important constitutional guarantees and civil liberties that Americans had previously taken for granted. They don't seem to see the irony of fighting on behalf of liberty in Afghanistan and Iraq while curtailing precious liberties here at home.
The administration should not be allowed to use war as an excuse. The U.S. is a very special place in large part because no one, not even the president, is above the law.
It's not just me who sees a dictator in D.C.
- Uke Man
January 12, 2006
New York Times
The Lawbreaker in the Oval Office
By BOB HERBERT
(a ukethanks to Phyll)
The country has set the bar so low for the performance of George W. Bush as president that it is effectively on the ground.
No one expects very much from Mr. Bush. He's currently breaking the law by spying on Americans in America without getting warrants, but for a lot of people that's just George being George. Forget the complexities of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act, or even the Fourth Amendment's safeguards against unwarranted (pun intended) government intrusion into matters that we have a right to keep private.
On his frequent trips home to his ranch in Texas, the president likes to ride his bicycle. He's not studying the Constitution.
"People are changing phone numbers and phone calls, and they're moving quick," said Mr. Bush, as he defended his authorization of warrantless eavesdropping by the National Security Agency on phone calls and e-mail
into and out of the U.S.
As the president put it, "If somebody from Al Qaeda is calling you, we'd like to know why."
Well, that's true, Mr. President. But Congress and the Constitution have spoken as clearly as a bright sun on a cloudless afternoon about these matters: if you're going to eavesdrop on Americans in the U.S., you'd better run out and get a warrant.
You have to act fast? O.K., do what you have to do - but you then have to apply for a warrant within 72 hours. If, after three days, you can't explain to a court - a secret court, at that - why you need to be spying on somebody, then you need to stop that spying.
It has become fashionable to say that this controversy is about
the always difficult problem of balancing civil liberties and national security. But I think the issue is starker than that. The real issue is President Bush's apparent belief - stoked at every opportunity by that zealot of zealots, Dick Cheney - that he can do just about anything he wants (mistreat prisoners, lock people up forever without filing charges), and justify it in the name of fighting terror.
"There's an enemy out there," said Mr. Bush.
That's also true. But this is not China or the old Soviet Union. The United States should be the one place on the planet where even a devastating terror strike by Al Qaeda is unable to shake the foundations of the government, which is grounded in the rule of law, the separation of powers and a constitution that
guarantees the fundamental rights of the citizenry.
A group of former government officials and law professors from some of the nation's most distinguished universities sent a letter to Congressional leaders on Monday expressing their deep concern about the president's domestic spying program. They said:
"Although the program's secrecy prevents us from being privy to all of its details, the Justice Department's defense of what it concedes was secret and warrantless electronic surveillance of persons within the United States fails to identify any plausible legal authority for such surveillance. Accordingly, the program appears on its face to violate existing law."
Among those who signed the letter were William Sessions, the former F.B.I. director, and Philip Heymann, a former deputy attorney general who is now a professor at Harvard Law School.
The Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, also took issue with the administration's defense of the warrantless eavesdropping. Its analysts searched diligently but apparently in vain for a legal justification of the spying authorized by the president. Their detailed report on the constitutional and statutory issues raised by the program said, "It appears unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has expressly or impliedly authorized the N.S.A. electronic-surveillance operations here under discussion."
The administration's attempt to justify the program, the analysts said, "does not seem to be as well grounded" as the administration seems to believe.
President Bush and others in the administration have repeatedly argued that the president's wartime powers trump some of the important constitutional guarantees and civil liberties that Americans had previously taken for granted. They don't seem to see the irony of fighting on behalf of liberty in Afghanistan and Iraq while curtailing precious liberties here at home.
The administration should not be allowed to use war as an excuse. The U.S. is a very special place in large part because no one, not even the president, is above the law.
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Of the pigs, by the pigs, and for the pigs
Hey Folks,
It never ceases to amaze me that total crap can be smeared across the face of the American people and hardly any response is elicited, not even a whimper – much less screams of outrage.
The ongoing charade to confirm Alito is a good example. This dildo probably will be given a LIFETIME appointment to a position where he can seriously harm millions of us, and WE aren’t allowed to ask any pertinent questions; and if we ask them anyway, he refuses to answer, and since he was smart in school and Dubya likes the cut of his reactionary jib, that’s enough - confirm the S.O.B.!
Orwell’s Animal Farm rings true. Comrad Dubya* is always right! I will work harder.
- Uke Man
* Did I mention that Comrad Dubya is a pig?
It never ceases to amaze me that total crap can be smeared across the face of the American people and hardly any response is elicited, not even a whimper – much less screams of outrage.
The ongoing charade to confirm Alito is a good example. This dildo probably will be given a LIFETIME appointment to a position where he can seriously harm millions of us, and WE aren’t allowed to ask any pertinent questions; and if we ask them anyway, he refuses to answer, and since he was smart in school and Dubya likes the cut of his reactionary jib, that’s enough - confirm the S.O.B.!
Orwell’s Animal Farm rings true. Comrad Dubya* is always right! I will work harder.
- Uke Man
* Did I mention that Comrad Dubya is a pig?
Orwell - a case against Bush?
Presidential pronouncements may too-closely reflect a familiar literary style
By Steve Young
http://www.antiwar.com/ocregister/young-orwell.html
Lawyers for the estate of George Orwell have announced their intention to sue President Bush for plagiarism.
"We have long believed that this administration has stolen much of its policy from Mr. Orwell's writings," said attorney Will Bilyalotz. "Expressly, '1984' and 'Animal Farm.' In some cases, like the illegal surveillance of its own citizens, this administration has lifted the passages word for word from '1984.' Just changing the year doesn't protect the president from copyright laws."
White House spokesman Scott McClellan, while refusing to comment directly because of the "ongoing investigation," reminded reporters that the Patriot Act had given the president the power to suspend copyright laws and, anyway, "No one can own words."
Legal experts believe proving copyright infringement will not be easy. "Even if he is guilty, the president's propensity for adapting Mr. Orwell's '1984' newspeak is so effortless, as if he made up the words himself," said law professor Sue Yu Atdropohat. "Illegal borrowing of words or even fictional characters from published works has a high threshold of proof. The producers of the film 'Being There' have had their lawsuit against the Bush campaign tied up in court since 2000. After all, one man's outright theft of ideas is another man's malapropos."
"Personally, I think this so-called intelligentsia is just jealous," said Newt Gingrich. "Orwell could have only dreamed of great terms like 'defeatist' and 'evil-doer.'"
Bilyalotz differs. "The president's comments like, 'This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table,' is plain and simple, Mr. Orwell's 'doublethink' (the power to hold two completely contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and accept both of them)."
The president has regularly pointed out that he will do whatever it takes to defeat terrorism, and that those who want to hamstring his ability to steal written material are only aiding the enemy. "9/11 has made us look at our plagiarism in a different way," said the president. "As long as I am president or king, the American people expect me to do everything in my power under our laws and Constitution to protect them and their civil liberties. And if that takes dissolving the Constitution, then so be it."
"It was Mr. Orwell in '1984' who first came up with 'Victory Mansions' and industrial-grade 'Victory Gin.' Now the president calls his book, a 'National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.' The president doesn't go 10 seconds without using the word 'victory.' One doesn't have to be a math whiz to put two and two together. Our greatest concern is not that the president uses Mr. Orwell's words," Bilyalotz said, "but that he's actually using '1984' as a governmental guidebook, and I'm afraid the president hasn't read how it ends."
In his weekly radio address, Bush said the "Spy on US" program has been reviewed regularly by the nation's top legal authorities and Fox talk-show hosts, targeting only those people with "a clear link to these terrorist networks, which include Al-Jazeera and CNN."
"Freedom is in its last throes," Vice President Dick Cheney said. "First, they take away torture, now they want to take away spying on our own citizens. What's next to go, Fox News?"
The revelation of the unauthorized bugging has delayed renewal of the Patriot Act, which includes a provision giving President Bush monarchial powers. "Not only will it make this country safer," explained the president, "but it will ordain either Jenna or Barb as the country's first queen without the risk of voter fraud or expensive campaigns."
"This country is ready for a female queen," said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, "and we can't take the chance that the next election could turn out to be a mushroom cloud."
In other Patriot Act news, the White House has asked historians to remove Ben Franklin's quote, "They that give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety" from history books. "It's wordy and confusing," Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said. "And one thing this country doesn't need in its fight against terrorism is more confusing words. At least that's what we feel here in the Ministry of Truth."
By Steve Young
http://www.antiwar.com/ocregister/young-orwell.html
Lawyers for the estate of George Orwell have announced their intention to sue President Bush for plagiarism.
"We have long believed that this administration has stolen much of its policy from Mr. Orwell's writings," said attorney Will Bilyalotz. "Expressly, '1984' and 'Animal Farm.' In some cases, like the illegal surveillance of its own citizens, this administration has lifted the passages word for word from '1984.' Just changing the year doesn't protect the president from copyright laws."
White House spokesman Scott McClellan, while refusing to comment directly because of the "ongoing investigation," reminded reporters that the Patriot Act had given the president the power to suspend copyright laws and, anyway, "No one can own words."
Legal experts believe proving copyright infringement will not be easy. "Even if he is guilty, the president's propensity for adapting Mr. Orwell's '1984' newspeak is so effortless, as if he made up the words himself," said law professor Sue Yu Atdropohat. "Illegal borrowing of words or even fictional characters from published works has a high threshold of proof. The producers of the film 'Being There' have had their lawsuit against the Bush campaign tied up in court since 2000. After all, one man's outright theft of ideas is another man's malapropos."
"Personally, I think this so-called intelligentsia is just jealous," said Newt Gingrich. "Orwell could have only dreamed of great terms like 'defeatist' and 'evil-doer.'"
Bilyalotz differs. "The president's comments like, 'This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table,' is plain and simple, Mr. Orwell's 'doublethink' (the power to hold two completely contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and accept both of them)."
The president has regularly pointed out that he will do whatever it takes to defeat terrorism, and that those who want to hamstring his ability to steal written material are only aiding the enemy. "9/11 has made us look at our plagiarism in a different way," said the president. "As long as I am president or king, the American people expect me to do everything in my power under our laws and Constitution to protect them and their civil liberties. And if that takes dissolving the Constitution, then so be it."
"It was Mr. Orwell in '1984' who first came up with 'Victory Mansions' and industrial-grade 'Victory Gin.' Now the president calls his book, a 'National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.' The president doesn't go 10 seconds without using the word 'victory.' One doesn't have to be a math whiz to put two and two together. Our greatest concern is not that the president uses Mr. Orwell's words," Bilyalotz said, "but that he's actually using '1984' as a governmental guidebook, and I'm afraid the president hasn't read how it ends."
In his weekly radio address, Bush said the "Spy on US" program has been reviewed regularly by the nation's top legal authorities and Fox talk-show hosts, targeting only those people with "a clear link to these terrorist networks, which include Al-Jazeera and CNN."
"Freedom is in its last throes," Vice President Dick Cheney said. "First, they take away torture, now they want to take away spying on our own citizens. What's next to go, Fox News?"
The revelation of the unauthorized bugging has delayed renewal of the Patriot Act, which includes a provision giving President Bush monarchial powers. "Not only will it make this country safer," explained the president, "but it will ordain either Jenna or Barb as the country's first queen without the risk of voter fraud or expensive campaigns."
"This country is ready for a female queen," said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, "and we can't take the chance that the next election could turn out to be a mushroom cloud."
In other Patriot Act news, the White House has asked historians to remove Ben Franklin's quote, "They that give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety" from history books. "It's wordy and confusing," Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said. "And one thing this country doesn't need in its fight against terrorism is more confusing words. At least that's what we feel here in the Ministry of Truth."
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
I know you are but what am I ?
Hey Folks,
Just a brief thought.
You know, earlier I posted that piece about Dubya signing legislation but then defining it as something it clearly isn’t so he can ignore the legislation and do whatever he wants.
It struck me today that Bush & Co. and all their apologists scream bloody murder about “activists judges” who “legislate from the bench,” usurping the role of the legislature!!
Of course, Dubya’s “this-legislation-means-whatever-I-say-it-means” gambit is clearly “legislating from the White House,” and Dubya is none other than one of those damned “activist executives”!
Tsk! Tsk!
- Uke Man
Just a brief thought.
You know, earlier I posted that piece about Dubya signing legislation but then defining it as something it clearly isn’t so he can ignore the legislation and do whatever he wants.
It struck me today that Bush & Co. and all their apologists scream bloody murder about “activists judges” who “legislate from the bench,” usurping the role of the legislature!!
Of course, Dubya’s “this-legislation-means-whatever-I-say-it-means” gambit is clearly “legislating from the White House,” and Dubya is none other than one of those damned “activist executives”!
Tsk! Tsk!
- Uke Man
Red Hat & Red Cheeks Club
Monday I got to visit my friend Gracie (92) and my granddaughter Frances (5 weeks)
- Cuties both!!!
- Cuties both!!!
MBA = Management Bullshit Always !!!
Hey Folks,
I’m sure you’ve heard how Dubya has been conning the
Congress by signing their bills into law and then
saying he’s going to interpret them however he wants
regardless of the language in the law.
This is pretty shocking. Quite a few people are
aghast, but the Uke Man has seen it all before. My
friend Sondra Hurwood can back me up on that; it’s
just typical management bullshit.
She and I spent fifteen-plus years fighting the union
- management wars, and - believe me - it’s just
“standard practice.” I wouldn’t be surprised if they
teach it in the business schools.
Everything in the business-media stories reports that
the economy is just hunky-dory, regardless of all the
working stiffs getting screwed, because the only thing
that matters is how the swells are doing. Similarly,
in the world of contracts, laws, ethics, and morality
all that matters is how the swells are doing.
We live under a double standard. Here’s how it works.
A union signs a contract with management; a President
signs a law created by the Congress; what does that
mean? For the union it means that the workers MUST
follow the language of the contract. For citizens it
means they must follow the language of the law. For
management it means they can do whatever the hell they
want. For the president it means he can do whatever
the hell he wants.
Why?
The enforcement of a contract or a law upon a worker
or a citizen is immediate. Little people feel the effect
immediately. Should they even appear to have misstepped,
there is a vigilant “system” waiting to engulf them and place
them at risk.
They immediately enter the system and work
their way through it over a long period of time. If they
are found guilty of any transgression, they often begin
to experience their “punishment” very early on. If after
months or years their innocence is finally determined,
the best they'll get for the intervening suffering and
expense is: “Sorry.”
On the other hand if the President or management
decides that black is white or white is black and acts
in a way contrary to the law or a contract, nothing
happens.
Before something can happen, someone has to
claim to be injured and then present a charge of
injury. In the case of a contractual injury, charges
are taken to a governmental board for redress. This
process can drag out for months or years.
Disregarding the common reality that these boards more
often than not favor management and rule against the
union, if the union, after months or years, IS
vindicated in the dispute, all that management is
required to do is to cease and desist its odious
practice.
In other words if a worker disregards a contract he’s
screwed; if management disregards a contract they can
screw the worker for as long as they can drag out the
process; and should they be found to be miscreant at
the end of the long process, they need only stop the behavior
in question and replace it with some new, and
equally odious behavior - while suffering no punishment
whatsoever.
In the case of the President, he can pretend that in
good faith he is signing a bill into law while
having not the slightest intention of obeying it. He
can screw anybody in any way he wants, and - short of
impeachment - no one can stop him short of the
process described above.
First, someone must claim to have been injured by his
“interpretation” of the law. Then they must take him
to court. Then the “process” must make its way to the
Supreme Court. Then the Supreme Court, which the
President is working so hard to pack with toadies,
must rule against him. This process will drag on for
months or years. If it should ever finally arrive,
the President will be expected simply to stop.
Any suffering he has caused by his willful stubborn
disregard of the clear intent and language of the law
is just “tough shit.”
Hey Folks, that’s just the way it is here in the land
and the home of the free and the brave; that’s the
freedom our brave men and women have died to preserve;
and the sooner we wake up to that fact, the sooner
brave men and women can die to preserve something more
honorable.
-Uke Man
I’m sure you’ve heard how Dubya has been conning the
Congress by signing their bills into law and then
saying he’s going to interpret them however he wants
regardless of the language in the law.
This is pretty shocking. Quite a few people are
aghast, but the Uke Man has seen it all before. My
friend Sondra Hurwood can back me up on that; it’s
just typical management bullshit.
She and I spent fifteen-plus years fighting the union
- management wars, and - believe me - it’s just
“standard practice.” I wouldn’t be surprised if they
teach it in the business schools.
Everything in the business-media stories reports that
the economy is just hunky-dory, regardless of all the
working stiffs getting screwed, because the only thing
that matters is how the swells are doing. Similarly,
in the world of contracts, laws, ethics, and morality
all that matters is how the swells are doing.
We live under a double standard. Here’s how it works.
A union signs a contract with management; a President
signs a law created by the Congress; what does that
mean? For the union it means that the workers MUST
follow the language of the contract. For citizens it
means they must follow the language of the law. For
management it means they can do whatever the hell they
want. For the president it means he can do whatever
the hell he wants.
Why?
The enforcement of a contract or a law upon a worker
or a citizen is immediate. Little people feel the effect
immediately. Should they even appear to have misstepped,
there is a vigilant “system” waiting to engulf them and place
them at risk.
They immediately enter the system and work
their way through it over a long period of time. If they
are found guilty of any transgression, they often begin
to experience their “punishment” very early on. If after
months or years their innocence is finally determined,
the best they'll get for the intervening suffering and
expense is: “Sorry.”
On the other hand if the President or management
decides that black is white or white is black and acts
in a way contrary to the law or a contract, nothing
happens.
Before something can happen, someone has to
claim to be injured and then present a charge of
injury. In the case of a contractual injury, charges
are taken to a governmental board for redress. This
process can drag out for months or years.
Disregarding the common reality that these boards more
often than not favor management and rule against the
union, if the union, after months or years, IS
vindicated in the dispute, all that management is
required to do is to cease and desist its odious
practice.
In other words if a worker disregards a contract he’s
screwed; if management disregards a contract they can
screw the worker for as long as they can drag out the
process; and should they be found to be miscreant at
the end of the long process, they need only stop the behavior
in question and replace it with some new, and
equally odious behavior - while suffering no punishment
whatsoever.
In the case of the President, he can pretend that in
good faith he is signing a bill into law while
having not the slightest intention of obeying it. He
can screw anybody in any way he wants, and - short of
impeachment - no one can stop him short of the
process described above.
First, someone must claim to have been injured by his
“interpretation” of the law. Then they must take him
to court. Then the “process” must make its way to the
Supreme Court. Then the Supreme Court, which the
President is working so hard to pack with toadies,
must rule against him. This process will drag on for
months or years. If it should ever finally arrive,
the President will be expected simply to stop.
Any suffering he has caused by his willful stubborn
disregard of the clear intent and language of the law
is just “tough shit.”
Hey Folks, that’s just the way it is here in the land
and the home of the free and the brave; that’s the
freedom our brave men and women have died to preserve;
and the sooner we wake up to that fact, the sooner
brave men and women can die to preserve something more
honorable.
-Uke Man
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
A Good Day
Hey Folks,
Today I got to do one of my favorite things: visit and talk with vibrant, young people!
I was at Worthington Kilbourne High School with the three Political Radicalism classes. “Poli-Rad” is a semester course in which the students get to hear presentations from a wide spectrum of speakers, for and against all sorts of things relating to God and gods, gays and anti-gays, pro-choice and pro-life, etc.
As always I told the classes that they had heard speakers of opposing positions, they’d hear more, and they’d hear me; but what I advised was to LISTEN to all the speakers and not believe a word they said – including my spiel – I argued that nobody knew any more than they did about the fundamental realities of existence. They should listen with an open mind but decide for themselves, and if they can’t decide, withhold judgment until they could decide.
I argued that all “civilizations” are pyramidal as a result of their large populations – that they always had been and that they remain so today – with the small top of the pyramid benefiting disproportionately compared to the vast numbers nearer the base; and that as a result a major directive of any culture inevitably was to PRESERVE and MAINTAIN the status quo of the culture; and moreover that this directive generally was fulfilled since the small group at the top who benefited from the system also overwhelmingly controlled the resources and means necessary to insure its own preeminence.
I also suggested that every culture, ancient or modern, worked to imbue its youth with its own particular arbitrary mythology of underlying assumptions – assumptions; whether involving Zeus, Jesus, democracy, or communism; that underlie and preserve the system.
I called on the students to choose for themselves what made sense rather than to reflexively assume the “dominant paradigm,” to borrow a cliché.
I think they heard me, but life is confusing and demanding; and the voices of the Matrix are upon us round the clock. Time will tell, but if I had to bet on it, I’d put my money on the kids!!
Oh, yeah!! I also got to share a few of my songs! Can't beat that for fun!!
- Uke Man
Today I got to do one of my favorite things: visit and talk with vibrant, young people!
I was at Worthington Kilbourne High School with the three Political Radicalism classes. “Poli-Rad” is a semester course in which the students get to hear presentations from a wide spectrum of speakers, for and against all sorts of things relating to God and gods, gays and anti-gays, pro-choice and pro-life, etc.
As always I told the classes that they had heard speakers of opposing positions, they’d hear more, and they’d hear me; but what I advised was to LISTEN to all the speakers and not believe a word they said – including my spiel – I argued that nobody knew any more than they did about the fundamental realities of existence. They should listen with an open mind but decide for themselves, and if they can’t decide, withhold judgment until they could decide.
I argued that all “civilizations” are pyramidal as a result of their large populations – that they always had been and that they remain so today – with the small top of the pyramid benefiting disproportionately compared to the vast numbers nearer the base; and that as a result a major directive of any culture inevitably was to PRESERVE and MAINTAIN the status quo of the culture; and moreover that this directive generally was fulfilled since the small group at the top who benefited from the system also overwhelmingly controlled the resources and means necessary to insure its own preeminence.
I also suggested that every culture, ancient or modern, worked to imbue its youth with its own particular arbitrary mythology of underlying assumptions – assumptions; whether involving Zeus, Jesus, democracy, or communism; that underlie and preserve the system.
I called on the students to choose for themselves what made sense rather than to reflexively assume the “dominant paradigm,” to borrow a cliché.
I think they heard me, but life is confusing and demanding; and the voices of the Matrix are upon us round the clock. Time will tell, but if I had to bet on it, I’d put my money on the kids!!
Oh, yeah!! I also got to share a few of my songs! Can't beat that for fun!!
- Uke Man
Monday, January 09, 2006
Twain - Perspective on law
Hey Folks,
I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 17th entry) .
His insights remain pertinent to this day. We haven’t changed much from Twain’s day – or from King Arthur’s, for that matter.
- Uke Man
Chapter 34 – The King (the font and creator of the country’s laws) and the Yankee (both still disguised as peasants) are sold into slavery.
A dozen of the rascal’s servants sprang forward, and in a moment we were helpless, with our hands bound behind us. We so loudly and so earnestly proclaimed ourselves freemen, that we got the interested attention of that liberty-mouthing orator and his patriotic crowd, and they gathered about us and assumed a very determined attitude. The orator said:
“If indeed ye are freemen, ye have naught to fear – the God-given liberties of Britain are about ye for your shield and shelter! [Applause.] Ye shall soon see. Bring forth your proofs.”
“What proofs?”
“Proofs that ye are freemen.”
Ah – I remembered! I came to myself: I said nothing. But the king stormed out:
“Thou’rt insane, man. It were better, and more in reason, that this thief and scoundrel here prove that we are not freemen.”
You see. He knew his own laws just as other people so often know the laws: by words, not by effects. They take a meaning, and get very vivid, when you come to apply them to yourself.
I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 17th entry) .
His insights remain pertinent to this day. We haven’t changed much from Twain’s day – or from King Arthur’s, for that matter.
- Uke Man
Chapter 34 – The King (the font and creator of the country’s laws) and the Yankee (both still disguised as peasants) are sold into slavery.
A dozen of the rascal’s servants sprang forward, and in a moment we were helpless, with our hands bound behind us. We so loudly and so earnestly proclaimed ourselves freemen, that we got the interested attention of that liberty-mouthing orator and his patriotic crowd, and they gathered about us and assumed a very determined attitude. The orator said:
“If indeed ye are freemen, ye have naught to fear – the God-given liberties of Britain are about ye for your shield and shelter! [Applause.] Ye shall soon see. Bring forth your proofs.”
“What proofs?”
“Proofs that ye are freemen.”
Ah – I remembered! I came to myself: I said nothing. But the king stormed out:
“Thou’rt insane, man. It were better, and more in reason, that this thief and scoundrel here prove that we are not freemen.”
You see. He knew his own laws just as other people so often know the laws: by words, not by effects. They take a meaning, and get very vivid, when you come to apply them to yourself.
Resonator Uke
Hey Folks,
A fellow uke player, Cody Johns, with whom I've coresponded and who liked my song "Eldorado" (see M.U.D. video: http://www.ukuleledisco.com/eldorado?PHPSESSID=f0c57391bdb6bbf0704ef9778af211f6 ) wrote to share a view of the resonator ukulele he'd put together (see it at: http://ezfolk.com/audio/bands/549/) Nice looking/sounding instrument.
I'd sent him the chart for "Eldorado," and he used some of the chord progression from it to write "Hope You Like My Resonator Uke."
Give it a listen at: http://ezfolk.com/audio/play.php?band_id=549&song_id=3629&mode=song_hifi
I'm mentioned in the song and feel honored by such a first!
- Uke Man
A fellow uke player, Cody Johns, with whom I've coresponded and who liked my song "Eldorado" (see M.U.D. video: http://www.ukuleledisco.com/eldorado?PHPSESSID=f0c57391bdb6bbf0704ef9778af211f6 ) wrote to share a view of the resonator ukulele he'd put together (see it at: http://ezfolk.com/audio/bands/549/) Nice looking/sounding instrument.
I'd sent him the chart for "Eldorado," and he used some of the chord progression from it to write "Hope You Like My Resonator Uke."
Give it a listen at: http://ezfolk.com/audio/play.php?band_id=549&song_id=3629&mode=song_hifi
I'm mentioned in the song and feel honored by such a first!
- Uke Man
Sunday, January 08, 2006
ELVIS-a-THON Report
Hey Folks!
The Elvis-a-thon was WONDERFUL !!!
ELVIS!!!
FRIENDS !!!
BANDS!!!
WONDERFUL!!!
The Uke Man went on at 10:30 and – I must say – it all came together! I was pleased and so was the crowd.
I’d meant to stay until closing, but the ancient Uke Guy started to fade near Midnight and had to get on the road to Circleville. I missed some great bands and can’t share their pictures with you.
Next year, you need to be sure to attend (in case I – even older THEN – poop out again!).
- Uke Man
Twain on wages and unions
Hey Folks,
I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 16th entry) .
His insights remain pertinent to this day. We haven’t changed much from Twain’s day – or from King Arthur’s, for that matter.
- Uke Man
Chapter 33 – The Yankee discusses wages and their future with Dowley, the blacksmith.
“Brother Dowley, who is it that determines, every spring, what the particular wage of each kind of mechanic, laborer, and servant shall be for that year?”
“Sometimes the courts, sometimes the town council, but most of all, the magistrate, Ye may say, in general terms, it is the magistrate that fixes wages.”
“Doesn’t ask any of those poor devils to help him fix their wages for them, does he?”
“Hm! That were an idea! The master that’s to pay him the money is the one that’s rightly concerned in that matter, ye will notice.”
“Yes – but I thought the other man might have some little trifle at stake in it too; and even his wife and children, poor creatures. The masters are these: nobles, rich men, the prosperous generally. These few, who do no work, determine what pay the vast hive shall have, who do work. You see? They’re a ‘combine’ – a trade union, to coin a new phrase – who band together to force their lowly brother to take what they choose to give. Thirteen hundred years hence – so says the unwritten law – the ‘combine’ will be the other way, and then how these fine people’s posterity will fume and fret and grit their teeth over the insolent tyranny of trade unions! Yes, indeed! The magistrate will tranquilly arrange the wages from now clear way down into the nineteenth century; and then all of a sudden the wage-earner will consider that a couple of thousand years or so is enough of this one-sided sort of thing, and he will rise up and take a hand in fixing his wages himself. Ah. He will have a long and bitter account of wrong and humiliation to settle.”
I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 16th entry) .
His insights remain pertinent to this day. We haven’t changed much from Twain’s day – or from King Arthur’s, for that matter.
- Uke Man
Chapter 33 – The Yankee discusses wages and their future with Dowley, the blacksmith.
“Brother Dowley, who is it that determines, every spring, what the particular wage of each kind of mechanic, laborer, and servant shall be for that year?”
“Sometimes the courts, sometimes the town council, but most of all, the magistrate, Ye may say, in general terms, it is the magistrate that fixes wages.”
“Doesn’t ask any of those poor devils to help him fix their wages for them, does he?”
“Hm! That were an idea! The master that’s to pay him the money is the one that’s rightly concerned in that matter, ye will notice.”
“Yes – but I thought the other man might have some little trifle at stake in it too; and even his wife and children, poor creatures. The masters are these: nobles, rich men, the prosperous generally. These few, who do no work, determine what pay the vast hive shall have, who do work. You see? They’re a ‘combine’ – a trade union, to coin a new phrase – who band together to force their lowly brother to take what they choose to give. Thirteen hundred years hence – so says the unwritten law – the ‘combine’ will be the other way, and then how these fine people’s posterity will fume and fret and grit their teeth over the insolent tyranny of trade unions! Yes, indeed! The magistrate will tranquilly arrange the wages from now clear way down into the nineteenth century; and then all of a sudden the wage-earner will consider that a couple of thousand years or so is enough of this one-sided sort of thing, and he will rise up and take a hand in fixing his wages himself. Ah. He will have a long and bitter account of wrong and humiliation to settle.”
Saturday, January 07, 2006
Elvis & Ed & the Uke Man Rule!! Saturday!!
Hey Folks,
It's Saturday, January 7, and I’ll finally be on the Ed Sullivan Show!!
Well, not exactly, but sort of.
That’s always been my dream, and I haven’t let Ed’s passing interfere with it. John Wayne and Fred Astaire have been dead a long time but still sell beer and vacuum cleaners. Digital Ed could easily introduce me right there “on our stage” during a “really big shew” just like he did for the Beatles and Elvis.
Well, the Beatles won’t be there Saturday, but Elvis will – it’s the 10th annual Elvis-a-thon at Little Brothers to benefit the Open Shelter (8:00 P.M. - $5.00) - and the Uke Man will be in fine fettle right there “on our stage” doing “Heartbreak Hotel,” “My Way,” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” – with NEW arrangements and a little help from Ted Lewis on “Heartaches Begin.”
Other performers include the X-Rated Cowboys, Ray Fuller, Bob Starker, the Mendelsonics, Bob Sauls, The Randy’s, Anna Paolucci, Doo-wop Boys, Sons of Gladys, and Trapper John.
Be there! And I’ll thank you!
(very much)
- Uke Elvis
It's Saturday, January 7, and I’ll finally be on the Ed Sullivan Show!!
Well, not exactly, but sort of.
That’s always been my dream, and I haven’t let Ed’s passing interfere with it. John Wayne and Fred Astaire have been dead a long time but still sell beer and vacuum cleaners. Digital Ed could easily introduce me right there “on our stage” during a “really big shew” just like he did for the Beatles and Elvis.
Well, the Beatles won’t be there Saturday, but Elvis will – it’s the 10th annual Elvis-a-thon at Little Brothers to benefit the Open Shelter (8:00 P.M. - $5.00) - and the Uke Man will be in fine fettle right there “on our stage” doing “Heartbreak Hotel,” “My Way,” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” – with NEW arrangements and a little help from Ted Lewis on “Heartaches Begin.”
Other performers include the X-Rated Cowboys, Ray Fuller, Bob Starker, the Mendelsonics, Bob Sauls, The Randy’s, Anna Paolucci, Doo-wop Boys, Sons of Gladys, and Trapper John.
Be there! And I’ll thank you!
(very much)
- Uke Elvis
Friday, January 06, 2006
What's Wrong with a Swine Farm??? Damn it !!
Hey Folks,
Here’s an example of our problem.
If we are to have a real world, we must deal with reality! Unfortunately, society works overtime to create illusions, to pull the wool over our eyes, to “sell” us. Here is a perfect example.
Since before WW II we have been inculcated by invasive waves of propagandistic crap about the evil enemy of godless, insane, arbitrary, oppressive communism.
And that’s all we’ve heard. What else could we believe? Well, it’s embarrassing to see an actual product of all those years of brainwashing (see the last section of this posting). It is so shallow, stupid, and insulting to one’s intelligence – if one has been giving any thought to the bullshit that passes for reporting – as to be nauseating.
This report on the death of the last surviving member of the Gang of Four drips with mindless rhetoric. It reports the terrorization of THOUSANDS of Chinese in a nation of a Billion – as if we haven’t terrorized thousands HERE in a population of 300 million.
It uses the term “purge” for its negative connotations rather than the more positive “remove.” Those who are “purged” rather than “removed” are called – positively - “Moderate party officials”- rather than, negatively, “enemies of the people,” or neutrally “opponents.”
Yao Wenyuan, the focus of the piece, is damned for being a “killer with a pen” by the “state media” – i.e. the official mouthpiece of the faction that won the struggle calls what Yao (of the losing side) said “propaganda” and describes his words as murderous.
As one would expect – if one thought about it – EVERYTHING about the LOSING side is negative. None of it is positive. The reader will find it impossible – based upon this article – to grasp any understanding of what this “Gang of Four” business is all about. The reader WILL be certain, however, that the Gang of Four were despicable people and that the Cultural Revolution was a dastardly and tragic episode – no explanation – no argument – no evidence. It’s nothing but propaganda.
As ALWAYS, my favorite example of self-serving, capitalistic crap is again presented:
“PROFESSIONALS WERE FORCED TO WORK ON SWINE FARMS!!!!” (actually in this particular case: “forced a generation of intellectuals to work in the countryside”).
This is a disgusting comment, but it has been made over and over again – Oh, the tragedy of accountants and lawyers and physicists having to work on FARMS – often even on SWINE FARMS!!!
Well, where did these fucks think the sweet and sour pork they ordered in their fancy restaurants came from – ledger books? Court rooms? Laboratories?
No! These fucks got their pork from SWINE FARMS!!
And the evil, godless communists made thousands (out of the billion) of these fucks – who wouldn’t be caught dead even pissing on a peasant - go work along side them!! What a FUCKING TRAGEDY !!!
And that shit is put out on a regular basis - and with a straight face!!!
Below, I took a recent Yahoo news posting and adjusted it a bit, hopefully to aid a more balanced understanding of just how ignorant and/or compliant the press has become. Posted last is the actual AP story.
- Uke Man
Last Survivor of Colonies “Indian Band” Dies
By JOE McDONALD, King George Press Writer Fri Jan 6, 10:04 AM ET
PHILADELPHIA – Benjamin Franklin, the final surviving member of the “Indian Band” that terrorized the colonies during the violent 1776 “American Revolution” by persecuting thousands of people, has died, the government said Friday. He was 230.
Franklin's death on Dec. 23 was blamed on diabetes, the New York Times, the paper of record reported. It didn't say where he died or explain the delay in reporting his death.
The “Indian Band”, reportedly given its name by then-king George III, directed the purge of tea, Tory officials and royal-sympathisers during the “American Revolution.” Franklin was the group's propagandist, later dubbed the killer with a penis by Fox media.
Led by former British officer George Washington, the “Indian Band” and its allies inflicted physical and emotional damage that still reverberates in British society, despite Margaret Thacher’s tightened social controls and economic reforms that have raised the living standards of the privileged class.
Nearly every American city dweller who was alive at the time can tell of a relative or friend who was beaten, harassed or driven to suicide, often by rebel tormenters who took advantage of the unrest to avenge grudges.
The violence pitted neighbor against neighbor, seriously impacted the income of the King and his retainers and forced a generation of intellectuals to work in the countryside along side of the ill-clad and ignorant settlers they had formerly reviled from a distance.
A month after Washington's death in 1976, the “Indian Band” members were arrested, marking the end of the “American Revolution.”
Franklin, a Philadelphia journalist, was convicted of trying to gain power by persecuting Tory officials and members of the public sympathetic to England and spent 20 years in prison before his release in 1996. It was not known what he did in the 10 years after his release.
Evidence at his televised trial included a diary entry in which he asked: "Why can't we shoot at them from behind trees and rocks? After all, taxation without representation is dictatorship."
On Washington's orders, Franklin fired the first salvo of the Cultural Revolution, writing a review condemning a popular Broadway play as an attack on John Hancock. He was rewarded with a seat at the band's Constitutional Convention .
Franklin later confessed to falsifying evidence (with the aid of discredited journalist Dan Rather) against George W. Bush , whom he had depicted as an uneducated, moronic slacker but who emerged as America's supreme leader in 2000.
"His weapon to kill people was the pen," the National Review reported in 1981 after Franklin's conviction.
Washington died in 1991 in custody, reportedly by suicide. Another member, Thomas Jefferson, died in 1992. A third member, John Hancock , died last May of tendonitis, leaving a large family of dependants penniless, having invested in worthless insurance policies.
The “Indian Band” received most of the official blame for the political violence as the British government tried to shift attention away from the role played by greedy bastards in the homeland, including thousands of government officials and the landed aristocracy sitting there on its dead ass.
Franklin served his sentence at Tonofguano Prison, where the “Indian Band” once held victims loyal to the crown in solitary confinement.
The Times didn't give any details of survivors or funeral arrangements.
************************************************
Last Survivor of China's Gang of Four Dies
By JOE McDONALD, Associated Press Writer Fri Jan 6, 10:04 AM ET
BEIJING - Yao Wenyuan, the final surviving member of the Gang of Four that terrorized China during the violent 1966-76 Cultural Revolution by persecuting thousands of people, has died, the government said Friday. He was 74.
Yao's death on Dec. 23 was blamed on diabetes, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. It didn't say where he died or explain the delay in reporting his death.
The Gang of Four, reportedly given its name by then-Chinese leader Mao Zedong, directed the purge of moderate party officials and intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution. Yao was the group's propagandist, later dubbed the killer with a pen by state media.
Led by Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, the Gang of Four and its allies inflicted physical and emotional damage that still reverberates in Chinese society, despite loosened social controls and economic reforms that have raised living standards.
Nearly every Chinese city dweller who was alive at the time can tell of a relative or friend who was beaten, harassed or driven to suicide, often by tormenters who took advantage of the unrest to avenge grudges.
The violence pitted neighbor against neighbor, wrecked the economy and forced a generation of intellectuals to work in the countryside.
A month after Mao's death in 1976, the Gang of Four members were arrested, marking the end of the Cultural Revolution.
Yao, a Shanghai journalist, was convicted of trying to gain power by persecuting officials and members of the public and spent 20 years in prison before his release in 1996. It was not known what he did in the 10 years after his release.
Evidence at his televised trial included a diary entry in which he asked: "Why can't we shoot a few counterrevolutionary elements? After all, dictatorship is not like embroidering flowers."
On Jiang's orders, Yao fired the first salvo of the Cultural Revolution, writing a review condemning a popular Beijing play as an attack on Mao. He was rewarded with a seat on the party's ruling Politburo.
Yao later confessed to falsifying evidence against Deng Xiaoping, who was purged during the Cultural Revolution but emerged as China's supreme leader in 1978.
"His weapon to kill people was the pen," a government magazine said in 1981 after Yao's conviction.
Jiang died in 1991 in custody, reportedly by suicide. Another member, Wang Hongwen, died in 1992. The third member, Zhang Chunqiao, died last May.
The Gang of Four received most of the official blame for the political violence as the government tried to shift attention away from the role played by others, including thousands of officials.
Yao served his sentence in Qincheng jail outside of Beijing, where the Gang of Four once held victims in solitary confinement.
Xinhua didn't give any details of survivors or funeral arrangements.
Here’s an example of our problem.
If we are to have a real world, we must deal with reality! Unfortunately, society works overtime to create illusions, to pull the wool over our eyes, to “sell” us. Here is a perfect example.
Since before WW II we have been inculcated by invasive waves of propagandistic crap about the evil enemy of godless, insane, arbitrary, oppressive communism.
And that’s all we’ve heard. What else could we believe? Well, it’s embarrassing to see an actual product of all those years of brainwashing (see the last section of this posting). It is so shallow, stupid, and insulting to one’s intelligence – if one has been giving any thought to the bullshit that passes for reporting – as to be nauseating.
This report on the death of the last surviving member of the Gang of Four drips with mindless rhetoric. It reports the terrorization of THOUSANDS of Chinese in a nation of a Billion – as if we haven’t terrorized thousands HERE in a population of 300 million.
It uses the term “purge” for its negative connotations rather than the more positive “remove.” Those who are “purged” rather than “removed” are called – positively - “Moderate party officials”- rather than, negatively, “enemies of the people,” or neutrally “opponents.”
Yao Wenyuan, the focus of the piece, is damned for being a “killer with a pen” by the “state media” – i.e. the official mouthpiece of the faction that won the struggle calls what Yao (of the losing side) said “propaganda” and describes his words as murderous.
As one would expect – if one thought about it – EVERYTHING about the LOSING side is negative. None of it is positive. The reader will find it impossible – based upon this article – to grasp any understanding of what this “Gang of Four” business is all about. The reader WILL be certain, however, that the Gang of Four were despicable people and that the Cultural Revolution was a dastardly and tragic episode – no explanation – no argument – no evidence. It’s nothing but propaganda.
As ALWAYS, my favorite example of self-serving, capitalistic crap is again presented:
“PROFESSIONALS WERE FORCED TO WORK ON SWINE FARMS!!!!” (actually in this particular case: “forced a generation of intellectuals to work in the countryside”).
This is a disgusting comment, but it has been made over and over again – Oh, the tragedy of accountants and lawyers and physicists having to work on FARMS – often even on SWINE FARMS!!!
Well, where did these fucks think the sweet and sour pork they ordered in their fancy restaurants came from – ledger books? Court rooms? Laboratories?
No! These fucks got their pork from SWINE FARMS!!
And the evil, godless communists made thousands (out of the billion) of these fucks – who wouldn’t be caught dead even pissing on a peasant - go work along side them!! What a FUCKING TRAGEDY !!!
And that shit is put out on a regular basis - and with a straight face!!!
Below, I took a recent Yahoo news posting and adjusted it a bit, hopefully to aid a more balanced understanding of just how ignorant and/or compliant the press has become. Posted last is the actual AP story.
- Uke Man
Last Survivor of Colonies “Indian Band” Dies
By JOE McDONALD, King George Press Writer Fri Jan 6, 10:04 AM ET
PHILADELPHIA – Benjamin Franklin, the final surviving member of the “Indian Band” that terrorized the colonies during the violent 1776 “American Revolution” by persecuting thousands of people, has died, the government said Friday. He was 230.
Franklin's death on Dec. 23 was blamed on diabetes, the New York Times, the paper of record reported. It didn't say where he died or explain the delay in reporting his death.
The “Indian Band”, reportedly given its name by then-king George III, directed the purge of tea, Tory officials and royal-sympathisers during the “American Revolution.” Franklin was the group's propagandist, later dubbed the killer with a penis by Fox media.
Led by former British officer George Washington, the “Indian Band” and its allies inflicted physical and emotional damage that still reverberates in British society, despite Margaret Thacher’s tightened social controls and economic reforms that have raised the living standards of the privileged class.
Nearly every American city dweller who was alive at the time can tell of a relative or friend who was beaten, harassed or driven to suicide, often by rebel tormenters who took advantage of the unrest to avenge grudges.
The violence pitted neighbor against neighbor, seriously impacted the income of the King and his retainers and forced a generation of intellectuals to work in the countryside along side of the ill-clad and ignorant settlers they had formerly reviled from a distance.
A month after Washington's death in 1976, the “Indian Band” members were arrested, marking the end of the “American Revolution.”
Franklin, a Philadelphia journalist, was convicted of trying to gain power by persecuting Tory officials and members of the public sympathetic to England and spent 20 years in prison before his release in 1996. It was not known what he did in the 10 years after his release.
Evidence at his televised trial included a diary entry in which he asked: "Why can't we shoot at them from behind trees and rocks? After all, taxation without representation is dictatorship."
On Washington's orders, Franklin fired the first salvo of the Cultural Revolution, writing a review condemning a popular Broadway play as an attack on John Hancock. He was rewarded with a seat at the band's Constitutional Convention .
Franklin later confessed to falsifying evidence (with the aid of discredited journalist Dan Rather) against George W. Bush , whom he had depicted as an uneducated, moronic slacker but who emerged as America's supreme leader in 2000.
"His weapon to kill people was the pen," the National Review reported in 1981 after Franklin's conviction.
Washington died in 1991 in custody, reportedly by suicide. Another member, Thomas Jefferson, died in 1992. A third member, John Hancock , died last May of tendonitis, leaving a large family of dependants penniless, having invested in worthless insurance policies.
The “Indian Band” received most of the official blame for the political violence as the British government tried to shift attention away from the role played by greedy bastards in the homeland, including thousands of government officials and the landed aristocracy sitting there on its dead ass.
Franklin served his sentence at Tonofguano Prison, where the “Indian Band” once held victims loyal to the crown in solitary confinement.
The Times didn't give any details of survivors or funeral arrangements.
************************************************
Last Survivor of China's Gang of Four Dies
By JOE McDONALD, Associated Press Writer Fri Jan 6, 10:04 AM ET
BEIJING - Yao Wenyuan, the final surviving member of the Gang of Four that terrorized China during the violent 1966-76 Cultural Revolution by persecuting thousands of people, has died, the government said Friday. He was 74.
Yao's death on Dec. 23 was blamed on diabetes, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. It didn't say where he died or explain the delay in reporting his death.
The Gang of Four, reportedly given its name by then-Chinese leader Mao Zedong, directed the purge of moderate party officials and intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution. Yao was the group's propagandist, later dubbed the killer with a pen by state media.
Led by Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, the Gang of Four and its allies inflicted physical and emotional damage that still reverberates in Chinese society, despite loosened social controls and economic reforms that have raised living standards.
Nearly every Chinese city dweller who was alive at the time can tell of a relative or friend who was beaten, harassed or driven to suicide, often by tormenters who took advantage of the unrest to avenge grudges.
The violence pitted neighbor against neighbor, wrecked the economy and forced a generation of intellectuals to work in the countryside.
A month after Mao's death in 1976, the Gang of Four members were arrested, marking the end of the Cultural Revolution.
Yao, a Shanghai journalist, was convicted of trying to gain power by persecuting officials and members of the public and spent 20 years in prison before his release in 1996. It was not known what he did in the 10 years after his release.
Evidence at his televised trial included a diary entry in which he asked: "Why can't we shoot a few counterrevolutionary elements? After all, dictatorship is not like embroidering flowers."
On Jiang's orders, Yao fired the first salvo of the Cultural Revolution, writing a review condemning a popular Beijing play as an attack on Mao. He was rewarded with a seat on the party's ruling Politburo.
Yao later confessed to falsifying evidence against Deng Xiaoping, who was purged during the Cultural Revolution but emerged as China's supreme leader in 1978.
"His weapon to kill people was the pen," a government magazine said in 1981 after Yao's conviction.
Jiang died in 1991 in custody, reportedly by suicide. Another member, Wang Hongwen, died in 1992. The third member, Zhang Chunqiao, died last May.
The Gang of Four received most of the official blame for the political violence as the government tried to shift attention away from the role played by others, including thousands of officials.
Yao served his sentence in Qincheng jail outside of Beijing, where the Gang of Four once held victims in solitary confinement.
Xinhua didn't give any details of survivors or funeral arrangements.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
The Not In Our Name Statement of Conscience
Hey Folks,
I've been urging your attention to "the World Can't Wait - Drive Out the Bush Regime." The call is based on the document below and is endorsed by an ever-growing number of individuals and groups.
- Uke Man
(the information below can be found at: http://www.nion.us/NSOC/NION2wsigninfo.htm)
As George W. Bush bullies his way through his second term, let it not be said that people in the United States silently acquiesced in the face of this shameful coronation of war, greed, and intolerance. He does not speak for us. He does not represent us. He does not act in our name.
No election, whether fair or fraudulent, can legitimize criminal wars on foreign countries, torture, the wholesale violation of human rights, and the end of science and reason.
In our name, the Bush government justifies the invasion and occupation of Iraq on false pretenses, raining down destruction, horror, and misery, bringing death to more than 100,000 Iraqis. It sends our youth to destroy entire cities for the sake of so-called democratic elections, while intimidating and disenfranchising thousands of African American and other voters at home.
In our name, the Bush government holds in contempt international law and world opinion. It carries out torture and detentions without trial around the world and proposes new assaults on our rights of privacy, speech and assembly at home. It strips the rights of Arabs, Muslims and South Asians in the U.S., denies them legal counsel, stigmatizes and holds them without cause. Thousands have been deported.
As new trial balloons are floated about invasions of Syria, or Iran, or North Korea, about leaving the United Nations, about new “lifetime detention” policies, we say not in our name will we allow further crimes to be committed against nations or individuals deemed to stand in the way of the goal of unquestioned world supremacy.
Could we have imagined a few years ago that core principles such as the separation of church and state, due process, presumption of innocence, freedom of speech, and habeas corpus would be discarded so easily? Now, anyone can be declared an "enemy combatant" without meaningful redress or independent review by a President who is concentrating power in the executive branch. His choice for Attorney General is the legal architect of the torture that has been carried out in Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and Abu Ghraib.
The Bush government seeks to impose a narrow, intolerant, and political form of Christian fundamentalism as government policy. No longer on the margins of power, this extremist movement aims to strip women of their reproductive rights, to stoke hatred of gays and lesbians, and to drive a wedge between spiritual experience and scientific truth. We will not surrender to extremists our right to think. AIDS is not a punishment from God. Global warming is a real danger. Evolution happened. All people must be free to find meaning and sustenance in whatever form of religious or spiritual belief they choose. But religion can never be compulsory. These extremists may claim to make their own reality, but we will not allow them to make ours.
Millions of us worked, talked, marched, poll watched, contributed, voted, and did everything we could to defeat the Bush regime in the last election. This unprecedented effort brought forth new energy, organization, and commitment to struggle for justice. It would be a terrible mistake to let our failure to stop Bush in these ways lead to despair and inaction. On the contrary, this broad mobilization of people committed to a fairer, freer, more peaceful world must move forward. We cannot, we will not, wait until 2008. The fight against the second Bush regime has to start now.
The movement against the war in Vietnam never won a presidential election. But it blocked troop trains, closed induction centers, marched, spoke to people door to door -- and it helped to stop a war. The Civil Rights Movement never tied its star to a presidential candidate; it sat in, freedom rode, fought legal battles, filled jailhouses -- and changed the face of a nation.
We must change the political reality of this country by mobilizing the tens of millions who know in their heads and hearts that the Bush regime’s “reality” is nothing but a nightmare for humanity. This will require creativity, mass actions and individual moments of courage. We must come together whenever we can, and we must act alone whenever we have to.
We draw inspiration from the soldiers who have refused to fight in this immoral war. We applaud the librarians who have refused to turn over lists of our reading, the high school students who have demanded to be taught evolution, those who brought to light torture by the U.S. military, and the massive protests that voiced international opposition to the war on Iraq. We affirm ordinary people undertaking extraordinary acts. We pledge to create community to back courageous acts of resistance. We stand with the people throughout the world who fight every day for the right to create their own future.
It is our responsibility to stop the Bush regime from carrying out this disastrous course. We believe history will judge us sharply should we fail to act decisively.
Over 15,000 people have now signed this statement. Among the initial signers are:
James Abourezk, former U.S. senator
Janet Abu-Lughod, professor emerita, New School
As`ad AbuKhalil, California State University, Stanislaus
Michael Albert
Edward Asner
Ti-Grace Atkinson
Michael Avery, president, National Lawyers Guild
Russell Banks
Amiri Baraka
Rosalyn Baxandall, chair, American Studies/Media and Communications, State University of New York at Old Westbury
Medea Benjamin, cofounder of Global Exchange and Code Pink
Phyllis Bennis
Larry Bensky, Pacifica radio
Michael Berg
Terry Bisson
Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen
William Blum, author, US foreign policy
St. Clair Bourne
Judith Butler, author and professor, University of California at Berkeley
Julia Butterfly, director, Circle of Life Foundation
Leslie Cagan, national coordinator, United for Peace and Justice
Kathleen & Henry Chalfant
Noam Chomsky, MIT
Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney-General
Marilyn Clement, nat’l coordinator, Campaign for a National Health Program NOW
Robbie Conal, artist
Peter Coyote
John Cusack
Angela Davis
Diane di Prima, poet
Ronnie Dugger, co-founder, Alliance for Democracy
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Michael Eric Dyson
Nora Eisenberg, author of War at Home and Just the Way You Want Me
Daniel Ellsberg, former Defense and State Department official
Kathy Engel
Eve Ensler
Nina Felshin, author of But is it Art, The Spirit of Art as Activism
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Laura Flanders
Carolyn Forché
Michael Franti
Su Friedrich
Boo Froebel
Nancy Garden
Peter Gerety
Jorie Graham, Harvard University
André Gregory
Jessica Hagedorn, writer
Suheir Hammad
Sam Hamill, Poets Against the War
Danny Hoch, playwright/actor
Marie Howe
Abdeen M. Jabara, past president, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
Jim Jarmusch, filmmaker
Bill T. Jones
Rickie Lee Jones
David Kazanjian
Barbara Kingsolver
C. Clark Kissinger, Refuse & Resist!
Evelyn Fox Keller, Professor of History of Science, MIT
Hans Koning, writer
David Korn
David C. Korten
Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor, TIKKUN magazine & Rabbi, Beyt Tikkun Synagogue , SF
Phil Lesh, Grateful Dead
Staughton Lynd
Reynaldo F. Macías, chair, National Association for Chicana & Chicano Studies
Karen Malpede
Dave Marsh
Maryknoll Sisters, Western Region
Jim McDermott, Member of Congress, State of Washington
Robert Meeropol, executive director, Rosenberg Fund for Children
Ann Messner
Robin Morgan, author and activist
Walter Mosley
Wayne Nafziger
Jill Nelson, writer
Odetta
Rosalind Petchesky, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Hunter College & the Graduate Center - CUNY
Jeremy Pikser, screenwriter (Bulworth)
Frances Fox Piven
James Stewart Polshek, architect
William Pope L
Francine Prose
Jerry Quickley, poet
Michael Ratner, president, Center for Constitutional Rights
David Riker, filmmaker
Larry Robinson, mayor of Sebastopol, CA
Stephen Rohde, civil liberties lawyer
Matthew Rothschild, editor, The Progressive magazine
Luc Sante
James Schamus
Peter Dale Scott
Roberta Segal-Sklar, communications director, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
Frank Serpico
Betty Shamieh
Wallace Shawn
Gregory Sholette
Zach Sklar
Peter Sollett
Starhawk
Tony Taccone
Grace Tsao
Alice Walker
Naomi Wallace
Immanuel Wallerstein
Leonard Weinglass
Peter Weiss, president, Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy
Cornel West
C.K. Williams, poet, Princeton University
Saul Williams
Krzysztof Wodiczko, director, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT
Damian Woetzel, principal dancer, New York City Ballet
David Zeiger, Displaced Films
Zephyr
Howard Zinn, historian
I've been urging your attention to "the World Can't Wait - Drive Out the Bush Regime." The call is based on the document below and is endorsed by an ever-growing number of individuals and groups.
- Uke Man
(the information below can be found at: http://www.nion.us/NSOC/NION2wsigninfo.htm)
The New Not in Our Name Statement of Conscience, opposing the domestic and international agenda of the Bush government, is signed by over 15,000 people and appeared in the New York Times on Sunday, January 23, and in the San Francisco Chronicle on Thursday, February 3. LA TIMES, February 15. Please help us get it published in other publications
You can also read the Statement in Spanish, French or English
As George W. Bush bullies his way through his second term, let it not be said that people in the United States silently acquiesced in the face of this shameful coronation of war, greed, and intolerance. He does not speak for us. He does not represent us. He does not act in our name.
No election, whether fair or fraudulent, can legitimize criminal wars on foreign countries, torture, the wholesale violation of human rights, and the end of science and reason.
In our name, the Bush government justifies the invasion and occupation of Iraq on false pretenses, raining down destruction, horror, and misery, bringing death to more than 100,000 Iraqis. It sends our youth to destroy entire cities for the sake of so-called democratic elections, while intimidating and disenfranchising thousands of African American and other voters at home.
In our name, the Bush government holds in contempt international law and world opinion. It carries out torture and detentions without trial around the world and proposes new assaults on our rights of privacy, speech and assembly at home. It strips the rights of Arabs, Muslims and South Asians in the U.S., denies them legal counsel, stigmatizes and holds them without cause. Thousands have been deported.
As new trial balloons are floated about invasions of Syria, or Iran, or North Korea, about leaving the United Nations, about new “lifetime detention” policies, we say not in our name will we allow further crimes to be committed against nations or individuals deemed to stand in the way of the goal of unquestioned world supremacy.
Could we have imagined a few years ago that core principles such as the separation of church and state, due process, presumption of innocence, freedom of speech, and habeas corpus would be discarded so easily? Now, anyone can be declared an "enemy combatant" without meaningful redress or independent review by a President who is concentrating power in the executive branch. His choice for Attorney General is the legal architect of the torture that has been carried out in Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and Abu Ghraib.
The Bush government seeks to impose a narrow, intolerant, and political form of Christian fundamentalism as government policy. No longer on the margins of power, this extremist movement aims to strip women of their reproductive rights, to stoke hatred of gays and lesbians, and to drive a wedge between spiritual experience and scientific truth. We will not surrender to extremists our right to think. AIDS is not a punishment from God. Global warming is a real danger. Evolution happened. All people must be free to find meaning and sustenance in whatever form of religious or spiritual belief they choose. But religion can never be compulsory. These extremists may claim to make their own reality, but we will not allow them to make ours.
Millions of us worked, talked, marched, poll watched, contributed, voted, and did everything we could to defeat the Bush regime in the last election. This unprecedented effort brought forth new energy, organization, and commitment to struggle for justice. It would be a terrible mistake to let our failure to stop Bush in these ways lead to despair and inaction. On the contrary, this broad mobilization of people committed to a fairer, freer, more peaceful world must move forward. We cannot, we will not, wait until 2008. The fight against the second Bush regime has to start now.
The movement against the war in Vietnam never won a presidential election. But it blocked troop trains, closed induction centers, marched, spoke to people door to door -- and it helped to stop a war. The Civil Rights Movement never tied its star to a presidential candidate; it sat in, freedom rode, fought legal battles, filled jailhouses -- and changed the face of a nation.
We must change the political reality of this country by mobilizing the tens of millions who know in their heads and hearts that the Bush regime’s “reality” is nothing but a nightmare for humanity. This will require creativity, mass actions and individual moments of courage. We must come together whenever we can, and we must act alone whenever we have to.
We draw inspiration from the soldiers who have refused to fight in this immoral war. We applaud the librarians who have refused to turn over lists of our reading, the high school students who have demanded to be taught evolution, those who brought to light torture by the U.S. military, and the massive protests that voiced international opposition to the war on Iraq. We affirm ordinary people undertaking extraordinary acts. We pledge to create community to back courageous acts of resistance. We stand with the people throughout the world who fight every day for the right to create their own future.
It is our responsibility to stop the Bush regime from carrying out this disastrous course. We believe history will judge us sharply should we fail to act decisively.
Over 15,000 people have now signed this statement. Among the initial signers are:
James Abourezk, former U.S. senator
Janet Abu-Lughod, professor emerita, New School
As`ad AbuKhalil, California State University, Stanislaus
Michael Albert
Edward Asner
Ti-Grace Atkinson
Michael Avery, president, National Lawyers Guild
Russell Banks
Amiri Baraka
Rosalyn Baxandall, chair, American Studies/Media and Communications, State University of New York at Old Westbury
Medea Benjamin, cofounder of Global Exchange and Code Pink
Phyllis Bennis
Larry Bensky, Pacifica radio
Michael Berg
Terry Bisson
Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen
William Blum, author, US foreign policy
St. Clair Bourne
Judith Butler, author and professor, University of California at Berkeley
Julia Butterfly, director, Circle of Life Foundation
Leslie Cagan, national coordinator, United for Peace and Justice
Kathleen & Henry Chalfant
Noam Chomsky, MIT
Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney-General
Marilyn Clement, nat’l coordinator, Campaign for a National Health Program NOW
Robbie Conal, artist
Peter Coyote
John Cusack
Angela Davis
Diane di Prima, poet
Ronnie Dugger, co-founder, Alliance for Democracy
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Michael Eric Dyson
Nora Eisenberg, author of War at Home and Just the Way You Want Me
Daniel Ellsberg, former Defense and State Department official
Kathy Engel
Eve Ensler
Nina Felshin, author of But is it Art, The Spirit of Art as Activism
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Laura Flanders
Carolyn Forché
Michael Franti
Su Friedrich
Boo Froebel
Nancy Garden
Peter Gerety
Jorie Graham, Harvard University
André Gregory
Jessica Hagedorn, writer
Suheir Hammad
Sam Hamill, Poets Against the War
Danny Hoch, playwright/actor
Marie Howe
Abdeen M. Jabara, past president, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
Jim Jarmusch, filmmaker
Bill T. Jones
Rickie Lee Jones
David Kazanjian
Barbara Kingsolver
C. Clark Kissinger, Refuse & Resist!
Evelyn Fox Keller, Professor of History of Science, MIT
Hans Koning, writer
David Korn
David C. Korten
Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor, TIKKUN magazine & Rabbi, Beyt Tikkun Synagogue , SF
Phil Lesh, Grateful Dead
Staughton Lynd
Reynaldo F. Macías, chair, National Association for Chicana & Chicano Studies
Karen Malpede
Dave Marsh
Maryknoll Sisters, Western Region
Jim McDermott, Member of Congress, State of Washington
Robert Meeropol, executive director, Rosenberg Fund for Children
Ann Messner
Robin Morgan, author and activist
Walter Mosley
Wayne Nafziger
Jill Nelson, writer
Odetta
Rosalind Petchesky, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Hunter College & the Graduate Center - CUNY
Jeremy Pikser, screenwriter (Bulworth)
Frances Fox Piven
James Stewart Polshek, architect
William Pope L
Francine Prose
Jerry Quickley, poet
Michael Ratner, president, Center for Constitutional Rights
David Riker, filmmaker
Larry Robinson, mayor of Sebastopol, CA
Stephen Rohde, civil liberties lawyer
Matthew Rothschild, editor, The Progressive magazine
Luc Sante
James Schamus
Peter Dale Scott
Roberta Segal-Sklar, communications director, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
Frank Serpico
Betty Shamieh
Wallace Shawn
Gregory Sholette
Zach Sklar
Peter Sollett
Starhawk
Tony Taccone
Grace Tsao
Alice Walker
Naomi Wallace
Immanuel Wallerstein
Leonard Weinglass
Peter Weiss, president, Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy
Cornel West
C.K. Williams, poet, Princeton University
Saul Williams
Krzysztof Wodiczko, director, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT
Damian Woetzel, principal dancer, New York City Ballet
David Zeiger, Displaced Films
Zephyr
Howard Zinn, historian
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Do or Die!
Hi Folks,
I just got back to Circleville from visiting my son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter in New Hampshire where we celebrated the new year and watched the Ohio State – Notre Dame game (and ate at the most authentic Mexican restaurant in the United States !!).
Coming back we laid-over in Cleveland. For half an hour, as I waited for my flight, small groups of young people (30 or 40 in all), dressed in army camouflage, straggled by.
They were very, very young; it seemed to me – just boys and girls - smiling and talking to one another as they passed, but diffident, isolated; passing among hundreds but disconnected - alone in a crowd.
I saw their feelings; I felt them myself. It was undeniable and overwhelming. They would have denied it, but who could blame them? They tried hard to put on the brave faces of invulnerable youth, but it didn’t wash. They tried, but they remained bewildered children caught in a tragedy written by old, stupid, evil men.
I knew I would never see them again. I wondered whether their parents would. At some level they must have wondered about that too, whether or not they could admit it.
And I thought of the day before, watching the Fiesta Bowl. Young people passed through my awareness there too, but how different THEY were!
No diffidence – only rowdy anticipation. No intimations of mortality – only joyous abandon. Instead of lonely isolation – intimate communion with thousands of adoring fans. And THESE young men were Men – ages older than the children marching bravely off to die; they were happy men playing a GAME, men certain to see their families again, men with a future.
And I was struck by what a fucked up world we live in.
- Uke Man
I just got back to Circleville from visiting my son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter in New Hampshire where we celebrated the new year and watched the Ohio State – Notre Dame game (and ate at the most authentic Mexican restaurant in the United States !!).
Coming back we laid-over in Cleveland. For half an hour, as I waited for my flight, small groups of young people (30 or 40 in all), dressed in army camouflage, straggled by.
They were very, very young; it seemed to me – just boys and girls - smiling and talking to one another as they passed, but diffident, isolated; passing among hundreds but disconnected - alone in a crowd.
I saw their feelings; I felt them myself. It was undeniable and overwhelming. They would have denied it, but who could blame them? They tried hard to put on the brave faces of invulnerable youth, but it didn’t wash. They tried, but they remained bewildered children caught in a tragedy written by old, stupid, evil men.
I knew I would never see them again. I wondered whether their parents would. At some level they must have wondered about that too, whether or not they could admit it.
And I thought of the day before, watching the Fiesta Bowl. Young people passed through my awareness there too, but how different THEY were!
No diffidence – only rowdy anticipation. No intimations of mortality – only joyous abandon. Instead of lonely isolation – intimate communion with thousands of adoring fans. And THESE young men were Men – ages older than the children marching bravely off to die; they were happy men playing a GAME, men certain to see their families again, men with a future.
And I was struck by what a fucked up world we live in.
- Uke Man
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Twain on the "Self-made Man"
Hey Folks,
I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 15th entry) .
His insights remain pertinent to this day. We haven’t changed much from Twain’s day – or from King Arthur’s, for that matter.
- Uke Man
Chapter 32 – The Yankee, still in disguise, sets up the blacksmith, a “self-made man” who is quite full of himself to blather on about his own importance.
Dowley was in fine feather, and I early got him started, and then adroitly worked him around onto his own history for a text and himself for a hero, and then it was good to sit there and hear him hum. Self-made man, you know. They know how to talk. They do deserve more credit than any other breed of man, yes, that’s true; and they are among the very first to find it out, too. He told how he had begun life an orphan lad without money and without friends able to help him [etc., etc. – until he achieved his present "high" station in life – at least compared to the other artisans in the village – that is, as he says] “Two times in every month there is fresh meat upon my table . . .and eight times, salt meat . . . [and] on my table appeareth white bread every Sunday in the year.”
I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 15th entry) .
His insights remain pertinent to this day. We haven’t changed much from Twain’s day – or from King Arthur’s, for that matter.
- Uke Man
Chapter 32 – The Yankee, still in disguise, sets up the blacksmith, a “self-made man” who is quite full of himself to blather on about his own importance.
Dowley was in fine feather, and I early got him started, and then adroitly worked him around onto his own history for a text and himself for a hero, and then it was good to sit there and hear him hum. Self-made man, you know. They know how to talk. They do deserve more credit than any other breed of man, yes, that’s true; and they are among the very first to find it out, too. He told how he had begun life an orphan lad without money and without friends able to help him [etc., etc. – until he achieved his present "high" station in life – at least compared to the other artisans in the village – that is, as he says] “Two times in every month there is fresh meat upon my table . . .and eight times, salt meat . . . [and] on my table appeareth white bread every Sunday in the year.”
Monday, January 02, 2006
Sunday, January 01, 2006
The Immigration "Problem"
Hey Folks,
It has been said – quite wisely I believe – that any system that exists is perfectly designed to deliver just what it delivers. Ignoring this reality leads to such mistaken analysis as demonstrated in the Columbus Dispatch editorial posted below.
The editorial bemoans the situation regarding “illegal immigration.” It describes two opposing factions: those who benefit monetarily from employing these inexpensive, hard-working immigrants and those who fear the immigrants are a threat to legal Americans’ ability to make a living, a threat to the dominant Anglo culture, and a weight on the taxpayer for schools, health care, social services, etc.
The editorial ignores the plight of the third group, the actual immigrants, altogether.
After setting up the dichotomy and discussing various “compromises” it says are going nowhere, the editorial ends with:
“This is not a surprise, nor is it unusual in American history. There have been numerous instances in which Americans have agonized for years over a social or economic issue before taking a side or reconciling themselves to a compromise.
With illegal immigration, neither outcome appears to be at hand.”
This leaves one feeling that since nothing has been “compromised” nothing is going on, but it ignores the fact that the system HAS been and WILL CONTINUE to produce EXACTLY what it is designed for: increasing the wealth of a few people at the expense of the rest of us – including the exploited illegal immigrants.
We do not have immigration problems because the system is broken; the system is DESIGNED to MAINTAIN the “problems.” For the few in a position to control the system, illegal immigration is a “blessing”! and one they fully intend to keep receiving!
That’s why “There have been numerous [historical] instances in which Americans have agonized for years over a social or economic issue.” And “agonized” is the correct word. The rich vampires who have always been in charge of this plantation don’t care whether we “agonize” forever over what WE see as a problem – as long as THEY can painlessly profit from it!
It’s always been that way; the system is designed to make it so – whether the good editors at the Dispatch are ready to admit it or not – perhaps they are naïve, or perhaps they are just clouding the issue – sounding concerned and erudite, but actually propagandizing for the Titans’ benefit!
In any case, we ought to take the World Can’t Wait call to drive out the Bush Regime seriously. Nothing will change until the system changes.
- Uke Man
Divided, we stall
Americans cannot make up their minds about illegal immigration
Thursday, December 29, 2005
The topic of illegal immigration can make people livid, never more so than now. In recent months, a series of incidents and legislative proposals has brought the issue to the forefront.
The problem is, Americans have contradictory views of illegal immigrants, and until the contradictions are resolved, little is likely to be accomplished.
Earlier this year, a Butler County tavern owner made the news when he posted a sign requiring customers to order in English or do without service. The sign was declared discriminatory by the Ohio Civil Rights Commission, but the incident helped fuel calls to make English Ohio’s official language.
The Butler County sheriff wants federal authorities to reimburse him for the cost of jailing illegal aliens. And a state lawmaker from Butler County wants to pass a law that would allow police to expel illegal immigrants from the state as trespassers.
In Congress there is a proposal to override the constitutional provision that declares that anyone born on U.S. soil, even those whose parents are noncitizens, is a U.S. citizen. Supporters of this change say that many foreigners sneak into the country to give birth so that, when the child is 18, he can use his citizenship to bring other family members into the United States.
But despite making headlines and generating much discussion, such proposals have not gotten very far.
On one side are those Americans who point to the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants and see a threat to the livelihoods and security of U.S. citizens. Since the largest group of these illegal aliens are Spanish speakers, the threat is seen as linguistic and cultural, as well.
In the view of many Americans, illegal immigrants impose costs on police, schools, social-service agencies and the health-care system. And since 9/11, the ease with which foreigners cross into the country raises fears of terrorists doing the same.
On the other hand are Americans who benefit from the labor provided by illegal immigrants.
These immigrants can be found building housing, harvesting farm produce and landscaping around homes and businesses throughout the country. They work hard and they work cheap, satisfying a demand for low-wage labor.
Probably at least one argument about this issue has occurred over dinner in a restaurant where the reasonable prices are due in part to the cheap labor of illegal immigrants who are cooking the food, washing the dishes and clearing tables.
The GOP-controlled Congress feels pressure from both sides. Many conservatives want strong action to stem the tide of illegal immigration. But powerful business interests want the cheap labor immigrants provide.
Politically, the issue is deadlocked, too. Republicans could mollify one part of their base by cracking down on illegal immigration but thereby risk losing Hispanic voters.
President Bush, former governor of a border state who is very familiar with the issue, has tried to find a middle way that offers something to both sides. He has proposed to beef up border-control efforts to prevent illegals from entering the country, while creating a guest-worker program that would allow foreigners to remain in the United States for up to six years before returning home and reapplying for admission.
But his idea has not caught on, and the opposing sides of the debate remain entrenched.
This is not a surprise, nor is it unusual in American history. There have been numerous instances in which Americans have agonized for years over a social or economic issue before taking a side or reconciling themselves to a compromise.
With illegal immigration, neither outcome appears to be at hand.
It has been said – quite wisely I believe – that any system that exists is perfectly designed to deliver just what it delivers. Ignoring this reality leads to such mistaken analysis as demonstrated in the Columbus Dispatch editorial posted below.
The editorial bemoans the situation regarding “illegal immigration.” It describes two opposing factions: those who benefit monetarily from employing these inexpensive, hard-working immigrants and those who fear the immigrants are a threat to legal Americans’ ability to make a living, a threat to the dominant Anglo culture, and a weight on the taxpayer for schools, health care, social services, etc.
The editorial ignores the plight of the third group, the actual immigrants, altogether.
After setting up the dichotomy and discussing various “compromises” it says are going nowhere, the editorial ends with:
“This is not a surprise, nor is it unusual in American history. There have been numerous instances in which Americans have agonized for years over a social or economic issue before taking a side or reconciling themselves to a compromise.
With illegal immigration, neither outcome appears to be at hand.”
This leaves one feeling that since nothing has been “compromised” nothing is going on, but it ignores the fact that the system HAS been and WILL CONTINUE to produce EXACTLY what it is designed for: increasing the wealth of a few people at the expense of the rest of us – including the exploited illegal immigrants.
We do not have immigration problems because the system is broken; the system is DESIGNED to MAINTAIN the “problems.” For the few in a position to control the system, illegal immigration is a “blessing”! and one they fully intend to keep receiving!
That’s why “There have been numerous [historical] instances in which Americans have agonized for years over a social or economic issue.” And “agonized” is the correct word. The rich vampires who have always been in charge of this plantation don’t care whether we “agonize” forever over what WE see as a problem – as long as THEY can painlessly profit from it!
It’s always been that way; the system is designed to make it so – whether the good editors at the Dispatch are ready to admit it or not – perhaps they are naïve, or perhaps they are just clouding the issue – sounding concerned and erudite, but actually propagandizing for the Titans’ benefit!
In any case, we ought to take the World Can’t Wait call to drive out the Bush Regime seriously. Nothing will change until the system changes.
- Uke Man
Divided, we stall
Americans cannot make up their minds about illegal immigration
Thursday, December 29, 2005
The topic of illegal immigration can make people livid, never more so than now. In recent months, a series of incidents and legislative proposals has brought the issue to the forefront.
The problem is, Americans have contradictory views of illegal immigrants, and until the contradictions are resolved, little is likely to be accomplished.
Earlier this year, a Butler County tavern owner made the news when he posted a sign requiring customers to order in English or do without service. The sign was declared discriminatory by the Ohio Civil Rights Commission, but the incident helped fuel calls to make English Ohio’s official language.
The Butler County sheriff wants federal authorities to reimburse him for the cost of jailing illegal aliens. And a state lawmaker from Butler County wants to pass a law that would allow police to expel illegal immigrants from the state as trespassers.
In Congress there is a proposal to override the constitutional provision that declares that anyone born on U.S. soil, even those whose parents are noncitizens, is a U.S. citizen. Supporters of this change say that many foreigners sneak into the country to give birth so that, when the child is 18, he can use his citizenship to bring other family members into the United States.
But despite making headlines and generating much discussion, such proposals have not gotten very far.
On one side are those Americans who point to the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants and see a threat to the livelihoods and security of U.S. citizens. Since the largest group of these illegal aliens are Spanish speakers, the threat is seen as linguistic and cultural, as well.
In the view of many Americans, illegal immigrants impose costs on police, schools, social-service agencies and the health-care system. And since 9/11, the ease with which foreigners cross into the country raises fears of terrorists doing the same.
On the other hand are Americans who benefit from the labor provided by illegal immigrants.
These immigrants can be found building housing, harvesting farm produce and landscaping around homes and businesses throughout the country. They work hard and they work cheap, satisfying a demand for low-wage labor.
Probably at least one argument about this issue has occurred over dinner in a restaurant where the reasonable prices are due in part to the cheap labor of illegal immigrants who are cooking the food, washing the dishes and clearing tables.
The GOP-controlled Congress feels pressure from both sides. Many conservatives want strong action to stem the tide of illegal immigration. But powerful business interests want the cheap labor immigrants provide.
Politically, the issue is deadlocked, too. Republicans could mollify one part of their base by cracking down on illegal immigration but thereby risk losing Hispanic voters.
President Bush, former governor of a border state who is very familiar with the issue, has tried to find a middle way that offers something to both sides. He has proposed to beef up border-control efforts to prevent illegals from entering the country, while creating a guest-worker program that would allow foreigners to remain in the United States for up to six years before returning home and reapplying for admission.
But his idea has not caught on, and the opposing sides of the debate remain entrenched.
This is not a surprise, nor is it unusual in American history. There have been numerous instances in which Americans have agonized for years over a social or economic issue before taking a side or reconciling themselves to a compromise.
With illegal immigration, neither outcome appears to be at hand.
About Me
- Name: Tom Harker
- Location: Circleville, Ohio, US
Music and Politics, Politics and Music!!! * * * Everything is political. We’re admonished, “Never discuss religion or politics.” Follow that advice, and we’ll have to quit talking altogether. * * * Well, the Uke Man speaks! * * * Keep track here of my musical shenanigans, my political ruminations, and - from time to time - some other interesting eruptions.
Previous Posts
- "Things are lookin' good !!"
- The Chicken are coming home to roost !!
- The Gateway to Crime !!
- Ice Cream and Coffee can be Dangerous !!
- Bush's Pet (scape) Goat ???
- How Smart Are We ??
- Consumed
- A short (hopefully interesting) discussion
- Hi, atus!!
- So rested he by the Tumtum tree and stood a while ...
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