A Thoughtful Response - Final Part

Hey Folks,

A while back I posted two Hugo Chavez-related items: “Truth and Fiction” http://www.ukuleleman.net/2006/09/truth-and-fiction.html and “Did I miss something?” http://www.ukuleleman.net/2006/09/hey-folks-did-i-miss-something-i.html .

A long, thoughtful comment was added at the second posting (click above to see the entire comment). I think it deserves a thoughtful response.Here is the Final Part. My comments are in red.

- Uke Man


And in addition to Chavez aligning himself with an anti-Semitic leader like Ahmadinejad, you might want to ask yourself why he'd want to be pals with someone who is imposing the most primitive right-wing religious government outside of Saudi Arabia on his people.

In case you hadn't researched this topic either, Sharia law calls for the death penalty for homosexuality, adultery, premarital sex, and lesser infractions only require the amputation of a hand or foot. Oh, and for all the atheists reading this, under Sharia law, "people of the Book" (Jews and Christians) have a choice of either converting or paying Jizyah (infidel tax), whereas Godless pagans and atheists have only two choices: convert to Islam or die by the sword.

You might want to do a little more research about how "heroic" and "benign" these guys than you seem to be doing at the moment.

Well, I made it clear in my postings that Chavez is open to criticism for his alignment with Ahmadinejad, and that if Chavez – who is not a Muslim – shares the Iranian’s prejudice that he should be condemned for that. I also stated my belief that, even if Chavez himself were not a racist, he had a responsibility to oppose his ally’s position (not that he’s likely to do that).

As to the suggestion that “you might want to ask yourself why he'd want to be pals with someone who is imposing the most primitive right-wing religious government outside of Saudi Arabia on his people,” I think it’s pretty clear why he’d do that.

Considering Chavez’s in-your-face approach to the imperial powers and their elite Venezuelan proxies, and considering his disdain for the “invisible hand of the infallible market,” whom should he “pal” up with?

He obviously needs pals; he’s a midget cussing out giants. There is an old saying, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and Chavez – if he is to survive – if he is to hold off the giants' inevitable push to restore the old “order” – needs to ally with – as Duhbya might say – “the willing.”

That’s why I think he’s “friends” with the Iranian – just like we, when it met our needs, were “friends” with the “Contras” and Pinochet and Saddam Hussein and the Taliban.

Ironically, we are presently “pals” with Saudi Arabia, the nation the commenter describes as an even worse pal than Iran. One of the leaders of Saudi Arabia is even an “honorary member of the Bush family”!

Since Saudi Arabian views are even more primitive than the Iranian’s, I guess American Jews, Christians, pagans, and atheists should be scared about the US government more than their Venezuelan counterparts are of theirs.

I didn’t include American gays in that because they are already seriously concerned about our government.

Well, Folks, that’s it. I really appreciate having received the comment. It prompted a broader discussion, which I hope you found worth reading.

I hope, also, that my homework was adequate.

- Uke Man

 

I can’t believe that most Americans think this is all right.

Hey Folks,

I'm with Herbert, but it seems the Congress is with the Boy President and his god on this one. Where DO the American people weigh in on this?

Are we good Americans? or "good Germans"???

- Uke Man

September 21, 2006
The Torture of Liberty
By BOB HERBERT
(a ukethanks to Phyll)

After traveling to Ottawa to interview Maher Arar last year, I wrote: “If John Ashcroft was right, then I was staring into the malevolent, duplicitous eyes of pure evil ... But all I could really see was a polite, unassuming, neatly dressed guy who looked like a suburban Little League coach.”

It turns out John Ashcroft was wrong. After an exhaustive investigation, a government commission in Canada ruled definitively and unequivocally this week that Maher Arar was no terrorist. He was nothing more than a quiet family man who found himself sucked into a vortex of incompetence, hysteria and a so-called war on terror that has gone completely haywire.

He’s lucky he survived. Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen who was born in Syria, was snatched by American authorities as he waited for a connecting flight home from Kennedy Airport in September 2002. The Americans apparently were acting on bad information fed to them by Canadian investigators.

As in the witch hunts of old, no one seemed to care whether there was any factual basis for the allegations against Mr. Arar. Without even a nod in the direction of due process, the Americans put him on a government jet and shipped him off to Jordan, where he was promptly driven to Syria, where he was tortured.

Welcome to extraordinary rendition, a reprehensible practice in which people are kidnapped by the U.S. government and sent off to countries that specialize in the evil arts of torture.

Mr. Arar lived in torment for nearly a year, confined most of the time to a tiny underground cell, about the size of a grave. Despite the torture, the Syrians were unable to connect him to terrorism in any way. The Canadian government managed to secure his release in October 2003.

If this were just a bad but honest mistake, we might be able to simply wish Mr. Arar well and vow never to let it happen again. Instead, the United States is about to ensure that many more individuals who are falsely accused are deprived of the single most fundamental tool they need to establish their innocence.

In the push to enact legislation dealing with the interrogation and prosecution of terror suspects, both the White House and dissident Republicans in the Senate intend to strip away the hallowed safeguard of habeas corpus for some noncitizens held in U.S. custody outside the United States.

Habeas corpus (literally “produce the body”) is a legal proceeding that allows one to challenge his or her detention in a court of law. It is the most significant safeguard against arbitrary imprisonment. Someone deprived of this right — which is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and has been recognized by various societies all the way back to the Middle Ages — can be locked up, whether innocent or guilty of any offense, and never heard from again.

I can’t believe that most Americans think this is all right.

“This is recognized as a broad common-law and constitutional right,” said Bill Goodman, the legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, which has been fighting to secure basic legal protections for prisoners in American custody at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

At a minimum, said Mr. Goodman, “A person has a right to know what crime he’s being charged with. And a court can demand that the government produce evidence indicating that there is a reason to hold that person.”

The authority to demand that even the highest officials in a nation — even the president, even the king back in the days of the Magna Carta — justify the detention of a human being is powerful, and essential in a free society.

The right to file for a writ of habeas corpus, insisting that this authority be exercised, is a crucial check on naked governmental power. It’s a check on injustice.

In Washington, instead of saluting this cornerstone of freedom, politicians are about to deep-six it for some people without even much in the way of debate.

Talk about freedom is cheap. We hear it all the time. Real protection against tyrannical behavior by powerful government officials is another matter.

I spoke to Mr. Arar by phone yesterday. He said now that the Canadian government has publicly cleared his name, he would like the U.S. government to follow suit. But the U.S. government is busy trying to make sure that other innocents, trapped unfairly in a cage, have absolutely nowhere to turn. No recourse at all.

"History is what I say it is" - Napoleon

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past" - George Orwell 

A Thoughtful Response III

Hey Folks,

A while back I posted two Hugo Chavez-related items: “Truth and Fiction” http://www.ukuleleman.net/2006/09/truth-and-fiction.html and “Did I miss something?” http://www.ukuleleman.net/2006/09/hey-folks-did-i-miss-something-i.html .

A long, thoughtful comment was added at the second posting (click above to see the entire comment). I think it deserves a thoughtful response.

Here is Part III. My comments are in red.

- Uke Man

And as much as you enjoy blogging your opinion, you might not be able to enjoy doing it in Venezuela. In an editorial on January 14 attacking the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the Washington Post wrote, “Mr. Chavez has pushed through a new law that allows the government to fine or shut down private media for vaguely defined offenses against 'public order'.” Something to think about.

Well, let’s assume the Post has it right and isn’t overstating anything. It follows then that there is some pressure on the Venezuelan press relative to what they print or broadcast.

That shouldn’t be surprising for a number of reasons. First, we in the US take it for granted that we have a free press; so, Chavez’s law sounds terrible. But we do not have a free press.

Most of the ubiquitous press sources are owned by conservative businesses. Most depend on advertising dollars provided by conservative businesses. Most play to the lowest common denominator to maximize ratings (and hence revenue) by avoiding controversy and “boring” nuance.

Broadcast journalists are under the thumb of government-controlled regulators and have to be careful about what they say - or face painful regulatory punishment. And public broadcasting is totally at the mercy of the government.

All this hardly adds up to a free press. The press censors itself, either for gain or out of fear, and the government rolls along.

In Venezuela’s case it was just the same before Chavez; the press were part of the elite, white/European/non-Indian minority, and have from the beginning done whatever they could to help thwart Chavez. No self-censorship there.

But the point is this: when the press twisted the news to suit the ruling elite, that was called freedom of the press because the government didn’t need to clamp down. But you better believe they’d have clamped down on hard-line opposition media.

It’s the same here.

Don’t think so? Well, consider Katharine Graham – also of the Washington Post, its owner at the time - who blew the whistle on Viet Nam by publishing the Pentagon Papers.

Ms Graham is a universally-recognized journalistic hero for printing the Pentagon Papers. That’s a given.

In the face of practically everyone at the paper – especially the lawyers – who warned of the most dire consequences if she proceeded, she went ahead.

Her behavior was so courageous that she is seen as a great hero. It is seldom considered, however, that all she did was put a true and important story in the newspaper she ran. People do that every day.

Nothing courageous there – UNLESS we don’t REALLY have freedom of the press in this country.

Remember when the president’s spokesman warned that we had to watch what we say? That’s not just idle talk.

As for my blogging, that's small potatoes. I'm under the radar. Look at Noam Chomsky. He's well-known, intelligent, widely read; but - even with the plug he got from Chavez - he is no threat to the power lords.

Freedom of the press at this time in this country means: You can say or print anything you want - as long as it has no effect.

- Uke Man

 

Has Bush Gone Over the Edge

Hill Street Blue
September 5, 2006

An increasing number of Republicans, ranging from former conservative Congressman Joe Scarborough to former President George H.W. Bush, worry that President George W. Bush's tenuous hold on reality is slipping away and the leader of the free world may be sliding into a full-fledged mental breakdown.

Scarborough sounded the warning recently when he devoted an episode of his MSNBC talk show to the topic "Is Bush an Idiot?" Other published reports say Bush's own father is worried about his son's mental state. Psychiatrists who have observed Bush during his presidency share this concern.

Bush family insiders say the former President's concern over his son's mental state was a primary reason why the President made a rare appearance at the family home in Connecticut during August. Bush rarely visits his father. In fact, NBC news anchor Brian Williams recently reported that former President Bill Clinton, who defeated the elder Bush after one term, visits his former rival more often.

White House aides point to the President's increasingly bizarre behavior: an inpromptu "massage" of a foreign leader at the recent G8 conference, his penchant for farting in front of new West Wing aides and his rambling, often incoherent answers to reporters' questions.

John Dean, the White House counsel who helped bring down another deranged President: Richard M. Nixon, shares the concern.

In his book, Conservatives Without Conscience, Dean calls Republican-controlled Washington a bullying, manipulative, prejudiced leadership edging the nation toward a dark era.

"We have returned to the imperial presidency (that existed in the Nixon era)," Dean says. "We have an unchecked presidency."

"Are we on the road to fascism?" he adds. "Clearly, we are not on that road yet. But it would not take much more misguided authoritarian leadership, or thoughtless following of such leaders, to find ourselves there.

"I am not sure which is more frightening," he adds, "another major terror attack or the response of authoritarian conservatives to that attack."

Dr. Justin Frank, the prominent George Washington University psychiatrist who wrote Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, says Bush has lost touch with reality:

With every passing week, President Bush marches deeper and deeper into a world of his own making. Central to Bush's world is an iron will which demands that external reality be changed to conform to his personal view of how things are.

As far as Bush is concerned, he is telling the truth; as Madeleine Albright recently said to Columbia Magazine: "the most serious problem is that George Bush now believes what he says." Like many of my hospitalized patients, Bush has created a vast, detailed but vague delusional system he feels compelled to maintain at all costs. This system helps him manage the terrifying anxiety that threatens to make his already endangered inner world more chaotic.

Psychoanalytic theory suggests that Bush's true enemy is an aspect of himself -- the overwhelming anxiety he works so hard to manage. For Bush, lying remains a central defense mechanism in managing his fears; he lies foremost to himself, altering his perception of external or internal reality to fulfill his psychic need to maintain order. His anxiety is so great that he cannot shift his thinking to account for new information --especially the fact that patriotic families of patriotic soldiers demand that he speak with them.

Taking responsibility has always been hard for George W. Bush. And taking responsibility for inflicting harm on others, a major step in the development of maturity, is a step President Bush has yet to make. Instead, he persists in lying to himself, surrounding himself with people who agree with him. And now he is not safe even inside his own closed circle.

Writes Jeffrey Steinberg in the Lyndon LaRouche scandal sheet Executive Intelligence Review:

"The word is circulating in high-level Republican Party circles that former President George H.W. Bush is profoundly worried about the mental state of his son, the current President."

Ordinarily, it is easy to dismiss a report from such a source but others with credible track records are backing up parts of the EIS report.

Dr, Frank has studied Bush's actions and personality extensively and believes the President needs extensive analysis and help.

"It is not too late for President Bush to have the second half of his medical check-up: psychological testing," Dr. Frank says. "After his recent press conference in which he kept talking about finishing the job while attacking Democrats for wanting an exit strategy, Bush showed even more telltale signs of a particular kind of mental disturbance which medical professionals call thought disorder."

Writing in The Huffington Post, Dr. Frank continues:

I had always felt that his inability to respond to crisis, as seen in his response to 9/11 and Katrina and Israel's bombing of Lebanon, was because he suffered from something called affective flooding, where overwhelming anxiety paralyzes any ability to think or even function. Such a response is similar to denial but writ large. Those who observe the president at such moments - thanks to smuggled film clips and his historic April 2004 press conference when he was asked if he had made any mistakes as president - see that he starts rapid blinking movements before his eyes glaze over and become almost fixed in a blank, mindless stare. This massive disconnection from inner self and outer world is called "splitting."

But a recent press conference (August 21, 2006) showed that when he is in control he is not flooded in this way. Rather, his splitting takes the form of hatred of reality. I use the term hatred purposefully. When he was pushed by a few increasingly frustrated reporters, he behaves like the untreated alcoholic he is - summarily dismissing material reality.

When offered a chance to re-think the Iraq war he becomes obstreperous, using sarcasm to both mask and express his internal rage at being challenged. When back in control he patronizes members of what he calls the "Democrat" party, saying that they are "good people" and that he doesn't question their patriotism. In control he is a poor man's Cicero, saying what he's not going to say anyway. Reading between the lines, he calls his critics quitters.

All of this behavior is in the service of defending himself against reality - something he actively hates. At times, his attempts to ward off reality make him appear stupid. He is not. Rather, internal and external realities are too threatening for him to face. When asked whether he had been surprised or frustrated by all the bad news from Baghdad he didn't even understand the question. This is because the very act of facing such questions threatens to destroy his tenaciously held preconceptions. This he cannot risk; he employs various coping mechanisms to attack such questions in any way he can. Instead of acknowledging personal frustration he said that the war must be frustrating for the national psyche. But his hatred of reality required a more violent approach - the day after his conference he sent more of those poor marines back into a world of horror.

His ability to dismiss reality is profound - more than the simple method used by his mother Barbara, who said she wasn't going to watch the TV news during the war because watching body bags would spoil her "beautiful mind". No, he has a rugged inner strength - unless confronted by surprise - that enables him to dismiss and destroy personal perception.

His mental pulse needs to be taken, not just his physical one. I think that what prevents his doctors from doing so is their fear of what they'd find. Without such an examination, we are left with no medical terms to describe his mental functioning, his private global war on terror which extends to attacks on his own capacity to perceive reality. I have not examined the President, so it is not proper for me to offer a diagnosis. However, my observations lead me to believe that he is psychotic.

"Ah can help git more opportun'ties for your discontented unemployed"

"Ah'm tight with Burger King an' WAL-MART !!" 

A Thoughtful Response - Number II

Hey Folks,

A while back I posted two Hugo Chavez-related items: “Truth and Fiction” http://www.ukuleleman.net/2006/09/truth-and-fiction.html and “Did I miss something?” http://www.ukuleleman.net/2006/09/hey-folks-did-i-miss-something-i.html .

A long, thoughtful comment was added at the second posting (click above to see the entire comment). I think it deserves a thoughtful response. Here is Part II.
My comments are in red.

- Uke Man



The Saudi economy is so completely dependent on oil now that opportunities for livelihoods in that country which are unrelated to petroleum are few and far between, which is just one of the causes of great discontent for the educated young engineers and natural scientists who study abroad, specifically in the midst of Western prosperity, and return home to a country that cannot offer decent employment opportunities. When young people have no significant work to do, it's convenient for them to hang together and cook up resentments, schemes and activities that give meaning to their lives. Like blowing up American and Western interests.

Well, it seems strange to hear that Saudi Arabia and Venezuela - BECAUSE they are blessed with tremendous amounts of oil – are doomed to unemployment and terrorism. What if they were similarly blessed (damned??) with other natural resources like gold or diamonds? It seems to me that it is GOOD to have abundant resources, and that if a country goes bad, such as Saudi Arabia, it isn’t the oil’s fault.

No, actually, it is the kind of government Chavez claims to oppose that brought trouble to the Saudi upper crust and to us via the terrorists. It’s exactly the pattern I described in one of my postings.

A cooperative minority is set up, enriched and protected by a foreign imperialist power who, in return is granted carte blanche to suck riches out of the country – at the expense of the people.

In Saudi Arabia the elite allowed/encouraged hateful religious teachings demonizing the West and others purposefully to keep their people focused on boogey men rather than on the real cause of their suffering: the self-serving elite.

Actually, it was western imperialism and the elite rule it engendered that produced the 9-11 disaster – not an abundance of oil.

I also find a number of incongruities in the comment that for “educated young engineers and natural scientists who study abroad … and return home to a country that cannot offer decent employment opportunities … it's convenient for them to hang together and cook up resentments … Like blowing up American and Western interests.”

First of all, Osama Bin Laden wasn’t unemployed, nor was he upset because of his employment opportunities. The leader of this mess was a wealthy playboy who was pissed off, essentially, because HE wanted to be George Bush bullying the world, but wasn’t.

Secondly, worrying about the hurt feelings and resentment of well-to-do Western-trained engineers and scientists belies an elitist vision that sheds tears for the relative minor difficulties of the “special” few while totally denying the squalor of the vast majority.

Moreover, it reaks of blackmail. The argument goes: unless you take care of the elite, they will blow up the West. The real fear of the elite is the resentment and anger of their mistreated masses being turned on THEM.

They did everything they could, legally and illegally – some things with the help of the US – to get rid of Chavez. So far they have failed, but they won’t stop trying, and Chavez is courageous to spit in their faces.

- Uke Man

 

Uke Man @ Larry's Sat. Night !!!

Hey Folks,

The Uke Man rides again - one more time before taking off for California Dreamin'.

I was invited by my old friends - now known as the Moops! http://www.myspace.com/moopishmusic (check out their site) - to open for them Saturday, Sept. 30 at Larry's http://www.larrysbar.com/index.htm.

I go on at 10:00 for an hour followed by the young'ns.

See you there !!

- Uke Man

T.J. Hecker of the Moops!! & the Uke Man at Comfest 

Pope Cookies

99% doctrinally pure !!! 

What does one make of this?

Pope excommunicates Zambian archbishop
by Martine Nouaille Tue Sep 26, 12:49 PM ET
(a ukethanks to Sondra)

VATICAN CITY (AFP) - A Zambian archbishop, who stunned the Roman Catholic Church in 2001 by getting married in a mass "Moony" ceremony, has been excommunicated for ordaining four married men as bishops, the Vatican has said.

Milingo, who has a fondness for carrying out exorcisms and advocates optional celibacy for Roman Catholic priests, was excommunicated because of "his increasing split" with church regulations and for "sowing division and disarray among the faithful," Tuesday's statement said.

The archbishop ordained the four men in Washington on Sunday, despite what the Vatican said were several attempts by the Holy See to dissuade him otherwise.

The excommunication was carried out "latae sententiae" (literally "by the law itself") -- an automatic expulsion resulting from serious violation of canonical law.

Other offences incurring such a severe penalty include heresy, apostasy, schism, violence against the pope and procuring abortion.

Milingo, 76, was archbishop of Lusaka from 1969 until 1983, when the Vatican asked him to resign because he refused to stop using rituals that were judged to be inconsistent with Catholic teaching.

In 2001, he shocked the Catholic establishment by marrying a Korean acupuncturist in a mass wedding ceremony in New York presided over by Reverend Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church.

Under threat of excommunication from the pope at the time, John Paul II, Milingo renounced the marriage two and a half months later and said he had decided to return to the church.

The Vatican sent him on a year's retreat to a religious order in Argentina, after which he spent four years at a spiritual centre in Zagarolo, east of Rome, where his activities were closely monitored.

He reportedly disappeared from Zagarolo in July, only to turn up days later at a press conference in Washington to announce the formation of "Married Priests Now!" -- a group aimed at defending the rights of Catholic priests to wed.

The Roman Catholic Church requires that all priests be celibate and any choosing to marry must first leave the priesthood.

Born in 1930 in a village in eastern Zambia, Milingo became a Catholic priest at age 28.

Famous across Africa for his radio broadcasts, the Zambian preacher was nominated Archbishop of Lusaka at age 39, a post he held for 14 years before falling out of favor with the Vatican over his activities as a healer and an exorcist.

He was recalled to Rome in 1983 but managed to keep his rank of archbishop.

Later, in his autobiography "The Healer of Souls, " he accused the Vatican of "kidnapping" him and forcing him to live for months -- "like a prisoner" -- in a monastery.

At one point, he even managed to record a couple of music albums, the first entitled "Gubudu Gubudu" ("The Drunkard") and the second an eponymous album dedicated to the continuing battle against evil.

Killing

 

Jesus preparing to Box Duhbya's ears

 

Jesus preparing to box Duhbya's ears

 

There was a whole lot of foreign investment in Africa

when the Europeans owned it. 

A Thoughtful Response - Part I

Hey Folks,

A while back I posted two Hugo Chavez-related items: “Truth and Fiction” http://www.ukuleleman.net/2006/09/truth-and-fiction.html and “Did I miss something?” http://www.ukuleleman.net/2006/09/hey-folks-did-i-miss-something-i.html .

A long, thoughtful comment was added at the second posting (click above to see the entire comment). I think it deserves a thoughtful response. Here is Part I. My comments are in red.

- Uke Man



According to a group of interviews conducted by Benjamin Dangl on Alternet (www.alternet.org): "Venezuelan people have not become richer with Chavez, but the poor are now happy to see the rich become poorer," he continued. "Rich people are poorer because with Chavez's politics we are buying more things from the exterior than we produce at home. There are also fewer investments in the country due to fears investors have about unclear policies and an insecure economic future in Venezuela ... I think there is a movement to 'Cubanize' many sectors of Venezuela. This is impossible because there is not an ideological or philosophical revolution going on here. It is just populism." It's nice to have an opinion, but it's good to do homework on that opinion.

I’m sorry, I tried but I could not find the specific interviews referenced here. We soldier on.

There is a lot to consider in this paragraph. First is the thought that I should do my homework on my opinion; which assumes I haven’t.

Well, I don’t claim to be an expert or a scholar, BUT I have been following the Venezuelan situation for a long time. In addition to reading the regular and alternative press, I’ve attended a meeting at Ohio State University where the issues were discussed and debated by a spectrum of people, including well-to-do Venezuelans.

Whether that constitutes ENOUGH homework is open to debate.

Secondly, it seems clear from the quotation, that the evidence challenging my “opinion” is itself opinion. What does it mean: "Venezuelan people have not become richer with Chavez”? Before Chavez, 80% of the people were poor. Who would expect them to suddenly be “rich”? The question is “Are they better off?” Based on several elections, it seems the majority of the people think they are. Maybe not rich, but better off. And “the poor are now happy to see the rich become poorer” certainly hasn’t been demonstrated as anything more than opinion (although I think it’s a safe bet that the rich aren’t happy).

What is the sense of "Rich people are poorer because with Chavez's politics we are buying more things from the exterior than we produce at home”? If a negative balance of payments constitutes poverty, then the United States is in BIG trouble.

Then there’s: “There are also fewer investments in the country due to fears investors have about unclear policies and an insecure economic future in Venezuela.”

Well, sure. But that’s how economic imperialism works. Foreign imperialists will invest in your country, and if you play ball, allowing THEM to enrich themselves at the expense of your countrymen, they’ll take care of YOU, the top 20% or so.

But if you drop the ball, they lose interest, stop or withdraw their investments, and make life tougher for YOU until the rabble gets whipped back into shape. The “insecure economic future” is pressing on international capitalists and definitely on their Venezuelan collaborators, but – at the worst – no more on the poor than before Chavez. AND, with a government acting as if it cares more about the masses than the elite, there IS hope of the people’s lot being improved, certainly more so than under the old elite policies.

My History homework informs me that a rich minority hates any changes that threaten their favored position, and will say and do just about anything to preserve it (e.g. see Iraqi Sunnis or the Family of Saud ).

- Uke Man

Fun & Music at Tommy Keegan's last Saturday

 

Music & Fun at Tommy Keegan's last Saturday

 

 

Keith Olbermann speaks up again

Hey Folks,

In case you missed it, here's Keith Olbermann, a sane voice speaking from within the media asylum:

http://video.msn.com/v/us/msnbc.htm?f=00&g=9c610738-4147-4473-a432-e779a609bae3&p=News_Comment%20-%20Analysis&t=c1149&rf=http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15004160/&fg=

- Uke Man

A thoughtful comment that deserves a response

Hey Folks,

A while back I posted two Hugo Chavez-related items: “Truth and Fiction” http://www.ukuleleman.net/2006/09/truth-and-fiction.html and “Did I miss something?” http://www.ukuleleman.net/2006/09/hey-folks-did-i-miss-something-i.html .

A long, thoughtful comment was added at the second posting. I think it deserves a thoughtful response. That would take more space than is appropriate for one posting; so, I’m reprinting the comment first, and then will reply over several postings, part by part.

- Uke Man




Anonymous said...

Hi Tom,

You might not be able to think of many things that Chavez has done against many Venezuelans, but you might [not] be doing much research on the subject either.

According to a group of interviews conducted by Benjamin Dangl on Alternet (www.alternet.org): "Venezuelan people have not become richer with Chavez, but the poor are now happy to see the rich become poorer," he continued. "Rich people are poorer because with Chavez's politics we are buying more things from the exterior than we produce at home. There are also fewer investments in the country due to fears investors have about unclear policies and an insecure economic future in Venezuela ... I think there is a movement to 'Cubanize' many sectors of Venezuela. This is impossible because there is not an ideological or philosophical revolution going on here. It is just populism."

It's nice to have an opinion, but it's good to do homework on that opinion.

The Saudi economy is so completely dependent on oil now that opportunities for livelihoods in that country which are unrelated to petroleum are few and far between, which is just one of the causes of great and discontent for the educated young engineers and natural scientists who study abroad, specifically in the midst of Western prosperity, and return home to a country that cannot offer decent employment opportunities. When young people have no significant work to do, it's convenient for them to hang together and cook up resentments, schemes and activities that give meaning to their lives. Like blowing up American and Western interests.

And as much as you enjoy blogging your opinion, you might not be able to enjoy doing it in Venezuela. In an editorial on January 14 attacking the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the Washington Post wrote, “Mr. Chavez has pushed through a new law that allows the government to fine or shut down private media for vaguely defined offenses against 'public order'.” Something to think about.

And in addition to Chavez aligning himself with an anti-Semitic leader like Ahmadinejad, you might want to ask yourself why he'd want to be pals with someone who is imposing the most primitive right-wing religious government outside of Saudi Arabia on his people. In case you hadn't researched this topic either, Sharia law calls for the death penalty for homosexuality, adultery, premarital sex, and lesser infractions only require the amputation of a hand or foot. Oh, and for all the atheists reading this, under Sharia law, "people of the Book" (Jews and Christians) have a choice of either converting or paying Jizyah (infidel tax), whereas Godless pagans and atheists have only two choices: convert to Islam or die by the sword.

You might want to do a little more research about how "heroic" and "benign" these guys [are] than you seem to be doing at the moment.

Vote for Me - I'm Black and rich and Republican

and ... I love Jesus and hate fags too!! 

What did I say about racism?

Hey Folks,

If you’ve been wondering, as I have, how the Columbus Dispatch would come down on the Ohio goober-natorial race, today its decision was made clear. They’ll be endorsing Blackwell.

Glen Sheller, editorial page editor, made it clear today in one of his rare (read “important”) columns, acting as John the Baptist to the Wolfe family’s Jesus.

In an essay that borders on, or demonstrates, racism – you can decide for yourself – Sheller lays out – albeit between the lines – the Dispatch’s election strategy.

He admits what everyone knows, “a Democratic governor is likely to be more sympathetic to minority demands for [what he calls] government favors [and others call “full citizenship].”

He also reveals the paper’s analysis: “In many elections pitting a black candidate against a white one, the question is whether a majority-white electorate will vote for a black candidate. In this one, the major question is how many blacks will vote for the black candidate. With the chance to elect a governor who looks like them…”

So, since significant numbers of white Republicans aren’t buying Blackwell – whether for his half-baked business/education proposals, his religious zealotry, or because of their own racism - the R’s are forced to look to Blacks to save their ass.

But Republicans can’t sell Blackwell to Blacks on the basis of self-interest – Sheller admits as much. So what’s a desperate editorialist to do?

Play the race card.

Demonize the Civil Rights movement, Jesse Jackson, affirmative action, integration, Black pride, Black colleges, and the "race card"; and go so far as to imply that Dr. King – who is unable now to speak for himself – would rather have Jackson supporting a candidate who will harm Blacks simply because the candidate is Black and “looks like them.”

Pretty sad.

So, Folks, if Las Vegas will take your bet, put all your money on the Dispatch endorsing Blackwell. It’s a done deal.

- Uke Man


Jackson’s jilting of Blackwell brings an unusual juxtaposition to Ohio politics
Monday, September 25, 2006
GLENN SHELLER
(my comments in red)

The modern civil-rights movement has been a roller coaster. It has risen, fallen, turned inside-out and doubled back on itself repeatedly. It has achieved great successes and spawned any number of contradictions, often tying itself and the nation in knots (yeah, but the White nation provided the rope and the jusification).

One decade, black leaders have demanded equality; the next, preferences. At one time, busing for racial balance was imperative; now we’re told, minorities are better served by neighborhood schools.

Once, rubbing elbows with white classmates was expected to improve blacks’ academic performance, but a few years later, this idea is seen as condescending to blacks.

The U.S. Supreme Court has said that ensuring racial diversity on college campuses is an interest so compelling that universities deserve a loophole in anti-discrimination law that allows them to give minority applicants an edge in admissions. Yet even as universities handed out these preferences, students segregated themselves in dormitories, cafeterias and ethnically-based campus associations.

And don’t even mention the compelling interest in diversity when the topic is historically black colleges. These institutions, it is said, are vital because they supply black students with a kind of validation and confidence that is hard for them to find on those integrated campuses where diversity is so compelling.

By now, Americans are so used to — or intellectually paralyzed by such ideological pretzel-twisting ( just because Sheller and others can't understand - or choose to not understand - these supposed contradictions, doesn't make them contradictions; instead it reflects, at best, stupidity and, at worst, self-serving racism) that many didn’t even notice what is perhaps the oddest inversion yet: A major black civil-rights leader is actively campaigning against the first black to ever have a shot at the Ohio governor’s mansion.

That happened right here in Columbus last Monday, when the Rev. Jesse Jackson convened a summit at the King Arts Complex to create a coalition, ostensibly to increase voter turnout and protect us all from attempts to suppress our vote (not that ANYTHING like that could happen in Ohio).

Not that Jackson was naive enough to come right out and say who he supports for Ohio governor. He’s probably well aware that certain other folks whose names are preceded by the Rev. have been accused of violating the federal tax code by demonstrating a preference for one of the gubernatorial candidates, specifically, the black one.

Jackson is for the other candidate, who isn’t black, but he doesn’t want to say so. Instead, he said Ohioans should vote based on ethics, not on ethnicity. "You’ve got to choose leaders based on priorities and public policy," he said. "We’re not arguing race; we’re arguing direction."

That’s quite a statement from a guy whose career has been built on playing the race card. And it’s a historic moment in civil-rights history, when a protégé of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. campaigns to prevent a black candidate from achieving political power. (yeah, supporting a good Black candidate is "playing the race card" and opposing a bad Black candidate is "playing the race card" - spoken like a good White man!)

Of course, Jackson embraces colorblindness only because he knows that a Democratic governor is likely to be more sympathetic to minority demands for government favors than a Republican one, even a black one.

For Jackson, colorblindness is not a principle that one should live and defend, it is a mere political tactic, as temporary as any other. But no surprise there; he has always been an opportunist (but Republicans and the Dispatch - on the other hand - DO live on and defend colorblindedness - that's why Blacks have it made in central Ohio).

Jackson’s statement is fascinating for another reason. In many elections pitting a black candidate against a white one, the question is whether a majority-white electorate will vote for a black candidate. In this one, the major question is how many blacks will vote for the black candidate (Sheller, fails to explain why the Whites can't elect Blackwell). With the chance to elect a governor who looks like them, how many blacks will abandon their traditional allegiance to the Democratic Party? He might have added "Please, please, please, please!!!!!"

This has been a worry for Democrats since J. Kenneth Blackwell entered the governor’s race. Jackson can blather on about vote-stealing conspiracies all day, but his real purpose in Ohio is to keep black voters from defecting to Blackwell (and what is Sheller's real purpose?) . That Jackson and Democrats feel the need to do this indicates a refreshing and encouraging change in the usual racial dynamics.

So, even if for the wrong reasons, Jackson is, in this instance, on the side of the angels. He is calling on Ohio voters to be colorblind, to vote for a political candidate based on his ideas, not the melanin content of his skin. This is the part designed to rebut any charges of racist content - i.e. "Oh, yeah!!! We're just saying all this because - unlike Rev. Jackson - WE really aren't racist in any way and NEVER play the "race card."

Amen, brother Jackson. Amen, brother Sheller.

Glenn Sheller is editorial page editor of The Dispatch.
gsheller@dispatch.com

- Uke Man

If Mike Wallace were dead

He'd be rolling over in his grave. 

Clinton sticks it to Foxxx News

Hey Folks,

If you missed Clinton getting in Chris Wallace's smug little Foxxx Face, here it is. The entire video is 15:51 long, but the fireworks don't start until 4:06, if you want to skip ahead to that point.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6119737638039170671&q=Clinton+and+Chris+Wallace&hl=en

- Uke Man

 

"Freeway Blogger"

Hey Folks,

For fun and iunspiration . . .

Click here:
http://freewayblogger28.cf.huffingtonpost.com/

- Uke Man

Invisible shackles remain 

Racism has been defeated !! Yeah, right !! - CLICK the VIDEO

Hey Folks,

Leonard Pitts lays it out there to Black folks about their responsibility to do something about the sorry state of racial discrimination. And I agree with him.

You might think White folks wouldn't need a reminder of their role in creating and maintaining this terrible reality and their responsibility toward correcting it.

Well, think again.

- Uke Man


Blacks deform their own self-image
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
LEONARD PITTS JR.

"Can you show me the doll that looks bad? "

The two baby dolls are identical except that one has pale skin, the other is dark. The little black girl, maybe 5 years old, has been holding up the pale doll, but in response to the question, she puts it down and picks up the other.

"Why does that look bad? " the interviewer asks.

"Because it’s black," the little girl says.

"And why do you think that’s the nice doll? " asks the interviewer, referring to the lightskinned doll.

"Because she’s white."

"And can you give me the doll that looks like you? "

The dark-skinned girl reaches for the light-skinned doll, jiggling it as if she really wants to pick it up. In the end, with palpable reluctance, she pushes the black doll forward.

You might be forgiven for thinking you have happened upon one of the "doll tests" conducted by psychologist Kenneth Clark beginning in the late 1930s, tests that helped persuade the Supreme Court to strike down segregation in its Brown vs. Board of Education decision. But this is a new doll test, conducted by Kiri Davis, a 17-year-old high-school student from New York City, for A Girl Like Me, her short film about black girls and standards of beauty. You can see it at http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=A+Girl+Like+Me+Kiri+Davis&search=Search . But be warned: if you have a heart, the new doll test will break it.

Hard upon mourning, though, will come outrage. How is this possible? How can this still be true? How in the hell, a lifetime after a little boy in Arkansas pointed to the black doll and said, "That’s a nigger . .. I’m a nigger," can we still have black children who think black and bad are synonymous?

Some of us were born of the generation that came of age with a mandate to hurl that thinking back onto history’s trash heap. Some of us remember when James Brown sang Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud. Some of us knew that when Aretha Franklin spelled out respect, she wasn’t just talking to a feckless lover. Some of us piled Afros high on our heads and sprayed them with Afro Sheen till they shone. Some of us clenched our fists and cried "Black is beautiful" in the face of a nation that had always told us you could be one or the other, but never both.

And for what? So that 40 years later, our children would still parrot media-derived lies of their own worthlessness? What’s appalling is that many of the lies now originate with black people themselves.

That’s not to let white people off the hook. The simple arithmetic of majority/minority means that under the best of circumstances, a child of color will always see fewer images of people like her in media. And the white makers and gatekeepers of those fewer images have historically weighted them toward ineffectuality, hyper sexuality, native criminality and plain ignorance.

What’s different now is that blacks are, themselves, often the makers and gatekeepers. And under our aegis the images have, if many ways, gotten worse.

To surf the video channels is to be immersed in black culture as conceived by a new generation, a lionization of pimps and gold-diggers, hustlers and thugs who toss the N-word with a gusto that would do the Klan proud. A new generation, afflicted with historical amnesia, blind indifference and a worship of filthy lucre, dances a metaphorical buck and wing, eyes rolling, yassuh bossing, selling itself out, selling its forebears out. Most of all, selling the children out.

And it’s little excuse to say we’re only buying lies we have internalized, lies that become self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s all well and good, but the moment you’re able to understand that you’ve been lied to is the moment you bear responsibility for promulgating some truth in reply. That too few of us are willing to accept that responsibility is driven home every time one of those black children chooses a white doll.

We’ve spent 387 years in this country trying to get white folks to love us. Might help if we first learned to love ourselves.

Leonard Pitts Jr., winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a columnist for the Miami Herald.

lpitts@herald.com

 

Herbert, Kafka, & Bush - Oh, my!!!

The Kafka Strategy
By BOB HERBERT
(a ukethanks to Phyll)

The president seemed about to lose it at times last week. He was fighting with everybody — tenacious reporters frustrated by the absence of straight answers about the treatment of terror suspects; key Republican senators who think it’s crazy for a great country like the U.S. to become a champion of kangaroo courts and the degradation of defendants; even his own former secretary of state, Colin Powell, who worries that the world is coming to “doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.”

It seemed that the only people the president wasn’t fighting with were the Democrats, who have gone into a coma, and the yahoos who never had much of a problem with such matters as torture and detention without trial.

As Marvin Gaye once sang, “What’s going on?”

The people at the top are getting scared, that’s what’s going on. The fog of secrecy is lifting, and the Bush administration is frightened to death that it will eventually have to pay a heavy price for the human rights abuses it has ordered or condoned in its so-called war on terror.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the Geneva Conventions apply to the prisoners seized by the administration, which means that abusing those prisoners — as so many have said for so long — is unquestionably illegal. And there is also the possibility that the Democrats, if they ever wake up, may take control of at least one house of Congress, giving them the kind of subpoena power and oversight that makes the administration tremble.

Bush, Cheney & Co. are desperately trying to hold together a house of cards that is ready to collapse because their strategy and tactics for fighting terrorism were slapped together with no real regard for the rule of law. What we’ve seen over the past few years has been a nightmare version of the United States. Torture? Secret prisons? Capital trials in which key evidence is kept from the accused? That’s the stuff of Kafka, not Madison and Jefferson.

The reason President Bush has been trying so frantically to get Congressional passage of his plan to interrogate and try terror suspects is that he needs its contorted interpretations of the law to keep important cases from falling apart, and to cover the collective keisters of higher-ups who may have authorized or condoned war crimes.

There’s no guarantee that the administration can properly bring to justice even the worst of the bad guys, people like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and 13 other high-profile prisoners who were recently transferred from a secret C.I.A. program to the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. These are men accused of the most heinous of offenses, crimes that would subject them to the death penalty.

But it’s widely believed that some or all of them were tortured. In civilized countries, evidence obtained by torture is inadmissible in a court of law.

The Bush administration would also like to deny terror suspects, even those facing the death penalty, the right to see evidence against them that is classified. This is a concept that is so far beyond the pale it makes most legal scholars gasp.

“We don’t charge people — particularly in capital offenses, but in minor offenses, as well — without letting them see the evidence that is being offered against them,” said Scott Horton, a prominent New York attorney and Columbia law professor who has done extensive human rights work.

“Let’s imagine you’re a prosecutor,” said Mr. Horton. “Are you going to seek the death penalty against someone and convict them and let them be sentenced to death without letting them know what the evidence is against them? No way. What prosecutor wants that?”

One of the biggest concerns of the administration is the possibility of evidence emerging that could lead to charges of war crimes against high-ranking officials. The president and others in the administration have argued that they are seeking changes in the law in order to protect soldiers and ordinary interrogators in the field against war crimes accusations.

But there are already clear guidelines — short of war crimes prosecutions — for dealing with soldiers and civilian interrogators who abuse prisoners. The Abu Ghraib prosecutions are a good example.

The people who would have to worry, if war crimes were found to have been committed, would be those at the top of the command structure who crafted policies that were illegal and ordered them carried out — or who turned a blind eye to atrocities.

“Those are the ones,” said Mr. Horton, “who are vulnerable.”

 

Uke Man plays tonight

Hey Folks,

If you're out and about tonight (Saturday), I'll be playing at Tommy Keegan's http://www.tommykeegans.com/ as part of Myke Rock's Multi Fest (part 2) www.multifestival.com .

There will be a lot of music. Drop in.

Here's the schedule:

Raks Jahaani 9:00-9:25
Chad Eric 9:30-9:55
Postcard 10:00-10:35
Ukulele Man 10:45-11:15
Myke Rock 11:20-11:50
Lotion Weed 11:55-12:30
Raks Jahaani 12:30-12:45
Larry Ramey 12:45-1:10
DOB 1:15-2:00

- Uke Man

Can you blame Noah for not letting this guy on the boat? 

Today's Redundancy Award (& fun with Dinosaurs)

Hey Folks,

I love dinosaurs !! Doesn't everybody? But I had to laugh out loud at the first sentence of this story.

Yeah, the Uke Man is weird. See what you think (I've highlighted the part in question), and I'll blather a little more afterwards . . . Uke Man



Scientists report dinosaur find in Utah
Sep 22

SALT LAKE CITY - The remains of two dinosaurs believed to be millions of years old were discovered in southern Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

They have been covered in plaster jackets and will be flown out of the remote area to the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City.

"It's been a dream summer for paleontologists," Alan Titus, paleontologist at the 1.9 million-acre monument, told The Salt Lake Tribune.

A 6-foot-long skull found Aug. 21 appears to have characteristics of the ceratoid family. Researchers also found the full skeleton of a ceratop-like dinosaur.

Scott Richardson, who found the skull, had finished a 12-week internship and was visiting the paleontologist camp before departing for the summer.

"I'd only gone about 200 yards away and found a few pieces of bone sticking above the ground," Richardson said from Flagstaff, Ariz.

Now Folks,

Did you laugh??

Well, I said I was weird, but I couldn't help laughing. They discovered two DINOSAURS but only BELIEVE them to be millions of years old !!!

According to Dinodatabase.com : "all of the dinosaurs died out completely and suddenly 66 million years ago, after having been very successful animals for about 160 million years. (In contrast, the human family dates back only four million years.)"

ANY dinosaur bones anybody EVER finds ARE "millions of years old. Hence, my chuckle.

Would they have said, "The remains of two dinosaurs believed to be dead were discovered in southern Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument"?

Did you laugh that time? Oh, well.

Then again, if you think of it, maybe the reporter is a Creationist and believes the universe is only 7,000 years old - including dinosaur bones.

Now, I'm not laughing.

- Uke Man

A Famous Historical Torturer

This guy was even the founder of a church!! 

Torture by any other name would still smell

Hey Folks,

Here's a bit fom Olbermann's show just a while back discussing the motivation of Duhbya's zealous demands upon congress regarding torture and the Geneva Conventions.

Since then "men of conscience" have spoken up demanding that we adhere to our fundamental American Values, our treaty commitments, and our responsibility to our own troops.

Then, after a few days they "compromised" : essentially letting the boy Emperor do whatever he was already doing, but with their blessing. More smoke and mirrors.

Jonathan Turley spoke to this Sept. 23 on Countdown, but I have not yet been able to locate that video. I'll keep looking.

- Uke Man

Click here:

http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?p=Jonathan+Turley&toggle=1&cop=&ei=UTF-8&b=0&oid=acc9eb3adf95bb92&rurl=feeds.feedburner.com&vdone=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.yahoo.com%2Fsearch%2Fvideo%3Fp%3DJonathan%2BTurley%26toggle%3D1%26cop%3D%26ei%3DUTF-8 (takes a minute or two on download - sorry)

Or cut and paste this address:
http://movies.crooksandliars.com/Countdown-Turley-Detainee.mov

 

Rumsfeld - on the day the toll of our dead soldiering youth equalled the number of 9-11 casualties

September 3, 2006
Donald Rumsfeld’s Dance With the Nazis
By FRANK RICH


PRESIDENT BUSH came to Washington vowing to be a uniter, not a divider. Well, you win some and you lose some. But there is one member of his administration who has not broken that promise: Donald Rumsfeld. With indefatigable brio, he has long since united Democrats, Republicans, generals and civilians alike in calling for his scalp.


Last week the man who gave us “stuff happens” and “you go to war with the Army you have” outdid himself. In an instantly infamous address to the American Legion, he likened critics of the Iraq debacle to those who “ridiculed or ignored” the rise of the Nazis in the 1930’s and tried to appease Hitler. Such Americans, he said, suffer from a “moral or intellectual confusion” and fail to recognize the “new type of fascism” represented by terrorists. Presumably he was not only describing the usual array of “Defeatocrats” but also the first President Bush, who had already been implicitly tarred as an appeaser by Tony Snow last month for failing to knock out Saddam in 1991.


What made Mr. Rumsfeld’s speech noteworthy wasn’t its toxic effort to impugn the patriotism of administration critics by conflating dissent on Iraq with cut-and-run surrender and incipient treason. That’s old news. No, what made Mr. Rumsfeld’s performance special was the preview it offered of the ambitious propaganda campaign planned between now and Election Day. An on-the-ropes White House plans to stop at nothing when rewriting its record of defeat (not to be confused with defeatism) in a war that has now lasted longer than America’s fight against the actual Nazis in World War II.


Here’s how brazen Mr. Rumsfeld was when he invoked Hitler’s appeasers to score his cheap points: Since Hitler was photographed warmly shaking Neville Chamberlain’s hand at Munich in 1938, the only image that comes close to matching it in epochal obsequiousness is the December 1983 photograph of Mr. Rumsfeld himself in Baghdad, warmly shaking the hand of Saddam Hussein in full fascist regalia. Is the defense secretary so self-deluded that he thought no one would remember a picture so easily Googled on the Web? Or worse, is he just too shameless to care?


Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t go to Baghdad in 1983 to tour the museum. Then a private citizen, he had been dispatched as an emissary by the Reagan administration, which sought to align itself with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam was already a notorious thug. Well before Mr. Rumsfeld’s trip, Amnesty International had reported the dictator’s use of torture — “beating, burning, sexual abuse and the infliction of electric shocks” — on hundreds of political prisoners. Dozens more had been summarily executed or had “disappeared.” American intelligence agencies knew that Saddam had used chemical weapons to gas both Iraqi Kurds and Iranians.


According to declassified State Department memos detailing Mr. Rumsfeld’s Baghdad meetings, the American visitor never raised the subject of these crimes with his host. (Mr. Rumsfeld has since claimed otherwise, but that is not supported by the documents, which can be viewed online at George Washington University’s National Security Archive.) Within a year of his visit, the American mission was accomplished: Iraq and the United States resumed diplomatic relations for the first time since Iraq had severed them in 1967 in protest of American backing of Israel in the Six-Day War.


In his speech last week, Mr. Rumsfeld paraphrased Winston Churchill: Appeasing tyrants is “a bit like feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last.” He can quote Churchill all he wants, but if he wants to self-righteously use that argument to smear others, the record shows that Mr. Rumsfeld cozied up to the crocodile of Baghdad as smarmily as anyone. To borrow the defense secretary’s own formulation, he suffers from moral confusion about Saddam.


Mr. Rumsfeld also suffers from intellectual confusion about terrorism. He might not have appeased Al Qaeda but he certainly enabled it. Like Chamberlain, he didn’t recognize the severity of the looming threat until it was too late. Had he done so, maybe his boss would not have blown off intelligence about imminent Qaeda attacks while on siesta in Crawford.


For further proof, read the address Mr. Rumsfeld gave to Pentagon workers on Sept. 10, 2001 — a policy manifesto he regarded as sufficiently important, James Bamford reminds us in his book “A Pretext to War,” that it was disseminated to the press. “The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America” is how the defense secretary began. He then went on to explain that this adversary “crushes new ideas” with “brutal consistency” and “disrupts the defense of the United States.” It is a foe “more subtle and implacable” than the former Soviet Union, he continued, stronger and larger and “closer to home” than “the last decrepit dictators of the world.”


And who might this ominous enemy be? Of that, Mr. Rumsfeld was as certain as he would later be about troop strength in Iraq: “the Pentagon bureaucracy.” In love with the sound of his own voice, he blathered on for almost 4,000 words while Mohamed Atta and the 18 other hijackers fanned out to American airports.


Three months later, Mr. Rumsfeld would still be asleep at the switch, as his war command refused to heed the urgent request by American officers on the ground for the additional troops needed to capture Osama bin Laden when he was cornered in Tora Bora. What would follow in Iraq was also more Chamberlain than Churchill. By failing to secure and rebuild the country after the invasion, he created a terrorist haven where none had been before.


That last story is seeping out in ever more incriminating detail, thanks to well-sourced chronicles like “Fiasco,” “Cobra II” and “Blood Money,” T. Christian Miller’s new account of the billions of dollars squandered and stolen in Iraq reconstruction. Still, Americans have notoriously short memories. The White House hopes that by Election Day it can induce amnesia about its failures in the Middle East as deftly as Mr. Rumsfeld (with an assist from John Mark Karr) helped upstage first-anniversary remembrances of Katrina.


One obstacle is that White House allies, not just Democrats, are sounding the alarm about Iraq. In recent weeks, prominent conservatives, some still war supporters and some not, have steadily broached the dread word Vietnam: Chuck Hagel, William F. Buckley Jr. and the columnists Rich Lowry and Max Boot. A George Will column critical of the war so rattled the White House that it had a flunky release a public 2,400-word response notable for its incoherence.


If even some conservatives are making accurate analogies between Vietnam and Iraq, one way for the administration to drown them out is to step up false historical analogies of its own, like Mr. Rumsfeld’s. In the past the administration has been big on comparisons between Iraq and the American Revolution — the defense secretary once likened “the snows of Valley Forge” to “the sandstorms of central Iraq” — but lately the White House vogue has been for “Islamo-fascism,” which it sees as another rhetorical means to retrofit Iraq to the more salable template of World War II.


“Islamo-fascism” certainly sounds more impressive than such tired buzzwords as “Plan for Victory” or “Stay the Course.” And it serves as a handy substitute for “As the Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down.” That slogan had to be retired abruptly last month after The New York Times reported that violence in Baghdad has statistically increased rather than decreased as American troops handed over responsibilities to Iraqis. Yet the term “Islamo-fascists,” like the bygone “evildoers,” is less telling as a description of the enemy than as a window into the administration’s continued confusion about exactly who the enemy is. As the writer Katha Pollitt asks in The Nation, “Who are the ‘Islamo-fascists’ in Saudi Arabia — the current regime or its religious-fanatical opponents?”


Next up is the parade of presidential speeches culminating in what The Washington Post describes as “a whirlwind tour of the Sept. 11 attack sites”: All Fascism All the Time. In his opening salvo, delivered on Thursday to the same American Legion convention that cheered Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Bush worked in the Nazis and Communists and compared battles in Iraq to Omaha Beach and Guadalcanal. He once more interchanged the terrorists who struck the World Trade Center with car bombers in Baghdad, calling them all part of the same epic “ideological struggle of the 21st century.” One more drop in the polls, and he may yet rebrand this mess War of the Worlds.


“Iraq is not overwhelmed by foreign terrorists,” said the congressman John Murtha in succinct rebuttal to the president’s speech. “It is overwhelmed by Iraqis fighting Iraqis.” And with Americans caught in the middle. If we owe anything to those who died on 9/11, it is that we not forget how the administration diverted our blood and treasure from the battle against bin Laden and other stateless Islamic terrorists, fascist or whatever, to this quagmire in a country that did not attack us on 9/11. The number of American dead in Iraq — now more than 2,600 — is inexorably approaching the death toll of that Tuesday morning five years ago.

The Ballot & the Bottle

 

Diebold and the Hotel Minibar

From “Freedom to Tinker” - http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1064


« Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine
“Hotel Minibar” Keys Open Diebold Voting Machines
Monday September 18, 2006 by Ed Felten
(a ukethanks to Mimi)

Like other computer scientists who have studied Diebold voting machines, we were surprised at the apparent carelessness of Diebold’s security design. It can be hard to convey this to nonexperts, because the examples are technical. To security practitioners, the use of a fixed, unchangeable encryption key and the blind acceptance of every software update offered on removable storage are rookie mistakes; but nonexperts have trouble appreciating this. Here is an example that anybody, expert or not, can appreciate:

The access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine — the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes, and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus — can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet.

On Wednesday we did a live demo for our Princeton Computer Science colleagues of the vote-stealing software described in our paper and video. Afterward, Chris Tengi, a technical staff member, asked to look at the key that came with the voting machine. He noticed an alphanumeric code printed on the key, and remarked that he had a key at home with the same code on it. The next day he brought in his key and sure enough it opened the voting machine.

This seemed like a freakish coincidence — until we learned how common these keys are.

Chris’s key was left over from a previous job, maybe fifteen years ago. He said the key had opened either a file cabinet or the access panel on an old VAX computer. A little research revealed that the exact same key is used widely in office furniture, electronic equipment, jukeboxes, and hotel minibars. It’s a standard part, and like most standard parts it’s easily purchased on the Internet. We bought several keys from an office furniture key shop — they open the voting machine too. We ordered another key on eBay from a jukebox supply shop. The keys can be purchased from many online merchants.

Using such a standard key doesn’t provide much security, but it does allow Diebold to assert that their design uses a lock and key. Experts will recognize the same problem in Diebold’s use of encryption — they can say they use encryption, but they use it in a way that neutralizes its security benefits.

The bad guys don’t care whether you use encryption; they care whether they can read and modify your data. They don’t care whether your door has a lock on it; they care whether they can get it open. The checkbox approach to security works in press releases, but it doesn’t work in the field.

 

Hey Folks,

Did I miss something?

I really LOVE “The Daily Show” and John Stewart, and tonight (9-21-06) – the same day I published the Chavez rant (below), Stewart took Hugo on for calling Duhbya “the devil.” He also presented a devil cartoon character who clearly thought Chavez was just as much headed for hell as Bush.

With such respect for Stewart, I asked myself, “Hey, Uke Man!! Are you missing something?"

Unlike his predecessors Chavez has been treating the 80% of his countrymen who are poor better and listening less to the 20% who are wealthy. Some think that’s sinful – but not me.

Chavez refuses to let powerful foreign interests dictate the oil industry in his country. Some think that’s sinful – but not me.

Some claim Chavez’s administration “bought” votes by providing bricks and milk to shack/slum-dwelling Venezuelans instead of “buying” votes by subsidizing the wealthy. Some think that’s sinful – but not me.

Chavez called our beloved president names. Some think that’s sinful – but not me.

I can’t think of anything Chavez has done to hurt the great majority of Venezuelans. He HAS pissed off the wealthy elites who’ve been riding the gravy train since the Conquistadores. So, what was I missing?

Well, then I thought “outside the Venezuelan box.” Yeah, there WAS one thing to criticize the guy for: his embracing of Ahmadinejad. The Iranian has established himself as an anti-Semite; That qualifies him for a hot spot in devil land and, if Chavez shares that mindset, him too. I’m unaware of Chavez’s personal views in that regard but am certainly open to learning them.

If he isn’t an anti-Semite, he definitely has a responsibility to forcefully point his Iranian friend in a better direction. I doubt that he will, though, in which case I agree with Stewart’s devil – in that specific regard.

At the same time, I stand by the criticisms made in the earlier posting. They weren’t made to defend Chavez from justifiable criticism but from the brainless criticism of moronic conservatives who care no more about the welfare of Jews than does Ahmadinejad.

My criticisms were aimed at those who were indignant that someone would officially, confidently, and flippantly “out” the true story of our Emperor’s new clothes.

Chavez may be open to criticism on SOME basis, but not for accurately describing our dimwitted President and his bullying regime.

- Uke Man

"Hee hee - Good idear, Bill." 

"Damn!! Ah shoulda done this a long time ago!!"

 

If the Pope won't apologize, neither will Bill Maher

Hey Folks,

Bill has a few things to share with us.

Click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN9l7NiAM9w&NR

- Uke Man

 

New York Times Editorial

September 7, 2006
Editorial
A Sudden Sense of Urgency

Two months before a Congressional election in which voters are expressing serious doubts about the Republicans’ handling of national security, President Bush finally has some real terrorists in Guantánamo Bay.

Mr. Bush admitted yesterday that the Central Intelligence Agency has been secretly holding prisoners and said he was transferring 14 to Guantánamo Bay, including some believed to have been behind the 9/11 attacks. He said he was informing the Red Cross about the prisoners, placing them under the Geneva Conventions, and asking that Congress — right now — create military tribunals to try them.

Those are just the right steps. If Guantánamo Bay has any purpose, it is for men like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, considered key players in 9/11. They should go on trial. If convicted, they should be locked up for life.

But Mr. Bush’s urgency was phony, driven by the Supreme Court’s ruling, not principle. This should all have happened long ago. If the White House had not wanted to place terror suspects beyond the reach of the law, all 14 of these men could have been tried by now, and America’s reputation would have been spared some grievous damage. And there would be no need for Congress to rush through legislation if the White House had not stymied all of its attempts to do just that before.

The nation needs laws governing Guantánamo Bay, not just for the 14 new prisoners, but also for many others who have been there for years without due process, and who may have done no wrong.

Last month, for example, The Washington Post wrote about some of the first arrivals at Guantánamo Bay in 2002: six men, born in Algeria but living in Bosnia, accused of plotting to attack the United States Embassy in Sarajevo. Two years after their capture, Bosnian officials exonerated them. Last year, the Bosnian prime minister asked Washington to release them. But The Post said the administration has decided the men will never be returned to Bosnia, only to Algeria, and then only if they are confined or kept under close watch. Even the Algerian government won’t go along with that.

Mr. Bush could have prevented this sort of miscarriage of justice if he had not insisted on creating his own system of military tribunals, which the Supreme Court ruled illegal. Even now, the legislation he is proposing to handle Guantánamo prisoners would undermine key principles of justice. It would permit the use of evidence obtained through coercion, along with hearsay evidence, and evidence that is kept secret from the accused. The military’s top lawyers have all publicly opposed these provisions.

Mr. Bush also wants to rewrite American law to create a glaring exception to the Geneva Conventions, to give ex post facto approval to abusive interrogation methods, and to bar legal challenges to the new system.

Some of the most influential Republican voices on military affairs, Senators John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, are sponsoring a more sensible bill that would bar the use of coerced testimony and secret evidence. Members of this Congress have a nasty habit of caving in to the White House on national security, and there’s a looming election, but it is vital that they stick to their principles this time.

 

Truth and Fiction

Hey Folks,

Below is part of an AP story on Hugo Chavez and his speech at the UN. I've put Chavez's comments in red. I've commented in blue.

I believe there is a valuable lesson in this. All or most of what Chavez says is entirely or partially true (figurative language is figuratively true - Bush is "the devil" not the devil [conservative readers may need to seek a translater on that last point] ).

The moronic right wing can't or won't think. They don't deal in facts or arguments. They simply assume poses, call names, spout baseless absolutes, and never stop saying whatever Madison Ave. sales message they've settled on.

Brilliant snake oil salesmen, but full of shit nevertheless.

- Uke Man




Chavez launches Bush broadside at U.N.
By IAN JAMES, Associated Press Writer 9-20-06


UNITED NATIONS - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called
President Bush "the devil" in a speech to the United Nations on Wednesday (He's not the first to do that), making the sign of the cross in a dramatic gesture and accusing him of "talking as if he owned the world." There are pre and post 9-11 documents in which the NeoConeheads clearly state a goal very close to "owning the world."

The fiery speech by the leftist leader, one of Bush's staunchest critics abroad, was harsher in tone than that of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who sparred with Bush the previous day over Tehran's disputed nuclear program but avoided any personal insults. (Whether one wants Iran to have the bomb or not, Bush has gone about discouraging it as if he DOES own Iran - as well as Iraq - should "evil-doer" be considered an insult?).

"Yesterday, the devil came here," (figurative, folks) Chavez said, referring to Bush's address before the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday. "Right here. Right here. And it smells of sulfur still today (figurative, folks), this table that I am now standing in front of."

He then made the sign of the cross, brought his hands together as if praying and looked up at the ceiling.

Lest anyone wasn't listening, Chavez continued:

"Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world," Chavez said.

Chavez's words drew tentative giggles at times from the audience, but also applause (how can that be??) at the end of the speech and when he called Bush the devil — a word he used no fewer than eight times. The truth hurts! What Bush & Co. have done to THIS country, much less the rest of the world, justifies his being called "the devil."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Chavez's remarks were "not becoming for a head of state." How many things has her boss said that were "unbecoming for a head of state" (do I have to make a list?)?

"I am not going to dignify a comment by the Venezuelan president to the president of the United States," Rice told reporters in New York (What else could she say? Almost NOBODY allows themselves to even DISCUSS this issue - except Noam Chomsky, and he's treated nearly as badly as Chavez). The main U.S. seat in the assembly hall was empty as Chavez spoke, though the U.S. Ambassador John Bolton told The Associated Press that a "junior note-taker" was present, as is customary "when governments like that speak." Condescention (governments like "THAT"), belittling (empty chair/"junior note-taker"), and John Bolton has had his own "unbecoming" addresses at the UN.

The address appeared to be one of Chavez' boldest moves yet to lead an alliance of countries firmly opposed to the Bush administration (According to polls, THIS country is firmly opposed to the Bush administration). The speech came after the leftist leader crisscrossed the globe this summer visiting like-minded nations from Iran to Belarus.

The Venezuelan has become Latin America's leading voice against the U.S. government, and his speech was reminiscent of crusading addresses by his mentor Fidel Castro of Cuba and the late Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

In his 23-minute address, Chavez also called Bush a "spokesman of imperialism" who was trying "to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world." Anyone who has studied how this world works, knows this is true. Large numbers of privileged people are pissed off - not because Chavez is lying - but because he had the gall to speak the bald truth.

"An Alfred Hitchcock movie could use it as a scenario. I would even propose a title: `The Devil's Recipe,'" Chavez said.

He accused the U.S. of planning and financing a failed 2002 coup against him, a charge the U.S. denies (But there is substantial evidence that the U.S. is lying). And he said the U.S. tries to impose its vision of democracy militarily in countries like Iran and Iraq. Can anyone doubt that? Bush clearly is trying to impose HIS view of democracy on us right here at home.

"We appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our head," he said. "The imperialists see extremists everywhere. It's not that we are extremists. It's that the world is waking up."

At the start of his talk, Chavez held up a book by American writer Noam Chomsky, "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance," and recommended it to everyone in the General Assembly, as well as to the American people. At best, Condi and Bolton might have a junior note-taker skim the book.

"The people of the United States should read this ... instead of watching Superman movies," Chavez later told reporters.

He called U.S. consumerism "madness," (Isn't it? What would Jesus buy?) saying Americans have wasteful habits in using oil and energy (We don't??). He held up a satellite photo showing the world at night, with bright light emanating from the U.S. and other wealthy countries.

Consuming less should be an environmental priority, he said, "instead of looking for oil" through the war in Iraq. Somebody in Bush's cabinet should have been screaming this a long time ago!

The United States continues to be the top buyer of Venezuelan oil, bringing the South American country billions of dollars in earnings that help fund Chavez's popular social programs.

Accusing Bush of neglecting the poor (Oh,no!! Didn't he see how concerned Duhbya was with the poor of New Orleans?), Chavez started a program last winter for Venezuela's U.S.-based oil company Citgo to sell discounted heating oil to poor American families. It distributed more than 40 million gallons of oil last winter to low-income Americans, and Chavez announced a doubling of that this winter.

Chavez also lambasted the U.S. government for trying to block Venezuela's campaign for a seat in the U.N. Security Council (He must have forgotten who owns the world). He said if chosen over U.S.-favorite Guatemala in a secret-ballot U.N. vote next month, Venezuela would be "the voice of the Third World."

The council currently consists of five permanent members with veto power — the United States, Britain, Russia, China and France — and 10 non-permanent members who serve two-year terms and have no power to veto resolutions.

The U.S. argues that Venezuela — closely allied with Iran, Syria, and Cuba — would be a disruptive force. The campaign for a U.N. seat is shaping up to be a formidable diplomatic test for Chavez, gauging his ability to lobby head-to-head against the United States.

Chavez said the U.N. in its current system "doesn't work" and is "antidemocratic." (Maybe Bush can bring "democracy" to the UN like he brought it to Iraq). He called for the world body to be overhauled, saying the U.S. government's "immoral veto" had allowed recent Israeli bombings of Lebanon to continue unabated for more than a month.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060920/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/un_venezuela;_ylt=Atc_hetbGTvocDARoBqd1qis0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA2Z2szazkxBHNlYwN0bQ--

Casey, the Wonder Dog !!!

Vocals on "Hard Drinkin' Mama" at: www.myspace.com/ukulelemanandhisprodigalsons  

I Double-Dog Dare You !!

Hey Folks,

Here's just a bit of folklore-debunking I happened upon. (I realize that many will take supreme umbrage over this report - including my dear granddoggy, Casey, the Wonder Dog. But no one HAS to believe it - I mean, it's "Ask Yahoo" not "Dear Abbey."

- Uke Man

Dear Yahoo!:

Are dogs' mouths really cleaner than humans'?

................................Jenna - Glendale, California

Dear Jenna:

All dogs lick themselves. Some eat their own feces. Humans (most of 'em, anyway) do not. So how in the world can the mouth of a canine be cleaner than that of a person? Simple -- it can't.

According to ABC News, this is basically an urban legend. However, unlike the one about the psycho killer with the hook, this story has a grain of truth.

Although the mouth of a typical dog is full of bacteria, it's "species specific." So, if a dog were to lick a person, most of the germs wouldn't transfer. "Bottom line -- you're more likely to get a serious illness from kissing a person than kissing a dog."

The myth may have stemmed from the way pups lick their wounds. A dog's tongue gets rid of dead tissue so wounds heal faster. Perhaps folks concluded that dog saliva is "healthy."Hardly the case, but you shouldn't be afraid of licks. They might be gross, but they're not dangerous.

I'm doing fine, thank you!!

Why don't YOU inherit a magazine!!" 

of the Rich, by the Rich, for the Rich

Hey Folks,

The economy is doing just fine, thank you ! But for whom?

- Uke Man


September 15, 2006
Progress or Regress?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
(a ukethanks to Phyll)

Is the typical American family better off than it was a generation ago? That’s the subject of an intense debate these days, as commentators try to understand the sour mood of the American public.

But it’s the wrong debate. For one thing, there probably isn’t a right answer. Most Americans are better off in some ways, worse off in others, than they were in the early 1970’s. It’s a subjective judgment whether the good outweighs the bad. And as I’ll explain, that ambiguity is actually the real message.

Here’s what the numbers say. From the end of World War II until 1973, when the first oil crisis brought an end to the postwar boom, the U.S. economy delivered a huge, broad-based rise in living standards: family income adjusted for inflation roughly doubled for the poor, the middle class, and the elite alike. Nobody debated whether families were better off than they had been a generation ago; it was obvious that they were, by any measure.

Since 1973, however, the picture has been mixed. Real median household income — the income of the household in the middle of the income distribution, adjusted for inflation — rose a modest 16 percent between 1973 and 2005. But even this small rise didn’t reflect clear gains across the board. The typical full-time male worker saw his wages, adjusted for inflation, actually fall; the typical household’s real income was up only because women’s wages rose (although by far less than everyone’s wages rose during the postwar boom) and because more women were working.

The debate over the state of the middle class, for the most part, is about whether these numbers understate or overstate the true progress achieved by typical families. The optimists point to technological advances that, they argue, don’t get reflected in official estimates of the standard of living. In 1973, you couldn’t chat on a cellphone, watch a video or surf the Internet; many medical conditions that are now easily managed with drugs were untreatable; and so on.

The pessimists point to ways in which life has deteriorated, things that also aren’t counted by the official statistics. Traffic has gotten far worse, and commutes have gotten longer. The economic riskiness of life has increased: year-to-year fluctuations in family income have grown much larger. The rat race has intensified, as families, no longer confident in the quality of public education, stretch to buy houses in good school districts — and often go bankrupt when misfortune strikes in the form of a layoff for either spouse or high medical bills.

Does the good outweigh the bad? Never mind. As I said, the ambiguity is the message.

Consider this: The United States economy is far richer and more productive than it was a generation ago. Statistics on economic growth aside, think of all the technological advances that have made workers more productive over the past generation. In 1973, there were no personal computers, let alone the Internet. Even fax machines were rare, expensive items, and there were no bar-code scanners at checkout counters. Freight containerization was still uncommon. The list goes on and on.

Yet in spite of all this technological progress, which has allowed the average American worker to produce much more, we’re not sure whether there was any rise in the typical worker’s pay. Only those at the upper end of the income distribution saw clear gains — gains that were enormous for the lucky few at the very top.

That’s why the debate over whether the middle class is a bit better off or a bit worse off now than a generation ago misses the point. What we should be debating is why technological and economic progress has done so little for most Americans, and what changes in government policies would spread the benefits of progress more widely. An effort to shore up middle-class health insurance, paid for by a rollback of recent tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans — something like the plan proposed by John Kerry two years ago, but more ambitious — would be a good place to start.

Instead, the people running our government are fixated on cutting tax rates for the wealthy even further. And their solution to Americans’ justified economic anxiety is a public relations campaign, an effort to convince middle-class families that their problems are a figment of their imagination.

Sink it, Poppa !! Sink it !!! 

Poppa,Poppa!! He's our man!! If he can't do it, no one can!!!

( "We haven’t achieved a full-scale 'clash of civilizations' yet, but we’re making progress")


Hey Folks,

Here's some REAL analysis!!

- Uke Man



Pope’s past reveals other cases of affronts to Muslims
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
GWYNNE DYER

On a scale of 1 to 10, Pope Benedict XVI’s first attempt at an apology was barely a 3. He said nothing himself, but on Saturday Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, told the world that "The Holy Father is very sorry that some passages of his speech may have sounded offensive to the sensibilities of Muslim believers."

That didn’t stop the protests that have been building in the Muslim world since the Pope gave the speech on Sept. 12 to an academic audience in Germany, so on Sunday he tried again. Speaking from his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome, he said: "I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims."

That won’t stop the protests either, because he really isn’t sorry for what he said. He’s sorry for "the reactions in some countries" to his remarks, but he implicitly stands by what he said in Regensburg. So is the new pope really anti-Muslim?

After the 9/11 attacks five years ago, the former Cardinal Ratzinger told Vatican Radio that "it is important not to attribute simplistically what happened to Islam." But then he added that "the history of Islam also contains a tendency to violence." True enough, but Christianity has its own history of violence: the Crusades, the Inquisition, the religious wars that devastated Europe in the 16 th and 17 th centuries and several other detours from the path of peace and tolerance.

Just before he became pope last year, Benedict declared that Turkey should not be allowed into the European Union because its Islamic culture is incompatible with the "Christian" culture of Europe. But the real case for the prosecution rests on his invitation to Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci to visit him at Castel Gandolfo last September.

It certainly wasn’t a religious visit, since Fallaci, who died last week, was an atheist, and her fame as a war correspondent and interviewer was decades behind her. But she carved out a second career as the most extreme anti-Muslim writer in Europe, producing two best-selling books since 2002 that vilified Muslims as dirty subhumans who multiply "like rats," and portraying Islam as an irrational religion that breeds hatred.

The title of her second-to-last book, the one that presumably inspired the pope’s invitation, was The Force of Reason, whose core argument was that the West is rational and reasonable, whereas Muslims aren’t. And there was Benedict in Germany last week, saying exactly the same thing. What a coincidence.

In his speech, Benedict quoted from the 14 th century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, who told a Persian visitor that "spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable....Godisnot pleased by blood." So far, so good. But then Manuel asked his Muslim visitor, "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." Benedict quoted that, too, without any further comment.

He ended his speech, 4 1 /2 pages later, by quoting the emperor again: " ‘not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God,’ said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding ofGod....Itisto this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures." In other words, you Muslims are unreasonable people, but if you do it our way, then we’ll finally get somewhere.

Pakistan’s parliament has unanimously passed a resolution condemning the pope’s speech. Seven Christian churches in the occupied Palestinian territories have been bombed, set ablaze or shot at. A Catholic nun was shot to death in Somalia. Most Muslims are well aware that violence is an inappropriate way to protest against accusations that Islam is a violent faith, but why do they even care what the pope says?

Benedict needs a few lessons in manners, but the real reason for the uproar is that so many Muslims feel under attack by the West. Two Muslim countries have been invaded by the United States and its allies since 9/11, and another, Lebanon, has been bombed to ruins by Israel with full support from the United States and Britain.

At least 20 times as many Muslims have died in these brutal wars as the number of Americans who died in the 9/11 attacks, and almost none of them had anything to do with that terrorist atrocity. So the suspicion grows among Muslims that all this is not really about 9/11 at all, and almost any minor insult to Islam from the West — cartoons in a provincial Danish newspaper, a foolish quote by an arrogant pope — is enough to trigger outrage from Morocco to Indonesia.

We haven’t achieved a full-scale "clash of civilizations" yet, but we’re making progress.


Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
76312.1476 @compuserve.com

 

This is a MARVEL of sight & sound!!!

Folks!!!!

Rube Goldgerg is turning over in his latest posthumous construction!!

You MUST see this: http://video.google.nl/videoplay?docid=2942922314315974986&q=label%3Afag

- Uke Man

Pixie Dust for Georgie

"There !! Now you ARE the Emperor."  

Double Standard - Revisited

Hey Folks,

No sooner do I rant about the double standard than I receive this disturbing news from MoveOn.org.

- Uke Man


Dear MoveOn member,

This week, the Senate is planning to quietly hold a vote that would pardon President Bush for breaking the law by illegally wiretapping innocent Americans without warrants. According to Senator Leahy, the bill would "...immunize officials who have violated federal law by authorizing such illegal activities."

President Bush broke the law, and courts are starting to agree. Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter once said the program was illegal "on its face." But he has now caved to pressure from Vice President Cheney, and introduced legislation that marks a new low: the bill justifies everything the president did. Worse, it makes it legal to wiretap Americans, in secret, without warrants or oversight, whenever the administration wants to.

So far, Democrats and some Republicans are holding strong against the bill, and there are good chances to stop it if enough of us speak up. Can you sign the petition opposing the Republican move to pardon President Bush for breaking the law?

http://pol.moveon.org/dontpardon/?id=8810-1578831-3dSvoXMHdov4SnO4m4HHYA&t=2

Many legal experts agree that the president's program to wiretap Americans who have nothing to do with terrorism violates the law. President Bush already has the authority to wiretap suspected terrorists—and we support that. In fact, his administration can tap anyone it likes as long as it gets an OK from a court a few days later.

Congress should be trying to hold him accountable—that's their job. Instead, some Republicans are trying to let President Bush off the hook completely. In fact, the legislation would give the president even more unchecked power.

Here are some quick facts about the Cheney-Specter bill:
·
· It allows President Bush—and every president after him—to wiretap Americans indefinitely, in secret, without a warrant and without any oversight.
·
· It effectively pardons the president for any illegal behavior by forcing Congress to concede that he has the inherent authority to conduct the program—something federal courts, numerous legal experts and many leading Republicans disagree with.
·
· It completely guts FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) which has protected the privacy of Americans against illegal wiretaps for close to 30 years. ·
· It prevents any legal challenges from taking place in the public court system. Instead, it moves all cases to a secret court, where only Bush administration officials can argue it.
·
· It would help "immunize" any officials who broke the law in this program from being held accountable in the future.

Since the program was exposed in December of last year, we've learned that President Bush personally blocked a Justice Department investigation of the program, Vice President Cheney also personally intervened to stop telecom companies from testifying to Congress about it, and a federal court recently ruled the program unconstitutional.9 In an effort to protect himself from further consequences, the president is pressuring Congress to let him off the hook.

This is an important issue and it will help remind Americans, in an election year, what Republicans are all about—accumulating power for themselves, and trampling the system of checks and balances designed to stop that. Can you sign the petition today?

http://pol.moveon.org/dontpardon/?id=8810-1578831-3dSvoXMHdov4SnO4m4HHYA&t=3

It's the Senate's job to act as a check on the president's power. If they can't do it, they shouldn't be in Washington.

Thanks for all you do,–Nita, Eli, Jennifer, Wes and the MoveOn.org Political Action Team Monday, September 18th, 2006

"It is unacceptable to think!!" - George W. Bush

"What good fortune for those in power that people do not think." - Adolph Hitler --- "The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself ... inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intollerable." - H.L. Mencken 

Olbermann speaks up for us again

Hey Folks,

Check it out at: http://video.msn.com/v/us/msnbc.htm?f=00&g=914c21e7-59fd-4d2f-b1f8-37b8b5ad2f84&p=News_Comment%20-%20Analysis&t=c1149&rf=http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/&fg=

- Uke Man

 

The Double Standard

Hey Folks,

I’d guess that most of us have had diect or indirect experience with the infamous “Double Standard.”

A favorite of mine involves a friend – a regular guy, working at a recycling center – and the former president of the Ohio Senate, Stanley Aronoff - now a big deal lobbyist in Cincinnati. My friend was coming home late – tired and weaving a bit. He passed the breathalyzer and lost his license for a year anyway, and – if you are unaware, it costs $500.00 to get it back when the year is up. Arnoff, who was drunk as a skunk and ran into a pillar trying to get out of the Statehouse parking garage, got “reckless operation” and a $300.00 fine. He also has buildings named after him (and they are NOT porta-potties.

Anyway, I’d like to point out that the “double standard” is much more broadly applied than in cases like this one. The entire system is a double standard. We are – fairly successfully - brainwashed not to notice it, to think that there really IS a “level playing field.,” but actually the system is a one-way street, purposefully designed to keep the people down. I learned this from long experience dealing with the system as a union officer.

Here’s how it works.

We have a nation of laws and contracts and constitutional rights and rules and policies and values. Or, at least that is what the little people are told (and most believe). But, friends, it’s bullshit!! You may have already heard me paraphrase Leona Helmsley, but here it is again: “Law, ethics, morality, and taxes are for the little people.”

In my 31 years’ union experience, when labor has a contract with management it is NOT a level playing field. According to the “official” line, a contract bears equally on both parties, but actually it doesn’t.

If management acts in conflict with the contract, there is a long, time and resource-consuming process that can drag on for a year or more. All that time – from day one – the worker must follow management’s improper directives, or he can be fired for insubordination.

These directives can involve extra effort and/or time on the job, added personal expense, personal stress, any amount of disruption to the process and more. And it affects all workers of similar category – often the entire work force.

Now, during the entire time the grievance drags on the workers (some or all) suffer the loss of rights provided by the contract, suffer real loss and offense – whether it be physical or mental or both. This can last longer than a year.

Now, you would think that if the union position were, in the end, vindicated, that some sort of recompense would be ordered to make up for that loss – or, alternatively, some sort of fine or punishment would be levied for the misbehavior.

In 31 years of active union leadership, I have NEVER seen that happen. All that happens is: the pricks are told to stop doing it and not to do it again. Often they soon attempt the same ends via a different approach, and the frustrating charade starts all over again.

It’s the system’s double standard: one for the people, another for their betters.

This reality, though, is bigger than Labor-Management issues; it runs all the way to the top.

Case in point: G.W. Boosh!

Our child President is presently operating just as I’ve described in regard to the secret prisons, torture, the Geneva Conventions, and our supposedly important “American Values.”

For a number of years the Bush Regime has maintained secret prisons where they inflicted illegal torture on captives. From the start their procedures were clearly outside the international treaty (contract) which we signed and by which we are legally bound.

Well, then how could they do it? Like management in the working world, they simply claimed the clear language didn’t mean what it clearly said and that 50 years of "past practice" – living with the agreement – was “vague. They simply ignored the “contract” and did what THEY wanted.

Finally after years of dishonorable, illegal behavior, they are told by the U.S. Supreme Court – just as in the union-management case – to stop doing it! No punishment. No community service or sensitivity classes required. No thought of making any amends to the victims – some of whom may be totally innocent

You might think that – at least – NOW the ghouls would back off and return to proper behavior. But no!!!!!!!! Bush is presently demanding, haranguing the congress to validate his illegal behavior by passing laws that not only abrogate our treaty obligations, but also repudiate the fundamental principles of justice this country has always held up and bragged about.

Not only law, ethics, morality, and taxes are for the little people. You can add “honor,” “fair play,” and “self-respect” to the list.

Drive Bush out - October 5 !!

- Uke Man

He thinks this is an Elvis impersonation! 

Mo' Mo - Lady MacCheney

September 13, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Vice Must Wash Hands Before Returning to Work
By MAUREEN DOWD
(a ukethanks to Phyll)

Washington

I called Tim Russert to ask if Dick Cheney had washed his hands after their interview on Sunday.

“No-o-o,’’ he replied, sounding confused.

Any sort of scrubbing, I wondered? Antiseptic wipe, Purell, quick shower on the way out?

No, Tim assured me, the vice president did not stop at the basement shower at NBC, or even drop by the men’s room you pass on the right as you head out to the parking lot.

According to The Times’s health section yesterday, Lady Macbeth and Pontius Pilate were not alone in wanting that “damned spot” out.

“People who washed their hands after contemplating an unethical act were less troubled by their thoughts than those who didn’t,’’ Benedict Carey wrote about a new study on the “Macbeth effect,” published in the journal Science.

“In one of several experiments among Northwestern undergraduates, the researchers had one group of students recall an unethical act from their past, like betraying a friend, and another group reflect on an ethical deed, like returning lost money,’’ the article said. “Afterward, the students had their choice of a gift, either a pencil or an antiseptic wipe. Those who had reflected on a shameful act were twice as likely as the others to take the wipe.’’

If Dick Cheney didn’t try to hose himself down after his outlandish performance on “Meet the Press,’’ he may be so deep in denial he doesn’t even know he’s ruining America and needs a symbolic moral superwash.

Since W. revealed he’s been reading Shakespeare — including “Macbeth” — I’ve been puzzling over which character the vice president most resembles. He’s got as much malignant sway over the protagonist as Iago, but Iago hated Othello.

The Lord of the Underworld is more like Lady Macbeth, who persuades her partner to make a huge error in judgment by taunting him about manliness. If he doesn’t want to be unmanned, he must pre-emptively wield the dagger against his rival. She tells him:

When you durst do it, then you were a man;And to be more than what you were, you wouldBe so much more the man.

Even though “blood will have blood,” Macbeth decides he must stay on his self-destructive path:

I am in blood Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

W. and Vice went on TV this week to double down on their dishonest case, now contradicted by a mountain of evidence, once more milking our sorrow over 9/11 to justify their errant course in Iraq.

In a speech that Tony Snow promised would be “reflective,’’ the president used hyperventilated rhetoric about “a struggle for civilization” and cynically retraced a line he now knows is false, again linking Osama and Baghdad: “If we yield Iraq to men like bin Laden, our enemies will be emboldened.’’

Bin Laden has become the Willie Horton of the midterms. After letting the C.I.A. disband the unit devoted to hunting for Osama — the Senate took a slap at the White House on Thursday when it voted to reinstate it — Mr. Bush now won’t stop talking about the bogeyman he ignored for five years while he transferred all his resources to Iraq.

“The safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad,” he said.

Instead of going after Osama, we invaded Iraq. Now W. says we must stay in Iraq or it will be run by Osamas. We must kill all the terrorists we are creating. American soldiers must keep dying because American soldiers have died. If we criticize Mr. Bush, then we’re unmanning the whole country. The logic is deviously Rovian, and we are trapped in the circularity.

On “Meet the Press,’’ Mr. Cheney warned that America cannot let its adversaries “break our will’’ and show we “don’t have the stomach for the fight.’’

“It was the right thing to do,” Vice insisted of the war in Iraq, “and if we had to do it over again we would do exactly the same thing.”

After all the miscalculations and billions wasted, projects screwed up, lives and limbs lost, foreign enemies made, American stature squandered, Taliban strength regained, North Korean bombs and Iran-Iraq alliances built (visiting the American-hating, Holocaust-denying Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yesterday, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq called Iran “a good friend and brother’’) Dick Cheney wouldn’t do anything differently?

Part of leadership has to be retooling, saying: “You know what? This hasn’t worked. This is making things worse. What else can we do?’’

Break out the Wet Wipes, Mr. Cheney. Time for a good scrubbing.

In case you wondered - We're Still Working on the new CD

Pete, Casey (the Wonder Dog), & the Uke Man are still on the job


 

 

Monkey Business

Hey Folks,

Here it is, the:

"What We Are" video !!!

Click* here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a15KgyXBX24

- Uke Man

*if necessary, use your opposable thumb, you cute little monkey, you !!!

 

Maureen sees it too!!!

Hey Folks,

Two postings below, Bob Herbert wrote, “Who are we?” and “The character of the U.S. has changed.” He ended by suggesting that, “We could benefit from looking in a mirror, and absorbing the shock of not recognizing what we’ve become.”

It isn’t a pretty sight, and it promises to get worse. Bush and his vampire retainers have brought us this far, and as Ms. Dowd points out, they are going to continue down this path no matter what - she quotes Bush:

“Let me just first tell you that I’ve never been more convinced that the decisions I made are the right decisions. I’m oftentimes asked about, well, you’re stubborn and all this. If you believe in a strategy, in Washington, D.C., you’ve got to stick to that strategy, see.”

And the ass believes it; is he thick as a brick? Does God send him regular messages that he’s right? He claims a lot of folks are prayin’ fer him.

Well, that shows you the power of prayer.

Unless the people do something beyond praying, this son of a bitch* will just keep grinding this nation into the gutter stones.

- Uke Man

* Barbara (see her comments on Katrina)




September 16, 2006
Awake and Scream
By MAUREEN DOWD
(a ukethanks to Phyll)

WASHINGTON


I wish W. would let me help crystallize him.

But, alas, I’m not one of his chosen crystallizers, because he is loath to be exposed to anyone who doesn’t agree with him. He roams the country but never strays from Bushworld, going from military bases to conservative powwows to Republican Hill allies to sworn Bush supporters to sympathetic columnists.

“It helps crystallize my thought to answer your questions,” he told conservative columnists called to the Oval Office this week. But he made it clear that his thoughts were contentedly calcified: “Let me just first tell you that I’ve never been more convinced that the decisions I made are the right decisions. I’m oftentimes asked about, well, you’re stubborn and all this. If you believe in a strategy, in Washington, D.C., you’ve got to stick to that strategy, see.”

Aside from Dick Cheney and Rummy, who don’t have all their buttons, we all long for W. to find better strategies on Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, pretty much the rest of the world and national security.

He’s facing a rebellion from big shots in his party who don’t
want him to rip up the Geneva Conventions. Lindsey Graham calls it a fight over “who America is in 2006.” John McCain, who has been trying so hard to play nice with W. for the sake of his political future, said the president’s plan risks “our moral standing and the lives of those Americans who risk everything to defend our country.”

Colin Powell, his conscience about Iraq clearly stinging, agreed
that “the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism” and that undermining the Geneva Conventions “would add to those doubts” and “put our own troops at risk.” (Tony Snow deemed Mr. Powell confused, which is how the Bushies dismiss those who don’t grasp their invisible genius.)

Whenever W. does something legally sketchy and morally ambiguous — from pre-emptive war to spying to torturing — he
claims he’s doing it to protect Americans from terrorists. But there’s a more visceral agenda: Vice and Rummy have persuaded W. he will not carry a big stick if bound by Lilliputian
legalities, tiresome checks and balances and Kumbaya international conventions. Rather than being alarmed at their battiness, the president naïvely admires what he sees as bravado.

Just as Vice lurked at Langley before the Iraq war, trying to bully reluctant C.I.A. analysts to come up with a Saddam-Osama link, now the White House has maneuvered reluctant J.A.G. lawyers into supporting its dream of undermining justice.

Catching terrorists and protecting Americans can be done
without trashing American ideals. This is about throwing off laws to prove that W. is “the Man,” as Vice likes to say, not some wobbly, wavering, multilateral metrosexual.

His counselors have dulled W.’s sense of urgency by persuading
him to take the long view and read about Washington and Lincoln, when it would be far better to focus on the Middle East and revise his backfiring policies.

“Ideological struggles take time,” he said, and the world expects “instant success.”

“Maybe it’s because there’s too many TV channels, I don’t
know,” he told the columnists, noting that’s why a president must have patience.

Despite his history reading, Mr. Bush seems to have forgotten
Vietnam. “It’s impossible for someone to have grown up in the 50’s and 60’s to envision a conflict with people that just kill mercilessly, using techniques that are kind of foreign to our — to modern warfare,” he said. “But it’s real.” Besides saying he’s in “a struggle between good and evil” — which inflames many Muslims — W. told the columnists he thought America might be experiencing “a Third Awakening,” a religious fervor, because people he meets in rope lines tell him they’re praying for him. That could also be because W.’s policies have led to so much global chaos and hatred for America, his supporters know he needs more prayers.

“I got into politics initially because I wanted to help change a
culture,” he said. He wanted to banish the old 60’s “if it feels good, do it” culture and “help usher in an era of personal responsibility.”

He has changed American culture, for sure. Bustling under Bill
Clinton, the nation is now insecure about its moral force and military force. The president should take responsibility for the hash he’s made, instead of insisting every decision was correct, and come up with more astute cultural and military
analyses.

The “awakening” should be W.’s.

"All our enimas in one place!!" 

What is Brian Williams ??

Hey Folks,

Over supper last night I saw Brian Williams on the nightly NBC News, broadcasting from Havana, supposedly because the Non-Aligned Countries were meeting there. His comments touched on Fidel Castro's health, his "doubtful" return to "full" leadership, and presented a segment on the "problem" of "smuggling Cubans" into this country.

He went to Havana for that? Shouldn't he have reported SOMETHING on what these 117 countries were thinking, saying, proposing??

He didn't.

Instead his report consisted simply of saying - a number of times - that the gathering consisted of "all of America's enemies," "all the enemies of the United States"!!!!!!!!

WHAT !!!!!!?????

There are 117 nations - some I've never heard of - who are our ENEMIES ??

Some of the nations (our "enemies") on that list are the Bahamas, Chile, Columbia, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Ethiopia, Grenada, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, Trinidad, and Viet Nam.

What has Brian Williams been smoking?

This is what passes for news? I guess that because Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and North Korea - the "Dastardly Duo" and the "Axis of Evil" - are there, we can just lump them all together - the six I mentioned and the 111 others.

This is an idiocy of even larger scale than identifying Cuba and Venezuela as our "enemies" simply because they won't kiss Uncle Sam's politico-economic ass!! (For that matter, what has Cuba or Venezuela ever done to America? What has America done to Venezuela and - particularly - Cuba over the years? Who is whose enemy?)

It would have been instructive to learn what these 117 nations - many of whom are allies or trading partners or recipients of US aid - thought their problems, needs, hopes, and plans were. Then we could have decided for ourselves whether they seemed like our "enemies."

But, no!! Brian Williams did our thinking for us.

Is he that stupid? Or does he just want to keep us stupid?

- Uke Man


The Entire List of Member Countries:

Afghanistan - Algeria - Angola - Antigua and Barbuda - Bahamas - Bahrain - Bangladesh - Barbados - Belarus - Belize - Benin - Bhutan - Bolivia - Botswana - Brunei - Burkina Faso - Burundi - Cambodia - Cameroon - Cape Verde - Central African Republic - Chad - Chile - Colombia - Comoros - Congo - Côte d'Ivoire -Cuba - Democratic Republic of Congo - Djibouti - Dominica - Dominican Republic - Ecuador - Egypt - Equatorial Guinea - Eritrea - Ethiopia - Gabon -Gambia - Ghana - Grenada - Guatemala - Guinea - Guinea-Bissau - Guyana -Haiti - Honduras - India - Indonesia - Iran - Iraq - Jamaica - Jordan - Kenya - Kuwait - Laos - Lebanon - Lesotho - Liberia -Libya - Madagascar - Malawi - Malaysia - Maldives - Mali - Mauritania - Mauritius - Mongolia - Morocco - Mozambique - Myanmar - Namibia - Nepal - Nicaragua - Niger - Nigeria - North Korea - Oman - Pakistan - Panama - Papua New Guinea - Peru - Philippines - Qatar - Rwanda - Saint Lucia - Saint Kitts and Nevis - Saint Vincent and the Grenadines - São Tomé and Príncipe - Saudi Arabia - Senegal - Seychelles - Sierra Leone - Singapore - Somalia - South Africa - Sri Lanka - Sudan - Suriname - Swaziland - Syria - Tanzania - Thailand - Timor Leste - Togo - Trinidad and Tobago - Tunisia - Turkmenistan - Uganda - United Arab Emirates - Uzbekistan - Vanuatu - Venezuela - Vietnam - Yemen - Zambia - Zimbabwe

 

America's Conscience - Bob Herbert

Hey Folks,

It's pretty obvious to me - and Mr Herbert, too!!!

How can we possibly explain that so many can't, don't, or won't see it?

I have some ideas, but they aren't pretty.

- Uke Man

September 14, 2006
The Stranger in the Mirror
By BOB HERBERT
(a ukethanks to Phyll)

We had elections in New York and around the country on Tuesday. But it seems to me that the biggest issue of our time is getting very short shrift from the politicians, and that’s the fact that the very character of the United States is changing, and not for the better.

One of the things that stands out in my mind amid the memories of the carnage and chaos of Sept. 11, 2001, is the eerie quiet — an almost prayerful quiet — that hovered over a scene on the western edge of Manhattan that afternoon.

I stood for a long time outside the triage center that had been set up at the Chelsea Piers sports and entertainment complex. Sunlight glistened off the roofs of ambulances lined up in military fashion on the West Side Highway. Doctors, nurses and other medical personnel were standing by, waiting for what they thought would be the arrival of legions of seriously wounded victims in need of emergency care.

There seemed to be very little talking. As I recall, most of the people maintained a kind of stunned, awed silence.

The expected onslaught of victims never came. As the afternoon faded, I headed east, along with others, toward the morgue at Bellevue Hospital.

What I thought was the greatest _expression of the American character in my lifetime occurred in the immediate aftermath of those catastrophic attacks. The country came together in the kind of resolute unity that I imagined was similar to the feeling most Americans felt after Pearl Harbor. We soon knew who the enemy was, and there was remarkable agreement on what needed to be done. Americans were united and the world was with us.

For a brief moment.

The invasion of Iraq marked the beginning of the change in the American character. During the Cuban missile crisis, when the hawks were hot for bombing — or an invasion — Robert Kennedy counseled against a U.S. first strike. That’s not something the U.S. would do, he said.

Fast-forward 40 years or so and not only does the U.S. launch an unprovoked invasion and occupation of a small nation — Iraq — but it does so in response to an attack inside the U.S. that the small nation had nothing to do with.

Who are we?

Another example: There was a time, I thought, when there was general agreement among Americans that torture was beyond the pale. But when people are frightened enough, nothing is beyond the pale. And we’re in an era in which the highest leaders in the land stoke — rather than attempt to allay — the fears of ordinary citizens. Islamic terrorists are equated with Nazi Germany. We’re told that we’re in a clash of civilizations.

If, as President Bush says, we’re engaged in “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century,” why isn’t the entire nation mobilizing to meet this dire threat?

The president put us on this path away from the better angels of our nature, and he has shown no inclination to turn back. Lately he has touted legislation to try terror suspects in a way that would make a mockery of the American ideals of justice and fairness. To get a sense of just how far out the administration’s approach has been, consider the comments of Brig. Gen. James Walker, the top uniformed lawyer for the Marines. Speaking at a Congressional hearing last week, he said no civilized country denies defendants the right to see the evidence against them. The United States, he said, “should not be the first.”

And Senator Lindsey Graham, a conservative South Carolina Republican who is a former military judge, said, “It would be unacceptable, legally, in my opinion, to give someone the death penalty in a trial where they never heard the evidence against them.”

How weird is it that this possibility could even be considered?

The character of the U.S. has changed. We’re in danger of being completely ruled by fear. Most Americans have not shared the burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Very few Americans are aware, as the Center for Constitutional Rights tells us, that of the hundreds of men held by the U.S. in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, many “have never been charged and will never be charged because there is no evidence justifying their detention.”

Even fewer care.

We could benefit from looking in a mirror, and absorbing the shock of not recognizing what we’ve become.

They March !!!

 

UFP&J Protest Update - They March!!!

Hey Folks,

I've been saying right along that the People have to stand up! If we don't they will grind us into the dirt.

Here is an example from which we should learn.

Our Masters said "Shut up and go away." The People said, "No! We're marching whether YOU give your blessing or not!! Arrest us if you dare, and we'll see you in court!!"

In this case, when courageously confronted, our Masters - who aren't stupid - retreated, reserving their Gestapo tactics for a future situation more succeptible to their twisted "justification."

- Uke Man


www.unitedforpeace.org 212-868-5545 Click to subscribe

WE WON!

In a stunning turn of events, the NYC Police Department has reversed its previous decision to deny us the right to march near the United Nations on Sept. 19th when Bush addresses the General Assemby.

When the NYPD told us there would be no marches in the vicinity of the UN that day, we announced that we would march anyway, even if it meant going to jail. We have just learned that we are being given a permit for a march and rally that morning to call for an end to the war in Iraq.

As President Bush makes his way to the UN for his speech to the General Assembly, we will be gathering at 6th Avenue and 37th Street in Manhattan between 9 and 9:30 a.m. At 9:30 a.m. we will begin our march, heading north on 6th Avenue and then east on 47th Street. We will end at the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza on 47th Street between 2nd and 1st Avenues, across from the UN with a rally from 11 a.m. to 12 noon; Bush will be speaking at the UN sometime between 11:30 and 11:45 am.

Let's make this a large and loud call for an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq -- all the troops must be brought home, and brought home now!

We have agreed to march on the sidewalk for this demonstration. While it is certainly not as good as marching in the street, we had offered this option as an alternative we could live with when we were negotiating with the police. They had told us this too would be unacceptable. It is clear that our determination to march with or without a permit -- our determination to be heard -- had an impact on the NYPD's decision to give us a permit for our protest.

 

Holy Doughnuts!!!

Hey Folks,

I awoke this morning to a three-story barrage of Holy News - wholly ridiculous Holy News.

In one report, the Pope had repeated nasty comments about Islam and pissed off the Turks, Lebanese, Egyptians, Syrians, and the Pakistanis (for starters). http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060915/ap_on_re_mi_ea/pope_muslims

Another story reported a Jordanian government decree that only a state-appointed council could issue religious edicts. The government, as everyone knows, is best prepared to determine which individuals - among the many claimants - has a direct hot-line to Allah. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-jordan-religious-edicts,1,7729080.story

The third story told of the brilliant holy sect in Kenya which had predicted the end of the world on Sept. 12; and – when the world continued on obliviously – decided to enter their holy bunker beneath the corn field and stay there anyway - because the attack on the US embassy in Syria was "just the beginning.” http://allafrica.com/stories/200609130039.html

According to story 1: ‘‘‘ The pope quoted from a book recounting a conversation between 14th century Byzantine Christian Emperor Manuel Paleologos II and a Persian scholar on the truths of Christianity and Islam.

"The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war," the pope said.

"He said, I quote, 'Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached,'" he quoted the emperor as saying. He did not explicitly agree with them nor repudiate them. ’’’

Way to go Papa!!! How could you ever have guessed that such talk might be taken as an insult by half the world? Why would a Muslim be sensitive to such talk by a Christian leader?

And you other people who are pissed off: it’s just some old man (who thinks he’s infallible) calling names. Remember: sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you.

Ignore him.

He can live in HIS fantasy world, and you can live in yours.

Just like the 22 members of the Kenyan doomsday cult can live in their little two-room bunker for as long as they want (up to 13 months, when the food runs out).

The only other option I see is to put the government in charge of religion, as in Jordan. It’s likely to work here. Our President already talks to God and has been sent on special missions.

- Uke Man

the Ukulele Club of Santa Cruz

Hospitality & cheer - & room for everyone from maestros to beginners and those of us in the middle. 

the Ukulele Club of Santa Cruz

Hey Folks!!

This is the Uke Club where I'll be playing October 12. You can tell from the article why I'm so pleased to have the oportunity.

- Uke Man


To see the original story go to http://www.avpress.com/n/31/0831_s8.hts

Valley Needs Ukulele Club For Relaxing Fun

By JOHN BIRSNER Special to the Valley Press

If there already is an Antelope Valley ukulele club and I just haven't found it, contact me and tell me where to sign up. But keep on reading. I want to tell why every community might benefit from a slew of strumming play-alongs.

About a month ago I was listening to a radio news program with a story on the Ukulele Club of Santa Cruz with an interview with Andy Andrews, who co-founded the club in 2001.

Lots of laughing and chatter, enthusiastic club members describing their appreciation of the club and monthly get-togethers, and finally a rousing version of "When Will I Be Loved," originally done by the Everly Brothers. I got the message even without the visuals: my kind of folks.

Next day, another radio station had its once-a-month program on the ukulele. Lyle Ritz was being interviewed, and his self-produced CD was being played.

I had played the "uke" as a kid and remember it didn't take much to get a recognizable tune out of it. Originally brought to Hawaii by Portuguese sailors in 1879, the natives gave the ukulele its present name, translated as "jumping flea" - how the fingers looked moving around the neck.

I don't remember where my ukulele came from, but nearly 10 million were sold in the United States in the mid-1950s for as little as $5 apiece. Rock 'n' roll and the guitar came along, forcing the diminutive instrument below the radar.

Wondering what the present status of the ukulele was, I went to the computer. A few clicks, and I found free sheet music, festivals, stores and auction sites to buy instruments and the Web site for the Santa Cruz club.

A trip to a local music store, the selection of a new entry-level ukulele, a how-to book, a tuner and instrument case, and I was off and strumming.

UCSC meets at Bocci's Restaurant in Santa Cruz. I knew I'd come to the right place. Ukuleles, Hawaiian shirts and smiles everywhere. The room really was a shed: a barely enclosed barn-like structure with decomposed granite "lanes" running down the length of it. These were the bocci courts.

Bocci ball: one part shuffleboard or lawn bowling, one part hand grenades, several parts enthusiastic Italian heritage. Something else I might like to see in the Antelope Valley.

Even after a nearly six-hour drive, I was still early for the six o'clock meeting. I found a place at a table out of the line of fire and settled in.

I introduced myself to Andy Andrews, bustling about like a jumping flea himself, and talked about the radio interview that had got me started on this odyssey in the first place.

I visited with a woman selling very affordable ukuleles, chatted with any number of people around our table, ordered up the pasta special and hunkered down. I was a happy guy.

For about 40 minutes, a more or less quartet of regulars alternately performed for the continually growing crowd. One fellow with the smallest of the four sizes of ukes did soaring solos without the least bravado or grandstanding. As good and inspiring as he was, anyone can learn a couple of chords and be able to play any number of songs in a shorter time than might seem possible.

The most expert and the rankest beginner all sound the same in a hundred-person play-along. Same goes for the entry level ukes from China compared with the custom or antique models that also were much in evidence. There's safety in numbers, I thought, as I energetically flubbed my way along.

And that's the brilliance of these clubs and gatherings. You can improve forever but can play within a matter of minutes. You're there to have a good time, and most egos seem to be left pleasantly at the door on the way in. People could not have been more open or genuinely friendly.

The theme for the night's play-along was "City Songs," and sheet music was passed out before every round. "New York, New York," "Chicago," "Viva Las Vegas" (with a sultry photo of Ann-Margaret), with chord diagrams provided as useful reminders.

We did a few tunes from the songbook, finished finger food, passed the hat for the wait-staff and settled in for the featured group of the evening. A father, two sons and a daughter played soulful Hawaiian music, and it was impossible for me not to think they were homesick.

I could only stay for a few songs but left contented and satisfied.

If you don't wish you were there, I haven't described this get-together well enough. Cheap fun, a sense of musical accomplishment, the warm feeling of being around a lot of relaxed people sounds like a great combination to me.

So what would it take to start a group like this anywhere including here? You would need a nominal leader, a restaurant that will supply food, drinks and, most important, room for enough people to guarantee some anonymity for the self-conscious rookie in a play-along.

A few experienced players and someone to make and hand out sheet music would help. The UCSC songbook explicitly states that its songs are free to be copied if no profit is expected. Good attitude. It seems very unlikely to me that anyone could figure out how to make any money off this endeavor anyhow.

A local club might just be a pipe dream perhaps, but I'll be going back up to Bocci's Restaurant on Thursday, Sept. 14, for the next gathering of the faithful. Meanwhile, I'm going to learn some more chords, check out the Salvation Army for cool Hawaiian shirts and hope enough people read this article to consider starting a group of our own.

Anyone who would like to contact me about anything in this article can do so by sending e-mail to me at http://us.f379.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=JacquesUse@aol.com. I'd love to hear from you.

Ukuleles for Sanity

Marching in NYC 

Update on UFP&J dealing with our friends at the NYPD

Hey Folks,

We should find this continuing process instructive. An earlier posting( http://www.ukuleleman.net/2006/09/nypd-mayor-feds-are-not-your-friend.html ) addressed the refusal of "Authority" to make any good faith effort to allow an even remotely rational protest against the war by United for Peace & Justice.

UFP&J are not turning tail. They are standing up for us and for our constitutional right as well as our young people and innocent Iraqis being killed daily.

How all this plays out should be - as I said - instructive.

I'll keep you up to date, or you can check their website yourself (http://www.unitedforpeace.org/).

- Uke Man


On Tuesday, Sept. 19, President Bush will be speaking at the United Nations as part of an election-year public-relations push on his disastrous Iraq War.

The New York City Police Department has refused to grant a permit to United for Peace and Justice to march anywhere near the United Nations. Based on feedback from our member groups and supporters, we have come to a decision: We are marching anyway. Permit or no permit, we will stand up against this immoral war and for our right to dissent.

While the Bush Administration has pursued its belligerent policy of preemptive war abroad, attacking a country that posed no danger to us, our Constitutional rights have been steadily eroded here at home, with peaceful protesters treated as security threats. In New York City, the NYPD and other agencies have systematically declared one location after another off-limits to protest -- no rallies in most of Central Park, no marches on Fifth Avenue, no pickets in Times Square, and so on endlessly.

We know there are serious security issues to consider when the president and other heads of state are in town. But those needs must be balanced against protecting the right to assemble, the right to protest, and the right to dissent. The NYPD said no to every alternative we put on the table and simply refused to give us a permit for a reasonable location for our march next Tuesday.

Enough is enough. We are marching -- marching to demand that the troops come home now, and to assert our right to peaceful protest. Marching without a permit amounts to nonviolent civil disobedience, and those of us who participate in the march on Tuesday will place ourselves at risk of arrest.

We also know and respect the fact that many people cannot participate in an activity that does not have a permit. And so we are seeking a permit for a rally starting at 8:30 a.m. in Herald Square, one of the busiest locations in Manhattan. This will enable anyone who wishes to protest the war and the restriction of our civil liberties to join us without risking arrest.

There are important details to work out, but this we know for certain: we will not be silenced, we will call for an immediate end to the war in Iraq, and we will be on the streets of New York City on Tuesday, September 19th!

WE NEED YOUR HELP:

1) Please share this email message as widely as possible. Help make sure that everyone knows about the rally and march on Sept. 19th and the denial of our request for a march permit.

2) Especially if you are in the NYC area, make plans now to join us next Tuesday morning. If you would like to participate in the march, please take a moment to call our office at 212-868-5545 so we can give you information about nonviolence trainings. We would rather take this risk than allow our rights to be undermined.

3) Check the UFPJ website for updates on the details for Sept. 19th, including the exact time and location of the rally and the plans for the march. If you are looking for or would like to offer a ride to NYC, please visit our ride board.

4) And, of course, all of this work takes money. Whether or not you are able to participate in person on Tuesday, you can show your support by making a financial donation today! Make an online contribution, call our office at 212-868-5545 to make a credit card donation over the phone, or send a check or money order to UFPJ, P.O. Box 607, Times Square Station, NY NY 10108.

"Oh, yeah!!???"

"Your mama!!!!" 

My Brush is bigger than Your Cigar !!! (tiresome ain't it)

September 9, 2006
The Unslammed Phone
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
(a ukethanks to Phyll)

Sandy Berger is lucky they didn’t show him stuffing government documents into his bra.

After all, cinematic license is cinematic license.

Regarding ABC’s tarted-up 9/11 movie that sparked a furor among Clintonites who felt they were unfairly blamed for the rise of Osama, I hate to be so quaint as to defend reality. There’s not much point. It’s as dead as dial-up.

In Hollywood, reality comes with quotation marks around it, as in fixed and scripted “reality” shows. In New York, hybrids of fiction and nonfiction are lavishly rewarded; publishers want the reality part to sell the fiction part and the fiction part to enhance the reality part. In Washington, the Bush team is on a cynical and dangerous new pre-election push to present its fantasies about Iraq as reality, accusing reality-based critics of “moral or intellectual confusion,” as Rummy put it.

When a reporter asked President Bush a couple of weeks ago what Iraq had to do with 9/11, he blurted out the truth: “Nothing.” But momentarily dismissing that fantasy isn’t about to dissuade him from others. “One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror,” President Bush told Katie Couric this week. I bet. Making up is hard to do.

The administration’s shameless mau-mauing was undercut yesterday by a 376-page Senate Intelligence Committee report slapping Bush hawks for relying on the flawed information provided by Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress to help make the case for war. The report also reaffirmed that Saddam viewed Osama in a negative light, and unveiled a C.I.A. assessment rejecting the president’s continuing claims about prewar links between Saddam and the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The 2005 C.I.A. finding concluded that Saddam “did not have a relationship, harbor, or even turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates.”

W. is pulling out all the stops this week to try to make people forget he was in charge when the twin towers were hit, but if he’s doing so great, why is Osama releasing new tapes while Afghanistan crumbles while Pakistan stands ready to implode while Lebanon has already exploded while Iran goes nuclear and taunts us while Al Qaeda in Iraq calls on its followers to kill Americans “by a sniper bullet, spear, explosive or martyrdom car”?

Conservatives are crowing at the prospect of an ABC movie written by one of their own that blames 9/11 on a flaccid Clinton national security team.

Bill was distracted by the Monica fallout, just as W. was distracted, on Osama and Katrina, by his insistence on living life as usual in Crawford. Bill had no natural inclination to use American force and fumbled on how to strike back at Osama. W., petulantly, did not want to focus on terrorism because his predecessor had.

W. had a clear narrative thread in 2001; all he needed to do was go after the bad guys who hit us. Instead, he obsessed about other bad guys who happened to pose no danger to us.

Why do presidents and filmmakers dealing with the most stunning events in recent American history feel the need to go beyond facts? Isn’t the dire actuality enough? Oliver Stone implied that Lyndon Johnson and Nixon might have been in some tortuous way connected to plots to kill J.F.K.

The ABC movie promoted itself as a serious work based on the 9/11 commission report and featuring Tom Kean, the commission’s co-chairman, as a co-executive producer. (It’s impossible to imagine Earl Warren producing a movie about the events in Dallas.) But if it’s making a claim upon people’s attention as a trustworthy and accurate description of events that bear on all our lives, you’ve got to stick with the truth. You can’t pick and choose when you want it to be history and when you want it to be art. (Quel art.)

Sandy Berger yelped about a scene that depicted him refusing to authorize a military strike to kill Osama and slamming down the phone on a C.I.A. officer at a key moment. Cyrus Nowrasteh, the Republican and Limbaugh pal who served as the writer and a producer, told KRLA-AM in Los Angeles that the scene was improvised.

They distorted history to throw in a standard cliche of melodrama? (The 9/11 Commission Report as Douglas Sirk would have filmed it.) Why compromise your movie by adding tacky things that don’t increase its aesthetic power and detract from its moral power?

The argument over which president is to blame for 9/11 is tiresome. Both obviously bear some blame. There are no West Wing heroes in this story.

In NYC at No-RNC

For Madison Square Garden, turn left at Fux News 

The NYPD (& the mayor & the feds) are NOT your friend !!

Hey Folks,

I received this note from United for Peace & Justice (http://www.unitedforpeace.org/).

They know what they are talking about. I was involved with their No-RNC demo mentioned below, organizing, marching, and a musical fundraiser (www.ukesanity.org).

Getting the least acceptable cooperation out of the NYPD and the Mayor's Orifice was a never-ending nightmare filled with lies, arbitrary fiats, foot-dragging, intimidation, you name it (a major phoney argument was that a rally in Central Park would "hurt the grass").

These charges of underhanded behavior have been verified in court - too late to affect No-RNC and apparently without effect upon the City's authoritarian, unconstitutional behavior in the present.

In any case, these people are NOT our friends. They work for our Masters.

- Uke Man


Dear friend,

Next Tuesday, September 19, President George Bush will be addressing the United Nations in defense of the disastrous Iraq War. United for Peace and Justice has planned a peaceful march and rally to voice our opposition and call for the troops to come home.

Yesterday we met with the New York Police Department, who informed us they will not allow any marches near the United Nations that day. In fact, they said they would not allow any marches east of Park Avenue, south of 52nd Street, or north of the mid 30s.

The police are invoking "security concerns" to justify shunting us so far away from the site of Bush's speech that we might as well be in another borough. We wouldn't just be out of earshot and out of visual range -- we'd be many long blocks away. Is this what democracy looks like?

We were completely willing to discuss a range of reasonable march routes, but the NYPD refused. Their only proposals were for marches far from the UN or a slot for a short rally at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, among at least eight other organizations working on an array of issues.

This is another in a long line of actions by the New York City Police Department -- and the federal government -- that undermine our right to dissent. Time and time again, United for Peace and Justice has had to fight to exercise our basic right to peaceful protest. They tried to stop us from rallying in the lead-up to the Iraq War. They tried to sideline our protest against the Republican National Convention ["no-RNC"] to the sun-baked West Side Highway.

We didn't back down then, and we're not backing down now. United for Peace and Justice is determined to have the strongest possible antiwar presence on the streets of New York City on September 19 while Bush speaks at the UN. We know this is a workday, but we urge you if you possibly can to make plans to join us in the streets.

Air Force Secretary Ironically Challenged

Air Force Secretery says nonlethal weapons should be tested on US civilians before being used on the battlefield (says it's a "Public Relations" move) 

The Secretary of the Air Force is NOT your friend

Hey Folks,

And neither is the AP, apparently. Notice the headline: "testy ...mobs." Notice the story: "crowd-control."

Hmmmmmm . . . mob . . . crowd . . . testy mob . . . testy crowd . . . control . . . testy control . . . microwavable mob . . . microwavable crowd . . . microwavable control . . . just push "frozen entre" . . . hmmmmmmmmm.

Well, if the constitution is, as our President says, "just a goddamned piece of paper," I guess it doesn't really matter.

- Uke Man

p.s. hang on to your testy's; wrap them in tin foil


!!Air Force chief: Test weapons on testy U.S. mobs

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday.

The object is basically public relations. Domestic use would make it easier to avoid questions from others about possible safety considerations, said Secretary Michael Wynne.

"If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation," said Wynne. "(Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press.

"The Air Force has paid for research into nonlethal weapons, but he said the service is unlikely to spend more money on development until injury problems are reviewed by medical experts and resolved.

Nonlethal weapons generally can weaken people if they are hit with the beam. Some of the weapons can emit short, intense energy pulses that also can be effective in disabling some electronic devices.

 

The Policeman is NOT your friend !!!!

Hey Folks,

I found this at:"Project for the Old American Century" (http://www.oldamericancentury.org/video_arch.htm) - a lot of interesting videos.

Here's one that shows our Constitution in action, guaranteeing our right to assemble and protest - in this case outside Halliburton headquarters.

http://www.oldamericancentury.org/haliprotest4.mpeg
( when it comes up, just click the triangle arrow)

-Uke Man

 

the Terrorism Industry

Hey Folks,

Things seldom - if ever - are as they seem. In my opinion, that’s because presenting things as they ARE, is not the goal of those who present those things to us.

Think I’m too cynical? Well, for starters consider toupees, Victoria’s Secret, insurance salesmen, political campaign ads, and Pat Robertson.

It’s no wonder that there are so few worthwhile, intellectual, factually-based discussions of actual, important issues. No one knows what the issue is; “facts” are whatever one says they are; the debaters are talking without facts about something that doesn’t exist; something fantastical they’ve invented for other reasons than educating the “Great Unwashed.”

As pointed out in the article below, journalists, politicians, bureaucrats and assorted entrepreneurs all actively and willingly play along – to the purposeful detriment of ever achieving an “informed public.”

This IS and HAS BEEN the case throughout modern times regarding most things – it is the Matrix, Mr. Smith – operating in the 3-dimentional real world. It is particularly evident and despicable in regard to terrorism.

Listen to Mr. Tierney and Mr. Mueller.

- Uke Man



September 9, 2006
Waiting for Al Qaeda
By JOHN TIERNEY
(a ukethanks to Phyll)

John Mueller has an awkward question for those of us in the terrorism industry, which is his term for the journalists, politicians, bureaucrats and assorted “risk entrepreneurs” who have alarmed America about terrorism.

For five years, we’ve been telling Americans that Sept. 11 changed everything. “It will always be a defining moment in our history,” President Bush says in this year’s Patriot Day proclamation. We declared it a harbinger of a new clash of civilizations, a global ideological struggle, “World War III,” in Newt Gingrich’s words.

We reported intelligence estimates of thousands of Al Qaeda terrorists and supporters in “sleeper cells” in America. In May 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft said that Al Qaeda’s preparations for an attack were 90 percent complete. We braced for acts of terrorism forecast to occur during the political conventions, the presidential campaign, on Election Day, after Election Day. Through yellow and orange alerts, we kept in mind the Department of Homeland Security’s warning: “Today’s terrorists can strike at any place, at any time and with virtually any weapon.”

So what’s keeping them? That’s the question raised by Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University, in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.

“Why,” he asks, “have they not been sniping at people in shopping centers, collapsing tunnels, poisoning the food supply, cutting electrical lines, derailing trains, blowing up oil pipelines, causing massive traffic jams, or exploiting the countless other vulnerabilities that, according to security experts, could so easily be exploited?”

The Bush administration likes to take credit for stopping domestic plots, but it’s hard to gauge whether these are much more than the fantasies of a few klutzes. Bush also claims that the war in Iraq has diverted terrorists’ attention there, but why wouldn’t global jihadists want the added publicity from attacking America at home, too? Al Qaeda’s leaders threatened in 2003 to attack America along with a half dozen other countries that haven’t been attacked either.

Mueller’s conclusion is that there just aren’t that many terrorists out there with the zeal and the competence to attack the United States. In his forthcoming book, Overblown, he argues that the risk of terrorism didn’t increase after Sept. 11 - if anything, it declined because of a backlash against Al Qaeda, making it a smaller and less capable threat than before. But the terrorism industry has been too busy hyping Sept. 11 and several other attacks to notice.

It has found a new audience for old dangers. For more than half a century, experts have warned that terrorists could destroy a city with a weapon of mass destruction. They still might, but their failure so far suggests it isn’t easy to do, and it didn’t suddenly become easier on Sept. 11.

There are plenty of fighters willing to use terrorist tactics locally during civil wars and insurrections, as in Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya or Kashmir. But it’s harder to recruit competent warriors to fight abroad, and harder for them to operate in orderly countries where the citizenry and the authorities both want to stop them.

“Outside of Afghanistan and Iraq,” Mueller says, “the number of people killed around the world since Sept. 11 by groups in sympathy with Al Qaeda is not that high. These are horrible and disgusting deaths, but they’re not a sign of a diabolically effective organization. The total is less than the number of Americans who drowned in bathtubs during this period.”

As it is, he figures, the odds of an American being killed by international terrorism are about one in 80,000. And even if there were attacks on the scale of Sept. 11 every three months for the next five years, the odds for any individual dying would be one in 5,000.

Compared with past threats - like Communist sociopaths with nuclear arsenals - Al Qaeda’s terrorists are a minor problem. They certainly don’t justify the hyperbolic warnings that America’s “existence” or “way of life” is in jeopardy, or that America must transform the Middle East in order to survive.

There undoubtedly will be more terrorist attacks, either from Al Qaeda or others, just as there were before 2001. Terrorists might strike Monday. There will always be homicidal zealots like Mohamed Atta or Timothy McVeigh, and some of them will succeed, terribly. But this is not a new era. The terrorist threat is still small. It’s the terrorism industry that got big.

Hole in the ground - 5 years 

Keith Olbermann on 9-11

Folks,

See the video!!!!!!

http://video.msn.com/v/us/msnbc.htm?f=00&g=6ab03f03-7a66-4378-8443-ef3afe82bab8&p=hotvideo_m_5yr&t=c2071&rf=http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/&fg=

- Uke Man

Hay - Hay !! 

New Numa (hey-hey)

Hey Folks,

I don't know exactly what to say about this, but it made me smile.

- Uke Man

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gg5LOd_Zus&NR

 

On 9-11 Remember Pogo's wisdom !

Hey Folks,

I heard a man on the radio once complaining about having his novels sold in the "New Age" section of book stores. He felt that "New Age" was too diffuse, having no particular "pathway." He explained that he didn't care what "pathway" one adopted - whatever religion or philosophy or other foundation that would give a "direction." Otherwise, he said, one could "never find god."

Now, he meant that figuratively - he was of Indian descent - not a Baptist. Asked, then, how one "finds god," he responded that Gandhi had given the best advice he knew in that regard:

One doesn't "find" god via piety, good works, following prescribed behavioral rules, or anything else one might suppose; one "finds god" through Courage!!

I've thought a lot about that, and my understanding is this:

We all can know what we SHOULD and should NOT do - it's the ancient "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" idea. That's not the problem.

The problem is having the courage to DO what we know we OUGHT to do. That ties in directly with the editorial below - both with the call to display courage at long last and with the shame of past cowardice.

All the way down the line - from top to bottom - on our side and on our adversary's side - actions or the lack of action has been motivated by selfishness rather than by other-directed considerations.

Power, wealth, advancement, ego, pride, and fear ruled. Our courage cowered in a dark corner.

As implied by the Inquirer - the legacy of this nightmare will be determined by how much courage regular folks can muster to tear down the facade that today passes for America.

- Uke Man
(Check out http://www.worldcantwait.net/)

Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial

How We've Changed - Remember 9/12?

Five years ago today, everything changed.

So it was said, again and again: Everything has changed.

Except it hadn't.

We hadn't.

Surely, the cataclysmic day when planes roared into towers, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania earth spurred much heroism, much soul searching.

So, on this day of looking back, it would be nice simply to write an elegy for those who died, to sing an anthem for those who rose to the dire occasion, then and since.

But would that be the full and honest story of the United States of America since Sept. 11, 2001?

Look at our nation: Is it a radically better place than it was before that hideous day? Hard to claim that.

Of the clear changes since 9/11, a few are for the better. More are for the worse. In many areas, very little has changed. Sometimes, that can be cause for pride. Often as not, it should be cause for shame.

Remember, on the fretful dawn of Sept. 12, 2001, how we felt that the world had changed utterly?

We felt at risk in a wholly new way. Angry, too. But more united, full of fellow feeling, idealistic urges, focus on the things that really matter.

We vowed to put aside toxic partisanship, the silly fights of the empty time that had gone before. We would donate more, volunteer more, pray more, be more kind, pay more attention, fly more flags.

On that day, we had the world's sympathy and, for a short while after, its admiration. "We are all Americans," European newspaper headlines declared. You could not pay the same publications enough euros to print the same headline today.

Why? Because of the ways we did not change for the better, and the ways we changed for the worse.

In these five years, the nation has been poorly led. History's verdict on those men and women (of both parties) will be severe.

But the rest of us will not escape censure either. When, God willing, our children and grandchildren look back at how we handled this test of fire and fear, will they really have that much to feel pride about?

On Sept. 12, 2001, we mourned and celebrated rescuers in uniform. Five years later, we still deny these public servants the tools to do their jobs without the confusion that doomed New York City's cops and firefighters.

On Sept. 12, 2001, we hailed the swelling ranks of Ground Zero volunteers, and swore to emulate them. After one uptick, the nation's volunteer rate (28.8 percent) has stayed the same for three years.

On Sept. 12, 2001, we swore we'd be more generous, at home and abroad. In 2005, despite tsunami and Katrina, U.S. charitable giving was precisely the same percentage of GDP as in 2002. And U.S. foreign aid for development ranked 21st out of 22 industrialized nations as a percentage of GDP, despite Iraq and Afghanistan.

On Sept. 12, 2001, as we began to learn who had attacked us, we vowed to curb our costly addiction to foreign oil. Yet, today, Hummers and SUVs still fill showrooms. Our 2005 consumption of oil was 367 million barrels more than in 2001.

We swore, too, that we would place our bond as fellow citizens ahead of any disputes that divide us, would work toward the common good.

Five years later, our politics are at a fever pitch of nastiness. Words such as traitor, liar, coward, idiot and appeaser are common political coin. More and more, on the left and right, people hunker down in media silos into which no fact that upsets their biases can penetrate.

There is much cause, too much cause, for us to be ashamed.

The worst of it is, we have not been brave. Oh, yes, hundreds of thousands of us - in the military and the nonprofit field - have shown stirring courage in doing what they can to protect our safety and uphold our values in fields of war.

But the rest of us, to whom the Framers and generations past bequeathed that great charter of liberty, the Constitution, seem willing to sell it for a mess of pottage.

We have bought scrambled, sneaky arguments that the Constitution is a pesky obstacle to a secret plan to keep us safe. We have let human beings be tortured in the name of our safety. We have let the rule of law be flouted. Through history, many Americans died to defend the Bill of Rights that some now deride as "bloodless legal principle."

We have done this because we are scared. We have reason to be. Some fanatics truly hate us and work cleverly to cause us harm.

But it is precisely in times of threat that a free people most needs to be strong, steady and brave. The greatest tribute to our values is to uphold them when we feel at risk. Bravery is most needed when we are most tempted to take the coward's way, the way of torture, secrets and random vengeance.

It is time, five years after, to truly live up to the last line of our national anthem.

What's the Pope say about this !!?? 

Speaking of Religion - did the Devil make us do it?

(a ukethanks to Sondra)


In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth and populated the Earth with broccoli, cauliflower and spinach, green and yellow and red vegetables of all kinds, so Man and Woman would live long and healthy lives.

Then using God's great gifts, Satan created Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream and Krispy Creme Donuts. And Satan said, "You want chocolate with that?" And Man said, "Yes!" and Woman said, "and as long as you're at it, add some sprinkles." And they gained 10 pounds. And Satan smiled.

And God created the healthful yogurt that Woman might keep the figure that Man found so fair. And Satan brought forth white flour from the wheat, and sugar from the cane and combined them. And Woman went from size 6 to size 14.

So God said, "Try my fresh green salad." And Satan presented Thousand-Island Dressing, buttery croutons and garlic toast on the side. And Man and Woman unfastened their belts following the repast.

God then said, "I have sent you heart healthy vegetables and olive oil in which to cook them." And Satan brought forth deep fried fish and chicken-fried steak so big it needed its own platter. And Man gained more weight and his cholesterol went through the roof.

God then created a light, fluffy white cake, named it "Angel Food Cake," and said, "It is good." Satan then created chocolate cake and named it "Devil's Food."

God then brought forth running shoes so that His children might lose those extra pounds. And Satan gave cable TV with a remote control so Man would not have to toil changing the channels. And Man and Woman laughed and cried before the flickering blue light and gained pounds.

Then God brought forth the potato, naturally low in fat and brimming with nutrition. And Satan peeled off the healthful skin and sliced the starchy center into chips and deep-fried them. And Man gained pounds.

God then gave lean beef so that Man might consume fewer calories and still satisfy his appetite. And Satan created McDonald's and its 99-cent double cheeseburger. Then said, "You want fries with that?" And Man replied, "Yes! And super size them!" And Satan said, "It is good." And Man went into cardiac arrest.

God sighed and created quadruple bypass surgery.

Then Satan created HMOs.

There is more money being spent on breast implants and Viagra today than on Alzheimer's research. This means that by 2040, there should be a large elderly population with perky boobs and huge erections and absolutely no recollection of what to do with them.

Monday is "9-11"

I'm playing Andyman's Tree House with alot of other good people. Show starts at 8:30 - I go on at 11:30. 

Hot Times !!

My first experience with this festival was wonderful (and there was plenty of parking!) 

Stagecoach BBQ Celebration

Had a great time & got to see my friend Aaron (who took this picture) 

Ladies & Gentlemen, The Pope!!!

and the backup Popemobile !! 

Beware the Pope - it's a Rope-a-dope

Hey Folks,

Here are some excerpts from an AP story ( http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060910/ap_on_re_eu/germany_pope_visit ) in which the Pope instructs us further as to how black is white and how the horse must come before the cart.

My comments are in red.

- Uke Man

Pope says not to reject God for science
By DAVID McHUGH, Associated Press
MUNICH, Germany -

Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday warned modern societies not to let faith in science and technology make them deaf to God's message, and suggested that Asia and Africa could teach the wealthier West something about faith. In his sermon to some 250,000 pilgrims at an open-air Mass in Munich, Benedict said modern people suffered from "hardness of hearing" when it comes to God.

First of all, no one should have “faith in science and technology”! That is an oxymoron; George Bush comes to mind: “Yeah, ah got a solution to global warming: air conditioning!”

One can LOOK to science for solutions, just as one can look to religious institutions for solutions; but BLIND FAITH in either one is not only stupid and destructive but a rejection of our responsibility as human beings – in religious terms, it is “immoral.”

Secondly, the Pope isn’t really worried about our being deaf to “God’s message,” but to his self-appointed “messenger,” the Church.

"Put simply, we are no longer able to hear God [or rather the Church]— there are too many different frequencies filling our ears," he said. "What is said about God strikes us as pre-scientific, no longer suited to our age."

"People in Asia and Africa admire our scientific and technical progress, but at the same time they are frightened by a form of rationality which totally excludes God from man's vision, as if this were the highest form of reason."

Here his Holiness attempts a fast one: he’s championing FAITH, but then implies that it (faith) is a higher “form of reasoning.” The Oxymoron marches on.

The need for Western Europe to return to its Christian roots is one of Benedict's favorite themes, and he is repeating it during his visit to his native country — home to a shrinking and liberal Catholic Church and a highly secularized society. Over 100,000 people leave the German church every year, and only about 14 percent attend Mass on an average Sunday. This is what concerns Papa, the CHURCH’s waning influence.

Benedict gently rebuked the German church for putting social service projects and technical assistance to the poor ahead of spreading the Christian message. Yeah! Get a load of that! Serving PEOPLE before the Church!!!

African bishops, he said, told him all doors were open to them in Germany when they wanted to talk about aid projects, but added they were greeted with reservations when it came to evangelization. Yeah, those damned Germans were interested in helping people but not adding to Papa's flock!

"Clearly, some people have the idea that social projects should be urgently undertaken, while anything dealing with God or even the Catholic faith is of limited and lesser importance," Benedict said. Yeah, imagine that!! Helping people is more important than spreading the Catholic faith !!

He said that faith must come first, before progress can be made in social problems, such as the AIDS epidemic in Africa. "Hearts must be converted if progress is to be made on social issues and reconciliation is to begin, and if — for example, AIDS is to be combated by realistically facing its deeper causes."

Oh, sure!! The Pope controlled much of the world once, and the Church didn’t do too much to address social problems then; if we have to wait for the world to “return to its Christian roots,” we might as well just forget about it, jump off a bridge, and plunge into the happy "afterlife."

That message is consistent with church teaching that chastity and faithfulness to one's spouse — and not condoms — are the best way to prevent the disease. And regular masturbation grows hair on your palms and makes you go blind.

In the crowd, Johann Habla, 76, praised Benedict's touch with the young. "He reaches young people. [ the young and the backward are more superstitious] ... If they all go to church is another matter [the young, however, aren't stupid] , but perhaps something will remain," Habla said.

Gerda Holzinger, 57, said that since former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became pope last year she was seeing a new side of the conservative former theology professor, who left Munich in 1982 to become the Vatican's chief doctrinal watchdog.

"Cardinal Ratzinger was for us a stubborn theologian; now he is opening up, and a completely different person is coming out," she said. "I find him good. He sticks to the old values, which have been good for 2,000 years." Obviously this woman is one of the “faithful.” A scientific review of the Church's 2000 year history cannot RATIONALLY support her conclusion.

- Uke Man

 

Krugman as promised

Hey Folks,

Listen to this guy!! He can SEE and THINK!!!

- Uke Man

September 8, 2006

Whining Over Discontent
By PAUL KRUGMAN
(a ukethanks to Phyll)

We are, finally, having a national discussion about inequality, and right-wing commentators are in full panic mode. Statistics, most of them irrelevant or misleading, are flying; straw men are under furious attack. It’s all very confusing — deliberately so. So let me offer a few clarifying comments.

First, why are we suddenly talking so much about inequality? Not because a few economists decided to make inequality an issue. It’s the public — not progressive pundits — that has been telling pollsters the economy is “only fair” or “poor,” even though the overall growth rate is O.K. by historical standards.

Political analysts tried all sorts of explanations for popular discontent with the “Bush boom” — it’s the price of gasoline; no, people are in a bad mood because of Iraq — before finally acknowledging that most Americans think it’s a bad economy because for them, it is. The lion’s share of the benefits from recent economic growth has gone to a small, wealthy minority, while most Americans were worse off in 2005 than they were in 2000.

Some conservatives whine that people didn’t complain as much about rising inequality when Bill Clinton was president. But most people were happy with the state of the economy in the late 1990’s, even though the rich were getting much richer, because the middle class and the poor were also making substantial progress. Now the rich are getting richer, but most working Americans are losing ground.

Second, notice the amount of time that inequality’s apologists spend attacking a claim nobody is making: that there has been a clear long-term decline in middle-class living standards. Yes, real median family income has risen since the late 1970’s (with the most convincing gains taking place during the Clinton years). But the rise was very small — small enough that other considerations, like increasing economic insecurity, make it unclear whether families are better or worse off. And that’s the point: the United States as a whole has grown a lot richer over the past generation, but the typical American family hasn’t.

Third, notice the desperate effort to find some number, any number, to support claims that increasing inequality is just a matter of a rising payoff to education and skill. Conservative commentators tell us about wage gains for one-eyed bearded men with 2.5 years of college, or whatever — and conveniently forget to adjust for inflation. In fact, the data refute any suggestion that education is a guarantee of income gains: once you adjust for inflation, you find that the income of a typical household headed by a college graduate was lower in 2005 than in 2000.

More broadly, right-wing commentators would like you to believe that the economy’s winners are a large group, like college graduates or people with agreeable personalities. But the winners’ circle is actually very small. Even households at the 95th percentile — that is, households richer than 19 out of 20 Americans — have seen their real income rise less than 1 percent a year since the late 1970’s. But the income of the richest 1 percent has roughly doubled, and the income of the top 0.01 percent — people with incomes of more than $5 million in 2004 — has risen by a factor of 5.

Finally, while we can have an interesting discussion about questions like the role of unions in wage inequality, or the role of lax regulation in exploding C.E.O. pay, there is no question that the policies of the current majority party — a party that has held a much-needed increase in the minimum wage hostage to large tax cuts for giant estates — have relentlessly favored the interests of a tiny, wealthy minority against everyone else.

According to new estimates by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, the leading experts on long-term trends in inequality, the effective federal tax rate on the richest 0.01 percent has fallen from about 60 percent in 1980 to about 34 percent today. Meanwhile, the U.S. government — unlike any other government in the advanced world — does nothing as more and more working families find themselves unable to obtain health insurance.

The good news is that these concerns are finally breaking through into our political discourse. I’m sure that the usual suspects will come up with further efforts to confuse the issue. I say, bring ’em on: we’ve got the arguments, and the facts, to win this debate.

 

Another twisted "Business Report" (from "economists")

Hey Folks,

Here's part of a recent story (see: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060907/ap_on_bi_go_ec_fi/economy with a newer, even cheerier headline: "Number of jobless claims drops by 9,000" ). Notice the positive tone, but think about it.

I'll comment periodically in red.

- Uke Man


Jobless claims fall by most in 7 weeks
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON - The number of newly laid off workers filing claims for unemployment benefits dropped by a bigger-than-expected amount last week, signaling continuing labor market strength despite a general economic slowdown.

The government reported that applications for jobless benefits totaled 310,000, down 9,000 from the previous week. It was the biggest decline in seven weeks and was a larger improvement than analysts had been expecting.
Many businesses, faced with a slowing economy, have reduced their plans to hire new workers but so far have not resorted to large-scale reductions in existing payrolls.

The total number of jobless claims was the lowest since 299,000 people showed up at unemployment offices the week of July 22.

The government reported last week that the unemployment rate dipped to 4.7 percent in August, after having risen to a five-month high of 4.8 percent in July. Job creation picked up in August but still remained below the sizable gains recorded earlier in the year when the economy was growing more strongly.

Realize that these comments mean the numbers of ADDITIONALLY laid off workers is less than those laid off in earlier times; that is, MORE people ARE being laid off, but not QUITE as many as last time!!!

And THAT signals "continuing labor market strength despite a general economic slowdown."

These fucks must have a different definition of "labor market strength" than working people do.

Then, Folks, as I've pointed out before, they slip the telltale truth in just before closing:

"For the week ending Aug. 26, total claims rose by 1,000."

This, after trumpeting how unemployment is DOWN !!!

Economic Charlatans

High Priests of Folderol 

Economists: the Master's Whores

Hey Folks,

The typical "economist" is this turd in the story below, John Lonski from Moody's Investor's Service. He and his pals have ONE job: to hoodwink regular folks. They are brothers of the Pharos', Caesars', and Kings' High Priests; they serve their masters by pulling levers from behind the curtain, rotating mirrors, expelling smoke, assuming poses, and threatening destruction if they are not obeyed.

Mr. Baumohl seems to be a different sort. I've put his book on reserve at the library.

- Uke Man


Economists debate effect of wage bump
Monday, September 04, 2006
Ellen Simon
ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK — Workers who don’t work on a farm and aren’t supervisors are making, on average, $22.69 more a week than they did last year, according to the Labor Department.

It’s easy to dismiss the increases with a winking, "Don’t spend it all in one place." But that raise is making some investors twitchy.

Year-over-year increases in average wages are the steepest since the summer of 2001. After 17 quarters of double-digit growth in corporate profits while wages stayed flat, average workers finally might get a scrap of the economic expansion now in its fifth year.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that wage increases could push prices higher. The Federal Reserve’s biggest concern about workers while their weekly earnings were flat was whether they would keep spending enough money to power the economy.

John Lonski, chief economist at Moody’s Investors Service, points to the gross-domestic-product report, the broadest measure of the economy. Wage and salary costs of nonfinancial corporations were up 9.7 percent from a year ago, according to the report released last week. That’s the biggest increase since the fourth quarter of 1984. Total compensation grew by 9.3 percent year-over-year, also the steepest increase since 1984’s fourth quarter.

Lonski said rising compensation costs could be a drag on corporate profitability. "Unfortunately for workers, faster growth of wages could lead to unexpected cutbacks in hiring activity once business sales begin to slow."

Not so fast, say the economists who think American workers are long overdue for a raise.

Higher benefits costs have increased total compensation costs without passing anything extra on to workers, they say. And higher prices for necessities such as gasoline have chipped into whatever wage gains workers have made.

"Wages have barely kept up with inflation and they certainly haven’t gone up in response to the productivity improvements we’ve seen," said Bernard Baumohl, executive director of the Economic Outlook Group and author of The Secrets of Economic Indicators.

Baumohl concludes that while "the Fed has to watch wage inflation ... there’s no need for them to seriously respond at this point because there isn’t any serious wage inflation out there. What you don’t want to do is punish workers just when they’re finally able to see some gains in real wages."

Can You find David Brooks hidden in this Picture???

 

Hey Folks,

I'm not reproducing it here (I'd get sick), but David Brooks, the token moron at the NY Times, has written a new version of "the White Man's Burden" explaining that everything is as it should be, that the poor aren't poor, the middle class is not shrinking, and the wealthy deserve their status because they are so smart and talented.

Fuck him!!

In any case, below is the letter I just sent the Columbus Dispatch. It won't be printed, any more than will the Krugman column I'll share with you before long.

Enjoy!!

- Uke Man



To the Editor,

Thank goodness for David Brooks’ recent column “Facts shoot holes in claims of income inequality”!

I look forward to his future pieces: “Copernicus was wrong!!” and “Social Darwinism Redux.”

It’s about time someone defended the long-suffering scapegoats at the top of the heap!!

- Uke Man

"Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?"

 

Krugman on Katrina

Hey Folks,

My heart aches for New Orleans - and America - and the World as well!! All are suffering at the hands of Bush & Co.

Let's Drive Him Out!!!

- Uke Man




August 28, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Broken Promises
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Last September President Bush stood in New Orleans, where the lights had just come on for the first time since Katrina struck, and promised “one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen.” Then he left, and the lights went out again.

What happened next was a replay of what happened after Mr. Bush asked Congress to allocate $18 billion for Iraqi reconstruction. In the months that followed, congressmen who visited Iraq returned with glowing accounts of all the wonderful things we were doing there, like repainting schools and, um, repainting schools.

But when the Coalition Provisional Authority, which was running Iraq, closed up shop nine months later, it turned out that only 2 percent of the $18 billion had been spent, and only a handful of the projects that were supposed to have been financed with that money had even been started. In the end, America failed to deliver even the most basic repair of Iraq’s infrastructure; today, Baghdad gets less than seven hours of electricity a day.

And so it is along our own Gulf Coast. The Bush administration likes to talk about all the money it has allocated to the region, and it plans a public relations blitz to persuade America that it’s doing a heck of a job aiding Katrina’s victims. But as the Iraqis learned, allocating money and actually using it for reconstruction are two different things, and so far the administration has done almost nothing to make good on last year’s promises.

It’s true that tens of billions have been spent on emergency relief and cleanup. But even the cleanup remains incomplete: almost a third of the hurricane debris in New Orleans has yet to be removed. And the process of going beyond cleanup to actual reconstruction has barely begun.

For example, although Congress allocated $17 billion to the Department of Housing and Urban Development for Katrina relief, primarily to provide cash assistance to homeowners, as of last week the department had spent only $100 million. The first Louisiana homeowners finally received checks under a federally financed program just three days ago. Mississippi, which has a similar program, has sent out only about two dozen checks so far.

Local governments, which were promised aid in rebuilding facilities such as fire stations and sewer systems, have fared little better in actually getting that aid. A recent article in The National Journal describes a Kafkaesque situation in which devastated towns and parishes seeking federal funds have been told to jump through complex hoops, spending time and money they don’t have on things like proving that felled trees were actually knocked down by Katrina, only to face demands for even more paperwork.

Apologists for the administration will doubtless claim that blame for the lack of progress rests not with Mr. Bush, but with the inherent inefficiency of government bureaucracies. That’s the great thing about being an antigovernment conservative: even when you fail at the task of governing, you can claim vindication for your ideology.

But bureaucracies don’t have to be this inefficient. The failure to get moving on reconstruction reflects lack of leadership at the top.

Mr. Bush could have moved quickly to turn his promises of reconstruction into reality. But he didn’t. As months dragged by with little sign of White House action, all urgency about developing a plan for reconstruction ebbed away.

Mr. Bush could have appointed someone visible and energetic to oversee the Gulf Coast’s recovery, someone who could act as an advocate for families and local governments in need of help. But he didn’t. How many people can even name the supposed reconstruction “czar”?

Mr. Bush could have tried to fix FEMA, the agency whose effectiveness he destroyed through cronyism and privatization. But he didn’t. FEMA remains a demoralized organization, unable to replenish its ranks: it currently has fewer than 84 percent of its authorized personnel.

Maybe the aid promised to the gulf region will actually arrive some day. But by then it will probably be too late. Many former residents and small-business owners, tired of waiting for help that never comes, will have permanently relocated elsewhere; those businesses that stayed open, or reopened after the storm, will have gone under for lack of customers. In America as in Iraq, reconstruction delayed is reconstruction denied — and Mr. Bush has, once again, broken a promise.

The ups and downs of Pogo 

Caroline's Stunt Video

Hey Folks,

She has met the Pogo, and it is hers!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWS2tM5E7Uc&NR

Hope she doesn't crack her noggin !!!

-Uke Man (maybe it's 'cause I'm old, but I found this amusing. Hope you do, too)

A Modern worker who has labored 4,200 years would have been born a contemporary of Abraham, during the time iron was discovered and paper invented.

He'd have worked for 500 years before Hammurabi's Code and 1000 years before Moses marched out of Egypt. 

This speaks for itself

Gap between worker, executive pay criticized in annual report
Monday, September 04, 2006
Diane Stafford
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS


KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Higher gasoline prices and war have been good, at least financially, for chief executives in the U.S. oil and defense industries.

That’s the theme of this year’s Executive Excess report, an analysis of selected CEO compensation in 2005 by the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy.

This is the 13 th year that the Washington-based think tank that describes itself as progressive and the Bostonbased organization that spotlights wage inequality have published an annual report critical of soaring executive pay.

In comparison, the groups note, average worker pay raises have lagged considerably.

Each year, the advocacy organizations choose a theme relevant to current events. In 2004, for example, the report zeroed in on CEO pay in companies that outsourced the most U.S. jobs overseas; in 2002, the report looked at CEO pay in the U.S. companies that laid off the largest number of workers.

This year’s report, released last week, focuses on two groups:

• Top executives of the 15 largest U.S. oil companies, who were paid an average of $32.7 million last year, or three times as much as CEOs in other comparably sized U.S. companies and eight times as much as what foreignowned oil companies paid their CEOs.

• Top executives of the 34 largest defense contractors, who last year were paid an average of $7.7 million, or double what they earned before the Sept. 11, 2001, attack, and 44 times more than what military generals with 20 years of experience earned.

The report put those numbers in perspective: "Since 1990, the overall CEO-to-worker pay gap in the United States has grown from 107-to-1 to last year’s 411-to-1."

Among the oil executives featured in the report, CEO William Greehey of Valero Energy had the biggest compensation package, valued at more than $95 million last year.

The study points out that a typical oil-company construction worker would need to work more than 4,200 years to earn what was granted Greehey in one year.

Among defense contractors, CEO George David of United Technologies had the biggest pay package, worth nearly $32 million last year, down from $88 million in total compensation in 2004.

The report’s authors, Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh, Chuck Collins and Eric Benjamin, continued their organizations’ long-standing call for corporate compensation committees and compensation consultants to rein in CEO compensation.

They said the new Securities and Exchange Commission rules, which went into effect this summer and require more complete disclosure of public company executive pay, are good but ultimately inadequate.

"The root problem is an imbalance of power," Collins said. "We need to give more clout to other stakeholders, such as requiring shareholder approval of executive pay and retirement packages, as is now done in Britain."

Listen to this man!!!

 

George Carlin is a Genius !!

Hey Folks,

You MUST SEE THIS!!!!

Carlin says it so well!!! He speaks for me - especially the first five minutes!!! I've said all this (except the "suicide" bit), but Carlin says it sooooooooo well and sooooooooooo succinctly!!

Listen to him - OVER and OVER and OVER and OVER !!!! (but don't commit suicide!! In case there are any conservative rock-heads reading this, He's being ironic!! We feel worthless because that's how we are treated here in the belly of "the American Dream" )

What we need to do is not get depressed, but recognize the TRUTH of what he's telling us and RESIST it furiously!!!

- Uke Man

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL6ULruYjNA

 

Playin my uke while "Hot Times" burns!!!

Hey Folks,

I'll be playing Friday at the Hot Times Festival. See the Friday schedule for both stages below (the day before [Thurs.] I'm joining the group celebration at the Stagecoach BBQ open stage in S. Bloomfield - http://www.stagecoachbbq.com/ ).

The Hot Times Festival looks like a lot of fun and a lot of good music!!!

It's on at 240 Parsons Ave., Columbus, Ohio (corner of Main & Parsons on the lawn of the Columbus Health Dept. - formerly the School for the Deaf)

Check out the website: http://www.hottimesfestival.com/

I hope to see you there!!!

- Uke Man


Hot Times 2006 Music Schedules - Fri. Sept. 8

Main Street Stage...................Parsons Avenue Stage

Men of Leisure - 6:00..............................Ukulele Man - 6:30
Cyrus Baty - 7:15.......................................Myke Rock - 7:15
Vaya - 7:30...................................................Doctah X - 8:15
S.P.I.R.I.T. - 8:30............................Sweet Vibrations - 9:30
Fabulous Johnson Bros. - 9:45.......Arnett Howard - 10:45
Willie Phoenix Band - 11:00

They get bigger

We get eaten 

A straight report on the economy

September 1, 2006

The Big Disconnect
By PAUL KRUGMAN
(a ukethanks to Phyll)

There are still some pundits out there lecturing people about how great the economy is. But most analysts seem to finally realize that Americans have good reasons to be unhappy with the state of the economy: although G.D.P. growth has been pretty good for the last few years, most workers have seen their wages lag behind inflation and their benefits deteriorate.

The disconnect between overall economic growth and the growing squeeze on many working Americans will probably play a big role this November, partly because President Bush seems so out of touch: the more he insists that it’s a great economy, the angrier voters seem to get. But the disconnect didn’t begin with Mr. Bush, and it won’t end with him, unless we have a major change in policies.

The stagnation of real wages — wages adjusted for inflation — actually goes back more than 30 years. The real wage of nonsupervisory workers reached a peak in the early 1970’s, at the end of the postwar boom. Since then workers have sometimes gained ground, sometimes lost it, but they have never earned as much per hour as they did in 1973.

Meanwhile, the decline of employer benefits began in the Reagan years, although there was a temporary improvement during the Clinton-era boom. The most crucial benefit, employment-based health insurance, has been in rapid decline since 2000.

Ordinary American workers seem to understand the long-term disconnect between economic growth and their own fortunes better than most political analysts. Consider, for example, the results of a new poll of American workers by the Pew Research Center.

The center finds that workers perceive a long-term downward trend in their economic status. A majority say that it’s harder to earn a decent living than it was 20 or 30 years ago, and a plurality say that job benefits are worse too.

Are workers simply viewing the past through rose-colored glasses? The report seems to imply that they are: a section pointing out that workers surveyed in 1997 also said that it had gotten harder to make a decent living is titled, “As usual, people say things were better in the good old days.”

But as we’ve seen, real wages have been declining since the 1970’s, so it makes sense that workers have consistently said that it’s harder to make a living today than it was a generation ago.

On the other side, workers’ concern about worsening benefits is new. In 1997, a plurality of workers said that employment benefits were better than they used to be. That made sense: in 1997, the health care crisis, which had been a big political issue a few years earlier, seemed to have gone into remission. Medical costs were relatively stable, and in a tight labor market, employers were competing to offer improved benefits. Workers felt, rightly, that benefits were pretty good by historical standards.

But now the health care crisis is back, both because medical costs are rising rapidly and because we’re living in an increasingly Wal-Martized economy, in which even big, highly profitable employers offer minimal benefits. Employment-based insurance began a steep decline with the 2001 recession, and the decline has continued in spite of economic recovery.

The latest Census report on incomes, poverty and health insurance, released this week, shows that in 2005, four years into the economic expansion, the percentage of Americans with private insurance of any kind reached its lowest level since 1987. And Americans feel, again correctly, that benefits are worse than they used to be.

Why have workers done so badly in a rich nation that keeps getting richer? That’s a matter of dispute, although I believe there’s a large political component: what we see today is the result of a quarter-century of policies that have systematically reduced workers’ bargaining power.

The important question now, however, is whether we’re finally going to try to do something about the big disconnect. Wages may be difficult to raise, but we won’t know until we try. And as for declining benefits — well, every other advanced country manages to provide everyone with health insurance, while spending less on health care than we do.

The big disconnect, in other words, provides as good an argument as you could possibly want for a smart, bold populism. All we need now are some smart, bold populist politicians.

"That's right, boys & girls! We can't kill 'em NOW - in this game, we can only talk 'em to death"

"But don't worry!! When the rapture REALLY comes, we can kill every last one of 'em!! - and Jesus will help!!!" 

Crusader Rabbit in the "Adventure of the Raptured Duck"

Hey Folks,

Sounds like they've cleaned up their Rapture video game a bit since the original publicity that promised plenty of blood, gore, and killing.

Time will tell whether THIS report is accurate (I wonder, for example what exactly is meant by "players ... can trigger 'spectacular angelic or demonic activity' with their choices").

In any case, the "Christian" books this is based on are soaked in blood. Moreover, the "Rapture" is claimed to be the overture to ALL evil "unbelievers" being exterminated and then sent to hell.

No violence there.

- Uke Man



SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - God's army will begin battling the Antichrist and his minions in a video game version of post-apocalyptic New York City to be released on Friday.

A beta version of Christian-based computer strategy game "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" will be released aiming at the kind of mass-market success garnered by films such as "The Chronicles of Narnia" and "The Passion of The Christ."

The game is based on the 15 "Left Behind" books by evangelical Christian authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, which have logged sales in the tens of millions.

"Eternal Forces" is set at the Biblical end of time known as the Rapture, according to Dereck Wong of Left Behind Games in California.

It pits "good" Tribulation Forces against "evil" Global Community Peacekeepers led by the anti-Christ.

The key to the game is recruiting and sustaining people and winning inevitable, albeit bloodless, battles, between good and evil, according to Wong. The characters and storyline are from the first four "Left Behind" books.

"Rumors can be set to rest regarding the content," said Left Behind Games chief executive Troy Lyndon. "'Eternal Forces' has no blood, no gore, no call to jihad and no gratuitous sex or violence of any kind."

For the Tribulation Force, prayer is a key strategy to build points. Another way is finding hidden scrolls bearing scripture verses left behind by loved ones already whisked into the afterlife.

In contrast, the Antichrist forces get strength by swearing and wicked deeds, according to the game makers.

Players conduct "physical and spiritual warfare" and can trigger "spectacular angelic or demonic activity" with their choices.

"We really are the alternative to a 'Grand Theft Auto'," Wong said, referring to the hit video game in which points are scored by carjacking, killings, and other malevolence.

"What we are finding is violence doesn't make it a better game. Gamers are interested in the storyline and the challenge."

Winning play gets rewarded with "Christian theme songs" or tips about what will happen to a person during the Rapture, which evangelical Christians believe is the time that Jesus ushers all believers to heaven.

But non-believers can skip the rewards and play the game too, Wong said.

"We wanted it to be a great game first ... We are not here to preach to you. It is not a game to be Bible-thumping."

Even so, players will be encouraged to seek out up to seven other friends to play together on line, according to Wong.

It remains to be seen whether a Christian-themed game can take off.

"It is untested waters, but clearly there is potential," said analyst David Cole of DFC Intelligence, which tracks the computer game industry. "Look at the number of Christians out there."

"If you asked people several years ago whether they would ever do a major movie with a Christian theme, you'd get a lot of skeptics. Then Mel Gibson came along and did a movie that was quite successful," he said, referring to the 2004 hit film "The Passion of the Christ".

"Gamers have this stereotype of being real violent, but that hasn't been the truth historically," Cole said.

Cole referred to the blockbuster successes of Pokeman, Mario Brothers, Tetris, and "cutesy fantasy land games."

Studies indicate the average age for gamers is about 32, and that they spend more time playing strategy games than gory games.

Demo versions of "Eternal Forces" were tested on people attending Christian rock music concerts and got enthusiastic reviews, Wong said.

Megachurches, those with memberships topping 3,000 parishioners, have reportedly committed to distribute the beta version of the game, which will also be available at the Left Behind Games website.

Mainstream retailers were interested in the game and a European distributor was in place, according to the company.

The final version of Eternal Forces is slated for distribution in time for the Christmas shopping season, and will include a copy of the first Left Behind book, at a planned price of 49.95 dollars.

"It's exciting," Wong said. "We are competing with the Electronic Arts and the Activisions of the world."

"Yeah, three o' them Shakespeares !!"

"Everbody said I was perfect fer Bottom lines !!" 

More Presidential Coloring (books)

September 2, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Much Ado About Reading
By MAUREEN DOWD
(a ukethanks to Phyll)

WASHINGTON

‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. W., the most simple, unreflective and Manichaean of men, communing with Will, the most subtle, reflective and myriad-minded of men.

Under Laura the Librarian’s tutelage, the president is discovering the little black dress of 60’s education, as one scholar referred to the president’s summer reading list of “The Stranger,” “Hamlet,” and “Macbeth.”

Mr. Bush’s bristly distaste for the intellectual elite has been so much a part of his persona, from Yale on, that it’s hard to wrap one’s mind around a heavy W., steeped in French existentialism and Elizabethan tragedy.

On the 2000 campaign trail, W. told me that he did not identify with any literary hero, that baseball was his favorite cultural experience, and that he liked John La Care, Le Carrier, or however you pronounce his name.

He was a gym rat, not a bookworm. He told Brit Hume in 2003 that he rarely read newspaper articles, preferring to get his information through aides, and he told Brian Lamb in 2005 that he would fall asleep after 20 or 30 pages of bedside reading.

But the first lady must have grown alarmed at seeing her husband mocked as a buff bubblehead wrapped in a bubble. She began giving interviews saying her man did too read newspapers, and she slipped W. some Camus and other serious fare.

Jackie Kennedy once complained that the Kennedys could turn anything into a competition - even oil painting. Just so, W. tried to keep his new gravitas homework interesting by engaging in a book competition with Karl Rove. Bush aides told Ken Walsh of U.S. News & World Report that the president wants it known that he is a man of letters.

W.’s claim of having read 53 to 60 books already this year has been met with some partisan skepticism; The American Prospect calls it “demonstrably ridiculous,” despite a Wall Street Journal article pronouncing speed-reading back in fashion among busy executives.

But I’m tickled that W. is reading Shakespeare, even if it’s just to please his wife or win a bet with his strategist. The president has been so tone-deaf in dealing with the world, and even with his own father, that he can only benefit from a dip in the Bard’s ocean of insight about the vicissitudes of human nature and war. Not to mention the benefits of being exposed to the beauty and precision of the language.

Stephen Greenblatt, the Harvard professor and author of “Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare,” demurs, noting that “there’s no reason to think reading Shakespeare necessarily makes you a more reflective or deeper person. Otherwise, the Nazis who kept the German Shakespeare Society going in the 30’s and 40’s would have learned something.”

Shakespeare’s texts are so complex, he says, that they allow a huge range of readings and political views, like the Bible.

Take “Macbeth,” Professor Greenblatt says. Bush critics might see irony in W.’s reading a play about a leader who makes a catastrophic decision to overturn a regime that ultimately brings his country and himself to ruin. But the president may be reading it differently, seeing shades of Saddam Hussein in Macbeth, a homicidal tyrant who gets his bloody comeuppance.

But he agrees there are some trenchant lessons that W. could glean, including Shakespeare’s doubt about quick and easy wars, and his conviction that what the professor calls “the rose-petal view” is an illusion; Shakespeare found a gigantic gap between what we imagine and what is actually likely to happen.

Ken Adelman, the former professor of Shakespeare and arms control director under Reagan, has compared W. to Prince Hal. But the Republican consultant, who teaches a management seminar with his wife, Carol, on Shakespeare, agrees that W.’s insulation prevents him from having the leadership strength of Henry V, who mingled among the common folk in the taverns and the soldiers on the battlefield.

Sometimes the second-term President Bush seems more like Henry’s opponent, the Dauphin of France, who has no sense of the reality of battle or his troops, misunderstands the situation and treats Henry with undeserved scorn.

The relentlessly black-and-white Bush could learn from the playwright’s riveting grays. “With Shakespeare,” says Marjorie Garber, a Harvard professor and the author of “Shakespeare After All, “nothing is ever finished. You never close the door on anything. There’s never any ‘Mission Accomplished.’ ”

A comfy Economic Refugee relocation "Enterprise Zone"

"What did you do in the Class War, Daddy?" 

Labor Day 3

Hey Folks,

And now for the man with the proper attitude and all the facts at the tip of his fingers: Greg Palast !!

- Uke Man


TODAY'S PIG IS TOMORROW'S BACON (a Labor Day recipe)

By Greg Palast
September, 3 2006
(a ukethanks to Linda)

Some years from now, in an economic refugee relocation "Enterprise Zone," your kids will ask you, "What did you do in the Class War, Daddy?"

The trick of class war is not to let the victims know they're under attack. That's how, little by little, the owners of the planet take away what little we have.

This week, Dupont, the chemical giant, slashed employee pension benefits by two-thirds. Furthermore, new Dupont workers won't get a guaranteed pension at all -- and no health care after retirement. It's part of Dupont's new "Die Young" program, I hear. Dupont is not in financial straits. Rather, the slash attack on its workers' pensions was aimed at adding a crucial three cents a share to company earnings, from $3.11 per share to $3.14.

So Happy Labor Day.

And this week, the government made it official: For the first time since the Labor Department began measuring how the American pie is sliced, those in the top fifth of the wealth scale are now gobbling up over half (50.4%) of our nation's annual income.

So Happy Labor Day.

We don't even get to lick the plates. While 15.9% of us don't have health insurance (a record, Mr. President!), even those of us who have it, don't have it: we're spending 36% more per family out of pocket on medical costs since the new regime took power in Washington. If you've actually tried to collect from your insurance company, you know what I mean.

So Happy Labor Day.

But if you think I have nothing nice to say about George W. Bush, let me report that the USA now has more millionaires than ever -- 7.4 million! And over the past decade, the number of billionaires has more than tripled, 341 of them!

If that doesn't make you feel like you're missing out, this should: You, Mr. Median, are earning, after inflation, a little less than you earned when Richard Nixon reigned. Median household income -- and most of us are "median" -- is down. Way down.

Since the Bush Putsch in 2000, median income has fallen 5.9%.

Mr. Bush and friends are offering us an "ownership" society. But he didn't mention who already owns it. The richest fifth of America owns 83% of all shares in the stock market. But that's a bit misleading because most of that, 53% of all the stock, is owned by just one percent of American households.

And what does the Wealthy One Percent want? Answer: more wealth. Where will they get it? As with a tube of toothpaste, they're squeezing it from the bottom. Median paychecks have gone down by 5.9% during the current regime, but Americans in the bottom fifth have seen their incomes sliced by 20%.

At the other end, CEO pay at the Fortune 500 has bloated by 51% during the first four years of the Bush regime to an average of $8.1 million per annum.

So who's winning? It's a crude indicator, but let's take a peek at the Class War body count.

When Reagan took power in 1980, the One Percent possessed 33% of America's wealth as measured by capital income. By 2006, the One Percent has swallowed over half of all America's assets, from sea to shining sea. One hundred fifty million Americans altogether own less than 3% of all private assets.

Yes, American middle-class house values are up, but we're blowing that gain to stay alive. Edward Wolff, the New York University expert on income, explained to me that, "The middle class is mortgaging itself to death." As a result of mortgaging our new equity, 60% of all households have seen a decline in net worth.

Is America getting poorer? No, just its people, We the Median. In fact, we are producing an astonishing amount of new wealth in the USA. We are a lean, mean production machine. Output per worker in BushAmerica zoomed by 15% over four years through 2004. Problem is, although worker productivity keeps rising, the producers are getting less and less of it.

The gap between what we produce and what we get is widening like an alligator's jaw. The more you work, the less you get. It used to be that as the economic pie got bigger, everyone's slice got bigger too. No more.

The One Percent have swallowed your share before you can get your fork in.

The loot Dupont sucked from its employees' retirement funds will be put to good use. It will more than cover the cost of the company directors' decision to hike the pension set aside for CEO Charles Holliday to $2.1 million a year. And that's fair, I suppose: Holliday's a winning general in the class war. And shouldn't the winners of war get the spoils?

Of course, there are killjoys who cling to that Calvinist-Marxist belief that a system forever fattening the richest cannot continue without end. Professor Michael Zweig, Director of the State University of New York's Center for Study of Working Class Life, put it in culinary terms: "Today's pig is tomorrow's bacon."

******Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, "ARMED MADHOUSE: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War," just released from Penguin/Dutton, from which this is adapted.

And go to www.GregPalast.com for a special Labor Day treat: an excerpt from Air America Radio's Thom Hartmann's new book, "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class -- and What We Can Do About It."

"I oughtta bite you!!!" 

Labor Day 2

Hey Folks,

I wrote Labor Day no.1 last night, assuming the Columbus Dispatch would run their usual, patronizing editorial. They didn't even do THAT much. Instead they did a news story on the minimum wage "controversy" and a point counter-point column on the editorial page, from which this is taken.

The other guy, as you would expect, thought outsourcing was the greatest thing since serpents stood up when they traveled (pre-Adam's apple - read your Bible, damn it!!!).

Basically, he told how it created sooooooooooooo many jobs and how greaaaaaaaaat!!! those jobs were and that we should pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Then Toto had his say!!!

- Uke Man



Labor Day question: Has globalization hurt America's workers?


Yes: The real issue is the transfer of wealth, which has diminished our middle class
Monday, September 04, 2006
MARK WEISBROT


Globalization is one of the major challenges facing American workers, which includes not only factory and office workers but more than 80 percent of our 144 million-person labor force.

But it is widely misunderstood. Most of the people writing and talking about globalization know little about economics, and of the few who know something, most are dodging the most important issues.

The central issue for Americans facing the global economy is income distribution.

Whether it’s international trade or investment or immigration, the main effect of globalization on most Americans’ lives has been on the distribution of income. And that distribution has gotten dramatically worse over the past 30 years: The rich have gotten a lot richer, the poor have languished and the middle class has shrunk.

The bottom 20 percent of wage and salary earners got only 1.6 percent of the increase in this income over the three decades from 1972 to 2001. The majority got less than 11 percent. But the richest 1 percent received 18.4 percent of the increased income — vastly more than went to the majority of Americans.

The "managed globalization" designed by our political leaders has contributed very much to this upward redistribution of income. The key word here is managed. It is not, as the pundits argue, simply the result of market forces combined with technological changes in communication and transportation.

The architects of the global economy have not thrown their friends and neighbors — the doctors, lawyers, executives and other professionals — into brutal international competition with the tens of millions of highly educated, English-speaking people who would be willing to do their jobs at half the salary. That is why, for example, doctors in the United States earn twice as much as their counterparts do in the rich countries of Europe.

Instead, our political leaders have devoted decades of careful and often protracted negotiations to rewriting the rules of international commerce so that the nearly 75 percent of Americans who do not have a college degree would face lots of global competition. Partly as a result of these changes, the real wage for most workers in the United States has barely grown over the past 30 years — about 9 percent — while productivity, or the amount that is produced by an hour of labor, has grown more than 80 percent.

Immigration policy follows the same rationale: Foreign citizens who want to work in restaurants or as construction laborers can do so by the millions, but the same is not true for foreign dentists or engineers.

The result of this "protectionism for the few, international trade and competition for the many" has been exactly what economists would expect: the gains from a growing economy have gone increasingly to the protected and privileged few.

Of course, managed globalization is only part of the story. Political and legal changes have undermined the bargaining power of organized labor and its membership has steadily fallen.

Health-care costs have been allowed to spiral upward — the United States spends about twice as much per person as other developed countries and has worse health outcomes — and these burdens are increasingly shifted to employees.

And the tax code has been rewritten to favor the upper classes. The federal minimum wage, in terms of purchasing power, is at its lowest point in half a century.

The majority of Americans have so little influence in our political system that despite the overwhelming support for an increase in the minimum wage, the party that controls many members of Congress believes it can be re-elected in November, while refusing to even allow a vote on the issue.

We shall see. Reform in all of these areas will be necessary if this country is to return to an economy in which most Americans share in the gains from economic growth.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Readers may write him at CEPR, 1621 Connecticut Ave. NW, Suite 500, Washington, D.C. 20009-1052. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

weisbrot@cepr.net

"I'm just glad to have a job !!" 

Labor Day

Hey Folks,

So, it’s “Labor Day”!!

Time for putting away all our white clothes and shoes for the winter, and some lucky ducks - those who “labor” - will have a day off for fun and frivolity (thank goodness their dedicated and generous employers never rest from THEIR toil).


Much of the world does celebrate “Labor Day,” but not when or how WE do. They celebrate on May Day (May 1); all the dark-minded unions, socialists, and communists get together and hoot about how “great” the “Workers” are and how they supposedly deserve a bigger part of the wealth they create with their “labor.”

We don’t truck with that here. WE celebrate in September!! And we urge “working” people to have a happy time on their holiday, whether they deserve it or not.

We usually do that after pointing out how unions only care about themselves (except in Poland) and how anything which increases the “cost” of labor (like health insurance or a living wage) will only decrease the number of jobs available to workers (thus the pernicious effect of unions on workers’ employment is made obvious).

And finally we remind these good working-Americans how lucky they are to even have a job and urge them to get rested up after their recreation, ready to work even harder Tuesday - remembering that “Labor Day” is over, and every OTHER day is Management Day, and the vast majority of them can be fired for looking cross-eyed or for nothing at all.

- Uke Man</