I stopped giving them any money a long time ago and so... can't "vote with my wallet" no more and rarely listen to their point of view anyway but heard about this:

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/12/16/williams-iraqi-ingrates/

and if you are giving them money, you are helping pay his salary!!

Why not just send a check to FOX News?

Juan Williams and the whole lot of NPR spokesmodels can go to hell! You could tell there was something rotten with them the way they mourned Reagan's death for a week!

Me...? still looking for a par of shoes I can part with to send to the Shrub m'self.

Peace

Instead of being cranky all the time, I am going to spend that energy instead on pushing for instant run off voting so we can all vote our conscience and still defeat bastards like McCain (and elect less toxic but still odious folks like Obama).

They have it in San Francisco and it seems to work and... just as the constitution makes no mention of Democrats or Republicans, it also doesn't forbid this method of making votes meaningful.

Check out this link:

http://www.fairvote.org/?page=2202

It doesn't seem like Illinois has an organization yet but if you know of one or would like to join me to start one, let me know!

BTW - I haven't voted yet and still might reluctantly pull the lever for the big O but will hope its the last time I vote for a pro death penalty corporatist war monger who think 'god' talks to him!

Of course, Cynthia McKinney is still my preference. If you watch the 'debate' tomorrow, think about the ideas you are being 'protected' from by the corporate elite!

Go Greens!

http://thepoliticalcarnival.blogspot.com/2008/09/misleading-absentee-ballot-forms-being.html

Spread the word. Absentee ballots are a waste of your vote in general and these fuckers are making it worse.

Well... if I end up voting for Obama after all it will be entirely the result of my impression of the RNC convention. Not only for the mindless babble I hear out of those people (especially their new-found 'feminism') but for the way that the right to peaceful protest is being denied by aggressive 'pre-emptive' (where have I heard that word before?) strikes targeting protesters and media.
Dang it! I want to vote FOR, not against someone but... 'the devil made me do it" might be my rationale. Am still leaning Green but... still undecided (not like those freaks who are undecided between D and R!)(what are they thinking!?!).
I assume all my friends are aware of this stuff but... for a fairly good account of the convention, this weeks Democracy Now episodes are an interesting merge of news and reporters (the host and a couple of her staff reporters have already been arrested).
It boggles the mind that anyone outside a corporate boardroom would dream of voting for McCain hence the reason they are so adamant about co-opting the Democrats at the same time. The "have more's" will never be satisfied I guess.
Anyway, if Obama wins, we will still have a long way to go but not nearly as far as if McC wins.
Arghhhh!

Here's a thing written by a woman named Sarah Mann-O'Donnell during a solo set I played a few days ago. This is from her blog (http://sarahssoundscripts.blogspot.com/) where you can read her take on some other folks improvising too. I only met her for a moment at the gig but she seemed pretty normal, actually!

***************************

Skin, draped and looping. Long, thin-thick stretches of it, extending and contracting its own strip-expanses, like an octopus with both arm-ends attached: derma- elastic teacup multiplied, draped arms radiating outward from an undefined center.

Falling now, a gravity-variable journey "downward": we drop down in space a few inches only to "scratch" ourselves backwards, like a vertically manipulated disc in time/space: d o w n - w - n - w - n - w - n. Gravity tightens its sound control: knobs tuned so finely that we are virtually suspended in Butoh-like, verging-on-absurd, verging-on-obscene tension vibration.

The tension slackens. We expand our corporeal existence-- rubbing sensually-obscenely against the walls of the tubular, shoot-like container that shapes us subtly while containing us oppressively. Inside this manhole that undulates more or less, we rub our undulating skin-fat against these walls, creating sounds of gross pleasure-- private, almost pornographic, repetitive rub-downs. Friction against our own walls-- we trap ourselves in this topography of contact.

When we come, it draws out, a sharp, piercing trajectory that outlives our expectations for sustained erotic noise. Lulled into this extension cradle of lengthening frequency, we inhabit a single pierced hole in our collective flesh, drilling our way to the (other) side of orgasm, to the far shore of self-gratification, pushing ourselves so far past the coming that we begin to break down, blips in our self-transmission, losing ourselves in the pieces of nothing, the pieces skipped over, the gaps in our flight.

Our oscillation between something and nothing distills us, finally, into a brute-beautiful motor: we are simple: humming: function: pure.


****************************

well... Grampy McCain is a psycho. Check out today's Times article about his latest smear campaign against his opponent. How anybody could even consider voting for him is beyond my grasp. People who are "undecided" meaning between R and D, are nuts! Undecided between Obama and nobody? Understandable. Of course, I say go Green but... the choice has to be between Obama and McKinney. As I said, if you feel confident your state will go for the big O, please consider the mighty McKinney but if you aren't sure about it, compromise with the center right dude with the nice smile! He may be in the pocket of the corporate elite and the war mongers but he would probably mark a tiny step in the right direction (sort of a 'compromise' as the Republicans are always asking for. Please please please though, talk to everyone you know about it. Even your uncle the Fox TV watching gun nut christian retired army officer! Whoever! Ask them to pick any speech by McC and then parse with them the string of lies. If they won't listen, keep trying!
Start with playing my favorite radio show... This is Hell for them while they sleep! Whatever it takes.
Download broadcasts of This is Hell at:
http://www.thisishell.net/

For those who don't know the show:
This is Hell is four hours of completely uninterrupted unedited blah blah blah which airs every Saturday morning in Chicago. Troublemakers, muckrakers, whistleblowers, host Chuck Mertz does in-depth interviews with rabble of all sorts. Noam Chomsky has called This is Hell "a voice of
sanity on talk radio." After you listen, you'll know why we think Noam's gone insane.

Oh, and a special note to all those disgruntled Hillary fans. If you just can't vote for Obama, the most pathetic thing you can do is go to the R side. Prove you are not the racist fucks some say you are by supporting a Black Female Candidate and her Latina running mate! That way, you can send a message to the DNC etc and not vote for someone who guarantees you an anti choice supreme court.

http://www.myspace.com/microgig

Asimina Chremos (a dancer) and I are going to spend the year doing small gigs for small audiences in un-likely situations. Those of you who really know me, know I am not so fond of dance (with very few exceptions) so you know that this must be special. A lot of the years events are not planned yet but the next one should be in August in a machine shop's junk yard. Anyway, you can see a short video of us performing in a van under the El near an abandoned Burger King on our myspace page. The great Brent Gutzeit under one of his pseudonym's is the videographer. You can also, of course, be our friend and find out where the upcoming gigs will be. They are all rsvp only but all events but are free (sometimes a small donation is solicited for the venue but... no strong arming, I swear.)

Okay, some of you will be furious with me but as of today, I am off the Obama bandwagon. I have voted for him every time I have had a chance (since he ran for state Senate here) and even gave him a small donation back a couple of months ago. I was always a little skeptical but was willing to go along with the "he's doing it to win" line whenever he would pull another 'centrist' rabbit out of his hat (like not supporting the impeachment procedure against our fiend in chief)(or appeasing the right wing Israeli lobby) but when he supported the new watered down FISA act and refused to even acknowledge his earlier pledges to support a filibuster against any bill that would offer immunity for past crimes by the white house and the telecoms I was upset.
Now I hear that ATT is a major sponsor of his upcoming convention (all the delegates are apparently going to even wear ATT logos on their tee-shirts!) it all makes too much sense.
It feels like just the beginning too (that moment when one has been picked up and sees the bus coming but have yet to bee thrown under it).

So... my fellow Americans... you can have a thug (McCain) or a hipster (Obama) but either way, the parasites who are sucking you dry will run the country and you can wait for the next exciting "horse race" (if you survive that long) and wear the next bootlegged teeshirt for the product (errr... 'candidate') who most symbolizes your fantasy of how cool you like to think you are. Of course, you won't want to ask the hard questions instead smiling knowingly and saying "well, they're all just politicians'!

Meanwhile, I will return to my natural allies, the Greens. I urge you all to think carefully about the election. If you are in a swing state and feel that you should vote for the "lesser of two evils", go ahead. It is certain that McCain's supreme court will suck worse than Obama's) but... if you live in a state like Illinois (where if Obama can't win, its all over anyway) then please... vote Green. If you don't usually vote, definitely get out there and vote Green (since you were 'throwing away' your vote anyway). Why not send a message to the corporations that we are not satisfied with the McDonalds VS Burger King options we have right now. If 5% of the country votes green, they will get funding and become a bonafide third party. Then the Democrats won't be able to tell themselves that progressives have "nowhere to go" and might start fighting for our votes (or at least have to "triangulate" our values instead of those of the Newt Gingriches of today).

Meanwhile, if the country can stomach McCain, well... shame on America (or as the right Reverend Jeremiah Wright says.... God Dam America!) This shouldn't even be a contest between him and Obama. Anyone who can listen to McFear talk for 30 seconds and not realize everything he says is a lie should be deeply ashamed of their gullibility. Probably there are very few such people in which case, the election, if 'won' by the Republicans, will actually have been stolen in which case, your vote for the 'rockstar' is irrelevant anyway.

On the other hand, a race between Cynthia McKinney and Obama would be a place to start a dialog that might result in a center we could all live with.

I know its not possible to ban the Republicans but... anyone who thinks they represent a valid point of view that needs to be respected (do you hear me NYT? NPR? CBS?) is not really interested in truth but just advertising/underwriting dollars.

I hate to be so pissed off but... just am.

Peace!

Dennis Kucinich is fighting the good fight!

Meanwhile, Vincent Bugliosi's new book lays out the case as well as any. Todays Democracy Now has an excellent interview with him (get the podcast at: http://www.democracynow.org/).

Here's an excerpt from the transcript:

In George Bush's first speech to the nation on Iraq and Saddam Hussein, Cincinnati, Ohio, October 7, 2002, he told the nation that Hussein was a great danger to America either by his attacking us with his weapons of mass destruction or giving those weapons to some terrorist group to attack us. And he said this attack could happen, quote, "on any given day," meaning the threat was imminent.

Unfortunately for George Bush—and I don't know how he could get around this at his trial—on October the 1st, six days earlier, the CIA sent George Bush its 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, a report from sixteen US intelligence agencies—there's a strong sound in my ear here, there's a big rattling sound here. Anyway, he was sent this report representing the consensus opinion of all sixteen US intelligence agencies on the issue of whether Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country. There's a lot of noise in my left ear, a constant rattle; if you can get rid of it, I'd appreciate it. And—well, it's not stopping. And on page eight of this ninety-one-page report, page eight, it clearly and unequivocally says—and, by the way, what I'm about to tell you, to my knowledge, has never appeared in any national newspaper or magazine in America; it may have, but to my knowledge, I've never heard this said before in any of the major magazines or newspapers of America. Page nine—page eight, ninety-one-page report, clearly and unequivocally says that Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of this country, that he would only be a threat if he feared that America was about to attack him. In other words, he would only be a threat if he was forced to fight in self-defense.

So we know—not "think," but we know—that when George Bush told the nation on the evening of October the 7th, 2002, Cincinnati, Ohio, that Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country, he was telling millions of unsuspecting Americans the exact opposite of what his own CIA was telling him. So if we had nothing else at all, this alone shows us that he took this nation to war on a lie, and therefore, all of the killings in Iraq of American soldiers became unlawful killings and therefore murder.

But it gets worse. October 4th, three days after the October 1st classified top-secret report, Bush and his people had the CIA issue an unclassified summary version of the October 1st classified report, so that this report could be issued to the American people and to Congress. And this report came to be known as the "White Paper." And in this White Paper, the conclusion of US intelligence that Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of this country was completely deleted from the White Paper. Every single one of these all-important words were taken out. And the question that I have is, how evil, how perverse, how sick, how criminal can George Bush and his people be? And yet, up to this point, unbelievably—and there's no other word for it—he's gotten by with all of this.

I'll touch upon another piece of evidence. January 31st, 2005—2003—by the way, you've all heard of the Downing Street memo, got a lot of attention. If I prosecuted Bush, that would be a very insignificant part of the case, because it's ambiguous. This is the Manning memo that seems to have gone over the head of everyone. It's a hundred times more important than the Downing Street memo. January 31st, 2003, George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair met in the Oval Office with six of their top aides, including Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser for Bush, and Blair's chief foreign policy adviser, David Manning. Now, two months later, they go to war, because they say Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and they had to go in there and disarm Hussein and these weapons of mass destruction.

After the meeting, Manning prepares a five-page memo stamped "extremely sensitive," in which he summarizes what was said at the meeting. And Manning writes that Bush and Blair expressed their doubts that any weapons of mass destruction would ever be found in Iraq, although two months later they went there because they said they had the weapons and we had to disarm them. But it gets much, much, much worse. Manning wrote that Bush was so worried, so upset, over the failure of the UN inspectors to find weapons of mass destruction, that he talked about three ways to, quote, "provoke a confrontation with Hussein," one of which, Bush said, was to, quote, "fly U2 aircraft, reconnaissance aircraft, over Iraq, falsely painted in United Nations colors," and Bush said if Hussein fires upon them, this will be a breach of UN resolutions and justify war.

So here we have George Bush telling the American people, telling the world, that Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country, so we had to strike first in self-defense, but behind closed doors, this very small man was talking about how to provoke Hussein into a war. The very last person in the world that someone acting in self-defense would try to provoke is a person who he's in deathly fear of, the person who's about to kill him. If George Bush actually believed that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which was the main reason he went to war, the very thought of provoking Hussein into a war obviously would never, ever, ever have entered his mind.

Now, I don't know if you're aware, but what I just told you is extremely powerful evidence of George Bush's guilt. I was on the radio with Dennis Miller a couple days ago in LA, and I told him about the Manning memo, and I said, "Now, Dennis, you're representing George Bush. You're his defense attorney. After you hear Manning testify to the Manning memo on the witness stand, other than trying to hide beneath the counsel table, what would your response be?" And Dennis is very quick, very smart. He gave a good answer: he said, "I would call for a recess." There is no answer to the Manning memo.

A beautifully shot set of short interviews wherein I blather on about various things relating to my recently closed installation "Photo-sound-esis":
http://www.gearwire.com/florasonic-ess-weather.html