Hammer Mill Days

Did you get through it okay? Good. We did, too. Kind of annoying, but it’s over. What’s that? You were referring to Christmas? No, no - I’m talking about the blue-hot sun. Whole different kind of annoying.

So, yes… a bit the worse for wear, our second-hand Soyuz spacecraft (personally checked for soundness by Yuri Gugarin himself) did actually carry us through the burning sun without major incident. The man-sized tuber had to turn up the humidity in his special space terrarium, but that’s no biggy. We have asked our pilot, Urich Von Braun (son of a rocket scientist, I’m told) to take us home via Proxima Centauri, where we may just stand to make a few extra bucks playing on their equivalent of Austin City Limits (which they call “terusdanorf girundolph huzzah” … not real catchy) before slinking home to the Cheney Hammer Mill and whatever housekeeping nightmare awaits us there. Hey - we couldn’t afford domestic help, okay? And that place sure as hell won’t clean itself. (Not yet, anyway. Mitch is working on a device right now…)

So, yeah… we’re pock-pock-pocking along through interstellar space once again, ringing in the new year as has been our custom; with a toast of Zenite cognac (thoughtfully provided by our sit-in guitarist, sFshzenKlyrn) and a demonstration of zero-gravity juggling by Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Very impressive. Somewhat less impressive was Marvin’s rendition of Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm”… his high, reedy voice seeming a bit thin even to posi-Lincoln (who himself has a high, reedy voice) and his recollection of the lyrics a bit less than perfect. (Since when does Maggie’s brother “hand you a pickle”?) Still, way out here, you have to take what entertainment you can get, no matter how bad it sucks. What the hell - it beats zero-gravity rehearsal, right? (Just try to hang on to those drumsticks, boy. Just try.)

We had plans to open our terusdanorf girundolph huzzah gig with a rousing performance of our new mp3 single, “High Horse“, which we’re currently handing out for free on our Web site. Thing is, that is a song that requires context. Out on Proxima Centauri, they don’t keep up with Earth-bound politics. Hell, they would never have even heard of Dubya if we hadn’t brought him out there back in 2000 as part of our glorious first-ever interstellar tour. Contextualizing “High Horse” would require our filling them in on everything that’s happened over the last eight years, and that might take… well… eight years. The show’s only 45 minutes long, for chrissake. Let’s face it - they just won’t get the irony. And they don’t take well to country music out here, even if it’s gag-country. We’ll need another opener. (I was talking to Marvin just then - he’s trying to open a can of soup with a letter-opener. But yes, we’ll need to open with some other song.)

Wish us luck. Not so much with the gig, but with the getting there. Urich is becoming strangely obsessed with yet another celestial object. I’m hoping it’s Proxima, but my luck hasn’t been so good lately.

Is this the spring of 2002, summer of 2006, or winter of 2009? I’ve lost track. The Israelis are again engaged in using their enormous (largely U.S. supplied) military might to crush a virtually defenseless people they are compelled by international statute to protect, dropping so-called precision weapons on one of the most densely populated parcels of land on earth and blaming the predictable resulting civilian deaths on those they target. Soon their tanks will roll into the open air prison that is Gaza on yet another mad, premeditated mission of murder and rampage, punishing 1.5 million Palestinians for voting the wrong way two years ago and, more fundamentally, for refusing to disappear as a people. Israel’s leaders, once more bloodying the ground for the next election, are intoning the rhetoric of the injured party, the enlightened state that has already endured too much, been too lenient, too forgiving, etc., as they pursue a strategy long in the making to decapitate Hamas while scoring substantial injury on all Palestinians. Their government officials and spokespersons, their surrogates in the American press, and their apologists in our own government repeat the mantra of self defense, likening lowly Hamas to the legions of Hitler (per Netanyahu) when comparisons even to Hizbullah are ludicrously overblown.

Like their depraved campaign in the West Bank in 2002 and the murderous war on Lebanon in 2006, this is the kind of assault that should be taken up by the U.N. Security Council and, ultimately, the Hague. I’m not holding my breath. From around the world, the response has ranged from equivocation to full-throated support for Olmert and Barak’s war. As Ali Abunimah said recently on Democracy Now!, Israel is waging war against a captive population, bombing mosques, hospitals, universities, and refugee camps. It is the most wanton attack against Palestinians in decades, and they are following through on it behind a protective shroud of silence. Israeli policymakers are confident that the United States government will be behind them no matter what they do, and that spineless leaders from Britain to Bahrain will refrain from raising their voices, or merely imply some kind of moral equivalency between the attackers and the victims. When Russia took action against Georgia, the outrage was deafening. Yet Israel bombs the most miserable place on earth, and you can hear crickets.

Let us not forget the genesis of this particular outrage. Hamas won the parliamentary elections in the Palestinian territories in 2006. Israel and the U.S. found this unacceptable and immediately began undermining the results of that election, applying pressure on Abu Mazen, their hand-picked Palestinian representative, to move against Hamas. They supplied Fatah with arms and were in the process of stoking a coup in Gaza when Hamas anticipated their move and drove Fatah from the strip in 2007. Since then, the Israelis and the United States have held the Gaza strip under siege, starving its populace, denying basic medical supplies, and generally engaging in collective punishment against the population in hopes that they would turn against Hamas. The vaunted cease-fire has never been observed by Israel, which has run bombing raids on Gaza through the duration. They picked this opportune moment to complete the job Abu Mazen was unable to finish for them more than a year ago.

In 2002, Arafat was the “terrorist” and the obstruction to peace. Now it’s Hamas, precisely because they earned the support of a majority of Palestinians. Hamas is willing to negotiate on equal terms with Israel - that makes them unacceptable. Israel wants a negotiating partner they can roll over and dictate terms to. What we’re seeing is their attempt to ensure that advantage will continue, through air raids that recall Guernica and god knows what else.

Make your voice heard. This killing will stop only if we abandon our silence.

luv u,

jp   

Sing along with me (to the tune of Jingle Bells)… Oooooh! Christmas freak, Christmas freak, flying through the sun! Burn your charges to a crisp, your work is almost done… Oh!

Hi, folks. Just celebrating the holiday the best way we know how… gasping for breath as our maniac pilot drives our sub-standard spacecraft through the center of a blue-hot star. Sure, I know what you’re thinking - that’s not the kind of Christmas I remember, right? Not the kind you used to know back home in Sheboygan. Well, I’m with you on that, as it happens. I just mean that we’re celebrating as best we can under the circumstances… specifically, those of flying headlong through a burning sun. We try to think of it as a slightly hotter version of “‘over the river and through the woods” … though Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is quick to remind me that that is, in fact, a Thanksgiving song, and Thanksgiving was a month ago. Right again, Marvin. Where would we be without you?

But enough about our problems. How is your holiday season going? We don’t hear nearly enough about you and yours… it’s always just about us and ours, right? For all I know, you too are spending this holiday out in the farther reaches of our galaxy, being flown around in an obsolete spacecraft by a maniacal pilot named Urich. Or perhaps not. The thing is, when we of Big Green elected to go on a brief tour in support of our new album, International House, we hadn’t considered the possibility of spending the entire Christmas week in-between stops in deep interstellar space. We’d pictured more of a pleasant series of performances in relatively small extraterrestrial venues, where people flash little lights instead of applauding and show their appreciation by dropping a little extra cash in the man-sized tuber’s little tin cup. (He typically uses it for plant food, but it makes a good tip jar as well.) That was not to be, alas. Just some rip-it-up type thrash-fests on Aldebaran and the mysterious planet Neuton, then stuck in transit. And it’s dull out here, man! Even the Lincolns are bored - both of them. And they never agree on anything!  

Still, you find ways of keeping busy, even cooped up in a tin can like this. As Urich has navigated his erratic path through the center of this burning star, we’ve taken advantage of the relative quiet to put the finishing touches on a new song. It’s called “High Horse”, and it’s something of a farewell number for George Dubya Bush, who will soon be leaving the Oval Office for blessed obscurity. Some of you may remember that the president was kind enough to accompany us on our very first interstellar tour. (For details, check out our blog archive for May and June 2000.) We thought it only appropriate to offer up a big country goodbye for Tex, which we are posting as a free mp3 on our site. Be the first to download it at www.big-green.net/highhorse/. We whittled it out of cleared-away sage brush in our spare time. (You can still smell the burning timber…. or is that our re-entry parachute on fire? Not sure. Not sure at all.)

So anyway… We’ll be seeing you on the other side of the annual divide (known as New Year’s) and hopefully on the other side of this burning sun Urich is driving us through. Til then, happy krimble and a very goo year. (Apologies to J. Lennon.)

Hi again, campers. Back to the Obama to-do list. Since the guy’s on vacation, I imagine he might even be able to find the time to read this one. Pull it up on your blackberry while you’re sitting on the beach. That’s http://www.hammermilldays.com/, Mr. President-Elect. There’s a good chap. This week, domestic policy.

Auto bailout. This is indeed a miserable business. The Bush administration has made such a muddle of the economy that it actually makes some of his other monumental failures pale in comparison. And yet when he came forward with the terms of his proposal, he did so in a somewhat self-righteous way, as if to lecture the industry on its failings. There are plenty of failures to take note of, that’s for sure… but Bush is in no position to criticize, quite frankly. (It’s a bit like Bernie Madoff giving advice on prudent investing.) What is particularly maddening is his focus on the auto workers. In what appears an attempt to throw his fellow Herbert Hoover republicans a bone, he has made the loan offer contingent on substantial labor concessions to bring their wages in line, as he sees it, with those of foreign manufacturers.

Here’s the real joke - UAW workers are making about the same as their non-union counterparts right now. Conservatives like to throw around wild numbers like $73 an hour as somehow representative of UAW scale. That’s what Bush used to call “fuzzy math.” They’re lumping wages together with retiree pensions and benefits and dividing that across the current active workforce. (Labor activist Gregg Shotwell gave a pretty good overview on Democracy Now! last week.) He and the G.O.P. leadership are keen to force some sacrifice on workers, even as corporate executives in the financial industry are still pocketing millions of dollars, including many of those at A.I.G., recipient of more than $150 billion in TARP funds.

This is consistent with the prevailing economic philosophy that favors maximizing corporate profits through outsourcing. As Shotwell explains, the auto companies have been investing overseas for years, so if their U.S. operations fail, they will still have enough assets in other countries to actually start “exporting” cars to the U.S. This would be a much more profitable model for them. Meanwhile, GM’s financial arm, GMAC, has managed to get itself classified as a bank holding company so that it can get a piece of the financial bailout cash. So the car companies can survive even if they employ next to no one in the United States.

Mr. President-Elect - take the workers’ side, for chrissake. If we’re going to try to make the domestic auto industry competitive with foreign auto makers, we’re going to need to move to a single-payer national health plan that provides universal coverage (not some kind of frankenstinian public-private hybrid). That’s what our main competitors have, along with more robust government sponsored pension systems. And if we’re going to bail out the automakers, let’s take an ownership stake in those companies and use that influence to steer them in a better, more sustainable direction that encourages domestic production of more fuel-efficient vehicles, as well as the development of greener mass transit.

Oh… and get a handle on this TARP bailout. These fuckers are walking off with boatloads of cash, and Congress seems unable to do anything about it. Enjoy your vacation.

luv u,

jp

Don’t see it? Well look again. That flaring star. That’s the sun… our sun. The sun the earth orbits. Its temperature is so high it can turn this ship’s hull to butter… and we’re heading straight for it!

Yikes… didn’t know anyone was listening, there. Just rehearsing my lines for the upcoming Lost In Space favorite episodes playoff. Haven’t heard of it? Not surprised. Oh… did you think I was talking about our own interstellar travels just then? Heh heh heh…. No, no. Not a bit of it. The flaring star we’re headed straight towards is not the Earth’s sun. It’s another star, far hotter than our own… a blue dwarf, as it were. And it won’t reduce our hull to butter. Oh, no… just vaporize it entirely, along with everything inside. So there’s a difference between television melodrama and the real thing, my friends, and don’t you forget it. Hollywood is the land of butter hulls. In real life, the term of art is “vaporization”. Write it down, underline it. Now, what was I going to say? Ah, yes. ARRRRGGGHHHHHHHH!!! 

Okay, I’ve caught my breath. Here’s the thing. Our pilot, Urich Von Braun, was able to get us off the mysterious Planet Neuton all right. Trouble is, he’s obsession prone. Recall that his obsessive behavior is what put us on that clownish little globe in the first place. (Still can’t get that freaking ceremonial hat off my head. I’ve put a call in to our agent to complain.) So… he spotted what looked like a little blue marble in the firmament… a deadly blue marble, as it turns out. Hot as blue blazes. Before we could say “Urich, Nooooooooooooooo….!” he pointed that nosecone towards the blue dot and stepped on the “gas”.  And hence… trouble.

Not that everyone on board is all that worked up about the imminent prospect of being seared to a crisp. (Or vaporized to a wisp.) Take Marvin (my personal robot assistant) … please. Marvin’s gotten more spam from that financial planner guy named “Remington Tagget”. He really thinks this guy is his personal investment counselor! I’ve tried to explain to Marvin that you really need to have investments if you’re going to retain one of those, but he doesn’t hear my words. Not a syllable. This Tagget guy keeps giving him reinforcement, though. He sent him a holiday message on Friday:

Hi Marvin,

Best wishes for a happy holiday & successful New Year from the entire team here at Direct Capital!

Please click here to view a special message for On Time Van Trans In.

Warm Wishes,

Remington Tagget

I’ll tell you, man. That wireless router has got some serious range. (Or should I say, Sirius range.) Anyway, here comes the sun…. The one pleasure we’ll get out of this is to watch Smith fry.

I had resolved to dedicate my blog rambling to a suggestion list for the incoming Obama administration over these few remaining weeks of the Bush II era. (Suggestion #9 - drop the homophobe preacher.) But sometimes events overtake us… events in the shape of a size ten shoe. Actually, two size ten shoes, tossed quite skillfully at the commander in chief himself, who dodged them - also quite skillfully - much as he’s been able (up to this point, at least) to dodge responsibility for the mass death and destruction he has brought down upon Iraq. This was for the widows and orphans and the thousands killed, said Muntazer al-Zaidi as he hummed the second limo at our fearless (or clueless) leader. My first thought was, huh… an anger so pervasive that it was able to penetrate even the octuple security of the Green Zone’s inner sanctum and make the president duck. And, as I’m sure someone has observed, it was no lame duck…. quite adept. Makes me wonder if people chuck things at him more than we know. (Barney, perhaps?)

Be that as it may, al-Zaidi’s act of defiance resonated throughout the poorer quarters where the despised of both Bush and Saddam claw their way through life, and far beyond. Is this as close as Bush will ever come to a genuine “accountability moment”, as he puts it? Perhaps. Prospects for any kind of constitutional come-uppance appear to be nil at this point, and it seems unlikely that he’ll see his day in court (this side of the Hague, anyway). There may be a broad recognition of this fact, perhaps even global in scope, bringing expectations of justice so low that even this purely symbolic effort takes on tremendous significance. Who hasn’t felt frustrated that Bush may be sailing obliviously off into a comfortable sunset, convinced of his own righteousness? In a world of misery made worse by his tenure, who hasn’t wanted to chuck that shoe… or at least hoped to see it chucked by someone else?

Particularly in Iraq, the feeling is more than understandable. To this day there is no real acknowledgement of the degree to which Iraqis have suffered as a result of this invasion, just as there remains to be any acknowledgement of how much they had suffered under the preceding dozen years of truly murderous economic sanctions and the destruction of the 1991 Gulf War. Their resentment of American intervention in their nation has been evident from day one. Even when our military orchestrated the pull-down of Saddam’s statue in the square packed with Chalabi’s people, cordoned off from the general public, they couldn’t keep signs of resistance out of the carefully composed television images. I can remember the flustered T.V. commentator reading on-air the sign that read “Go Home You U.S. Wankers”, fully expecting it to be some kind of celebratory message. In the midst of a whirlwind of triumphalist press about our successful invasion and drive to Baghdad, there was that irrepressible anomaly that presaged the great unraveling that was to follow.

Have we arrived at another such moment? Will Bush actually be held to account, along with other members of his administration? Has he unfurled the “mission accomplished” banner a bit prematurely once again? We can only wait and see if there is yet one more shoe to drop.

luv u,

jp  

What time is it? Say what? Can’t be that yet, can it? Seems like we just got up… and now it’s night fall. Oh, right. Small planet. Fast rotation. Got it.

Trouble with being on the road is you never know what town you’re waking up in. Or what planet. That’s bad enough when you have a set itinerary, but with Big Green… mother of pearl! Even when you’ve got your wits about you, it’s hard to figure out where the hell you’re playing. Like this little planetoid Urich our pilot drove us into. It’s not on any astronomical charts. It’s as yet undiscovered and unacknowledged by the scientific community. So, when we walk out on stage to do a few numbers, what the hell do we shout out to the crowd of hideously misshapen extraterrestrial concert-goers? “Helllooooooooo……. whatever!” Got any suggestions? Let us know, damn it. It’s disorienting, and I’m about as disorientated as anyone needs to be. (Except maybe the man-sized tuber… only he’s got a terrarium.)

Well, we did manage to find an opportunity to perform here on the mysterious planet Neuton. The inhabitants seem particularly fond of early 20th century calliope music and something they call “juggling”, which is a kind of anti-gravity technique involving multiple objects that don’t ordinarily float in mid-air without encouragement. But that’s just culture shock, I guess. There are more practical concerns. For instance, transportation is a serious issue. About the only way you can get anywhere on this planet is either by cramming into a tiny vehicle with about 20 Neutonians in full traditional garb, or getting on a tiny one-wheeled conveyance and riding to your destination across a stretched cable. (They throw a spotlight on you while you’re doing it. It’s very unnerving.) And since when are there elephants on other planets? I’ve always thought of them as the quintessential Earth animal, but I guess I’m wrong. (Here they do tricks. Curious thing.)

We performed in this large canvas enclosure propped up with enormous poles. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) didn’t like this at all - in fact, he refused to step inside, apparently taken with the impression that it might fall down on his polished brass head. We finally convinced him to join us on stage, though he would only agree if we gave him a barrel to stand on and a small theatrical umbrella to hold absurdly over his head. (Only tubey seemed to enjoy the spotlight.) Later that evening, we were invited to the local magistrate’s home for what was ostensibly a “meet and greet” event, during which an appalling assortment of Neutonians came up to us in their absurdly oversized footwear and performed their traditional greeting ritual, which involves shoving a sacred custard pie in each of our faces, then baptizing us with purified holy water sprayed out of a decorative lapel flower. This gets a little old… especially when the magistrate invites his entire extended family.

Hey - you got to pay to play, right? Just ask Blagojevich. And now that we’ve divested ourselves of all custard, perhaps Urich will be so kind as to GET US THE HELL OUT OF HERE…….!     

Another segment of suggestions for president-elect Obama as he completes what feels like the longest presidential transition ever. Before I get into that, however, I will briefly join the chorus of people sounding off on Illinois governor Blagojevich and his jaw-dropping, bald-faced, kleptocratic frenzy to fill Obama’s senate seat with the ass of the highest bidder. I think of myself as a fairly jaded individual, generally speaking, having trawled through the sludge of American politics most of my life on one level or another (never a very elevated one)… and yet somehow that transcript of Blagojevich saying “this thing is [fucking] golden” struck me as, well, appalling and depressing, even as it made me laugh. Just the sheer mind-numbing greed of it made me think, as Keith Olbermann said the other day, of Zero Mostel in the original movie “The Producers” … “Oh! I want that money!!” Holy shit.

Anyway, back to another Illinois politician of note, a certain Barack Obama. This week, domestic policy. (No, I’m not done with foreign policy…. just need a break.)

Health Care. National Health Care is too expensive - that’s what we’ve heard year after year, my entire life through. And yet when major banks and investment houses start to cave in on their glorified ponzi schemes, it’s declared a national emergency and we somehow put our hands on the hundreds of billions it takes to float their pirate ships again. Why isn’t the collapse of our health care system a national emergency? The 44 million without coverage - not an emergency? The millions more underinsured and one illness away from bankruptcy - not an emergency? The constant upward pressure in costs that is driving even those with decent insurance closer to the brink - not an emergency?

I think Obama recognizes that something needs to be done, but I’m concerned that ”something” will be a series of half-measures. We need a national health system, similar to the Canadian / European model. The current highly privatized insurance system is bankrupting workers, strangling employers, and spinning out of control. It will take something far more comprehensive than a few tweaks and some computerized records to make it work the way it needs to. And don’t let them tell you we don’t have the resources, because we do. We spend an enormous amount right now on a system that doesn’t work. We can certainly afford one that does. 

Poverty. Poverty is growing in America. People who had relatively secure middle-class lives a few years ago are now wearing cardboard belts and eating out of local food pantries. Unfortunately, the only tall politician with good hair (i.e. not Kucinich) who talked about this has felled himself with a tawdry sex scandal, in effect bringing the entire issue down with him. (Very costly affair, wouldn’t you say?) Obama needs to take up this gauntlet. Poor people may not vote in large enough numbers to constitute a reliable electoral block, but that doesn’t mean they should be ignored. “The poor” is not a static population… people of relative means fall into poverty all the time. We need to press for policies that will bring about full employment, repair the social safety net, and stop punishing people for not having money.

Okay, I’m through with you for this week. You can record your radio address now.

luv u,

jp

Good Fahrenheit, everybody! What a beautiful backhoe it turned out to be. I was wondering how Australia the wine barrel might get before the trout found its gerund.

Forgive me, friends. My brain is addled. I’ve asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to correct my copy from here on in. It’s been a long week on the road, let me tell you. Typically I make it to the end with all of my faculties intact, but this was the week we ended up on the mysterious (and as yet undiscovered) planet Neuton. It’s a clever little globe, friends. Knows better than most how to conceal its identity. Hides behind red giants and blue dwarfs - quite ecumenical in that regard. We were diverted there by an unexpected event… a bout of binge drinking on the part of our new pilot Urich Von Braun, who took up with that party animal (in a manner of speaking) sFshzenKlyrn to slog their way through a quart and a half of Zenite lager. Not sure if you’ve ever had any of that particular micro-brew - all I can tell you is that, if you have had it, you may not remember.

Ach du lieber, well Urich started seeing double, triple, quintuple. Frenchmen were all around him. He started flailing his arms, let out a loud moan, and to our dismay, directed the nosecone of our second-hand Soyuz spacecraft at what he thought was a small companion star of Betelgeuse, hoping to pierce it. (It was a dagger, he claimed drunkenly, pointed at the heart of the fatherland. Who were we to argue otherwise?) Before any of us were half-aware of the danger we were in, old Urich had driven us clear around the perimeter of that obese, red star and brought us down into what we now know is the mysterious undiscovered planet Neuton. (No, it’s not where they make the fig bars. That’s clear over to the other side of galaxy. Entirely different globe, my friend.) The landing was hard but survivable. Mitch lost a tooth, but it was one he had just invented last Thursday, so he wasn’t too broken up about it.

Now, obviously, we didn’t have any gigs booked on this particular celestial sphere (even Loathsome Prick Records doesn’t work that fast). Still, as long as we were there, we thought it would be appropriate to at least have a look around. What the hell, right? After all, we’ve got a new album to promote. Gotta find listeners somewhere, even if on a dark and forbidding world. The man-sized tuber was the first out the hatch. Yea, it was cold and dank out there. (More dank, really. Good hefty sweatshirt was enough to beat the cold. But that dankness… man!) We followed the tuber onto the surface and surveyed the area - a desolate boulder field, devoid of life, dimly illuminated by a mellow sun. Then on the not-so-distant horizon we spotted the silhouettes of some kind of sentient life forms. They had sensed our presence, apparently, and began moving closer. As they approached, we could begin to make out their hideously misshapen forms. Ghastly! Nauseating! But, I wondered…. do they listen to pop music? And use currency?

One of them came directly up to me and placed some kind of welcoming garland around my head, like a Hawaiian lei, made of strange, black tubers. While it was a gesture of friendship, apparently, it made me mental. So now my stapling machine is feeling a little burgundy. MARVIN! You’re supposed to be correcting this!

The president elect is getting an earful from just about everybody these days, not surprisingly. (His impossibly lame successor is now fully occupied with patching his own image. More on this later.) Surely the O-man won’t mind hearing from one more stranger, one more time. Let’s find out. Here are a few more things to bug him about.

Somalia. Our government has been pumping cash into the Ethiopian regime for years, despite (or perhaps because of) their poor record on human rights, and in 2006 we assisted them in the invasion of Somalia, throwing that sorry nation into another tailspin of chaotic bloodletting (more than a decade of which it had only recently extricated itself from). Apparently the Bush administration had a problem with Somalia’s ruling Council of Islamic Courts, claiming it was run by Al Qaida operatives - a claim that had about as much credibility as the White House’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s bin Laden ties. (I’m not talking fancy neckwear, here.) Between the indiscriminate violence of the Ethiopian military, U.S. air strikes, and resurgent warlordism, as many as 10,000 Somalis have died in the last two years as a result of this invasion.

Our strategic interest in the horn of Africa stems from the early days of the Iranian revolution, when the Carter administration was looking for a replacement for Washington’s close ally in the region, the Shah. They found one in Somalia’s dictator at that time, Mohammed Siad Barre, whose corrupt regime received hundreds of millions of dollars in aid from the Reagan/Bush I administrations before collapsing of its own torturous weight in the early 1990s. The Council of Islamic Courts was not a Jeffersonian democracy, but it was better than the chaos that had prevailed in Somalia after our long “assistance”. (Not an unusual result - think Afghanistan; think Haiti…) That is too valuable a piece of real estate, apparently, for us to relinquish, sitting so conveniently just across the Gulf of Aden from the Arabian Peninsula. Our imperial hooks are still in that carcass. Obama needs to pull them out.

Haiti. Speaking of Haiti. This is the coup that was. (Venezuela is the coup that wasn’t.) In 2004, with the support of Bush and the crew, a bunch of thugs drove President Aristide from power and into exile, the U.S. obligingly flying him (unbeknownst to the Haitian leader) to the Central African Republic, an amazingly remote nation that apparently owed us a favor. Four years later, Aristide lives in exile in South Africa as his nation struggles to regain its footing under the nominal leadership of Rene Preval, who presides while Washington holds a gun to his head. Time for this outrage to stop. Haitians want Aristide to return - let it happen.

Tell Obama what you’re thinking at http://change.gov/ - rumor has it they read the posts. We’ll see.

Bushcapades. While his minions work feverishly to wreck everything they didn’t get around to wrecking in the last eight years, Bush has been making the rounds, giving talks (inspired by bacon boy Karl Rove) to patch up his well-deserved bad image. Bush’s vision of the middle east was criticized for being too “idealistic”, per the president. Not the first word that comes to mind.

luv u,

jp