Overheard:

“Scrappy’s been in and out of prison so many times. He goes to prison, rats out other users… He’s even ratted out his dealers. It’s not ‘3 Strikes and you’re out. It’s more like 20 Strikes and you’re out.”

“Sounds to me like Scrappy’d be facing retribution for something like that, and is better off in prison.”

“No. I think he’d be fine. Scrappy is a scrapper.”

…………..

I found myself in North Portland, where I walked around the blocks of my old apartment. I walked up to old posters posted onto signposts of a missing cat. I penned a question mark and an exclamation mark at two different points of the poster… So it goes like:

Missing Cat
Orange Tabby
White Too ?
Longtime Missing !
Contact Information: ….

I could have scribbled out a badly drawn picture of a cat, but I figured even on what looks a little old — though the fact that there were many of these posters — it’d be too confusing. Besides, I’ve occasionally marked these posters with these punctuation marks — for no real discernible reason.

Have You Seen the News?
A Movement Has Began!
Power to the People!
Pioneer Square Saturday November (Last)
This Is A People’s Movement Against Bush.

I don’t know how this movement is any different from the movement pre-election day, or what news I’m suppose to have seen, but I suppose it has to be related to:

The two party system and the electoral college are a fraud to democracy. (etc etc blah blah blah). Keep your eyes open for real democracy.

Better yet, someone posted a long-ish piece, sprinkled with Beatles references, about how we must all turn away from politics and turn to MUSIC.

Wait and see. Keep your eyes open. A Movement has sprung up!

The problem is that the actions of infamous dictators work too well as reference points as to why a particular courses of action are bad.

If a former KGB director destroys direct elections to dumas… maybe there is no such thing as a former KGB agent.

Bush Administration, under the control of the new political hack CIA director, is now ridding the CIA of anybody except political hack yes-men. The doubters of the politicized intelligence and the anti-Chalabists that the neo-cons hate so much… gone. Get rid of any possible whistleblowers — or doubters of the imposed conventional wisdom (most recently — Saddam’s stockpiles of WMDs), and the truth will have to squeeze out in other ways.

Not that it may matter too much. Back to Colin Powell… he wasn’t a “yes man”, but he was willing to play the part of one when one was needed. Maybe it’s best that the Government be completely evil, so that there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind. (Incidentally, Joe Lieberman says he’d go for a cabinet spot in the Bush Administration. I hope Lieberman gets his wish, so we can forgo having him in the Senate’s opposition party caucus.

Back when I was typing out old New York Times articles (from a batch of discarded Library Books), I stumbled at the articles involving the “Iranian Oil Crisis” of 1953. They were hilarious in their incredulity, and provide us with the basic template for the “official story” ahead of every coup America has orchestrated since. (Key point: there’s always a huge part of the mob that is confused, and just waiting to see which way the Wind Blows, because the first attempt has a good chance of misfiring, and you need an explanation for the crowd… in this case, apparently there’s a huge movement of “Royalists”, because there’s nothing a nationalistic populace with a nationalistic leader wants more than a government decided on blood-lines.) But I didn’t know how to post them, and an extensive footnoting of a batch of articles seemed excessive.

Somewhere in the back, the truth came out… as if to telegraph the incident, the New York Times printed the “absurd allegations found in Pravda.”

Keep that in mind as the years unfold.

Perhaps the entirety of Colin Powell’s post-Gulf War career was one giant set-up.

I say that knowing that the delivery of an “Adlai Stevenson Moment” before the UN was one. (And I sensed that coming, the ultimate meaninglessness of the reference, as it played out — in slow motion before my very eyes between the summer of 2002 and the spring of 2003.)

The whole ball of wax. Place him of Clinton’s medium list of candidates for running mate. Write a book, become the consumate “moderate voice” for an American public that loves “moderation”. Play the Eisenhower card in deciding on a party, before assigning yourself as the consummate Eisenhower Republican — “I want to return the party of Lincoln to the Spirit of Lincoln”. The choice of the Americans in 1996 who today gravitate toward Rudy Giuliana and John McCain. Ultimately, don’t run for president. Become the one respected force in a Bush II administration before the International Community…

And blow the whole wad of gum on the “Adlai Stevenson Moment”.

Later, he would fluster backward and forth… call much of the evidence “intentionally misleading”, which falls into obscurity for me to have to remind anyone who listens everytime I have the urge…

Jacques Chirac has rubbed salt into the Tony Blair’s “Reconciliation de Europe” attempts, by pointing out that Blair has gotten nothing out of his US- partnership (nothing with Israel / Palestine, and the Bush II administration ain’t moderating itself.) Thus I ask: What did Colin Powell get for his four years of soldiering service?

Ralph Nader met with John Kerry last Summer. The only that really reverberated out to the public from that meeting was Nader’s request/advice that Kerry stay clear of picking Tom Vilisak as running mate, and choose John Edwards.

Today, Ralph Nader is spear-heading Kerry’s under-the-radar, low-key Election Irregularity Search.

The question arises: What did John Kerry and Ralph Nader talk about?

My sixth grade teacher (perhaps the only middle school teacher I had that I more or less respect), a man who probably did as much as anyone to influence my outlook on civic government, the day after Election Day, gave an characteristically cynical speech to the class about how elections are run. “All nations cheat in their elections.” He then went through a list of shenanigans one associates with Banan Republics, and the workings of past American “Machine Politics” systems — thank you Tammany Hall, Thank you Mr. Daley, and thank you everyone who has suppressed the Black Vote through our nation’s illustrous history. I can’t say exactly how he brought the lecture back to one heralding the civic commitment to voting — “But no matter how rigged the system is, voting is a privilege and right that we should all cherish… and we’re better than Haiti.”

Perhaps there’s a flair of the Bushian attack on Kerry there: “What’s your message: Wrong War, Wrong Place, Wrong Time, Keep Fighting?” Perhaps not. I don’t know.

I understand why Paul Wellstone had to be murdered. Somewhat out of league with the national Consensus formed by the useless Democratic Party, under the watchful eye of the recently deposed Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle… we had a man offering up actual opposition who was opening up a double digit lead in his Senate race, and that precedent could not stand. (Daschle is said to have been defeated because he offered up too much resistance, which means that it probably doesn’t matter one iota whether or not he is defeated.) The powers that could be could care less which of the two figures waiting in the wing, the tired aging traditional Liberal Walter Mondale and the young, image-moderate former centrist Democrat now Republican, and happy Bush-ditto, Norm Coleman, comes through.

But that doesn’t explain why in the world Mel Carnahan would have to be “disappeared”. If one is to believe that Wellstone was assassinated, one would also have to believe that Carnahan was killed as well, since he died in the same way. By all appearances, Mel Carnahan was a standard pol, and the fact is he was losing to John Ashcroft. The joke that “John Ashcroft lost to a dead guy” never struck me as funny, because he lost because of and not in spite of the fact that his opponent was dead.

Perhaps the string-pullers of the New World Order saw far enough ahead to where they would need him as Attorney General to bring a little… this to governance:

Let the eagle soar,
Like she’s never soared before.
From rocky coast to golden shore,
Let the mighty eagle soar.
Soar with healing in her wings,
As the land beneath her sings:
‘Only god, no other kings.’
This country’s far too young to die.
We’ve still got a lot of climbing to do,
And we can make it if we try.
Built by toils and struggles
God has led us through.

The coming replacement of Ashcroft with Mr. Gonzalez flummoxes me, perhaps exposing yet again the uselessness of the Democratic Party. You can not properly oppose the “Geneva Accords have been rendered Quaint” guy? Word on the street is that this is a bit of psycho-politics, where red-state Democrats smarting from Tom Daschle’s demise, must filibuster carefully… more word on the street is that Gonzalez is the more ‘moderate’ choice for Supreme Court, and the Religious Right are upset that he doesn’t take a tough enough stand on whatever and whatnot.

May God Help Us All… and Let the Eagle Soar, Like He’s Never Soared Before.

Dan Savage channeled David Byrne’s lyrics here:

I see the shapes,
I remember from maps.
I see the shoreline.
I see the whitecaps.
A baseball diamond, nice weather down there.
I see the school and the houses where the kids are.
Places to park by the fac’tries and buildings.
Restaunts and bar for later in the evening.
Then we come to the farmlands, and the undeveloped areas.
And I have learned how these things work together.
I see the parkway that passes through them all.
And I have learned how to look at these things and I say,

(chorus)

I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.
I couldn’t live like that, no siree!
I couldn’t do the things the way those people do.
I couldn’t live there if you paid me to.

I guess it’s healthy, I guess the air is clean.
I guess those people have fun with their neighbors and friends.
Look at that kitchen and all of that food.
Look at them eat it’ guess it tastes real good.

They grow it in the farmlands
And they take it to the stores
They put it in the car trunk
And they bring it back home
And I say …

(chorus)

I say, I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.
I couldn’t live like that, no siree!
I couldn’t do the things the way those people do.
I wouldn’t live there if you paid me to.

I’m tired of looking out the windows of the airplane
I’m tired of travelling, I want to be somewhere.
It’s not even worth talking
About those people down there.

Goo goo ga ga ga
Goo goo ga ga ga

I don’t know what “Goo goo ga ga ga” symbolizes, though.

If I’m tempted to give Ariel Sharon a shrug at this time and say, “Only Nixon can go to China”, I snap myself out of it. Substitute the name “Joe McCarthy” for “Nixon” and you get the point. Or, if you will, how does “Only Hitler Can Save the Jews” sound?

Imagine the differences between the reactions an Al Gore would get to those a George W Bush would get if either one seriously embarked on the quest for alternative sources of energy… Al Gore, the proported environmentalist, George W Bush less so.

But if a politico is seriously embarking on a quest toward contrarianism, they will do so. Organized Labor would’ve been better served under a second Georg H W Bush administration than under Clinton. Clinton embarking on “Third Way” DLC politics in regard to NAFTA. Bush would’ve faced actual Democratic Party opposition to the treaty, you see, while Clinton — well, it was at the time the thing that was supposed to save his early faltering presidency, and the Democrats couldn’t afford to watch his early faltering presidency die on them. This is the way the New World Order operates.

Not to damper the Clinton image too much. Whenever you knock Clinton, stop for a second and consider why black Americans poll him as amongst America’s Greatest Presidents… a fact Republicans cringe at, wobble about to come up his supposed “racial divisiveness” and “use of the race card” to forward his agenda.

Personally, I’ll careen more toward the greatness of President Grover Cleveland. But only to make a point. Come on, I dare you to knock Grover Cleveland from this high perch I’ve created for him!

What is my point? I’ll give you the raw ingrediants for the thought train. James Carville says that the problem with the Democratic Party is that they lack a narrative. Bush’s “narrative” is that of “Redemption”, meaning no matter what crises he finds himself in he can be redeemed. AND… I have no idea what “values” means… if, for example, I value “prudence” and vote on the issue of “prudence”, I am not saying to the pollster that I voted on “values.”