John from Charlotte, an avid Howard Dean supporter, emailed to ask if I had a favorite poem (he requested I answer via blog and gave permission for me to use his name). I had to think about the question for awhile. Favorite? As in liked or preferred above all others? I'm not saying this is the best poem in the world, or even that everyone would even consider it a poem. But here it is.

In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey
Butane in my veins, and a mouth to cut the junkie
With the plastic eyeballs, spray paint the vegetables
Dog food skulls with the beefcake pantyhose

Kill the headlights and put it in neutral
Stock car flamin' with the loser in the cruise control
Baby's in Reno with the vitamin D
Got a couple of couches, sleep on the love seat

Someone came sayin' I'm a saint to complain about
A shotgun wedding and a stain on my shirt
Don't believe everything that you breathe
You get a parking violation and a maggot on your sleeve

So shave your face with some mace in the dark
Savin' all your food stamps for burnin' down the trailer park

(yo)
(cut it)

Soy un perdedor
I'm a loser baby so why don't you kill me?
(double-barrel buckshot)
Soy un perdedor
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me?

Forces of evil in a bozo nightmare
Ban all the music with the phony gas chamber
'Cause one's got a weasel and other's got a flag
One's on the pole, shove the other in a bag

With the rerun shows and the cocaine nose job
The daytime crap of the folksinger squad
He hung himself with a guitar string
A slab o' turkey neck and it's hangin' from a pigeon wing

Get right if you can't relate
Trade the cash for the beat for the body for the hate
And my time is a piece of wax
Fallin' on a termite
Who's chokin' on the splinters

Soy un perdedor
I'm a loser baby so why don't you kill me?
(get crazy with the cheeze whiz)
Soy un perdedor
I'm a loser baby so why don't you kill me?

(drive-by bye kids)

(yo bring it on down)

Soooooooyy....

em llik uoy t'nod yhw os ybab resol a m'I, rodedrep nu yoS

I'm a driver, I'm a winner;
Things are gonna change, I can feel it

Soy un perdedor
I'm a loser baby so why don't you kill me?
(I can't believe you)
Soy un perdedor
I'm a loser baby so why don't you kill me?
(uhh)
Soy un perdedor
I'm a loser baby so why don't you kill me?
(Sprechen sie Deutchie, baby?)
Soy un perdedor
I'm a loser baby so why don't you kill me?
(you hear what I'm sayin'?)

Thanks for the question, John! With a little luck, I'll see you this Wednesday in Charlotte at the Howard Dean MeetUp — where presumably the topic will be winning!

Posted by Me at 20:21 link

From this week's MoveOn Bulletin:

ENVIRONMENTALISTS = TERRORISTS
Karen Charman, TomPaine.com
If legislation crafted by the ultra-conservative American Legislative Exchange Council becomes law, some fundamental rights of American citizenship -- like signing a Sierra Club petition or publicly protesting for animal rights -- could become illegal.
http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/7748

Meanwhile...

Could mainstream Western news media be coming back to life? From Reuters via Yahoo:

A growing number of U.S. national security professionals are accusing the Bush administration of slanting the facts and hijacking the $30 billion intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in Iraq.
<full story>

From the Associated Press:

As President Bush begins a European tour to patch up trans-Atlantic relations, comments from senior defense officials about Iraq's weapons have revived controversy in Europe over whether the war was justified.
<full story>

"We've had all kinds of reports that we're going to use force against Syria and now some on the left, I guess, are saying force in Iran or force here and force there. You know, it's pure speculation," said Bush, who denied for months that the United States had any plans to attack Iraq.
<full story>

"Cause I know that the hypnotized never lie...do ya?"
       — Pete Townshend, "Won't Get Fooled Again".

A study applying rigorous accounting standards to the US budget suggests the true fiscal deficit - counting long-term pension and health care liabilities - is a whopping 44 trillion dollars.

...

The study concluded that to correct the imbalance, wage taxes would have to be hiked 16.7 percent or personal income taxes by 69.3 percent.

The study was disclosed on Thursday by London's Financial Times, which said the US government shelved the report in the midst of seeking a 10-year, 350-billion dollar tax cut, which was passed by Congress last week.

President George W. Bush's administration chose to keep the findings - commissioned by then-Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill - out of the 2004 annual budget report, published in February, the daily reported.

There are only two explanations for this administration's fiscal policy, as far as I can tell. Either they truly don't know what they're doing, or they just want people to believe they don't know, while they systematically clean out the middle class and the poor. In the words of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi "while the Republicans' tax break leaves no business behind, it leaves behind millions of children from working poor families". Click here to read about the dirty last-minute deals that made the tax cut happen, and how those deals left the most vulnerable Americans out in the cold.

Personally, I think this administration is full of liars. I heard today on NPR's Here and Now, in a discussion on Iran, a US intelligence expert describe the administration's approach to intelligence analysis as selecting only facts that fit their a priori assumptions, and creating new "facts" as needed.

Need more? Paul Wolfowitz today admitted that the point the administration used to sell America the Iraq war—the urgent need to destoy Saddam's purportedly huge arsenal of WMDs (remember?)—wasn't really the main point, but was chosen for "bureaucratic reasons". In other words, the WMDs point was chosen because it would sell to the American public, and because the point held at least the slight possibility of being accepted as legal justification under international law. Unlike the real reasons for the war, such as increasing US world dominance by controlling the world's second-largest oil reserves, which were unquestionably illegal and morally indefensible. In other words, the administration lied to us. Again.

Rumsfeld quickly said they didn't lie. Uh huh.

So, when Bill Clinton lied about receiving oral sex, he was a monster. Clinton's lies hurt his wife, who seems to have forgiven him. When Bush and his administration lie about the reasons for going to war, he's some kind of hero. Bush's lies kill people. His lies have killed thousands of Afghans, thousands of Iraqis, and a couple hundred American and British soldiers. So far.

The American public seems dazed:

The BBC's Ian Pannell in Washington says that although Mr Wolfowitz's remarks will be seized upon by critics who claim there was little justification for the war in Iraq, it is unlikely to have any political consequences in the US.

All opinion polls show most Americans are unconcerned about the failure so far to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. <more>

George W. Bush was born to be a used-car salesman; I don't know how he strayed from his true calling. But why on earth are we still following him?

Posted by Me at 23:34 link

Remember the Palestine Hotel shelling incident? On April 8, a U.S. tank took careful aim and fired a single shell into the Reuters suite of the Palestine Hotel in downtown Baghdad, killing two journalists and wounding three others. If you don't remember much about it, that's not surprising—the same day the shelling was reported, the big news items were 1) another assassination-by-missile attempt on Saddam; and 2) the carefully-staged Saddam-statue-toppling show.

The family of one of the slain journalists, José Couso of Spain, filed suit Tuesday against three U.S. soldiers involved in the incident, charging them with war crimes and murder. U.S. military officials have repeatedly claimed the tank was responding to sniper fire from the hotel; all civilian witnesses (most highly-trained and experienced journalists) say the shelling was completely unprovoked.

Journalist Robert Fisk, respected veteran reporter for London's Independent:

I was driving on a road between the tanks and the hotel at the moment the shell was fired and heard no shooting. The French videotape of the attack runs for more than four minutes and records absolute silence before the tank fires. And there were no snipers in the building.

Indeed, the dozens of journalists and crews living there have watched like hawks to make sure that no armed men use the hotel as an assault point.

Two of the three journalists injured in the attack on the Palestine Hotel just happened to be Reuters bureau chief Samia Nakhoul and photographer Faleh Kheiber—the pair who'd just happened to break the Ali Ismail Abbas story the day before they were nearly blown to bits by a carefully-aimed American tank shell (Nakhoul is still in pretty bad shape, with part of the shell still lodged in her brain). <more from Robert Fisk>

Other notes on Iraq

Amnesty International today issued their 2003 Annual Report, a survey of human rights in 151 countries. Topping the list of worldwide threats: the negative consequences of the Iraq war.

Howard Dean on the Iraq war:

...a war, which I'm the only major candidate who did not support, which we have now no way to pay for. We are now paying for what we did in Iraq, because when you see al-Qaida coming back, that is the price of taking your eye off the ball and spending our resources beating up on a tin-horn dictator who, as evil as he was, was no threat to the United States. And we are now being paid back, because al-Qaida is reconstituted, [and] we're not spending the money that we spent in Iraq instead on buying back the plutonium stocks in Russia that really are a threat to the United States if those should get into the hands of terrorists. (from MSNBC)

Click here to join the Dean campaign, or just for more information on Howard Dean.

Salam Pax offers firsthand insight, wit and perspective on the situation in Iraq. Electronic Iraq is hosting some of his pictures, as well as some of his journal.

Pray for peace, and for an end to the policies of empire, which won't help anyone but a few rich folks. Pray, and vote.

Posted by Me at 23:45 link

I see two obvious main contenders: Iran and North Korea. Neither one offers a very nice prospect. My blogging time is limited today, so check out the always-excellent country profiles at the BBC:

• Iran

• North Korea

Or check out US military spending compared to the rest of the world. No, we don't actually spend as much on "defense" (best defense is a good offense?) as the rest of the world combined—the rest of the world combined spends $416.3 billion annually; we only spend $396.1 billion. Geez, don't you hate when people exaggerate?

Here's a crazy idea: if we just have to go blow stuff up, why not go where that sort of thing is needed right now? I'm talking about the Democratic Republic of Congo. Why is hardly anyone else talking about it? There's a real honest-to-God slaughter in progress there right now. 50,000 civilians have been killed there since 1999.

I have a feeling our next military move will be reactive, though. Just intuition. I should probably keep in mind the wise saying, "the fewer declarative statements a man makes, the less likely he is to look foolish in retrospect" (someone please remind me which movie that line is from...).

Posted by Me at 22:37 link

     ...born on this date in 1967.^*

It was 16 years ago today that I gave young Mr. Williams the newly-released CD Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Had to drive all over northwest Jersey to find it. The gift was particularly apropos, because of the first line of the first track: It was twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.... Ian had joked several times that he'd been "released" the same day as Sgt. Pepper's. The CD had been released exactly 20 years after the album's original release, a marketing gimmick that surely would have given John Lennon very bad cramps.

I guess Ian liked his CD. If I remember, some major-but-soon-completely-forgotten crisis was in progress, so the gift turned out to be more of a backqround event than I'd hoped. But I didn't mind. I knew he'd enjoy the music.

A few months later, on the day I turned 21, Ian borrowed my beloved bicycle (mine was actually blue). He, being a much more trusting soul than I was, misplaced the lock with which I compulsively chained the bike down anytime I was going to be away from it more than a few seconds. This led me to quip that Ian had given me a "negative lock" for my birthday. Not having the money to replace the lock, or room for the bike in my dorm room, I decided to try Ian's trusting approach. Sure enough, soon I also had a "negative bicycle".

A few years later, I repayed the favor and then some, by borrowing Ian's shiny new mountain bike and subjecting it to the epic tortures of a notorious powerline cut "trail", effectively killing the bike (and nearly myself). Oh, well, what are friends for!

Happy birthday, bro! 36 is no big deal (I've grown several years younger this year, in fact). If you always remember you're just a kid, you always will be just a kid. I keep addressing the dogs (aged 9 and 7) as "puppies" and they (and I) keep bouncing along.

Like Sgt. Pepper's Band, Ian may have gone "in and out of style" but to this day he's still "guaranteed to raise a smile".

Today's Birthdays: Actor James Arness is 80. Actor Alec McCowen is 78. Opera singer Teresa Stratas is 64. Sportscaster Brent Musberger is 64. Rock singer-musician Levon Helm (The Band) is 63. Rock musician Garry Peterson (Guess Who) is 58. Singer Stevie Nicks is 55. Actor Philip Michael Thomas is 54. Actress Pam Grier is 54. Country singer Hank Williams Jr. is 54. Former astronaut Sally K. Ride is 52. Actress Margaret Colin is 46. Country singer-songwriter Dave Robbins (BlackHawk) is 44. Actor Doug Hutchison is 43. Actress Genie Francis is 41. Comedian Bobcat Goldthwait is 41. Singer Lenny Kravitz is 39. Actress Helena Bonham Carter is 37. Rock musician Phillip Rhodes is 35. Actor Joseph Fiennes is 33. Rhythm-and-blues singer Joey Kibble (Take 6) is 32. Actor-producer-writer Matt Stone is 32. <back>

Posted by Me at 10:28 link

Hero: A person noted for feats of courage or nobility of purpose, especially one who has risked or sacrificed his or her life.

Monday is Memorial Day in the U.S., a day set aside to remember our military dead. We owe these fallen ones a great deal, the men and women who gave their lives in service to their country.

War has been glorified too much lately. I want to remember a few of those who gave their lives for peace, who gave their lives for justice.