impending buildup at the Crawford Ranch, protesters, that is

[jimboloco]

yes indeed, i have a 96 chrysler, paid 36 bucks to fillerup, it does get about 19 mpg, just not using it too much except for work commute and basics, nine more months it will be paid off. pushing 100,000 miles, needs a brake job and shocks, otherwise will drive it til it drops.

how much did you pay for the hybrid?

they had cindy sheehan's estranged in-law on tv this morning, good morning america!, and she touted her family's "strong military tradition."
oh for the sake of
http://llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrn ... andad4.wav

thanks for turning out Z, mr point mon.

well, got to start digging a hole for a tree in the front yard.

[Zlatko Waterman]

Dear Jim:

The Hybrid was 24 thousand clams with all the xtras-- security system, hefty CALTAX etc.. Our income taxes get relieved a little for a "Zero Emissions Vehicle."

But since we have 210,000 miles on our 1990 Honda Accord, and I drove it to Seattle last year and it is a science-fiction car in terms of reliability, we expect this little CIVIC to last for a while.

Things are obscenely expensive, as you no doubt have noticed. I live in a dumpy, cookie-cutter 1964 tract house in California. Houses in my neighborhood are selling for 650,000 to 725,000 dollars.

And they are SELLING! One for sale about a month on our nightly walk ( across the street from the NUKE THE TOWELHEADS FOR JESUS!) house ( the one I referred to in an earlier message) just sold this week.


--Z

[jimboloco]

sounds like you got a car to last awhile.....

since you are a hybrid of sorts.


hope you last awhile too, another 200,000 miles or so.


one more time around the sun.

we do know that we have empowerment.

[Zlatko Waterman]

Cindy and Goliath:

Here's a nice piece by Norman Solomon about the attempt by the right-wing ProWar cadres to villify Cindy and other anti-war protestors ( like me).:


(paste)




Camp Casey vs. Camp Carnage

by Norman Solomon



The surge of antiwar voices in U.S. media this month has coincided with new lows in public approval for what pollsters call President Bush's "handling" of the Iraq war. After more than two years of a military occupation that was supposed to be a breeze after a cakewalk into Baghdad, the war has become a clear PR loser. But an unpopular war can continue for a long time – and one big reason is that the military-industrial-media complex often finds ways to blunt the effectiveness of its most prominent opponents.

Right now, the pro-war propaganda arsenal of the world's only superpower is drawing a bead on Cindy Sheehan, who now symbolizes the USA's antiwar grief. She is a moving target, very difficult to hit. But right-wing media sharpshooters are sure to keep trying.

The Bush administration's top officials must be counting the days until the end of the presidential vacation brings to a close the Crawford standoff between Camp Casey and Camp Carnage. But media assaults on Cindy Sheehan are just in early stages.

While the president mouths respectful platitudes about the grieving mother, his henchmen are sharpening their media knives and starting to slash. Pro-Bush media hit squads are busily spreading the notions that Sheehan is a dupe of radicals, naive and/or nutty. But the most promising avenue of attack is likely to be the one sketched out by Fox News Channel eminence Bill O'Reilly on Aug. 9, when he declared that Cindy Sheehan bears some responsibility for "other American families who have lost sons and daughters in Iraq who feel that this kind of behavior borders on treasonous."

That sort of demagoguery is on tap for the duration of the war. Military families will be recruited for media appearances to dispute the patriotism of antiwar activists – especially those who speak as relatives of American soldiers and shatter media stereotypes by publicly urging withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

So far, during this war, President Bush is leaving the defamation chores to his surrogate media fighters. But loud noises coming from the right wing today are echoes of key themes that other presidents eagerly voiced.

During the mid-1960s, as President Lyndon Johnson escalated the Vietnam War, he grew accustomed to trashing Americans who expressed opposition. They were prone to be shaky and irresolute, he explained – and might even betray the nation's servicemen. "There will be some Nervous Nellies," he predicted on May 17, 1966, "and some who will become frustrated and bothered and break ranks under the strain. And some will turn on their leaders and on their country and on our fighting men."

Delivering a speech in mid-March 1968, President Johnson contended that as long as the foe in Vietnam "feels that he can win something by propaganda in the country – that he can undermine the leadership – that he can bring down the government – that he can get something in the Capital that he can't get from our men out there – he is going to keep on trying."

LBJ's successor Richard Nixon was quick to brandish similar innuendoes."Let us be united for peace," Nixon said early in his presidency. "Let us be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that."

Martin Luther King Jr. found that former allies could become incensed when he went out of his way to challenge the war. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, he said, the U.S. was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them.

That kind of talk drew barbs and denunciations from media quarters that had applauded his efforts to end racial segregation. Time magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post warned that "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

When the Gulf War began, snappy phrases like "blame America first" were a popular way to vilify dissenters. "What we cannot be proud of, Mr. Speaker, is the unshaven, shaggy-haired, drug culture, poor excuses for Americans, wearing their tiny, round wire-rim glasses, a protester's symbol of the blame-America-first crowd, out in front of the White House burning the American flag," Representative Gerald B. H. Solomon said on Jan. 17, 1991.

During a typical outburst in early 2003 before the Iraq invasion, Rush Limbaugh told his radio audience: "I want to say something about these antiwar demonstrators. No, let's not mince words, let's call them what they are – anti-American demonstrators." Weeks later, former Congressman Joe Scarborough, a Republican rising through the ranks of national TV hosts, said on MSNBC: "These leftist stooges for anti-American causes are always given a free pass. Isn't it time to make them stand up and be counted for their views, which could hurt American troop morale?"

Such poisonous sludge is now pouring out of some mass media – and we should expect plenty more in response to a growing antiwar movement.

This article is adapted from Norman Solomon's new book War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. For information, go to: www.WarMadeEasy.com

[Zlatko Waterman]

Here's a nice article and pictorial on the "improvised" vigils last night. On the "Common Dreams" site.


http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0818-01.htm

[mnaz]

Mr. Solomon's book sounds very much like one I would be interested in writing some day. Thanks for the link, Z.


I can't watch that arrogant poisonous sludge which oozes from Fox News...... haven't been able to for many many months now.

[Lightning Rod]

this is a semi compilation from posts and information you guys have provided me with on the Sheehan subject

The Poet's Eye

[jimboloco]

http://www.cpr4democracy.com/blog/2005/ ... casey.html

[jimboloco]

L Rod, I thought you were a lady, now I find out you are a man.

[Lightning Rod]

jimbo,

best laugh I've had all day.

whenever I shave off my moustache, I have to be prepared for 7-11 clerks to call me ma'am.

[Zlatko Waterman]

The President of the National Council of Churches has invited Bush to pray for the soldiers in Iraq. Cindy Sheehan's group, camped in Crawford, will gather with many church leaders on Friday to pray.
Cindy herself is with her ailing mother.

Having tended to a 74-year-old mother myself in a time of dire illness, I can somewhat understand her strain and worry.

Bush's evil, cruel, illegal, pointless, barbaric and murderous war will be the center of attention, whether or not DUB II is present.

Here is the link to the story:


http://www.ncccusa.org/news/050816Crawf ... rvice.html



--Z

[jimboloco]

Bush's evil, cruel, illegal, pointless, barbaric and murderous war will be the center of attention, whether or not DUB II is present.

This is good.

I am telling you, when I went up to the October protest at the School of the Americas in 1998, I was surprised when a guy ID'd himself to me as a Methodist minister. There were a number of church folks there. I was especially impressed by some Catholic sisters who were staying in our hotel. Amazing. this one sister had been in Chiapas, another had been in Pakistan.

What is it called? Liberation theology....JA! Bring on the Methodissed. We got a street minister around here, Rev Bruce, a real street minister, to the homeless, the poor folk,at mid-Pinellas coalition for the homeless....a Lutheran.

I am friends personally with a Sister Ann, who is president of Pax Christi, Tampa.

Jesus! That martini was good..... LROD, thank heaven for 7-11

Zman, I was talking with a Republican today, I was giving him blood. He said that we don't know as much as they do(the prez) I said not so, we know plenty.... I was taking his blood pressure every 15 minutes, and it started going up, I told him that it was because he was talking to a liberal! He laughed, and we both agreed that we were independunces.

the Southland Corp.....how any 7-11 clerks have bought the farm....?

I did a stint as a 7-11 clerk, graveyard, in north surburban Detwat, 1975, after my second drop out from MBA school, was so tired and sad, out of the circle of power, a fucking Vietnam War military dropout.....I actually made a super eight film, yes! of the 7-11 store, there one night, with close ups of the silly advertising props they had, and the dumb toys for the kids, etc, real scary it was. too bad it vanished on the trail of absurdness.

Buddha be bop. Kerowack never gave up on his Catholick roots. He has some wonderful word paintings going inside old cathedrals inside Mexico, on the road. Sacred space.

[Zlatko Waterman]

Dear Jim:

I converted to Roman Catholicism in 1990. My wife is a cradle Catholic. She works with the poor but I can't disclose any details because she requested that I keep her avocations a secret. She is a teacher of Algebra at a local college, a magna cum laude grad in Math AND Religious Studies simultaneously!

The boy buggering was sort of the final insult for me, particularly the cover-ups and denials. I haven't been back to church in years. I did meet some fine folks there, however, and taught briefly in their initiation classes because I was encouraged to do so by a priest who himself had "celibacy problems" ( his happened to be with a woman.) He was a good guy and a hard worker for peace. The peace movement within the mother Church and its ministry to the poor ( feeding them, clothing them, providing shelter, prison ministry, etc..) is an appealing side of a somewhat appalling huge bureaucracy.

The new LA cathedral is something to see. It's a gigantic stone mausoleum, with modernist touches. After Cardinal Mahoney, critics dub it the "Taj Mahoney."

I grew restless inside such a male chauvinist institution, though the Lib Theology group were my heroes, particularly in Latin America, a region in which I have maintained much interest, teaching reading and writing skills to the Spanish-speaking in California.

I began college as a Spanish major, went as far as graduate classes in Spanish and ( counting high school) have racked up five years overall studying the language. I am rusty but can carry on a conversation with most any monolingual Spanish speaker. Mexicans mumble terribly to my ear, but I have accustomed myself to it.

Our "gente" are good folks, and here in SoCal more than fifty percent of the population.

Excelsior,


--Z

[Zlatko Waterman]

(30-year CIA intelligence veteran Ray McGovern has written a strong essay linking protests against war from the past with Cindy's struggle-- and ours . . .)


Published on Friday, August 19, 2005 by CommonDreams.org


There is Such a Thing as “Too Late”
by Ray McGovern

President Bush still refuses to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the Rosa Parks of Crawford, Texas, but there is some good news. While Crawford’s Camp Casey (named after Cindy’s son killed in Iraq on April 4, 2004) continues to be short on amenities, a sympathetic neighbor has given the hundred or so friends I left there on Wednesday a field in which they can pitch their tents. No longer will they have to try to sleep in the seven-foot wide ditch alongside the road, with local pick-up trucks and Secret Service SUVs whizzing by honking reveille at 5:00 AM. In addition, newly donated tarps are providing some protection from fire ants by night and the 105-degree sun by day.

A rumor ran through the camp that Karl Rove set loose the fire ants into the ditches in the same way he has loosed the rabid talk-show-dogs that have been barking at Cindy. But it turns out the ants are indigenous—like other local pests.

While at Camp Casey I had a daydream. I visualized turning Crawford into Selma. Think of it: 40 years later, thousands of us crossing a new Edmund Pettus Bridge—this time over Tonk Creek en route to the Texas White House. There is legal precedent. In 1965, Federal District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr. weighed the right of mobility against the right to march and ruled in favor of those marching from Selma to Montgomery. Judge Johnson ruled:


“The law is clear that the right to petition one’s government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups...and these rights may be exercised by marching, even along public highways.”
Folks ask me what I think Cindy Sheehan and her devoted supporters need most at Camp Casey. In my view, the answer is simple: They have built it; will you come? Your bodies are needed on site to help petition our government for redress of the grievance of reckless endangerment of the bodies and the souls of the young men and women sent off to wage an unnecessary war.

Can We Do Something Else to Help?

Two years after the march from Selma to Montgomery Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. took the pulpit at Riverside Church in New York City and gave a speech titled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” Today we can substitute “Iraq” for “Vietnam.” Dr. King spoke clearly:


“Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam.”
Ignore. That’s what the vast majority of Germans did in the 1930s as Hitler curtailed civil liberties and launched aggressive wars. I was born in August 1939, a week before Hitler sent German tanks into Poland to start World War II. I have studied that crucial time in some detail. And during the five years I served in Germany I had occasion to ask all manner of people how it could possibly be that, highly educated and cultured as they were, the Germans for the most part could simply ignore. Why was it that the institutional churches, Catholic and Evangelical Lutheran, could not find their voice? Why was it that so few spoke out?

A few did...and they provide good example for us today. Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke out, plotted against Hitler, and was executed. Also executed was a more obscure but equally courageous professor from the University of Berlin, Albrecht Haushofer.

Like Bonhoeffer, Haushofer was arrested for speaking out. The SS prison guards were required to extract a confession from prisoners before they were hanged or shot, but Haushofer refused. When they removed his body, though, a paper fell out of his pocket. It was his admission of guilt written in the form of a sonnet:

Schuld
...schuldig bin ich Anders als Ihr denkt.
Ich musste früher meine Pflicht erkennen;
Ich musste schärfer Unheil Unheil nennen;
Mein Urteil habe ich zu lang gelenkt...
Ich habe gewarnt,
Aber nicht genug, und klar;
Und heute weiß ich, was ich schuldig war.

Guilt
I am guilty,
But not in the way you think.
I should have earlier recognized my duty;
I should have more sharply called evil evil;
I reined in my judgment too long.
I did warn,
But not enough, and clear;
And today I know what I was guilty of.

At Riverside Church 22 years later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. began by quoting a statement by Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” Dr. King added, “That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.”

And that time has come for us in relation to Iraq. But where are the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Iraq? Where are the successors to Dr. King, to Bonhoeffer, to Professor Haushofer? “There is only us,” says Annie Dillard, and she is right of course. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Dr. King was typically direct: “We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak....there is such a thing as being too late....Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with lost opportunity....Over the bleached bones of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too late.”

An Example to Follow

I believe Cindy Sheehan provides prophetic example for us all. She let herself be guided by the spirit within. President George W. Bush had said that the sacrifice of our dead soldiers, including Casey, was “worth it.” And earlier this month he added that it was all in a “noble cause.” Cindy, while giving a talk at a conference in Dallas, spontaneously asked if someone would come with her to Crawford, because she needed to ask the president what it was that he was describing as a “noble cause.” You know the first chapter of the rest of the story. The point I would make here is simply that she was open to the spirit within, decided to follow its prompting, and did not hesitate to claim the help she needed. Cindy used her conference speech to speak out clearly, as she has been doing for these past several months, and then she acted.

Is it not time for us—each of us—to be open to such prompting. Is it not time for us, amid the carnage in Iraq, amid a presidentially promulgated policy permitting torture “consistent with military necessity,” amid growing signs of an attack by Israel and/or the U.S. on Iran—is it not high time for us to speak...and to act. How, in God’s name, can we not act?

Creative Protest

Dr. King enjoined his listeners at Riverside Church to “seek out every creative means of protest possible,” in matching actions with our words.

Not all of us can join the march to Selma...I mean Crawford. So let’s be creative.

I wear a t-shirt with a representation of Arlington West on the front. At 7:30 AM every Sunday, Veterans for Peace in the area of Los Angeles bring white crosses, stars of David, and crescents, down to Santa Monica beach as a poignant reminder of those troops killed in Iraq. The crosses, stars, and crescents are arrayed respectfully in lines as hauntingly straight as those here in our own Arlington Cemetery.

When a few months ago I had the privilege of helping my veteran colleagues set up Arlington West, there were 1,600 crosses, stars, crescents, and it took three hours to set them in place. We are fast approaching 1,900; I don’t know how long it takes to emplace them now. When the veterans of Arlington West heard of Cindy Sheehan’s courageous witness in Crawford, they packed up 800 and drove all night to ensure that a large slice of Arlington West could be emplaced in newly created Arlington Crawford at Camp Casey.

That’s creative, no? Here we already have “Arlington East” to honor the dead. But what about the thousands and thousands of wounded? Can we be imaginative enough to discern visually creative ways to witness to and honor our wounded? And what about all the Iraqi civilians—“collateral damage,” in military parlance—who, absent the war, would be alive today? The number of civilian dead was put as high as 100,000 a year ago. Our government does not consider Iraqi casualties worth counting. Is this a way of saying that, in our country’s view, Iraqis don’t count? Have we become so callous as to ignore, and thus acquiesce in that?

These are some spontaneous thoughts...the only suggestions that occur to me this evening regarding things we might consider doing to walk the talk. No doubt, you will have more imaginative, more creative ideas. Don’t wait. Remember: there is such a thing as being too late.

The fire ants were not the only pests in Crawford. There were a few unfriendly folks who kept telling us to go to hell. That brought to mind the dictum of the 18th century English statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of crisis, remain neutral.”

Let’s not oblige the pests; I understand that hell is even hotter than Crawford.

Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC, and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. On Wednesday, he arrived home in Arlington, VA, after five days in Crawford, and shared these remarks with 300 neighbors at the close of a candlelight observance in honor of Cindy Sheehan.

###

[hester_prynne]

Good reads Zlatko, and i'm thinking if I don't get this job i should just sell everything and get on board with Cindy as I do think she is the spark that can set what needs to get rolling, rolling.

I think we are up against a very corrupted system and many many brainwashed people, including most of the religious believers and clergy. I mean the Pope is now asking for immunity is he not, for a cover up of a molestation case. Of course, now that he is pope he is automatically immune from any past crimes, I mean, mistakes?

It's a real chance for a new church we got now. A church based on truth, a church that is not complacent with lies and deceit. A church with backbone when it comes to comforting, protecting and caring for the poor, the children, and the trampled.

But I fear that it won't happen. There is too much diversion, avoidance and acceptance. Money is too powerful, people are being driven to the point of doing anything for money, because they have to survive....which gives this government the power it needs to stay in control. Even the media is under the influence of this administration

I guess I fear it's too late.....

thanks for all these great reads though. They give me hope that there are others who are acutely aware of the tragedy happening before our very eyes, and under our very noses, in the name of America, i.e. in the name of us. For in the end, Bush will blame it all on us. That's how his kinda folk operate.....they are indeed, very very small.....in mind and spirit and soul.....

H