But for the cum in your hair,
The cocaine on your teeth
You'd be just like the girls
That I kissed on the heath
Your mother left and you're all alone
And the world is at your feet
You smell like ash, mildew and hash
Can barely even speak
And it's so sad that you're so sad and you're so bad for me
I followed your perfume as you ran down the street
I caught you and held you and pushed back your fringe and swore undying loyalty
We'll make a new art for the people,
A new art for the people
A new art for the people
you and me.

I followed you home
Knocked at your door
Offered myself in the kitchen
Passed out on the floor
And when you shout, I get terrified
And then I love you more
You sound middle class, but I'll let it pass,
I don't understand you at all
And it's so sad that you're so sad and you're so bad for me
I swallowed my pride with a pill and decided to give you back your key
You caught me and held me and I took your hand and swore undying loyalty
We'll make a new art for the people,
A new art for the people
A new art for the people
you and me.

Under the covers forever
Everything well within reach
A small price to pay for our freedom
And for our celebrity
Such ornaments and gorgeous things
Like string lights at the beach
Intensive care and conditioned air
And our faces on TV
And it's so sad but they're so glad that you're so bad for me
The dark days ahead and the blood on the bed and the cover of the NME
They gave us a cheque and took us by our necks and swore undying loyalty
We'll make a new art for the people,
A new art for the people
A new art for the people
you and me.

Just checking...

Source (of course).

I, of course, recommend reading the entire Salon article. But, as always, the editor in me can't resist cutting to the chase a bit.

And it's an amazing country where an Arizona multimillionaire can attack a Chicago South Sider as an elitist and hope to make it stick. The Chicagoan was brought up by a single mom who had big ambitions for him, and he got scholarshipped into Harvard Law and was made president of the law review, all of it on his own hook, whereas the Arizonan is the son of an admiral and was ushered into Annapolis though an indifferent student, much like the Current Occupant, both of them men who are very lucky that their fathers were born before they were. The Chicagoan, who grew up without a father, wrote a book on his own, using a computer. The Arizonan hired people to write his for him. But because the Chicagoan can say what he thinks and make sense and the Arizonan cannot do that for more than 30 seconds at a time, the old guy is hoping to portray the skinny guy as arrogant.

Good luck with that, sir.

Meanwhile, the casual revelation last month that Mr. McCain has never figured out how to use a computer and has never sent e-mail or Googled is rather startling. It's like admitting that you've never clipped your own toenails or that you didn't know that toothpaste comes out of a tube because your valet always did that for you. It's like being amazed at the sight of a supermarket scanner. What world does Mr. McCain live in? Where does he keep his sense of curiosity? My 94-year-old mother has sent e-mail. Does somebody plan to show him how it's done and will they explain to him what "LOL" means?

I find that comparison and contrast quite funny, especially because it's good natured and, yet, still delivers the goods.

Enjoy.

I never thought I would say this, but I think it might, in fact, be time for the United States to be held internationally to a tribunal. I never thought, in my lifetime, that I would say that, that we have become like Serbia, where an international tribunal has to come to force us to apply the rule of law. I never imagined that a Congress, a Democratic-led Congress would refuse to take actions, even with the preeminent institution of the Red Cross saying, this is clearly torture and torture is a war crime. They are still refusing to take meaningful action.

So, we've come to this ignoble moment where we could be forced into a tribunal and forced to face the rule of law that we've refused to apply to ourselves.

I'm not normally one to argue for the prosecution and incarceration of anyone. However, the current administration's human rights violations are so grievous that there is no other remedy which has a prayer of restoring the rule of law other than prosecution.

Blanket pardons are likely forthcoming during the last few days of the administration, and a spineless Democratic congress seems averse to prosecuting its constitutional duty.

The only entity that will not be constrained to honor the president's pardon would be an international tribunal convened to prosecute the war crimes of the past 7 years.

Read the Greenwald post. It's a road map to a just government and an America I could support.

I Don't Get It
(Margo and Michael Timmins)

Breaking away to the other side
I wanna make sense of why we live and die
I don't get it, I don't get it

I ask my friends if they understand
They just laugh at me and watch another band
They don't worry, they don't worry

Lookin' for a way to lose my load
I wanna make it easy to walk this road
I can't find it, yeah I can't find it

Yeah, I'm looking for answers in so many places
I open my mind
I don't get it

Walkin' this earth and keepin' my peace
I do what I want but the price is steep
It don't seem right, it don't seem right

My mama she told me "One step at a time
and sooner or later you'll walk that line"
I don't want to, I don't want to

Takin' my time to live and die
I wanna find a way to do it right
and I ease on, and I ease on

They say "One thing always leads to another"
I open my mind
I don't get it

Breaking away to the other side
I wanna make sense of why we live and die
I don't get it, I don't get it
I don't get it, I don't get it
I don't get it

Have you ever been ransacked by it? Were that it weren't necessary, but it seems that it is, and, without it, we mortals don't appear to have the capacity for the quality of humility, compassion, nor caring that really matters.

Witness
by Sarah McLachlan

Make me a witness.
Take me out
out of darkness
out of doubt.

I won't weigh you down
with good intention,
won't make fire out of clay
or other inventions.

Will we burn in heaven
like we do down here?
Will the change come
while we're waiting?

Everyone is waiting.

And when we're done
soul searching
as we carried the weight
and died for a cause,
is misery
made beautiful
right before our eyes
will mercy be revealed
or blind us where we stand?

Will we burn in heaven
like we do down here?
Will the change come while we're waiting?
Everyone is waiting.

America needs more Jeremiads, more truth tellers, not less.

Thanks to Kira for knowing how much her dad would enjoy it.

Interestingly, last night there was an exception to this ideological whitewashing. As Glenn Greenwald notes, last night's Charlie Rose show unwittingly gave a platform to voices from beyond the ideological pale.

Rose's interview with Ali Fadhil and Sinan Antoon unwittingly contests the premises that led us to invade Iraq in the first place, not to mention the tragic aftermath of our invasion and subsequent occupation.

These are voices to which we should attend. Mainstream assumptions about what is and what is not acceptable are fundamentally flawed, and, as long as we believe them, our policies are doomed to failure.

What's exceptional is that these voices of dissent were ever aired.

Please enjoy this brief moment of truly free speech. Thanks to Greenwald for his excellent analysis.

My friend Rob forwarded this excellent article to me from the Huffington Post. It appears that American Morning producer Chez Pazienza has been dooced by CNN.

To say that Mr. Pazienza has not gone quietly into that dark night would be a bit of an understatement, but perhaps I'm a bit biased, since he's so deftly skewering an institution that I feel has been so cynically screwing the self-same viewing public that it's ostensibly serving.

I'll provide this brief excerpt, which will hopefully whet your appetite for what is one of the best political tracts that I've read in a long time.

During my last couple of years as a television news producer, I watched the networks try to recover from a six year failure to bring truth to power (the political party in power being irrelevant incidentally; the job of the press is to maintain an adversarial relationship with the government at all times) and what's worse, to pretend that they had a backbone all along. I watched my bosses literally stand in the middle of the newsroom and ask, "What can we do to not lead with Iraq?" -- the reason being that Iraq, although an important story, wasn't always a surefire ratings draw. I was asked to complete self-evaluations which pressed me to describe the ways in which I'd "increased shareholder value." (For the record, if you're a rank-and-file member of a newsroom, you should never under any circumstances even hear the word "shareholders," let alone be reminded that you're beholden to them.) I watched the media in general do anything within reason to scare the hell out of the American public -- to convince people that they were about to be infected by the bird flu, poisoned by the food supply, or eaten by sharks. I marveled at our elevation of the death of Anna Nicole Smith to near-mythic status and our willingness to let the airwaves be taken hostage by every permutation of opportunistic degenerate from a crying judge to a Hollywood hanger-on with an emo haircut. I watched qualified, passionate people worked nearly to death while mindless talking heads were coddled. I listened to Lou Dobbs play the loud-mouthed fascist demagogue, Nancy Grace fake ratings-baiting indignation, and Glenn Beck essentially do nightly stand-up -- and that's not even taking into account the 24/7 Vaudeville act over at Fox News. I watched The Daily Show laugh not at our mistakes but at our intentional absurdity.

The Zebra Storyteller

Once upon a time there was a Siamese cat who pretended to be a lion and spoke inappropriate Zebraic.

That language is whinnied by the race of striped horses in Africa.

Here now: An innocent zebra is walking in a jungle, and approaching from another direction is the little cat; they meet.

“Hello there!” says the Siamese cat in perfectly pronounced Zebraic. “It certainly is a pleasant day, isn’t it? The sun is shining, the birds are singing, isn’t the world a lovely place to live today!”

The zebra is so astonished at hearing a Siamese cat speaking like a zebra, why, he’s just fit to be tied.

So the little cat quickly ties him up, kills him, and drags the better parts of the carcass back to his den.

The cat successfully hunted zebras many months in this manner, dining on filet mignon of zebra every night, and from the better hides he made bow neckties and wide belts after the fashion of the decadent princes of the Old Siamese court.

He began boasting to his friends he was a lion, and he gave them as proof the fact that he hunted zebras.

The delicate noses of the zebras told them there was really no lion in the neighborhood. The zebra deaths caused many to avoid the region. Superstitious, they decided the woods were haunted by the ghost of a lion.

One day the storyteller of the zebras was ambling, and through his mind ran plots for stories to amuse the other zebras, when suddenly his eyes brightened, and he said, “That’s it! I’ll tell a story about a Siamese cat who learns to speak our language! What an idea! That’ll make ’em laugh!”

Just then the Siamese cat appeared before him, and said, “Hello there! Pleasant day today, isn’t it!”

The zebra storyteller wasn’t fit to be tied at hearing a cat speaking his language, because he’d been thinking about that very thing.

He took a good look at the cat, and he didn’t know why, but there was something about his looks he didn’t like, so he kicked him with a hoof and killed him.

That is the function of the storyteller.

Thanks to Margaret for placing this fable in my path.

I hear tell that the drawing might make its way into the magazine.