Update on the story as it developed from 7:30 pm below or at the bottom of the link

 

Media reports about the latest U.S. attack on Syria show the fog of war in action. What is truth? What is falsehood?

 

The Guardian, that bastion of news reporting in the U.K. said that Sunday's helicopter attack on civilians on the Syrian side of the Iraqi border was "the first known US attack on Syrian soil."

 

Clearly, the Guardian doesn't read Sy Hersh or even Ha'aretz. Ha'aretz, an Israeli paper, reported this morning on Sy Hersh's stories from 2004:

On June 18, another event occurred that produced a sharp Syrian response. A convoy of cars and trucks in Iraq that was heading for the Syrian border gave rise to suspicions that Saddam Hussein and members of his family were in the vehicles. An American Special Operations team penetrated Syrian territory to a depth of between 10 to 40 kilometers and waited for the convoy. About 80 people, including Syrian citizens, were killed in the American attack on the convoy, which turned out to be smuggling gasoline from Iraq into Syria. In the wake of the attack and the violation of Syrian sovereignty, Damascus decided to sever its line of cooperation with the Americans.

Not only that, but little old me, working on reporting done by the UPI, has even talked of U.S. attacks on Syrian soil. This latest jab on Syria happens to be the most brazen. You wouldn't know it by reading the New York Times, though.

The New York Times was a bit more circumspect about the lethal explosion. Reporting from Baghdad and not from Damascus, the Times said:

An explosion on Sunday killed nine construction workers and wounded 19 others near the border of Iraq and Syria, the police in Anbar Province said.

Local witnesses said they believed the blast was caused by American shelling, but Maj. Gen. Tariq al-Youssef, the provincial police chief in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar, which borders Syria, said that could not be confirmed.

The police statement did not indicate on which side of the border the blast had taken place.

Think the Times might be soft-peddling U.S. aggression? Contrast that lead with what the Guardian said:

US helicopters flying from Iraq landed inside Syria yesterday and dropped special forces who killed eight people, including four children, the Damascus government said today as Washington admitted it had targeted "foreign fighters".

Syria warned it held the US "wholly responsible for this act of aggression and all its repercussions".

Surely, this violation of international soveriegnity will provoke some sort response from either Syria, Iran or Hizbollah. News reports say nine dead, including four children.

 

That, my friends, is the fog of war. Whose reality? And for those who think that the border of Syria is a technologically advanced zone of warfare, I offer a photo from 7km off the border. These terrarists hiding in them sunflowers:

I've often wondered how much damage can farmers living in mud huts exact on the American empire. It's the fog of war. Who are you going to belive, the New York Times, the U.S. government or your lying eyes?

 

Update 7:30 pm: The New York Times now reports that the US of A has taken responsibility for the act.

WASHINGTON — A raid into Syria on Sunday was carried out by American Special Operations forces who killed an Iraqi militant responsible for running weapons, money and foreign fighters across the border into Iraq, American officials said Monday.

A few more grafs down, the Times explains that the action was okay because, well, it's like that bit in Pakistan (where we have the government's permission, kind of).

American officials said the Bush administration was determined to operate under an expansive definition of self-defense provided a rationale for strikes on militant targets in sovereign nations without those countries’ consent.

Of course, anonymity is the name of the game. Don't want anyone to have potential liability in future war crimes tribunals. The AP/Yahoo story plays the same game. Only the AP/Yahoo story says we killed an Al Qaida, so the other casualties are collateral damage, only they don't quite use that phrase.

SUKKARIYEH, Syria – A cross-border raid by U.S. special forces killed the al-Qaida-linked head of a Syrian network that smuggled fighters, weapons and cash into Iraq, an American counterterrorism official said Monday.

At least the AP report is bylined from Syria. And the AP gave us who the dead were.

At the targeted building, the floor was bloodstained Monday, with abandoned tennis shoes scattered amid pieces of human flesh. A tent pitched near the site had bags of bread, pots and pans and wool blankets...

About 30 women dressed in black wept in a small courtyard outside the home of Dawoud al-Hamad, who was killed in the bombing along with his four sons.

"They were innocent laborers who worked from dusk to dawn," said the man's wife, Rima. She said work at the construction site started last week.

Bush is doing his right best to make the next president's job close to impossible. And whoever the next commander in chief is, the media will likely deliver his international warmongering in terms of how it benefits the US.

 

Link...

 

Apparently, department managers requested additional Hartford police officers at City Hall to insure layoffs went smoothly yesterday, Friday, October 24.

 

Police didn't necessarily escort anyone out of the building, sources said.

 

"They were present," one source in City Hall said. "The protocol was that everyone had to pack up their stuff by noon, and were escorted out by their boss. The normal detail of one guy was increased. They stepped it up."

 

This source was less than pleased.

 

"People are getting laid off, they didn't commit a crime," the source said. "They didn't get fired. Why do you have to dehumanize them further? They are already sad they are losing their jobs."

 

Another source said the police didn't do anything egregious. The source said that Lillian Ruiz, the manager of Human Relations, and Carlos Rivera, the manager of Health and Human Services, were concerned about staff reactions. Rivera's staff works at Holcomb Street. Neither Ruiz nor Rivera could be reached for comment.

 

One such layoff was Ed Lazu, who worked in Human Relations. Last month, the Courant reported that Lazu received work from embattled contractor Carlos Costa, who performed work at Mayor Eddie Perez's house.

 

Lazu could not be reached for comment. Lazu's brother Sixto is the aide for Councilman Pedro Segarra. Neither Sixto Lazu or Attorney Segarra could be reached for comment either Saturday morning.

 

Segarra is not one of Perez's favorite councilmen. Should astute observers be wondering whether or not Perez vetted the list of those who got cut, imagining that department heads probably submitted a list of possible cuts to Perez prior to the ax falling? And did anyone in Perez's bloated executive branch fall to the budget cuts?

 

City Councilors had not seen a list of who had been laid off, according to Councilman Matt Ritter. Nor had councilman Luis Cotto heard who had gotten laid off, and who the police presence was there for.

 

"If it was Ed Lazu, I would think that it was unfortunate," Cotto said. "What can anybody do on a ten minute time? Everyone knew something was going to happen. I have been laid off and let go from jobs before, they wanted to do that with me, and I just found it degrading. It is not a way to end a job that these people put many years in."

 

The entire situation is unfortunate, Cotto said, from the concept that layoffs were needed to the point of actual termination.

 

Councilman Matt Ritter expressed dismay that council members did not know who got laid off, second that police presence could impact morale and third that the layoffs didn’t have to happen.

 

"We have not gotten a list of who have gotten laid off," Ritter said. "That is the first thing we all would like to see."

 

Ritter had prior work obligations which prevented him being at City Hall yesterday.

 

"The last thing you ever want to do is ever lay anyone off," Ritter said. "I have not seen the layoff list. One of the concerns we had as a council, we did not want to see a disproportionate share of people come from Hartford residents and from lower level staff, and none from upper level."

 

Hartford Courant reporter Jeffrey Cohen reported this morning that  of the 132 job cuts, 56 came from layoffs, 26 of whom live in Hartford. Ritter said none of this had to happen.

 

"One of the proposals we had talked about was cutting salaries of upper level people by 10% - that would have saved 30 jobs," Ritter said. "Let's cut everyone making more than $90,000 a year by ten percent – that would save half a million dollars. Some people above $90,000 you can't cut because they have contracts – but that might have saved 20 jobs.

 

"Is laying off a guy who just got hired at DPW with a wife and two kids here in Hartford good, or do you want to negotiate with someone making $110,000 a year?" Ritter asked.

 

Another cost cutting measure the city failed to explore was an offer from State Comptroller Nancy Wyman to join a health insurance risk pool, Ritter said.

 

"Both the Comptroller and Clarke King [president of the AFSCME union] thought we could save millions with that," Ritter said. "For some reason, we have not entered it.  There were a lot of proposals on the table that never really got flushed out. The administration has ability to lay people off. Council controls the budget. Overall there was a lack of discussion both ways."

 

The lack of knowledge on Council's part makes it difficult for him to respond, Ritter said.

 

"They can do the layoffs," he said. "I am not here to say what they did was illegal. If they had a more inclusive process, we could have maybe prevented this. It is a painful thing for everyone. It is a last resort."

 

At the end, it damages the city.

 

"Not only does it affect services, it affects morale at City Hall," Ritter said.

 

With more layoffs expected, it can't get any prettier.

Link...

 

Until I met a man Al Jazeera called a war criminal, I was going to write about Hartford’s Hooker Day parade – the march of Mayor Mike's legions – which is happening this Sunday afternoon, October 26 at 3 p.m. on the corner of Allyn and High Streets.

 

The Hooker Day parade was one of the first events I covered when I moved to Hartford 10 years ago. I remember seeing people dressed in tie-dyed haz-mat suits beating on five gallon drums and people on bicycles and students carrying signs about "lernin" and going to "skool" in Hartford’s oppressed system.

 

What fun, celebrating Thomas Hooker's march of independence from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to start his own corporate board of governance to protect his religious views.

 

But I had a mid-course correction once I sat in the New York City Bar Association headquarters in mid-town this past Saturday, October 18 for a conference hosted by the American Branch of the International Law Association.

 

Some of the sessions were sleepers, but my ears perked right up the moment Attorney Eric Blinderman said that Al-Jazeera had labeled him a war criminal for his role in creating the Dujail tribunal that resulted in the execution of Saddam Hussein.

 

Michael Newton, another architect of the Iraqi High Tribunal, wrote Enemy of the State, a book about his experiences in the trial. Newton, a professor from Vanderbilt, was a full-fledged advocate of the tribunal, and said it was a positive international development.

More about Dujail and possible war crimes trials here ...

 

Scumbags abound. As far as Esquire magazine is concerned, Holy Joe is one of the ten worst losers in Congress. Being called the worst in the nest of 535 idiots is something to be reckoned with.

 

Esquire put Holy Joe (4) up there with Georgia scumbag Saxby Chambliss (1), Louisiana's $90k in cold hard cash William Jefferson (6), California's lunatic Pete Stark (5), the indicted Alaskan Ted Stevens (10), and of course, Minnesota's anti-American McCarthyite, Michele Bachman (2).

 

As Esquire said of Connecticut's sleaziest independent:

Inherent in politics is the fact that someone always loses. Some lose gracefully, some lose poorly, and, as in the case of Joe Lieberman, some lose their minds. Since being defeated by an antiwar candidate in the Democratic primary in 2006, Lieberman (who was subsequently reelected as an Independent) has pursued his campaign of revenge against his former party, thinly disguised as an act of principle, replete with the quavering sanctimony that no country should have to put up with from anyone, much less from this small man.

So yeah, forget blaming Ralph Nader for Bush's victory in 2000. Connecticut's liberal son gone bad had something to do with that Democratic defeat. And for Lieberman staffers in 2006, like Ken Curran, do you feel utterly stupid yet for foisting this idiot of a Senator on us? We have to suffer through him for four more years. Jeez. The Republicans who ran Giordano against him in 2000 should be even more ashamed.

 

Lieberman's successor as CT Attorney General, Dick Blumenthal, is his first name for hitting this struggling law student with a $500 security for costs charge in my civil rights lawsuit for false arrest against the city of Hartford, four city cops and two state cops. Blumenthal's office represents the state cops.

 

Under the guise of Federal District Court for Connecticut Local Rule 83.3(a), Blumenthal's office said I had to fork up half a grand because they feared I was a vexatious litigant, and the money insured I was serious in pursuing a remedy for violations of my civil rights.

 

Seriously Dick? I spent 13 hours in jail because an executive branch law enforcement agency targeted me for exercising my First Amendment rights. I nearly got my face rearranged in jail for accidentally touching a large man who could snore and chew gum simultaneously, and my life was turned upside down by being called erratic and equated with a violent lunatic in the New York Times, and you think I'm being vindictive? You heard what John Stewart said to Sarah Palin, right?

 

The real pisser: Local Rule 83.3(a) was promulgated by the District Court in response to a steady flow of vexatious litigation by one Anthony R. Martin-Trigona, a pro se litigator who filed numerous meritless suits, like one to intervene in federal Judge Jose Cabranes' divorce and get custody of the Cabranes children.

 

Martin-Trigona was prevented from joining the Illinois bar because he has a "moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character." So go figure that there's this guy named Andy Martin on Sean Hannity a few weeks back saying Obama is a Muslim.

 

Andy Martin is Anthony R. Martin-Trigona, who actually was born in Middletown, and ran for Senate in Connecticut. Wikipedia has a complete dossier on this jackass Andy Martin. Dickipedia has the dossier on Hannity. Does he vet his guests? Is this how low the right is sinking - relying on guests who are so mentally imbalanced that the Illinois Supreme Court refuses to allow them to practice law?

 

Gary Jules is not a scumbag, and he has an ode to those of us trying to remain sane in this Mad World. If you didn't notice, it's 2 a.m. and I'm done pulling punches after reading admin law for the past three hours.

Link...

 

An active, passionate third-party registrar of voters in Hartford, a leader like Urania Petit, would be a boon to democracy.

 

Unfortunately, a heck of a lot more people read the Hartford Courant editorial page than this column, and a few weeks back, the sinking ship editorialists at America's oldest daily newspaper surmised that Urania Petit's candidacy for registrar was a systemic redundancy.

 

The editorial dismissed Petit's bid to become the Working Families Party registrar of voters without actually addressing the merits of the issues. So I beg you: Don't listen to the corporate hacks scribbling for the master's dimes. Urania Petit will bring effusive energy, excitement and new ideas to the registrar's office. She deserves your vote.

 

When not more than 20 percent of voters on average turn out for elections in Hartford, we have a sick system. Petit agrees. The two parties have failed utterly in their ability to create a healthy civic life here in the nation's poverty capital. Petit wants to see 70, 80 percent voting rates in Hartford.

Link...

 

D avid Owens, Hartford Courant ace reporter, comes up with this gem from the state police barracks in Canaan:

The principal of the Walther G. Cady School at the Connecticut Juvenile Training School in Middletown has been arrested after allegedly damaging a neighbor's property.

 

John A. Mattera, 55, of New Hartford, was charged Saturday with attempted third-degree burglary, disorderly conduct and third-degree criminal mischief. He posted $1,500 bail and was released. He is scheduled to appear Monday in Superior Court in Bantam, which is a section of Litchfield.

It should be noted that Mattera is a defendant in this April 2008 lawsuit, alleging that DCF has sexism, racism and violence problems at CJTS. We come back to Owens and Courant:

Gary Kleeblat, a DCF spokesman, said today that Mattera notified the DCF commissioner of his arrest, as required by agency policy.

 

"We're reviewing the matter," Kleeblat said. The allegations against him do not involve children so Mattera remains in his position, Kleeblat said.

 

State police at the Canaan barracks said Mattera, of 373 Main St., New Hartford, was charged after allegedly damaging a tenant's property in an adjacent apartment. According to New Hartford assessor records, 373 Main St. is a single family home.

Link...

 

I n summation, Obama can be dishonest yet transcendent, Joe the Plumber can boast of 340 videos about him on Youtube, and we just can't count on morning radio to do much.

 

While I almost believe Obama is th great hope he makes himself out to be, the reptitive quality of discourse that bored to tears my two debate watching companions told me all I needed to know. Presidential politics are still meaningless to most Americans like Joe the Plumber.

 

And in the quest for power, no truth nor dream is so sacred as to not be sold. Hearing McCain trumpet the American Dream rang as hollow as the rock anthems his campaign has bought the rights to, the ones the musicians don't want him to use.

 

As for FM radio, WPLR had me on for three minutes this morning. I discussed the Bradley Effect - don't trust polls when it comes to a black candidate in white America because there may be a 7-point differential between those who say they'll vote black and those who actually do - and voter fraud.

 

The ACORN business in the debates last night, and over the past week, to me, is a matter of mere projection. The Republicans have stolen the past elections. Now that it seems pretty clear they are going to have to hand over the keys to the Democrats, they start crying voter fraud.

 

For those willing to look, the literature and investigations about GOP voter suppression in 2000 in Florida and in 2004 in Ohio could fill up a library. But most wouldn't know it because it is not reported. Yet the Republicans claim the Democrats are perpetrating the most massive scheme to undermine democracy in American history. Please.

Link...

 

C onsider this an unabashed moment of self-promotion:

 

Thursday, October 16 at 8:20 am, I am booked for a segment on WPLR to discuss the presidential debate/conversation set for tonite in Long Island.

 

McCain has promised to whip Obama, a kind of startling use of language - how often do we allow a white politician to intimate the use of a whip on a black politician. Racial wounds run deep in this country, and McCain knows each and every word he says will be parsed.

 

Obama is ready for the Bill Ayers connection. One hopes that Obama brings up McCain's connection to the Keating Five, but after two debates full of non-moments, I'm imagining Obama might bring up McCain's messy first divorce sooner than he'll mention McCain's near indictment in the late 1980s.

 

The slick Obama campaign has released a memo it calls Obama's pre-debate strategy. After reading it, it seems more liekly that they wrote wonky press release and gave it a new label so as to make it seem like we are getting an inside look at the workings of the campaign.

 

Perhaps I am being cynical, but McCain and Obama won't even release the contract they formed that set the parameters to the "debates."

 

Any strategy memo would likely have more depth, and one hopes that if McCain is prepared to bring up the Weather Underground, then Obama better bring up Sarah Palin's connections to the right wing militia/separatist movement, something well documented.

 

Will the kid gloves come off? Will we hear anything other than platitudes? I ain't holding my breath. I'll need it to dissect the equivocating on the radio tomorrow morning. Tune in then.

 

Link...

 

W orking on Nader's 2004 presidential campaign, we endured all sorts of calls from people who once were Ralph's biggest fans, from all across the country, urging him to drop out of the race.

 

We defended Nader's Frist Amendment rights on the phone, and tried to hang up with them in under 30 seconds. Why waste time? Interoffice banter referred to these callers as chicken-shit liberals or viral progressives.

 

The name-calling allowed us to dehumanize the other, the enemy who we thought was with us, in order to protect ourselves. It's kind of easy to label Joe Schmo from San Francisco an idiot when he calls you the same for trying to actually implement the progressive policies you want.

 

But how do you respond to those you love who disagree with your policy ideals? Your friends are your mirrors, the saying goes.

 

I feed the illusion that I surround myself with people who demonstrate characteristics I want to see in myself: smart, critical thinkers who are adventurous, brave, bold, courageous, fearless, loving, caring, compassionate, generous, funny, fun-loving, mischevious, mysterious, skilled, filled with wonder and awe, real, dispensing with pretense, among other things.

 

To expect everyone I know to fall in line with my views is a fallacy, and it would make for a boring world. Yet the past couple of days, ideas I hold as naked truth, so natural as to be undeniable, have been questioned by people who I thought shared such convictions with me.

 

For example, my mom is a justice of the peace, but she swore to me she will not marry gays in Connecticut, despite the recent landmark CT Supreme Court ruling and the promise from legislators to codify said opinion into statute.

How do I convince my mom...

 

B oy, I can't say that I'm a fan of waking up at 6:30 a.m. the be ready to cheer on two of my sisters and one of their boyfriends running the Hartford Half-Marathon Saturday, October 11, 2008.

 

Aside from being a gorgeous day out there today, it was awesome to see like 10,000 people taking advantage of what the city has to offer.

 

Best moments for me - obviously the photo above. I rode my road bike around the city, on the course, loving the lack of cars, rooting not just my siblings and their significant others, but anyone bold enough to attempt a 13.1 or 26.2 mile run.

 

I don't have the knees for it. My oldest sister, who has run these types of races around the world, said HPD was on target and doing a good job. So kudos to the boys in blue. And all the music at all the stops was energetic.

 

It makes me wonder, though, if we need all this electricity to pump rock and roll through the atmosphere. Why not just acoustic? Along the east side of the river, at mile 20, I heard some gentlement banging on drums, and it seemed plenty loud.

 

In Bushnell Park, after the race, the noise of amplifiers rung through my head, and it seemed to distract from the quality of hang-out time I had with my family.

 

Jodi Rell's OneThing, a sponsor of the event, and which also had a table in the Park, should be so innovative as to wonder whether or not we need such loud music. It strikes me as odd, considering that after a bicycle race I threw, the police attended to our loudness not once, but twice.

 

So if it offends my neighbors, why should we tolerate it at such a massive event? Has our culture gotten the best of our sensitivities?

 

Anyways, Congrats to the Hartford Marathon volunteers and staff who put on a great race.

Link...

 

So I hate driving my car. I am not a very good driver, and of all the lousy car culture trappings, I loathe when you break down in the middle of the highway at 4:30 on a weekday afternoon.

 

Yuck. It cost me $70 to tow to a garage, and I was 30 minutes late for law school. In education law, the class discussed the reach of the government into our daily lives. I argued that policy impacts behavior, and shapes the way we live, and made me late for class.

 

People said that I granted too much power to the government, that I afforded the institution more credit than it deserves. I tried to use the automobile as an example, how auto manufacturers bought up trolley companies and the laissez faire regulatory state let this radical transit monopoly emerge.

 

Yet I lacked time to delve into the subsidies our tax dollars give the auto industry – if the public fisc didn’t spring for roads, how would the private single-occupant vehicle transportation system work? In ways we don't even realize, government pervades all areas of our lives.

 

When we do challenge corrupt, dangerous policies, we pay a price. This Monday, I attended the wake of John Hogan of Hamden, age 73. I drove my rotten car down to the funeral home. I had never met John, but he inspired me.

 

Hogan and eight others doused hundreds of draft cards with homemade napalm in 1968, saving countless young men from war. They were the Catonsville 9, from Maryland, and they all did between two and three years in federal pens for their acts of conscience.

 

With another of the Catonsville 9, Tom Lewis, I once spent an afternoon in jail. The repercussions of that obstruction of free passage on a sidewalk charge from 2004 still haunt me. I missed Lewis’ wake when he died in May. I had to go pay my respects to John Hogan.

Link...

 

For about 45 minutes tonite, I hung out down at the Asylum Hill Congregational Church with about 50 other people for a Candidates Forum. Sponsor Hartford Organizing for Power and Equality provided excellent pizza, and an opportunity for candidates to sound off.

 

I went to shoot some politicos for file photos. And for the most part, only incumbents are running, and my opinion is pretty set about them.

 

This was for state candidates, so Steve Fournier, the Green runnign for Congress in the Hartford, didn't get a platform. But he sent out a decent e-mail about his experiences that's on his website here.

 

And, most importantly, I was surprised to realize that both Craig Stallings and Larry Charles are challenging Marie Kirkley-Bey for the Fifth district seat in the House of Representatives.

 

Kirkley-Bey has held that seat for eight terms, or 16 years, I think she said. She survived a primary challenge this August from Abe Giles.

 

So, here, in about 25 words are less, my impression of the candidates saying "Elect me because:"

 

Link to see what the Candidates said...

 

Considering that tonite's Town Hall-style debate is supposed be a wide-ranging discussion about all the policies that will impact our country in the next eight years, yet there exist a series of topics that are off-limits in mainstream political debate. Call is censorship. Call it palatability to mainstream American values.

 

Oh, he can't win if he talks about that _______. Well, why the hell not? It is a festering sore in my community, in my country, and it needs to be discussed.

 

So, in honor of enforced silence, here is a quick list of words and names that we will most certainly not hear tonite:

 

Legalization

Hemp

Prison-Industrial Complex

Perpetual Warfare

International Criminal Court

War Crimes

Nuremburg

Impeachment

Unitary Executive Theory

Resegregation

Glass-Steagall Act

Keating Five (although Obama has made a website...)

Lynching

Saudi Arabia ***OBAMA SAID IT*** Holy Cow! He must not hand out with King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz like some oligarchs.

Procedural Due Process

Troy Davis

Clemency

Capital Punishment Moratorium

Instant Runoff Voting

Proportional Representation

Caging

Voter Suppression

Black Box Voting

Diebold

Coup d'Etat

Civil Disobedience

Corporate Welfare

Corporate Crime

Blackwater

Fallujah

Skin Cancer

The American Israeli Political Affairs Committee

Paul Craig Roberts

Free Speech

Ralph Nader

Cynthia McKinney

Bob Barr

"Loose Change"

Central Intelligence Agency ***Gosh, wasn't it funny to watch McCain dance around the history of Afghanistan and Pakistan without mentioning the CIA's involvement in creating the Taliban and the "freedom fighters" who overstretched the Soviet Union to the point of collapse.***

Substantive Differences

Nuclear Disarmament

Abolish

Universal Declaration of Human Rights ***Obama mentioned that health care was a right. He's getting there.***

Roosevelt's Economic Bill of Rights

Nazi

Operation Paperclip

Don Siegelman

Karl Rove

Alberto Gonzalez

Joseph Wilson

Valeria Plame

Donald Rumsfeld

War Crime

Harry Whittington

It would be too easy to throw a list of names of political prisoners, like Mumia Abu Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Jeffrey Luers and TreArrow, so I won't take up our time and space. America doesn't have political prisoners.

Saddam Hussein

Catonsville 9

Plowshares

Gilded Age

Imperialism

Fannie Lou Hamer

Goodman, Cheney and Schwerner

Todd Palin

Treason

Seccessionist - Not mentioned, as promised. But what is so bad about the word? So McCain wins because of the Bradley effect, Karl Rove and who knows what else. He dies in office. Palin takes over. She breaks up the union - she's a seccessionist. She won't start a civil war over keeping California in the Union. California is for god-hating fags. Home rule for Northeast and West coast liberals. We aren't dealing with Kansas anymore...

Alaska Independence Party

Polar Bears

Car-Free

Green Party

Constitutionalist Party

Libertarian Party

Individual Liberty

Pre-emptive detention

Guantanamo Bay

Abu Ghraib - How can McCain and Obama proclaim that out soldiers serve with honor, and know that their policies turn men into monsters, writ Haditha, writ Fallujah?

Baghram Air Force Base

Opium

LSD

MK Ultra

Crumbling Infrastructure

Lyndon Baines Johnson

Thurgood Marshall

Googling any of these words will give you a basic idea as to why they are unmentionable.

Link...

 

Found, Garbage Pail Kids, in Chill Will's detritus before he moves to Key West.

 

Link...

 

A regular installment in the Continuing Saga of Morning Radio in America's 28th or so largest media market - New Haven/Hartford.

 

So it's October, but I gotta relate what happened Monday, September 15 when I heard Jesse Ventura's voice on WPLR's Chaz and AJ's morning show.

 

Mind you, since I heard the former Minnesota Governor and pro wrestler hawking his book, Don't Start the Revolution Without Me, Chaz and AJ have done thoughtful interviews with Congressman Joe Courtney and Ralph Nader (which in full disclosure, I helped set-up).

 

Chaz and AJ took free speech a step further this week, as Monday, Sept. 29, they spent 12 or so minutes cancelled with Harold Burbank, the Green Party candidate from the Fifth Congressional district. Burbank still awaits his interview.

 

Burbank, an experienced human rights attorney, has been shut out of League of Women Voters debates between incumbent Democrat Chris Murphy and Republican with a mobster problem challenger David Cappiello. The League shut down Independent Party candidate Tom Winn, too. Susan B. Anthony would not be proud of the incorrigible suppression of free speech.

 

League president Jara Burnett and I don't see eye to eye on this. After I read her some history on the League's insistence on open debates from three decades ago, she hung up the phone on me today.

 

While Chaz and AJ have done that to me as well, the PLR morning show treated Courtney, Nader and Ventura with ultimate respect. I missed the Burbank interview, but the bits I heard with Courtney, Nader and Venture they were intelligent conversations about pressing issues.

Link...

 

Lawmakers can determine the number of prison beds they need to build based on third grade literacy rates. Yet states have not enacted effective policy changes that will improve third grade literacy rates.

 

Reducing class sizes in pre-K through third grade should be the first priority for our governments: municipal, state and federal.

 

In 1978, Project Star in Tennessee demonstrated the positive the impacts of smaller class sizes on academic achievement in grades K through 3. Researchers found that children in classes with 15:1 student-teacher ratios outperformed students in classes larger than 20:1.

 

From Heros, Inc.:

"The Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) was a four-year longitudinal class-size study funded by the Tennessee General Assembly and conducted by the State Department of Education.

"Over 7,000 students in 79 schools were randomly assigned into one of three interventions: small class (13 to 17 students per teacher), regular class (22 to 25 students per teacher), and regular-with-aide class (22 to 25 students with a full-time teacher's aide).

"Classroom teachers were also randomly assigned to the classes they would teach. The interventions were initiated as the students entered school in kindergarten and continued through third grade.

"The analysis of academic achievement consistently and significantly demonstrated the advantage of small classes over regular size classes and regular sized classes with a teaching assistant. As Jeremy Finn and C.M. Achilles stated in the American Educational Research Journal (Fall 1990), "This research leaves no doubt that small classes have an advantage over larger classes in reading and math in early primary grades."

The additional benefits of small classroom include more motivated teachers. Heros website also reports that students in small classes are more likely to pursue college, and have higher graduation rates and higher grade point averages (GPAs) than regular class size students.

 

It seems a no-brainer, then, that education equality and adequacy advocates like those in the Sheff v. O’Neill movement would have latched onto Project Star. So why have we been waiting to fix it and reduce class sizes?

Link...

 

The 1,800 mile coastline of Somalia, where pirates currently lurk, is not where I saw international brigands.

 

When I spin my sea yarns - like heading south in the Red Sea towards Somalia - people ask me if I ever saw any pirates. We weren't attacked like that boat in the Med recently, or Le Ponant in the Gulf of Aden this spring. Or like this attack in the Gulf of Aden this week, where Somali pirates captured a ship full of military hardware.

 

But we did see one pirate ship. Yet it wasn't on the African coast. We didn't need any of the armaments we had prepared for unfriendly visitors in the Red Sea. We smuggled across the Atlantic a pair of shotguns and a rifle from a south Florida Bass Pro Shops.

 

We carried a rocket-powered line launcher - normally a man overboard tool, but if some man boarded our ship, it would work as a repellent. We had plans for anyone who dared mess with us in the Arabian Sea.

 

On watch, we'd imagine what we'd do if the pirates boarded: engineer, mate and captain grab the guns. Deckie fouls the attackers' props with lines. Bowsun navigates, watching speed and direction and performing evasive manuevers.

 

We ran without running lights under the bright moonlight in the Gulf of Aden, hoping to avoid the fate that befalls other ships, like Le Ponant.

 

On the radio, passing tankers or frieghters caught us on the radar, and once in a while, a strong foreign accent in English would mutter across Channel 16 - "What you do, it is not safe. Why no lights? Turn on your lights."

 

Uh, pirates, dude, you wanted to say. We're a white ship. Bad guys might mistake us for a ghost ship or something. We maintained radio silence.

 

And then there were those 10 p.m. all-hands-muster-in-the-bridge moments when something strange settled on the radar a mile away from Maverick II, and we thought, these are the fuckers who want to capute our booty. The blips turned out to be 27" sailboats or third-world fishing boats.

 

Who can deny nerves, scary and raw? Trust no ship passing in the night off the coast of Africa.

Link...

 

A regular installment in the Continuing Saga of Morning Radio in America's 28th or so largest media market - New Haven/Hartford.

 

So, in our last adventure, Chaz and AJ put a halt to my fledgling career as a progressive morning radio commentator.

 

But I didn't stop listening to PLR - I have it programmed onto button 3 in my car. 99.1 is mid-spectrum on the FM dial, not around many other listenable stations. So it has a spot on my rotation.

 

Once in while they play a good tune that still has some listenability, some life and spark left in it, otherwise, I'm comfortably numb from hearing comfortably numb. The Wall contains a dozen other great songs, like Nobody's Home: "I got a little black book with my poems in it, a bag with a suitcase and a comb, when I'm a good dog they sometimes throw me a bone."

 

Whatever, I'm done beating PLR's dead horse playlist.

 

This one August morning, Tuesday, August 19, I took off from work to head down the beach with friends, get in a good day at the beach before school started. I'm sitting a drug store parking lot waiting for a friend who ran in for something, flipping stations, and I hear Gov. M. Jodi Rell's voice.

 

Gov. Rell deigns to grace them with her presence regularly. They don't ask hard questions, and she's a morning show maven. Check out Andy Bromage's reporting in the Advocate about how Grandma Rell studiously (if anything she does can be considered studious) avoids WNPR's John Dankoski and his hour-long interview-call in format, Where We Live.

Link...

 

Watched what passes for political discourse in the United States last night, and walked away without vomiting on the sofa.

 

Obviously, it starts as a sham considering that the debate disincluded three other presidential candidates - Bob Barr, Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney. This trio have all qualified for enough state ballots to mathematically have a chance at enough electoral votes to capture the presidency. That they weren't included casts the entire exercise as a charade.

 

That McCain and Obama both thanked the corrupt Commission on Presidential Debates, the allegedly not-for-profit but very partisan body in charge of the debates, goes to show they are corrupt, too.

 

Pundits say Obama won, and I tend to agree with Sean Penn, that we all lost. No mention of Palestine, as Penn said. I'll add to that list Saudi Arabia, Bagram, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib.

 

How Obama could debate McCain and not mention the Keating Five is beyond me. The year of the Keating Five, 1986, was clearly in play, as the first question from Jim Lehrer - the terriblest moderator ever - rang up a quote from Eisenhower. Then McCain mentioned 1983 and plenty of other dates from his history.

 

I felt like I was watching Obama as a character inHarrison Bergeron,content with the handicaps placed upon him by a mad society. It was like Obama had NASCAR restrictor plates on his Constitutional Law professor mind. Or maybe he really does believe all the crap he was peddling.

 

McCain and Obama both suffer from visions of empire. When they talked about Iraq, they talked about casualties in terms of 4,000 American lives. The "We don't do body count" ethos has permeated this debate, and there was no mention of millions of dead and displaced persons around the world harmed by this "War on Terror."

Link...

 

A regular installment in the Continuing Saga of Morning Radio in America's 28th or so largest media market - New Haven/Hartford.

 

Way back, a few months ago, before law school kicked in, before my time disappeared into text books, I hammered out a deal with Chaz and AJ, the morning crew on WPLR 99.1FM, Connecticut's so-called number one morning show.

 

Chaz and AJ granted me a pre-recorded minute every Monday morning for four weeks, to be aired at 6 a.m.

 

They set out some sacred cows, like that I couldn't go after their advertisers. PLR, a classic rock monster in Milford, is owned by Cox Communications.

 

I disagreed with limits on editorial content, and the next week, giving them credit for accepting alternate points of view, I went to work.

Week 1 - July 21
Good morning. This is Ken Krayeske with the40yearplan.com checking in with 60 seconds worth of not normally heard-on-the-radio news and views.

On Thursday last week, President-elect Al Gore challenged Americans to transition all electrical power supplies in this country away from fossil fuels and go to renewable sources like wind, solar and geothermal. And he wants us to do this in the next ten years.

A debate has ensued whether or not this will be included in the Democratic party platform for the 2008 presidential election. What is odd about this is not that I called Gore the President-elect, but that the Apollo Project, the 10-year plan to energy independence, was pushed by Gore's opponent Ralph Nader in the 2000 presidential election.

My notes for week one are in a notebook, and I don't have a sign off. I'm sure I did one. I'm not sure the response, because my alarm didn't wake me up. But one of my oldest friends in the world, Pete the Pole, called me up afterwards and said that I didn't sound good.

I vowed to improve. I wrote and rewrote and practiced and recited the words for week two.

Read What Happened in Weeks Two, Three and Four...

 

What is the exact amount of money that will corrupt a person? $100? $200? $10,000?

 

That's what State Representative Corky Mazurek wants to know. Mazurek, a three term Democrat incumbent in the 80th district in Wolcott and Southington, won a heated August primary over challenger Karen Houghtaling by about 70 votes.

 

Mazurek's primary victory produced one of the first bumps in the road for the new campaign finance law, bumps which the Elections Enforcement Commission is determined to smooth out by the time the 2010 election cycle rolls around.

 

Mazurek, who voted against the clean elections bill back in 2005, participated in the program during the primary, and was the recipient of a contested series of mailings by the Realtors PAC, worth about $10,000.

 

Houghtaling's campaign manager Phil Sherwood wonders exactly how many of those 70 votes came from that mailer.

Link...