Not a very scary jack o' lantern, just goofy happy, sitting outside our windows and now in the ether as well.

The just-about-legendary, yet historical, New York socialist community, The Workman's Circle, or Der Arbeter Ring celebrates over one hundred years of caring. Now exhibiting the effects of its success, or at least those of its age, it looks for ways to attract the young. With the humor and optimism which its members have always exhibited, the director of fund-raising efforts explains the strategy, "I don't want to say younger people are smarter, however there is one thing: they're going to be around longer."

It's a wonderful story.

The beginnings:

It was started in a tenement on the Lower East Side.

A handful of immigrant socialists, most of them Yiddish-speaking laborers, gathered in the Essex Street home of Sam Greenberg, a cloak maker, wanting to find a way to take care of one another through sickness and death as they tried to gain footholds in a formidable country. In the process, these newcomers hoped to ease their loneliness.

Quickly their idea, the Workmen's Circle, caught on. People seemed to like joining a group that helped tide them through an illness yet allowed them to sit with friends over a glass of tea and argue a fine point of radical politics. Within 30 years, the organization gained 80,000 members around the country, joined with the garment unions to broaden the rights of American workers and started an early and absurdly cheap version of health insurance and dozens of Yiddish schools.

Jam Master Jay, the DJ of the rap group Run-DMC, was shot in the head and killed last night in a Queens recording studio.

"He has a little soul, to rock n' roll

Every record that he touches turns to gold

He's well conducted, self-instructed

His styles were plied, heavily constructed

Mechanically inclined, and if you don't mind

We add spice to your life, time after time

And think about times, where he's a long laster

We rock our rhymes for the Jam-Master."

"Jam Master Jammin'" (1985)

From the Run-DMC site:

Hey, Sad day. Of all the people to get caught in that sh*t. What a shame.
It's like Rap has lost their Beatle.

Mark

Michael Bronski has written a sharp essay on the real Harry Hay and his "uneasy relationship with the gay movement."

Hay believed that "queer sexuality had an essential outsider quality that made the outcast homosexual the perfect prophet for a heterosexual world lost in strict gender roles, enforced reproductive sexuality, and numbingly straitjacketed social personae."

During [the seventies], Hay spoke out against what he saw as the increasing conservatism of the gay-and-lesbian movement. As he saw it, the gay — and now, lesbian — movement was far more interested in electing homosexuals to government positions than in making the government responsible to the needs of its people. It was more interested in making sure that gay people were represented in commercial television and films than in critiquing the ways mass culture destroyed the human spirit. It was too interested in making strategic alliances with conservative politicians, rather than exposing how most politicians were working hand in glove with bloodless, destructive corporations.

After he founded the Radical Faeries in 1979 ("something of a cross between born-again queers and in-your-face frontline shock troops practicing gender-fuck drag"), the movement as a whole treated him as a "benign crackpot," when it did not ignore him altogether. Gays, no less than all other Americans, could stomach his long history of involvement with the American Communist Party and political radicalism in general, but he seemed to irritate everyone with his persistent support of the right of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) to be represented in the movement.

Even many of Hay’s more dedicated supporters could not side with him on this. But from Hay’s point of view, silencing any part of the movement because it was disliked or hated by mainstream culture was both a moral failing and a seriously mistaken political strategy. In Harry’s eyes, such a stance failed to grapple seriously with the reality that there would always be some aspect of the gay movement to which mainstream culture would object.

....

In death, though, Harry Hay’s critics have finally been able to do what they couldn’t do when he was alive: make him presentable [witness the laudatory press releases and eulogies even from the institutions most antithetical to his life's work]. . . . But it’s important to remember Hay — with all his contradictions, his sometimes crackpot notions, and his radiant, ecstatic, vision of the holiness of being queer — as he lived. For in his death, Harry Hay is becoming everything he would have raged against.

Richard Goldstein made it onto the NYTimes Op-Ed page again today, this time using Harry Hay's death to remind us all of the American blackout of queer history.

Why are the gay movement's roots so obscured? The reason is the invisibility of gay history. With rare exceptions, schools fail to acknowledge that there even is such a thing. Only university students who opt for elective courses — if they are offered — learn that, in the 1920's, gay liberation was an important part of Emma Goldman's radical agenda. You won't find that mentioned in the film "Reds," in which Goldman was a prominent character. Nor can you deduce from "Cabaret" (film or play) that gay people in the Weimar Republic did more than patronize kinky nightclubs. The gay community was a very visible part of Berlin's political landscape, and its leader Magnus Hirschfeld was an emblem of the liberal society that the Nazis smashed. The famous photo of storm troopers burning books is widely thought to have been taken at Mr. Hirschfeld's library.

Oh sure, they're gonna "open their files." Actually, it's simply a continuing coverup of Vatican complicity in the Holocaust, and a transparent propaganda move, to show historians "the great works of charity and assistance" undertaken by Pius XII for prisoners and other victims during World War II.

VATICAN CITY - Some 3.5 million files on World War II prisoners of war will be made public by the Vatican in January as part of a promised release of documents intended to counter criticism of the papacy during the Holocaust.

The Daily News story continues with a cautionary note.

The files are believed to deal exclusively with the treatment of POWs during the conflict and not directly with issues surrounding the Holocaust.

Critics of Pope Pius XII, the wartime Pope, argue that he failed to raise his voice and use his position to head off the extermination of European Jews by the Nazis. Defenders insist he made every effort possible to help Jews and others.

Jewish groups and others have been seeking a complete opening of the Vatican archives.

Boondocks' Huey really says it best, and it makes a great sound bite, should any of us find ourselves under a microphone in the near future:

Just a reminder that the economy is in the toilet, we're on the brink of global war, our government has been hijacked bycorporate crooks, teachers still don't make money, and because you haven't done anything to stop this, you're a pathetic excuse for an American.

We sat in the first row for the Robert Wilson/Tom Waits "Woyzeck" last night. We're both getting impatient (at the least) with Wilson, but Waits' raw super-noir keeps him interesting. (This is their third collaboration, after "Black Rider" and "Alice.")

Misery's the River of the World
Misery's the River of the World
Everybody Row! Everybody Row!
Misery's the River of the World
Misery's the River of the World
Everybody Row! Everybody Row!
Everybody Row!

The first row meant we had the wonderful theatre in the pit as well as the fabulous Danish orchestra's scrowling, pluckering, scrinching, smuthering murooning sounds. Waits' music and words stuff is absolutely wonderful and worth the price of admission alone, but the cast was right on, as were the magical mechanicals which sometimes bedevil these Wilson things.

The costumes, the sets, the makeup, and the design conception were all diverting, and I suppose I mean that in the best sense (I did love the Drum Major's devilish red tail/coattails!), and the work was chuck-full of early twentieth-century German theatre references that really work with the 1837 Buechner text. For me, that text seems fresher and less perverse with each visit, whatever the medium.

The choreography (Wilson), especially the trademark stylized limb movements, was absolutely right, when it wasn't slowed to almost a halt. Barry said it hardly seemed right that even Berg's grand opera is shorter than Wilson's production, usually by over forty minutes.

I think there was a moral, but the whole experience was too jaggedly lush to leave any memory of it. Great, great fun.

Oh yes, seen in the audience and again at the reception following the performance: the great Isabella Rossellini and the indescribable (so I'll do lots of links) Slava Mogutin.

Oh what joy! To be able just once to say to the Bushies, "Take a Hike!" and know that they heard, and that so did everybody else.

WASHINGTON - The sons of the late Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone said Vice President Cheney wouldn't be welcome at their father's memorial service last night, sources confirmed.

"The family thought it wouldn't be appropriate. They were concerned about the difference in principles between the two men — and believe me it's principles here, not politics," a top Democratic operative told the Daily News.

At a certain point, we have to admit it and we have to say it, "those people are evil!"

How far has The Left gotten by being nice, playing it like it was all only a game or a cocktail party?

The Right doesn't play.

[Yesterday a Middle East intellectual] suggested that there was a double standard in the extraordinary reaction against Mr. Hussein today compared with the world's inaction when he turned chemical weapons against Iran and even against Iraqi civilians.

"If chemical weapons are bad, why when they were used against [Iranian] or Iraqi citizens wasn't Iraq condemned and pressured?" he asked.

The man who posed the question, responding to reporters' questions while on a visit to Spain, was President Mohammad Khatami of Iran, representative of the "Axis of Evil."

Mr. Khatami, a midlevel cleric who studied philosophy, is the first Iranian leader to make an official visit to Spain since Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1965. He is using the occasion to press his campaign for the "dialogue among civilizations" that he introduced at the United Nations four years ago.

At Complutense University in Madrid, he delivered a speech on Cervantes and his relevance in today's world. In the course of the speech, he cited Proust, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Orwell, Kafka and Mann, and criticized modern-day Don Quixotes who lack his "kindhearted, merciful and humanitarian" nature and "ruthlessly assassinate and annihilate people with their huge war machines."

Although Khatami's question about chemical weapons went unanswered in Madrid, we should know the answer. In the past, the weapons were only directed toward brown people, and now they are about to be turned on white ones, or so we are told.

The whole answer is too complex for Americans, and for that reason, as well as for what it tells about our greed and hypocrisy, it won't be put forward by Washington.

More from this notorious evil-doer.

In a sharp criticism of the United States, President Mohammad Khatami of Iran said today that his country opposed a war against neighboring Iraq and charged that Washington's misguided campaign against terrorism had strengthened support for Osama bin Laden in the Muslim world.

"Have the erroneous policies of the United States made bin Laden more popular or more hated than before in various sectors of the Islamic world?" Mr. Khatami asked in a joint news conference with the Spanish prime minister, José María Aznar, during a three-day official visit to Spain. "Have the erroneous policies of the United States weakened Islamic trends that favor wisdom and democracy? The United States with its hegemony has strengthened bin Laden, so we ought to condemn it in some way for supporting terrorism."

And finally.

Mr. Khatami even likened the logic of Mr. bin Laden to that of President Bush.

"I hear a discourse from two poles," Mr. Khatami said in his native Persian. "One is the voice raised from Afghanistan by bin Laden that says, `Whoever is not with us must be destroyed.' The other is the voice from the United States that says, `Whoever is not with us is against us."' He added, "That is a logic which on one side leads to the most atrocious forms of terror and, on the other side, on the pretext of confronting terrorism, creates the worst type of atmosphere for waging war."

Fanatics madly spin the world and reason is made whoozy.

Gore Vidal is not afraid to offend, bless him.

America's most controversial writer Gore Vidal has launched the most scathing attack to date on George W Bush's Presidency, calling for an investigation into the events of 9/11 to discover whether the Bush administration deliberately chose not to act on warnings of Al-Qaeda's plans.

Vidal's highly controversial 7000 word polemic titled 'The Enemy Within' - published in the print edition of The Observer today [JAW--I actually bought the Sunday Observer today, since the full text is not avalable online] - argues that what he calls a 'Bush junta' used the terrorist attacks as a pretext to enact a pre-existing agenda to invade Afghanistan and crack down on civil liberties at home.

Vidal writes: 'We still don't know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected President with the oil and gas Bush-Cheney junta.'

Vidal has always seemed to annoy even those who would be expected to agree with his arguments, but I have always thought it is basically because he comes off as an aristocrat (he is) and because he comes off as a faggot (he is), and not enough Americans are comfortable with either.

Actually, I think we should be very grateful for the product of both of his outsider identities.

He represents much of the best of both of these eccentric elements of American society (one waning quietly while the other waxes loudly), and that, after sufficiently crediting his intelligence (and who said real intelligence is valued in America?), his solid position within those unpopular orders explains much of the power of his social and political criticism.

The novels are still a guilty pleasure, but the essays really do it for me.

Barry has just blogged a great piece on the disaster in Israel and Palestine.

One of today's Ha'aretz essays, titled "Before Jewish fascism takes over", discusses interesting similarities between this era and that of the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans. Yossi Sarid argues that what caused Jerusalem to collapse was zealotry, and Israel faces the same danger today

Bad news for "the business of America": Business is bad, and America finally knows it.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Worries about jobs and a possible U.S. attack on Iraq pummeled consumer confidence to its lowest level in nine years in October, a report said on Tuesday, boosting chances the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates next week.

Financial markets were rattled by the dramatic drop in The Conference Board's October Consumer Confidence Index to 79.4, a low not seen since November 1993, and far below the trough of 84.9 carved after last year's Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S.

Gosh, maybe this is only a coincidence, but wouldn't counting nine years back set us down right in the remnants of the last Bush administration?

Regardless of where the blame really rests, we can at least hope that a gloomy report of gloom like this does not bode well for the current regime's partisan election hopes for next tuesday. Could voters possibly ask for more of the same after all they've already gotten?

Now for a completely different read [NYTimes letter] on the item I posted recently.

CHEVY GETS THE FAITH

To the Editor:

Re "G.M. Gets Criticism for Backing Tour of Christian Music Performers" (Business Day, Oct. 24):

Chevrolet's sponsorship of a Christian concert tour reveals how some evangelical leaders have resorted to superficial marketing techniques to promote their religious views. These leaders are becoming like business managers who design market-driven programs to reach targeted audiences.

Spirituality becomes dependent upon providing church members with entertaining worship services that offer messages on success and psychological comfort. A growing number of evangelicals are promoting the development of programs and beliefs that foster cultural conformity.

It is tragic that Christian concerts have trivialized God by resorting to cheap marketing methods. America needs religious groups that encourage people to be cultural creators who embrace a spirituality that has a moral vision for the common good.
BRENT MUIRHEAD
Alpharetta, Ga., Oct. 24, 2002

Is it using SUVs to sell god that trivializes the writer's imaginary friend, or is it using god to sell SUVs?

Don't let them keep getting away with it. [The Democrat-Republican party oligarchy, that is.] And we won't even be helping Pataki when we do it!

Barry says it all on Bloggy:

I see no reason to vote for Carl McCall in this election. Pataki, whom I despise as much as the next person, appears ready to win in a landslide. He has been endorsed by all of the major newspapers in the state, and the latest polls show that McCall might even get less votes than Golisano.

So my advice: McCall's going to lose big anyway, so vote for the Green candidate, Stanley Aronowitz. You'll help keep the Green Party on the state ballot without them having to go through and expensive petition process.

Aronowitz is a great candidate. He was a steelworker and union organizer, and he is currently Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Every endorsement of Pataki has talked about how dysfunctional Albany is, with most decisions made by just three people: Pataki, Sheldon Silver, and Joe Bruno. Why reward the two major parties by letting them continue to operate this way? 98% of state legislators are re-elected in each election.

I'm very, very serious about this. We have watched the Democrats collapse in front of the Republicans over civil rights, drug laws, health care, tax cuts for the wealthy, and war. When you have a chance to vote for a Green, particularly when doing so doesn't help a Republican, you must do it.

Good coverage of NY Politics, including the poll numbers, can be found on PoliticsNY.com.

I love The Onion, so I hope they will excuse me when I say that sometimes it's enough just to read through the cheeky headlines. Well, at least when you're in a big hurry. A small sample from the last two weeks:

NEWLY OUT GAY MAN OVERDOING IT

STARVING THIRD WORLD MASSES WARNED AGAINST EVILS OF CONTRACEPTION

AMERICAN PEOPLE SHRUG, LINE UP FOR FINGERPRINTING

DEFENSE DEPARTMENT TYPO RESULTS IN U.S. ATTACK ON IRA

63 PERCENT OF U.S. IMPLICATED IN NEW SCANDAL

SUNKEN OIL TANKER WILL BE HABITAT FOR MARINE LIFE, SHELL EXECUTIVES SAY WITH STRAIGHT FACE

LINEBACKER FACES SUSPENSION FOR GENOCIDE

Well, you get the idea. If you don't, you probably aren't reading this weblog.

The Washington Post redeemed itself this time. The later edition of their article on the D.C. anti-war demonstration is a pretty fair report. No, it's a damn good one!

Luigi Procopio, 45, a social worker from the district, wore a pink triangle with "$ FOR AIDS NOT WAR" written on it. He said even though he normally focuses his activism on issues in the gay community, he and at least a dozen friends came to protest the war in Iraq.

"It's time, man. . . .it feels imminent," he said. "Congress has just rolled over."

It's a salon Premium article, so the regular Salon site includes only a precis, but it's all that's really needed to begin to put the story into perspective.]

The media is fixating on John Allen Muhammad's Muslim beliefs. But the most relevant fact about him could be his record of terrorizing his family members -- and how that didn't stop him from getting his hands on guns. [Jaw--even while he was under a restraining order]

A poet salutes his friend.

Paul Wellstone was an unlikely politician in a place like Minnesota — land of walleyes, cornfields and phlegmatic Scandinavians. He was an urban Jew, son of immigrants, a college professor at the fanciest of Minnesota's private colleges. And, probably worst of all for his non-talkative constituents, he was a passionate orator, a skilled rouser of rabble over issues he loved and an unapologetic populist liberal.

Perhaps equally casual about distinguishing between those who "are either with us or against us," Bush's "new friend" has "weapons of mass destruction," and he doesn't seem to hestitate in using them even "against his own people."

MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) -- A raid by Russian troops to free hostages held by Chechen rebels in a Moscow theatre is coming under scrutiny amid fears a nerve agent used may have contributed to the deaths of 118 hostages. [JAW--the number, it is now believed, may exceed 200]

By the way, in another parallel to Iraq, Chechnyans are regarded by Moscow as "their [Moscow's] own people," since that is the official basis for Russian opposition to the nation's secession, and Russia is alleged to have used chemical weapons there during the ten years of the current war.

Are we going to invade Russia now?

Clinton and his administration were no great shakes when it came to their domestic policy programs or their real successes, but Bush and his own people make their predecessors look like progressives and political geniuses if we look at not even a full two years of the current regime's reactionary policy articulations and our concomitant economic and social disasters.

Hardly an argument there, but what about foreign policy? During the Clinton era the U.S. was basically at peace and seemed to be able to look forward to a continuation of peace. We were admired by a good part of the world, or so we were led to believe, and much if not most of the planet had or was about to adopt our own well-advertised recipes for both political and economic success, especially economic success (even if the economic prescription presented perilous consequences for many, here as well as outside the country). Today U.S. influence in the world has been disastrously compromised, and what remains is in great peril. The Bush administration has totally squandered the immense good will and support which had accrued to us after the disaster of September, 2001, but its policies independent of those events had already and continue to increasingly alienate the entire planet.

Brilliant in his judgment and the economy of words, Daniel Shore delivered a scathing assessment of the White House's disastrous foreign policy failures around the globe on NPR this morning.

BUSH FOREIGN POLICY -- NPR Senior News Analyst Daniel Schorr assesses President Bush's commitment, expressed during the 2000 campaign, to a foreign policy based on humility.

[Sorry, but I'm only able to link to an audio record, not a printed text.]

Ah, that's better.

I've been feeling so distanced from the visual arts thing for months, I was beginning to think I was going through another change of life (-style).
This afternoon's outing put the kibosh on that notion.

The galleries in Chelsea were at their best today. It was a wonderful day, and worth being pulled out of bed at the crack of ten a.m. by houseguests eager to go out to "brunch." Actually, I thought "brunch" had been replaced by something more, oh, edgy(?) during the years I've been sleeping late and preferring to defer to the cereal boxes on the top shelf.

What did we see?

There was Gustav Kluge at Klemens Gasser (Barry noted that German expressionism isn't dead after all).

There was a great show from David Shrigley at Anton Kern (Gee, it seems that Glasgow has created a special silly sweet sensibility shared by several of its sons).

We're also really excited about Kiniko Ivic's very sympathetic-pathetic paint things at Andrew Kreps. [No picture links; what are these galleries thinking?]

Oh and don't pass up Maurizio Cattalan's "Wrong Gallery" (the installation space is only about ten inches by thirty-six inches!) through the door immediately adjacent, where you will see a piece by Martin Creed, the Turner Prize guy the conservatives love to hate.

How often does a woman born in 1919 in Carinthia, Austria, get a solo show in Chelsea? Don't bother asking, but look in on the work of Maria Lassing at Petzel, especially the work on paper in the rear space.

I'm a sucker for good car stuff (It started while I was growing up in Detroit during its halcyon years), but even Barry liked the brilliant shapes and colors on Peter Cain's canvases at Matthew Marks on 22nd Street. Very sexy images from an artist we miss a lot.

Peter Campus innovative 1970's video work projections seemed today to be upstaging his current work at Leslie Tonkonow, but I have to admit we did not stay long enough to really see the new stuff on the small screens. Gotta go back.

I'm crazy about Yoshitomo Nara, and have been from the moment I first saw his tough little cartoon girl, several years back. Yes, she reminds me of my equally tough little sister years ago, but she and her gestures also seem more and more to represent at least one absolutely appropriate attitude to a more and more stupid and threatening world.

The young Israeli artist, Tomer Ganihar, has a provocative installation of photographs at Paul Rodgers/9W. He chronicles a group he refers to as the "New Jews," a "spontaneously emerging youth movement" in Israel.

We were both really enchanted with the show at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, where Rob Fischer has installed a fantastic shed/plane/boat/greenhouse/trailer construction I would really, really like to live with, if not in, on a permanent basis (but just where, other than in the field for which I would never trade my own cozy New York warren of rooms?). The small works on paper in the back and, in the reception nook, a lightbox-mounted photograph of hoary Minnesota boathouses looking like a model of a stone-age fishing village sans villagers, are a bit more portable and almost as wonderful.

The Washington Post is certainly not repeating its brave record of the Viet Nam war era. The paper has been diligent in pushing a very conservative foreign policy agenda and dramatically demonstrating its support for the war fever of the White House junta, but the coverage it gives to today's massive anti-war demonstration in the Capital, its home town, is unspeakable.

It is now after 7:30 in the evening, and the protest began this morning, but at this late hour the continuously-updated Post website reports, "Demonstrators by the hundreds [my italics] gathered near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Saturday . . . "

Other sources, even other commercial news media, have already reported that easily tens of thousands or even over one hundred thousand people participated.

Protestor numbers are always a difficult and very political call, but It looks like the truth lies somewhere between the two hundred thousand claimed by some organizers and the twenty thousand reported by a number of press sources. [The huge range I describe reflects how bad I personally am with numbers, and the fact that I wasn't able to be there today to see for myself.] "By the hundreds" is a disgustingly transparent political call by what should be an important print and web-based news source.

If you are alive, dancing is a fundamental right, but dancing is illegal in almost any public place in New York City today.

Come to City Hall Park thursday (Halloween!) to help show that we can and will dance when and where we please. Repeal the absurd law!

The law states that an establishment must be licensed if the club features three or more musicians, or if any of the instruments is percussion or brass, or if there is three or more people moving in synchronized fashion.

In the late eighties, after a five year legal battle on behalf of the Musicians Union led by New York University Law Professor Paul Chevigny, the courts declared the three musician rule unconstitutional and accepted live music in zones where bars and restaurants are permitted. But nothing was done to lift the stigma of dancing.

....

Although there are currently over 5,000 liquor licenses in the five boroughs you can only dance in 296 places. You are not allowed to dance to the jukebox or DJ at your local bar. You are not allowed to move to the rock band or jazz act at your neighborhood club.

And while we're at it, can we finally get rid of the sunday "blue law" that won't let us buy wine or liquor on that special "holy day" observed by a few religious cults?

"For the Bush administration is an extremely elitist clique trying to maintain a populist facade." Paul Krugman deconstructs the short-term strategy of the Bush administration and then, inexplicably, he says that he is confused.

What remains puzzling is the long-term strategy. Despite Mr. Bush's control of the bully pulpit, he has had little success in changing the public's fundamental views. Before Sept. 11 the nation was growing increasingly dismayed over the administration's hard right turn. Terrorism brought Mr. Bush immense personal popularity, as the public rallied around the flag; but the helium has been steadily leaking out of that balloon.

Right now the administration is playing the war card, inventing facts as necessary, and trying to use the remnants of Mr. Bush's post-Sept. 11 popularity to gain control of all three branches of government. But then what? There is, after all, no indication that Mr. Bush ever intends to move to the center.

So the administration's inner circle must think that full control of the government can be used to lock in a permanent political advantage, even though the more the public learns about their policies, the less it likes them. The big question is whether the press, which is beginning to find its voice, will lose it again in the face of one-party government.

So the media is our only remaining hope? I don't feel so good.

The news could not be more sad (even for me, and I have little interest in the Broadway musical form), unless it had included an announcement of the death of Betty Comden as well. In fact, Comden and Green were so much of a partnership it has always been more difficult to imagine either of them as one than as the two that even they insisted they were.

Mr. Green was artistically incomplete without Ms. Comden, and vice versa. They knew it and acknowledged it frequently. "Alone, nothing," Mr. Green once told The Washington Post. "Together, a household word, a legend, Romulus and Remus, Damon and Pythias, Loeb and Leopold — Mr. Words and Miss Words."

Mr. Words and Miss Words were so professionally inseparable, so committed to each other, so pleased to have their relationship and so happy to talk about it, that many people thought they were married. In 1954 a writer for The New York Times mistakenly referred to them as a "husband-wife" writing team.

... Throughout his career, Mr. Green deferred to Ms. Comden and attributed the team's success to her. She was always "unforgivably responsible," he told The New York Herald Tribune in 1961. "She is always on time for everything, while I am late for anything. To make matters worse, she invariably appears at, say, producers' conferences, with our latest work of dialogue or lyrics neatly typed and arranged in readable form." He added that "without directly confronting me with my inadequacies, she has always humiliated me fair to distraction. You see, I have lived for years in the shadow of an overwhelming suspicion that all our collaborations have, in reality, been solo efforts, written in toto by Betty alone — an untenable position for me."

Ms. Comden said she was not the secret to the team's triumphs; they were. "Everything is together," she explained. "We don't divide the work up. We develop a mental radar, bounce lines off each other." She said that she could not envision a life without the collaboration. Years after it all started, she confessed that "we can still be delighted by something the other says or does."

Lovely.

Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife Sheila, daughter Marcia, and five others
were killed today in a small plane crash near Eveleth, Minnesota.

The Senator was one of our most courageous and progressive legislators, and we have very very few.

His death is a tremendous tragedy for the nation and the world.

Harry Hay died today.

HARRY HAY, PAVED THE WAY FOR MODERN GAY ACTIVISM, DIES AT 90

Henry "Harry" Hay, known as the founder of the modern American gay movement, has died at age 90. The pioneering gay activist devoted his life to progressive politics and in 1950, he founded a state-registered foundation and secret network of support groups for gays known as the Mattachine Society. He was also a co-founder, in 1979, of the Radical Faeries, a movement affirming gayness as a form of spiritual calling. A rare link between gay and progressive politics, Hay and his partner of 39 years, John Burnside, had lived in San Francisco for three years after a lifetime in Los Angeles. Hay had been diagnosed weeks earlier with lung cancer. Despite his illness, he remained lucid and died peacefully in his sleep in the early hours of October 24.

"Harry Hay's determined, visionary activism significantly lifted gays out of oppression," said Stuart Timmons, who published a biography of Hay in 1990."All gay people continue to benefit from his fierce affirmation of gays as a people."

Hay is listed in histories of the American gay movement as first in applying the term "minority" to homosexuals. An uncompromising radical, he easily dismissed "the heteros," and never rested from challenging the status quo, including within the gay community. Due to the pervasive homophobia of his times (it was illegal for more than two homosexuals to congregate in California during the 1950s) Hay and his colleagues took an oath of anonymity that lasted a quarter century until Jonathan Ned Katz interviewed Hay for the ground-breaking book Gay American History. Countless researchers subsequently sought him out; in recent years, Hay became the subject of a biography, a PBS-funded documentary, and an anthology of his own writings.

Previous attempts to create gay organizations in the United States had fizzled - or been stamped out. Hay's first organizational conception was a group he called Bachelors Anonymous, formed to both support and leverage the 1948 presidential candidacy of Progressive Party leader Henry Wallace. Hay wrote and discreetly circulated a prospectus calling for "the androgynous minority" to organize as a political entity. Hay's call for an "international bachelor's fraternal order for peace and social dignity" did not bear results until 1950. That year, his love affair with Viennese immigrant Rudi Gernreich, (whose fashion designs eventually made him a TIME cover-man) brought Hay into gay circles where a critical mass of daring souls could be found to begin sustained meetings. On November 11, 1950, at Hay's home in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, a group of gay men met which became the Mattachine Society. Of the original Mattachine founders, Chuck Rowland, Bob Hull, Dale Jennings pre-deceased Hay; Konrad Stevens and John Gruber are the last surviving members of the founding group.

"Mattachine" took its name from a group of medieval dancers who appeared publicly only in mask, a device well understood by homosexuals of the 1950s. Hay devised its secret cell structure (based on the Masonic order) to protect individual gays and the nascent gay network. Officially co gender, the group was largely male; the Daughters of Bilitis, the pioneering lesbian organization, formed independently in San Francisco in 1956. Though some criticized the Mattachine movement as insular, it grew to include thousands of members in dozens of chapters, which formed from Berkeley to Buffalo, and created a lasting national framework for gay organizing. Mattachine laid the ground for rapid civil rights gains following 1969's Stonewall riots in New York City.

Harry Hay was born in England in 1912, the day the Titanic sank. His father worked as a mining engineer in South Africa and Chile, but the family settled in Southern California. After graduating from Los Angeles High School, he briefly attended Stanford, but dropped out and returned to Los Angeles. He understood from childhood that he was a sissy - different in behavior from boys or girls - and also that he was attracted to men. His same-sex affairs began when he was a teenager, not long after he began reading 19th Century scholar Edward Carpenter, whose essays on "homogenic love" strongly influenced his thinking.

A tall and muscular young man, Hay worked as both an extra and ghostwriter in 1930s Hollywood. He developed a passion for theater, and performed on Los Angeles stages with Anthony Quinn in the 1930s, and with Will Geer, who became his lover. Geer took Hay to the San Francisco General Strike of 1935, and indoctrinated him into the American Communist Party. Haybecame an active trade unionist. A blend of Marxist analysis andstagecraft strongly influenced Hay's later gay organizing.

Despite a decade of gay life, in 1938 Hay married the late Anita Platky, also a Communist Party member. The couple were stalwarts of the Los Angeles Left; Hay taught at the California Labor School and worked on domestic campaigns such as campaigning for Ed Roybal, the first Latino elected in Los Angeles. The Hays occasionally hosted Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie when they performed in Los Angeles, and Hay recalled demonstrating with Josephine Baker in 1945 over the Jim Crow policy of a local restaurant. When he felt compelled to go public with the Mattachine Society in 1951, the Hays divorced. After a burst of activity lasting three years, the growing Mattachine rejected Hay as a liability due to his Communist beliefs. In 1955, when he was called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, he had trouble finding a progressive attorney to represent him, he felt, due to homophobia on the Left. (He was ultimately dismissed after his curt testimony.) Hay felt exiled from the Left for nearly fifty years, until he received the Life Achievement award of a Los Angeles library preserving progressive movements.

For most of his life Hay lived in Los Angeles. However, during the early
1940s, Hay and his wife lived in New York City; he returned there with John Burnside to march and speak at the Stonewall 25 celebration in 1994. During the 1970s, he and Burnside moved to New Mexico, where he ran the trading post at San Juan Pueblo Indian reservation.

His years of research for gay references in history and anthropology texts lead Hay to formulate his own gay-centered political philosophy, which he wrote and spoke about constantly. His theory of "gay consciousness" placed variant thinking as the most significant trait in homosexuals. "We differ most from heterosexuals in how we perceive the world. That ability to offer insights and solutions is our contribution to humanity, and why our people keep reappearing over the millennia," he often stressed. Hay's occasional exhortations that gays should "maximize the differences" between themselves and heterosexuals remained controversial. Academics tended to reject his ideas as much as they respected his historic stature.

A fixture at anti-draft and anti-war campaigns for sixty years, Hay worked in Women's Strike for Peace during the Viet Nam War as a conscious strategy to build coalition between gay and feminist progressives. He also worked closely with Native American activists, especially the Committee for Traditional Indian Land and Life. Hay was a local founder of the Lavender Caucus of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition during the early 1980s, determined to help convince the gay community that its political success was inextricably tied to a broader progressive agenda. His decades of agitation for coalition politics brought him increasing appreciation in later life from labor and third-party groups.

A second wind of activism came in 1979 when Hay founded, with Don Kilhefner, a spiritual movement known as the Radical Faeries. This pagan inspired group continues internationally based on the principal that the consciousness of gays differs from that of heterosexuals. Hay believed that this different way of seeing constituted the contribution gays made to society, and was indeed the reason for their continued presence throughout history. Despite his often-combative nature, Hay became an increasingly beloved figure to younger generations of gay activists. He was often referred to as the "Father of Gay Liberation."

Hay is survived by Burnside as well as by his self-chosen gay family, a model he strongly advocated for lesbians and gays. His adopted daughters, Kate Berman and Hannah Muldaven also survive him. A circle of Radical Faeries provided care for him and Burnside through their later years. Harry Hay leaves behind a wide circle of friends and admirers among lesbians, gays, and progressive activists.

This memorial was generously provided by Stuart Timmons, author of The Trouble With Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (1990)

"I adored Harry because he remained radical and iconoclastic to the end. Take a moment and think what it must have been like all those decades ago--to cut a path where none existed. What nerve and vision! Each one of us who uses that path has a responsibilty to keep it clear, and to widen the path for those that follow."

Bill Dobbs

Wonderful photo

The photo credit and caption reads:

"One of the founders of the gay rights movement, Harry Hay, left, brushes the cheek of his partner John Burnside with his hand Friday, July 19, 2002, at their home in San Francisco."

NYTimes obituary

Gosh, and I thought it was just their cars and SUVs that were offensive.

Chevrolet, a division of General Motors, is title sponsor of the monthlong 16-city Come Together and Worship Tour, which begins on Nov. 1 in Atlanta. The tour will feature two acts in the fast-growing genre known as contemporary Christian music, W. Michael Smith and Third Day, along with a Texas pastor, the Rev. Max Lucado.

When Chevrolet announced its sponsorship, a news release described Mr. Lucado as a "world-renowned author." But, as The Detroit Free Press said in an article yesterday, Mr. Lucado will be preaching on stage between the musical acts of the show. The shows will also include the distribution of evangelical literature to audience members. As a result, some find Chevrolet's association with such a tour disturbing.

But there's even more.

The sponsorship is to be augmented by Chevrolet with a monthlong promotional program to some consumers on the concert stops, inviting them to take test drives at local Chevrolet dealerships where they can get free CD's featuring songs by Mr. Smith and Third Day and an audio version of a chapter from Mr. Lucado's new book, "A Love Worth Giving."

There are complementary promotions sponsored by a national chain known as Family Christian Stores along with general retailers like the Sam's Club and Wal-Mart divisions of Wal-Mart Stores, Borders and Books-A-Million.

What does the world look like today, compared to what it looked like just two years ago?

No, the dwarf in the White House can't be blamed for everything, but he certainly can't be credited with anything.

Admittedly he has done great things for his donors, precisely the people who don't pay serious taxes, only serious gratuities. Wow, have they gotten good service!

But why on earth are we being told how extraordinarily "popular" he is? I'm afraid to think too much about an answer to that question.

Oh, and has anyone seen a non-war issue lying about lately? I guess, since there's still a full week and a half before the election, there's still plenty of time. That is, unless sometime in the next days we see our national sniper standing behind the presidential seal to make a very serious announcement.

We're probably already doomed, and the world with us, unfortunately.

Washington chickenhawks don't like what all of the top intellegence agencies are telling them, so they've erected a creature, responsible only to them, to give them the answer they want.

Some officials say the creation of the team reflects frustration on the part of Mr. Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and other senior officials that they are not receiving undiluted information on the capacities of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq and his suspected ties to terrorist organizations.

But officials who disagree say the top civilian policy makers are intent on politicizing intelligence to fit their hawkish views on Iraq.

In particular, many in the intelligence agencies disagree that Mr. Hussein can be directly linked to Osama bin Laden and his network, Al Qaeda, or that the two are likely to make common cause against the United States. In addition, the view among even some senior intelligence analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency is that Mr. Hussein is contained and is unlikely to unleash weapons of mass destruction unless he is attacked.

(Deputy Defense Secretary) Wolfowitz almost certainly doesn't understand the irony in his argument for the new Pentagon "intelligence" unit.

He described "a phenomenon in intelligence work, that people who are pursuing a certain hypothesis will see certain facts that others won't, and not see other facts that others will."

President Bush said on Wednesday he was praying for a quick end to the killing spree [our home-grown and our very latest] and offered full government resources to help catch the "ruthless" killer.

Thank God.

Also thank God Dubya is safe in the State of Maine (or wherever), campaigning for the frat brothers.

p.s.

Surely this leak is at least partly intended to help our allies feel good about the competence of their supreme American warlord.

Yes, I know there is a drama and perhaps a real tragedy being played out in Moscow as I write this, but I read this item about the beleagured wine industry in Chechnya this morning before the news about the hostage taking. I still much prefer to think about one of mankind's most benign occupations, that of the vintner, than to dwell on the evils still being done in the name of nationalism, greed and power.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 began a tumultuous decade that left Chechnya's wine industry, like much of the republic, in shambles.

Some here say the industry's decline began earlier, with President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign in 1986, which resulted in thousands of vineyards across the Soviet Union being tilled under.

But it quickened, all agree, when Chechnya's first president, Dzhokhar Dudayev, declared the republic independent and began to restore Muslim traditions. His government stopped supporting the wineries.

... Of all the factors, though, fighting has caused the greatest toll. The two wars in Chechnya — the first from 1994 to 1996, the second from 1999 and still grinding on — destroyed thousands of acres of vineyards and several wineries, including the main one in the capital, Grozny.

It's all so very very sad, and so unnecessary.

Geesh, these people must think we're all really stupid!

New York Republican neanderthals have finally decided to let the New York Senate vote on gay rights, but only in order to secure more votes for Republican candidates in November.

The Democratic candidate for governor said it best.

Asked about [Senate Majority Leader Joe] Bruno's promise, [Carl] McCall replied, "If that's true, these people really have no principles, do they?"

"For eight years, George Pataki has been promising it, Joe Bruno has been stopping it," said McCall, the state controller. "Now, what, two weeks before an election ... all of a sudden Joe Bruno and George Pataki come up with a little gimmick to try to buy off an endorsement? Most of the endorsements they have, they bought."

But we shouldn't get too excited yet, since they are telling us that the vote will come after the November elections.

Weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998 without U.N. approval in a predawn evacuation on the orders of their chief, Richard Butler, hours before American and British attacks on Iraq. Butler had been advised by Washington of a possible U.S.-led bombing attack, but the official explanation given for the withdrawal was that Iraq was not cooperating with the inspectors.

Since 1998, the media, which had originally reported the facts basically as described above, has totally revised the story into one which features Iraq throwing inspectors out of the country.

Does anyone need further proof of the media's collusion with the White House junta?

I have been talking about this for months, and lately I have heard this quite Big Lie repeated even by sources usually critical of Washington propaganda, like The Nation and WNYC's Brian Lehr.

If the sources of our information are so corrupted, and if even the sceptical are so easily hoodwinked (or become so vulnerable because of just plain laziness), how can we possibly survive as a democracy?

Want more on the story of the "weapons inspectors?"

[from the NYTimes in a 1999 story] WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 -- United States officials said today that American spies had worked undercover on teams of United Nations arms inspectors ferreting out secret Iraqi weapons programs.

Iraq has long condemned the inspectors as tools of American intelligence. In October it issued a statement saying it would never cooperate with United Nations teams riddled with ''American spies and agents.''

I'm borrowing a direct quote from ZNet email message, because it's so succinct:

The U.S. propels a war on terorism in
order to pursue its entirely different agendas of redistribution at home
and solidifying empire internationally -- not least solidifying control
over Iraqi oil -- and of course the predictable horrific increase in
terrorism is then used to fuel additional terror war policies and
responses.

Resist!

These are our children!

Activists demonstrated inside and outside of the UN General Assembly yesterday, where they shouted, "No war in Iraq!"

These good folks, knowingly or not, were following in the footsteps and the soundbites of generations of worthy progressive protestors and innovative interlopers, most notably and most recently those spawned by AIDS activism.

Until they close down the world altogether, activists will always find a way to speak.

But I suppose the NYTimes will also always find ways to distort the news and the message. What's with their gratuitious statement, "The protestors were apparently not armed or carrying any unusual items."?

One more humble question, this one for the City of New York: Why were six people arrested outside on the street, apparently only for speaking?

It's a fucked-up country.

Sexphobia and religion encourages AIDS

Ever bigger, tanklike SUVs protect us from each other

Bombing is regularly employed to maintain peace

Health care is made a commodity

Incumbents are honored when terror strikes on their watch

The environment is converted into theme parks

Public schools must be supported by donations

--or replaced by private schools

History has been turned into a costume party

Violence is conventional

Drugs are regarded as more dangerous than a drug war

Democracy is rejected in favor of gossip

Populism is regarded as class war

Guns are absolutely the law of the land

Taxes are a duty for all but big business and the rich

Intelligence is always suspect

Corporations abjure tax obligations

--but compete to throw money at government

Theocracy is regarded as the ideal polity

Suburban villas keep us as far from each other as money can manage

Using public transportation is regarded as shameful

Morality must always be religious morality, and it usually means sex

Almost everything means sex

Asshole Trump essentially embodies the worst aspects of the New York of the last few decades. Stupidity, greed, the appetite for power, horrendous taste, insensitivity, waste, and just plain vulgarity, with absolutely no redeeming social value.

He is an embarassment for a city almost impervious to embarassment.

Why hasn't he been run out of town yet?

But of course all Palestinians are terrorists, and G-d says this is our land. How could anyone have a problem with that?

It sure looks like Barry may have had more than a little to do with it. The Daily News now has a story on the deceit of the White House's North Korea secret.

Tom Tomorrow is just observing. This is not political satire. Our much balleyhooed two-party system ceased to exist a while back.

The Daily News did its tabloid thing yesterday with an hysterical front page headline ("IT'S TOLLS FOR THEE") and story screaming the news that our Mayor wants to charge tolls on the East River crossings.

Duh.

Gosh, why should someone driving a two or three-ton machine over our streets and bridges into the narrow, impossibly-overcrowded, polluted, noisy and pedestrian-dangerous streets of Manhattan have to pay money for the privilege? Besides, don't those streets and bridges maintain themselves, just as the buses and subways do, and shouldn't they not cost a cent for those who use them? And for more than fifty years haven't we already given away, usually for free, a good chunk of each public street to private car owners so they can store their property? The issue is clearly a no-brainer, what? The News seems to think so.

Get ready to dig deeper into your pockets: The Bloomberg administration is preparing to put tolls on the East River bridges.

The article continued with a description of two Borough presidents' reactions and those of several equally generous and thoughtful driver-citizens.

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz has called the idea "a turkey," and Queens Borough President Helen Marshall has said commuters should not be "punished" for traveling from one borough to another.

Yesterday, at the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg Bridge, drivers fumed when asked about possible tolls.

"It's outrageous," said Randy Settenbrino, a real estate sales associate from Brooklyn. "I'm surprised Bloomberg doesn't charge for air. As usual, this is a tax that hurts the average working person just trying to get by."

Jose Rodriguez, 30, a construction worker from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said the tolls could be devastating.

"If I pay $6 a day, that's over a $100 a month," he said. "With that money, I should be buying food for my kids."

Unfortunately these good burghers probably have nothing to worry about. This is America, even if it is New York. You just do not mess with the car.

Wow! Holding a grudge for eighty-nine years!

The NYTimes let us know this week that it has by no means forgotten its ignominious defeat over an environmental issue fought in the early years of the last century.

In an editorial appearing yesterday the newspaper essentially came out in favor of the draining of a magnificent California valley lost, before World War I, to a large dam and a water reservoir for the City of San Francisco.

In 1913, over the course of the year, this page ran a total of six thunderous editorials opposing the reservoir and unsuccessfully urging President Woodrow Wilson to intercede. In the uninhibited vernacular of the time, the editorials described the scheme as "sordid," the commercial interests that supported it as "grabbers of water and power," and California's politicians as "trans-Mississippians" who "care nothing for matters of natural beauty and taste." Given this editorial pedigree, the least we can do is endorse a feasibility study. It may well lead to something remarkable.

The tone of the pre-WWI editorial clearly betrays the fact that the Times had not yet assumed its self-appointed role as the entire nation's daily newspaper--and it also might show that it was once somewhat bolder about opposing monied interests than it is today.

Heck, although I was an insurance underwriter for thirty years (albeit in tort liability, not health insurance), I happy to find that I'm not the only American who understands the basic principle of insurance, the spread of risk among a group of insureds.

To the Editor:

Re "The Forgotten Domestic Crisis," by Marcia Angell (Op-Ed, Oct. 13): In addition to placing health care increasingly out of the economic reach of individuals and businesses, our commodity approach guarantees that the pool of insurable individuals will continue to shrink, thereby undermining the very essence of affordable insurance.

Insurance works because a lot of people pay premiums and not everyone uses services. The more healthy people insured, the stronger the system. A single-payer, broadly financed health insurance system is hardly socialism; it is the only way health care can become universally accessible and even remotely cost-effective.

SUSAN POOR
San Francisco, Oct. 15, 2002

Gosh, what could be more fair, efficient, even mainstream and truly "American" than insurance?

--is even worse than the smell of secrecy.

The New York Daily News ain't Big Daddy.

Their own newswriters, their wire services and their columnists apparently weren't swift enough to pick up on the lie, but whoever is responsible for the letters to the editor department recognizes a news item when it slips through the paper's mail slot, and he or she also knows something about the placement of a story.

Barry's words pointing out one of the White House's latest, and more cynical, manipulations of the news for its agenda appears today as the lead letter (with a double-sized headline and typeface) on its "Voice of the People" page.

SECRECY SMELLS

Manhattan: The Bush administration kept news of North Korea's nuclear program to itself for 12 days before letting the public, or even Congress, know. Shouldn't we be asking why they didn't tell Congress until after they voted on the Iraq resolution?

Barry Hoggard

The information had appeared on his weblog a couple of days ago. Three cheers for Bloggy!

Gary Trudeau looks at the Bushie pack in Doonesbury today.

At least it stayed cold.

Is it possible that some day in the distant future (if a future is possible) we will look back on the period of the Cold War as one of peace and prosperity, when compared to the period in which American power had no equal?

For half a century, the real or imagined Russian threat restrained the American and kept this nation relatively circumpect in its ventures around the world. It seems also to have worked to keep the governments of smaller nations out of the worst trouble, by serving them both the benefits and the burdens of the East-West rivalry.

Today U.S. power and greed is unchecked, except by terrorism, against which conventional weapons are virtually useless. Moreover, in the name of a cynical war against terrorism, the U.S. threatens, now or potentially, the security of every nation on the planet, including, in a peculiar reversal, that of the U.S. itself.

We should not be surprised that many nations have decided to pursue an aggressive course in the development of weapons of mass destruction as the only possible protection from what they view as the monstrous power of a rogue U.S.

[Two points may illustrate the argument. First, the U.S. is the only state ever to have employed nuclear weapons in anger, and those employments were against civiians and in a war already won. Second, there is now speculation that the reason the U.S. government has been particularly soft on North Korea is its belief that that nation already has these weapons in place. It looks like some people still think deterrence works, but unfortunately I don't think we can any longer trust our own government to understand either the stakes or the rules.]

It's not going to be a pleasant ride.

The junta itself can't make it's arguments consistent, let alone believable for anyone with a mind, but the media eats it up!

The White House insists it isn't "wagging the dog" to divert attention from domestic issues, an accusation that Fleischer and Vice President Dick Cheney have both pooh-poohed as "reprehensible." But still, much of the mainstream media is chasing the war ball. After all, it's a lot sexier than discussing how 41 million Americans have no health insurance.

The media dog has not only been wagged, it's rolled over at Bush's feet.

Of course Woody Harrelson doesn't have the credentials of a George W or most of the patsies in government and in the commercial media, but he does seem to understand the issues. It ain't that hard, afer all.

It also seems like he may even understand he'll be blackballed for speaking out.

Harrelson is writing in the British Guardian.

This is a racist and imperialist war. The warmongers who stole the White House (you call them "hawks", but I would never disparage such a fine bird) have hijacked a nation's grief and turned it into a perpetual war on any non-white country they choose to describe as terrorist.

To the men in Washington, the world is just a giant Monopoly board. Oddly enough, Americans generally know how the government works. The politicians do everything they can for the people - the people who put them in power. The giant industries that are polluting our planet as well as violating human rights worldwide are the ones nearest and dearest to the hearts of American politicians.

But in wartime people lose their senses. There are flags and yellow ribbons and posters and every media outlet is beating the war drum and even sensible people can hear nothing else. In the US, God forbid you should suggest the war is unjust or that dropping cluster bombs from 30,000ft on a city is a cowardly act. When TV satirist Bill Maher made some dissenting remarks about the bombing of Afghanistan, Disney pulled the plug on him. In a country that lauds its freedom of speech, a word of dissent can cost you your job.

He answers a friend's question about what he himself would do in Bush's shoes.

Easy: I'd honor Kyoto. Join the world court. I'd stop subsidizing earth rapers like Monsanto, Dupont and Exxon. I'd shut down the nuclear power plants. So I already have $200bn saved from corporate welfare. I'd save another $100bn by stopping the war on non-corporate drugs. And I'd cut the defense budget in half so they'd have to get by on a measly $200bn a year. I've already saved half a trillion bucks by saying no to polluters and warmongers.

Then I'd give $300bn back to the taxpayers. I'd take the rest and pay the people teaching our children what they deserve. I'd put $100bn into alternative fuels and renewable energy. I'd revive the Chemurgy movement, which made the farmer the root of the economy, and make paper and fuel from wheat straw, rice straw and hemp. Not only would I attend, I'd sponsor the next Earth Summit. And, of course, I'd give myself a fat raise.

At least someone in Washington is willing to say it.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - CIA Director George Tenet said on Thursday al Qaeda has reorganized and become as serious a threat to the United States as it was in the months before last year's Sept. 11 attacks.

Tenet, in a joint hearing before the congressional intelligence committees, also said the CIA and the FBI could not be flawless all the time in fighting the terror threat.

"The threat environment we find ourselves in today is as bad as it was last summer, the summer before 9/11," Tenet told the committees. "It is serious, they've reconstituted, they are coming after us, they want to execute attacks."

"You see it in Bali, you see it in Kuwait," he said, referring to attacks this month on American troops in Kuwait and the bombing in Bali that killed more than 180 people. [JAW--although we have not been shown evidence of Al Qaeda involvement in these crimes], "They plan in multiple theaters of operation, they intend to strike ... again."

The United States launched a war on terrorism last year with a military campaign in Afghanistan to destroy Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, which it blamed for the hijacked plane strikes that killed 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001.

Despite routing al Qaeda forces and making some key arrests around the world, the United States does not know the whereabouts of bin Laden and other network leaders.

Oh, but we really have done a lot. Aside from killing unknown thousands of Afghans, and abrogating most of the U.S. Constitution, our de facto government has managed to alienate that part of the world which didn't already regard us as evil.

The next nut who speaks of the great job the Unelected One is doing with the "war on terror" should be committed.

The blast that killed nearly 200 people on the Indonesian resort island of Bali this weekend is a different type of terrorism from what the Bush administration has campaigned against, and will open a new geographic front in that campaign, Western officials said yesterday.

The target was not an American embassy, military outpost or financial institution that would represent American power, of the sort that terrorists have attacked in the past. Rather, it was a nightclub whose revelers were mostly Europeans and Australians; indeed, Indonesians were often turned away at the door.

Oh yes, another "front!" The NYTimes can describe the significance of the event, but neither it nor any other commercial media source or political hack will tell it like it really is.

Are you better off than you were two years ago? Is the world better off? Of course not, but ain't it wonderful how the little Bush is handling his "war on terror!"

Wait, just what has he accomplished even in that one area of his responsibilities as putative Chief Executive? I don't get it. Did he manage to snatch, and smash the plans, of the nineteen men who hijacked four planes September 11? Did he capture Osama Bin Laden? Did he put Sheik Oman on trial? Is Al Qaeda destroyed? Are Americans safe where they travel and live around the world? Do we all feel safer here at home? In fact, can we, or anyone in the world, ever feel safe again after what this government has done in the last two years, or not done?

Are you better off than you were two years ago?

Calling it a "war on terror" was an excellent move. It's not officially a war with Afghanistan, a war with Osama, a war with Al Qaeda or a war with any people or thing, so there isn't any real objective for which the White House can be held accountable. The truth is, it's not really a war, but a blind for political opportunism and incompetence. The possibly perpetual junta will always be able to claim that it is winning, but that it's not over yet, and won't be for generations, so stay in line, people!

But what does this "war on terror" mean? What does a war on an invisible, stateless foe, war on an idea, war on an anger and a resentment, have to do with closing our borders, our courts and our minds and our hearts?