Where We Are Today

President Bush with a shrug of his shoulders stated yesterday that approximately 30,000 thousands Iraqi citizens have been killed in the previous two years. Next question? and yet most of those are civilians, "collatoral damage", or, more vivid, women and children caught in the crossfire of military weaponry and hot real estate.

Stanley "Tookie" Williams was executed this morning by the state of California after having sat on death row for nearly twenty-five years. A man reformed? The leader of the Crips? Such a tough issue; had one of those victims been my wife or son, we would not have needed the state as I would have killed the person myself. However, on the other and more humane and just side, do we as a society move beyond the three thousand year-old Code of Hammurabi and create a more modern, progressive set of laws that actually sets out to correct those placed in correctional facilities instead of cages?

Eugene McCarthy died on Saturday; his candidacy in 1968, while toppling the Democrats and paving the way for a Nixon presidency, truly exposed the Johnson administration's house of cards in Vietnam and raised the issue of a dovish and peace-minded presidency based on principle and idealism and not politics. Let's hope that the LBJ of today is spelled with a W.

Sy Hersch's latest New Yorker article mentions the expansion of the Iraq War through the use of a heretofore unknown bombing campaign carried out by the Air Force. Instead of "ground troops" we're going to use "precision bombing."

The elections of the 15th in Iraq already is showing signs of Ohio, as a truck with supposedly falsified ballots was stopped at the Iraq/Iran border. Another irony was that the first Iraqis given the opportunity to cast their ballots were prisoners. In Iraq, felons vote; in America, they get their veins pumped full of chemicals.

Texas' redistricting seen as possibly racist and fundamentally disenfranchising. Any state headed by Tom DeLay must automatically be viewed as suspect.

This last week I taught the Bush Administration to my classes of juniors and in being more than fair and objective, I still nearly vomited at the end of each lecture. Either from the students' reactions of disgust and embarrassment or from constantly having to remind the not-so-bright ones that Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with the events of 9/11; that is, unless you're a neocon, a Bush, a Republican, a demagogue or a frigging moron (but I repeat myself).

Next up, more albums that changed my life...