Another Wednesday, which means I’ll have to disappoint the dog, since I don’t have time to take him out for fun before I have to go to class (not if I’m going to be able to wave the book in front of my face, and pretend I’ve read what I’m supposed to read).   Sure makes you proud to be a  ‘merican, hearing dubya represent us all so well at the UN yesterday, doesn’t it?  I can hardly wait until we attack Iran.  I think it’s gonna turn out just great.  Have a good one.

Nice to see Mike Malloy slip one past the crack AAR team last night, and post on their show page. We should get a pool going to see how long it takes AAR to notice. I know they’re supposed to be “liberals” and all, but they sure do seem to be acting like Republicans. I would use a crude analogy to describe them, but I’m above all that now. I just hope the Democrats don’t screw up and lose all these races Kos keeps telling me are so “competitive.” However unworthy you might think the Democrats are, you have to admit it’d be awfully fun to watch Denny Hastert and his Boehner cry like little babies when they lose control (not to mention Bill Frist – and I’m very interested in seeing George Allen having his macaca handed to him, and I hope Rick Sanatorium cries like a little baby, too).

Whoppdie-doo, it’s Monday.  I hope you have a happy and productive day.  Me?  I think I’ll go take a nap.

Another Sunday already?  Damn, it’ll be Thanksgiving before you know it.

On Press the Meat, Terrible Timmy hosts a debate between Senator Macaca, and his rival James Webb.  If George Allen is as stupid as he usualy is, it might be kind of entertaining.

Over at Faze the Nation, it’s an all torture show, with a superbly balanced panel of Republican Lindsey Graham, Republican Arlen Specter, the man who’s trying to fill the Lizard’s shoes as National Security Advisor, Stephen Hadley, and  token Democrat, Carl Levin.  Could be worse, I guess; they might’ve gotten Joey Liebermann instead.

Should be easy to keep up the boycott of the Goebbels Broadcasting Company, unless you have a desire to look at Senator Chipmunk Cheeks McCain while he talks tough on torture (I believe this is all designed to show how “courageous” these Republican are in “standing up” to dubya on this –  though they never seem to question why so many of these creeps are actually on board with it), and creepy Stephen Hadley, as he tells us how we aren’t gonna be safe unless we torture people, and I’m sure he’ll point out all the wonderful “intelligence” they’ve gotten (hey, they busted the Miami Seven, what more do you want?).  You’ll also be missing out on the axis of drivel, as Cokie “the hag” Roberts, George :jerk: Will, and Sammy “the toop” Donaldson sit around the roundtable, and pontificate.  Oh, and Jewel will be on to talk about breast awareness or something.  You’re better off doing a google image search.

Over at Fux News Sunday, the weaselly one pulls a Boehner, and (as if that isn’t creepy enough),  there’s also John Negroponte, who for some reason isn’t in prison somewhere.

Over at CNN’s Late Emission, the Wolfman has yes, once again, Stephen Hadley, redneck pro-torture Texas Senator John “Cornout” Cornyn, Evan Bayh, Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni (good name, gotta give her that), George Soros (who really should buy Marc his own radio network), Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser, and Lt. Gen Ali Mohammad Jan Aurakzai, who is Governor of Pakistan‘s Waziristan province.

Later, on 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl does a story on Internet gambling :yawn:, Scott Pelley has a chat with Bill Romanowski (should be a thrill for all you non-football fans), Ed Bradley chats with Howard Stern (who really ought to buy Marc his own radio network – or at least get Sirius to put him on the air; if they can have an all-Elvis channel, they can make room for a few hours of Maron every day), and a couple of stories I seem to recall already being on – one on the Canadian guy who the US wants to put in jail forever because he sold pot seeds via mail-order, and something about siblings of anonymous sperm donors hooking up.

Don’t forget, you can join Painting Girl and other Maron fans for the AAR Marc Maron wake over at FreeRadioSAIC tonight. Have a good Sunday.

Saturday, and another chance for SU to extend their losing streak.  This week, it’ll be on the road at Illinois.  Could be ugly, but, hey, you never know.  I think I’ll get me a big old bag of spinach and listen in.

Don’t forget to get out and see Marc, if you’re near San Fran.

Last day of the “old” AAR lineup, and the day when (supposedly) AAR is going to announce their “restructuring.”  I dunno, it’s not that I have anything in particular against the shows that’re moving to the evening slots – it’s just that I don’t see them as entertaining fare that’s gonna raise their listenership.  I have nothing against preaching to the choir, but if they think this is gonna be the big move that’ll get them better ratings (or get their programming on more stations), I think they’re nuts. Or maybe it’s just the people willing to work for next to nothing.  Give the big bucks to Al and Randi, and then go as cheap as you can on everything else.   Oh well, I just hope some good, entertaining, progressive radio (like, say, the Marc Maron Show) comes out of all this – if not at AAR, then someplace else.   Speaking of Maron, if you’re in the San Francisco area, you can catch him for four shows (8:00 & 10:00, tonight and tomorrow night) at the Punchline on Battery Street.  And if you can’t make it to the show, you can catch him on Keepin’ it Real with Will and Willie, on the Quake, 960 AM from 7AM – 10AM Pacific time (listen live here).  Can’t catch it live?  Well, since it isn’t an AAR show, you can podcast it.  Enjoy.

Wow, just barely made it out of reporting for Jury Duty today.  I missed the cut by seven spots.  So, unless they manage to seat the juries today, it looks like I’ll be stuck reporting tomorrow.  Not that not I’m thrilled at the prospect of serving my community by sitting on my butt all day, but, geez, how tough is it to pick a few dozen jurors?   Well, here’s hoping I can slide by, one more time.  Otherwise, I’m behind in pretty much everything, and better get busy doing some work.  See ya.

I haven’t looked at the national election results from last night, but there weren’t any surprises here in NYS. I’m really interested to see how the RI US Senate Republican primary went (hey, any race that’s Laffey v. Chaffee has to be a good one). If Chaffee lost, it’s a real good chance for the Dems to pick up that seat, since Laffey is an all but unelectable wingnut.

The good news is that I’ve once again missed the cut for Jury Duty, but they’re starting to get awfully close to my number, and I don’t know if I’ll survive another round. Sounds like they’ve got three jury trials to seat, so I hope today’s crop works out. The bad news, of course, is that today’s Wednesday, and I have to go to class. Better than JD, to be sure, and this is one of the few courses that I actually feel will do me some good. Still, I’d feel remiss if I didn’t at least whine about it a little bit.

Anyway, I guess I’ll see if the dog can talk me into taking him out to the park before class this afternoon. There’s only so much of his pitiful pleading eyes I can take. See ya.

Here in NY (as well as AZ, DE, DC, MD, MN, NH, RI, and VT, I believe), it’s Primary Day (aka, the first opportunity I have to plant the kiss of death on scandidate by voting for them; I don’t exactly have a very good track record with elections). I never used to get to vote in the Primary, because, for years (ever since I first registered) I was a proudly registered “no preference,” and here in NY State, that means you can’t vote until the General. But then the Republicans impeached Clinton, and that was such a useless, stupid, time and money wasting exercise, that I figured, goshdarnit, I’m gonna register as a Democrat. For some reason, here in NY it takes like a year when you change your party affiliation for you to become eligible to vote in the Primary, and the first Primary I actually wound up voting in was for the 2004 election, when I voted for Howard Dean, who promptly got stomped. Sorry, Howie.

So, today, I’ll go out and cast my symbolic votes for a slate full of candidates who (realistically) haven’t a prayer of getting nominated, let alone winning in November. Jonathan Tasini has my vote (to be honest, I’d have preferred Steve Greenfield) over Hillary. Sean Patrick Maloney will get my vote for Attorney General (looks like Andy Cuomo in a landslide, and, even if he loses, it’ll be to Mark Green, and not Maloney). The only “winner” I’m going for this time around is Eliot Spitzer for Governor. I’m sure there’ll be someone out there to tell me why he’s not worthy, but he’s made a career (at least as AG) of going after corporate corruption, is for gay marriage (in a debate with his opponent, Tom Suozzi – who is for “civil unions” – Suozzi said something to the effect that their differences were just a matter of semantics, to which Spitzer turned to Suozzi and replied, “it isn’t about semantics. It’s about equality”), and, well, he’s gonna crush whichever chump the Republicans put up against him anyway (and we haven’t had a Jewish Governor here in NY since Herb Lehman, the new-deal Democrat, Liberal, and Labor man who succeeded FDR, way back when, – so I reckon it’s about time). It’ll be awfully nice to get rid of George Putztaki, at the very least.

Plus, I dodged the Jury Duty bullet for at least another day.

Back in 2001, I was working at the SU Law College as the Web Guy. Had a really nice office with a window, a couple of the best computers available at the time, and, really, pretty cushy work (I wonder, at the moment, why the hell I ever left – though in honesty there were some pretty dysfunctional people there, and I got out at a pretty good time). I had NPR on the radio, as I pretty much always did at the time (can’t stand it these days), and they were rather typically unaware of anything that was going on, so I was, too. Until my wife IM’d that a plane had flown into the first tower. She knew it was an attack, right away, even as most people were thinking it was an accident or who knows what. Then came the second plane, NPR still not even mentioning anything (probably playing one of those insipid touch-feely trite stories they seem to pride themselves on), and the CNN website was unreachable. Then the Pentagon, and then – in the confusion – all kinds of reports of things that eventually turned out to not be true.

Then, of course, the towers fell.

All this was being described to me via IM (my wife saved the IM transcript, which I would reproduce here, except many of my replies were filled with expletives that somebody or other might find offensive, so I guess I’d better not). I think what I remember most about that time (in addition to watching the replays over and over and over) was the sight and sound (or lack thereof) of a sky totally devoid of air traffic. Where I live isn’t exactly a major metropolis, but we do have an airport, and (like most people), I’ve gotten accustomed to hearing planes in the air almost contantly. The silence was kinda eerie – but not as eerie as when the sound of military aircraft (our Air National Guard F-16’s were doing air combat patrol over NYC, so they’d fly in and out every now and again, and we’re pretty close to some other military facilities here, so occasionally a squadron of choppers or a large transport would fly over) would fill the sky. Then, you’d kind of look up, and ponder about what might happen (knowing it probably wouldn’t suddenly fly into a building, but, well, it was hard not to think about the possibility). Strange days indeed.

Everybody up here knows somebody who lives downstate – friends, family, lots of SU students. The Law School lost a bunch of alumni – one was on Flight 175, others worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, and Harris Beach. My brother – who of course we couldn’t get in touch with – lives on Long Island, and often was in that part of the city, attending meetings and training sessions at the WTC. A woman in his office got a call from her husband that morning. He called to tell her that he was OK, and that it was the other building that had gotten hit, not his. After they hing up, she never heard from him again.

So, here we are, five years later. Somehow, this bumbling stumbling fool who ignored the warnings given him by the previous administration, Richard Clarke, and in the now-infamous “determined to attack” PDB, became the “war president.” Racist Rudy became a hero. The Bushies bombed the stuffing out of Afghanistan (promising to “smoke ’em out,” if only we’d go out and do some shopping), but then abruptly quit, instead opting to lie us into the most ill-advised, unjustified, and poorly run invasion and occupation in our history (and that’s saying quite a bit, really). Now, the PR arm of the Republican Party has been given a $40 million propaganda prize in the form of this homage to Leni Riefenstahl they’re calling “The Path to 9/11.” Somewhere in hell, Joseph Goebbels must be smiling in steely admiration for what these people have accomplished.
Everyone (everyone with a brain, who’s been awake and paying attention for the past five years) knows what a fraud Disney is perpetrating upon history. Because, make no mistake about it, this will become the defacto history of the story of 9/11. Oh, there’ll be a bunch of hootin’ and hollarin’, of course. Maybe somebody will get sued, and after years and years of legal maneuvering, the parties will settle, and there’ll be a paragraph buried somewhere in the business section.

But in a few months – maybe even every September 11th from now on – ABC will rerun this lying piece of garbage (with commercials next time, you can be sure; maybe even release DVD version with “edited scenes”), and the “fair and balanced” media folks will talk (for a moment or two – maybe) about “alleged inaccuracies,” and that “some say” this “docudrama” contains factual errors, all the while repeating and reinforcing the falsehoods. And down the road, Bill Clinton – who has a lot of things to answer for, but not for this – and Sandy Berger and Madeline Albright will become infamous for allowing 9/11 to happen, and our blinking babbling pet goat of a president will be richly remembered as the man who took on this terrible legacy and…. Well, I dunno. You can only put so much lipstick on this pig (or goat).

Right now, those who are capable of critical and independent thinking know what thse people are all about. It’s amazing how willing they are to use the memory of the events of five years ago for their own twisted purposes. I suppose their plan is to sell the Democrats as a bunch of bumbling fools who can’t keep us “safe,” thereby keeping control of Congress, and thwarting any serious investigation. Hopefully, too much has happened, we’ve seen too many things, had the “terror card” played one (or ten or a hundred) times too many. Hopefully the people are too smart for this to keep working.

Counting on Americans to be smart just doesn’t feel like a safe bet these days. But maybe we’ll surprise ourselves and do the right thing. We had a chance to do just that, five years ago. To build something beautiful out of the burning twisted pile of death and hatred, and make this a better world (not just for Americans, but for everyone).

But we didn’t have a real leader in place to take us where we needed to go. Maybe, finally, we’ll realize that our “leaders” will never take us anywhere. It’s up to us to lead, dragging them kicking and screaming along behind us – or better yet, just leave them. To quote The Who: “We forsake you…Let’s forget you better still.”