Interview

I missed this back in '13, which is no surprise.

Thanks to CL for sending it my way.


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Death of a Radical

There's a martyr now around whom to rally. There are people in jail around whom to rally. There's a cause for the feeble-minded and the politically delusionary to embrace. There is a wildness in our politics, and the fringes are expanding almost by the day.--Esquire, Jan. 27.

It's a done deal, with possibly more to come.

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Every Picture Tells a Story, Don't It?

The Pentagon on Friday was forced to release nearly 200 photographs of bruises, lacerations, and other injuries inflicted on prisoners presumably by U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The record-dump was the result of a Freedom of Information Act request and nearly 12 years of litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which fought to expose the Bush-era torture.

The images, the group says, prove that there was "systemic abuse of detainees." And while troubling, attorneys say that even more problematic is the roughly 1,800 photographs that the government refused to disclose.--Common Dreams.

I don't know about HC's victimization by the "vast right-wing conspiracy" seeking to undo her political career, but here is more evidence of an actual conspiracy to cover up the war crimes of Junior and his cronies.

BTW, while Bernie is no peacenik he did vote against the congressional authorization of Dubya's outrageous war.

At least he has that going for him.  Clinton most definitely does not.


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Report

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The Flood

If you lived in Oregon 20 years ago, you remember this.

What I remember most was the shock of seeing Oregon City submerged.  And my friend Char's house being inundated with deep mud when the hillside behind her place collapsed.

It was a nice little cottage over in the Macadam neighborhood that she'd purchased the year before for 40K, which was an amazing price for that time. Of course once we got the mud out of the place it was still uninhabitable.  A few days or weeks later along came a wealthy Californian looking at damaged properties, which he knew he could buy and rehab as an investment.

He offered Char 100K cash on the spot. She grabbed it in a heartbeat, turning her tears to laughter. She moved to Long Beach, WA and bought a dream cottage near the beach.

She became one of the lucky ones.


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Imagine

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Choices

Dang it, I had to miss the Hills/Bern debate tonight because it conflicted with my Ducks basketball game vs. Colorado.

The Ducks won the game.

Was there a "winner" in the debate?



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Four More

Bernie will clean her clock, but most won't notice.


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Blue Ducks

Meltdown in Duckville.

Oregon's '16 recruiting class sucks, dontcha know?

At least one yokel on the forum is arguing with a signee from Central Catholic here in Portland about the strength of the class.

It's like, "kid, you're just a new arrival on the team.  I'm telling you your class stinks."

Another guy wants a coaching change now because an 18-year-old kid switched his commitment at the last moment and signed with USC. Absurd.

Believe it or not.


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I Do

Who even remembers the moment in mid-February 2003, almost 13 years ago, when millions of people across this country and the planet turned out in an antiwar moment unique in history? It was aimed at stopping a conflict that had yet to begin. Those demonstrators, myself included, were trying to put pressure on the administration of George W. Bush not to do what its top officials so visibly, desperately wanted to do: invade Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, garrison it for decades to come, and turn that country into an American gas station. None of us were seers. We didn’t fully grasp what that invasion would set off, nor did we imagine a future terror caliphate in Iraq and Syria, but we did know that, if it was launched, some set of disasters was guaranteed; we knew beyond a doubt that this would not end well. --Tom Engelhardt

Who remembers?  I do.  From a personal standpoint, I refer to the time as my days of rage, which translated into an enormous funk. Too many people I respected and considered friends at the time bought the propaganda.  Some of them were artists who should have known better.  The barroom where I hung out became divided. That is a terrible thing to happen to a good old bar.  I stopped going there, I stopped trying to talk sense to the senseless.


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Doc of the Day

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Bad Feeling

After skimming over the hullabaloo surrounding the Iowa results I'm getting a bad feeling.

A sinking feeling about this made-for-television political season.

Marco Rubio is going to be our next President.  Mind you, this feeling is based on what I think I know about America, a centrist nation--sans its hawkish imperialists--if one currently exists in global politics.

On the right, the appeal of both Trump and Cruz is limited to the fringe voters who are either too bigoted (Trump supporters) or too dogmatically religious (Cruz's fanatics) to  constitute a serious threat to the vast majority.  I say this despite our nation's infamous religiosity.

That claptrap played well in conservative Iowa, but so did Rubio's much more moderate social exhortations. The vast majority of Americans are much more like Iowa's Rubio folks--centrists unwilling to hang their hats on bigoted speech and radical Christianity--than not.

The vast majority in this country has heart as well as a perplexing love of Jesus, and a common disgust for radical rightwing rhetoric. Nobody wants to see black people gunned down by the police in the streets, or bigots take over federal land.

That stuff is as unpalatable to centrists as Bernie's muddled socialism or Confederate-flag-waving, revisionist historians.

The fences at the border and the Will of God are just as absurd as Marxism to these folks.

All of that is embarrassing to free-thinking and semi-educated Republicans (just as is the right's conflation of modern socialism and Marx in my mind).

The point is the U.S. works on this level if it is given a chance.  The haters and the free-range pseudo-constitutionalists have but one thing in common with the vast majority of Republicans--their dislike of Democrats.

That's not enough to get rightwing zealots over the hump (speaking of God, thank you for that, Ma'am).

The centrists' belief in capitalism is more urgent than a reactionary antisocial agenda.  I think Rubio understands this now, and he'll back off his more extreme positions and let Trump and Cruz continue their unrealistic diatribes against all things alien.

(FWIW, I don't think Trump believes half of what he says, and Cruz is a dangerous man.)

Going forward, Rubio would be wise to avoid advocating for cuts in Social Security.  If he has a better medical plan than Obamacare, he'd better state it unequivocally.  His foreign policy thinking had better shape up and find its clarity.  He might want to come around regarding the environment as well.

This amounts to unsolicited advice, but a discussion of these issues is what Americans are waiting for.

The gargantuan money will begin to flow into Rubio's campaign now that mainstream mega-capitalists have a clearer picture of who can challenge Clinton's heretofore expected coronation (not that they are very dissimilar).

The Iowa sideshow was, and always has been, good for airing the laundry.  The fun and games are practically over, however.

Whether it is Hillary, pulled leftward by Bernie's policy ideas, or an unrepentant Bernie himself corralling the Demos, Rubio is now officially the challenger--as economy and how to run one once again takes its rightful place in the policy debate.

Trump and Cruz are about to be dumped by America's goodness--its rejection of tomfoolery and, ironically, hustle.  Neither has a realistic shot, while Rubio is stepping into the resultant void.

America doesn't want extremism on either side.

About that sinking feeling I have:  I'm for Bernie.  I'm still not convinced he can win, and I've always disliked Hillary Clinton.


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Rollin'

With the expansive NCAA men's tourney looming in March, it's sort of meaningless, but the Ducks are again a top 20 team according to the AP writers, coming in at 16 this week.

It's a perception problem; the more wins a team has the higher its seed will be when the selection committee brackets the tourney.  If they win the conference the Ducks will likely be slotted with a decent seed and get to play a supposed cupcake.

It's still a big if, though. With 5 of the next 7 coming to Eugene, Oregon appears to be in control of its destiny, but what can you reliably count on?  Not much.

Problem.  There are no cupcakes, particularly this year, and there isn't one overwhelmingly superior team like there has been in recent years with Kentucky's supply chain of one-and-done phenoms.

This year's tourney will be as wide-open as any I can recall lately. The parity is insane across the board, not just in the Pac-12.

More than ever, the right bounce and the lucky shot will count.

The Ducks have a revenge shot against Colorado on Thursday.  They lost in Boulder a couple of weeks ago.

Oregon isn't very deep.  The Ducks must stay healthy (and out of trouble).  We'll see...


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Cartoon

This.


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Old Man

"I was just invited to a poetry reading in Norway but had to turn it down. Such a shame,” he adds ruefully, “they were going to pay business class. Do you know how rare it is for a poet to get business class?”-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 96.

A nice piece brought to my attention at CD's blog.




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