Word to Conservatives: "Everything you Know is Wrong" (link)

Here is a great quote from an interesting blog that I ran across:

"Given such severe cognitive deficits,Conservatives are prone to perseveration on a pathological level. Sadly,it's all too easy to reduce the substance of Conservative arguments to these simple terms:

*Hillary
*Tax and spend Liberals
*You hate America
*Liberal Media
*Bill Clinton lied about a blow job
*Big Government
*Personal Responsibility
*Socialistic Program
*From my cold dead hands
*Gays are destroying the country"


To this list I would ad only one thing:
*Christian hating

When you are accused of this you're not merely disagreeing with their politics, you're gratuitously attacking their religion.

Squeeze the Wheeze.........(link)

"Go ahead....Squeeze the Wheeze....People often do......."


Firesign Theater

18 Democrat Senators trash party's future. (read more)

Ventures hope to ride wave to Rock and Roll Hall of Fame...(link)

I saw the Ventures at Issaquah's Salmon Days last October and, let me tell you, for this fan, I felt like I'd died and gone to rock-and-roll heaven. As a kid one of the first rock songs I'd ever attempted was, "Walk Don't Run", by the Ventures. Every kid who wanted to play guitar in those days attempted that song. That song was and is to this day one that everyone recognizes on some level. People like to dance to it.



Don Wilson is the front man and personality of the group. His infectious enthusiasm and reverb-laden rhythm guitar are a trademark of the Ventures that is instantly recognizable. Nokie Edwards on lead guitar is as precise as the gears in a swiss watch. His rendition of "Apache" I would pay $100 just to watch him play it up close. The lead that he has created for "Apache" for some reason moves me a great deal. I am, for that moment when I'm listening, the nine year old boy that I was when I first heard it. The rhythm section of Leon Taylor on drums and Bob Bogle on bass keep time so seamlessly that you don't even know they're there.

There were also some heavy duty guest musicians at the concert. The first one was Roger Fisher, the original guitarist with, Heart. The guitar part that Mr. Fisher crafted for, "Barracuda" is so strong and influential that it alone, in my opinion, is grounds enough to put him in the Hall of Fame. No matter how good the Wilson sisters are, it was that opening guitar riff to , "Barracuda", that made them into international stars.

In addition to Roger Fisher on guitar, the Ventures were also joined by the drummer from, Yes. This was truly a supergroup and it was all for the enjoyment of the relatively small crowd at Salmon Days. Don't let me forget to mention that the crowd was WILDLY enthusiastic. I had a great time--and I'm not that easy to please. I am often critical of the performances of highly acclaimed artists. So I am not just waxing nostalgic. It was truly something to hear.

You can find out more about the Ventures by clicking on the link at the top of this article. They are having a concert this Saturday, March 12th. I guarantee that you will have one of the finest and funnest musical times of your life!

R. Tom Delay's Buddies Steal $70 Million from Indian Tribes

(Link on Title)
Jack Abramoff and Mike Scanlon, two close political cronies of George W. Bush and Tom Delay, are being investigated by Washington for stealing money from Indian tribes. Is this another lesson from the Bush administration on how to re-introduce moral behavior into National politics?

U.S. Constitution NOT Based on Christianity (link)

President John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli on June 7, 1797. Article 11 of this treaty states: "The Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."


Another quote from John Adams, Founding Father: "Where do we find a precept in the Bible for Creeds, Confessions, Doctrines and Oaths, and whole carloads of other trumpery that we find religion encumbered with these days?" (here) In addition, God is not mentioned even once in the Constitution

Privatization: How world finance plans to steal your free will. (link)

The Schizophrenic American

I am going to write an essay entitled, "The Schizophrenic American". It was the title of a lecture that my favorite U.S. History professor in college,Dr. Monte Poen, used to deliver. I've given him credit for the main idea that I'm using, but the twists on the theme are all mine. It involves the duality of the American character that has existed from the very inception of the first colonies--Puritanism/smuggling, freedom/slavery--the very opposite things that Americans routinely do, simultaneously, without a thought as to their inconsistency.


It may take some time to finish it, but if you'd like to know more about Professor Poen in the interim just click >
(here)

How to create passion about finance banking???(CLICK HERE)

My next impossible project is to get people passionate about finance banking.

"America cannot teach democracy to the world until they
restore their own."
William Greider/ Journalist and Author

Public airwaves become Rightist Propaganda machine (click here)

According to a recent poll of high school seniors 36% feel that the first amendment goes "too far" in protecting free speech.

"Sinclair Action was created to bring balance to Sinclair Broadcast Group's ( the largest single owner / operator of television stations in the U.S.) programming, by drawing attention to the company's misuse of the public airwaves to promote a conservative agenda via a nightly' news and commentary ' segment titled ' The Point' . " (here)

If you are tired of huge communications conglomerates using public airwaves to promote ONLY their own political viewpoints and no other, there is something you can do about it! Just click on one of the above links to find out how....

Headless Lucy: The first Incarnation

First I should explain how I came up with the name, "Headless Lucy", for the band. I had been playing guitar for at least ten years and I was recently divorced, so I had a lot more time on my hands than I was used to. I owned a small carpet cleaning company and one of the cleaners, in fact the only one besides me(his name was, Terry) heard me playing Led Zep's, "Good Times/Bad Times", one afternoon. He asked if I would teach him what I knew about playing guitar and I agreed because I had the time now and it would be a fun project.

Terry turned out to be the most motivated and driven guitar player I had ever run in to. After a few years, we had developed quite a good size reportoire of hard rock, classic rock songs,power ballads, and old time blues----- not to mention all the old Stones' covers from the Brian Jones era. I lived ,at the time, on an old dude ranch that had what used to be guest cottages on it. The cottages were constructed in 1949 out of adobe blocks. I had about five neighbors in my immediate area and we lived in the high desert of southeastern Arizona in isolation, about two miles from the nearest town. Tim, my neighbor, said he had always wanted to play the drums, so he went out and bought a kit and took some lessons. We soon started the laborious process of adding a fledgling drummer to our musical project. Another year of practice and we had the kernel of a rock band. People started showing up uninvited to listen to our sessions.

They often asked what the name of the band was? We three had never thought of ourselves as a
"band". Our intentions were much more modest. But it would now appear that we did , in fact, have a band and would need a proper name for it. Many names were considered and subsequently discarded. One day as Terry and I were driving from Huachuca City to Tombstone to do a carpet cleaning job, I was thinking about a murder that had happened in Phoenix years before. Odd things pop into your mind at odd moments ,occasionally. A woman's body had been found in a dumpster and the horrifying thing about it was that the murderer had chopped her head off, so the authorities were having a hard time identifying her body. Seemingly with no context to the time and place we were inI said, in a low voice, "Headless Lucy".

Terry said," What? What did you say?"

"Headless Lucy."

"Why in the name of God did you say that?"

"Oh, it just popped into my head", I replied.

We both laughed at the strangeness of this "Headless Lucy" remark and decided that it was so out of left- field that it would make a good band name. It was gruesome and at the same time silly and very resistant to analysis. The name seemed to mean something , but what? No one could really say. I came up with some seemingly logical reasons for inventing the name. One was that I named the band after anthropologist Louis Leakey's famous Headless Lucy skeleton that he found in Ethiopia.Another one was that Charlie Brown wised -up to Lucy's football trick and kicked her head off instead of kicking the football. But the truth of the matter is that the band was named after a nameless and headless murder victim that was found in a dumpster in Phoenix ,Arizona.

comments via "haloscan"

I just installed " haloscan" and it erased all the comments people had left. Sometimes when you improve something you lose something in the process.

...social security mess Ronald Reagan's fault!

The current mess with Social Security began in 1983 in the administration of Ronald Reagan. Under Reagan's direction Social Security withholding was doubled. The excuse for doing this was that because of the size of the baby boomer generation a "surplus" of funds would be needed to take care of the BOOMERS in their retirement years. The surplus was supposed to be what Reagan called "a trust fund" which would enable the country to pay the baby boomers their promised retirement without unduly strapping the upcoming Generation-X. Reagan, of course, spent the money as fast as he could get it on unapproved and even illegal operations---- calling the funds a "surplus" that he was free to spend in any way he saw fit. Now we have another Republican president who wants to tamper with your retirement money. If you think you'll ever see any of the funds you put into your "private SS acount" you are seriously mistaken. My sources for this information are:


Ronald Reagan, "Remarks on Signing the Social Security Amendments"-1983, from: The Public Papers Of Ronald Reagan.

"Bush's Financial Folly", The New York Times", 2-15-'05.

Jeff Gannon: GWB's fake news reporter!

"White House credentialed fake news reporter`Jeff Gannon` from fake news agency `Talon News` was cited by the Washington Post as having the only access to an internal CIA memo that named Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert CIA agent. Gannon, in a question posed to Wilson in an Oct. ,2003 interview referred to the memo( to which no other news outlet had access....). Gannon subsequently has been subpoenaed by the federal grand jury looking into the Plame outing." from: dailykos.com in a Jan.,30th posting by SusanG


Just the latest from the Neo-Feudalists in the White House in their attempt to control and twist the news to make it into overt propaganda. Just type "Talon News" and hit the search button for all the breaking news on this story.

I Hate Ronald Reagan

Corporate taxes under Reagan and now GWB have reached their lowest point since 1929. This fact alone should give any reasonable person a good idea where things are headed in this country and the world. Corporations, who DO use water, electricity, garbage collection services and all the other things provided by government through taxes, are now taxed at a lower rate than individuals are. They also receive special discounts on the resources that they use. This trend in America, for individual citizens to pay for the services used and the collateral environmental damage caused by corporations through their payroll taxes, began in the administration of Ronald Reagan. The now discredited theory used to describe this situation was aptly called the "Trickle Down Theory." We were promised a trickle and we did not get even that. Real wages, after adjustment for inflation, fell in the Reagan years as they have in both Bush administrations. -(1)-

Labor was also hard hit during the Reagan administration
After Reagan fired all the air traffic controllers for striking for better working conditions and hired permanent replacements, corporate employers followed suit, thereby, for all intents and purposes, emasculating the Labor movement and turning the clock back on the decades of progress made for the American working man. Far from being upset by these developments the majority of voters inexplicably were enthused by them.-(2)-


So, during the Reagan years taxes were lowered on the upper 1% of the income tier, thereby increasing their wealth tremendously, and those in the lower income tiers received meaningless decreases accompanied by a DOUBLING of withholding on their Social Security. In addition, the Reagan administration could spend this "surplus" on whatever they chose. And they did-- every cent of it-- with no accountability to anyone but themselves. One of the things that they spent the money on was right wing death squads south of the border. They also spent the money that they acquired illegally through arms sales to the Iranians on similar projects south of the border. This was the famous Iran-Contra scandal that many of Reagan's minions were convicted of master- minding and participating in. Reagan, of course, alleged that he had no memory of these dealings-(3)-, hence his other popular moniker: "The Great Forgetter", a name that would prove to be ironically apropos in the ensuing years.


Reagan,as well as George W. Bush, ostensibly believe in smaller government, a strong military, lower taxes, and a balanced budget. However, both presidents have lowered taxes for the rich, increased military spending, and almost paradoxically created larger government and crippling budget deficits.-(4)- which they then leave for their successors to deal with. My belief is that these presidents did and do believe in a weak and small government and concurrent unanswerable and vast power in "private" multi-national corporations. The strategy now is to weaken our government,which is the only force powerful enough to control the corporations, by deliberately bankrupting it. There is no other reasonable explanation for their behavior.

This is why I hate Ronald Reagan.
Knowing these things, would you consider Reagan to have been a patriot, a knowing traitor, or an unwitting dupe of huge corporate interests? This fracturing of governmental power is a worldwide phenomenon and the way it's being done is similar in many respects for the different countries involved. The power vacuum is, of course, being taken up by huge multi-national corporations. This is what is being referred to by scholars who know as "the New Feudalism." But that is a topic for a different post.




-1- Mark Weisbrot,"Ronald Reagan's Legacy", Knight-Ridder,6-7-2002.

-2- Randy Schweitz, NATCA press release, 1-28-1997.

-3- P. Kunhardt, Jr., The American Presidency (NY, Riverhead Books,
1999), pp. 292-301.

-4- Joe Strupp, "Ronald Reagan: still the teflon president", in Editor and
Publisher, 6-8-2004.

Bush Presidency Begins to Unravel...

The coalition of the willing list no longer exists. Senators are publicly announcing that the current administration lies to us on a daily basis about issues large and small. I, personally,cannot think of a single issue on which this administration has not lied.

"Outposts of Tyranny"

"...Stripped of social coloring and modern legal restraints, the arrangement for work in modern America resembles the same terms that functioned during feudalism. But this is more than an echo from distant times. The employment system is the defining structure for maintaining a still dominant hierarchy among citizens, those with stunted rights and those with expansive power over others."


"Where did citizens learn the resignation and cynicism that leads them to withdraw as active citizens? They learned it at the office; they learned it on the shop floor. The real-life education in who has the power and who doesn't creates a formidible barrier to ever establishing an authentic democracy in which Americans are genuinely represented and engaged. The socialization of powerlessness is probably far more damaging to politics than the special-interest campaign money or the emptiness of televison advertising." William Greider from, "The Soul of Capitalism"



Maybe we should tend to our own garden before we attempt to tend to the rest of the world's. What was it that that esteemed Repuplican president, Dwight Eisenhower, warned us against? He warned in his farewell to the nation address,in substance,to
beware the military-industrial complex!

"Gregoire Relaxes Rules on Medicaid"

According to an article in today's,Seattle Times,"Gov. Christine Gregoire yesterday ordered the state to ...ease its Medicaid rules..." in relation to children getting and staying on the state's Medicaid rolls. This will add about twenty thousand children to the rolls and will undo the work of former state senator, Dino Rossi, to keep the poverty stricken children off the rolls.
It will also, as a side effect, add many votes to Gregoire's gubernatorial bid if a revote should become necessary. This is smart politics and more importantly helps children from poor families recieve much needed health care. Republicans are expected to oppose this measure as it does not in any way help big business or Republican cronies.

"...proud 'neath heated brow!" Bob Dylan

There is a person named "Lawrence" who sounds like he's about 17 but claims to have several advanced college degrees and his personal mission seems to be to vanquish Headless Lucy in debate. His absolute obtuseness to anything but the hard core reactionary right- wing view is astounding. If a surgeon chopped his leg off by mistake he'd come out of anesthesia arguing in favor of a 250,000 dollar cap on punitive damages.


"Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rolling high and mighty traps.
Countless fires on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps.
We'll meet on edges soon said I
Proud 'neath heated brow.
Ah! but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now!"

Bob Dylan, "Younger Than Yesterday"



I hope I got the words right. I got them by listening to the Byrds version. The Byrds still sound good. They have some of the best Dylan interpretations that have been done.

New Governor for WA State

Christine Gregoire,Dem., will be sworn in 1/12/2005!! It's been a long battle but honesty and integrity finally won out and we will finally have a Dem. Governor with not only ability but backbone as well!