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Sarah Palin's Map of the U.S. Are you in her sights?

Secession is when a state leaves the union of states, or a region (as with southern Sudan currently) declares itself independent of a larger political entity. But what’s it called when the sane part of the union kicks the insane bit out? We need to expel Arizona, Texas and Florida from the U.S. I mean, enough is enough.

From Harper’s Weekly email:

A gunman opened fire on a “Congress on Your Corner” event held by Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D., Ariz.) in a mall in Tucson, killing six people and wounding more than a dozen. Representative Giffords, the primary target of the attack, was shot at point-blank range in the head but survived and remained in critical condition. Among the dead were U.S. District Court Judge John Roll and nine-year-old Christina Taylor-Green, who was born on September 11, 2001 and attended the meet-up after being elected to her elementary school’s student council. The gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, was apprehended and charged with numerous felonies, including murder and attempted assassination of a member of Congress. The FBI found an envelope at Loughner’s home labeled with the words, “I planned ahead,” “My assassination,” and “Giffords.” “Dear friends,” Loughner wrote on his MySpace page, “please don’t be mad at me. The literacy rate is below 5 percent. I haven’t talked to one person who is literate.” Clarence Dupnik, the sheriff of Pima County, where the shooting occurred, connected the act to “unbalanced people and how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government,” adding that Arizona was “the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

In addition to expelling Arizona, Texas and Florida, Sarah Palin should be brought up on charges. She is clearly inciting violent behavior, as Dupnik alludes to above. In addition to the now-infamous crosshairs graphic, Palin and her myrmidons have been inciting violence around the country in other ways. Here’s a snip from a Move On email I got a couple days ago:

Windows were smashed at Representative Giffords’ district office last March just a few hours after the House vote on health care reform. At one of the infamous town hall events in August 2009, a man attending the event accidentally dropped a handgun on the floor that he had been hiding under his arm. And violent tendencies have been inflamed by the careless and irresponsible rhetoric of certain political leaders. Sarah Palin’s infamous “target list” displayed Democratic districts, including Rep. Giffords’, in crosshairs, as if viewed through a gunsight.

But, Move On, it it really “careless”? This appears to me to be a deliberate and planned campaign to, literally, target progreesives around the country. Let’s not be naive, folks. As the Move On message continues:

violent imagery was prominently featured during the last election. For instance, a rally for Rep. Giffords’ Republican opponent, Jesse Kelly, was promoted with the following notice: “Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.”

Move On would like us all to sign a petition protesting this sort of vitriol and violence; it’s the least we can do. But what else should we do in this “culture war”? Are we merely going to continue signing petitions?

We need to find a way to bring Palin up on charges, for one thing, and to at minimum sanction Arizona and other states that harbor these criminals.

Charles Diez shot a bike rider in the head -- and got 120 days in jail

Via Treehugger:

While driving down the road one day, Charles Diaz grew upset at seeing a man riding his bike on a busy street with his 3 year-old son. So he shot him in the head. Thankfully, the bullet narrowly missed his skull, instead getting lodged in the cyclists’ helmet. Well, Diaz has just been sentenced for admitting to nearly murdering a man by firing a gun towards his head–and he’s received a paltry 4 months in jail.

Police said Charles Diez, an Asheville firefighter since 1992, stopped his car to confront a couple riding bikes along heavily traveled Tunnel Road. Diez was apparently incensed by Alan Simons carrying his 3-year-old child on a seat mounted on the back of his bike. After an argument, Diez pulled a gun and shot at Simons, but the bullet passed through Simon’s bicycle helmet, just missing his skull, police said.

Via Streetsblog:

In August, a grand jury reduced charges against Diez from attempted first degree murder to felony assault. While assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill certainly sounds like an offense worthy of a lengthy prison term, the presiding judge apparently agreed that this was a case of a stand-up guy having a bad day.

Via Mountain Xpress:

Convictions on such a charge result in an average 20-39 months in prison for the defendant. But in the sentencing, Superior Court Judge James Downs found that Diez’s military service, along with testimony from former colleagues about his good character, were mitigating factors, and chose to sentence him to 15-27 months instead. Downs suspended all but four months of that sentence unless Diez breaks the law again in the next 30 months.

Fox is using intimidation tactics on its affiliates to get them to run pro-war in Iran (read it again: Iran) programming. Fox’s “political experts” (AKA poli-spurts) cite a build up of nuclear weapons as a good reason to start the bombing in five minutes. Read all about it here and sign the networx open letter here. And then go watch some videos over at the Willie Nelson Peace Research Institute.

fiction by Brian Charles Clark

“I’m in heaven,” Orkney sings as he and his little black bag bloom through the door. I’d swear he was gesticulating wildly, but no, it’s just his aura flaring.
I’m smacking cornflakes, sitting stoic as a reader in bed.
“Where ya been? Been specten ya.”
Orkney trips another step into the little yellow room. He grins like a refrigerator door swinging open, waves away my question.
“We’re in the news,” he says.
AWOL, base police, truncheons, court marshal, the Group W bench.
“I’m trying not to jump to conclusions here,” I say. I feel like an old felt hat. Too comfortable to have much backbone. I eye Orkney suspiciously.
He hands me his cache, snicks it on. I click the Morning with WNN bookmark automatically.
“Click on obituaries.”
“Scu me?” But I click anyway.
Flip me. There we are. Our names.
“We were killed in the war.” We were killed in the war? Did I miss something? Read the rest of this entry »

Liz and Jay continue to kick out the jams: their latest project–actually one that they’ve been involved in for many years, but that is now seeing the light of the digital day–is a collaboration with Willie Nelson.

Yeah, *that* Willie Nelson: he of the tao and the beater guitar and all.

“The Willie Nelson Peace Research Institute believes in the Promise of Peace on Earth in Our Lifetime as the Birthright of Our Global Human Family.” Amen to that, brothers and sisters. I’m saying, check it out now–while you still can. The site is full of great ideas that ought to get your compassion flowing.

Here’s a verse from a lyric by Willie and Amy Nelson:

There is a peaceful solution. It’s called a peace revolution.
Now let’s take back America.
There’s a war and we’re in it, but I know we can win it.
So let’s take back America.

Now check out Willie singing the whole thing a cappella.

We’ve known for a good long while now that Senator Santorum is an unlawful enemy combatant, working, as he does, for Lord Sauron. Proof has finally arrived, if you know how to read between the lines. In an interview published in the Bucks County Courier Times, the Myrmidon of Mordor said, “As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else. It’s being drawn to Iraq and it’s not being drawn to the U.S. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the Eye to come back here to the United States.” Now I’m a Tolkein fan from way back, but this is just fuckin weird. This is war, damn it, not an RPG.

Please check out 15-year-old media-activist Ava Lowery’s site, peacetakescourage.com. She’s visually articulate and very couragous. She’s also received some truly hateful responses to her work. One hate-monger wrote to her, threatening, “It’s people like you who need to fucking die and get raped while your corpse rots in the sun…. Fuck you, I would jack off on your parents if I could. If you don’t like the team, get out of the park. That means take ur small dick and get the fuck off of my homeland you faggot chocolate gulper.” A story about Ava, her work, and the respone to it (both positive and negative) can be found at The Progressive.

“Dear Senators Cantwell and Murray: I’m ashamed to admit that I once thought you were pretty good senators. But you and your party’s lack of support for Senator Feingold’s move to censure President Bush for his crimes against civil society, the people of Iraq, and the people of the world through torture and wrongful imprisonment, leave me sick at heart and stomach. You can count on me to do whatever I can to see that you are not reelected. No more Democrats, the party of the chickens. And no more Republicans, the part of the chickenhawks.” Use this letter as a model, if you like; and contact your senators using this form.

A vital bit of news has gone missing in action (again). Here’s the scoop from The Nation, followed by a suggestion regarding what you can do about the missing story. “A new memo leaked to the British media last week asserts that George Bush and Tony Blair agreed in January 2003 to go to war in Iraq–not March 2003, as they insist. It also suggests that the leaders knew there was no legitimate case for war, and that Blair told Bush that he was ‘solidly’ behind US plans to invade Iraq before he sought advice about the invasion’s legality. Most shocking, it reveals that Bush was so desperate to provoke a war that he proposed painting US planes to look like UN aircrafts and flying them low over Iraq in hopes of inciting an Iraqi attack. (Bush to Blair: ‘The US was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach.’)” Take action! Write your local newspaper and demand coverage of this story. Here’s a draft letter that I sent to various papers in the Pacific Northwest as well as the New York Time. Be sure to revise the letter a bit before sending. Read the rest of this entry »

Regarding the Pain of Others

review by Brian Charles Clark

Regarding the Pain of Others
by Susan Sontag
Publisher: Picador, 2004

Susan Sontag’s new book, Regarding the Pain of Others, updates, expands, and in certain respects repudiates her 1977 book On Photography. Where On Photography was quite theoretical and full of jargon, following, as it did, the work of the French critic Roland Barthes, Regarding the Pain of Others is a series of simple ideas written in plain language. The new book is nonetheless, or perhaps more so because of its simplicity, a work of profound and needed philosophy. The core questions of this short book are, Do photographs of the destruction and pain caused by war in any way inhibit such acts? Or do such photos, because of their prevalence, inure us to the pain of others? Where once, as during the Vietnam war, “photography became… a criticism of war” through a public display of the carnage, “[t]his was bound to have consequences,” a “blowback” reaction since the “mainstream media are not in the business of making people feel queasy about the struggles for which they are being mobilized.” Contemporary news media are, rather, in the entertainment business. Thus, in the current war, the media have been willing and eager flag-waving dupes of the military. Read the rest of this entry »