The bus ride to Nerja from Malaga was only three euros.

Walking down the narrow streets of my first European town. Towards the Balcon. Flanked by stucco. Emotion swells as the mountains and the sea come into veiw, beneath the dark blue sapphire sky. The sound of the tide pounding through the Medditerranean air. An old Spanish widow standing in a doorway, watching her world pass by. Ice cream shops and a certain cafe. Artists on blankets. Horse-drawn carriages. Shoppers and Drinkers. Young girls and Small dogs. Flowers in bloom. Palms in the wind. The whiff of petrol int he whirr of scooters. When I am far away, and I think of Europe, this is the image that comes to me. In that memory, I am over there at that table drinking a vodka lemon or a cococnut seven or something, and the sun is not yet set. This place was my first love.

There are so many things that I should write...

It is dark now. Somewhere out below the balcony a kid just dove into a swimming pool. Across the way a dog has begun barking, maybe at the sound of my typewriter, but probably not. I am using a laptop. If i were to glace over my shoulder, I would see the red glow of a neon sign that reads "Linda's Bar." It is calling me, or maybe that is the night, or my liver, or just the need for human interaction. I don't know anymore. It wasn't always this way.

The first time i came to Nerja. I was skinny nineteen-year old virgin who couldn't drink or smoke; i was just a kid. Every ideal I had ever invented sat on a pedastal untarnished by those experiences which would eventually make me a man. There has never been a day in my life, since i was here the first time that...

...Wait. Sorry, it's that red light. Let's do an experiment. I am going to go to the bar and order one beer, drink it. Then, I am going to come back and finish my thoughts. That is the plan. Let's see what happens...

That was only three days ago.

More Bob Harris:: "as much as 30% of the country and growing -- are still afflicted with a whole series of bizarre notions, to wit:


1. that corporations whose sole legal purpose is to maximize profit and externalize costs are trustworthy stewards of the public good, and thus deserve legal and political power unavailable to individual citizens

2. that the politicians and media figures who serve these institutions most slavishly, mouthing their deceptive PR and inviting them into the backest rooms of media and government, are the most devoted servants of the working American public

3. and that when (and only when) the name of a specific deity is invoked by these amoral creatures, their work in rolling back and attacking virtually every social, political and environmental protection takes on the holy glow of a just, generous, and loving God of infinite power who nonetheless has chosen to reveal himself only to a minority of humankind


Believing any of these notions requires a stunningly fictitious, invented version of even basic history, economics, and several hard sciences..."

I like this guy.

Bob Harris On The Senate Deal To Preserve Filibusters:
"Long-term, however, the very notion of Senate rules having any meaning at all has itself been put on the table. And if the last few years have shown us anything, it's that what's unimaginably extreme today can be spun into conventional wisdom tomorrow.

Compulsive executive secrecy, lies to Congress, elective war in defiance of virtually the entire world, nationalized surveillance databases, imprisonment without trial, torture without accountability, reporters on the White House payroll, elections with no paper trail, and dozens of other concepts complete alien to any basic understanding of what America is supposed to be have all become a part of the daily landscape.

They push for a foot and we surrender an inch. But fanatics never stop. So gradually we're all pulled along. Inches become feet become miles.

So victory is ours: we only gave an inch this time. Again. "

Are you my dear fellow citizens the victim of propaganda? Today's question: Did Newsweek cause any deaths with its reporting last week? If you anawered yes, then it might be time to start getting your news from somewhere besides the White House Media Whores, or as I prefer d.c.p.r.b.s machine.

From The Light of Reason's Anatomy of Propaganda: "But I find this paragraph buried in the middle of the article even more intriguing:
The appearance of the sign follows a national news story from last week. Newsweek magazine retracted a story reporting that military guards at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay flushed a copy of the Koran down the toilet during interrogation of a detainee. The Newsweek story sent Washington in a frenzy and was blamed for igniting Muslim riots and deaths abroad, including a particularly violent outburst in Afghanistan.
You have to love that passive construction: the Newsweek story �was blamed�� Just exactly who was it who blamed Newsweek �for igniting Muslim riots and deaths abroad�? Oh, gee, who knows. It just kind of happened.
What is significant about this paragraph is that it is simply dropped into the story, without a second thought"

The Downing Street Memo :: The most undereported story in years:
To those who troll the globes various papers and blogs none of this stuff is new, per se. But for those making the case that America has really become more odacious in its global criminal activities, the evidence has never been more succinct.

Excerpt: "The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.
The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force."

Read the whole thing and then wonder how free is that freedom must be shielded from the truth by this ever-sickening, ever-thickening veil of propaganda.

It's All Newsweek's Fault - New York Times: "Let's stipulate flatly that Newsweek made a serious error. For the sake of argument, let's even posit that the many other similar accounts of Koran desecration (with and without toilets) by American interrogators over the past two years are fantasy - even though they've been given credence by the International Committee of the Red Cross and have turned up repeatedly in legal depositions by torture victims and in newspapers as various as The Denver Post and The Financial Times. Let's also ignore the May 1 New York Times report that a former American interrogator at Guant�namo has corroborated a detainee's account of guards tossing Korans into a pile and stepping on them, thereby prompting a hunger strike. Why don't we just go all the way and erase those photographs of female guards sexually humiliating Muslims (among other heinous crimes) at Abu Ghraib? "

pehaps a better word for televangelists and presidents would be cattle-ist. They seek to effect change in the mindless herds? I do not know but there must be a good bumper sticker in there somewhere.

Just a little something:
"But hope has succeeded in the past, with the abolitionists, the civil rights movement, and the social reformers. As Wallis pointed out, it is no accident that these movements were led by people of faith, for with faith comes hope.
Wallis closed with a plea to his audience to hope. He said that �hope creates the will, will creates action, and action creates change. This is where he puts the contract in front of us and asks us to sign on the dotted line. He wants us to hope."

I have been far too guilty of letting those fundmentalist puppet monkees define for me modern Christianity. This is no small part of my decision to abandon the Christian language as far as I seek to define and navigate my own path. However, I can not help but to get a little sentimental when as I read a piece like this. Now I have no intention of returning to any particular religious narrative for the basis of my understandings, but I am happy that there are some out there carrying their crosses in opposition to BSTBN Christianity. Good luck. Now, I am going to meditate over a beer.

her creamed dishpan hands
tug at flesh-toned pantyhose,
then smooth Sunday rouge
onto to her fleshy cheeks,
framed by pinstriped clothesline hair.
then smooth Sunday rouge
once again
onto the dimpled skin
bared by the scooping neckline
of a second-hand evening gown.

ready for a shiny night in a dusty town.

in the parlor downstairs,
beneath the muffled blare
of big band radio,
smoke floats from a Lucky
man, patient in an oversized easy chair,
the first gentleman caller since Dewey thought he won the election.

A: "What's it like to be back?"

B: "You see things in life, and you'd be surprised what you see. Your life, your whole life is changes. you go through changes in your life- one second you got it made, next second your down in the dumps. and it goes back and forth throughout your whole life. one second you got the most beautiful girl in the world. the next second you don't even have a girlfriend no more. and it goes back and forth and back and forth, you know, and this is life, man. it's changes. this is what you got to go through throughout your whole lifetime. never never, never never land."

British Intelligence Warned of Iraq War: "Seven months before the invasion of Iraq, the head of British foreign intelligence reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair that President Bush wanted to topple Saddam Hussein by military action and warned that in Washington intelligence was 'being fixed around the policy,' according to notes of a July 23, 2002, meeting with Blair at No. 10 Downing Street.
'Military action was now seen as inevitable,' said the notes, summarizing a report by Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, British intelligence, who had just returned from consultations in Washington along with other senior British officials. Dearlove went on, 'Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.'"

Home from Iraq: "Lots of column inches have been spent in the discussion of how our rights as Americans are being surreptitiously confiscated, but what about our complicity, as journalists, in that? It seems to me that the assault on free speech, while the fear and intimidation is in the air, comes as much from us -- as individuals and networks of journalists who censor ourselves -- as it does from any other source.
We need to wake up as individuals and as a community of journalists and start asking the hard and scary questions. Questions we may not really want to know the answers to about ourselves, about our government, about what is being done in our name, and hold the responsible individuals accountable through due process in our legal or electoral system.
We need to begin to be able to look again at our government, our leadership and ourselves critically. That is what the Fourth Estate is all about. That's what American journalism can do at its zenith. I also happen to believe that, in fact, that is the highest form of patriotism -- expecting our country to live up to the promises it makes and the values it purports to hold. The role of the media in assisting the public to ensure those values are reflected in reality is undeniably failing today.
Go ahead, take a hard look in the mirror, ask the questions -- if there is something in our nation that needs repair or change, that is how it will get done, by asking those questions, getting answers and reporting them.
We still have the freedom in this country as individuals and as journalists to defend the rights enshrined in the Constitution, to defend the values that we as individuals still hold dear -- so why aren't we doing it? Are we scared? If we're scared, then who will be there to defend those rights and values when it is "

AIDS Now Compels Africa to Challenge Widows' 'Cleansing' - New York Times: "But they hunted her down, she said, and insisted that if she refused to exorcise her dead husband's spirit, she would be blamed every time a villager died. So she put her two small children to bed and then forced herself to have sex with James's cousin.
'I cried, remembering my husband,' she said. 'When he was finished, I went outside and washed myself because I was very afraid. I was so worried I would contract AIDS and die and leave my children to suffer.'
Here and in a number of nearby nations including Zambia and Kenya, a husband's funeral has long concluded with a final ritual: sex between the widow and one of her husband's relatives, to break the bond with his spirit and, it is said, save her and the rest of the village from insanity or disease. Widows have long tolerated it, and traditional leaders have endorsed it, as an unchallenged tradition of rural African life. "

Brussels Sprouts - New York Times: "At the end of the day, the Chinese would rather live with a nuclear North Korea than risk a collapsed nonnuclear North Korea, and the Europeans would rather live with a nuclear Iran - that Europe can make all kinds of money off of - rather than risk losing Iran's business to prevent it from going nuclear. The Chinese and the Europeans 'each assume that in the end, the U.S. will deter both the North Koreans and the Iranians anyway, so why worry,' Mr. Mandelbaum said.
Are the Europeans and Chinese behaving cynically? Of course, these are the very countries constantly complaining about U.S. 'hegemony,' and calling for a 'multipolar world.' Yet the only thing they are really interested in being a pole for is to oppose the U.S. - not to actually do something hard themselves to stabilize the global system."

WorldNetDaily: Was World War II worth it?: "If Britain endured six years of war and hundreds of thousands of dead in a war she declared to defend Polish freedom, and Polish freedom was lost to communism, how can we say Britain won the war? "

Hullabaloo: "But I'd really appreciate it if they'd can the phony sanctimony from now on and shut the fuck up about 'Desperate Housewives' and dirty talk on TV. If it's ok for the First Lady of the United States to joke publicly about her husbands limp dick and jerking off farm animals then it's ok for Whoopie Goldberg and everybody else to make Bush jokes"

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Bush Disarms, Unilaterally: "Today, most U.S. homes can access only 'basic' broadband, among the slowest, most expensive and least reliable in the developed world, and the United States has fallen even further behind in mobile-phone-based Internet access. The lag is arguably the result of the Bush administration's failure to make a priority of developing these networks. In fact, the United States is the only industrialized state without an explicit national policy for promoting broadband.'"

Journalism is has gone to poop, reason number 456 for those stll countin: "What the audience didn't know was that the ABC videotape had been edited so as to create an inaccurate impression. At that press conference, Mrs. Clinton had been asked not how much work she had done for Madison Guaranty, but how her signature came to be on a letter dealing with Madison Guaranty's 1985 proposal to issue preferred stock. ABC News had seamlessly omitted thirty-nine words from her actual answer, as well as the cut, by interposing a cutaway shot of reporters taking notes. The press conference transcript shows that she actually answered as follows: 'The young attorney [and] the young bank officer did all the work and the letter was sent. But because I was what we called the billing attorney -- in other words, I had to send the bill to get the payment sent -- my name was put on the bottom of the letter. It was not an area that I practiced in. It was not an area that I know anything, to speak of, about.'"

More Bible?

Another thought: If I murder someone I deserve to go to prison whether I get caught or not. If I possess cocain, but do not get caught, do I also deserve to go to prison? If Bush has admitted to cocoaine, does that mean we are looking at a man who deserves to have been a prisoner of the state?

What is the elegant difference?

Are drugs that bad?: I remember back in my college days, I asked a buddy of mine what he had done on Saturday, and he said took some Mexican Fly, man. He then went on to describe in vivid detail the phychelic effects of the acid.

"So basically," I replied, "You sat on the sofa for six hours."

I thought of him this morning when I read a new report on TV viewership. Americans are watching an average of 4.5 hours of TV everyday, second only to Japan. I thought I had read that intenet use was driving down TV viewership, but I guess not. Or maybe it is one of those Bush decreases: It's not as high as it would have been had Al Gore not invented the internet.

(we all know at this point he never said that, right)

But what if a drug could be made that was cheap and healthy, but still obliterated the mind ino a mesmerizing kaleidescope of color, beauty, sound, and wonder. How many Americans actually have a moral standing that allows them to condemn someone who carefully builds a lifestyle around drug use.

4.5 hours a day. With your snacks on your lap. Your emaciated faces glowing blue in the flickering light of your boobtoob. Your brain reprogrammed to not hear the laugh track, to not see the over-acting. How is that respecting reality, physical, spiritual, or otherwise.

You might as well get all coked up and play Monopoly with imaginary friends.

Disclaimer: This is not an endorsement of drug use.

Coning next season. Robot jockeys. Where is the union on this one?

A reminder that America's fighting force is not involuntary.

Fw:

graveyard in praha

the sea is in our sweat.
the ocean is full of tears.

explore

The Big Picture: Dynamic Pricing: DVD versus CD Strategies

HoustonChronicle.com - Life support may be cut based on pay, prognosis:
"A similar case is still in the courts. Texas Children's Hospital wants to discontinue life support on 5-month-old Sun Hudson, who was diagnosed shortly after birth with a fatal form of dwarfism. His mother, Wanda Hudson, wants her son's care to continue at the hospital."

Unlike the Terri Scivaro case, many Texas families are losing family members against the wish of the patients' families. Keep your eyes on the ball.

From Digby:
By now most people who read liberal blogs are aware that George W. Bush signed a law in Texas that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient's family's wishes. It is called the Texas Futile Care Law. Under this law, a baby was removed from life support against his mother's wishes in Texas just this week. A 68 year old man was given a temporary reprieve by the Texas courts just yesterday.

Those of us who read liberal blogs are also aware that Republicans have voted en masse to pull the plug (no pun intended) on medicaid funding that pays for the kind of care that someone like Terry Schiavo and many others who are not so severely brain damaged need all across this country.

Those of us who read liberal blogs also understand that that the tort reform that is being contemplated by the Republican congress would preclude malpractice claims like that which has paid for Terry Schiavo's care thus far.

Those of us who read liberal blogs are aware that the bankruptcy bill will make it even more difficult for families who suffer a catastrophic illness like Terry Schiavo's because they will not be able to declare chapter 7 bankruptcy and get a fresh start when the gargantuan medical bills become overwhelming.

And those of us who read liberal blogs also know that this grandstanding by the congress is a purely political move designed to appease the religious right and that the legal maneuverings being employed would be anathema to any true small government conservative.

Those who don't read liberal blogs, on the other hand, are seeing a spectacle on television in which the news anchors repeatedly say that the congress is "stepping in to save Terry Schiavo" mimicking the unctuous words of Tom Delay as they grovel and leer at the family and nod sympathetically at the sanctimonious phonies who are using this issue for their political gain.

Want to smell like Jesus?