whenever i ...

... ... fall at your feet

crowded house

I'm really close tonight.
I feel like I'm moving inside her.
Lying in the dark,
I think that I'm beginning to know her.
Let it go.
I'll be there when you call.

Whenever I fall at your feet,
You let your tears rain down on me,
Whenever I touch your slow turning pain.

You're hiding from me now.
There's something in the way that you're talking.
The words don't sound right,
But I hear them all moving inside you,
go.
I'll be waiting when you call.

Whenever I fall at your feet,
You let your tears rain down on me,
Whenever I touch your slow turning pain.

The finger of blame has turned upon itself
And I'm more than willing to offer myself.
Do you want my presence or need my help?
Who knows where that might lead?
I fall ...

Whenever I fall at your feet,
You let your tears
Let them rain
Let them rain
down on me.
Whenever I fall,
Whenever I fall

cheneyBu$hCo

the cheneybu$hco regimen never had any legitimacy.

they stole the 2000 election in florida.

they exercised a judicial coup d' etat,

with their accomplices, the supreme court felonious five.

they stole the 2004 election in ohio.

they were never duly elected.

they defrauded the american people and stole our democracy.

they have had no honest claim to the presidency.

they are illegitimate.

they are invalid.

all of cheneybu$hco acts are null and void.

they continue to be the thieves they have always been.

they remain a usurper junta of tinhorn plutocrats and kleptocrats.

since they stole power and have occupied the White House (our House!),

they have proved beyond any reasoned doubt,

that they,

every complicit member of the cheneybu$hco regime and every supporter and enabler,

are the biggest threat to the Constitution of the United States.

every member of our armed forces and every government official

swears an oath to defend our Constitution against all enemies,

foreign or domestic.

or domestic.

the cheneybu$hco regime is the gravest danger of our Constitution;

they are enemies to the Constitution domestic.

all of our military and every elected member of our government

has sworn to protect the Constitution and should, no, must

defend it against the cheneybu$hco regime’s attacks.

habeas corpus.

innocence until proven guilty

the fourth amendment

et cetera

and the cetera here is the whole list.

it is a long list.

it’s a litany.

(see link to litany)

for all these reasons it is imperative that cheneybu$hco not be validated, as if they have any legitimacy.

compromise with them not possible.

there exists an inherent wrongness in every action they take and they must be opposed if for that reason alone.

collaboration is wrong;

bipartisanship is wrong;

coordination is wrong.

unless cheneyBu$hco do exactly what we want,

they must be opposed, resisted, denied, repudiated, marginalized, trivialized, defied and defeated.

cheneyBu$hco simply must not be accepted.

on anything.

period.

they are the threat to our country.

they are the enemy.

they must be exposed to one and all as the traitors

that they are: traitors against the Constitution;

traitors against our nation;

the treachery listed in the Litany

Bi-Partisanship is collaboration with the enemy.

the only permissible negotiations are negotiations of their capitulation.

my case in point:

this regime i always call cheneybu$hco has asserted an executive privilege to shield their advisers to their putative "president", their pretender to the Oval Office from disclosing their advice to the executive.

these suckers may as well be vampires for all their aversion to the light of day.

John Dean at http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20020201.html

"Cheney says he is refusing to provide information to the Congress as a matter of principle. He told the Today Show that he wants to "protect the ability of the president and the vice president to get unvarnished advice from any source we want.""

public servants working on the tax-payer funded payroll are so worried about the Oval Office occupier(s) being able to get the "unvarnished" advice and to protect their access to this resource that they can't let Anyone know what that advice is/was and who would have given any of it.

what an excellent canard for criminals to use to stonewall and avoid bringing evidence of their crimes forth.

after all, what advice could there be that the adviser and the advice must be kept secret?

under which circumstances should such secrets be kept?

at what cost to our free and open form of government?

well, wouldn't that be when we would want to protect the secret identity of one of our valued secret agents?

oh, apparently, Not so much? See: Mrs Valerie Wilson.

well, what if the advice itself is lies and the advisor is advising that the laws be violated and crimes be committed?

oh, apparently, yes. even if the advice comes from enemy agents to serve the interests of our enemies?

See: Irving L. Libby, et al.

we would never know, if we allow the cheney canard.

if all of these folks are upholding their sworn Oaths to defend the Constitution, what could they possibly need to hide?

answer: Nothing.

what we have been taught by cheneybu$hco over and over again is that we can never trust them and we can not believe them.

Impeach them;

Remove them;

Indict them;

Convict them:

sentence them to be banned from further government service;

no presidential library;

no possibility of pardon, parole or commutation;

mandatory prison.

they are traitors.

It is our duty as patriots, as defenders of the Constitution to make them eat shit.

Keep Hope Alive.

Refuge of Tolerance

from The Austin-American Statesman, February 25, 2007

In 1984, I moved to Austin from a socially oppressive land, a desolate place, void of any freedom to question authority and inhabited by dogmatic conformists. This place is known as the Texas Panhandle.

My move was really more akin to a ''pressured relocation.'' My suspicious neighbors in Amarillo had become more brazen. The glares and whispers I had become accustomed to had turned to name-calling and veiled threats. I wasn't flamboyantly open about my sexual orientation, but my reluctance to fully embrace Reaganomics, the Dallas Cowboys and, well, women, made me highly conspicuous.

In the 1980s, the Austin City Council passed an ordinance providing health benefits to domestic partners of city employees, including those in same-sex relationships. I remember a grim-faced TV anchorman in Amarillo announcing the item on the 6 o'clock news. I half-expected to hear, ''Coming up next, a perspective from Anita Bryant regarding a city here in Texas that has chosen to defy God and create a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah.''

That was when I seriously started to consider making Austin my new home. I had thought about moving to Dallas or Houston, both of which have large, visible gay communities. However, Houston's Montrose and Dallas' Oak Lawn areas are confined to only one section of the city. I didn't want to move to a gay ghetto, where acceptance was guaranteed only within certain street boundaries.

After all, choosing a new city was more than a matter of just counting the number of gay bars - it was a safety and security issue. I wanted to live in a place in Texas that would be tolerant to folks of my persuasion, a place where I wouldn't wake up in the middle of the night greeted by narrow-minded villagers wielding pitchforks and carrying torches. Or so it seemed to me at the time.

Upon moving to Austin, I discovered that it is not the queer community that draws gays to Austin, but instead the larger, accepting heterosexual community. The lack of an identifiable gay ghetto in Austin means that we can roam almost anywhere and don't have to confine ourselves to certain neighborhoods.

However, I had to make some serious adjustments to my ''gaydar'' in order to detect other gay men in Austin. It seemed that very handsome, well-dressed, slightly effeminate, cosmetic-wearing men (what we now call metrosexuals) were more likely to be heterosexual. And the T-shirt, Levis- and boots-wearing men were more often homosexual.

It was a ratio almost inverse to what I was accustomed to in the Panhandle. So when I met a guy, I had a hard time deciding: Is he really gay or did he just get here from Lubbock?

In Amarillo, I had tried to keep my homosexuality a well-guarded secret, to be shared only with family and close friends. Once I moved to Austin, I felt comfortable enough to begin sharing my sexual orientation with my new fellow citizens. Maybe too comfortable.

At first, I found myself coming out to just about everyone I met: the postman, bank tellers, employees at drive-up windows of fast-food restaurants, H-E-B grocery sackers. There were a few surprised or bewildered looks, but most responded by saying, in effect, ''OK we get it, you're gay.We don't care.''

Austinites, I learned, are a jaded breed. It takes someone really bizarre or scandalous to get their attention, like a panhandling, bikini-clad cross-dresser or a state senator soliciting sex on Congress Avenue.

I, however, am just a run-of-the-mill, garden-variety gay man, homosexualus familiaris. homosexualus familiaris. To be viewed as unremarkable, really. Which is exactly what I was seeking, to be treated by my fellow neighbors as normal and ordinary.

Once I settled in, I reported my findings to friends in the Panhandle, and soon my Austin apartment had become a terminus on a gay underground railroad for queers who wanted to relocate here. Feeling safer in this environment, most decided to ''come out'' to their friends and family back home. Once, a straight friend of mine still living in Amarillo asked, ''Just what is it about that city? It seems like everyone who moves to Austin turns gay.''

I wanted to tell him that the his former Amarilloans were already gay and that they only felt comfortable enough in our city to express who they really are. I wanted to tell him that with given the opportunity to live in a place that tries not to judge you, you have permission to become whoever you want. But the cultural divide between us was too vast; I didn't think he would grasp what I was saying.

So instead I made a joke: ''It's the cedar pollen, the cedar pollen is what turns you gay.''

I had planned to move to Austin with my best friend from high school. For years, we had dreamed about living in a different place and wondered what it would be like to wake up in the morning and not smell cattle feedlots or the oil refinery. But when the time finally came for us to move, she abruptly did an about-face and decided to stay in Amarillo.

I wasn't really surprised, having sensed her apprehension days before. ''Not now, someday I'll move,'' she said.

It's been almost 25 years, and she still lives in the Panhandle. She visits me at least once a year, and every time she comes, she marvels at what a wonderful place Austin is and swears she's going to move here.

I like her annual visits - they serve as affirmations of my decision to relocate. Because despite the long lines of traffic, the increasingly high cost of living and the messy, loud scavenging invaders (the grackles, not Californians), this is still the best place in Texas to live.

Take it from a former Panhandle boy, happily living his own unremarkable life.

Bret Gerbe FOR AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Larry Cuellar, left, with partner Andy Davis, moved to Austin from Amarillo in the 1980s and found he was accepted here as a gay man, as were others who joined him from the Panhandle.

Austin became a refuge of tolerance

BYLINE: Larry Cuellar SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMA
DATE: February 25, 2007
PUBLICATION: Austin American-Statesman (TX)
EDITION: Final
SECTION: Insight
PAGE: G01

This is one of a series of personal essays grounded in Austin. Our aim: to give readers an intimate glimpse of life in our town. Do you have your own tale of the city to share? Submit your original essay of 1,000 words or less to tales@statesman.com for consideration by our editors.

(i paid my $5.95 to the American-Statesman folks for this article.)
(then i violated the HELL out of their copyright by posting it here.)
(i am not proud of that)
(but it needed to be liberated from their archives)
(which are in Naples, Florida)
(and brought back to Texas)
(to be FREE!)

... ... ...

NOT a quote from the REAGAN DIARIES

May 17, 1986:

'A moment I've been dreading. George brought his ne're-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they'll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work.'

Ol' Ronnie was a lot sharper then i thought.

... ... ...


or so i thought:
1) the Global Research link has changed to reflect that this was not accurate;
2) This Snopes link is persuasive.
3) The Museum of Hoaxes is quoted by Snopes.

Kinsley was writing satire and it is quoted as fact.

Only now do i realize that i have been hoaxed.

I apologize for perpetrating a fiction posed as fact.

i thank Suzanne at Firedog Lake for pointing this out to me.

... ... ...

Leukocyte Extravasation

The Inner Life of Cells

Specially created for Harvard biology students, this eight-minute computer-animated film reveals the beauty and hidden cycle of intricate organic mechanisms at work at the molecular level. The focus is on how white blood cells respond and react to external stimuli. Everything that you see in this clip, the unusual orchestra of Nuclei, proteins, and lipids, are actions that are taking place right now in your body, in every individual cell. This includes one of the most surprising sequences - the motor protein plodding along on two pod-like feet along a track, carrying behind it a sphere of lipids. As cartoonish as that sequence looks, biologists report it’s an accurate rendering. The film is the work of a group called XVIVO using NewTek LightWave 3D and Adobe After Effects.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB6G9GD2KFk

also see http://home.earthlink.net/~shalpine2/KubyHTML/Inflam.htm

and this is the music video version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H1S9d5h-Ps

shorter version: Inflammation happens; good guys are on the way.

FISA Fiasco Fallout

the congressional Democratic embarrassment:
Scarecrow at Firedog Lake:

A Nation Represented By Sheep

After telling Congress and the public that the reason they needed to revise FISA was to ensure they could spy on foreign-to-foreign communications that might be routed through US facilities (to close an alleged loophole created by a FISA court ruling that such surveillance required a warrant), the White House went for broke. The New York Times now reports that the Administration actually had very different reasons to make wholesale changes in FISA:

Congressional aides and others familiar with the details of the law said that its impact went far beyond the small fixes that administration officials had said were needed to gather information about foreign terrorists. They said seemingly subtle changes in legislative language would sharply alter the legal limits on the government’s ability to monitor millions of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the United States.
. . .
“This more or less legalizes the N.S.A. program,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington, who has studied the new legislation.

Under just some of the revisions, NSA can spy on any call you make to or receive from another country (or a place the AG reasonable believes is to/from another country), without a warrant, as long as Alberto Gonzales and the Director NSA claim they reasonably believe it involves “foreign intelligence.” There doesn’t have to be any connection with a foreign power with whom we are war or terrorist group. Just you and your foreign friends is enough. The FISA court may examine the overall process in some undefined, rubberstamp way, but it cannot consider the reasonableness of your individual case. Any pretense that the 4th Amendment applies is gone.

which of course makes it unconstitutional and therefore illegal.
not that the courts will offer any relief.
well, they tried.
and cheneyBu$hco was allowed to ram this through our Democratic congress.

i share the widespread pain of those bewildered by our party's treachery.

Glenn Greenwald from Unclaimed Territory:

Democrats' responsibility for Bush radicalism

It is staggering, and truly disgusting, that even in August, 2007 -- almost six years removed from the 9/11 attacks and with the Bush presidency cemented as one of the weakest and most despised in American history -- that George W. Bush can "demand" that the Congress jump and re-write legislation at his will, vesting in him still greater surveillance power, by warning them, based solely on his say-so, that if they fail to comply with his demands, the next Terrorist attack will be their fault. And they jump and scamper and comply (Meteor Blades has the list of the 16 Senate Democrats voting in favor; the House will soon follow).

Jack Balkin fron Balkinazation:
The Party of Fear, the Party Without A Spine, and the National Surveillance State

Behind the current events is a more troubling trend. As Sandy Levinson and I have written, we are in a gradual transition from a National Security State to a National Surveillance State. We pointed out that although the Republicans got first crack at constructing many features of this emerging state, it would be a bipartisan effort. The only issue will be what kind of national surveillance state we would have, and whether government would put in place the appropriate checks and balances to protect civil liberties, prevent the multiplication of secret laws and secret methods of enforcement, and restrain an increasingly ambitious executive.

So far the answers to this question have not been reassuring. Whether controlled by Republicans or Democrats, Congress seems willing to bestow more and more unaccountable power to the President of the United States. The Democratic Party, which has long prided itself on its support for civil liberties, seems altogether to have lost its soul, and the Republican Party, which long contained a strong element of libertarianism and respect for individual freedom-- particularly in economic matters-- has given up any claims to providing a counterweight to a deluded and incompetent President.

we need Democrats who believe in the democracy we believe in.
this country has devolved into a police state.
and they are listening to every key stroke we type.

"ANGER, he smiles, towering in shiny metallic purple armour
Queen Jealousy, envy waits behind him
Her fiery green gown sneers at the grassy ground

Blue are the life-giving waters taken for granted,
They quietly understand
Once happy turquoise armies lay opposite ready,
But wonder why the fight is on
But they're all bold as love, yeah,
they're all bold as love.
Yeah, they're all bold as love
Just ask the axis ... "
~ Jimi Hendrix

our privacy and habeas corpus are gone for now;
but the Fourth Amendment SHALL Rise AGAIN.

...

The 4th Amendment of The U.S. Constitution

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

that's what it says.

the original 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
never fit within the confines of the Fourth Amendment.
after J.Edgar Hoover, and Watergate;
after the Church Commission, and
Seymour Hersh's New York Times' articles such as
HUGE C.I.A. OPERATION REPORTED IN U. S. AGAINST ANTIWAR FORCES,
OTHER DISSIDENTS IN NIXON YEARS,
we noticed we'd had NO oversight of any of our intelligence surveillance activities nor any of our clandestine agencies.

FISA was going to make it all better.

How Star Chamber can you get:
a secret court for warrants from the feds?
this was one of the larger winks at the Constitution.
well, post-Nixon/pre-cheneyBu$hco, anyway.
FISA has always been Constitutional Fiction.
The PATRIOT Act made an already unacceptable state of affairs
much worse.

Then cheneyBu$hco got caught in violation of even the
constitutional laxity of own rewritten update to FISA.
(as amazing as that still seems to be)

What in the hell have they been up to that they failed to find enough fellow travelers to let them continue to get away with it?

we have seen that some Republicans still cling to the Rule of Law
and eschew violating the Constitution: Judge Reggie Walton; James Comey; Bruce Fein; Patrick Fitzgerald; even John Ashcroft, soort; among others untold.
And, at least one of the FISA court judges.

we may not unreasonably believe that what we call "data mining" is what the hell they have been up to.

ben franklin said "A republic, if you can keep it!"