Just before John Edwards’ campaign got the last nail driven into it in South Carolina’s Saturday primary election, there was another one of those “debates.” Three remaining “acceptable” Democratic candidates on a platform where they surrender all of their dignity and a nice chunk of their integrity for the chance to field moronic questions framed by high-paid media hookers. One thing about the fall of the empire, it’s ugly on a truly grand scale.

A week or two ago, CNBC, whose parent company General Electric manufactures more weapons of mass destruction than can be found in the arsenals of every Middle Eastern country combined, decided to terminate the candidacy of Dennis Kucinich, congressman from Ohio, who’d had the temerity to call for and try to pay for an audit of the weird reported vote in New Hampshire. It finished him with the simple expedient of extending, and then cancelling, an invitation to appear in the televised Nevada “debate.”

Kucinich went to court and got an injunction; on appeal, the network’s lawyers partied with the judges and threw out the injunction. This is not the place for an analysis of the judges’ explanation, however as a lawyer myself I understand to a faretheewell how any sort of ruling can be justified, and anyhow you all witnessed the approved theft of the 2000 Presidential election by the Supreme Court.

It is enough to say that the airwaves, which legally belong to us, have been effectively stolen with the full support of both major political parties. It’s a cozy arrangement. The pols “license”, e.g. trade, perhaps the public’s most important democratic resource – its exposure to information from which political decisions are made – to a few powerful corporate entities. These entities, thanks to the helpful, if bizarre, legal fiction that such corporations are “persons”, are said to have the right to free speech. That right includes the power to restrict it to candidates and issues of its own choosing.

This is how democracy is destroyed, and we are all of us witnesses to it, with eyes wide shut.

When Kucinich was excluded from the “debate” in Nevada, the three remaining candidates did not protest. Even Edwards, who certainly understands that the nation’s media actively elevates and destroys candidates – much as it does other ‘celebrities’ and for much darker purposes – and that this practice is dangerously anti-democratic, kept his own counsel. Obama, who claims a deeper philosophical grasp on the making of public policy, said nothing.

Then came the televised “debate” in South Carolina. I did not watch it. These things are excruciating experiences and I’m on a mental health holiday, resting up for the madness sure to come, and am thus skipping these things. Heard about it, though.

There was Clinton and there was Obama, and somewhere nearly offstage was John Edwards, who was now being unofficially Kuciniched. Finally, in exasperation, Edwards interrupted to complain that the moderator, that pathetic whore Wolf Blitzer, was not giving him an equal chance to be heard.

You might say that Edwards had an opportunity to make his case to America, but that’s a convenient illusion. We have devolved into a nation where the powerful have unprecedented control over not only the electoral process but the mass media which frames the candidates and issues for a mass public audience.

None of this should surprise anyone. Consider the behavior of the media when it came to the lies about Iraq and the drumbeating for war. Consider the circumstance in which critically-important news stories – often featured prominently in media around the rest of the world – simply disappear in America following whatever brief ridicule is considered necessary.

We still have serious unexplained facts indicating that the last two presidential elections were stolen. We still have the uneasy specter of telecommunications giants as accessories to wholesale illegal federal wiretapping. We recognize that it is possible that our government has also lied about the reason for the collapse of three buildings in New York City on September 11, 2001. It is federal policy that our secret police kidnap people and fly them to other countries where they are tortured.

Is this the America we were promised? Is this the America John F. Kennedy gave his life trying to build?

Thirty-seven million Americans go to bed hungry every night. More than a hundred thousand veterans – the same people the rightwing nuts like to talk about “supporting” – are homeless and will sleep tonight in shelters, if they are lucky, and in the streets if they’re not.

John Edwards, the only major candidate of either party to stand up for people most desperately in need, has been ‘Kuciniched’. The field is narrowed to the most “acceptable” Democrats, each of whom is smart enough and tough enough to handle the presidency, but each of whom offers no threat to the corporate gangsters, military thugs, and secret police who run the place. Maybe.

I know a few people who know people who hang around the higher echelons of the Obama campaign, and it’s like playing ‘telephone’ trying to get a fix on him that way. I’ve seen a couple of speeches. Ted Sorenson probably wrote the one for Iowa’s primary night. It used – verbatim – a great line from JFK’s inaugural address.

If Obama’s serious, then he could turn out to be a problem, especially if he augments his Secret Service detail with some private-hire cops of his own. If he’s serious, he’s got to stay alive to get there. Let’s not be naîve about what can happen in America.

It’s hard to keep hoping sometimes. We’re living in a culture which has been purposely made to feel afraid. Look at how the “news” is offered, and by whom. We worship violence. How do we find our way out? How can we get there?

Over the last five or six years, that question has been asked all over the internet and among friends. What’s the mechanism? Where’s the trim tab?

I have no idea whether Barack Obama is the second coming of JFK or something considerably less. But maybe it doesn’t actually matter. Maybe what matters is that a lot of people believe he is, because if a lot of people start to believe again, if that somehow got loose in the country, then the bastards who have run this place for about forty years might discover they’ve got a problem they can’t fix.

Hell, maybe Martin Luther King, Jr., was right when he said that “truth, crushed to earth, will rise again.”

Today is the seventeenth consecutive day of unrelenting downpour here in Marin County, center of the universe according to its inhabitants, and it’s beginning to seem possible, maybe likely, that arks will turn out to be the real hovercraft of the 21st century. I don’t believe I am hallucinating, not yet anyway, not enough time for the drugs to have kicked-in.

I’m fully aware of the rain, now, even when I sleep, and it has become the sound not of great torrents but of sewer lines backing up, a constant rumbling to disrupt the clarity even of quasi-rational thought, and there’s nothing to do now but await the final roar.

I hope to Christ my house doesn’t slide down the hill, especially with me in it.

Locally, there are floods covering the roads leading into my town, the emergency horn has been sounding over the past hour and parts of San Anselmo and Fairfax are preparing for evacuation, but I am not too worried. Rescue helicopters piloted by drunken FEMA officials can still get in, and my internet service, such as it is, continues, which should relieve the concerns of various domestic spy agencies who depend upon email intercepts to justify their swollen budgets. Bugsy, you’re doing a helluva job.

The Chronicle was delivered sometime in the early morning. Today’s headline claims that “Home Buyers Catch A Break” under the ‘stimulus package’ being rushed through Congress, and the stories indicate that our national leaders will enact this measure with the same sober consideration formerly given to authorizing foreign wars and wiping out excess provisions of the Constitution.

The break being advertised is not one I will be catching. Nor will those who can’t afford to buy nine-hundred-thousand-dollar homes at any interest rate. There will be tax “rebates” too, they say, from a federal government which has sold the next three generations into slavery in order to finance yachts for corporate executives and pension plans which would embarrass the Rockefellers.

The bankers and mortgage brokers whose moral depravity and greed caused the latest economic crisis will be neither jailed nor sanctioned. Several banks, in fact, have announced record bonuses for their top dogs. Why not?

The Chron story noting the withdrawal of Dennis Kucinich from the presidential race appeared in maybe two column inches on page A17, a perfect reminder of the media’s role in burying the one candidate of either party who has not been consistently wrong about public policies over the length of his or her career.

Kucinich was an embarrassment not only to the Democratic Party, whose leaders’ have been on their knees to the Bush regime for seven years, but to the media, whose cheerleading for war and silence in the face of widespread and plainly illegal domestic spying, has rendered it complicitous in monstrous crimes.

Bankers steal billions and rip-off credulous investors. Nothing new in that. Hell, if you were a banker you’d be a fool to pass up the opportunities available in America these days. Nobody’s going to stop you.

I’m not sure what the first signal was, we can argue about that. But all you’ve got to do is look over the history of economic scandals over the past twenty-five years and it’s obvious what’s going on. If you’re big enough, you can break any law at all. Remember the Savings & Loan executives (which included one of the Bush boys)? They wrote bad loans in enormous numbers and for enormous sums, to people everyone knew weren’t going to cover them, and in the end they got bailed out by politicians who simultaneously took it out of our pockets and cut social services to pay for it.

The Savings & Loan rip-off was so successful that similar ventures were launched by public utilities (in California, Pacific Gas & Electric, aka Pacific Graft & Extortion, passed its profits to a ‘parent’ corporation, voted its executives huge raises, then declared bankruptcy all within a couple of weeks).

How far back do we need to go? The federal bailout of Chrysler? You paid for that. Ditto the bailout of Lockheed. Corporations have been poisoning the air, earth, and water for a long time, and some, such as Monsanto, have gone to war against people who oppose them and, thanks to the pols, you are paying for the poisons, the damage caused by the poisons, the phony federal agencies who pretend the poisons are okay, and the lawyers’ ninety-thousand-dollar automobiles, too.

Hey, taxes are for suckers, and, by the way, Social Security’s the next calamity. And don’t get sick. America’s insurance industry and its “health care” industry, and the pharmaceutical industry, cannot help you. Your claim is denied, these drugs have side-effects, and three nights in a hospital will force you to sell your house.

Kucinich was an embarrassment because he talked about these things. Edwards, too, is confronting the matter of class in America, going after corporate greedheads with some heat, but he’s still in the race because he’s fairly well-financed. The major media, which the rightwing nuts have been terming “liberal” for years, has played a major role in diminishing his candidacy, too. Like Kucinich, Edwards finds himself in the small print, even though he beat Clinton in Iowa and may, again, in South Carolina.

Americans complain about the state of things but show little interest in doing anything about them. Half are willing to vote. Of these, most don’t know anything about the candidates and aren’t interested in learning. And those who still believe in thinking for themselves find the going a little rough. In a society which can turn people such as Paris Hilton into “celebrities,” the level of intelligence is not something one can count on with any degree of confidence.

Half the people don’t vote, but that’s not the problem. Every country, society, culture worth a damn throughout history has always been run by a relatively small number. Maybe ten percent of the original European colonists in America backed revolution against England; that was enough. Same for Czarist Russia in 1917. It doesn’t take a majority to stage a democracy, never has. It takes only an informed, determined minority whose aspirations rise with the time.

Probably this is not a time for revolution or any real social or economic transformation of America. Not when the reins of power are so exclusively held by crooks, thugs, and moral cowards.

The “emergency” relief measure zipping right through Congress contains no extension of unemployment benefits, as many have sought, nor increased food stamp payments. These proposals were surrendered behind closed doors by Nancy Pelosi. There she is, in the photos, grinning at Secretary Paulson, only minutes after screwing the poor with a grand “tax rebate” which will do exactly nothing for those most in need. Guess she’s looking at the bigger picture, she and her phony liberal millionaire friends in the Bay Area.

I’m told that downtown San Anselmo is now being evacuated. You and I have heard the sirens across America for seven years. Now the Democratic Party’s leaders have clearly abandoned the great purposes to which their more honorable progenitors once summoned us. Maybe it’s time to evacuate their whole damned party.

This morning’s Chronicle ran a story on the latest California poll. It shows, the story reads, that Clinton leads Obama and Edwards among California Democrats, and charts a trajectory which finds Edwards losing numbers to both of the media-annointed “front-runners”.

The Field Poll, was “taken among 377 likely Democratic primary voters January 14-20...” I have reason to believe that the poll – which claims a 12-point Clinton lead – may not be entirely reliable. I say this because I was one of the 377 people interviewed.

Normally, I would’ve hung up on the poll-taker. We all get calls like this and they are generally intrusive, annoying, and conducted in such a manner as to court unreliability.

Most polls are taken by the camps of various candidates and/or corporate or political entities trying to bend the public their way... I am reminded of the late Bill Hicks’ brilliant commentary on this: “Do you agree that George Bush, a good, Christian white man, should have the right to send troops to Iraq in order to prevent them from coming over here and raping our women?”

Normally, I would’ve hung up, but it’s been raining a lot lately, and it’s winter, and dark, and I had nothing better to do, and this type of madness can be a diversion under appropriate circumstances, so I said, Sure, fire away.

Turned out this was the Field Poll, one of those theoretically independent, and therefore more reliable, surveys. Its methodology has been honed by many years at the task. By the way, I’m sure its poll-takers are not supposed to divulge whose survey it is, however this one surrendered enough information to do so.

Of course, it’s dangerous to extrapolate one’s own experiences and when one does, it’s a cinch to draw erroneous conclusions. And my own contribution to this survey accounts for 0.26525 percent of the total. Since the reported percentages are rounded-off, it’s possible that my little vote changed the reported numbers by one percent, or not at all. The chances of that are about equal.

It’s dangerous to extrapolate, but I’m going to do it anyhow.

I think that a lot of voters, and a lot of poll respondents, are going through a re-evaluation of the candidates right now, especially those who have supported the candidacies of John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, and Mike Gravel. I have plenty of respect and admiration for these three, and an America with any of them as President might become an America I’d be proud of again. But they ain’t gonna make it.

You can blame the situation on the mass media if you like. The monopolist ownership of this national resource – the airwaves – makes it easy to rig an election from the beginning, making sure that candidates with unacceptable messages have no airtime and are not taken seriously. It was a cinch to marginalize Gravel and Kucinich from the beginning; neither would have the money to compete and neither could generate much support from within the party’s leadership.

Edwards was a tougher deal. First of all, the guy was raising money. Second, he had some serious people recruited to help him, including the man who ran the internet campaign of Howard Dean four years ago. Third, he was speaking to the issue of class in America, the matter of poverty and the fact that our health care system is a disgrace.

But the Edwards campaign is failing, partly due to its inability to appeal to its natural constituencies – the country’s minorities – because of the unique gender and racial breakthroughs in the candidacies of his chief opponents, and partly due to corporate criminals having a strong interest in sinking him. He’s also got his own failings, of course. But it’s hard to argue against the media’s relentless washing of the nation’s brains.

So, we’ve got this situation, those of us who may have been drawn to Edwards, or to Dennis with his own haircut problem, and I really hope he’s stopped bursting into song at these campaign gatherings, or to Mike Gravel, who was once a genuine American hero, a Senator back in the seventies, who responded to the attempts of Nixon to prevent publication of the Pentagon Papers by reading portions aloud into the Congressional Record, tears streaming down his face. These guys have earned the support they’ve gotten, and it’s symptomatic of our problems that they could not contest for the presidency on a more even field.

The Field Poll is wrong not just because my answer to the caller was complicated but because I think the answers of a lot of people, true answers, would be complicated. Maybe all the registered Democrats who have planned to vote for Edwards or Gravel or Kucinich are wondering now whether to vote instead for Obama.

We’ve got two weeks to figure it out.

Monday is not the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., but it’s celebrated anyhow as his day, the product of considerable lobbying by civil rights leaders and various pols, and there will be the usual television shows and newspaper articles, and people of differing persuasions accounting themselves experts as they weigh the solemn questions posed each year – how much progress has been made, what is King’s legacy – as the reality of King himself fades into the mist of failing memory, a convenience for all concerned.

I get mad every year around this time, aware of, if not keenly attendant to, the public farce of self-congratulation. There is an acceptable method of ignoring King, along with the Kennedys and, to an extent, Malcolm X, in the process of naming streets and squares, and an occasional school or airport for them. It’s what we do in America, tamping down the stark dissonance of, for example, naming the Justice Department for Robert Kennedy, our greatest Attorney General, even as its succeeding occupants shame his legacy with lofty legal opinions unsuitable for a free society.

If you succumb to the spectacle, you will again witness selected portions of King’s famous speech in August of 1963, at the March on Washington. “I have a dream,” he said, and that works for us far better than his later, more radical words and actions.

You will not see anywhere his speech in New York City, on April 4, 1967, in which he broke with Lyndon Johnson over the Viet Nam War and called his own country “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” nor reference to his remarks a few days later in Washington, where he warned that the country could fall to “a fascist takeover.”

It was on his final birthday in January of 1968 that King met with representatives of a number of progressive organizations to plan another march on Washington, this one to take place in the summer of that year, where, he envisioned, tens of thousands of poor would create a tent city in the capital and lobby congress relentlessly, sitting-in at congressional offices if necessary, to force lawmakers to confront the issue of poverty in America.

He had fewer than three months to live.

I am impelled to write this entry after reading the TruthOut piece from Bill Moyers Journal, in which Moyers, who is now a liberal icon, recalls his days as a “young White House Assistant” with President Johnson and waxes about how King’s moral stance brought LBJ around on the urgency of civil rights legislation.

What a crock.

Bill leaves out of his rosy tale any references to his own participation, as a Johnson aide, in a campaign to discredit King and use King’s friendship with people the FBI had labeled “communists” as a wedge against Robert Kennedy. Moyers was the conduit between J. Edgar Hoover’s bureau and Johnson of wiretap and bugging operations aimed at King’s sexual practices. Moyers also circulated, on Johnson’s behalf, unsigned scurrilous monograms about King to members of congress, in an effort to thwart the speed of King’s movement for voting rights in the South.

At the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City in 1964, Moyers was the man to whom FBI agents delivered hourly reports on wiretapping and other surveillance of King, his communications with RFK, and his position on the credentials challenge by the Mississippi Freedom Delegation.

Moyers’ TruthOut offering begins by mentioning the current flap over Hillary Clinton’s otherwise harmless remark that it took a President to force through the 1964 Civil Rights Act, for which King and millions of others had labored. He remembers Johnson being brought around by the moral force of King’s words and deeds. Oh, how wonderful is sanitized recollection.

In fact, for much of his service to Lyndon Johnson, Moyers worked to undermine Martin Luther King, Jr., and to use various King “failings” against both King himself and against Robert F. Kennedy, whom Johnson loathed and feared.

According to Taylor Branch, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his three-volume history of King and the movement he led, the Johnson White House was not exactly a friend, and Moyers’ role in playing political games with King’s image is a shabby one. In one maneuver, Moyers tried to use wholesale FBI wiretaps on King as a means of ‘neutralizing’ Robert Kennedy’s opposition to Johnson.

The FBI had, in the last days of JFK’s White House, pushed RFK to approve a wiretap on King as a means of investigating his alleged “communist” connections. Hoover hated King, once terming him “the biggest liar in America,” which is pretty funny coming from him. The Kennedys, afraid that Hoover would use unfounded accusations against King to smear the civil rights movement, agreed to authorize a single, time-limited tap, both to clear King and to protect themselves.

When John Kennedy was murdered, Hoover immediately disconnected the direct line RFK had installed in his office and would no longer take calls from the Attorney General. He also continued and broadened the wiretaps, adding other forms of electronic surveillance, long after the RFK-approved tap had expired.

In the spring of 1964, a still-shaken RFK was angered to learn what Hoover was up to, and his emissary Burke Marshall warned Johnson that Hoover might use these intercepted communications against the pending Civil Rights Act. Moyers told Johnson that he believed that Kennedy himself would leak anti-King stories with the design of blaming Johnson for playing “political footsie” with King “even after learning of his flawed character.” (see Taylor Branch, “Pillar of Fire”).

The effect of Moyers’ work was to cause Johnson to refuse to look at the FBI’s King file, in order to establish deniability, and to feed the President’s fears concerning the loyalty of JFK-holdovers in his administration.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was, in the arc of his public career, routinely pilloried in the press. National magazines – who now put his on their covers – published attacks on his motives and methods, called him an extremist and an agitator. Political people such as Bill Moyers tried to divert him, scare him, slow him down, or use him for their own ends.

Now that he is long dead, he’s everyone’s hero, a polished, purified symbol of peaceful protest. Forgotten are his deeper messages, his fight against the war machine, his broadened campaign to force America to face the disgrace of its millions of poor, and, not coincidentally, the reason for his assassination.

Three people phoned me earlier in the evening to mention it. There was a new film on PBS: The American Experience. Called “Oswald’s Ghost.” Presumably each had called because, as an FBI agent had once casually mentioned to a close friend of mine, they knew of my “interest in the Kennedy assassination.”

Of course, I’m not quite as interested as I once was. There’d been times when it seemed possible that something might still be done about the worst crime in American history. Public opinion polls have for forty years consistently shown a two-thirds majority of Americans believe that President Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy, and most of these also believe that the CIA was involved.

There’d even been a congressional investigation, a select committee funded during the Carter administration, in the aftermath of Watergate and Senate hearings into activities of our secret police, and a growing number of representatives, having finally poked into the documentary evidence then available, concluded that both the JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. murders had been the products of conspiracies. The committee Report referred the matter to the Justice Department for further investigation.

The Justice Department, with the ascension of Reagan, ignored it.

The evidence was by that time already overwhelming. Anyone who faced up to the facts with an open mind could reach no other conclusion. Unfortunately, not too many people were willing to do that. In the ten years or so that I researched, wrote , and talked about these crimes in public forums and on Bay Area radio, I had several experiences which reinforced that belief.

One of these involved Senator Barbara Boxer, who was then a congresswoman. I’d known Barbara for a long time. She’d come out of a suburban anti-war movement. Now that she’d been elected to the House, I thought, considering her relatively progressive politics, she’d be interested in viewing a snippet of film which at the time was both unavailable to the public and also the most important evidentiary document in the JFK murder: a copy of the 16 millimeter film of the assassination taken by Abraham Zapruder.

The Zapruder film shows Kennedy’s shooting from a position to the right front of the motorcade as it rolled into the killing zone on Elm Street. Behind Zapruder was the picket fence atop a grassy knoll. To his left was the Texas School Depository Building.

Although every detail of the assassination has now been sucked out of the corners, and the film itself has been viewed by many millions, at the time I got ahold of a copy it was illegal to possess it and illegal to show it. It had been viewed by several members of the Warren Commission – or at least members of its staff; the members themselves were usually too busy to attend – and stills from it had been printed by Life Magazine, which owned it. But the film itself offered a stunning experience to anyone who saw it.

I showed the Zapruder film to public audiences, first explaining that the official government story of the fictitious “lone assassin” had rested on proof of two things: first, that all of the shots had to have been fired within 5.6 second and, second, that each had been fired from the farthest corner window on the sixth floor of the Depository.

When seen in color and on a big screen, we witness Kennedy’s head being struck in the right temple, the force driving it violently back and to the left. No one other than a crazy person wants to see it. Each time, audiences exploded in shock, a collective gasp at the halo of blood.

Barbara Boxer would not look at it. Okay, I do understand why a person might want to skip it. It’s horrifying to look at. I’ve now seen it a hundred times and I can say with great authority that it doesn’t get any easier. But Boxer was a member of congress. In my opinion, she had no moral choice. She evidently disagreed. I imagine she’s seen it by now. I never asked her.

Since the Zapruder film clearly showed that the fatal shot was fired from the right front of the limousine, it had to be suppressed. But since the film existed, and since at 18.3 frames per second the Bell and Howell gave us a chronometer with which to analyze the time intervals between shots, an explanation had to be crafted which would pin the shooting on Oswald, who was said to have been in the sixth floor window of the book building.

Enter a young Commission staff lawyer named Arlen Specter. His theory, such as it is:

Oswald fired three shots from the sixth floor window, the most it was possible to fire from the bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano (about which, more later) in 5.6 seconds. One shot struck Kennedy in the head, killing him; one missed the limousine entirely and wounded a spectator, James Tague, who had been standing next to the triple underpass to the far front of the motorcade. The third, therefore, had to account for the other known wounds in both Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally, who had been sitting directly to Kennedy’s front.

This created a problem for Mr. Specter who, even at such a tender age, might already have envisioned himself as a Senator from Pennsylvania. Kennedy’s back wound was not in his neck; it was several inches down his back and slightly to the right of his spine, about at C5-T1 for the chiropractors in the audience. He had a wound in his throat, described by every single doctor who’s seen Kennedy at Parkland Hospital as a wound of entry. Connally, too, had a wound in his back, plus an exit wound in his chest, a shattered radius in his right wrist, and a superficial wound in his left thigh.

Therefore, Specter described the path of a single bullet, a rather magic bullet it turns out, which entered Kennedy’s neck, exited his throat, then entered Connally’s back, exited his chest, broke the wrist bone, and wound up in this thigh. This theory dovetailed with a piece of forensic evidence: a bullet had been found on a bloody stretcher at Parkland, and the best evidence was that it matched the rifle Oswald is said to have used.

Sadly for Specter’s immortal soul, and for America, the Magic Bullet theory was an impossibility, and he, and the Warren Commissioners, had to have known it.

* Nobody could fire the supposed assassin’s weapon three times and with the accuracy attributed to Oswald in 5.6 seconds, even though the feat was attempted many times by Olympic riflemen. And this was after the defective scope had been corrected.

* The sequencing of the shots is impossible. In the Zapruder film, the first clear indication that Kennedy had been shot appears when the President raises his hands to his throat. This is obviously the first shot and it is from the front, causing the wound the Parkland doctors said was an entry wound. In the seat in front of him, Governor Connally begins to turn around – he’s heard a shot, he later said – first to his right, and then to his left. He is holding his Stetson in his right hand, clearly visible in the film. Then he his shot, slammed down, his face distorted. The time which elapsed between Kennedy and Connally being hit is more than a second. Bullets do not travel that slowly.

* The Kennedy and Connally reactions to being shot also destroy any possibility that a single gunman fired the shots, since these do not appear far enough apart, less than the 2.3 seconds which is the fastest the Carcano could be made to operate.

* Kennedy and Connally were so situated in the limousine that any shot which entered Kennedy’s back and exited his throat would’ve missed Connally by a wide margin to his left. The angle is forensically impossible.

* The bullet found at the hospital was virtually pristine; it was missing far fewer grains of lead than had been recovered from Connally’s body alone (some was left in his body and couldn’t be measured). This bullet was supposed to have gone through Kennedy’s body, entered Connally’s, broken his fifth rib, and broken the radial bone in his wrist. The Commission investigators had test-fired bullets into the wrist bones of cadavers. Guess what? Forget the broken rib, no bullet could break the radius and come out other than totally misshapen. There are photos of these test bullets. There are photos, too, of test bullets fired into gelatin blocks meant to replicate the thickness of a human neck, all looking a lot worse than the Parkland bullet.

The Magic Bullet does resemble other test bullets, though, several fired from Oswald’s rifle into cotton wadding for examination of the markings made by the rifle’s barrel on the slugs.

* It turns out that there is very good probability that the bullet found at Parkland was planted. This is because the bloody stretcher it was found on had been used to carry not Governor Connally but another emergency case, five-year-old Ronnie Fuller, who had a bad cut on his chin.

If Specter’s theory is wrong, there cannot have been a single assassin. Well, it’s not only wrong, it was known to be wrong by the people who ratified it.

Years later, several members talked, and when they did their remarks did not comfort anybody. They were under pressure, said Congressman Hale Boggs, and could not get evidence out of the CIA and FBI. They were told what their job was: to pacify the country. Their “conclusions” had been dictated by what they were told were historically-dangerous conditions. Dark whisperings in Washington, any talk of conspiracy would incite war, Johnson had told the Commission Chairman Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. If Oswald, a man who had once “defected” to the Soviet Union, was part of a plot, then disclosure of too much information or even doubt, could bring the public to demand retribution against its perpetrators, and that might mean Russia, or against Cuba. To avert war, Johnson told Warren, the case had to be whitewashed. Warren is said to have bought it.

A Warren relative once told me of a family gathering in Florida, right after release of the Report, and things the Great Man had said, his conscience bothering him over what he’d promised and delivered to Johnson. “He was ashamed,” she told me, and she had been young then, and shocked to see him that way. “He did what they wanted him to do.”

For the good of the country? Because ordinary people couldn’t handle the truth? Because there might be war? Because there might be civil war? Because those who could’ve stopped what was to come after were afraid?

Barbara Boxer, one of the brighter, more honorable members of the Senate, didn’t want to see the film on Dallas. Presumably she’s seen it by now but if so she’s not saying anything. Dallas is old news. That’s what my friend back East used to hector me with, it’s a long time ago, Raz, forget it.

It was Bill Hicks who answered the same criticism by saying, “A long time ago? Okay, well, I’ll forget about (what they did to) Kennedy if you’ll forget about Jesus... I mean, if you’re talking about shelf life...”

Of course it matters. You think nations just go bad suddenly? You think this recklessly dangerous world power, where a congress enacted a lengthy “Patriot Act” without even reading it first, where torture is considered, by moderates, to be “enhanced interrogation” and one of its proponents, John Yoo, teaches at a prestigious law school, where there are now free speech “zones” when once the entire nation was a free speech zone because we had a fucking Bill of Rights ––– you think all of this is sort of an accident?

The PBS documentary was an ugly thing, a farce in sheep’s clothing, with lengthy and often peculiar speculation by some frightful personages.

It pains me to say this, but Norman Mailer, whose death, as has been noted about others, conferred no additional qualities, had nothing to offer apart from a weird and demonstrably false psuedo-psychological theory on “why Oswald did it.” This was coupled with interviews of others who believe that the failure of people such as me – and another hundred million others, I guess – to accept the lone nut theory is due to an unwillingness to face up to the realities of a life where random tragedies can take place.

Well, let’s think about that for a minute. According to these guys, you’d prefer to believe that your country has been taken over by its secret police and their friends in the corporate and military worlds. That would be more comforting than facing it that sometimes the world can be harsh, unpredictable, and dangerous.

Well, if it turns out that both of those things are true, that is not even vaguely comforting. Only a shrink or a half-assed drunk who once wrote a couple of great books could believe such nonsense.

Of course, having spent the better part of thirty years reading damned-near everything written in English about the murders which destroyed America in the sixties, I’m used to these filmic whitewashes. America’s mass media has disgraced itself beyond measure over Dallas and its sequelae, as have both political parties and the last four presidential administrations.

“Oswald’s Ghost” was junk, even if it did give us a few clips from critics like Josiah Thompson and Mark Lane. It pilloried Jim Garrison, which is easy to do unless you investigate what happened in New Orleans, to him and to his investigation. He’s dead now, and we’ll leave to history the task of uncovering his story. I suspect history will record him as one of America’s great patriots, but I suppose that depends on who writes it.

The Kennedy assassinations, and that of Dr. King, are not the subject of controversy. Revelations in recent years have simply added confirmation to what has long been known by many people in power. Political leaders are often murdered by their own governments, that’s the political history of the world. In America, who else could manage it?

Presumably, most of the conspirators involved in the sixties’ killings are themselves dead now. In June it will have been forty years since Sirhan Sirhan shot five people in the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and none of them was named Kennedy. Within the last year, the BBC showed filmic evidence of three known CIA assassins inside the Embassy Room celebration the night Robert Kennedy won the California primary. American television did not care. Nor, evidently, do the American people.

So I doubt that I will be watching any more “documentaries” on the assassinations. No point. But I must have some hope left in me somewhere. After all, I’m writing to you about it.

I have no clue what to make of the current presidential contest. I’m not sure whether anything can be done, regardless of who wins. Maybe the best thing to hope for is an administration which will not actively destroy what’s left of the greatness of America, the last pieces of its Constitution, and the spirit of youthful anger, confrontation, and resistence.

I know what Bobby, and Jack Kennedy, and King would be saying about America’s wars, about torture, about warrantless surveilance, and “free speech zones,” and so do you.

This is a story about the brains of Americans and how they are becoming squeaky-clean, thanks in equal measure to a systematic scrubbing by the thugs and sociopaths who run the place and a deep desire on the part of most people to live in a fairytale world. That’s pretty much all it takes.

As the late, great comic Bill Hicks kept saying, “Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control. Here, drink some more beer, watch another episode of American Gladiator...”

Hicks, of course, was a “conspiracy theorist,” one of those nuts who think that people plan and carry out illegal activities.

Today’s screed is engendered by an Associated Press story out of Minneapolis, where a book review of former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura’s “Don’t Start The Revolution Without Me” is passed off as straightforward news.

The book’s not due in stores until April, but the media is already conducting a pre-emptive strike against the author. The AP piece is an example of how potentially embarrassing ‘claims’ are ‘invalidated’ not by examining their premises but by attacking the ‘claimant.’

Mr. Ventura, the story goes, “uses the book... to rail against organized religion and the media...” He also “hasn’t reined in the outrageous opinions that got him in trouble when he was governor from 1999 to 2003.”

Hmmm... “Outrageous.” Meaning: ridiculous, ludicrous, having no basis in fact, and so loony that we don’t even have to examine them. Go back to bed, America.

And what are these outrageous opinions?

“The government is supposed to be us, and it’s not us anymore. It’s been hijacked. Just when is somebody going to do something?”

Ridiculous, right?

In the book, according to the AP story, Ventura “discusses the assassination of President Kennedy. He scorns the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and claims that during a trip to Dallas as governor, a police officer warned him to avoid talking too much about ‘things that certain people don’t want brought to light.’”

Ventura “also airs his suspicion that ‘somebody in the government’ sent people to infiltrate a government course he taught at Harvard University in 2004, on a day he discussed the Kennedy assassination. He repeatedly shows a fascination with conspiracy theories and surveillance, recalling several encounters he had with CIA agents while governor and claiming that his wife found an electronic listening device at their private home during his term.”

Scorns. Claims. Airs his suspicion. Infiltrate. Fascination with. Claiming.

If I tell you that I had a whole grain cereal with bananas and blueberries for breakfast this morning, am I “claiming” that I did? Yes, but no one would describe it that way because although I might be lying or delusional about some things it’s likely that I am being truthful about the blueberries. I would have no reason to lie.

If I tell you that I saw a flying saucer land on the roof of the San Anselmo Town Hall last week – assuming it wasn’t dropping off newly-elected councilman Ford Greene – you may charitably write that I am “claiming” to have done so, because, even though you don’t know why I might lie about it, the statement itself requires a belief that such saucers exist and most of us are not ready to buy that.

If you entertain a notion which precedes inquiry, then the inquiry may well be shaped to conform to the original notion. This is how the morons at the august New York Fucking Times led the cheering section for a pre-emptive attack against Iraq. The absence of Iraqi weaponry beyond the bow and arrow didn’t matter. As the Downing Street Memo later exposed, the facts were shaped to “fit” the policy.

There are two sorts of weapons available in a conspiracy to brainwash people, a necessary consideration for any bunch of yahoos who harbor deep desires to take and maintain control of a country.

The first is the media. If you control what people see and hear, you control their decision-making process. Policy wizards at the CIA and Pentagon have always known that if they could control the input to a President, they could control the policies that the President supported. If you want to control a population, it’s the same idea.

The second weapon is the inclination of people to avoid bad news. We don’t like it. It is a bummer. It reminds us of our feelings of inadequacy. It reminds us of our mortality. Get out of my face with your bad news.

The continued myth of the Lone Assassin in America is important. For one thing, although most of the original conspirators are now dead, their lineal offspring, both literal and organizational, are still flourishing. To excavate those murders would be to overturn much of the existing power structure in America, and that’s not going to be permitted to happen. For another thing, we as a people are not up to the collective responsibility of securing democracy. We do not want to be awakened. Not most of us.

So Jesse Ventura and his “outrageous” views on the murder of the President.

Recently, E.Howard Hunt, a convicted Watergate conspirator and long-time high-level CIA operative, who had been a CIA Station Chief and then chief of Domestic Intelligence in 1964, left a legacy to his heirs, a confession of sorts which detailed CIA involvement in the killing of John F. Kennedy. The mass media barely mentioned it.

Recently, previously unexamined video and still footage taken in the Embassy ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel on the night of June 4, 1968, and shown on the BBC and on the internet, has exposed the presence of three men who have been identified by multiple sources, including people who knew them, as CIA killers. Not important, according to America’s ‘liberal’ media.

Read the newspaper. Every day there is another disclosure, another bizarre, twisted government plan to do something which will rid you of annoying democratic tendencies, and there is a collective sigh. Nancy Pelosi schemes for electoral advantage and legislation is passed every day which further diminishes your rights, by members of congress who have not even read the bills – no one read the “Patriot Act” before enacting it, by itself behavior so reprehensible that every member who voted yes ought to be barred from public service as too stupid and irresponsible to be allowed near the levers of state.

Every day there is another assault on reason, freedom, basic rights, and these pass barely mentioned, although there was a time in America when a single one of these acts would’ve sparked massive, collective resistence not only in the country but inside the Congress as well.

That’s how far down the well we’ve tumbled.

Of course, that’s only me, scorning people, airing my suspicions, and displaying my fascination with some things “certain people don’t want brought to light.”

Yes, I do know full well that I invite some nasty shit just bringing the subject up. It’s maybe the one thing you still can’t talk about at dinner parties without people edging away from you, sometimes with a look of panic in their eyes that makes you think you’ve inadvertently flashed them or something. I know it full well.

But I’ve got this problem with the plain fact that American elections are beginning to resemble the ones Stalin used to throw from time to time in another empire where government and commerce were owned by the same guys and war was the primary enterprise.

I have no personal opinion – yet – about whether there’s a credible explanation for the peculiar data out of New Hampshire. But the data are disturbing for several reasons.

Message boards, notably on BradBlog and a number of other sites – I haven’t checked in at blackboxvoting – are having a fine time with various arguments, recitations, and screaming matches. So far it appears to be a tie, with a lot of angry people calling each other the rudest names they can come up with, each of whom is sure that the others are stupid, naive, or paranoid, and sometimes two of the three.

At first blush, the very idea of electronic vote manipulation sounds ridiculous, even to me, and I know damned well the vote was hacked for at least five million Bush votes in 2004, and probably closer to seven. But New Hampshire? Come on, get serious.

I know. I can already hear the incredulity in my own voice, never mind the voice of the fellow in Vermont who thinks I wear a tinfoil hat to keep the alien rays out of my brain.

The poll numbers in the week before Tuesday, in at least the five polls I know of, uniformly showed a very dramatic increase in prospective votes for Obama; at the same time, Clinton was sinking faster than Donald Rumsfeld. The reported totals work out to a seventeen percent swing, plus-or-minus a three percent margin of error, from Obama to Clinton. In three days.

The Zogby Poll, which had Obama winning by a good margin, has responded to the enormity of the perceived discrepancies by claiming that its tracking polls on the day before the vote registered gains for Clinton but that they had not released them because they need a three-day total to find a reliable tally.

The Zogby statement is one of the scariest items to emerge from this because it’s simply false and they know it. With the methodology they use and a three-day protocol, they are able to update numbers continually, and they do. There is no three-day delay. There is simply a lag in the reflection of trends. The numbers might be wrong, but they will not be wrong by much because – absent an earthshaking event – there is no such thing as a seventeen point swing in one day.

And the troubling companion to this is the detail that the reported vote results were roughly the same as the Zogby polling results in the 20% of New Hampshire counties which use paper ballots, while Clinton’s votes were reported uniformly to be about seven per cent higher in the remaining 80% which used the Diebold machines. This very strange result cannot be dismissed as some sort of random coincidence. It is statistically off the charts. And it reminds me of Ohio – and several other states – in 2004.

A moment of your time, please, for a brief trip down memory lane.

It is election day, November, 2004. In California, we first learn of the reported turnouts back east, especially in what are considered to be “key” states, including Ohio, and the turnouts are massive. Long lines in the rain. Heavy votes in traditional Democratic precincts and in cities. To anyone fairly familiar with some basic politics, the very big turnouts were a strong omen for Kerry.

Then, later, came the exit polls. Here’s what you need to know about exit polls: they are the single most reliable indicator of voting behavior and attitudes available for the simple reason that they are contemporaneous records of actual votes cast, although they are imperfect due to the fact that they are comprised of statistical samples smaller than the complete vote itself.

Exit polls have been refined since their origin and are now, given accepted methodology, reasonably expected to be accurate within 1.5 per cent. Usually, they are much closer than that. They have been used universally for years as a barrier to the kind of wholesale election fraud historically practiced in a number of countries where rulers would otherwise see no reason, other than the threat of democratic revolt – and sometimes not even then, to permit fair elections.

The first reported exit polls in Ohio and, indeed, across the eastern United States showed a landslide victory for the Kerry-Edwards ticket. Bush was told by his aide, Karen Hughes, to prepare himself for defeat.

Then came the reported vote counts, and there was widespread confusion in political circles. Politicians all know that exit polls are accurate; they know this because it’s a fundamental part of their job to know it. Something was wrong, and the pols knew it. Later on, Kerry and Edwards engaged in a furious argument over whether Kerry should concede, with Edwards pointing to evidence already coming in of widespread fraud.

Subsequent hearings by the Conyers Committee established beyond doubt that this fraud existed and had been systematically-perpetrated, often through phony “shell companies” created as a buffer. Voting rolls had been purged in Florida, and to a lesser extent elsewhere, and those purged had been uniformly of minority race, and the vast majority of whom were clearly eligible to vote. Precincts in Ohio where large turnouts of minorities and students were expected were denied operable voting machines such that lines of people stretched for blocks in the rain in many urban areas. Routine challenges at the polls against black voters resulted in tens of thousands of “provisional ballots” which were later discarded or in many cases never counted.

And that’s nothing.

The real scandal of the 2004 elections was the theft of millions of votes, sufficient to turn a massive Bush defeat into a narrow “re-election.” This was done electronically.

There are numerous sites where you can acquaint yourself with some of the technical aspects of electronic voting, the history of Diebold and the other companies which produce the machines, the legally “proprietary” nature of the source code, which keeps the actual counting/recording mechanism secret from the public. Try blackboxvoting. I’m not going to attempt a technical explanation. I will say only that I have become convinced that the technology exists and the nature of the machines is such that the vote can be hacked.

Here’s the reason I am sure that this happened.

The discrepancies between exit poll results and the reported vote totals was uniform, being between 5 and 7 per cent. In each case the discrepancy seemed to show that Kerry had actually polled between 5 and 7 per cent less in comparison to Bush than reported in the exit polls. And this discrepany existed in just a select handful of states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Colorado, New Mexico, and New Hampshire. In the rest of America, the exit polls and reported results were virtually identical.

There is simply no other way to account for this combination of facts. For example:

1. If there was an error in how the exit polls had been conducted, the error would have shown up uniformly, not in such record-breaking numbers and not in only a few states. Nothing remotely like this had ever happened before.

2. If there were, for some unexplained reason, these extreme errors in as many as six states, it is statistically beyond the improbable that each one would tilt in the same direction.

From a purely statistical standpoint, according to several studies I’ve seen (and will dig out and reference if you’re interested), the odds against what is said to have happened with this vote really happening are something like a hundred million to one. In other words, never.

So, when you tell me that the Zogby poll in New Hampshire turns out to be so badly wrong – but only in the precincts which use the Diebold machines – I don’t like the smell of it.

I have no information beyond what I’ve written that the New Hampshire Democratic primary was cooked. That may be a totally incorrect hypothesis. But there is no escaping the fact that in recent American history we’ve seen plenty of cooking going on, and there is no reason to believe that rigging a vote – like steroid use among ballplayers – is a rare occurrence.

As regular readers of this column know, it’s been more than three decades since I exposed my brain to the horseshit of television news and, specifically, to the ravings of political candidates, but it was a slow night for entertainment, the rains outside had been unrelenting and, according to the Weather Channel, the winds blowing open the door to the deck had reached fifty miles per hour, and there was nothing much left around midnight but to watch the results out of Iowa. Anyhow, I’d been curious.

Ah, politics. It was all coming back to me, like a screaming, nightmarish, acid flashback, or maybe only acid reflux. Phony stories, talking media robots, campaign flacks, the whole panorama of fools and whores.

The numbers on the Democratic side showed Obama with a fairly comfortable victory, less than 40% but still, and then Edwards, outspent by a mile, and then Hillary, the media-anointed future nominee running third. She’s about as genuine as her “everything’s fine” reaction to 29%, her voice a little arhythmic, as though someone in the control booth had screwed-up the lip sync, and a smile last unfrozen when her husband got himself charged with lying about oral sex.

I don’t quite know what to think about Obama. He says the right things and he says them well, plucking lines out of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches, lines from JFK. He is smooth as silk, smooth as Monta Ellis on the fast break, very assured for a guy who a few years ago was a state legislator in Illinois.

But he seems about one percent too slick, as though he has been crafted by fine engineers and comes with the latest options and the new car smell. He has been right about Iraq, and that’s a lot, but there’s something very, very disturbing about his “reaching out” philosophy.

Yup, we all like hope. It’s a good thing. And when it comes to America’s present and future any hope you can get together is helpful and appreciated. But only if it has some basis in reality.

The Obama rhetoric, which likens partisan policy disputes to “food fights,” is either naive or phony. It can’t be anything else. When he speaks of achieving universal health care by getting everybody together, it necessarily raises the question whether this man has any idea how the real world actually works.

We do not have universal health care – unlike virtually every other western, industrialized country – because in America health is a huge, money-making business and your access to care is controlled by insurance companies who, as I may have mentioned in other posts, are the scum of the earth.

The corporate thieves and professional militarists are not going to make nice just because Obama sits them down for a chat. Surely he knows it. And the only way to get this country back, which is what Obama claims he wants to do, is to take it back. That means a fight, not a group sing-a-long. It is not simply a case of honest disagreements among mutually well-meaning people. That’s the kind of bilge I last believed in high school, just before the real world began to explain itself to me.

There is something else puzzling me about Obama. Ordinarily, I would not be too concerned about which candidate is being supported by which lunatic, since you can’t control that sort of thing. But what’s with this long list of right-wing nuts, led by William Kristol and David Brooks? These guys are among the leading pro-war, pro-Bush cheerleaders of the press. How come they like Barack Obama so damned much?

Well, hell, what do I know? Maybe he’s the real thing. After all, JFK ran a centrist campaign, nothing to scare anyone too much, and then he set in motion the most revolutionary foreign policy in a hundred years. In the end, it got him killed.

Several of my e-mail correspondents have written to describe their reasons for supporting Obama, and they may be right. A close friend offered these remarks:

“Iowa brings a resounding end to the Boomer's era, a new generation like the late 60's, ready to take the reins. Good riddance. My generation proved to be wastrels and shirkers of their social responsibilities.

“I worry deeply that an RFK like assassination will bring about the general malaise and deep seated empty headed general population I've witnessed in my generation.

“Remember these men are criminals, the statues are in place for a FEMA run martial law, a divisive assassination would create a social unrest not seen in 40 years. Protecting Obama is worthy of a multi-millions investment on the part of his campaign.

“God bless and keep him safe.”

I suspect that conversations like this are flying all over the net right now. It’s so hard to believe that there might be this opening in the clouds. I still support John Edwards. But his campaign hasn’t caught fire with the constituency it needed, and the black vote is probably lost to Obama (and even, pitiful to say, to Clinton). So, in the midst of what will surely be a misleading, propagandist media circus over the next few months, I have to figure it out for myself, and the country has to figure it out, too.

Maybe they still have those signs, “Over one billion sold,” something like that. I used to see them as I drove by, thinking “Somebody’s eating a lot of that shit because they’re getting my share.” McDonald’s. Just another American success story.

They’re advertising dollar deals now, which I know about because McDonald’s is one of the sponsors of Warriors basketball games and I’m one of those non-fans who got turned on to these guys – they seem to be decent fellows who also can handle themselves when it gets serious – and they’re pushing these things called “burgers,” presumably not calling them “hamburgers” because that might subject them to litigation if anybody ever finds out what’s in the things.

There’s this thing on the screen with two, count ‘em, two “beef” patties, and I’m thinking how much is McDonald’s paying per pound for this stuff? They’re got a corporate empire to feed, along with the porking of the masses, and their investors and spiffy officers are interested in terms such as “profit margin” and “overhead.” Maybe the two patties weigh in at a piddling two ounces each, got to be at least that much, probably two-and-a-half or even three. In any case, they are not paying more than twenty-five or thirty cents a pound, not and turn a profit.

But if they’re paying thirty cents a pound for “beef,” what the fuck could it be made of? Is it possible that fairly healthy cattle can be topped at that price? Maybe, to put the best possible face on this, we’re talking certain less desirable parts of cattle. It’s not difficult to imagine, although doing so may induce nausea.

Can one obtain large quantities of pig entrails at that price?

So what’s going on here? Evidently, words now mean what people pay for them to mean.

“Beef” could be some broadly-defined category of “meat product.”

People are buying water, you know. Everywhere. Some are paying a premium for the kind with a droplet of coloring and some fake sugar. Several brands of water, marketed by Coca-Cola and Pepsi, are simply tap water, “purified.”

Remember these words of warning: You will be buying air, flown-in from the tropics. I am not joking. It will be soon. I live in Marin County, California, U.S.A. It will probably start here.

Given the events of the world these days it may seem surprising that there are so many of us still vertical and assessing the damage before moving into another year. Millions and millions, even billions still breathing, still trying to figure something out every day and screwing up with great regularity.

There’s this scene in one of the decent Woody Allen movies where he’s reciting aloud a few of the reasons to go on living. (it’s cool, Travis, we’ll deal with Woody some other time).

We’ve each got our own lists, and they can be pretty long. Just start with friends and world looks rich already, and then all the rest of it, pretty stunning shit, when you get down to it.

Personally, I don’t think that God – or whatever term one wants to use to describe the fairly obvious presence of universal interconnection, not to mention beauty – is going to let human beings off the hook that easily. We are spiritual beings. Hell, we are luminous spiritual beings, the regular screwing-up notwithstanding. And we may well be expected to get our work done before we graduate.

I’m not going to give you my list. This column is not a souped-up, poor imitation of Herb Caen. Poor imitation of something, maybe, but the Herb is not imitation.

Yes, we’re aware of much of the damage, and if you want to explore what your government is doing in any depth there is certainly the risk of clinical depression, and we don’t need that. If I see a way to help the situation, I’ll grab it, but otherwise I’m going to try to live my life as best I can, appreciate what I’ve got, which is sufficient for any sane person, and work on myself, there being plenty of work to do.

The Chinese restaurant which delivered some food an hour ago had about a dozen stops on my street alone, the guy told me. There’s a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers marathon on TCM, and my favorite, “Carefree”, is on just after midnight. I might still be awake.

Have the kind of 2008 you’d like to have. Why not?