From their website.

And check out the rest of their goodies, including a fun-filled map of Denver and a DNC disruption primer.

You don’t bring a squirt gun filled with human urine to a First Amendment party. That’s the message the Arapahoe County Sheriff brought to the Centennial City Council on Monday night.

Sheriff Grayson Robinson is in favor of a new ordinance that he says is about public safety. It would bar protestors from carrying items such as metal wiring, wooden clubs, slingshots, gas masks, and squirt guns within demonstration areas.

“This ordinance, if you choose to pass it, is truly a public safety ordinance,” said Robinson.

He worries that any of those items could be used against officers trying to make sure the demonstrations are peaceful.

“This is a Super Soaker,” said Robinson, holding up a large squirt gun. “Some people that have been bent on causing harm have filled this with, again, human urine and then have sprayed this on peace officers and firefighters.”

Keep reading.

Nice to know the spirit of Barney Fife’s not dead.  Seriously, that they let this dimwit motherfucker walk around armed is all the argument against gun control one should ever need.  If this article is any evidence, this fucking idiot shouldn’t be allowed to operate anything more dangerous than an electric toothbrush.

Or, y’know, he’s a fucking liar.

Here’s the thing, Mr. Fife, no Super Soaker has ever been used for any such thing in any political protest in America.  Not once.  Not against firefighters or peace officers.  Never.

So which is it?  Are you a fucking liar, or are you just possessed of the IQ of a lump of pigshit?

Update:  Glenn Spagnuolo and Tom Mestnik of Recreate 68 expressed the same point much more eloquently on Peter Boyles this morning, and Mr. Boyles has claimed he’ll have the idiot on the air to defend his moron allegation.  Don’t let up on the asshole, gentlemen, he made an uncategorical claim that Super Soakers have been used to spray urine on cops and firefighters — make the lying little shit provide some evidence.

Update II:  Where the fuck is the libertarian crowd when this kind of fucking nonsense goes through, by the way?  Where are the shrill missives from Harsanyi-land, the outcry from Jon Caldara?  Hell, even Peter Boyles himself was accepting the concept as plausible.  I mean, this is up there with 911 truthseeker stupidity.  Or, for that matter, protesters spitting on homebound Vietnam soldiers.  Take ten seconds out of your busy lives of pimping Lasik surgery, gentlemen, and fucking think about the logistics of doing something as awesomely fucking useless as carrying a bag of shit or a leaky squirt gun through a jostling crowd in August heat just on the off chance you’ll get close enough to a heavily armed cop to be able to dig it out of said pack and actually use it on them.  Right before they beat you into a bloody puddle.

Can you imagine anything fucking dumber, more irrelevant, or less likely to succeed?  Y’know, besides Mr. Robinson’s career in law enforcement?

So, needless to say, I was all too happy to see this post.

Sometime in early 2009, the Denver District Court will begin to hear testimony in Ward Churchill’s lawsuit against the University of Colorado.

It will be a very different national political climate than the one in which Churchill’s reference to Hannah Arendt’s classic study of the banality of evil*, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) set in motion events that led to his termination on charges of “plagiarism” and “research misconduct.”

The processes of shared governance at the University of Colorado’s flagship campus will themselves be on trial. The result may raise questions about the integrity of those processes not just at UC, but at many other campuses with similar (or lesser) degrees of faculty participation in decision-making.

My own views** are consistent with those of the national American Civil Liberties Union, and Eric Cheyfitz, Cornell’s Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters.

Cheyfitz, who examined the investigating committee’s report and testified about it before a UC panel, concluded that the charges were “fabricated” and “fundamentally baseless,” and flow from “problems in the investigating committee’s own flawed scholarship.”

The “research misconduct” charge is that Churchill didn’t provide enough evidence relating to his account of the origins of a 19th century smallpox epidemic. Whether or not one agrees with Churchill’s account, I found in reading the investigators’ report that I had to share Cheyfitz’s opinion that “what is properly an academic debate about the relationship of Native peoples to United States history was turned into an indictment…. The research misconduct charges disappear when you start looking at them closely.”

The use of the “research misconduct” charges to discredit Churchill should be particularly troubling to all of us–as Churchill supporters made clear by promptly filing “research misconduct” charges against the investigating committee, using the same standards for “misconduct” that they employed against him (and which future observers may well find more convincing!)

The “plagiarism” charges are 1) that the prolific Churchill cited articles that he had ghostwritten, 2) published a piece in which a co-author’s name was omitted by an editor and 3) copyedited a piece in which another person, unknown to him, had plagiarized.  Of course there can be serious disagreement about these choices and the degree of personal responsibility that Churchill bears for them.

But the plain fact is that neither the investigating committee or the appeals panel felt that they merit dismissal.  And it’s fairly clear that neither committee was stacked in Churchill’s favor.  Indeed, the constitution of the committees will likely represent a key element in the lawsuit.

What I like about Cheyfitz’s analysis, as reported by Daniel Aloi for the Cornell Chronicle, is that it connects the elements of political retaliation in the case to the climate of intellectual fear produced by the larger attack on tenure and faculty self-governance under corporatization:

Keep reading.

When authority becomes despotic, citizens have an absolute right to resistance.  It was exactly this situation that faced the original American rebels, and it is exactly this situation that faces dissenters today.  We are in a condition in which the First Amendment freedoms do not work effectively.  Citizens have the right to speak, assemble, and protest freely until their actions begin to have a subversive effect on unresponsive authorities.  It can be expressed as an axiom: at the point at which protest becomes effective, the state becomes repressive.

. . .

Where this issue arose most sharply in 1968 was in our attempt to obtain permits for marching, rallying, and sleeping in the parks.  Nothing should be more routine under the First Amendment than the issuing of permits.  This is a normal city function conducted under vague municipal statutes that are rarely tested in the courts.  Permits are supposed to be used to arrange and facilitate the expression of citizens’ views, and city officials are supposed to limit such requests only to protect public safety, transportation, and so forth.

.  .  .

Our case demonstrated the arbitrary political use of permits.  It was a casebook example of the difference between real and empty constitutional rights . . . So officials proposed meaningless rights of assembly.  They rejected the proposed assembly at the Ampitheater on the grounds of “security” and “traffic congestion.”  They rejected the Festival of Life by declaring that during the week of the Convention they would enforce an 11 P.M. curfew as well as local ordinances.  In return, they offered a march through the Loop and a bandshell rally during the daylight hours of nomination day.  Rennie’s reply was that such a rally, instead of promoting protest, would have underscored people’s helplessness in the face of a great national emergency.

.  .  .

The government made the familiar argument that we had framed our demands in such a way that they were “nonnegotiable,” that we were not willing to compromise.  We replied, in Rennie’s words, that “we would negotiate anything but the Constitution,” and, if that document was suspended in our case, we had what the Reverend Jesse Jackson testified was a “moral permit” to march anyway.  We did not want or need a permit to be surrounded helplessly in a bandshell by troops.  Instead, we would issue ourselves a permit based on rights that the government could not legitimately suspend under any circumstances.

Tom Hayden – Trial

To which Denver’s finest started chanting in response, “and IEDs!”

Anyway, you knew they were ahistorical, a little demented, and partially brain-damaged.  Now you know why.

Eating high levels of some soy products - including tofu - may raise the risk of memory loss, research suggests.

The study focused on 719 elderly Indonesians living in urban and rural regions of Java.

The researchers found high tofu consumption - at least once a day - was associated with worse memory, particularly among the over-68s.

The Loughborough University-led study features in the journal Dementias and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders.

Soy products are a major alternative protein source to meat for many people in the developing world.

This kind of research into the causes of Alzheimer’s could lead scientists to new ways of preventing this devastating disease.

But soy consumption is also on the increase in the west, where it is often promoted as a “superfood”.

Soy products are rich in micronutrients called phytoestrogens, which mimic the impact of the female sex hormone oestrogen.

There is some evidence that they may protect the brains of younger and middle-aged people from damage - but their effect on the ageing brain is less clear.

The latest study suggests phytoestrogens - in high quantity - may actually heighten the risk of dementia.

Keep reading.

Students at a planned “Tent State University” may get a lesson in Denver geography, after a city council person proposes moves them to a different location at night.

“Tent State” is expected to draw 20 thousand anti-war protesters to Denver’s City Park, where they plan to camp out, listen to music and lectures.

The only problem is that city rules say parks must close, and everyone has to be out, at 11:00 p.m. — meaning 20 thousand people may have no where to stay.

The protest organizer Adam Jung says the common sense solution is to let people stay in the park. He says that allows event organizers to control security and control who comes in and out.

But city councilman Charlie Brown says the city has never allowed anyone to camp at City Park, including the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. But Brown agrees you can’t simply dump 20,000 people on the streets. So he’s proposing that protesters camp out at the Stock Show grounds which are close to town.

Keep reading.

Hell, maybe the city could just make the stock grounds the free speech zone, and then T.A.R.D. wouldn’t have to bother anyone.  Everybody wins, nobody’s upset.  If you think about it, then T.A.R.D. wouldn’t even have to protest.

They could just do a little cocaine and go jogging.  (Scroll down to Kevin’s comment.  And, for God’s sake, mute your compute before clicking on the link,)

By the way, can you think of a better place for a bunch of fucking sheep than the stock grounds?

An ethics group has filed a complaint accusing Republican Jim Geddes of ducking campaign-finance laws in his run for a CU regent seat that’s highly coveted by conservatives.

Colorado Ethics Watch, a nonpartisan legal watchdog group, filed the campaign-finance complaint Wednesday with the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office, saying Geddes’ campaign hasn’t filed two sets of contribution and expenditure reports that were due May 1 and June 2.

Geddes, a trauma surgeon from Sedalia, could face late fees exceeding $4,000, and critics question whether he’s committed to CU’s mission to be open and accountable to the public.

Geddes’ campaign could not be reached for comment Thursday after repeated attempts.

Geddes is the lone GOP candidate for the Republican-heavy 6th Congressional District, which blankets Douglas, Arapahoe and Elbert counties. He will face Democrat AJ Clemmons.

CU Regent Paul Schauer, R-Centennial, last month said he wouldn’t seek re-election — an announcement that came amid complaints from conservatives that he was ideologically soft. Schauer, managing director of the Colorado Ready Mixed Concrete Association, has said he is not running to defend his seat because he’s busy changing occupations.

Some observers speculate whether a stricter conservative on the already Republican-heavy board would give the GOP more power over highereducation in the state.

Split in conservative opinion

Schauer — a moderate Republican who has been a swing vote on the CU board — has been slammed by conservatives for not getting behind the creation of a Western civilization department that was pushed by his GOP colleagues.

Regent Tom Lucero, R-Johnstown, proposed that CU start Western civilization departments on its campuses in December 2006. The board voted unanimously to table the motion, and in January 2007, Lucero asked that it be scrapped, acknowledging shared governance among faculty members, administrators and the board. The Boulder campus offers a program that awards certificates, which are similar to minors, in Western civilization studies.

An outside conservative political organization called Coloradoans for Reform in Higher Education circulated fliers in 6th Congressional District neighborhoods this spring comparing Schauer with fired professor Ward Churchill, who ignited national furor with an essay he wrote comparing 9/11 victims with “little Eichmanns.” The fliers said both Schauer and Churchill opposed Western civilization.

The rest.

I think I’ve done this before, but I’d really like to challenge Tom Lucero to a debate, just for shits and grins.  You pick any single period you think best exemplifies “Western civilization”, Mr. Lucero, and let’s roll up our sleeves, get dirty, and see who has a better grasp of the works therein.  My guess is your knowledge consists of half-remembered quotes from David Horowitz.

“Dear Miss,” he could have told her, “we will be fighting for forty years.”

– Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Happy 4th of July, Enjoy the Barbecue!!!

Why We Say . . .Fuck the Troops

With this kind of spirit in town, do you really think anyone’s gonna miss T.A.R.D. come August?

Needless to say, everything after “Hey All” is a lie.  I mean literally everything.  The Jill to whom he refers, for instance, has been an activist in Denver for ten years, has been working her ass off in local communities, and is trusted by just about everyone.  Adam, on the other hand, is about fifteen seconds from being chained to a tree and horsewhipped.

But let’s get it started.

Hey All,

I’ve been thinking about this alot over the last few days.  I’m posting it because I won’t be at Wednesday’s meeting.  We have less then 6 weeks till the Convention and I can’t spend three hours discussing R68, which is what the last three meetings I’ve attended have entailed.  So this is my take on the Sunday march.

You mean you idiots have been spending your meetings whining, and not getting anything done?  I’ll try not to swallow my cigarette in shock.

- Logistically its a nightmare.  Many people will just be getting into Denver the morning of the 24th and I think a 9:30 start time is too early. Following the rally, if we are alotted equal say and speakers, a situation will be created forcing us to “compete” will R68 for people.  We have events planned that afternoon and evening, and so does R68.  And we will be farther from our “homebase” then R68 at the rally (by about 12 blocks.)

In other words, you don’t have your shit together.  Again, cigarette/shock.

- We will confirm alot of people’s assumptions that we were simply created to put a friendlier face out there for R68.  Regardless of promises, this march WILL be an R68 march.  R68 claims everything.  Jill has contacted some of our artists in what can only be considered sabotage, including repeatedly contacting Son of Nun.  They’ve claimed Doc’s Place and are still claiming United for Peace and Justice and CODEPINK in their “e-flashs.”  And they are claiming the march right now.

Yeah, of course this’ll be an R68 march.  Y’know, in that it will be coordinated by R68, because, well, they’ve actually been coordinating it for a year and a fucking half, while you’ve been doing whatever it is you do.

- The music festival will be wrecked.  I’ve spoken with Jamie from the Flobots a lot about this.  Just today they were offered a show at Red Rocks during the DNC.  I understand they are rejecting it, but these offers will increase.  With their rock solid opposition to R68, it’s highly possible they will drop out and play another, un-related event. Rage Against the Machine has already stated they are not interested in being associated with R68.  Wayne Kramer thinks their mere existance is ridiculus.  I think it’s safe to assume Against Me! and Pearl Jam, nethier of which have confirmed yet, but it’s looking likely, will not play ethier.  Both bands are backing Obama.

Horseshit, top to bottom.  But, speaking of not having their shit together, let’s not forget that Mr. Jung(k) doesn’t even have a place for his bands to play.  Right?  The only thing he has is a conditional permit for City Park.  If any of these poor fuckers actually sign up with Tent State, there’s a real good possibility they’ll end up playing on a Colfax sidewalk.

- We lose organizational support.  I don’t think it’s a secret why UFPJ is hesitant to join ARD.  We don’t have our shit together on this march and we’re entertaining the idea of a march with R68.  I think (Zoe, correct me if I’m wrong)the CODEPINK Parade may be scrapped now for the same reason.  If you go to the Backbone Campaign’s website I think you can agree they will not march under R68 eithier.  Not to mention all the individuals R68 has already turned off, including the delegates that I thought we wanted marching with us.

Groups don’t want to join you because they don’t think you have your shit together?  Where’d that cigarette go?

- Funding.  No one’s going to give to a group affiliated with R68. Couple that with the loss of the bands (who are securing the $60,000 necessary for the stage and sound,) were are we going to get funding?

You know, usually I try not to rag on typos and whatnot, as I myself am prone — particularly after a cocktail or two — to the occasional lapse in grammar.  But one has to ask: this little asshole’s really a college student?

- Our message is lost and media turns against us.  I’ve spoke with Judith at UFPJ and she framed it best.  Up until recently, R68 has held a hedgemony on messaging, and their messaging has been horrible.  We’ve broke that. ARD or coalition groups have been receiving the majority of coverage both locally and nationally.  The Nation’s feature next month is on ARD members, the Flobots put alot of ARD members, banners, and messaging in their music video that will drop on Mtv in a couple weeks, and almost all of the coverage has been positive.  If we hand what we’ve built back over to R68, we’re screwed again.

You’ve turned around R68’s “hedgemony” in messaging you say?  That’s funny, I go to R68’s website and look at July’s updates, and I see articles from The Denver Post, The Rocky Mountain News, The New York Times, Fox 31 Colorado, 9News, The LA Times, and USA TODAY, as well as nigh daily interviews on two local talk radio shows.

And then I search, say, “alliance for real democracy” on Google News, and I get, well, four articles, none of them in July.

Great media work, ace.  Hell, you fuckers ought to send me a case of Scotch.  I seem to be the only person in Denver talking about you at all.

- You make some of our lives hell.  We’ve met with City Officials, the Mayor, Councilmembers, the Police, DOJ, Neighborhood Associations, East High, and the Zoo.  This have ALL been positive.  The Police, the Zoo, some city officials, and East High all want us to be allowed to camp.  Alot of it has to do with our positive messaging and willingness to work with these institutions.  East High is even writing off the 8th period on Wednesday to allow students to attend the Flobots portion of the concert, presenting some of our speakers at the school, allowing field trips to Tent State, and going to bat for us with the parents.  An association with R68 will destroy all of this.  They believe us when I say we’re not with R68, and are thankful.  Just look at Concilwoman Madison’s quote last week in the Post.

Well, at least he’s got it together with the junior high school students.

Hey, maybe they’ll let him hold his concerts in their auditorium.

Y’know, since as of right now, he ain’t got anywhere else to put the bands he may or may not have.

- There is no trust.  The R68 members now coming to our meetings (wtf!?) have broken trust time and again.  Ben did it with Dead Prez, and many of you saw his amazing writing skills.  Jill is contacting as many of our artists as she can causing wonderful conversations between some of us and the artists, and apparently plans to disrupt the neighborhood meetings.  Seriously, wtf!?  She also bcc’s Ben Whitmore and who knows who else every time she emails us, resulting in more wonderful emails sent to a few of us.  If you’re not familiar with him, here’s a link to his blog:

http://tryworks.org

You’ll find wonderful articles written on myself, Claire, Ben, Zoe, and T.A.R.D. as he loves to call us.  Maybe you’ll recognize the usual R68 commentors below the articles.

Sue me.

And finally, a major WTF!?  Many of the organizations in ARD refused to work with Tent State when we were associated with R68.  Now people are arguing to be associated with R68.  It’s more then frustrating.

And that’s the kicker, of course.  T.A.R.D. is falling apart, and the reason they’re falling apart is because they don’t have their shit together.  Right now they exist as a kind of group therapy session, spending every Wednesday evening venting hurt feelings and licking their wounds.  They’ve already canceled what was supposed to be their big march, and they don’t even have a place to hold the events they stole from R68.

Again, Mr. Jung(k) can claim whatever he wants, but the only thing he has is a conditional permit for City Park.  And hell, even if by some miracle the city grants it to him, that means his little shindig’ll be located four fucking miles from the Pepsi Center.

Good luck with that.   Given what I’ve seen of your organizational skills so far, I’ll be fucking amazed if there are more than a hundred people at City Park at any one time during the DNC.

And that’s if every group aligned with you hasn’t already jumped ship by August.

Which, from your email, and from what I’m hearing offline, looks to be the case.

Adam Jung,
National Organizing Committee,
Tent State University,
816.349.7385
adam@tentstate.org
http://tentstate.org

National Organizing Committee, you say?

No offense, but I’m betting you ain’t gonna retain that position for long, Mr. Jung(k).

But, as much as I do enjoy finding unkind things to say about T.A.R.D., there are groups working in Denver that manage to cut through the overwhelming contempt that washes over me whenever I contemplate that useless, bloated, ahistorical, drooling beast known euphemistically as the antiwar movement.

What I mean is that as long as there are groups like RAIMD and Unconventional Denver out there, all hope ain’t lost.

From the Denver Post.

In Denver this weekend, a group of anarchists who have pledged to disrupt the Democratic National Convention will hold a secret action camp to learn about medical training and legal rights and to practice nonviolent tactics.

“We don’t want history to remember the Democratic National Convention in Denver as something that went smoothly,” said Tim Simons with the self-described anarchist group, Unconventional Denver.

“We want people to know there was dissent and people spoke up,” he said.

In the meantime, local governments in the region are inking contracts to send hundreds of law enforcement officers into Denver during the last week of August to work the convention.

Aurora will send nearly half its force to Denver, Jefferson County will ship more than 100 deputies and Arapahoe County is expecting to add 100.

Dozens of other agencies are sending officers: Colorado State Patrol, Arvada, Wheat Ridge, Englewood, Littleton, Colorado Springs, El Paso County, Douglas County and many others.

“We want to make sure we are adequately staffed for the number of people who are going to be here,” said Sonny Jackson, a Denver police spokesman. He would not disclose what agencies will be participating or how many officers are expected.

“We respect everyone’s First Amendment rights,” Jackson said. “We hope that the citizens will come in and conduct themselves in a law-abiding and responsible manner.”

With the contingent of local officers and federal agents and the money being spent on security from a $50 million federal grant, protesters worry about possible outcomes.

“The police are gearing up for confrontation,” said Glenn Spagnuolo, organizer with the protest group Re-create 68. “Police are getting dressed up for a fight, and if there isn’t one, they will create one.”

He said he has not heard of any of the protest groups planning violence against the police or citizens.

Plan for disruption

Numerous anti-war groups have announced their intention to demonstrate in Denver during the Aug. 25-28 convention, but most have promised peaceful actions. The language of the anarchist groups is more confrontational. Unconventional Denver is part of a national group of anarchists planning to descend on Denver.

The group says it will engage in nonviolent direct action and has called for protesters “to engage in a broad variety of tactics to disrupt fundraising events and prevent Democratic delegates from putting on the spectacle they claim as democracy,” according to the group’s website.

Unconventional Denver wants to shut down, disrupt or delay the convention; storm events; and “ensure that the DNC is a thing of rowdy beauty.”

The website suggests activists “hold” intersections to strand delegates in buses and “swarm” streets to force police to retreat.

The group has posted a schedule of events for certain days:

Sunday, the group wants to reclaim public space in the city. Monday, there will be actions against parties or restaurant outings and a “black bloc” gathering against capitalism. Tuesday, the group wants to shut down access to the Pepsi Center. And Wednesday and Thursday, there will be “creative actions” to address specific issues such as global warming, racism and criminal injustice.

“The streets will be a wild and creative place,” said Simons, a 25-year-old graphic artist who grew up in Boulder and lives in San Francisco.

Simons is helping organize Denver’s group, which meets weekly at a Colfax Avenue coffee shop. He wouldn’t disclose the size of the group.

For six days starting Saturday, they will meet at an undisclosed location to discuss actions and learn how to tend to one another’s medical needs and how to legally monitor the police reactions.

Simons says there will be street theater, “guerrilla gardening” and ways for alternative forms of media to get out their message.

A group called the Colorado Street Medics will be on hand throughout the protests to provide immediate medical service, said Zoe Williams, who is coordinating the expected 120 volunteer street medics.

“We don’t want to see a dark, evil atmosphere descending on Denver,” Simons said. “We want a festive atmosphere that celebrates grassroots movements.”

History of violence

Yet, historically, law enforcement officials have blamed anarchists for violence in protests.

In 2003, Colorado Springs Police Chief Luis Velez said, officers used tear gas on war protesters after anarchists from Denver disrupted the peaceful rally with violent acts — blocking an intersection and banging on cars.

Anarchists took center stage in Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting, when protesters smashed shop windows and police shot tear gas and rubber bullets. The National Guard and state patrol were called in to quell the chaos.

“I was there,” said Simons, who blamed police force for the trouble. “We were standing up for democracy.”

Simons said the real message of what people want will not be heard in the Pepsi Center or in the Democratic Party’s platform; it will come from what is being said in the streets.

“Politicians and the people in power should be afraid of the power of the people,” he said. “That is the sign of a healthy democracy.”

Well fucking said, Mr. Simons.  Tonight I’ll raise a glass to and yours.  In the eternal words of Herman Melville:

Gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of long pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together — there, ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses!

Agreeing with writers such as Ward Churchill, I have been arguing that the notion that the U.S. does not “intentionally” kill civilians in its bombings of civilian areas, and thus is “not terrorism” is not a convincing argument. U.S. military planners know that the bombings will kill civilians, they pre-label the fatalities as “collateral damage” and prepare press briefings in advance condemning the enemy for using “human shields” — that the enemy wants to defend its neighbourhoods is dismissed — and this amounts to a logic of calculated killing, of knowing murder, and thus terrorism. One might quibble about whether the primary or secondary target is civilian.

Keep reading.

Arizona Sen. John McCain did not bother to show up for Wednesday’s Senate votes on whether to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to absolve George Bush of responsibility for initiating an illegal warrantless wiretapping program and to provide retroactive immunity to the telecommunications corporations that violated the privacy of their customers in order to collaborate with a lawless president.

But that’s OK, because Illinois Sen. Barack Obama cast the votes that McCain would have.

Keep reading.

Just in case anyone wants to know, Mr.. Whitmer is part of the R68 coalition, and is one of their biggest supporters.  In case anyone was wondering about solidarity, this is how to build it, eh?

Adam and Zoë are also frequent targets.

Funnily enough, I am not even part of the Alliance.

Read this and maybe people will reconsider about working with R68.

And unlike some people do, I have no one bcc’d on this.  Funnily enough, when you bcc someone on an email, then they stupidly hit reply all, then everyone knows who is bcc’d.

Funnily enough, I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about, dear.  I ain’t a part of the R68 coalition.  I am a supporter, of course, but I don’t represent anything here other than my own half-formed, usually incoherent abhorrences (apologies to Ed Dorn).

It’s a fucking blog, ma’am, a little space of my own to bang out ten minutes of hate between cocktails, it’s sure as shit not a mission statement.  As import goes, it’s somewhere between couch therapy and masturbating into a condom.

That said, Ms. Ryder, I seem to recall an incident not too long ago where you posted personal information about an R68 member on a website that gets a whole hell of a lot more traffic than this one.

I just took it as a sign that you wanted to play.

As some of you have pointed out, it’s simply what these corporatized activist organizations do.  Right?  They blow into town, systematically plunder the work that’s been built at the grassroots level, crush local perspectives, drown out voices from communities of color, and ensure whatever so-called oppositional points of view left are pristine, lily-white, and entirely fucking useless.  It’s business as usual for these assholes.

But I’m curious as to why.  What do these little shits have to gain?  Or, a better question, given their nature: what purpose do they serve?

Well, I’ve got an answer.  And I’m gonna precede that answer with the following from Baudrillard’s discussion of Watergate in Simulacra and Simulation:

The denunciation of scandal always pays homage to the law. And Watergate above all succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal — in this sense it was an extraordinary operation of intoxication: the reinjection of a large dose of political morality on a global scale. It could be said along with Bourdieu that: “The specific character of every relation of force is to dissimulate itself as such, and to acquire all its force only because it is so dissimulated”; understood as follows: capital, which is immoral and unscrupulous, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever regenerates this public morality (by indignation, denunciation, etc.) spontaneously furthers the; order of capital, as did the Washington Post journalists.

But this is still only the formula of ideology, and when Bourdieu enunciates it, he takes “relation of force” to mean the truth of capitalist domination, and he denounces this relation of force as itself a scandal: he therefore occupies the same deterministic and moralistic position as the Washington Post journalists. He does the same job of purging and reviving moral order, an order of truth wherein the genuine symbolic violence of the social order is engendered, well beyond all relations of force, which are only elements of its indifferent and shifting configuration in the moral and political consciousnesses of people.

All that capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of rationality, to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name of morality. For they are identical, meaning they can be read another way: before, the task was to dissimulate scandal; today, the task is to conceal the fact that there is none.

Watergate is not a scandal: this is- what must be said at all cost, for this is what everyone is concerned to conceal, this dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, a moral panic as we approach the primal (mise-en-)scene of capital: its instantaneous cruelty; its incomprehensible ferocity; its fundamental immorality — these are what are scandalous, unaccountable for in that system of moral and economic equivalence which remains the axiom of leftist thought, from Enlightenment theory to communism. Capital doesn’t give a damn about the idea of the contract which is imputed to it: it is a monstrous unprincipled undertaking, nothing more. Rather, it is “enlightened” thought which seeks to control capital by imposing rules on it. And all that recrimination which replaced revolutionary thought today comes down to reproaching capital for not following the rules of the game. “Power is unjust; its justice is a class justice; capital exploits us; etc.” — as if capital were linked by a contract to the society it rules. It is the left which holds out the mirror of equivalence, hoping that capital will fall for this phantasmagoria of the social contract and fulfill its obligation towards the whole of society (at the same time, no need for revolution: it is enough that capital accept the rational formula of exchange).

In an admittedly reductive nutshell, then, that’s where I see T.A.R.D.  The members therein don’t actually oppose the war any more than the Watergate scandal opposes Capital.  Instead, they provide moral cover for the population at large.

We cluster-bombed civilians?
Don’t blame me, I adhere to solely non-violent principles.

US contractors raped prepubescent boys to garner information?
Don’t blame me, I lit a candle.

More than a million civilians have been exterminated since 2003?
Don’t blame me, I wore pink.

In fact, if you think about it, the members of T.A.R.D. are necessary for the furtherance of the war.  If they didn’t exist, the state would have to invent them.  Without them to provide that moral cover, to help bridge the cognitive dissonance inevitably caused by a culture that prattles on about human rights while committing a fucking holocaust, someone might actually do something to, well, stop the war.

In other words, CodePink, United for Peace and Justice, and the rest of T.A.R.D. are as necessary to ensuring Iraq remains an abattoir as .223 rounds.  They function as an ideological Free Speech Zone, mandating the limits of what is allowable in protest, and restricting dissent.  They serve to provide a safe, State-sanctioned zone for the exercise of limited rights, and to express a purely symbolic opposition to the war.

The only problem being, of course, that the war isn’t symbolic.  And neither are those one million and more dead Iraqis.

They’re just fucking dead.

And, in part, they have T.A.R.D. to thank for it.

Update:  On cue, your T.A.R.D. representative, in the Rocky Mountain News.

The city of Denver has conditionally approved permits for 1,000 local Democrats to host an Aug. 26 Democratic National Convention “watching party” on a big-screen TV at City Park and - just a Frisbee throw away - an encampment for 20,000 to 50,000 war protesters vowing to “Confront the Democrats” for failing to use their control of Congress to cut Iraq war funding.

“How fun will a Denver Democratic convention watching party be with 50,000 protesters all around protesting us?” asked Julie Kronenberger, a Denver County Democratic Party member working to obtain city permits for their night event at City Park Pavilion and adjacent band shell.

But leaders on both sides of the political divide believe they can find common ground at the park.

“I think it’s great. I think the dialogue between the people at Tent State University and the (local) Democrats will probably be more democratic than anything that’s going on inside the convention,” said Adam Jung, chief organizer for Tent State, which describes itself as “a positive, youth-led initiative to fund education instead of war.”

“We’re not there to chastise rank-and-file Democratic Party members. Many of them probably agree with our position on the war,” said Jung.

He said the young protesters’ beef is with national Democratic Party leaders, including presumptive presidential nominee Barack Obama.

Jung fears Obama is making a “run to the right” and wavering on vows to withdraw troops from Iraq 16 months after taking office.

Yet, he added, “I can’t foresee us doing anything that would make (local Dems’) night unpleasant. In fact, I think they would be welcome to check out what we’re doing. I think they might have a lot of fun.”

Keep reading.

Fucking pig.

And I mean that quite literally.  As Glenn Spagnuolo alludes in an interview with Peter Boyles this morning, Adam Jung(k) of Tent State (and a founding member of T.A.R.D.) is working with the city to draw people away from downtown Denver’s Civic Center Park, which is home base for the protests and protesters.

After a day of measured responses, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper on Wednesday issued a sharply worded rebuke of a singer who replaced the words of the national anthem with lyrics from another song before a Hickenlooper speech.

Reading from a prepared statement beneath gathering afternoon clouds on the steps of the City and County Building, a visibly angry Hickenlooper said the singer’s actions overshadowed what he wanted to convey in his Tuesday morning speech.

The annual state of the city address is the mayor’s biggest speech of the year and sets the agenda for the course of city government in the coming year.

“No one paid attention to that speech,” said Hickenlooper, who said that he had spent at least 72 hours preparing
the speech and that his staff had spent weeks preparing for the event.

Instead, the mayor said, his office had been deluged with angry telephone calls and e-mails. At least 80 people had expressed displeasure Wednesday with Rene Marie’s song choice Tuesday.

The local jazz singer and actress, who had been invited to perform “The Star-Spangled Banner,” instead sang a song recalling the life-threatening conditions slaves were forced to endure in the 19th century called “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The song, which Marie sang to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” is also called the “black national anthem.”

. . .

Other politicians also were weighing in. Speaking during his monthly appearance on the “Mike Rosen Show” on 850 KOA on Wednesday, Gov. Bill Ritter said the performance had been “inappropriate.”

“If you invite someone to sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at an event, you invite them to do just that,” Ritter said.

“The problem here is she was invited to do one thing, and she chose to do another thing,” Ritter said.

“It’s a fair interpretation to say it’s disrespectful.”

The mayor had used much milder language the day of his speech. He said then that Marie had apologized and told him she meant no disrespect.

On Wednesday, he said he had grown angrier after watching televised interviews of the singer. It became clear, he said, that she “was making a political statement.”

He said that while he thinks the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” are beautiful, it wasn’t appropriate to replace “The Star-Spangled Banner” during an official city function.

“‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is sacred, one of our most beloved traditions,” the mayor said.

Keep reading.

One of our “most beloved traditions” you say?  Well, maybe, but sure as hell not one of mine.  See, unlike the geniuses inhabiting our City and State office buildings, I know something about the history of “The Star Spangled Banner’s” adoption as the national anthem.  After all, the key proponents were none other than two of my favorite exterminationist confidence men, Buffalo Bill Cody and Theodore Roosevelt.

Cody, the most dedicated mover, played the tune for some thirty years to kick off his Wild West, an outdoor drama which began as a series of corny New York plays about himself, based on dime novel fantasies penned by the likes of Prentiss Ingraham, and grew into a global phenomenon.

Buffalo Bill never let his Wild West be called the Wild West Show, insisting the that what was being presented was no mere representation of the Wild West, but the Wild West itself.  And, in at least one regard, Cody was correct to insist on its authenticity: the show presented the march of Manifest Destiny as the historical inevitability which has formed the core of American Indian-Hating and Empire-Building ever since.  The spectacle opened with the forest primeval, complete with savages skulking through the underbrush, and led the viewer through the so-called civilization of America, depicting, as Richard Slotkin put it in Gunfighter Nation, “the struggle between Red Man and White on the American frontier [as] the archetype and precedent for the world-wide struggle between ‘progressive’ and ‘savage’ or ‘regressive’ races that shaped the modern world.”

Or, as Cody put it in the Wild West’s handbill:

The central figure in these pictures is that of THE HON. W.F. CODY (Buffalo Bill), to whose sagacity, skill, energy, and courage . . . the settlers of the West owe so much for the reclamation of the prairie from the savage Indian and wild animals, who so long opposed the march of civilization.

Although one has to wonder at the logical contortions inherent to any claim of an Anglo-American right to “reclaim” the prairie from its original inhabitants, the handbill couldn’t be clearer about the racist assumptions of this particular confidence game.  Unlike the later softening of the winning of the American West that has come with more politically correct sensibilities, Cody’s Wild West wasn’t a place of cultural exchange, where Indians simply vanished before the oncoming civilization; it was unabashed in its worship of the cult of extermination.

Not that, for all his insistence on historical accuracy, Cody was particularly vested in the principle.  He was a confidence man.  My favorite example of Cody’s chicanery comes with George Armstrong Custer’s etiquette lesson at Greasy Grass.  At the time, Buffalo Bill was nominally employed as a scout for the 5th Cavalry, taking a break from his career of play-acting himself in an attempt to bolster his authenticity.  Hence, a few weeks after Custer’s defeat, the 5th Cavalry scouts, led by Cody, hunted down a party of Cheyenne who had nothing to do with Custer’s defeat, and butchered them.  Cody then scalped one of the corpses and proclaimed it the “first scalp for Custer.”

As Richard Slotkin notes, again in Gunfighter Nation, this incident became “the core of the Buffalo Bill legend, and the basis for his national celebrity.  Before the year was over he would be hailed as the man who took the first scalp for Custer,” and in only a few months time, Cody had already translated the skirmish into a play entitled The Red Right Hand; Or, The First Scalp for Custer.  In the play, Cody’s battle with the Cheyenne warrior, Yellow Hand, mutated into a hand-to-hand duel, with Cody holding the scalp above his head and shouting the line, “The First Scalp for Custer!”  Yellow Hand himself was transformed into a prominent Cheyenne war-chief, who had been present at the Little Big Horn.

Even better, it seems that Buffalo Bill anticipated the massacre by donning a black and scarlet velvet Vaquero outfit on the morning of the murder in lieu of his usual buckskins, allowing him to later stand on stage in the East, declaring truthfully that he stood before the audience in the very garb he was wearing when he took the first scalp for Custer.

Nor was that the end of it.  Yellow Hand’s scalp was displayed on advertisements for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West for the entirety of its run, and Buffalo Bill himself played Custer in the culmination to his show for decades.

In fact, besides “The Star Spangled Banner”, the murdered Cheyenne warrior Yellow Hand’s scalp was the most consistent feature of the Wild West.

There’s a continuity there that one really needn’t bother remark on.

So how’s about Roosevelt?  Well, Roosevelt is widely understood as having inaugurated the movement which led to “The Star Spangled Banner’s” becoming the national anthem.  And he fell in love with it at Cody’s Wild West.  He was generally impressed with the historical lesson Cody provided, but was particularly moved by the swell of feeling given him and the audience by the playing of the song.  So moved, that he had his volunteer cavalry regiment, the Rough Riders — who took their name from a portion of Cody’s Wild West entitled “The Congress of the Rough Riders of the World” — play the tune when they hoisted the first American flag in Cuba.

And it gets better.  See, when Roosevelt returned, Cody replaced the closing act of his Wild West, wherein he played a courageous General George Armstrong Custer, with a reenactment of the Battle of San Juan Hill, wherein he played a courageous Teddy Roosevelt, leading his Rough Riders in their famous charge.  (A famous charge which, it’s worth remembering, was essentially a mop-up operation, as a black cavalry regiment had already taken care of most of the combat.)

Cody understood what Roosevelt understood, and that was that the invasion of Cuba was US Indian policy on the road.  It was, and is, the kind of militaristic racial expansionism which they both recognized in “The Star Spangled Banner”.

Am I being too hard on Roosevelt, calling him an exterminationist and a racial expansionist?

Well, don’t take my word for it.  Following are some quotes from his four-volume Indian-killing, expansionist epic, The Winning of the West (which was plagiarized by no less a racial expansionist than Adolf Hitler):

During the past three centuries the spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world’s waste spaces has been not only the most striking feature in the world’s history, but also the event of all others most far-reaching in its effects and its importance . . . There have been many other races that at one time or another had their great periods of race expansion — as distinguished from mere conquest, — but there has never been another whose expansion has been either so broad or so rapid.

. . .

Unless we were willing that the whole continent west of the Alleghanies should remain an unpeopled waste, the hunting-ground of savages, war was inevitable; and even had we been willing, and had we refrained from encroaching on the Indians’ lands, the war would have come nevertheless, for then the Indians themselves would have encroached on ours.

. . .

The settler and pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages.

. . .

Whether the whites won the land by treaty, by armed conquest, or, as was actually the case, by a mixture of both, mattered comparatively little so long as the land was won. It was all-important that it should be won, for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind. It is indeed a warped, perverse, and silly morality which would forbid a course of conquest that has turned whole continents into the seats of mighty and flourishing civilized nations. All men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership.

. . .

The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori, — in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people. The consequences of struggles for territory between civilized nations seem small by comparison. Looked at from the standpoint of the ages, it is of little moment whether Lorraine is part of Germany or of France, whether the northern Adriatic cities pay homage to Austrian Kaiser or Italian King; but it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.

. . .

Yet the very causes which render this struggle between savagery and the rough front rank of civilization so vast and elemental in its consequence to the future of the world, also tend to render it in certain ways peculiarly revolting and barbarous. It is primeval warfare, and it is waged as war was waged in the ages of bronze and of iron. All the merciful humanity that even war has gained during the last two thousand years is lost. It is a warfare where no pity is shown to non-combatants, where the weak are harried without ruth, and the vanquished maltreated with merciless ferocity. A sad and evil feature of such warfare is that the whites, the representatives of civilization, speedily sink almost to the level of their barbarous foes, in point of hideous brutality. The armies are neither led by trained officers nor made up of regular troops–they are composed of armed settlers, fierce and wayward men, whose ungovernable passions are unrestrained by discipline, who have many grievous wrongs to redress, and who look on their enemies with a mixture of contempt and loathing, of dread and intense hatred. When the clash comes between these men and their somber foes, too often there follow deeds of enormous, of incredible, of indescribable horror. It is impossible to dwell without a shudder on the monstrous woe and misery of such a contest.

. . .

Yet in its results, and viewed from the standpoint of applied ethics, the conquest and settlement by the whites of the Indian lands was necessary to the greatness of the race and to the well-being of civilized mankind. It was as ultimately beneficial as it was inevitable. Huge tomes might be filled with arguments as to the morality or immorality of such conquests. But these arguments appeal chiefly to the cultivated men in highly civilized communities who have neither the wish nor the power to lead warlike expeditions into savage lands. Such conquests are commonly undertaken by those reckless and daring adventurers who shape and guide each race’s territorial growth. They are sure to come when a masterful people, still in its raw barbarian prime, finds itself face to face with a weaker and wholly alien race which holds a coveted prize in its feeble grasp.

Many good persons seem prone to speak of all wars of conquest as necessarily evil. This is, of course, a shortsighted view. In its after effects a conquest may be fraught either with evil or with good for mankind, according to the comparative worth of the conquering and conquered peoples. It is useless to try to generalize about conquests simply as such in the abstract; each case or set of cases must be judged by itself. The world would have halted had it not been for the Teutonic conquests in alien lands; but the victories of Moslem over Christian have always proved a curse in the end. Nothing but sheer evil has come from the victories of Turk and Tartar. This is true generally of the victories of barbarians of low racial characteristics over gentler, more moral, and more refined peoples, even though these people have, to their shame and discredit, lost the vigorous fighting virtues. Yet it remains no less true that the world would probably have gone forward very little, indeed would probably not have gone forward at all, had it not been for the displacement or submersion of savage and barbaric peoples as a consequence of the armed settlement in strange lands of the races who hold in their hands the fate of the years. Every such submersion or displacement of an inferior race, every such armed settlement or conquest by a superior race, means the infliction and suffering of hideous woe and misery. It is a sad and dreadful thing that there should of necessity be such throes of agony; and yet they are the birth-pangs of a new and vigorous people. That they are in truth birth-pangs does not lessen the grim and hopeless woe of the race supplanted; of the race outworn or overthrown. The wrongs done and suffered cannot be blinked. Neither can they be allowed to hide the results to mankind of what has been achieved.

Sigh, nothing like reading Teddy to get that old Teutonic blood flowing.  Gee, wonder why people of color might feel a tad bit, shall we say, alienated by that kind of horseshit?

Anyway, to be honest, my opposition to “The Star Spangled Banner” has very little to do with Cody or Roosevelt.  It has to do with it being a monstrously stupid piece of hammer-rhyme hackwork.

But, that aside, there’s something particularly fucking repellent about all those talk-show clones on the local channels getting worked up about Rene Marie’s statement that she never felt “The Star Spangled Banner” applied to her.

I don’t think the song in itself is racist — just fucking awful — but, in the same way that there are survivors of Nazi concentration camps who’d rather not listen to Wagner, one can certainly understand Ms. Marie’s desire to sing something else.