One, Two, Three, Four...

I’m old enough to remember the rallying cries of the sixties, and they are making a comeback. I heard today on CNN, demonstrators in Washington chanting “One, two, three, four. We don’t want your oil war! “ Lacks something of the passion I remember as the original was “One, two, three, four. We don’t want your fucking war!” But to quote another inspirational line, “It doesn’t take a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Ah yes, “The times they are a changin’.”

Yes, Iran Has No Al-Qaeda

Probably no bananas either. And the women are forced to wear traditional Islamic dress, not the burka, but the head scarf and a long dark coat or robe thingy. No makeup, no nail polish. Not encouraged to do much of anything but make her family’s life a “paradise.” But the lights are on, the water’s running, bombs are not going off in the cafes or markets. It is not impossible for a woman to get an education and they are not prohibited form working, just strongly discouraged. Is Iran training Al-Qaeda or even supporting Al-Qaeda elsewhere? It’s highly improbably, most unlikely, and not in Iran’s self interest.

John McCain’s “misstatement” or as I’d call it, “oft told lie”, shows one of two problems. He is either senile, stupid and arrogant like Bush the Younger, or he is a propagandist like Bush the Younger, et al. It is a Rovian tactic to repeat the lie over and over in various settings with much press coverage, until it has been heard so often by the populous that it is perceived as truth.

A good read on the shifts in the culture of Iran is the wonderful book “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir.” This excellent book was written by Azar Nafisi, and published in 2003. It give us a very good look at the hostilities between Iran and Iraq, told by a female academic teaching at one of the universities in Tehran. Set in the 1980’s, after the revolution that put the Islamists in control in Iran, with the strongman, thuggish Saddam Hussein, a nasty Sunni neighbor, looking for trouble and getting it. Iran is pretty much the only Shia country in the neighborhood.

John, old boy, take a history class, read a book, get an advisor, someone who knows his ass from a hole in the ground.

I Used To Love Her, But It's All Over Now

Bobby Womack wrote “It’s All Over Now” in 1975. I’ll bet Bill Clinton knows the lyrics and can play it on the Sax without charts. And it’s, in part because of Bill, that I feel that way about Hillary. Though honestly, I hate to admit it, I still kind of have the hots for Bill. But he is beginning to be pretty embarrassing again. And that makes me want to ask her, “Why can’t you control you husband?” He’s off the reservation again. No, not poaching interns, but running his mouth and putting Hillary and McCain on the same ticket. Do they aim to arm wrestle for the top spot, I wonder?

Boomer Nation, Move Over

I’m a leading edge Boomer. Born before World War II was over by a few months. I came of age in the early 1960’s. And was passionately involved in the movement to end the War in Vietnam. I joined the rallies and demonstrations to end the war. We marched to the Utah State Capital and demonstrated. We marched to the University of Utah and briefly took over the Administration Building. We joined forces with anyone against the war, including the Black Panthers. We raised money to bail-out anyone picked up and jailed during any demonstration. We were glued to the news coverage of the mounting casualty numbers. And we knew that there would be a tipping point at some point when middle America, that famous Silent Majority, would become so sickened by the carnage that they too, would join us. It only made them angrier at us. We thought there would be a revolution. We rooted for the Students for a Democratic Society, the Free Speech Movement, Youth International Party, The Chicago Seven, the Weather Underground. In the end they shot a bunch of kids at Kent State, they jailed and prosecuted just about everybody in a leadership role in any of those organizations. They called us communists. And it all fell apart in disgust and alienation.

During the decade of the sixties I moved from Salt Lake to San Francisco, and a year later I sailed on the Michael Angelo to Italy for a year. During a demonstration against the war, in Milan in 1965, I was with the chairman of the Communist Youth Organization (a kid whose father was a wealthy shipping magnate) when someone in the crowd behind me, grabbed me and pulled me into a cafe, whispering in my ear, “Don’t speak English, they’ll kill you if they know you’re an American. If anyone asks you where you’re from, say you are Canadian.” I looked around to see who said this, and he was gone. I never planned to return to the United States. I was working as a model and making plenty of money. My friends were famous artists and writers. Life was good. And by the way, communists are allowed to vote in Italy. Pretty much all artists and intellectuals in Italy were communists in those days. It was about as radical as voting democrat in Utah. But at the end of my first year, my mother sent me a telegram telling me she needed me to come home. She and my father had divorced. She had moved back to the family home, and wanted me to come back to the States for awhile, to keep her company.

Returning to Utah was one of the worst decisions I ever made. The real reason my mother wanted me to come home was her “friendship” with a man who worked as a covert agent for the FBI. Due to their relationship, he told her to get me back here, to keep me from my “dangerous” associations. This is how I found out there was a file on me at the FBI. Those were the good old days of J. Edgar Hoover. That cross-dressing hypocrite bastard! Sorry, not meant to insult cross-dressers anywhere. Really, I’m all for it. It’s the hypocrite bastard part I find objectional. That’s when the spying on all of us began. You guys remember Nixon, Watergate and that Great Senate Hearing? Ah, those were the days.

Now we all know the government is spying on all of us all the damn time. We’re getting used to it. Common place. We have let them take our civil right’s away without a peep. They can come into your house and do a sneak-n-peek with impunity. Fancy that. Move over boomers, we’ve fucked it up. It’s time to retire from the leadership roles we’re hanging onto, and leave the podium after we’ve handed over the keys to the crumbling, about to collapse kingdom. Good luck, Generation Obama.

Reverend Wright Was Right

Maybe we need to take a trip down memory lane and reexamine our history. There is now a new series on HBO called John Adams. It is a stirring look at the beginnings of our “Democracy.” I watched the first installment and there was not one mention of the “Native Problem” or slavery. That first episode showcases the lovely relationship between Adams and his wife, Abigail. It’s a nice devise, and is documented in years of letters between Adams and his wife over the long course of their marriage. And frankly she seems the more thoughtful and intelligent of the two. It’s interesting for me to imagine how different our history might be if Abigail had led the revolution and helped to write the Declaration of Independence. Might it have read instead, “…..conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal.”

So for me, descended from the Choctaw, our history of “Live Free or Die America,” begins with invasion and slaughter, removal from our lands to concentration camps, and the deliberate destruction of our culture and language. For the descendants of slaves, it begins in invasion of their native lands, capture, kidnapping, a perilous and mostly deadly journey to a place where they were auctioned off and made to labor often under the lash and for no stake in anything except survival. That any of us survived your damed “democracy” is a bloody miracle. So for starters, I’m not sure Reverend Wright’s list of atrocities you have committed in the name of “Democracy and America,” is half long enough. But just so we’re clear on this, let me innumerate for you a few.

Manifest Destiny is the term that was to justify the expansion of the United States from the original thirteen colonies westward across the continent, gobbling up other people’s land all the way to the Pacific and then south into Mexico. It is the religious zealot’s justification for taking what does not belong to him. God wants me to have “it,”—land and everything on or under it, or in the case of certain classes of people, “you,” especially if you are not the same color or speak the same language, as I, because He favors me. I am chosen and you are not. Sounds pretty stupid, doesn’t it? What is it that makes you immigrant descendants of Europeans think you are so very special that God favors you above all other’s? Even your Christianity is a child among the world’s religions. Now again Manifest Destiny is a term Bush used recently to justify our occupation of Iraq and our permanent presence in the heart of an ancient culture we know almost nothing about—such is our arrogance. God wants us there!

And in between, we have so much carnage, the fire-bombing of Dresden, the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the My Lai massacre, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. I think the Reverend might have touched upon a few, but I could go on and on. The real reason we want Cuba back is to turn it back into the whore house it was before Castro’s revolution. Our little brown Las Vegas in the soft, warm waters just ninety miles from Miami. Did I mention our guy Pinochet? Our little CIA operations to topple democratically elected socialist governments throughout our hemisphere and replace them with military dictatorships—so common, so uniformly disastrous to the ordinary people in those countries. Remember the Disappeared? Remember Haiti?

And here at home we are using religion to justify denying full civil rights to certain classes of citizens because God doesn’t approve of them for some reason. Here the Reverend and I part company. I cannot believe in such a god.

Ancestry And The American Dream

I just got off the phone with a young man from one of the small North Dakota Reservations. The People are out of wood for wood-stoves, utilities cut off for non- payment. It’s a long hard winter and the People are freezing. The People are a tribe of Sioux and they are living the life of people in every part of the world where the local government views a tribe or class of human beings as unwanted, disposable, and so they are rounded up and put in concentration camps. This is happening in Africa, it’s happening in the Middle East, it’s happening here, in the United States of America, only here the camps are called “Reservations,” and we have turned our backs on all such people everywhere because it shames us to know, and so we do nothing.

My mother’s family is descended from the Choctaw who lived in Mississippi, prior to their forced march to Oklahoma where they were given a small parcel of uninhabitable land. Oklahoma territory was nothing like Mississippi with it’s rich delta, green and lush with plentiful game and soil that anything would grow in. No, Oklahoma is dust. The Oklahoma concentration camp was…… I can think of no other word than inhospitable. We were a proud nation, part of the Muskogean linguistic group, called the Five Civilized Tribes. A people with a rich language and culture, a people who were cooperative and generous toward the new immigrants who came to our lands. And we were nearly slaughtered into extinction. Under Andrew Jackson’s administration we were made a model of his “Indian removal plan.” We were the first tribe to be marched to Oklahoma. This mass forced march is know as The Trail of Tears. Do you remember this from your history books?

In the beginning it was call the Office of Indian Affairs and was formed in 1824, created by the Second Continental Congress . The esteemed Ben Franklin and Patrick Henry were early commissioners of the OIA charged with negotiating treaties. Treaties which were broken over and over until we get to the Oklahoma part of my family’s history with the newly changed OIA to the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) run entirely by white immigrants whose job it was to indoctrinate a proud and ancient people in the ways of Christianity, in the ways of white culture. My mother’s people were forced to send their children away to schools run by the BIA, where they were made to be ashamed of their own language and culture. And that shame grew into such self loathing that four generations back from me the women in the family married white men who then owned their lands. Three generations back those women moved off the Reservation and started passing as white. They lived in various parts of Texas, married to ignorant cracker men who treated them like shit. So now we have my mother who could not get far enough away from her families past. Smart, good looking, determined to live a better life, she married an Army man with three boys of his own. She got pregnant with me and he went off to fight in the Second World War. While he was fighting in France, I was born on the Army Base in Paris Texas. When he came home we packed up and roamed the country in a new Ford, pulling a new Airstream trailer, which we lived in for over a year. When my mother could stand the nomadic life no more, we happened to be in Salt Lake City, camped on the outskirts of the city in a trailer park. She took my father’s remaining cash and found a big stone house on the upper avenues and bought it. He never got over being furious at her, and their marriage ended in loud, violent fights. She took me and fled in the early morning dark of a cold Utah Spring. And I was sent to live with my mother’s brother and his wife in Sherman, Texas. They tried awfully hard to give me a good life for the year I was their child. But the one thing that I could not get, could not ever understand, was their hatred of indians and black people. I could not learn bigotry. I don’t know why. Everyone else in my mother’s family got it. What was wrong with me that this very important lesson didn’t sink in? In truth I think it’s a Jungian thing. The collective unconscious. I identify with the oppressed. I personally have never experienced oppression unless being female and married counts. But I will not listen to anyone spout that kind of race or identity hated. It enrages me.

I am too far removed from my heritage to go back, go native. Everyone sees me as white. But deep in the bone I am not. I am not white. I am Choctaw. I will not give up my small, inherited plot of land. Like the Native people in North Dakota, I have a hard time paying my utility bills. I keep it cold to save money. I have moved out of the main house to live in the little house—a renovated garage at the back of the property so I can rent the main house. I try to stay out of sight. I am an old recluse living in my garage to save money so I can keep my land. But hearing about the plight of those native people in North Dakota this morning made me sob. And I can’t stop. I told the young man that I thought it was very important to make sure that all native people are registered to vote in the Presidential Election. If we make the effort to vote, we just might have a President for the first time in our nation’s history who can understand our complicated history and listen to our story. A man who looks more like us than the old white men who have ruled us since the early 1800’s. A man who just might be sympathetic to our plight.

Barack Obama gave the most important speech in American political life since the Gettysburg Address. And like Michelle Obama, for the first time in my lifetime, I am proud of my country.

I'm Here Because of AshleyPlease go to Swiftspeech! Stella’s marvelous site. There you will find the text for Barack Obama’s beautiful speech today.

Please go to Swiftspeech! Stella’s marvelous site. There you will find the text for Barack Obama’s beautiful speech today. If you can’t find Swiftspeech on your own, go the comments section on any of my posts, find Stella’s intelligent and insightful comments and click on her name—that will lead you to her.

Rare Kudos to MSNBC

For the most part I have liked David Gregory. And only for a second or so did I ever like Tucker Carlson. What the hell good is a liberal media if the only liberal on the air is Keith Olbermann, with the occasional brief appearance of Eugene Robinson and Rachel Maddow? Otherwise it seems to me that Pat Buchannon is the voice of MSNBC. But I digress. It was David Gregory we’re talking about here. Today was the debut of his new show, with a panel of my two favorites, Rachel Maddow and Eugene Robinson. I’m glad both Rachel and Eugene will also stay where they are, Air America and The Washington Post, respectively. They have a token Republican, Morning Joe Scarborough, but it could be worse, it could be, well, Tucker Carlson for instance, or worse yet, Petrified Pat Buchannon.

It was a very fast hour. Unlike Hardball which is the slowest hour of my day. Gregory’s taking email comments and questions. Bloggers, start your engines.

PS Loved the new SNL clip

PPs Also looked like MSNBC dialed down the bells and whistles and all the fancy flashing graphics. Classy move guys. If you can do it for David why don't you do it for everybody--then they might not look so stupid.

PPPS Waiting for Barack's speech tomorrow.

It's Not Because You're White, Geraldine.......

It’s because you’re irrelevant. I was going to say stupid, but thought it was unkind. When you were on the Democratic ticket to be our first female Vice President it had little to do with your qualifications, Ms. Ferraro. It was because you were a woman. I refuse to research this, my memory serves me pretty well. Part of the reason you and Mondale had such a rough time was the shenanigans involving the promised but delayed release of your husband’s tax returns. And once released they were hinky enough to cause serious damage. You were a token, and not a very helpful token, at that. Once the race was over and Reagan reelected, you tried a couple of times to win a Senate seat and never made it. And your problem in the tax return area ought to be instructive to Senator Clinton. The days of secretive politicians who want to gain the public trust are over. But for you, an old, irrelevant white woman, to claim reverse racism because your comments about Barack are offensive to everyone, except maybe Hillary and the Republicans, is absurd. Your timid feminism after the heavy lifting was mostly done, made you an almost daring but, in the end disappointing choice for a running mate for Mondale. Barbara Jordan would have been a far better choice. At least she would have won the VP debate with Pappy Bush.

Better Late Than Never

Ferraro Leaves Clinton Campaign. Good news, but a little late. Hillary has a mighty strange rule book. If an Obama surrogate says something remotely disparaging about Hillary, it’s an outrage. The unfortunate surrogate must be fired, immediately. Remember the “monster” comment? Off with her head. And she is gone the moment the words are out of her mouth. The Clintons have a double standard, and they make the rules. Now they keep changing the rules and moving the goal posts.

If Hillary had not married Bill Clinton she would not be an elected official with any record at all. The Ferraro comments could have been made about Hillary. And while we are all engrossed with the spectacle of another long suffering political wife standing by her lying, philandering husband, isn’t that the reason we now have Hillary running for President? We would not know who you are, babe, if your husband had not been President. But now that we are talking about philandering husbands again! Let’s talk about yours. I do not want Bill back in the White House. I can’t imagine any mother allowing her daughter to go work as an intern in the White House while Charming Billy is around. Would you let your daughter work with Bill Clinton? Will it be a girl-free zone?

I have heard women say with a straight face that the Spitzer case is a good reason for electing a woman to be our next President. Maybe, but not Hillary. If she had divorced Bill and married someone else, maybe. But sadly, she’s the wrong woman. Of course I’d like a female President. But it would have to be a woman I respected and admired in order for me to enthusiastically support her. I’d go for Barbara Boxer.

Creating The War On Terror

First there is a real threat. 9/11 was a real event. We know who the actors were, and where they came from. It was mostly Saudi Arabia, whose princes are close friends of the Bush family. The terrorists in training had been taking flying lessons, getting ready, soaking up the delights of our culture, like strip clubs, for instance. We knew who they were at the time, we were watching. You, President Bush, and all your advisors knew, and were briefed. Condoleeza Rice wasn’t worried, neither was Cheney. It was your administration’s decision that 9/11 was just the thing you needed to revive your plan to take us to war with Iraq. You manufactured intelligence, cherry picked what worked for you, and then tried to scare us to death with images of mushroom clouds. While backing off the wealthy and well connected son of a Saudi mogul, Osama Bin Ladan. Why do you in Congress go along with this tactic destined for such tragedy for the people of Iraq, for our sons and daughters sent from their National Guard assignments here at home where we need them, to Iraq over and over?

Mr. President, and you, all of you, Republicans and Democrats alike, who voted for the Iraq War Resolution, owe us—We The People—an apology. It is you, all of you, who started “The War On Terror” that now, since you took the terror to the “terrorists” in Iraq, (who, by the way, weren’t there prior to our arrival in Iraq) have created the best and biggest advertisement and recruiting scheme in history for every young discontented and alienated misfit in the world to join the jihadists, because now they do really believe that we are The Great Satan. Thanks a lot.

And this war on terror has given you the excuse you were looking for to change the rules and strip us of our constitutional rights one by one. Stack the Supreme court to take choice away from women (the better to control them), and to prevent the carriage of justice for anyone detained illegally, transported to a foreign country for torture and then disappeared to Guantanimo, without representation or a hearing. Where did Habeas Corpus go? Has it moved to Canada to join the hordes now fleeing your ruinous governance. We are losing everything, our houses, our civil rights, our sons and daughters, our bridges are falling down and you tap dance on the porch waiting for your successor to bring us more of these good old days. Thanks a lot Congress. Thanks a lot Mr. President. Isn’t it Romantic?

Isn't It Romantic?

Anyone remember the lyrics to that song but me? Well, no George, it isn’t. Vote Vets isn’t going to think so either. Not unless you think it’s romantic to see little kids starve or die in car-bomb attacks at their local market is romantic. How romantic is a traumatic brain injury? PTSD? How about an amputation by roadside bomb? See your buddy blown to bits? We would be only so happy to facilitate your early retirement so you can go—Air National Guard, Right? Still got that romantic flyboy outfit you wore the day you gave your Mission Accomplished speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln? Why don’t you do your duty and take somebody’s son’s place since it sounds like so much fun to you. As a former Commander In Chief, I’m sure they’d extend the age limit. I hear the Armed Forces are stretched pretty thin, and have relaxed a lot of standards, maybe even I.Q. Take the girls with you too. Aren’t they longing for a little adventure and romance?

World War Three?

Word is, Admiral Fallen was retired early because he isn’t in favor of a war with Iran. Remember all the times Bush said he listens to the Generals? Well, if anyone thought that was the truth then, they know it’s bullshit now. Bush seems determined to make the Rapture inevitable before he leaves office. And since we don’t have the numbers of cannon fodder soldiers at the ready, there will have to be a Draft to carry out this scheme.

When we had a Draft, during the Vietnam war years, the only refuge for the children of the rich and powerful was the National Guard—you all remember the pictures of young George in his uniform, proudly grinning at the camera as he thumbed his nose at guys like John Kerry, Max Cleland and John McCain. Well, under Bush, Chenney, the National Guard is no longer the refuge of anyone, and is no longer available to do the very real work the National Guard was designed to do—protect us here at home. Now it’s a ticket to Iraq. Soon to be a ticket to Iran. With the removal of Admiral Fallon no one stands in the way.

The Rich Are Richer and I Can Barely Afford To Eat

Do you think rich Republicans know that lemons are seventy nine cents apiece? Do you think it matters? And why does writing this make me cry? I live on roughly $1,000.00 a month. I could only pay half my property tax on time this year. Now the interest and penalties are mounting and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. My twenty two year old Jetta has finally given up the ghost, each past repair has cost at least $500.00. I can no longer afford to keep it running. I’m disabled and have high medical costs. My teeth are crumbling and I have no dental insurance. I need to see my primary care physician, but keep putting it off because I can’t afford the twenty percent medicare doesn’t pay. And I’m lucky. At least I qualify for medicare. I was dropped by my insurance carrier years ago because I actually needed insurance. Get a diagnosis that might cost them something and they’ll drop you in a New York minute. My premiums went from $500.00 a month for a single self-employed person, to $1,000.00 in the space of two months.

An old friend came to visit me one day last fall to tell me that I couldn’t afford to live in my house anymore. It made me so angry that I told him to go take a flying f***k, and haven’t spoken to him since. How is it that an old woman living in a home that is completely free and clear of debt cannot afford to live in her house? And because my income is so low, I don’t qualify for a loan on the property even though the property is worth nearly half a million. I grew up in this house and know everyone in my neighborhood. They are my only contact with people. I love them and don’t want to sell the house and move into a condo. Winters are harsh in Utah and this year, especially long. I keep my house at 60 degrees trying to save money on utilities, and still the price goes up and up on gas every month.

Writing about the political race has been a way for me to think about something other than the grim realities of my life, but this election is about the huge disparity between the haves and the have nots. And I am just one of the millions of have nots. At least I have a roof over my head. I should be very grateful for that. But to think I have to budget for a lemon? This makes me sob. It is such a small symbol for the gulf that divides us.

Snatching Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory

Here we go again. If anything could make it possible for John McCain to win the Presidential election it just might be the kind of campaign the Clintons are engaged in. I’m still pissed off about the ringing phone ad. Even if I were still a supporter of Hillary, that ad would have change my mind. It’s a play worthy of Carl Rove. I wonder if Rove is working for the Clintons now that he’s a free man. You must be scared, very very scared! My God, how cynical and stupid do they think we are? How stupid and cynical are they to run such an ad? At this point there’s nowhere to go but up for Hillary. Gerry Ferraro’s comments were stupid beyond belief. What the hell were they thinking? Why not just hire a hit-man to knee-cap the guy. My God, what have we become as Democrats that we would destroy our chances to take back the White House by running so nasty a primary campaign? Both Obama and Clinton are qualified, otherwise neither one would have gotten this far. Please Senator Clinton, stop the snide and nasty comments about Obama. It should be beneath you. That you seem to be willing to win at any cost to the Party is a dangerous game to play. Lets raise the level of discourse. Let’s focus on the right opponent. Unless it’s really John McCain you want to share the ticket with. Is that your dream team? Clinton and McCain on the same side? Stop it now, before we’ve lost any hope of winning anything but a reputation for complete self-destruction.

Spitzer's Fall From Grace

I thought her name was Kristen. Grace, Spitzer? I don’t think so. Not unless Grace is a hooker from his past that we don’t know about yet. I don’t think even Democrats in New York would call the high ledge Spitzer has been teetering on, graceful. The worst thing for me, as a woman, is to see another woman having to “stand by her man” while he tries to back away from the edge. I want, just once, to see the wife, standing beside the philandering, lying bastard she’s married to, haul off and deck him, in full view of cameras, and call him the names he deserves.

Why do political wives agree to make the perp walk with their lying, hypocritical, stupidly arrogant, just plain dumb husbands? Does Mrs. Spitzer have secret ambitions to run for President? What’s up with that? How can you love someone who has lied to you for ten years or so? Doesn’t love require some trust? Isn’t complete betrayal a good reason to dump the bum? Isn’t having teenaged daughters a good reason to say, “No, girls, you never have to sacrifice your own ambitions for a career to keep a man. And no man is worth losing your own integrity. No man is worth this kind of humiliation. Not even your daddy.”

Risky Business

The reason Eliot Spitzer’s sexcapade is news is not that the man had sex with a high priced prostitute but that he was, in New York law and order circles, Mr. Moral Rectitude. He was a tough Prosecutor who went after cases just like the one he is embroiled in, with the zeal of the righteous. Then he was Attorney General and according to the news papers and broadcast news stories on this scandal, he was brutal and thorough in prosecuting just this kind of case. He could face several felony charges, the most serious of which is the Mann Act, unless he cuts a deal, and resigning his position as Governor might be just the deal to keep him out of jail. I had a friend in Junior High School whose father was prosecuted under the Mann Act. He supplied “girls” to a pimp in another state, and when he got caught, he served a long prison sentence. Eliot Spitzer arranged to have his “girl” Kristen transported across state lines to service him at the Mayflower Hotel in DC. And it was some unusual aspect of the money trail that seems to have alerted the Feds and ensnared Spitzer.

It isn’t that a man has sex with someone other than his wife that makes this a story—that’s as common as dirt, it happens a million times a day and often with prostitutes. No, it’s the tough prosecutor who has busted up prostitution rings in his long career—jailing the girls (and mostly ignoring the Johns) to go after the mobsters who make their money preying on the girls-- that makes this a big story. As long as prostitution stays illegal, the men who profit from the labor of the prostitutes on either side of the transaction—pimp or John— don’t usually get hurt much when the ring gets busted up. But the prostitutes get jail time. And men get to go on calling it a victimless crime. And that’s the whole point of this entire episode. Eliot Spitzer is only a victim of his own bad judgement and hypocrisy. His wife and daughters are victims. If the prostitutes go to jail, they are victims of a legal system that makes the girl the criminal and the John just a poor innocent man whose little brain has talked him into a little risky business. What a sad and sleazy mess.

If prostitution were legal, none of this would be an issue. We need to allow prostitutes to unionize, run their own Empress Club, hire their own security, tax their earnings, so they get workers compensation, insurance, and retirement packages. Until then, the Johns and the racketeers are the only ones who should be prosecuted under existing law.

What's In A Name, Client 9?

Consider this. Eliot Spitzer is now, and forever will be Client 9. He is finished as Governor of New York. I hope for his daughters’ sake his wife is already talking to her attorney. And I hope he doesn’t cost as much as the call girl Spitzer took to D.C. On Valentine’s day!!!??? But I do hope her divorce attorney is a shark.

Clinton is a name that comes to mind in just a case like the Spitzer one. Sleazy sex scandal. Not Hillary, of course, but charming Billy. Not that Bill ever had a taste for the kind of babes who work for The Emperor’s Club, or that he ever paid for it except, after the fact, in lawyers fees fighting law suits. Maybe a settlement or two, but the sleazy sex part, the bad judgement regarding the wants of his little brain, the betrayal of his wife and daughter (in Bill’s case one and in Spitzer’s case, three), the lies, and finally the public apology. That’s classic Clinton. Spitzer called it a “Private Matter,” today in his press conference. Do you get the cognitive dissonance of that construct? Does Mann Act mean anything to you Governor? Your name is soon to be added to the list of famous men prosecuted under the Mann Act. You and Charlie Manson. Nice company you’re keeping these days. And not to leave Republicans out, let's not forget Larry Wide-Stance Craig.

The Emperor Has No Clothes

The Emperors Club (tee hee, snicker snicker) is the name given to the high priced prostitution ring that the FBI has been investigating and has now filed a case on, with an indictment and loads and loads of evidence gathered. Eliot Spitzer, Governor of New York, friend of Hillary’s, and probably Bill’s, is the first big name client to fall. This just might get real interesting as leaks dribble out. The rates these women were getting for their services is staggering. As Chris Matthews just said on Hardball, “More than Washington lawyers!” But just like lawyers these women are doing a dirty and difficult job. And apparently the old boys club of political pundits still think it’s a “victimless crime.” In the words of the late great Molly Ivans, “That’s chicken shit!” I’d posit that Spitzer’s wife and daughters don’t exactly feel that there aren’t victims in all of this.

Does Your Vote Count?

I’ve always wanted us to be a country where every vote counts. Sadly this is not the system we have. Maybe now, with all these first-time voters involved in our Byzantine electoral process, we can get a little electoral reform going. I sure hope so, since as long as I’ve lived in Utah, my vote has not counted in Presidential Elections. This gives a lot of lazy Democrats a reason to stay home on election day. Their rational is, “My vote doesn’t count. Why bother?”

Now the Clinton campaign is saying that the Mountain-West doesn’t count, the South doesn’t count, small States don’t count, New England doesn’t count, the Canadian border States don’t count, because they are either thought to be Red States or have such small populations as to be meaningless in a General Election. Well, I got news for you Senator Clinton, it pisses me off royally to hear you say that the only time my vote really does count—in a primary—is meaningless. I live in Utah, one of the reddest States in the Nation, and Barack won Utah in the Democratic Primary. Turnout was huge and for the first time in my voting life, I thought Utah just might vote Democratic in the General Election, if Obama gets the nomination. Call me naive, but if young people really do stay engaged, we might have a whole new map to call red or blue.

Texas has been a Red State for a long time. Why is Senator Clinton calling her slim lead in the actual vote tally (but not the delegate count) in the Lone Star State more important than his win in Wyoming? More than likely neither state is going to vote Democratic in the General Election, but with Obama’s bottom-up, grassroots organization, he’s got a hell of a better chance to win both those states than Hillary.