There has never been a place on TNC to post comments about “The Libraries of Sarajevo and the Book that Saved Our Lives” by Kemal Bakarsic.
Now, thoughts may be posted here below.
 It’s almost four years since journalist Gary Webb was suicided.
Here he speaks.
Webb in the mid 90s had re-broken in a big way the big story of the CIA’s involvement in the international drug trade — updating old tales from Vietnam by documenting CIA-NSC responsibility for the Crack explosion in American cities during the Reagan years.
Webb’s serial newspaper reportage in 1996 bore the name Dark Alliance, and was republished in a book of the same name.
Those were the Clinton years; the stories not only got published, but drew widespread attention from the major media.
But Webb himself was soon and suddenly fired by his San Jose newspaper — which also destroyed its web archive of the Dark Alliance story. Soon it was clear that the author had been blacklisted out of the business.
A month after Bush-Cheney were re-installed in 2004, Webb was shot twice in the head and died. Suicide, the coroner reported. Neither Little Jimmy Grimaldi nor Webb’s friends believe that.
Read his book.
And think about Daniel Moynihan in 1991 …
“The time has come to ask, with the Cold War over, can we purge the vestiges of this struggle from our laws, our bureaucracy, and most importantly from our way of thinking,” Moynihan said. “Can we muster the will to redefine ourselves?”
And then tell YourObama to purge and reform the National Security Apparat.
The Strong Man, a biography of John Mitchell, Nixon’s atty general and campaign manager, and one of the first and largest bodies to fall from the heavens as the Watergate scandal unfolded, came out earlier this year.
Jim Hougan (author of two important books, Spooks and Secret Agenda, the latter about Watergate) and others commented on the new Mitchell book at the Education Forum, which across the years has housed perhaps the best discussion of inter alia the JFK murder.
I posted a comment in response to Hougan’s overview of the book, and asked him three questions. He replied. All visible here.
The discussion may not be entirely rooted in nostalgia. There is a tenuous Bush family connection that reaches, yet alive, into the present day. If looking for a quicky — here.
I posted a comment (the 9th) at my friend Peter Gilbert’s site, De Unione Ecclessiarum.
The discussion there had moved from Peter’s thoughts about the election to consternation among some readers about changes in abortion law perhaps forthcoming.
My comment is about three strata of legal principles underlying Roe v Wade — and about how the trimester scheme of Roe corresponds in a way to old Christian principles about how and when a fetus becomes “animated” (by a soul).
I’ve revamped my little memoir of that happy week or so, with a lot more photos and a bit more scrip.
Only thing that I did wrong
Was staying in the wilderness too long
Keep your eyes on the prize
Hold on
The great questions in the air — about how much lasting constitutional and foreign-affairs damage Bush-Cheney have done, about the ways and means of turning things around, and the capacity of the american people to be citizens rather than consumers — leave me for the moment speechless.
I do think the turn in the works is a major turn.
A premise there, however, is that the forces behind the Fascist Shift of the new century are not deeply rooted and are exhausted for now — leaving the new administration a horrible mess, yes, but also a durable mandate and some elbow room.
But — if the premise is false, then four years from now we may see Romney on the verge of victory, and the young Obama already a has-been.
This was one reason why, this past winter, I thought Hillary the better candidate for the Donkeys to nominate — to allow her to absorb the worst of the blast, while holding Obama in reserve.
But … The hour of doom is at hand. Let the sun shine …
The mandate will not be large. LBJ in 1964, riding a wave of sympathy re Kennedy’s murder the year before, gathered 486 EC votes and carried 44 states.
Nothing near that is in the cards for Obama. Rather, somewhere between 289 and 364 votes, with 22 to 27 states, plus D.C.
Clinton got 370 votes and 31 states in ‘92. And 379 and 30 in ‘96. Plus D.C. in each.
Reagan has the all-time high, against hapless Mondale in ‘84, with 525 votes and 49 states. Then FDR in 1936, against Landon, with 523 and 46 (of 48 total) states. And then Richard Nixon in ‘72, contra hapless McGovern. 520 votes and 49 states.
Then again … Even the greatest EC landslides were, roughly speaking, five people voting chocolate and five vanilla. Fifty-three Pistachio, forty-seven Rocky Road.
No matter what happens on Tuesday and across the next four years, there is no escaping or re-writing the fact that the failures to apply Due Process in the 2000 election, and to depose Bush-Cheney in 2004, were costly beyond measure and plain evidence that, on the national level, we are not a functioning democracy.
Only thing that we did right
Was the day we began to fight
Keep your eyes on the prize
Hold on
It’s an open question — whether WE can fight at all.
But … Team Obama has. They’ve run an amazing campaign — principled and potent.
Can the example revive an increasingly impoverished and brain-dead citizenry?
Seems all my NY friends are holing up Tuesday night. Me, I think it’s the first thing in the public sphere worth celebrating since …Â Can’t recall.
Let’s have a General Strike on Wednesday. And then, to the business of rebuilding.
Where’s my blue suede shoes?
Aha — a final pre-election postscript:Â Great overview from a waning & weeping Laissez Faire fellow in the London Daily Telegraph.
I didn’t know this was on the web. A documentary from 1976, featuring hero Roger Craig, by hero Mark Lane.
Very much worth watching. Five parts, all there on YouTube.
Hard to look away all the time …
Wow. A new frontier in notional crime and relations between the sexes.
I keep forgetting to mention this …Â Came to mind during the late winter, as the primary and golfing seasons got underway.
The astounding play and mind of Tiger Woods these past nine years have something to do with the astounding fact that the United States seem on the verge of electing a black man to the presidency.
Perhaps the point is obvious. If not …
Sarah’s perfect.
And there’s more where she came from …
