Mayor Gridlock

Here is our mayor, who only this month was heralded by Rolling Stone magazine as an environmental trailblazer for his work to fight global warming. A couple of weeks ago, he made sure that there will be hundreds of thousands of stinking, polluting cars gridlocked on Seattle's freeways for years to come. The mayor and the rest of the City Council blundered their oversight of the monorail project, then scuttled the whole thing by bad mouthing it to the press and forcing the people to vote a FIFTH time for it. From now on and for ever, I will refer to him as mayor Gridlock.

First Audio Blog

Strange news

Last night, I closed one of my posts with the question "do you smell cars burning?" I'm not advocating violence. I don't think it solves anything, and I believe the violence being done by the young men in France has as much to do with an absence of positive initiation experiences for young adults as it does with alienation and being disenfranchised. That being said, Bill O'Reilley and the rest of the republican mouth peices on Fox "Doublespeak" (to call it news is an insult to journalism) ought to be careful about pointing fingers at France and calling it a failed experiment in socialism. We have plenty of folks who are one 48 ouncer away from burning cars in neighborhoods that aren't a lot nicer than the government housing projects in France. A case in point is an act of arson that occured this last week in West Seattle, in a neighborhood called White Center. Some one decide to, you guessed it, light a car on fire. Hmmm... Was this a random act of violence or the beginning of a revolution? Time will tell.

I saw the line

The new movie about Jonny Cash, "I Walk the Line," is outstanding. I just read the review of the movie in The Stranger for this week, and I think the critic must have been a "Hootie and the Blowfish" fan. T-Bone Burnett put the music together, and Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon did their own vocals. I guess that is the standard after Jaime Fox nailed "Ray." If you are a musician, go see this movie. Hell, go see it if you aren't. The scene where Johnny plays Fulsom Prison blues for a young Sam Phillips is amazing, and the concert scenes made me feel like I was right there watching it, except nothing you heard back then had the kind of fidelity the movie was recorded with. So, it's kind of like eavesdropping on an earlier time, only with better sound. I saw a sneak preview of the movie last night, and I think I might go to opening night this weekend.

I don't feel any safer, in fact...

I was standing in line at my favorite Indian/Pakistani lunch place the other day, and a middle eastern gentleman shot me a nervous glance. On another day, in another time, I might have overlooked it, but it is today, and war is being waged in our names by a group of religious zealots that failed to plan what to do if the people of Iraq did not meet us with open arms. Three years later, more than 2000 American soldiers have died, with countless Iraqi civilian casualties, many of them women and children. While Vice President "Himmler" lobbies the congress for the authority to abuse detainees, we are creating entire generations of islamic terrorists, trained to give their lives for what they perceive to be a holy cause. No, President kill-again, I don't feel safer, and I won't until you and every last one of your bigoted, narrowminded zealot cronies are safe behind bars, where you belong. I feel shameful for assuming that the man standing in line ahead of me in a turban may be planning to kill himself and take me and 25 others in the restaurant with him. But the greatest shame goes to the crew in Washingtion that exploited the good will of the planet after the attacks of 9/11 and exploited this nation's fear to satiate their lust for oil and profit in a land that posed no threat to us whatsoever. Hundreds of billions of dollars later, American's who have been made homeless by the hurricanes this season are facing evictions from the squalid "fema-camps" they have been living in, while the republican-controlled government plans another tax cut for the wealthiest. Meanwhile, fresh science on global warming states the obvious, the planet is getting warmer and this is causing weather changes, like more ferocious hurricanes in the Atlantic ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. What is that smell? Are there cars burning?