YouTube Favorites December 2008

1	Johnson Mountain Boys - Duncan and Brady
2	"I'm So Happy" Kenny Vance & The Original Teenagers Doo Wop vocal group hall of fame
3	Ike & Tina Turner "Fool In Love" & "Work Out Fine" medley
4	Jim Garland - I Don't Want Your Millions, Mister
5	Frank Sinatra Night and Day 1943
6	Music using ONLY sounds from Windows XP and Vista
7	Argument to Beethoven's 5th
8	Bob Dylan - Simple Twist of Fate (1975)
9	Charlie Chaplin from The Great Dictator
10	Bella ciao Italian traditional Partisan song
11	The Band - King Harvest 1970 - Long Black Veil 1970
12	Jerusalem Ridge
13	chava alberstein & the klezmatics IV

Acorn On Acorn

http://www.acorn.org/index.php?id=12439&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=22384&tx_ttnews[backPid]=12386&cHash=8
48fccca14


Thanks to Nora A. for this,

Playing The Banjo During Surgery!

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=5946602

Racism And The Working Class

Thnaks again to Bob T.

http://www.truthout.org/100608L

Paulson's Plunder

http://www.democrats.com/stop-paulsons-plunder

Palin For President

Thanks to my high school classmate Shelia G, for this one.
http://www.michaelpalinforpresident.com/

Trojan Moose

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/sarah-palin-a-trojan-moos_b_124867.html

Ralph Stanley Supports Barack Obama

This is great news. As a bluegrass player and fan this brings me great joy and hope that Obama is able to reach folks who I imagined, might have been reluctant to vote for an African American.
http://brendancalling.com/2008/09/09/holy-sht-ralph-stanley-endorses-barack-obama/

Most Heard Mandolin Solo?

See if you can guess before opening link. Great story also.

http://www.mandolincafe.com/news/publish/mandolins_00938.shtml

Good Insight Into Sarah Palin

This is by a women from her home town.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/kilkenny.asp

A Deeper Look At McCain's War Record

http://www.lewrockwell.com/gaddy/gaddy34.html

Freedom Of The Press?

What you might not see on mainstream news.
http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/dont_arrest_journalists/?r=1376&id=796-513873-cD1aaXx

Giving Constitutional Rights To Nature

From Ecuador.
http://www.greenchange.org/article.php?id=3185

Colonoscopy Fun!

Similar to my own recent experience. Thanks to Jim R.
DO NOT LET THIS STOP YOU FROM GETTNG ONE. IT COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE!
Dave Barry's colonoscopy journal: I called my friend Andy Sable, a gastroenterologist, to make an appointment for a colonoscopy. A few days later, in his office, Andy showed me a color diagram of the colon, a lengthy organ that appears to go all over the place, at one point passing briefly through Minneapolis . Then Andy explained the colonoscopy procedure to me in a thorough, reassuring and patient manner. I nodded thoughtfully, but I didn't really hear anything he said, because my brain was shrieking, quote, 'HE'S GOING TO STICK A TUBE 17,000 FEET UP YOUR BEHIND!' I left Andy's office with some written instructions, and a prescription for a product called 'MoviPrep,' which comes in a box large enough to hold a microwave oven. I willdiscuss MoviPrep in detail later; for now suffice it to say that we must never allow it to fall into the hands of America 's enemies. I spent the next several days productively sitting around being nervous. Then, on the day before my colonoscopy, I began my preparation. In accordance with my instructions, I didn't eat any solid food that day; all I had was chicken broth, which is basically water, only with less flavor. Then, in the evening, I took the MoviPrep. You mix two packets of powder together in a one-liter plastic jug, then you fill it with lukewarm water. (For those unfamiliar with the metric system, a liter is about 32 gallons.) Then you have to drink the whole jug. This takes about an hour, because > MoviPrep tastes - and here I am being kind like a mixture of goat spit and urinal cleanser, with just a hint of lemon. The instructions for MoviPrep, clearly written by somebody with a great sense of humor, state that after you drink it, 'a loose watery bowel movement may result.' This is kind of like saying that after you jump off your roof, you may experience contact with the ground. MoviPrep is a nuclear laxative. I don't want to be too graphic, here, but: Have you ever seen a space-shuttle launch? This is pretty much the MoviPrep experience, with you as the shuttle. There are times when you wish the commode had a seat belt. You spend several hours pretty much confined to the bathroom, spurting violently. You eliminate everything. And then, when you figure you must be totally empty, you> have to drink another liter of MoviPrep, at which point, as far as I can tell, your bowels travel into the future and start eliminating food that you have not even eaten yet. After an action-packed evening, I finally got to sleep. The next morning my wife drove me to the clinic. I was very nervous. Not only was I worried about the procedure, but I had been experiencing occasional return bouts of MoviPrep spurtage. I was thinking, 'What if > I spurt on Andy?' How do you apologize to a friend for something like that? Flowers would not be enough. At the clinic I had to sign many forms acknowledging that I understood and totally agreed with whatever the heck the forms said. Then they led me to a room full of other colonoscopy people, where I went inside a little curtained space and took off my clothes and put on one of those hospital garments designed by sadist perverts, the kind that, when you put it on, makes you feel even more naked than when you are actually naked. Then a nurse named Eddie put a little needle in a vein in my left hand. Ordinarily I would have fainted, but Eddie was very good, and I was already lying down. Eddie also told me that some people put vodka in their MoviPrep. At first I was ticked off that I hadn't thought of this, but then I pondered what would happen if you got yourself too tipsy to make it to the bathroom, so you were staggering around in full Fire Hose Mode. You would have no choice but to burn your house. When everything was ready, Eddie wheeled me into the procedure room, where Andy was waiting with a nurse and an anesthesiologist. I did not see the 17,000-foot tube, but I knew Andy had it hidden around there somewhere. I was seriously nervous at this point. Andy had me roll over on my left side, and the anesthesiologist began hooking something up to the needle in my hand. There was music playing in the> room, and I realized that the song was 'Dancing Queen' by ABBA I remarked to Andy that, of all the songs> that could be playing during this particular procedure, 'Dancing Queen' has to be the least appropriate. 'You want me to turn it up?' said Andy, from> somewhere behind me. 'Ha ha,' I said. And then it> was time, the moment I had been dreading for more than a decade. If you are squeamish, prepare yourself, because I am going to tell you, in explicit detail, exactly what it was like. I have no idea. Really. I slept through it. One moment, ABBA was yelling 'Dancing Queen, Feel the beat of the tambourine,' and the next moment, I was back in the other room, waking up in a very mellow mood. Andy was looking down at me and asking me how I felt. felt excellent. I felt even more excellent when Andy told me that 'It' was all over, and that my colon had passed with flying colors. I have never been prouder of an internal organ. ABOUT THE WRITER: Dave Barry is a Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist for the Miami Herald.

How Hurricanes Gain In Stregnth

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/katrina_seaheight.html

Sit Down Bass

Here's my latest favorite shot from a couple of weeks ago at music camp. Photo is as taken, no fixing. I was my self surprised by the fiddles, and because one of the fiddles was left handed , it framed the bass fiddle wonderfully

60's Terrorists

Thanks to Bob T. for this

counterpunch.com Weekend EditionAugust 2 / 3, 2008
Westmoreland, Johnson and Nixon
Meet the Real Terrorists of the 1960s
By HARVERY WASSERMAN Hate-mongering against alleged “leftist 1960s terrorists” now fills the days of anti-Obama rage for the Rovian bloviator battalion. Bill Ayers and the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, Baby Boom professors, social workers , etc, are front and center for the hateful blatherings of the usual GOP flunkies all cowering at the prospect of an African-American president. But there were, indeed, three 1960s terrorists whose murderous, planet-killing rampage continues to poison this nation. They tower above all others. Their names: William Westmoreland, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon.This unholy trinity killed outright more than 55,000 Americans and several million southeast Asians---most of them innocent civilians---while bombing, strafing and spewing horrific toxic chemicals onto countless of square miles of previously pristine jungle. Their Agent Orange caused tens of thousands of deaths and deformities that still carry through the generations.No single terror act in the history of the United States even remotely compares to the lethal psychosis that created and was then furthered by the Vietnam War.As Commander In Chief of US forces in Southeast Asia, Westmoreland dragged the US into the Vietnam quagmire. He repeatedly assured Lyndon Johnson that Vietnam’s north-south civil war was “winnable”.In the 1980s I debated Westmoreland on two campuses (the University of Florida and Juneata College) and heard him tell me directly that “we never lost the war in Vietnam.” According to the man who lit the fuse, the US spent all those lives and dollars “successfully protecting” Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines from Communist dictatorships. Never mind that Suharto (Indonesia), Lee Kwan Yew (Singapore), and Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines) were among history’s most violent and authoritarian kleptocrats. In Westmoreland’s world, all that death, destruction and expenditure were worth it to keep these torturers in office while they stacked billions of public dollars in their private bank accounts.Lyndon Johnson bought Westmoreland’s lies. With Defense Secretary Robert McNamara explaining the war in terms of “kill ratios,” Johnson used a fake non-attack by alleged North Vietnamese gunboats to get a blank check from Congress and impose wholesale slaughter on both the US and Vietnam.’Johnson’s March, 1965, decision to escalate the war is arguably the turning point from which America’s moral standing and quality of life took their definitive downward plunge.While he crumbled from the psychological and spiritual strain, LBJ sent 550,000 Americans to Vietnam to perpetrate a human and ecological slaughter on a scale unique in the modern annals of gratuitous terror.Richard Nixon followed with still more. After winning the presidency based on a “Secret Plan” to end the war, he escalated air attacks on an innocent nation that exceeded all the explosive tonnage dropped during World War 2. Nixon illegally expanded the war into Cambodia, where three million civilians eventually died in wholesale slaughter.At home, Nixon’s close friend, Governor James A. Rhodes, furnished the Ohio National Guard with the live ammunition they used to kill four unarmed students. Two more died soon thereafter in an official attack on a college dormitory at Mississippi’s Jackson State.A clearly deranged psychotic, Nixon’s resignation journey should have taken him straight to prison, rather than to a presidential retreat alongside the Pacific.None of these horrific terrorists was ever prosecuted or imprisoned. But their ungodly assault drove America’s economy, currency, health care and educational systems, moral and military standing, and much, much more, into a deep decline from which we have yet to recover. None of those bilious corporate bloviators ever mention these highest-ranking terrorists in their rants against all things sixties. But when it comes to an American axis of evil perpetrating useless, gratuitous and totally unredeemed mass destruction of people and the planet, this is the 1960s trio that overshadows all others.
Harvey Wasserman, a co-founder of Musicians United for Safe Energy, is editing the nukefree.org web site. He is the author of SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org. He can be reached at: Windhw@aol.com

Great Article On Levon Helm

http://www.ulsterpublishing.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=454286

His new CD is great. His story is a great triumph over adversity.

Where To Send Aid To Burma By Alan Senauke

An Imperfect Storm

Once again, our hearts go out to the people of Burma.

Cyclone Nargis struck the Irrawaddy Delta of Burma (Myanmar) on Friday, May 2 with winds that reached 135 miles per hour, and a 12-foot storm surge that has left vast areas of the delta completely submerged. As of today, the official death toll has reached 25,000, but with dozens of towns and villages underwater, and countless coastal Burmese unaccounted for, the numbers will certainly go much higher. The storm moved up the delta, devastating Rangoon itself, with thousands of buildings destroyed. Shari Villarosa, the charge d'affaires of the US embassy in Myanmar, said: "The information that we're receiving indicates that there may well be over 100,000 deaths in the delta area.” Five regions — Yangon, Ayeyarwady, Bago Divisions and Mon and Kayin States have been officially designated as disaster areas.

The scope of this disaster cannot yet be measured, and it comes just a week before Burma’s military junta, SPDC, plans to hold a referendum on a new constitution that would consolidate the generals’ illegitimate hold on power for the foreseeable future. The amount of energy and expense the junta has spent over these last months suppressing opposition to a forced referendum, hunting down and imprisoning dissidents, stands in sharp contrast to their failure to give timely warning to the delta’s population — when the likely path of the storm was evident to meteorologists all across South Asia. It stands in contrast to the government’s slow and deadly response to the storm itself, and to the obstacles it places to the receipt and distribution of disaster relief funds and materiel.

And yet the vote goes on, with a minor concession postponing the referendum in the flood zone until May 24. So we see the terrible possibility of disaster settled upon disaster — an imperfect storm of suffering.

Buddhist Peace Fellowship and the new Clear View Project encourage the wider Buddhist community to respond in the following ways.

1. Offer humanitarian aid now to those directly affected by Cyclone Nargis. Emergency relief efforts can be directed towards BPF’s affiliate, the Foundation for the People of Burma (FPB), which already has some funds in Burma, and has the resources and connections in country that assure proper distribution and use of your generous gifts.

Foundation for the People of Burma
225 Bush Street, Suite 590
San Francisco, CA 94104
Phone: (415) 217-7015
Fax: (415) 477-2787
www.foundationburma.org
Email: info@foundationburma.org

2. Write or email the Myanmar Embassy, expressing your compassionate concern for the Burmese people in this natural disaster, in hopes that the government of Myanmar will wholeheartedly devote all its considerable military and civilian resources to rescue those trapped in the path of the cyclone; will allow the free flow of international relief aid; and will indefinitely postpone the constitutional referendum until such a time as there can be a full and open vote — internationally monitored by respected parties acceptable to all sides.

The Honorable Ambassador U Linn Myaing
Embassy of the Union of Myanmar
2300 S Street NW, Washington D.C. – 20008
info@mewashingtondc.com


— Hozan Alan Senauke
for Clear View Project
& Buddhist Peace Fellowship
5.9.08

Bill Moyers On Rev. Wright

Thoughtful article from Bill Moyers as usual.
Thanks again to Bob T. for sending it too me.


Rev. Wright
By BILL MOYERS
I once asked a reporter back from Vietnam: “Who’s telling the truth over there?”
“Everyone,” he said. “Everyone sees what’s happening through the lens of their own experience.”
That’s how people see Jeremiah Wright.
In my conversation with him and in his dramatic public appearances since, he revealed himself to be far more complex than the sound bites that propelled him onto the public stage. More than 2000 people have written me about him, and their opinions vary widely. Some sting: “Jeremiah Wright is nothing more than a race-hustling, American-hating radical,” one of my viewers wrote. Another called him a “nut case.”
Many more were sympathetic to him. Many asked for some rational explanation for Wright’s transition from reasonable conversation to the shocking anger they saw at the National Press Club. A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and see this complicated man more clearly, but I’m not a psychologist.
Many black preachers I’ve known—scholarly, smart, and gentle in person—uncorked fire and brimstone in the pulpit. Of course, I’ve known many white preachers like that, too. But where I grew up in the south, before the Civil Rights movement, the pulpit was a safe place for black men to express anger for which they would have been punished anywhere else. A safe place for the fierce thunder of dignity denied, justice delayed.
I think I would have been angry if my ancestors had been transported thousands of miles in the hellish hole of a slave ship, then sold at auction, humiliated, whipped, and lynched. Or if my great-great-great grandfather had been but three-fifths of a person in a constitution that proclaimed: “We, the people.” Or if my own parents had been subjected to the racial vitriol of Jim Crow, Strom Thurmond, Bull Conner, and Jesse Helms.
Even so, the anger of black preachers I’ve known and heard and reported on was, for them, very personal and cathartic. That’s not how Jeremiah Wright came across in those sound bites or in his defiant performances since my interview. What white America is hearing in his most inflammatory words is an attack on the America they cherish and that many of their sons have died for in battle – forgetting that black Americans have fought and bled beside them, and that Wright himself has a record of honored service in the Navy.
Hardly anyone took the “chickens come home to roost” remark to convey the message that intervention in the political battles of other nations is sure to bring retaliation in some form, which is not to justify the particular savagery of 9/11 but to understand that actions have consequences. My friend Bernard Weisberger, the historian, says, yes, people are understandably seething with indignation over Wright’s absurd charge that the United States deliberately brought an HIV epidemic into being. But it is a fact, he says, that within living memory the U.S. public health service conducted a study that deliberately deceived black men with syphilis into believing that they were being treated while actually letting them die for the sake of a scientific test.
Does this excuse Wright’s anger? His exaggerations or distortions? You’ll have to decide for yourself, but at least it helps me to understand the why of them.
In this multimedia age the pulpit isn’t only available on Sunday mornings. There’s round the clock media – the beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for the fast food with emotional content. So the preacher starts with rational discussion and after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on the fire that will eventually consume everything it touches. He had help – people who, for their own reasons, set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who wasn’t running for president with the man in the pew who was.
Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering, Catholic-bashing Texas preacher, who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee’s delusions or thinks AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court Justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11, Jerry Falwell said the attack was God’s judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass. Jon Stewart recently played tape from the Nixon White House in which Billy Graham talks in the Oval Office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America. This is crazy and wrong -- white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren’t.
Which means it is all about race, isn’t it?
Wright’s offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn’t fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone’s neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettles some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship. We’re often exposed to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I’ve never seen anything like this – this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner played out right in front of our eyes.
Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said, “beware the terrible simplifiers.”
Bill Moyers is managing editor of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.


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Grand Theft PentagonHow They Made a Killing on the War on Terrorism

















The Occupationby Patrick Cockburn




Humanitarian ImperialismBy Jean Bricmont

















CITY BEAUTIFULBy Tennessee Reed