A New York Times blog from this morning alerted me to a promising development, and gave me new respect for fellow Santa Monican Larry David:
"Randy Credico, 54, a stand-up comedian and drug law activist who was director of the fund for the past 12 years, has decided to step down from [the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice. He plans to devote himself full-time to his United States Senate campaign, in which he intends to challenge Senator Charles E. Schumer for the Democratic nomination next September."
Mr. Credico said his campaign manager is a former comedy writer for “Saturday Night Live,” and then he began pouring forth with phone numbers of celebrities and comedians he said were endorsing him. I called only one: Larry David, at his office in Los Angeles. Mr. David would not reveal any details about the season finale of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on HBO, but he did offer his support of Mr. Credico’s candidacy – in his own inimitable, free-associative, hilarious style – and praised his passion for fighting harsh drug laws.
“It’d be pretty interesting, Credico in the Senate — kind of like tying a bunch of cans to a dog and setting him loose in a china shop,” he said. “I don’t envy Schumer. Randy’s really going to get under his skin.”
When told that Mr. Credico plans on running the race sober, Mr. David said, “Listen, I can’t tell the difference whether Randy’s drunk or sober.”
Then Mr. David said, in an unprintable way, that Mr. Credico had a lot of guts.
“He’ll say absolutely anything that’s on his mind,” he said.
Hmm, just like Larry David, I observed.
“No, I only do it on TV,” Mr. David shot back. “I’m only Larry David on TV. Credico’s Larry David in real life.”...
“My campaign slogan is going to be, ‘Which candidate would you rather smoke a joint with? Credico or Schumer?’” he said, while racing around the penthouse apartment of a friend and directing a small staff of young adults with laptops on how to get out word of his candidacy. He wore his usual jeans and sport jacket and smoked cigarettes and chugged Coke — the soft drink — directly from the 2-liter bottle. He had on hand two boxes of Cuban cigars that he claimed were a gift from former Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau.
Last year, Mr. Credico was arrested after interfering with police officers making a marijuana arrest on Gay Street.
Mr. Credico makes no pretense about his longtime battle with drugs and alcohol addiction. He said he has been free of drugs and alcohol for two months now and hopes to stay sober for the entire campaign.
Though sober, Mr. Credico does hope to appeal to the partying public.
It's worth going into that line about how Credico was arrested to understand him -- the story behind it gives good insight into his real-world approach to activism, and puts on display a very direct theory of social change: Be the change. Tony Papa of the Drug Policy Alliance gives the fuller description in a June 2008 article:
In Minnesota, bong water can count as an illegal drug.
That decision from Minnesota's Supreme Court on Thursday raises the threat of longer sentences for drug smokers in that state who fail to dump the water out of bong — a type of water pipe often used to smoke drugs
The court said a person can be prosecuted for a first-degree drug crime for 25 grams or more of bong water that tests positive for a controlled substance.
Lower courts had held that bong water is drug paraphernalia. Possession of that is a misdemeanor crime.
The case involved a woman whose bong had about 2 1/2 tablespoons of liquid that tested positive for methamphetamine. A narcotics officer had testified that drug users sometimes keep bong water to drink or inject later.
Heather Graham stars as the Public Option in this funny ad, showing how she'll force the lazy, bloated private insurance companies to get back in the game and compete. After all, competition is as American as apple pie. Featuring actor Peter Coyote as the narrator-- Check out more from MoveOn.org
I remember the smells of PBR in the air, jocks wearing white baseball hats swizzling lacrosse sticks in their hands, and the sound of ping pong balls bouncing into plastic Solo cups like it was yesterday. But it was really the mid-'90s. This was a frequent late-night high school experience in NW Washington, DC. -- some preppy party I didn't want to be attending, and probably wasn't really welcome at. It just so happened that it was either go to these parties, or don't go to any parties at all. If I could name a theme song for these people and their parties, it would be Kenny Rogers' 'The Gambler.' I once heard that song play at a Beer Pong session at least 10 times in a row. "One more time!" Imagine watching a room full of heaving jock guys n' gals, chanting the lyrics of the most commercialized and insipid country and western singer of the '80s for half an hour, as though they were reciting Rumi or... as though it had a drop of meaning. I guess it had meaning for them.
What does disgraced Galleon Hedge Fund founder Raj Rajaratnam have to do with this? It has been revealed that “Raj paid $4 million to have Kenny Rogers come to a birthday party at his house and sing his favorite song, ‘The Gambler,’ over and over again. Kenny refused to go on after a dozen times.”
Every person has their price, seemingly to a point. Kenny's pride at the $4 million level equaled 12 consecutive performances of that song. And then he drew the red line. Must have been an interesting moment. Fair to assume that with a hedge fund ego on the loose, the cost of Kenny's appearance was printed on the guest invitation. You can imagine everyone at the party making that calculation in their heads, especially Raj at the moment of refusal. Here's a video below, so the uninitiated can get a sense of the milquetoast tune that the my high school booze-hound classmates and egomanaical hedgefunders get off on.
Slavoj Žižek, dubbed the ‘most dangerous philosopher in the west’ by The New Republic, was rudely cut short by a bomb scare as he spoke to an audience of 800 at Cooper Union last night. Expounding on his new book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Žižek was forced by police to round up his talk and exit the Great Hall along with his hundreds of fans.
Amid the kerfuffle outside Cooper Union as police and security guards made efforts to get stragglers out of the building—several refused to be torn away from a bookstall inside selling copies of Žižek’s numerous books—the renowned Slovenian philosopher continued his talk for a time, signing copies of his newly launched book.
First as Tragedy, Then as Farceis a call for the Left to reinvent itself in the light of our desperate historical situation. And in the aftermath of last night’s bomb threat, one line in particular from the book’s jacket is worth noting: The time for liberal, moralistic blackmail is over.
Unfazed by yesterday’s interruption, Slavoj Žižek can be heard on today’s Democracy Now, speaking to Amy Goodman.
From diarist alien abductee DailyKos: "Michael Moore's Capitalism, A Love Story has revealed a deep dark secret to the intrepid reporters of ABC News - so-called Dead Peasant Insurance, the practice of companies taking out secret life insurance policies on their low-level employees, with the benefits paid out to the company upon the employee's death, even if they no longer work at the company."
They may have been cops, but the video still reveals the militarization of police work. Muriel Kane at Raw Story shares a statement released by security at the G20:
"Military members supporting the G20 Summit work with local law enforcement authorities but do not have the authority to make arrests. The individuals involved in the 9/24/09 arrest which has appeared online are law enforcement officers from a multi-agency tactical response team assigned to the security operations for the G20. It is not unusual for tactical team members to wear camouflaged fatigues. The type of fatigues the officers wear designates their unit affiliation.
Prior to the arrest, the officers observed this subject vandalizing a local business. Due to the hostile nature of the crowd, officer safety and the safety of the person under arrest, the subject was immediately removed from the area.”
Mike Bickle doesn't take prayer lightly. Not that anyone else who prays does either, but for the sheep in Pastor Bickle's flock, it's something else. It's a "job description." According to an article in Christian publishing titan Steve Strang's Charisma Magazine -- Strang is also the publisher of Texas madcase megapastor John Hagee's books -- Bickle, founder of the International House of Prayer (IHOP) "has spent the last 10 years developing a 'culture of prayer,' with some 1,500 full-time committing to 12, two-hour prayer times each week. 'It's part of people's job descriptions,' Bickle said. 'We tell them, "You are intercessory missionaries; you're not just [employees]." Part of their task is to be in the prayer room crying out for justice.'" Sounds more like the cruel pep talk of a Wal-Mart deputy manager than someone to reach out to for inspiration, but it appears that at least 1,500 people think otherwise.
10 straight years. Now it's time to mark -- not "celebrate," that's a bit over the top for this crowd -- this decade of constant praying with prayer.
In case you can't make it in person yet want to pray along, put your hands together and hold them there -- the marking will broadcast live, starting tonight Sept. 17, and continue for four consecutive days. Continuity is the IHOP way.
Bat-shit crazy quotes from Bickle meant to tempt people to watch the anniversary service from the Charisma article below:
At the 10-year mark, we're making a commitment by the grace of God to combine 24-hour prayers of justice with 24-hour works of justice until the Lord returns."
The risk is huge, and ... the reason we're taking it on is, biblically, we're on the earth for it," he said. "And the Spirit is pressing us. The Lord is saying over and over, it is now time to be far more aggressive. ... Now He's got His finger on us. He's upped the intensity of it. And our people really want to. We've talked about it for years, and we have no option but to do it."
"We think very strongly from the Word and the Spirit that it's great trouble and great victory -- both of them are emerging at the same time," Bickle said. "It will be the greatest harvest field in America, but it will be the season of the greatest falling away from the faith, or at least from the organized church."
Glenn Greenwald has a great post explaining how the focus on the doings of staffers at a small organization like ACORN is a useful distraction for the real crooks in the corporate world who remain uninvestigated:
ACORN has received a grand total of $53 million in federal funds over the last 15 years -- an average of $3.5 million per year. Meanwhile, not millions, not billions, but trillions of dollars of public funds have been, in the last year alone, transferred to or otherwise used for the benefit of Wall Street. Billions of dollars in American taxpayer money vanished into thin air, eaten by private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, led by Halliburton subsidiary KBR. All of those corporate interests employ armies of lobbyists and bottomless donor activities that ensure they dominate our legislative and regulatory processes, and to be extra certain, the revolving door between industry and government is more prolific than ever, with key corporate officials constantly ending up occupying the government positions with the most influence over those industries.
Exactly as one would expect, the prime beneficiaries of all of that pillaging continue to grow. The banks that almost brought the world economy to collapse but then received massive public largesse because they were "too big to fail" are now bigger than ever; as The Washington Post delicately put it: "The crisis may be turning out very well for many of the behemoths that dominate U.S. finance." Everything involving the government turns out well for these "behemoths" because they own and control the U.S. Government.
...
ACORN isn't just being mentioned in passing as something that needs an examination; it's dominating headlines and the obsessions of the Fox News movement, despite the fact that it's a tiny, microscopic drop in the bucket even when assessed by the principles the protesters claim to support [by a vote of 345-75, the Democratic-led House just joined the Senate in voting to cut off all funds to ACORN; I'm sure the courageous Congress will be doing that to Blackwater, KBR, Citibank, lawbreaking telecoms and many other corrupt corporations who own them any moment now). Claiming you're worried about large government and taxpayer waste while fixating on ACORN proves the insincerity of the ostensible concern, let alone doing so while cheering on the same Wall Street banks, defense contractors, and insurance industries that control and expand government power for their own benefit.
...[A] statistical trace of what I've taken to calling the "puff daddy" movement emerged a few years ago, when researchers at the National Institutes of Health compared national drug surveys conducted over two-year periods beginning in 1991 and 2001. Their analysis, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that the percentage of people who say they smoked marijuana in the past year had remained fairly stable over the 10-year stretch. (That is to say, it ended where it started.) But they found a very different pattern among those between the ages of 45 and 64: As my parents' generation matured, the number of smokers in that group had nearly tripled.
The baby boomer drug uptick turns up again in the recent data. According to the 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, almost 6 percent of all adults between the ages of 50 and 59 reported smoking marijuana in the past year. That's up from about 3 percent five years earlier. Meanwhile, the number of recent users over the age of 50 has climbed to 2.65 million people nationwide (and we can assume the real prevalence is somewhat higher, since these figures are based on self-reported drug use). Here's something to think about: There are about as many boomers using cannabis today as there are high-school students doing the same.
Ralph Steadman, I caught you. Hunter S. Thompson is now long dead, and you've got nothing left to prove in the illustration world. So you became an adept webdesigner you're are a believer in the white-space zen style for webmagazines and your proposal was just what LA Times was looking for. You did a very nice job for the genre, but like any person with an alter ego, you couldn't help but leave your trademark ink splotch at the bottom of the home page.
Splotch at the bottom of the new LA Times.com:
Steadman at work, caught in flagrante:
See more of Steadman's style here. Of course, it's probably just a coding bug -- or as one friend suggested, perhaps some kind of digital watermark to prevent content theft. Stay tuned, and I'll try to find out.
Keith Olbermann calls out Sen. John Thune, Sen. John McCain, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republicans -- as well as a few Democrats, too: specifically the "Blue Dogs."
Via Jerome Armstrong from MyDD I saw this eerie video to the right. From Tuesday's Virginia Democratic primary for governor, in which Clinton money guy Terry McAuliffe got the drubbing he deserved. It's a disturbing video -- who would be so stupid as to plant thousands of signs on a country road like that? What a colossal waste. But then -- we step back and look at the spectacle -- and it looks like what artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude might have come up with if they were given the task of sharing the essence of Terry McAuliffe; infinite two-dimensional Terry flowers blooming on the roadside.
I'm sitting in a press conference next to my AlterNet colleague Joshua Holland. We're watching progressive heavyweights Bob Borosage, Howard Dean and labor leader Anna Burger discuss the prospects for health care reform in Congress this summer. The topic is the major pile of dough -- $82 million -- and number of grassroots and advocacy groups -- 1,000 -- and their members -- 30 million -- that are pushing hard for the Health Care for America Now (HCAN) campaign.
Howard Dean lays out the landscape: "This is a center-left nation," Dean is saying. He ties the rise of America's "multi-cultural" society, and the precedents set by patterns of younger voters who "see themselves as multicultural" -- who not only have elected a multicultural president, but whose ideology offers hope for health care reform. RIchard Kirsh, who is the national campaign manager for HCAN, makes some major declarations: "We've waited 100 years for health care reform, and we're going to see it in the next few months."
Pollster Celinda Lake announces the results of a survey she conducted for Change to Win, a major labor coalition pushing hard for health reform. Looking through the results, the one that caught my eye is this number: 62% of people in the survey think that health care, education and energy reform must be enacted as soon as possible. Which is really in tune with the thinking of this HCAN campaign.... do it NOW!
A reporter from the Boston Globe asks Howard Dean if it's more important to have a bipartisan plan or a public health care plan, and Dean smashed that softball out of the park -- we'll pass it with 51 votes if we need to, Dean says. Kirsh came up to the mic and reminded us that when Social Security was up for a vote in DC, not one GOPer in the House voted for it, and only one Republican senator gave a yes vote.
This clip is from the new documentary Food Fight -- a look at how American agricultural policy and food culture developed in the 20th century, and how the California food movement has created a counter-revolution against big agribusiness. This clip features Will Allen, McArthur Genius Grant Winner 2008.
Note for Santa Cruz residents: You can go to a screening on Tuesday, May 12th, 6:30pm at the Riverfront Twin Cinemas. Special guests (Woody Tasch) and local farmers, supper reception after at the Farmhouse Culture Kitchen, 303 Potrero St.
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