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“Goodbye, Babylon”: A Resurrection of Vanished Glory

February 8, 2006 No Comments

That White Mule of Sin. Black Diamond Express to Hell. Woke Up This Morning With My Mind on Jesus. There Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down.

The titles roll out like pulpit thunder, the ghostly rumble of a world long gone: the gospel songs and sermons of America’s rural poor, black and white, from the great outpouring of folk culture that rose in the Deep South during the first half of the 20th century. Emerging in the wake of cataclysmic upheavals – slavery, civil war, industrialization, dispossession, pandemic – these multivarious works together embody a

Will D. Campbell Background

February 8, 2006 No Comments

Background on Will D. Campbell, from Gimmie That Old-Time Religion: John Crowe Ransom and Will D. Campbell as Critics of American Religion, by Thomas D. Kennedy, Austin Peay State University, published in Border States: Journal of the Kentucky-Tennessee American Studies Association, No. 7 (1989).

Will D. Campbell, now of Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, was recently described as having “spent his 60 years elevating iconoclasm to a vocation” (Gibble 570). He is, in the words of a Newsweek article in 1972, a “bourbon-guzzling, tobacco-spitting, guitar-strumming man who rarely preaches a Sunday sermon and believes that the institutional

Hellfire and Damnation: The Washington Consensus for Murder

February 2, 2006 No Comments

This is an expanded version of the column appearing in the Feb. 3 edition of The Moscow Times.

Last month, President George W. Bush murdered four children. This is not a controversial statement. There is no dispute about the facts. Indeed, Bush’s own minions fully acknowledge – even

Shadow Boxing

February 2, 2006 No Comments

Good sense from the ever-sensible William Pfaff, via the ever-indispensable Information Clearinghouse: Nuclear Iran is not a Threat.

But of course, good sense was shown the door in Washington a long time ago, and the drive for military action against Iran is gathering steam, perhaps heading into the home stretch, following the same path

The Bush Hits the Fan

January 31, 2006 No Comments

There’s no nice way to say this, so let’s just put it straight: George Bush loves pig shit. And horse shit. And cow shit. And chicken shit. He coddles it, he caresses it, he cradles it with a cocoon of loving care. Bush loves shit so much that this week he exempted nearly 3,000 “factory farms” from having to pay fines for befouling the American heartland with endless rivers of steaming, industrialized animal excrement. From AP: Deal Lets Big Farms Skirt Pollution Fines. Excerpt: The Bush administration will let thousands of factory-style farms escape severe penalties for fouling the air

Same as it Ever Was

January 31, 2006 No Comments

Reagan Warned Before Beirut Blast (AP)
Excerpt: A former defense secretary for Ronald Reagan says he implored the president to put Marines serving in Beirut in a safer position before terrorists attacked them in 1983, killing 241 servicemen. “I was not persuasive enough to persuade the president that the Marines were there on an impossible mission,” Caspar Weinberger says in an oral history project capturing the views of former Reagan administration officials.

….[Weinburger] said one of his greatest regrets was in failing to overcome the arguments that “‘Marines

Through a Glass Darkly — Again

January 30, 2006 No Comments

Paul Craig Roberts, the former Reagan official and Wall
Street Journal editor who has become one of the leading firebrands of
dissent against the Bush Faction, rains fire on the heads of the
warmongers slavering for a strike on Iran – and on the American people
who seem all too willing to be led down the primrose path to
terrorist-spawning quagmire once again. From Antiwar.com: Rank Ignorance Reigns.

Some excerpts: The “evidence”
that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons consists of mere assertion by
members of the Bush administration and the neoconservative media. Iran
says

Machine Dreams

January 28, 2006 No Comments

Let us here
contribute our very small voice to the last-ditch campaign to
filibuster the nomination of Sam (The Sham) Alito. Steve Gilliard is
providing one of many nerve centers of the effort, so we will point you toward his capable hands, and echo his motto for this battle: “Better to Go Down Fighting.”

Or as Mario Savio once put it:
“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious,
makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you

Halliburton to Ride Herd on Huddled Masses

January 28, 2006 No Comments

Halliburton Unit Gets Deal From Agency

From AP, via Buzzflash:
Halliburton…said its KBR subsidiary [has] received a five-year, $385
million contract from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
department. The pact
provides for establishing temporary detention, processing and
deportation facilities if there is “an emergency influx of immigrants
into the U.S.,” Halliburton said….The deal is worth a maximum of $385
million and consists of a one-year base period and four, one-year
options. The contract may also include providing migrant detention
support to other

Throwback Mountain: Bush Embraces Ahmadinejad in Anti-Gay Alliance

January 27, 2006 No Comments

This just in from Human Rights Watch: U.S. Aligned With Iran in Anti-Gay UN Vote (via the King of Zembla).

[Excerpt]: In a reversal of policy, the United States on Monday backed an Iranian initiative to deny United Nations consultative status to organizations working to protect the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people….”This vote is an aggressive assault by the U.S. government on the right of sexual minorities to be heard,” said Scott Long, director of the LGBT rights program at Human Rights Watch. “It is astonishing that the Bush administration

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