Today’s fun at Vado Ligure: they finished putting messages on the smokestacks and one guy paraglided down towing a banner.

Follow via Twitter here, main story here.

This is just so made of win! Greenpeace has occupied four coal-based power plants in Italy as part of a political action to get the attention of the G8 conference attendees on the issue of global warming. One of the coal plants, Fusina, has smokestacks that tower 160 meters over Venice. This guy climbed up and hung a banner. Other plants that have been occupied are Porto Tolle, Vado Ligure, and Brindisi.

They have also sealed the plants and are preventing the processing of coal.

UPDATE!!! In solidarity with the 100 activists in Europe, Greenpeace members in the US hung a banner on Mount Rushmore. The story was covered by Newsweek.

The action is going on NOW and being updated via Twitter. Follow the rest of the goings-on here. Main story here.

Well, it’s official. I have the stupidest Congresscritter on the planet.

“I’ve seen so many good people the last few days, who aren’t going to get credit for anything,” he said, “and then I see this guy, who’s really a lowlife, and he’s being treated like a hero of civilization.”

Funny, I feel the exact same way about George W. Bush.

Jackson had problems, sure, but you should be doing your own laundry first, Parasite Petey. And if you think that the American public doesn’t know about how some of the KBR/Halliburton/Saudi connected predators attached themselves to Jackson and his money during the last few years of his life, you are as clueless as you wish WE were. Given the fact that Jackson’s shady doctor and even shadier doctor’s lawyer have direct links to Cheney’s shadow government, you’re not doing anything to assuage the conspiracy theorists who suspect that he was offed to collect on the tour insurance.

Jackson has his own problems but he’s paying for them now, and depend upon it someday you’re going to have to face that judge yourself and answer for all the innocent blood you’ve shed with your warmongering policies. Whatever his faults, at least he was never responsible for another human being’s DEATH on this earth, and yes that includes the 5000 Americans you pretend to support who have died in the unnecessary Iraq war.

Never voted for Parasite Petey, never will. I hope Albany will finally get it’s act together and redistrict you out of existence, you Rethuglican dinosaur.

Incidentally, this story also sets off my “chaff” meter. It’s a deliberate, sensationalist Rovian style distraction issue meant to get the American public’s attention away from something else.

What’s the something else? Well, it could be the fact that the Israeli Navy intercepted a humanitarian ship filled with medical supplies and children’s toys bound for Gaza despite the fact that it was not in Israeli waters, and held former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and 20 other human rights activists for several days without charge or trial.

Or it could be an effort to divert scrutiny away from post-resignation Sarah Palin. (Le Yawn, good riddance, don’t let the helicopter blade hit you in the ass on the way out.)

Or it could be an effort to completely distract the American public from the fact that next week representatives from Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth are going to present scientific evidence alongside their call for a re-investigation of the 9/11 attacks at a National Architecture conference in Washington DC. Support for a SCIENTIFIC re-investigation of the events of 9/11 is growing in various communities, especially in the light of the discovery by scientists of military-grade nanothermite particles in four different WTC dust samples. Over 60,000 residents of New York City have signed a petition to put a checkbox vote for a re-investigation of 9/11 on the next election ballot. Although not a resident of the city proper, I am listed as a signatory on the concurrent petition provided for families of victims, survivors, and first responders.

Yeah, I could see a few of these news items getting Rove and his buddies a little nervous. Bush is gone, Palin is gone (hmmm, and Rove didn’t like that – wonder if she simply decided not to volunteer for it?); so congratulations, Parasite Petey. You’re the GOP’s new lightning rod. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

The country club near my house has fireworks every year, usually the day before July 4th. An impressive, professional show. We can see them from our deck.

There’s something that always gets to me about this show, though. What it sounds like.

The colored lights of fireworks are pretty, they always have been and always will be. But the thing about the way this show sounds is that it’s the closest thing to some weird, I dunno… memories? Psychic foo? I am not sure I even have a word for how and why I know the stuff I do about it. My grandfather? My spirit guides from Germany? I have no idea.

Where I live is very hilly. The area was once all referred to by the Native American name Matenicock, which means “very hilly place”. It also looks a hell of a lot like where I was stationed in Germany.

Most fireworks shows on Long Island are shot off over either the ocean or LI Sound, so the water absorbs the noise. This one echoes off the hilly land. The echoes are what freak me out.

I realize from the pretty colors that what I’m hearing is not what I’m seeing, but… there’s a part of me that hears it and REMEMBERS… something else. I find myself remembering the foxhole that I tripped and fell into behind my house in Kaiserslautern, cutting my hand on barbed wire that had been wrapped around a sapling (now a tree) 50 years before. The tree had grown AROUND the barbed wire. They were now forever one thing.

I took this picture of it while standing in what had been the foxhole. It is placed strategically at the corner of a hill above a road that leads to Der Kammgarn, a former spinning factory that was converted to produce munitions during WWII, and was later converted to a concert hall.

I find myself just KNOWING that the soft thumps of the rockets launching, not the explosions themselves, are what you need to listen for and take cover from, because by the time you hear the big boom and you’re not behind something, it’s all over. I never worked around artillery in my life. My grandfather never told me this when he was alive. I never received training for this aspect of warfare. How the fuck do I know this?

The hills where I live echo and ring with explosions, and it is so not the sound of music to these my ears, for all that the fireworks are pretty. While my eyes are seeing fireworks, my ears are hearing – REMEMBERING – a place I am familiar with being shelled.

And I find myself by the big finale repeating like a mantra, like a prayer: “Never in my lifetime. Never in my lifetime. Never in my lifetime.”

I’m starting to feel about July 4th the way I feel about September 11th, these days.

Let’s not even go into the mind-bending interdimensional hypocrisy involved in Verizon’s sponsorship of a fireworks show for happy, clueless flag wavers at the beach after that soulless corporation has contrived to place equipment all over our national infrastructure which violates the privacy of law abiding citizens and erodes civil liberties paid for with the blood of generations of far, far better men and women.

No, let’s not even go there this time, as bad as that aspect of it is. Instead let’s deal with the explosions themselves and what they’re supposed to be about. The Rockets’ Red Glare, Bombs Bursting In Air. Let’s go there. So many Americans have suffered from the lack of that glorious experience. Let’s bring you right there where the rockets glare red and the Sousa music makes it all glorious.

Anyone who’s ever worked stage crew views a play in a different light. Anyone who’s worked as a DJ or an engineer for a radio station listens to the radio differently than someone who has not.

And anyone who’s been touched by war can no longer truly enjoy a fireworks show the same way as when they were a kid.

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I’ve been lucky. The closest I’ve come to actually being in a disaster was the attack on the WTC, and somewhat peripherally the northeastern blackout and the Ramstein Air Show disaster (which is why I don’t go to air shows).

Now I’ve seen the pictures of white phosphorous wounds on children in Gaza, wounds that keep on burning right down into the bone if they don’t get all of it out. “Willie Pete”, as Colonel Ann Wright explained, is stuff that’s meant to light up the sky. It’s not supposed to be used in urban environments or densely populated areas. Knowing that Israel purchased these arms from the United States kinda took some of the joy out of the Memorial Day fireworks show for me.

I also wondered when they played Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The USA” while shooting off the fireworks how many “yellow men” were in the audience as ol’ leather lungs sang the line about killing the Vietnamese… I predicted, correctly, that they wouldn’t have the guts to play the entire song.

“Ten years burning down the road,

nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go…”

Oh no they weren’t going to play that part, heh.

But I guess the thing that really haunted me as I watched the fireworks this past Memorial Day was something that happened in front of the Washington Monument in DC during a Native American medicine working called Turtle Women Rising a couple of whiles back. A real nice guy named Tom Brinson who is a Vietnam vet and a former board member of Veterans for Peace was walking toward me when a car backfired somewhere behind me. Tom flinched and ducked down, a look of absolute terror on his face. Since he was reacting, I reacted too (yay ADD) and whirled in the direction of the noise before we both realized it was just a car. Then he slowly rose back up, looking embarrassed. We locked eyes, and he looked a bit relieved that the only person who had noticed his overreaction was someone who understood.

Guys like that don’t go to fireworks shows. They’ve seen enough of the real ones. What’s so terrible and ironic is that on days like Memorial Day or July 4th we “celebrate” what they’ve gone through, when they themselves would never want to do anything of the sort.

While little kids all around me were going “YAY” and adults going “OOH AHH”, and rightfully so – it was a very nice fireworks show – all I could see was the naked fear on Tom Brinson’s face as he reacted to that car backfiring with a lightning speed beyond his years, which well explains why he is still with us when 58,000 of his brothers in arms are not.

I had a brother, at Khe Sahn, fightin’ off them Viet Cong,

He’s still there… he’s all gone…

I won’t begrudge anyone their right to say “YAY” or “OOH AHH” when they watch fireworks shows on Memorial Day or July 4th, but I don’t think I’ll be quick to join them ever again.

People are going to say I’m just being a stick in the mud, that I’m trying to ruin everybody’s good time. I’ll simply reply that if they understood even one single goddamned thing about war, it’s that it’s not something to be glorified. That’s when these preprogrammed kneejerk patriots will claim that what’s being glorified are the sacrifices our veterans have made, and I will call bullshit because I AM one of those veterans and I see full well how we are really treated in this country every other day of the year.

The Boomers aged. Sure, not everything was perfect, not everything was back to normal. But we were staying fed. We were staying entertained. The electric bill was hard to pay but at least the damned AC worked when it got hot. Flick the switch, the dang thing turns on and works, that’s all want out of life.

Kids were hitting summer vacation. It was beach time, barbecue time, cold beer in the hot sun time. And frankly, we didn’t have the money anymore to haul our asses to DC for lobbying or NYC for protest marches. Transportation’s become rather expensive, doncha know. But really, don’t sweat it. Obama will end the wars soon. Just give him time. More time. More time. More time. Echo… echo… echo…

Then the kids started begging you to take them to see the new Transformers movie.

Now, only if you were ex-military would you cringe as you realized that the first such movie, which you’d been forced to sit through as a stoic, benign parent; was a two hour US Air Force Cyber Command recruiting commercial. The rest of the 98% of you who have never served, never known anyone who served, and don’t know or care what’s involved with military service would just resign yourselves to sitting through two hours of the usual Hollywood uber-simplistic stentorian morality play interspersed with robotic chase scenes and explosions set to glorious music.

But it’s just a petty annoyance, just as it’s a petty annoyance that the new Star Trek movie kinda messed with Kirk’s handling of the Kobayashi Maru. I mean, any true Star Trek geek knows that compassion and diplomacy, not JUST hacking your own computer system, was the Roddenberry way around a no-win alternative; just as surely as there are some of us who still swear by that “quaint” concept of the Prime Directive of the Federation. But most of the Star Trek geeks who’d remember that and could still afford to take their kids to the new movie today would agree that hacking computer systems is cool, too… right? So what’s not to like? Right?

Yes. Support of dissent is part of democracy. Suppression of dissent leads to totalitarianism and dictatorship. Yes. We get it, assholes. And now, YOU’RE gonna get it.

Perhaps you can tell me where were the so-called “free” American press when AMERICAN protesters were filling the streets by the hundreds of thousands in NYC, DC and elsewhere during the Bush administration?

This prurient interest to support dissent abroad is the ultimate in hypocrisy and only serves an agenda bound for destabilization and warmongering in the Middle East. Let’s do our own dirty laundry first – if we want Iran to have a democracy, we haven’t exactly been setting anybody the best example to follow over the last few years.

I have photographs of massive AMERICAN ANTI-WAR protests from 2002 all the way up to 2008 that never saw any mainstream media coverage. Do any of you creeps working for the “free” American mainstream press want to try to explain to me why that is? Go right ahead. I have all day.

…how many rich, right wing, “big oil sympathetic” Republicans are standing out in the incessantly dumping rain today at the US Open?

Out of all those rich, right wing, “big oil sympathetic” Republicans, how many of them are still utterly convinced that global warming is a myth?

Credo has a nice action page for communicating with Congress about the upcoming Global Warming bill, which Republicans and complicit Democrats are trying to nerf.

And as usual, the Germans are both better informed and give more of a shit than anyone here…

For those not familiar with the issue, the New York State Senate is having a collective hissy fit because two of it’s Democratic members, Pedro Espada Jr. (“R for hire”, “Bronx on alternate Tuesdays”) and Hiram Monserrate (“Who’s got more money and power to wave at me?”, Queens), both respectively under investigation for dalliances outside the law have jumped the aisle, sold what’s left of their tattered souls and become Republicans.

The reason outlined by the NY Times is apparently that Tom Golisano, a billionaire who supposedly financed State Majority Leader Smith and several other Democrats into office “wasn’t getting what he paid for”, so in turn he worked to woo these two turncoats across the aisle.

While news comes out that Monserrate apparently hit his female partner in the face with a broken bottle, the Times details Espada’s issues as somewhat more serious:

Mr. Espada has been fined more than $60,000 for ignoring state law requiring disclosure of campaign contributions. A nonprofit organization that he ran for decades, Soundview HealthCare Network, is being investigated by the attorney general on suspicion of having misappropriated funds. And the Bronx district attorney is investigating whether he lives in the Bronx district he represents.

The dismissive term being applied to this situation by most of the press is “the circus in Albany”, with the New York Post even sending a person dressed as a clown. The rest of the story is a bit more insidious and concerns end game machinations which will attempt to put Republicans back in power state wide.

With his fragile coalition, Sen. Dean Skelos (R-Rockville Centre) is positioning his party for the 2010 State Senate races that could make or break it in New York for the foreseeable future.

The reason: Whoever controls the legislature after 2010 will help draw the boundaries of congressional and legislative districts. And with the Democratic enrollment edge growing fast, Republicans need to help draw those district lines to have any chance of remaining a relevant statewide force.

One reason many observers say that Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) is seriously looking at a run for the U.S. Senate, Levy said, is the fear that if Democrats control redistricting after 2010, it may be easier for him to win election statewide than in his own district.

More here…

Since I live in that fearmongering creep’s district, currently suffering under the weight of his cack-handed misappropriation of our tax dollars away from local interests and into the hands of corrupt DoD contractors and their cronies, that is a very, very real fear for him to have. Next to Bush himself, Peter King is mostly responsible for the continued existence of the completely useless Department of Homeland Security – an organization that was pushed into existence by the Bush regime after 9/11 and packed chock full of compliant Bush cronies and boondogglers to circumvent the legitimate operations of the other intelligence agencies, and to otherwise be yet another flea sucking blood out of the asses of Bush’s dogs of war.

King’s current district, NY-3, has been carefully carved out of Nassau County to include some of the richest neighborhoods IN THE NATION. He panders exclusively to the interests – and carefully cultivated fears – of the nation’s New York based right wing power elite. He ignores everyone else, and the ONLY reason he can because of the way his district is structured.

I’ve never voted for the man in my life and I never will. I went to directly lobby him in DC as a member of CodePink and he didn’t even have the guts to meet with me face to face, but as a Bush enabler he’s sent many a far better man and woman than he will ever be to their deaths across the sea.

We don’t need any more Bush dinosaurs, and they are not yet gone nor forgotten. They may be dying the death of the cornered rat, but you don’t want to be getting to close to the corners they’re in unless you’re prepared to deal with lots of fang and claw. That’s how it is in Nassau County, and that’s how it is in Albany, and indeed that’s how it is in other select corners of the nation.

Not a circus. A circus maximus – and we’re running short on bread around here, too.

McClatchy HAMMERS Cheney:

If former vice president Darth Cheney had been arrested for any of his multiple felonies, he might remember the most important of the Miranda rights that the arresting officer would have read to him: You have the right to remain silent.

These days, you can’t turn on your television without finding Cheney’s doughboy face on the screen, alternately repeating old lies, mouthing new lies or defiantly confessing to yet another criminal act.

Wow. A mainstream press outlet finally grew a pair. Awesome.

In other news, Sarah Palin might decide to present a facile “I’m so compassionate” front by claiming to support the developmentally disabled, but this gal who happens to have been slapped with that label is not and never will be so broken in the head that I’d EVER vote for her – or ANY Republican under the current circumstances. Shitfire, if these wingnuts had their way everyone with ADD would either be paying big pharma for the dubious privilege of serving as their guinea pigs while they throw “chainsaw juggling” antidepressant comorbidity MK-ULTRAesque cocktails at us, or serving time in the “arbeit macht frei” prison industry. They don’t even dare put us in the military anymore – and they sure won’t put us anywhere else where we might make the wrong people look bad. ;-7

Yeah, Republitards, you won’t get my vote any time soon – or Thom Hartmann‘s either, I’m thinkin’. There’s another guy with ADD who can kick your asses around the block all day long and never get tired. He’s even happy to explain why and how in clear, concise terms.

See, here’s the current state of affairs, ReThugs: if you really want to support the disabled, you’d best look a bit closer to home. While we’re on the subject, when you’re shooting critters out of that helicopter, don’t hang your foot out the door if you want to come back home with all ten tootsies. And don’t aim for your friend’s face, either.

You folks seem to have a serious problem with “friendly fire” when it comes to “protecting America”, and as the list gets longer people are finally starting to catch on. Some of them are even your own people. Want some reminders from that list? Pat Tillman, Mike Connell, Enron, Worldcom, Securacom, Lehman Brothers… do you want some more well here’s some more!

Yeah, with “support” like this who needs the mafia… well payback’s a bitch…