Mines have spurned safety for too long

One faction of the Tea Party will gather on the mall in Washington, D.C., this week on Tax Day. They will rail against big government, intrusive regulations, taxes and spending.

On Monday, people across the country observed a moment of silence for the tragic loss of 29 lives at the Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, W.Va. The nation's worst mining disaster in over four decades took place at a mine that had been cited for literally hundreds of violations over the last year, including many serious ones.

Will we ever learn? Mining is an inherently dangerous occupation. According to the United Mine Workers of America, in the last century more than 100,000 miners were killed due to mine disasters. More than 100,000 died from black lung disease by breathing coal dust. Even today, a coal miner dies every six hours from black lung disease, and these numbers are rising again.

So don't tread on me

Yeah, well you finally stopped getting mad

Here's a popular "Letter to America" and a new reply from America below.
You didn't get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.
You didn't get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate energy policy.
You didn't get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.
You didn't get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.
You didn't get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.
You didn't get mad when we spent over 600 billion (and counting) on said illegal war.
You didn't get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq.

You didn't get mad when you saw the Abu Grahib photos.
You didn't get mad when you found out we were torturing people.
You didn't get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.
You didn't get mad when we didn't catch Bin Laden.
You didn't get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.
You didn't get mad when we let a major US city drown.
You didn't get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark.

Dispatch from China: Number 15 has left the building

Li Changchun is often referred to as one of the most powerful men in China, in Asia and, increasingly, in the world. He is a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China's Central Committee. On April 8, he awaited our arrival at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Between him and I stood a group of newspaper editors from throughout Asia, along with giant pillars, thick walls and a strict protocol that had to be followed to the letter, or to the number.

Will the Tea Party take the heartland?

It was Tax Day in the Buckeye State, America's most consistent political barometer. A crowd of around 4000 protesters packed the Ohio Statehouse lawn. Is the self-proclaimed Tea Party movement a mere Republican Party-manufactured astro-turf organization or an authentic and autonomous grassroots populist crusade?

Well, they appear to be neither and both. The people are angry in the heartland and the thunder is almost all on the right.

There were the traditional April 15th anti-taxers and Libertarians and the usual rhetoric from the podium that we're being taxed to death. The "death tax" is emerging as a key issue in Ohio elections this year. Steve Stivers, Republican candidate for Congress in the 15th district has been hammering the issue hard in his race against Democratic Congresswoman Mary Jo Kilroy. Speakers at the podium solicited signatures for a petition drive to outlaw Ohio's "death tax" or, as the state calls it, estate tax.

Mind if I play through?

Peace activists extend an olive branch to the Tea Party to talk about war

On Tax Day, Tea Party members from around the country will descend on the nation’s capitol to “protest big government and support lower taxes, less government and more freedom.” CODEPINK, a women-led peace group advocating an end to war and militarism, will be sending some representatives to begin a dialogue. While we come from the opposite end of the political spectrum and don’t support the goals and tactics of the Tea Party, there is an area where we are seeking common ground, i.e. endless wars and militarism.

As Tea Partiers express their anger at out-of-control government spending and soaring deficits, we will ask them to take a hard look at what is, by far, the biggest sinkhole of our tax dollars: Pentagon spending. With the Obama administration proposing the largest military budget ever, topping $700 billion not including war supplementals, the U.S. government is now spending almost as much on the military as the rest of the world combined.

Perhaps the Tea Party and peace folks—unlikely allies—can agree that one way to shrink big government is to rein in military spending. Here are some questions to get the conversation going:

Chamomile, comfrey, coltsfoot, and...cannabis: (Or what's wrong with the current Ohio Medical Marijuana bill...)

Cannabis is an herb. It belongs to the same class of commonly used plants as Chamomile, Comfrey, and Coltsfoot, known as herbs, which have a long and distinguished history of industrial, medicinal, and recreational usage dating back to the earliest days of human history. To pretend that cannabis is somehow different than these other plants is to make a major mistake in both classification and characterization.

Under the food supplement guidelines set by Senator Orrin Hatch, (See the "Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA)." the above named herbs, (Chamomile, Comferey, and Coltsfoot) are essentially unregulated.

Aside from routine safety and commercial regulations insuring that the proffered items are...
A...Unadulterated,
B...Properly labeled and advertised for what they are,
C...Safely packaged, processed, transported, and stored,
D...Properly taxed at the point of sale according to the routine business laws already in place for commercial transactions, (and I am NOT referring here to the institution of any of the so-called "Sin Tax" taxes such as are routinely applied to Tobacco and or Alcohol.)...

Country Joe's

BANGKOK, Thailand -- When Country Joe and The Fish performed their famous satirical protest song "Fixin' To Die" during the 1960s, they influenced many people to oppose America's disastrous Vietnam War. Today, Barry "The Fish" Melton -- still a self-proclaimed "leftist" -- grimly predicts the U.S. is doomed to also lose its war in Afghanistan. "I don't think we should be involved in Afghanistan, I think it is a waste of time and energy," Melton said in an interview on Saturday (April 3) when he arrived in Bangkok on his first visit to Southeast Asia. "I've got to believe that whatever we are doing in Afghanistan will end up in failure, that it can't have an outcome that is particularly positive for anybody." When Melton and "Country" Joe MacDonald created the San Francisco-based band, one of their most catchy and powerful songs had a vaudeville-style chorus which mockingly taunted: "And it's one, two, three / What are we fighting for? / Don't ask me I don't give a damn / Next stop is Vietnam."

Gray-haired Melton now performs with other bands in California and Europe.

Our national epidemic of violence

James Gilligan published a book 13 years ago called "Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic," in which he diagnosed the root cause of violence as deep shame and humiliation, a desperate need for respect and status (and, fundamentally love and care) so intense that only killing (oneself and/or others) could ease the pain -- or, rather, the lack of feeling.  When a person becomes so ashamed of his needs (and of being ashamed), Gilligan writes, and when he sees no nonviolent solutions, and when he lacks the ability to feel love or guilt or fear, the result can be violence. 

The choice to engage in violence is not a rational one, and often involves magical thinking, as Gilligan explains by analyzing the meaning of crimes in which murderers have mutilated their victims' bodies or their own. 

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