Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat

"Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat"
Starring Patrick Cassidy, at the Palace Theater until May 7, 2006.

Here's a show that's so unrelentingly good natured, camped-out, perfectly staged and precisely performed that it's virtually impossible to dislike. The Broadway in Columbus version that's just opened at the Palace simply overwhelms, with immense good heart and impressive technical competence, any potential pitfalls of cliche. It is also a spectacular advertisement for pure athleticism and the virtues of physical fitness.

This Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice gem has been around a long enough to be termed a standard. It's so regularly performed by school groups that half America's parents must have seen it at least one time or another. The story is Biblical, the music tuneful and, at the Palace, the staging just a shade shy of Las Vegas glitz-perfect.

In other words, take your kids, from ages six (we did that!) on up, not to mention your parents. Leave all critical blase at the door, and just sit back for a good time.

Impeach Cheney first

We should impeach Vice President Dick Cheney first, and President George Bush immediately thereafter.  This idea is not original with me.  It's been seen on bumper stickers for quite some time.  My attention has been called to it by the fact that Congresswoman and Judiciary Committee Member Maxine Waters is talking about it.  See below.

I'm persuaded of thevalue of this approach for several reasons.  Among activists who very much want impeachment, one can hear a long list of fears and concerns about how things might go wrong, how impeachment could help Republicans who come around and back it, how impeachment could take energy away from elections, etc.  But by far the most common of the nonsensical fears one hears is this one: "Impeaching Bush would give us Cheney, who is worse." 

By proposing to impeach Cheney first, we eliminate this fear.

The uproar over the Israel lobby

For the past few weeks a sometimes comic debate has been simmering in the American press, focused on the question of whether there is an Israeli lobby and, if so, just how powerful it is.

I would have thought that to ask whether there's an Israeli lobby here is a bit like asking whether there's a Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor or a White House located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. The late Steve Smith, brother-in-law of Teddy Kennedy, and a powerful figure in the Democratic Party for several decades, liked to tell the story of how a group of four Jewish businessmen got together $2 million in cash and gave it to Harry Truman when he was in desperate need of money during his presidential campaign in 1948. Truman went on to become president and to express his gratitude to his Zionist backers.

Republicans wake a sleeping giant

AUSTIN, Texas -- Dec. 16, 2005, is a day that will live in infamy in the Hall of Fame of Unintended Republican Consequences.

A bunch of the guys were just noodling around in the House of Representatives in Washington, see, kind of fooling around with the idea that they might get some traction out of immigration as a hot-button issue. The old hot buttons have kind of cooled off here lately, with people up in arms about Iraq, oil, health insurance and all this other stuff that makes the boys say, "Who me?" Where's a good divisive social issue when you need one? They weren't that far wrong -- some variation on the race card usually works.

Trouble is, they played the card, tried to make every illegal worker in the country a felon and woke up the Sleeping Brown Giant, instead.

Eyes Wide Open Exhibit

Your help is needed to bring a dynamic exhibit on the human cost of war to Columbus, Ohio June 12-14. The American Friends Service Committee exhibit: "Eyes Wide Open: The Human Cost of War" will open at 11:00 AM, Monday, June 12, on the West Lawn of the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio (High Street between Broad and State) and remain in place through Wednesday, June 14. The Episcopal Peace Fellowship is bringing the exhibit to coincide with the national General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the USA. We need additional contributions from individuals and groups: $10 from 600 people, or $100 from 60 groups, or a combination! All contributions will be used for the exhibit.

The exhibit features:
• A panel display memorializing the civilian Iraqis killed in the war.
• A field of empty combat boots symbolizing the more than 2,350 US soldiers who have lost their lives, each pair of boots bearing the name of a fallen soldier.
• An interlocked field of shoes and sandals representing Iraqi children, women, and men who have died.

Springsteen and Young: music of a once and future democracy

Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young have just released a pair of incredible albums of protest, one a bone-rattling revival of the best of rebel music of ages past, the other an impassioned attack on our present slide toward fascism.  A hundred years from now, if the human race has survived, when a future Springsteen records a future "Seeger Sessions" it will be bound to include the music of Young's "Living With War."  Also by that time, Young's instant classic, "Let's Impeach the President," will have been translated, as any national anthem should, into a variety of languages, some or all of them, no doubt, destined to be deemed inappropriate by future proponents of the worst of the past.

Carol Fisher found guilty

Carol Fisher was found guilty today of two counts of felonious assault of two 200 + pound Cleveland Heights policemen (who, collectively, can bench 700#’s) and whose testimony contained serious contradictions.  None of the other witnesses provided by the prosecution actually saw “the assault.”  Their claims had more to do with Carol’s perceived lack respect for authority.  The jury deliberated for more than 8 hours over two days before announcing the verdict. 

Former prosecutor Judge McGinty, who was supposedly “randomly” assigned to Carol’s case, is known to be “police-friendly,” a fact that was painfully obvious to observers.  McGinty ruled out key pieces of evidence as “not relevant” to the case, denying the jury the opportunity (obligation?) of hearing them.  The fact that virtually everyone in Cleveland Heights can relate “horror stories” about the Cleveland Heights police was not to be known by the jury of individuals born and raised in Northeast Ohio, but not in Cleveland Heights.   As the court transcript will show, McGinty showed clear bias toward the prosecution.

The Bush administration and Wall Street – Two peas in a pod

George W. Bush likes to portray himself as a down-home Texan, the kind of guy you’d love to barbecue steaks or hunt with on the weekend. As most people know, Bush is in fact a child of Eastern establishment privilege, weaned in suburban Connecticut and the coast of Maine, grandson of a Wall Street partner and great-grandson of a brokerage house founder.

There’s no crime in being born rich. But the dichotomy between W.’s public persona and his family background has beclouded more dangerous parallels between the way his administration and Wall Street function on a daily basis.

Stock-market people often disagree on which way the economy is going. Bulls and bears are always in evidence, and an ironclad rule on the street is that if sentiment has shifted too strongly in one direction, the market will go the opposite way every time. There’s even a culture clash on Wall Street, between blueblood firms that specialize in investment banking and trading firms populated by blue-collar types. It’s not a monolith down there in the Canyon of Heroes.

Remarks prepared for Annual Free Press Awards Dinner

Native American Indian Center of Central Ohio
Sunday, April 30, 2006

Pachtama?waas ahhki Anishinabeok.

In the tongue of my Grandma's people, Mohican: "The Great Spirit blesses the land where we, the people, live."

God bless America!

Pachtama'waas ahhki Anishinabeok.

This is Goats in Prison, Volume 1 of the Free Press archives project.

I?m dedicating this never-ending quest to my aunt and uncle Bernice and Arvid Miller from the Mohican Nation Library in Wisconsin. Some of you may remember Arvid from the last page of Custer Died for Your Sins. He helped found the National Congress of American Indians, the United Nations of tribal governments. After he died, their cabin caught fire and all the young people, who never seemed to care much before, formed a bucket brigade and saved their library. Bernice was my Daddy?s childhood friend, and best, along with Bill Coleman, Chief Buffalo from the Aleut Scouts, first American to contact Japanese ground forces. When Aunt Bernice retired the Tribe hired twelve people to do her jobs and now she?s passed leaving over 220 direct Mohican descendents.

Social insecurity: the economic crisis ahead

Millions of Americans are deeply worried about their economic futures. The signs of the economic crisis ahead are literally everywhere, if one bothers to look at the statistical evidence.

The first, and most important indicator, is the unprecedented concentration of wealth within American society. According to USA Today columnist Yolanda Young, in 1970 the bottom one-third of all U.S. households (today, about 96 million people) “earned 10 times that of the top one percent” of all households. By 2004, the upper 1 percent “made as much as the bottom third of Americans.”

The vast destruction of millions of manufacturing jobs and out-sourcing of U.S. businesses have pushed growing millions of black, brown and working-class whites into what can be described as “the fringe economy.” Over half of all Americans, according to Young, now “live from paycheck to paycheck.”

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