Patti Smith is the high priestess of NY Punk. In a world where Avril Lavigne and Christina Aguilera are considered rebellious, thank god Patti can still come around and remind them they’re not. I would love to see these MTV darlings go on TRL and proclaim that, “Jesus died for someone’s sins, but not mine.” That was the opening line of Smith’s iconic 1974 release, Horses. Thirty years on, Patti is using Trampin’ as a sounding board for an American revolution of a different kind.

From the first guitar riff, you know the album is gonna rock. The opening track “Jubilee,” is a bit of a barnyard stomp with Patti in a two tone chant declaring, “We will never fade away /Doves shall multiply /Yet I see hawks circling the sky.” The band underscores Patti’s fading utopian dreams with a psychedelic jam of tight blues and swirling guitars.

In “My Blakean Year,” Patti pays homage to every Beat poet’s hero William Blake. The minimal guitar scratching and deliberate underproduction is brilliant. Patti fades out with the repeating lines, “Embrace all that you fear /For joy shall conquer all despair /In my Blakean year.”

Texas inmate David Ray Harris went to his death with no excuses on June 29.   ``Sir, in honor of a true American hero: Let's roll,'' Harris said when asked if  he had a final statement. By echoing the words of a passenger before he and  others attacked the hijackers of Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, possibly   causing the jet to crash before reaching its intended target in Washington,   Harris apparently wanted to sound heroic.

But Harris was no hero. He was  a cold-blooded killer who also almost caused the execution of Randall Dale  Adams, an innocent Ohioan Harris helped frame for the first of two murders we  know Harris committed at a young age. Only because Adams had good trial  attorneys whose objections to the actions in the kangaroo court that convicted  him and an appeals attorney who exploited those objections to the hilt was  Adams' life saved by the U.S. Supreme Court three days before his scheduled  execution in 1979.

Prosecutors asked that the Ohioan's sentence be  commuted to life in prison rather than face the possibility of retrying Adams,  who had no prior record,

The details and media reaction to missing government record concerning former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and Resident George W. Bush is very important. Sandy Berger made some notes on the efforts of the Clinton Administration and accidentally removed COPIES of some documents on the subject. No original documents are missing and no facts are being hidden from public view by Berger’s actions. Berger screwed-up but there is no cover-up! Bush’s military records have been found to be conveniently and permanently destroyed.

Right Wing Talk Radio, Fox News and Republican politicians have been spinning the Berger incident as some kind of Clinton cover-up. The facts make their arguments bad jokes on the voting public. Taking copies of documents and leaving the originals are not cover-up behavior. The timing of the leak about the Justice Department investigation certainly looks fishy. The 9-11 Investigative Commission report is due to be released this week. Creating a non-issue controversy to distract voters from the failures of the Bush Administration seems to be a standard operating practice for the Bush Republicans.

Amen! Besides the titles you mention, there are a plethora of journal articles and books published circa 2000 that thoroughly outline the almost 10-15 years' previous failed attempts at getting the pipeline built, UNOCAL vs. The Argentineans-who-also-wanted-rights-to-it, recent Afghan history, etc. ... one such is

Taliban : militant Islam, oil, and fundamentalism in Central Asia / Ahmed Rashid. -- New Haven : Yale University Press, c2000.

It has a nice little map near the front of it of the proposed route of the pipes.

Maxey Lynch
Gainesville, FL