Boing Boing: Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America:

Now that habeas corpus and other basic rights, including the right not to be tortured while interrogated, have now been deemed unnecessary, more Americans than ever have been thinking of getting out the door while they still can. Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America (Process Books, January 2007) provides an informed consideration for all potential expats: where to go, how to get there, and how to live best outside the U.S.

I’m not seriously thinking of leaving; with or without such a book, that seems monumental. But it has crossed my mind. Maybe what we need is a new New World … Nah, we never learn from our mistakes.

via All That Arises

What we remember
is cold, afraid to leave the bed
while the room is ticking over
like an engine shivering
in thin and blue-black air.

What we remember
is hungry, reading
the morning paper,
waiting to be lifted
by coffee out of death.
And maybe there is bread.

The crows have slept
all night on the crossarm
between the milkglass knobs
in love with nothing.

What we remember
is waiting – a dog
with one blue eye,
in the frigid morning,
cotton stalks looped
with ice, and no wind.

What we remember
is praying, sleepless
all night in the kitchen
chair, drawing worries
with her fingers in
the fine spilt salt.

The crows are finally
awake and gone. The field
is rising from its fog.

Kyle Kimberlin
10.17.2006

Well all I can say is,it’s about time. And we can only hope it won’t be long before American cities get behind our progressive cousins to the north, and finally attend to this matter. It chafes at our national conscience too.

MSNBC.com :

[to Bush] “And yet you can actually claim that you and you alone can protect us from terrorism?

You can’t even recover our dead from the battlefield—the battlefield in an American city—when we’ve given you five years and unlimited funds to do so!

…

Setting aside the fact that your government has done nothing else for those five years but pat yourselves on the back about terror, while waging pointless war on the wrong enemy in Iraq, and waging war on the cherished freedoms in America;

Just on this subject of counter-terrorism, sir, yours is the least competent government, in time of crisis, in this country’s history! “

Therefore, tonight, have we truly become, the inheritors of our American legacy.

For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:

A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.

–Keith Olbermann

a few nights ago, and a piece of it just resurfaced, as I was plugging my flash drive into the desktop.

All I remember of the dream is that I was pulling laundry from the washing machine and stuffing it into the dryer. And when I got the last of it out, my flash drive was in the washer, presumably destroyed. It would be bad for it, don’t you think?

It proves two things: that I’m too hung up on my stuff, and that Halloween is less than two weeks away.

Boo.

still has game. He was a very fine poet already, back in 1983, when my friend Mark and I went to hear him read in the student union at Chico State. And here, Garrison Keilor reads a poem from Snyder’s new book.  And proves the Zen poet – at age 76 – is still fine as frog’s fur.

Bush Aide Sees a Parallel Between Vietnam and Iraq – New York Times: “WASHINGTON, Oct. 19 — President Bush’s chief spokesman conceded today that the latest carnage in Iraq was somewhat reminiscent of the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, which helped to turn public opinion against the war in Southeast Asia. But he said the president still envisioned victory in Iraq.”

I wonder when we’re going to start seeing parallels with the last Korean War.

Dozens Of Iraqis Killed in Reprisals – washingtonpost.com:

“BAGHDAD, Oct. 15 — Militias allied with Iraq’s Shiite-led government roamed roads north of Baghdad, seeking out and attacking Sunni Arab targets Sunday, police and hospital officials said. The violence raised to at least 80 the number of people killed in retaliatory strikes between a Shiite city and a Sunni town separated only by the Tigris River.

The wave of killings around the Shiite city of Balad was the bloodiest in a surge of violence that has claimed at least 110 lives in Iraq since Saturday. The victims included 12 people who were killed in coordinated suicide bombings in the strategic northern oil city of Kirkuk.”

And Bush and Rummie still won’t call it a civil war.

Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.
      -Lewis H. Lapham

I haven’t blogged for a few days. I’ve been woolgathering . Has to be done. And I’ve been feeling a bit burned out and awash in all the crap that’s been going down. Sensory overload, you know? Three school shootings in less than that many weeks. How can anyone be so crazy as to be willing to shoot children, and still be sane enough to drive to a school? I guess I don’t understand insanity, not being a sputtering nutjob myself. But it seems like if you were that frijoles en la cabeza, you wouldn’t be able to tell a road from a wombat, a car from a crookneck squash.

Tonight I’m watching Tim Russert interview Bob Woodward , about the latter’s new book . He’s pointing out that Rumsfeld knew, in the fall of 2003, that there were a thousand attacks a month by the insurgency in Iraq. Rumsfeld ordered the report buried, because he was in denial. Now the country is in all out civil war, and we have lost the battle for the hearts and minds of Iraq. In terms of every excuse – including establishment of democracy – that the Bush administration has given at various times for bringing this hell on that country, America has lost the war altogether.

So, chaos over there and chaos over here, and the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense are asleep in their comfy beds. I guess I’ll tuck in too.