The Flea's Knees

I Never Claimed to Be Different

2008-01-08T06:28:00.000-08:00

There's been a bit of a hiatus here on this blog. That's not all that bad. There are some published pieces in an actual wood pulp newspaper below to keep you entertained, or at least give you an idea what I do with the rest of my time.

So, for the moment. I'm going to play around with the layout here. Black is getting a bit garish and lots of people employ this scheme.

Time for something different.

CBGB Owner Grew Up in East Windsor

2007-10-15T05:19:00.000-07:00

From the Windsor-Hights Herald

If you live in the East Windsor/Hightstown area, you may know either the name Hilly Kristal or the New York City nightclub CBGB.

What you may be unlikely to do is make the connection between them.

Mr. Kristal was the owner of that iconic punk rock club in Manhattan’s Bowery section that helped to launch the careers of The Ramones, Patti Smith, The Talking Heads and Blondie, among others. But he spent the majority of his childhood and teenage years living on his father’s chicken farm in the township, according to classmates and a family member.

Mr. Kristal, who died from complications due to lung cancer late last month at age 75, was born in New York, but reportedly moved to the township sometime before his first birthday.

His father was Shamel Kristal, who was a “prominent poultry man” in the area, according to retired township farmer Charles Davison. Shamel Kristal was a one-time president of the Central New Jersey Farmer’s Co-op, he said, and the Kristal Farm still stands on Windsor-Perrineville Road.

But Hillel “Hilly” Kristal, described by many of his former classmates from Hightstown High School, as a polite, nice-looking boy with curly hair, had no aspirations to follow in his father’s footsteps, said his cousin, Milton Herr.
”There was a rebel in him, which is not atypical of kids who grew up on a farm in this area,” said the Rhode Island resident.

”I don’t think he liked farm work very much, so he left home and joined the Marines,” he added.

Mr. Kristal served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War as a member of the honor guard stationed in Washington, his cousin said.
But before that, most of his interest and energy was devoted to music.

The first thing one his former classmates, Betty Conover, said when Mr. Kristal’s name was mentioned last week was, “he played a beautiful violin.” And that seemed to be his defining characteristic when other local residents remembered him.

Indeed, Mr. Kristal began studying violin at a very early age, according to Mr. Herr, and began performing concerts by the age of 9.

All throughout his academic career, music was a priority.

”I played ball with him and rode with him on the school bus,” said another of Mr. Kristal’s former schoolmates, Leon Witherall.

”What I remember most about him was that he was a smart kid, always into music, and always involved in the band or the orchestra,” he added.
Mr. Kristal tried his hand at a musical career, meeting modest success as a singer after he left the township.

But his real talent was as a promoter.

Mr. Kristal spent a number of years in the late 1950s and 1960s as a promoter for the famous Village Vanguard jazz venue in Manhattan, where he’d book such acts as Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
He bought the venue that became CBGB in 1973, and originally planned it to be a place where musicians from his favorite genres would have a place to play in the city.

CBGB is an anagram for Country, Bluegrass and Blues.

But as the 1970s marched onward, the venue became more famous for raucous and unusual punk rock bands, and maintained a reputation for booking new, original and cutting-edge artists until the venue’s doors closed in October of last year.

The eclectic mix of the sometimes loud and sometimes dissonant acts that filled CBGB’s marquee surprised Mr. Kristal’s cousin.

”Hilly was raised in a classical environment,” said Mr. Herr.

”Even though he lived on a farm, classical music permeated everything there. That was what he studied, and that was his training. He’s not the image one might have of someone who owns a club in the Bowery,” he added.
Perhaps it was some of the qualities he absorbed while living in his father’s farm in the township that aided the success of CBGB and allowed him to become famously known as “the good shepherd of a flock of black sheep,” by pop musician Patti Smith.

To Mr. Herr, it was even simpler than that.

”He had a farmer’s son’s way about him always. He was just a laid back nice kind of person,” he said.

Hired Hand in Iraq

2007-10-15T05:17:00.000-07:00

From the Windsor-Hights Herald

ROOSEVELT — Over the past three years, Joe Zahora spent many a Friday afternoon barbecuing poolside before retiring to his room to watch a DVD or a football game. Outside his window, his view was filled with palm and date trees set against the backdrop of azure skies.

But the razor wire, blast walls and men carrying machine guns that he also saw belied this place as an exotic vacation locale.

The longtime Roosevelt resident was in Iraq, not as a soldier or a tourist, but as a hired construction project manager, rebuilding the devastated landscape and infrastructure of that Arab nation after nearly 30 years of war and neglect.

The pools were inside one of Saddam Hussein’s many palaces. Although he said he sometimes worked more than 100 hours a week, he’d usually have Friday afternoons off to relax in one of the former president’s mansions.

His neighborhood was Karadat Miryam in Baghdad inside the Green Zone, an area in the central part of the city cordoned off by coalition forces that once housed the Provisional Authority that governed Iraq before the 2005 elections. The 4-square-mile area is still the center of the international presence in Iraq surrounded by a heavily armed perimeter.

Karadat Miryam is just a few yards away from the Baghdad Zoo, where the infamous Uday Hussein, one of Saddam’s sons, was rumored to feed virgins, and his enemies, to one of the menagerie’s tigers.
”I didn’t feel comfortable walking by myself in that neighborhood,” Mr. Zahora, 54, said in an interview late last month.

Surrounded by the guerrilla aftermath of the U.S. invasion, Mr. Zahora and his crew of construction workers and civil engineers worked to restore power, water, and other necessities to many of Iraq’s cities.

His job was to repair most of the urban damage that resulted not only from the two Gulf Wars and the war between Iraq and its neighbor Iran in the 1980s, but the decades of neglect most of the infrastructure had sustained since Saddam Hussein took power in the late 1970s.
That task, he said, was daunting.

Of the 394 electrical towers that strung power from one municipality to the next, 350 of them, he said, were damaged, destroyed or missing. To make matters more difficult, almost all of his work had to be done remotely from Baghdad. The Iraqis working under him would only go out, he said, disguised as members of the Ministry of Electricity. And even then, their safety in the lawless country was questionable. One of the men who worked for him was killed.

Mr. Zahora, a 21-year resident of the borough, left what he described as a very stressful job in Philadelphia in 2004. He accepted a position with the Washington Group, an international company based in Idaho that provides construction and civil engineering work for governments around the world. The company, which was also instrumental in the effort to dismantle nuclear weapons in the Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was awarded a contract by the U.S. government in 2003 after the Iraqi government dissolved as a result of the invasion.

Some people might call Mr. Zahora’s attempt at relaxation by working in Iraq, folly. But Mr. Zahora saw it as both an adventure and an opportunity for service.

”I had a desire to help Iraq to get back on its feet, and it was an opportunity to put my skills to good use,” he said.

Plus, he added, the money was very attractive.
His family wasn’t happy with his decision.

”The impact on my family was rough,” Mr. Zahora said.

His wife, Diane, 14-year-old son Joseph, and 9-year-old daughter Rebecca eventually came around to supporting his decision, he said. His work schedule — with short spurts of time in Iraq, about 70 days, followed by two weeks leave to visit home — made it easier.
Yet, time apart took its toll.

”I felt like I missed some part of (my children’s) growing up,” said Mr. Zahora.

”My wife had the harder job, despite the fact that I was the one over there,” he added.

Insulated from Baghdad’s violence and poverty on a modular and portable compound surrounded by a U.S. military base, Mr. Zahora rarely left his temporary home.

Still, he’d sometimes hear, or hear about, the explosions that would rip through Baghdad’s streets and markets and then land on the evening news programs of nearly every Western country.

Nonetheless he said, “I never felt I was in any danger.”
”I was on a military base surrounded by 30,000 soldiers, and it wasn’t a significant part of everyday life. Those attacks are random and sectarian; they don’t happen at the same place every day,” he said.

On the few occasions he did leave, his security detail was heavy.

”We’d have Chevy Suburbans in the front and back and a Ford Explorer where we rode in the middle,” he said.
All of the cars were armored, and all of the guards were armed. Attacks by guerrillas or insurgents, Mr. Zahora said, were unlikely.

”The insurgents preferred to shoot at people who didn’t shoot back,” he said.
The first group of mercenaries his company used for security are best described as “cowboys,” by Mr. Zahora.
They’d typically drive very quickly through the city streets and highways, shoot without provocation, and ram their vehicles into any car unfortunate enough to be in their paths, he said.

”I was personally embarrassed by the image we were projecting,” he said.
They were soon fired by Washington Group, and a security company from South Africa took their place. They were far more professional, said Mr. Zahora.
”They drove slowly, always creating a bubble around us for protection,” he said.

When Mr. Zahora first went to Iraq in the summer of 2004, things were relatively calm. Major military operations were deemed complete at the time and the insurgency had yet to reach the boiling point it did about a year-and-a-half later. And even then, Mr. Zahora said the most apparent change in the daily lives of the Iraqis he worked with was one of mood.

”They were optimistic when we first got there. They had hope,” he said.

”Now, a lot of that hope has turned to despair.”

There were also constant reminders that he was indeed inside a war zone.

Bullets would sometimes land on deck patios, the results he believed of shots constantly being fired into the air. And although, the U.S. military controlled Iraq’s airspace, there was still random incoming fire from rockets and mortars shot blindly from somewhere in the Iraqi countryside.

Six months after he arrived, he said, even those stopped.

It was not until the destruction of Samarra’s Golden Mosque in late 2005 that violence began to rise again.

The random aerial bombardments began to increase, almost to 2004 levels, in the early months of this year, he said. That, in his opinion, is what prompted this summer’s troop increase.

A troop increase in excess of 30,000 to the already 150,000-strong force was ordered by President George W. Bush early this year. While Mr. Zahora said he believed the initial invasion “wasn’t supported by any facts,” he does believe the U.S. government is doing the right thing now.

”Everything (Bush) is saying now is backed up by action,” said the contractor, whose time in Iraq and with the Washington Group ended in June.

”The focus of the American effort in Iraq has noticeably given (the Iraqis) the abilities and skills (to govern) themselves,” he added.

Yet, he believes that work is far from finished and a troop withdrawal now would have disastrous consequences.

”I feel strongly that the country would fall into immediate chaos if we left now,” he said.

”There is no strong Iraqi central authority to put them in a position to do anything. (A troop withdrawal) would create a lot of instability, and that instability would spill over the borders into the whole region,” he added.

In the meantime, Mr. Zahora says, life goes on in Iraq much like it has since that region birthed history’s earliest known civilization.

”It’s just people trying to live their everyday lives,” he said.

”It’s not a constant war zone. That stuff is random at different locations everyday,” he added.

The tragedy, he says, is that the Iraq people are caught in the middle of the arbitrary violence that continues to impede Iraq’s transformation into a modern liberal democracy.

”That randomness,” he said, “has taken the Iraqis’ hope away.”

Getting a Good Reid

2007-10-15T04:56:00.000-07:00

From the Windsor-Hights Herald

At 2 a.m., when the sun hasn’t even begun to peak over the horizon near Reid Lamberty’s Long Island home, he’s awake and getting ready to go to work.

By 3:45 a.m. the Hightstown High and Peddie School graduate is in his car and on his way down to Manhattan to prepare for the 5 a.m. broadcast of the WNYW TV morning news program “Good Day Wakeup.”

After proofreading his copy, getting his hair and makeup done, and chit-chatting with his co-anchor, his director counts down from five and Mr. Lamberty’s day anchoring the broadcast kicks off.

It lasts an hour. Then from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. he’s sent out to do some reporting in the field. He gets a quick break and then is back in the anchor’s chair for a half-hour broadcast at 11 a.m. called “FOX 5 Live.”

He’s home to spend some time with his 3-year-old son in the afternoon, and usually retires to bed sometime between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. only then to run the whole schedule again.

It may sound like a moonlighter’s grind, but to the 34-year-old graduate of both area high schools, delivering the news to millions of viewers is the realization of a lifelong dream.
As a 12-year-old in Princeton, when Mr. Lamberty would come home from school or play in the mid-1980s to eat with his family, dinner and television news were always the staple on the menu.

”It was one of our routines, something I grew up with,” he said.

At the time, the seminal news event was the space shuttle Challenger explosion that killed seven astronauts including teacher Christa McAuliffe.
With his eyes glued to the television during the 1980s example of news Zeitgeist, he developed an admiration for “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw. Since that day in 1986, Mr. Lamberty said he studied every detail of the Brokaw broadcasts in order to one day sit in a national news anchor chair of his own.

Fast forward more than 20 years, and Mr. Lamberty is on the right track toward that goal. Mr. Lamberty, who graduated from Hightstown High in 1991 and completed a post-graduate program at Peddie a year later, is now one of the co-anchors for a top-flight morning program at the Fox affiliate in the nation’s No. 1 media market.

It’s a hefty milestone on a journey that began about 10 years ago, after Mr. Lamberty graduated from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He then came back to New Jersey to begin a career in broadcast journalism.

”I’ve been fortunate, blessed really,” he said.

”A lot of people can take a lot of time to get to New York in this profession. I worked hard to get where I am, and I was fortunate enough to have good timing in a business where timing is everything,” he added.

His professional quest began in 1996 at a local television station in Hamilton, WZBN, where he worked 15 months as a field reporter for the half-hour news broadcast “Mercer County Update.”
Fresh out of college, with little television experience except a few broadcasts at his university’s TV station, Mr. Lamberty described his first handful of taped reports as amateurish and green.

”It’s laughable when I look back at those tapes because I was so bad,” he said.
”It’s funny, because I felt comfortable while doing it, but I definitely don’t look comfortable. Now and then is literally black and white,” he added.
He moved on to Dayton, Ohio’s NBC affiliate WKEF-TV in February 1998, making what he called “the natural progression from market to market,” to work as their weekend anchor.

The move was “definitely a major change,” he said, transferring from a station that produced only one show with about five full-time employees to one that had a full broadcast schedule and production staff.

Mr. Lamberty went from cutting a four-minute report to “doing broadcasts at noon, five, six and 11 o’clock,” he said.

”There was a lot more work involved,” he added.

The progression continued as Mr. Lamberty jumped to Boston’s Fox affiliate, WFXT-TV, in 2000. And then in 2003, he landed at the CBS network’s flagship station in New York, Channel 2, to report for its Long Island bureau and anchor two of the weekend newscasts.

Mr. Lamberty realized part of his goal, to work in New York City, but being a centerpiece anchor still eluded him.
Good timing struck him again, since his news director from Boston and his general manager from WCBS now worked at WNYW. Both of them, he said, wanted Mr. Lamberty to come work for them again. When his contract was up at Channel 2 in March, Mr. Lamberty made his move.

”It’s an exciting job,” he said.

”You talk to people, get to tell their stories — it’s never boring. One day you could be covering a political story, the next day it’s a crime, maybe then a feature. Every day it’s brand new,” he added.
Along the way, Mr. Lamberty has had his share of experiences and war stories. He covered the return of the U.S.S. Cole’s crew from Yemen after that ship was bombed in 2000; was right in the middle of the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal while in Boston when the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal broke there; reported from Logan Airport where terrorists hijacked two of the planes involved in the Sept. 11 attacks; and spent 18 hours in Bosnia the next year, covering members of the Massachusetts National Guard stationed on their peacekeeping mission there.

But even surrounded by all the excitement and bustle of being a field reporter, Mr. Lamberty sits firmly and exactly where he wants to be — in the anchor’s chair.

While he enjoys his position at WNYW immensely, one day he’d still like to have his face in front of a national audience. It could be, he says, as an anchor on the Fox News cable network or perhaps on one of the national morning shows like “FOX and Friends” or ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
”I’d like to do one of the morning shows because I’d be sharing part of my personality,” he said.

”There’s definitely a difference between morning news and news at 10 or 11 o’clock. In the morning you still have to be serious, but it’s more laid back. You get to have some fun with it,” he added.

Mr. Lamberty said at the moment, he’s “happy where he is right now.” But at age 34, there are still thousands of feet of videotape left in his career. A morning show may be in his future, but what if one of those three big evening anchor chairs that so enthralled him two decades ago were to come into reach?
”That’s something from fantasy land,” said Mr. Lamberty.

But when pressed, he quickly responded, “I’d take it in a New York minute.”

Media Blitzer

2007-10-06T11:15:00.000-07:00

From the Windsor-Hights Herald...

It was 1975 in New York City.

Dick Cunningham completed his first broadcast as anchor of the ABC radio network’s national news broadcast.

When the red back-lit “on air” sign turned off he thought to himself, “Is this all there is?”

More than 30 years later the Washington Township resident who volunteers as public information officer for the East Windsor Fire Department found out his life and career would amount to much more.

In addition to his duties in the township, Mr. Cunningham, 60, runs his own production company, Broadcast Productions, with his wife, Bernice, from their home in Washington Township.

It sounds like the basement dreams of a hobbyist. But his career took him on what he called a “whirlwind trip into absolute dreamland.”

His resume is impressive, and he delivers his accomplishments in a jackhammer style moving from one seminal pop cultural or historical event to the next. The journey has taken him through Olympic games, side by side with presidents and billionaires, in the midst of a war on a Caribbean island, and annually in the middle of Manhattan’s Times Square for the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve.

And still, he has the time to run media training classes for corporate public relations professionals, shoot file footage for news broadcasts, record voice-overs and co-produce the weekly call-in show “Spotlight East Windsor” on local cable with Mayor Janice Mironov.

How is he able to juggle this intense schedule?

”This is my job and my hobby,” he said.

”It’s what I love,” Mr. Cunningham added.

That enthusiasm was seeded when Mr. Cunningham, a Marlboro, Mass. native, was a small boy listening to WBZ radio in Boston. The invisible voices of personalities such as Carl DeSuze and Gary LaPierre traveling through the air at the speed of light into the young Mr. Cunningham’s home, is what he said inspired him to pursue a career in broadcasting.

His father, he said, wanted him to be trained as an accountant in order to have a backup in case the cut-throat broadcasting world wouldn’t accommodate him.

Still, the magnetic pull of the potential to be heard by thousands of listeners just like him ripped him from his college studies and brought him to the doors of his local radio station, WSRO-AM, every weekend. Eventually, he said, the station’s general manager figured he couldn’t get rid of him, so instead offered him a job.

In subsequent years, Mr. Cunningham made the rounds on the Boston media scene jumping from AM to FM radio and then television as both an anchor and a street reporter in the late 1960s.

Being on the top end of the northeast corridor, New York City, the nation’s No. 1 media market, beckoned. And in the mid-1970s, he made his move to the township to commute to the Big Apple.

In 1975, Mr. Cunningham, at age 29, became the youngest network news anchor ABC radio at the time ever had, he said. But that wasn’t the extent of his tenure in New York.

Mr. Cunningham held down two full-time positions for public relations agencies. He’d run cross-town to read news for WNBC (660 AM at the time) working alongside Charlie McCord and Don Imus.

Mr. Cunningham said he didn’t even give a second thought to straddling both sides of the world of information — reporting and public relations. There was no conflict of interest, he said, because “Once you’re in the newsroom, all bets are off,” he said. Being objective is a must, he added, and reporters in those days held such dual roles all the time.

On the news side, the enthusiastic Mr. Cunningham said the challenge was not so much juggling his hectic multi-station schedule, but handling all the tasks he’d have to perform live on the air. ”You have your left eye on your copy and your right eye on the clock, and you have your left ear on the network feed and your right ear on yourself,” he said.

”The network feed was coming in at 6 o’clock whether you wanted it or not. You have to respect deadlines,” he said.

His same manic manner, he said, served him well on the public relations side.

”In PR I was traveling all over the world and meeting the most fascinating people. I would branch out, be exposed to hundreds of people and things I wouldn’t have experienced in radio,” he said.

As the 1980s burst in, Mr. Cunningham took a risk and decided instead of bringing in information for another company, he’d do it for himself.

That’s where Broadcast Productions was born, a company he describes as willing to videotape anything, “except weddings.” The company shoots video for corporations, educational institutions, television news stations, documentary companies or anyone who was buying.

He shot video of then President-elect Ronald Reagan posing for a medallion to be engraved with his likeness at his Palisades Park, Calif. home, and many of the awards ceremonies at the annual International Film and Television Festival in New York.

One of the most memorable events for him was the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, where he proposed to his wife over the Rocky Mountains on the way there. Broadcast Productions also shot footage of the 1992 games in Barcelona, Spain and the 1996 games in Atlanta.

Donald Trump found his way into Mr. Cunningham’s viewfinder while shooting a piece on the Atlantic City Convention Center in the late 1980s. And Mr. Cunninghanm found himself smack in the middle of the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada when he went out to shoot footage for the Jamaica Tourism Board. After getting footage of Jamaica’s beaches, his crew swung around to Grenada to shoot some of the historic images of that three-week long war.

”We went down there for the Ministry of Information and became war correspondents overnight,” he said.

And every year since 1986, he’s one of the many people shooting the footage of New York’s New Year’s celebration in Times Square for the jumbotron there.

”That was the first year I didn’t kiss my wife for New Year’s Eve,” he said.

”I kissed my cameraman instead,” he added laughing.

His schedule hasn’t slowed down a bit since moving to Washington Township in 1999. He still travels to places like Las Vegas to shoot footage from at the annual Consumer Electronics Expo, or is able to gather scenes for entities like Panasonic or the Mayo Clinic.

The bug for broadcasting has now bitten his son, Paul, who got his start in the late 1980s on WKXW, commonly known as New Jersey 101.5, Mr. Cunningham said his son has his full support while following in his footsteps. But he, “cautioned him about a lot of things in this business.”

”To one producer you can be a hero, and to the next you’re a bum because you didn’t comb your hair right or something,” he added.

The business is securely “all in the family,” said Mr. Cunningham, who has no aspirations to retire.

”I don’t know what I would retire to,” he said.

He adds, “The world of technology (in media production) is really exciting. There’s so much coming down the pipe. It’s too bad I’m 60 now. I wish I were 20 years younger so I could keep doing this for 20 years more.”

Allentown, N.J.

Promise Me You'll Remember

2007-07-30T05:38:00.000-07:00

Many months without blogging means many months of misery? Perhaps.

But there's good news. I'm now writing for a professional publication, and you won't find out what it is here. I came very close to moving to North Dakota, but decided to stay in New Jersey.

That's all. More blogs will come for sure now....

And here is an example of bloggers guilt you see all over the web. "Sorry I haven't written in a while" and so on...

None of that here.

Something Rotten in the State of South Dakota?

2006-12-14T10:44:00.000-08:00

It should be noted that the most important aspect of this story is the health and well being of Senator Tim Johnson. I wish him and his family a quick and speedy recovery. With that said, the second, and glib and cynical, aspect of this story sounds like it comes from a political suspense novel. Our world would indeed be a scary place if truth does imitate fiction.

What should also be noted is that control of the U.S. Senate is uncertain here. Yesterday, the senior Senator from South Dakota Tim Johnson was hospitalized with stroke-like symptoms. As of last night and this morning in Washington, no reporter has been able to get any information about Sen. Johnson’s condition. The only information available is that, according to Johnson’s office, he did not suffer a stroke but is undergoing brain surgery today. The wall of silence speaks volumes about the grim outlook for Johnson and his seat.

If Johnson is unable to serve his term in the 110th Congress, South Dakota’s Republican governor Mike Rounds will appoint his replacement. The South Dakota Constitution makes no requirements for party, and that means Rounds is free to appoint a Republican to the seat. In this situation, it is usually considered proper form for a governor to appoint a replacement that keeps the seat in the party that the people elected. Granted, Johnson won reelection in 2002 by only a margin of 524 votes, but he still won. However, Rounds could easily and legally appoint a Republican to the seat. Given South Dakota’s strong right-wing bias, he could do so with little or no political consequences. Such an appointment would return control of the Senate to the G.O.P.

Currently the Senate of the 110th Congress is split 49-49 with one independent, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, and one Social Democrat, Bernie Sanders. Both Senators plan to caucus with the Democrats and will be counted as such for committee assignments. If Johnson’s seat goes Republican, that split goes 50-48. While the Republicans don’t have a majority in terms of numbers, any tie-breaking vote goes to Vice-President Dick Cheney, effectively giving Republicans control and the ability to set the legislative agenda. Government in Washington goes back to the G.O.P, with the Democrats as the opposition party only in the House.
The stroke was seemingly unexpected, and we have a current Administration that has a history of going to any length to keep their power. Is it a stretch to imagine that someone, somewhere is trying to eliminate Johnson for the purpose of regaining control? Do we really have a clandestine government that will do anything to retain their power and do as they wish? Is it the same people who gave us faulty intelligence about Iraq, outed CIA agent Valerie Plame, and bogged down the election process in Florida, which compelled Al Gore to concede defeat?

The answer to those questions is "highly unlikely." Johnson is one of the centrist, almost rightist, Democrats in the Senate. He sided with the Republicans for the Personal Responsibility Act of 1995 ending traditional "New Deal" era welfare while in the House. He voted to repeal the ban on semiautomatic weapons, and he voted in favor of President Bush’s tax cut bill in 2001. While in the Senate, he voted in favor of giving Bush the authority to invade Iraq, and he voted to confirm Sam Alito to the Supreme Court. He’s no enemy of the Bush Administration, and while not a solid ally, he’s someone they could use in negotiation.

However, Johnson was slated to head the Senate Ethics Committee in January in an era where we could see indictments and punitive action for Republican violations during the past decade. He is the only senator with a child serving in the military and may have been part of the faction determined to limit or freeze the Administrations spending on the Iraq occupation. Does that make him a marked man?

I am not accusing the Bush Administration of acting out the script to a political suspense thriller. I make no assumptions that the above scenarios at which I've surreptitiously hinted are true. However, we do have an Administration that has demonstrated it is willing to ignore the law if it is inconvenient. What a sad state of affairs that such a conspiracy is something for the people of the United States to muse . It's happened elsewhere, and it CAN happen here.

A Bush and his Dog

2006-12-07T13:33:00.001-08:00

If there are any lingering doubts that Tony Blair simply bends to George W. Bush's will, those doubts ought to die with the close of their meeting today in Washington. It might have looked to the world that Blair was starting to thaw about the possibility of having some type of summit on Iraq with both Iran and Syria. However, Bush will never negotiate with either state, at least not in public.
Iran was explicitly named as a member of the "Axis of Evil" in 2002, and Syria is not far behind. The Administration may have been using former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to field test including Syria in that club, just as they might have been field testing changing the name of the "War on Terror" to "World War III." It seems neither test, whether the directive came from the White House or from Gingrich's future presidential exploratory committee, gathered any steam.
Still, Syria is on the Bush II enemy list for sure. Donald Rumsfeld made some not-so-veiled threats to Bashar al-Assad during the actual military portion of the invasion to stop insurgents from entering Iraq via Syria. It was a Reagan-esque tactic to scare the Syrians off by casting the United States in the role of crazy bomb wielder. However, what else can the United States do to make some sort of exit from Iraq? Using Syria as a counterbalance to Iran seems like a solution. Unless anyone has a better idea, like bringing the Swedes and the Swiss in to negotiate peace, why not at least hear what the Iranians and Syrians have to offer?
Bush will have no part of it, just as he would have no part of the 9/11 Commission Report, just as he would have no part of the United Nations, and just as he would have no part of the invasion's critics--many of whom turned out to be right. It's not surprising that Blair won't either after his meeting. Blair has been nothing but a follower in this war, and can't even do a good job of bringing his European Union colleagues or his own government along. My question is this: How on earth did Blair benefit by joining the United States in this invasion? The United States benefited by having at least one powerful European nation on its side and by having one of the world's best trained militaries involved in combat. The United States benefited by having a model by which to follow from one of the world's most experienced occupation forces. How does the United Kingdom benefit?

Is it repaying the favor for the United States' support during World War II and the Cold War? Was it a gigantic miscalculation by Blair? Did he think the invasion would be successful and those who didn't participate would be left out in the future? Did the Bush family find him in a Texas brothel with a dead hooker on the bed and this is his "service" for making that go away? I'd love for history to tell me.

In the Beginning

2006-12-07T10:35:00.000-08:00

God created blogs, and He said they were good.

Only, they were not good. There almost 100 million blogs on the World Wide Web which collectively have an average readership of....one.

To blog or not to blog. I choose the former.

Enjoy!

matt