Is that the emperor without any clothes?

In this essay from The New York Review of Books, Cheney: The Fatal Touch, Joan Didion manages, through unremitting scholarship, to disrobe our vice-emperor.

Sailing is divine

Sailing is a wonderful way to engage with beauty... of wind, waves, the curve of a sail and a hull, the strain of a line staying true. The boat doesn't move by dominating its surroundings, but through understanding, yielding, respecting. Will and I were lucky enough to go sailing overnight last week with my oldest friend, Bill, on his beautiful ketch Black Pearl.

American Indian/European Fusion

I went to a wonderful concert Monday night, sponsored by Robert Jonas's Empty Bell center, and featuring Vince Redhouse. Vince had been a jazz musician from childhood who, at age 37, embraced his "Indianhood" and began playing the Indian flute. He extended its traditional Dorian scale into a full chromatic scale, and thereby can perform with European instruments in playing classical western music, like Satie and Debussy. He was joined Monday by drums and two electric guitars. The effect is magical and a little haunting as he weaves the sounds of the two cultures into a musical unity that belies our visceral memory of them at war.

Keeping it simple

In a 3/1 salon.com artlcle entitled Impeach Bush,Garrison Keillor suggests "The U.S. Constitution provides a simple ultimate way to hold him to account for war crimes and the failure to attend to the country's defense. Impeach him and let the Senate hear the evidence." Hear, hear.

Saving Our Democracy

Bill Moyers takes on the scandal that is our national government in a Feb. 27 article, Saving Our Democracy on http://alternet.org. As usual, he cuts to the heart of the matter while providing full -- in this case, lurid -- detail. Here are a few conclusions, but you've got to read the article for the stories behind them. They made my hair stand on end.

"It is a Dick Cheney world out there -- a world where politicians and lobbyists hunt together, dine together, drink together, play together, pray together and prey together, all the while carving up the world according to their own interests."

...The recent book, "Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality" and Insecurity, describes how "thirty zipcodes in America have become fabulously wealthy" while "whole urban and rural communities are languishing in unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, growing insecurity, and fear."

...In the words of Al Meyeroff, the Los Angeles attorney who led a
successful class action suit for the workers on Saipan, the people who
now control the U.S. Government today want "a society run by the
powerful, oblivious to the weak, free of any oversight, enjoying a cozy
relationship with government, and thriving on crony capitalism."

... If a player sliding into home plate reached into his pocket and handed the umpire $1000 before he made the call, what would we call that? A bribe. And if a lawyer handed a judge $1000 before he issued a ruling, what do we call that? A bribe. But when a lobbyist or CEO sidles up to a member of Congress at a fundraiser or in a skybox and hands him a check for $1000, what do we call that? A campaign contribution.

...Think about this: Californians could buy back their elected representatives at a cost of about $5 or $6 per California resident. Nationally we could buy back our Congress and the White House with full public financing for about $10 per taxpayer per year. You can check this out on the website Public Campaign.Public funding won't solve all the problems. There's no way to legislate truly immoral people from abusing our trust. But it would go a long way to breaking the link between big donors and public officials and to restoring democracy to the people. Until we offer qualified candidates a different source of funding for their campaigns -- "clean," disinterested, accountable public money -- the selling of America will go on.

Thank you, Bill Moyers.