Happy New Year
Now Playing: Garrison Keller's New Year's Show
With the end of 2006 I'm watching K.T.Tunstall on the local PBS station, my favorite new singer/songwriter artist who bangs on a Gibson Dove like it's a drum as well as playing it like the beautiful guitar it is. Truthfully I cringe a bit when I see her hitting it, the Gibson Dove she was playing costs thousands of dollars. A beautiful singing voice as well an being impishly beautiful and it's one of those pleasures to have discovered her. Good stuff. In music she was the best of the year. Also there was the collaboration between two of my all time favorite jazz artists. Al Jarreau and George Benson came out with their first CD together and it was great. Al Jarreau singing on George Benson's Breezing is classic. The Seals and Croft song was well done and the whole album flows with artistry and a liveliness that neither performer has created in a while. I saw them in their concert tour before the CD came out this year as well and it was simply magic. Al and George seemed to push each other to put out their best effort and I can say that with confidence since earlier in the year I saw George Benson perform by himself. He was great, how could he not be? But put up against the concert with Al Jarreau it seemed flat. Like old friends I hadn't seen in many years it was tear inducing hearing the songs I've sung out loud for many years. We all look older than I remember but the songs remain as fresh and wonderful as the first time I heard each performer.

It wasn't such a good year for the Constitution as the Bush administration continued it's assault against the rule of law in their efforts to find terrorists and other strawmen. Like a bad remake of 1884 the eternal enemy was used as an excuse for curtailed civil liberties and domestic spying on citizens. Joseph Padilla, by all accounts a simple street delinquent was labeled after 9-11 as public enemy/scapegoat number one, an American citizen who was denied each and every possible constitutionally assured right the Constitution and Bill of Rights affords. He was locked up without council, without charge, tortured and treated in ways that would assure any Nazi or Japanese soldier in World War II a place in a war crimes trial. If the methods of his torture could be thought of as less barbaric than those of the Nazi's or Japanese it's only a matter of the intervening years and refinements made in the methods and ways of the torturers. The people of World War Two frequently were mocked for using the excuse of 'we were only following orders' and I wonder these days what the guards and jailers and those patriots who use waterboarding, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and all of the other more 'sophisticated' and 'civilized' methods of torture must be telling themselves about their behavior. Do they wonder if they will someday be held to account for their roles in assisting the cruelty and barbarity condoned and encouraged by the Bush administration? If the President and his functionaries wish to call you or I a Security risk or possibly somebody who may be thinking of planning some act of terrorism against the United States then you can really, by dint of law, become a nonperson. You can vanish and no lawyer, friend or congressman can do anything to help you. Like Joseph Padilla, you can be accused, locked up and held indefinitely. If the New York Times is to believed, Joseph Padilla is now a gibbering mentally unbalanced person. The government lawyers, who deserve their own place in Dante's or anyone else's hell, now argue that the whole thing needs to be kept secret since Mr. Padilla is no longer able to assist in his own defense. Like the officials of Nazi Germany who shed their Nazi uniforms and associations when the allies came these people engaging in these activities do know that they are engaging in unconstitional, internationally outlawed behaviors but will to a man deny any culpability when the worm finally turns on them. Didn't you know it was illegal and a crime against humanity to torture people? The answer will be "I was only following orders."

The trial of Saddam Hussein was a joke. Judges removed because they were not sufficiently hateful toward Hussein, lawyers killed constantly and a total farce most resembling the show trials of the Soviet Union was what we were witness to. A sovereign country invaded by my country. A sovereign country invaded and destroyed on false pretenses for some alleged charges that when they were made I knew were false but the media and other leaders who should have tried to protect us and who should have tried to protect the rule of law were swept up and kept silent. The legal ruler of that country hunted down and put on trial in what was nothing more than a show trial and taken out in the dead of night to be hung by a bunch of thugs who mocked Hussein like the lawless thugs they were and who chanted the name of another thug whose militia kills American soldiers every day. It's a national disgrace to see the values and beliefs of the country further brought down to the gutter. And beside all of that, the people who led us to this ill conceived and badly planned war with an enemy that was not a supporter of terrorists got it all wrong. Because Hussein was a secular dictator, not a religious zealot who wanted anything to do with the terrorists our fight is with. Like Tito in Yugoslavia, Hussein used an iron hand to keep religious rivalries under control and like Tito, without Hussein the whole region fell apart, the groups fighting each other. The countries supporting the terrorists are Iran and Syria. Those are the real enemies and they are still there supporting our enemies. The bombs/ied's blowing americans up in Iraq are made in Iran. So the Bush administration is evil and stupid. A dangerous combination and we're along for the ride they've sent us on.

It's a sad world we have here. The democrats have won the election based on the desire of the American people to end all of this madness. But the Democrats are like the Republicans in that they'll say and do whatever they think we want to hear so that they can get elected and reach power. Once they have that power they will do not do what we elected them to do. The deconstruction of the Constitution will continue under their auspices and the war will continue despite the voice of the people having said loud and clear that they wish it to end. The main job that the Democrats will work feverously toward is keeping themselves in power. That's it. That's what they will work on. I hear the Republicans are talking about 'getting back to the values of Reagan' - and of course what they mean to say is that they need to mouth those platitudes and wave those flags to get elected again. They will continue to serve their masters, those who finance their campaigns and what you or I want them to do is not important except as to fit into a mostly empty photo op to be used during the next campaign. It doesn't look good, the future that is. It never does but somehow it comes along no matter what we do. Hopefully the democrats will heed the voters and successfully curb this President this year. I'm not holding my breath.