ABC apologizes. Dean says "Thanks for nothing, jerks!"
ABC & Diane Sawyer finally admit that not only was Dean's scream taken out of context when they played it a billion times last month, but it was also played without the benefit of the deafening roar of 3500 people in the room with Dean at the same time. Could it be that he was actually trying to talk loud enough just so he could be heard?

No, of course not. Dean's a dangerous loon who can't be trusted with our national security. Who knows what that nut job might do? He might, oh, I dunno, INVADE A COUNTRY FOR NO GOOD REASON.

Yeah, right.

Bloodline
Did you know that John Hinckley Sr., the father of the man who shot Reagan within a month of the Gipper's inauguration, was one of the biggest contributors to George H.W. Bush's first presidential campaign back in 1980?

Bush lost the G.O.P. nomination that year, of course, to Reagan and was forced to sign on as Reagan's V.P. Bush was the establishment candidate and many thought that Reagan's excessively partisan stances made him unelectable.



Sound familiar?

Now, why no one seems to want to report this, who can say. But I have recently found myself wondering "how does a former director of the CIA become the President of the United States"? What campaign, especially in the post-Watergate era, was he expecting to run on?

Anyway, Kevin Phillips was a former Nixon staffer who, surprisingly, has nothing but contempt for his old boss's hand-picked spy chief and his son, our current Chief Executive. Here, in this scathing book, he scrutinizes a laundry list of Bush family atrocities, dating all the way back to the 2nd World War.

Black Power Quote of the Day


"I wrote it as a training manual so that people would do it right."


- Sam Greenlee, referring to his novel, The Spook Who Sat By The Door, in which the first Black man trained as a C.I.A. field operative returns to his native Chicago to train street gangs to become the basis of an underground armed insurgency against the U.S. government.

After years of languishing in bootleg Hell, the film version of the book, directed by Ivan Dixon (whom you may recognize as the brother in "Hogan's Heroes") is now being released as a DVD by Tim Reid's Obsidian Home Entertainment.

Many of you may only remember Tim as Venus Flytrap from "WKRP in Cinncinati", or as Frank in "Frank's Place", but ever since the cancellation of that great show, the brother has been working tireless to build an infrastructure to support thoughtful and original black films. Not only has he stepped behind the camera to direct the films Asunder and Once Upon A Time.... When We Were Colored, but he's also been trying to construct a studio lot in Northern Virgina as an economic development project.

Dixon, who is now enjoying a quiet retirement in Hawaii, also directed the Blaxploitation classic "Trouble Man".

But, in a bit of sad irony, the actor who played the epymonious "Spook", Lawrence Cook, just died on December 27th, 2003, exactly one month before the DVD release of this film.

We'll miss you, brother.


For those of you who've never seen this movie or read this book, I cannot stress enough what a powerful effect it had on me. I saw it for the first time as an undergrad, where it was buried in a nearly forgotten video library in Princeton's late and lamented Third World Center. At the time, the Rodney King verdict and the L.A. riots were still very fresh memories. Hip-hop had yet to turn into the bling-bling pablum pop crap that it's devolved into today. Most of what we were listening to in college hovered somewhere between the consciousness of Digable Planets & A Tribe Called Quest and the absolute unbridled anger of Ice Cube, Onyx, & occasionally Paris. Malcolm X had just come out in theatres. EVERYBODY had some article of clothing with a Kinte pattern.

It's only now, with the decade of hindsight, that I see the early '90's for what it was - a minor rebirth of Black Power among the Talented 10th.

For a bunch of overly educated Black 19-year-olds living literally in the belly of the white establishment beast, the idea of an armed rebellion was more than plausible.

It was intoxicating.

Which only makes me sadder to realize how much of a fad that really was. Three years later, instead of red, black, and green, Black college students all around the country had discovered Tommy Hilfiger, Polo, and the red, white, and blue. The 5% wisdom of the Wu-Tang Clan loses to Puffy Daddy at the Grammys.

And the world has been poorer since.

Somewhere, I think we decided that cash=justice. But I think we've skipped a step in between, where cash must transform into power before justice can roll down like a mighty stream. Folks like Greenlee and Huey and Stokely got the power=justice part, but they also missed the point. Sure, there's power in a shotgun, but the establishment will almost always have better firepower. Something tells me that the real answer lies somewhere between Rockafella and the Black Panthers.....

Vote in The Invisible Primary
It's amazing what you can learn when you start actively participating in a political campaign.

The term "invisible primary" is used among pundits and politicos to describe the chase by political candidates to raise money for their campaigns. The conventional wisdom, of course, has always been that the candidate with the most money almost always wins the party nomination.

Of course, up until this year, I suspect that only a small number of average citizens actually give money to candidates, and, even then, only the extremely wealthy or active, who usually end up maxing out at the $2000 limit.

Of course, Howard Dean has changed alot of that by being the first candidate to really take off from small contributions from a ton of individual donors. Dean's raised roughly $40 million dollars, where the average contribution is something like $80 per person. Part of why this has happened is that he's inspired such a passionate following among the rank & file. The other part is that they've taken advantage of the internet to make it exceedingly easy for anyone with a credit card to contribute to the political process.

And Amazon.com has never met an internet business model they didn't like.

Which is why Amazon is now providing a page where anyone can make any contribution up to $200 for anyone of ALL the registered Presidential candidates. Yes, now, even the crazed Lyndon Larouche supporters can get in on the act.

Needless to say, you all know where I stand on the issue, but far be it from us here at Macroscope to stifle dissent. So, for anyone who's not ready to commit troops and treasure to Dean's crusade here, use the link above to find and support the candidate of your choice. I'd rather that everybody was actively supporting someone than sitting back, just waiting for the 2nd Tuesday in November before they start to think about the future of this country.

Misinterpreted Quote of the Week

[crowd response from 3,500 campaign volunteers, some from as far away as Tokyo, in bold]

"Well, you guys, you have already got the picture here. I was about to say, you know, I'm sure there are some disappointed people here. You know what? You know something? You know something? If you had told us one year ago that we were gonna come in third in Iowa, we would have given anything for that. And you know something? You know something? Not only are we going to New Hamphire, Tom Harkin, we're going to South Carolina, and Oklahoma, and Arizona, and North Dakota, and New Mexico! We're going to California, and Texas, and New York! And then we're going to South Dakota, and Oregon, and Washington, and Michigan! And then we're going to Washington D.C. to take back the White House!

Yeah!!!!

YEEEAAAHHHH!!!!

We will not give up!

Yeah!

We will not give up in New Hampshire!
We will not give up in South Carolina!
We will not give up in Arizona!
Yeah!
Or New Mexico!
Yeah!
Oklahoma!
Yeah!
North Dakota!
Yeah!
Delaware!
Yeah!
Pennsylvania!
Yeah!
Ohio!
Yeah!
Michigan!
Yeah!

We will not quit now or ever! We want our country back for ordinary Americans.

Yeah!!!


I.... and we're gonna .... win in Massachussetts!
And North Carolina!
And Missouri!
And Arkansas!
Yeah!
And Conneticutt!
Yeah!
And New York!
Yeah!
And Ohio!
Yeah!

Let me.... let me... let me.... Wait a minute, wait a minute, waaait a minute. There are some polite things we need to do here. And the first is to thank some people......"

- The entire text of the speech Howard Dean gave to his disgruntled supporters following his third place finish in the Iowa Caucuses last week.

Of course, my transcript can't actually do it justice. If you actually watch the video in the link above, you'll see that it was not a concession, but more like the St. Crispin's Day speech in Shakespeare's Henry V (e.g. "Once more into the breech, dear friends!!!!")

And, consider this: Dean's charm offensive Thursday night, with the help of David Letterman, Diane Sawyer, and especially his wife, Miss Crushed Cupcakes herself, Dr. Judith Steinberg Dean, has brought him back within the margin of error in polls relative to John "Vote for Me Because I Already Look Like The President" Kerry.

Which brings me to a really personal peeve of mine.

I've made my thoughts on so-called "Electability" known months ago. But let's get at something that seems to be on everybody's mind this week, namely, what exactly constitutes "Presidential" behavior.

Dean has taken alot of heat this week for not looking presidential for giving a loud, rousing speech to his supporters instead of hanging his head and sulking off into the night after his Iowa loss. But Dean stil has tremendous structural advantages over his Democratic opponents. In addition, Dean has the strongest, most compelling message in the entire Democratic field. How can I say that? Well, simply listen to the other candidates: they all SOUND LIKE DEAN. Even the Congressional Democratic response to the State of the Union lifted whole chunks from Dean's standard stump speech.

Dean is already leading the Democratic party, even as he takes the slings and arrows that come from leadership. Because he believes he's right.

With 600,000 people publicly hanging their hopes on Dean, it would have been irresponsible on his part to give a sheepish concession. These people were relying on him. And, whether they know it yet, so is the rest of the country.

Courage. Conviction. Responsibility. Leadership.

Those sound like Presidential qualities to me.

So, to those who're really big on pomp, circumstance, appearances, ceremonies, facades, and pretense - go ahead and vote for Kerry. Bush will thank you in the end.

But if you just want the country to work, vote for Dean.

So, while I'm waxing nostalgic about Shakespeare, let me simply quote Kenneth Branagh from Dean Again, the film he made after his own version of Henry V:

"This is all faaaaar from over............."

Five Years Late
When I was in elementary school, I had a Space: 1999 lunchbox. For those of you who aren't up on your '70's sci-fi, the premise of the show is that the moon is being used as both a scientific, military, & industrial center by the year 1999. Everything is cool until a bunch of toxic waste left on the dark side of the moon blows up and knocks it out of Earth orbit, sending it into deep space and leaving the poor humans stranded on Moonbase Alpha to wander the cosmos forever.

Pretty bleak, I know. And, let's face it, rediculous. Any explosion on the moon's surface strong enough to knock it out of orbit is also likely to turn Moonbase Alpha into a giant-sized garlic press for the people inside. But science fiction has always fibbed just a little bit with the science. Between the refreshingly realistic Eagle landers, Martin Landau as a very un-Kirk-like Commander Koenig, Barry Morse, the original Lt. Gerald from "The Fugitive", as the resident loopy scientist, and a super-hot shape-changing alien babe, the show was waaaay cool.

And, judging by today's announcement, slightly prescient.

I must admit, I have mixed feelings about Bush's announcement of NASA's new goals. I'm a science baby, so anything that can return us to active space exploration gives me a nice warm fuzzy. In addition, a number of scientists suggest that the moon may have vast depositories of the element Helium-3, that I believe some say could be used to actually make cold fusion a reality, thus replacing our need for fossil fuels, eliminating the stranglehold that Saudi Arabia & Co. have on the world economy, and removing virtually all funding resources for Islamic terrorists. The moon could be the next gold rush while simultaneously bringing Mid-East peace.

Of course, the operative term there is "could".

Remember, these are the same people who don't believe in global warming, so their science may be, shall we say, "questionable", if you know what I mean.

And let's get down to brass tacks: who's going to pay for all of this? According to the International Monetary Fund, Bush's fiscal policy will have bankrupted the world economy long before any next generation space vehicle has even had the chance to roll off of an assembly line.

Who knows, maybe we'll just be a global monarchy by then and God-King Jorge Epiphanes the Second will just decree all personal property forfeit in pursuit of the Holy Pilgrimage to the Heavens and above.....

A Full Accounting
Next Tuesday, the day after what is shaping up to be a bloodbath in the Iowa Democratic Caucuses, is the State of the Union Address. Now, while I suspect everything Bush has proposed in the last week, such as making it legal to exploit undocumented workers (and just what do you think that's going to do to your wages & benefits when IBM can hire illegal aliens who'll work for peanuts just as well as the California grape growers?), or going to the Moon (more on THAT later), there are other things that are actually part of his job. You know, little things like promoting the general welfare and ensuring the blessings of liberty. All that jazz.

So, the good folks at www.TomPaine.com have compiled a little score card of what's actually happened since Bush took office, relative to what he's actually talking about. Use at your leisure.

Oh, and, just in case you have some real horror stories on the state of your own personal union, Howard Dean wants to hear them.

"Open For Business" or "How I learned to stop worrying and love Amazons"
I'm sure I've lost count of how many books, authors, movies and other forms of media I've linked to, recommended, or otherwise mentioned here on Macroscope. After all, how can one be a Spaminator without endless sources of information? So I'm sure I've generated more than my fair share of traffic at Amazon.com, intentionally or otherwise.

Well, since it's a new year, I figured, why should I advertise for Amazon for free? With that in mind, Macroscope has officially become an Amazon associate - in other words, everytime you link to a book or whatever at Amazon from Macroscope and actually buy something, The Royal We here get a tiny kickback. Just so you know, I'm highlighting all those Amazon links in previous threads in RED.

Now, would it be completely shameless of me to recommend that, even if you aren't buying a book I'm recommending on Macroscope, to go ahead and use this button

for ALL your Amazon purchasing needs? I'd certainly appreciate the business, just as I'm sure the good folks at Sallie Mae would appreciate it, too.

Please note that this particular post will stay on the main page for the forseeable future, just for your shopping convenience.....