Author: Captain Future

Have fun, enjoy the indictments.  Sit glued to the tube for every morsel about the fall of Bush.

But remember: Bush doesn’t matter.

Congress matters.

While Bush fiddles, and Bush burns, the Republican Congress isn’t slowing down.  It hasn’t seen the light of the burning Bush.  It is busy worshipping down at the Golden Calf bar and grill with oil lobbyists and bankers, Halliburton and other mercenaries.  

DeLay indicted, Dems delighted, and still the hammer pushes through legislation to enrich oil buddies at the expense of the American people, the environment and every child’s future.  

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Two news stories I noticed–each of them also flagged by a prominent southpaw blogger–contribute to a disquieting trend in recent proposals from the Bushcorps White House.

Put together they suggest the possibility of a military dictatorship in the making.

The first was Bush’s own suggestion, made at his press conference Tuesday. It was significant enough for an AP report to lead with it. He was speaking to the concerns of a possible global pandemic if something like the Asian bird flu mutates, which the UN estimated could kill as many as 150 million people worldwide. Bush chose to talk about a new role for the military in such an outbreak.

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August Wilson, one of the great playwrights in American theatre history, died on Sunday. He had been diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer in late summer, and began telling friends that he’d been told to expect only a few months left of life. He died in his home city of Seattle, surrounded by family.

By his example and by his insistent voice, August Wilson did more to bring African American culture into the precincts dominated by ruling class and upper middle class white culture than anyone else in the past 30 years, and more than any other playwright in the 20th century.

And of course he provided wonderful moments of drama, laughter and song for those of us who experienced those plays, mostly as audience in the theatre, but also as readers.

 He worked with the rich rhythms of speech, capturing the cadence of black American talk and infusing it with a magical lyricism. He transformed the emphatic repetitions and insistences of people who had to use every device to be heard into incantations with the power of memory, tragedy and soaring spirit.

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Disaster is opportunity—though it may sound heartless, it is true.  Though it provides an opportunity for progressives to get a potent message across (which will be the subject of my next entry), right now it is the...

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It’s an edgy moment, and there are dangers looming.  The horror of what we’ve just seen in the Katrina zone is still alive.  But sounding alarms is one thing.  Sounding alarmist is another. A popular...

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