Do you know where I was when the Wal-Mart opened at 5 a.m. this morning for the early shoppers?

I was sound asleep is where I was. And I was sawing logs at 4 a.m. when the other stores opened to cater to the, well, lunatics who get up that early to go shopping.

Shopping.

Shopping is what you do an inch ahead of starving, when the bell bottoms finally fray apart, when there is simply nothing else to do at all. But to get up before the roosters to go shopping?? This is not what healthy people do.

Shopping before sunrise? I don’t think so. Once, only on assignment, I visited the stores in the pre-holiday wee hours to see exactly what motivated people to get up and out before the sun. Mostly they were there because they were nuts. There was nothing at 5 a.m. that wouldn’t be available at 11 a.m. but they were caught up in the frenzy of other bent noodles who had left the warm beds for the cold aisles. Amazing.

Unless you are buying something for me-me-me there is no need whatever to get up so astoishingly early to commit an act of shopping.

Go back to bed, people.

Well, I didn’t get rich but I had a great time.

Being in a reminiscent mood, writing about annoying Burmese junta terrorists in the last blog item, I fall to woolgathering over the 1967 Red Sox — also with a Southeast Asian flavor.

With so many marking the 40th anniversary of the Impossible Dream season of 1967, I recall my own hijinks back then.

I was in the Army doing my part to lose the big war going on over in Southeast Asia. The Red Sox campaign of 1967 was so astonishing, coming as it did after such a dismal performance in the preceding years. The baseball world could hardly believe its eyes. Sitting on exactly the other side of the world it was hard to have a handle on exactly what an amazing thing was happening but it was exciting no matter where you were.

I was doing time in a small upcountry Army unit in the middle of nowhere but near to a huge Air Force base. My military colleagues were from everywhere and had various baseball allegiances. I was the only Boston fan around. But there were guys there who were from Detroit and those who rooted, strangely, for Minnesota. Baseball rivalries bound us together.

Because of the time difference, the Armed Forces Radio reports on the games — so many of them day games actually played most often when we were sound asleep — were delayed until the afternoon. We would get up and debate the merits of our teams, argue, dispute. And bet. Then, in the afternoon, we’d hear the games or the sporting news. There was no internet, no personal radios and the like up there.

Here’s what I did, on your tax dollars. I would wake up at 3 a.m. or so. I would scrounge a Jeep or a bicycle and drive over to the Air Force base where I knew some people who were Red Sox fans and we would listen to the games on their gigantic radios. I would then pedal or drive back to my “hootch” and get an hour or so’s sleep.

At breakfast time, I’d saunter into the mess tent and engage in the day’s baseball banter. And I would make bets on the games — knowing the results in advance. I made a killing. If the Red Sox won, I’d win. If they lost, I’d win. Of course, I had to be careful and not win every bet and tip the hand — even to those dense sorts who root for midwest treams — that I had some inside info.

So I made silly bets. I would say, “I think that Yaz will hit six home runs today!” “I think the Tribe will score 22 runs.” Of course, people made bets against me and I would be the talk of the Army town for my wild predictions.

I lost on Yaz and I lost on the 22 runs and everyone had a good laugh at my expense, while not noticing that while I was losing small amounts on those bets I was winning larger amounts on game bets made more quietly, at their expense. 

I didn’t get a lot of sleep in those exciting baseball days and wouldn’t you know that the war got in the way of my scam? They actually expected me to do some work for a living, if you call that living, and the season finally ended leaving me little else to do but be a soldier. Talk about unfair!

But while the hoary adminition was to, “make hay while the sun shineth,” I made mine while other were hitting the hay and the sun shineth-not. If our war policies had been as clever we’d have won the thing.

“I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”So George W. Bush solemnly swore. Twice.Looking for high crimes  and misdemeanors to impeach the man, that would be a good place to start. Anyone who works so vigorously and unrelentingly to dismantle the liberties and protections of the Constitution of the United States is no friend of America.

When others do much the same they are outlawed and hunted down for the peril they raise for the principles and things we stand for. Before, they would be called terrorists and enemies of the American people.

Now such people and their enablers hold high office and positions of power on the rightwing media. There is a distinction somewhere between them and others who despise our liberties but I don’t get it.

 George W. Bush might have a loophole in the “best of my ability” clause but he has been mighty efficient otherwise in violating the spirit and letter of that oath of office. And the price is paid in blood and sorrow.

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I’ll be interviewed by Brian Greenberg for Greenberg News, which airs throughout the Philadelphia region and surrounding states via 1360-AM each Thursday, 5 p.m. Eastern, and also to a worldwide audience on the Internet.  I’m down to be on at 5:45 p.m.

Also, you can hear my interview with Faith Middleton on NPR: It starts about 8 minutes in.

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They’re at it again. The supermarket madmen are on the loose once more.

Every six months or so the moguls at the market decide to change things. Seeing through their eyes in the ceiling that the customers are content and pleased to discover the aspirin is near to the bandages and that the milk is close to the cream, they change everything around.

Now no longer are the pretzles near the potato chips but they have been moved to the soup aisle. Why? Shut up.

It is said that supermarket shelves are the result of the most careful science and planning, that popular items are at eye-level, that there is a plan. It is a lie. They change it only to drive us crazy.

Why are the brussels sprouts and french fries and english muffins not together in the “international food” aisle? Because that would make sense. Why is the apple sauce apart from the apples and the pineapples? Because that’s what they want to do and, not to worry, it’ll change in a few weeks anyway. There is a special supermarket task force in place to hide things and the change their resting place once the chump customers get comfortable knowing where to turn for the tin foil.

My Walbaum’s is in its annual upheavel. Nothing is where it was yesterday. There is no logic to the change — the oranges migrate to the west, the donuts roll away to the north. Shoe polish somehow finds itself with the lightbulbs while sugar and spice and everything nice is mixed in with snips and snails and puppydog tails.

And at the end of it, what do you have? You have totally befuddled customers and smirky stock clerks alone on the planet earth knowing where anything is.

Power, that’s what men dream of.

Struck by the obvious parallels in lies and blunders and manipulations and anti-American spirit of the American leaderships’ mirror image wars in Vietnam and Iraq, who’d have imagined that there was such an earlier parallel to absorb?

An earlier royalist, anti-people, anti-liberty, anti-Democracy, fervent enemy of all the freedoms and noble liberties that America would come to stand for, another George — George III, that time — laid out the gameplan for disaster with his approach to the “mess” in America during the revolution. It sounds like the game book that his heir apparent in monarchy is following even now.

You can read about it in the Times in a neat piece by Michael Rose. Hopefully something as “positive” will follow for America as George II Bush’s mad war dismantles — at the horrid cost of our children’s lives. The surer hope is that because of the laws and freedoms the revolutionaries established and which are now so despised by Bush & Co. we will soon enough be rid of these un-American Republicans and can have hope that the country will heal and move on.

The sooner the better.

The Internet sets us to soaring — when it works. When the blog world locks up, it’s like being frozen in amber: dead for all the world to see.

But with the web-masterful hand of my dear son at the e-helm, the thing has finally been chopped loose like one of Al Gore’s ice blocks calving off the Antarctic.

It is a frustrating and lonely thing not being able to push open the door to jabbering away with the ease that the blog world allows us. But I’m back (and the Red Sox actually held on to win 7-5.) We had to start over again entirely so forgive me while I try to master again the tricks of this lovely trade.

There was so much going on in recent days, so much of which was more of the dismal same at the hands of the Bush administration and its fellow anti-freedom corps in Moscow and Beijing and elsewhere.

China is trying to kill us. Not swamp our economy or destroy our hated liberties but to poison us, to kill our pets, to make our toothpaste venomous, our medicines fatal. They’re trying to kill us, pure and simple. Their mirror image Stalinist-Tsar Vladimir Putin — whom George Bush got all gooey about, looking into his soul (!!!) and loving what he saw, the dope – dares to criticize America on the war and liberties front in order to dfefend the great evil Stalin from criticism. Oh, yes. Bush is a great soul reader.

 If you were at all wondering what difference it makes who’s president imagine the Supreme Court after yet another term of reactionaries in the White House appointing even more of the knuckle-draggers such as dominate the court now on behalf of the Rich and the Powerful against mere people. This gang actually comes out for racism! Using racial numbers to repair racial problems is a crime in their eyes. The idea that you can’t use race to repair racial offenses is like saying the police can’t use guns because the criminals use guns. 

 The demonic Anton Scalia compares the breezy withholding of American freedoms to what goes on in TV shows — something of the opposite of the pathetic warmonger, Joe Lieberman, who is so stylistically opposed to violence on TV but loves it when it’s real — real when someone else gets to carry out his bloody agenda in the Middle East anyway where his interests trump America’s.

Speaking of the Mideast, pity the lamentable Tony Blair who was once a sterling citizen until he fell under the sway of Svengali Cheney and his ilk. Now Blair will work for peace in the Middle East. Does anyone anywhere believe that there ever can be peace there? I don’t. For generations, centuries, millenia these people have fought one another with a ferocity unseen anywhere else on the planet — except maybe the Balkans. They kill one another with a glee that is perfectly inhuman.

 We knocked off Saddam only to discover that it is a whole country of Saddams — there being plenty of people always to torture and maim and kill the innocent. Just as in Germany or Russia or China there is never a shortage of people to run the death camps, the torture centers, to blow up the blameless at their prayers. And we die by the thousands on their behalf.

 No, there never will be peace there because they do not want peace there. No one does. Forever, great diplomats have sailed to the Middle East and come back empty-handed or with chimeral accomplishments which last an hour or two. Ralph Bunche. The old monster Henry Kissinger. Anwar Sadat. Menachem Begin. Bill Clinton, It never works. Never. Good luck, Tony Blair.

 So the surge goes on, more of our kids dying to cover up the madness of the Bush-Lieberman-Cheney Axis and the cowardice of the Congress. And, like Bush, there are candidates who claim that they hear America say it doesn’t like the way the war is going — so they would give us even more.

More death.

More of the same.

Please bear with us as we try to resurrect DenisHorgan.com.

We’ve switched to WordPress after being abandoned and left for dead by Blogger – thus the temporary new look. We’ll have to re-learn some things, but hopefully Denis Horgan will be back blogging by this evening when he returns from the Red Sox/Devil Rays game.

(it’s 7-1 Sox now – maybe he’ll get out of the there early!)

In the meantime, how many passes do you count?

dhjr

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“Equal justice under law,” it says over the highest court in the land.

“Equal justice” my foot.

The Bush people despise our institutions of liberty, democracy, fairness, the law. In this, they are indistinguishable from the terrorists who also hate our institutions of liberty, democracy, fairness, the law.

If there are a half-million legitimate terrorists suspects in the country then maybe we should take a hard look at their cause: If there are that many, maybe they’re on to something.

Much more likely, there are not at all 509,000 legitimate terror suspects here. More likely, it is your government at its maniacal work. The reason that conservatives and liberals alike fear Big Government and Big Police State Activities is that it runs entirely on its own – and runs amok.

ABC News reports and no one denies that the central government has some 509,000 people on its lists of terrorist suspects and that the list is growing growing growing. Imagining that even the best law enforcement agencies would miss quite a few, the suggestion is that there are millions of terror people here.

Or, far more to the point, that the FBI and federal snoopers are over-reaching once more. And the reports that the FBI is overreaching even its horizon-to-horizon power to watch how we sleep at night are terrifying aplenty. It is a sad business when the presumption, nearly automatic, is that the government is doing the wrong thing. But when you get lists after lists including just about everyone the government doesn’t like why would you assume differently?

The fact that the lists are full of errors and duplications doesn’t minimize the lists but makes them all the more suspicious. The further fact that critics of policy are lumped in with bombers and assassins make the whole game a menace.

Are you on the list?

No?

Are you sure?

Why would you be?