home / subscribe / donate / about us / books / archives / search / links / feedback / events

Sensational New Print Edition of CounterPunch Amazing Plan Surfaces: "We Need Ethno-Weapons!" David Price tells how top-flight US anthropologists eagerly obeyed US government's mandate to "think in a-moral terms". One scheme of OSS's willing executioners: target Japanese physical "weak spot", the respiratory tract, with anthrax germs. Gabriel Kolko asks What's so New About the Neo-Cons? If they had not existed, would the policies have been the same? Jeffrey St Clair digs up more dirt on Halliburton's secret history. Alexander Cockburn on why we need more "celebrity justice". Get the answers you're looking for in the latest subscriber-only edition of CounterPunch ... CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! Show the New York Times You Don't Believe a Word of It: CounterPunch's New 14 Per Cent Club T-Shirts Call Toll Free 1-800-840-3683 or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558

Now Available! Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY Click Here to Order the Hot New CounterPunch Book by 3-time Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Kathy Kelly! Today's Stories July 9 / 10, 2005 Alexander Cockburn After the Bombings Sheldon Rampton Blaming Galloway: Rhetoric vs. Reality in London Bill Christison Hiroshima's 60th Anniversary and Nukes in Iran: an Opportunity or Just More Hand-wringing from the Peace Movement? Robert Fisk Blair's Alliance with Bush Bombed Behrooz Ghamari Thomas Friedman's Muslim Problem Karl Beitel False Promises and Real Debt Relief Brian Concannon, Jr. Throwing Gasoline on Haiti's Fires Fred Gardner Sentencing Season John Whitlow And What Does the Market Say? Niranjan Ramakrishnan The London Blasts: Who's Being Transformed, Them or Us? Jackie Corr Ted Turner and Jiminy Cricket Dave Lindorff "My Brother Went Over There Gung Ho; Now He's Just Bitter" N. D. Jayaprakash Why the CIA Tried to Kill Chou En Lai at the Bandung Conference Seth Sandronsky Meet the "Truth Tour": Rightwing Radio Hosts Go to Iraq Ben Tripp The Inevitability of George W. Bush Website of the Weekend The Mother of All Enemies Lists   July 8, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts Blowback Hits Britain: Londoners Pay Heavy Price for Blair's Deception Tariq Ali The London Bombings: Why They Happened Monica Benderman One Soldier's Fight to Legalize Morality Rick Jahnkow Beyond Opt-Out: the Counter-Recruitment Movement Christopher Brauchli Dear Vet: If You Want to Eat While You Recuperate, You Gotta Pay Extra Kim Peterson Bombs in the Underground: Terror Begats Terror Joshua Frank Leakers and Liars: Inching Toward Indictments? Norman Solomon Messages from the Carnage Website of the Day An Interview with Ray McGovern   July 7, 2005 Cockburn / St. Clair Judy Miller: the Luckiest Martyr John Walsh More Hawkish Than Bush: Dems in Full Battle Cry Mike Marqusee Message from London Gilad Atzmon London's Burning Nicole Colson Showdown at the Supreme Court Jack Random Judith Miller, Anti-Hero Norman Solomon Judith Miller, Drum Majorette for War Len Colodny Is Bob Woodward Still Protecting Al Haig? Cockburn / St. Clair Judy Miller: the Luckiest Martyr   July 6, 2005 Elaine Cassel Political Necrophilia in Florida: Jeb Bush and Terri Schiavo, a Strange Affair Sean Donahue Why the G8 Debt Relief Plan Won't Help Nicaragua's Poor Jeremy R. Hammond State Sponsors of Terrorism, Applying the US Standard Joshua Frank Will Rove be Indicted? Ali Khan The "Gift" of US Democratization Michael Dickinson Billy Graham's Final Crusade: Blessed are the Warmakers Norman Solomon How to Plunge Deeper into a Quagmire: Withdrawal and US Credibility Dave Zirin Triumph of the Shrill: Tony Blair's Olympiad Gary Leupp Accusing Ahmadinejad Website of the Day Humiliation in Baghdad: "Not Something We Would Do"     July 5, 2005 Behrooz Ghamari What's the Matter with Iran?: How the Reformists Lost the Presidency Elaine Cassel Why This Progressive Will Miss Sandra Day O'Connor Ron Jacobs Robert and Mabel Williams's Great Fight for Justice Bob Libal The Right's Assault on Academia Dr. Peter Rost Mea Culpa from a Big Pharma CEO Mark Engler The Big Debt Deal: Where's the Jubilee? Gideon Levy They Broke the Public's Heart Dave Zirin The Great Olympics Scam Sameer Dossani The Trouble with Gleneagles   July 2 / 4, 2005 Alexander Cockburn "Bomb Teheran!" Urges Jilted Condi? Lenni Brenner Jefferson, God and the Fourth of July Laura Carlsen Zapatista's Red Alert James Petras The Pretensions of Neoliberalism: Six Myths About the Benefits of Foreign Investment William A. Cook Kings of Serpents Brian Cloughley Quagmire of the Vanities Saul Landau The Mass Media, Symbols and Ownership Tom Crumpacker Who Has What to Hide About Luis Posada Carriles? Greg Moses Dylan's America Dr. Susan Block My Adelphia Story: a Tale of Censorship, Fraud, Christian Family Values and Really Lousy Cable Service Fran Shor Disassembling Bush's Iraq War: Liberated into a No Man's Land Fred Gardner Study: Smoking Marijuana Does Not Cause Lung Cancer Moshe Adler The New London Case: Corporate Giveaways That Destroy Communities, But Don't Create Jobs David Model The Downing Street Memo: So What's New? Seth Sandronsky California Spying, Schwarzenegger-Style Ramzy Baroud Managed Democracy in the Middle East Suzan Mazur Frank Carlucci the First: the "Sublime Prince" of Scranton Ben Tripp Voltaire, I Can Dig Your Rap Justin Taylor Faux Biography and the Pleasures of "Lint" Brendan Bailey Mesh Caps, Vice Magazine and the Trouble with Irony Poets' Basement Albert, Engel and Louise Website of the Weekend Radical Reference   July 1, 2005 Christopher Brauchli With Friends Like These: Bush Buddies Karimov and Musharraf Pat Williams What Real Westerners Think About Bush's Pseudo-Cowboy Palaver Gary Leupp Summer Surprise? John Stauber Mad Cow in America: the USDA Continues to Lie John Chuckman The Blessings of Canada Justicia y Paz Colombia's Disappeared: Their Names, At Least! Cockburn / St. Clair It's Put Up or Shut Up for Bush and the Dems on the Supreme Court   June 30, 2005 Kathy Kelly An Open Letter to Carl Levin: Compassion for Iraqis John Stauber Oprah Not the "Only" Mad Cow in America Virginia Rodino All Roads Lead to Baghdad: Unity in the Anti-War Movement Jason Leopold Meet the New Chair of the FERC: James Kelliher, the Man Who Invited Enron to Write Bush's Energy Policy Dave Lindorff What Was Bush Thinking? Greg Moses Racism at Cape Cod Norman Solomon Memo to the Iraq War Joshua Frank Israel's Theocrats Alexander Cockburn The Political Function of PBS   June 29, 2005 Mike Schaefer How the Washington Post Lied About Its Own War Poll Roger Burbach / Paul Cantor Bush's Big Democratic Hoax in Iraq Sharon Smith Democrats Shift into Reverse Sam Husseini A Quick Way to End the Insurgency John Stauber Put a Photo of Mad Cow #2 on a Milk Carton Ahmad Faruqui Is Militarism Irreversible in Pakistan? Linda S. Heard Bush's Speech: the View from Cairo Stew Albert Chet Helms: a Rock and Roll Hero Ray McGovern Bush at Ft. Bragg: Stay the Crooked Course     June 28, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts A Defeat Bred in Deceit Landau / Hassen Bush's Meddling in Internal Syrian Politics John A. Murphy Keeping Nader Off the Ballot: an Analysis of Political Profiling in Pennsylvania Mike Whitney More Lies from Rumsfeld: Those "Meetings" with Insurgents CounterPunch News Service JFK on Staying in Vietnam: Is Bush Reading from Kennedy's Playbook? Dave Zirin Pining for the Pistons Dave Lindorff Showtime in Washington Patrick Cockburn Iraq: a Bloody Mess     June 27, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts Blood Sacrifices for Empty Slogans Mike Marqusee G8: Who are the Hijackers? Mark Scaramella When a Corporate Raider Claims Economic Hardship: the Court-Approved Lies of Charles Hurwitz Leigh Saavedra Press Apologists for Torture Kathy Kelly Where is the UN? June 25 / 26, 2005 Alexander Cockburn The Supreme Court's Jackboot Liberals Jennifer Van Bergen America's Parallel Legal Systems George Corsetti This Land is Their Land: Condemnation for Corporations Mark Chmiel / Andrew Wimmer Let's Open the Gulag: a People's Mission to Gitmo Kevin Zeese Counter-Recruitment: How to Keep the Military From Getting their Hands on Your Kids P. Sainath Russian Roulette in Vidharbha John Stauber How to Bury a Mad Cow Scott Handleman Gay in the Third World Tom Barry The Politics & Ideologies of the Anti-Immigrationists John Walsh Looking for Peace in All the Wrong Places Justin E.H. Smith The Hairless Apes of Kansas vs. the Reality-Based Community: Why Progressives Have a Stake in the War on Evolution Alan Wallis The Story of Pinky: the Drug Trade in My Neighborhood Ben Tripp Negative Space: an Artful Lesson Frederick B. Hudson Songs to Lose Your Loneliness By: the Raised Voices of Sweet Honey in the Rock Poets' Basement Gaffney, Engel, Davies, and Albert     June 24, 2005 Ray McGovern The Downing St. Fixation: Fixing to Fix "Fixed" Jorge Mariscal "They Only Call Us Americans When They Need Us for War": the Paradox of Mexican Americans in Iraq Desiree Hellegers Portland vs. the FBI Zeynep Toufe What Do the American People Know and When Did They Know It? Joshua Frank Call Him Senator Con Job David Lindorff Which Flag Would Jesus Burn? Michael Neumann Victory and Recruitment Website of the Day Gagging Dr. Dean June 23, 2005 Christopher Brauchli Thomas Griffith and Rule 49: He Practiced Law Without a License; Now He's a Federal Appeals Court Judge Clay Conrad Killing Off the Jury with Tort Reform Standard Schaefer A Retort to Military Neo-Liberalism P. Sainath Vidharbha: No rains and 116F, But It Does Have "Snow" and Water Parks Mark Engler CAFTA Deserves a Quiet Death Norman Solomon Voluntary Amnesia in America Cockburn / St. Clair Frank Calzon Kathy Kelly Where You Stand Determines What You See   June 22, 2005 Kevin Zeese The Bush Administration's Psy-Ops on the American Public: an Interview with Col. Sam Gardiner William S. Lind Afghanistan: the Other War Arsalan Iftikhar Patriots Against the PATRIOT Act Dan Nagengast Give Populism a Chance: From France to Kansas David Krieger To the Graduates: We Live in an Interdependent World Kathleen & Bill Christison Tempest in Santa Fe: Confronting Israeli Myth-making     June 21, 2005 Brian Cloughley Destroy the Unbelievers! Mike Whitney President Disconnect Dave Lindorff Who Needs Big Bird, Anyway? Mark Weisbrot Bush's Lonely Campaign Against Hugo Chavez Matthew R. Simmons The Coming Saudi Oil Crisis Dave Zirin The Crass Slipper Fits: Ron Howard's Terrible "Cinderella Man" Virginia Rodino The Anti-War Movement and Impeachment Paul Craig Roberts A War Waged by Liars and Morons   June 20, 2005 Alan Maass The GM Job Massacre Tariq Ali To the Gates of the Gleneagles Hotel! Mickey Z. WMDs American-Style: It's 60 Years Since Alamogordo William Blum Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends Gary Leupp Old News Indeed: In 1999, Bush Craved Chance to Attack Iraq Jason Leopold Someone Tell Bush Iraq Wasn't Behind 9/11, Before He Starts Another War Dave Lindorff Why the Media Should be Schiavo'd Alan Maass The GM Job Massacre Uri Avnery Condi and Hamas Website of the Day Crimes Against Poetry                                                                               Hot Stories Alexander Cockburn Behold, the Head of a Neo-Con! Subcomandante Marcos The Death Train of the WTO Norman Finkelstein Hitchens as Model Apostate Steve Niva Israel's Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings? Dardagan, Slobodo and Williams CounterPunch Exclusive: 20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians Steve J.B. Prison Bitch Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber True Lies: the Use of Propaganda in the Iraq War Wendell Berry Small Destructions Add Up CounterPunch Wire WMD: Who Said What When Cindy Corrie A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter I Can't Hear From Gore Vidal The Erosion of the American Dream Francis Boyle Impeach Bush: A Draft Resolution Click Here for More Stories.     Subscribe Online

Weekend Edition July 9 / 10, 2005 CounterPunch Diary After the Bombings: Emile Henry v. the New York Times By ALEXANDER COCKBURN 'The old definition holds: the function of an editorial writer is to come down from the hills after the battle and shoot the wounded. A New York Times editorial this weekend starts with Conrad's The Secret Agent, gets swiftly lost and ends up 180 degrees in the wrong direction: In "The Secret Agent," published almost a century ago, one of Joseph Conrad's characters remarks that a terrorist act "must be purely destructiveMadness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it either by threats, persuasions or bribes Conrad's character was wrong. The terrorists' desire is to show the enemy precisely that they ­ the terrorists ­ are sane, but implacable. When the Conrad-era French anarchist Emil Henry carried a cooking pot filled with explosive and 120 bullets into the café Terminus near the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris in February, 1894, touched his cigar to a 15-second fuse and strolled out, his plan was to kill ordinary, relatively humble people, shopkeepers, clerks and salesgirls having a beer and listening to the band. "Not 'innocent'", he claimed later. "These beer-drinkers, petty bourgeois with a steady salary in their pockets, are the ones that always line themselves up on the side of the powerful, ignoring the problems of the workers. They hate the poor more than the rich do!" Many anarchists promptly repudiated him. "At least have the courage of your crimes, gentlemen of the bourgeoisie", Henry declared to the court that condemned him to the guillotine, "and agree that our reprisals are fully legitimate." Reprisals for what? "Are these not innocent victims? Children dying slowly of anemia in the slums Women turning pallid in your sweatshops Old people you have turned into machines for production all their lives and then cast on the garbage dump and the workhouse when their strength is exhausted." Like a horse pleasantly rubbing its backside on a fence post in the corral, the Times editorialist continued to ruminate: But the madness that is truly terrifying is not that of the terrorists. It is our own. The purpose of terrifying us is to turn us loose among our own emotions, to undermine our ability to reason with ourselves and with each other. Wrong again. The presumed purpose of those bombs in London this week is to try to force the English to reason among themselves, to confront the consequences of their country's participation in the attack on Iraq. The aim of the powerful is always to persuade that resistance is not only useless but irrational. Back to Conrad. In his review of Jeffrey Meyers's recently republished Married to Genius John Carey describes how Conrad married a substitute mother. Jessie, a former typist, was intellectually undeveloped but excellent at domestic chores. She treated Conrad as a son, calling him "Boy", and nursing him through his shattering depressions. When a real son arrived, Conrad naturally felt displaced, and this led to a strange incident when, on a train with Jessie and their child, he suddenly threw the their bundle of baby clothes out of the window. Tight-lipped, Jessie remarked that when the clothes were found there would be a search for the baby's corpse. Meyers ingeniously deciphers this moment of murderous jealousy as the germ of Conrad's novel The Secret Agent, in which the shady and incompetent Verloc kills his "stepson" Stevie who is the sole object of his wife's love. At Last! Shock Treatment Gets Whipped in Court A jury has found against a South Carolina doctor who referred a patient electro-shock treatment that left her permanently impaired. The patient, Peggy S. Salters, is a 60 year old former psychiatric nurse. She was subjected to 13 electroshocks within the span of 19 days. The jury awarded her $635,177. The jury found that her loss of 30 years of memory and cognitive impairment ­ which are demonstrable symptoms of brain damage ­ was due to ECT. Maybe this decision will give shrinks pause before they send the next poor soul off to get battered on the head with an electric club. A press release from Linda Andre, president of Committee for Truth in Psychiatry (CTIP) informing us of this victory adds that 100,000 patients in the US undergo electroshock ­ many against their will. ECT causes persistent cognitive impairments and long-term memory loss in 25 to 30 percent of patients, while its efficacy in relieving depression is admittedly short lived-about four weeks ­ at most, six months of mood improvement. As Lindra Andre writes, "ECT is dominated by medical cowboys who push the limits of intensity of electric shock as they please. In his deposition (May 24, 2005) in Peggy Salters' case, Dr. Fink defended the administration of 13 intensive ECT in 19 days which caused her permanent memory loss stating: "There are no absolute limits on the low side or to the high side if you're going to give a patient a treatment... I have personally treated patients twice a day. And there was a time when I gave patients eight treatments in one sitting, you know, on an experiment [!!]that we did many years ago. So, yes, I have treated patients with eight seizures in a morning... It was called multiple monitored ECT. It was a government-supported project in an effort to find out if we can speed up the response." Wouldn't you describe Fink's tone here as one of ghoulish glee? Leonard Frank outlined the economics of ECT succinctly in testimony: ECT is a money-maker. An in-hospital ECT series can cost anywhere from $50,000-75,000. Using a low figure of 100,000 Americans who are electroshocked annually, most of who are covered by private or government insurance, ECT brings in $5 billion a year." ECT promoters are its stakeholders-they include device manufacturers, hospitals and practitioners. The malpractice verdict was against the referring doctor, Eric Lewkowicz. The jury could not return a verdict against the other two doctors because of one holdout vote for acquittal. The hospital settled its liability for an undisclosed sum early in the trial. Former patients have reported devastating, permanent amnesia and cognitive impairment since ECT was first invented in 1938, but that has not hindered the treatment's popularity with doctors. The first lawsuit for ECT amnesia, Marilyn Rice v. John Nardini, was brought exactly thirty years ago, and dozens of suits have followed. While there have been a few settlements, including one for half a million dollars, no former patient has won a case until now. Psychiatrist Peter Breggin, author of Toxic Psychiatry, who served as Ms. Salters' expert witness, was also the expert in Rice v. Nardini, and has appeared for plaintiffs many times over the past three decades without success. Psychologist Mary E. Shea presented extensive neuropsychological testing proving to the jury's satisfaction that Ms. Salters suffers dementia due to ECT brain damage. Peggy Salters' case is the first in which a former ECT patient has been believed. She says she sees it as a victory for all ECT survivors. In fact defiant ghoulishness seems to be a stock in trade of the ECT lobby. "For forty years," Dr Milton Greenblatt told a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Miami in 1976, "the therapeutic value of convulsive therapy has been recognized. My personal recollections go back to 1939 shortly after the introduction of metrazol when, as a medical student, I was allowed to inject metrazol into chronically ill patients at Worcester State Hospital ­ against their terrified and frightened resistance, which, I might add, was overpowered by several burly attendants. In those days we required only the approval of next of kin for the procedure, and had few qualms about proceeding against the patiant's resistance." Greenblatt goes on to describe how ECT was initially hailed as a marvelous substitute for metrazol, since there were no "awful preseizure sensations" and patients "were fortunate to have a period of amnesia after the treatment." It's like saying bleeding via leeches were a big step forward from opening a patient's vein and having his blood splash all over the bed. The 1950s found Dr Greenblatt overseeing research into LSD, in a program funded by the CIA. Randy Newman and Those Cages I quoted from Randy Newman's 1974 song Rednecks last week, having heard him sing it in New Orleans at Jazzfest earlier this year. Now your northern nigger's a negro You see he's got his dignity Down here we're too ignorant to realize That the north has set the nigger free Yes he's free to be put in a cage In harlem in new york city I remarked that the crowd laughed a bit nervously as Newman explained the background of the song, with erstwhile restaurateur, foe of desegregated schools and Georgia governor Lester Maddox being baited in a New York TV studio ("Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV showe/ With some smart-ass New York Jew/ And the Jew laughed at Lester Maddox/ And the audience laughed at Lester Maddox too / Well, he may be a fool but he's our fool") The crowd listening to Newman on the Sprint stage seemed to be pretty much solid NPR listeners, and you don't hear too much Redneck language there, so they were nervous as Newman banged out the song. CounterPuncher Jack Hamilton misconstrued my motives, writing thus: In the mildest of defense of Randy Newman, he has a very dry, ironic sense of humor. He also is a very weird guy, so those three characteristics make him hard to figure. I still own a copy of his "Good Old Boys" album, though I no longer have a turntable. The song "Rednecks" is part of the theme of the album, kind of old Louisiana, Huey Long, etc. "Rednecks" is his L.A. Jewish attempt to empathize with the plight of the poor southern white. Singing that song in New Orleans showed poor judgement, but performers are ego-driven, and like to do whatever they want. Randy Newman probably would sing "Sail away" in Charleston and "Political Science" in Los Alamos, and assume everyone would or should get the irony. He's certainly no worse than Sting singing "Every step you take" to end world hunger at the Live 8 concert. Jack, I wasn't trying to diss Newman, who is certainly from LA but who also has family in New Orleans and spent much of his youth there. But get a new turntable. For preference an old Recocut, like mine, plus a Scott tube amp. Recorded sound peaked in quality in the late 50s. Vinyl lives! Another reader in New York writes in sourer vein: I'm black. I've lived in Southwestern Lousiana (Cajun country) and Sunflower County in the Mississippi Delta. I'd rather live in a cage in New York City (and I do) versus live in the deep South. Atleast I can say something about it. Try doing that down South and not meet a wall of self-pitying, self-loathing, delusional white anger, bitterness and resentment. Forgive me, but I consider the South a very sad place. The white South. The black South is mentally healthier, intellectually/culturally more advanced and emotionally more mature. Otherwise the place would be completely unbearable, as it was for me on many an occasion. Driving out of New Orleans on I-10 towards Houston I described here my fortunate stop at Poche's, dispenser of top notch crawfish etouffee. This fine establishment is two miles north of the interstate just east of Lafayette, near Breaux Bridge. This elicited a letter brimful of ripe local knowledge from Donald Juneau: Sir: I read with great interest your piece about Poché Bridge, which is a place I have visited for the past quarter century. As the surname indicates, je suis un vrai acadien, and my ancestral roots are about 50 miles north of Bayou Teche, where Poché's is located, in Avoyelles Parish. Not only have I enjoyed the nonpareil cuisine there, as did you, but I have also proselytized it, and have informed no less a luminary of vernacular food than Calvin "Bud" Trillin about the place. Bud did a piece years ago about boudin several years ago for The New Yorker, in the days before that publication began shilling for the Iraq war The boudin at Poché Bridge is excellent, although T-Jim's in Cottonport, a town in Avoyelles Parish, is also stellar. The cracklins at Le Pont Poché are also outstanding, but they cannot lay a glove on the platonic ideal made by Lonnis Kelone in Mansura, another location in Avoyelles Parish. The chaurice I have sampled a few times, but I am more enamored of boudin. But that is something that I shall bring home as you brought the chaurice to Petrolia, California. Donald concludes by urging us to do a story on "our new Republican Senator, David Vitter. He is such an execrable character that even a sullen nincompoop like Rick Santorum looks positively benign next to him." Santorum benign? Now that's surely over the top. "Fight Crack" Suspender Lady Rallies in Support of Our Google Ads Alex, Jeffrey et al: Thanks for telling us about the ads, which I had seen but simply not registered. Just want you to know that since you mentioned it, I have braved the world of christian gobbledygook, republican jingoism and other disgusting sites, risking cookies from sites I will be downright mortified to have the FibEye find on my hard drive when they day comes they confiscate computers of all left-of hard-right terrorists who hate freedom - which, by my calculation of how fast our democracy is fading, should be sometime early next year. Meantime, I'm doing my best to jazz up [click up would be a more appropriate phrase] your Google income, but at the cost of my immortal soul. That's how much I love you all! Marianne Torres Spokane Valley WA It's good to hear from Marianne, who organized a speaking gig for me in Spokane a while back. But what's this about "fighting crack"? Marianne also sells excellent suspenders, with the words Fight Crack on them, above a picture of the top end of good-ole-boy buttocks showing above sagging pants. I flaunt mine (suspenders, not buttocks) from time to time, drawing cheers from the many-headed. If you want to buy a pair, write Marianne at mtorres@icehouse.net