The last time we met Michael Bérubé was back in 2007, and he was up to his neck in a rubbish dump, where I’d placed him, in the company of other promoters of the 2003 war on Iraq: where, I asked, are those parlor warriors now? Had any of them reconsidered their illusions… “… that [...]
by The AVA
OCCUPY OBAMA Editor, The Occupy Wall Street protest movement that emerged this summer in New York City as a public rebuke of corporate greed, fat-cat government bailouts, and the decimation of social programs is the best thing that’s happened in America since the yippies surrounded and then levitated the Pentagon in the 60s as an [...]
November 18th marked the 33rd anniversary of the Jonestown massacre. Jim Jones, founder of the 8,000-member People’s Temple in San Francisco, once asked Margo St. James, founder of the prostitutes’ rights group, COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), how he could obtain political power. She answered, sardonically, “Arrange for some of your women to [...]
Udo died in the autumn of 1991. He’d been driving alone late at night, so no one ever knew exactly why or how his car wound up at the bottom of a ravine. The best, most likely guess was that he’d swerved to avoid a deer and lost control. We buried him in Little Lake [...]
Saturday morning I was trying to sleep in, but the phone rang about eight. It was my current employer, Mort O’Henry. “Spec?” “Man, I didn’t think we were working today.” “No, I’m down at my grandma’s farm. Guess who’s here with me.” I knew it had to be my 14 year-old son, Craig. “Craig and [...]
Greetings one and all – if you are sitting comfortably then I shall begin… Talking of ‘sitting comfortably’, that was something not at all easy to do after the vast amount of food that I devoured on Thanksgiving. You too, eh? The Turkey Coma was in full effect for about four hours and I really [...]
by Steve Sparks
I met with Lanny at his home south of Boonville near to the Meyer Family Cellars tasting room. We sat at a dining table, where we were to later enjoy some delicious shrimp quesadillas that Lanny prepared, and began our conversation… Lanny was born in 1935 to parents Sam and Rose. Both were Russian immigrants. [...]
The Speaker of the California State Assembly in the 1960s, Jesse ‘Big Daddy’ Unruh once announced that, “money is the mother’s milk of politics.” His was an era of unrestrained financing in state and federal elections. The wealthy and the powerful, and those who sought greater wealth and power, poured money into the accounts of [...]
by Saul Landau
As a kid I listened on the radio to “The FBI in Peace and War.” My parents had listened during the mid 1930s to “G-Men.” FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover helped produce those programs and, in Clint Eastwood’s new biopic film, “J. Edgar,” we learn that Hoover orchestrated several other radio and TV shows to [...]
by Fred Gardner
Q: Who killed more Americans —al Qaeda crashing airplanes into the World Trade Center, or Merck pushing Vioxx? A: Merck, by a factor of 18. One of the most downplayed stories of our time ended with a whimper this week. ”Merck has agreed to pay $950 million and has pleaded guilty to a criminal charge [...]
