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,…
Posts tagged as “essays”
How many musicians can really be seen as revolutionaries — in not just musical terms but political ones as well? Fela Kuti is one such figure, and Americans are finally learning about him. The award-winning…
The French are for the millionaire. The Americans are for the maid. Among the French, three out of five think the IMF’s former managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has been framed. (Strauss-Kahn tendered his resignation as…
I met with Muriel at the Redwood Drive-In a week or so ago and we sat and drank coffee as she shared her story with me. For those who don’t know, she is Terry Ryder’s…
Time bombs tossed seemingly casually in the past month by his vice president and his secretary of state disclose president Obama, in the dawn of his first term, already the target of carefully meditated onslaughts…
Most drug-policy-reform advocates know the name of Judge Francis Young and many can quote a line from his 1988 recommendation that the DEA remove marijuana from Schedule One: “Marijuana is one of the safest therapeutically…
Our renowned “Baghdad by the Bay” as Herb Caen, the famous San Francisco Chronicle columnist dubbed it, was originally founded in 1776 by Franciscan missionaries (see Mission Dolores) who dedicated the site to the venerable…
“Change” and “hope” are not words one associates with Senator Joe Biden, a man so ripely symbolic of everything that is unchanging and hopeless about our political system that a computer simulation of the corporate-political…