By BILL AYERS

When Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin got hold of it, the attack went viral. At a now-famous Oct. 4 rally, she said Obama was "pallin’ around with terrorists." (I pictured us sharing a milkshake with two straws.)

The crowd began chanting, "Kill him!" "Kill him!" It was downhill from there.

What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

Looking back on a surreal campaign season

By BILL AYERS

Whew! What was all that mess? I’m still in a daze, sorting it all out, decompressing.

Pass the Vitamin C.

For the past few years, I have gone about my business, hanging out with my kids and, now, my grandchildren, taking care of our elders (they moved in as the kids moved out), going to work, teaching and writing. And every day, I participate in the never-ending effort to build a powerful and irresistible movement for peace and social justice.

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Dylan is set to focus on significant and influential periods of his life in the first of three books called simply Chronicles: Volume One. Now, in a book his publisher describes as "extraordinary, revealing and surprising" and "a beautifully written, singular achievement", he is going to speak for himself.

The 304-page tome is due out on October 12, published by Simon and Schuster and will be followed about a week later by an updated edition of Lyrics: 1962-2001, a compendium of lyrics to nearly every Dylan song. Link



Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans: The Best of McSweeney's Humor Category, edited by Dave Eggers et al. (Knopf, 239 pages, $24.95). Anyone who ever loved Bob and Ray or Mad magazine in its heyday or Lenny Bruce will revel in this den of satirical-to-bizarre humour. Typical entries: Lefty icons Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn provide (unused) audio commentary for a DVD of The Lord of the Rings; Ezra Pound reviews the worst films of all time on Italian radio ("Bambi: Filth."). Most of the 50 entries are very short. Some are very funny, others a bit flat; none suffers from the great McSweeney's dread -- drabness.



Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) Needs Funding For Research - Did you know that Hepatitis C killed twice as many people as AIDS did last year in the US. Go to Petition and Sign Here



John McCleary's, "The Hippie Dictionary" book is chock-full of pointed editorializing, slang and swear words culled from the vernacular of the 1960s and 1970s hippie youth, who questioned authority and created their own counterculture. I particularly liked this statement of his:

In his entry on Presiden John F Kennedy's assassination, he wrote, "It is interesting tonote that liberals are the ones who are killed in their prime, and conservatives die old in their soft beds. This world would ba a better place in which to live if John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther Kind, Jr, had lived to die in their soft beds." more »

NY Post Claims Weather Underground To "Wreak Havoc" During the RNC. A number of extremists with ties to the 1970s radical Weather Underground have recently been released from prison and are in New York preparing to wreak havoc during the Republican National Convention, The Post has learned. (via RNC Watch)



All Stresses Out And No One To Choke? - Unload that gun and Check out the 35 Symptoms of Menopause first.

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John Malkovich is thumbing a ride on "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," a Disney adaptation of the Douglas Adams novel. Malkovich will play a religious cult leader called Humma Kavula, created by the late author especially for the long-gestating film.



April 27 - The Weather Underground

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, several hundred young women and men tried to spark a socialist revolution. The Weathermen waged a low-level war against the U.S. government: bombing the Capitol building, breaking Timothy Leary out of prison and evading one of the largest FBI manhunts in history. The Weathermen were a surviving faction of the SDS. (Where are the Weathermen now?) [link]



{Past Re-visited}

I recall Cliff Potts came by the university in his converted old bread truck and parked in front of the Student Center where all us 'ne'er do wells' were lounging. He set up a table with SDS pamphlets and we all signed up and discussed Nixon's pending visit to the campus and talked to us about the ROTC program and how to take over that building in protest of Vietnam. Within a year I was onboard with NOW, SDS, and for fun, Montrose, a performance troupe of drama and art majors and assorted strays named for the historic Montrose building that now housed many university students (read: freaks). I was eighteen and felt electrically plugged in, challenged and scared.



saturday morning me//

black tank top/aqua low waisted sweats/

barefoot/green tea #2/rye toast/oj/

good hair day/i'm wearing a hat/

good husband day/he's off running errands/

listening: shoutcast radio/

so how about you?/



Just a molotov cocktail missing a match.

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Oh, Blogger, what am I going to do with you?



The word for the day is Revolution, children. As in, we almost had a __________, or Why don't we start a __________?



A Trip Back to the Contradictions of the Stormy 60's

The Weather Underground, a movie-documentary is now playing in New York and a few select venues around the country. During the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration, a group of white-bread, upper-middle-class college students took up guns and explosives to plot the violent overthrow of the United States government. Sam Green and Bill Siegel's energetic and incendiary documentary, The Weather Underground, tracks the history of this radical political group, the Weathermen, and examines the psychology and politics which led its members to commit countless acts of terrorist activism. FBI files on the Weathermen.







Steal This Movie, a 2000 movie about Abbie Hoffman and his life as an organizer, hippie radical and his life on the run is currently playing on cable and at your neighborhood video store. He also wrote a book called, Steal This Book that got a strange reception at book stores at the time and Steal This Urine Test. My copy also got stolen. So did my Soul On Ice copy. That summer I worked the phones at a Crisis Hot Line where we also had that book and others with a note to steal and to drop off your books, as well. But I remember him as an exuberant champion of the underdog and a founder of the Free Store feeder of the poor, and 1/7 of the Chicago 7.



You can make a poster here.



He asked for it all

So I gave my life and love

Crabs were a bonus

[via: haikooties]



Quote For Today

"God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December."

~ J.M. Barrie



Can I trade this job for what's behind door #2?

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