Pro-Life Activists Confront Candidates For Abortion/
They plan to hold   a pep rally with Sarah Palin

On Thursday mornings, the candidates for surgical abortions come to the Planned Parenthood clinic on Waco's Columbus Avenue.

It's a quiet and dignified, tree-lined street lined with old money mansions, some of them converted to treatment centers and halfway houses for drug offenders and parolees. There is a very large and imposing red brick Southern Baptist Convention congregation, Columbus Avenue Baptist. Right next door is St. Mary's Catholic Church. Further on downtown, near the Courthouse, is the Masonic Grand Lodge of Texas, A.F.& A.M. Equally imposing, its huge limestone veneer walls are covered with bas relief sculpture of quarrymen, entered apprentices, fellowcraft and master masons working on King Solomon's Temple. They were sculpted by a famous Parisian artist.

It's that kind of neighborhood, steeped in the grandeur of a once and future establishment and all its trappings. As it turns out, Columbus Avenue is the home of a curious ritual that has persisted for many years, through heat and snow, drought and violent thunderstorms.

Thursday is the day for surgical abortions.

About 20 activists attend the Thursday morning vigils, "including children." A leader in the local Pro-Life movement said in remarks at a monthly meeting held today, "I think children should be included."

When the patients for surgical abortion arrive, the anti-abortion demonstrators line the driveway and sidewalk in front of the low-slung brick professional building. They try to get the patients who are going inside to terminate their pregnancy to cross the parking lot and talk to them. They carry signs depicting aborted fetuses. They hand out literature.

One of their most popular missives says, "Abortion is always the wrong choice."

In fact, the organization pays to lease small billboards plastered with the same message outside the abortion clinics located in Groesbeck, Ross, Temple and other Central Texas communities.

It's called "Sidewalk Counseling" and sometimes it's effective.

John Pisciotta recalls one couple in particular. They did not stop their car to talk. They went on in the parking lot and sat and talked for 15 minutes. Then they drove away smiling and waving to the sidewalk counselors.

"We saved a baby that day.

"We're kind of guessing, at times," Mr. Pisciotta told his audience at St. Mary's Fellowship Hall who had gathered after church for a "Second Sunday" spaghetti lunch and to talk about anti-abortion strategy.

"We don't really know what goes on inside the abortuary."

They call the abortion clinics "abortuaries."

Those patients who do not change their minds a leave a little after luch, around one or two p.m. Each one is carrying a single stem red rose in her hand. The staff of Planned Parenthood present them with the roses as they exit.

A woman sitting at one of the long lines of cafeteria tables stood and said of the women who go through with a surgical abortion, "They're sad. They're emotionally drained. "You can tell by looking at them. They're carrying a red rose. Planned Parenthood gives them a red rose." Another woman sitting in the audience spoke up and said, "We ought to give each one of them a white rose."

Mr. Pisciotta, who said he and his son arrived about 7 a.m. Sunday morning at St. Mary's to prepare the excellent marinara sauce used on the meatballs and bowtie pasta that is typically served at Second Sunday, told his supporters, many of whom have been involved in this ministry for many years, that he would like to hear from them.

"Does anyone have anything they want to say?"

He invited them to come to the podium and make brief remarks.

No one spoke up right away. Mr. Pisciotta waited patiently. A veteran of the sidewalk wars for the lives of unborn children, he added, "Planned Parenthood coaches them very specifically not to talk to us when they come in." He maintains a website for the sidewalk ministry at www.prolifewaco.com. It quotes Proverbs 31:8, "Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute" and "Proverbs 24:11-12, "Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter..."

He said, "I think Planned Parenthood should be confronted at every single turn in everything they do...to let people know that this is not a positive force in your neighborhood." When he announced that Ms. Pam Smallwood, long-term director of the Waco Planned Parenthood Clinic, is leaving to take up a post as Chief Operating Office of that organization's Texas Capital Regional Austin office, the throng of almost a hundred crowding the Fellowship Hall burst into applause. Ms. Smallwood is 57 and has held her post at Waco for almost 30 years. She told media outlets in February that her new job at Austin will allow her to narrow her focus solely to patient health care.

An announcement that Sarah Palin will address the Pro-Life alternative service, CareNet, to be held in September at Baylor University's Ferrell Center basketball gymnasium, also garnered enthusiastic applause. A former cheerleader and beauty contest winner, Mrs. Palin is the former Governor of Alaska. She was Senator John McCain's Vice Presidential running mate in the elections of 2008.

"It's not just for Catholics any more," Mr. Pisciotta said with pride.

A final note in these small battles of the culture wars is about the Girl Scouts of America, passing out what the Pro-Life movement terms Planned Parenthood literature at the United Nations in New York City. The flyer reads, in part, "Many people think sex is just about vaginal or anal intercourse... But, there are lots of different ways to have sex. Just have fun, explore and be yourself!"

According to the brochures, "National laws requiring HIV- positive people to reveal their status to their partner(s) "violate the rights of people living with HIV...There are many reasons that people do not share their HIV status. They may worry that people will find out something else they have kept secret, like they are using injecting drugs, having sex outside of a marriage or having sex with people of the same gender."

To counter such ideas, the Pro-Life movement holds 40-day Prayer and Fasting rituals. Part of the program, which includes rosaries and masses, is to state and re-state the affirmations, "I believe in chastity; I believe in life; I believe in respect for the unborn."

In closing, a man stood and read an old letter to the editor regarding a woman who had given birth to a one-year old child and was again pregnant. She was in a doctor's office asking for relief through his surgical expertise.

In the narrative, the doctor is just as willing, in fact prefers, to terminate the life of the one year-old child. He takes up his knife and the woman reacts in horror. The man, a graying gentleman of an age dressed to the nines in brightly polished cowboy boots and a well-fit sport coat and slacks, had a look of triumph upon his face as he regained his seat.

At this point, The Legendary chose to leave the room. He had been weeping softly for a half hour and he had become very uncomfortable. It was time for The Legendary to leave because, for God's sake, he was out of paper napkins to dab at his eyes and wipe his running nose.

He repeated the Our Father several times on his way home. This prayer, attributed to Jesus, who was said to have been asked, after the Sermon on the Mount when one of the Apostles said, "Rabbi, teach us to pray," gave The Legendary some comfort.

War, even cultural war, is hell, as General Sherman said; in its cruelty, you cannot refine it. The Legendary agreed with the General several times as his Chevrolet pickup hummed down Highway 6 toward home. He was left with no choice but to pray.

There is no sugar coating available for this conflict. After all, it involves a death in the family.

"Jesus wept."

Amen.

So mote it be.

By The Legendary
Jim Parks

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A Photo Essay

by Jim Parks

There is a small town on the Santa Fe main line named Clifton. I live there. This is the kind of place it is.
For reasons I do not understand, there is sculpture everywhere you look.
Most of it involves practical arts, the skills of the oil fields
and the building site,
and the monument;
while some is as simple to behold as your neighbor's front porch,
but this is the kind of place it is.

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Posse Comitatus Act Back In Force - As Originally Written

A clear cut indication of the extent to which members of Congress had become disenchanted with the more extreme neoconservative ideas of the Bush Administration came with the repeal of the Insurrection Act Rider of 2006.

This legislation, signed into law in the middle of the night on October 28, 2006, amended the venerable Insurrection Act of 1807 and totally usurped the authority of State Governors to either give or withold their assent and refuse to consent for the President to order Federal troops to take over in times of national emergency.

The amendment consisted of allowing the President to declare a state of emergency anywhere, any time, and move U.S. troops to suppress any public disorder. It also allowed the President to take control of any state troops, forces or national guard.

The original Insurrection Act of 1807 and 1876 made similar provisions, but only allowed those measures to be taken when and if the Governor of a State consented to allow it. Congress passed the 1876 law following the elapse of the 10-year Reconstruction period following the Civil War.

Local authorities had prevented many people from voting in elections and receiving due process of law in disputes with both individuals and local governments. The insurrection law was therefore strengthened in an effort to prevent states and local authorities from riding roughshod over an individual's civil rights.

For instance, President Eisenhower asked for and got the approval - however grudging - to allow crack Army paratroopers to take over security functions during riots which occurred in reaction to a Federal Court order to desegrate a high school in Little Rock. The crowds were threatening murder, insurrection and other terroristic tactics at the time.

Similarly, President Kennedy was able to persuade the Governor of Mississippi to allow troops to be deployed at the University of Mississippi at Oxford during similar unrest over the desegregation of that institution's Law School - something that had been ordered by a Federal Court.

The use of Federal troops for law enforcement purposes inside the borders of the United States is prohibited by the Posse Comitatus Act - Latin for, literally, "power of the County." The Federal government must defer to the judgment and consent of local and state officials. Military power resides with the Governor, who is in command of the National Guard.

Under the new provisions of Public Law 109-364, which President Bush signed into law, the President could take over in times of an attack on the United States; natural disaster such as hurricane, earthquake, flood or fire; and disease caused by a biological attack or global pandemic.

But the worm turned before the year was out.

Cooler heads prevailed - before the ink had time to dry on the new law - when the members of Congress who control the government's budgetary purse strings moved that same year to nullify the new law in a rider to the Defense Authorization Act of 2007, H.R. 5122, also known as the John Warner National Defense Act of 2007. Thus, the law changed in 2008, and not without the approval of a sizable majority of moderate members of both houses - on both sides of the aisle.

The rider inserted in the defense act by Senators Boyd and Leahy repealed in its entirety the previous wording of the amended form of the Insurrection act of 1807 and 1876 and restored it to its original content in U.S. Code, Title 10, Subtitle A, Part 1, Chapter 15.

In case of a nuclear attack or biological event such as the rapid spread of a pandemic of influenza, plague or smallpox, Federal authorities could force quarantine and subsequent evacuation only if the Governor allows it. Otherwise, the National Guard will remain under the control of the State of Texas, paid by the Federal government, commanded by the Adjutant General

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Ritual Duel - A Walk In the Park, A Muster In The Sun (June 20, 2009. Issue 6.)

The National Mall will soon see a ceremony of the rawest form of ritual combat, a muster of men-at-arms bent on fulfilling an oath they took to "protect and defend" the Constitution of the United States of America "against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

On the other hand, there are Federal authorities mulling the implications of the Second Amendment, of a "well regulated militia," and the declaration that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

They will meet on the National Mall, a green space of hallowed ground originally planned for such confrontations and filled with touchstones of the great experiment of the constitutional republic; between the Parthenon of the Lincoln Memorial and the obelisk of the Washington Memorial; hard by the sunken wall, the black stone "V" of the Vietnam Veterans Monument; across the street from the post- revolutionary Federalist Executive Mansion, the White House; and across the river from the Pantheon of the Jefferson Memorial on Saturday, June 13, 2009.

Just up the street, the marble basilica of the double-domed U.S. Capitol Building dominates the sky line.

There, a similar drama will play out when the Senate ponders the proposed treaty of the Organization of American States, a measure which calls for all member states to pass laws that will prohibit private gun ownership if ratified.

In this steely eyed game of brinksmanship, neither side is likely to blink.

And so, the second muster of Oath Keepers follows the first muster of the Continental Army held at Lexington Green on April 19, 1775, anniversary of the "shot heard round the world," the day when British troops fired upon colonists defending their ideas of liberty, and the war began. This muster was most recently repeated at Lexington on April 19, 2009, in a ceremony of reaffirmation of that oath taken by all men at arms of the U.S., including the President, the Cabinet officers, Judges and members of Congress.

Thus, begun in conflict, the exercise in representative government abides in uncertain times of further conflict, of war, and rumors of war.

Gun control advocates in Congress and the Department of Justice seek to increase the strictures already represented by the more than 20,000 firearms laws currently on the books.

The schism persists between Courts, as well.

A recent Supreme Court holding, Washington, D.C. v. Heller, maintains that it is unconstitutional for a local government to disallow the possession or registration of handguns. The militia consists of armed citizens, not necessarily members of the National or State Guard, according to the majority opinion of Mr. Justice Antonin Scalia.

But a 7th Circuit Court of Appeals decision holds that it is constitutional for a state, or the local government of Chicago and Oak Park, to create law barring the ownership of handguns, something that is considered contrary to U.S. Constitutional law, according to the petitioner, National Rifle Association, in NRA v. Chicago - home of President Obama.

"Federalism is an older and more deeply rooted tradition than is a right to carry any particular kind of weapon," according to Judge Frank Easterbrook.

That decision has been appealed to the Supreme Court. There is a further complication: President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, was part of a Second Circuit Court of Appeals panel in New York that reached a similar conclusion in January.

When the band of active duty military men, veterans, peace officers, and Federal agents, both active and retired, step out on the green, they will reaffirm not only their original oath, one that compels their first loyalty to the law, and not the elected officials whose authority flows from the Constitution, they will also affirm that they will not obey any of the following types of orders:

1.) We will NOT obey orders to disarm the American people.

2.) We will NOT obey orders to conduct warrantless searches of the American people

3.) We will NOT obey orders to detain American citizens as "unlawful enemy combatants" or to subject them to military tribunal.

4.) We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a "state of emergency" on a state.

5.) We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty.

6.) We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.

7.) We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.

8.) We will NOT obey orders to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people to "keep the peace" or to "maintain control."

9.) We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies.

10.) We will NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.

Many intelligence and security analysts believe that the thrust of these declarations is meant to counter a National Level Exercise scheduled for later this summer which, for the first time, will concentrate on a pre-emption of terrorism inside the boundaries of the United States and not a foreign adventure, a war on terror. A joint task force of American, United Kingdom and Australian troops will participate.

The exercise is expected to follow the outline of a highly classified executive order, NSDP-51, which was promulgated and published by the Bush Administration. The measure would nationalize all communications, transportation, food supplies, labor, and industrial capacities under the authority of the President in case of a national emergency. In effect, the order would nullify the powers of the Congress and the judiciary in favor of the sole authority of executive command.

"Lone Star Iconoclast" Military Affairs Editor Captain Eric May has characterized the government's new authoritarian posture in this way. "Post 9/11, there was a counter revolution against the American revolution. I think Oath Keepers is a counter to that counter revolution...

"Government has made all its force come to bear against the American people, so Oath Keepers have become a fifth column within the fifth column."

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Obama Signs Off On Repeal By Treaty of the Second Amendment (May 20, 2009. Issue 5.)

A historic war over gun control is brewing between the White House and Senators on both sides of the aisle.

During his recent trip to Mexico, President Obama signed off on the United States' ratification of an

Organization of American States (OAS) treaty that would criminalize the manufacture, sales, shipment and ownership of firearms and ammunition and of reloading spent ammunition.

Soon, the United States Senate will be asked to ratify the "Inter-American Convention Against The Illicit Manufacturing Of And Trafficking In Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives, And Other Related Materials."

http://www.unodc.org/pdf/crime/a_res_55/255e.pdf

Senate approval would neatly sidestep the Constitution of the United States in its Second Amendment, which guarantees that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

In an effort to control international shipment of arms, the OAS adopted the treaty in November, 1997 at the 24th Special Session of the General Assembly when it met at Washington, D.C.

So far, all but four of the organization's thirty-four member states have ratified the treaty. They are The United States, Canada, Jamaica and St. Vincent - The Grenadines.

Freedom-loving nations such as Argentina, Chile, The Dominican Republic, Haiti, Paraguay, Uruguay, Colombia, Nicaragua and Venezuela have already outlawed the possession, sales and shipment of firearms, except for relics and curios built in the 19th century. That includes ammunition and any accessories - including telescopic sights, high capacity magazines or any other gear that may be attached to them. Dealing in any of these is referred to as "trafficking." All firearms must be numbered and identified under government license and supervision, under the terms of the treaty.

The manner of that licensure and supervision is yet to be determined. Bureaucrats will be called forth to promulgate those new regulations if the Senate approves the treaty.

Assembling or disassembling firearms without government license and supervision, even for purposes of cleaning, is illegal in those states. Shipment or sales are also illegal, including any part of the whole round meant to be fired - propellant, projectile, primer or cartridge case. That is classified as manufacturing.

According to one legal expert who has spent a great deal of time analyzing the 4,078-word document,

"..."'Trafficking' is not explicitly limited by 'illicit' and could mean almost anything."

The basic conflict will be between the language of the United States Constitution, a document which assigns the role of making law to the Congress, a limited role of making law to the judiciary in its appeals holdings, and the enforcement of laws and treaties by the Executive Department. In the case of international treaties, they may not be enforced without Senatorial ratification, termed as a process in which Senators "advise and consent" to the adoption of treaties and international conventions.

The treaty provides for "States Parties that have not yet done so shall adopt the necessary legislative or other measures to establish as criminal offenses under their domestic law the illicit manufacturing of and trafficking in firearms, ammunition, explosives, and other related materials." Additionally, the treaty provides that "...the criminal offenses established pursuant to the foregoing paragraph shall include participation in, association or conspiracy to commit, attempts to commit, and aiding, abetting, facilitating, and counseling the commission of said offenses."

The conflict that is likely to erupt is reminiscent of the epic efforts of the Woodrow Wilson Administration to gain ratification of the treaty that would have included the U.S. in The League Of Nations following World War One.

DWI and Drug   Offenders:
The Case  "They Don't Want You To Know About" (April 24, 2009. New Moon. Issue 4)

by Jim Parks

A man convicted of driving while intoxicated sits dejected in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting; his wife, a native of one of Mexico's high desert western states, sits by his side.

His dilemma is simple enough. His probation officer, a chicana, has threatened repeatedly that in a worst case scenario, he will be put in the penitentiary, or in jail, if he does not attend the meetings in the frequency and in the sequence she demands.

The tension is unbearable because his wife, a woman who was born in Mexico, thoroughly believes that he will be put in the pen. Her reasoning? Back home in Mexico, when a government official makes such a pronouncement, it usually turns out to be true.

What, then, would become of her and her child if her husband was locked away in some part of the Texas gulag to atone for the crime of imbibibing too many cervezas frias on the way home from work?

It is one of at least a half dozen meetings of the recovery group solely devoted to the seemingly insurmountable problem of this man's insistence that he can make the meetings when and if he chooses, according to when he has the time. Ordered to make a total of eight meetings each month - two per week - the officer alleges he had violated the order by making the majority of them within a period of one week. He attended something like six of them, then spread the other two out over the month. She doubted his sincerity.

The setting for this attendant drama is a meeting room in a prominent protestant church at the county seat.

The man heaves a huge sigh, looks from his wife's worried countenance to his infant's sleeping form in the car carrier at her side, and back to the group, which is seated in a circle around him.

After an aggregate of six hours of listening to the various accounts of this contretemps, another man, who is not on probation and is in attendance only to maintain his sobriety, speaks up and says it's not that simple, this business of ordering a person to be incarcerated in the penitentiary or the jail. The probation officer cannot just snap her fingers and put the man in the jail or penitentiary. There are a number of intricate steps which must be carried out before such a drastic action takes place.

First of all, since the probationer was convicted in the remote city of San Angelo, in another State District Court jurisdiction, the local prosecutor will be obliged to write a recommendation to the prosecutor there for a motion for a show cause hearing to explain to the Court why the man's probation should be vacated, the Court should proceed to sentencing, and he should be locked up.

At the hearing, the people of the State of Texas would be obliged to make the case, which would require the appearance of the probation officer at that proceeding, a hearing which would be held more than two hundred miles distant.

At this point, the chairwoman of the meeting, highly indignant, interrupts him and declares that since he is not an attorney, he has no standing to interpret the law or give legal advice.

The interlocutor, exasperated, counters her objection. He is not giving legal advice, he says, but talking about something he has learned in his research of these matters, his exploration of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, and Federal case law.

After all, he reasons, it's still a free country.

Nevertheless, she demands that he be quiet and let the meeting proceed without any further discussion of the law. She accuses him of attempting to act as the man's attorney.

The interlocutor explains that the three-pronged test of the charge of practicing law without a license is if an actor unlicensed to practice law promised results, filed court papers on behalf of another person, and accepted payment for doing so. Nothing of the sort is taking place here, he insists. Instead, the people are asked to endure an endless complaint about a problem with no remedy in sight.

He is ordered to desist immediately.

Oh, he says, then the meeting will be all about how this man is going to the pen? What about the stated subject of recovery from the "disease" of alcoholism, then? Will that mission statement be cast aside because of the threats of a zealous probation officer, someone who demands the incarceration of this offender because he does not attend enough meetings - at least not enough at the times she has specified?

It appears discussion of recovery from the disease of alcoholism is out the window; the ceaseless game of cat and mouse will only continue.

All of this dialogue is dutifully translated into the Spanish for the benefit of the offender's wife, who sits ashamed, her eyes downcast and focussed on the floor.

The chairwoman becomes more insistent; she demands that all such discussion desist at once.

The man continues to defy her authority.

Due to certain Federal Court holdings, it is not only unconstitutional, but illegal for any authority figure in the United States of America to order any person to attend 12-step recovery program meetings or to threaten any action if compliance is not forthcoming.

The truth is this. A person so ordered to attend has the option of voting with his feet and simply walking out of the "spiritual" meeting where, according to its organizers, no "religion" is espoused. AA is "spiritual," not "religious," according to members of AA. Federal Courts have found a way to counter that equivocal line of logic - most recently in a decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals at San Francisco, Inouye v. Kenma.

The reason: Since, according to the First Amendment, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...," it is impossible that failure to attend a meeting deemed religious in its nature could be a violation of the law - any law no matter who lays it down or how they do it.

Pandemonium ensues. The meeting deteriorates into a shouting match.

In fact, though he has opened an emotional can of worms, he is right, entirely correct, but there is more.

According to the Inouye holding, handed down recently from the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at San Francisco, any "coercive" authority who demands attendance at the meetings without offering an alternative, secular program may be sued, individually, for inunctive relief, money damages, and the like, because of the deprivation of an individual's constitutional rights.

"This is the law they don't want you to know about," according to a clinical psychologist active in the treatment field.

"Our religious or spiritual beliefs (or lack of them) are our personal business, and not something the government is allowed to interfere with." A. Tom Horvath, Ph.D., ABPP, is a board certified clinical psychologist and president of Practical Recovery, an addiction treatment facility in La Jolla (San Diego), CA, focusing on collaborative care and self-empowerment.

The facts of Inouye v. Kemna, published on September 7, 2007, are that Ricky

Inouye was imprisoned in Hawaii for drug charges and served his time. After his release, his parole officer, a person named Nanamori, ordered him to attend the AA meetings though Inouye, a Buddhist, had previously made an issue out of his objection to the religious nature of the AA steps to recovery.

i offered him the choice of attending the meetings, or experiencing a return to prison. Inouye sued Nanamori in U.S. District Court in Hawaii. The suit was unsuccessful because Nanamori claimed the state of law at the time was "fuzzy" on whether AA is religious, or not.

Inouye appealed and the Ninth Circuit Court made short work of the controversy. A three judge panel unanimously ruled that a long line of previous cases from across the nation have established that the 12 steps and the nature of the meetings is, indeed, religious.

They sent the case back to the District Court in Hawaii, where the ruling consisted of requiring Nanamori, the parole officer, to pay monetary damages to the Inouye estate. In the ensuing time, Mr. Inouye had passed and his son continued the prosecution of the civil rights suit.

This development rocked the world of the recovery "community" in all its treatment centers, counseling practices, probation programs and state treatment jails operated by state governments and private contractors alike, contractors such as Corrections Corporation of America, Wackenhut, and their subcontractors.

"Based on recent court decisions, if you have been ordered to attend a 12-step group or 12-step-based treatment by the government (the order could be coming from a court, prison officer, probation or parole officer, licensing board or licensing board diversion program, or anyone authorized to to act on behalf of the government}, you have the right not to attend them," wrote Dr. Horvath. "However, you can still be required to attend some form of support group, and some type of treatment," Dr. Horvath has concluded.

Those who were previously ordered to attend under coercion and duress may possibly have standing to bring suit for violation of their civil rights. A competent attorney should be consulted if one has strong feelings about their treatment by probation, parole or prison officials, judges or treatment center counselors.

Here is a short list of the related cases that led to the Ninth Circuit decision:

A New York Appellant sued for relief after he had been denied the privilege of visiting with his family while incarcerated in the state penitentiary because of his refusal to attend AA meetings in the treatment program for drug offenders "when the the program necessarily entails mandatory attendance at and participation in a curriculum which adopts in major part the religious-oriented practices and precepts of Alcoholics Anonymous..." - (Griffin v. Coughlin, 1996 - N.Y. Int. 137)

In County of Allegheny v. American Civil Liberties Union (492 US 573) and Lemon v. Kurtzman 403 US 602) the Supreme Court held that coercion is present any time a person is required to observe any form of religious observance, even if they are just requested to do the minimum of remaining quiet and not interfering.

In spite of the threats of the probation and parole authorities, no one seems to know of a person actually having been incarcerated due to the neglect of attending AA meetings. Some other offense has been alleged and the Court has proceeded to sentencing on the original suspended sentence.

U.S.  Citizens No Longer In Control - (April 9, 2009. Full Pink Moon. Issue 3) 
United  Nations Placed in Charge of National Parks, Monuments

by Larry Goldman and Jim Parks

It is only reasonable that an American citizen would believe that the people of the United States have the ultimate authority over the nation's national parks and historic sites - places such as the Statue of Liberty and Independence Hall, Yellowstone Park and Death Valley.

Those who notice are shocked to see the bronze plaques in the place where the Congressional delegation signed the Declaration of Independence, framed the Constitution, and began the experiment of self rule in a new Republic.

They proclaim that this building in downtown Philadelphia is the common inheritance of humanity at large and has been placed under the control of the United Nations' agency, UNESCO. The same goes for the Statue of Liberty and dozens of other national parks, monuments and historic places.

What's more shocking is that the internation control extends to the areas contiguous to their boundaries. For instance, a Montana gold mine has been shut down because it is deemed a hazard to the ecologically sensitive area of Yellowstone National Park - though it is far outside the borders of that national treasure.

Why?

It all goes back to a treaty President Richard M. Nixon signed in 1973. The Biosphere Treaty proclaims these sites are to be protected in the name and the interest of the world's people. Later, a broader interpretation has been added, the provision that if any industrial process threatens the natural ecology of the site, that mine, fabrication or manufacturing plant, ranch or farming facility must be shut down and the property acquired by the powers that be - the United Nations.

Altogether, there are more than 49,433,229 acres affected.

How will that authority be maintained? By troops from more than twenty other nations that signed and ratified the treaty.

How did all this become the law of the land? Through Executive Order. A president need only publish his order in the Federal Register, then wait for thirty days, and his word becomes law. What part did Congress play in the changes? Well, the Senate would have had to advise and give consent to the original treaty Nixon signed back in 1973, a year before he left Washington, D.C., forever - in total disgrace.

President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12919 on June 3, 1994, a measure that encompassed nine previous Executive Orders that span the decades from the Truman years through the present - orders intended to be used in times of national crisis or emergency.

They provide for:

#10995 - Seizure of all communications media in the United States;
#10997 - Seizure of all electric power fuels and minerals, public and private;
#10999 - Seizure of all means of transportation, including personal cars, tucks or vehicles of any kind and total control of highways, seaports and waterways;
#11000 - Seizure of all health, education and welfare faciities, public and private;
#11002 - The empowerment of the Postmaster General to register all men, women and children in the U.S.;
#11003 - Seizure of all airports and aircraft;
#11004 - Seizure of all housing and finance authorities to establish forced Relocation Designated Areas, to be abandoned as "unsafe";
#11005 - Seizure of all railroads, inland waterways and storage facilities, public and private.

The "Biosphere Reserves" designated under the control of the UN are:

Oath Keepers (April 9, 2009. New Pink Moon. Issue 3)

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: Let me introduce you to the Militia! That's right, I'm talking about the one you read about in the Second Amendment.

Read all about it at - http://oath-keepers.blogspot.com/

Peace officers, veterans of the Armed Forces, active duty soldiers, sailors, Marines and Airmen have united to declare that their first loyalty is to the United States Constitution, a document representative of a nation and its people, which they are sworn to uphold and defend "against all enemies foreign and domestic."

These men and women are hardheaded about this. They affirm that their loyalty is not to a politician, a party or any group of politicians. They are sworn to defend their nation and their constitution.

Period.

On Lexington Green, site of the first shots fired in the American Revolution, "We oath keepers will be mustering , gathering forces for the first time, on April 19, 2009 to read aloud declaration of orders.

"OATH KEEPERS: ORDERS WE WILL NOT OBEY !.

"1. We will NOT obey orders to disarm the American people.

2. We will NOT obey orders to conduct warrantless searches of the American people

3. We will NOT obey orders to detain American citizens as "unlawful enemy combatants" or to subject them to military tribunal.

4. We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a "state of emergency" on a state.

5. We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty.

6. We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.

7. We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.

8. We will NOT obey orders to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people to "keep the peace" or to "maintain control."

9. We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies.

10.We will NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances."

Their stated goal is not to overthrow any part or parcel of any government, federal, state or local, but to insist upon a strict interpretation of the Constitutional underpinnings of any such government.

Hear me out and understand me well when I say that I cast my lot with theirs long, long ago in a nation many thought fell apart and died.

We have news for them.

Blues For Mizmoon (March 26, 2009. New Moon. Issue 2)

She wrote something hard and scratchy, a she cat with the blues wearing a red slip, something worthy of a woman's worst wrist-cutting moods.

Billie’s ghost lolled in the doorway.

"Pluck the flowers, cultivate the thistles, make them bleed a bit to hear your eight bars, sugar.

They deserve it."

Quiet. So quiet you could hear the St. Charles Avenue streetcar go by two blocks away.

Somewhere on the little park on Coliseum Street she could hear a female cat screaming at her lover.

Her image in the speckled old mirror peered back at her out of red rimmed eyes.

She picked up the spoon with the handle bent back on itself, shook the smack out of the little baggie Murphy had brought her earlier and lit her Zippo under the water she had drawn up in a cap of a Coke bottle and squirted in the spoon.

It cooked, turned brown, brown as shit, bubbled, cooled. She put a cotton ball over it and drew it up in the syringe. Tied off her upper left arm with a piece of latex surgical tubing Murphy had scored for her.

"That’s why they call it shit," he’d said her first time. The abscess had gotten worse where she had missed the vein a week before. It throbbed.

She thumped her arm, found the vein and slid the needle in, found blood, plunged the handle with her thumb and slipped the tubing off her arm.

Warm. So warm in the pit of her stomach and flowing out through the nerves of her arms and legs, under her tits and over her shoulders to center under her ears and around her eyes.

She nodded, nodded off, her forehead resting on an emaciated knee crossed over the other.

Her heart slowed, her gorge rose and she toppled sideways off the stool before the dressing table.

Billie’s ghost strode over and took her by the hand. There were blisters on her first two fingers from trying to hold the spoon over the flame of the Zippo.

"You poor hootchie, had it going for awhile." She grabbed the piece of note paper, folded it and thrust it into her bra.

They floated away, through the screen door and out over the courtyard.

"Murphy will..."

"Fuck Murphy, honey. He never was no good for you, anyway."

They disappeared into the air.

# # #

Outside on the red brick walls of the place next door, moonlight and the harsh amber street lamps projected swaying, clawing outlines in shadows and shapes - hydrangeas, pyrocanthas magnolias, azaleas, jasmines - they all looked like monsters and witches posing and posturing in the night.

Murphy stroked on up Prytania Street, bouncing and weaving like a boxer on the balls of his feet the way he hit his bars on the tenor, feeling the pavement and the shock of its contact all the way through his frame. He wore his sunglasses and a stingy brim porkpie hat over a top coat in the late night cold. The rumpled sharkskin suit let the sharp March winds through its creases and seams. The tails of the topcoat streamed out behind him in the wind. Murphy was field hand big and strong; his hands were splayed and calloused, easily able to span the keys of the tenor. His barrel chest filled the big horn with wind and his massive shoulders bore its weight on the neck strap easily, as if it was a toy, something he’d found in a box somewhere just waiting for that one special dude to come play with it.

Murphy was in a hurry to get back to the pad. They’d been away for a couple of weeks, he in Parish Prison and she - Mizmoon - in the detox unit at the infirmary in Charity Hospital. They’d both been very sick. Then, when he got out, he found her back at the crib off Coliseum, clean, crying and trying to heal up the abscessed lesion on her left arm. He doctored her with epsom salt baths, antibiotics and clean bandages.

They had worked a scam on a square at the Hilton. Murphy, his street name because he was adept at the game, had beat a fool for his American Express card. He’d told a lame, a little business guy from Detroit he had met in a jazz gin mill, that he could score him some hash down a dark side street in the Quarter and socked him in the back of the head with a padlock wrapped in tape inside a sock. It made a sick little thud when it hit him.

They’d checked into a room in the hotel, then he’d done a cash advance number to get enough to pay the bell captain off.

Just like clockwork, the mark, another horndick daddy’o from the expense account business world, had arrived in the room. Mizmoon had phoned for a half pint of whiskey. Murphy showed up shortly after, screaming his outrage at finding this poindexter with his "old lady," brandishing a .38 and bitch slapping the guy around with his other hand.

The man gave up all he had, his eyes flashing wildly from side to side like a steer driven before a herd to slaughter, and it was more than two thousand dollars. It was enough to get his horn out of the pawn shop, pay the rent on the place, and score her a little taste to get her over feeling so sick while he went downtown to get a stash. They could live.

Meanwhile, the mark fled into the night with the cooperation of the house detective and the bell captain. After all, they were trying to help him keep from getting involved in a scandal. He’d hidden his face and eyes when they put him in a taxi at the service entrance in an alley behind the hotel.

His first split down at the shotgun house off Elysian Fields made him sick, so sick the world turned into an old black and white television doing horizontal flips in a nightmare motel world and getting fuzzy while he nodded on a couch filthy with animal hair and food stains. A dog licked his face.

It was amazing, but the heavily muscled two hundred-fifty pound man could do nothing about a twenty pound dog licking his face.

"Go ‘way. Get th’fuck ‘way f’m me, mothafucka’," Murphy said, lolling on the couch and making half-hearted attempts to backhand the dog.

It had been a little while since he’d gotten down and the dope hit him hard. It happened that way sometimes. His resistance was down after kicking cold turkey in the cell at Orleans Parish Prison, his bowels squirting and his nose running while he scratched at imaginary bugs on his skin and had cold chills and hot sweats.

Stoned out, he drifted in and out of remembering scenes with Mizmoon. The way she used to look at him on the bandstand while he played his breaks in her blues tunes.

He’d gone for coffee one night with a crowd in Chicago, rapping away the hours before dawn in the diner after gigging in a South side club, and they’d found out they were both river trash - he from Cincinnati, she from Paducah.

River trash. It was a feeling, a pose against the world, a remembrance of when people and things moved by water, the flow of the rivers.

He really dug her looks, curly red hair and freckles, a big rack, blue-blue big eyes and a little girl laugh. But when he heard her sing, he flipped. It was a fey little lady voice that would suddenly turn hard and mean, then hurt and wild by turns, moaning, screaming, outraged, placating, babyish and purely sexual with each turn in tone and timbre.

"Where’d you get that?" he’d asked her one day in a crummy little hotel room in the Loop after an el train had passed clattering by.

"Get what?" She was hanging up her stockings on the shower rod and she looked at him over a naked shoulder with an evil angel tattooed on its back side.

"That. That song you were just singing."

"Oh, that." That little girl laugh. "I just wrote it, just now, while we were screwing."

"While we were screwing."

"Yeah, while we were screwing." She giggled.

She had screamed his name, called him a whore dog, a fuckin’ tramp, a lowlife fool, told him to sock it to her, to hurt her with his "thing." She clawed at the skin of his back, beat her little fists against his chest, slapped at his face, then demanded more and more.

He liked to make love to her while she still wore her stockings and a garter belt, her glorious femininity spilling out of bra, blouse, skirt, shoes, jewelry. She was just right for the part and dressed for it, too.

She sang it again and it was solid. In fact, it was dynamite. He did an arrangement, fiddling around the piano in an old church, and they did it that Sunday afternoon at an open jam in a club where he gigged a lot during the week. The cats got into it. In fact, the dude running the session started getting guys up to join in and they did chorus after chorus of the tune. When they were finished, everyone in the joint was on their feet, shouting.

They both felt that glory train people feel sometimes, that thing that’s actually bigger and better than anything a dude or dudette has to offer alone. It pulses and pushes and takes over, and in the total rush it leaves a trail of psychic joy and total immersion in the beat, the harmony and the rhythm and realization that it is something that actually brings the people together as one big being before it is over.

When it’s over, it isn’t really over.

There is an afterglow. There’s an obsession that one can get it back, that glory train feelng. People will do almost anything to get it, keep it, get it back again.

They had been looking for it ever since, holding on to each other through one junkie scrape after the next and they drifted on down to New Orleans, gigging, scamming, hustling - looking for that last chance union with God, with the divine. Looking everywhere, in the music, in time, the river, the sound of marching feet, the tones of horns and singers and the cadence of drummers, cooking smells, and spicy sauces.

He swung up the stairway, sprung the screen door and half kicked it in, all the while talking to her in soft tones.

"Yo, honey, I got the stuff and wait until you get a taste. We can get right and stay that way. You know what? I want to work on that new song you wrote just before I got busted? You know, the one about how I looked the first time you saw me blowing my horn and...

"He saw her in the mirror first, stretched out on her back with spit drooling down out of her mouth and her eyes rolled back in her head. It wasn’t really her, was it?

Mizmoon in her red slip with filmy, milky blue dead eyes looking way up over and behind her forehead at a spot on the ceiling where there was nothing, really, to look at.

He grabbed her up and tried to make her stand. Threw her on the bed, slapped her face, raked his knuckles down her breastbone, breathed air into her mouth while he pinched her nostrils, massaged her heart through her chest, pushing down on the ribcage with all his might.

All he heard or felt were some hideous bowel sounds from this cadaver, this body that was once her and now would never be her again.

Mizmoon was no more. He grabbed his horn, threw a few things in a plastic bag, some shirts and socks, a toothbrush and razor and got all the way down the stairs before the shock wore off and he started to cry.

By the time he caught the St. Charles Avenue trolley, he was starting to get over the panic of the thing that had just happened, that he had just discovered. After all, it could have been him and he couldn’t afford to get caught with a dead girl in his room, not the way things had been going, certainly not with what had just gone down - the Murphy game on the mark, the AmericanExpress card, the dope in his pocket he couldn’t afford to lose.

He jumped the first thing northbound. Memphis would do for starters.

Butterfly Woman (March 5, 2009. Issue 1)

She never wore shoes. She never wore clothing except for a wrap and a floppy straw hat on her way up and down the cliff between her house and the beach.

One morning she whistled. Reclining atop a driftwood log, she crooked a finger, said "Call me Jane."

In a redwood grove atop the cliff, she reclined and pointed a leg at the sky. I straddled the other, holding on for dear life. I shouted her name when I could no longer contain myself.

Butterflies whirled amid shafts of sunlight streaming down among the ancient trees.

I sprouted wings, flew.

Shot By A Gun That Didn't Make Any Noise (March 26, 2009. New Moon. Issue 2)

Tim Hix died the first week of March - still waiting for his claim to be approved. He died in agony and intense pain caused by his tumors. He told me this."I can take the dying; I just can't stand the pain." - Editor

This article appeared in "The Lone Star Iconoclast," which is published at Crawford, Texas, home of the western White House. It was part of a series detailing the Bush administration's record on veterans affairs. The voters returned the Democrat Chet Edwards to his seat in the l7th District, choosing him over a Republican candidate backed by a fellow constituent, President George W. Bush. Edwards's seniority on the House Appropriations Subcommittee for Veterans Affairs assured him the chairmanship. He, in effect, now signs the checks for all such VA expenditures.

Shot By A Gun That Didn't Make Any Noise
By Jim Parks

How did a kid of eighteen wind up on a sleek greyhound of the sea in l966? How did he become exposed to a deadly toxin without even knowing it until nearly forty years later?

Ask Tilden "Tim" Hix, a Kansas man that lives near the Western White House at Crawford and works for little more than minimum wage with no health benefits in a metal fabrication plant making custom pickup bumpers at Clifton, Texas.

Though the U.S. Navy's methods were a bit different than the Royal Navy's ancient impressment methods, nevertheless, Mr. Hix was impressed into the Naval service by his local draft board at the direction of President Lyndon B. Johnson in a Wichita Armed Forces examination station, packed off to boot camp at Great Lakes Naval Training Center forty years ago, in 1965. He wound up serving in the Gearing Class Destroyer Dennis J. Buckley, DD 808, until her return from a second trip in three successive years to the waters offshore of Vietnam between l966, l967 and 1968.

Pick one, Army, Navy, Marines, or Air Force. Hix found a "home and a feeder" in the Navy.

"I knew it would be safer than walking on the ground. I thought it was. It was safer from the bullets...but, like you say, this was a bullet that didn't come out of a gun."

He is one of a few proud sailors and Marines to share that status, that of a civilian impressed into service by the U.S. Department of the Navy.

The indisputable record shows that he served with honor and distinction.

Hix is part of that rare breed, a greyhound sailor, a tin can China hand with numerous crossings of the Pacific on a rolling dance floor that spent a lot of time underwater.

All hail the mighty Dennis J. Buckley!

In that time, Hix saw the Western Pacific from the Gulf of Siam to Yankee Station, an imaginary spot on the water off Haiphong harbor near Hanoi where American aircraft carriers launched jets and unleashed hell from above. Destroyers served as "plane guards," standing by to rescue pilots that were unfortunate enough to miss the flight deck and topple into the ocean.

But it wasn't that duty that bought Hix his present problems. Yankee Station was almost a hundred nautical miles from the shore.

It was the onshore bombardment of "unfriendly villes" in what was known as III Corps, the Mekong Delta area of South Vietnam, where Hix was exposed to the dreaded defoliant, Agent Orange. The Navy called it the "gun line," a line on the chart that showed a minimum depth of navigable fathoms.

Ships like Buckley ran that line firing at will at targets pinpointed by as many as eight coordinates. Her automatic twin 5- inch guns would follow their coordinates through automatic radar- directed fire control systems, no matter which way the ship may have turned.

At the time, the dioxin compound was used to defoliate the jungle vegetation surrounding these villages. Something no one knew at the time, dioxin proved to be very toxic over the long term.

As a result of the defoliation, airborne forward observers could then see precisely where to direct Buckley's five-inch "automatic 38" gunfire, which consisted of air burst high explosive, fragmentation and white phosphorus rounds that left the enemy little comfort or shelter in their aftermath.

The objective was to destroy the capacity to store that most important of commodities produced in the delta region of Vietnam, rice, something produced in huge quantities in the area. A secondary mission was to disrupt the flow of arms and munitions.

How close did Buckley come to the shore?

Within twelve miles, something considered in international law to be "coastal waters"?

Closer.

Within three miles, something considered in international case law to be the coastal waters in terms of pollution cases, toxic spills?

Closer than that.

The truth is that Buckley and her sister ships came much closer than that.

Hix says he remembers being able to see people on the banks of the rivers, the beaches, to distinguish buildings and small vessels plying the wide waters of river tributaries, that the vessel often steamed into the brackish waters of the hundreds of estuaries of the Mekong Delta on her firing missions.

On one secret mission, Buckley steamed around an island for several days. The importance of surveying Paracell Island was deemed important enough to be classified. Hix remembers spending several days at the task.

Throughout these experiences, he served in his general quarters role as a "phone talker," one of a crew of men manning a sound- powered communications system that connected the departments of the ship and their battle stations - engineering, weapons, communications, operations - to the Captain on the bridge. Solely powered by the vibrations of the human voice, these phones are not subject to the vagaries of electrical supply. They continue to function when generators, fuses and wiring fails. In his regular job, Hix was an Interior Communications specialist. He kept the phones and intercoms in Buckley in top repair.

Most phone talkers are from the midwest and mountain states. Their flat, unaffected, pronunciations and lack of regional drawl or unusual regional accents makes their skills at delivering vital information to the bridge very good.

Quite simply, Hix and his shipmates were within yards of the planes spraying Agent Orange on their enemy.

What's more, he can prove he was there. There is no dispute about that. In fact, at least one shipmate that served in Buckley when Hix was a member of her crew is receiving full benefits as a veteran one hundred percent disabled through service connection. All of his prescriptions, medical procedures, shoes, dental care and eyeglasses are provided by the VA.

Hix's brother, who also served in Buckley, was awarded a similar settlement from the manufacturers of Agent Orange in a class action lawsuit, which class has been closed by the Federal Court.

What is the difference between their claims and Tim Hix's?

They made them before George W. Bush was elected President of the United States.

Because Hix made his claim after the ascension to power of the Bush administration, he has been denied all benefits, as have all other sailors that did not set foot in Vietnam, though the substantive Congressional public law guarantees such benefits to them.

What of the conditions that persisted when she steamed around blasting rounds at the shore and taking underway replenishment of more rounds and powder casings, fuel, groceries, spare parts and mail?

She needed "feed water" to supply her twin boiler and turbine engine rooms. Buckley was a Gearing Class destroyer launched in 1944. Capable of top speeds of thirty knots, she was a thirsty consumer of desalinated, condensed sea water produced in evaporators to feed those boilers. Aside from water to drink and
with which to cook, that need was a top priority.

Showers and washing skivvies, dungarees and shirts came way down the list.

Buckley's crew often went without fresh laundry and showers for extended periods. It's a fact of life, nothing uncommon in terms of shipboard routine, especially in small vessels.

Meanwhile, airplanes continued to spray Agent Orange on the jungles surrounding the Buckley's various targets.

The ship was a product of the forties, a World War Two design that had seen service in a number of conflicts since then.

Her namesake lost his life in a skirmish that reads like a sea story from the days of wooden ships and iron men.

Dennis Joseph Buckley was born April 22, 1920 in Holyoke, Massachusetts. He enlisted in the Navy September 30, 1940. Fireman First Class Buckley was posthumously awarded the Silver Star for displaying exceptional courage in attempting to board and salvage a blockade runner which had been intercepted by his ship Eberle (DD-430) on March 10, 1943. The blockade runner's crew planted a booby trap.

Fireman Buckley paid with his life.

Eberle had sailed for South Atlantic patrol, based on Recife, Brazil. When she intercepted the German blockade runner Karin, sailors from Eberle boarded. The demolition charges set by the Germans exploded, killing half the 14-man boarding party outright. The remaining seven persisted in their heroic efforts to save the Karin and obtain information until fire and further explosions forced them to abandon ship. They and 72 prisoners were picked up from the water by Eberle.

Dennis J. Buckley (DD-808) was launched December 20, 1944 by Bath Iron Works Corp., Bath, Maine. She was sponsored by Mrs. D. J. Buckley, mother of Fireman First Class Buckley; she was commissioned March 2, 1945, Commander K. C. Walpole in command.

Hix was not injured by an explosion or a bullet. He was not burned or blasted, cut or scalded.

Hix was shot with a gun that didn't make any noise at the time.

Forty years later, Tim Hix is afflicted with prostate cancer and diabetes, two of the numerous terminal illnesses - incurable soft tissue cancers and skin diseases chief among them - deemed presumptive evidence of exposure to Agent Orange. Veterans Administration doctors have performed radical prostate surgery on
him, subjected him to enough radiation therapy to leave burns on his lower back and upper buttocks, and are studying the feasibility of prescribing chemotherapy.

The result so far has been that the constant bills Hix receives from the VA have resulted in his bankruptcy.

What of civilian medical benefits he may have earned as a civilian aircraft worker at Cessna and Lear Aircraft in his native Kansas after his service in Vietnam?

He was laid off. New management took over. The jobs moved overseas. He had earned pension benefits working for Lear. When the company was sold to a Canadian corporation, Hix and his fellow workers lost their money.

He receives no benefits from the VA, even though Congress enacted a public law guaranteeing service-connected disability status to all those exposed to Agent Orange in the Republic of Vietnam or its coastal waters. In fact, all those who suffer from these diseases are presumed to have been exposed to the deadly toxin.

The burden of proof that they were not so exposed rests on the government.

But Hix has been billed for surgery, therapy, prescriptions and the like. He also receives no travel pay and is billed for his hospitalizations in the domiciliary facility at the Dallas VA Medical Center while he has taken radiation therapy.

The net effect, at the end of the day, a day with increasingly lengthening shadows for Hix, is that the Bush administration changed the code of federal regulations by moving one comma several places and modifying its adjudication policy manual to exclude sailors and airmen that did not set foot on land in the
Republic of Vietnam. This was done unilaterally at the direction of the General Counsel of the Veterans Administration.

The policy was reversed and remanded in mid-August by the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims in Jonathan L. Haas v. James Nicholson, a case that is directly on point with the Hix case and many others. Haas served as a boatswain's mate on an ammunition supply ship replenishing supplies of ammo and other items for small ships such as Buckley. The ship in which Haas served never anchored or moored in Vietnamese ports because of concers about sabotage of her explosive cargo.

THE ICONOCLAST: So, Tim, your representatives at Vietnam Veterans of America in Washington say that all the claims of blue water sailors with conditions caused by exposure to Agent Orange are "on hold." Is that because of the reversal of the case of Jonathan L. Haas last month?

Hix: I think one hundred percent, it is.

THE ICONOCLAST: How does your claim compare to Mr. Haas's claim?

Hix: I would say it's exactly the same at Jonathan Haas's, except my initial claim was for cancer, but I added a claim for diabetes.

THE ICONOCLAST: What had you been told by the Board of Veterans Appeals? What was their ruling?

Hix: Their ruling was that they need more evidence, which I have waived my right to introduce any new evidence. I feel that any rational person could make a decision based on the evidence I have given them.

THE ICONOCLAST: Why do you think that your claim has not been addressed?

Hix: I just think they don't want to pay the sailors. I think they want to get out of it. I think that's why they changed the M-21-1 (adjudication) Manual.

THE ICONOCLAST: Have you received any therapy or prescriptions for diabetes?

Hix: Not at this time. They haven't deemed it necessary.

THE ICONOCLAST: Nevertheless, have you been diagnosed?

Hix: Yes.

THE ICONOCLAST: How much does the VA claim that you owe them at this point?

Hix: Right now, it's...I'm not positive, but they take any money I'm supposed to get back on income tax refund goes to the Treasury Department. The bulk of all my surgery and everything was included in the bankruptcy. That went away, so I don't owe it. But it sure as hell messed up my credit.

THE ICONOCLAST: What about your wife's income tax refund?

Hix: We file jointly.

THE ICONOCLAST: What are the VA's reactions when you are unable to pay?

Hix: They just keep sending me bills, adding interest.

THE ICONOCLAST: How much interest do they charge?

Hix: I'm not really sure.

THE ICONOCLAST: How long has your claim been pending?

Hix: Since June of 2002.

THE ICONOCLAST: Have your representatives at Vietnam Veterans of America been able to give you any time frame of when your claim might be addressed?

Hix: At this time, no.

THE ICONOCLAST: Anything you'd like to add?

Hix: I'd like to have a bumper sticker printed. "Vietnam. Served with distinction. Returned with disillusion."

THE ICONOCLAST: Would you consider adding "We were winning when I left"?

(Laughter)

Representative Bob Filner, D-CA., of the 51st District which covers San Diego, chair of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, plans to amend the law to include Blue Water sailors excluded by the Bush Administration's arbitrary and capricious policy change. - Editor

In The Barber Shop (March 5, 2009. Issue 1)

In the Metropolitan that Tuesday morning, all was brilliant refracted sunlight from the prism edges of the mirrors and the dull shine of polished dark-stained wood. The tiny hexagonal floor tiles gleamed from a fresh scrubbing and the air was redolent with shaving soap, liniment and tonic.

The old man came in, nodded to everyone and pulled a newspaper out of the side pocket of his coat after he hung up his hat on a mahogany tree at the door.

His hands shook too badly to do it himself, so he got a shave on Saturday nights, took "Little Bitty Grandma" to church on Sunday, then made the obligatory visit with her to some friends' place before dinner, and spent a lazy afternoon snoozing in his chair.

But there was hell and Jesus in his house now. He could get no rest.

The Klan came into the church on Sunday morning in their robes and one of them made a speech about protecting the flag and southern womanhood.

Little Bitty Grandma could not be consoled. They had committed that one unpardonable sin against southern womanhood. They had scared her.

"Bill, I don't go to church for that kind of trash to come in and talk to me - not that way. I wouldn't listen to them anywhere, much less in my church. I want something done about it."

She had said it over and over - each time the same way. She meant business, had stomped out of the church on the heels of her high button shoes and handed herself into the enormous touring car, then slammed the door with her nose in the air.

He asked what she expected him to do about it.

"I'm sure you will think of something if you know what's good for you, Bill ______."

He made so bold as to ask "Or else what?" It was the kind of thing that came as close to fight as they ever had.

"I will go back out to the place and live with Rebecca."

The "place" was their cotton farm fifteen miles out in the country. Rebecca was her oldest daughter who lived in a home in the compound of five houses they had built over the years so their kids could take care of the enormous place.

He found bedding - quilts, pillows and sheets - on the horsehair sofa in the living room downstairs. Nothing was said.

He could hear her crying upstairs. He went to their room and knocked on the door softly.

"Go away."

"Sarah, I..."

"Go away, Bill. I don't want to hear it." He felt despair as he stood in the wide hallway of the old house, staring at pictures of his children.

He did not sleep well that night. He did not fit the sofa.

That settled it. He would take action, personal and direct, though he was almost eighty, diabetic, and often found himself standing in one place or the other in his home or his yard wondering what it was he had intended to do next.

He waited for Tuesday.

They had found a white woman murdered, strangled and stabbed, her baby trying to nurse at her breast, in a house down along the railroad tracks just outisde the town.

The posse found a negro camped under a low trestle not too far away, dragged him to the jail, and the rest would enter the oral history of the town for the next century to come.

They chained him on a load of hay soaked with kerosene and touched it off. People said he screamed for awhile, then began to turn into a smaller and smaller sizzling piece of stinking, reduced and blackened burned tissue, sizzling smaller and smaller around the skeletal structure. Finally, his skull had exploded with a diminutive pop.

The old man had visited the domino parlor and the fire station. He knew who was responsible, had waited - he called it "laying around the lick log" - until he saw them enter the barber shop that morning, then followed them inside.

Suddenly, he laid his newspaper aside and said, to no one in particular, "Y'all gonna mind me."

No one paid much attention. They just kept on chatting and laughing at one joke or another.

"I said y'all gonna mind me. You will mind me, you hear? Y'all don't mind me, you'll wonder how come you didn't."

One of the barbers stopped in mid-sentence and said, "Are you talking to me, Bill?"

"That's Mister Bill to you, boy."

"Mister Bill, what in the world is wrong?"

"What's right with the world? You tell me, fella."

He stood up and pulled off his coat, throwing it down on the bench next to him. No one missed the big .45 caliber revolver hanging down from the shoulder holster almost to his left hip. The dark brown leather rig held it snugly to what once had been a massive chest and huge shoulders.

His moustaches jumped up and down as he talked. His eyes flashed fire.

"Y'all burned that air niggah t'other day? I can't he'p that. Then you come to my wife's church and talked about it uninvited. That scared her. Y'all ought not scare her - any other women in this town, you hear?

"Here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna promise you that if you try to burn anyone else, niggah or white, Meskin or Injun, I'm gonna come for you. You won't like that..."

"Aw, Mister _____, one of the Klansmen said, trying to reason with him.

"No, sir, you listen here to me, boy. Y'all gonna mind me. Y'all think someone done some killin'? Something like that? You turn him over to the Sheriff. Let the District Attorney get him indicted, then let a jury convict him unanimously. Then you turn him over to the Governor to make sure his sentence is carried out. It's that simple. Y'all try to do anything else - especially scare my wife or any other woman - and you'll answer to me."

He put on his hat and folded his coat over his arm, then stalked out of the barber shop, leaving the cloying mixture of odors - lilac and powder, shaving soap and liniment, bootblack, and the light machine oil they used on the clippers and scissors.

Outside, he felt better than he had at any time in at least twenty years. There was a bite to the early Spring air. He sprung along in his boots, then swung up into his touring car with its polished brass and dark-painted fenders and doors, its odor of rubber and gasoline, leather and dust.

He went home to a lunch of cold biscuits and ham, warmed- over coffee and an apple.

He said, "Little Darlin', I talked to them..."

"Do tell," she said, flouncing out of the kitchen as if she was eighteen again. She snorted as she went up the stairs to their room. "Go on and talk to them, old man. Just you be sure and talk to them, now. I'll bet they will be real impressed."

He burned for her, became fully involved in her rage. It was now a matter of survival. Little old men cannot make it by themselves. He knew this so well.

It was another little old man who telephoned him as he dozed in his chair in the middle of one of his famous afternoon naps.

"Bill, they're fixing to burn another damn niggah down here on the square. You'd better get on down here, old man."

"Don't you go nowhere. I'll be by to get you in just a minute."

He stuck his feet in his boots, hitched up his suspenders and shouldered into his holster. Jamming his hat on his head, he thanked himself for having an electric starter put on his touring car.

When they got there, the crowd had just started their war dance. Ugly hatred marched across every face in the crowd. The old man shuddered as he watched neighbors and business acquaintances lust for the blood of this unfortunate black man who was in a wild dither as he begged them to spare his life.

"Lawd, no, hell, no. Don't y'all burn po' me. I didn't do nothin' to nobody. Hell, no," he screamed, trying to break the chains as they laughed at him and made faces.

The old man drove up in the middle of the crowd, making them move out of the way of the big car with its big steel fenders and the incredibly long hood topped by the chromed swan taking flight. He hoisted himself out and stood on the running board, struggling to conceal how he had lost his breath.

He drew the old pistol, fired it in the air.

That startled the crowd, especially when they saw who had done it. It was well known that he had come into the country from Virginia, had made a lot of money and was very influential in business affairs.

"Put the niggah in the jail. Do it and do it now. Y'all gonna mind me, or you'll wonder why you didn't." He shouted it. His voice came from somewhere deep, down near his navel.

The same smart mouth who had tried to talk back to him in the barber shop spoke up.

"Now, Mister ______, you're liable to get yourself hurt."

The old man fired just over his head, his wobbly hand holding the pistol as steady as he could as the broken plate glass from a store front behind the "reserve" deputy crashed inside the window.

"I said you are going to mind me, and I don't mean maybe. So get busy."

The crowd melted away very quickly after that. Two deputies unchained the man and helped him down from the wagon.

"And y'all clean that kerosene off that boy, you hear me?" He was breathing harder than ever, close to a heart attack or a stroke. "I don't want my jail a'burnin' down. Y'all might think that's yo' jail, but it's not. It's my jail."

He watched bleakly until they had gotten the man down from the wagon and gone down the block to the jail, then he climbed back into the driver's seat and reversed out of the parking place and drove on home.

When he had dropped his friend off and wheeled into the old barn behind the house, she was waiting on the back porch to take his hat.

"I've been listening to the party line, Bill. They are all saying you done the right thing."

She looked up at him with pride, taking his elbow and pressing her breast to his side.

She felt the gun hanging from the holster pressed between them.

"And take that thing off. Don't you dare try to wear that into my house. Is it loaded?"

"Wouldn't be much good if it wasn't, would it, now?"

She laughed in spite of herself.

"You hungry, old man?"

"You know I am, Little Darlin'."

They laughed at each other again as they passed under the shotgun hanging on pegs over the door between the kitchen and the mud room.

La Mome (March 5, 2009. Issue 1)

Her voice came booming out of the old Victrola speakers as if it had traveled from France to the moon and back to our town on the prairie.

Edith Piaf. Singing "Milord," that rousing Gallic ballad about a lonely man and a strumpet in a Parisian cafe. NBC's "Monitor" weekend radio show, the one that went on and on, murmuring all weekend long with meandering news features about everything from holy pilgrimages to Mecca and Jerusalem to ruby mining in Burma.

The thing about La Mome was that most of the men of our suburb had heard her voice in real time, in live broadcasts, during their war, broadcast for someone or the others's propaganda purposes. It was never quite clear, as these things are never quite clear. However, it always caused them to stop and listen respectfully. Of course, I had no idea that she was not even five feet tall, an alcoholic, a drug addict, a serial scandalizer with men half her age she didn't bother to marry.

Now this movie, "La Vie En Rose," I find under discussion in various magazines, reviewed favorably. I don't need it. Just the mention of her name takes me back to the days of summer, the days before air conditioning, the days of long, drawn-out pitchers' duels and playing under the sprinkler to cool off with her voice drifting out of the windows of our house, belting out her songs in French. I just knew that she was a controversial figure, someone who inspired the confidence of those who would like to believe she symbolized the courage of the resistance of the French nation to Nazi occupation; others chose to believe she was a collaborator.

As for me, I just loved the sound of that song, "Milord." It made me want to dance, to sing, as the stanzas repetitively beseech one to do. It made me wish to forget my troubles for a moment, forget the feeling of living under nuclear threat, of repeated warnings of what would happen to me if a thermonuclear device was detonated over the ship channel ten miles distant from my home and school.

After all, I was ten years old and they kept telling me that if I looked at the blast, my eyeballs would boil and explode, my hair would burst into flames immediately, and my body would be covered with burns. Radiation sickness would follow immediately, they said.

So, when I learned about this movie, I Googled her and found a video of her performance in an Ed Sullivan Show appearance I believe I saw some time in the fifties. In heavily accented English, she translates the words of the song, a ballad to a swell whose girl caught a ship and sailed away. "Did you cry, Milord? I can hardly believe that..."

Then she plants her feet on both sides of the microphone stand and projects her voice to the third balcony, shouting the chorus as if she is shouting to a neighbor hanging out her laundry on a balcony five stories up, her head tilted back, and made tears flow down my face. I felt no shame. She took me to the streets of Paris, to the slums of one of the world's great cities where she learned her trade singing on the streets for spare change. And she did it all with the sound of her voice. There are few gestures, no props; she is dressed in a simple black dress with no elaborate jewelry. She is a waif, a sparrow of the city, someone who survived with no self pity and a tremendous sense of how to work a room - whether it was a cafe, a street corner, a concert hall or the living rooms of millions of viewers.

And so, the rest of the story is that she fell from those great heights and died as a result of complications of alcoholism and drug addiction. She spent her last days unconscious as a result of cancer.

I put it to you.

Who did not? Whose nation was not occupied? Occupied by whom?

I put it to you.

Edith Piaf singing Milord on Ed Sullivan.

Buzzy (March 5, 2009. Issue 1)

When the boat trailer topped with the big cage pulled into Ralphie's driveway, we kids came running.

Something was up.

Then his grandfather's big old Buick ambled up to the curb, its HAM radio antennae brushing the lower branches of live oak. The old car looked as if it was a smiling chrome toothed beast, its fat, squat body two-toned and the big tires sporting white walls at least six inches wide.

Ralphie jumped into his arms when he swung the door open. We all crowded around to look at the big radio under the dash board with its glowing tubes still shining light from under the dash.

Rufus slowly got out and stood deferring to his arthritic knees and hips, his double pleated khakis riding up almost under his tits and held up by wide red suspenders, his iron gray crew cut brushy and looking like a warrior's roached style. His trifocals topped off the wrinkled face over the clipped military mustache. Everything about him shouted that he came from a previous century, a different time, a different place.

"What's that, grandpa?" Ralphie kept asking, plucking at his trouser legs and pointing at the big cage on his uncle's boat trailer.

"What's what?" his grandfather said, looking all around, up and down the street, in the sky and the back seat of the Buick. "What?"

"That!" Ralphie pointed with even more insistence. The rest of the kids chimed in.

Rufus looked everywhere but at the trailer. He scratched his head and tapped a Lucky Strike out of a package he took from one of the double set of breast pockets on his starched white shirt. Then he took a very long time to tamp the tobacco on a Zippo he pulled from his other breast pocket before he lit it and savored the first drag.

The kids all swarmed to see the prize loaded on the boat trailer. It was clearly a cage made of reinforcing bar with chicken wire laid over it, a door in one end and various perches built inside made from of small tree limbs and branches. It was about ten feet long and eight feet wide, built so it would fit precisely on the trailer with no overhang.

When the grandfather walked over with two smaller cages he had taken from the trunk of his Buick, all the kids did a double take. They crowded around and exclaimed their delight.

This was too cool. In one cage was a proud, arrogant, erect raven with a huge black beak and the blackest, glossiest feathers you could imagine. In the other were two squirrels.

"Grandpa!" Ralphie said, his mouth open, pointing to the animals. He stood beaming, dressed in his shorts and barefooted, wearing no shirt, bronzed by summer days in the swimming pool and playing baseball in the playground.

Rufus shrugged, carefully tapping ash from his Lucky and nodding.

"Are we going to put them in that cage?"

"You bet we are," the grandfather said, blowing smoke in a thin stream into both of his nostrils, then holding it and exhaling perfect smoke rings in the still, muggy summer air.

This grandfather was really a very special character. He had been an ambulance driver in The Great War, the one that ended in 1919, long before all our dads had served in World War Two and Korea. He married a German girl, Ralphie's grandmother, who still spoke with a thick accent, and brought her home.

Though he hadn't worked as a machinist in twenty years, he still kept his breast pocket filled with a small steel gauge, a set of calipers and plenty of mechanical pencils.

I thought of the old picture album bound with black ribbon he had casually left on the tool bench in the garage. We had all lain on our stomachs for hours peering at the old snapshots of battle field scenes from World War One, glimpses in gray and black on washed out white backgrounds of moments in time in Belgium and France. There were zig zag trenches filled with dead men bloated by decomposition, their heavy woold uniforms stretched tight; there were barbed wire fences upon which other corpses hung, their rifles fallen at their sides, their limp hands dangling uselessly where they had stopped moving at the moment of death.

Dozens and dozens of shots depicted long, straight trenches with the naked corpses of dead soldiers neatly arrayed shoulder to shoulder, the photos fading away into infinity. In some, there were bulldozers shoving the dirt in over the tops of their bodies. In occasional cases, blankets or a makeshift shelter built from cast off wood covered a corpse or two.

Ralphie had pointed to one of these and asked the purpose of such a thing.

"Friends of his did it so there wouldn't be no dirt shoveled in his face, how come," his grandfather said, spitting snuff in a soft drink bottle and hitching his pants over his massive belly.

Oh, he was a very unusual grandpa, that he was.

He brought his photo album from home to show us after we had failed to heed the admonishment of a neighbor lady who demanded that we hold the noise down during our war games. We had no idea why shouting "Bang, bang, you're dead, sucker!" would upset a middle aged lady during a perfectly ordinary summer afternoon.

He told us he was going to "learn" us a thing or two about war.

I described all this to my mother as I stood barefoot beside her She was busy stirring the contents of pots and pans, trying to get dinner on the table.

"Oh, boy, just don't worry about it," she said, glancing at the clock while she took the cover off a sauce pan with one hand and glanced inside, then cracked the oven door to see about some cornbread she was baking. She sighed, routing a sweaty tendril of hair behind her ear and mopping her brow with the hem of her apron.

"But, mama," I began.

She stopped abruptly and pointed the spoon in my face, almost making my eyes go crossed. "You stay away from the morbid old son of a bitch, you hear me?"

I learned then and there to keep my mouth shut about the wonders of the war in which Ralphie's grandpa fought. It wasn't up for discussion with my mama.

As quickly as Ralphie's uncle Eddie had the ropes off the cage, the two of them picked it up and carried it around the side of the house. They put it under a pecan tree in the back yard.

That was when the old man ceremoniously shooed us out of his way and stepped inside the cage alone. He held the wooden box with one side covered with chicken wire up beside a roost made from the trunk of a sapling and opened the raven's cage. Then the kids could see the raven had one bad wing. It hopped onto the roost cocking its head from side to side and cawing loudly.

The squirrels immediately scampered up a smaller sapling to a nest in the corner of the cage made from a wooden packing crate and covered with burlap. They immediately came back outside with pecans they had found stashed inside their nest and sat on the limb working on them, neatly stripping the shell away from the meat of the nut and eating them with precise bites.

The raven preened his feathers with his beak, dipping it under his good wing and trying in vain to reach the other side of his body and his broken wing.

Why did he put the beak under his wing? We all wanted to know.

The old man explained that there was a kind of bird grease under there that came from glands. The bird was greasing himself up to make the tendrils of his feathers stick together, to make it easy to fly.

"They all do it," he said as he went through the ceremony of lighting another Lucky Strike.

"Y'all had chickens and ducks, geese, you'd know that." This time he threw back his head and blew the smoke in a long, thin gray stream almost straight up.

What was his name? We all wanted to know.

"His name is Ko-lo-neh," the old man said, zippng his lips as if they were the closure of a leather bomber jacket after he spoke the name.

What did that mean?

"It means the raven," Rufus said. Grandpa Rufus was a native of the Big Thicket deep in the east Texas woods. It was the name the Cherokee had given Sam Houston long ago.

It wasn't until several years later that I learned what they meant, that the huge white man, the professional soldier, was like a carrion crow feeding on the dead.

"I want to call him Buzzy," Ralphie said.

Why?

"Because when he gives his cry, it starts out with a buzzing sound," Ralphie said gleefully, his eyes gleaming while he stared at this magnificent new pet.

That was how the summer of Buzzy started. We experimented with what he would eat, killing toads and small snakes for his culinary delight. We found out he totally rejected the kind of food humans liked, puny items such as lettuce and squash. Buzzy wanted meat. Dead meat.

There were secret missions with flash lights to check on him after dark. His eyes glowed in the rays we shone upon them. Of course, we begged to sleep out under the sky with our blankets and mosquito nets.

We read aloud Edgar Allan Poe's magnificent poem about the raven who haunted him o'er many a volume of forgotten lore as he pondered weak and weary.

We fed the squirrels pecans. It was a daily ritual. Ralphie had a private zoo in his back yard.

Rufus came back often. One day he fetched Buzzy down from his perch. I was terrified as he calmly reached up and took the wild bird under his body, lightly grasping the creature and holding him out to Ralphie while the rest of us watched from outside the case.

Ralphie took him from his grandfather. He held him at arm's length. He stood mesmerized, held deeply in the force of the bird's unblinking stare.

Suddenly, the crow lunged his supple neck forward, tilted his head and snapped the long, razor sharp beak. He took a sizable chunk of meat out of Ralphie's upper lip just under the septum.

Ralphie struggled to keep from bursting into tears. He stood unbelieving that Buzzy would do something like this to him.

"Turn him loose! Turn him loose!" Rufus shouted. Ralphie thrust him away with the same motion he had used when the bird attacked, then released him. If Ralphie had not done this and at the same time jerked his head back, his injury would have been much more severe.

The grandfather stood and stared at him.

"He did it because you scared him. I think you squeezed him too hard. He thought you were going to harm him. You see, an animal like that bird is wild. They do not trust humans. They cannot afford to. Let that be a lesson to you."

Ralphie stood with tears starting to trickle down his cheeks.

"I think he was aiming at your eyes, Ralphie." I said it loudly, excited. When the bird attacked, I had retracted my head, too, even though I was standing outside the cage. I could taste brass and smoke in my mouth, that aftertaste of shock and adrenaline.

Rufus turned to look at me through those coke bottle glasses. He appeared disgusted with me.

"I think your mama is wondering where you are. Why don't you run along?"

"I..."

"Go on, boy. Get outta here," he said, ushering Ralphie out of the cage, giving him his handkerchief to dab at the blood.

Ralphie had struggled to the highest perch in the cage. He was caw caw cawing like mad and flapping his one good wing.

Ralphie's mother came out of the house and scolded Rufus. Ralphie began to wail, crying as she escorted him to the house. The old man sat heavily at the family's picnic table, staring at us kids.

"Y'all scat. Right now!" He clapped his hands very loudly.

The next day our mothers took us on a picnic at the park downtown near the zoo. When we got back, the cage, Buzzy and the squirrels had disappeared.

Ralphie came our door crestfallen, his shoulders stooped, a hump in his back as he told me the news. He tried hard not to cry, but he did. When the tears and snot flowed into his bandage, he had to pull it off, a sodden mess. It was ugly because the wound hadn't scabbed over yet. I got him a paper towel from the kitchen. We played cowboys and Indians, then we got up an impromptu game of kick the can with a couple of the other guys. When it got dark, his mom called him several times while he ignored her. Then she called our phone number.

My mother told him his mother wanted him on the phone. He mumbled something into the receiver, then hung it up where it perched in the little cul de sac in the hallway. He sounded very resentful when he said, "Okay. All right."

I walked him home.