Much has happened in the surreal landscape since we last met.

                                   Let's take a few moments to review:

The Big Stuff

*  Warped, brain-diseased psychopaths have taken over our White House. Yeah, that's a biggie, and that would be bad enough, except that, to these evil, money-and-blood-drenched inbreeds, that was the easy part. World conquest is where it's at, baby. And we're all going along for the ride. (More on this later in this e-epistle.)
*  Via the Patriot Act and other cabinet-level skullduggery, these very same megalomaniacal thugs are gleefully raping us in our sleep. Or so they think... Some of us refuse to sleep, and in this, I find much hope. Sadly, most of us seem to have been lulled into an artificial REM-like state where Clever Suggestibility out-Indian-leg-wrestles Reason best 10 out of 10, every time. And lastly, woe unto those who are only pretending to sleep during these violations (which, given the metaphor, is not only pathetic but waaay kinky).
* These murderous neo-neo-Nazi-wannabes lied to the American people and the world about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which they used to justify the illegal invasion and conquest of Iraq at a cost of nearly 200 American lives and thousands of Iraqi lives. They committed the ultimate war crime by launching 'aggressive war' in defiance of the U.S. Constitution and the U.N. Charter. This is the crime for which Nazis were convicted and executed at the Nuremberg Trials.

Other Stuff

* This is trivial next to the afore mentioned horrors, but it's something that's really buggin' me: this website, OtherSpokane.com, HAS BEEN OFFICIALLY BANNED IN CHINA!  Click here to see what this very website has in common with the U.S. District Court of Oregon and the Oakton, Virginia Baptist Church. If you can find any connection, I'm all e-ears.
* More and more people have taken to flying the flag upside down (an internationally known sign of distress) because of the coup in DC. My dream on 10/13/01, reported in Issue 19, has turned out to be somewhat prophetic. (Please don't ask me to contact "othersiders"; my powers are limited.) Click the flag to see how it should be properly flown after the regime change.
* Three words: Digital video, baby. I'm just dipping my toes now, but I'm slipping off the log. Future video editions of this humble e-mag are in the works.
* I got a job. Having sworn on everything holy that I would never again work in "restaurant management", I have, by way of dumb luck and bizarre acts of God, found myself as kitchen manager of a new, hip, downtown, underground (i.e., below the surface of the earth) pub. My hyper-odd experiences of the past eight months will no doubt find their way into future issues.
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Stik Predicts:
The next national Election Day will be unlike any in our country's history. My friends, these people will not give up power. Just as they gained power by deceit, so will they not neglect any deviousness in order to keep it. Ultimately, they will have to be removed, perhaps by force.
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"The truth will emerge..."
"And when it does, this house of cards, built of deceit, will fall."
Spoken on the floor of Congress by Senator Robert Byrd, one of the few in that eroding edifice with testicles larger than snow peas. Read his brave words here. This issue of OtherSpokane is proudly dedicated to that crotchety old fart.
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Did You Know? 
Did you know that the randomly colored letters in the left-hand index column of this web page are actually elements of a secret code to my covert brotherhood of insurgents and rabble-rousers, and is specially designed to confound some mid-level kiss-ass new-hire at the Department of Fatherland Security?   [x228epc17]
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"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves."
     Henry David Thoreau
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Freedom Under Fire
This report from the American Civil Liberties Union illustrates how dangerous it has become since the terrorist attacks of September 11 to criticize the President or his policies. Scary...
Read the full ACLU report

Not outraged enough? Click here to read Amnesty International's annual report.
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Where Were You in '72?
Maybe it was all the booze or the blow, but George can't remember. His flyboy act on the USS Abraham Lincoln was a slap in the face of all soldiers who actually showed up for duty -- which Bush did not. Need documentation, records, testimony of his commanding officers?
Click here or here or here.
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Reward!
Did you witness GW Bush performing any National Guard Service between May 1972 and October 1973, in either Alabama or Texas? If so, you could be eligible for thousands of dollars in unclaimed reward money! Here are the details of the Texas and Alabama rewards.
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"Those who died in this war did not die for their country. They died for their government. They died for Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. And yes, they died for the greed of the oil cartels, for the expansion of the American empire, for the political ambitions of the President. They died to cover up the theft of the nation's wealth to pay for the machines of death."
     Howard Zinn, writing in the June edition of The Progressive
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Stik Predicts: New Bumper Stickers Soon to Appear
Bush Lied / Thousands Died
Re-defeat Bush
Regime Change Begins at Home
No More Bushit
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Deviouser and Deviouser
The devious bastards in the Pentagon, striving wildly to become even more devious and even more bastardly, have instructed their mad scientists to develop a radar-based device that can identify people by the way they walk. This "gait signature" could become a part of the vast surveillance system called Total Information Awareness. The amount of data stored in this soul-sucking pig-monster will be measured in petabytes (one petabyte is roughly equal to 50 times the amount of data in the Library of Congress). Run by former Iran-Contra criminal John Poindexter, the system will draw conclusions and predictions about "terrorists" from databases that record passport applications, visas, work permits, driver's licenses, car rentals, airline ticket purchases, arrests or reports of suspicious activities, etc, etc, etc...
source
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Need for a Congressional Panty Raid?
Did you see Ashcroft audaciously asking Congress for even more dictatorial powers via the Patriot Act? Listen closely to the inflections in his voice. Look at the hollowness in his eyes. Faithful readers, I'm willing to wager any amount of money that this man is wearing some form of expensive, silky, lady's undergarments.
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When you meet with opposition...endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory."
     Bertrand Russell
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On Bush's Visit the Fatherland...
When George W. Bush toured the former Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau, the US Media failed to mention that Dubya's grandpa Prescott Bush was a financier of the Nazis. The assets of gramps' companies were seized in 1942, under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Given his family's history, it is surreal that Bush said, "The sites are a sobering reminder of the power of evil...May God bless the victims and their families and may we always remember." Except that Bush does not want us to remember that his family made a healthy chunk of their fortune financing the Nazis.
source

More Poop on Prescott
Prescott Bush, a shareholder of the company United Banking Corporation, worked with industrialist Fritz Thyssen from the Nazistowskiego Silesian Consolidated Steel Corporation, where Auschwitz prisoners worked. The American press blew the whistle in 1942, and the U.S. government conducted an audit of USA UBC's books. The Roosevelt administration cracked down, sort of. The Company was allowed to continue operations, but restricted Bush from dealing with his goose-stepping buddies.
source1 source2

Toby Rogers of Clamor Magazine goes even farther: "According to classified documents from Dutch intelligence and US government archives, ...George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush made considerable profits off Auschwitz slave labor...A portion of the slave labor force in Poland was 'managed by Prescott Bush'...Bush himself is an heir to these profits from the holocaust which were placed in a blind trust in 1980 by his father, former president George Herbert Walker Bush."
source
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The Triumph of Propaganda
When the United States invaded Iraq, a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that 42 percent of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. An ABC News poll said that 55 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein directly supported Al Qaida. There has never been any evidence of either claim.  [Editor's note: And all the herd said, "Mooooo..."]
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The New Corporate Media Mantra
"The report cannot be independently verified."
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The pseudo-rescue of Jessica Lynch
A must-read Toronto Star investigation reveals the so-called rescue operation of Jessica Lynch to be a giant farce. The medical team who tended to Pvt. Lynch actually tried to give her back to the U.S. troops, but their ambulance was shot at instead. Having determined that there were no Iraqi soldiers at the hospital, the U.S. soldiers burst in like Rambo on crack two days later. "Everyone expected the Americans to come that day because the city had fallen. But we didn't expect them to blast through the doors like a Hollywood movie," said one of the doctors. Of course, accompanying the rescuers were two cameramen and a still photographer, also in uniform.
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"There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement."
     E. B. White
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"The images you are seeing on television, you are seeing over and over and over, and it's the same picture, of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it twenty times and you say, 'My god, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?'"
     Donald Rumsfeld, downplaying the sacking of the Iraqi National Museum.
[Editor's note: Hey, Don. The poor of Harlem are looting the Met. Quick, say something funny.]
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Token Nice Guy has Enough
At one point, as Secretary of State Colin Powell was rehearsing for his February 1 speech to the UN, he tossed several pages of the script into the air.
     'I'm not reading this,' he shouted. 'This is bullshit.'"
source
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Yet Another Threat to Democracy
Touch-screen electronic voting machines have suddenly became the hottest thing since hanging chads.  No doubt that they are fast and convenient, but are they reliable? Are they tamper-proof and free of programming errors? Who's to know?  The machine code is a proprietary secret of the company that supplies them.  This puts vote counting under the control of a private company, with no independent checks or audits.
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Stik Predicts:
Look for a big name Democrat to leave the clan
     and lead a new third party.

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On the We-Will-Bring-Them-Freedom Mindset:
The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within."
     Gandhi
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Dixie Tricks
Why were the Dixie Chicks so derided for saying that they were ashamed of Bush? Two factors:
     (1)  Much has to do with sexism in the world of country music and among white male Bush supporters, where the overlap is substantial. The Dixie Chicks are, obviously, chicks, and in some quarters folks don't appreciate baby dolls criticizing a macho, shit-kickin', cowboy hat-wearing Texan president.
     (2)  It was a political maneuver. According to a story from American Newsreel, phone calls originating from Republican Party headquarters in DC went out to country stations, urging them to exclude the Chicks from future airtime. The "alternative concert" was the work of South Carolina GOPs.
source
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"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
     Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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