whew....

Quoted: The victory would give President Evo Morales a fresh mandate to redistribute petroleum royalties and private farmlands among Bolivia’s poor indigenous majority.

whoa...

Quoted: But in an apparent bid to defuse the potential standoff, the assembly was giving the king 15 days to vacate the palace in central Katmandu, said Bimalendra Nidhi of the centrist Nepali Congress, the second largest party in the assembly. Nidhi made the comments after his party met with the Maoists — former insurgents — who hold the most seats in the assembly and are expected to lead the country's new government. The Maoists gave up their 10-year fight for a communist Nepal not long after, and the election of the assembly in April marked the culmination of the peace process with the former insurgents. The assembly is charged with governing Nepal while it rewrites the constitution. On Tuesday, 575 of its members were sworn in.

I just found out about a recent push in city government for an "Events Promoters" ordinance that would force competely unrealistic criteria upon small events promotors. The effects of this ordinance are potentially disastrous for local and independent music and theater.

Quoted: Imagine a Chicago with no Metro or Double Door...

a decent analysis of the dem situation

Rad May Day demonstration. You don't see them here, but there were also giant communist-themed flags all about and an anarchist contingent that I chatted with before the march. In Paris, May Day is an occasion for varying groups to assemble together and collectively demonstrate for their various issues and causes. Such groups include legal and illegal (sans papiers) workers alike and highlight concrete contemporary social problems like the recent sky rocketing of housing costs, access to working papers, the recent moves under Sarkozy to re-privatize the healthcare industry, and the state's attempt to cut education budgets throughout France (which has led to a number of recent student strikes over the past few months). Being the 40th anniversary of May '68, of the few people I talked to, almost all of them seemed ambivalent toward its contemporary legacy--the idea being that when conservatives today attempt to disparage the history of French radicalism, you know that it still serves as a touchstone for today's militancy. However, on the other hand, even more important than this is the rejection of nostalgia in favor of the will to create new strategies and alliances that work towards solving the contemporary crises mentioned above.

One such tactic that has become important is the move on the part of the sans papiers to seek work permits, as opposed to the traditional movement towards naturalization. With work permits, asserting the right to exist in French territories without naturalized status or a visa becomes much easier and it provides an alternative to the citizen/non-citizen binary that tends to make immigrant struggles difficult. More on this later...

Quoted: http://www.humanite.fr/Un-premier-Mai-de-ripostes-sociales

My sentiments exactly:
Quoted: Indeed, the entire trajectory of Clinton's campaign can be traced as a kind of reification of phallic power as a sad and unnecessary means of attempting to legitimize a female candidate to those enmeshed with the dominant patriarchy, those who might find such a candidate weak simply because of her sex. Such a tactic is bound to fail because by reifying such power, the female candidate merely justifies the perceived and false weakness. In other words, those who live by the Penn, die by the Penn.

...So there you go, Clinton supporters. Your candidate has told you what she believes about military force. She is willing to make the United States a target for nuclear retaliation and massive terrorist acts should Israel be attacked. Now that's a fuckin' way to tell people to take their hope and shove it up their asses.

Damn. Why'd he go and do a thing like that when he has what Dick Cheney says is the only thing that matters--the confidence of the president?

Quoted: President Bush today praised Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, whose tenure has been marred by accusations of perjury before Congress, as “a man of integrity, decency and principle.”

Again: No. Fucking. Way.

Quoted: What about those who say he's leaving to avoid Congressional scrutiny? "I know they'll say that," he says, "But I'm not going to stay or leave based on whether it pleases the mob."