sometimes, I feel I gotta get away


NY subway portrait, 1941, by walker evans. collected in Many Are Called.

* Los Alamos whistleblower beaten. excerpt:

"Los Alamos lab whistleblower scheduled to testify before Congress was lured to a bar and then badly beaten in an attack his wife and lawyer believe was designed to keep him quiet.

"Tommy Hook was in a Santa Fe hospital recovering from a fractured jaw and other injuries, his wife, Susan Hook, said Monday. She said the assailants told him during the attack early Sunday that 'if you know what's good for you, you'll keep your mouth shut.'

"Tommy Hook has a pending lawsuit against the University of California alleging whistleblower retaliation. He had been scheduled to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee later this month about alleged financial irregularities at the nuclear weapons lab."

Be sure to click through to the link for the picture; Hook was truly badly beaten.

* The New York Times on the Bush economy. excerpt:

With all of the debate about taxes, the economy and domestic spending, it is hard to imagine anyone supporting the notion of taking money from programs like Medicaid and college-tuition assistance, increasing the tax burden of the vast majority of working Americans, sending the country into crushing debt - and giving the proceeds to people who are so fantastically rich that they don't know what to do with the money they already have. Yet that is just what is happening under the Bush administration. Forget the middle class and the upper-middle class. Even the merely wealthy are being left behind in the dust by the small slice of super-rich Americans.
...
There is something deeply wrong about a system that calls into question a comfortable retirement or a top-notch education for people who have broken into the top 20 percent of income earners. It starts to seem politically explosive when you consider that in a decade, those making between $100,000 and $200,000 will pay about five to nine percentage points more of their income in federal taxes than those making more than $1 million, assuming the Bush tax cuts are made permanent.

This is not about giving wealthy people more money to invest back into the economy. At this level, it's really about giving more money to those who have nothing to do with it except amass enormous estates for their heirs. Fixing the problem will require members of Congress to summon the courage to say no to a president who wants more for the richest of the rich at the expense of everyone else. We're not holding our breath.

* Why can't my flights be so eventful?

"On Western Airlines Flight 322, yesterday, a shapely blonde in 2nd class section suddenly stripped nude and paraded down the aisle. When she got to the 1st class section she grabbed several courtesy bottles of Scotch and then sat in row 10, singing and laughing. She told the crowd of enthusiastically clapping passengers that she had just heard on the radio that she had won a million dollars in the state lottery. A stewardess tried to cover her, but the woman evaded her and raced up and down the aisles for 10 minutes with passengers cheering. Said the stewardess: 'She wasn’t really a blond.'"

* The Supreme Court rules against science and bans medical marijuana.