Gee Whiz! Jersey City Councilman Steve Lipski popped for whizzing on crowd at nightclub

Click to enlarge councilman Lipski

A hammered Jersey City, New Jersey city councilman has been popped for urinating on a crowd of music fans from the balcony of a Washington D.C. nightclub, according to the cops and club sources.

"He was very drunk," one source said. "We've dealt with this man before. He's never peed on anybody, but he gets really belligerent and drunk."

The New York Daily News reported Sunday that two-term Jersey City councilman Steve Lipski has been charged with assault.

The 44 year-old Lipski was kicked out of the 9:30 Club Friday night during a concert by a Grateful Dead tribute band when club staffers saw him relieve himself onto the crowd from a second floor balcony. No one seems to know whether it was musical criticism or just another drunken politician doing what comes naturally.

This sort of behavior isn't unknown in Jersey City, just across the river from New York City. The lurid incident marks the second time in recent years that a Jersey City pol was caught with his pants down. Photos showing Jerramiah Healy, another councilman at the time, naked and passed out on his front stoop were circulated all over the Internet in 2004, just days before he won election as mayor of Jersey City.

Lipski told reporters outside his home this weekend "I've resolved not to touch alcohol again," He called the incident "deeply humiliating, very embarrassing" and "troubling." The two-term Democrat also refused to admit he'd actually whizzed from the balcony of the 9:30 club. "I can't comment on that," Lipski told Fox 5 TV. "I'm going to continue to do all the good things, and I'm not going to let this overshadow me."

"I spoke to one of his contributors this morning, and he's denying the whole thing," one source said. "He's telling people he spilled a drink. It's ridiculous. He's already said he's not resigning. He's telling people that."
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Painting: The Obama Transition Team

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Lemmings do not commit mass suicide. . .unless they are nudged along by Walt Disney

The notion that Lemmings commit mass suicide became a full-blown urban legend in 1958, following a Disney documentary “White Wilderness,” that contains a lot of faked footage.

Instead of filming an actual migration, the movie team transported a few dozen lemmings to a riverbank in Alberta, Canada (not far from Vancouver, where I am writing this), which is not even coastal, and therefore not even part of the lemmings' range.

The Disney filmmakers then tossed the rodents off a cliff into the river. In the documentary, the river becomes "the sea." The cameras rolled as the lemmings drowned, and thus was born the longstanding urban legend. See a YouTube clip from the movie here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMZlr5Gf9yY

Despite faking the documentary, Disney won the Oscar that year for Best Documentary. Do they have to give it back?



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We shed a lot of joyful tears Tuesday night

I had more than a few moments of tears Tuesday night. It started with John McCain's concession speech, when I shed a few tears for him, but most of all , for what we'd done that night, for what our beleagured party had finally marshalled together, and, most of all, for what this meant for all of us--and in particular, those who are not white, not male, not inside, and not political (until this year).

I was a delegate for Jesse Jackson in 1988. I went from my local caucus to the County Convention, and moved ahead to the State Convention, where our campaign finally collapsed. For a brief moment in the 1988 election, Jesse Jackson was the frontrunner. But, alas, it was not to be.



It was moving to watch Jesse in Grant Park Tuesday night. . .crying copious tears. . .tears I didn't even know a veteran hardballer like the Rev. Jesse Jackson was capable of shedding. Unlike some of the national conservative pundits--who claimed Jesse's tears were because someone finally made the grade and it wasn't him--I knew Jesse Jackson cried because at long last, a brother made the grade, and was headed to the White House in 75 days. God bless America. Jesse, Barack may have gotten there at long last, but you helped lay the asphalt down on the road to the White House.

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painting ---- Self portrait 27: boxed

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The NY Post cover from yesterday...

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Neil Young plays "Leave The Driving To Us" with lyrics

This song is one of my favorites from Neil's magnificent album (and movie!) "Greendale."



Leave The Driving To Us
Music and Lyrics by Neil Young

out on the old coast highway
flyin' through the night
jed got stopped by the CHP
for speedin' and no brake lights

rolled down the drivers window
slipped his gun down under the seat
glove box full of cocaine
trunk was full of weed

"driver's license and registration,"
said the officer with his flashlight
searchin' around the floor of the car
smellin' like somethin' ain't right

jed's life flashed before him
like a black and white super 8
he heard the sound of the future
on a scratchy old 78

nothin' was still, all was movin'
when the flashlight found the gun
then jed pulled the trigger
in a split second tragic blunder

"makes you think about livin'
and what life has to tell,"
said jed to grandpa
from inside his cell

camouflage hung in his closet
guns all over the wall
plans for buildings and engineers
and a book with no numbers at all

the whole town was stunned
they closed the coast highway for 12 hours
no one could believe it
jed was one of ours

meanwhile across the ocean
living in the internet
is the cause of an explosion
no one has heard yet

but there's no need to worry
there's no reason to fuss
just go on about your work now
and leave the driving to us

and we'll be watching you
no matter what you do
and you can do your part
by watching others too

grandpa put down the paper
staring in disbelief
jed had always been good to him
and never gave him any grief

"the moral of this story
is try not to get too old
the more time you spend on earth
the more you see unfold

and as an afterthought
this must to be told
some people have taken pure bullshit
and turned it into gold"
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List of some of my favorite poets and their books

I know I've left out some key poets and poems, but that is the problem with lists!

William Blake - Songs of Innocence and Experience; America, A Prophecy; Jerusalem; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

James Dickey - Falling and other poems; Selected Poems; Buckdancer's Choice

Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass

Poetry is the shadow
cast by our streetlight
imagination
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Christopher Smart - Jubilate Agno

Lord Byron - Don Juan

Lawrence Ferlinghetti - A Coney Island of the Mind; Populist Manifesto; The secret meaning of things; Northwest ecolog; Starting from San Francisco

Mark Strand - Darker, Reasons for Moving, Stories of our Lives

Charles Bukowski - Screams from the Balcony; Crucifix in a deathhand; Burning in water, drowning in flame; The days run away like wild horses

Pablo Neruda - Selected poems; 20 love poems; Book of questions; Residence on earth

John Ashberry - Collected poems (1956-87); Note from the air

Elizabeth Bishop - The Collected Poems; Geography III

William Shakespeare - The Sonnets

William Butler Yeats - Collected Poems. I am partial to his later poems, but he didn't write many bad ones.

Allen Ginsberg -Howl; Kaddish; The Fall of America; Reality Sandwiches

John Berryman - The Dream Songs

Anne Sexton - The Awful Rowing Toward God; Transformations; To Bedlam And Partway Back; Collected Poems

William Wordsworth - Lyrical Ballads; Recollections of Early Childhood; The Prelude

Frank O'Hara - Selected Poems; Meditations in an emergency; Lunch Poems

Ted Berrigan - The Sonnets; Selected Poems; Many Happy Returns

Sylvia Plath - Ariel; The Colossus; Crossing The Water; Collected Poems

James Wright - The Branch Will Not Break; Shall we gather at the river; Collected poems; Saint Judas

Carl Sandburg - The people, yes; Chicago Poems; Slabs of the sunburnt west;

T.S. Eliot - Collected Poems (as long as they include The Waste Land, J. Alfred Prufrock, Four Quartets, and Burnt Norton)

Robert Lowell - Life studies; For the union dead; The Notebook; Lord Weary's Castle; Collected Poems

Ezra Pound - The Cantos

Arthur Rimbaud - Illuminations; A season in hell

Garcia Federico Lorca - Poet in New York; Selected poems

Nikos Kazantzakis - The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. I'd always liked this work, but renewed by acquaintance after last summer, when I was in Greece, and had a poetry reading in a bookstore and they had me read several long passages from this book--because they wanted to hear what it sounded like in English. They liked it.

Emily Dickinson - Collected Poems. In my booklet, she was the first great American poet, and right at the top of the rockpile for all time.

e.e. cummings - Selected or Collected Poems.

Wallace Stevens - Collected Poems; The Emperor of Ice Cream; Harmonium. Who'd have thought an insurance executive could write such beautiful, moving, dense, lyrical poems?

William Carlos Williams - Collected Shorter Poems; Paterson; Imaginations; Pictures from Breughel and other poems; Asphodel: That Greeny Flower and Other Love Poems

Theodore Roethke - Collected Poems.

Robert Hershon - The German Lunatic; Into a punchline; The Public Hug: New and Selected Poems

Gregory Corso - The Vestal Lady on Brattle; Gasoline; Elegiac Feelings American

Kenneth Koch - Collected Poems

Jack Kerouac - Scattered Poems; Book of Blues; Mexico City Blues

Richard Hugo - Collected Poems; The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir
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See also, A List Of Lists On All This Is that
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Victory! The tally as of midnight, Pacific Standard Time

By Pablo Fanque,

All This Is That National Affairs Editor

The raw tally: Obama: 58,581,942; McCain: 52,925,833; House of Representatives: Democrats up 12; U.S. Senate: up 5.

Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States Tuesday night, kicking off an all-new chapter in America's history as the first African-American to hold the world's most important job. You know, in the brilliant Warren Beatty film, Bulworth, Bulworth explains that the country needs to begin a proactive racial deconstruction program, "I mean if everybody starts f***ing everybody, pretty soon we'll all be the same color." We haven't quite gotten there, but tonight we got started.

Barack Obama is not just an African-American, he is a half-white, half-black man, who was raised off shore, born of a Kansas woman and a Muslim Kenyan father. There's just a little bit of all of us in Obama. Tonight we took the big leap toward that deconstruction. It was moving to see African-Americans, white men and women, Asians, and Hispanics celebrating and weeping over someone who has taken down the last barrier brick by brick.

When I was 15 years old in 1968, not all black Americans were even allowed to vote until the the Voting Rights Act passed. It took 40 more years to finally propel an African-American into the White House.

And even the Republicans seemed to hop on the bandwagon in the end. John McCain made a most gracious concession speech and let his supporters know the country had done the Right Thing. A close friend of mine--a diehard Christian Conservative/longtime Bush supporter said to me "He's our President now. I can't wait to see what he makes happen."

"If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,'' Obama told 120,000 people gathered for a victory celebration in Chicago's Grant Park.

The Illinois senator ends his long 21-month journey with a stunning electoral victory that bumped the Democrats' majority in Congress and marked the end of Republican dominance and malfeasance in Washington.

Obama crossed the threshold of 270 electoral votes early last night when television networks projected him winning the state of California (in Washington, we like to think it was us). As I write this, at midnight, he had at least 338 electoral votes to McCain's 145, according to the Associated Press and television network projections. Six states were still unclear.

His victory, along with Democratic gains in congressional contests, puts Democrats in firm control of the federal government for the first time since the early 1990s. And, baby, "we're not going to rock the boat. We're going to tip it over."

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Victory: One President, 35 Senate Seats, 435 House, 11 Governor seats up for grabs

[from yesterday's Drudge Report]


John, John






Click to enlarge President-elect Obama




Victory: One President, 35 Senate Seats, 435 House, 11 Governor seats up for grabs. Just how many seats will we take?


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POTUS 39 - President James Earl Carter - Not As Bad A President As You Have Been Led To Believe, But Rather A Victim Of Circumstance

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I remember how proud I was of Jimmy Carter, that Tuesday in November, 1976, when he stomped President Gerald R. Ford. It was my second Presidential election, and my first election had been a disaster, for me, and for the country.

With Ford's departure, the White House would finally be swept clean of the detritus of Dick Nixon. President Carter was my kind of people. Even among hillbillies, there are a few who rise above their mean beginnings. Of course, his brother Billy Carter was more my kind of people with his constant beer infusions, improvident talk, and public urination.

It didn't take long before things didn't go so well for President Carter, even though he would eventually win the Nobel Peace Prize. The last year of his admininstration was scarred by the Iranians holding a large number of Americans hostage. They would not be freed until the moment Dutch Reagan took the oath of office. Runaway inflation didn't help his election either. Since his forced retirement, the former President has worked tirelessly for various causes, most notably Habitat For Humanity.

He is the only person to be sworn in as president using his nickname. President Carter was also the first president born in a hospital. Jimmy Carter caused quite a stir when he said he had lusted many times in his heart after seeing pictures of women such as those in Playboy magazine. He instituted the first live televised phone-in broadcast from the White House in March 1977. He also began regular Saturday morning radio addresses to the American public.
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"Because the night belongs to us"

Today. . .this night, does belong to us, as Patty Smith and The Boss wrote decades ago.



After two long years of campaigning, we sit now in the eye of the hurricane, waiting for the next wave of the storm to hit. I've irritated most of my friends over the last couple months, when I wrote saying "be aware of the bear," that we had won nothing yet, that Democrats, had a pathetic record of closing the sale, and this time was no different.

McCain was actually a real threat. The gut-wrenching list of Stevenson, Humphrey, McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry give one pause.

But, alas, we've done it.
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