Could you please ask Sen. Sanders the following question?

Sen. Sanders, What can we do about informing the public through network news broadcast, when the stations are owned by large corporation? People get most of their news on these networks.

Good work Democrats. Let's get a vote on immigration reform and raising the minimum wage. The Republicans do not want a vote on minimum wage because they are certain the bill would pass, then the folks who finance them will be upset. Why should corporations be upset by raising wages; all this does is put more money in the pockets of consumers. This helps both the poor and the middle class and believe it or not "it trickles up to the richest folks too." Higher minimum wages are good for the nation.

Our immigration laws are broken, have been for decades. The Republicans do not want to repair the problem because the corporations that fund their elections benefit from broken immigration law. These corporations can hire labor under market rates because the undocumented laborers will not complain to the officials when their employers cheat them. They pretend that it is about not rewarding lawbreakers. The real lawbreakers are US corporations that knowlingly recruit and hire undocumented labor because it boosts their profits. The real lawbreakers are the rich corporation leaders who thumb their noses at US immigration law. In the US we started with slavery. When the Civil War ended slavery we changed to the Chinese Exclusion Act. During World War II we switched from cheap labor from China to cheap labor from Mexico with the Bracero Act. Now we have an immigration law that does not fit our needs or the needs of the global community. The Republicans are content to keep it broken because their campaign donors get rich cheating poor people who have no voice in US Government

Yes, go forward with the petition. By not allowing a vote, Mr. Boehner is simply protecting the Repubs who would have to publicly oppose the will of the people. After all, this is 2014 and they don't want to show their ignorance.

There is no Republican party anymore. Just the No Party.

Too bad Democrats didn't care as much about slashing food aid to the elderly, disabled and poor. Again. There was no arm-twisting needed to get 89 Dems to cut food aid. This example does show some interesting priorities that are certainly worth publicly addressing.

Excellent point, Fabian! Bush came first and should be first in line to get nailed, along with his fascist sidekicks & enablers. Then it's time to go after Obama, and those other scoundrels Palsimon listed. Hey, why not have it all? A democracy as vibrant and alive as this one deserves no less. (Couldn't resist a little sarcasm here...)

By the way, as to Thom's topic of the day... With all due respect, Thom, I'm more than a little weary of these stupid dramas in Congress. I often wonder if they're staged, just to keep us voting for the party of "lesser evil". Given this freak show we've been handed, it wouldn't surprise me. Even if factually incorrect, such thoughts are hardly without merit. - Aliceinwonderland

Loren, I think the key word is "pretense". I hate to be a cynic, but me thinks that's all it is. I just hope I live long enough to see socialism rise up from the ashes one day, after capitalism crashes & burns. Remember that old fable about the phoenix? Such a beautiful metaphor... But should this blessed event ever occur, it won't come to us gift-wrapped by the Dems.

Yes, Alice, "pretense" is indeed the key word, just as we were taught by the Big Lie of "change we can believe in." Alas, the Red Phoenix -- what an emblem for a new flag! -- will no doubt be a long time rising. In the meantime we have Paul Robeson's translation of the lyrics from an old song of rebellion, first sung by the Red Cavalry in their epic rides across the Steppe during the Russian Civil War (1918-1923), then by the entire Red Army during World War II, also as the anthem of the Communist Party in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. For many decades after the post-war purges, Roibeson's version was banned, but now thanks to the Internet, as if in prophetic microcosm of the Phoenix, it has risen again:

"O far and away the road goes winding;
Look and see how merrily the road goes..."

Here it is from his 1941 album Songs of Free Men, which was part of the music of my childhood:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5PBrFXNQQA&feature=kp

And just for the record -- no pun intended -- here it is by the Red Army Chorus c. 1937: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6NHw4kiUak

Alice, I think Robeson dropped the key from A to D most likely to accommodate his own vocal range. Long ago, when I was a folk singer of some local renown, singing only traditional British and Appalachian ballads (especially those with obviously pagan roots), I often switched keys for the same reason, though I never changed a minor or modal-keyed song into majors, as that I considered real sacrilege. (To me there is a unique resonance evoked by minor and especially modal chord-sequences, a musical aura that suggests a choreography of shadows in moonlit meadows or the slow slow slowly darkening dance of blue midsummer twilight at latitudes north of about 45 degrees or how clear and troutly rivers sometimes murmur with distinctly female voices, and above all else, the magick of how such chords become like brush-strokes of color, as if some phantom painter were disclosing the exquisiteness implicit in the face of a lover, a woman rightfully an incarnation of the Muse.) But as you say, such is the freedom within traditional music. Quoth Taliesin, "I have been in an uneasy chair..." Hence Thanks and Blessed Be to you.

Was hoping you'd check back, Alice, and very glad you did. I'd love to hear your music, and back in the day, numbered several musicians amongst my friends. I also have the sense we have rather a bit to say to one another, not the least about matters that are surely relevant to changes in consciousness but might seem otherwise in the nominally materialistic context of Mr. Hartmann's website. Apropos mixed sensory phenomena, the first time I saw a Mark Rothko painting, this c. 1965 in the Modern: I could literally hear it (probably not really, but that's surely how it felt, as if I were somehow seeing the interacting colors of a raga). Ditto some Clyfford Still painting later that same (very wonderful) year. Yes, I'm happiest creating, these days mostly with words, but in the past also with photography, painting and music -- old bohemian to the bitter end. (For a good look at my relationship with music -- not so much as a folk musician but as a semioticist with a subtle ear for meaning -- check out my blog piece entitled "Dancer Resurrected": it's way too long, 22,000-something words in dire need of a competent editor, but I suspect it makes a number of points with which you can relate.) Apropos connections, if you're a member of LinkedIn, we maybe could get in touch via that medium. Otherwise I don't have an immediate solition, but I'll file the problem away so my subconscious can work on it, a process I as a writer have come to trust absolutely. Sometimes the response is quick, other times it takes a while, but it's rather like Robert Graves says of the Goddess in the poem "To Juan at the Winter Solstice": "nothing promised that is not performed."

By the way, speaking of hearing things: out in the Pacific Northwest back country, far away from the madding crowds and their maddening noise, you can actually hear the Northern Lights, just as Jack London described in some of his writing. They crackle and hiss in time with their motion, low and softly as they wane, louder as they surge and flare, always rather like static on old-time radios...

Thank you for the compliments, Alice. From you they are indeed meaningful.

Meanwhile you have shown me a unique and decidedly intriguing quality of memory, the recollection of an essay's content not so much by its (unavoidably) linear text as by the qualities summarized in the distinctly non-linear iconography of its illustration. In other words, you understood -- which damn few people (allow themselves to) do.

The "etherial images" piece is "Abutments," an account of an eerie, compelling and ultimately pivotal experience I had in the deeper woods of Northern Michigan (the Au Sable River country, upper part of the Lower Peninsula) when I was 12. "'Dancer' Resurrected: a Story of Love, Art, Sex and Revolution" is infinitely more linear, a reconstructed summary of "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer," the 24-year book project, its 75,000-word manuscript lost with its two filing-cabinet drawers of research notes and nearly all its photographs in the 1983 fire. The connection between the two texts, apart from their shared metaphysical elements, is the illustration: I used a sandwich to illustrate "Abutments" because the other-worldly quality of this particular image seemed just right for the text. (The sandwich is made of my casual portrait of a beautiful young woman with long windblown hair printed atop my I-was-here photo of a grove of young alder in the Cascade back country; the alders are bisected by an abandoned road, now just a path, that though filled with early-autumn leaves is reminiscent of the abandoned road that is the setting for "Abutments.") Then a year or so later I wrote "'Dancer' Resurrected" and used the same sandwich, this time because the woman in the image is in real life the woman whose role is so central to its text.

"Abutments," a chapter from my memoirs, is only about 4,000 words, but "'Dancer'" is very long, 20,344 words according to the counter on my computer (I remembered it as 22,000 words, which means I have already edited it down a bit, but as I said, it remains in dire need of rigorous editing by a skilled editor).

"'Dancer' Resurrected," as its subtitle implies, is both a love story and a summary of the key findings detailed and thoroughly documented in the original full-length book -- that the Counterculture (which I define in its broadest sense to include feminism, environmentalism, the Back-to-the-Land movement, the alternative press, the associated music and art, the restoration of the musician to the role of bard, the pagan renaissance, the advent of genuinely woman-centered families resulting from white women chosing single parenthood, etc.), was not merely an extension of the Peace and Civil Rights movements (as it was self-servingly defined by the Left) nor a generational tantrum (as it was defined by Ruling Class media), but rather the first wave of the greatest and potentially most healing revolution in our species history: the overthrow of patriarchy -- the symbolic and conceptional epicenter of which is (as both Robert Graves and Edward Whitmont, who was the head of the Jungian Institute, called it in separate pieces, the former an essay, the latter a book), The Return of the Goddess.

"'Dancer' Resurrected" is here: http://lorenbliss.typepad.com/loren-bliss-outside-agitators-notebook/201... Its primary relevance to this conversation is its discussion of the matriarchal origins of traditional balladry, the seemingly magickal evocative power such liturgical fragments yet possess, and the semiotic and prophetic messages conveyed by the Counterculture's eager adoption not just of the associated symbolism (as in folk rock) but of the mores, folkways and modes of living so implied (as in communes, consciousness-raising collectives, the restoration of writers, artists and especially musicians to bardical roles of cultural leadership, etc.). If I were to pick one of the many cited works of music as the icon of its hypothesis, it would be a verse from Tim Buckley's "Phantasmagoria in Two," which beyond its deceptively contemporary form is an archetypal dialogue between the Muse -- the Goddess -- and the bard who is also her lover and prophet:

It you tell me a lie I'll cry for you
Tell me of sin and I'll laugh
If you tell me of all the pain you've had
I'll never smile again

Heavy stuff. But as Graves said: "there is one story and one story only."

Loren Bliss: You're right...that link doesn't seem to work but this one does:

http://lorenbliss.typepad.com/loren-bliss-outside-agitators-notebook/201...

By the way....nice photo! Nice story. Very well written!

Likewise a pleasure for me/Loren