“–Wherever the land is dry and hard, you could be the water … –or you could be the blade disking the earth open; –or you could be the acequia, the ditch that carries water from river to fields; –or you could be the just engineer mapping dams that must be taken down, and those which would serve the venerable all, instead of only the very few; –or you could be the battered vessel for carrying water by hand; –or you could be the one who stores the water,...

Probably because the Pope makes little of it, many may not remember that today it’s the Pope’s birthday: Born April 16, 1927. He’s a sharp and strong 81 years old. Age alone is no determinant about a person’s abilities to be a strong… Pope… or a President. Relationships Catholics have long had what often seems strange to others, either a kind of an arm’s length, “Touch-him-not,-he’s-like-God” relationship with their prelates, or a deep personal...

Again, a disclosure: I am a Catholic. Catholic social teachings disagree with abuses of power, disagree with politics that omit and oppress the poor and needy, disagree with trampling the preciousness of the life force, disagree with any idea that preemptive war is good, disagree with any idea that humans are not worthy of justice and dignity… and much more. These principles are in place to keep the world from going dead black with avarice and sloth and cruelty and the sounds of many mouths...

First, a disclosure: I am a Catholic who comes from a long line of deeply ethnic old believers. I’ve had my bewilderments with the Church hierarchy, and my critiques and condemnations of some of the actions of some within the hierarchy as well…. but also hold to the deep social teachings from the heart of the Church which share their core with other philosophies and other faiths’ tenets, especially the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, to attempt, as one can, to take on the repair of the...

Long ago, in the 1800s and 1900s, they came for the boys, and forced them into the army. A war needed ‘material.’ Human material. It’s called conscription today. Back then, it was just a round up of village boys. What are called recruiters now, back then were just soldiers on horseback, riding with sabres and rifles, often in the night, arriving almost as a dream in the villages. Clouds of dust, saddles whining, silver tack shining, saddle blankets tasseled. What tribal boy could...

A lot of us are thinking, could the news media mince the minutiae any finer? Geez. The trivia that some few in media perseverate on: today a comment by a fellow introducing Senator McCain, a fellow who tried to make a joke by calling on the name Tiger Woods… a small matter really. But, all of a sudden Keith Olbermann, who I like, had on Professor Dyson, who I respect, saying in too long a segment, that this remark was “racial.” The remark was this, and I don’t doubt that it referred...

That’s what some of the pundits are hinting at. But, I wonder what the rules are for releasing one’s medical records if one is running for the presidency; surely it’s not required. Senator McCain’s had several brushes with cancer; it’s not his age, but perhaps some think it’s his vulnerability to cancer that ought be weighed. There’s a saying in the old religious stories that when we were born, God put a number on our heads, indicating the number of years we’d...

In Eldorado, Texas, there’s been a gathering up of women and children taken into protective custody from a commune that practices polygamy, one that claims LDS (Mormon) status, (Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints: FLDS) but long ago was exiled from the Mormon Church… Facts presented in affidavits brings again into the spotlight, evil toward children justified by wrapping it in robes of religion. Lawyers for the commune are arguing that this was ‘an unlawful raid,’...

Having worked at ‘the knife and gun club’…. that is, the ER of city hospital where gunshot wounds and lacerations are more prevalent than broken bones… I sense there is more to the young woman turned away from the hospital story… for these reasons: Anyone who has been to the ER of a large hospital , who afterward, goes back to retrieve even a simple paper record, knows you can spend hours and days and even weeks trying to get accurate info about your own contact there. The...

Several professional climbers have scaled the SanFran Golden Gate Bridge to put up huge flags high on the tall girders on the bridge. The flags read: ONE WORLD ONE DREAM and FREE TIBET Fox News says they have the cell phone numbers of one of two city workers who are at the highest point on the bridge, about half again as high as the climbers, who are pretty high indeed. Apparently the police have arrested several people on the ground, and are not hazarding to climb the guy wires. Instead they will...

Hillary calls for President Bush to Nix Going to Olympics in China… but he, apparently, is set on going anyway. Given that today he meets with sports figures from a winning team in the US, and last week pitched the baseball at an opener, it would seem it’s easier to get a hearing with the Prez if you were born athletic and winning, than if you were just a gaggle of a few million citizens losing jobs and homes. I have never quite understood the ceremonial calenders of presidents. I read...

Likely you’ve noticed too the vitriol spill that began small, then burgeoned, and now continues its escalations on many fronts. It’s not just based on “How dare you call my candidate names??!! &^*#, There, take that. And that, you creep.” There’s far more to it than that I think. Regarding the psyche, we know that if a human being cannot gain positive stimulus, he or she will go after negative stimulus, for being ‘stimulated’ is a way of feeling and knowing one is alive and...

The message is up and awake, unanesthetized and walking. The message is about ‘the past’ and the ghosts that are yet unlaid in our country. Its other name is “racial issues.” I hope it isn’t too politically incorrect to say that when the big old featherbed of ‘race’ is slashed open by one thing or another, all manner of odd and non-race related things come flying out too, it seems. These have to be sorted carefully for some are cordwood and some are chaff. Cities...

We now see more of the insane despot cooks in the kitchen in Asia. They are not cooking nourishing food for the people as they said they would. Instead, they are unleashing fits of temper and breaking everything in sight. China’s current crushing of peaceful protest in Tibet, and China’s ordering of brutality against the Tibetan people are the latest intrusions. China which misappropriated Tibet by force and now calls it its own, is showing us by its current brutality to the Tibetans,...

Barack is, like I am, like many others of us are–for lack of a more graceful word– we are Bi-racial. Cross-racial is probably a slightly better, but still awkward term. That is, we are born twinned: one of each of two or more races is inside us. The blood of often opposing groups, runs in our cells, our bloodlines. Barack’s mother was Caucasian. His father was an African from Kenya. People who are bi-racial are never without their twin. Never. Our twin is both ‘other’...

Set your recorder, or watch in person: Joe Gandelman, our Editor in Chief of The Moderate Voice, will be on television at approximately 6:30 PM EST today, Sunday March 9, 2008. That’s 6:30 PM Eastern Time 5:30 PM Central Time 4:30 PM Mountain Standard Time 3:30 PM Pacific Time CNN is doing a segment called Blog Buzz, and they’ve selected a blogger on the right, on the left, and in the center… which is where Joe will be as he is formally an Independent, like Dr. E and a few others...

By his veto, President Bush broadcasts loudly to the world that a bill forbidding water boarding torture of human beings, and other egregious harms to prisoners held without habeas corpus, shall, by his fiat, continue. Mr. Bush argues that ‘we,’ not he, cannot be having any humane treatment of prisoners. That ‘we’ must be able to use torture ‘techniques.’ That we “can’t, can’t can’t” remove even one item, e.g., water boarding, from...

The name of my new weekly Monday column at The National Catholic Reporter online, is El Rio Debajo El Rio: The River Beneath The River. I’m honored to join the four talented, long-time online columnists there at NCR, all of whom are tireless social justice and peace activists and prize-winning journalists: Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister; Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton; the Jesuit Father John Dear; and NCR Senior Correspondent John L. Allen, Jr., who is Vatican analyst for CNN and covers global...

The Associated Press reports today that Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan “says presidential candidate Barack Obama represents hope that the United States will change for the better.” Seems a neutral enough statement. Farrakhan, 74 years old and recovering from prostate cancer, said he wasn’t telling anyone who to vote for, but “praised Obama and took small jabs at his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in a speech Sunday”. Minister Farrakhan’s keynote address...

This is one of the funniest/most cringe-poignant articles I’ve read recently. It’s ‘good medicine’ after a week when a good deal of media ‘news’ about candidates looked somewhat like a two parakeet flap-fest going on inside a single-legged trouser. This article that bobbed across the ocean and landed on the shore of my desk, is about USA political contenders’ tastes in campaign music… from present snafus and gaffes, and going all the way back to indecent...

I hoped it wouldn’t come into being. But, in my bones I knew this was coming. But, it was still like taking an unexpected gut-shot to the spirit. I was at a Starbucks yesterday, not a normal occurrence for me. I mostly stay in the cave. But, as I’ve mentioned here on TMV before, I am trying to learn to draw. So, I went with my conte and pages to draw passersby out the window at Starbucks. … and there at a table, four men were discussing the remark that Michelle Obama made about...

There’s been a silence amongst our election 08 candidates, one writ bold by mainstream media’s incessant pick-up game of candidates’ bickering… sometimes seeming like a replay of The Bickersons– an old time radio show that consisted mainly of a man and a woman relentlessly harping at each other … I keep wondering, what will our candidates say/ do about Cuba; the gem of the southern waters a mere 90 miles offshore the USA… the Cubanos living there, us living...

In the primaries, petty accusations and imagined slights and slings and arrows seem rife-– and arguing about such matters ad infinitum and ad nauseum. Every day, this media or that flogs one or another candidate for doing, saying, being, acting…re some insignificant thing. And sometimes, the candidates themselves turn to seemingly ‘out-victiming’ one another by petty accusation and counter pittance accusation. But, there’s a price to pay for allowing/putting the emphasis...

UPDATE You can hear Dr. E. telling the lost story of Eros and Limitless Love, here at KGNU F.M. for Thursday, February 14, 2008. Look in the far left column for 8:00 am “Morning Magazine” … then click on yellow audio-speaker button on the far right. Then move your audio marker to about the 25:50 point, and you will hear intro. The story clip ends around 31:10. I aplogize for these added steps. There has to be an easier way to do this for you, so you can listen to future commentaries...

Lest we forget in the ruts many of us seem somewhat lost in these days, that of the dirt track race of tired horses we’re following, a/k/a the Presidential nomination process… meanwhile there are others in many parts of the world, who are striving just to speak aloud without being ‘disappeared’ by government thugs. In late 2007 in Burma, (renamed Myanmar, by the current despotic regime,) thousands of monks poured into the streets of Yangon and other cities, to ask for mercy...