What's going on?

And so I wake in the morning and I step outside and I take a deep breath and I get real high and I scream at the top of my lungs what's going on?



Twenty - five years and my life is still
Trying to get up that great big hill of hope
For a destination
And I realized quickly when I knew I should
That the world was made up of this brotherhood of man
For whatever that means
And so I cry sometimes
When I'm lying in bed
Just to get it all out
What's in my head
And I am feeling a little peculiar
And so I wake in the morning
And I step outside
And I take a deep breath and I get real high
And I scream at the top of my lungs
What's going on?
And I say, hey hey hey hey
I said hey, what's going on?
Ooh, ooh ooh
And I try, oh my god do I try
I try all the time, in this institution
And I pray, oh my god do I pray
I pray every single day
For a revolution
And so I cry sometimes
When I'm lying in bed
Just to get it all out
What's in my head
And I am feeling a little peculiar
And so I wake in the morning
And I step outside
And I take a deep breath and I get real high
And I scream at the top of my lungs
What's going on?
And I say, hey hey hey hey
I said hey, what's going on?
Twenty - five years and my life is still
Trying to get up that great big hill of hope
For a destination

If I may quote the 4 Non Blondes....

Also... whose Mike Gravel?


Grow a brain people!! Sheeeeet!! Is there no hope?

May 4, 2007 transcript of interview with Mike Gravel from truthdig.com

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Harris: ... so, I want to know if you would share with us what you think should be next for us in Iraq.

Gravel: What should be next is to get out, and one of the things that we should do is—. There’s a civil war going on, and so when you hear Hillary and the others say, “Well, we’re going to get out,” they’re not getting out; they’re talking about just pulling back the combat troops. That still leaves 100,000 American soldiers there and 50,000 mercenaries and then all those war profiteers that are over there ripping it off at the expense of the Iraqis. So we’re going to leave all those people there and “Sure, we’re going to end the war.” You can’t end the war. Our presence is causing the war, our very presence. So if we leave any troops there at all, the insurgents will continue the war and they’ll continue killing other people. So their plan is a non-starter.

My plan would be very simple: We pull our troops out. As we’re pulling our troops out—that takes about 60 days—we turn around and get the puppet government ... and I want to say it, the word is probably ... the puppet government that we’ve set up ... we get them to draft 3 million young Iraqis. These young Iraqis are unemployed. Who do you think is part of the insurgency or these militias? It’s these young people that have no way of making a living and so they do this “insurgency” with banditry—the whole nine yards. What we do is draft them, put them in uniforms. OK? No civilian clothes. No arms. No arms. Begin to disarm them and turn around and give them the tools to rebuild their country with their own hands. And get the damned American war profiteers out of the country. Let them build their country, let them have some pride.

We had a program like this in the ’30s. It was called the Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC. That’s what we need to do with Iraq and then get out, and use diplomacy, let them form their own government. It’s their country. Politicians in Washington feel we’re going to cut the country up in this way, that we’re going to get them to do this with their oil. ... It’s their oil! Let them do what they want with it. Who are we to go tell them what to do? Can you imagine if we had a million and a half, a million five hundred troops in the United States—and that’s about the proportions now population-wise. If we had a million and a half troops in the United States that had the power to go anywhere with their weapons and to kick in any door and to shoot anybody when they panic, what do you think would happen in the United States of America?

Harris: Our editor, Robert Scheer, in a recent panel with Nancy Snow and a bunch of other folks, Chris Hedges ... said that we are in fact afraid to let these Iraqis make their own history. Why do you think we are so fearful of leaving and allowing them to shape, as you said, their own future?

Gravel: Two reasons. One, we want to continue to control the oil and the media people on the Hill are getting briefings that we’ll lose control of this oil. That’s why we went to war. Who cares if we lose control of the oil? They’re going to sell it. They can’t drink the oil. What we should be doing is spending our treasured resources to get off of oil and to get off of that dependency. And of course, I have the proposal for a carbon tax that will begin to do it but we’ve got to first get our heads screwed on right.

It’s very simple. Energy is not an American problem. Energy, the environment, is not an American problem; it’s a global problem, and we need to work with other people from a global point of view. So I would have a carbon tax and under my administration we would set up a global institution and we’d ask other countries to come in and join us and to put carbon tax on their people and then we would take that money and integrate the global scientific community and the global engineering community into getting us off of carbon in a decade. When I say global ... the Chinese are ahead of us in fusion. The French are ahead of us in fission. The Israelis are ahead of us in photovoltaic. We’re ahead, of course, in weaponry. A lot of good that’s going to do us in the long run.

Scheer: ... I know you said earlier that you don’t need as many mavericks. I would hope that people are learning from you and I hope that we actually have more mavericks. I think we need more mavericks right now, more people who—.

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read the rest of the interview in its entirety here
or listen to the interview here

Please visit Mike Gravel's website: www.gravel2008.us

There's something to be said for blind optimism If the few political leaders that are not part of the bought system don't believe in themselves then there is no chance of at least exposing a tired, apathetic public of what we want and deserve from a politician.