Prayer of the Day

Mile Kepka/San Francisco Chronicle, AP Photos

Michael Hanly figured crews were only trimming the trees when he saw them carrying tools to the old spruce and pine outside his office at Washington State University's Avery Hall last week.

But they kept cutting, and the trees eventually were gone.

Hanly did some digging and learned that more trees are on the chopping block around Avery, Bryan and Murrow halls during the third phase of the Library Road project, slated for completion in Sept. 2009.

"If they had said from the beginning that these trees were going to come down with this project, you can bet there would have been a protest," said Hanly, an English professor.

Hanly claims the university did not adequately make its plans known to the public, and he is trying to generate support from others concerned about the trees' removal. He's gathered some English department staff to protest and hopes to involve other departments if a compromise can't be reached with WSU's Capital Planning and Development Office.

- "Tree removal surprises some faculty and staff; 80 trees being cut down as part of university's Library Road project," Moscow-Pullman Daily News, July 11, 2008

Oh Lord, if a bunch of middle-aged WSU English professors are going to protest trees being cut down on the WSU campus, please do not let it be a nude "sit-in" as we have seen down in Berkeley. Amen.



UPDATE: Perhaps former Whitman County Democratic State Committeeman Dave Gibney would care to apologize to Christians for commenting that the Rapture would get rid of all the "stuck up assholes." Perhaps Democratic House candidate Tyanna Kelley would like to apologize to 9th District farmers for attacking their "gaz-guzzling" trucks.

Grow up.

3 Days of Piecework and Hsu Sick

The Norman Hsu Democratic campaign funding scandal continues with even more deliciously ironic revelations.

It seems Woodstock promoter Joel Rosenman might have been bilked out of $40 million by Hsu. Rosenman's firm, Source Financing Investors, gave Hsu the money to manufacture apparel in China for top designers such as Gucci and Prada, which would yield a 40 percent profit. However, the checks from Hsu's company, Components Ltd., bounced when Source Financing tried to cash them. That certainly explains Hsu's hosting of $1,000-a-plate birthday bashes for Kennedy progeny, his $400,000 in donations to Democratic candidates , and his posting $2 million bond to get out of jail.

I don't know what is better: the fact that ex-hippie Rosenman is involved in a capitalistic deal to exploit Third World workers, or the fact that Hillary Clinton, who returned a $5,000 donation from Wal-Mart last year citing "current company practices" was happy to take $850,000 raised by a felon and Chinese sweatshop promoter.

Summer of Love Survived, Sadly

This is a great commentary by Dick Feagler in the Spokesman-Review on July 17, 2007. It bemoans the sadness that has become us.

Forty years ago, my editors put me on a plane and shipped me off to San
Francisco to live with the hippies. I always had great out-of-town luck. So,
on the ride, I met a nice, middle-class couple who were flying out to meet their
son. He was a drummer for a band called Big Brother and the Holding Company. He
met his parents at the airport.
"You want to know the scene?" he said. "Come with me tonight. We got a gig at the Fillmore."
That's how I entered the Summer of Love – a summer that changed America.
He took me backstage to meet the band's lead singer. This woman struck me as totally obnoxious. My idea of a lead singer was Doris Day. This woman, who was grungy, sat at a dressing table, patting Southern Comfort whiskey on her face. Her name, she grudgingly told me, was Janis Joplin.
When the show started, I left. It was too loud. I came from the era of Sinatra, and Janis Joplin came from a new age of screech.
The next few weeks were equally startling. The Summer of Love was a summer of sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and dirty words. It was so foreign to me, I was sure it couldn't last.
Everybody used dope. The only question was, what kind.
I smoked some. I thought I had to. I took my first toke in a fraternity hovel where the bathroom was wallpapered in tinfoil and the housemother was busy baking organic bread. But I got bored and decided to go home.
A bus came along and I got on it. After about an hour, it dawned on me that it might not be the right bus. I pulled the cord and got off. I had no idea where I was. I flagged a cab and he took me back to Union Square.
I went into a bar and ordered a gin gimlet. The bartender wouldn't serve me. "You're stoned," he said. "I am not," I said. "I only had a couple of cigarettes."
Next morning, I called the city desk. "I turned on to pot last night," I told the city editor.
"My God," he said. "Get out of there right now."
When I got home, I wrote a four-part series about Haight-Ashbury. It got a lot of response. The saddest response was from parents who said: "Did you run into my daughter, Denise? She ran away from home. Did you see her?"
When I wrote that series, I was 28 years old.
So I thought the Summer of Love was just a fad. I was sure the screeching music wouldn't last. The summer of sex, dope, rock 'n' roll and dirty words would be left behind when these tie-dye kids grew up and joined the mainstream. My mainstream.
I have learned since, to my dismay, that those kids dragged their adolescence with
them, tugging it along like a security blanket and dragging the rest of us with it.
Sex used to be private; now it's public, in the commercials on TV. Drugs?
Well, there are two kinds – the illegal ones and the Viagra type that guarantees
Superman-like instant erections. Rock 'n' roll? When's the last time you saw
a violin in a commercial – even a commercial that wants to lull you to sleep.
And dirty language? It's commonplace. The words we never used to say
because we thought they were gross come regularly out of the TV, for our
children to hear, and find their way into music. Music without melody.
I didn't know it then, but the Summer of Love was a summer that changed the
culture. The kids – the most pampered generation we had produced for a long time – made American music unmusical and American speech obscene. They erased from the American scene any idea of civility or seemliness.
They dealt us today.
And now they're stuck with tomorrow.