Subj: Re: hi
Date: 3/25/2004 10:29:01 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: BigBlkMusc256
To: ZEUSFUELLIGHT



Hi, do you mean Grace? I don't know if she was psyhic or not? I remember spending alot of time with her. She was spiritual more than anything else. I would check art books out of Stetson Library and let her borrow them. She was in alot of pain with shingles. Some guys thought that she was crazy, I didn't. I still have a picture of her that she gave me in 76. My parents never understood why I loved Grace so much. I think that my mother used to go and see her also. They didn't understand what happened with me, why I changed so much.
Funny thing is that I hadn't changed at all. I've never shared their view of the world, or had the same basic needs that they did. You were one of the first people that I ever met, who could see what I see.
Remember how fascinated I was with clay and your sculpture? I'm glad that you're working again. I haven't been, because I've been looking at what I did last year, and decided that at least one painting was not finished, even though I framed it. I don't think that you have to be in a hurry to do anything.

James.
Art is just as much seeing as doing.

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Ex-Terror Adviser Lashes Out
WASHINGTON, March 24, 2004


President George W. Bush's government scaled back the fight against al Qaeda after taking office in 2001 and spurned suggestions that it retaliate for the bombing of a U.S. warship because "it happened on the Clinton administration's watch," a former top terrorism adviser testified.

President Bill Clinton's administration had "no higher priority" than combating terrorists while the Bush administration made it "an important issue but not an urgent issue," said Richard Clarke, who advised both presidents. He testified Wednesday before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, the worst terrorist strikes in American history.

Clarke's testimony turned what had been a painstaking, bipartisan probe of pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures and bureaucratic miscommunications into a nationally televised criticism of Bush, who has made the terrorism issue the core of his campaign for a new term.

Clarke slid into the witness chair for widely anticipated testimony just days after publishing a book that criticized Mr. Bush's response to the threat of terrorism. (The book's publisher and CBSNews.com are both owned by Viacom). The White House has sharply criticized the book and mounted a counteroffensive against its author.

The Bush White House remains in crisis mode over Clarke's charges, and again sent top officials to deny that the administration ignored the terrorist threat, reports CBS News Correspondent Bill Plante. Aides accused Clarke of changing his story to sell his book.

"What he is reporting ... does not reflect the reality that I know to be true. and I've spent a lot of time with the president. I've been in almost every one of his intel briefings,'' White House aide Andrew Card told CBS News. "What he alleges is not the fact."

"He needs to get his story straight," said Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser and Clarke's boss while he served in the administration.

Former Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson, a Republican, took up the president's cause inside the commission hearing. "We have your book and we have your press briefing of August 2002. Which is true?" he challenged the witness.

Clarke's testimony overshadowed the release of a commission staff report that said bureaucratic disagreements about the extent of the CIA's authority to kill Osama bin Laden hampered efforts to eliminate al Qaeda's leader during the Clinton era. The result was a continued reliance on local forces in Afghanistan that all sides recognized reduced the chance of success, both before and after Bush took office, the report added.

"If officers at all levels questioned the effectiveness of the most active strategy the policy-makers were employing to defeat the terrorist enemy, the commission needs to ask why that strategy remained largely unchanged throughout the period leading up to 9-11," it concluded.

Officials from Clinton's National Security Council told investigators the CIA had sufficient authority to assassinate al Qaeda, the report said, but Director George Tenet and other spy agency officials "believed the only acceptable context for killing bin Laden was a credible capture operation."

Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, testified that the former president gave the CIA "every inch of authorization that it asked for" to kill bin Laden.

"There could have not been any doubt about what President Clinton's intent was after he fired 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles at bin Laden in August 1998," Berger said, referring to strikes at a camp in Afghanistan where the al Qaeda leader was believed present. Bin Laden escaped.

Tenet, who preceded Berger in the witness chair, also was asked about the issue of authorization to kill bin Laden.

"I never went back and said, 'I don't have all the authorities I need,"' he replied.

Tenet said that even if bin Laden had been captured or killed in 2001, he did not think it would have prevented the 9-11 attacks, an assertion that mirrored testimony by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell on Tuesday.

Tenet's tenure has spanned two administrations. And unlike Clarke, he praised aides to both presidents for their attentiveness to terrorism. "Clearly there was no lack of care or focus in the face of one of the greatest dangers our country has ever faced" after the Bush administration took office, he said.

A few hours later, Clarke began his appearance with an apology to "the loved ones of the victims of 9-11. ... Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you."

Some family members in the audience dabbed their eyes as he uttered the words.

In the course of his testimony, Clarke criticized the FBI, the CIA and Congress as well as the Bush administration.

Despite his catalogue of complaints, he said under questioning by former Republican Sen. Slade Gorton that nothing he proposed to Bush officials would have prevented the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. More than 3,000 people were killed that day when terrorists flew hijacked planes into the twin World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon outside Washington. Another plane crashed in a field outside Pittsburgh as passengers struggled with the terrorists aboard.

Clarke said that early in the Bush administration, he had tried to persuade officials to make the elimination of al Qaeda official government policy.

"I was told ... that was overly ambitious and that we should take the word 'eliminate' out and say `significantly erode,"' he recalled. Later, after the terrorists struck, he said, "we were able to go back to my language of eliminate, rather than significantly erode."

A second question from Gorton prompted Clarke to raise the issue of the USS Cole, a warship bombed while refueling in a harbor at Aden, Yemen. Seventeen sailors were killed in the attack, later blamed on al Qaeda.

The former White House aide said he suggested the month Bush took office that "the Cole case was still out there" and suggested retaliation.

He added, "I was told on a couple of occasions, 'Well, you know, that happened on the Clinton administration's watch."'



©MMIV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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dear uncle hugo

i heard from my mom in a letter today that last month you passed on
and i want to tell you i wish i had known you better, but i know that
your long unfair suffering is over, and that you are with your son and
your wife

i would like to ask of you, as i have of all my loved ones
whom have left this plane for another plane.......

would you watch over me, in these difficult times, would you watch over me

few of my dreams have come true

i would love to become and be an artist

love and energy

dave

The Passion of the Christ - FilmReviews - www.theage.com.au
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The Passion of the Christ

March 7, 2004

Anyone planning to see Mel Gibson's new film should know what they're in for by now: an unrelentingly brutal depiction of the events leading up to Christ's death. In fact, had it been about the torture and execution of anyone but Jesus Christ, it's unlikely the censors would have permitted its release.

Gibson's version follows a traditional line, beginning with Christ's anguished foreboding of the agony that awaits him and moving through the Stations of the Cross to his resurrection. But it's also very much a tale of its times, filled with the kind of violence that was anathema to the cinema in the days of bloated epics such as King of Kings (1961) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). Even as recently as 15 years ago, had Martin Scorsese coupled the kind of bloodletting Gibson puts on screen here with the sexual yearnings that defined Christ as human in The Last Temptation of Christ, I doubt it would ever have seen the light of a projector.

The Passion of the Christ is effectively a sadistic horror movie whose hero (played with admirable tenacity by Jim Caviezel) is also its victim. It begins with the camera prowling through the darkness, stalking a man praying in a garden, then, in the hours after Christ has been seized, it turns very gruesome. The scourging at the pillar, which leaves his bloodied body literally criss-crossed with gashes cut deep into his flesh, is an unsettling, in-your-face sequence designed to put the audience through it, to make us witnesses like Christ's mother, Mary (Maia Morgenstern), and Mary Magdalene (Monica Bellucci).

The film's monsters are several: an androgynous, hooded Satan (Rosalinda Celentano) forever lurking in the wings, the Pharisee elders who demand that he should be killed, the mindless lynch mob that supports them, the barbaric soldiers who beat and torture him, even perhaps the Roman authorities who, however reluctantly, allow the crucifixion to proceed.

However, the charge that the film is anti-Semitic is curious. The elders are presented as representatives of a Jewish splinter group, knowingly contravening their own rules of conduct even in having Christ arrested, let alone sentenced to death. And most of those who show sympathy for Christ, or express disapproval at the way he is treated, are Jewish (and mostly women).

Without ever defining it precisely, the film points to political unease as at least partly responsible for the unfolding events. Pontius Pilate (Hristo Shopov) is shown to be going along with the high priests to maintain an already uneasy peace. And the contemptuous "Jew!" hissed by a Roman soldier as crowds cross his path en route to Calvary indicate that tensions are running high.

Had Gibson spent time detailing these more precisely the film might have worked much better as a drama. Visually, The Passion is extremely powerful, shot by veteran US cinematographer Caleb Deschanel and filled with a Renaissance- inspired painterliness. It certainly makes you sit up and pay attention. It's adventurous and uncompromising in various ways, including having the characters speak in generally sub-titled Aramaic and Latin, with snatches of Hebrew. But it's also content to ride along on the intensity of the violence and the audience's knowledge of what's to come without ever doing any more than sketching in a human context for Christ's sacrifice.

At the end, Satan gets his/her comeuppance and Christ rises from the dead. But both sequences are presented so perfunctorily, with so little imagination, that there's no sense of release. It's as if Gibson has put so much effort into his depiction of the murder of the noble Christ's body that he's got nothing left for his spirit.

**


This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/03/03/1078295443523.html

Faith and Violence

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, March 2, 2004; Page A21


I saw Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" the morning it opened and hurried to my office to write what I thought of it. I thought the movie was tawdry, cartoonish, badly acted and anti-Semitic, maybe not purposely so but in the way portions of the New Testament are -- an assignment of blame that culminated in the Holocaust. But I wrote none of that, actually nothing at all, because there was something else about the movie that disturbed me, and it took days to figure it out. It is fascistic.




I don't know if I use the word right -- probably I don't. But I want to use it because I recently read Richard J. Evans's brilliant "The Coming of the Third Reich," in which it becomes clear, if it wasn't before, how violence was so much a part of fascism. It was not merely that Hitler and, to a lesser extent, Mussolini used force to get their way but also that violence, almost for the sake of it, became part of the ethic -- what Evans calls "the cult of violence." After awhile, Germans became inured. That, both precisely and surprisingly, is how I felt watching Gibson's disturbingly nondisturbing movie. I was bored stiff.

I abhor violence in movies and avoid films that have more than I think I can tolerate. I got snookered into seeing Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" because a friend took me, and because I didn't know what it was about. As for Tarantino's latest, "Kill Bill, Vol. 1," the reviews mentioned too much blood for my taste. With certain movies, I confess to briefly closing my eyes, and with others I simply repeat to myself, "It's only a movie. It's not real." Sometimes this works. Usually it doesn't. The mind can be fooled by almost any film director. What we see, we feel.

So I approached the Gibson movie with some dread. I went to see it only as part of my job, wishing that the Anti-Defamation League and other critics had simply ignored it. They had not, and so what could have been a minor film became a major cultural (or at least media) event, and I felt compelled to see it. I even joked with friends that the ADL's Abraham Foxman must be taking a cut of the gross for all the publicity he had given the film. But my joking mood changed when I entered the theater. I became uneasy.

I need not have worried. The movie is as violent as everyone says -- indescribably and inexcusably gory. But instead of being repulsed, I found myself intrigued: Why wasn't I horrified? Why wasn't I revolted? Instead of feeling any of those things, I was more like the Roman soldiers who tortured Jesus. I did not laugh with glee as they did, but I did find myself at an emotional remove. There was so much blood, so much flayed skin, so much horror that almost immediately I became inured to it all. I felt as a surgeon must in the operating theater or, maybe, as the torturer feels when another "job" is brought before him. More work. Repeatedly, I found myself checking my watch.

I may not be a typical viewer. Importantly, I am not a Christian and so, I suppose, I am not conditioned to seeing the passion of Christ in religious terms. Still, even seeing the torture of an ordinary man should have filled me with revulsion. Yet it didn't. In Gibson's relentless, driving vision, a man became an object, and the violence, the gore, became even more important than the man.

This is what I mean by a fascistic sensibility. The violence was the message. It overwhelmed the message of Christ, which even a non-Christian can admire and endorse. What's more, the cause of the violence -- its origins -- was not the Romans, who were actually in charge, but stereotypical Jews who, in their clever ways, manipulated even Pontius Pilate, about the only complex figure in the entire movie. Gibson says he is no anti-Semite. Maybe. But if he could breathe humanity into the autocratic Pilate, then why not something similar for the downtrodden Jews?

The whole thing -- the violence, the stereotypical Jews, the wooden acting -- makes for a tedious and unsettling two hours in the theater. It left me deeply disturbed -- not by the violence but by how little the violence disturbed me. Something went awry. Maybe, strictly speaking, the movie cannot be called fascistic -- but, in the best sense, it cannot be called Christian either.

cohenr@washpost.com

3712209In Search of Syntax On Gay Marriage

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, March 2, 2004; Page A21


Their syntax was mangled. Their choice of words signaled their discomfort. As John Kerry and John Edwards struggled with the question of gay marriage in Sunday's Democratic presidential debate, you could imagine the smiles on the faces of President Bush's political lieutenants.



"What's wrong with gay marriage?" CBS News's Dan Rather asked Kerry. Kerry replied: "I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. It's a personal belief."

But his "personal belief" is not the issue, so Rather pressed on: "What's wrong with a man and a man committing to each other for life?"

Kerry's reply: "What I think -- I think it's a distinction between what you believe the institution of marriage is, but what's important, Dan, is that you give people rights. I'm for rights, not for terminology or status -- rights."

Edwards was more than happy to say that "this is one place that actually Senator Kerry and I largely agree." What, exactly, was he agreeing with? "We're talking about what the definition of marriage is, which is something that has always been decided by the states, not rights. . . . If we're talking about a bundle of rights, with what rights you'd get under federal law for partners, the problem with adoption. . . ." Here Al Sharpton interrupted, but you get the drift. In their roundabout ways, Kerry and Edwards are saying they want to give gays and lesbians the rights associated with matrimony, but they stay out of a debate with Bush over the definition of a word. They've read the polls.

The paradox is that the Democratic muddle may be closer to the public's view than Bush's embrace of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. By proposing to move preemptively to change the Constitution, Bush would block state courts and legislatures from working through a tough issue in a more deliberate way.

That's why Rep. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who is gay, believes that in endorsing the amendment, Bush "drew the line in the wrong place." He abandoned the middle ground on gay marriage to his opponents.

Frank argues that while public sympathy for gays and lesbians has steadily increased, there are still doubts about gay marriage. That's why he says of the current battle: "I wish it hadn't come up quite so early."

"There are a large number of people who have no particular animus against homosexuals," Frank said, but are "afraid of the social consequences" of gay marriage. Since "respectable people are telling them" that gay marriage would be disastrous, he said such voters are inclined to respond: "Why take that risk?"

This explains another paradox in the debate over gay marriage. Usually it's conservatives who defend states' rights and liberals who endorse the use of federal power. But on this issue, the conservatives are pushing for national action now, while opinion is on their side. Gay rights advocates want experiments with gay marriage and civil unions to go forward in the states. Frank believes that such experiments will, over time, convince moderate opponents of gay marriage that it does not, in fact, threaten heterosexual marriage. As a result, Frank predicts, opposition will gradually ebb.

The odd thing is that before Bush endorsed the constitutional amendment, he held very strong rhetorical ground. He could stand with the majority in opposing gay marriage, criticize "activist judges" for "forcing their arbitrary will upon the people" and hold out for an amendment as a last resort. Now, Bush wants to trump the states and the courts.

Opponents of gay marriage say that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's 4 to 3 decision earlier this year making gay marriage a state constitutional right gave Bush no choice. (By the way, three of the four judges in that majority were appointed by Republican governors.) With activist judges on the move, foes of gay marriage insist that a federal amendment has become urgent.

My guess is that most Americans do not share their urgency. They do not want to rush through a constitutional amendment. They'd prefer to give this argument time to play out.

Yes, Kerry and Edwards often find themselves working through a thick swamp of words whenever the issue is raised. But their hemming and hawing may well reflect the views of an ambivalent majority. It includes many who are still uneasy with gay marriage but wonder how encouraging faithful relationships among homosexuals could be a greater threat to the sanctity of matrimony than, say, infidelity or divorce. Bush may find himself in his own verbal swamp when he tries to explain to such voters why he has raised this issue now.

postchat@aol.com