Sandman's Journal

Christmas is coming and so is tour. I'm looking especially forward to the mid-January Texas shows where it's warmest. Texas: home of Willie Nelson, Janis Joplin, Alvin Ailey, Molly Ivins, Kinky Friedman, Gene Autry, etc. It's also home to former Texas Commissioner of Agriculture, Jim Hightower. He's pretty articulate when it comes to what he wants for Christmas this year:

Santa, bring me no stuff. Instead, the one and only thing I want is this: A REAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY, ALIVE AND KICKING!

It's not enough to wail about what the Bushites are doing to our country. Yes, it's awful they're brazenly ransacking our public treasury and giving the loot to the rich, they have us mired in a macho-maniacal war to make the world safe for Halliburton, they're sawing the rungs off the ladder of upward mobility for the poor and the middle class, they're defoliating our environmental and safety protections, they're gutting labor and consumer laws, they're deliberately defunding our public infrastructure, they're militarizing both the federal budget and our society, they're supplanting our basic liberties with executive autocracy, they're enthroning corporate supremacy through trade scams and stacked courts, they're ... well, the list goes on and on.

Texas is wild.