HOCUS, POCUS; Making the Elephant Vanish!

I would call it the elephant in the middle of the room, but that doesn’t begin to define its impact nor its opaqueness. It has been whispered about, smirked and wise-cracked about on Democratic net sites with increasing frequency and venom and decreasing impact on the mainstream press for seven years now. With 80% of Republicans still claiming to approve of President Shrub (at least until this latest fiasco) the mainstream press, striving for the appearance of neutral reporting, remains transported with their audience to an alternate universe, a sort of “Emperor’s New Clothes” world, where the unstated assumption is always assumed not be assumed, even while its assumption influences every nuance and inflection of political debate. That assumption is that George W. Shrub is the biggest idiot to sit in the oval office since Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke and fell off a White House toilet. But while Wilson struggled to recapture his mind and body, G.W. Shrub has no such expectations or abilities.
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The latest fiasco was, of course, the newest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), the collective work product of 16 separate government intelligence agencies. This collective brain power has decided that not only is Iran not currently building nuclear bombs, they haven’t been building bombs since 2004, despite the repeated doomsday predictions from that Cassandra of the NEOCONs, Dick Cheney. The Iranians retain the capability of restarting a nuclear program but if and when they do, we no longer retain the credibility of being believed when we cry wolf. That loss of credibility is just another legacy of his Shrub-ness. And now, if the press were actually reality based, they would be asking the question posed by a previous generation of Republican statesmen (when the Republicans still had statesmen), “What did the President know and when did he know it?” And the current in vogue unasked question; “Why didn’t Jesus tell him to know it?”
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It was almost amusing to watch the Shrub that exists only in the headlines, jumping through hoops of illogic. TIME Magazine found our Great Leader still competent enough to insist “…you can bet that an explosive, 180 degree turn on Iran like this one was greenlighted by the President.” While Michael Hirsh for NEWSWEEK described the “…second, and less noted, effect of the new NIE is that the already tattered credibility of this administration…is shredded – simply gone with the wind.” Less noted by whom? And less noted, why? In what must be the journalistic understatement of a presidency chronicled by journalistic understatements, Jonathan Landay from McCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS observed that, “The President will now find it difficult to persuade Russia and China – and even America’s European allies – to impose new sanctions on Iran.” True, but what would be truly amazing is if some allied nation does not seriously propose sanctions against us!
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In the JERSUALEM POST, Calev Ben-David struggled to contain his disgust with Israel’s most dependable friend – Shrub. “Whatever one may think of the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report on Iran’s nuclear intentions and capabilities, there is no doubt it provides some telling and timely insights into a regime whose true direction and condition many analysts here in Jerusalem have been trying to discern for the past year, That regime is the Bush administration.” The allies of Shrub, from Britain to Australia to Israel, have already begun dealing with the Post-Shrub reality based reality, where they didn’t merely back the wrong horse, they backed a dead horse. Domestically,
Shrub’s job approval rating has been virtually unchanged from an abysmal 33% for over a year now, and, in the words of Gallup, “…it is unlikely Bush’s approval rating will get much better between now and the end of his term.”
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The Zogby poll found that “Among Republicans, 67% of likely Iowa caucus goers and 68% of likely New Hampshire primary voters said they are angry with the political system… (21% and 26%)…said they are “very angry”…Most of their anger appears directed at Congress…(but)Nearly half – 43% - of likely Republicans voters in New Hampshire said they were angry at President Bush.” As Gallup also noted, “…Bush’s support has eroded most among Republicans.” And yet, if you watch the polical-tainment programs like HARDBALL you would think that the machinations of Republican candidates to replace Shrub should be taken seriously. The best thing that could happen to the GOP in 2008 is if they go down to ignominious and total defeat.
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How rare it is to be able, in all honesty and sincerity, to tell Republicans that if they want to save their party, this year they should vote for the elephant in the middle of the room; Vote Democratic.
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EMILY, WE HARDLY KNEW YOU.

I am just pissed off. The violent death of Emily Sander has left the usual wreckage. Her family is devastated. Her friends are bereft. The Kansas towns where she grew up and went to college have been wounded. But in a month or two few of us will remember her name, and we will forget that once again we got a look behind the veneer and saw the true face of our news media; provocateurs who cater to the public’s prurient interests. Without the ennoblement of the Bill of Rights, they (we) would all have been arrested as pornographers long ago. And the truly ironic aspect is that the media have been selling their papers by billing Emily as an “internet porn star”, as if the pittance she made from selling her image and reputation had ever come anywhere near the treasure collected each day by CNN, NBC, FOX, and even the Associated Press, selling Emily’s image and reputation. Her life didn’t make her newsworthy to them. Marketing her self as the “barely legal, Zoey Zane” certainly did not distinguish her significantly from millions of others living a fantasy on the net. Even her brutal murder by itself did not earn her a dubious equation with “man bites dog”. But her life and death and that word “pornography” appearing in the same paragraph is what finally made Emily Sander “worthy” as news.
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The word “pornography” was born from an odd root. The ancient Greek sources are “porneia”, meaning fornication, and “graphein” meaning to write. They refer to the advertising signs hung outside the prostitute’s place of business. For three thousand years a “pornographer” was anyone who wrote anything about the lives of prostitutes or their customers. It wasn’t until the Victorian age (about 1850) that the noun “pornographer” evolved into the more specific meaning of “…Someone who presents, shows or sells writing or pictures whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal”. But the last 150 years has failed to inspire a simple accurate definition of what is now considered to be pornographic. In 1964 Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart admitted that the best description he could provide was, “I know it when I see it.” And it is that hazy justification which allows the news media to sell Emily Sander as an “internet porn star” without calling themselves “pornographers”.
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Emily was a lovely, vibrant 18 year old woman, discovering her sexuality at a time when the internet and the electronic revolution has given young women more power over their bodies than ever before in history. She wanted to make a profit from that power. And if that was a mistake it was her mistake to make. But Kansas is infamous for its fear of shifting that power away from the old men who have traditionally held it. In a battle reminiscent of the temperance movement, today in Kansas two separate special grand juries are seeking to punish doctors and nurses who perform “legal” abortions. But Emily Sander is and was proof that that cultural war has already been lost.
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Emily’s death is no more proof that internet sex sites are dangerous for women than the murder of Stacy Peterson, the missing Chicago cops 4th wife, is proof that being married to a cop is inherently dangerous. These two women (if Stacy Peterson was murdered, as I suspect) were not murdered as punishment for some moral shortcoming, no matter what the implied moral the media wants to tag on their lives. They were murdered by men. And 57% of all women who are murdered are killed by their husbands or ex-husbands or boyfriends. And that puts Emily in the unlucky minority. That should have made her worthy of being a headline; but it didn’t. As the saying goes, sex sells – especially it sells newspapers and cable news time. The slaughter of another young woman by an enraged male ego is simply another “dog bites man” story and not “news worthy”; unless she could be described as an “internet porn star”.
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Well, Emily wasn’t much of a “star” until she was murdered by the media. On what was once her web site (ZoeyZane.com) her business partners, RagingBucks, posted the following; “Emily was a solo nude model whose site went live September 25, 2007…the media…sent more traffic to Emily’s adult site in two hours then the site has received in the two months since the site has gone live”. The “Fort Worth Star-Telegram” printed the absurd statistic that 30,000 customers paid $39.95 a month to look at Emily’s nude photos. In fact “RagingBucks” offers access to images of dozens of young women at that price and Emily was merely one of the newest. And in any case, it is also an assertion that any one who has ever been the victim of internet porn pop-ups and seen the prices listed can testify is “not a viable business model”, as 5 minutes of investigation by this main stream media source would have shown.
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"RagingBucks has set up a fund for Emily's family and seeded it with $3,000. The least the "Star-Telegram" could do is match that amount, so that Emily might at least be paid symbolically part of the money she made for them. And in what may be the most poignant overlooked element of this story, in “cyber speak” to be “zane” is to be sane and insane at the same time. Who ever picked that “nom de internet” for Emily was prescient.


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But what finally, ultimately pisses me off is that if you “Google” the name Emily Sanders you get 1,920,000 references, and almost all of them refer to her at some point as an "internet porn star". But if you Google “Isreal Mireles” you get just 734 hits, and he’s the SOB suspected of killing her. He is still at large with his 16 year old pregnant girl friend. And I hope he gives himself up without hurting anybody else, including himself. Because what the media needs right now is a good salacious murder trial, ala O.J. Don't you think?
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CHOCOLATE FANTASIES

I was amazed when archaeologists found 4,000 year old ceremonial Mayan pottery in Honduras. Now, archaeologists and pottery go together like cocaine and addiction, but this fancy pottery had the remains of chocolate in it, and it was carbon 14 dated at about 1100 B.C., about 500 years earlier than conventional wisdom said that cacao plants were harvested by humans. It seems it was served at weddings and births, in much the same way we today use champagne Once again we have proof that if it’s addictive, humans will find it and even invent any chemistry required to gain access to it. It’s beginning to seem that it was our addiction to addiction that led us off the Savanna and into the crack house.
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Making chocolate is much more complicated than just stomping on grapes. You begin by harvesting the enormous seed pod, which you toss in a pile to let ferment for about a week. The first Mayans to do this threw the seeds away and brewed the meaty pods into a powerful beer. But then some Mayan Nerd noticed that the seeds abandoned in the sun smelled delicious. Of course if they didn’t dry fast enough they turned moldy, but if the beans dried quickly, and if the Mayan Nerd then roasted the beans, and then pried opened their shells, he or she would find what are called the nubs. And if this ancient chemistry Wonk then ground up the nubs (like a coffee bean) the Mayan alchemist would end up with a liquid called “chocolate liquor” – for obvious reasons – and when he or she then heated that material and allowed it to cool and solidify, they produced what we call “baking chocolate”, and what the Mayan called cacao. And then, some 4,000 later, some idiot convinced American school children that chemistry was boring. Chemistry gets you beer and chocolate. How could that be boring?
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Here’s some more chemistry. Chocolate contains anandamide, which is also found in marijuana, and a couple of chemicals that slow down your metabolism of anadamide; in other words they make the “high” last longer. Chocolate also contains tryptophan, which is the stuff in turkey that puts you to sleep after Thanksgiving dinner. And chocolate also contains theobromine, which is actually a superior opiate to the watered- downed opiates in over- the-counter cough medicines. Of course chocolate contains really small amounts of all of these compounds and for any or all of them to have a major effect on your brain you would have to eat so much chocolate you would likely die from dysentery. Getting your chemistry from the chocolate companies is as silly as getting your sexual counsel from the people who make Viagra.
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Chocolate also contains magnesium, a chemical that pre-menstrual females are short of. This is the usual justification given for women’s monthly chocolate cravings, but only 40% of women claim monthly chocolate cravings, and so do 15% of men. A more likely influence on chocolate cravings in both sexes might have been located by a British study that reported the very odor of chocolate reduces theta activity in the human brain, indicating calming and relaxation. This may explain why Hershey, Pennsylvania (Derry Township) has less than ¼ of 1% of the national rate of violent crimes. The whole town reeks of chocolate!
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The Spanish Conquistadors reported that the Aztec emperor Montezuma drank a big cup of cocoa before entering his harem. And that reputation was enhanced when Giovanni Casanova recommended the drink as an aphrodisiac. What is surprising is that the Church had no problem with all this chocolate inspired sex, probably because the Popes were amongst the first high and mighty who were seduced by the brown powder. Pius V decreed in 1569 that drinking chocolate did not break lent. The reformation tried to introduce the “sin” factor into chocolate, when, in 1624 a Viennese professor, Johan Rauch, condemned chocolate and called for it to be banned. But by that time the Protestant Dutch had reintroduced the “cocoa butter”, drained from the chocolate liquor during the cocoa stage, to create “Dutch Chocolate”. And after that, even chocolate’s role in masking the poison that killed Pope Clement XIV in 1774 could not shake the church’s addiction to the cocoa bean.
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But the sin of Chocolate has never really been “lust” but “avarice”. The Aztecs collected their taxes in Cocoa beans, as did the Spanish who succeeded them, dividing the world into the “have chocolate” and the “grow chocolate” populations. Like diamonds, chocolate has funded and fueled many wars across Africa and South America. (The Cocoa tree only grows within 20 degrees of the equator.
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Meanwhile the “have chocolates” are rich enough to support empires, like Hershey and Cadbury. These corporate chocolate factories are based on the concept of “chocolate for the common man”, often containing less than 10% cocoa butter, and sometimes closer to 1%. Less cocoa butter not only lowers the cost but raises the melting point, and was the original meaning behind the sales pitch, “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand”. It implied quality but also convenience. Today quality seems to matter only in Europe proper, where it is still easy to find “Chocolate” with 60% cocoa butter. In America the mega-mixers have asked permission to eliminate cocoa butter completely and still call the product “chocolate”, which would be like calling sugar cocaine, because you used to sell cocaine and because you package your sugar in little baggies.

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Or, maybe I'm pushing my chocolate analogies just a little too far.

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HE WILL ALWAYS BE KEN

I am continually amazed by what people believe, and even more by what they expect others to believe, such as the 60 year old man who came into the Nishtar Hospital in Multan, Pakistan, to report he had been the victim of a pair of armed rustlers. He told the doctors that the intruders not only stole two of his water buffalo, but before they left they took the time to shove a bottle of Pepsi Cola up his butt. No, really; Dr. Abdul Manan, the physician who performed the “Cola-ectomy”, has the x-rays to prove it. Yes, it is very easy to fake x-rays. But why bother? Most emergency room folk know similar stories and many have similar x-rays revealing everything from Pepsi bottles to small furniture inserted into rectums by a curious public fascinated with shoving things up their own butts. But they never seem to think far enough ahead to wonder how they are going to get this stuff back out. In other words I don’t believe the story about the cattle rustlers. Which is a shame, because this poor guy probably spent hours inventing that cover story before he decided he had to go to the hospital. I just want to know how he got there. Did he walk? That must have been excruciating.
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And then there is the amazing story invented by Ken Williams, the twice elected mayor of Centerton, Arkansas. He looked his long suffering wife square in the eye one afternoon and told her, “Our whole world is about to come crashing down around us because I am Don LaRose, and I am Ken Williams, sort of.” Hearing that, my first reaction would have been, ‘this ought to be good’, but his wife Pat assured the “Benton County Daily Record” that she still loves Ken, or Don, and will stand by him, or them, because, “He’ll always be Ken”. Well, actually lady, evidently not.
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According to Ken, in 1975 Ken, who was then Don and a Baptist preacher, was kidnapped by a gang of “underworld criminal Satanists”, because criminals are so often swayed by theology. They hustled him into the back of a van and told Ken-Don that Satan was unhappy with him because he was such a good preacher, and wanted him to stop. Then they stuck an electronic device on his forehead to wipe out his memory and dumped him in Minneapolis, because, I guess, how would he ever find his way home from Minnesota. But I have to wonder why they wiped out his memory before they told him why they were doing it, since, presumably, once his memory had been wiped he would not remember the justification. It seems that back in the 70’s Satan was hiring idiots to be his henchmen.
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In any case, Ken did find his way home, even though the cops showed little interest in his tale of abduction by a gang of criminal Satanist, and he kept preaching. In 1978 Ken-Don moved with his wife and two daughters to the Hessville Baptists Church in Hammond, Indiana. And there, in 1980, the Satanists showed up again, as they so often do. This time they told Ken-Don that if he kept preaching they were going to murder his family. And, so, to protect his family, Ken-Don disappeared. What a heroic figure! Or so says Ken.
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Here is what exists on the public record. Donald Lester LaRose was born March 11, 1940. In September 1958 he began classes at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, and left in 1961 without graduating. According to Ken-Don he then went to work in Christian radio. In 1972 he remade himself again, this time as a minister and moved his wife Eunice and two children to Maine, New York, where he was hired as a preacher at the First Baptist Church. According to Ken-Don, one day in 1975 a letter arrived. “Inside was a piece of black paper with a pasted-up message on it…it accused me of blaspheming Satan and committing sacrilege against him. A few days later a second letter arrived.” I guess the Reverend Ken-Don was singled out because he was the only Baptist minister in America who had taken on Satan.
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As Ken-Don so dramatically puts it, on Election Day, 1975, he vanished. Of course, 1975 was an off year election and it would have been so much more dramatic if the Satanists had waited a year, but they didn’t. Less spectacularly, Eunice told the FBI that Ken-Don had said he had to go next door to speak to someone in the church, and never came back. A few days later his car turned up abandoned in nearby Binghampton, New York. Ken-Don’s disappearance was chronicled in a number of Christian publications, as well as the local secular press. And in February, 1976, a part time preacher in a Minneapolis shelter saw Ken-Don’s photo in a magazine and recognized him as the man he knew as Bruce Williams. When confronted, Ken-Don-Bruce insisted he was the only son of Dr. Kent Williams, of Middleport, N.Y, and that he was a salesman for Williams-Fragrano. But when the FBI checked they found that Bruce Williams had died in a horrible car crash years before. Ken-Don-Bruce then said his name was Donald Fragano, but the FBI already knew that Fragano had died in the same crash that had killed Bruce. Finally Ken-Don-Bruce-Donald came up with the Satanist abduction story and the FBI decided they had more important things to worry and returned him to his lucky family.
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Back in Maine, New York the “simple country folk” as Ken-Don-etc. described them, were just glad Ken-et.al. was safe. But frankly his utility as a preacher had been about used up, so after hearing his abduction story, they fired his ass. And that was why Ken-Don-etc. and Eunice and the kids moved to the little church in Hammond, Indiana; lucky congregation, they. And it was from there, on June 8, 1980, that Ken-Don-etc. disappeared yet again. According to that missing person’s report, Ken-Don-etcs’s friends in Hammond said they feared he might have been abducted by the same “cult” which had kidnapped him before. Seven years later poor Eunice had him legally declared dead.
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I will leave it to Ken-Don-etc. to explain the details of his fascinating life (detailed at http://donlarose.com/) in part because the details keep changing but mostly because frankly I don’t find the details, what ever they are at the moment, all that fascinating. My own life is much more interesting, at least to me; such as the revelation I experienced when I was ten or eleven, angry because I had done a good deed and had not received what I thought was sufficient praise. My mother had given me a hug and a kiss on the forehead and then asked, “What did you expect, a medal?”
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Clearly, Don.LaRose was expecting a medal. And when he didn’t get one, he sent Bruce Williams out to collect it. And when Bruce didn’t get one, Ken-Don-etc. kept changing characters like other people change shirts, until, at the age of 67 or 69, depending on his choice of birth dates, Ken-Don ran out of the energy needed to keep reinventing himself. So now he’s decided to celebrate his self obsession and self centeredness on an elaborate website, when he ought to be celebrating the two kids he abandoned, and the two wives he spent a lifetime lying to. How come he didn’t devote his web site to them?
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Ken-Don-etc. is a guy with a lot more up his ass than just a Pepsi bottle. He’s got his whole head up there. And a couple of other people’s heads as well.



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NOT SO SWEET IN POTEET

I can’t think of any place in America farther from Washington, D.C. than Poteet, Texas, zip code 78065. The little farming town is 20 miles south of San Antonio, and less than 70 miles north of the Rio Grande. Poteet has a population of just 3,500, while the 20010 zip code, the central core our nation’s capital, is home to over 26,000 people, more than seven times the population of Poteet. D.C.’s population is about 57% African-American, while Poteet’s is 88% Hispanic, which in south Texas is called “White”. Average household income in the urban 20010 is $36,000 a year, while in rural Poteet the average income for a family is only $25,000. Poteet is known as the strawberry capital of Texas, while D.C. seems to grow nothing but a lot of hot air and red tape. Officially the 20010 zip has 26 registered sex offenders, a ratio of about 895 to one, while tiny rural religious Poteet has 29 registered sex offenders, a ratio of about 125 to one. Now, either something very odd is going on in Poteet or we are completely mistaken about what we think we know about sex offenders; who they are, what they do, and how to stop them from doing it again.
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What brought all of this to my attention was Poteet’s newest registered sex offender, its 3 term mayor, Mr. Lino Donanto. On Halloween ‘Hiz Honor’ cut a deal and pleaded guilty to two counts of indecent exposure and “no contest” to one count of indecent contact with a child younger then 17. The two girls in question were his daughters. The plea agreement requires that the mayor register as a “sex offender” and keep 1,000 feet away from any location where children congregate. And when the Atascosa County probation officers ran a tape measure between the entrance of City Hall and the Atascosa Boxing Club and Youth Center they found it “well within 200 feet”. So even showing up for work could get the mayor re-arrested.
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But part of the problem is the nature of the charges which Donanto pled to. They originally surfaced during a contentious 2005 divorce case, and his ex-wife, Aleida, admitted under cross examination that she has lied to the police in the past. Also, the alleged indecent exposure occurred once in 1996 and once in 2000, and the indecent contact charge involved “improper touching”, once, in 1997.
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Aledia testified that she lived in what the prosecutor described as a “…world of verbal…and physical abuse” And one of the girls (they are now 17 and 25) tearfully testified that Donanto would uncover them as they slept, remove his own clothes, and masturbate. Aleda testified that he began this behavior when the youngest child was 3 months old, and she testified that she had told the police chief about the abuse, beginning in 2000, but “her husband’s political connections” prevented her from pressing the case. The day the chief was to testify, Donanto accepted a plea bargain, and so did the prosecutor.
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And that plea is also part of the problem. By its terms the mayor must pay a $2,000 fine and do 400 hours of community service. And he will be on the “sex offenders” registry for 20 years. But the rest of the court’s judgment was labeled as “deferred adjudication” with 10 years probation, meaning that Donanto has not been officially convicted of his crime unless he violates the terms of his parole, such as coming within 1,000 feet of any where that children congregate.

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It’s a messy situation for an elected official. The Mayor was most recently re-elected this year, after his indictment and very public arrest by Texas Rangers while he was working in his auto repair shop. His repair shop and his position as Mayor, make him one of the most important and most respected citizens in this small town. Still the assumption was that Donanto would resign after his conviction. He had called a meeting of the council to do just that, but at the last minute he pulled a Larry Craig and changed his mind. He insists, "I did what was the best to my interests, as per my attorney," but he also insists that he did not molest his children. The mayor is staying put. City Councilman Larry Cantu says that although the council still has a quorum even if the Mayor doesn’t show up, “He needs to get out.” The situation, says Cantu, is “…not right for the citizens of Poteet”.
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Of course, Larry lost that last election to Donanto and he may be a little bitter. I suspected as much the minute that Cantu reminded everybody, as the trial started, that Donanto was “innocent until proven guilty”. What a hack politician thing to say. But since there is nothing in the city or state codes that would require the mayor to step down before his term runs out in May 2009, I guess Councilman Cantu is just screwed.
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Besides, with that high a percentage of citizen sex offenders, it was only a matter of time before one of them got elected mayor. Still, what the hell could be in the water of Poteet – besides high concentrations of insecticides and herbicides – that would produce sex offenders at ten times the rate they are created in the Babylon of Washington, D.C.? I thought that Babylon was supposed to be the source of moral decay, as opposed to the more natural, land and faith based lifestyles of farm country? Or was that just 4,000 year old propaganda from the Jewish controlled media, i.e. The Old Testament? Jesus Christ, of course it was!
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But I still wonder what kind of “kink-based life-styles” these strawberry heads are practicing down there on the farm. As Poteet citizen Jesse Ramirez put it, “Es una verguenza”. It’s a shame; yes, it is. But whose shame is it?
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Hon. Lino Z. Donato, Mayor

P.O. Box 378

Poteet, Texas 78065

(830) 742-3574 / FAX (830) 742-8747