Democracy for New Mexico

Bird Blogging: Deck the Halls Edition

Bosco the peach-faced lovebird likes to help with organizing and putting up our Christmas decorations. Here he is (above) helping us prepare some of our deck the halls material.

Bosco likes to include his play gym area, near our front window, in the Xmas displays. Here he is sprucing up his Roswell space alien toy, which he insists be part his holiday decorations since the spaceman is a Christmasy green color.

Hope for the Holidays Vigil Takes On Wal-Mart

From WakeUpWalMart:
“HOPE FOR THE HOLIDAYS” CANDLELIGHT VIGIL
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 14TH, 3:30 PM
WAL- MART {CORNER OF MENAUL & CARLISLE NE}
TO CHANGE WAL-MART TO A RESPONSIBLE EMPLOYER

For more information about this event, call Diane at {262-1986}. Check the WakeUpWalMart website for more information about this issue.

Consider Buying Your Christmas Tree Here

From Terri Holland: Help support a NM businesswoman. Kathy Lucero, a strong support of the American GI Forum (AGIF), has a Christmas tree business called DISCOUNT TREES, with beautiful NM trees for sale.  Located at the corner of Edith and Los Ranchos-daytime hours-very fair prices! Get your tree from her!

Saturday Music Hall: It's Comin' on Xmas

While I was having my coffee this morning Joni Mitchell's song, River, came into my conciousness -- the one that starts out, "It's comin' on Xmas, they're cuttin' down trees, they're puttin' up reindeer and singin' songs of joy and peace." So I searched YouTube for the song but couldn't find any videos of Joni herself performing it.

The vid above has Joni singing the song, but features clips from Gus Van Zandt's film, My Own Private Idaho, with the late River Phoenix. Next best thing. Beautiful images in its own right. I also found the vid below, with Sarah McLachlin performing another luscious version of the song, which is a cut on her new album of holiday music called Winter Songs. The holidaze season is indeed upon us. Let's hope it brings some peace, or some peaceful beginnings, or at least some peace in our hearts.

Organize or Attend a Screening of "An Inconvenient Truth"

From Terry Riley:
MoveOn is working to help educate people on environmental issues. They are holding screenings of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Please go to this URL to find a screening near you or organize one yourself. Bring a friend. The more people who know what is really happening, the better our chances of changing our world.

Also, if you can, why don't you e-mail your Senator's and Representative's offices and invite a member of their local staff to attend.  THIS is where change really starts. Congress.org makes it easy.

December 8, 1980

It was 26 years ago today that John Winston Ono Lennon, age 40, was gunned down in front of the Dakota in New York city. I learned about it and cried on an oddly foggy, almost otherworldly night in Albuquerque while on the way back from the airport to pick up a friend. All the incoming planes were being turned away due to the weather. I heard the shocking report on the tinny car radio, my Cherokee surrounded by billowing gray ground clouds. The misty fog seemed fitting, matching my melancholy about another one gone too early, another one gunned down, another kindred spirit cut down in his prime, another creative and courageous soul lost to us in violence, in tragedy.

I went home and listened to John and Yoko's album Double Fantasy, released just 3 weeks before his death. And wept again. It's almost impossible to describe what Lennon meant to my generation. In the end, I guess you had to be there to truly understand. We had literally grown up with his music as a primary groove in our soundtrack to life. In many ways, we had also grown up with Lennon himself, evolving in tune with him and his emotional and political explorations.

The profound changes of the era and those in us progressed along with his changes and those of so many other transcendent artists, writers and political figures of the time. We projected onto them. They projected onto us. Somehow we were all in the trip together, in a powerful circular flow of kinetic generational energy traveling up-an-octave peaks and bottoming-out valleys. There was a strange kind of linkage among us and our shared flaws and our shared joys, a web of in and out and around. And now blood spurted once more, spattering our branching hopes and dreams with pain, again, again, again.

What I am writing probably comes across as corny, cliched, melodramatic to those too young to remember. But those of a certain age will surely understand.

This year, Yoko Ono released a statement called forgive us as a full-page ad in the New York Times. She asks us to commemorate John's life and death as well as the suffering of souls across the globe. With so much of the world in bloody chaos, it's time. As she says, "Let's wish strongly that one day we will be able to say that we healed ourselves, and by healing ourselves, we healed the world."

Official Lennon website.

Donate Now to Help Wounded and Sick Veterans With a Phone Card

From Working Assets Act for Change:
Support the veterans who've served our country by sending them a phone card so they can call their loved ones over the holidays. Click here.

Veterans Administration (VA) budget cuts in recent years have left many of our nation's veterans at VA hospitals without the means to call their families over the holidays. These long distance calls are generally not covered by the VA, and many vets just don't have the financial resources to call all their loved ones.

So Working Assets, Veterans for Peace, CODEPINK, Iraq Veterans Against the War and Gold Star Families for Peace have teamed up on a project to thank our veterans by sending them phone cards loaded with 125 minutes of domestic long-distance calling time. We'll purchase these cards and deliver them to VA Medical Facilities all over the country on December 18th. (If you want to join in delivering the cards to a VA hospital near you, just click on the link you'll see after making your gift.)

$10 will cover the cost of phone cards for three veterans. $20 will buy six phone cards. $33 will buy ten cards. $100 will buy phone cards for 30 veterans to call home over the holidays. 100% of your gift will go directly to buying phone cards -- so please give as generously as you can.

Have Coffee With Santa Fe Mayor Coss

From the Office of Mayor David Coss: Next Morning Coffee with Mayor Coss to be held December 13 with Preservation Community. Santa Fe Mayor David Coss will meet with community members interested in the preservation of Santa Fe’s historic areas at the next Morning Coffee with Mayor Coss, scheduled to be held Wednesday, December 13. The forum will be held from 9:15 AM to 10:30 AM in the Council Chambers, 200 Lincoln Ave.

Although the Morning Coffee public outreach forum has been regularly scheduled on the first and third Wednesdays of each month, Coffees will not be held on December 6 or December 20.

Beginning in January 2007, Morning Coffee with Mayor Coss will be held on the first Wednesday of each month. For more information, please contact Becky Lo Dolce, Special Projects Coordinator, at 955-6629.

Guild Hosts Local Premier of Controversial "Death of a President"

From Albuquerque's Guild Cinema:
DECEMBER 8 - 14
(ONE WEEK)
Too hot to play at the multiplex - A Guild Exclusive!
DEATH OF A PRESIDENT (4:30, 6:30, 8:30)
Winner of the International Critics' Prize at the Toronto Film Festival, DEATH OF A PRESIDENT is conceived as a fictional TV documentary broadcast in 2008, reflecting on another monstrous and cataclysmic event: the assassination of President George W. Bush on October 19th, 2007. The "documentary" combines archival footage and carefully composed interviews as it refashions the event into a riveting story, following the FBI's hunt for the assassin.

Director Gabriel Range previously used the device of a "retrospective documentary" in his celebrated 2003 film, THE DAY BRITAIN STOPPED, about a chain of events that led to a breakdown of the country's transport system and nearly a hundred fatalities. Both of these films have been acclaimed for the technical virtuosity with which they combine archival footage and filmed scenes to create disturbingly real visions of catastrophes. DEATH OF A PRESIDENT was honored by The International Critics Prize Jury (FIPRESCI) at Toronto for "the audacity with which it distorts reality, to reveal a larger truth," and the Guild Cinema is excited to have been chosen to present its Albuquerque premiere.

Also coming to the Guild:

DECEMBER 9 & 10 (SATURDAY & SUNDAY)
By Popular Demand for Two Shows Only:
AMERICA: FREEDOM TO FASCISM (2:00 PM ONLY)
All Seats $5
Determined to find the law that requires Americans to pay income tax, Aaron Russo (THE ROSE, TRADING PLACES) sets out on a journey. Neither left- nor right-wing, this startling examination exposes the systematic erosion of civil liberties in America. Through interviews with US Congressmen, a former IRS Commissioner, former IRS and FBI agents, tax attorneys and authors, Russo connects the dots between money creation, federal income tax, voter fraud, the national identity card (becoming law in May 2008) and the implementation of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to track citizens. A striking case about the evolving police state in America.

The Guild Cinema

3405 Central Ave. NE

Albuquerque, NM 87106

(505) 255-1848

www.guildcinema.com

This Just In: Richardson Will Run for Prez (Debunked)

Not unexpected, but still news or at least Faux News: According to a Fox News story, Gov. Bill Richardson WILL run for president in 2008:

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson is expected to formally file papers to form a presidential exploratory committee in January. But today he told FOX News "I am running," as he described the professional and personal experiences that he believes have prepared him for the job.

He also gave a speech on comprehensive immigration reform today, something one might expect a presidential candidate to do. Let's see how much buzz the Fox item produces....

UPDATE: Ah, but wait, now kos sez the Richardson camp is calling the Fox report a lie. Video to come at kos. Also, a new Albuquerque Tribune article contains the denial. Either way, more media coverage for Richardson.

UPDATE #2, 12/8: Faux News clearly twisted the facts on this one, but the Richardson denial story garnered a front page headline in the Albuquerque Journal this morning.