Right Wing Counter Protest

Where Eagles Dare
The Counter-protest Group The Gathering Of Eagles Cause A Ruckus As Bush Comes To New London's Coast Guard Ceremonies.
By Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate May 31 2007 (No longer online)

The first encounter I had with right wing protest group the Gathering of Eagles was watching an Eagle upbraid young, female demonstrators outside the New London Coast Guard Academy.

The demonstrators had come to protest President Bush’s visit as commencement speaker last Monday. The heavy-set man with a personal PA system challenged the “hippy girls’” loyalty to their “homo,” “girly-man” boyfriends. Later, he accused the anti-war protesters of getting paid to attend the May 22 protest. An anti-war protester yelled that he paid $20 for gas to get there. The Gathering of Eagles member suggested he “should have driven a hybrid vehicle.”

He ran out of steam, one-liner-wise, after that, but he and other less-light-on-their-feet Eagles with megaphones and speakers droned on for the next hour or so, including a long droning “swim to Cuba” chant during a Latino anti-war speaker’s speech.

Before the protest, the group’s Web site, gatheringofeagles.org, said the group planned to “welcome the families of the graduating Coast Guard academy” and “support … these families and graduating cadets.” The group, at least nominally, was worried the Coast Guard graduation would be unfairly disrupted by the anti-war rally planned by the ANSWER coalition and other anti-war groups, including Veterans for Peace and Connecticut Opposes the War.

“We believe that ANSWER’s protest was very ill-timed, and a very bad location. … For ANSWER to protest the President on what’s supposed to be the happiest day of these people’s lives so far, that was shameful and very disgraceful,” Connecticut Gathering of Eagles organizer Jim Bancroft said. (Turns out he shouldn’t have been so worried — the Presidential motorcade avoided the protest. Neither the demonstration nor the counter-demonstration impacted the ceremony.)

Bancroft claimed an early remark by an anti-war speaker changed the Eagle’s gathering’s purpose from a celebration of the cadets to a hectoring of the anti-war demonstration.

“We were there to welcome the President. When we got there, the first thing that happened was someone called us baby killers,” Bancroft said, adding that the slur was stated sometime between 7:30 and 7:45 a.m.

His claim seems extremely unlikely, in light of an ANSWER’s spokesperson’s version of the timeline.

“Our sound permit didn’t start until eight. We might have done a sound check, but they would have just heard ‘Check, check,’” ANSWER organizer Tahnee Stair said.

Elliot Adams, a Vietnam veteran and the president of Veterans for Peace, attended the rally, and said he viewed the Eagles with resigned sadness.

“I feel sorry for them. A number of them are vets, and I understand the misplaced anger associated with [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder],” Adams said. “With PTSD, you have what’s called misplaced anger that goes off in all directions. It’s a real common thing.”

He added, “Also, they believe in the American dream, and they don’t just see that we’re losing it.” Read more!

Ex-Offender Reform Article

Lockdown
Activists seek more help with substance abuse and job placement for those behind bars
By Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate September 20, 2007

On Tuesday, Sept. 11, the Connecticut legislature held a special session to discuss the state's criminal justice program in light of the brutal July triple murder in Cheshire. Lawmakers explored the state's ability to share information between law enforcement agencies, and considered proposals about three-strikes laws and increased prison construction. An important voice, advocates say, was missing from the discussion.

"The people who are not part of this dialogue are the people who know something about what it would really take to prevent people coming out of jail from re-offending," Peter Goselin, coordinator of the Connecticut chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, said. "Those are people who have been through that process."

An ad hoc collection of social justice groups, spearheaded by three-month-old ex-offender rights organization the Clean Slate Committee, spoke on behalf of the currently and formerly incarcerated at a press conference on Sept. 11 outside the Legislative Office Building. A part of Connecticut drug policy reform organization A Better Way Foundation, Clean Slate aims to change the way the state treats former offenders.

"They're talking about building more prisons, they're talking about GPS tracking, they're talking about electronic bracelets," Clean Slate's David Samuels said. "Nowhere in that conversation is there any talk about rehabilitating inmates while they're incarcerated."

Connecticut offers tax incentives to companies that hire former convicts and employment services for the formerly incarcerated. Samuels believes they're ineffective. "The policies on the books that supposedly address the issues of discrimination against ex-offenders have no teeth," Samuels said. "There's nothing on the books that provides ex-offenders with the legal avenue of taking an employer to court."

While a handful of Connecticut businesses hire former offenders, nothing legally compels private sector employers to consider former offenders for work. One state legislator noted that when former felons compete in the job market against non-felons, the former felons lose out, perpetuating a cycle of incarceration.

"We have 400 ex-offenders coming into Hartford a month. There are scant services for them and very little housing," State Representative Art Feltman said. "People bounce around and look for work, and get turned down for work because of their criminal records, and everyone is surprised when they end up back in jail. No one should be surprised given how few options they have."



Several former convicts I spoke with had employment problems stemming from their criminal records. Hartford resident Stanley Johnson, 41, who was released from prison in 1992 after serving 18 months of a three-year sentence on drug charges, was recently fired from a job because of his criminal record.

"On the job application, it asked if you've had a felony within the last five years," Johnson said. "I hadn't had one within five years, I applied for the position. Once they realized I had a felony, they let me go."

Johnson said the recent incident was part of a long pattern of employment issues. "I've been back and forth, see-sawing between jobs just because of my background and felonies," Johnson said.

Jeff Sherman, 49, of Bristol, was released in 2002 after serving 11 months for drug charges. At that time, he re-started his house-painting business. While many of his former clients signed on with him again, many were wary of hiring him again because of his criminal background.

"Some people looked at me and figured once a drug addict, always a drug addict. I'm self-employed, but if I went in somewhere and filled out an application, I'm sure it would hold me back," Sherman said.



Under the tenure of current commissioner Theresa Lantz, the Connecticut Department of Correction adopted what's called a re-entry model of corrections, which emphasizes job readiness for convicts.

"Basically, their discharge planning starts the second they get in. They know day one what they're going to need once they leave here so that they won't come back here," DOC representative Stacy Smith said.

Samuels contends that inmates with release dates are often denied access to those programs, in favor of inmates serving life sentences. As a result, Samuels said, many released prisoners encounter difficulties with jobs, putting their parole in jeopardy. "When a person goes to see a [parole officer], the one thing they're going to hear is, 'Find a job or else,'" Samuels said.

James Hanton, 44, of Bridgeport, said that while he was on parole, employment concerns were placed ahead of treating his substance-abuse issues.

"I got into some issues with the director of the halfway house. His issue was work, work, work. My thing was that I had to get into some outpatient treatment, because being clean in prison and being clean out in the world are two different things," Hanton said.

Smith said prisoners are allowed into drug treatment and job-readiness programs based on their records. "Individual histories determine what programs people qualify for," Smith said.

Samuels said the criteria are flawed, claiming that people with release dates, the people who could benefit the most from those programs, are often excluded from them. Hanton, who was imprisoned for a robbery he committed to feed his addiction, was able to get into the tier-two program after a protracted legal battle.

"The Attorney General's office was sitting there, trying to defend their position on this. Basically, the court was going to make a decision in their favor until I said to the judge, 'Listen, I'm right around the corner from parole. Do you want to be my next victim?'" Hanton said. "That's how I got through to him, and he ordered the treatment."



Samuels and his allies characterize Connecticut's justice system as a criminal factory, a system that — intentionally or not — encourages recidivism. Barbara Fair of New Haven-based criminal justice reform group People Against Injustice and others worry that in the wake of the Cheshire murders, things will get worse for former offenders.

"Because of their knee-jerk reaction to what happened in Cheshire, the people on parole are going to have to pay," Fair said. "All the persistent offenders are going to have to pay dearly."

Fair's son was released from prison the morning of the press conference. She's already seen firsthand how the state has begun cracking down on former offenders.

"Already, my son's parole officer told him he had to be on a bracelet for 90 days, with a 9 o'clock curfew. Which is ridiculous," Fair said. "Like my son said, 'If I'm going to commit a crime, and I know I have to be in the house by nine, I'm going to do it before nine.'" Read more!

Right Wing Comedy

Laughing Matters
The vast right-wing comedy conspiracy.
By Adam Bulger
New York Press, Oct. 14, 2003

Julia Gorin is onstage cataloguing the gory side effects of RU-486, the morning-after abortion pill. She waves her arms emphatically as she describes the blood and doctor’s visits the pill would entail.

"What are the NOW ladies going to be happy about next?" She pauses, then continues: "Wire coat hangers?"


Two tables from the stage, where in a typical comedy club a boozed-out fratboy might be heckling, sits a man who is the spitting image of Carl Reiner in the Ocean’s Eleven remake. The crowd sweats modest urban affluence, with men dressed in Brooks Brothers’ dress shirts tucked into unwrinkled khakis, and women in wool slacks and high heels. The American flag is the accessory of choice: One male audience member wears a flag pin on the lapel of his Patrick Bateman-style pinstripe suit; opening act Robert George had tiny flags on his tie; and Gorin, the headliner, wore a bead-encrusted choker with an American flag centerpiece.

This is not a typical comedy crowd. And this is not a typical comedy show. This is Republican Riot–comedy for and by political conservatives–held last week at the Don’t Tell Mamma cabaret on 46th St., a sublevel club around the corner from a porno emporium.

In addition to topping the bill, Gorin also organized the night, with an eye toward monthly shows and a run that will hopefully culminate during the 2004 Republican convention. She’s a seasoned stand-up comic whose act evolved from observational humor and jokes about dating into political humor during the late 90s.

"Bill Clinton was in office, so there was always something funny to say… The audience responded pretty well, so that encouraged me to move in a political direction. I happen to be right-wing, so my observations are always coming from that perspective."

That same year, she started writing opinion pieces for conservative outlets, and has since written articles such as "Not at Albright" and "The Hours: I Am Woman, Hear Me Bore" for Jewish World Review, FoxNews.com and Opinion Journal. The Republican Riot was her first attempt at producing a show.

"I suffered through nearly a decade of listening to other people’s acts, when they bash Republicans. Conservatives are the butt of all their jokes. And they defend Bill Clinton and talk about how his penis was good for the economy. And the audience cheers."

To counter what she views as a pronounced liberal bias in stand-up comedy, she created a routine demanding that Americans get their heads out of the gutter and instead wrap their arm around President Bush–or her "Georgie," as she refers to him during the act. Democrats ("You gotta love ’em") were frequent targets of jokes, as were immigrants, Iraqis, Europeans (specifically, and obviously, the French) Palestinians and, of course, Bill Clinton.

Sex is an oft-returned-to topic. "Libertarians are Republicans with an unhealthy preoccupation with sex," she jokes, and "the Democrats are against the missile shield because they’re so busy having sex they won’t notice that the bombs are dropping." She defines liberal ideology as "give me liberty or give me tyranny, as long as you give me sex."

This anti-sex slant is a tough sell for a room full of comedy-hungry drunks no matter what the ideological makeup of the audience, but Gorin draws upon years of experience on the comedy circuit. She knows how to brand an identity: onstage she becomes a Chuck Jones sketch of a New York Jew, effecting a high-pitched tremolo voice and kvetch-me-if-you-can nervousness. She airs her insecurities to get the audience on her side, tightly intertwining jokes about her self-image with her right-wing observations.

Her opening act, Robert George, lacks Gorin’s streamlined stand-up mojo; his act is a scattershot volley of one-liners devoid of her smooth transitions. He’s a professional television commentator and a writer for the un-bylined editorial page of the New York Post, which he refers to as the second-least credible paper in New York. The first? The New York Times.
George is a black Catholic Republican, and he opens his set with jokes about the inherent conflicts in his racial, spiritual and political identities. He equates his multilayered personality with the Republican party’s broad diversity, then jokes that the party has some diverse broads, while winking at a lady in the front row.

With the California recall election just one day old, George takes the opportunity to riff: Arnold won by courting the Cali hiphop vote with a band called "Schwarza-niggahs with Attitude" and a song called "Straight out of Austria." After a rendition of that song, he adds, "I might be black, but I’m not crazy." The crowd wants him to succeed, wants him–and Julia–to kill, to be hilarious, to be funnier than Garofalo and Carlin and the other liberal giants of standup. So when Julia’s punchlines flatline or when George’s voice stammers, the crowd is uncomfortable but patient.

The Republican Riot show may just be the New York tip of the Republican comedy iceberg. Brad Stine is a conservative comic who tours with the Promise Keepers, playing to arena crowds numbering in the thousands. A veteran of the secular circuit and the 90s cable-tv comic boom, Stine has found his "very pro-Patriot, very pro-theism, very pro-God" personal philosophy to be in opposition to the stereotypical comedian.

"Comedians are thought of as rock ’n’ roll, spoken-word, edgy, pushing the envelope," he observes, "but to do that from a conservative, Judeo-Christian point of view is unique."
Around the 45-minute mark of his act, Stine will often point out that he hasn’t used a single curse word. No matter which club he’s in, he says, that factoid never fails to garner applause.
He currently brings his brand of pro-American jokery to churches and religious functions, noting he doesn’t "do as many clubs now because [he doesn’t] make as much money."

Stand-up comedy is a format that’s ready-made for conservatives. There’s allowance for the Limbaugh monologue/rant, spots for one-liners and ample space for Fox News-style soundbyte ethos. Comedy club audiences respond to shouting and invective and, really now, how far of a jump is it from Bill O’Reilly to Sam Kinison?

As Stine told me, "There is certainly a huge constituency of conservatives in the United States who have made Fox News the number-one news network… There are millions of Americans saying ‘speak for me, speak for me,’ and they’ve never had a comic do it." Read more!

Salvia

Meet the New Drug
Controversial yet legal, the herbal psychedelic salvia is readily available in Connecticut. But does it work?
By Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate, August 2, 2007

The cluster of kids gathered by the counter mentioned salvia when I walked into the head shop. The four college-age rocker-looking kids and the store's owner were discussing legal highs, like herbal ecstasy and various smokable herbs. Those were good, they said, but none of them produced as intense an experience as salvia.

By a strange coincidence, I was there to buy salvia divinorum, a legal herbal drug with alleged hallucinogenic properties. A member of the sage family of plants and native to Mexico, salvia is sold as a leaf or an extract that can be smoked or chewed. The potency of extracts increase as the cost goes up. Salvia graded as 10X contains 10 times more Salvinorum A, the active ingredient of salvia, then the same amount of salvia leaves, is generally the cheapest. Salvia graded as 50x is more expensive. Salvia experts told me that the labelling system is misleading, as the potency of salvia varies widely.

Once I said I was a reporter and interested in buying salvia, advice was dispensed rapidly and haphazardly, from both the customers and the store's owner. I was handed a pamphlet about the herbal drug that included a short history and a long list of instructions, which emphasized in all capital letters that I should not drive or operate any type of machinery while under the influence of salvia.

I was told I shouldn't take it alone. I was warned that I would most certainly drool while I was on the drug. The smoke from the cured leaves was harsh, they said, and I couldn't just roll it up and smoke it; a water pipe was needed to cool the smoke. The high lasts about 20 minutes, but would seem like an hour.

Cautionary stories about friends and peers were shared. This one guy who smoked salvia thought a glass coffee table was a well and tried to swim in it. A girl took the drug and believed her body was made out of Lego pieces.

According to Bryan Roth, a director for the National Institute of Mental Health, those experiences illustrate the dissociative experiences salvia users typically have.
"For most people it's pretty overwhelming because they're more or less instantaneously transported to an alternative universe," Roth said.

I walked out of the store with a plastic lid filled with 20X grade salvia (the highest grade available at the store) and a small red water pipe. I felt pretty spooked. I had assumed salvia's effects were going to be as negligible as smoking banana peels. As anxious as I was, I decided not to enlist the aid of a sitter. I was first of all a grown man who hasn't required tending by a babysitter in the last quarter century or so, and secondly averse to having people watch me drool. Thirdly, my girlfriend was out of town, and she is the only person I think I'd really trust in such a situation.

I went home and struggled to remember how to load screens into a bong (it's been a while) and spilled the contents of the salvia container onto my coffee table. I made a Rhapsody play list, including "Comfortably Numb" by Pink Floyd, a song I planned on using as a ripcord I could pull if I started freaking out, and poured myself a glass of water and opened a can of beer and put them on the kitchen counter.

I pulled two hits from the bong and, as instructed, held the smoke in as long as I could. The effects of the salvia kicked in almost immediately. The music I was playing — Spiritualized's Live at Royal Albert Hall album — suddenly seemed extremely intense. My computer was nearby, and I typed out the sentence "If I knew it was going to do this to the music, I would have done it to the whole apartment."

When I looked up from the typo-ridden sentence, the air seemed like it was streaked with waves, and the walls seemed to pulsate. I stood up to get closer to the music, which seemed to be capable of taking me on an intense journey.

I was both elated because the drug worked and panicked because the drug worked. I was down the rabbit hole, and wondered if I should have heeded the warnings of the head-shop kids.
Then, two songs into the play list, the rush subsided, leaving behind an unpleasant lightheadedness. I felt over-heated and ripped off. For the next couple of hours I was tired, mellow and stupid. I felt hung over the following day.

Judging from the dozens of videos of salvia trips uploaded to the video-sharing website YouTube, my mild experience with salvia was not the norm (or maybe I can just handle my shit better than most, or my self-administered dosage was too low). The salvia users on the internet videos freak out like crazy in trips that last nearly a half an hour.

The videos straddle the line between hilarity and deeply disturbing — a mix the Internet was made for. Reactions range from giddiness to seeming regressions into atavistic states. The salvia-takers, who are mostly white males who appear to be in their early 20s, remove their pants, babble like idiots and, yes, drool.

Thanks to media reports, governmental action and maybe even those YouTube videos, salvia divinorum has snowballed into a topic of concern nationwide. It's illegal in Delaware, Missouri and Louisiana. Other states, including New Jersey and Louisiana, have proposed banning it, and two proposals have been forwarded to prohibit it at the national level. Currently, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency classifies salvia as a drug of concern, but has not yet defined it as a scheduled narcotic.

Salvia isn't some recently-created designer drug. Native to the Oaxaca region of Mexico, salvia has been used in shamanistic rituals and as a healing agent for centuries. It's been known to the industrialized world since the 1930s and sold commercially since the mid 1990s.

Interest in salvia seems to have spiked in the last two years. In the past two months alone, newspapers across the United States and Canada have run editorials and articles with headlines like "Hallucinogenic Salvia a Growing Threat" (San Bernardino County Sun), "Salvia: Harmless Recreation or a Dangerous Drug?" (Wisconsin State Journal) and "Herb Poses Dangers to Users" (The Calgary Herald).

The headlines imply salvia is causing some sort of an international drug apocalypse. A reader could easily infer that the streets of San Bernardino, Wisconsin and Calgary are piled high with strung-out salvia heads, and the city emergency rooms and morgues are clogged by the shattered bodies and tattered corpses of salvia users. Evidently, that inference would be incorrect.

"There's not a single documented case of overdose. There's not a single documented case of an emergency room visit. There's not a single documented case of addiction," salvia researcher John Mendelson said.

Why all the fuss and why now, then? Jag Davies, the director of communications for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, an organization that studies the possible medicinal and therapeutic benefits of drugs like MDMA and LSD, said salvia is following a familiar trajectory for naturally-occurring controlled substances.

"It's a very similar pattern, and we've seen it happen over and over again throughout history. Salvia, for example, is a plant that's been used for thousands of years in Mexico by indigenous people with relatively little side effects when used in a safe context that's part of the social order of the society," Davies said. "Then it starts getting spread in underground circles. Once it gets to a critical mass, the media goes into hysteria mode."

The arguable critical mass event for salvia was the 2006 suicide of Delaware teenager Brett Chidester. Sometime before taking his own life, the 17-year-old honors student told his mother he had experimented with salvia. Reportedly, in his conversations with his mother, Chidester said he didn't like the drug. In his suicide note, Chidester reportedly wrote that he couldn't go on living after he "learned the secrets of life." The rest of the note hasn't been made public. Pro-salvia websites and sources have contended that the line wasn't in reference to Chidester's salvia use, and speculated that other factors — divorced parents, acne medication, drinking, etc, — led to his decision to take his own life. Chidester's mother has maintained that salvia, along with depression, were the major contributing factors in her son's suicide.

The Delaware state legislature, led by Democratic state senator Karen E. Peterson, passed Senate Bill # 259, nicknamed "Brett's Law" in the spring of 2006. The bill made salvia divinorum a schedule-one controlled substance in the state, which prohibited its sale and use.

The precise way salvia divinorum acts in the human mind isn't yet known. Articles about how the drug affects mice, chimpanzees and other animals have appeared in scientific and medical journals for years. The first human study with controlled conditions is only now currently underway. John Mendelson, senior scientist at the Research Institute at California Pacific Medical Center, is operating the study, and he told me that the neurochemical makeup of salvia is unique.

"It really represents something completely new in medicine. Basically, salvinorum A [salvia divinorum's active ingredient], what kids are using now and is available on the net, activates a unique set of receptors," Mendelson said.

Mendelson and others believe the potential medical applications for such a substance are great.
"They appear to mediate some effects of bipolar disease, some forms of mania and possibly HIV," Mendelson said. "There's a lot of excitement around something that specifically and potently activates kappa receptors."

Mendelson said he's worried that the pressure in many quarters to make salvia illegal would have a negative impact on the scientific study of the plant. If the drug were classed as a controlled narcotic, obtaining salvia would become exponentially more difficult for researchers.
"I think the politicians who are pushing control here are just idiots. They're ignorant. They hear that some kids have gotten high and they want to make it illegal. They don't consider the consequences of that," Mendelson said.

The possible consequences extend beyond the scientific community. The most dramatic consequence, Mendelson feared, would be on the drug's recreational users.

"Some people will go to jail for it and have their lives completely ruined. And right now there's no underground commerce in this drug, and there will be," Mendelson said. "How stupid can you get — to actually ask for a new drug abuse problem? With scheduling, it'll actually make kids say 'This stuff is good and it really gets you loaded.' It's like the government seal of approval."

Salvia is available in several stores in the Hartford area that sell paraphernalia — an employee at one store told me it was popular. According to state police public information officer Trooper William Tate, Connecticut hasn't encountered problems relating to salvia.

"If there's no law that's applicable to the substance, there's no action that can be taken," Tate said.

A search of the Connecticut Legislature's website for salvia didn't return anything.
However, some local merchants are hesitant to sell salvia. The Trading Post in Canton, which sells water pipes and legal purported psychoactive substances, for example, does not sell it. Trading Post owner Bill Buell said that while he recognized salvia would sell, he didn't want to be responsible for its possible consequences.

"I just, I don't know. I don't see how any good can come out of it. I'm not comfortable with it. I'm just not comfortable with what it can do and the potential problems it can cause," Buell said.
A store owner who does sell salvia said he had his reservations about the drug.

"It really shouldn't be legal," the store owner, who asked not to be identified, said. He worried that someone would take salvia and drive a car or otherwise cause an accident. Read more!