By Gene Mahoney

*Congratulations to our own Jeff Kay of the West Virginia Surf Report (the WVSR.com) for making The Drudge Report radio show. Matt Drudge never mentioned Jeff or theWVSR.com, but he did say there's a web site that keeps track of the number of times the word "fuck" has been uttered on the HBO series Deadwood.

*CD pick of the issue: Soviet Kitsch by USSR-born, Brooklyn-raised Regina Spektor (visit ReginaSpektor.com). To me, it sounds like a mix of Tori Amos, Bjork, Ani DiFranco, and Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine CD (which Fiona finished in 2003 but was never released by her record company because it didn't sound commercially viable enough to them). Regina played Café DuNord in April but I missed her to see our own Kimberlye Gold perform at Sweetwater in Mill Valley. Great show, Kim. Love ya. (Kiss noise.)

*It's hard to believe, but America isn't the fattest country in the world anymore. I'd like to think it's because we slimmed down, but apparently, as hard as it is to fathom, five other countries managed to become fatter than we are. I don't know how they did it, but my hat's off to them. That's an amazing feat. According to the Associated Press and some other news outlets from March 28, Greece topped the list for having the most number of obese men, then came Germany, the Czech Republic, Cyprus, and Slovakia. The list for obese women has the same countries in the same order (except Malta was 4th instead of Cyprus). I can't believe the Czech Republic made the list. I'm half-Czech so I took a trip there 12 years ago and never saw so many beautiful women in my life. Then again, Texas has plenty of beautiful women and that's probably the fattest state in the country. Didn't this obesity epidemic worsen as people quit smoking? That's something to think about. Regardless, don't take up smoking if you're packing on the pounds. Do what I did. I'm a slim guy, but I just had my 40th birthday so I'm prone to a spare tire if I don't watch it. I went to Vitamin Express (see their ad inthis issue) and purchased a bottle of Biochem Carb Phaser 1000. No, I'm not getting any additional money from them for writing this. This is from my heart (not my gut). You ingest two capsules with each high-starch meal and it does the trick. Give Vitamin Express a call at 1-800-500-0733 or stop by one of their 5 Bay Area locations. What have you got to lose? Except all that blubber off your stomach.

*10.4 million illegal aliens reside in the United States (source: Pew Hispanic Center) Every year, 500,000 additional illegal aliens enter the United States (source: Pew Hispanic Center) California's nearly 3 million illegal immigrants cost taxpayers nearly $9 billion each year (source: Federation for American Immigration Reform) Illegal aliens cost the federal government $10 billion more annually than they pay in taxes (source: Center for Immigration Studies) Taxpayers pay $1.4 billion annually to house the 48,000 illegal aliens in California prisons (source: Federation for American Immigration Reform).

Find out what you can do at CalBorderPolice.com.

*My favorite place to eat lately? That would be Crepevine (locations in San Francisco, Oakland, and Burlingame). The Pacific sandwich is so damn good I dream about it at night. I can't wait to wake up so I can go there and order it. Check it out.

*Congratulations to Jennie Luvv, singer for America's hottest swing act, the Boilermaker Jazz Band, who just tied the knot to some lucky guy. I saw them perform at some ballroom near John Wayne Airport in Orange County a few months ago and they were smokin'. Yessiree. Order a CD from these crazy hep-cats at boilermakerjazzband.com.

*There are posters around town that read, "Jimmy Carter was a Democrat". I thought they were put up with the intention of turning San Francisco into a Republican stronghold, but it turns out to be the title of a play about the air traffic controllers' strike in the early 1980s. Hmmm. Interesting.

*Redwood Symphony is an all-volunteer orchestra dedicated to the performance of ambitious, contemporary repertoire, as well as the great orchestral classics, and they're pretty much the official symphony for the Peninsula. Check out redwoodsymphony.org for info.

*There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production– with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. "A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale," warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, "because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century."

The three paragraphs above are from a Newsweek article titled The Cooling World, which was its April 28,1975 cover story about the impending ice age. I guess they really meant global warming, huh?

*Nowadays, keeping your feelings to yourself is considered unhealthy --even strange. All over the country (especially here in the Bay Area), we're surrounded by self-absorbed, self-pitying, get-in-touch-with-those-feelings kind of people, who just can't stop emoting, apparently blind to the fact that there are actually inhabitants of this planet who have bigger problems than they do. This creepy (though all too common) behavior is often encouraged at childhood. Whereas in the old days a boy would be told by his strong, family-providing father to "tough it out", nowadays he's told by his divorced, man-hating mother to "let it all hang out".

Authors Christina Hoff Sommers (a writer of American culture) and Sally Satel (a practicing psychiatrist) examine the subject in their new book One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance (St. Martin's Press, $23.95).

Sommers and Satel coined a new term, Therapism -- a philosophy that views humans as centers of fragility, and challenges a traditional American creed: the can-do attitude of stoicism and self-reliance. They claim it isn't a book deriding people who have problems and are seeking help, they just object to imposing the therapeutic mentality on others; treating the human condition as a pathology in need of cure. The authors are highly critical of the trauma industry's "debriefing" therapy, where you sit with a group of 10 or 20 people who, say, witnessed a shooting at a place of employment. You sit with the employees and have them emote "to verbalize their trauma." Besides being intrusive and annoying, it can make some people worse. It interferes with the usual instinct, which is to distance yourself. It's not coping, it puts someone in the mind-set of "I'm overwhelmed. I've been defeated by this."

The authors point out that people who repress their emotions are usually more successful in life than their in-touch counterparts.

Rudy Giuliani is praised in the book: "On September 11, he spoke to New Yorkers as mature adults, giving practical advice, telling them what he knew and did not know. He asked people to help each other out."

The tsunami provided another positive example. One of the first things that the Sri Lankan government wanted to do was to get the schools open to preserve structure and provide a healthy distraction. They didn't need trauma counselors out there infiltrating the area.

Unfortunately,therapism is rampant in today's schools, with educators who think that children should be protected from competition (on the playground, there are efforts to replace dodge ball and tag with games where no one is ever "out".) The authors point out that life isn't like that, everyone doesn't win, and sheltering children from every disappointment and challenge won't strengthen them.

Some educators want to liberate children from what they call the "ideology of achievement", and believe we shouldn't test them. (We shouldn't even use red pens because if they see red marks on a paper, that implies judgment.)

There are classes where during roll call - when Suzy says "here" and Tommy says "here" - the child is supposed to identify his emotions at the moment. So Suzy says, "I'm mellow." Tommy says, "I'm upset."

The authors believe this attempt to turn the nation into one big Marin County started with the human potential movement in the 1960s and '70s, with Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. What say we let it die? No grief counseling will be necessary.

*I'm no longer a Democrat, I'm an independent, but I have to admit that becoming a Republican is tempting in at least one regard: if you go to a GOP party, you won't run into any Hollywood idiots who cling to Dems the way flies cling to shit. Well, maybe you'd run into Pat Boone or one of the Oak Ridge Boys, but nobody hip. Say what you want about Ronald Reagan or even Arnold Schwarzenneger (not to mention Sonny Bono and Love Boat star Fred Grandy), at least they put up and actually ran for office instead of just yakking away to the media. (If Ben Affleck or Jon Bon Jovi is reading this please don't interpret that as encouragement to do the same). Though I have to give credit of a different sort to Democrat disciple Barbra Streisand. For the past few years her web site has had more blistering attacks on those nasty Republicans and praise for the saintly Democrats than news about her show biz career. I visited it recently and she apparently has quit posting her opinion pieces in favor of giving links to left wing web sites that, I assume, express her sympathies better than she can. That's too bad, because she's provided more entertainment with recent political commentary than she has in 40 years worth of movies, plays, and music. Some highlights from the past few years: She sent a long memo to the Democratic House Leader, Dick Gephardt, chock full of mistakes, beginning with his name ("Dick Gebhardt"). When The Drudge Report pointed it out she issued a statement blaming it on a new employee and noting that she had won a spelling bee at school.

Next, at a Democratic national gala, she quoted Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervour, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate."

When The Drudge Report pointed out that her Shakespeare speech was an Internet hoax, Barbra said who cares? "Whoever wrote this is damn talented, and should be writing their own play."

Then, on her web site, Barbra accused Republicans of misrepresenting her "deep opposition to the Iranian dictator, Saddam Hussein". (Saddam tried to be the Iranian dictator in the ‘80s but it didn't pan out). She also used her site to rail against Halliburton, a company she despises, no doubt, because Dick Cheney once headed it. Drudge then reported that in 2000 the Streisand Foundation, through its investment advisor, had bought and traded 800 shares of Halliburton.

Visit barbrastreisand.com.

I have another story about Malibu Barbie. Remember Hello Gorgeous, that museum on Castro Street dedicated to Barbra Streisand? MisterSF.com described it as "an earnestly tacky collection of mannequins, artwork, and other assorted memorabilia, the museum never rose above silly." I remember interviewing a despondent Ken Joachim, the founder/owner/curator in his visitor-challenged museum on a rainy day for a ‘zine I published prior to the Herald. Ken said that when he opened Hello Gorgeous it received national publicity, so there were plenty of visitors, but it soon dwindled to practically none, and most heartbreaking of all, Babs had never visited or even called, though she did send a seven-word letter of encouragement. "I don't get it," Mr. Joachim pondered. "If someone opened a museum dedicated to you, wouldn't you visit, or at least call and thank that person?" The only phone call he got, if I recall correctly and I think I do, was from her manager telling him to quit selling Streisand-style prosthetic noses, which he began hawking when he angrily realized that the diva was never going to give his place proper acknowledgement. Ken Joachim finally closed the shrine in May '98, two years after it opened. Joachim, who said Streisand didn't deserve a museum because she doesn't care about her fans, auctioned the junk off.

Maybe I'll start a James Brolin museum dedicated to Barbara's husband, with screenings of classic horror flicks like The Car, classic TV episodes of Hotel, as well as some AAMCO commercials. Wait a minute, wasn't James cast as Ronald Reagan in that TV movie, The Reagans, which got bumped from CBS to Showtime a couple of years ago? And Australian actress Judy Davis, who was so vocally upset that Americans had become patriotic after a little thing like 9/11, played Nancy Reagan? And the film said that Reagan's vision wasn't to stop Soviet fascism and rescue our Jimmy Carter-ravaged economy  –- that his real plan was to give everybody AIDS, or something like that? No, wait, that was Angels in America, right? Actually, I think that was the plot of TheReagans as well. Too bad I missed that one. I like to see the Hollywood Left look out for the little guy they care so much about. Just ask Ken Joachim.

*Speaking of Tinsel-town, Hollywood Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon -- The Case Against Celebrity is the title of an endlessly fascinating, very well-written, extremely well-documented, best-selling book by Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner, published by John Wiley and Sons. I can't recommend it enough. Go out and buy it, especially if you've ever wasted a minute of your life envious of the beautiful people. The book doesn't just dish sleaze about celebrities, callously exposing mistakes they made in life merely for the sake of sadistic entertainment. It's a warning to the so-called average person about how much damage the entertainment industry has inflicted upon the American psyche. It's all here: Hollywood "family values"… "Special" schools…  Drugs… Therapy… Rehab… Hollywood stars who laugh at the traditional religious beliefs of "unsophisticated" Middle-America as they themselves join trendy religious cults… The mainstreaming of pornography… Courtney Love (need I say more?)…  Millionaire Marxists who call Bush a fascist and then go to Cuba to praise sadistic (but trendy) dictator Fidel Castro… Knee-jerk liberal comediennes and their annual "Comic Relief" benefit to highlight the homeless crisis supposedly caused by Reagan (which they abandon when the homeless crisis worsens under Clinton). If you're too e-commerce-minded to visit your local bookstore, go to HollywoodInterrupted.com to order it, along with T-shirts, coffee mugs, and other goodies.

*Most visitors probably don't know that when they're in Cuba, they're being tape-recorded and watched, on direct orders of communist dictator Fidel Castro, a tyrant who has jailed more of his subjects than Hitler or Stalin. That's according to Humberto Fontova, author of Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant.

Fontova says Castro and his spies have secretly taped -- using both audio and video equipment -- some of Hollywood's most notable stars. Woody Harrelson, Kevin Costner, Jack Nicholson, Steven Spielberg, Chevy Chase, Leo DiCaprio, Francis Ford Coppola, Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Robert Redford and many other famous fans of Fidel were spied on when they visited Cuba.

"My job was to bug their hotel rooms," high-ranking former Cuban intelligence officer Delfin Fernandez, who defected to the U.S., told the author. "With both cameras and listening devices. Most people have no idea they are being watched while they are in Cuba."

When these guests arrive, their hotel rooms have already been set up with eavesdropping and videotaping gear. Sometimes, says the intel officer, the guests would be followed wherever they went, 24 hours a day. In doing so, some of the stars' most intimate, private and potentially embarrassing moments were captured on film and tape -- all for the private viewing pleasure of Castro and his most-trusted inner circle.

Fernandez also claimed that after a star left, Castro and his comrades would break out the popcorn and review the tapes, almost like Hollywood screenings.

"Hmmmmmm, these scenes are more scandalous than anything in any of her movies!" Fernandez recalled one intelligence officer exclaiming as he watched the "nighttime cavortings" of a famous actress from Spain. "Now, it really seems to me, compañeros," the Castro intimate chortled as he looked around the room, "that this señorita should be making more respectful comments about our regime, right?"

He said that Jack Nicholson proclaimed Castro a "genius" after visiting with him in 1998. "Castro is a humanist like President Clinton," Nicholson said, according to Fernandez. "Cuba is simply a paradise!"

Fernandez said Jack Nicholson was "bugged and taped thoroughly during his stay in the hotel Melia Cohiba." Fernandez says he knows because he was in charge of that operation.

Renowned Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar was a target for this bugging but nothing of value came of it for Castro. "Everybody already knows I'm a maricon!" Almodovar laughed at Castro's blackmailers. "So go right ahead! Knock yourselves out!"

The late Pope John Paul II foiled his taping party. Before he arrived in Cuba for his 1998 visit, his aides "discovered and removed several bugging devices" from his room, Fontova writes.

*As I write this it's June of 2005, which marks the 40th anniversary of my being on Earth and the 20th anniversary of my being in California. Ah yes, June of 1985 –- I remember driving up in my gas-guzzling '77 Camaro to my Aunt and Uncle's Palo Alto home, relishing the thought of no longer having to endure another New York winter, and of becoming an enlightened San Francisco liberal, hell-bent on taking down the Reagan administration. Oh, and the Thatcher administration, too (I was an Anglophile). After leeching off Auntie and Uncle for a few days, I found an apartment in Belmont and it was in this new West Coast home of mine that I jubilantly watched The Worldwide Electronic Concert that made Woodstock look like an Open Mic Night at some dive bar. That's right –- I watched Live Aid!

Live Aid was organized by Boomtown Rats lead singer Bob Geldof. Eight months earlier, "Saint Bob"  (as U2 front man Bono called Geldof) organized the top names in British pop to record as Band Aid. This resulted in a worldwide smash hit single "Do They Know it's Christmas?"

The purpose of Band Aid and Live Aid was to raise money to feed the starving masses in Ethiopia. Unfortunately, things didn't go according to Saint Bob's plan.

Here are some excerpts from George Kerevan's May 19th column in The Scotsman that help explain why:

Remember Geldof's famous Live Aid concert of 1985, to raise donations to end famine in Ethiopia? Well, the Ethiopians were starving not because you lent them money but because their utterly mad dictator, the odious Mengistu Haile Marium, had butchered at least 100,000 of them in imposing his Marxist dictatorship. Then he launched a series of external wars, with the help of Cuban tanks lent by his fellow nutter, Fidel Castro. That bumped off thousands more, while destroying the local economy. And by the way, much of the food aid paid for by Live Aid ended up being stolen by Mengistu to feed his armies. Never mind, it made Geldof famous, even if it didn't help the Ethiopians.

Kerevan goes on to make the following observations: 

Yes, the plight of sub-Saharan Africa is desperate, but it will be cured by hard economic logic rather than pop-star emotion. Geldof thinks African poverty is our fault. He thinks we are not giving Africa enough free financial aid - an extra £50 billion a year, or roughly the entire national income of Scotland, would be handy.

He also wants us to forgive all debt interest owed by African governments - I've seen numerous conflicting estimates, but we're in the billions-a-year category. And he is anxious that the G8 countries open their economies to African imports without expecting the same in return. This is called "fair trade". Just for a moment, let us ask: what has happened to the half a trillion dollars lent to the independent African countries since the Sixties? We are talking your taxes here. The whole point about borrowing is that you invest and end up richer than you started, even after paying back the loan. How come most of Africa is now poorer than when the loans began?

The answer has nothing to do with the usurious West demanding interest payments. During the Eighties alone, there were at least 92 attempted military takeovers in sub-Saharan Africa, affecting 29 countries. Not to put too fine a point on it, your money was wasted in civil war and corruption.

When your loans were not funding genocide, they were funding Swiss bank accounts. Western aid has corrupted generations of African politicians as it is the fastest route to riches for the local elite.

Mr. Kerevan's solution:

For the record, given sub-Saharan Africa's current basket-case economies, a strictly short-term Marshall Plan may be necessary. But it has to be linked to a vision that says Africa has to help itself through trade, not aid. Africa needs a bourgeois revolution: the emergence of an entrepreneurial middle class which will create local jobs by making and selling products other folk want to buy.

The developed world funnels nearly one billion dollars a day in subsidies to its own farmers, coincidentally enabling them to dump artificially cheap food in poor countries, resulting in yet more poverty.

Thank you, Mr. Kerevan. That reminds me about the end of Live Aid, when multi-millionaire Tom Joad impersonator Bob Dylan announced that some of the Live Aid money should be diverted to further subsidize American farmers.

And the moral of the story is: Reagan and Thatcher were right. Geldof and Dylan (and their enlightened fans like me) were wrong.

Saint Bob has organized a new star-studded concert to "help" Africa this summer called Live 8. Get it? The name's a cross between Live Aid and the G8 conference those greedy industrialized nations are having. I don't know who's performing or when it is, I just know that unlike Live Aid, I won't be jubilantly watching it. I won't be watching it at all.

Mr. Kerevan had an interesting solution to the sub-Saharan African famine. Here's another solution from the late Sam Kinison:

"You want to stop world hunger? Stop sending these people food. Don't send these people another bite, folks. You want to send them something? You want to help? Send them U-Hauls. Send them U-Hauls, some luggage, send them a guy out there who says, ‘Hey, we been driving out here every day with your food, for, like, the last thirty or forty years, and we were driving out here today across the desert, and it occurred to us that there wouldn't BE world hunger, if you people would LIVE WHERE THE FOOD IS! YOU LIVE IN A DESERT! YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING DESERT! NOTHING GROWS OUT HERE! NOTHING'S GONNA GROW OUT HERE! YOU SEE THIS? HUH? THIS IS SAND. KNOW WHAT IT'S GONNA BE HERE A HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW? IT'S GONNA BE SAND! YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING DESERT! GET YOUR STUFF, GET YOUR SHIT, WE'LL MAKE ONE TRIP, WE'LL TAKE YOU TO WHERE THE FOOD IS! WE HAVE DESERTS IN AMERICA –--- WE JUST DON'T LIVE IN THEM, ASSHOLES!'"

*I'd like to thank David Horowitz and the FrontPageMagazine.com staff for their well-researched articles that I've taken excerpts from below. I strongly suggest you visit the site, as well as their new one, DiscoverTheNetwork.org.

*On March 3rd, Edward Guthmann of the Chronicle wrote an article about Brian Dennehy being in town to portray "real-life hero" Dalton Trumbo in Trumbo: Red, White and Blacklisted which ran through March 20th at the Post Street Theatre. Here are some excerpts from the article:

Written by Christopher Trumbo, it's a portrait of his screenwriter father ("Roman Holiday," "Spartacus"), a member of the Hollywood Ten who was blacklisted in 1947 after refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. The younger Trumbo constructed the piece from the letters his father wrote between 1947 and 1960, when the blacklist ended: letters vibrating with outrage and verbal wit, describing financial crises and the spinelessness of the Hollywood elite, expressing a husband's wonder at his wife's generosity and reflecting the tenderness of a father for his ostracized daughter.

"As far as I'm concerned, Trumbo was an American hero," Dennehy says. It would have been easy to give HUAC what it wanted: to confess that he was a Communist, to finger other Communists in the movie industry and, as Trumbo wrote, to "perform an act of political purification hitherto characteristic of fascist states."

Instead, Trumbo fought the committee and paid the price with 10 months in a Kentucky prison and a long exile during which he used a "front" -- another writer who pretended to have written Trumbo's work -- to sell his scripts to the studios. He fled to Mexico, borrowed money when finances were desperate, saw the movie industry capitulate to fear and hysteria.

Art Eckstein came to some very different conclusions in his article Fountain of Lies (which ran on FrontPageMagazine.com eleven days after Mr. Guthmann's article appeared in the Chronicle). Here's an excerpt:

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Dalton Trumbo was a secret member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), which was a secret revolutionary organization loyal to the Soviet Union (Communists, unlike witches, really did exist). Trumbo was a Stalinist, faithfully following every twist and turn in the Party line. And he was a person who participated in the Party's traditional suppression of free expression.

For instance, Trumbo was part of the Party's inquisition against the screenwriter Albert Maltz in 1946, for Maltz's published statement that artists should be free to say what they feel, and that literature should be judged by its human and humane quality, not the politics of its author. Trumbo and his fellow communists browbeat Maltz for publishing this heresy, until Maltz finally issued a humiliating public recantation. Maltz, who also later was brought before HUAC (and went to jail for refusing to testify), told Gerda Lerner that his appearance before HUAC in 1947 was simply nothing compared to the real and psychologically destructive trauma of his criticism/self-criticism sessions before the Communist Party in 1946.

Dalton Trumbo was also part of the savage Communist Party inquisition against the director Robert Rossen in 1949, because of Rossen's film, "All the King's Men."  Party Headquarters in New York thought that his film was too much an attack on one-man rule -- i.e., Stalin. The confrontation with his Hollywood inquisitors over the nature of his art drove Rossen right out of the CPUSA ("Take the Party and shove it!"). 

These inquisitors consisted mostly of the Hollywood Ten themselves -- the very men who are now officially depicted at the University of Colorado as sainted martyrs and defenders of freedom of speech.

There is some evidence that Trumbo was in private not happy about these incidents. But there is NO evidence that he ever openly protested them at a Party-meeting -- though other Hollywood Party- members certainly did so.This means that, in the end, Trumbo accepted the Party's claim to impose discipline over the intellect: he obeyed, participated, went along. Now, the Maltz and Rossen incidents were famous incidents. They were well known to anyone who knew the basic history of the Hollywood section of the CPUSA long before the Dalton Trumbo Free Speech Fountain was dedicated with great fanfare at Colorado a couple of years ago. How could anyone, knowing these incidents, depict Dalton Trumbo as a champion of free speech -- let alone such a grand champion of free speech that he deserved to have a "Free Speech Fountain" named after him?

But actually, the situation is far worse than that. In 1944, Dalton Trumbo voluntarily invited FBI agents to his Hollywood home, and voluntarily "named names" to the FBI -- not of Communists (of course), but of people of various political views whose crime was the following: they had written him asking to buy copies of his novel Johnny Got His Gun.

Trumbo was a talented writer, and Johnny Got His Gun is one of the greatest anti-war novels ever written. It describes the thoughts, feelings and ultimate fate of a hideously wounded soldier. The novel was published in the summer of 1939, and it was a big hit with the CPUSA during the period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact (August 1939-June 1941), because of its denunciation of the horrors of war. Since Stalin and Hitler were now friends, this was the "peace movement" era of the Party: despite Hitler's attack on Poland, and his war with democratic Britain and France, the constant theme of the CPUSA was "Peace."  That is: absolutely no American support should be given to those nations which were fighting Stalin's friends the Nazis. So it was natural that during the period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Party did everything it could to promote and publicize Johnny Got His Gun. But Hitler's surprise attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 made the novel an acute embarrassment. The Party line changed instantly from "Peace" (with Hitler) to "fight the anti-fascist war!"  The largest "peace demonstration" in American history had to be cancelled. No novels on the horrors of war were wanted now; the Party slogan was "Defend the Soviet Union!"  Trumbo did what he could to suppress the novel.

Conversely, though, Johnny Got His Gun became a big hit with right-wing isolationists, as well as sincere pacifists, after Dec. 7, 1941 and the entry of the USA into the world war. A number of such people -- some real fascists and anti-Semites, who saw the war as a plot perpetrated by Jews, but also some sincere isolationists and pacifists -- wrote to Trumbo between 1941 and 1944, asking where they could buy copies of his book.

In 1944, Trumbo voluntarily invited FBI agents to his house, showed them the letters he had received, and turned those letters over to the FBI. And not only did he "name names."  He followed up the invited FBI visit with a letter to the Bureau, urging that the people who had written him asking for copies of his book be dealt with. Trumbo was acting here in conformity with then-current CPUSA policy, which was -- since the Soviet Union was under attack -- to denounce to the U.S. government anyone who opposed the war. Needless to say, Trumbo did not notify the people whose names he had named to the FBI of what he had done; nor did he tell them that the FBI was now in possession of their letters to him [The information on this incident can be found in Dalton Trumbo, ed., Additional Dialogue:  Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942-1962 (New York, 1970), pp. 26-31).]

Later, as one of the Hollywood Ten, Trumbo claimed for himself the mantle of a martyr for freedom of speech -- and savagely castigated as "rats" those poor souls whom HUAC or the FBI had pressured into becoming informers against the Party.

Thank you, Mr. Eckstein. For more info about Dalton Trumbo you can purchase a recently released book byRonald Radosh andAllis Radosh titled Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance with the Left (Encounter Books).

Or, uh, you can read this article:

He was blacklisted in a national witch hunt. Yet writer Dalton Trumbo never lost his integrity. By Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle film critic, on sfgate.com.

*Man, this is really turning into the "Let's Expose those Commie Bums from Hollywood" issue. Oh well, they deserve it. It doesn't matter that Hollywood put out The Way We Were, The Front, Guilty By Suspicion and a slew of other movies decrying the Hollywood Blacklist of the ‘50's, "evil" Joe McCarthy was proven right ten years ago with the Venona Documents. Look it up. Okay, now we leave the quaint Eisenhower era for the chaos of 1972-- when the gorgeous star of Barbarella made a VERY big mistake. Then again, we've all made mistakes in our youth (hey, she was only 35). For those of you who think the worst atrocity Jane Fonda ever committed was her current movie Monster-in-Law, I think you should read an article (also on FrontPageMagazine.com) titled An American Traitor: Guilty As Charged, by Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer, based on their book about the actress-turned-activist, Aid and Comfort. Here's an excerpt:

Of her broadcasts over Radio Hanoi, Fonda writes in her autobiography,  "Aside from a few notes I have scribbled to myself, I speak extemporaneously, from my heart, about what I have witnessed and how it made me feel." 

This claim, as we showed in Aid and Comfort, is ludicrous: "Consider some of the statements made by this young actress who lacked political sophistication, who was ignorant of history, who had an almost non-existent knowledge of international affairs, and who probably had never before written anything more complicated than a check: "neocolonialism," the 1954 Geneva Accords, what constituted a military target, different types of aircraft and ordnance . . .and more. It is obvious that in Hanoi, Jane Fonda was acting as a willing tool of the Communists, to a considerable extent simply reading "canned" material created by professional Communist propagandists (albeit with perhaps an occasional ad-lib). Indeed, some of the words and syntax are those of a person or persons for whom English was not a first language, and it is doubtful that the political language came from Fonda herself.

Fonda also lies about why she made the propaganda broadcasts. She writes: "I want to speak on your radio, I say to my hosts. I want to tell U.S. pilots what I am seeing here on the ground."

If, as she claims in her autobiography, the purpose of her broadcasts was to apprise pilots and ground troops of what our bombing was doing to the North, why did she broadcast the following statements (among others like them)?

*The Vietnamese people were peasants—leading a peaceful, bucolic life before the Americans came to destroy Vietnam.

*The Vietnamese seek only "freedom and independence" — which the United States wants to prevent them from having.

*The Vietnamese fighters are her "friends."                     

*The million infantry troops which the United States put into Vietnam, and the Vietnamization program, have failed.

*The United States seeks to turn Vietnam into a "neocolony."

*Patrick Henry's slogan "liberty or death" was not very different from Ho Chi Minh's "Nothing is more valuable than independence and freedom." 

*Nixon violated the 1954 Geneva Accords.

*Vietnam is "one nation, one country.

*The Communists' proposal for ending the war is "fair, sensible, reasonable and humanitarian."

*The United States must get out of South Vietnam and "cease its support for the . . . Thieu regime."

*"I want to publicly accuse Nixon here of being a new-type Hitler whose crimes are being unveiled."

*"The Vietnamese people will win." 

*"Nixon is continuing to risk your [American pilots'] lives and the lives of the American prisoners of war . . . in a last desperate gamble to keep his office come November. How does it feel to be used as pawns? You may be shot down, you may perhaps even be killed, but for what, and for whom?"

*Nixon "defiles our flag and all that it stands for in the eyes of the entire world."

*"Knowing who was doing the lying, should you then allow these same people and some liars to define for you who your enemy is?"

*American troops are fighting for ESSO, Shell and Coca-Cola.

*"Should we be fighting on the side of the people who are, who are murdering innocent people, should we be trying to defend a government in Saigon which is putting in jail tens of thousands of people into the tiger cages, beating them, torturing them . . .. And I don't think . . . that we should be risking our lives or fighting to defend that kind of government."

*"We . . . have a common enemy—U. S. imperialism."

*"We thank you [the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese] for your brave and heroic fight."

*"Nixon's aggression against Vietnam is a racist aggression [and] the American war in Vietnam is a racist war, a white man's war."

*Soldiers of the South Vietnamese army "are being sent to fight a war that is not in your interests but is in the interests of the small handful of people who have gotten rich and hope to get richer off this war and the turning of your country into a neocolony of the United States."

*"The only way to end the war is for the United States to withdraw all its troops, all its airplanes, its bombs, its generals, its CIA advisors and to stop the support of the . . .regime in Saigon . . .."

*"There is only one way to stop Richard Nixon from committing mass genocide in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and that is for a mass protest . . . to expose his crimes . . .."

*"In 1969—1970 the desertions in the American army tripled. The desertions of the U.S. soldiers almost equaled the desertions from the ARVN army . . .."

*American soldiers in Vietnam discovered "that their officers were incompetent, usually drunk . . .." 

*"Perhaps the soldiers . . . who have suffered the most . . . [are] the black soldiers, the brown soldiers, and the red and Asian soldiers."

*Recently I talked to "a great many of these guys and they all expressed their recognition of the fact that this is a white man's war, a white businessman's war, that they don't feel it's their place to kill other people of color when at home they themselves are oppressed and prevented from determining their own lives."

*"I heard horrifying stories about the treatment of women in the U.S. military. So many women said to me that one of the first things that happens to them when they enter the service is that they are taken to see the company psychiatrist and they are given a little lecture which is made very clear to them that they are there to service the men."

Whoever scripted this blatant anti-American, pro-Communist propaganda, one thing is certain: it had nothing to do with apprising pilots and ground troops of the consequences of American bombing in North Vietnam. Fonda's transparently crude attempts to provide the Communists with a famous American voice to mouth their propaganda and undermine our war efforts in Vietnam could have had only one purpose: to provide aid and comfort to our enemy.

Doubtless because the accusation has dogged her for over three decades (we made the same charge in Aid and Comfort), Fonda found it necessary to disabuse her readers by tossing in a single throwaway sentence: "[S]ome will later accuse me of treason for urging soldiers to desert—something I do not do." 

Here is Fonda speaking live over Radio Hanoi, and on tape, virtually inviting South Vietnamese soldiers (and, by implication, American troops) to desert:

We read with interest about the growing numbers of you [South Vietnam Army troops] who are understanding the truth and joining with your fellow countrymen to fight for freedom and independence and democracy [i.e., with the Communists]. We note with interest, for example, that as in the case of the 56th Regiment of the 3d Division of the Saigon Army, ARVN soldiers are taken into the ranks of the National Liberation Front [the Viet Cong], including officers who may retain their rank. We think that this is an example of the fact that the democratic, peace-loving, patriotic Vietnamese people want to embrace all Vietnamese people in forgiveness, open their arms to all people who are willing to fight against the foreign intruder. [Emphasis ours]  

How can the Communists "embrace" and "open their arms" to South Vietnamese and American troops unless they desert?

As to encouraging "mutiny"—a word never mentioned, a subject not even addressed, in Fonda's autobiography—Fonda's Radio Hanoi broadcasts, unlike her veiled nuances devoted to desertion, are not so subtle: "[Although] we do not condone the killing of American officers . . . we do support the soldiers who are beginning to think for themselves." 

Which soldiers were those? Beginning to think about what? The juxtaposition of these two thoughts—killing officers and thinking for themselves—can have no meaning other than applauding, even encouraging, the "fragging" (murder by hand grenade) of officers by enlisted men.

Fonda is insistent in her autobiography about having gone to wartime North Vietnam only because she wanted to help stop the killing and end the war: "I…wanted to…stop the killing."

Another lie. Worse than a lie—a perverse irony. By providing the North Vietnamese Communists with an abundance of timely anti-American, pro-Communist propaganda, Fonda's trip and the activities of her comrades in the anti-war movement who were also inspired by her betrayals actually lengthened the war and, concomitantly, increased the deaths and casualties on both sides.

Fonda, herself, along with [Tom] Hayden and their followers, have for years taken credit for restraining the Nixon Administration from destroying the dikes—an action which, by all accounts, would have shortened the war and perhaps even ended it, reducing at least one year's casualties.

That Fonda's propaganda efforts played an important role in prolonging the war and increasing the death toll is attested to by North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin. In a postwar interview with The Wall Street Journal reproduced at length in "Aid and Comfort, " the Colonel, a dedicated Communist cadre for most of his life, confidant of Ho Chi Minh and the architect of the "Ho Chi Minh Trail" along which the North Vietnamese conducted their aggression against the South, and also one of the first officers of their army to enter Saigon on the day it fell, had this to say:

Wall Street Journal:  Was the American antiwar movement important to Hanoi's victory?

Bui Tin:  It was essential to our strategy. Support for the war from our rear [China] was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda . . . gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses.

(Emphasis ours)

The identical point was made by North Vietnamese Defense Minister General Vo Nguyen Giap, the architect of France's defeat at Dien Bien Phu. This was the man most responsible for the Communists' military strategy in their war with the United States.

Stop the killing? End the war? Jane Fonda's treason unquestionably prolonged both. What she "ended" were the lives of many Americans, and many more Vietnamese for whom she claimed to have such sympathy.

Most chilling of all, perhaps, is that the consequences of Fonda's actions did not begin and end with Vietnam. In facilitating a Communist victory in Vietnam, Jane Fonda, self-described woman of conscience, contributed to the genocidal bloodbath that would soon follow in Cambodia.

*"You're moving to California? I wouldn't. They've got earthquakes there."

Twenty years ago this month I moved to the Golden State and heard that warning from several New Yorkers and Oklahomans I knew (having spent the first 19 years of my life in the Empire State I moved to Tulsa for a year to attend college).

As it turned out, they were right about the earthquakes. Five years and three months after their dire warnings I was in a Palo Alto book store reading an essay critical of Christianity written by some witty atheist when the Loma Prieta Quake of '89 hit. I hope I didn'tcause it. That bad joke aside, 66 people lost their lives.

As awful as the earthquake was, it's rather ironic that the two states I lived in prior to California were the only ones to recently suffer catastrophes worse than The Dreaded California Quake (New York's World Trade Center on 9/11/01 and Oklahoma's Alfred P. Murrah Building on 4/19/95).

As you know, Timothy McVeigh, a decorated Gulf War vet from Lockport, a town in Upstate New York, was arrested for the Oklahoma City bombing. Later his estranged accomplice, Kansas farmer Terry Nichols, was also apprehended. The story we've heard is that McVeigh had been deeply disturbed by "the Iraqi suffering" he had witnessed four years earlier and figured if the U.S. government could kill people in the Mid East they could certainly kill their own people, like they did at Ruby Ridge and Waco. In 1992 he wrote a letter to The Lockport Union-Sun & Journal harshly criticizing America's politicians: "Is a civil war imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system?"

April 19, 1995 was the second anniversary of the Feds demolishing the Branch Davidian compound at Waco. It was also the 220th anniversary of the start of the American Revolution. So it was the perfect date to start America's second revolution against a tyrannical government, right? "Oklahoma City" happened.

Captured then convicted, McVeigh was executed by the same government he despised so much in May of 2001.

Jayna Davis, then an investigative reporter for the NBC affiliate in Oklahoma City, KFOR-TV, was among the first correspondents on the scene of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building.She has reached a very different conclusion about the bombing than the mainstream media has in her book The Third Terrorist (available at bookstores and JanyaDavis.com).

Here are some of Ms. Davis's quotes on the subject from her recent interview by Jamie Glazov forFrontPageMagazine.com:       

The Third Terrorist is the culmination of nearly a decade of exhaustive research. Throughout the course of my investigation, I interviewed eighty potential witnesses, twenty-two of whom I deemed credible because their testimonies could be independently corroborated, and more importantly, their stories did not conflict with the government's case against McVeigh and Nichols. 

In detailed affidavits, these witnesses confidently identified eight specific Middle Eastern men, the majority of whom were former Iraqi soldiers, colluding with the Oklahoma City bombers, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, during various stages of the bombing plot.

All of these suspects immigrated to the United States following the Persian Gulf War, ostensibly seeking political asylum from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. However, my investigation revealed they were, in fact, false defectors – not outspoken dissidents as they had claimed.

This cadre of Iraqi servicemen moved to Oklahoma City in the fall of 1994 and began performing handiwork for a property management company that was owned and operated by a Palestinian expatriate. The affluent real estate mogul, who operated under eight known aliases, funded his vast, multi-million dollar housing empire from monies contributed by siblings living in Baghdad, Jerusalem, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and Amman, Jordan. 

In the early 1990's, the Palestinian property owner pleaded guilty to federal insurance fraud and served time in the penitentiary. Court records revealed that the FBI once suspected the ex-convict of having ties to the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

Six months prior to the bombing, the Palestinian felon hired a group of self-professed "defectors" from the Iraqi army to do maintenance work on his low-income rental houses. On April 19, several witnesses watched in stunned amazement as their Middle Eastern co-workers expressed prideful excitement upon hearing the first radio broadcasts that Islamic extremists had claimed responsibility for the attack on the Murrah Building. The men cheered deliriously, exuberantly pledging their allegiance to the now deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, vowing they would "die for Saddam."

Nearly two dozen Oklahomans have signed sworn affidavits in which they accuse these ardent Saddam supporters and ex-enemy combatants of aiding and abetting McVeigh and Nichols.

The most incriminating testimony centered around one man – Hussain Hashem Al-Hussaini. Al-Hussaini not only fit the FBI's physical description in the official arrest warrant for John Doe 2, but according to veteran law enforcement officials, was a dead ringer for the government's profile sketch of the elusive suspect. 

Witnesses identified this Iraqi immigrant socializing with McVeigh at an Oklahoma City nightclub prior to the bombing. An Oklahoma City gas station attendant also fingered Al-Hussaini as the customer who paid one hundred dollars cash to fill up a large Ryder truck with diesel fuel (key chemical component used in Ryder truck bomb) on eve of the bombing - April 18, 1995. The next morning, a maintenance working at the motel located adjacent to the service station observed what was very likely the same Ryder truck emanating an odorous stench of diesel, yet according to the witness, the gas cap bore a warning sticker which read: "Unleaded Fuel Only."

Two witnesses named the Iraqi soldier as the dark-haired, olive-skinned male they observed timing his run at a breathless pace from the Murrah Building one block east shortly before daybreak on April 19. Moreover, several Oklahoma City residents claimed to have seen Al-Hussaini climbing into the cab of a Ryder truck that reeked of diesel fuel at a local motel an hour before the explosion. The witnesses indicated that Timothy McVeigh was seated behind the wheel of that moving van as it pulled off the lot and headed toward downtown.         

Furthermore, the Iraqi soldier was positively identified sitting in the passenger seat of the Ryder truck next to McVeigh a few blocks north of the Murrah Building at 8:30 a.m., stepping out of that truck at ground zero directly in front of the ill-fated federal complex moments before the massive fertilizer/fuel oil bomb detonated, and speeding away from downtown in the driver's seat of a brown Chevrolet pickup targeted by the FBI in an official teletype for foreign suspects.         

Five witnesses independently fingered Al-Hussaini and several of his Middle Eastern associates as frequent visitors at an Oklahoma City motel in the months, weeks, days, and hours leading up to 9:02 a.m. on April 19. On numerous occasions the Arab subjects were seen in the company of Timothy McVeigh, and during a few rare instances, associating with Terry Nichols. More significantly, detailed interviews with key witnesses proved conclusively that the man whom witnesses named as the nefarious "third terrorist" had no provable alibi for the critical hours of April 19.

Colonel Patrick Lang, a Middle East expert who formerly served as the chief of human intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency, determined that the Iraqi soldier's military tattoo and immigration file indicated that he was likely a trusted member of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard before being recruited into the elite Unit 999 of the Estikhabarat, more commonly known as the Iraqi Military Intelligence Service.  Before the 2003 Iraq War, Unit 999 was headquartered in Salman Pak, southeast of Baghdad, and was tasked with clandestine operations at home and overseas. Several defense and intelligence analysts, with whom I consulted, concurred with Colonel Lang's conclusions.

Soon after that fateful day in 1995, Al-Hussaini moved to Massachusetts and sought employment at the Boston Logan International Airport. In November 1997, four years before two planes were hijacked from that very airport on a deadly trek to incinerate the World Trade Center, the Iraqi national began suffering panic attacks about his airport job and sought psychiatric hospitalization.  When his therapist asked why he was experiencing sudden and intense trepidation about working at Boston Logan, the patient replied, "If something happens there, I will be a suspect."  

I later learned that during this same time frame, Al-Hussaini was residing with two former Iraqi Gulf War veterans who provided food-catering services to the commercial airlines at the Boston airport. In the wake of the suicide hijackings of 2001, law enforcement speculated that food services workers might have planted box cutters aboard the doomed flights.  Hussain Al-Hussaini's uncanny foreknowledge of a possible event slated to take place at Boston Logan Airport, the point of origin for Al-Qaeda's murderous rampage of 2001, just grazes the surface of the disturbing nexus I have uncovered between 4-19 and 9-11.  

The case for Middle Eastern complicity that I have outlined, thus far, centers primarily upon Timothy McVeigh's collaboration with men whom witnesses described as Iraqi intelligence agents. However, I have also uncovered strong indicators of an Al-Qaeda component to the Oklahoma bombing.  I outline in my book, The Third Terrorist, compelling evidence that McVeigh's defense team developed which suggested Terry Nichols might have received bomb making expertise from Al-Qaeda operatives based in the Philippines.

We know that the small-time Kansas farmer of modest means took frequent and unexplained trips to the South Pacific islands, many times without his Filipino mail order bride. The court record revealed that the Oklahoma City bomber was in Cebu City in December 1994 at the same time as the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, Ramzi Yousef.  Did these two men cross paths? According to the sworn statement of the co-founder of the Muslim terrorist group Abu Sayyaf, a spin-off chapter of Al-Qaeda, Nichols and Yousef did, indeed, meet in the early 1990's to discuss bomb making.

Richard Clarke, President Bill Clinton's former terrorism czar, disclosed in his book, Against AllEnemies, that the FBI "could never disprove" the theory that Terry Nichols learned the macabre genius of terrorist bomb construction under the tutelage of the Al-Qaeda lieutenant, Ramzi Yousef. Clarke writes, "We do that Nichols' bombs did not work before his Philippine stay and were deadly when he returned."

Phone records reveal that Nichols received and placed a slew of calls to a boarding house in Cebu City, which according to McVeigh's defense lawyers, sheltered students from a local university known for Islamic militancy.  Additionally, Nichols and McVeigh used a phone debit card to make a series of cryptic calls to untraceable numbers and pay phones in the Philippines from pay phones in Kansas in an apparent effort to cover their tracks. Why? That question has never been addressed or answered by the Department of Justice.

Thank you, Ms. Davis.

Does this sound familiar if you think back ten years ago? The bomb went off and everyone assumed it was set by Islamic terrorists, then McVeigh (John Doe Number One) was caught and everyone quickly forgot the Feds were looking for a swarthy John Doe Number Two as well.

On a similar note, in his DVD documentary, Mega Fix, Emmy-award-winning filmmaker Jack Cashill traces the roots of Sept. 11 to the Clinton White House in the 1995 - 1996 election cycle. Beginning with the Oklahoma City bombing, Cahill claims the Clinton Justice Department made eyewitnesses disappear (the FBI refused to even look at the material Jayna Davis had gathered). Instead of relying on witnesses, the prosecution built an entire case on circumstantial evidence.

Cashill points to similar behavior in the case of TWA Flight 800, which blew up over Long Island, as the FBI lost interest in witnesses once the White House established its talking points. I remember watching television when Flight 800 met its fate. ABC interrupted programming and went to the news anchors at WABC in New York, who were interviewing eyewitnesses claiming they had seen a streak of light hit the plane.

To understand why America did not respond to terrorist attacks in the 1996 election cycle one has to understand the politics of the era. When Timothy McVeigh was identified as a suspect two days after the Oklahoma bombing, Democrats were gleeful that the blame could be placed not on Islamic terrorists, but on right-wing nuts supposedly inspired by Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. Clinton was subtler than his supporters, merely blaming the  "purveyors of hate and division." His supporters filled in the blanks.

Cashill notes that President Bill "I feel your pain" Clinton was a master of strategic grief counseling, arriving in Oklahoma City with an approval rating in the low 40s and leaving with a rating well above 50. Suddenly, the "Republican revolution" that swept into office six months earlier looked treasonous.

Cashill claims that from Oklahoma City forward, our progressive friends were able to shame those who had assumed that Islamic terrorists were behind the bombing. This included not only conservatives, but also non-partisan terrorist experts like Steven Emerson, who had already been reproached for "bigotry and misrepresentations" and "creating mass hysteria against American Arabs" for his PBS documentary, Jihad in America.

Incredibly, it continues today.

The "Mega Fix" DVD is available at cashill.com.###

If you wish to read more , click here!

Gene can be emailed here