Posted by
Gabrielle Cusumano on Tuesday, October 31, 2006 6:44:56 PM
Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, and most other Democrats are in a time warp, they still loath America just as they did during the years of Vietnam War protesting, they see America just as the Europeans and the rest of the world as " the despicable enemy". Thirty-some years later they still want peace and love, they still champion the so-called underdog and the deprived, the discriminated against, everywhere in the world they give all nations, all tyrants, all dictators, all terrorist and their enablers the benefit of the doubt, but their brethren American such as George W. Bush, The Commander in Chief or our American soldiers in Iraq, American homeland security, the American middleclass and their families' financial futures, these they put in the cross hairs of a gun, a no vote, a filibuster, because they are fair game for killing.
These fat cat Democrats know nothing of earnestness, hard work, genuine helpfulness, the want of security and peace of mind when they sleep at night. They know nothing but contempt for these American wants and needs, they know nothing but contempt for everything that they believed in thirty-some years ago. Their good intentions are warped from years of insidious hate mongering. They lie, then lie about their lies, and do it so often and as Bill Clinton, so well, they no longer recognize the truth or what is right or wrong or even what has been for generations the "American way". They don't have a clue to what is American and what is a time honored American value.
These four articles clearly make the point better than I can so I copied and pasted them here.
America is alive and well, it is the rest of the world that is sick! If the Democrats can't see how good they have it here in the country that they are bent on destroying and running into the ground, they should go elsewhere, Europe perhaps, or better yet to their friends the terrorist in the Middle East and live and breathe there.
"You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq." Stupid remark by John F. Kerry on October 30, 2006 (Someone said later it was suppose to have led into a joke!)
From
While Europe Slept
by Bruce Bower
"Like their American counterparts, Europe's '68-ers were mostly middle-class university kids, children of postwar prosperity who came of age protesting the Vietnam War and decorated their bedrooms with posters of Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison (and in some cases, Mao and Ho Chi Mihn). The transatlantic similarities are many. But there are important distinctions. For one thing, the Europeans had another key formative event in additions to Vietnam: the May 1968 general strike by French Students and workers, which paralyzed France and nearly brought down the government of Charles DeGaulle. This experience not only gave students an exaggerated lifelong sense of their own power and importance; it also established a postwar French custom of resorting to crippling, pointless strikes at a drop of a chapeau in response to just about anything."
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The European and American Left
since 1945 by Andrei S. Markovits
Dissent Magazine, Winter 2005
The Orthodox Period: 1945-1968
The Heterodox Period: 1968-1979
It would not be an exaggeration to say that virtually all the tenets defining the left during the "orthodox" period were substantially challenged, if not superseded, by events during the legendary sixties. Thus, it is not by chance that in Germany, France, Italy, and the United States, the "'68ers" (achtundsechziger, soixantehuitards) have attained near mythical status, and generated a considerable nostalgia, in the postwar histories of these countries' left-wing politics. Be it the events at Berkeley, Columbia, and the National Democratic Convention in Chicago for the United States; "the events" in Paris; Italy's Hot Autumn; or the politics of confrontation embodied by the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO) and the Student Socialist Organization (SDS) in the Federal Republic, there developed a clear challenge to the existing lefts in each of these societies.
For the first time in the history of the left, the essential impetus for this development came not primarily from Europe but from the United States. Concretely, these changes were anchored in two major struggles that informed American politics at the time: the civil rights movement at home and the Vietnam War abroad. Both of these developed into absolute icons for all lefts in the world. Mainly carried by students and not by the traditional subject of the left-that is, the industrial working class-this massive transformation of the discourse of the left was deeply anchored in the cultural climate of the United States, which the rest of the world, particularly Europe's students and its young generally, embraced with enthusiasm. One cannot understand the rise of the New Left in Paris, Berlin, Milan, and London without understanding the massive influence of American rock 'n' roll, folk music, protest songs and poetry, and the civil rights movement's tactic of the "sit in." Posters of Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Jerry Garcia, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Allen Ginsberg adorned the homes of thousands of European New Leftists alongside such other icons as Che Guevara and, of course, Ho Chi Minh. On both sides of the Atlantic, this generation was equally formed by the first seemingly democratic and impromptu rock festival held in the muddy fields near Woodstock, New York, and by one of Europe's foremost intellectual émigrés who, unlike others in his immediate milieu, proudly remained in America while becoming one of this country's most challenging critics. I am talking about Herbert Marcuse, whom many have-quite rightly-called the New Left's most influential thinker. The deep American roots of the New Left in Europe, both in form and substance, are beyond debate.
In notable contrast to the subsequent time period, which entailed a paradigm shift, the New Left challenge developed within the Marxist paradigm-though it was profoundly threatening to the existing world of socialist politics. If the subsequent era was to transcend socialism and develop some sort of post-socialist politics, New Leftists in the period I have labeled "heterodox" wanted a "true" socialism, freed from what they viewed as related perversions: social democracy in the West and Leninism/Stalinism in the East (though some New Leftists were mesmerized by Leninism in its Maoist version).
The authority that parties of the established left enjoyed during the orthodox period eroded in this decade of heterodoxy. On the intellectual level, the New Left offered a radical critique of the politics of the hegemonic parties. On the institutional level, there emerged small, but intellectually influential parties to the left of the traditional social democratic and communist parties in terms of their programs as well as their strategic approaches. Though small in actual numbers, these parties represented the legacy of the "68-ers" in the left's "party space"-a standing challenge to the orthodox left. The Parti Socialiste Unifié in France might perhaps be the best example of this genre: small in number of voters, members, and officeholders, but important in intellectual influence.
On the other hand, the relationship between parties and unions changed substantially. Several points are worthy of mention in this context:
1. Everywhere in Europe there occurred at this time a clear politicization of the unions. They expanded their horizons from the confined world of industrial relations and shop-floor affairs to include issues of "grand politics" hitherto left to the respective "sister" (or "mother") party. Unions catapulted themselves into a position of quasi-equality with "their" parties. On the one hand, they entered into various macropolitical arrangements with employers and the state that gave labor an active role in economic management. Even though often defensive in nature (and also demobilizing), these neocorporatist arrangements signaled a new union strength. In addition to this activism "from above," the unions also engaged in an activism "from below." Largely propelled by a restive rank and file that wanted to cash in on its superb position in a tight labor market, the unions bargained for the most impressive "quantitative" and "qualitative" gains attained by labor at any time in the fifty-plus years of the postwar period. Even though these two activisms clashed with each other, they emanated from the same optimism, power, and self-confidence that redefined the role of unions inside the European left during this period.
2. This, of course, led the unions to distance themselves from their respective parties. Nowhere was this more obvious than in Italy, where the three union confederations (allied with different parties) discovered that as many things united as divided them. Similar, though not as effective, distancing maneuvers on the part of unions also occurred in Germany, Britain, Sweden, and Austria. Only in France did the old transition-belt model between the Communist Party (PCF) and the communist-dominated trade union federation (CGT) remain largely intact. There too, however, independent union power figured significantly in the discourse of the left, particularly because the former Catholic union, sporting the new acronym CFDT, shed its former clericalism and became one of the most vocal advocates of the New Left.
3. Central to this activism was the role of hitherto marginal elements within the labor movement. Although labor's core-that is, male, skilled, industrial workers-also participated in the general mobilization, it was often its lesser skilled, female, and foreign colleagues who were the political vanguard at the grass roots and on the shop floor. Add to this group a substantial presence of tertiary-sector "intellectual" workers, and the new working class had become a politically meaningful reality.
4. There was also a noticeable "intellectualization" of the labor movement. Through the influx of a large number of academic researchers, many of whom were veteran "68-ers," the unions developed a more sophisticated theoretical approach to problems that until then remained largely beyond their purview. Union leaders always had a very ambivalent relationship to left-wing intellectuals, but now a "march through the institutions" on the part of New Left activists changed organized labor's mentality to a noticeable degree.
But something wholly new also happened at this time: the rise of left politics outside of any established institutions, parties, or unions. It was in this milieu that the new meaning of "leftism" in Europe and the United States was forged. It was at this critical juncture-the decade between 1968 and 1978-that tendencies developed whose influence persists to this day, in Germany especially, but also in Europe generally. In my article "The Minister and the Terrorist" (Foreign Affairs, November-December, 2001), I described four groupings that emerged at this juncture within the New Left.
I call the first group the "Westerners." Germany's current foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, is exhibit A. This group, though vehemently against the war in Vietnam, totally supportive of third world liberation movements, and bitterly opposed to Western-as well as West German-capitalism, began to reorder the hierarchy of its negative preferences. Crucial in this reordering was that tyranny rather than capitalism was put at the top of the list. Put positively, at the top now was not the emancipation of the working class or even the liberation of third world peoples from imperialism, but rather democracy, due process, constitutionalism, and human rights. For reasons that probably have more to do with the personal psychologies and histories of the relevant individuals than with macro-sociological factors such as class background, education, religion, geographic origin, and gender, the Westerners successfully differentiated between American culture (which they loved, as is evident from Fischer's well-known admission that Bob Dylan had a greater influence on his life than Karl Marx) and American politics in the world (which they disliked). Above all, they did not develop a visceral hatred of all things American. And they also began to look at the Holocaust as a development sui generis and not merely as an epiphenomenon of what the rest of the German left then still called-and continues to call-"fascism" rather than National Socialism. As a consequence, the Westerners committed a major blasphemy in the eyes of the rest of the left. They argued that the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany could-and did-on occasion produce good things, such as a stable and democratic order in Germany and Europe; and that liberal democracy, though capitalist, was indeed preferable to tyranny, even of the people's republic kind. They saw the West also as an occasional force of liberation and emancipation, not only as one of repression and exploitation. Lastly, members of this group upheld the value of universalism-already at this time a ready target for various relativizing particularisms that came to define other groups on the left, to which I now turn.
The second group I call the "Third Worldists." They considered imperialism the most important political issue of the day and rejected everything that the developed world stood for, including Western values and industrial modernization. The Third Worldists would later constitute the bulk of the "Fundamentalist" (or "Fundi") wing of the German Green Party and fight a bitter rearguard action against what they believed to be the sellouts by Fischer and his "Realos." During the 1970s, the Third Worldists believed that the Federal Republic was second only to the United States in its objectionable character. They detested its parliamentary institutions, disdained its market-based economy, hated its role as a driving force in modernization's inevitable destruction of the environment, and feared any manifestation of nationalism, which they saw as a harbinger of the ever-looming "fascistization" of German politics and society. They were vehemently anti-Zionist (although not necessarily anti-Semitic) and found in the Palestinians an emblem of noble suffering and anticolonial resistance.
The third group were the "orthodox Marxists," who located the source of the Federal Republic's ills not in industrial modernization but in capitalism. In contrast to all other New Leftists, members of this group considered the industrial working class not only a worthy ally but as an "objectively necessary" part of any major social transformation. Adherents of this tendency reached deep into the SPD and some German trade unions, notably the metal workers', printers', journalists', writers', and bank employees' unions. They also developed cozy relations with East Germany, whose Marxist-Leninist system they regarded with tolerant admiration if not outright enthusiasm. This group's strength explains why serious criticism of "actually existing socialism" in the Soviet bloc was unpopular in parts of the German left well into the 1980s-so much so that the Polish Solidarity movement was often denounced by German unionists and social democrats as retrograde and reactionary. (During his JUSO [youth organization of the SPD] days, the current chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, was closest to this wing of the New Left.)
I call the fourth and last remaining group the "neo-Nationalists." The New Left focused mainly on opposing the war in Vietnam, demonstrating solidarity with developing-world liberation movements, and transforming bourgeois society. But in Germany it also had a nationalist component provoked by the country's division and limited sovereignty. Left-wing nationalism has a long history in Germany (National Bolshevism and the Strasser wing of the National Socialists are two cases in point), and it is hardly surprising that such feelings were represented among the '68ers as well. Nationalist sentiment grew over the controversy surrounding the 1983 deployment of American intermediate-range nuclear missiles on German soil and was later intensified by German unification. By the mid-1990s, in fact, a substantial number of '68ers had completed a journey from extreme left to extreme right, with the constant factor being their hatred of the West. Today, this antimodernist, anti-Western sentiment is alive and well throughout Europe among those on the extreme right and left who invoke nationalism in their opposition to globalization. The two most prominent German radicals to undergo such a shift are Horst Mahler and Bernd Rabehl. Along with two other prominent ex-leftists, Mahler-now the far right National Democratic Party's official legal counsel-recently declared that the '68er movement had been "neither for communism nor for capitalism, neither for a Third-Worldist nor for an Eastern or a Western community of values." Instead, it had been "about the right of every Volk to assert its national-revolutionary and social-revolutionary liberation." In this view, the Germans were no exception. Already then, the main root of Germany's trouble lay in its solid anchoring in the West-controlled by that double-headed evil, the United States and world Jewry. In marked contrast to the Third Worldists, adherents to this path developed an anti-Zionism that could barely, if ever, be differentiated from anti-Semitism.
This is also the period when the left's enmity against Israel, begun in the wake of the Six Day War of June 1967, became a salient issue for its politics, its identity, and also its internal divisions. Indeed, I would argue that perhaps the most defining gauge of where somebody stood politically, how she/he saw the world, was that ubiquitous triangle of Israel, the Jews, and the United States. Roughly speaking, to the Westerners, the plight of the Jews was a serious issue, which meant that they developed a much more favorable view of Israel than did the other three groups. To the Third Worldists and the orthodox Marxists, the plight of the Jews-though real-remained unimportant, massively subordinate to the plight of third world peoples (to the Third Worldists) and of workers (to the orthodox Marxists). In the nationalist camp, by contrast, the plight of the Jews was either never acknowledged or even viewed with outright contempt. It is here that the nexus between the völkisch left and the völkisch right, which manifested itself so vigorously in the streets of many German and European cities in the spring of 2002 and again in 2003, was forged. (continued)
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/Articles/The%20European%20and%20American%20Left.htm
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Consistency
by Chris Arnell
Consistency can be a good thing. The democrats have been amazingly consistent since the 60’s. Unfortunately, for most Americans, democrats have been consistently wrong. The left has been consistently wrong about war, appeasing tyrants and dictators instead of confronting them. The left has been consistently wrong about taxes. In favor of taxing anything that is not nailed down. However, more than anything, liberals have consistently misread and misjudged the American People.
During the 60’s, the left was opposing America’s involvement with Vietnam. Ignoring facts that were as obvious then as they are today, Communism was choking the life out of a country that was in desperate need of our help and on a humanitarian level, we needed to be there. Vietnam was slowly becoming another Stalinist country with none of the freedoms or privileges we demand in our own country. Why was attacking Bosnia in the 90’s acceptable but fighting communism in the 60’s was not? Bosnia was a lesser threat to the U.S. than a Communist Vietnam. The end goal of Bosnia was not to take over the United States unlike the communist movement in Vietnam that was a small part of a larger scheme.
In the 70’s liberals decided the next thing to oppose would be any progress that involved cutting down a tree. It did not matter that logging companies had been replenishing the forests by implementing strict replanting policies. Chaining oneself to a tree became the vogue. At the time of this writing, there are more trees in the United States than at its founding in 1776. If there are more trees now than there were then, why are so many democrats so uptight? After all, thousands of cities have grown from nothing and yet we have more trees. We would not be in nearly as good a shape as we are if nobody cared and nobody was trying.
Throughout the 80’s, the common Democratic theme was that Reagan was wrong. Reagan was wrong in believing in lower taxes even though lower taxes help spur a technology boom that carried on through the 21st Century. Microsoft, Apple, and IBM all started in garages and grew into bigger and better companies thanks in part to a realistic and fair tax code that certainly didn’t start in the Carter Administration. In addition, we were assured that Reagan was an idiot. These Reagan is an idiot updates came via The Media, late night talk shows, and many elected democrats. Regarding the Soviet Union, Reagan was opposed on nearly every issue by pacifist liberals. The left not learning from the experiences of Neville Chamberlain, who failed to see the ever-increasing threat of Nazism, continued to seek appeasement instead of strength.
While controlling the White House for much of the 90’s, liberals avoided discussing the onslaught of terrorist activity against the U.S. by talking about Dotcoms, 30 year olds retiring early, and the sitcom Friends. It is ironic that democrats love to take credit for a booming economy that was built on inflated, hyped-up companies that had no real business plan except that they were Dotcoms. Ignoring over half a dozen attacks against the U.S. including the first attack on the World Trade Center and numerous attacks against U.S. Interests abroad there was no increase in the military budget, no questions about the competence of the CIA or the FBI, and no need to check with the United Nations on any military operations involving foreign countries.
From 2000 to 2006, anti-war protesters, communist dupes, U.N. loving Senators, and Hollywood idiots, also known as, “The Democrat Party” wailed loudly against almost every attempt that the U.S. made to protect itself from Islamic terrorism. Democrats have shown more contempt towards our military than toward Jew-hating, civilian-killing, women-suppressing Islamic terrorists. Democrats didn’t like the Patriot Act, they didn’t like monitoring phone calls originating from outside the U.S. from suspected terrorists, they are against any interrogation techniques that might upset the Muslim community, and yet Democrat Senators have the audacity to ask why we were not better prepared against terrorism. If liberals would treat Islamic nuts as they treat tobacco companies then we might actually be safer against future attacks.
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http://www.carnellknowledge.com/2006/06/14/news-41/
Consistency
Filed on 06/14/06 by Chris Arnell
www.carnellknowledge.com
What happens when young revolutionaries go grey?
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young for Europe’s radical upheavals of 1968 was (with apologies to William Wordsworth) very heaven!
The young radicals of ’68 grew up (or rather didn’t grow up) to become some of Europe’s most influential leaders, as Bruce Bawer notes in a review of Paul Berman’s new book, Power and the Idealists:
“Remarkably, after the protests were over, an extraordinary number of ’68ers—those who’d stood on the barricades denouncing the system—ascended into positions of political and cultural power, shaping a New Europe (and an EU) in which the anti-Americanism of the barricades became official dogma. Paul Berman’s absorbing, elegantly written Power and the Idealists recounts the political journeys of three of the most influential of these ’68ers. Joschka Fischer, once head of the militant group Revolutionärer Kampf (Revolutionary Struggle), became German foreign minister in 1998. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the May ’68 Paris demos, now sits in the European Parliament. And Dr. Bernard Kouchner, boy Communist, went on to found Doctors Without Borders in 1971 and to serve as an EU and UN official. The ultimate point of Berman’s 100-page opening chapter is that ethnic cleansing in Kosovo compelled these three to move ‘from radical leftism to liberal antitotalitarianism’—that is, to reject their longtime view of the U.S. as the world’s supreme menace and support NATO action against Milosevic. Many ’68ers, Berman suggests, made the same move.”
But the realignment did not survive the U.S. invasion of Iraq:
“Of Berman’s trio, only Kouchner supported the invasion of Iraq; Cohn-Bendit, Fischer, and nearly everybody else on the European left opposed it, in most cases fiercely. Berman claims that this posture was ‘tactical’—in principle, he insists, the left continued to stand for ‘liberal antitotalitarianism.’”
Bawer thinks that the brief flirtation with U.S. policies had more cynical roots. He argues that the goal of the book is to present his ’68 trio as “models of reflective and principled interventionist leftism” at a time when the left’s “hatred of George W. Bush has blinded them to the iniquities of al Qaeda, the Taliban, Saddam, et al., not to mention the best interests of people who’ve suffered under tyranny.”
Instead of creating heaven, the young ideologues of ’68 built a European social democracy that is “a kind of fundamentalism, rigid and doctrinaire, yielding what Swedish writer Johan Norberg calls ‘one-idea states’—nations where an echo chamber of insular elites calls the shots, where monochrome media daily reiterate statist mantras and shut out contrarian views, and where teachers and professors systematically misrepresent the U.S. (millions of Europeans believe that free public schools, unemployment insurance, and pensions are unknown in America).”
Three Radicals, Inside Europe's Leftist Elite
BY BRUCE BAWER
A few years back, after a prolonged immersion in American Protestant fundamentalism (I was writing a book), I moved from the U.S. to Western Europe, ready to bask in an open, secular, liberal culture. Instead I discovered that European social democracy, too, was a kind of fundamentalism, rigid and doctrinaire, yielding what Swedish writer Johan Norberg calls "one-idea states"—nations where an echo chamber of insular elites calls the shots, where monochrome media daily reiterate statist mantras and shut out contrarian views, and where teachers and professors systematically misrepresent the U.S. (millions of Europeans believe that free public schools, unemployment insurance, and pensions are unknown in America). The more I saw of the European elites' chronic distrust of the public, and the public's habitual deference to those elites, the fonder I grew of the nasty, ridiculous rough-and-tumble of American democracy, in which every voice is heard—even if, as a result, the U.S. gets capital punishment and Europe gets gay marriage.
How did Western Europe come to be ruled by monolithic ideologues? Short answer: the "'68ers," which is what Europeans call those who came of age in the radical movements of the 1960s, revering Mao and reviling the U.S. as Nazi Germany's successor. Remarkably, after the protests were over, an extraordinary number of '68ers—those who'd stood on the barricades denouncing the system—ascended into positions of political and cultural power, shaping a New Europe (and an EU) in which the anti-Americanism of the barricades became official dogma. Paul Berman's absorbing, elegantly written Power and the Idealists recounts the political journeys of three of the most influential of these '68ers. Joschka Fischer, once head of the militant group Revolutionärer Kampf (Revolutionary Struggle), became German foreign minister in 1998. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the May '68 Paris demos, now sits in the European Parliament. And Dr. Bernard Kouchner, boy Communist, went on to found Doctors Without Borders in 1971 and to serve as an EU and UN official. The ultimate point of Berman's 100-page opening chapter is that ethnic cleansing in Kosovo compelled these three to move "from radical leftism to liberal antitotalitarianism"—that is, to reject their longtime view of the U.S. as the world's supreme menace and support NATO action against Milosevic. Many '68ers, Berman suggests, made the same move.
Berman's first chapter is based on "The Passion of Joschka Fisher," an August 2001 New Republic essay. Days later came 9/11, in whose aftermath the notion of the European left as a newfound bastion of "liberal antitotalitarianism" would be increasingly hard to buy. For even if a significant number of '68ers did switch sides over Kosovo, the wars in Afghanistan and (especially) Iraq switched most of them back. Of Berman's trio, only Kouchner supported the invasion of Iraq; Cohn-Bendit, Fischer, and nearly everybody else on the European left opposed it, in most cases fiercely. Berman claims that this posture was "tactical"—in principle, he insists, the left continued to stand for "liberal antitotalitarianism." My own observations strongly suggest that most '68ers never really embraced "liberal antitotalitarianism" in the first place; yes, European governments felt obliged to go along with the Kosovo and Afghan invasions, but the academic, journalistic, and bureaucratic elites protested both operations vociferously (only to drop their opposition down the memory hole when those efforts succeeded).
Berman's goal is clear: At a time when many leftists' animosity toward George W. Bush has blinded them to the iniquities of al Qaeda, the Taliban, Saddam, et al., not to mention the best interests of people who've suffered under tyranny, he wants to hold up Fischer, Cohn-Bendit, and Kouchner as models of reflective and principled interventionist leftism. Fine. One problem here, alas, is that all three of these men have, in their time, done things that raise serious questions about their principles and powers of reflection. Fischer, for example, brutally beat up a cop at a 1973 Frankfurt street protest; Cohn-Bendit hid a fugitive whose group had helped coordinate the 1972 Olympics murders. While reporting candidly enough on these and other episodes, Berman prefers to see them (with excessive generosity) as eminently forgivable missteps made in their youth by men who have since developed a mature wisdom deserving of emulation. Whatever. Bottom line: he's out to convince readers that if they stop cheering George Galloway and linking arms with Islamofascists at antiwar rallies and instead join his trio in (as he sees it) supporting "liberal antitotalitarianism"—i.e., siding with freedom against oppression—they'll still be able to call themselves leftists. It's ironic: Berman's New Republic article recounted the supposed awakening of the European left; to read the book that's grown out of it is to be intensely aware of just how many leftists are still sound asleep.
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=25924
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