Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2005 I AM TRYING to focus my thoughts and am not having very much luck. But hey if I am feeling a little tense and nervous, imagine how Dick Cheney is feeling. If he is not personally indicted tomorrow, whatever happens affects him profoundly. His current transits include Pluto square his Pisces Moon; his progressed Moon is about to make a conjunction to Chiron; and in his solar arc directions, there are two significant points of contact to the MC, which can involve the government. Further, he was born with Varuna conjunct Hylonome in the 8th house (a bit grim and menacing, to say the least). Currently, transiting Varuna is making a square to that position. He is having his Varuna square, this being a planet very heavily concerned with matters of truth, lies and agreements. Oh, and floods. If I were his astrologer...well...thankfully, I am not. The Valerie Plame grand jury traditionally meets Wednesdays and Fridays, i.e., tomorrow; thus both of their meetings this week are under Jupiter in Scorpio; and some have commented that Patrick Fitzgerald is unlikely to wait till the last day for an official vote to indict because if something happens to any of the jurors...or if they don't meet quorum at the last meeting...the whole effort, 22 months of investigation, is potentially lost. Marc Ash, executive director of truthout, dropped me a note this morning with the cautious reminder that yes, this could well be the week -- but not to underestimate the extent of corruption in the broadcast media. What he means is the alarming degree to which everything we see broadcast is a wholly owned subsidiary of the military machine; that it's one vast, oceanic, commercially driven disinformation campaign and never seems to tell the truth, much less the whole truth. I get most of my TV from BBC World, which is actually bearable, and acknowledges the existence of poverty. Television news in the US is not really covering the Valerie Plame spy outing issue, which is complex and sinister; they would rather leave that for their prime time hallucinations. And I hardly hear it mentioned on BBC World, though they are not exactly pro war. Many millions of people have no clue the case even exists. And I replied to Marc: let's not imagine a world without the Internet. Our hits do add up. Planet Waves is not CNN, but combine its efforts with 10,000 other Web sites slowly spreading the word and you do have something worth mentioning in history. Then there are the many people who know what the forward button is for, who send interesting clips to their parents, their friends, and so on. Remember that Watergate -- the issue that brought down Nixon -- was not a television story. TV refused to cover it until the very end. It did not "make pictures" -- the evidence was on paper (boring); the tapes were not released (pathetic); the conspirators were ugly bureaucrats; and so on. Not exactly James Bond stuff. Watergate was covered mainly by the famous Woodstein team at the Washington Post; and The New York Times soon got in on the act, spurred by their adventure covering the Pentagon Papers (which exposed the fraud of Vietnam); and finally the LA Times broke some good stories. But the story of the president turning the FBI and the CIA into his own personal mafia did not exactly make big news in Middle America. It was really news only on the coasts. Eventually, at the end, CBS remembered its reputation and did a two-part segment which explained it to Ma and Pa Kettle (actually, Ma Kettle was already hip). So if you wonder why I have explained Valerie Plame at least 10 times in this space, why we have kept a link to truthout.org up on the homepage every day for three years, why I donate a chunk of cash to them every three months, and why I am generally such a pest, the reason is that I don't see a choice; television is full of shit; newspapers and the mainstream Internet are a little confusing to say the least; and you have to take your news where you can get it, and if you're a writer, you put it where you can. Meanwhile, back in the Pisces Department, we are picking over Dick Cheney's chart like vultures, and will have a full report later in the week. And now, in these last hours before the cosmic trigger of Jupiter entering Scorpio, I have a lot of horoscopes to write, because the in-house Planet Waves horoscope editor is about to give birth to a child, and she said hurry up.