WASHINGTON (CNN) — Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo’s campaign stood by his assertion that bombing holy Muslim sites would serve as a good “deterrent” to prevent Islamic fundamentalists from attacking the United States, his spokeswoman said Friday.

“This shows that we mean business,” said Bay Buchanan, a senior Tancredo adviser. “There’s no more effective deterrent than that. But he is open-minded and willing to embrace other options. This is just a means to deter them from attacking us.”

On Tuesday, Tancredo warned a group of Iowans that another terrorist attack would “cause a worldwide economic collapse.” IowaPolitics.com recorded his comments.

“If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina,” Tancredo said. “That is the only thing I can think of that might deter somebody from doing what they would otherwise do. If I am wrong, fine, tell me, and I would be happy to do something else. But you had better find a deterrent, or you will find an attack.”

Tom Casey, a deputy spokesman for the State Department, told CNN’s Elise Labott that the congressman’s comments were “reprehensible” and “absolutely crazy.” Tancredo was widely criticized in 2005 for making a similar suggestion.

i’m coming out to Costa Mesa for work on September 20, will be there at least through Sept. 21, leaving (I suspect) the AM of Sept. 22. Any gigs out there?

Radio story right now on NPR on one of my favorite musical artists, the Pakistani qawali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

He died ten years ago this month…I never would have imagined that it’s been that long. He was 49…

Time sense shifts as you get older, but his work suspends time.

Some basic info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nusrat_Fateh_Ali_Khan

I make a lot of noise about my ambiguous relationship with the world of slam poetry. I love the people and the energy and it’s still the single artistic community where I feel most at home. I hate the formulaic, hidebound, conservative place it’s become (yes, I mean conservative in the sense of having a commitment to maintaining the status quo) and the too frequent confusion between the concept of “what wins” and “what’s good.”

So why do I stick around?

For all the high minded reasons I could state, I have to confess that I harbor one unfulfilled slam ambition: I’d like, someday, to perform this poem as a sacrifice at Finals. Just once. Just one chance to speak to the whole assembled community at once.

I know it won’t happen now, and I’m OK with that in most ways…but you can always dream.

MISSION STATEMENT

Our mission is

to act up at public gatherings
toss stones at the comfortable
sneer at the television
and afflict the generic

to dance naked in the clean laundry in the great steam room of the world
to get LAID/ to get LOVE /to get NOTICED
to waltz against the knives of war and greed
as they try to cut us loose from the church of our freedom

to look each other in the eyes at 2 AM
speaking like flowers and acting like idiots
to write rants missives novels novellas epistles
and advertisements for our huge and tender egos

to find a child crying alone and offer a hand
to get an old woman up from her electric rocker
and hear stories of the holocaust in her lonely patriarchal days
to stop bullets with a single line and make them over into pencil leads

Our mission (should we choose to accept it)
involves us – all of us – even Bill Gates
(in theory)
in a mass chain improvisation
leading a dance of tongue and cheek and bump and grind
Amos Andy Sacco Vanzetti
skatepunks riot grrls and anyone else
hurling epics and haiku into the face of bland conformity
rap snapped like a chalkline straight line
double time quick rhyme from the victim to the stage
a whisper of erotica sliding us home
end rhyme as tightly matched as lips
the right words cut and shaped to fit
into white hot bursts
of short sharp verse
and the longline wasted pseudo Beat nonetheless pure at heart stories of pain and gargantuan gothic gallows laughter

Our mission friends is
poetry
and we are on a mission only we can define

so dig, daddio:

Listen:
poets in other places and times have died
doing what we do here tonight so casually
They stand at our elbows every time we pick up that pen
step to the mike or
(God Forbid!) listen to one another
so: do not let anyone define your voice
and if you want a leader then lead –
you lead
And many voices will come together in one mission
The way storm clouds come together to make lightning
And when lightning passes it leaves thunder
And one day
they will say the same
about us