Click to Order
In 2000 Palecek was the Iowa Democratic
Party nominee for the US House 5th District,
receiving 67,000 votes with an anti-military,
pro-Hispanic/immigration, anti-prison platform.
During the '90s Palecek worked as a reporter,
editor and publisher of small papers in Iowa,
Minnesota and Nebraska. In 1994 the Byron
[MN] Review, published out of Ruth and Mike's home,
was named the Newspaper of the Year by
the Minnesota Newspaper Association. In the early '90s
Mike wrote a column against the Gulf War
while working for the Ainsworth Star-Journal in the Sandhills
of western Nebraska, which made life very
interesting for Mike and Ruth and a small child in cowboy
America decorated with yellow ribbons like
a Dairy Queen birthday cake; this was just after being
released from a six-month term in the Council
Bluffs, Iowa county jail.
During the '80s Palecek served five terms
in county jails in Iowa and Nebraska, and federal prisons
[Chicago MCC, Terre Haute, Leavenworth,
El Reno, La Tuna] for misdemeanor trespass at Offutt
Air Force Base, near Omaha, in protest
of U.S. nuclear weapons targeting.
Palecek was born and raised in Norfolk,
Nebraska, home of Johnny Carson. He was a
football co-captain and the catcher on
the 1972 state champion baseball team [Go Panthers!]
He never saw Johnny, except on the living
room TV of his parent's home with the cool
summer breeze pushing through the windows.
He spent 1979 in Catholic seminary at the
College of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn. where he
met Fr. Daniel Berrigan, who was able to
relate information about the church, the gospel and
the world that the priests back home did
not seem to be aware of.
During Easter Week of that year, rather
than going home for the break, he took a train to Washington, D.C.
to take part in a "Berrigan Brothers" week
of protest at the Pentagon and White House, where the young
seminarian saw a priest pour blood on the
White House. The priests back home almost never did that.
ha ha
Palecek has two books published: KGB
and Prophets
Without Honor [with lead
writer
William Strabala, recently reviewed in
Rain Taxi Review, the Rocky Mountain News and the Des Moines Register.
His third book, a novel based on his run
for Congress, Joe
Coffee's Revolution,
will be published in the spring by Badger
Books of Madison, Wisconsin.
KGB is available at Amazon.com or through your local bookstore.
KGB,
based in the Woodbury County jail.
These prisoners, the damned of America, scheme alone
with an underground radio station and a Morningside
College faculty member to bring justice to America.
"KGB is well written and imaginative,"
Danny Schecter, two-time Emmy winner,
a 20-20 producer and the founder of Globalvision.
"Faced paced and suspenseful,"
Jill Barrett, Confluence magazine, St Louis
Click to Order