John Edwards - Look your children in the eye tonight

Tom Waits-- Gods away on business

Tom Waits - Hold On

TPMtv: Sunday Show Roundup: The Rhetoric of Iran

Had a nice day off...

This is the first weekend I've had totally off in a month. I feel it, i'm tired, the people around me are tired. But I finally had a Saturday for myself and it was wonderful. I grabbed my camera and went to Oakland Cemetary, you can read more about the history here. It was founded in 1850 and boomed with the civil war.

Here are a few of the best shots...









And finally here is (or is it... was???) my tour guide: Melvin...

Krugman on movement conservatism and the thesis of his new book (which I highly recommend)

What the movement is about is economics: the core goal is, as Heritage says in its fundraising letters, to roll back the New Deal and the Great Society — or as Grover Norquist puts it, to get things back to the way they were “up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over.”

Race and other distractions aren’t the goal, they’re a tactic — they’re how an anti-populist movement wins elections.

The 2004 election was a perfect example. Bush won by portraying himself as the nation’s defender against gay married terrorists — then, immediately after the election, declared that privatizing Social Security was his first priority.

Excellent point...

Mamutong on Dumbledore, Rawling's, and ever present conservativism in our world

Did anybody notice the disconnect in Rawling’s quoted response? What, may I ask, does Dumbledore’s gayness have to do with the question? Does she not think gays fall in love? Or worse, is she intentionally failing to give recognition to that?

As the press makes speculation on Rawling’s liberal leanings, I’m thinking just the opposite - I read the answer as coming from someone deeply homophobic.

911 TRUTHERS INFILTRATE BILL MAHER AUDIENCE

Bill Maher dealt with this well...

Lance Hahn R.I.P.

My fiances family just had a major loss, so we are headed up to North Carolina in the morning. But getting home from from work I see that the punk rock world just had a major loss as well. Lance Hahn known for many things... but I think of him most fondly as the nice anarchist guy, whom I read in MRR, and listened to in a band called J Church died on Sunday. I remember seeing J Church 7inches when I was 14. I think I finally got around to buying J Church around 20 or so. I saw them live when they open for Propagandhi in Los Angeles. Its strange to feel something for a man I never knew in real life. Only in my mind, where his words and his music gave me some hope that somewhere "out there" outside my little head someone else gave a damn about things and wanted things to work out for the best. Where everyone was cool and we all lived in a perfect little commune. Everyone had the latest 7inches, and ended their days watching movies and thinking about the meaning of life. Then we'd all sit by fires drinking and singing songs of remembrance for those who came before and the ideals of peace and freedom we hoped our children will keep alive. Lance, what you were is now gone... but what you are will always be alive inside me. And that makes me smile....

Imaginary Friends
Available on One Mississippi LP/CD

She can talk in codes I only partly understand,
She learned them trying to communicate with imaginary friends,
She used to call them angels but now they're not anything,
Now she feels alone and wishes that they were here again

She writes a letter and one week later she puts it in the mail,
She says that California Dreaming is a cautionary tale,
She says I shouldn't treat it like an empty pop song,
She says interpretations make the premises all wrong,

She has two older sisters who send care packages in the mail,
She collects all of their letters in a yellow plastic pail,
She can make it to the store as it's part of her routine,
She watches videos until they mix in with her dreams,
Until they mix in with her dreams,
Until they mix in with her dreams,
Until they mix in with her dreams

Good post.... don't have time to really dig into it though...

So you go do the close read... cause i'm due to be at work by 5am!

Obituary: Conservative Economic Policy

Conservative economic policy is dead. It committed suicide.

Its allegiance to market solutions, tax cuts and spending cuts, supply-side nonsense, manipulative and corrosive ties to industry and the rich, have left it wholly unable to cope with the challenges we face. Its terribly limited toolbox simply cannot address the economic insecurities and opportunities generated by today's global, interconnected, polluted, insecure, dynamic, bubble-prone economy.

What’s more, progressives have developed an alternative policy set with the flexibility to combine market forces with the necessary regulation and redistribution to address these challenges. Whether that agenda will ever see the light of day is another question.

My first thought is... was it ever alive?

bad move... again... redux...

From TPM: The hysterical party heads for the fainting couch

A month ago, congressional Republicans were so desperate to avoid discussing the substance of U.S. policy towards Iraq, they decided a newspaper ad from MoveOn.org was the single biggest threat to Western Civilization in recent history. The coordinated hissy fit was a transparent effort to distract attention from the issue at hand, but it was also a largely successful sham -- Republicans stopped talking about Bush's failed policy and started talking about the NYT's ad rates.

This month, those same congressional Republicans are so desperate to avoid discussing the substance of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), they've decided Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) has replaced MoveOn as Public Enemy #1. (For reasons that defy logic, CNN has decided that the GOP's feigned outrage is a really important story.)

Far be it for me to give Republicans advice, but I don't think they've thought this one through.

For the record, what did Stark say to send the right into high dudgeon? During the debate on overriding the president's veto for children's healthcare, Stark said, "You don't have money to fund the war or children, but you're gonna spend it blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their head blown off for the president's amusement."

Intemperate? Sure. But the coordinated hysteria we've seen over the last few days is more than misguided; it's silly.

There's just no reason for apoplexy here. Stark said something mean about Bush during a congressional debate. The president is a big boy; I think he can handle it. But by throwing a tantrum, congressional Republicans are suggesting that they can't handle it. They're not grown-ups. Random, intemperate criticism of Bush is just too much for the fragile, virgin ears.

In other words, by throwing a fit, Republicans end up looking weak and hysterical. Indeed, it reinforces the least flattering GOP caricature of all -- these guys can't govern, but they can fall onto a fainting couch like nobody's business.

For years, Republicans worked to create the opposite reputation. They're tough. This is the macho "daddy party." They don't care about "political correctness" and wussies who cry over words that rub people the wrong way. This is a crowd that calls it like they see it, and doesn't look bad or apologize.

And yet, they've now spent the better part of a year trembling over mild rebukes from liberals. If Democrats were smart, they'd look at this as an opportunity to rebrand the GOP as pathetic cry-babies who can barely go a week without throwing a hissy fit over one manufactured outrage or another. Alas, it doesn't look like Dems are smart at all.

Rejoice....

a beautiful thing, should be appreciated.



and another

Torture

MatthewY has a great email on torture

As has been amply documented ("The New Yorker" had an excellent piece, and there have been others), many of the "enhanced techniques" came to the CIA and military interrogators via the SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape] schools, where US military personnel are trained to resist torture if they are captured by the enemy. The specific types of abuse they're taught to withstand are those that were used by our Cold War adversaries. Why is this relevant to the current debate? Because the torture techniques of North Korea, North Vietnam, the Soviet Union and its proxies--the states where US military personnel might have faced torture--were NOT designed to elicit truthful information. These techniques were designed to elicit CONFESSIONS. That's what the Khymer Rouge et al were after with their waterboarding, not truthful information.

As I was reading today...

So I'm reading the new Paul Krugman book. And I was thinking about economic data, and how you really can't run around it. You either address it--which is what the reality based community would do. Or you evade it, which is what Conservatives do. And I thought to myself,you know

the numbers don't lie... but there are people who will lie about the numbers.

[of coarse that is a bit of hyperbole... even though the numbers don't lie, there are a very small number of people who understand the numbers--some of whom lie about them, and then a really large group of people who don't understand the numbers and so when they talk about them and are wrong...they aren't lying persay. They are just exposing poor computational skills. The really hard part is understanding the numbers, the really really hard part is explaining the numbers to the rest of us... I don't know if there is anyone in the really really hard part arena. I have my presupmtions...]

Star Trek + Nine Inch Nails = Closer

Sometimes a picture...

I nearly shattered after seeing this picture yesterday morning on the front page of the NYT's

I've been trying to put this into words...

And George Lakoff did it really well in an old interview.

BLVR: Is Karl Rove Bush’s Ailes?

GL: Well it’s not just one genius. What you’ve got is forty-three think-tanks. Two billion dollars. Thirty-five years of experience. And thousands of people working on these projects. All the leadership institutes they have, which give them language training. Given all that, Karl Rove can integrate it.

TPMtv: A Chat with Paul Krugman