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29 May 2010

Saturday Shuffle

One Hundred Stories - Alkaline Trio
Triad - Tool
Dead & Bloated - Stone Temple Pilots
Circles (live) - Soul Coughing
No Excuses - Alice in Chains
Gotta Know The Rules - Social Distortion
Anything, Anything (I'll Give You) - Dramarama
Norwegian Wood - The Beatles
Little Wing - Stevie Ray Vaughn & Double Trouble
Phenomena - Yeah Yeah Yeahs

22 May 2010

Saturday Shuffle

Harvest Moon - Bedlam
Half-State - Black Rebel Motorcycle CLub
Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat - Dr. Dre
Pull/Pulk Revolving Doors - Radiohead
10,000 Days (Wings Part 2) - Tool
Through The Fire - Larry Greene
It's The Morning - Dr. Octagon
Sick of Me - Ani DiFranco
Let It Be Me (live) - Social Distortion
Senses Working Overtime - xtc

18 May 2010

Bad Religion 1980 - ????



Hard to believe these guys have been around for three decades, now. Simple longevity aside, it's even more to their credit that they still haven't run out of things to say. (A challenge the Lady Gagas and Justin Biebers of the world will never have to address).

The new--not to mention free--30th anniversary live album starts going out, today, via download link. Get yours, here.

15 May 2010

Saturday Shuffle

Beautiful Day - U2
She Rides - Danzig
Help Me - Johnny Cash
Rough Justice - Trans Am
Mononucleosis (live) - Ween
Teenage Mojo Workout - The 5.6.7.8's
That Great Love Sound - The Raveonettes
Flying Saucer Dudes (live) - Béla Fleck & The Flecktones
Misery Loves Company - Mike Ness
Dreams Reoccurring - Hüsker Dü

14 May 2010

Pastor Dick loves his silver linings


Instaputz caught this gem of a Tweet Twat of the Day candidate from Obama's anti-same sex marriage BFF, Rick Warren:
KIDS WIN in Recession! In 2009 a MILLION more moms (vs 1986) stayed home with small kids instead of hiring daycare.
Some things really just can't be properly responded to without using the phrase "shit-for-brains," can they?

No word, yet, from ol' Pastor Ricky on how kids "win" when their moms are staying home because they've lost their jobs, or had to quit them, halving (or worse) the household income because the family can no longer afford daycare.

Of course, think about all the time the kids can spend with mom waiting in overcrowded waiting rooms for food stamps and other public assistance programs.

And what brings a family together more than all having to stay in a relative's spare bedroom (if not their car, more cozy, yet, eh?)--after mom got evicted for not paying rent after she "stayed home?"

Winners all around, Rick.

Winners all around.

13 May 2010

Where molesters warrant more sympathy than mothers

In case you were wondering who they will kick out:
A Roman Catholic school in Massachusetts has “withdrawn its acceptance of an 8-year-old boy with lesbian parents, saying their relationship was ‘in discord’ with church teachings.”
Looks like some things are more "in discord" than others, I guess.

I'm sure they'll be getting around to booting those children of divorced parents any day, now.

Yep...any day now...

11 May 2010

Bay Buchanan dies in tragic, stone-related, glass house collapse

This is rich:
Conservative commentator Bay Buchanan said on "Larry King Live" on Monday that Obama's choice of Sonia Sotomayor to fill a Supreme Court vacancy last year, and now Elena Kagan are signs that the President has "dummied down the Supreme Court."

"What makes her qualified?" Buchanan asked, referring to Kagan. "She has -- being a president of Harvard makes you qualified? It does not. What he's done is dummy down. He has dummied down the Supreme Court. He has given two of the best appointments of his administration to people who are not the best and the brightest. That's unfortunate."
So, in case you're scoring at home, the math-majoring high school teacher and sometimes accountant--whose current "career" as a tee vee talking head was launched from her work for GOP PACs and being rewarded with a two-year patronage appointment as Treasurer for her loyal service to the Reagan campaigns--thinks that this woman:
Sonia Sotomayor

Judicial Career
• U.S. Appeals Court judge, 2nd Circuit, 1998-2009
• U.S. District Court judge, 1992-1998
• Nominated to federal bench by Bush in 1991, Clinton in 1997

Government/Legal Career
• Former N.Y. County Assistant District Attorney, 1979-1984
• Former private practice attorney, Pavia & Harcourt, New York, 1984-1992

Education
• J.D., Yale Law School, 1979
• B.A., Princeton, 1976 (summa cum laude)
and this woman:
Elena Kagan

1981: Princeton University (B.A.)
1983: Oxford University (M.Phil.)
1986: Harvard Law School (J.D.)

1986-87: Clerk for Judge Abner Mikva, U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit
1987-88: Clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall, U.S. Supreme Court
1989-91: Associate in Private Practice, Williams & Connolly
1991-97: Assistant Professor and Professor, University of Chicago Law School (1991-94 as assistant professor)
1995-96: Associate White House Counsel
1997-99: Deputy Assistant to the President, Domestic Policy Council
1999-01: Visiting Professor, Harvard Law School
2001-03: Professor, Harvard Law School
2003-09: Dean of Harvard Law School
2009-10: Solicitor General of the United States
not only don't qualify as being "the best and brightest," but, in fact, "dummy down" the Supreme Court with their very presence.

If only Sotomayor and Kagan had curriculum vitae highlights like captaining *their* brother's three disastrous presidential bids onto the rocks...

08 May 2010

Saturday Shuffle

Rollo (live) - Helmet
Sleeping Beauty - A Perfect Circle
Bankshot - Operation Ivy
Sanity - Bad Religion
Over and Out - Alkaline Trio
Wanted Dead or Alive - The Slackers
Offbeat Bare Ass - 311
Fiberglass Jungle - The Crossfires
Mirror's Eyes - Drain S.T.H.
(No More) Luxuries - The Jim Carroll Band

04 May 2010

Well, that didn't take long...

A couple hours, at most, in fact.

Like clockwork, the GOP are up in arms over the notion that a U.S. citizen arrested on U.S. soil would be treated like, well, a U.S. citizen:
“I hope that [Attorney General Eric] Holder did discuss this with the intelligence community. If they believe they got enough from him, how much more should they get? Did they Mirandize him? I know he’s an American citizen but still,” (Rep. Peter) King said."
And leave it to our good friend and former Maverick, Johnnie Mac, to immediately go all in, embarrassing himself by wiping his ass with the Constitution in an effort to go full Pander Bear for his primary voters:
It would have been a serious mistake to have read the suspect in the attempted Times Square car bombing his Miranda rights, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Tuesday.

"Obviously that would be a serious mistake...at least until we find out as much information we have," McCain said during an appearance on "Imus in the Morning" when asked whether the suspect, 30-year-old Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized American citizen from Pakistan.

"Don't give this guy his Miranda rights until we find out what it's all about," McCain added during an appearance on the Imus show, which is broadcast by the Fox Business Network.
Remember those who pooh-poohed the idea that gulag-ing non-citizens is a slippery slope?

"Well, these are terrorists on the battlefield, they don't have the rights of a citizen."

Now our citizens don't have the rights of citizens.

You'd think catching a terrorist would be a good thing

Authorities arrested a Pakistani-born U.S. citizen in connection with last weekend's attempted car bombing in Times Square. This is the part that caught my eye, though:
...he was expected to be charged Tuesday in federal court.
Cue the right wing outrage over not Gitmo-ing this guy without trial or charge in 5...4...3...2...

03 May 2010

Quote of the Day

Rush Limbaugh on the Gulf oil spill, presumably from his customary vantage point, deep within his own rectum:
 
"I'm not advocating don't care about it hitting the shore or coast and whatever you can do to keep it out of there is fine and dandy, but the ocean will take care of this on its own if it was left alone and was left out there," Limbaugh said. "It's natural. It's as natural as the ocean water is.
 
"Well, the turtles may take a hit for a while, but so what? So do we!" Limbaugh said.
 
Limbaugh the Hutt's so-called "rationale" stems from a scientist telling him that oil naturally seeps from the sea floor at a cumulative rate similar to 5,000 barrels per day...across the Gulf's 600,000 square miles.
 
While the flaw in his non-thinking is too obvious to merit any serious response, I wonder how the corpulent gasbag would feel about testing his theory...say, for example, with single-dose ingestion of average lifetime ammounts of lead, arsenic, radiation, etc.  
 
After all, "it's natural." 

02 May 2010

Christianists and the lack of "civic courage"

Lately I've been following more of Andrew Sullivan's "Daily Dish" from The Atlantic. The other day I ran across this bit of coverage on oral arguments before the SCOTUS which finds Antonin Scalia on the same side of the street as gay rights supporters.

The crux of the case, Doe v. Reed, is that the supporters of an effort to repeal a Washington state domestic partnership law don't want people to know they signed petitions designed to get the measure on the ballot.

As Sullivan rightly notes, these individuals are the most craven of cowards, eager to use the political process and the force of law to foist their subjective beliefs onto other people's households, yet wanting to insulate themselves from any accountability for this imposition with a veil of anonymity.

Big Tony lets them have it with both barrels:

Working himself into an Originalist froth, Scalia notes that "for the first century of our existence, even voting was public—you either did it raising your hand or by voice," and then scolds that "running a democracy takes a certain amount of civic courage. And the First Amendment does not protect you from criticism or even nasty phone calls when you exercise your political rights to legislate."

Justice John Paul Stevens, the model of civility, breaks in to ask the money question: "Wouldn't it be legitimate public interest to say, I would like to know who signed the petition, because I would like to try to persuade them that their views should be modified?" He adds, "Is there public interest in encouraging debate on the underlying issue?" Bopp replies: "It's possible, but we think this information is marginal."

This leads Scalia to bring down the house with: "What about just wanting to know their names so you can criticize them?" Scalia notes that the disclosure of your name is "so you can be out there and be responsible for the positions you have taken."
Powerful words, there: "Civic courage."

Can't think of too many things more pathetic than the lack of it. If you are going to attack peoples' very families--especially over something that has nothing to do with you, personally--the least you can do is own up to your actions. If standing up for your faith is that important to you, it's more than a little curious that you'd object to actually having to stand up to the people who are affected by what you're doing.

The elefante in the living room

As Arizona surges forward with their new "Papers, please" law which essentially forces every Hispanic resident to carry proof of citizenship with him/her, in case they find themselves "reasonably suspected" of being in the country illegally, I ran across this recent tidbit from the Brookings Institution (via Andrew Sullivan):
Yet there is an important demographic nuance to this growth—providing context to the white backlash in Arizona in ways that could play out else where. It is the fact that the state’s swift Hispanic growth has been concentrated in young adults and children, creating a “cultural generation gap” with largely white baby boomers and older populations, the same demographic that predominates in the recent Tea Party protests. A shorthand measure for this cultural generation gap in a state is the disparity between children and seniors in their white population shares. Arizona leads the nation on this gap at 40 (where 43 percent of its child population is white compared with 83 percent for seniors). But the states of Nevada, California, Texas, New Mexico, and Florida are not that far behind.

...Nationally this gap is 25 percentage points.
Of course, a good number of the pro-SB 1070 folks will decry any mention of these facts as an attempt to label all of them as racists. "Illegal is illegal," we'll hear, "it has nothing to do with race."

Illegal is illegal.

But it's preposterous to think that this cultural generational gap plays no part in people convincing themselves that it's perfectly fine to leave 30% of the--very much legal--population subject to harassment and constantly having to be able to provide proof, not only of identity, but of origin if they want to avoid being detained or arrested.

Whenever there is a rising tide of "the other," it's extremely easy for members of the in-group to minimize the impact any decision might have on the members of the out-group. And these days, it's all about who's in and who's out.

As egalitarian as we believe ourselves to be, as Americans, can we even go more than a day or so without hearing someone talk about wanting "their" country back? They try to dress up that (intensely irritating) formulation as star-spangled patriotism, but the implicit corollary is that, if you're one of the ones who disagrees with them, this isn't your country.

Similarly, aging Arizonans are watching the citizenry undergo a massive demographic shift towards a population that is distinctly "not them." And if it's not "their country" what's the problem with playing fast and loose with "their" rights?

01 May 2010

Quote Tweet of the Day

"Better late then never" edition:
Every asshole who ever chanted 'Drill baby drill' should have to report to the Gulf coast today for cleanup duty -- Bill Maher

Saturday Shuffle

Summer Babe (Winter Version) - Pavement
From Out of Nowhere - Faith No More
We'll Let You Know - Morrissey
Puke & Cry - Dinosaur Jr.
Crawl (BBC version) - Alkaline Trio
Cayenne - Solex
Fully Retractable - Soul Coughing
Suture Up Your Future - Queens of the Stone Age
The One Rose (That's Left in My Heart) - Johnny Cash
Movement of Fear - Tones On Tail
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