Added Alien & Sedition , the WeFunk Archive (great jams) and also put Snarky Boy back on . When he’s not letting his boner for Odum at GMD get the best of him he actually writes some pretty good stuff. Check him out.
UPDATE: Also added Vermont Scrap Wood and VT Impeach.
I just finished reading a great diary over at Kos, ‘I Was a Mole at the Conservative Summit – They’re Not Dead Yet’, about some observations at last week’s Conservative Summit by the National Review Institute. The usual gang of idiots were there: Jeb Bush, John Bolton, Jonah Goldberg, Newt Gingrich and a host of others working hard to run this nation into the Dark Ages.
The biggest person in Washington, I learned from a tour guide, is Freedom, who stands atop the Capitol dome. She faces east because that is the direction from which danger came. But today the danger is all around her. And on this day in particular, it is fourteen blocks behind her at the Marriott Hotel, where the movement that has wreaked so much havoc, at home and abroad, is licking its wounds, and preparing for a comeback.
Will we be ready?
Have a look.
I’ve alwys considered the majority of the 1980′s to be a musical wasteland, not having an appreciation for new wave, punk, or hair bands. And that was also the decade that the great progressive rock bands, such as Yes and Genesis, began their transformation into pop sellouts. But not King Crimson. Have a look at this early 80′s television performance… it’s math rock, but grooves hard….real hard. And Robert Fripp was actually smiling. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well. Enjoy.
I seem to have a terminal case of the blogging lazies this week, but it’s cool. Over at Smirking Chimp today, a great piece by Ted Rall, ‘Memo to Republicans: Shut Up, Shut Up, Shut Up’:
Attention right-wing neoconservative Republicans: We Americans have done things your way since 1981, when an actor named Reagan convinced us that we weren’t entitled to anything from the government other than a canceled check for our taxes. We supported dictators against democratic movements. We started wars against tiny weak countries like Grenada and Panama and
Afghanistan just because we could. Even when we had a Democratic president, he bought into Reagan Republicanism; Clinton cut rich people’s taxes, signed NAFTA and got rid of social welfare programs.Twenty-six years into the NeoCon nightmare, everybody hates the United States. We’re broke. Here’s how screwed up we are: we can’t even get out of a war that 91 percent of Americans are against. Republicans got us into this mess.
Rall then says what many people with functioning brain stems must be thinking:
Since these pundits and politicians were and are so spectacularly wrong about such a straightforward and momentous issue as this idiotic war, no one should take them seriously again. Right-wingers deserve to be marginalized and ignored. The American left–the real, non-accommodationist, non-Hillary, left–ought to define the mainstream from now on. Only the left, from Noam Chomsky on the left left to
Howard Dean on the right left, have been consistently correct.
It’s funny, whenever Bush comments on ANYTHING nowadays, before I can even process what he’s saying, I’m screaming out loud, ‘Shut up. No one worth shit gives a flying fuck about what you think. You are an idiot. You do not tell the truth about anything, zero credibility. Please shut the fuck up.” Somehow, I suspect I’m not alone in that sentiment…
Norbizness, with a good spin on Mike Huckabee and the other Jesus freaks who will be clamoring for the votes of the mouthbreathers.
From the Alamogordo (New Mexico) Daily News…
It seems to me Republicans spend more time thinking about gay sex than any other group of people in the known world, even more so than gay people trying to find other gay people with whom to have sex.
Good little mini-documentary form Robert Greenwald documenting the many times John McCain’s ‘Straight Talk’ was anything but…
File this one under ‘so bad, it’s awesome’. Last night I watched ‘Three The Hard Way’ (1974), directed by Gordon Parks, Jr. (Superfly). Not available in the U.S., I watched a Japanese import, a pan and scan version. Now, where to begin?
The film stars three of the biggest stars of the early 70′s blaxploitation action film genre… Fred Williamson (Black Caesar, Bucktown, etc), Jim Brown (Slaughter, Black Gunn), and Jim Kelly (Black Belt Jones). Williamson stars as some high-roller publicist, Brown is a Rolls-Royce drivin’ record producer, and Jim Kelly runs a karate school. The three join forces (I’ve always wanted to say that) to stop some wimpy-lookin’ white supremacist who’s going to poison the water supplies of Detroit, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles with a deadly poison that only kills black people. Yep, read that sentence again. I’m not kidding. Sounds like Trent Lott’s wet dream, eh?
This movie was a hoot, soooper low-budget. There were so many funny things about it, here’s a few… You can see the shadow of the cameraman in several shots (I was looking for the boom mic to pop into the top of the frame but it never happened). Huge loopholes, continuity issues. There’s a huge shootout scene that takes place in a car wash in Chicago. Somehow, in the next scene, everybody’s in New York. Nobody ever runs out of bullets. Williamson’s character has a long cigar in his mouth in every scene… that’s NEVER lit. Jim Kelly makes silly grunting noises in his badly choreographed kung-fu scenes, which sound even sillier when in slo-motion. Our heroes take on and kill huge amounts of white supremacists with machine guns, using only a handgun. The evil mastermind gives his speech about how his plan will exterminate the black race to his massive group of about twenty followers. I’m sure it would work, considering the only places in the country with black populations are Detroit, L.A. and D.C. , right?
Jim Brown explains to Fred Williamson and Jim Kelly how quickly their careers will disappear after the blaxploitation craze runs its course.Now, it’s interesting how some bad movies can really just suck (like Black Shampoo) and how other bad ones are just so watchable. I can’t pinpoint it, but I enjoyed the hell out of this movie. The soundtrack, by Curtis Mayfield’s old group, The Impressions, was truly funktastic. It was every blaxploitation musical archetype… the sweeping strings, the horns, the soulful vocals, the non-stop wah-wah guitar. I loved it. I was kind of surprised, though at the difference in quality between this and Parks, Jr’s other Blaxploitation flick, Superfly, which was a much better movie overall (as far as the genre goes, anyways). Good luck finding this one (try eBay). If you’re into the genre, this one’s a must-see, if only for the humor of it all.
Good, straightforward article by Stephen Fleischmann on Smirking Chimp today, ‘Who’s Afraid of Single Payer?’ :
Who’s afraid of the single payer health plan, otherwise known as National Health Insurance? Big Pharma and the medical establishment, that’s who—because “single payer” is the big bad wolf that’s huffing and puffing and is about to blow their house down. And it’s a big house, bloated by excess profits, government subsidies and sheer theft of the people’s money.
Now, I understand the philosophical conservative viewpoint against single-payer healthcare. I don’t agree with it, but I understand it. This article isn’t so much about philosophy, it’s about practicality. As I think of our nation, I see certain things that are detrimental to society that are kept in place because it protects an industry. Healthcare is one of those things. When are the tables going to turn? When is someone going to ask what is more important in the grand scheme of things, protection of an industry or the health of a nation?
Added Rip and Read to the VT blogroll, and Dispatches from the Culture Wars, The Skeptic, New Humanist, and Unclaimed Territory by Glen Greenwald to the ‘other blogs & sites’ blogroll. Check ‘em out. Also, if you link here, lemme know. I’ll reciprocate.
