goofballs

Many and copious thanks for the Marcia Funebre of Opus No. 55 . And thanks for setting the bar so very, very high that Johannes Brahms waited 47 years, 23 years after being called "the chosen one" by Robert Schumann in 1853, to even attempt to write a symphony -- a form so highly perfected by yourself. Also, sorry about your hearing, and the syphilis. You are ichiban, Your faithful and humble fan, Christopher

When I was a toddler, a plucky Croatian/Irish American progressive named Dennis Kucinich , at the time only 31 years old, ran for and won the mayorship of a steel town that bordered my hometown to the West; the same steel town where I was born in 1975 at Rainbow Babies and Children. The Dennis Kucinich Mayoral tenure is considered Cleveland, Ohio's most turbulent. The Cleveland Free Times recently ran a cover story about a mob assassination attempt against the young mayor, who was fighting an uphill battle against the entrenched corruption and graft that had permeated Northeastern Ohio politics in the 1970s (an era in which my father and mother witnessed first hand a mob car bombing at the steps of Cleveland City Hall, drawing obvious parallels to the 1920s). In 1979, family friend and former colleague of my father George Voinovich, a Cleveland lawyer, ran against Kuchinich and won the mayoral race. He oversaw a brief period of economic growth for a city that has been behind the 8...

I saw this while perusing The Assimilated Negro . James Baldwin ? Who is this person? Why have I never heard of him? Blogspotters.. now you know what books to get me for xmas!..

That is a GOOD QUESTION . The question was asked by Steve Skvara tonight at Soldier Field during the MSNBC Democratic Presidential Debates hosted by Keith Olbermann . 1) We live in a country whose political dialog is dominated by non-issues like gay marriage and teaching "intelligent design". 2) We live in a country where 7 figure earning lobbyist cook up terms like "death tax" and "tax relief" to sell policies which grant billions in corporate welfare and tax benefits to the very rich. 3) We live in a country who can spend 10 figures on research on a stealth warplane, 14 figures (a one with 14 zeros) on a war of choice and have 50,000,000 (that's 8 figures) Americans without health insurance, 9,000,000 of them are children . 4) Three words: No Child Left Behind 5) Farm subsidies that only benefit large agribusiness like Cargill, ADM, ConAgra Foods and the like, but keep actually farmers in perpetual debt, and keep our children swimming in high fruct...

It makes me sick, sick, sick to my stomach that weak-kneed Democrats in the United States Congress voted along with the Republican minority to amend the already hopelessly permissive FISA bill. Here is the Washington Post coverage : The Senate bowed to White House pressure last night and passed a Republican plan for overhauling the federal government's terrorist surveillance laws, approving changes that would temporarily give U.S. spy agencies expanded power to eavesdrop on foreign suspects without a court order. The 60 to 28 vote, which was quickly denounced by civil rights and privacy advocates, came after Democrats in the House failed to win support for more modest changes that would have required closer court supervision of government surveillance. Earlier in the day, President Bush threatened to hold Congress in session into its scheduled summer recess if it did not approve the changes he wanted. Honey, pack our bags, we're moving to Canada. As many have pointed out, and...

I wanted to quickly quote this letter from the comments on a Glenn Greenwald post from earlier this week: I am a Jew who has had the opportunity to live and work in Israel. God, I hope that the people who read Lieberman's garbage do not think it represents the thinking of any but the most minute fringe in Israel. I never met anybody in Israel who believed this sort of junk. Lieberman is a sick, perverted man with no sense of honor or decency. When he says things like this, he speaks neither for the Israeli government nor for the Israeli people. -- Carl from L.A. The letter is in response to a post by Greenwald in which Greenwald dissects the strange bedfellows of AIPAC activist and cheerleader Joe Leiberman (I-CT) and frothing-at-the-mouth Rapture lunatic Reverend Hagee. I commented on this earlier this week in the LJ Atheist Community here: http://community.livejournal.com/atheist/1445891.html . My point being, I know that not all Israelis are evil Zionists, rabid L...

Here is an edifying bit on Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress' now thoroughly shamed (but illogically non-imprisoned) neocon go-to guy for pre-war dirty work. In 1996, the CIA was trying to organize a serious attempt to overthrow Saddam using the INA, headed by a former Saddam hit man, Iyad Allawi who had broken with Saddam and walked in to work for MI-6 in the late 1970s. The Brits eventually brought him to the CIA in 1992. Allawi had assets inside Saddam's military but Chalabi betrayed the coup out of jealousy. The INA was the preferred CIA instrument, its intelligence was being checked out by technical means, and its success would have meant the end of Chalabi's funding. In any case, Chalabi got caught fabricating information and the CIA cut him off. He merely went to the Pentagon and the checks kept coming because his fabricated intelligence on Iraq's WMD was so essential to selling the war, this from a man who had already failed four CIA polygraphs so that...