"I Want to Help You Ann" - The Lyres
A little nostalgia from my life as a Boston youth. I was talking to a young waiter at the local pizza joint the other night while out walking Stan -- I am sure his table was appreciative -- a kid who is a musician moving back to Cleveland where you can be a struggling artist and not starve -- or at least not as quickly as you do here in DC -- and he mentioned this band to me. It's a great garage rock sound -- reminiscent of "? and the Mysterians" and the Kingsmen. (One can really waste a prodigious amount of time on youtube -- this led me to a whole bunch of other Boston-based bands of the same time period, acts that had regional followings and local radio hits, when such a thing as local radio existed.)
Well, the big storm has not yet proven too terrible here in DC. A whole lot of warm rain -- Stanley and I just took a spin around the neighborhood and saw a few limbs down, but that's about it. I hope that this is as bad as it gets. If the power stays on I will be a happy camper.
Here's a few things that hot gotten my attention the past couple of days:
- Dave Weigel and Cornel West both remind us that Martin Luther King was a man of the left, a radical who was disliked by a large chunk of the American populace. I suppose it's great that he has become an unassailable icon, but I fear the real man and his politics have been lost in the process.
- I find the notion that building (or not building) a pipe line being a "make or break" environmental issue for Obama to be absurd hyperbole. So if this pipe line is greenlighted, I guess environmentalists are going to rally around Rick Perry. Evidently the Obama Administration is not afraid of the fall out.
- I never wrote much about the Libyan intervention. I was ambivalent and skeptical about the whole affair. But I never found the comparisons to Iraq to be very compelling. If anything, it reminded me much more of the Kosovo intervention, another situation where U.S. airpower was brought to bear with an insurgent local ground force. And, in the end, it has been very much of an allied effort, which makes it wildly different than the Iraq disaster.
- Glenn Greenwald really is an idiot about politics. I couldn't even write about this post for days, it made me so pissed. A ridiculous apologia for Ron Paul, a man who thinks we should get rid of FEMA, the Federal Reserve, shouldn't have passed the Civil Rights Act or Social Security or Medicare, who thinks women should not have the right to an abortion -- this guy is a right wing lunatic. And Greenwald thinks he deserves a serious look from progressives because he is opposed to military interventions and the war on drugs. Amusingly, while defending a guy who thinks Social Security should be abolished, Greenwald castigates Obama for contemplating changing its cost of living increase formula. Greenwald's politics, such as they are come down to two things: 1) he thinks that the maximalist civil liberties position -- at least those he cares about -- trump all things; and 2) he really hates Obama. He's a child. And how someone who thinks he is the ultimate civil libertarian can cozy up to a guy who wants to abolish the right to an abortion is beyond me.
Update: A must read column by Charles Blow about child poverty and attacks on family planning services and abortion rights. And, it should be noted, that the Obama Administration has 1) drawn a line in the sand against efforts to defund Title X, the federally funded family planning program for low income women; 2) intervened in law suits on behalf of Planned Parenthood in several states where Republicans have sought to defund its operations. and 3) made contraceptive coverage without co-pays a required benefit under health care reform. But hey, what's that as a progressive move compared to what Ron Paul has to offer.
What's up with all of you?
