"Bus Stop" - Fountains of Wayne"
Eerily accurate Hollies cover by FOW. These guys are amzing mimics -- in every show I've seen they usually break out a medley of cheesy 70s hits -- Steve Miller, ELO, you name it -- and do it with uncanny note-for-note precision.
So I finally get something halfway done and Internet Explorer decides to shut down -- very aggravating. For once I don't think I can play Typepad for my woes.
Well finally settled back in at home and work after several days on the road took me to Oakland, Lake Tahoe, Reno, Philadelphia. Bethlehem PA, Woodbridge, NJ, and back to DC. Two coast to coast flights, about 500 miles of driving, and a train ride for good measure. My goal this week is to not leave the DC city limits.
- Raacists?!! We all know that is liberals who are the real racists. Really. (Conservatives seem to think that we liberals are actually never around living, breathing right wingers, that we are never privvy to the casual racism of the family get-together or the business meeting where these attitudes are manifested matter of factly and without the faux decorum generally demonstrated at places like NRO.)
- Speaking of racism, I am really happy to hear that NYC's incredibly offensive stop-and-frisk policy has been held unconstitutional by a federal district judge in what sounds like an appropriately scathing ruling. As the linked article notes, what is in many ways the most amazing thing about the policy was the unabashed ways in which Mayor Bloomberg and Chief Ray Kelly admitted to the profiling and insisted it was perfectly fine. Bloomberg's reaction to the decision strikes me as hysterical.
- Fuck Dylan Matthews. Erik Loomis takes the little neo-liberal turd to task. Yeah, unions don't have a great track record on matters of policy, Dylan. The 40 hour week, the FLSA, Social Security, pensions, health insurance, OSHA, mine safety, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid -- not a decent idea in the bunch. Not like those well meaning geniuses at AEI. (Were I commisar for a day, I would sentence young Matthews to a 60-hour week of laying cinder block in the DC heat at a sub-minimum wage -- he'd last about four hours. I'm pretty confident I could outlast him even at my advanced age.)
- I often find the New York Times treatment of women as reflected through the lives of an impossibly small elite to be deeply annoying and misleading -- you know, the old "trends" that exist in a handful of U.S. zip codes only. Still, I thought yesterday's magazine piece looking at the lives of a small group of women who a decade ago were said to be part of a trend of accomplished women opting out of the work force and who were now trying to return to work to be worthwhile in a cautionary tale kind of fashion. The thing that struck me was that even with all of the advantages that most of these women had in terms of education, credentials, and connections, most of them found a return to professional life to be extraordinarily difficult and characterized by much lower levels of economic attainment than once would have been possible for them. To me, the article suggested the folly of ceasing to be an economic actor for an extended period in a society in which this is the only truly valued activity. These women sacrificed untold career earnings, became utterly dependent on their husbands -- which was destructive to them and their marriages in a variety of ways -- and made their families more vulnerable to the vaguaries of today's economy, all the while trying to live up to some strange oppressive notion of perfect motherhood that is in many ways more stultifying and self-defeating than anything that 1950s ideal ever dished up. There is something so disturbing about hyper-achievers reducing their talents to planning the best birthday parties, school auctions, and home renovations.
What is going on with all of you? Hopefully Typepad will allow you to tell me.
