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Monthly Archives: June 2013

Friday Night Music

Okay, it’s somewhat depressing, but the obituaries do provide great fodder for this feature, which I am really contemplating either retiring or lightening up on the no repeat artists rule. Anyway, Bobby Bland died this week, so he’s the featured artist. I do remember listening to some of his music on my first transistor radio, […]

American Blind Justice

This is one of those stories that is so outrageous that it is beyond my poor literary power to express. Still, I will do my mite by passing it on, in hopes that the outrage will spread and, in the end, that outrage might cause some semblance of justice to prevail. Our tale takes place […]

The Court rules on gay rights

We got a bit of good news out of the Supreme Court yesterday, proving among other things that race remains the final frontier in this country. Who would have thought that the Supreme Court would protect gay marriage one day after reinstating Jim Crow. Some folks are disappointed that the court ducked the chance to […]

Privatizing the security state. What could go wrong?

Digby raises a good point at Hullabaloo, about the fact that there is a lot of money to be made by expanding the security state. We pour billions into collecting haystacks of data and then start searching for the needles, and some folks are getting very rich indeed as more and more of the work […]

The Free Press, Post 9/11 edition

A few weeks ago I commented on the fact that the mainstream press has a very limited attention span, and that the recent re-revelations about the extent to which Washington is spying on us all had effectively driven a number of faux scandals off the front page and out of the mass media mind. Now, […]

Midsummer getaway

This post will have nothing to do with politics, unless in the course of it I make some snarky comments about rich people, with whom I am currently surrounded. As I mentioned yesterday, my wife and I find ourselves staying at the Hopkins Inn in LItchfield County. This came about sort of through happenstance. Our […]

Friday Night Music

This is the Midsummer's Night isn't it, and summer begins, some went searching for a summer song. While I myself don't actually have the Summertime Blues this seemed like a decent choice, especially because I really don't have a whole lot of time to go looking around for music. We are on a bit of […]

There’s pressure, and then there’s pressure

Looks like Obama is about to cave once again, this time marching us, against his own better judgment, waist deep or more into the Big Muddy of Syria. Well, you can’t blame the man. He knows he’s only setting us up for trouble down the road, but the man is under a lot of pressure: […]

My fashion sense appreciated

We all get emails and all of us get spam, which may be a good thing, as it might make it harder for the NSA to get at the interesting stuff. And then there’s the stuff that’s betwixt and between. I mean I really hoped, as I began reading a recent email, that I had […]

Yet one more modest proposal

David Atkins asserts that someday it will be a crime for Wal-mart to pay its employees so little that most of them end up getting food stamps or some other form of government aid. I’m not sure about that, but it occurs to me that a sufficiently creative state legislature could do something about this. […]