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Saturday, May 08, 2004

and now for something...

"He's had success against me? You must be smoking Kool-Aid," said Bonds, now 9-for-30 against Leiter. "What success have you been reading? I don't fear no pitcher, dog."

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joe schmoe

"This is the sort of subject-changing our parents try to wean us from when we're in grade school. (Okay, I did that. But look what Tommy did!) And of course there's the side-issue that Lieberman is playing to the notion that there's some sort of 'they did this to us and now we did this to them' issue here. And (how many times does it have to be said?) these folks in Abu Ghraib weren't the 9/11 planners.

Nothing Lieberman said is untrue precisely. It does set us apart from fascists and mass-murderers that Americans are outraged by this and that there will be investigations and accountability. But talk about defining deviance down!"

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Friday, May 07, 2004

read em and weep

"Bush has other pressing reasons to keep Rumsfeld. Who would replace him? The Pentagon would be thrown into turmoil. By the rules of succession, the deputy secretary of defense would step up as acting secretary. But the deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, has even less credibility on Capitol Hill. In fact, Rumsfeld's entire inner circle is tainted—if not by the Abu Ghraib scandal, then by the controversies over the Iraq war and the "stovepiping" of false intelligence that led up to it. Confirmation hearings for a new secretary would be a golden opportunity to revisit each of these controversies in great detail, with an election just months away."

(two must reads in slate today. whats wrong with them? kaplan is consistently good.)


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stop hitting yourself

"Closely related to this aggressive ignorance is a third feature of Bush's mentality: laziness. Again, this is a lifelong trait. Bush's college grades were mostly Cs (including a 73 in Introduction to the American Political System). At the start of one term, the star of the Yale football team spotted him in the back row during the shopping period for courses. "Hey! George Bush is in this class!" Calvin Hill shouted to his teammates. "This is the one for us!" As governor of Texas, Bush would take a long break in the middle of his short workday for a run followed by a stretch of video golf or computer solitaire."

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kostars

"And of course about sex and cars, about the affection in breaking the boredom as well as being young and disco-punk-cool at the Umeå club Elvira in the 1980’s. From a purely scientific point of view, the rescue operation is conducted so that the water level in your hearing system is restored, which occurs as soon as you have modified your CD player with “KoKoMeMeDaDa”. The roar will pass and be replaced by small purling streams of swells and ringing. Thereby, a broader awakening of waterpower also appears that will, in the long run, be able to support more and more liberated amplifiers and music computers.
From the beginning to the end, “KoKoMeMeDaDa” is an angel of mercy of sound. The sound of pop in the cracks of the earthquake."

animated video blossom from kokomemedada


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balls also to the wall

"The higher ups, on the other hand, appear to have realized fairly quickly that exposing the abuses at Abu Ghraib would draw global attention to the entire system - Gitmo, the prisons in Afghanistan, their entire kinder, gentler gulag archipelago. So it looks like they adopted a strategy of letting the CID investigations run their secret course, while allowing Taguba's report to sit on the bureaucratic shelf.

The photographic evidence, however, couldn't be controlled -- the gang should have seen that from the start -- and somebody (Taguba?) became so angry about the way the report was being buried that they leaked it to Sy Hersh. The stonewall crumbled."

[link]


Thursday, May 06, 2004

familie affair

"On "Brother is to Son", all the special-ness that the full band brought to previous Danielson albums is fully present. The earnest vocal chirp of head Danielson himself is still there, not to mention the empassioned and punk-inspired hard strum of his acoustic guitar. He still leads his folk jamboree through the familial boy-girl harmonies as the banjos, bells, piano keys and jaw harp all teem with kinetic energy, like a deconstructionalist jug band led by a man who follows in the bold footsteps of Sun Ra, Don Van Vliet and Johnny Lydon as a truly original art terrorist."

mp3 things against stuff from brother is to son
mp3 daughters will tune you from brother is to son


[link]


the unicorns

"In that sense, they rival The Shins, or The Magnetic Fields, or any of the innumerable indie touchstones, but what truly sets Who Will Cut Our Hair apart is the near-total absence of traditional verse/chorus/verse framework in their songs; to nail beautiful, memorable lines with such remarkable ease is a feat unto itself, but to do so in essentially formless compositions is a different class of achievement entirely. Songs shift effortlessly from segment to segment, never relying upon the crutch of repetitive composition to create the illusion of a powerful hook. That's not to say that motifs aren't revisited throughout a song, but elementary concepts of A-B-A structure are abandoned in favor of brilliant, sprawling whole-song compositions."

mp3s tuff ghost and les os


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of of

"Of Montreal's long-out-of-print, high-ticket-eBay-item album "Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies: A Variety of Whimsical Verse" is now available through Polyvinyl as a re-issue. Prior to "Satanic Panic in the Attic," "Coquelicot's..." concept, arrangements, and artwork (a whopping sixteen page booklet featuring paintings by David Barnes) was described as Of Montreal's most ambitious album in terms of scope and quality."

reissue mp3 good morning mr edminton
new mp3 disconnect the dots


[link]


depeche mood

"Musically, (Patrick) Wolf sees himself as a 21st Century folk artist, which includes playing viola, accordion, and ukulele as well as his trusty laptop by his side. With laptop, the folk artist can go ANYWHERE and record, from a city squat to a forest cabin. The result is a mixture of haunting melodies, beautiful strings, glitch core beats, cut up field recordings, and passionate singing and lyrics. His musical influences include: Joni Mitchell, Meredith Monk, The Pixies, Vashti Bunyan, Chet Baker, Lucia Pamela, Pierre Boulez, PJ Harvey, Osvaldo Golijov, Digital Hardcore Recordings, Bjork, Clara Rockmore, John Cale and Nico."

streams london calling 2003


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