Alberto and George

This is certainly the most incompetent administration that I have seen in my lifetime. This goes to show that all of the moronic Republicans who said that intelligence was not necessary for a president were simply out of their gourds. George Bush makes Jimmy Carter seem like George Washington. It is difficult to see how this current administration can achieve anything during its last year and a half. They will have their hands full just staying out of jail. It is unfortunate that Tony Snow is willing to let himself be dragged down into all of this mess.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/politics/4815887.html

Good Riddance

At least, no soldiers had to die because of his mistakes at the World Bank....
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/17/world/18cnd-worldbank.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Alberto Gonazles and Greg Newton

It really surprises me when Democrats and some Republicans criticize our Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales. I think that he is exactly the sort of attorney general that Americans deserve. Americans no longer abide by International Law or even by the Rule of Law internally, and Alberto Gonzales is the perfect type of legal mind for people of that mindset.

It reminds me a bit of a statement by Wake Forest All American Tim Duncan a few years back when a journeyman player from Duke named Greg Newton, called Duncan, soft and passive. When asked by the media for a reaction, Duncan responded that the journeyman Newton was the greatest player he had ever seen.

Alberto Gonzales is the most brilliant lawyer I have ever seen.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2007/05/11/gonzales_hearing/index.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/washington/15cnd-attorneys.html?hp

The Case for Unions

Conservatives and libertarians often deride unions unfairly. While most people would agree that there have been many problems with the way that unionism has played out in North America and Europe, at the same time, unions can play a beneficial role by confronting oppressive government policies with a membership of millions united. This can be especially important when dealing with authoritarian governments, as shown by Lech Walensa.

Well, into the same as it ever was category, the U.S., under Paul Bremer, attempted to continue Sadaam's policy of banning unionization among oil workers. I guess the rationale was, "hey, you guys are free now, you don't need any stinking union." Let's face it. The real reason why business-owners, conservatives and authoritarian governments dislike unions is because it cuts into profits. When unions such as state bar associations or medical associations are created and act in the same manner in terms of restricting output, few voices are heard decrying this type of monopolization.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=192709

Time to Get out?

"A comprehensive Iraqi survey has been conducted annually by ABC News, USA Today, the British Broadcasting Corp. and ARD (the German public broadcasters association) over the last three years. Its findings illuminate the most important trends in Iraqi politics. They show that, by March 2007, no less than 78 percent of Iraqis opposed the presence of U.S. forces, compared with 65 percent in November 2005 and 51 percent in February 2004. In the latter year, only 17 percent of the population thought that violence against U.S. forces was acceptable, while by 2007 the figure had risen to 51 percent."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/05/14/iraq/index1.html

Do They Hate Us for Our Freedoms?

I have never believed the Administration's line about the Arabs hating us for our freedoms. There are two major reasons why many Arabs hate America: 1) they resent having our troops stationed near Muslim holy areas and 2) they resent what they perceive as American unfairness regarding the Holy Land.

There may or may not be good reasons for the two above policies, but first, Americans need to recognize why our country is so disliked by muslims, rather than accepting the silly neo-conservative argument that "they hate us for our freedoms," as we decide whether giving up so much of the few freedoms that we have left is worth the cost.
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0701a.asp

Land of the Free?

Still think so? Take a look at the following article: http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,660220395,00.html

George Harrison was a Libertarian Hero

Song:           Taxman 
Duration:       2.37
Track No.:      No. 1, Side 1 Revolver
Composer:       Harrison
Vocals:         George Harrison
Year:           1966
Lyrics:

(One, two, three, four, one two)

Let me tell you how it will be
There's one for you, nineteen for me
'Cause I'm the taxman
Yeah, I'm the taxman

Should five percent appear too small
Be thankful I don't take it all
'Cause I'm the taxman
Yeah, I'm the taxman

(If you drive a car car) I'll tax the street
(If you try to sit sit) I'll tax your seat
(If you get too cold cold) I'll tax the heat
(If you take a walk walk) I'll tax your feet

Taxman!

'Cause I'm the taxman
Yeah, I'm the taxman

Don't ask me what I want it for
(Ah, ah, Mr. Wilson)
If you don't want to pay some more
(Ah, ah, Mr. Heath)
'Cause I'm the taxman
Yeah, I'm the taxman

Now my advise for those who die
(Taxman!)
Declare the pennies on your eyes
(Taxman!)

'Cause I'm the taxman
Yeah, I'm the taxman

And you're working for no one, but me
(Taxman!)

http://web.mit.edu/scholvin/www/harrison/hbeatles.htm#Taxman

Wolfowitz

Has there ever been a more incompetent administration than the current Bush Administration? In George Bush land, somehow it is possible for people like Paul Wolfowitz and Condi Rice and Alberto Gonzales to be completely wrong and erroneously put the country into an unneeded war with Iraq and yet Rice gets a promotion to Secretary of State, Gonzales becomes Attorney General, and Wolfowitz gets a sinecure running the World Bank.

Apparently, in Bush Bizarro World, Affirmative Action, Bad! Nepotism, Good!

At least, the President should have known that the Europeans were going to be fuming mad at Wolfowitz because of his misrepresentations regarding the war in Iraq and would look for any means possible to exact some revenge on Wolfowitz. And now they have it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/washington/08wolfowitz.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Spider-man 3

I saw Spider-man 3 yesterday and I thought that it was pretty good, although not as good as the first two Spider-man flicks and probably not as good as either the last Batman or the last Superman, but those movies were all excellent, so there is no shame in being only "pretty good."

One thing that might be a little disappointing for some of us fathers out there is that I found Spider-man 3 to be much scarier than the first two Spider-man movies and I cannot really recommend it for children under 8 years old. I decided to screen it before taking my sons and I think this one is much darker than the first two. The Venom character, especially was pretty scary looking and the violence seemed much more hardhitting than the first two. I do think that watching at home on DVD would be much less scary as the film just wouldn't quite have the same impact.

Here come some plot spoilers.

Spider-man 3 was unique in that at the end of the movie, Spidey is left without any bad guys who still have issues with him. Harry apparently returns from the dark side to save Spidey and then, once redeemed, appears to die, although in the comic book world you never know. Venom seems to have been blown up, but I doubt it. This is also without mentioning that Venom, in the comic book, ultimately becomes a hero anyway.

Finally, Spidey and the Sandman, who was ret-conned as the killer of his uncle, basically reach an understanding and go their separate ways, with the Sandman becoming an advocate for universal health care for children. I am not kidding! Although it was a nice statement about not seeking revenge and all, it still was a strange way to end the movie, given that the Sandman had just tried to kill Peter, MJ and Harry.

Another problem with the movie was Mary Jane Watson. In the comics, MJ was an energetic gal, who was always chasing Peter and calling him "tiger". In these movies, she is basically a shy pouting type who keeps getting in the way. I know that in the comics, Superman and Spider-man had to save their women from time to time, but it didn't happen each and every issue. Now, in the Spider-man trilogy, all three movies have ended with Spider-man arriving to save Mary Jane. Please, if there is another sequel, no more MJ saving and if there is another Superman, no more kryptonite. These plot devices have become boring and hacknyed.

Ditto for Aunt May. In the comic book, she was afraid of Spider-man. This was good because she was a boring character who basically was a burden to Peter/Spidey, so we weren't subjected to so many boring speeches by her. Here, she always has to give Peter pep talks. It gets kind of old.

It seems that Sony has left things at the end of Spider-man 3 so that they can either go forward with more sequels or stop. I have to believe that there will be more, given the amazing gate that Spider-man 3 has garnered so far. My prediction is that the next movie will have Dr. Connors, Peter's physics professor as his new villain. Dr. Connors, who is lacking his right arm, attempts to re-generate his limb and is successful, but unfortunately, the process also turns him into a powerful lizard-man. If not Dr. Connors, then I predict that the next villain will be the Hob Goblin and look for Venom to pop up again, perhaps as a scary-looking good guy.

Finally, we will all have to watch for the revenge of Gwen Stacy. Will she capture Peter Parker's heart on the big screen after being unceremoniously killed by Marvel and the Green Goblin some 35 years ago, with MJ stepping into her shoes as Peter's main squeeze.

Rodney Dangerfield

Rodney Dangerfield used to have a great bit about not ever getting any respect. We usually think that such a fate only befalls the truly mediocre among us, but there truly are some interesting stories involving individuals ultimately considered truly great, but who were overlooked at the beginning. I guess Vincent Van Gogh might be one of the more well-known examples. Another would be Johnny Unitas, the great quaterback for the Baltimore Colts, who was unable to even make his hometown team, the perennially-awful Pittsburgh Steelers.

Add the Beatles to this category. When they originally tried to get a recording contract, they were turned down by virtually all of the studios in England, and were finally only able to get a four song deal with a comedy label run by George Martin, who had so little faith in their abilities that he had them immediately fire their drummer. Out went Pete Best, in came Ringo Starr and Martin still wouldn't let Ringo play on the Beatles first single, Love Me Do.

Then, after the Beatles made it big in Britain, they tried to duplicate their success in the U.S. and virtually no one wanted to carry them, not even Capitol Records, which was Parlophones' corresponding American label. The Beatles ended up issuing their first American album on something called VeeJay Records, called Introducing the Beatles. Only a year or so later, would Capitol recognize its error and come out with a similar title called The Early Beatles.

Richard Starkey

People have often derided the Beatles' solo careers, but each of them was hugely successful as a solo artist during the first five years after breaking up. Compare Ringo, for example to any of the former members of Pink Floyd, the Who, Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones, none of whom had anything close to as much success as solo artists....

http://www.whatgoeson.com/features/the-beatles/let-ringo-in.html

Drug War

Will Republicans and Democrats ever wake up and realize that the war on drugs is in actuality a war on people, most of them black and hispanic. In spite of the most draconian penality scheme this side of Indonesia, the drugs just keep pouring in and the only response that any of our brilliant people in Washington have is to up the penalties even more, and put Sudafed behind the counter. If they ever re-make Midnight Express, they are likely to use the United States as the locale, given that our current drug war policies make Turkey look lenient.

Really, the only hope is for the unheard voices of the American people to stand up and say to the mediocre politicians who run this country for their own benefit rather than ours, "Listen, we've upped our standards, so up yours.

http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/mayfaire/latimes22.htm

Spider-man 3

Spider-man 3 is getting mixed reviews. I will see it no matter what since my sons are dying to go, but I felt that Sony might be making a mistake by having him confront numerous enemies in one movie as this seems to be what killed the first go-around of Batman sequels.

The original Batman had only the Joker and the first 2 Spider-man movies had one villain each, in the Green Goblin and Doc Ock. I think it becomes difficult to maintain focus in a movie and to develop the bad guy characters when you have multiple villains. Superman on the other hand has the problem of almost always having Luthor as a villain, which has happened in four out of the five Superman movies. The other had Richard Pryor--bleeh! Warner needs to pit Superman against Doomsday or Darkseid so that everyone can see just how much better Superman has gotten in the last 20 years.

The last Batman movie, Batman Begins, had things just about right. It introduced one villain, Ras al Ghul, while most of the focus was on another villain Scarecrow, but it was refreshing because there was no Joker, or Penguin or Mr. Freeze or Catwoman or any of the other hacknyed criminals of Batman history.

http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=10472

http://www.ifmagazine.com/review.asp?article=1770

http://www.slashfilm.com/2007/05/04/movie-review-spider-man-3/

Affirmative Action

One of the most aggravating hypocrisies of the Bush Administration and its Republican enablers, has been the disconnect between their public stance against Affirmative Action and their actual behavior in terms of hiring. The Bush Administration has been composed of some of the most mediocre individuals that I can remember, going back to the first Reagan administration.

Accordingly, the truth comes out. Republicans are not against Affirmative Action at all. They simply use it as a political wedge to separate people and their party from the Democrats, while all the time serving up people like Albert Gonzales and Condi Rice who would never have achieved their positions in the administration solely upon merit.

Here's an excerpt from a Salon article discussing Rice's career:

[Rice] the arrogant perfectionist is inevitably beset by contradictions and liabilities. With the possible exception of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, she is probably the nation's single most prominent beneficiary of affirmative action, but remains haughtily aloof from the black community and strikingly devoid of empathy for minorities who have not emulated her success. Those feelings were reflected in her decision to join the Republican Party during the Reagan era, supporting a conservatism undergirded by whites' resentment and dedicated to abolishing the reforms that had made her career possible. It is hard to like a striver who wants to pull up the ladder behind her.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2007/05/04/condi_rice/

Civil Liberties in Times of War

It is a great pity what has happened to the Wall Street Journal. A publication which used to promote the Reaganesque notions of smaller government, now seems to be little more than a neo-conservative tool of the Bush Administration, constanting harping on the need for more presidential power to accompany its editorial position, which can now be described as favoring three main things: Big Business; Big Government; and Imperialism.

Here is a quote from an article from the May 2nd Journal, by Kenneth Mansfield, professor of government at Harvard, which is remarkable for its flimsiness and lack of textual authority:

The lesson for us should be that circumstances are much more important for free government than we often believe. Civil liberties are for majorities as well as minorities, and no one should be considered to have rights against society whose exercise would bring society to ruin. The usual danger in a republic is tyranny of the majority, because the majority is the only legitimate dominant force. But in time of war the greater danger may be to the majority from a minority, and the government will be a greater friend than enemy to liberty. Vigilant citizens must be able to adjust their view of the source of danger, and change front if necessary. "Civil liberties" belong to all, not only to the less powerful or less esteemed, and the true balance of liberty and security cannot be taken as given without regard to the threat.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110010014

Alberto Gonzales and DOJ

As matters continue looking worse and worse for Gonzales and his incompetent cronies from the Regent School of Law, the following quote from the Washington Post should give Republicans pause:

An "obvious comparison and contrast to Gonzales is Janet Reno and her tenure as President Bill Clinton's attorney general. Pilloried for her role in the disaster at Waco, Texas in April 1993, Reno famously vexed her boss (so much so that he reportedly stopped talking to her) by appointing a special prosecutor to look into the Whitewater affair, a move that begat Kenneth Starr and Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky and ultimately the impeachment of Clinton in the winter of 1999. Reno was not necessarily a politically-savvy attorney general, had no real constituency in Washington, and did not earn rave reviews from legal scholars. But she was from time to time willing to act independently in a way that put her in direct conflict with the man who had given her the job. No similar examples stand out for Gonzales."

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/benchconference/2007/03/alberto_gonzales_a_willing_acc.html

More about the Beatles

I have just finished reading the memoir, Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles, by Geoff Emerick. Emerick served as the sound engineer for most of the Beatles final albums, working on all of them, except for Let It Be and later was the engineer for Paul McCartney's greatest post-Beatle album, Band on the Run.

There were a few things that really struck me from this book. The Beatles were creating music in the 1960's in a manner somewhat similar to much of what is now being done on computers. Back then the Beatles obtained similar effects by combining sounds and recordings from up to 4 different tapes.

One of the strange by-products of such recording methods is that it is possible to create a perfectly good sounding song that the band was not actually able to play all the way through in the studio without mistakes and flubs. Thus, a sound engineer could take several different sections of song run-throughs and then tape the various sections together, resulting in what appears to be a recording of a single complete song. Such an approach differs from a "live" recording in that a live recording, whether made in a studio or at a concert, will basically contain all the good and the bad playing and singing that took place and will lack over-dubs.

Thus, it has always puzzled me why the Beatles often derided the album they "made" with the title, Let It Be, because this album has many excellent songs and does not appear to be vastly inferior to their other albums. The reason is that the making of this album required much more cutting and pasting than virtually all the other Beatles albums. From what the people involved and the Beatles, themselves, have said, it appears that it took a Herculean effort by Phil Spector (yes, the same one currently on trial for murder) to present them with a decent final product. McCartney never liked the Spector-version of Let It Be and subsequently brought out his own version in 2003, called Let It Be Naked.

Yet, in spite of some similar production techniques, there obviously was much that separated the Beatles from the Brittany's and Ashley's of today's teen pop.

Nobody could ever doubt that both Lennon and McCartney could sing well and in a variety of styles. Second, Lennon and McCartney and George Harrison towards the end, were all top-notch composers who were creating the works they sang and played. Third, the Beatles made most of the decisions about what special effects to put on their records. Finally, the Beatles were all pretty good musicians. George Harrison excelled on lead guitar and McCartney was a musical virtuoso, who according to many accounts, was the best guitarist, drummer, bass player and pianist in the group. McCartney would go on to show this, by making two top-selling solo albums by himself in his basement, playing all of the instruments featured on both albums.

The Beatles reached stardom during a real flux in terms of music technology. Not only were multi-track recorders changing the way that music was made, the recent advances in stereo technology were also in play. Although stereo had been around since the late 1950's, it really did not reach extensive use until the early 1970's. Thus, most of the Beatles albums until Abbey Road and Let It Be, were originally mixed in mono, with the stereo versions being more or less an afterthought. Emerick, himself, recommended the mono versions where available.

However, since the release of most of the Beatles catalog on compact disk in 1988, people have been unable to purchase specific mono or stereo versions. Basically, the early albums were released in mono on CD and the later ones in stereo on CD. Many Beatles fans and engineers like Emerick, have specifically noted that Sgt. Pepper is far better in mono than in stereo. Those who are diehard adherents of the Beatles should keep their eyes open to see if their record company doesn't start to release the different versions.

Spider-man 3

With all the bad news out there, from Iraq to Blacksburg, it is good to know that at least one true American hero is getting ready to hit the silver screen again and take our minds off current events. On May 3, the third edition of Spider-man will be out and judging by the trailers, Spider-man 3 should be just as good as the first two, which were both spectacular.

Marvel has generally done a better job than DC at translating their heroes to film and this is probably due to their general adherence to utilize already proven popular plots from the underlying comic books. For some reason, DC generally tries to work up new scripts, which are rarely going to be as good as a popular story arc taken from the comic book's past.

In Spider-man 3, Marvel again follows this key to success by incorporating one of the most famous storylines from the comic book: the Venom saga, together with one of the more famous Spider-man villains, the Sandman. Best of all, and what kids and comic book fans are going to really love, is that Spider-man 3 shows Spidey wearing his infamous black costume. I don't want to give anything away, but the black costume is really cool and all my sons can talk about is Spider-man's black costume and the effects that it has on his crimefighting. It should be fantastic, especially for anyone able to see it on an Imax screen.

60 Minutes and Stop Snitching

60 Minutes did an apoplectic piece last night about the current phenomenon in black communities not to talk to police when they investigate crime. From my point of view, it makes perfect sense.

The criminal justice system is slanted against African-Americans in terms of criminal penalties and criminal targets. Most of the investigations involve the so-called "War on Drugs," under which possible sentences are so severe at the federal level as to make Draco look like a bleeding heart liberal. The United States currently has more people in prison than any other country in the world, including far larger nations such as China and India. The United States imprisons blacks at a far higher rate than did the formerly racist government of South Africa.

Why should any American black be interested in helping the very law enforcement officials who are dedicated to such dubious propositions? I can think of few good reasons.