Tarek Speaks! Or, Some Good News Already

Shocked as I have been by the apparent self-immolation of the databases that once powered the mightly Liquid List, I've been uncharacteristically quiet lately. I'm in my little laboratory, dreaming up a new way to revive TLL to its former glory, though I don't know if I won't just get distracted by the new New Yorker. Who knows.

Anyhow, some quickies, my lovelies:

At last some good news. I welcome any legitimate presidential candidates. If you get the signatures and submit them in keeping with the laws of the state, you get on the ballot, even if I hate you, and even if you will assuredly be consigning our nation to a life of absolute evil and despair for a hundred fortnights. But if you don't, buddy, you're not getting on the ballot. Period. That's the law. Bam.

Best. Slogan. Ever.


I'm desperately searching for a good photo of this phenomenon. I don't know why, but I'm just fascinated by the idea that all four lanes of a major highway would be directed in the same direction. It just stuns you at the basic level of consciousness, like seeing a new fully grown tree somewhere, or the first time I saw a plane after three days of empty skies in September 2001. Can't find a photo anywhere, though.

Politics: Good News, Bad News

The post-ponement (for now) of the CA Recall Election is good news because it at least will force the state to guarantee that votes get counted, but it's bad news because the momentum was swinging in the right direction on a few points, and the money people like Schwarzenegger and supporters of prop 54 have won't run out any time soon.

Politics: Police Chief, Soldier, Endless

An Iraqi police chief was assassinated, and a U.S. soldier killed by a rocket-propelled grenade in separate attacks today in Iraq.

Meanwhile, we're certainly not "bogged down" or anything in this war, even though we talk about the mysterious Sunni triangle like it is a mystical place where the RPGs grow as high as an elephant's eye. For cryin' out loud.

But if you're interested in self-delusion, get a load of the Cheney quote from this weekend's appearance on "Meet the Press." In responding to charges that he is making money from the $2 billion in no-bid contracts that Halliburton has received for work in Iraq, Cheney reassured Russert that a failsafe system is in place to make sure nothing untoward occurs: "I don't know any of the details of the contract because I deliberately stay away from any information on that," Mr. Cheney said.

I feel better already.

Politics: That Worked Like a Charm

Palestinians Rally Round Arafat After Exile Threat. I'm sure that's what Israel was after.

I am dealing with an ongoing internal conflict about this matter. I have reached the conclusion that nobody is right, and that almost everyone involved is largely in the wrong.

I am disgusted that American political candidates aren't allowed to say the word "even-handed" with regard to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict without getting attacked, but the City Council in one of our largest cities can consider a resolution reading "in remembering the victims of Sept. 11 we also remember and acknowledge the truth as to who the perpetrators themselves claim to be, that is, Muslims, carrying out the will of the Deity of their religion known as Islam."

I believe suicide bombings are vile, abhorrent things, and I would never defend their heartless terror. I also don't believe in tomahawk missile assassinations and destroying homes to advance a cause.

I do believe that there needs to be some new thinking about Israel and Palestine and the United States. But I don't think the Bush administration's approach -- to advocate for Arafat's removal but otherwise sit largely mum while both sides slowly kill themselves -- is effective either. There is a strong belief that America has a job to do here, and if you compare the job Clinton did with the job Bush is doing, Clinton's approach was the clear winner. The players came to the table with Bill Clinton. With George Bush, the table is buried under rubble and behind a soaring brick wall.

Nobody ever thought for a second that Clinton was abandoning Israel in this approach. The Bush administration has redefined the standard for behavior toward Israel, so that now only open animosity toward Palestine is viewed as strong enough. Under Clinton (who, incidentally, hasn't done everything in his power to destroy the U.S. diplomatic infrastruction, like Bush has), everyone knew what the story was, but at least we didn't bother with name-calling. American diplomacy in the last two years has destroyed a lot of progress and weakened the structure for any future work for a long time.

Now, can't we admit that this was a failure, and that it needs something different, maybe something that worked better before? Something closer to Clinton's approach?

Politics: Be Better

Here is a terrible story in which, in the latest wave of violence in Iraq, two coalition soldiers were killed and 10 were wounded in the last 24 hours.

The story also mentions how a batch of allied Iraqi security personnel were mistaken for enemy forces and fired on by U.S. personnel, killing eight and wounding five other people.

Aaron at naw pointed out earlier that with our Vietnam-like troop rotations, we will have more of this stuff to deal with, more mistakes, more death and injury and more confusion. The promise from Rumsfeld that this war wouldn't last more than 5 months has proven patently false. We've got people on the ground who didn't fight the war, who don't know who their friends and enemies are, and who are heavily armed. We also have tired, over-worked and cynical soldiers who have been lied to by their commanders and who miss their wives, children and homes.

That's a recipe for disaster.

Politics: Pack It In, Then

Krugman is on a tear, and he's right of course. But it sounds so damn depressing.

Sadness: The Man In Black

Johnny Cash died today at age 71.

Last November, I was in Houston, Texas, which I consider a terrible place, though I'm sure some disagree. I was there for work, and it rained every single friggin' day, and it was cold and miserable. I had been doing non-partisan work to make sure underprivileged folks in the city could vote in the election there, and I despite the overall success of the effort, I was depressed, because of the political and physical landscape, and because I was driving an SUV on a perpetually under-construction highway through a waterlogged sprawl-nightmare.

All the music on the radio in Houston sucked.

Then, I came across this NPR two-part interview with Cash by Bob Edwards. As I cruised through Houston's barrio to our temporary office, I listened to the man in black talk about loss and redemption, and I felt a little better.

Recall: Blue Sky

On September 11, 2001, I got out of the Farragut West Metro station here in Washington and started walking north toward Dupont Circle. Like that day we've seen on TV so many times, the sky here was snapdragon blue and cloudless. There was a light breeze.

I ducked into a record store because the date was already important to me: I picked up Bob Dylan's "Love and Theft," which dropped that day. I was at the store early, but the manager was checking in new disks and let me in. When I was finished, I continued to my office job, on the tenth floor of a relatively big building above the circle. It was not yet 8:30 am.

I listened to the record, smiling at its gentle pace and simple melodies. Bob's last record, the Grammy-winning "Time Out of Mind," was fulll of tortured souls and dreams darkened by reality. This record had tunes of love and devotion, and grizzled rockers offering no apologies.

One song, "High Water (For Charley Patton)," was a slow-building ominous tune about definite endings and absolute edicts. It was eerily prescient.

I listened to the words and thought that Bob was creating a whole different world with the song, a hazardous, mythical, angry, sad world, like the troubled land of "Desolation Row." As a flood once and for all wipes away this stained universe, final acts of desperation and careless impulses consume everyone: "Judge says to the High Sheriff/ I want them dead or alive/ Either one, I don't care/Highwater everywhere." and "Highwater rising/ six inches above my head/ Coffins droppin' in the street like balloons made out of lead."

Then the first airplane his the World Trade Center. Staff members all collected in the conference room to watch the morning broadcast of a long shot of the twin towers, smoke billowing from one as we all listened to Katie and Matt pondering the terrible accident, and wondered how a plane hadn't accidentally bumped into the tall buildings earlier.

I went back to my desk and listened to music for another minute. Then I was heading through the conference room toward the other side of the office when I stopped to rubberneck for a minute. The second plane hit right as I was standing there, and I just sat down in a chair. Everybody knows what happened next.

Much later, I was trying to get home to Virginia, and we had to walk a pretty good distance because so much of our public transportation is mingled with startlingly important things. Every morning and every afternoon, my wife and I transferred from bus to train or train to bus at the Pentagon, which had been hit by an airplane. On the train as we made our way out of the city, we were stopped one station short of the Pentagon, and made to offload at Arlington Cemetery.

We walked along the George Washington Parkway, trying to figure how to get to our home, which was only a half-mile away directly through the locked down cemetery and the adjacent Fort Myer, also under lockdown. Instead, we wandered over to Rosslyn, creeped out by the tall buildings and industrial smell of burning Pentagon, which lingered around our South Arlington home for days.

I remember the sky was strangely still very blue, and totally cloudless, and no matter how long you stared, there was never an airplane.

Music: Great Day in the Morning. The Pixie Reunite.

The MTV is reporting that the Pixies will reunite for a tour and possibly an album.

I am speechless.

Politics: Blog Within a Blog

There's a good discussion going on in the comments from our post about RIAA the other day. I'm going to put my latest comment in here to tell you to read the whole thing. One of the commenters is using the handle James Hetfield, which is a riot:

I think it would be awesome if the actual James Hetfield was joining a comment discussion about music downloading on our site.

However, I am skeptical that is the case.

Nonetheless, I do believe that there is a connections between a craven industry that doesn't pride itself on creating a product worth your $20, the rise of music sharing and the death of the small record store.

Look at the numbers for music purchases today and you can see that if some adjustments were made (in quality and breadth of product offering, price points and marketing techniques) everybody could thrive.

When we were undergoing crushing austerity measures to save enough money to buy a house and start a family, I downloaded music. Much of what I downloaded I eventually replaced with purchased music, because I wanted to support the artist (several of whom have lost or dropped their labels because they were poorly promoted, badly managed and more). Today, I download songs for a buck a piece from Apple, and I buy only records that I really, really want to have in complete form (got that Frank Black record yesterday, natch).

If a record were $12 in the store instead of $19, I would probably buy more records. If I buy ten records a year now, I spend $190 bucks a year. If the price drops to $12, I would probably buy twice as many records, spending $240 bucks a year.

More money, more stores, more artists, better music on the radio, voila. World peace? Maybe not. But I think we need only look back on the summer of "Hot in Herre" to know what we don't want from record labels anymore.

It's time to think different about music. If labels aren't willing to market and promote real artists who can make a listenable cd of songs as opposed to the next 15 minutes worth of ear candy, they deserve what they get, CDs will wither and die, and even James Hetfield can't change that.

Politics: Poindexter Op-Ed in the NYTimes

These aren't the droids you're looking for.

Politics: The Point Behind Dean

David Shribman in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette makes an interesting point that Howard Dean may be surging in the polls and taking over the conventional wisdom's frontrunner position in the Democratic race for president precisely because he's actually talking about things, instead of talking about nothing, or trying to rhyme, or whatever.

Shribman starts by pointing out Dean's rising poll numbers, then:

You don't need to delve into the messy statistical innards of poll results to figure this out. The country is basically split evenly between Republicans and Democrats. Half the country is skeptical of the president's performance. Since Republicans are politically inclined to sympathize with Bush's assumptions and policies and temperamentally inclined to stand by their man anyway, it stands to reason that the dissent is coming from the Democrats.

Easy conclusion (though not so easy that all the presidential candidates haven't drawn it yet): Beating up on the president is really, really good politics if you're a Democrat and if you're running for the White House.

Dean was the first to figure this out and remains the most artful in carrying it out. The political establishment is having a grand time plotting the trajectory of Dean's progress, as if he were a tropical storm bearing down on Bermuda, and the current meteorology suggests that, now that Hurricane Dean has made landfall, he is veering right. Maybe he is, maybe he's not. It doesn't matter. He hasn't lost sight of the main game in the surprisingly narrow world of primary politics, which this year turns out to be making an issue of taking issue with Bush.

Then he concludes with what I, as a voter, have been praying for since I started watching the news:

No fluff in Dean. No black-and-red checkered shirt, no peanut brigade, no tales from Project Mercury, no rhyming couplets about self-esteem. And that just might be the point behind his rise. Dean benefits subliminally, perhaps, from the doctor bit, and he may get a bounce from Vermont's reputation as a flinty, plain-spoken mountainous redoubt on the frosty frontier hard by Quebec. But mostly it is what he says that has made the difference. In 2004, that rarest of political years, the premium might be on the political, not the personal. Miracles do happen.

Indeed.

Politics: Crass

Ellis Henican's column in this morning's Newsday strikes a welcome refrain from a family member of a 9/11 victim:

The living brother stood in the glorious sunshine of Union Square with other relatives of Sept. 11, describing their ambitious plans for tonight. They will gather in this park, which had been such a center of public sorrow in the weeks after the terror attack. Quietly and together, they will walk to Ground Zero carrying small lights in brown paper bags. Then, with many hundreds of others, they will encircle the big hole in the ground that is the World Trade Center site.

"As we encircle the site," Andrew Rice said, "we think of ourselves as protecting it."

Protecting it from all those who are trying to use it for their own grubby ends.

The glomming politicians. The spotlight-hogging media hordes. The slogan-bearing sign-wavers. The hawkers selling Ground Zero trinkets to gullible tourists. The legal debaters and bill proposers or self-congratulatory celebrities, all of them cynically stage-managing this desperate human tragedy to advance their partisan or selfish or promotional concerns.

For one brief moment, Andrew Rice said, let all of them please stay home.

I concur.

Politics: Wither Alabama

The voter of Alabama overwhelmingly turned down Republican Governor Riley's plan to reverse the wildly unfair tax system in the state and rescue it from a deel fiscal crisis. Riley, a conservative former congressman who had never before supported a tax increase, struck a recalcitrant note and decided to talk about how he was going to win back the people's trust, all while apparently cutting about $1 billion from the budget.

The vote was badly affected by wealthy people who were afraid of paying more taxes. Deceptive ads swayed public opinion against the plan, even though its centerpiece was to change this fundamental imbalance: In Alabama, a family of four making about $4,700 a year pays about 12% state income taxes, while a family of four making, say, $200,000 a year pays about 5%.

Roll tide.

This morning on NPR, the education supervisor for the state, Ed Richardson, stated some jarring statistics, ones he has mentioned throughout the futile battle to get this plan by voters: Next year, Alabama will lose 4,000 teachers and 2,000 support personnel in the public schools in an effort to make the budget cuts necessary to keep schools open at all. These cuts will be part of a 20-30% reduction in the funding for schools in the state.

Here's to the future.

Politics: Good Riddance

Barbara Comstock, the scuzzy spokesperson in charge of bald-faced lies at the Justice Department will be departing for a public relations job at a lobbying firm, Blank Rome Government Relations.

Here's an excerpt from release about her new job:

Previously, she served as Director of Research and Strategic Planning at the Republican National Committee responsible for developing and managing the research operations utilized for the Bush 2000 campaign. In 2001, Comstock developed the RNC's "Winning Women" communications initiative and Web site to promote the Bush Administration's policies to women voters.

It's nice that there isn't the appearance of rewarding government insiders with peach jobs when they are tired of earning nothing for their particular cause. I know both sides do this, and I don't have any problem saying I think it's grotesque on all counts.

Politics: Harsh Reality? We'll Ignore It

The Madison Capitol Times editorial page -- always ably overseen by John Nichols -- had an excellent observation of President Bush's unbelievably over-the-top request for $87 billion to fight the unnecessary war in Iraq this morning. This is the cost of Halliburton's plunder:

What the president did not mention in his speech is that the $87 billion more he seeks to fund his occupations abroad could pay for 1.4 million new teachers at home. It could help 11 million low-income families meet housing needs. It could provide health care coverage for 30 million children.

For Wisconsinites and residents of other states that are struggling to maintain state and local services in the face of economic doldrums, the $87 billion would balance every state budget.

Overseas, the United States should begin to address the conditions that create the frustration and resentments that lead to terrorism. The president's $87 billion could, according to UNICEF, meet the basic human needs of every impoverished person on Earth.

So what do our lawmakers, responsible for initiating and authorizing the spending that America undertakes, have to say?

No problem.

Politics: RIAA Sues You

RIAA has announced lawsuits against another pile of music sharing services as well as some power-downloaders, while announcing an amnesty program for individuals who download music.

I've said before and I'll say again: lower prices, diversify the acts that get a chance to make music and cut out the monkey-see monkey-do signing of copycat artists and you'll sell records. Until then, each of these labels is making the downloaders into heroes while alienating future music buyers.

In a related note, the local record chain in DC is closing down, because retailers get screwed by the pricepoint on cds so badly that they cannot compete against the massive chains. Combine that with a little regular small business mismanagement, and you're out of business. Now where am I going to get the new Frank Black album tomorrow?

Admin:Note to Readers and Oliver

Our hosting company apparently migrated Liquidlist.com over to a new server, so what seemed like a problem with Blogger was really a problem with our host. We apologize for the grievous lack of posts for the past few days, and will promise to kick somebody's *ss when we get a chance.