They were shining there for you and me

or perhaps, "The Name of the Game" would have been more appropriate. I dunno, I like this one better.

BBC: Sweden approves wiretapping law

Sweden's parliament has approved controversial new laws allowing authorities to spy on cross-border e-mail and telephone traffic.

Glenn Greenwald:
Time Magazine uncritically prints Nancy Pelosi's "justifications" for the FISA "compromise":

The Congressional Democratic leadership explains that sacrificing the Fourth Amendment and the rule of law is necessary to win some more swing seats...

Nicole Belle, at Crooks n' Liars(via IOZ):

"Good God, is this why we elected a Democratic majority in 2006? So they can continue to enable the Bush administration as more and more independent sources have verified the criminality that we’ve claimed correctly all along? "

IOZ-

Yes.

In the above referenced post,Belle also writes:

John[Amato] mentioned our new coalition, Strange Bedfellows, earlier and I can’t reiterate more strongly the need to fight Blue Dogs like Steny Hoyer, so if you can donate, please do so. Think of the message it sends to Congress that we are willing to fight our own if they don’t represent us and our Democratic values the way they should.

I don't know about the details, but I wonder if that's true, because "Act Blue" sounds like an organization whose approach, starting with its very name, may antagonize voters in so-called "Blue-dog" districts, when outreach is needed. (I also think the views of those voters are often stereotyped, and therefore misunderstood, by people in the lefty blogosphere. Not everybody in the hinterlands is unreachable, any more than are all San Fransicans and Bostonians disappointed that Nader isn't running.) Then again that begs the question of whether abandonment of the democratic party altogether makes more sense that yet another attempt to fix it.

it's time to jump up and down

because today is Mike Gravel's birthday.


check out Eva Mendes's très chic hairdo,


according to the BBC, Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed got married in April.

Dennis sings

Don't forget to vote

Or, stay home and watch "Mexican Radio"; the result may be the same-- who knows?

also: "find Chuck Norris"

I posted part of this earlier, then took it down- it's not meant as a commentary on the Mississppi primary in particular.

Zuboly!

via mighty skimble, who also digs this.

(Zuboly describe themselves thusly: "the band is called zuboly, they are Hungarian. they are using authentic instruments(?), and the they are desrcibing themselves as an "broken-ethno" band...." )

Something tells me that their name is missing some obscure diacritical mark which I've never heard of, but they strike me as the sorts who wouldn't mind too much. I gather the song is about homeopathy(?).

the possible return of Friday middle eastern pop star blogging

photo of Dina Hayek(link appears to now be corrupted.)

Naturally 7:concert-sauvage-dans-le-metro

Concert sauvage dans le métro !
Uploaded by lapapsprod

via American Samizdat:

Naturally 7 is an American hip-hop group based in NYC. Here, they are videographed* on the Paris Metro, 01 December 2006.

As Zippy might observe: meanwhile, somewhere in Beaumont,Texas a middle-aged Francophile is salivating with jealousy...

*I guess that's the right term. Non?

No, it is NOT Hammer time

Vast Left discusses MC Hammer's unfortunate "anti-war" song(via Avedon.):

If MC Hammer can help save our troops with his new video, "Bring Our Brothers Home," why should I quibble?

Well, because it's deeply dishonest.

Still, I agree with the chorus, which is actually pretty catchy:

Bring 'em home
Bring our brothers home
Too much dying
They've been gone too long
People crying
That this war is wrong
Right or wrong, it's time to come home

Also, the endless montage of war footage and flagged-draped caskets is quite moving. How could it not be?

Unfortunately, Hammer has been Hannitized for our mutually assured destruction.

I have to agree with "Vast Left." Hammer has bought in to the idea that domestic criticism of the war is "hating the troops." Another sample:

Man it must be hard
With all the things you're going through
Got the world on your shoulders
Everybody watching you
Keep us all safe
And out the same mouth we hate you.

and Hammer seems to be saying that the problem with the war was just that we stayed there too long:

You did what we needed
In our darkest hour
While our peoples was dyin'
In them burning twin towers
Never before have we seen it like this
The enemies we looking for
Was living in our midst
So we brought it to 'em
And we hit 'em where it hurts
Stuck they heads in the sand and knocked they dicks in the dirt
They know what it is, sir,
Job well done
Now pick up the phone and tell our boys
Come on home.

"Stuck they[sic] heads in the sand and knocked they[sic] dicks in the dirt, They know what it is, sir, Job well done?"

Apparently he's decided to be a racist to boot. Too bad. The title is "Bring Our Brothers Home," and you can look for it if you are determined; but like hell I'll embed the Youtube video here.

I wonder how many people will also decide, years down the road when(and if) the Iraq occupation is finally over, that it was the right thing to do, but we "just stayed over there too long." For all I know it may already be a common sentiment among the blood-n-guts crowd that keeps buying those damn bumper stickers. (If I displayed a bumper sticker that said "I support the troops, except the deranged and sadistic ones," I imagine I'd be compromising my safety, even though it strikes me as a pretty reasonable sentiment. What if I also specified "And I support extensive mental health treatment for the deranged ones?" No, I think it still would be unwise...)

Anyway: as I said the other day, our mass media operators seem pretty determined that people don't make connections and don't put the pieces together, and Hammer's view is tailor-made for giving a way for people to unreflectively square the sheer waste of the war with the aims of the once and future war machine. It's not that different, if you stop and think about it, from John Kerry's "message" in 2004 that the problem with the war was that it was prosecuted badly.

It wasn't always this way. Remember when Jon Voight and Jane Fonda won the lead acting Oscars for Coming Home? I'm not saying the Oscars are or ever were a meaningful measure of film art (clearly they're not, and if they ever manage to be it's only coincidentally so), but they are a measure of what the Hollywood elite holds up as valuable, and it's unimaginable that a film like Coming Home, were it made today, would receive that kind of conferred legitimacy. Today Hollywood courts Hillary Clinton and (to a lesser degree) Obama, with their "all options on the table" talk viz-a-viz Iran, and even in the last cycle they wouldn't touch Howard Dean when he still seemed viable in late 2003.

If you want another reason to see Hammer's view as small and mean, consider this, from another era:


(larger image here.) photo courtesy "Rom Tobbi"

(a total of about half a million soldiers died at Gallipoli in a few months' time, roughly half on each side, the British and French, and the Turkish. The custom of sending soldiers' bodies back to their home countries is a comparatively recent development. Incidentally the man who wrote the words fought there too.)

Radio Free Europe

according to the uploader, this REM clip is from a Letterman appearance from October 1983. In this clip from the same show, Letterman talks to Stipe and Buck a bit and they do "South Central Rain"

Mike n' P!nk, etc

this is Mike Gravel's Myspace site. I wonder if Pink know his profile features one of her tracks("Dear Mister President"), and would she be tickled if she knew? Incidentally, Gravel was the person, back in the day, who read the Pentagon papers into the congressional record, to make sure they wouldn't "disappear into history."

Google disses Chile(and demonstrates the brave new web world isn't so infallible after all.)

speaking of Myspace and sundry web 2.0 phenomena, I've gotten word via one of my many newsletters that there's a new organization named A28.org that has created an "impeachspace" website, and has declared April 28th "the day the impeachment movement starts." Oh, A28. I get it, sort of. Why April 28th? This I still haven't figured out.