Alby's Latest Posts
DL Open Thread Thursday, April 22, 2021
Republican officials in Georgia are getting scared because they can’t convince Trump’s hardcore fans to move on, and Trumpism disgusts the suburban voters the party needs to win elections. Ironic, isn’t it, that a party that wants to rule from a minority position is itself ruled by a minority within? That brings up the latest […]
Song of the Day 4/20: Peter Tosh, “Legalize It”
Peter Tosh once told an interviewer that ganja would someday be as legal as cigarettes. That’s still years off, but as this handy map shows, in only six U.S. states, all of them deep red, does weed remain entirely illegal. Weigh that against 16 states (17 if you count D.C.) containing 43% of the population […]
Song of the Day 4/19: Pixies, “Here Comes Your Man”
Why did rock music sputter out after the 1990s? I don’t know the answer, but the anti-commercial pose that became de rigueur with punk and extended into the era of college radio and alternative bands couldn’t have helped. Consider this song by the Pixies, the closest thing they ever had to a hit in the […]
Chris Coons Is Worse Than Useless
I’m starting to think Chris Coons is taking revenge on Joe Biden for failing to name him Secretary of State. Delaware’s bipartisanship show pony is at it again, going on Fox News yesterday to announce he and Sen. John Cornyn are working on an alternative to Biden’s infrastructure bill — one that would chop the […]
DL Open Thread Sunday, April 18, 2021
Why do so many Central Americans seek asylum in the United States? Because so many U.S. guns have migrated to Mexico and Central America. Officials estimate about 2 million guns have moved south over the past decade. The General Assembly is returning to Legislative Hall, but the public isn’t invited. House Speaker Pete Schwartkopf said […]
Song of the Day 4/16: Toronto, “Your Daddy Don’t Know”
Protectionism has a bad name among economists, but as with most things, in some circumstances it’s absolutely the right thing for a country to do if it wants to grow a particular industry. For Canada in the early days of rock music, the danger was the domination of the its music industry and airwaves by […]
DL Open Thread Friday, April 16, 2021
County Councilman Jea Street very publicly resigned as co-chair of council’s safety committee after condemning the fatal shooting of Lymond Moses. “I go all the way back to when I was in high school and riots broke out in the 60s, and we looked up, here come the county police with long guns in riot […]
Song of the Day 4/15: Ludovico Einaudi, “Due Tramonti (Two Sunsets)”
Oscar season is upon us — the ceremony takes place April 25 — and it will be a major shock if “Nomadland” isn’t named best picture. Everything about the film stands out amid Hollywood’s mass-produced dreck, including its soundtrack, mostly taken from Italian pianist-composer Ludovico Einaudi’s seven-album collection “Seven Days Walking.” Director Chloé Zhao, who […]
Republicans Got Nothin’ and They Know It
It seems Jim Clyburn knew what he was doing after all. When the South Carolina Congressman endorsed Joe Biden just before the South Carolina primary and Biden carried the state, most progressives took it as a sign that the Democratic Party wasn’t ready for a progressive administration. It turns out that wasn’t the point at […]
Song of the Day 4/13: Less Than Jake, “The State of Florida”
As pop-punk band Less Than Jake noted in this 2008 song, Florida is sinking into the sea. I would note that the process isn’t going fast enough. Unlike, say, Neil Young writing about Southern men, LTJ’s critique came from inside — the band’s album “GNV FLA,” released in 2008, is named for their hometown, Gainesville. […]
Dear Republicans: You Have Already Been Replaced
Why are Republicans suckers for every half-witted conspiracy theory ever concocted? Consider the latest obsession of Tucker Carlson, poster boy for mediocre white dudes, the so-called Great Replacement theory. It holds that Democrats want to replace white Americans with immigrants, apparently so they can win elections. To start with, this is just recycled Hitler, who […]
Song of the Day 4/12: Sinéad O’Connor, “Black Boys on Mopeds”
The continuing plague of police brutality against Black men has kept this song relevant more than 30 years after its release. Colin Roach was a 21-year-old Black man living in the London borough of Hackney in 1983, when police tried to pull him over, apparently thinking the moped he was driving was stolen. Hackney, a […]
DL Open Thread Sunday, April 11, 2021
We all know that Matt Gaetz like to fuck 17-year-olds, but did you know that his real job is fucking the public? It seems the sex scandal is somehow related to a scheme to pay people to enter races to siphon off Democratic votes, one of which actually made a difference in getting a Republican […]
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