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DL Open Thread Tuesday August 17th 2021
The corrupt edifice that was our invasion and 20 year occupation of Afghanistan has come tumbling down in spectacularly speedy and chaotic fashion.
Biden’s address yesterday was heartbreakingly direct and honest. My take is that given the situation he inherited from Bush, Obama and Trump, he said what needed to be said.
And yet the humanitarian crisis will be long and nauseating. Separating good faith criticism and bad faith criticism will be impossible. So, I agree with Alby. I’ll be staying far away from the Opinion Industrial Complex for a while. And also, this…
You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you sit back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
While the young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud
Song of the Day 8/16: Bob Dylan, “Masters of War”
Who lost the war in Afghanistan? Certainly not the defense industry, which got the lion’s share of the trillion dollars the country wasted waging it. Big win for them. The Cuban Missile Crisis, which seemed to awaken Americans to the fact that they could be incinerated at a moment’s notice, was still fresh when Dylan […]
DL Open Thread: Monday, August 16, 2021
Yo, Joe, Stop This Pipeline Now. They voted for you. The filthiest oil in the United States, headed here ‘courtesy’ of a Canadian corporation, will soon flow through Indigenous lands if you allow this. 5 billion gallons of water diverted, 760,000 barrels of crude per day to flow through across 14 counties in northern Minnesota. […]
DL Open Thread Sunday, August 15, 2021
One of them finally spilled the beans. A congressional aide told journalist Julia Ioffe the reason Republican politicians are getting their own constituents killed: About a month ago, I was talking to a pretty senior Hill aide on the Republican side. Vaccinated, everybody in his shop was vaccinated. I said, ‘What is the deal, why […]
Song of the Day 8/14: Nanci Griffith, “Tecumseh Valley”
Nanci Griffith was an accomplished singer and songwriter who broke through after moving from her native Austin to Nashville in 1985, but her greatest acclaim came with her Grammy-winning 1993 album “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” covering other singer-songwriters who, like her, worked musical territory between folk and country that produced a literate hybrid we now […]
DL Open Thread: Saturday, August 14, 2021
Is Louis DeJoy Currently The Most Corrupt Federal Official? Well, consider this: Postmaster General Louis DeJoy purchased up to $305,000 in bonds from an investment firm whose managing partner also chairs the U.S. Postal Service’s governing board, the independent body responsible for evaluating DeJoy’s performance. Between October and April, DeJoy purchased 11 bonds from Brookfield […]
Song of the Day 8/13: Bruce Springsteen, “I’m Goin’ Down”
Enough with the ersatz Bruce — let’s play some of the real thing. Springsteen recorded this track with the E Street Band in 1982, at the same Power Station sessions at which the full-band versions of the songs on “Nebraska” were recorded (they were later scrapped in favor of the four-track demos they worked from, […]
DL Open Thread: Friday, August 13, 2021
House ‘Can’t Say’ Whether Ethics Complaint Has Been Filed Against Brady. Gee, you know they’d just love to tell you, but, unfortunately, their very own rules preclude them from doing so: But the public may not get confirmation for some time because the process of investigating an ethics complaint in the House is so shrouded […]
Song of the Day 8/12: Marah, “Point Breeze”
Yesterday’s post about Jack Antonoff’s solo project Bleachers included the tune he recorded with Bruce Springsteen, and I mentioned how much it sounded like one of Springsteen’s late-period moody ballads. It reminded me that bands used to emulate a much different Springsteen — the R&B-influenced sound of the band he used to record his first […]
DL Open Thread Thursday, August 12, 2021
Legal experts are saying the evidence piling up against the Previous Guy makes an indictment of the pretend president inevitable. This means it has less than a 50-50 chance of coming to pass. You know how they say alcoholics are never “cured,” they’re just in recovery? I have to assume the same applies to crackheads […]
Song of the Day 8/11: Bleachers, “Stop Making It Hurt”
I heard this song on the radio the other day and, being a sucker for major-key pop song with a good hook, I looked up who did it, because I had never heard of Bleachers. Turns out the guy, real name Jack Antonoff, was the guitarist for Fun, which had a big hit in 2012 […]
DL Open Thread Wednesday, August 11, 2021
One certainty about the Trump coup is that this lumbering mound of seething resentment and ignorance — Trump, that is — isn’t smart enough to have done all this himself. Though the news-consuming public doesn’t seem to care, there are people at work determining who provided that help, and the most interesting facet is where […]
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