night out

I went to see Lisa Dewey and Dave Ray at the Phantom Galleries reception. ( Let me unpack that. )

And then after that, I went to an open mike, at Josline's Cafe in Sunnyvale. Not much to say about it--I showed up late, so I missed most of the show. But I did get to play my long-neglected mandola, and plug my show tomorrow, and plug Kris Delmhorst's shows next week, and play a song ("World of Freedom") that I've only played once before, on the night I wrote it, maybe a year ago. And people liked it! Hooray! But this doesn't mean I'm going to start dragging the mandola to gigs.

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Say it again:

But as with Vietnam, "W" is AWOL and Cheney has "other priorities." They have not merely ignored "homeland" protection, they have sabotaged it.

It's a topsy-turvy world.

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More Alterman:

It is New York’s poor and middle class who will suffer for having received the back of George Bush’s and George Pataki’s respective hands. The well-to-do can escape to their vacation homes, buy their kids a high-quality education and let them swim in private — or suburban — pools. You would think all that sympathy we earned for having been Ground Zero at the moment America was attacked would earn us something when the Republicans were taking care of their own. You would be wrong. Again, I submit my proposal to Mayor Bloomberg. Until we develop our own WMD — or at least convince Bush that we have them — we’re never going to get anywhere with this guy.

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The Nation appreciates The Daily Show.

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Monkey Media reacts to the bewildering claim that military success in Iraq justifies having gone to war.

I get a particularly big guffaw at the ones with the strange need to have their unnecessary brutality validated by fans of nonviolence. "What do you think now, eh? Bombings that kill children aren't so bad now, are they?"

And offers a quick refresher course on Syria's complex relationship with terrorism--it turns out that not all terrorists are the same.

Does it really make sense to attack the current Syrian President for Al Qaida links based on the mere existence of citizens who belong to fundamentalist groups the government has fought with?