Charity Alert: Four years old and still up & running: The Hunger Site : Give Food for Free to Hungry People in the World
Weather: It rained last night -- let's have some of that EVERY evening!
Wildlife: Robins are sitting on the window sill, pecking at their own reflections, and freaking-out our cats.
Media Watch: 1954's Godzilla (Gojiro) on AMC -- made the mold for this rubber-suited guy! Actually, some of it is stop-action too. EX-cellent dawg-assed show! Books -- I'm reading a how-to-appreciate Classical music book, told from a Rock music point of view -- humorous, and not too bad.
In the Community:
Yesterday, I made some new additions to the Historical Society Web site, and added a LINKS page: The M -- Your Museum and More! NW Montana Historical Society Museum at Central School
Tonight, I'm taping Bernard Pomerance's play The Elephant Man at the college.
Here's an OK fan site about David Bowie's involvement in it: David Bowie in The Elephant Man
NOTE: The folks who are doing our production haven't seen John Hurt's movie, or the video of the stage show.
Tomorrow, I'm assisting with the 3rd Annual Hockaday Benefit Auction of Miniatures.
After taking some pictures, I'm supposed to be a "rapper." I'll turn my baseball cap backwards, change into a football jersey, slouch-dance around, and say "Yo!"
Or is that "wrapper?" I'd better check...
Hockaday Museum of Art - Prime visual arts resource in Flathead Valley of Northwest Montana.
Thursday, May 20, 2004
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
One of the greatest drummers EVER has passed on -- Elvin Jones (1928 - 2004) The John Coltrane Quartet/Quintet made music that changed my life as a teenager in the early 60's, and continues to sustain my spirit.
Hear A Love Supreme: ::: JOHNCOLTRANE.COM :::
Weather: No rain in the valley, but the mountains got moisture yesterday.
Wildlife: Oh yes, there IS a Mallard nest on our "floating island." It's actually a derelict raft that our neighbors anchored down, and built a box upon. The turtles are standing guard.
Charity Alert: The Breast Cancer Site : Fund Mammograms for Free
Media Watch: A Perry Mason movie from 1935 -- Case of the Lucky Legs -- Hilarious knockabout comedy with lawyer Mason being portrayed in a John Barrymore impression (by actor Warren Williams) as an irrepressible drunk, and two-fisted investigator.
Sublime to the Ridiculous -- Another PBS out-of-time show called Colonial House -- these re-enactment projects are under-prepared, under-funded, and irritating as dramas of ineptitude. I think that the historical stories they want to tell are trivialized by these whining testimonies to failure. ENOUGH!
More ridiculousness: Colonial House . Interactive History . Dress Up | PBS
Hear A Love Supreme: ::: JOHNCOLTRANE.COM :::
Weather: No rain in the valley, but the mountains got moisture yesterday.
Wildlife: Oh yes, there IS a Mallard nest on our "floating island." It's actually a derelict raft that our neighbors anchored down, and built a box upon. The turtles are standing guard.
Charity Alert: The Breast Cancer Site : Fund Mammograms for Free
Media Watch: A Perry Mason movie from 1935 -- Case of the Lucky Legs -- Hilarious knockabout comedy with lawyer Mason being portrayed in a John Barrymore impression (by actor Warren Williams) as an irrepressible drunk, and two-fisted investigator.
Sublime to the Ridiculous -- Another PBS out-of-time show called Colonial House -- these re-enactment projects are under-prepared, under-funded, and irritating as dramas of ineptitude. I think that the historical stories they want to tell are trivialized by these whining testimonies to failure. ENOUGH!
More ridiculousness: Colonial House . Interactive History . Dress Up | PBS
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Wildlife; On my way to work today, a Magpie was swooping down on a fenced yard while a couple of large dogs ran around barking at the bird. Either the Magpie was going after some food, or it was just having stupid fun -- but it wasn't giving up.
Charity Alert: The Child Health Site : Help a Child in Need Lead a Healthy, Active Life
Weather: Predictions of thundershowers, let's see if they materialize. Low cirrus clouds overhead in the A.M. -- enough sunlight to cast shadows.
Media Watch: The word about Fahrenheit 9/11 is circulating on the Internet at least! Incendiary 'Fahrenheit 9/11' Fires Up Crowd at Cannes
Here's a couple of articles about the hideous reactionary cabal that's taken over our country for the moment. It took 'em forty years to do it:
Article 1 -- The War at Home
Article 2(from the NY Times)--
For Conservatives, Mission Accomplished
By JOHN MICKLETHWAIT and ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE
Published: May 18, 2004
Last week Washington was the site of the biggest birthday party you never heard of. The occasion was the 40th anniversary of the American Conservative Union, and the guest list included all the grandees of right-wing America, from Senator Mitch McConnell to Phyllis Schlafly to Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association to, of course, President Bush.
In his speech, the President promised that "for our blessed land the best days lie ahead," and was greeted with several foot-stomping ovations and cries of "Four more years!" But the real flavor of the event was captured by what the president called the "fine group of decent citizens" gathered at the tables in front of him — members of the N.R.A., the Heritage Foundation, the Family Research Foundation and countless other groups that make up Conservative America. One man wore a tie with the Ten Commandments; women carried handbags in the colors of the American flag; and when the narrator of a film about the conservative union used the phrase "right-wing nuts," the room roared its approval.
This is the type of partisan anniversary that only one side of America pays attention to — the side that watches Fox News Channel (the host for the evening was that network's Tony Snow). Yet every Democratic politician in the land could have learned a great deal by attending. It would be going a little far to say that the A.C.U. ought to have celebrated under a banner labeled "Mission Accomplished," but it is because of such groups that the right has out-organized, out-fought and out-thought liberal America over the past 40 years. And the left still shows no real sign of knowing how to fight back.
To consider the ground that liberals have ceded, one must look back at the union's founding in a cramped living-room in 1964, a few days after Lyndon B. Johnson had thrashed the first fully paid-up conservative presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater. Back then, the self-styled "Mr. Conservative" seemed to come from another planet. "When in all our history," asked the political theorist Richard Hofstadter, "has anyone with ideas so bizarre, so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus got so far?"
Fast forward to today. A Republican Party that is more conservative than Mr. Goldwater could have imagined controls the White House, Congress, many governors' mansions and a majority of seats in state legislatures. Back in 1964, John Kenneth Galbraith smugly proclaimed: "These, without doubt, are the years of the liberal. Almost everyone now so describes himself." Today, a Gallup poll tells us, twice as many Americans (41 percent) describe themselves as "conservative" than as "liberal" (19 percent).
Democrats have come up with all sorts of excuses, from the evils of Richard Nixon's "Southern strategy" to the "stolen" election of 2000. They usually ignore the fact that the right has simply been far better at producing agenda-setting ideas. From welfare reform in Wisconsin to policing in New York City, from the tax-cutting Proposition 13 in California to regime change in Baghdad, the intellectual impetus has, for better or worse, come from the right. As President Bush bragged at last week's party, the right is "the dominant intellectual force in American politics."
Yet many Democrats insist this will change once Mr. Bush is ejected from the White House. This shows how little they have learned. First, the right has a history of advancing its agenda under Democratic executives (welfare reform came about under Bill Clinton). More important, it has organized itself for a much longer battle. Whenever it has been forced into retreat — as after Watergate — the flame has burned eternal at places like Heritage, the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute, and at their smaller cousins in virtually every state.
Brains are nothing without political brawn. That's why the American Conservative Union disciplines Congressional Republicans by rating them according to their purity (the average rating for House Republicans has risen from 63 percent in 1972 to 91 percent in 2002). Yes, liberal environmental and abortion rights groups rate members of Congress too, but those figures are more effective as fodder for conservative attack ads than as a way to keep Democrats in line.
There are other battalions of foot soldiers, too. Americans for Tax Reform, which had a table at the dinner, rigidly enforces the party's pledge not to raise taxes. Focus on the Family (which has a campus in Colorado Springs so big that it has its own ZIP code) concentrates on promoting family values. Sometimes these groups feud — Cato libertarians have plenty of differences with Focus on the Family's social conservatives — but as all the back-slapping at the party showed, they share a sense of movement.
In theory, liberals have more than enough brain and brawn to match conservative America. The great liberal universities and foundations have infinitely more resources than the American Enterprise Institute and its allies. But the conservatives have always been more dogged. The Ford Foundation is as liberal as Heritage is conservative, but there is no doubt which is the more ruthless in its cause.
Now, perhaps, a few liberals are waking up to the task that confronts them. Americans Come Together, a group backed by the billionaire George Soros, already has 20 offices and 450 employees in Ohio alone. John Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, has founded the Center for American Progress, which Democrats are calling "the liberal Heritage." But it still seems that liberals are purely reactive. Barry Goldwater may have been strong meat, but at least he had ideas. By contrast, Americans Come Together's entire raison d'être (like that of the John Kerry campaign) remains negative: to send Mr. Bush back to Texas.
"There is no such thing as spontaneous public opinion," Beatrice Webb, the great British leftist, once said. "It all has to be manufactured from a center of conviction and energy." The American Conservative Union is just one of many such centers on the right; it's a lesson that liberal America seems unable to learn.
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, writers for The Economist, are the authors of "The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America."
Charity Alert: The Child Health Site : Help a Child in Need Lead a Healthy, Active Life
Weather: Predictions of thundershowers, let's see if they materialize. Low cirrus clouds overhead in the A.M. -- enough sunlight to cast shadows.
Media Watch: The word about Fahrenheit 9/11 is circulating on the Internet at least! Incendiary 'Fahrenheit 9/11' Fires Up Crowd at Cannes
Here's a couple of articles about the hideous reactionary cabal that's taken over our country for the moment. It took 'em forty years to do it:
Article 1 -- The War at Home
Article 2(from the NY Times)--
For Conservatives, Mission Accomplished
By JOHN MICKLETHWAIT and ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE
Published: May 18, 2004
Last week Washington was the site of the biggest birthday party you never heard of. The occasion was the 40th anniversary of the American Conservative Union, and the guest list included all the grandees of right-wing America, from Senator Mitch McConnell to Phyllis Schlafly to Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association to, of course, President Bush.
In his speech, the President promised that "for our blessed land the best days lie ahead," and was greeted with several foot-stomping ovations and cries of "Four more years!" But the real flavor of the event was captured by what the president called the "fine group of decent citizens" gathered at the tables in front of him — members of the N.R.A., the Heritage Foundation, the Family Research Foundation and countless other groups that make up Conservative America. One man wore a tie with the Ten Commandments; women carried handbags in the colors of the American flag; and when the narrator of a film about the conservative union used the phrase "right-wing nuts," the room roared its approval.
This is the type of partisan anniversary that only one side of America pays attention to — the side that watches Fox News Channel (the host for the evening was that network's Tony Snow). Yet every Democratic politician in the land could have learned a great deal by attending. It would be going a little far to say that the A.C.U. ought to have celebrated under a banner labeled "Mission Accomplished," but it is because of such groups that the right has out-organized, out-fought and out-thought liberal America over the past 40 years. And the left still shows no real sign of knowing how to fight back.
To consider the ground that liberals have ceded, one must look back at the union's founding in a cramped living-room in 1964, a few days after Lyndon B. Johnson had thrashed the first fully paid-up conservative presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater. Back then, the self-styled "Mr. Conservative" seemed to come from another planet. "When in all our history," asked the political theorist Richard Hofstadter, "has anyone with ideas so bizarre, so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus got so far?"
Fast forward to today. A Republican Party that is more conservative than Mr. Goldwater could have imagined controls the White House, Congress, many governors' mansions and a majority of seats in state legislatures. Back in 1964, John Kenneth Galbraith smugly proclaimed: "These, without doubt, are the years of the liberal. Almost everyone now so describes himself." Today, a Gallup poll tells us, twice as many Americans (41 percent) describe themselves as "conservative" than as "liberal" (19 percent).
Democrats have come up with all sorts of excuses, from the evils of Richard Nixon's "Southern strategy" to the "stolen" election of 2000. They usually ignore the fact that the right has simply been far better at producing agenda-setting ideas. From welfare reform in Wisconsin to policing in New York City, from the tax-cutting Proposition 13 in California to regime change in Baghdad, the intellectual impetus has, for better or worse, come from the right. As President Bush bragged at last week's party, the right is "the dominant intellectual force in American politics."
Yet many Democrats insist this will change once Mr. Bush is ejected from the White House. This shows how little they have learned. First, the right has a history of advancing its agenda under Democratic executives (welfare reform came about under Bill Clinton). More important, it has organized itself for a much longer battle. Whenever it has been forced into retreat — as after Watergate — the flame has burned eternal at places like Heritage, the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute, and at their smaller cousins in virtually every state.
Brains are nothing without political brawn. That's why the American Conservative Union disciplines Congressional Republicans by rating them according to their purity (the average rating for House Republicans has risen from 63 percent in 1972 to 91 percent in 2002). Yes, liberal environmental and abortion rights groups rate members of Congress too, but those figures are more effective as fodder for conservative attack ads than as a way to keep Democrats in line.
There are other battalions of foot soldiers, too. Americans for Tax Reform, which had a table at the dinner, rigidly enforces the party's pledge not to raise taxes. Focus on the Family (which has a campus in Colorado Springs so big that it has its own ZIP code) concentrates on promoting family values. Sometimes these groups feud — Cato libertarians have plenty of differences with Focus on the Family's social conservatives — but as all the back-slapping at the party showed, they share a sense of movement.
In theory, liberals have more than enough brain and brawn to match conservative America. The great liberal universities and foundations have infinitely more resources than the American Enterprise Institute and its allies. But the conservatives have always been more dogged. The Ford Foundation is as liberal as Heritage is conservative, but there is no doubt which is the more ruthless in its cause.
Now, perhaps, a few liberals are waking up to the task that confronts them. Americans Come Together, a group backed by the billionaire George Soros, already has 20 offices and 450 employees in Ohio alone. John Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, has founded the Center for American Progress, which Democrats are calling "the liberal Heritage." But it still seems that liberals are purely reactive. Barry Goldwater may have been strong meat, but at least he had ideas. By contrast, Americans Come Together's entire raison d'être (like that of the John Kerry campaign) remains negative: to send Mr. Bush back to Texas.
"There is no such thing as spontaneous public opinion," Beatrice Webb, the great British leftist, once said. "It all has to be manufactured from a center of conviction and energy." The American Conservative Union is just one of many such centers on the right; it's a lesson that liberal America seems unable to learn.
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, writers for The Economist, are the authors of "The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America."
Monday, May 17, 2004
Charity Alert: It's SO easy! The Rainforest Site: Help Save Our Rainforests!
Wildlife: Our backyard is an official National Wildlife Wild Bird Environment site -- we heard a new call early this morning, and have to identify the bird now!
Weather: Rain overnight, but it's gonna be warm today -- I'll be planting tomatos with water jackets anyway!
Media Watch: Rudraksh -- meaning 'talisman,' a somewhat juvenile Bollywood movie about an evil Rakesh (demon) vs. a good Brahmin -- he works as a bouncer in a strip bar -- the Brahmin that is.
Ha Ha Funkin' Ha -- That dawg-assed show Troy is number one at the box office, but it's also being viewed by some as an Anti-Iraq War movie:
Trojan War Shows Bush and Blair's Achilles' Heel Say Actors Who See a Modern-Day Similarity
Hey, if the sandal fits -- wear it!
Seriously, the Trojan War was a terrible disaster for both winners and losers.
The real historical event behind Homer's epic was just one example of the Aegean nations destroying their own prosperity and culture by mutual piracy -- much like my ancestors, the Germanic 'Barbarians' and Vikings, did in Europe a dozen or so centuries later.
'Dark Ages' of desperate mass migrations, poverty, squalor, and illiteracy followed victories by those rapacious armies, whose troops, and their families, ended up much worse off than they were before their 'glorious victories.'
Wildlife: Our backyard is an official National Wildlife Wild Bird Environment site -- we heard a new call early this morning, and have to identify the bird now!
Weather: Rain overnight, but it's gonna be warm today -- I'll be planting tomatos with water jackets anyway!
Media Watch: Rudraksh -- meaning 'talisman,' a somewhat juvenile Bollywood movie about an evil Rakesh (demon) vs. a good Brahmin -- he works as a bouncer in a strip bar -- the Brahmin that is.
Ha Ha Funkin' Ha -- That dawg-assed show Troy is number one at the box office, but it's also being viewed by some as an Anti-Iraq War movie:
Trojan War Shows Bush and Blair's Achilles' Heel Say Actors Who See a Modern-Day Similarity
Hey, if the sandal fits -- wear it!
Seriously, the Trojan War was a terrible disaster for both winners and losers.
The real historical event behind Homer's epic was just one example of the Aegean nations destroying their own prosperity and culture by mutual piracy -- much like my ancestors, the Germanic 'Barbarians' and Vikings, did in Europe a dozen or so centuries later.
'Dark Ages' of desperate mass migrations, poverty, squalor, and illiteracy followed victories by those rapacious armies, whose troops, and their families, ended up much worse off than they were before their 'glorious victories.'
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