"I don't care what they say"

UO has always been cheesy arena-rock redivivus and I dig them. I saw them a couple years back with my wife at the Grog Shop in Cleveland Heights.



Saturation came out a year before Pulp Fiction which featured their cover of Neil Diamond's Girl You'll be a Woman Soon. It's one of my favorite rock albums.

I could have posted Linger or These Are Days for '93; both very artful. But I'm a male chauvinist today, I guess.

Welcome aboard, Senator Paul.

Jen Rubin has a bit of fun with Rand Paul with his foreign policy reality issues and recent abrupt about-face. Excerpt:

His transformation does, however, show rather definitively that there is no real struggle in the GOP between isolationists and hawks. Rather there was Rand Paul vs. everybody else; now he’s apparently thrown in the towel. Or does he lack any true convictions, a criticism leveled at Hillary Clinton, who blows with the wind depending upon the political fashions of the day? As a former State Department official critical of the administration put it, “More and more he reminds me of another senator who had little foreign policy experience and thought he could be and should be president: Obama.”

If Paul is serious about this transformation, it is important to carry through on his newfound desire to obliterate the Islamic State, which he now recognizes is a threat to the United States. Would he reverse course and now support droning Americans who have joined up with the Islamic State? Maybe we do need a robust National Security Agency program to detect plots against the homeland. Maybe we should be using military trials at Guantanamo Bay and not risk bringing terrorists to the homeland for trial and incarceration with the regular prison population. Maybe we need a new secretary of defense, rather than Chuck Hagel, whom Paul voted to confirm. Paul’s about-face also raises the question as to what his beef with Clinton now is. Before she was too hawkish. Maybe now — like fellow Republicans — Paul will acknowledge that she was insufficiently persuasive in urging the president to take a tougher stance against Syria.

I would support a Rand Paul bid for President if he just said four words: "My dad was wrong."

whatever happens will be

...whatever that means...

But I think this is a masterful video. I saw this band live four times, really dug them. Twice before this song came out. They are great musicians, even the bassist and drummer who are total smart-asses. The album was actually released in '91, but 1992 was the year I heard this song multiple times a day.



The splendor of sepia-tone.

The glory of the B-3.

What is Ed FitzGerald?

So what is Ed FitzGerald really? Is he a Quarterback for the Cleveland Browns? That's what he compared himself to. Of course, he lacked a valid drivers license for quite a length of time, so, Cleveland Republicans with some sense of humor might want to insert a The Drive pun in the comments.

Or perhaps he is a giant snake attacking Cuyahoga County employees. That's what Laborers' Local 860 compared him to.

Or maybe Ed FitzGerald is merely the newest poster boy for political leprosy.

The QB-comparison piece quotes from a Columbus Dispatch article that contains some insights. Excerpt:

The emergence of two down-ticket races in the mid-term election follows the August implosion of Democratic gubernatorial nominee Ed FitzGerald that knocked his challenge to Republican Gov. John Kasich off the marquee.

Ohio’s 2014 election cycle thus becomes somewhat of a giant political-science experiment. When the governor’s race is largely decided before Labor Day, can Democrats focus on down-ticket races and grab enough voter attention to avoid a Republican sweep?

“People don’t show up at the polls to vote for or against the treasurer and auditor. They may make independent decisions, but they go because of the top of the ticket,” Yost said.

Cool. I love to watch mad scientists—or Democrats—do "experiments".

Barone on Obama: Transfixed with his self-image

Great article. Best one I've seen on the difference between Obama and a more traditional, successful American politician like Bill Clinton. Excerpt:

Reagan deployed that ability in establishing productive relations with allies such as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, with whom he was by no means always in agreement, and with adversaries such as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, whose character, strengths and weaknesses he shrewdly assessed.

The ability to read other people comes more easily if you're interested in others, curious to learn what makes them tick. It comes harder or not at all if you're transfixed with your image of yourself.

Which seems to be the case with Barack Obama. Not only is he not much interested in the details of public policy, as Jay Cost argues persuasively in a recent article for the Weekly Standard. He is also, as even his admirers concede, not much inclined to schmooze with other politicians, even his fellow Democrats.

That goes double for Republicans. House Speaker Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, is one of the most transparent and least guileful politicians I've encountered. The late Sen. Edward Kennedy and liberal Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., had no difficulty reaching agreement with him on the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act.

"I may be delayed"

Siouxie resembles Suzy Parker more than Jayne Mansfield. That's a feature, not a bug, IMHO.



I mad a hard time choosing something for 1991. Here's the page from the website I usually use to aid my memory for these postings. That was the year that Pearl Jam released Ten, U2 released Achtung Baby, the P-Furs released World Outside, R.E.M. released Out of Time, etc.

But I had to pick this one as my fave track from '91. Combining the Indian folk instrumentation which was hip in the UK at the time with sampling from arguably the first gansta rap evah, PSK What Does It Mean? from 1985, created the kind of buzz around a pop song I usually can't stand; it's the kind of song that knows it's cool. But slickness aside, the fact is that it's a great tune with incredible melodies and deserves the recognition it still gets.

Imagine that you are Rod Dreher, and you have one life to live...

In a post entitled What Would Flannery Do?, Rod Dreher muses

Imagine that you are Marc Juris, and you have one life to live, and you get to the end of that life, and you survey what you’ve done with what you’ve been given, and you see … Sex Box.

Certainly a fair question from someone who has made a professional career out of minding other peoples' business, particularly if his bloodhound nose picks up the prurient tang of sex. But, surely, turnabout is fair play, and so it's imminently fair to muse in turn

Imagine that you are Rod Dreher, and you have one life to live, and you get to the end of that life, and you survey what you’ve done with what you’ve been given, and you see …

Well, what do you see? What has Rod Dreher done with his life?

Because my co-bloggers here have far better archives than I do, I'm going to encourage them to take the lead in filling in the timeline for our new anonymous fan Anonymous.

I will kick things off, though, by starting arbitrarily somewhat in the middle and asking, how did that Templeton Fellowship turn out for you, Rod? People do recall that Rod did win one of these rare opportunities, don't they?

Most people would kill for the chance to score one of those research fellowships. What became of your Templeton-Cambridge research, Rod? Was it notable? What was it even about? Did it lead to further career opportunities, perhaps with the John Templeton Foundation itself? How did you leverage that even more rare gift in turn?'

As I said, I jumped in somewhere in the middle. To be scrupulously fair, though, we should start at the beginning and see what Rod has done with what he's been given and then judge, as he himself feels free to do, whether he has managed to turn his God-given apples into apple pie or whether he has somehow lost them on the road of life as just so much squandered applesauce instead.

The times, they are a-changin'

Then: 

The First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment served in the Union Army during the American Civil War, including at the First Battle of Bull Run and Antietam.  On the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg:

Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, Commander of the II Corps, ordered the First Minnesota to charge into a situation where it would be outmanned by odds of at least 5:1.  The General's purpose was to buy minutes of delay with human lives, and one survivor spoke afterward that he expected the advance to result in "death or wounds to [every single one of the attackers]."  The Regiment fully and instantly executed the order, received at least 82% casualties among those making the attack, and contributed significantly to the preservation of a key Union defensive position on the heights of Cemetery Ridge. . . 

[Wikipedia.]

Now, in a different civil war: 

On August 27, the identity of a second American killed fighting for Isis was revealed, "Abdirahmaan Muhumed from Minneapolis." 

According to FOX 9's Seth Kaplan, Muhumed was profiled by Minnesota Public Radio in June. 

MPRNews reported Muhumed was one of "as many as 15 Somali-American men from the Twin Cities [who] have traveled to Syria to join radical groups to overthrow President Bashar Assad's regime:...

On August 26 The New York Times reported that the first American killed fighting alongside ISIS was 33-year-old McAuthur McCain.  He also had ties to Minnesota...

[Breitbart.]