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Reality-based Liberal

Published Letters: 969
Editor's Choice: 102

Friday, June 1, 2007 09:41 PM

Have to echo others

Do you authors know much about music, or just the scenes you're into? Nothing sounded like the Beatles post-66 work before them. Kids like you have the luxury of taking them for granted, but you've no clue how much music you love today that owes their lineage to what the Beatles did.

And the fact that you list "she's leaving home" as an example of no emotion suggests to me that you are not only clueless about music history, you aren't even good listeners.

As for sounding dated - everything sounds dated eventually. John Coletrane from the 50s is now a soundtrack for the 50s. But like Coletrane, it took decades before the Beatles had been fully integrated into pop culture, it was so new. Metallica (for whom I've some respect) was dated, adopted, and passed by just 10 years after they broke ground. Madonna was dated a year after she came out and survived only by changing with the times every couple years (but none of it stood for more than a year or so).

It's so easy to look back and call something groundbreaking dated, because you can see how it will evolve simply by virtue of your date of birth. Dixieland jazz is so unstructured. Marx didn't have all the answers. Apes are dumb. Sure. But what matters is who turned the corners along the way, and to argue the Beatles (and Sgt. Pepper) didn't is to be a poor historian.

Wednesday, June 6, 2007 06:14 AM

Hunter not the only one who would use nukes on Iran

Giuliani said that while he hoped conventional weapons would work (so he supports preemptive strike on Iran - crazy), he would not take nukes off the table -- insane.

I wish Scherer had mentioned other things: all of them support corporate “healthcare”; all of them would bankrupt America to transfer public monies to the oligarchy; all of them support preemptive war (but Paul - who consistently got applause for his repeated and largely cogent attacks on preemptive war policy and the Iraq war in particular).

I understand that reporting such things is like reporting the sky is blue, but it is important to remind the public that the GOP does not exist to serve the nation -- it exists to: a) transfer money and power to the elite; b) exploit the military to this end; and c) foster bigotry and ignorance as needed to scrape up enough voters to pull off the crime.

Wednesday, June 6, 2007 06:19 AM

Just one more note about nukes

Even entertaining the idea of nuking Iran means that you are willing to kill tens of thousands of innocent people in slow, horrible ways -- and in Giuliani's case, without provocation and only because that nation pursues what the US and Israel already have.

That is genocidal, and whatever shortcomings the leaders of nations we call our enemies may have, their citizens would be right to consider us as frightening as ours consider al Qaida. After all, the potential leaders of our nation have just said they would consider wiping innocents off the map preemptively.

Wednesday, June 6, 2007 07:08 AM

If you can get away with crapping on the Constitution...

...surely you can pardon a patsy.

The story would disappear in two weeks.

Thursday, June 7, 2007 11:25 AM

Anonymous has a creepy link --

If there was an attack, Bush might not need us to see it his way. Check out these presidential directives issued last month:

http://www.worldcantwait.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4135&Itemid=220

Saturday, June 9, 2007 11:18 AM

How it will end

His wife decides to kill him but he dies by accident/another's hand before she gets the chance to follow through. The series ends on her tragic stare: Who is she without Tony? What does it feel like to fail in committing the liberating act but still have to pay the price of that act?

Saturday, June 9, 2007 11:39 AM

Don't Be Cruel

First off, Salon is looking a little pathetic complaining about the coverage of a woman it regularly covers.

Second, she is in our faces because she has been marketed by media corporations to willing consumers. Just because she's rich and fucked up doesn't mean she deserves all the blame for being a product, or for being written about in Salon.

In fact, I consume huge quantities of real news and the only time I read about Paris Hilton, outside grocery check-out-lane-headlines, is when Salon writes about her. That means Salon, not Hilton, is most to blame for her antics coming into my life.

This woman will never lead a real life because those around her have taken advantage of her bad instincts at a young age. Not exactly a situation in which it is “progressive” to tell her to fuck off.

Monday, June 11, 2007 11:48 AM

Let's Hope Full Court Doesn't Reverse

The 4th is a bad circuit on constitutional issues. But on the bright side, torture memo celeb William Haynes never got confirmed; there's one pro-detention vote we don't have to worry about.

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