Hope for the future?

As a jazz fan, I often worry about whether the genre will die out. That's why I'm always happy to stumble across "youngsters" with obvious talent and dedication carrying on the tradition. Check out Melody Gardot, 22 years old. (Just let it roll after you click on the link). She is for real, but what I really like are the musicians behind her. They are obvious jazz-heads who, along with her, will carry on. It may not be Ella, Nina, or Nancy, but it sure as hell beats Brittney!

Oh, and then after you listen to a couple of her tracks, check out her bio. It's an amazing, uplifting story. Please check it out.

Ciao,

tom

Reality brings incredible saddness

As readers of this blog are well aware, I am a fervent supporter of Barack Obama. I truly believe that unlike anyone else in the picture, he is a unique figure at this time in our history, who would bring healing, pride and even joy back to our nation. I viewed all the recent attacks on him as acceptable, though often loathsome, because his weathering them showed his viability.

But today, I find this in Dana Milbank's column in the Washington Post (and I found many other articles of similar tenor). I hope beyond hope that I am wrong, but I am coming to believe that the Rev. Wright has become a pair of cement shoes for Barack. Why can't the guy just shut up until after the election? I'd like to say things like, "Well the American people will sort this all out and end up voting for Obama," but I'm not able to now. These latest Wright comments (including a coy aside implying that Barack's criticisms of him are disingenuous), are going to be amplified and repeated again and again by Republican smear merchants in general election, with fatal results.

Please tell me I'm wrong! I'm totally depressed to the point at which I'm actually thinking it might be best after all for Hillary to be our candidate. The next four years of Supreme Court nominations is THE most important issue in the next elections, bar none -- trust me on this. Accordingly, it is absolutely imperative, ABSOLUTELY, that John McCain NOT become president. If Obama is going to lose because of this Wright shit sitting on top of all the other stuff, then maybe Hillary could win, in view of her already-vetted past, along with her bare-knuckles approach. Again, I need some bucking up here folks -- tell me that Barack is going to be my next President. His first Supreme Court pick: Hillary Clinton.

Bloody but not bowed,

Tom

Fun, fun...

Hey, if you just want to smile a little and bring some cheer, try this.

Be sure to check out the caricature gallery.

Hillary's amazing past?!

I have been fuming over the Sean Hannity via Stephanopoulos' question to Obama in the last debate regarding his supposed connections with Bill Ayers, which the Hillary camp is now perpetuating. Tom Hayden, citing his wife's current revulsion over Hillary, writes an eye-opening article on this subject. Geez, my jaw was literally dropping over the facts that he presents. Not that I condemn Hilliary's connections, but the sheer hypocrisy of her current stance is appalling.

Here is a salient excerpt:

To take just one example, the imagined association between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers will suffice. Hillary is blind to her own roots in the sixties. In one college speech she spoke of ecstatic transcendence; in another, she said, "Our social indictment has broadened. Where once we exposed the quality of life in the world of the South and the ghettos, now we condemn the quality of work in factories and corporations. Where once we assaulted the exploitation of man, now we decry the destruction of nature as well. How much long can we let corporations run us?"

She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an "unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged." She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors. She surely agreed with Yale president Kingman Brewster that a black revolutionary couldn't get a fair trial in America. She wrote that abused children were citizens with the same rights as their parents.

Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack, after Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm's partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others "tolerated communists". Then she went on to Washington to help impeach Richard Nixon, whose career was built on smearing and destroying the careers of people through vague insinuations about their backgrounds and associates. (All these citations can be found in Carl Bernstein's sympathetic 2007 Clinton biography, A Woman in Charge.)

Check it out the entire article -- it's worth the read.

By the way, I knew Bob Treuhaft in the mid-seventies when I was still practicing criminal law in the S.F. Bay area. He was a sweet, but totally committed guy. And - a fact I'll bet you did not know - he was married to Jessica Mitford.

~ tom

Maureen says it so well...

I love Mo Dowd! She has the rare ability to present logical, well-reasoned substantive positions and yet still make her comments devilishly humorous, if not outright hilarious. Her post-Penn. primary autopsy is outright Hillary-arious, but it's also so, so right on. Enjoy.

~ tom

P.S. I had to run to my dictionary re: "Brobdingnagian" Here's the definition:

Brobdingnagian \brob-ding-NAG-ee-uhn\, adjective:
Of extraordinary size; gigantic; enormous.

Poets laureate

I am definitely a California guy, and especially grateful to live 500 feet from the Bay. We may be wine-drinking, cheese-nibbling effete snobs, but to our credit we love our poets.

~ tom

Edward Hoagland

I don't read as much as I should, and one of the literary formats I tend to ignore is the essay. I'm up at our place at Tahoe this weekend, and I happened to notice that I had one of my favorite essay collections up here: "Tiges & Ice -- Reflections of Nature and Life" by Edward Hoagland.

All the the essays are worthy reads. One of my favorites, which I just reread with pleasure, is "Running Mates" dealing with the subject of friendship. Here is a wonderful excerpt from that essay:

Friendship can be exploitive and predatory, a strange symbiosis of quiet underwater carnage, though I've seldom seen one stay that way. Yet friends are partly for quarreling with. Most of us need to squabble occasionally in order to tap off our toxins, and friends permit us to without inflammatory consequences. We can be a trifle mean, or stumble into a brief tailspin, and be forgiven. Knowing our knotty nuttiness, our self-destructive lonely spells, they let us phone a bit too much and don't require us to specify just how tricky we feel. Friends are for jitters as well as barbecues.

Some other Hoagland quotes on a cool site I had not seen before.



All the best,

~ tom