I heard these words for the first time in 1972, long after the Chicago Democratic Convention. Always liked this song. Beautiful.

So your brother's bound and gagged
And they've chained him to a chair
Won't you please come to Chicago just to sing?

In a land that's known as 'Freedom'
How can such a thing be fair?
Won't you please come to Chicago for the help that we can bring?

We can change the world
Re-arrange the world
It's starting (If you believe in justice)
It's starting (If you believe in freedom)
To get better

Little did I know that, after an iTunes download, this song would rivet me once again, in ripe old middle age. And the Obama-Chicago connection is eerie, too...

Barry might be just a little too young to really get this song in his gut.

Oh, this answer is so easy, so simple, so perfect, it will NEVER be used. Not in a million years.

Bring back the Fairness Doctrine.

Once it was abolished, Rush's fortune (and those of countless other nutjob shills, media whores and the FOX News Network) was made.

Bring back the Fairness Doctrine. It worked before. It's their worst nightmare. It'll put them all right out of the propaganda business, if not bankrupt altogether. Aside from seeing George W. Bush retire to Dallas, nothing could be more satisfying for me than THAT.

Nothing could be easier to sell to the American public, too, especially if the rightwingers keep killing people, if this terror doesn't stop. And from the looks of it, it's just heating up.

But they don't scare me. I don't terrorize easily, unless it's right in my face. I'd like to think I'm tough, I'm strong enough to take care of myself.

Sun Tzu wrote "Kill one to terrorize ten thousand." What did he mean by that? That's important, but don't forget the hidden lesson, too: Terror only affects a small number of people directly. But it scares the rest of them--if it works.

I don't know about you, but it's against my policy to give free rent to anyone in my head. Especially killers, of ANY stripe. I will plan my day and life most certainly NOT in accordance with some possible terror attack disrupting my life. And I strongly suggest that the sooner everyone (except the professionals, of course) starts living their life in exactly that manner, the sooner we will move past the post-George-W.-Bush world I eagerly anticipate.

But it looks like some people have other plans for us.

Does anyone besides the FOX News True Believers think this is true?

Taken together, the government could soon determine who gets a mortgage, which cars consumers can buy, the type of treatments patients will get and how many credit cards a person can carry.

If it IS true...I'm sittin' pretty.

If it isn't, I'm STILL sittin' pretty. Win-win.

(H/T to Josh Marshall. Can I help it if the only issues I wanna blog on are coming from him today...?)

Good looking man. Happy. Serene, even. Books stacked on a shelf behind him. A scholar, of course.

Looks can be deceiving.

So he should be able to post an opinion piece written by himself on the front page. But it's incredibly rare when Josh does so, and like this one, important enough to justify its placing.

Here's the line that made me stop, re-read it and cheer:

...getting out of the West Bank doesn't endanger Israel. It's actually critical to the country's future well-being, even its survival.

Absolute sense. Perfect logic, even if impossible to be understood by neocretins.

As counter-intuitive as it may seem, defenselessness can be the best defense. This is a tenet of the 12-Step mindset. Not many people get far enough to understand it, but it works MOST of the time.

Israel will never have peace if it doesn't withdraw from its illegal settlements. That is a guarantee. The last forty years have proven that once and for all. Josh knows this. Josh is a reasonable man. Neoconservatives, American as well as Israeli, do not.

There is no guarantee that Israel will have peace if and when it withdraws from the illegal settlements in the West Bank. But there is a guarantee that there will be no peace if it does NOT withdraw. Peace lies in one direction only--justice.

And the notion that Israel is 'threatened' by Doing The Right Thing is utter nonsense. I've had enough of this tough talk/refusal to cow to terrorists to last the rest of my life. It doesn't work. Negotiation is the only thing that WILL work, if ANYTHING.

And making fun of this, ridiculing it, claiming it's appeasement, etc, is the grossest kind of kindergarten populist garbage you can find under the nearest rock.

My daughter has autism. We are treating it with a new system of cognitive behavior therapy and remediation called rdi. It is, believe it or not, working, and I stop short of calling it a cure. But it's reality- and science-based to a great degree. No diets, no pressure on the torso, no forced eye contact.

One of the problems with people on the autism spectrum is this: They cannot put themselves in someone else's point of view. Stop and try to understand what a strange and complex concept this is: To be able to imagine yourself in someone else's mind, understanding their conclusions based on their very different experiences and thoughts from your own.

When I first heard of this concept, I thought, "Man, an awful lot of people must suffer from some sort of autism, and most of them are conservatives."

Anyway, there are two opposing camps in the subject of American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm in the smaller one. I think we need to pull out of both countries immediately. Most people don't think we should, and especially the President, who's just sent 7 thousand fresh troops there.


Reasonable people that I respect for past honesty, like Fareed Zakaria disagree with me, and maybe have legitimate reasons for claiming that democracy really IS starting to 'flourish', and saying "There is much going on in Iraq that is admirable".

How do we end up with two separate stay-or-go camps? What are their reasons for wanting the U.S. military to either stay or go?

I used the argument about the number of dead soldiers for a while. It's amazing how cavalier the war supporters are when it comes to that particular point of debate; the number of dead is acceptable, smaller than Vietnam, they're volunteers so they knew what they were getting into, the wounded are getting the best care in the world (computerized prosthetics! Star Wars stuff, man!), and on and on.

But now I'm reverting to the MONEY argument. Especially ever since Paul Woflowitz's claims that the Iraq Invasion would not only cost less than $2 billion, but with Iraq oil revenues, it would PAY us to occupy Saddam's oil fields.

Can we really afford a surge in Afghanistan? While we're deep in a recession? Can we really afford to keep 100,000 troops in Iraq, on island bases, under constant mortar attack? Can we really afford this mess that George W. Bush left us all in?

Of course we can't. Somebody tell me why I'm wrong. Please. Convince me that we need to stay in these countries. Tell me what winning looks like, too, while you're at it.