Close your eyes, dear boy,

Too much of life and too much death have you seen;

More than grown men can bear

have you borne upon your frail shoulders.

Curtains you have drawn aside show the black Earth

That men lie and call green, that they may survive.

Close your eyes, and rest,

May the fantasies you believe, be truth

May your hopes of Heaven be reality

And let my dark certainties be the lies.

But your young-old eyes cannot close

So cruelly has this world mistreated you

You look out of them even now

upon chaos and grief you cannot see.

I see those eyes in my sleep

I try to close them with trembling fingers

Yet they stare through my dreams and my nightmares.

We are still alike, you and I,

My eyes, like yours, cannot shut out the black Earth.

...don't know where, don't know when.

Taking a little break, gang; I simply can't physically deal with strong emotions like rage at this point in time. So see y'all around when things are going better for me.

Can someone get this question asked of Joe Lieberman?

"Are you using paid or volunteer staffers to promote your campaign on the blogs?"

Call me overly suspicious, but I smell a rat.

Hmm. This can't be a good thing.

You read that right. The Moose's column today inexplicably criticises Republicans! I thought he was only interested in slamming his "fellow" Democrats.

But it's very amusing to see how gentle the pokes are; practically love-taps. Compare the deferential tone of his column today with the redfaced anger he reserves for his "own" party.

David Sirota is one sexy, sexy wonk.

David, loud as he may be at times, makes me wish I could afford to just blog all the time.

(Crossposted at Planet Sundog)

The Moose is very proud of being a "hawk". He avers over and over again that "only hawks get elected president."

What exactly is a "hawk"? Is a "hawk" a person who is not averse to using military force when the situation, calmly and clearly analyzed, seems to demand it, and all other measures have been tried and failed? By this definition, I personally would never vote for a non-hawk, and you probably wouldn't either.

But that's clearly not what Moosie means. What Moosie means by being a "hawk" is a person who prefers military solutions. Any and all disputes are reduced to a bitter, us-versus-them battle to the death.

In what universe is this a sane approach? It's like saying "I'm a three." Whatever question you are asked, the answer is "three". Once in a great while, someone will actually ask you a question for which you have the correct answer, but most of the time, umm, no.

The Moose is a terribly angry, terribly paranoid, terribly cowardly animal. He sees bogeymen behind every single tree in the forest. Make no mistake, the bogeymen are out there, but come on, Marshall, they're not behind every tree. Face the world like a man, not a mouse.

A MooseHawk will bravely root for Israel as they stupidly embroil themselves in a no-win situation in Lebanon because, well of course, violence is the only answer for people who dare to oppose the will of Israel. Okay, Moose, you got your way. Let's see your analysis of the unalloyed good that this brave little war achieved. It didn't even get the two prisoners that started the whole thing back. Is the word "failure" in your vocabulary?

But that's not going to happen. MooseHawks have a strange deformity; they are not capable of turning around and examining where they've been. To the Moose, the Lebanon campaign was a rousing success. On to the next battle against the next bogeyman.

Add this deformity to his black-and-white-only visual problems, and you have one very dangerous, very stupid animal.

Oh, and Atrios, thanks and welcome to the party.

Russell Shaw is an idiot.

Please excuse this uncharacteristic, Atrios-style post. Sometimes it just needs to be said.

I try to stick to politics in this blog, since that's pretty much what we're all here for. Josh has given us a great, uncluttered place to speak our minds and I try not to abuse the privilege. But this particular entry is going to be a little different.

This is going to be a pretty dark trip; you may not want to take it. Fair warning. My apologies if you find it inappropriate or simply too dark to handle.

And yet, this is a story of hope. It's a story of sneering at the dark. It's a story of the indefatigable human spirit.

Okay, if you're still interested, read on below the fold. You've been warned.

-------------------------

First off, there's nothing wrong with me. I wish it was me. It's my 18-year-old son. He was diagnosed with a virulent form of abdominal cancer the same week of the tsunami, in December 2004. Since then we have gone through unimaginable times of despair, hope and defeat, seeing the cancer go into remission, having it come back immediately, going back into the hospital. At this point he is receiving heavy radiation and chemotherapy at the same time, and it is taking a heavy toll on his young body.

He has had to watch these last few weeks as all his friends pack up to go to college. He's sitting in a very, very familiar hospital room in the pediatric cancer ward while his friends are off to college, blossoming into their adult lives.

I'm not going to lie to you. It's been nearly two years of a complete fucking nightmare, and it's not nearly over yet.

But oddly enough, this is a story of rising above all that. This is a story of hope. This is a story of incredible courage and a very real kind of victory.

My son and oldest daughter are very talented musicians and songwriters. Throughout the last year, a typical week would be my son spending Monday through Thursday or so in the hospital, coming home and recovering for a day, then off to play at one of the local coffee houses with his sister. They've achieved a certain amount of local success and have quite a loyal following.

They have used my little recording studio to produce a 15-song CD over the last two months. And no, I'm not providing a link; that isn't what this is about. What this is about is the fact that a boy who would have every right to be suicidally depressed never refers to his cancer. He races home from the hospital to spend hours and hours tweaking the songs, recording new parts, getting his sister's vocals just perfect.

When I see him in the hospital - which is every single day he's there - if he feels well enough to move, he's got his laptop open, working on their website, learning copyright law, and - perhaps most amazing of all - forming a local co-op of musicians to help them get their songs recorded.

Cancer? He has no time for it. He has a music career to get off the ground.

Music has been a friend to me from an early age. It has helped me get through some pretty rough times in my life. Right now, however, I feel silenced; I feel that the muse has left, maybe forever. Certainly until this nightmare is over. There is just no song in my heart right now.

But that's the burden of any parent with a sick child. The amazing thing - and what I'm terribly, terribly grateful for - is that music has been there for him during the most awful time in his young life.

It's a lesson for all of us. Someone asked me the other day if I was scared about something-or-other unrelated thing. Scared? I have looked into something far scarier than the face of personal death. Nothing on Earth could frighten me now.

That's something my son has taught me. I'm still trying to learn the other lesson: that human beings are, at the core, undefeatable.

(Crossposted at DemProgress)

I'm sure I'm not the only person to get this admittedly evil idea, but I haven't seen anyone blog about it yet.

So Lieberman has a four-point advantage over Lamont and Schlesinger is at... what? 4%? So... all we have to do to ensure Lamont's victory is bump Schlesinger's numbers up the tiniest, tiniest bit, stealing Republican votes from Lieberman?

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Too Machiavellian for you? Then get off the stage. As Ford Prefect said, "They care, we don't. They win."

Who can do this? Who can organize a get out the vote campaign for Schlesinger? It could work, you know. I'll feel guilty about it later.

A little break from politics, if you don't mind.

If you read Bob Dylan's rant about modern music today, he sounds unhinged. He isn't; he just isn't describing what he means very well, or it went over the reporter's head and didn't get on paper.

To understand what he means, you need to know what a "compressor" is. (Bear with me here.) In the audio world, a compressor is a device that takes incoming audio above a settable threshhold and mashes its dynamic range, again to a selectable extent. It is useful for making sure a singer's high notes aren't ten times louder than her low ones, and in many other ways, from getting tight drums to punchy bass to overdriven guitar.

Turn the "ratio" way up, and the sound really starts getting mashed together. You would recognize it immediately: "Oh, now it sounds like a radio". This is because radio traditionally had a limited signal-to-noise ratio, and the louder you could mash everything together, the more clearly everything could be heard. So compressors have always been used at radio stations for this purpose.

Compress things far enough and they actually sound "louder" to the ear; everything is squished into a very narrow dynamic range, all loud. In the last couple of decades it has become fashionable during the mastering process to heavily compress the final product, for what reasons who can say, because it sounds like crap, just as Dylan says. He hears the unmastered version in the studio, then compares it to the CD which is sonically squished, and rightly hates the sound - there's "sound all over it", as he says.

You read that right - producers purposely defeat the dynamic range made possible by CDs. In fact, CDs today in general have less dynamic range than vinyl albums did, for just this reason.

Now I am guessing here, but I'd lay odds that when Dylan is griping about the sound, this is what he means.

So now you know why your CDs with their pristine signal-to-noise ratio sound like crap.

(Crossposted at DemProgress)

Sometimes in the dense political landscape, choices are difficult to make. Who really is the best Democrat? Who is the better person? Who would I want sitting at my table over Sunday dinner? Who's the good guy?

Sometimes, the choices make themselves, based not on the issues but who a candidate chooses to surround himself with (sorry, Dan), the tone he takes, and the kind of people who support him. In other words, sometimes I am not sure who I should be for, but I always damn sure know the kind of people I'm against.

...Oh, what's the use.

Lolly do dum, lolly do dum day.

(Apologies to the Smothers Brothers)

(Crossposted at DemProgress)

So Senator Kerry, how do you feel about Joe Lieberman's claim that the Democratic party stance on Iraq will strengthen the terrorists?

That's bunk. That's scare-tactic bunk. And it's an unfortunate statement from somebody of Joe's quality, and I regret it....I'm not going to stand for those scare tactics, that's exactly what the Republicans have been doing for the last years. They avoid a real discussion by throwing out a slogan and they scare people....It's a disgrace that people are playing to the lowest common denominator of American politics, which is fear.

Oh, but look! Bloggers!

"Lieberman’s tone and message has shocked a lot of people," said a second senior Democratic aide who has discussed the issue with other Senate Democrats. "He’s way off message for us and right in line with the White House."

But look! Bloggers! Bloggers! Don't you see the nasty, vile bloggers? Look! There's Markos right there behind that bush! When will Ned Lamont take responsibility for the nasty, awful, hurtful BLOGGERS!

"Corliss Lamont was the only Lamont unashamed to declare his communist sympathies and beliefs publicly, but that doesn't make Thomas, Ted and Ned any less Marxist. Red Ned may label himself a progressive, but when he espouses goals shared by Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Castro, et al., he gives away his true color."

So what? What's the matter with you, can't you see the BLOGGERS? They hacked Joe's WEBSITE, for heaven's sake!!

There's just no reasoning with Lamont supporters.