Fact-esque

Donate to Chuck Today

I know it's fashionable to throw money only at a few A-List approved candidates, like Connecticut millionaire Ned Lamont, but Chuck Pennacchio could use some of that fiscal love too.  In fact, he could use it more than Ned for a few reasons:

1. He's facing a primary in 6 weeks, not five months.
2. He's built a genuine state-wide grassroots organization that has made considerable wins in the last several weeks including getting open primaries in Bucks and Lancaster counties.  That was no small trick.
3. He's the 100%-PAC-free candidate.   He's relying on donations from small donors.
4. You know where Chuck stands on important issues and he doesn't stand with anti-Choice, anti-stem cell, pro-war, corporate, Me Too Dem, Bob Casey. 
5. Chuck can beat Man-on-Dog in November.  Casey can not.  See Number 4. 

So send ten or twenty five bucks his way today.   Be part of a real grassroots effort and rest assured the money will be going to good use.  The fight to take back the party back for real Democrats starts in PA.

If Audible is Good Then DOWN RIGHT BLARING MUST BE BETTER

One more musical theater post before moving on.  Can someone tell me when it became a good idea to mic these productions even in venues with excellent accoustics and in productions with talented performers?  I can see miking the middle school play that happens in a cafetorium (it's a real word) but why are we miking people in the Philadelphia Academy of Music?  It gives probably otherwise beautiful voices a tinny quality and sets up a painful competition between the performers and the orchestra to be heard.   

I know that miking has opened the theater to less talented performers who don't belong on a stage but I have a feeling that the people benefiting from this policy aren't actors who can really use the work and I'm sure it hasn't helped the audiences out at all. 

Advermatizing is Easy!

Join in the Madison Avenue mania over at Norbizness' place and make your own Tahoe commercial.   So far all the entries are great.  Here's mine.

Here's one for the Hippo.

Here's one I saw at an Atrios comment thread.  It's almost perfect.

Update: Well, the virus certainly spread. Chevy has got to be thrilled with this response. Before this contest I didn't know what the Tahoe was. Or how much it hated sunflowers.

Prince Spaghetti is for Witches

Today I'm going to Philly with my daughter's class to see Wicked.   I picked that photo of the show because it captures that special American Idol-esque, screech that dominates the soundtrack, which I've heard two hundred and eleven million times now.  After the first seventy-five thousand times I started to appreciate the screaming.  Now I'm offically desensitized to it and should have a good time today.   Truth be told, I'm way ahead in this game.   When my husband went with my son's class, he had to sit through Oliver.  I love the American musical genre but I'm picky.  Oliver drives me crazy.

Wicked has a good and painfully relevent story going for it.   It's sort of an Enemy of the People set to screechy pop music.  The story is a prequel and a sequel to the Wizard of Oz and it's too complicated to get into here.  The short version is that Elphaba (the Wicked Witch of the West) and Glinda are set up as opposites with a common cause ("goodness"), although Elphaba's eyes open to what that fight really entails (resisting the government) before Glinda's do.  In the end, Elphaba is exiled and it's Glinda who survives to rule Oz.  Since I've always had more Elphaba in me than I've come to see is productive, the story resonates with me.  Mostly though, I'm fascinated to see how the larger political message (benevolent dictators whose power is rooted in a fearful populace are bad) goes over with the rest of the parents, who are nearly all BushCo voters, but I don't expect it will come up in conversation.  It's not polite to talk about politics, even though I don't let that stop me most days.  Bad Elphaba.

So today I'm taking a break and going totally Glinda.  I'm going to see some screaming sopranos and flying witches and trust that most everyone who hears the line, "Fellow Ozians, as terrifying as terror  is, let us put aside our panic for this one day: and celebrate!" will get the message without my inner Elphaba helping them out.

UPDATE: 

Wicked was fantastic.  If I could afford it, I'd take the rest of the family to see it.   Extra bonus feature for Buffy fans: Mr. Trick has joined the cast in the role of Dr. Dillmond.  He's does a ton with a not-huge part.   I had no idea he could sing so beautifully.  I knew he could act.   

The whole cast was very good.  Freeman was great.  The Wizard just finished six years on Broadway as Mr. Cellophane in Chicago so the part of the Wizard fit him perfectly.  Elphaba's part can only even be attempted by someone who's loaded with voice talent.  But it was Kristin Chenowith I ended up being the most impressed by and she wasn't even on stage.  Thanks to the soundtrack CD, I've been living with Chenowith's performance for four months. As talented as the woman playing Galinda today was, she couldn't touch Chenowith, who must be from another planet she's so good.

If You Can't Beat'em, Join'em

The latest memo showing what a mess U.K. and U.S. thinking were before the two invaded Iraq is already old news - really old news if you consider that this latest memo story was in the U.K. papers five weeks ago.   Still, there's good coverage of it here from Ron and here from Tas.

The NYT is excited enough about the story to have front paged it.  I'm guessing that's because they can act as if they broke something significant.  They always like to do that:

Since then, The New York Times has reviewed the five-page memo in its entirety. While the president's sentiments about invading Iraq were known at the time, the previously unreported material offers an unfiltered view of two leaders on the brink of war, yet supremely confident.

It's taken all this time to read a five-page memo. 

The January 2003 memo is the latest in a series of secret memos produced by top aides to Mr. Blair that summarize private discussions between the president and the prime minister. Another group of British memos, including the so-called Downing Street memo written in July 2002, showed that some senior British officials had been concerned that the United States was determined to invade Iraq, and that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" by the Bush administration to fit its desire to go to war.

The latest memo is striking in its characterization of frank, almost casual, conversation by Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair about the most serious subjects. At one point, the leaders swapped ideas for a postwar Iraqi government. "As for the future government of Iraq, people would find it very odd if we handed it over to another dictator," the prime minister is quoted as saying.

"Bush agreed," Mr. Manning wrote. This exchange, like most of the quotations in this article, have not been previously reported.

It's not only that the story is old news, it's also that the story, as reported in the NYT, is unreasonably hard to piece together.  Anyone who hasn't been following it very closely is bound to get lost.   It  needs charts and timelines like you can find on DowningStreetMemo.com.  Either this is a big deal or it isn't.

But this story has never been a favorite of Bill Keller.  Just for laughs, look back at where the fearless NYT was on this when the story of the Downing Street Memos broke.  There was the first story, Prewar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn't Made, in which David Sanger told us that the memos proved that "no political decisions" had been taken to invade Iraq.  That was fun.  And then there was the follow-up, written by Todd Purdom, which tells us to calm down, the Downing St. memos don't tell us anything we don't already know.   

These memos were the story of 2005 and the NYT did its best to bury them.   There aren't enough disjointed,isolated front page strories in the world to make up for that. 

Read Around

Connecticut is standing up to WalMart's have-a-baby policy of stocking Plan B contraceptives but not guaranteeing that there will be anyone on duty to dispense it.  From CT's comptroller:

Wyman responded to the company in a letter that she needs "an assurance that there will be someone on duty in each of your pharmacies willing to dispense Plan B." If there is no one on duty, Wyman wants specific information from Wal-Mart on how the company would ensure the patient's ability to receive the drug.

"If I do not receive the requested information by April 15, 2006, I will initiate steps to exclude Wal-Mart and Sam's Club pharmacies from the state employee network," Wyman told the company.

Tell them you support them here:   Blumenthal   Wyman

nyceve, another dKos diarist, shares a conversation s/he had with a pharmacy cashier about Medicare Part D. 

bondad, also from dKos, makes a good, simple, well-sourced argument for single payer health care in the U.S.   It's good for sharing with friends who don't know anything about the issue.  Get to them with this before the next Harry and Louise commercials start airing.  Then, when they know the issue, send them over to Ezra's place.

The NYT has set up a page for four military bloggers.  I don't know how long it's been there.  I just found it.   Judging from what I read, none of them will like this idea.

I think I blogged about this a while ago but why not hit it again: the IRS is going to sell your tax return to the highest bidder.  I feel like I should get cut in on any action generated by my tax return.  I'm the one who filed it.

A million Frenchman can't be wrong.

I'd like to take this opportunity to announce that I will only link to bloggers who remain anonymous.  Full disclosure is for show-offs.

R.I.P.

Norweigianity has the best Caspar Weinberger obit  yet.

Frat Boys Gone Wild

This is why I can't get excited about the NCAA basketball nonsense.   News coverage here.

And They Cook, Too

Has this happened to you?  You're spending hours reading your favorite blogs when suddenly you realize that you have hungry kids somewhere in the house and nothing planned for dinner.  Now the same bloggers who put you in that predicament are ready to help you out of it.  And They Cook, Too, a cookbook filled with recipes from bloggers, is available for purchase.   Proceeds go to Doctors Without Borders.  Buy early and often.

Here He Comes to Save the Day!

Our good friend and ally Pakistan is in Nicholas Kristof's crosshairs:

Ms. Parveen, the young Pashtun woman I wrote about on Sunday, was kidnapped at the age of 14 and imprisoned in a brothel here in southeastern Pakistan for six years. She escaped in January and married the man who helped her flee, but now a Pakistani court has charged her with adultery and is threatening to hand her back to the brothel owner — even though she is adamant that he will then torture and kill her.

Ms. Parveen's court hearing was yesterday, and I was afraid that would be the end. But the court adjourned the case for one week for further investigation.  And Ms. Parveen's lawyer thinks the mood is different now: the Pakistani press picked up on my column, and the attention will make judges more careful about handling her.

So the publicity may save her life, but it won't make much difference for thousands of other Aisha Parveens around the world. Asma Jahangir, the chairwoman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, said she sees cases like Ms. Parveen's all the time.

Kristof, probably figuring that discretion is the better part of valor, made no mention of Dear Leader in this column.  Asking him to come to Africa to witness the effects of his rotten, self-serving policy aimed against the U.N. Population Fund is one thing.  Asking him to spank Pakistan publicly twice in a month  - and this time about cultural misogyny  - is something even Kristof, the superman, can't think is worth trying. 

Here are some organziations that work every day against slavery and violence against women:

Women for Women International
Heifer Project International
Funding Exchange - Social Change Philanthropy
Global Fund for Women