McCain is In.

Sounds like the team is starting to align. This from the Palm Beach Post.

A Bush By Any Other Name, Part III

Unfortunately, even though our country currently has a war going and is on the brink of economic crisis, The President of The United States today released an official statement on the Terri Schiavo right-to die case.

Here is the full text of the official statement:

President's Statement on Terri Schiavo

The case of Terri Schiavo raises complex issues. Yet in instances like this one, where there are serious questions and substantial doubts, our society, our laws, and our courts should have a presumption in favor of life. Those who live at the mercy of others deserve our special care and concern. It should be our goal as a nation to build a culture of life, where all Americans are valued, welcomed, and protected - and that culture of life must extend to individuals with disabilities.

END OF STATEMENT

Here we have another instance of our President taking a "complex issue" and boiling it down to black and white. Did we elect him President, or did we elect him Moralist?

How anyone who can send American soldiers to die in a war that was not started in self-defense is beyond me can claim this kind of moral high ground, calling for a "culture of life", is beyond me.

============================
As always, your comments are welcome.
============================

March Comes In Like A Lion

Nine days into March, and mother nature is kicking us in the balls again. This is the most miserable time of the year in the Northeast - spring peeks through for 24 hours or so before Old Man Winter squashes it like a bug.

Meanwhile, Randy Johnson's fastball is in the low 90s. The president is trying to get rid of Social Security, yet the news is dominated by the Michael Jackson trial and Martha Stewart's emergence from camp cupcake to bathe in a swimming pool of hundred-dollar bills. I'm not worried about the Big Unit, but I am worried about the Big Trust Fund. I don't trust a guy who never ran a successful business, who didn't know that Social Security was a federal program, to find the solution.

There are times to be had, however. This month has been determined by fate to be remembered as the second coming of The Black Crowes, reunited with immortal lead guitarist Marc Ford for not only a seven-night run at the Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC, but a full-blown national tour.

With the spring thaw will come new movement on the political front. Everyone in both parties is waiting to feel out the first hundred days of the second Bush Administration before beginning the arduous tasks of political positioning and (more importantly) fundraising. By the time the year is out, we'll be so deep in handicapping both fields that we'll have forgotten that there was an election at all.

Early bird prediction...

Dems: Hillary Clinton


Repubs: Mitt Romney


All for now.


============================
As always, your comments are welcome.
============================

A Week Off From Fantasy Football

Not only did my "Squared Sevens" squad recover from a dismal 1-3 start to finish 8-4 and win the division... but we (yes, that's right, I said "we" in reference to my fantasy squad) get a bye in the first week.

That's right, bitch.


The 'Cuse Has Definitely Been In The House On My Team This Season.

Why am I so attached to this team?

1. Donovan McNabb, 25 points/game. Culpepper, Vick and Manning have gotten all the attention, but McNabb's performances this season have single-handedly accounted for at least five of my wins.

2. After absolutely blowing a third-round pick using Quinten Griffin on the Mike Shannahan RB Corrolary (someone for the Bronocos will average over 100 yards rushing), I was in dire straits by week 4, particularly with Deuce McAllister (first round) hurt with a high-ankle sprain (so high on his ankle I think it was actually a vaginal sprain). On the same day, I pick up Reuben Droughns (11.4 ppg), Willis McGahee (10 ppg) and the Jets defense, which turned out to be VASTLY underrated at 12 ppg. I mean, this one day of brilliant GM-ing (I was working the injured reserve slot overtime with Deuce's status changing constantly from probable to questionable) basically carried me to a division title.

Have fun worrying about your lineups on Saturday, you poor bastards. Me and my boys will be taking this week off.

============================
As always, your comments are welcome.
============================

MUSIC: Marc Ford Taking A Break From Ben Harper... Crowes Nesting???

In a statement released Wednesday on his official website, Ben Harper revealed to the world of "rock-rock" (my new, hyphenated subgenre) that guitarist Marc Ford would not be joining him (as a member of his supporting band, the Innocent Criminals, with whom Ford has played since mid-2003) for a handful of engagements in the immediate future.


Marc Ford's work with the Black Crowes is vastly underrated.

This begs the question: Are the Black Crowes getting ready to reunite?

Ford has not worked with the Crowes since parting ways with the band following the band's headlining jaunt on the 1997 Further Festival. With Ford in tow, the vastly underrated Crowes cut two of the greatest albums of the 1990s and were known (rightly) as one of the top bands on the touring circuit. When Ford left the fold, the Crowes' power was severely diminished.

For a solid exhibit of the Crowes in their prime, check out their second album (and first with Marc Ford), The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion.




============================
As always, your comments are welcome.
============================

BASEBALL: I Can't F--king Believe The Red Sox Won The World Series

There. Got that one out of my system too.

============================
As always, your comments are welcome.
============================

ELECTION: I Can't F--king Believe That Bush Won

There. I have it out of my system.



============================
As always, your comments are welcome.
============================

Review: U2's "How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb"

This One Is No Bomb

ARTIST: U2
ALBUM: How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
RATING: A


Rock and roll is normally a demonic art. As such, you don't expect 40-somethings who have already sold tens of millions of records and have more money than God (even after God gets his next round of Bush tax cuts) to fall from their creative peak for more than a decade only to regain form. It doesn't happen. The Rolling Stones tanked after firing Mick Taylor and falling victim to a desire to meld with the times rather than have the times meld to them. Pink Floyd parted with Roger Waters and their music became (pun intended) watered-down. Zeppelin were never the same after Plant's car crash during the Presence sessions allowed Jimmy Page to indulge a bit too much in his hard drug habit. None of these bands ever recovered (and in Zeppelin's case, John Bonham's death closed the deal on that ever happening) - but fear not. Despite the relentless annoyance of that the recent iPod commercial featuring "Vertigo", U2 have somehow done the impossible more than 11 years after the release of their worst album and slid back into the sound of their prime. While their latest, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb doesn't break any new sonic ground for the Irish quartet, their mastery of their craft and the ease of their command of still herculean talents have them breaking ground in a totally new way. Could it be that U2 are in the midst of an unprecedented second creative peak in their already Hall-Of-Fame career?

In 1991, when Bono and Co. broke out of a four-year recording hiatus to release the uber-brilliant Achtung Baby, that album's chaotic and "industrial" sound was instrumental in ringing in an era where virtually all rock-based music had some sort of label, often with a hyphen involved somewhere: Grunge; alt-rock; alt-metal; alt-punk; nu-metal; rap-rock; you get the idea. You couldn't just have one countdown show on MTV anymore - there had to be one for each genre. Eventually, frustrated programming execs grew frustrated [read: revelled in] the end of the rock star and stopped airing music videos at all on MTV. While helping rock become increasingly fragmented, Achtung and its genre-bending experimentation would go on to inspire another generation of rock bands (usually put under some "alt-" label) like Radiohead, Oasis, Coldplay and Wilco to varying degrees, whether or not they're honest enough to admit it, and the byproduct of this new trend of experimentation was that the music was often too frightening to the mass market to, say, carry the genre above the undertow of its subgenres.


If anything, Achtung Baby was too good.

This is not to blame U2 for rock's increasing irrelevance throughout the ass end of the 1990s. All told, if Cobain had any real friends (a better rehab program and fewer shotguns), or if Pearl Jam hadn't decided to practically take 3 crucial years off from touring because of a battle with Ticketmaster, things could just as easily have turned out differenly from the reality we eventually had of Boy Bands ruling the end of the decade. But alas, that's where we went. And while Pearl Jam's martyrdom didn't adversely effect their music, U2's Stones-esque elephantitis saw their music suffer to the point that they were nearly irrelevant. By the time 1993's Zooropa came around, it was becoming clear that the band was starting to go overboard on the whole irony thing, preferring to write songs that would be little more than props in an elaborate, themed stage show. And aside from the oft-forgotten gem "Stay, Faraway (So Close)", Zooropa was an absolute steaming dung pile of a record, and 1997's Pop wasn't much better. Where the band had built its name and following upon enormous anthems like "Bad" and "With or Without You" that were delivered with unparalelled emotion by a singer with golden pipes, self-indulgent mumbling and pseudo-rapping took precedent for Bono, while the rest of the band developed an unhealthy reliance on drum machines and synthesizers, the latter of which often crowded out the brilliance of guitarist The Edge, whose performance on Achtung Baby was so pivotal in the album's success.


Pop (1997) was definitely not U2's strongest moment.


All of this made it all the more exciting when in 2000, the band finally released a decent album in the life-affirming All That You Can't Leave Behind, which was actually quite good, at least through the first 7 tracks. It was refreshing to know that U2 could still care about writing great songs again, but it was still easy to worry that it was their last gasp, and that the band's regained success would again make them arrogant and lazy, leading them to release more recorded fecal matter. The other four tracks on that album weren't offensively bad, but certainl not very good or interesting, and one still had the feeling that even on the good tracks the band wasn't trying particularly hard, at least not the way they did back in the Unforgettable Fire or Joshua Tree days.

Thankfully, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb returns U2 to the precious balances that once made them the world's greatest band: the balance between the subjects of love and politics; the balance between overproduction and underproduction; the balance between whispering and shouting; and the balance between taking themselves too seriously and not taking themselves seriously at all.

There is no mistake throughout most of the album's 47 minutes - this is primarily a rock record. But its genius is that it mines many of U2's personalities from the past: there is the garage-rock brashness of the opening track, "Vertigo", and "All Because Of You"; the earnest, teach-the-world-to-sing global awareness of "Yahweh" and "Crumbs From Your Table"; ascending anthems in "Miracle Drug" and "Original Of the Species"; and "Man and a Woman" and "Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own", which feature Bono-as-love-struck-lothario.

But what makes Atomic Bomb such a striking return to form is the combination of two factors, the first and probably most important of which is the fact that Bono sings on this album like he's in his 20s rather than his 40s. "The stars are in your eyes" Bono wails on "Miracle Drug", the album's second track, "I see them when you smile". Meanwhile, the Edge hammers away at his signature distorted stecatto riffs that often sound like sirens or bells, which happens to be the second crucial factor of the band's return to form - the Edge has his god damned guitars back. Finally. Electric and acoustic both, he's not afraid to use them with punishing virtuousity.

With those factors in place, Bono could be singing about dirt on his Porsche and it would kick ass. And as was the case with All That You Can't Leave Behind, Atomic Bomb doesn't completely abandon the electronica of the band's 90s experimentation - it merely utilizes those elements as garnish in the way they invented during Achtung Baby. This may not be quite as "challenging" to the band in terms of musicianship or "breaking new ground", but they seem to have poured some of that excess energy back into writing the best songs that they possibly can, which in my book is the preferrable dispersion of the band's resources.

One can only wonder what would have been if U2 hadn't decided to experiment most of the 90s away to virtually no avail, instead spending time trying to craft rock songs like "All Because of You" that would make any current "garage" band like The Strokes age jealous in its ferocity or the catchiness of its hook. While it's frustrating to think of what U2 had in the early 90s only to throw it away, it's heartening to know that they may finally have found what they're looking for.

I read recently that Bono said he wanted to avoid having U2 "become crap like everyone else does". They're off to a good start. How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb is easily the best album I've heard this year, and the U2's best since Achtung Baby.

Long live rock and roll.

============================
As always, your comments are welcome.
============================