Its official: John Edwards loses plot!

Its been coming for a long time... now John Edwards is asking americans to protest the Irak war on memorial day! take a sign reading "bring them home" to your memorial day parade!!!!!!

i am afraid john edwards has lost it completely... he's acting increasingly desperate..

andrew sullivan's take on obama..

is very positive! the reagan of the left!

when a guy like obama has both andrew sullivan and arianna huffington in his back pocket he must be doing something right!

check it here

more on ron paul

i think ron paul doesn't scare regular people..it scares the republican and democratic establishment.. because what ron paul says makes sense and is perfectly in harmony with the constitution or rather the principles which guided the founding fathers... the main principle is of course that of LIMITED government..a non intrusive govt which does not get in people's business and a foreign policy that is extremely cautious about the foreign entanglements washington warned us about in his farewell address....

where ron paul's common sense ideas ever to get out there to the people there could be trouble because the american people are all about the common sense..

what we are witnessing in america today is the democratic party becoming much more like the leftist parties of the rest of the world.. people like hugo chavez (an absolute joke.. he is now using $18 million of state money to fund a movie danny glover will direct on slave uprising in haiti! is that being for people?? wasting their money like that??!?!) are looked at as great.. free trade? thats a bad thing! globalization is bad too! for some democrats higher taxes are now a good thing (john edwards has talked not only of repealing bush's tax cuts but actually raising taxes on the wealthy)

so the democratic party is slowly undoing itself.. it has no chance of ever winning anything much less governing if it moves in this direction..

i don't know if you check out the mydd blog??? its a real eye opener..some real wack jobs on it... the main guy, matt stoller keeps posting anti- free trade stuff.. i thought we had left that in the dust in the 1970s??!? you see people on mydd now bandying the "neoliberal" tag as some sort of insult much like people did in argentina ten years ago!!!! thats right: we are borrowing our words and terminology from words/phrases latin america was using a decade ago! and the democrat progressives much like the left in latin america are intent on destroying neoliberalism.... who knew liberals were down on neoliberalism?

which raises the question of what is an american liberal???

this same issue came up in regard to the french election where the progressive community came down very hard on sarkozy whose ideas have a lot in common with the traditional ideas that both democrats and republican have had some sort of consensus on... what we saw was the democrat progressives trying hard to identify themselves with a socialist! this is of course utter rubbish and i had trouble explaining it to french people much like i had trouble understanding it myself..

47west63rd endorses in French Presidential election!

47west63rd is endorsing Nikolas Sarkozy for tomorrow's French presidential election...

truth be told we may be undergoing a bit of a political conversion/minor shift when it comes to domestic politics but we feel that with respect to international politics when presented with a right of center vs. left of center old school socialist party we have always and will continue to opt for the right of center..

sarkozy also impressed the times we viewed him on television and in the presidential debate were an obviously slightly desperate segolene was more bluster and rudeness than substance (although she performed better than expectations).. oh that only we had the political debate the french have had these past few months in the United States.... our politics seems so devalued in relation to the french when we compare, for example, our presidential debate to the one held between segolene and sarkozy this past week...

Who the hell is Ron Paul?

so there's a guy running for the republican nomination for president, ron paul, who is apparently a libertarian..

the little i've found on him i like..

he seems to be a common sense guy.. and yes he voted against the Iraq war and against the patriot act.. how many democrats can say that?

his campaign site is here

Unsung scattered musings on Chet Baker Sings

i have to say.. chet baker sings which was originally released in 1956 or 1957 has really got to be one of the greatest jazz vocal albums nay JAZZ nay ALBUMS of all time.. absolutely wondrous....bewitching... so simple but so gorgeous and affecting... but enough with the platitudes.. i'm listening to a heavily banged up second pressing or first pressing on world pacific (the real first pressing was on pacific jazz THANKS orpheus records for nothing!)... this is one of those records that is just SO tough to get in the original...

remember the talented mr ripley? this album was laying on a table in a scene meant to show just how "cool" the guy who gets killed by damon was...

chet baker what to say bout him? seems like a real hard luck story..how would you like to be the biggest thing since rice a roonie when you are just entering your 20s .. selected best jazz trumpeter or vocalist etc.. and then as the years went by .. and very quickly.. he just wasn't "in" anymore.... heroin takes over your life.. next thing you know you throw yourself out your hotel window.. anybody who's seen pictures of chet in the 1970s can attest to just how much heroin consumed him.his face in those pictures is horrifying gaunt.. david wilcox wrote a great song called "chet baker's unsung swan song" and introduced it on a live version i had on a radio station live comp cd "..this is what i imagine chet baker must have been feeling /thiking as he contemplated throwing himself out the balcony" ..or some such..i paraphrase and the memory gets a bit hazey.... but anyways i guess people loved the chet baker boy or very young man..but he wasn't the greatest singer or the greatest trumpet player by all accounts... but on chet baker sings there is this incredibly affecting-you cannot help but me moved- vulnerability of a very young passionate person who is feeling love the way you can only feel it those few times if you're lucky...

and what to say about russ freeman who plays piano on all these tracks and i think had a lot to do with the music.. great just great playing behind chet.. he really underpins the songs... and what songs! chet really picked some great stuff here.. there are songs by Hoagy Carmichael (I get along without you very well), Sinatra's songwriting team of Sammy Cahn and J(ules?) Styne (Time after time... songs by jimmy van huesen...gershwin (but not for me)

but perhaps whats most striking about chet baker is that in a world where there was a Frank Sinatra and there were many incredible singers its Chet Baker's versions of these songs which will stick in your head....at least thats the way i hear it...and Chet Baker was not a singer per se.. you get the sense he's a guy just like you and me that got up in front of the mike on a lark... now maybe thats putting it a bit strongly... and Chet Baker was a great singer.. just not in a classical sort of way.. he gets by on his personality or his person...if that hopefully makes any sense...he doesn't have the greatest singing chops but the way he sings is what makes it so great..and its his way..

i always thought it was so cool how elvis costello who had covered my funny valentine (a song forever associated with chet who , again had the definitive version though its not on this album) recruited chet to play the trumpet on his wonderful shipbuilding....i think he pretty much wrote that song so he could get chet to play on it.... because i'm sure like me he heard chet baker singing and thought "gold jerry..gold"... this stuff just sticks in your head..its that good....

its always striking to me that the young chet baker on these sides just looks to be a completely different man from the gaunt heroin addict on the later album jackets..that guy is scary looking... but such is life.. it ain't always the american dream.....still the joy chet brings people year after year with these performances is reason enough for him to smile wherever he may be tonight regardless of whatever