Patty Griffin:

Patty Griffin and Emmy Lou Harris:

Todd Rundgren:

Today I am your chariot horse
Tomorrow I’m your albatross
Suspended by the finest thread
No one could ever see
And when there’s breathing in your ear
You put your faith in all you hear
But just how deep those feelings go
I have no way to know
I’ll never know
If I was blind
Would you still be my eyes
Or hide everything you see
Pretending to care about me
When all the time
You’re just wishing I’d fade away
You just can’t bring yourself to
Say out loud the reasons why
You won’t admit you realize
The promise you’ve been living by
Is just an empty shell
You’ll come to bear it like a cross
Then start to tear it like frayed gauze
Though I’m ashamed to be afraid
I just can’t help myself
Can’t help myself.

Kenn Kweder and the Employees, live in Budapest:

Steve Earle:

Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams with one of my very favorite duets:

Tornado warning in my general area for the next 15 minutes or so.

All the money in the world for this war, but not enough for schools:

Along with stocking their children’s backpacks, parents are increasingly helping teachers fill their cash-strapped classrooms with glue sticks, markers, hand sanitizers, toilet paper, and other basic materials once covered by school budgets.

Many teachers sent out the pleas last month before the first day of school as part of welcoming letters. Others handed out the lists last week on opening day. And a growing number, such as those at Chelmsford’s Harrington Elementary this year, posted requests on school websites, saving money on postage and paper.

The lists are another telltale sign of how budget-cutting in recent years has affected the pocketbooks of parents, coming on top of the hundreds of dollars they spend annually on ever-increasing fees for school lunches, sports, after-school programs, and buses.

With household budgets this year stretched thin by rising grocery and fuel prices, parents are questioning how much longer they can keep giving.

“Parents are starting to feel like a piggy bank,” said Holly Ewart-O’Neall, the mother of a second-grader and cochairman of the Worcester Arts Magnet School’s parent-teacher group, which experienced a decline last year in fund-raising revenue that sometimes goes toward supplies.

School districts, wanting to avoid cuts to staff and programs, have been spending less on classroom supplies and materials during this economically turbulent decade. Statewide, school district expenditures on instructional supplies and materials, including textbooks, dropped 4.3 percent between fiscal years 2002 and 2007 to $334.7 million, despite a dramatic increase in the cost of many items.

“It’s a sad state of affairs,” said Thomas Scott, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents. “I’m surprised cleaning fluids and things like that are on the lists. That is going to another level and is more suggestive of how bad things are getting.”

In many cases, teachers refer to the supply requests as “wish lists,” but the items are hardly extravagant.

Susannah Hoffs and Matthew Sweet:

Go read Duffy. He’s funny.

It didn’t really start raining until noon, and now it’s pouring like the dickens. The thing is, I can’t open the windows and enjoy it because it’s still really hot and it feels like a sauna outside.

By the way, I recently passed 25,000 posts here at SG. If there’s one thing you can say about me, it’s that I’m prolific.

Via April, Paul Simon:

I stole this from Dr. S. The Beatles:

Bob Geiger has some great ones. And Krugman points us toward Ted Rall…

Very funny opening commercial:

On the Palin-McCain wedding:

Pretty funny:

TRENTON, N.J. - Cries for help inside a Trenton, N.J., home turned out to be for the birds. Neighbors called police Wednesday morning after hearing a woman’s persistent cry of “Help me! Help me!” coming from a house. Officers arrived and when no one answered the door, they kicked it in to make a rescue.

But instead of a damsel in distress, officers found a caged cockatoo with a convincing call.

[...] About seven years ago, the bird cried like a baby for hours, leading to reports of a possible abandoned baby and a visit to the home by state child welfare workers. But it was only Luna practicing a newfound sound, DeLeon says.

DeLeon says her bird learns much of her ever-growing vocabulary from watching television, in both English and Spanish.

Ooo, and they prophesy, too! Apparently God wants Sarah in the White House!

That John McCain plans to tax health-care benefits so he can cut taxes on the rich?

He does offer a tax credit, but there’s a catch:

For most taxpayers, McCain’s tax credit quickly becomes a tax increase.

McCain’s new tax credit grows only at the rate of inflation (about 2 percent a year), while current tax subsidies keep up with health insurance premiums (about 7 percent a year).3 As a result, the value of the tax credit quickly falls behind rising health care costs, meaning most households with employer coverage today would soon see a tax increase. Families earning $40,000, for example, would receive a small tax cut in 2009, but by 2018 they will be paying over $2,800 more a year in taxes.

Many middle-class households under the McCain plan pay higher taxes immediately. Households with employer-sponsored coverage, higher incomes, and higher premiums are the most likely to see immediate tax increases. The largest tax increases fall on middle-class families, which pay the highest combined payroll and income tax rates.

This being the Republican party, there’s a long-term goal in sight:

North Texas employers are not saying they would drop employee coverage altogether if Mr. McCain’s plan were enacted.

But some do say the plan, which Mr. McCain detailed in July, would encourage young and healthy workers to forgo company coverage, purchasing insurance on their own rather than paying income taxes on the benefit. That would leave employers with only the costly sick workers to insure.

And that, they said, could eventually lead to the death of company-provided health plans.

“If health benefits became taxable income, yes, I do think that more people would opt out,” said Andrew Webber, president and chief executive of the National Business Coalition on Health, a nonprofit group of employer-based health care coalitions, including the Dallas-Fort Worth Business Group on Health.

Bob Queyrouze, who oversees benefits for 1,200 workers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, calls Mr. McCain’s plan “radical.” “Long term, it would be destructive to the system,” Mr. Queyrouze said.

He adds that he doesn’t think the health insurance industry could respond quickly enough to handle a large influx of individuals looking to buy their own, more affordable policies.

So what have we learned, class? That the GOP, as usual, is working to bring Big Business even cheaper, even more disposable labor!

This would be good information to share with your GOP-loving friends and family.

And privatizing gains - the motto of the GOP:

WASHINGTON — Senior officials from the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve on Friday informed top executives of mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that the government was preparing to seize the two companies and place them in a conservatorship, officials and company executives briefed on the discussions said.

The plan, effectively a government bailout, was outlined in separate meetings that the chief executives were summoned to attend on Friday at the office of the companies’ new regulator. The executives were told that, under the plan, they and their boards would be replaced, shareholders would be virtually wiped out, but the companies would be able to continue functioning with the government generally standing behind their debt, people briefed on the discussions said.

It is not possible to calculate the cost of any government bailout, but the huge potential liabilities of the companies could cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and make any rescue among the nation’s largest ever.

I woke up this morning with my eyes and face swollen. It’s not the paint that’s the problem - it’s the spilled detergent that’s still in the rug, emitting fumes. Looks like I’m going to have to hire a professional cleaning service, since I don’t have a wet and dry vacuum. Arggh.

John Hiatt:

And he shows his versatility with “His Penis Came Between Us” (yes, I saw him on this 1989 tour):

On Bristol’s very delicate “decision”:

Clap your hands! No recession here!

WASHINGTON — Recession fears are back with a bang and the economy is front and center in the political arena again after a Labor Department report Friday showed that the nation’s unemployment rate leapt to 6.1 percent in August, employers shed jobs for the eighth consecutive month and revised numbers for earlier months showed even greater payroll hits.

Employers shed 84,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department said, and the unemployment rate moved up by a larger than expected four-tenths of a percentage point. There were job losses across most of the broad spectrum of U.S. employment, especially in the manufacturing, retail and construction sectors.

The strong 3.3 percent economic growth in the second quarter of this year, led by solid U.S. exports, had eased recession concerns. But Friday’s jobs numbers pointed to a serious slowdown and erased any confidence about the economy for just about anyone outside the optimistic Bush administration.

“So Sambo beat the bitch.”

Charming.

Back early - Tropical Storm Hanna was supposed to hit early Saturday morning so I figured I might as well leave. (That, plus I torqued a muscle on the side of my knee and I’m in agony. There was no way in hell I could make the walk to the beach.)

I’m in decompression mode now but will catch up with y’all later.

She really rips into McCain:

Last night at the Republican National Convention, John McCain used the word “fight” more than 40 times in his speech. In the 16 years that we have served together in the Senate, I have seen John McCain fight.

I have seen him fight against raising the federal minimum wage 14 times.

I have seen him fight against making sure that women earn equal pay for equal work.

I have seen him fight against a women’s right to choose so consistently that he received a zero percent vote rating from pro-choice organizations.

I have seen him fight against helping families gain access to birth control.

I have seen him fight against Social Security, even going so far as to call its current funding system “an absolute disgrace.”

And I saw him fight against the new GI Bill of Rights until it became politically untenable for him to do so.

John McCain voted with President Bush 95 percent of the time in 2007 and 100 percent of the time in 2008—that’s no maverick.

We do have two real fighters for change in this election—their names are Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Do you ever get that feeling like you forgot something? Oh yeah, the war in Iraq!

This UN draft agreement between the U.S. and Iraq was just leaked and translated by the erstwhile Raed Jarrar.

Continue Reading »

Why, there’s no way the Bush administration would suddenly start searching for Osama bin Laden, just to get a Republican elected in November! Of course not.