Grateful Dead Hour

"It Was Twenty Years Ago Today" – photo by Stu Levy. Read more about it.

This post from The Daily Kos (by Hunter) is a thing of beauty. An excerpt: Playing with fire, you say? Because the indictments ringing Tom DeLay finally reached up that one, final step from his ring of closest advisers to DeLay himself? Because the SEC has launched a formal investigation into the same behaviors by … Read more

The U.S. drug czar’s office is running ads implying that smoking marijuana can lead to insanity. But pushing dubious science is no way to persuade teenagers not to do drugs. By Maia Szalavitz Parents who read the New York Times or Newsweek this past summer could be forgiven for freaking out when they came across … Read more

Mark Morford’s column in today’s SF Chronicle is apposite. An excerpt: …it’s so unfair, isn’t it, to attack poor Dubya like this? Just a little misplaced? After all, Bush has always been the rich white man’s president. He is the CEO president, the megacorporate businessman’s friend, the thug of the religious right, a big reservoir-tipped … Read more

“…official Washington was like a dog watching television. It saw the lights and images, but did not seem to comprehend their meaning or see any link to reality.”

Amazingly informative piece on Stratfor by George Friedman, New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize. Last Sunday, nature took out New Orleans almost as surely as a nuclear strike. Hurricane Katrina’s geopolitical effect was not, in many ways, distinguishable from a mushroom cloud. The key exit from North America was closed. The petrochemical industry, which has become … Read more

I canceled a planned trip to Oregon this weekend. I was scheduled to play a private party west of Portland – a really nice tribal reunion that I played last year. My decision was based in part on the cost of gasoline, but it’s more than that. It just seems like a bad time to … Read more

This administration and the congressional majority are profoundly anthropocentric, following a line of thinking that nothing is doing any good unless it is producing a commodity for human beings. Human beings are, according to the fundamentalist theology of this administration, God’s chosen species. We have have therefor been authorized to despoil as necessary in order … Read more

I saw Senator Trent Lott on The Daily Show and heard some of his interview on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He sounded so damn reasonable and affable, such a regular guy. But I wasn’t amused. I just thought, “That fucker spent three decades smearing the halls of democracy with shit, and now he writes … Read more

Dog Days #1, originally uploaded by dgans. Our first Giants game of the season – August 6, 2005. It was the Giants’ ninth annual “Dog Days” event. Fans brought their dogs and had a parade before the game, and then sat in the bleachers to watch the Giants beat Houston 5-2. Rita and I went … Read more