Chris Christie should just make up his mind. Either run or don’t, but let’s end the speculative nonsense surrounding his non-candidacy.
Personally, I think all this talk is foolish — both on his part and the GOP’s– but ego will ego and the mainstream media is addicted to racehorse speculation.
The Republicans may think that the president is a socialist, but to paraphrase Lloyd Benson all those years ago: I know socialists (happen to consider myself one) and, Mr. President, you’re no socialist.
Read what John Nichols has to say.
We can judge a society by how it deals with its most vulnerable.
And no one is more vulnerable than a man on death row hours away from execution.
Georgia executed Troy Davis last night, who was convicted of killing a Savanna cop nearly 20 years ago. The conviction has stood numerous court challenges, but Davis’ guilt was placed into doubt because seven of the nine eyewitnesses that testified against Davis recanted in a case that had little physical evidence to support the conviction.
I have no idea whether Davis was innocent or not. What bothers me about the case, however, is that there remained some doubt — which means that Georgia may have executed an innocent man.
And that should be unacceptible. That it’s not, that Americans are unwilling to see that the death penalty submerges us in a moral swamp, that it taints everyone of us who lives in the United States.
The death penalty is a barbaric failure. It offers no deterrence (otherwise why would Texas, the execution capital of the nation, have 17 percent more murders per capita than the death-penaltyless New Jersey). The machinery erected to try suspects is as rickety as America’s decaying bridges, with the ultimate, irreversible penalty being imposed and no way of guaranteeing that the person being sent to death is guilty. There always is reasonable doubt.
Albert Camus called it premeditated murder in which society is complicit. When we put anyone to death, we are all guilty of murder.
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| Photo from R.E.M. Website: http://remhq.com/photo_gallery_detail.php?id=1586&gallery_id=118 |
I guess I was 19 or so when I first heard R.E.M. on college radio — most likely WRSU at Rutgers or WPRB in Princeton, though it could have been on the Penn. State station, where I was still in school.
“Radio Free Europe” came out on an independent label in 1981, received more widespread attention in the year that followed and then became the centerpiece (in a more polished version) of the band’s first full-length album, Murmur, in 1983.
The jangly guitar and muffled vocals that created an odd sense of mystery, and a title referring to the U.S. funded radio station piped into communist countries — it was a revelatory sound that, along with the remnants of punk, helped set me on a musical path that I have hued closely to ever since.
Now, 30 years after the song came out on Hib-Tone, the band is calling it quits. I can’t really blame them. The band’s first 15 years were a blur of perfection, a collection of remarkable releases that saw its stylistic pallet grow. Murmur was pure low-fi indie, as were the next few albums to follow. The band’s sound grew to fill stadiums with Document — which I think is their finest, a cross between their low-fi past and stadium present/future.And then it softened with the exquisite Automatic for the People and grew outsized and harsh with Monster. What followed was less consistently good, though had some other unknown or less-well-regarded band had produced them, albums like New Adventures in Hi-Fi, Up and Around the Sun might have been seen as the solid recordings that they were.
Accelerate was somewhat of a return to form for the band, and included songs that looked back at R.E.M.’s heyeday, but Collapse into Now, a solid effort, fell flat and it was clear that R.E.M. had probably run out of gas — a sense that was reinforced by Mike Mill’s comments on the band’s Web site:
During our last tour, and while making Collapse Into Now and putting together this greatest hits retrospective, we started asking ourselves, ‘what next’? Working through our music and memories from over three decades was a hell of a journey. We realized that these songs seemed to draw a natural line under the last 31 years of our working together.
I feel lucky to have been a fan of the band throughout the career, to watch it grow and change and adapt. And I feel even luckier to have gotten to see them live three times at different points in their career. I wish the members well and hope their new projects are fulfilling for them and produce music that strikes a cord with the listener.
The numbers are horrific — highest poverty rates in years — and the efforts on the table are just not good enough.
New Jersey, for instance, is looking to institute mobile farmers’ markets, which as I said yesterday, can be useful but really are nothing more than a Band-Aid.
Even the very good proposals offered by Katrina vanden Heuvel today on The Nation Web site — including an increase in food stamp allocations — will do nothing to address the larger causes of poverty.
To really make a dent in this problem, we need to do more. We need to upend our economic system and rebuild it. We need to realize that corporations are not the best of most efficient providers of services, that they exist only to build profit and nothing else — and they do that by charging as much as they can get away with while doing everything they can to keep costs down.
Enough is enough. Our well-being is more important than the corporate order.
