http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640
Stephen Colbert testifies before Congress. In character. And the Republicans just don’t get it, nor do many of the Democrats. Crazy stuff — funny like Tom Toles is funny.
Bruce Springsteen turns 61 today — which makes me feel old. I can remember when I first became interested in Springsteen’s music 32 years ago (at age 16) with the release of Darkness on the Edge of Town. The album had an edge and life that much of what I was listening to at the time lacked, and it sent me back to his earlier albums and forced me to rethink my whole approach to music.I don’t have HBO, so I won’t be able to watch the Springsteen documentary until the special edition box set comes out in November. The box set — three CDs (a remastered version of the album and alternate takes of the originally planned album The Promise, along with two DVDs of documentary and live footage) is the kind of release Springsteen-ologists would have liked to see when The Boss issued the 30th-anniversary Born to Run package five years ago.
One of the things I’m interested in is the sound. Darkness was a shift in production from BTR, moving from a massive wall-of-sound approach to something more nuanced in which the individual instruments stood out more. It was intentional, according to interviews I read, and it fit the dark, desperate material perfectly.
On Darkness, Springsteen moved away from the sprawling lyrics chronicaling the last-gasps of youth that characterized his first three efforts and focused on the broken dreams plaguing working-class 20-somethings — the dead-end jobs and fruitless attempts to hold on to a moment in time that could not be held onto — a set of themes that would govern his songwriting for the next decade.
I won’t call it poetry — rock lyrics are not poetry — but Darkness flows from a poetic spirit and is part of my poetic foundation.
Assemblyman Reed Gusciora has upped the ante on ethics reform in tbe New Jersey Legislature. The Assemblyman, who represents most of Mercer County, unveiled a legislative package today that would alter the dynamic in Trenton by toughening penalties on corruption, creating new classes of crime and — most surprisingly — making the Legislature a full-time body and imposing a 10-year term limit on legislators.
According to a press release from his office, Gusciora would:
With the Gusciora proposals now on the table alongside some pretty tough rules being proposed by Gov. Chris Christie, there is a chance that the culture of corruption that has badly damaged the public’s faith in state and local government can be overturned.
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/assets/swf/CSPANPlayer.swf?pid=295625-1
The Republicans’ new plan for the nation — as described in their “Pledge to America” is not exactly a bold statement pledging a new direction. The plan, tax cuts and vague promises to cut government spending can be summed up succinctly: More of the same.
We’ve been down this road before. The notion that we can cut our way to prosperity is absurd. It hasn’t worked in the past and it will not work moving forward. Consider recent history: The last three decades have been characterized by wild fluctuations in our economy, an upward shift in income, a growing underclass, failing infrastructure, a failing regulatory apparatus and so on. Libertarians and fiscal conservatives, such as the misleadingly named Club for Growth, say that this proves that government does not work. The reality, of course, is that government can’t work when you tied its hands behind its back.
Is the failure of our food-inspection regime due to government’s built-in inefficiencies, as the fiscal hawks would say, or is it because we’ve reduced the number of food inspectors and asked industry to police itself? Did the financial collapse happen because of some inherent government failing, or was it because we gutted the rules and handed the keys to the financial cop car to the crooks? The same goes for the rest of the regulatory apparatus, which was gutted under Reagan and the two Bushes (Clinton did not exactly rebuild the system, but at least he didn’t make it worse).The questions, I think, imply the answer.
And what about the growing inequality in the nation? Is this shift happening because the wealthy have been smarter and work harder? Or is it because we slashed taxes for the rich at the same time that we criminalized the poor and took away the handful of lifelines we had offered?
The Republicans are peddling a lie, trying to convince the American people that their plans will magically transform a nation in decline into a reborn superpower, when what they really are offering is further erosion and decay. (The Democrats are only nominally better on this, unwilling as they are to stand up to their corporate sponsors.)
Anti-Muslim bigotry is going mainstream. That’s the topic of this week’s column. Discuss.
