Think Again...Or Even For A First Time

Writing to his usual standards of incomprehensible Latinate, George Will yesterday laid this egg:

The public sector's involuntary tendency to become, regarding productivity, a concentration of stagnation...

George, have you read your own column lately? You've been intellectually and stylistically stagnant for years. Moreover, you work for a newspaper still coasting on the Woodward-Bernstein Watergate investigatory reporting of the early '70s.

I hate to disillusion you (o.k., not really), but the private sector is as subject to stagnation as the public sector. Why do you think Toyota and Nissan kicked Detroit's ass? Why do you think the BP/Halliburton catastrophe happened? Why do you think that Apple ambushed every recording label in the world and took over the music distribution business? Should I go on?

What a minute...think...I guess I'm not being fair: I shouldn't expect thinking from someone who hasn't had a new thought in thirty years.

Green Onions

We're staving off a global depression and George Will writes about...light bulbs. If conservatism isn't dead, it's sure doing a good job of rendering itself irrelevant...

In a highly useful analysis, the great E. J. Dionne assesses President Obama's relationship to the status quo and his critics on the left:

Without question, President Obama’s tax and budget proposals are daring, and his unwavering commitment to passing health care reform this year is both honorable and gutsy.

But his plan to bail out the banks reveals a deference to the existing financial system, deep worry about further unsettling an already troubled market and a devout hope that the economic situation is not as bad as some economists, notably Nobel Prize winners Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, fear.

Mami Wata...

Currently on Citizen K.'s album rotation:

• Leonard Cohen, Live In London. This guy is 73? You wouldn't know it from listening to this incredibly vital performance. As far reaching as this CD is, it merely scratches the surface of what Cohen has to offer. I can't wait to see him when he's in Seattle later this month.
  
• Asa, [asha]. Anglo-Nigerian singer-songwriter has a silver voice, a heart of gold, and the talent to make them shine.
• Indigo Girls, Poseidon and the Bitter Bay. They just keep getting better. Get the deluxe edition with the second CD that reinterprets the first with all acoustic arrangements.
• Gomez, A New Tide. Endlessly searching and creative, on this release they successfully probe their folk-rock side with an intricacy not often seen in that genre. It's their prog-rock roots that them do this, but who's complaining if it works this well?
• Femi Kuti, Day By Day. Fela Kuti's son comes into his own with this world music masterpiece that augment Afrobeat with robust horns, the Hammond B3, and ominous lyrics like these: "How the richest continent get/Majority of the poorest people/You better ask yourself." Indeed...

Friday's Choice: It's 1966 and Booker T. & The MGs play "Green Onions" on Shindig: