A judge can now draw an adverse inference if someone is silent during police questioning, and they later rely on something in court that they could have reasonably mentioned in custody in the presence of a lawyer.
And people think I’m overwrought when I say we need a bill of rights.
“Oh, I think we should keep power out of the hands of unelected juges.” Yes, well, look what happens when you abandon individual rights to the whim of the public.
Cassadee Pope, “Over You” (2012)
I like Cassadee Pope a lot, but this really demonstrates the gulf between her and someone at the level of Miranda Lambert. Compare the way each singer delivers “how dare you” after “you went away.” Pope is angry, but on her version, Lambert packed a slew of competing emotions into those three words: hurt, confusion, self-doubt, melancholy, even a numbed acceptance. As country covers go, this is no “Cry.”
(Source: Spotify)
Rod Dreher, “Sizzurp,” The American Conservative, March 29, 2013
Oh conservatives. Is this what Jonah Goldberg envisioned when he said you should leave pop culture to the liberals?
Also, in the comments on the Dreher post, from MH - Secular Misanthropist:
I never heard of him before, but this isn’t a big achievement as I live under a rock with respect to pop culture. My only awareness comes third hand from TV shows and music my kids watch (which are still fairly juvenile) . But if one of the ponies from Equestria makes the news I’ll know all about it.
!!!
Songs: Ohia, “Farewell Transmission,” The Magnolia Electric Co. (2003)
My favorite Jason Molina songs have always been his brittlest, most miserably lonely ones — while Didn’t It Rain is probably his record I like most, I also have a great fondness for Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go, the lower-than-lo-fi album he made all alone in a garage with no window, and which is so numbingly desolate that when, on track six, he adds a drum machine to his acoustic guitar, the effect is as striking as if he’d suddenly invited Phil Spector to produce the tune.
But waking up to the news that Molina drank himself to death, I think I prefer to hear him today in full-blooded, full-band form. “Farewell Transmission” is a song called “Farewell Transmission,” but it makes a lyric like “mama, here comes midnight with the dead moon in its jaws” sound triumphant, and I prefer to hear Molina like that than those songs in which he so ably summoned the suffocating blackness of despair.
(Source: Spotify)
The first date, May 25, with The Hold Steady!
Done. There.
but i don’t want to go to jersey
OMG, I could do this. I’m not flying out of LA until the 27th. I hadn’t intended going north of DC, but maybe I should make the trip up to Asbury Park?
Which would be perfect because I’m missing out on Gaslight in Sydney on the 10th cause I’m out of the country.
(Source: just-kind-of-floating)
Songs: Ohia, “Blue Factory Flame,” Didn’t It Rain (2002)
When I die put my bones in an empty street
To remind me of how it used to be
Don’t write my name on a stone;
Bring a Coleman lantern and a radio,
Cleveland game and two fishing poles
And watch with me from the shore
(Source: Spotify)
“Step”, from Vampire Weekend’s forthcoming Modern Vampires of the City, is named Best New Track. You can also hear “Diane Young” from the new album.
Oh! Cover art!
Playing dress-up with my new clothes which I bought because lately I’ve gone so hard on the pastels and floral print and colored pants and bright shades and other items in the general realm of ain’t nobody gonna tell me what boys are allowed to wear that I realized I was beginning to run out of casual clothes at the subdued end of the scale other than jeans. So now I have a brand new and thoroughly nice Respectable Man outfit but cot damn gray and camel is such a drab combination. I feel I need some sort of just-a-little-bit girly accessory to make it clear that I don’t, you know, watch rugby or read menswear blogs that explain what kind of collar you’re meant to wear on which occasion.
Also today I went out in green pants and I forgot that it was St. Patrick’s Day. So instead of looking awesome I just looked like some dude who was really excited about smashing pints of Guinness. It was not cool, fam.
EDIT: But I also bought some pastel argyle socks which I spent way too much on, but pastel argyle.
…after peaking in 2009 at $1.4 trillion, the deficit began coming down. The Congressional Budget Office expects the deficit for fiscal 2013 (which began in October and is almost half over) to be $845 billion. That may still sound like a big number, but given the state of the economy it really isn’t.
Bear in mind that the budget doesn’t have to be balanced to put us on a fiscally sustainable path; all we need is a deficit small enough that debt grows more slowly than the economy. To take the classic example, America never did pay off the debt from World War II — in fact, our debt doubled in the 30 years that followed the war. But debt as a percentage of G.D.P. fell by three-quarters over the same period.
Right now, a sustainable deficit would be around $460 billion. The actual deficit is bigger than that. But according to new estimates by the budget office, half of our current deficit reflects the effects of a still-depressed economy. The “cyclically adjusted” deficit — what the deficit would be if we were near full employment — is only about $423 billion, which puts it in the sustainable range; next year the budget office expects that number to fall to just $172 billion. And that’s why budget office projections show the nation’s debt position more or less stable over the next decade.
So we do not, repeat do not, face any kind of deficit crisis either now or for years to come.
Paul Krugman, “Dwindling Deficit Disorder,” New York Times, March 10.
Does this come as a total surprise to anyone else? Another question this raises—are most of the people who talk about the state of the economy on TV news networks totally ignorant? I don’t understand why I’m not hearing this anywhere else.
I’ve been seeing this argument around — I’d have to look a bit closer before I jump fully on board — but the basic principles seem sound. But are the TV talking heads actually ignorant?
Oh My Little Pony comics, well done on shoehorning a Carly Rae Jepsen reference into your dialogue, even if it is in the form of a truly dismal pun.
Follow the brilliant career of Jonathan Bradley, noted iconoclast, libertine, and man of letters. When he's not blogging here, he blogs at The United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia. Jonathan is the editor of American Review magazine's daily Blog Book section and a daily editor at the Singles Jukebox.
e-mail: saturdayclubproductions [at] gmail.com
twitter: @_jbradley
