From Salon, a review of the first "Vote For Change" show in Philly, with the Springsteen, REM line-up.

"Hunched over a 12-string acoustic guitar, standing in the lone spotlight of an otherwise darkened Wachovia Center in Philadelphia Friday night, Bruce Springsteen began his tour sprint to help unseat President Bush with a bluesy, instrumental version of the “Star Spangled Banner.” “America is not always right -- that’s a fairy tale you tell your children,” Springsteen later commented from the stage. “But America is always true. And it’s in seeking this truth that we find a deeper patriotism. Remember, the country we carry in our hearts is waiting.” "

Read the entire review (well worth sitting through a commercial if this is premium content)
From RJ, a couple of quotes worth remembering:

"Naturally, the common people don't want war ... but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country." : Hermann Goering

"The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men": Plato

And, finally, via my cousin, E.L. Doctorow's essay on President Bush. All the more worth reading since the debate, where the President allowed as how he knows how tough war is because he sees it on TV. Putz.

"I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our twenty one year olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the WMDs he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel inm the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousand dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be. They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and father or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life.... they come to his desk as a political liability which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq. How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his "mission-accomplished" a disaster.

He does not regret that rather than controlling terrorism his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he did.

He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to. Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator.

He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing -- to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends. A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you.

Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children. He is the President who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the thirty five million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the forty percent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills -- it is amazing for how many people in this country this President does not feel. But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest one percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the safety regulations for coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a- half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class.

And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it. But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneous aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over the world most of the time. But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind.

It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.

The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble. Finally the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail. How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.

E.L. Doctorow

In a world where celebrity is measured in single names, I think that Richard Avedon was the first photographer to be elevated to the status of the faces he photographed. Avedon, like his subjects, only needed one name.

I'd be lying if I said that in art school I didn't worship the richness of his images. Where the boys were drooling over Ansel Adams' zone system, I was mesmerized by the clarity and depth of Avedon's portraits.

I was never so much of a fool as to think that I'd ever make anything as beautiful, but I shot an awful lot of black and white of my friend Patti.

Richard Avedon, another of my heroes, has left the planet.

The animals, the RLA and I have a game we play. It's called "Sockie on the Head" and it consists of (when putting socks on or off) taking the sockie and bopping the animal on the head with it. Ming tries to hook it with his claws, and does a mighty fine job of catching them, I may add. Nails bites the sock. Or at least snaps at it. We love this game.
I bring this up because when I got back from the gym last night, the RLA was watching the "debate" and one look at the smirking, simpering chimp and I went wild. I ripped off my gym socks and proceded to beat the talking head on the TV screen. I played Sockie on the Head with Dubya.

Sigh. Dubya. He fumbled, he mumbled and he stumbled his way through 90 of the most excrutiating minutes on TV. It was awful. I couldn't sit through the whole thing and went off to the showers. When I came back he was still there repeating his one memorized line: Kerry changes his mind.

I don't know about you, but if I had never changed my mind about anything, I'd still be a redhead married to the Anti-Christ. I'd still be drinking coffee milkshakes accompanied by Bar-B-Que potato chips and I'd still think that shoulderpads were a good look. Granted, most of those are superficial beliefs, and not the earth-shaking ideals that Dubya was yapping about, but if he hadn't changed his mind about certain things, he wouldn't have gone AWOL in the National Guard and he'd still be drinking like a fish and snorting cocaine. So maybe changing your mind isn't the sin he likes to make it out to be.

Of course, born-again Christian though he is, he still lies like a rug. High crimes and misdemeanors.

I kept waiting for Kerry to answer one of Bush's snivelling platitudes about the value of every American soldier's life with the question "Oh, yeah? Then why haven't you had the grace to go to a single one of their funerals? Why don't you let the American people see the price we're paying by showing photos of the flag-draped coffins of the military dead? And don't tell me it's out of respect, because you are using the dead of 9-11 like fucking wall paper, every chance you get."

But that wasn't going to happen.

I thought whoever dressed Kerry did a great job. Loved the black suit and white shirt: it really played off that great hair of his. It was stark, it was dramatic, it was a dangerous fashion choice and it rocked.

Verbatim from today's blog:

What Kerry Should Say (Rude Version):

If, at tonight's "debate", when Kerry is asked, "What would you have done differently in Iraq?", he doesn't answer, "What the fuck kind of question is that, Jim? Jesus Christ, how many corpses of children need to be piled at the door of the White House to know that any reasonably well-trained terrier could do a better job managing this war than that motherfucker at the other podium? How many dead soldiers need to clog the pool at the 'ranch' in Crawford before anyone in this goddamned administration admits that things are more fucked-up than a thalidomide baby with warts? Here's what I would have fuckin' done different: Short answer - I wouldn't have fuckin' gone to Iraq, and if this squinty fuckface wants to accuse me of leaving Saddam Hussein in power, then he can fuckin' ask the mom of some kid blasted to shit by a roadside bomb if she gives a rat's ass whether or not Saddam's in power and Iraq is gonna have fake elections to prop up its fake ass government. Long answer? Yer askin' me a fantasy question, Jim, and if you wanna get into fantasy, here's my fuckin' fantasy - so get your wish-fulfillment bell ringin': I'd've gotten a large gay black man to get into William Rehnquist's shower back in late November 2000 and had him scare the Chief Justice into a coma with his raging black hard-on. I'd've fuckin' sent the SEC probin' Bush's asshole for evidence that he fucked over the shareholders of Harken. I'd've sent his fuckin' drunken, coked-out, duty-skippin' ass to Vietnam, where the men of his platoon would've used him for practice before raping the village girls in the Mekong. I'd've yanked down his pants at a Skull and Bones meeting and paddled his butt bright red with the wooden plank that had 'Bitch' carved in it so the word would be scarred on his ass forever. I'd've spiked pregnant Barbara Bush's drink with an abortifacient so she would eject the goo that would become George W in her womb. I'd've gotten George, Sr.'s nuts ripped off when he ejected from his fighter jet. I'd've made sure Prescott's dick was mustard gassed into disuse in the Meuse-Argonne. That's what I would have done differently in Iraq. Now, you little semi-conscious cuntface, get Karl Rove to shove a talking point up your ass about that or do you want me to make you suck my cock in front of a national audience?", then the debate will be worthless.

This is the week that a good deal of my stress ends: the project from hell is due to go live on Friday.

A little recap: sometime in the middle of last year, the hospital got a new web management tool. My father died the first week of May. While I was sitting at his bedside, web tool was installed and configured. It had taken almost 9 months to get the tool installed. The day I returned to work, I started on the site conversion. My PHB asked me how long it would take, and I told him six to nine months to complete the work, if the PR department cooperated with content, and assuming I'd be working on this pretty much alone. He said that he'd help (yeah, right) and that I had three months.
So I have been working como un perro ever since. The PHB "helped" for a month or two by adding and deleting links and going to California for classes and then by leaving me alone to do my work. The PR department "helped" by telling me how to structure the site, demanding pages be added, then not giving me content, and lastly demanding that those empty pages be deleted.

Thursday we have a demo and are supposed to go live on Friday. That's two months longer than my boss gave me, and one month less than my shortest estimate.

I've also been maintaining the existing live site, keeping it updated and adding pages. I've also been going to meetings and doing all the other day to day business I'm expected to manage.

And then there's my personal life: executing my father's estate, trying to keep an eye on my mother's care (she has advanced Alzheimer's) and worrying about the various extended family that lives up and down the Treasure Coast. The names of the cities that they live in would have been unfamiliar to 90% of America until this month, when they were in the path of two monster hurricanes.

Vero Beach, Port St. Lucie, Stuart, Hutchinson Island, Snug Harbor, West Palm Beach.

I have no idea today if my cousin's house in Vero is standing, or my auntie's condo on Hutchinson Island exists. I haven't spoken to my brother in Port St. Lucie (his mother-in-law died in the last storm and I have little hope that his father-in-law will do any better in this one). I spoke to Mummy's nurse yesterday morning, but haven't heard since.

Yesterday, I had a full-fledged anxiety attack in the middle of the afternoon.

Today, I am back at my desk, pounding out another 20 pages or so in anticipation of Thursday's presentation. My flu is in remission. My boss is over at his west coast house, stuck in the Tampa airport.

My horoscope keeps promising me good fortune in business. I have two resumes out, and am waiting to hear from other opportunity. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Item the first: I've got the flu. That'll teach me to discount the RLA's misery when he gets it first. I'm falling over in my chair, surrounded by OTC flu products and big honking box of tissues, spreading my disease to my co-workers because (despite my personal feelings about coming to work when sick) I have the web roll-out from hell in one week, and I have to be here to work. Hah! and Good Luck with what ever I produce today.

Item the second: Bruce Springsteen is 55 today. Happy birthday, Bruce. Read his most excellent interview in Rolling Stone. Here.

Item the third: Hurricane Ivan is back? And Jeanne just won't go away. She's bearing down on the Florida coast for the third time, after wandering in circles in the Atlantic for two weeks. Just beat us up, and go away, already.

Item the fourth: I'm preparing a rebuttal to the person who dropped a comment on my entry down below about the Bush family, and how she admires their family values. So far, I have found multiple arrests spanning multiple generations for crimes ranging from breaking and entering, to DUI, to drug abuse. I have located the reports of Neil's philandering and Poppy's. From personal friends, I have the story of Barbara's anti-Semitism that goes back to her childhood. And that's just the opening paragraph. I haven't even gotten to the high crimes and misdemeanors of the sitting president. However, with the roll-out from hell, and the flu from next door to hell, that rebuttal will have to wait.

Go read what Bruce has to say. It's worth the read.