Comments (1) He was 91. I saw Brubeck perform at least three times, twice in Salt Lake City and once in Chicago. Joe Morello on drums, Eugene Wright on bass, Paul Desmond on sax, and Dave Brubeck on the piano.
Hat tip: Ann Althouse.
And he can dance too!
To simply call this video by the California Teachers Union offensive is to do offense to the word offensive:
Warning: You should be standing up when the video hits the 2:55 mark; otherwise, you may injure your jaw when it hits the floor.
and then there are flash mobs that sing songs from Les Misrables at your wedding dinner.
You can find it here. I’ve attended at least three of the Choir’s annual Christmas Concerts, one with Sissel and David McCullough, another with Natalie Cole, and finally one with Brian Stokes Mitchell and Edward Hermann. Around Christmas, these concerts are one of the hottest tickets anywhere. They’re free, but you can only get them via a random, on-line selection process described here. As you’ll see, it’s too late to get ticket for this year, but put it on your calendar for next year.
White House press secretary Jay Carney assures us that all these protests are because of a stupid YouTube video.
Yeah, right. That’s why protestors in Egypt were chanting, “Obama, Obama there are still a billion Osamas.”
That’s why some in the Muslim world were chanting the same thing back in May:
That’s why protests are happening all over the world and appear so coordinated. No, this is all because of a YouTube video. Yeah, right.
Maybe the protestors are tired of Team Obama spiking the ball. You can almost hear the jihadists thinking, “Okay, you got our guy. Enough already!”
On second thought, it’s probably Romney’s fault.
UPDATE: Regarding that movie. I haven’t seen it, but I’ll grant that it’s offensive and some in the streets of Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere are greatly offended by it. Still, I have sincere doubts that we can attribute all these protests and protestors to that movie.
I agree with what President Obama says in this video, particularly at around the 4:00 – 4:30 mark. Until we–Republicans and Democrats–stop fear mongering, we will not solve our nation’s financial problems.
The question is, does President Obama and his side of the aisle really believe what he says in that video? The evidence from the last few weeks says no. To be fair, does the Republican party?
Why does money always get the bad rap, while power–at least the power coveted by those in government–is almost always benign? You know the mantra: If you want to find out who did the dirty deed, it’s always follow the money, never the power. It’s what Woodward claims Deep Throat told him in that garage in Washington D.C., and it’s been repeated ad nauseam ever since. But let me ask you: wouldn’t a quicker route to solving the Watergate mystery have been to follow the power? Who benefited from the break-in? Well, Nixon, of course. And who ended up resigning because of his abuse of power? Nixon again.
Power in government comes almost inevitably to those who first offer you something. They offer to fix your schools. The say they can clean up the environment. Need healthcare? They’re on your doorstep. The list goes on. And yes, they often come through on their offers. We get cleaner water and a safety net. It’s not all bad. Never is. And in any case, your personal cost for anything the offeror does is often obscured by the good deed. But don’t kid yourself; there is a cost. After the transaction, you have less power, and the government that solved (or tried to solve) your problem has more.
In my mind, power is at least as corrupting as money–and in the wrong hands, much more worrisome. For me, the wrong hands are the hands of people I can’t simply walk away from. Thus, though my church may be powerful in some sense, it’s not power I fear because I can walk away from it. Likewise, I’m not too concerned about the power of a G.E. or an ExxonMobile because I can drive across the street and buy from Sears or Texaco. And it’s not power in the hands of the governor or legislature of my state because it’s pretty easy to move to another state.
No, the power I fear most is power in the hands of the federal government because it’s not so easy to leave the United States of America. That takes more money, a passport, and the proper visas. It takes a dislocation of family and friends, of employment, of language, and so on. Besides, if power in the hands of the federal government has reached a point that I would want to move, it’s likely that I may not be able to move in any case.
Now don’t misunderstand; I don’t think we’re anywhere close to that in the U.S. But I do think it’s time to recognize that every time someone in government offers to help us with something in our lives, be it healthcare or soda, the environment or gun violence, we need to ask who really benefits. In other words, we need to follow the power. Almost inevitably, that offer to help results in a loss of my power and an accretion of the power in the hands of the offeror, power in the hands of people and institutions that I cannot walk away from willy nilly.
Don’t believe me? Ask Milton Friedman.
At least Romney talked taxes when he signed Romneycare into law:
Our experience also demonstrates that getting every citizen insured doesn’t have to break the bank. First, we established incentives for those who were uninsured to buy insurance. Using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages “free riders” to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others. This doesn’t cost the government a single dollar. Second, we helped pay for our new program by ending an old one — something government should do more often. The federal government sends an estimated $42 billion to hospitals that care for the poor: Use those funds instead to help the poor buy private insurance, as we did.
In contrast, Congress and President Obama explicitly avoided using the word tax--until, that is, they finally had to argue their case in court.
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