February 6, 2007

Man of weak flesh in an armored disguise


Jenny Brake, Hopscotch, 2006

* Bush's deficit dance. excerpt:

"Having piled up record deficits, President Bush now promises black ink by 2012 -- three years after he leaves office. The fiscal 2008 budget the president submitted to Congress yesterday shows Mr. Bush's purported path to a $61 billion surplus by 2012. Some of its approaches, particularly the effort to restrain the growth of Medicare through additional means-testing and cutting payments to providers, are commendable; they merit more serious consideration by Congress than they appear destined to receive. The administration also deserves credit for a more candid acknowledgment of the likely cost of the war in Iraq than in budgets past. For the first time, the administration included a realistic estimate of the cost of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for the coming year, $145 billion.

"Yet Mr. Bush's balance is more illusory than real. It ignores known costs such as ameliorating the impact of the alternative minimum tax, which would top $90 billion in 2012 alone; the administration, once again, would simply affix a one-year patch for 2008. It assumes the government will collect far more revenue than the Congressional Budget Office projects, amounting to a $150 billion difference in 2012. No one should start spending Mr. Bush's projected surplus."
...
"Either way, the money available would increasingly fall behind as the population grows and inflation erodes the funding's purchasing power. A Democratic Congress is not going to accept -- nor should it -- cutting health insurance for low-income children or fuel assistance for the elderly while extending tax cuts for millionaires.

"If Mr. Bush's budget is dead on arrival in this Congress, that increases pressure on the leadership there to come up with its own approach. Democrats have a new responsibility to propose realistic solutions to difficult problems and to demonstrate that they are willing to make the kinds of painful trade-offs for the country's long-term fiscal health that the president, once again, has ducked."

* Short, Chickfactor interview of Dump.

cf: where is my new dump album?
dump: it's not done yet.

cf: what has dump been watching on tv? now that dump is a tv star who has starred on the gilmore girls and the simpsons, what other shows does he want to be on?
dump: I've been watching heroes, the wire, lucky louie, pitagora suichi and talk sex with sue johanson. I wouldn't mind being in the audience of a judge judy.

cf: what is dump eating on the road with his other band?
dump: I've been eating cuban food in miami, somewhere near the corner of stab whitey and kill whitey. bbq from dreamland (the tuscaloosa branch, but delivered to us in birmingham) was stout and soulful. I couldn't find anything to eat in orlando so instead I bought records (eddie bo, skull snaps, chubb rock, beach boys "breakway" 45, released the day I was born!). fried chicken in tallahassee. very good cheeseburger at pete's in knoxville. jonathan marx brought me cookies from nashville's best bakery, becker's.

cf: what does dump download, listen to, watch, whatever, on the internet?
dump: recipes, sports scores, directions, occasionally music, 'can't stop the bleeding,' hardcore pornography, flipper videos on youtube, and streaming wfmu.

cf: where is my dump box set? badges? promotional vinyl carrying case?
dump: I don't know where your dump box set is. same goes for the badges. I don't even know how to address the matter of the promotional vinyl carrying case. those would all be pretty cool, because the first two things could fit inside the third thing, and you could carry them all around like that, and then it'd be really easy to know exactly where they all were. but I haven't made any of those things yet.

cf: why is dump ignoring the fans? when will he deliver the goods?
dump: I'm not ignoring dump fans, quite the contrary. I finally started a dump myspace spage, where I am conversing freely, practically like a normal person. I'm posting new, unreleased and hard-to-find songs there from time to time, as well as original artwork.

* Baltimore-based West Main Development will release Cramped Leisure, the first ep by The Foreign Press, February 27, 2007. You can pre-order now at the West Main Development site.

* "To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make." -- Truman Capote

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