July 2010 archive

I was asked that very question late last night. The answer is yes, very much so. We are a very “hard”, left leaning blog but willing to entertain many points of view. Just be prepared to defend whatever you write. We are democratic in that sense.

We like people like Glen Greenwald, Sirota, digby, Jane Hamsher, Atrios and even occasionally, Armando (BigTentDemocrat).

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It started off as a song, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, released that previous Christmas to raise money for relief of the famine in Ethiopia.

Band Aid was a British and Irish charity supergroup, founded in 1984 by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia by releasing the record “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” for the Christmas market that year. The single surpassed the hopes of the producers to become the Christmas number one on that release.

The record was released on November 29, 1984, and went straight to No. 1 in the UK singles chart, outselling all the other records in the chart put together. It became the fastest- selling single of all time in the UK, selling a million copies in the first week alone. It stayed at No. 1 for five weeks, selling over three million copies and becoming easily the biggest-selling single of all time in the UK.

It exploded into a concert that went around the world and raised £150 million (approx. $283.6 million).

1985: Live Aid makes millions for Africa

The Live Aid concert for the starving in Africa has raised triple the £10m expected.

And as the London event draws to a close at Wembley Stadium, Britain had contributed £1,100,000 to the global total of £30m.

Described as the Woodstock of the eighties, the world’s biggest rock festival was organised by Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof to raise money for famine relief in Africa.

Wembley was packed with a crowd of 72,000, andTV pictures, co-ordinated at BBC Television Centre, have been beamed to over 1.5 bn people in 160 countries in the biggest broadcast ever known.

How do you make Dems care about the midterms?

Posted at 4:20 PM ET, 07/12/2010

The White House and Dems have made this case every which way: They’ve charged that Republicans will again rule as stooges of Big Oil and Wall Street. They’ve claimed that Republicans will rain a blizzard of subpoenas on the White House if they take control of Congress. They’ve framed the elections as a choice between the policies that got us into this mess and those that are getting us out of it. And so forth.

Yet rank and file Dems don’t appear to care that much. The latest polling shows that the “enthusiasm gap” remains the same, with Republicans far more excited about voting than Dems are. In other words, Dem scaremongering about the GOP takeover doesn’t yet appear to be revving up Dems to turn out this fall.

What if the only way to boost Dem enthusiasm isn’t to reveal how successful those awful Republicans were in rendering the Dems quasi-powerless, but to succeed in spite of this problem and do more to mitigate the crisis and the pain it’s caused?

Le.  Tour.  De.  France.

The uptempo singing and dancing is supposed to distract you from the fact that there are only 3 names you need to care about for the next 12 days rest of the Tour-

Evans, Schleck, and Contador.

Oh the announcers will try to get you hooked on Levi Leipheimer, but he’s almost as old as Lance and farther away from his dreams of glory.

Or, you know, busses.

127 Miles from Morzine-Avoriaz to Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne including 2 category 1s, a category 2, and a category ‘K’ that I suspect does not stand for ‘Kute Kuddly Kitty Kat’.

Especially if you’re stiff as a board.

1985: Live Aid concert

On July 13, 1985, at Wembley Stadium in London, Prince Charles and Princess Diana officially open Live Aid, a worldwide rock concert organized to raise money for the relief of famine-stricken Africans. Continued at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia and at other arenas around the world, the 16-hour “superconcert” was globally linked by satellite to more than a billion viewers in 110 nations. In a triumph of technology and good will, the event raised more than $125 million in famine relief for Africa.

Live Aid was the brainchild of Bob Geldof, the singer of an Irish rock group called the Boomtown Rats. In 1984, Geldof traveled to Ethiopia after hearing news reports of a horrific famine that had killed hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians and threatened to kill millions more. After returning to London, he called Britain’s and Ireland’s top pop artists together to record a single to benefit Ethiopian famine relief. “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was written by Geldof and Ultravox singer Midge Ure and performed by “Band Aid,” an ensemble that featured Culture Club, Duran Duran, Phil Collins, U2, Wham!, and others. It was the best-selling single in Britain to that date and raised more than $10 million.

Crossposted at Daily Kos

12

9 pm, Total Drama World Tour premier- “Anything Yukon Do, I Can Do Better”.

• AMC– Mad Men
• ESPN– Home Run Derby
• FX– Man on Fire
• History– Pawn Stars, American Pickers
• SciFi– Another repeat of the season premier of Warehouse 13.
• TBS– Family Guy and Neighbors from Hell
• Turner Classic– Roman Holiday
• TLC– Cake Boss

Later-

Letterman- Nicolas Cage, Steel Train.  Jon (6/30) and Stephen (7/7) in repeats.  Good Eats has Tacos.  Turner Classics– Spellbound.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 BP deploys new cap to finally seal rogue well

by Mira Oberman, AFP

35 mins ago

This is “Take Two” which is only available on the web. Rachel Maddow discusses her recent trip to Afghanistan and the Republican women and what they have to offer American women. (Sorry, no transcript is available.)