AddieStan

Sunday evening found your blogstress in the thrall of the amazing Anoushka Shankar , composer and sitar player extradordinaire -- and, yes, the daughter of Ravi Shankar . This weekend, the younger Shankar dazzled the audience, equal parts Indian and non-Indian, it seemed, at Washington, D.C.'s Lisner Audiorium. Anoushka Shankar has taken a daring walk out to the edge of classical Indian music, mixing her sitar and other traditional instruments with piano, electric bass and rock-n-roll-with-a-world-music-twist stack of drums. The results were mixed but always riveting, and those pieces that thrilled were positively transcendent. One particularly astounding piece featured tabla player Tanmoy Bose and Ravichandra Kulur , a virtuoso on the traditional wooden flute trading percussive vocalizations in a a call-and-response mode. Imagine Bobby McFerrin gone South Asian. It was breathtaking. Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of the evening was the sight of this jewel of a young woma...

Your blogstress wishes you and your family a blessed Samhain -- known in these parts as Halloween -- whether you celebrate in the old way (dancing around a fire) or the new way (dressing up as a cartoon character, begging for sweets). Either way, these are our days of the dead, our welcome to winter, our moment to disappear into the form of a different being. It's also the eve of All Saint's Day, a co-option by the Roman Catholic Church of this ancient pagan festival, wherein we celebrate the pure ones who have gone on to the next world. The following day, All Souls Day, we try to pray any loved ones stuck in Purgatory out of that firey netherword. And so it mote be...

Today's New York Times offers a superb editorial on the efforts of the president and others in his party to exploit, for the purpose of rallying the party's base, the New Jersey court decision on civil unions for gay people: If the last month has taught us anything about the Republican Party, it is that homophobia is campaign strategy, not conviction. Congressmen who trust their careers to gay staffers vote for laws to enshrine second-class citizenship for gays in the Constitution. Gay appointees and their partners are treated as married people at official ceremonies and social gatherings. Then whenever an election rolls around, the whole team pretends it’s on a mission to save America from gay marriage. Add to this the revelations in David Kuo 's book, Tempting Faith , of the demeaning way in which White House types were said to refer to the religious right, and the moral bankruptcy of the whole G.O.P. enterprise appears in full. Your blogstress takes this occasion to sa...

Today your blogstress is very, very proud to be a native of the great State of New Jersey, given yesterday's decision by the state Supreme Court that gay and lesbian couples are entitled to the full rights and benefits of marriage. And despite the right-wing rending of garments, the decision appears to square with the sentiment of the New Jersey electorate, according to a Rutgers-Eagleton poll, as reported by The Record of Hackensack. By more than 2-to-1, New Jersey voters favor conferring all marriage rights to same-sex couples through civil unions, according to a Rutgers-Eagleton Poll in June, a full 66 percent to 29 percent. Legalizing marriage is touchier: 49 percent support it, 44 percent oppose. Some are disappointed that the court stopped short of calling for the same marriage license granted hetero couples to be conferred on same-sex betrothals, but your cybertrix is quite content with this ruling, in the hope that the court will next halt the granting of marriage licen...

In response to your blogstress's exposé , at The American Prospect Online , of the cleverly named group, Feminists for Life, she received this thoughtful missive from an artist: I hear your points but I also can't help but hear a differing point. I heard a lady ask a question, "Why am I not fit to live?" She was asking the question because, as a child conceived as the result of a rape, she had a question which is not so easy to answer. The pro and anti forces couch the issue of abortion in terms far too conveniently simplistic. --Joseph David Marshall True enough that, in the sound-bite age, all arguments get reduced to their essences. However, with regard to the woman conceived through a rape, your pro-choice cyberscribe is not saying that the woman is not fit to live; rather, I'm saying that her mother's choice to carry to term the embryo yielded by the rape should remain the pregnant woman's choice. The framing of the issue as whether or not the wo...

Tonight, World Series fans, you will get to view the latest in the paid political advertising entertainment served up for the mid-term election stem-cell wars of the Cardinals' home state. Watching, on YouTube, a fuzzy preview of the ad -- which was apparently thrown together in response to Michael J. Fox 's latest star turn as an advocate for stem-cell research -- your blogstress felt the hand of Mother Church orchestrating this video confab of right-wing Roman Catholic sort-of celebrities. Now, your Webwench is not saying that she knows for a fact that Big Ma is behind this whole thing; that grail continues to elude her. However, her ears pricked up at the mention of the name of Patricia Heaton , whose face graces the misleading Feminists for Life ad that has run on various political Web sites -- including that of The American Prospect Online , for which your cybertrix writes -- off and on for the last month. As your écrivaine reported for The Prospect 's site la...

Check out your blogstress's riff on the anti-reproductive rights group, Feminists for Life, today at The American Prospect Online . There you will learn of the group's deceptive ad campaign, aimed at young women, and its relationship to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Were any further evidence needed of the spiritual bankruptcy of 21-century America, one might look to the Mark Foley scandal, where the vicissitudes of secular politics -- a realm in which the Roman Catholic Church wields no small measure of power -- have rubbed up against the sanctimony of the church in a most unbecoming way, reviving a scandal of its own that church fathers likely thought they had put to bed with a flood of money paid out to the victims of sexually predatory priests. Mr. Foley, you'll recall, sought to, at best, explain his sexual harassment of young men (or, at worst, to excuse it) by revealing, through his attorney, that in his teen years Foley himself had been molested by a Catholic priest. This week, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune tracked down a priest who admitted to having a sexual relationship with the young Foley who was, at the time, an altar boy. The church has yet to comment. Most telling in the the Herald-Tribune 's interview with Foley's f...

If you've never heard of Susannah McCorkle , then David Hajdu's masterful review , in The New Republic , of a new McCorkle biography by Linda Dahl , might not sing to you. But then again, it just might: I pictured McCorkle aging into a figure like Blossom Dearie, an odd bird revered after a long career as an endangered species. Indeed, you might just love it for the sentences. Alas, McCorkle was not to see old age, having thrown herself out of the window of her 16th-floor Manhattan apartment several years ago, after she lost her regular singing gig at the Algonquin. McCorkle was a singer who worked with jazz musicians, but you wouldn't exactly call her a jazz singer. And she wasn't exactly a typical caberet singer, either, possessed, as she occasionally was, with the bombast born of a rock 'n' roll past. But, wow, could she put over a song, as she teased her own emotional color out of every note she chose to sing -- sometimes a little flat. I saw her perform...

Yesterday Sen. Max Baucus , ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, issued a minority report on the use of right-wing, tax-exempt non-profit organizations to provide, in an apparently illegal fashion, services in exchange for donations -- a practice forbidden to exempt organizations by the tax code. Most delicious, aside from the report's exquisite timing, is the exploration of an axis of evil composed of Grover Norquist , Ralph Reed and Jack Abramoff . For background on this all-but-forgotten facet of the Abramoff scandal -- the one that shows the religious right and so-called secular, economic conservatives in cahoots with a sent-by-Central-Casting villain -- refer back to your blogstress's March post on the whole, ungodly mess. More of your Webwench's wisdom on this seedy affair (not that she would have any expertise in seedy affairs) may be found at TAPPED , the blog of The American Prospect Online.

This just in to your blogstress from a colleague in the blogosphere, heretofore unknown to your Webwench: Bush says U.S. Won't Attack North Korea That is the headline of an AP article that hit the wire just over an hour ago. It is currently the top headline on many news sites. Anyone who listened to the press conference, however, knows that the headline is misleading. From the AP article itself: Bush said the United States remains committed to diplomacy but also "reserves all options to defend our friends in the region." Reserving all options does not sound like he has ruled out the possibility of a military response. What Bush actually said was that the U.S. "has no intention of attacking" North Korea. Where have we heard that phrase before? In 2002 Bush repeatedly claimed that he had "no intention of attacking Iraq." CLICK HERE TO READ THE WHOLE POST

North Korea has declared its conduct of a test of a nuclear weapon, and geologists report seismic activity in the region that suggests Pyongyang is telling the truth. President Bush has called the test "a provocative act," which indeed it is -- leaving one to shudder at the thought of what response may be provoked. Let us not forget who we've got at the United Nations, representing U.S. interests. Yes, it's still John Bolton, the man who has expressed his contempt for that very institution. Pray that the gods of multilateralism hold out against the titans of go-it-aloneism. Your blogstress takes some comfort in the notion that the opportunities for Bush-friendly contractors seem somewhat minimal in an occupied North Korea.

From Reuters: Marijuana may stave off Alzheimer's WASHINGTON, (Reuters) -- Good news for aging hippies: Smoking pot may stave off Alzheimer's disease. New research shows that the active ingredient in marijuana may prevent the progression of the disease by preserving levels of an important neurotransmitter that allows the brain to function. Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in California found that marijuana's active ingredient, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, can prevent the neurotransmitter acetylcholine from breaking down more effectively than commercially marketed drugs. If I could only remember where I left the bong...

President George W. Bush with Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev in the Rose Garden at the White House, Friday, Sept. 29, 2006, following their meeting in the Oval Office. White House photo by Eric Draper. This comment by our commander-in-chief caught your blogstress's delicate ear earlier this week, but being an easily distracted, prone-to-the-vapors sort of gal, your blogstress must concede that la tête de t'écrivaine was set spinning by the scandal, murder and mayhem that has besieged our benighted nation over the course of the last few days. What momentarily drew your Webwench's attention to the mystical realm of foreign policy was the president's description of Kazakhstan as "a free country." This he said with the dictator of that oil-rich Central Asian nation by his side -- Nursultan Nazarbayev, the dictator who has ruled the Kazakh people with an iron fist since before the republic gained independence in the disintegration of the Soviet Union....

Unlike many of her colleagues in the blogosphere, your blogstress does not find herself in a position to judge whether or not former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), who has checked himself into a subtance-abuse rehabilitation facility , is actually an alcoholic. To make that determination, your cybertrix would have to take the former congressman's inventory , a practice strongly discouraged by the cult of powerlessness through which your Webwench became sober. Yes, one imagines rehab to be a good place to hide from scandal, and it would be a pity if that were the raison seulement for which the teen-eyeing politician sought entry. However, either way, the 12 steps he is likely to learn in that facility, if taken to heart, could help with the management of that behavior, as well.

Normally a rather docile creature, content to drift from lingerie emporium to chocolatier , your blogstress today, alas, finds herself in a position that requires the unsheathing of her mighty sword of rhetorical wit. This crusade arises from a very poorly executed attack on your Webwench by one of the resident liberal wags of Fox News Channel, who has accused your cybertrix of writing things she never wrote -- a trick more typically used by right-wing commentators. Herewith, your écrivaine 's rebuttal: With (the Christian) God on her side, who needs facts? I don't find it particularly surprising that a Fox News commentator would resort to a factually challenged and misleading retort to an essay on Pope Benedict XVI 's recent geopolitical mischief in the Islamic world. I did, however, find it a bit alarming to see that modus operandi employed at The American Prospect Online , by Kirsten A. Powers . In her commentary, Who Should Apologize? (which includes an ostensibl...

Who knew that, in the land of liberals, there lives a pundit with designs on becoming the Ann Coulter of the left. At least that's how it seems. At The American Prospect Online , one Kirsten Powers uses your blogstress's essay on the pope's dastardly comments about Islam to falsely accuse , by implication, your Webwench of justifiying the violence conducted against women and Christians by Islamists and their leaders. But at no point does Powers thoughtfully address the central premise of your the point made by your cybertrix: that the pope's remarks were irresponsible, and designed to provoke the response they got.

Among the many unsettling things your blogstress heard tonight from disgraced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was a call for the imposition of a literacy test for parole from prison. From the podium of tonight's gala at the Family Research Council Action PAC Washington Briefing , Newt also seemed to call for Congress to shut down the 9th Circuit federal court. (That would be that troublesome group of federal judges located in San Francisco.) More tomorrow. Bon soir, mes amis.

What won't your blogstress do for her devotees? Today, for instance, she has been at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, feeling the hate pouring off the rostrum of the Family Research Council Action PAC " Washington Briefing " gathering for "values voters." (Don't all voters have values? Otherwise, what would be the point in voting?) While there was so much more hate to report on than your cybertrix has energy for at this late hour (imagine Ann Coulter, L. Brent Bozell and Gary Bauer speaking from the same podium on a single day), it was Bauer who took the cake in the category of hard-core demonizers of his opponents. Most interesting was Bauer's swipe at Senator John McCain (R-Az.) for his refusal to accept the White House version of a bill that would have created unconstitutional tribunals for so-called "enemy combatants" that also would have permitted some forms of the "inhumane and degrading treatment" forbidden by Article Three of the...

In the U.S., the top stories today focus on who's dissing us now at the big rectangle on the East River (a.k.a., the U.N.). In Germany, the top story also focuses on the U.S., but there the big news is the disclosure of the identities of three CIA contractors who abducted an apparently innocent man, Khaled el-Masri , from where he was staying in Macedonia, then beat him and shipped him to Afghanistan, where he languished in a secret prison for five months. Because el-Masri is a German citizen, pressure is mounting on the German government to issue arrest warrants for the three, who, according to a European broadcaster, live in North Carolina. Spanish authorities are under similar pressure because the flight manned by the three originated on the Spanish island of Mallorca. According to Deutsche Welle : [M]any journalists wonder why it is taking prosecutors [so long] to find out more about el-Masri's case. In an article on Thursday, the Süddeutsche Zeitung wondered why German...