MISCmedia by Clark Humphrey » Blog Archive RANDOM LINKS FOR 8/9/11

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RANDOM LINKS FOR 8/9/11

August 8th, 2011 by Clark Humphrey

Some guy who’s writing his own Seattle music-scene book has just listed me among the most “underrated Seattle music people.” Considering that the only public musical performing I’ve done is karaoke, I guess that’s an accomplishment.
Today’s sermon against the deep bore tunnel comes from the Tacoma News Tribune, which chides the state Dept. of Transportation for refusing to make its tunnel-related records public.
What they didn’t want to release, an internal memo about the tunnel project’s financial prospects, has been leaked online by tunnel opponents.
R.I.P.Â Mark Hatfield, an actual sane Republican (back when there was such a thing) and one of the first national lawmakers to public acknowledge the Vietnam war was a huge mistake. The hereby-linkedÂ OregonianÂ obit claims Hatfield had been on the short list for the GOP VP nomination in ’68; but Richard Nixon chose the more “southern strategy” friendly (i.e., demagogue-like) Spiro Agnew.
Obama insists that the Standard & Poor’s nonsense notwithstanding, America is still “a triple-A country.” So why don’t we try harder to break into the majors? (At least it’s better than the bush leagues, where we were when the seeds of this mess were planted.)
Virginia Heffernan asks, and believes she has an answer, why grade-school students can write very lucid blog posts andÂ lousy class papers. She calls for a move away from industrial-age rote learning and a return to “socratic learning.”
Michael Wolff says he knows how to get the Rupert Murdoch empire out of the U.S.â€”sic ’em with the RICO Act.
There’s panic on the streets of London, and spreading to other U.K. cities. It was originally inspired by protests against police brutality. Guardian commentator Nina Power offers another reasonâ€”increasing inequality in that land (still not as bad as it is here). The same paper also quotes academicians who see large parts of a whole young generation who believe they have no future. Is this the story of Johnny Rotten?