Soup | Anthony De Rosa

*332

"Barack Obama, raised by a single mother and his grandparents, born with no discernible financial advantages, clocked Hillary Clinton, clocked John McCain, and got himself elected the first African-American president of the United States. He got himself elected in a country that was still lynching black people when he was a child. Barack Obama, whatever you may think of his politics, doesn't need anyone telling him to man up."

*102

I’ve always been mildly annoyed by people who don’t know the difference between being serious and taking themselves seriously.

- Coke Talk

*82

*14

stalk:

I see what you’re trying to do there …

*2

Castro's Sister Says She Collaborated With CIA

One of Fidel Castro’s sisters says in a memoir released Monday that she collaborated with the CIA against her brother, starting shortly after the United States’ failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.

*4

It is fiscally irresponsible not to do health-care reform. To bury our head in the sand for even one more year and pretend that the problem of rising government health-care expenditures will go away is simply untenable.

- Christina Romer

*424

kaytee:

“While we’re name-calling, will you still love me if I start calling you my sweet baboo?” ♥

*13

President Obama, we elected you, it’s time to fight.

*9

… I’m a little tired of the false equivalency here. You go ask this White House if they’re happy that I’m insisting on the public option when they’re not. You go ask this White House if they’re happy that I’m pushing for torture prosecutions and they’re trying to soft pedal them.

I don’t know if the paranoids of this world, like Michelle Malkin, think Obama handed me my instructions, or she thinks I handed him his. But when I support what this president is doing, it’s because I think he is right. The operative word is think.

I’m not, Rachel Maddow is not, Glenn freaking Beck or Michelle freaking Malkin, a knee jerk jukebox of party doctrine, screeching at every reform, mocking every expression of sympathy, repeating anything the nit-wits, which they serve as doctrine slaves, try to palm off on the sheep they hope will lead them back to power.

- Keith Olbermann [via C&L] (via danielholter)

*31

Aviary

mokoyfman:

Today we announced Spark’s investment in Aviary (www.aviary.com) – a pioneering suite of digital creation and editing tools in the cloud. With this investment, we join a terrific team of existing investors including Bezos Expeditions and a prominent network of angel investors who continue to be engaged in the business.

Aviary’s business is exciting on two primary fronts. Firstly, Aviary is fundamentally democratizing digital creation by bringing free browser-based tools to a previously desktop software dominated market. The software as a service model has been proven over and over again in multiple markets (Salesforce, NetSuite, Google Docs, Flickr, Vimeo, DropBox, etc.) and it is sure to extend to the creative marketplace. And the Freemium business model is continuing to prove itself across a number of these businesses as well as many others.

We are also in the very early stages of an emerging digital economy. I’ve said before that I expect the digital goods market to grow substantially over the coming years and mirror the market for offline goods in many ways. We recently reached the $1B threshold of digital goods sold, and it’s still incredibly early. Aviary provides the manufacturing capacity for this digital economy. Their toolset and open API empower the market for creation, allowing users to participate in the creation as well as consumption of digital goods. This completes the circle necessary to exponentially increase the number of creators and collaborators contributing to the digital goods marketplace and ultimately drive the velocity of the digital economy.

What I’m most excited about though is having the opportunity to work with Avi, Michael, Iz and the rest of the terrific Aviary team. The products they’ve built to date are nothing short of fantastic. And they’re just getting started…

Congrats Mike!

*24

brooklynmutt:

“You Should Have ‘Dithered’ Before Invading Iraq” - George Will To VP Dick Cheney

*9

Twitter got Google and Microsoft to pay for the content that the media industry should have been hosting instead of Twitter. There was money here. And as we all know, the media industry can’t find enough money to keep going. They’re looking for handouts from the government. Meanwhile there was money everywhere. They just had to evolve.

- Dave Winer, Is Google/Microsoft/Twitter in the News Business?

*24

Well, the band hasn’t broken up. It’s one of those weird things where we never could agree amongst the four of us what the nomenclature should be for what was going on. It’s not one of those situations for us where we got together, formed a band, then played a few shows, released a couple records, and then decided to call it a day. We had been friends since even before the band started. I mean, I’ve known Brendan, the drummer, since I was like 14 years old. Up to this point I had only ever been in bands with him; I’ve been in like 6 groups with him. That’s a friendship that predates the band and will go to the grave with me, and the same with Joe and Ian. There’s a bond there that goes beyond whether or not we have a gig booked next week or we have a studio date booked, it’s just different than that. Initially I was kinda like, “Well, maybe we should say we broke up just so we can stop the phone from ringing and take a break.” But nobody felt right about it because it seemed kind of false. The band may do something again; we don’t know. We see each other all the time. We certainly always have work to do concerning the band, and we’re still working on projects within the band—like right now we’re trying to get every live tape that we have from the group archived on the Internet so people can listen to 1200 Fugazi shows! [Laughter] If they want to! You know, shit like that. We’re always dealing with stuff, there’s always an outside chance that we may decide to do something.

-

Guy Picciotto, Fugazi - Gothamist

This interview with Guy is mostly about his current work as a sideman for Vic Chestnut, but this is him explaining that Fugazi is in some way still something that exists. Though I hold out hope for those guys to make more music or tour again, I mostly just want to hear new music from Guy. He’s one of the great rock and roll vocalists of all time as far as I’m concerned, and it’s a shame that he’s not out there with new material of his own.

(via perpetua)

*16

Oscar Award Winning Director Paul Haggis (Crash) Renounces Church of Scientology in Blistering Letter

*6

azspot:

Mike Keefe