I have all my CDs ripped to digital, but I still can't bring myself to get rid of the physical media, or even store them off in a box in the garage. I like seeing them in the racks and knowing I can pull one out and play it if I want. New ones I buy mostly digital, but for example the Bonnie Raitt CD we were talking about the other day...I have all her other ones on CD...it seems wrong to buy the rest on digital. But that seems stupid too.

Certainly, I understand the difference in stated ends ... but, the means of the Sanders' campaign has become quite troubling as they sling around the stuff usually associated with last-stands or panic over delegate rules & reality ... a reality that both adults, Sanders & Trump, knew going into the high-stakes political contest entailed by seeking the presidency.  

I respect your loyalty to your man; and, at the same time, I do not believe that one so quick as yourself is really blinded by the plain-old politics emanating from the Sanders' campaign.  The one thing about the one-time practitioners of techniques that Sanders (aka J. Weaver & T. Devine) appears to be emulating is that they never posed as pure/above-it-all types...think Tricky Dick and beyond.  Sanders may be alright outside the campaign trail; but right now--and in all honesty--his fealty to his limited goals vis-à-vis breaking-up-big-banks and free tuition for all seem to be obscuring anything but rote, loud speeches against "corruption."  If he wants to pursue that approach that is his decision, of course.  People like me may not agree with what looks like classic political overpromising, but that is his right to preach and your right to believe.  HOWEVER ... the turn to name-calling of a particularly ugly nature, of a whistling cue nature when his opponent is the first woman to have reached that political & governmental level ... the accusations of "unqualified" and "whores" have a special ugliness to women of a certain age, in view of the fullness of their meaning over time and in view of the personal gut-insult that they carry with them ...that turn is more than "inappropriate," it is more than misspeaking or anything resembling that.  It is the kind of thing that even Trump might avoid; it stinks.

kdog: "Jane is talking about taking our country back from the 1% and special corporate interests...something we'd probably all agree was a good idea 2 years ago, but now is an inconvenient truth."

... an empty rhetorical exercise in ideological self-indulgence, in which proponents seek to mask their political temper tantrum as some sort of "revolution." And unless and until such "revolutionaries" actually get up off their arses, and make personal commitments to become active instruments of change themselves, they're not going to "take back" a single school board or city council -- never mind the entire country.

Making and sustaining the sort of change you envision takes a lot of time and effort, and as I told you last week, I'm not seeing that sort of commitment from Bernie's folks. And quite honestly, what I'm seeing from that political camp is the worst thing anyone can do in that regard, which is to think that someone else -- e.g., the Sanders campaign's high-priced consultants, Jeff Weaver and Tad Devine -- is going to conduct this so-called "revolution" on behalf of the American proletariat, rather than for their own personal and material benefit.

Because should Bernie's revolution actually succeed and our country's ruling class be vanquished, one may regretfully discover that the relative handful of activist power brokers who managed to somehow pull off that particular feat have their own respective personal agendas in mind. Those agendas may not necessarily reflect the best interests of those who chose to sit in the bleachers and cheer the spectacle as it unfolded. And that's when revolutionary movements -- even those initially undertaken with the very best of intentions -- can get hijacked and become terribly messy.

It should be noted that Nicholas II, the Czar of All Russias, was NOT overthrown by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917, during the First World War. Rather, he was compelled to abdicate the throne by Alexander Kerensky and the political moderates in the elected Duma, who then proclaimed a Russian republic and pledged to continue the country's war efforts as a member of the Allied cause. For his part, Lenin was then living in comfortable exile at the time in Switzerland.

Only when it became apparent that Kerensky had failed to consolidate his own control over the country in the immediate wake of the Czar's downfall, did the Imperial German government then agree to facilitate Lenin's return to Russia. Again for his part, Lenin pledged to his German benefactors to immediately cease hostilities and withdraw Russia from the war, once the Bolsheviks had successfully moved to fill the resultant power vacuum in St. Petersburg. At that point, the Russian Revolution quickly got very ugly.

One year later, Lenin had effectively seized power, signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Imperial Germany that acknowledged Russia's capitulation and withdrawal from the First World War, and moved the Russian capital to Moscow. Meanwhile, Kerensky had fled the country post haste to his own eventual exile in New York City, along with the remnants of his short-lived republican government.

And the hapless Nicholas II and his entire family wound up facing the business end of a Bolshevik firing squad in the basement of a nondescript apartment building in Ekatrinberg, as Russia plunged into a bloody, multi-faceted civil war between communists, republicans, royalists, and Allied forces who had intervened militarily in a misguided and ultimately failed attempt to bring about Lenin's own removal.

All this nonsensical talk of "revolution" in our country is infinitely cheap, kdog -- and what's coming from the lips of Bernie and Jane Sanders has long since become the political equivalent of a K-Mart "Blue Light Special." To quote co-founder Jann Simon Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine, a veteran leftist and political activist who's long served on the front lines of the struggles for change in our country:

"Every time Sanders is challenged on how he plans to get his agenda through Congress and past the special interests, he responds that the 'political revolution' that sweeps him into office will somehow be the magical instrument of the monumental changes he describes. This is a vague, deeply disingenuous idea that ignores the reality of modern America. With the narrow power base and limited political alliances that Sanders had built in his years as the democratic socialist senator from Vermont, how does he possibly have a chance of fighting such entrenched power? I have been to the revolution before. It ain't happening."

... two weks ago people asked - the Clinton campaign or somebody asked - and we said: Of course.

The insinuation that 'the Clinton campaign' asked for them was unnecessary but I'm sure no coincidence. It adds nicely to her husband's claim, that they are being attacked by the Clinton campaign 'all. the. time'. Which is his (their) excuse for attacking her.

Hillary is being held to a different standard.  Stop the presses.

You may be better that that joke.  I am not.  And I will not be.  The mayor also is not and, I'm happy to say, basically told pi$$y Chris Hayes to suck it.   His expression was "look you beanie wearing little twerp I'm married to a black woman and have mixed race children.  If I want to make a CP time joke I will damn well make it".