… you get your house painted?
Answer: Nowhere. Not when you hire a non-union painter to do the job.
So here’s the deal. A few days ago somebody slipped some photos under the cyber-door here at The Progressive Fox. Pics of a lovely home in Aurora getting spruced up with a little fresh paint. And it turns out that’s Vernon and Linda Chapa LaVia’s home.
Before Peoria-native Jon Ginoli was even out of his twenties he had done seemingly everything there was to do in music. Having moved to Champaign-Urbana to attend the University of Illinois, he had written for a series of music magazines and fanzines,
He also played in a band of his own, The Outnumbered, a mainstay of the local music scene in the mid-1980s that released three albums and toured widely, and was remembered by one writer who knew them well as “perhaps the world’s only all-male feminist band, performing anti-misogynist, anti-capitalist, anti-war rants at the height of the Reagan era.”
He is best known, however, for his next band, the path-breaking gay rock band Pansy Division, which he founded in 1991 after moving to San Francisco. Eighteen years later Pansy Division is still around, still recording new material and performing live when most veterans of the earliest days of the gay rock scene have long since disappeared. In March Jon’s memoir, Deflowered: My Life in Pansy Division
I recently caught up with Jon on his book tour for Deflowered and we sat down one evening to talk about, what else, life in Pansy Division. (More on whether it’s a “pop-punk” or “rock” band or both, among other things, after the jump.)
I didn’t make it to the Inauguration Ceremony, but I got close. Just about as close as it was possible to get without a ticket. As close, in fact, as some people got with a ticket.
Originally posted at Fireside 14 and Daily Kos.
As a newcomer to the political scene in IL-14, Bill Foster, more than most, has had to spend time telling voters his “story,” has had to spend time, and a lot of money, introducing himself to a community he had been a stranger to until he moved back to the district from Washington, D.C., a month or so after he announced he would be a candidate for Congress back in Illinois. From the beginning, his story has been based upon the notion that he has a track record as a “successful businessman and accomplished scientist” that spoke to his abilities as a problem solver, and that he would be able to build upon that prior experience to become a successful problem solver as a politician, too. “Businessman, Scientist, Democrat for Change,” as one of his campaign slogans puts it.
Here is the thumbnail description of Foster’s career as a businessman that his campaign offers to those seeking to learn more about that part of his life:
Before coming to Fermilab, Bill was a successful businessman. When he was 19, Bill and his younger brother started a business from scratch in their basement. Starting with $500 from their parents, they built a company that now manufactures over half of the theater lighting equipment in the United States. Their equipment is used on Broadway shows, Rolling Stones tours, the great Opera houses, half-time shows at the Super-Bowl, and at churches, schools, and community theaters throughout the country. Their company sells millions of dollars of equipment around the world and provides over 500 good jobs — with good pay and benefits — here in the Midwest.
On one occasion, Foster campaign manager Tom Bowen put a finer point on the equation, stating that “as a businessman, [Foster] has experience solving problems close to home like meeting payrolls and budgeting for the future.” But for the most part, the blockquote above is representative of what has been consistently said by the Foster campaign about his career in business. Bill and his brother started a company from scratch while they were still in college, and now that company is enormously successful. And while there is much that is left unsaid in the gap between the beginning and the end of this part of Foster’s story, it is clear that the point that everyone is supposed to be taking away from this narrative is that Bill Foster played a major role in the development of an extremely successful company and that this accomplishment is evidence that he can be expected to be an effective member of Congress.
The problem with all this, however, is that no one has ever tried to fill in the gaps in the story of Bill Foster’s career as a businessman in order to see what the truth of the matter really is.
Originally posted at Fireside 14 and Prairie State Blue.
Drinking Liberally is, in it’s own words, “an informal gathering of like-minded left-leaners who want to trade ideas, get more involved, or just share each other’s company… and every week kvetch, vent, ponder, and pontificate on the issues of the day.” And in DC once a month they have guest speakers. Last Thursday the guest speaker was Chris Bowers of Open Left, and I stopped in to hear what he had to say.
Originally posted at Fireside 14 and Daily Kos.
AMERICAN VALUES
When Republicans first began pushing internet gambling prohibition about ten years ago, it was a fairly straightforward proposition. As the titles of the legislation would indicate — Computer Gambling Prevention Act of 1996, Internet Gambling Prohibition Act of 1997 — these were anti-gambling measures, no doubt about it. And the National Gambling Impact Study Commission report recommendations regarding internet gambling, released in June 1999, called for prohibition “without allowing new exemptions or the expansion of existing federal exemptions to other jurisdictions.”
But there was a problem with this approach. The bills never made it to the floor for a vote. Too many Members had gaming interests in their districts that would be harmed by the legislation. So, in order to sweeten the deal, loopholes began to show up in these bills. So many loopholes, in fact, that House Resources Committee Chairman Don Young wrote to Hastert to complain.
Originally posted at Fireside 14 and Daily Kos.
BETTING ON THE COME
Tough talk by the current crop of Republicans about the evils of gambling didn’t begin in response to the emergence of Indian casinos, or even with the arrival of internet gambling. The more principled of the social conservatives in the party had been profoundly opposed to gambling all along. When Pat Buchanan won the Republican primary in Louisiana in 1996, he did so while running on an anti-gambling platform. Later that year, a leading congressional opponent of gambling, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), saw his National Gambling Impact Study Commission Act signed into law. Indeed, it was the release of that commission’s report in June 1999 that proved to be the tipping point in the relations between the Republican Party and the gaming industry. Interestingly enough, however, the anti-gambling legislation that was proposed in the wake of that report didn’t make things worse between the two of them; it ended up bringing them closer together.
Originally posted at Fireside 14 and Daily Kos.
Lost in the media frenzy surrounding the breaking news of the Mark Foley scandal was the story that internet gambling prohibition, a piece of the so-called “American Values Agenda” that Dennis Hastert and the House Republicans have been promoting this election season, had been signed into law that same day. Along with the bills included in their “suburban agenda” (you remember, that’s the one where they stressed their commitment to protecting kids from internet predators) the measures incorporated into the American Values Agenda were designed to rally the Republican base by billboarding the party’s allegiance to conservative values. Regarding the internet gambling legislation in particular, Hastert said, “It seeks to protect our children from gambling sites at home, keep our hard-earned money in the bank, and put the criminals that seek to take advantage of our family earnings in jail.” But if, by chance, any of that rhetoric gave you the impression that Dennis Hastert was seriously concerned about such things, or that he was in any fundamental way an opponent of the gaming industry, I’ve got a tip for you. Don’t bet on it.
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