I get up in the mornin' but it's too early to wake


The Band (and Albert Grossman) on the way to the stage at the Woodstock festival, 1969.


* The Nation lays out why George Bush should be impeached, concluding:

"Representatives and Senators should be asked specifically to support hearings on and investigations into the deceptions that led to the Iraq War and President Bush's role in the torture scandals. Senators should also be asked to insure that the hearings already planned by the Senate Judiciary Committee into warrantless wiretaps are comprehensive. The hearings should evaluate whether the wiretaps were genuinely used for national security purposes and why the President chose to violate the law when it was so easy to comply with it. Representatives should specifically be asked to co-sponsor Congressman John Conyers's resolution calling for a full inquiry into presidential abuses.

"Finally, if this pressure fails to produce results, attention must be focused on changing the political composition of the House and Senate in the upcoming 2006 elections. If a Republican Congress is unwilling to investigate and take appropriate action against a Republican President, then a Democratic Congress should replace it.

"As awful as Watergate was, after the vote on impeachment and the resignation of President Nixon, the nation felt a huge sense of relief. Impeachment is a tortuous process, but now that President Bush has thrown down the gauntlet and virtually dared Congress to stop him from violating the law, nothing less is necessary to protect our constitutional system and preserve our democracy."

* From Harper's:

-- Chances that a U.S. company settling a corporate crime case will illegally deduct some or all of the settlement to the IRS: 3 in 5

-- Percentage of U.S. CEO vacancies that are filled from outside the company: 40

-- Average amount the companies spend on each search: $2,000,000

-- Chance that a CEO will quit or be fired within eighteen months: 1 in 2

-- Minimum number of American colleges and universities that offer programs in video-game design: 82

-- Price for a vibrator that plugs into an iPod and "stimulates you in time with your favorite music": pound 29.99

-- Year that a Hindu nationalist party in India rechristened Valentine's Day "Prostitution Day": 2005

* "We are bored when we don't know what we are waiting for. That we do know, or think we know, is nearly always the expression of our superficiality of inattention. Boredom is the threshold to great deeds. -- Now, it would be important to know: What is the dialectical antithesis to boredom." -- from Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project.

"Each generation experiences the fashions of the one immediately preceeding it as the most radical antiaphrodisiac imaginable. In this judgment it is not so far off the mark as might be supposed. Every fashion is to some extent a bitter satire on love; in every fashion, perversities are suggested by the most ruthless means. Every fashion stands in opposition to the inorganic world. To the living, fashion defends the rights of the corpse. The fetishism that succombs to the sex appeal of the inorganic is its vital nerve." -- from Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project.