This morning’s Washington Post features the following headline:

As He Enters Race, McCain Appears to Be Off His Stride

“Off his stride”?

I realize that big-name media pundits and political journalists tend to fawn over McCain the Maverick. However, perhaps a more accurate headline might be “As He Enters Race, McCain Appears to Have Alienated Most of the Voting Public Through His Unflagging Support For George W. Bush’s Massively Unpopular and Ill-Conceived War, as Well As His Sycophant Pandering to the Worst Elements of the Republican Right.”

You may or may not have noticed that I have added something new to the right-hand column. Under the “New Albums” section, you’ll now find “downdb’s Recently Played Tracks.”

Long-time readers of this site might remember that I experimented with Last.fm a while back, and had something similar during that period. At that time, I was using Last.fm’s player to play track from their service, and then using the RSS feed they provide to generate the list in my sidebar.

Unfortunately, their player is pretty clunky, and I quickly gave up.

What’s happening now is that I have my various media players reporting the tracks I play locally up to Last.fm via various Audioscrobbler plugins, and am once again sucking their RSS feed into a WordPress plugin to generate the list here. Theoretically, I could probably figure out how to have my various disparate media players talk directly to this site, but, since Last has already gone to the trouble of figuring this out, it’s easier just to use their service, which is free.

Unfortunately, the list to the right does not update on its own, so the entire page needs refreshing, nor does it show how recently it’s been updated. It also won’t pick up web radio when I’m listening to that. However, since I don’t imagine any of you care that much about what I’m listening to right at this very second, I’m not too worried about it. If you really want the thorough inventory, head over to my Last.fm page.

Anyway, I thought it was pretty cool, so there you go.

Do you listen to streaming music via the web? If so, enjoy it now, because as of May 15, web radio as we currently know it will, in all likelihood, cease to exist.

Alarmist? Not really.

The body that controls how royalties are paid to music copyright-holders has recently changed the way in which royalties are calculated for online radio. As a result, online music stations like Pandora, Yahoo Music, Live365, and Launchcast, as well as countless independent netcasters will now have to pay roughly triple what they were paying before. Beginning May 15, net broadcasters will be required to pay $0.0011 per performance per listener—while that might not sound like much, it quickly adds up. To make matters worse, the recalculation is back-dated to the beginning of 2006, so any Internet station with even a modest number of listeners is going to get hit with a whopping bill, in many cases running into the millions of dollars.

If you have any doubts about how serious this is, go to the homepage of virtually any net radio station—kexp.org, woxy.com, kcrw.org, radioparadise.com, etc.—and you’ll find a reference to the Copyright Royalties Board decision. Many of these stations are listener-supported, but even the big operations like Yahoo and Live365 are going to have a very difficult time paying these bills.

As though all that weren’t enough, the rates are scheduled to increase to $0.0019 per performance per listener in 2010.

A couple of interesting sidenotes… These royalties are paid to an RIAA-created group called SoundExchange, which, in theory, then distributes them to artists. However, SoundExchange keeps a significant percentage of the royalties payments for itself, and it is up to the individual artists to get their royalty payments from SoundExchange.

It should also be noted that traditional, over-the-air broadcasters pay no royalties to SoundExchange.

A coalition of Internet broadcasters appealed the Copyright Review Board’s decision regarding these royalties payments. Unfortunately, the appeal was rejected by the CRB last week. At this point, the only real option for getting the decision changed is via legislation—you can visit SaveNetRadio.org to find out what’s happening on this front, as well as what individual net radio listeners, musicians, and broadcasters can do to help in the effort. They even provide a handy form for emailing you Congresspeople.

Short of some sort of legislation being passed, the future of Internet radio is pretty bleak, and it will arrive pretty quickly. Given the huge array of net broadcasters and the incredible variety of new and interesting music they provide, we’re talking about a pretty significant loss here. Should radio on the web go dark, the alternative is the vast, bland, ClearChannel-controlled wasteland of broadcast radio.

Forgetting that KEXP devotes Sunday mornings to public affairs programming, I tuned in yesterday and discovered they were playing a speech given recently by activist and sometime politician Tom Hayden.

He was talking about what he refers to as “the global justice movement,” exemplified by various WTO and World Bank protests, as well as marches and demonstrations against the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Saying he believes this movement marks the rise of the next global superpower, Hayden remarked how excited he was to be alive during not just one, but two great social uprisings (the first being the peace movement of the Sixties). It just feels really great, he said, to know that history is being made.

While I share many of Hayden’s beliefs regarding justice and equality, something about that statement bothered me.

These movements have arisen because millions of people the world over live their lives under conditions of crushing poverty and political oppression. Activists like Hayden find excitement from participating—that’s understandable, but really, this isn’t the sort of thing one should really be getting excited about in the way that Hayden seemed to be, is it?

I’m obviously throwing around some pretty broad generalizations here. Clearly, the majority of people involved in the global peace and justice movements are sincere and well-meaning. Nonetheless, the aura of self-importance hanging around Sixties-style activists like Hayden is disturbing in that it seems that a good deal of the thrill for these guys is being part of a movement and participating in demonstrations.

That wouldn’t be so bad, except that the practical impact of protest-oriented movements seems to be dwindling. Hayden and his crew talk about the tens of thousands people they turned out on the streets to protest the Iraq war. While that is no small feat, it made little difference in the end, as the government has figured out ways to easily contain and diffuse street protests. To make matters worse, the protesters themselves have become an extraordinarily motley crew, with every oddball fringe group turning up to shout for their specific cause, regardless of the larger purpose of the march at hand.

I fully realize that I’m casting stones here without providing any positive solutions. Regardless of that, though, it’s a shame that the energy devoted by activists like Tom Hayden is spent on the same tired, self-aggrandizing protest politics of the Sixties.

I’ve been playing around with the new version of Ubuntu on a spare machine for the last day or two. Seems pretty cool.

I’m upgrading the laptop today, so more later on how that goes.

I’ve made a few references in recent posts to the Bush administration’s trumped-up charges of voter fraud. These charges exclusively target Democratic voters, and are pretty clearly an attempt to use the power of the federal government to rig elections in favor of Republican candidates.

McClatchy (formerly Knight-Ridder) provides a fairly thorough write-up of the whole sorry story:

For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates.

The administration intensified its efforts last year as President Bush’s popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm battle for control of Congress, which the Democrats won.

Go read the whole article—it’s a pretty disturbing tale.

For most of the day, I have been trying to figure out what to say about the testimony of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales before the Senate Judiciary Committee. While I never expected him to show up and provide a clear and convincing explanation of the firing of the eight U.S. Attorneys, his performance yesterday was so flabbergastingly bad that it almost defies words.

TPMMuckraker provides a good collection of the highlights, which I would highly recommend checking out.

Gonzales’s previous appearances before Congress have been uniformly smug and condescending, playing into the popular mythology of the Bush administration has canny, all-powerful political operators. This time, however, he came across as a bumbling hack.

Claiming ignorance of basic goings-on at the DoJ, as well as of the actions of his direct reports, Gonzales answered question after question from Senators by saying that he could not remember, could not recall, wasn’t sure if he was in that meeting, or was not familiar with the document or email in question. Gonzales suggested that questions regarding his competence constituted attacks on the “career professionals” working at DoJ, a diversionary tactic suspiciously similar to that employed by the White House when faced with criticism of its Iraq strategy.

Gonzales reportedly spent two weeks closeted away, preparing for his testimony, and yet could not even muster answers satisfactory enough to please normally sycophantic Republican committee members like Jeff Sessions and Lyndsey Graham.

The question making the rounds today seems to be how Gonzales could possibly have thought he was accomplishing anything besides digging himself deeper with his embarrassingly bad appearance. However, it becomes more clear with each passing day of this latest scandal that the blame lies squarely at the door of the White House. As such, every day that the A.G. manages to keep the attention focused on his incompetent management of the Department of Justice is one more that people are not looking at the White House’s attempts to squash corruption investigations of Republicans, or their efforts to drum up bogus voter fraud scandals at the electoral expense of Democrats.

Gonzales was on the Hill for one reason, and one reason only—to protect his boss and long-time friend George W. Bush. Little surprise, then, that his answers to Senators’ questions were and endless string of nonsensical evasions.

CNN’s homepage as of 7:35 EDT this morning:

Alberto Gonzalez’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee has been delayed until Thursday, but you can bet that, even then, it will get exactly zero coverage from networks busy interviewing students, students’ families, panels of grief counselors, and right-wing activists insisting this tragedy never would have happened had Virginia passed concealed-carry legislation.

The CNN homepage, as of approximately 8:15 EDT this evening:

One imagines that we will be subjected to wall-to-wall coverage of this for the rest of the week. In addition, one wonders how many civilians were killed in Iraq today.

One generally has to think that when a public officials explicitly claim that s/he has “nothing to hide,” there’s probably something to hide. One also has to imagine that when that same public official has spent the last two weeks holed up, doing nothing but practicing her or or his testimony, stating the honest facts is not at the top of the priority list.

Accordingly, this morning’s New York Times headline, “‘Nothing to Hide,’ Attorney General Insists” leaves me feeling rather skeptical.

Of course, we could give Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez the benefit of the doubt. His big day of testimony before the Senate is tomorrow, and I’m sure it is very difficult for him to remember whether he did or did not coordinate and approve the firing of the 8 U.S. Attorneys. It’s probably also tough to remember what he has said before on the subject, especially considering that he’s said so many contradictory things about it.

It will be interesting to watch Gonzalez’s testimony tomorrow. During all of his previous appearances before Congress, the Attorney General has been condescendingly vague. However, now that Arlen “Never met a White House offer I didn’t like” Specter having been replaced as Judiciary Chair by the rather more aggressive Patrick Leahy, that strategy may not play so well.

What is most amusing (or perhaps depressing) about this entire scandal is that it’s not clear to me that the original firing of the eight attorneys involved any actual wrongdoing. Politically motivated? Clearly. But as many commentators have pointed out, it’s entirely within the President’s power to hire and fire U.S. Attorneys whenever he likes. While booting a prosecutor for purely political reason may be unsavory or quasi-unethical, there’s no actual rule against doing so as far as I know. Had the administration and the DoJ simply said, “It was time for a change,” there’s a good chance nothing would have come of this entire affair.

Instead, they took their usual approach of blatantly lying and assuming no one would call them on it, and now that strategy has blown up in their faces. To quote Sen. Barbara Boxer, elections have consequences.

UPDATE: Yeah, what Yglesias said.