I perceived the clarinet sample in the program I used to create Incidentally Broken did not have sufficient dynamics to approximate a bass clarinet when played in the lower register. I believe the bassoon sample (utilized in this mix) is more fitting and blends nicer with the remaining instrumentation.
Just when I thought my little
Empire would never be conquered.
I was invincible.
Went from the frying pan
Right into the fire.
Now I don’t care at all.
I’m one smooth operator,
But standing two feet tall;
Was like some great dictator.
Damn the coffee.
Damn the sugar.
Damn the colonies.
Where’s my future?
What awaits me?
I don’t want to be
Napoleon of broken dreams.
So when I got myself
A taste of that glorious power.
It was intoxicating.
The more I took became
The more that I wanted.
But soon the thrill was gone.
Wanted to meet my maker.
I’ll pay for what I’ve done
Just like that great dictator.
Could be people like me
Should be alone.
Nothing is ever enough;
Enough for this eccentricity.
It’s said, by nature, that a
Man can become territorial.
And I’ve been known to do it.
Simple offense became
An outright obsession.
I got my just desserts.
Maybe I’ll see you later.
But still it could be worse
Just like that great dictator.
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Just when I thought my little
Empire would never be conquered.
I was invincible.
Went from the frying pan
Right into the fire.
Now I don’t care at all.
I’m one smooth operator,
But standing two feet tall;
Was like some great dictator.
Damn the coffee.
Damn the sugar.
Damn the colonies.
Where’s my future?
What awaits me?
I don’t want to be
Napoleon of broken dreams.
So when I got myself
A taste of that glorious power.
It was intoxicating.
The more I took became
The more that I wanted.
But soon the thrill was gone.
You’ll want to meet your maker.
I’ll pay for what I’ve done
Just like that great dictator.
Could be people like me
Should be alone.
Nothing is ever enough;
Enough for this eccentricity.
It’s said, by nature, that a
Man can become territorial.
And I’ve been known to do it.
Simple offense became
An outright obsession.
I got my just desserts.
Maybe I’ll see you later.
But still it could be worse
Just like that great dictator.
(from http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Shutdown_Blues?src=soc_fcbks[By Charles P. Pierce])
". . . This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way." . . ."
(from http://www.sobhaniformaryland.com)
". . .The campaign of Independent candidate for the U.S. Senate Rob Sobhani
today announced it has learned that both incumbent Senator Ben Cardin
and the Republican nominee in the race told a Baltimore radio station –
so far the only venue for a debate in Maryland’s senate race – that
neither would appear if Rob Sobhani were allowed to share the platform
with them.
This revelation comes in direct contradiction to the
claims of the campaigns of Cardin and his Republican opponent that they
are open to debating Sobhani, whom public opinion polling has clearly
shown to be running dead even with if not ahead of the Republican
nominee.
“This is precisely why Rob is running, to open up the closed system
that takes voters for granted and plays rope a dope games whether at
election time or when it comes time to actually govern on behalf of the
citizens,” Sobhani spokesman Sam Patten said. “Moreover, this is a
clear indication that neither of these establishment politicians is
being truthful with the media or the public on the subject of debates.
As such, it is deeply disappointing.”. . ."
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AMBIENCE & WINE
. . . schmate of the union. . . sounds good. . . can it all be done? . . . I'm listening not watching. . . are all the republicans stone-faced, sitting with their arms folded? . . . I can only picture it. . .
For the Obama record, here are some facts regarding promises made and goals accomplished. . . (based upon story By Tom Curry, msnbc.com National Affairs
Writer)
'. . . Sometime this spring, the Supreme Court will determine whether
Obama’s signature accomplishment – the law which expands and
fundamentally redesigns health insurance in the United States – will
survive. If the Supreme Court permits the law to stand, Obama will have
accomplished much of what he pledged to do in his Feb. 10, 2007 speech
in Springfield, Ill., when he formally launched his presidential
campaign: “We will have universal health care in America by the end of
the next president's first term. But the Obama plan won’t be fully implemented until 2018. The major overhaul of the nation’s health care system stands as one of the largest legislative achievements in decades.
The presiden hasn’t closed Guantanamo Navy Base as a prison camp for al-Qaida members and other terrorist suspects, as he pledged to do in an executive order he signed on the day be took office in 2009. But this was largely to due to Republican opposition.
When Obama signed the $825 billion economic stimulus plan into law in February of 2009, there were 141.7 million Americans working and 12.5 million unemployed.By February of 2011, two years after the stimulus was enacted, there were 139.5 million Americans working and 13.7 million unemployed.
Between the month he signed the stimulus into law and February of 2011, the unemployment rate went from 8.1 percent to 8.9 percent. These numbers explain Republican criticism of the stimulus as a squandering of taxpayer money that didn’t result in increased employment. In recent months, the jobs data has improved but there were still almost one million fewer people employed last month than when Obama signed the stimulus into law. Obama’s critics on the left, such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, argue the stimulus was too small, while Obama’s defenders say it prevented a far worse economic slump.
The Obama administration also decided to spend $80 billion to keep General Motors and Chrysler alive, and as of last November, according to the Congressional Budget Office, $35 billion of that money had been repaid to the Treasury, $7 billion had been written off as a loss, and $37 billion was still outstanding. The two car companies are still operating; in fact, GM reported a few days ago that it has reclaimed its title as the world’s largest seller of automobiles.
Obama himself said in his speech accepting the Democratic nomination in 2008, “We measure progress in the 23 million new jobs that were created when Bill Clinton was president when the average American family saw its income go up $7,500 instead of down $2,000 like it has under George Bush.” Clinton served for eight years and Obama has served so far for only three, but the Census reported that median household income, adjusted for inflation, declined by 2.3 percent between 2009 and 2010. This was part of longer-term trend that predates Obama’s presidency: since 2007, median household income has declined 6.4 percent and is 7.1 percent below the peak ($53,252) that occurred in 1999.
The Census also reports that the poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent—up from 14.3 percent in 2009, the third consecutive increase in the poverty rate. When Obama launched his candidacy in Springfield in 2007, he portrayed these economic woes as Bush Era problems, about which the Republicans were in denial: “For the past six years, we've been told that our mounting debts don't matter. We've been told that the anxiety Americans feel about rising health care costs and stagnant wages are an illusion.”
One sector of the economy where Obama appears to have fallen short is housing. In his first debate with John McCain in 2008, he said: “We've got to make sure that we're helping homeowners, because the root problem here has to do with the foreclosures that are taking place all across the country.”
In the face of Republican opposition, Obama has been unable to fulfill his promise to enact legislation reducing use of tax deductions by upper-income taxpayers and raising income tax rates for those with incomes over $250,000. But as part of the health care law he did increase Medicare taxes on upper-income people. The law also other imposes other major tax increases including the penalty on people who choose to go without insurance and the tax on high-cost “Cadillac" health plans which takes effect in 2018.
Obama promised in 2008 to cut taxes for “95 percent of working families.” The 2009 stimulus included more than $300 billion in tax cuts and credits — including the Making Work Pay Credit, a big tax cut for workers earning less than $75,000 and couples making less than $150,000 a year. Making Work Pay has now been replaced by the payroll tax cut.
Although the House passed a cap-and-trade greenhouse gas bill in 2009, Obama along with Sen. John Kerry, D- Mass., Sen. Joe Lieberman, I- Conn., and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R- S.C., the three Senate leaders on the issue, failed to come up with the compromises needed to pass a bill. The effort died in the summer of 2010. The Obama administration has made grants and loans to alternative energy companies, but it was embarrassed when $535 million in taxpayer money was lost in a loan to Solyndra, the California solar company that went bankrupt last September.
Obama shored up the liberal wing of the Supreme Court by appointing Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to replace retiring Justices David Souter and John Paul Stevens.
And he pleased gay rights advocates when he ended the legal defense of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which allows states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. Obama also ended the Clinton Era “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy on gays serving in the military.
He also made recess appointments to National Labor Relations Board, which helped fulfill a campaign pledge he made in 2007 to help union organizers “lift up this country’s middle class again.”
As Obama promised to do in 2008, he has withdrawn American troops from Iraq. He has also ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden and American-born Moslem cleric and al-Qaida organizer Anwar al-Awlaki. He has continued and expanded the use of drones to kill alleged terrorists in Yemen and elsewhere.
When Obama took office there were 32,000 troops in Afghanistan. In March 2009 he announced he’d send an extra 4,000. On Dec. 1, 2009, he increased U.S. troop numbers in Afghanistan by another 30,000, bringing the total to 100,000. “After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home,” he said.
He lashed out at “the cynics, the lobbyists, the special interests who've turned our government into a game only they can afford to play.” And on the night he won the Iowa caucuses, he said that he and his supporters had “beat back the politics of fear and doubt and cynicism … .” But the Washington reform groups Common Cause and the Center for Public Integrity have accused him of falling short of his anti-lobbyist rhetoric.
Obama signed an executive order on his first day in office which imposed limits on former lobbyists and others who worked in his administration. An ex-lobbyist working in the administration could not for two years after his appointment be involved in any policy matter on which he’d lobbied in the two years before his appointment, or work in a federal agency that he had lobbied within the two years before being appointed.
But the executive order provided a waiver from the rules if it was deemed in the national interest. Former Clinton administration Defense Department official and former Raytheon lobbyist William Lynn was given a waiver to serve as deputy secretary of defense. And the New York Times reported in 2010 that White House officials regularly met with lobbyists at the Caribou Coffee shop down the street from the White House, avoiding disclosure on the public White House visitors’ log.
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Common Cause president Bob Edgar, a former Democratic congressman, chided Obama last year for accepting campaign funds for his 2012 run which were raised by “bundlers” working for Washington lobbying firms. '
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