Tonight at Christ United Methodist church (Old Canton Road at Pear Orchard) the Mississippi Symphony will present a program of piano concertos played by four winners of the Wideman Piano Competition. Having rehearsed with these fine young musicians the last two evenings, I can say that this is an extraordinary opportunity to hear world-class piano playing for a song (as it were). All four of the players simply blew me away. The MSO musicians are giving their services for this concert, which is a benefit for the orchestra. Here's the program:

Tina Chong (Canada) - Ravel: Piano Concerto

Ching-Yun Hu (Taiwan) - Prokofieff: Piano Concerto No. 3

Intermission

Yoonjung Han - Lizst: Piano Concerto No. 1

Alexey Koltakov (Ukraine) - Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No. 2</>

These concertos are part of the standard concert repertoire, and most concert-goers will recognize them. Contestants in performance competitions invariably choose dazzling works requiring a high level of virtuosity. The ones scheduled for tonight certainly fit that description.

The conductor's baton comes down at 6:30. Tickets are $15.00, an incredible bargain. There's a WorldWide WingDing party with exotic foods and wine, festive music, and colorful decorations afterwards at Colonial Mart Mall for $15.00.

Be there.

According to the New York Times, our own senator, Thad Cochran, introduced an amendment to the supplemental Iraq spending bill that would have removed the deadline for withdrawal.

Surely he realizes that the Army will break long before next March if things continue as they have been. Our military should be out of Iraq long before then.

It appears that virtually all the Republicans in the Senate still check their brains (along with two other important bodily parts) at the door before they vote blindly and cowardly the way Bush tells them.

Senate Keeps Pullout Date in Iraq War Bill

I've been following an interesting discussion on TPM Cafe on the growing U. S. Attorney scandal, What Was the U. S. Attorney Purge Meant to Achieve?, and also on FireDogLake: The Math, which correlates the firings with the electoral map.

Everyone has their own theory about why those six were fired, but here are the principal ones:

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• To make way for administration-favored lawyers to pad their resumes with the prestigious position. This is one of the reasons advanced by the administration;
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• To eliminate attorneys not willing to bring frivolous voter fraud cases against Democrats shortly before elections. The fact that most of the fired attorneys were located in highly contested states supports this thesis;
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• To kill investigations and prosecutions of Republicans for corruption and install U. S. Attorneys who would instead prosecute Democrats;
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• This is related to the previous reason: To stop Carol Lamm, U. S. Attorney in San Diego, from further investigations and prosecutions of Republican corruption. Under this theory, the remaining firings were merely a smokescreen to obscure the real objective of the administration, which feared that Lamm would follow the trail of corruption higher and higher in the administration.
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One can be sure that all of these reasons played a part in the administration's decision, but the firing of Carol Lamm is the one most directly related to an immediate threat to the Bush regime. Lamm had already put U. S. Representative Duke Cunningham (R-CA) in jail for bribery. She was investigating corruption related to the Cunningham case and in the top levels of the C.I.A. Without a Republican-dominated Congress to ignore or whitewash the Bushites' crimes, the threat posed by Lamm's investigations was simply too dangerous to allow it to continue, irrespective of the political fallout. Apparently Lamm was taking Deep Throat's advice to follow the money, and if this administration and its political party is about anything at all, it's about money. And property. Cunningham attempted to conceal his payoff through a mansion that he sold at an inflated price for considerably more that it was worth.

Corruption on a grand scale cannot be hidden without an infrastructure of corrupt law enforcement that ignores graft and abuses of power and concentrates its resources on red herrings like voter fraud or election fraud. The current federal prosecution of Paul Minor and two judges for bribery here in Jackson is a typical example of what the Bushites like. Minor, a wealthy trial lawyer, has been contributing to Democratic campaigns for many years, so a conviction on just one count would tar the image of the plaintiffs' bar and eliminate Minor's influence in future elections. Since one of the financial mainstays of the Democratic party is plaintiffs' lawyers, anything that reduces their influence or income helps the Republicans. Thus the intense lobbying for tort "reform" designed to eliminate the large judgments that have allowed the trial lawyers to be a political force on behalf of the common man. Interestingly enough, the prosecutors in the Minor trial are from the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. This is an important case for the Bushites.

For that reason, it is highly unlikely that Bush will fire his longtime crony Gonzales, no matter how much heat he takes. Gonzales is the one official that can protect Bush, Cheney, Rove and the rest of the criminal conspiracy from exposure. Gonzales is the one official that can prevent an FBI investigation or kill one that comes too close. Bush will throw all his other minions under the bus before he fires Gonzales, because a Democratic Senate will not confirm another Gonzales. This is so important that it bears repeating:

A Democratic Senate will not confirm another Gonzales.

As long as Bush can control the Justice Department, the only remedy for his crimes is impeachment, and although Bush's crimes might be heinous and proven beyond a reasonable doubt, there are not enough Republicans in the Senate with the integrity, intelligence, or courage to vote for impeachment.

Under those circumstances, Bush would have to be even stupider that I thought to fire Gonzales. I don't think he's that stupid.

Mat Stoller has written a moving and persuasive summary of the current political situation and a call to wage a persistent campaign against the tyranny that has been imposed upon us by a bipartisan consensus over the last sixty years. The reprehensible role of Dixie's politicians and the people who elected them is not minimized. There is hope, however. Things do change and trends can be reversed. Let everyone do his or her part.

Matt Stoller: Ending the National Security State

By way of Aziz Huq at the Huffington Post, Bush in his speech the other day used the royal pronoun:

Incidentally, in the "is-it-funny or scary" category, I note that President Bush in his address commented that U.S. attorneys are "decent people. They serve at our pleasure."

That says everything, doesn't it?

The tax swap to lower the sales tax on groceries and raise it on tobacco pretty much died this week in the legislature. With the governer's opposition, it had little chance in the Republican-dominated Senate.

Why did the governor oppose the revenue-swap? Two reasons:

First, as a right-wing Republican, he is philosophically opposed to tax relief for anyone but the wealthy. A sales tax reduction would benefit all the people of this state, but it would benefit the people at the bottom the most. That's a no-no.

Second is his long-term lobbying relationship with the tobacco industry. Clearly this is more important to Governor Tobacco than the welfare of Mississippi youth who are the most vulnerable to the blandishments of this industry of death.

In the linked article, Governor Tobacco mentioned that as soon as the state budget improves he has some major tax cuts in mind. You can be virtually certain that his proposed tax cuts will not include the sales tax, one of the most regressive taxes levied in this state, but you can be sure that he will propose cutting income and estate taxes, small as they may be, because the benefits of those cuts would go to the wealthy.

Of course, there must be spending cuts to balance the budget (unlike the federal government). Guess where they will come from? You guessed it: programs intended to benefit the public and for which there is no immediate payoff. Fortunately, the likelyhood of the tax cuts is slim, because the legislature must match revenue and expenditures and those are parts of the budget that will be almost impossible to cut, practically or politically.

The total state tax burden on Mississippi's citizens is regressive. A person earning less than $11,000/year pays the State of Mississippi an average of 10% of his income. Persons making between $53,000 and $96.000 pay 8% of their income, and persons in the top one percentile (annual income $509,200.00 and over) pay only 5.3%. Who needs tax relief, then? Who can afford to pay more taxes? The answer is obvious.

Even an absolutely flat tax—where all state taxes combined extract the same percentage of income from everyone—would be preferable to what we have now. That 10% literally takes food off the table of the folks at the bottom. It would be pocket change for persons in the top 1%.

But Governor Tobacco will have none of that.

A diary on the Daily Kos paints a dismal and outraging picture of the Republican approach to hurricane relief:

This is a multi-pronged issue, but in a nutshell, it's this: Big industry is getting free rein to buy up anything it can get its hands on, with encouragement and aid from the government at several levels.

Even Haley Barbour is playing his part. Read and heed.

Buying Up the Coast for Fun and Profit--LOTS of Profit