The Magpies
The Cleveland, Ohio based band embraces alt country and gives it a bluesy embrace. Roger Hoover’s textured growl seems to have transported to the present day from a whiskey soaked bar room in mid-70’s middle America. Standout tracks from their latest album Eastern Standard Time include the mournful “Girl on a Hill” and the bar stool stomper “The Waiting”.

Edith Backlund
Neil Young put the Swedish singer’s “Rosie” on his website Living with War and it was voted as one of the 10 best anti-war songs. Combining the pecularities of …

I fell behind on my reading last week due to the site move and the mild coma I lapsed into thanks to the Republican National Convention. But getting back into it, I find a piece by Sean Quinn at Five Thirty Eight that points out the seemingly obvious (but somehow often overlooked) fact that the presidential election cycle is largely a game. There are teams, there are players, there are official rules that can’t be broken (with  punishment of ejection) but many others whose violation will cause, at worst, a …

Laughing. So. Hard. Tears. Down. Face. McCain will apparently never learn to stop speaking in front of blue or green screens.

I just received this press release in my inbox. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to make it out to my local campaign office today because I’m swamped with work and lack transportation but if there’s any other Florida women who’d like to do some phone banking today, the info’s all there: 
 

OBAMA’S CAMPAIGN FOR CHANGE TO REACH OUT TO FLORIDA’S WOMEN VOTERS,
SEN. CLINTON CAMPAIGNS FOR BARACK OBAMA IN FLORIDA
 
As Hillary Clinton makes her second visit to Florida to campaign for Barack Obama, Campaign for Change volunteers hold statewide women to women …

Hurricane Ike has weakened to a Category 2 but is expected to gain strength back in the Gulf of Mexico and be a Category 3 when it hits the predicted landing point of the Louisiana-Texas border. Ike has already wreaked havoc in Haiti, Cuba and the Turks and Caicos. 73 people have been killed in Haiti- many due to a flooding river near the capital. Those can be added to the 167 Haitian deaths caused by the other storms this year. 
Destruction in the hard hit regions is extreme. From CNN: 
Waves as …

Lauren Elgee Design was suggested by Anne in the Indie Retailer Suggestion Thread. I liked Elgee’s kitschy earrings so much that I decided to feature her shop right away. The price tag of $55 a pair is a bit higher than I would normally go for a piece of jewelry (yes, I’m cheap), but these pieces are so unique that they’re worth it. Some of them might make it onto my “to buy” list for the holidays. 
What’s the Lauren Elgee Design formula? Start with some generous helpings of covetable kitsch: 

Retro …

I’m always on the lookout for indie retailers to feature in our Monday through Friday “Indie Retailer of the Day” spots. I usually turn to three sources for ideas: Rare Bird Finds, Indie Shopping and Etsy. The latter has the most to offer but is also the hardest to sift through to find really great stuff. Obviously, there are really great businesses out there that I might never stumble across on my own. But I’m open to suggestions.
Anyone know of some indie retailers I should feature? Leave your suggestions in …

Don Haskins, the legendary basketball coach at the University of Texas at El Paso (formerly Texas Western College), has passed away at the age of 78 due to heart failure. 
Haskins served as the university’s head coach from 1961 to 1999. In 1966, his underdog team beat the University of Kentucky Wildcats in the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship. That win was especially notable because Hawkins only played his team’s seven black players. Hawkins’ said that he didn’t consider the color of his players’ skin when making the selection, only their …

Palin’s Homeland: Dave Noon of Lawyers, Guns and Money (an Alaskan himself) describes the unique political climate in that state regarding their views towards the rest of the United States.
Meth Heads: Do you remember the three white-supremacist meth heads that were arrested while plotting an Obama assassination during the Democratic National Convention? Dave Neiwert of Orcinus has a followup to that story in which the FBI wanted to charge the men for the assasination attempt but were prevented from doing so by US attorney Troy Eid- a Karl Rove operative …