Hammer Mill Days

Big Green celebrates four years of pointless podcasting with a spanking new episode of Ned Trek, seven new songs, and various exultations of joy. Four more years! This is Big Green - August 2015. Features: 1) Ned Trek 24: Whom Gods Deploy; featuring six new Big Green songs: 2) Song: Up On The Bridge, by Big Green; 3) Song: I Paint What I See, by Big Green; 4) Song: Naturally, by Big Green; 5) Stephanie's Song, by Big Green; 6) Song: Baby Bush, by Big Green; 7) Jesus Has a Known Mind, by Big Green; 8) Real Talking Horse, by Big Green; 10) Put the Phone Down: Cheap Limburger blues; 11) Playground in their minds; 12) Charles Nelson Riley remembered; 13) Popeye theme; 14) Happy Anniversary singalong; 15) Looking back a bit; 16) Time to go. Go to episode page >

This will be another quickie. I am neck-deep in web development and video production this week, none of it Big Green related, so bear with me. We are in the midst of another election season, as you know. I could have made that statement at any point in the last eight years, essentially. Our elections are now permanent affairs; the moment one election passes, the next one begins to dominate the national conversation. Sure, elections are important, but the constant focus on horse-race politics, who's ahead, who's behind, who's in/out ... distorts our political culture and in many ways makes the country completely ungovernable and, worse, unresponsive to public will. It used to be that, between the elections, policy would be developed, legislated, signed into law, etc. Now there's no space for any of that. How is that working? The danger in this is that we have developed a political economy around this practice of perpetual elections. One leg of this stool is the pay-t