I did mention that it's launch madness 'round these parts, yes? Over the weekend, I launched Gotham Acme, a personal music blog for a Democratic consultant. It's reeeeeally pretty and lovely, and I'm quite proud of it. Record turnaround on this one, too — just under two weeks from concept to launch.

In an obvious move marking a new low point in an already declining career, poet and sometimes-musician John S. Hall has released a new book with Soft Skull Press, entitled "Daily Negations," and will be making two, no doubt poorly-attended, New York appearances.

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I'm much too undercaffeinated to go into much detail, but in the wee hours last night, we relaunched Room Eight, a scoopy-insider-snark-scoop blog on New York politics. I was the designer and CSS tweaker on this one; much thanks to Doug Green of CivicActions for doing the heavy-lifting (and creative problem-solving) of coding. Happy relaunch, Room Eight!

Rather than give the Academy Award speech that I've been saving up since I was a toddler, I'll just give you the link to the website I just launched for The Hightower Lowdown, and the press release:

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George W is doing a heck of a job!

At least, that's what he says. He reckons our economy is "steady and strong. Steady and strong."

In the real world, dozens of researchers are keeping track and the Hightower Lowdown has put all their facts and figures into a HANDY DANDY POSTER that spells out what a whopper and a crock'o' that Bush claim is!

Just a couple of highlights: Last year we bought more goods and services from other countries than they bought from us — $723 billion more, which is an all-time record trade deficit. Bush has cut taxes on people who make $10 million a year by half a million bucks a year each. Meanwhile, 37 million Americans are living in poverty.

Visit http://www.hightowerlowdown.org to see the ARE YOU BETTER OFF YET poster in the July issue on the EXCELLENT NEW Hightower Lowdown website.

Jim Hightower and all of us at the Lowdown, which has 140,000 subscribers, are thrilled to invite you to check out this hot-off-the-keyboards website which features:

* A crisp and clean redesign with our current issue and over seven years of archives online!
* Email alerts from Hightower and the Lowdown!
* Quick and easy ways to send messages to Hightower or anyone else at the Lowdown!
* Places for subscribers to comment on any and every article in the Lowdown!

And — wait, there's more coming soon! –

* Daily blogs from Hightower and others in the Lowdown camp!
* Local Lowdown events that subscribers can organize and anyone can attend!
* RSS/syndication feeds for the geekily-inclined!

So click out of this email and go check out the NEW ISSUE of the Lowdown on our NEW WEBSITE.

http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/

Best from Jim Hightower, Phillip Frazer, Matt Wuerker, Laura Ehrlich, Deanna Zandt, Karen Gifford, Sahu Barron, Gwenda Blair, John Ernst, Bob Siegel, Jackson Frazer, and the whole crew at CivicActions (www.civicactions.com) who built this mighty nifty website.

Sitting in a meeting for work right now — Phillip Frazer, my boss at the Hightower gig, just said about the current state of electoral politics: "The problem is not that we need a third party, the problem is that we need a second party."

And an old Hightower quote was just resurrected: "Geoge W. Bush is somebody who was born on third base and has gone through life thinking he's hit a triple."

That's right, kids — you can get your daily dose of Hightower fed straight into your brain via iTunes now. Here's the link to the podcast…

Have you seen the End the War Tour? I just finished this little site and blog for them; two fantastic books that are necessary reading for anyone seeking to end the war.