Silly me

*

My firm prediction that the government would be shut down for between 5 and 7 days, not published here but explicitly stated to friends, was based on my certainty that Republicans needed a face-saving play to keep the tea bag caucus on board with Boehner. My guess was that this would come in the form of a short-term shutdown to satisfy the 'baggers, followed by an appeal to higher authority, such as reopening the government to restore "market confidence." Then we'd get a GOP declaration of victory, and their own well founded faith in having the history rewritten by party propagandists and broadcast on Fox.

Well, I believe I got the "face-saving" aspect correct. But I truly did not predict that it would be Harry Reid and Obama who would give Boehner his political cover, and also several extra billion in cuts to sweeten the deal. Silly me.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

*

This may sound like too laid-back of a band to call "experimental," but that's what I'd call it anyway. Listen to John Mayall's impressions, jamwise, of California.



This four-piece string-driven band was recorded in 1969 and released on Mayall's album The Turning Point. It was a Easy Rider-era favorite amongst the high school outcasts who started growing our hair about then since we didn't fit in with any other group and couldn't get near girls except in marching band.

I don't know much about Mayall even though he was so influential in the British blues scene, and his Bluesbreakers band was a proving ground for many players I admired in other settings, including Sugarcane Harris and Aynsley Dunbar (violin and drums, respectively, with Frank Zappa), and Dick Heckstall-Smith (reeds with an under-known British jazz-rock band called Colosseum). (I'll bet Barry or Sam can offer some interesting facts.)

Anyhoo, although it's somewhat subtle, one will notice that this combo uses no dedicated percussion instruments. The guitars, bass, and Mayall's impressive harp-sucking are deployed throughout the album in highly rhythmic and percussive ways, yet the overall sound is predominantly mellow. In addition to that innovation, Mayall added a straight-ahead jazz component with Johnny Almond's sax and flute. Almond isn't that dazzling, technically speaking, but he really doesn't have to be---it's a goddam blues band, after all. Listen how the crowd responds when Almond hits the altissimo register at the end of his tenor solo; it doesn't require virtuosity, but he uses the sound to excellent climactic effect.

Altogether, what impresses me most about this band is how well everyone fits with everyone else. I think this is a sound that has been under-explored over the years.

California, John Mayall (1969, "The Turning Point," Polydor [catalog information not available because I can't find the damned album in my junk]), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Betting against my own predictive prowess tonight [updated x2]

*

Up until a short time ago I was certain that there would be a government shutdown at midnight tonight because I assumed that the lugubrious Speaker of the House (Boehner) has much more to lose by compromising than by standing with his tea bag coalition. I would have staked my prognostication credibility on it, and in fact I think I did with a few friends at work.

But today, Herr Karl Rove, "presidential hopeful" Mike Huckabee, and "whatever she is" Michele Bachmann all announced that the wisest course for Republicans would be to take the money and run. Like Josh Marshall says, this might mean that the House 'bagger caucus has been convinced by leadership behind closed doors, accurately, that it would be stupid to hold out on the Planned Parenthood assault when they've already completely rolled Obama and Reid.

By reaching this "compromise" to rob social programs at no negative political cost to themselves, the GOP can frame their Planned Parenthood "giveback" move as a "diplomatic" and "adult" contribution to the national welfare (no pun intended). Meanwhile, President North Star and Reid stand there pretending they haven't been sprayed down in shitmist.

I didn't put this together until I read on TPM that Bachmann had expressed her opinion on the matter. If she brings the 'baggers around, then her status is significantly elevated in the GOP.  If that is in fact the case, then Boehner still looks weak in terms of House majority leadership and is vulnerable to a challenge by Eric Cantor, for example, the Majority Leader. And if that happened, Bachmann might come out of it in the future with a deputy-whip-type position or even shot at Republican Conference Chair, movin' on up to the East Side so to speak, George Jeffersonwise.

Editor's note: for purposes of Truth In Blogging, RubberCrutch discloses that he is employed by a small agency inside a larger one buried deep inside a cabinet-level department that is very good at blowing up things.

Update: if this (from TPM) is true about a three-day continuing resolution in the works, then Obama gets rolled in another way. He said he would not approve any more extensions. Yes, I know that he has to do this if there's an acceptable deal on the table---acceptable to himself and the invertebrate caucus, that is---but it will still be painted by triumphal Republicans as "further evidence" of Obama's weakness. I don't think Democrats could negotiate a discount on a Cabbage Patch Baby at a DuPage County flea market....

Update x2:  TPM sez the pending deal includes two fucking billion dollars more in spending cuts plus a "symbolic" floor vote on the Planned Parenthood attack. If true, then a total win for GOP, plus the corporate media will surely give Republicans all the credit for the "compromise." And I don't have any convincing reason to think this floor vote is necessarily destined to fail. Altogether, a fate worse than a gigantic rogue asteroid smashing up the joint in terms of what this means for the system of government under which we were privileged to be born. Democrats give away the farm and provide political cover for a cabal of thugs. Plus, I was sort of looking forward to having Monday off....

Also, "Afghan Spring"?

*

General Petraeus, correctly, does not think the smoke from burning Qurans in the spring smells like victory:

"We condemn, in particular, the action of an individual in the United States who recently burned the Holy Quran," said the statement issued by military commander Gen. David Petraeus and the top NATO civilian representative in Afghanistan, Mark Sedwill.

Maybe because:

The Taliban said in a statement emailed to media outlets that the U.S. and other Western countries have wrongly excused the burning a Quran by the pastor of a Florida church on March 20 as freedom of speech and that Afghans "cannot accept this un-Islamic act."

Neither US "hawks" or "doves" have anything to cheer about apropos of an "Afghan Spring" of violence by religious zealots there, as ignited by religious zealots here. Neither do General Petraeus or the population of Afghanistan. The only two gaining parties are the Taliban and "Pastor Terry Jones."

I've noticed that mainstream reports like this one in the New York Times bury the identity of the Quran desecrator way down in the column. Suppose Minister Farrakhan publicly roasted a Holy Bible during a Friday afternoon prayer meeting, and that it drove the "good Christian people" of Chicago, for instance, to firebomb Arab nation consulates (because they are perceived to be less dangerous to "good Christian people" than local Nation of Islam properties): does it seem likely that we'd have to wait until the 10th paragraph to find out the identify of this "individual in the United States"?

Saturday Night Fish Fry

*

And though she feels as if she's in a play
She is anyway...



This version of "Penny Lane" was first sold to fans on a US-issued 1980 Beatles anthology called Rarities. This recording dates to 1967, like the original single and album releases of the same track, but differs (very significantly, to my ears) in that it includes a piccolo trumpet flourish in the final measures. This is the version that many, but not all, radio stations played in spring 1967---the version that all of us who couldn't afford to buy records grew up with. Years later, when I finally bought Magical Mystery Tour, I thought the album version of this song had somehow been stunted in production because of how the tune ends in an anticlimactic instrumental drone with a weak drizzle of cymbals.

I first learned that the "trumpet ending" was an actual rarity when Rarities was issued. If I remember the story correctly, the trumpet ending didn't make it to the pressing of the commercial 45 rpm single, but Paul for some reason intervened and had it included on the promotional version of the record that was distributed to US radio stations, both aired by them and given away at radio-hosted "sock hops" and the like.

Today is a sunny but frustratingly chilly early April day, like weekends I remember in April 1967 when Chicagoland was slowly ascending from a brutal winter. "Penny Lane" was in solid rotation then at both WLS-890 and WCFL-1000, with its merry, surreal narrative beaming through the "blue suburban skies" on a 50 kilowatt AM signal.

Penny Lane, The Beatles (1967, Capitol promotional 45 rpm single P-5810), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Apropos of nothing

*

You'll shoot your eye out, kid!



Greenie Stickum Caps!!!

Via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Tiresome question of the week

*

"Why aren't we bombing Bahrain, too?"

It's all over the place. And I'll admit that I, too, have asked it. But rhetorically. Facetiously. It's easy to concoct your own variations on the question: just substitute "Ivory Coast," "Syria," even "Zimbabwe" if you want to get a little obscure.

Colonel Qaddafi was a bastard 40 years ago, and he was a bastard 20 years ago, and he was a bastard less than 2 years ago when Senator John McCain was a guest at Qaddafi's Libyan "ranch" and "discussing a military equipment deal" with this "interesting man." (Senators Olympia Snowe and Joe Lieberman were part of McCain's 2009 entourage.) And now Colonel Q is the facing a new "makeover" to append his previous one. They've probably already labeled the body bag. "They" who? NATO nations, which might in this case be considered client states for most of the "supermajors."

Even if there were a genuine humanitarian impulse behind this North African squirmish, the ways and means are all wrong for many of the reasons you've probably read about, the main one being that nobody outside of an Orwell anthology conducts humanitarian operations with heavy bombers. Libya is a sovereign nation, and it has not committed an international act of aggression against any nation in this new coalition of the willing. Past sponsorship of international terrorism is one thing that makes Qaddafi a bastard, but I'm pretty sure that is not the same thing in terms of international law as committing a current act of war.
But there is no humanitarian motive behind Operation: Odyssey Dawn during this so-called Arab Spring. This week President North Star had to wipe US fingerprints off the whole thing as rapidly as possible to create the illusion to the Arab world that the US did not leave its fingerprints all over the whole thing. I'm not promoting any imperialist "conspiracy theory," but just based on what shows from behind the curtain, the situation appears fairly straightforward: circumstances have put the sustainability of Qaddafi's authoritarian regime in serious jeopardy, so there is an irresistible opportunity to wrest power away from him, complete with a blue-chip "humanitarian" alibi for doing so. Why? Because Colonel Q is de facto boss of Libya's National Oil Corporation (NOC). Regardless of which supermajors may now be making money directly or otherwise off Libya's "light sweet crude," it seems certain that all players---including NATO governments---should love to see NOC dismantled in a wave of Bush-style tsunami of peeance and freeance.

Disingenuous grandstanding

*

My congressman, Tim Johnson (IL-I5), is forced by circumstance to masquerade as a somewhat independent, somewhat moderate Republican because an important part of his district includes Urbana and Champaign, home of the University of Illinois. While this is, in my opinion, one of the most redneck Big 10 campus settlements, the university still exercises a liberalizing impact on civic life that Johnson cannot ignore. Virtually a straight party-line voter over the years, he has occasionally been permitted by GOP leaders to break party ranks on votes that might have a symbolic importance to the university community but whose outcome was not in doubt.

I'm not exactly sure what Johnson's motive is for leading an effort in the House to defund Libya military operations, but disingenuous grandstanding must be high on the bulleted list of possibilities. If you review Johnson's voting record, you can see that he's not been reluctant to vote for war funding during his first decade in Washington. I suppose he's trolling for some Tea Party cred. Oddly, any number of liberals and independents might be expected to strongly support Johnson's effort, but for different reasons than are motivating him.

One thing of which I am certain: if the current President were a Republican, we wouldn't be hearing a peep about Libya out of "The Honorable Timothy V. Johnson."

"Considering all options"

*

The Associated Press, via HuffingtonPost, reports that

the U.S. military warned Tuesday it was "considering all options" in response to dire conditions there that have left people cowering in darkened homes and scrounging for food and rainwater.

So a new Coalition of the Willing implements a no-fly zone over Libya by bombing the shit out of the country. Then, due to the "dire conditions" to which Operation: Odyssey Dawn must have contributed to immensely, the omnipresent "U.S. military" seems to threaten pretty much anything in order to make things all better.

I've already registered my complaint, and Gurlitzer's, about the name given to this humanitarian military initiative. Maybe they should have called it Operation: Hey Kid Stop Hitting Yourself Or I'll Kick Your Ass.

In front of our noses

*

In the comments section of last night's post about "Operation: Odyssey Dawn," Gurlitzer observed that the name of this military intervention may be more worrisome than inartful. The name pretty well literally means "the beginning of a long, complicated journey." I wonder whether that amounted to some kind of military Freudian slip or it actually was intended to convey the meaning that Gurlitzer pointed to.

This evening Josh Marshall posted about how many ways this adventure looks like a bad idea to him. As much as liberal-minded people want tyrants like Qaddafi to disappear, and think it's a noble idea to level the "playing field" for his internal enemies, we have many more reasons to reject this kind of thinking: three of the most compelling can be summarized as Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Even if the US were the most nobleminded liberal democracy on the planet, it would still not be in our charter to try governing nations that we feel are being run by villains. Where we have national agreement that influencing certain outcomes is in the best interests of global tranquility, then the weapons of choice would be trade, foreign aid, diplomacy, and sanctions. These tools would be applied to help or hinder as required, and executed in the context of a broadly multilateral international consensus. Maybe everyone will be ready for that sometime in the 23rd century.

Another take on Operation: Odyssey Dawn is offered by Duncan Black (i.e., "Atrios"): wars are free, aren't they?! Also, "freedom bombs" may be good for the economy!

Finally, here's a post from Hullabaloo that better gets at the point pertaining to management of the public narrative that I was trying to make last night: they're using centrifuge-grade spin, but the issue is too important to greet with the knee-jerk cynicism we've been conditioned to react with.

Quaint ideas I have

*

It seems that I have a mistaken idea of what the term "no-fly zone" means. I'd understood it to mean that our UN heroes would patrol Libyan airspace and shoot down Colonel Qaddafi's fighters and bombers to prevent them from strafing protesters. But evidently it means that the US and British navies bomb the shit out of coastal cities with cruise missiles. And so begins Operation: Odyssey Dawn... which has to be the worst name given to any military operation in world history!

Setting aside the stupid name for the attack, I do understand the concept of disabling the dashing Colonel's antiaircraft batteries so UN air forces can patrol the skies. But I also understand that Qaddafi's air defense infrastructure is somewhat old and mediocre, and is not considered a high threat to Western nation's superior air power. Cruise missiles are an outstanding modality for causing "collateral damage."

Second-guessing military strategists is not my purpose, though; I'm more interested in the delicate pubic narrative versus the comparatively jarring reports arriving on our computer screens. We're told that the US has been very sensitive about being seen as the ringleader of this military action. In the same HuffingtonPost article linked above, Harry Reid coyly states

"I support the actions taken today by our allies, with the support of several Arab countries, to prevent the tyrant Moammar Qaddafi from perpetrating further atrocities on the people of Libya."

as if the United States has confined itself to cheerleading in the bleachers.

In other news, where the Kingdom of Bahrain and its subjects are concerned, it appears that the United States and European democracies have not even bothered to set up the bleachers. I wonder why.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

*

I do not wish to lead our British Cousin, Marginalia, down another maudlin path with this evening's musical selection, like I did last time. So tonight I humbly put forth a more robust offering from the spoiled-romance department.



Now I, myself, never had a problem with my girlfriends' "mamas"---they always seemed to adore me...more than their fucking daughters did, actually! In fact, it's too bad that they didn't have "cougars" back then, because I might have made it once or twice! Anyway, I consider this jaunty tune to illustrate another case of a missed Frank Zappa opportunity for a hit radio single. True, the "kill your mama" meme would probably have sent 1970 broadcast sensors into a tizzy, but maybe he could have gotten airplay with it on FM "underground" stations. In my opinion, this track has it all: an aggressive beat, great lummox-rock riff, a zillion instruments on its jazz-rock chart, and humor in both lyrics and arrangement. In a more perfect world, this song---not the embarrassing and tiresome Dinah-Moe Humm---would have been his concert encore crowd-pleaser.

The cover art of the album from which this track is extracted, "Weasels Ripped My Flesh," is also worth remarking upon, and I'm delighted that the YouTuber who posted "Guitar" included it as the visual channel. I remember "freaking out" when I first saw this hilariously creepy cover during the summer of '70, on an excursion to an incense-fogged record store in Piper's Alley, Old Town, in Chicago. Sight unheard, so to speak, I eagerly dug out my $3.25, which was plucked from my hand by a greasy longhair with 8-inch dingy yellow fingernails that sickly curled toward the palms of his hand. (What a jagoff!) Fortuitously, 40-some-odd years later it came to my attention that this album jacket artwork was inspired by the cover of a postwar pulp men's magazine. Scroll down below the song credits to see it, and note the inconspicuous article title at bottom right of the cover.

My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (1970, from"Weasels Ripped My Flesh," Warner Bros. - Reprise - Bizarre MS 2028), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

"Calculated risk"

*

"It would be hard to describe how alarming this is right now."

That's what a high-ranking US official told ABC News about the deteriorating nuclear reactor situations at Fukushima.

The difficulties caused by the evacuations were blamed for "escalating" the chances of a meltdown.

"They need to stop pulling out people -- and step up with getting them back in the reactor to cool it. There is a recognition this is a suicide mission," the unnamed U.S. official was quoted by ABC as saying. 

Yes sir, those "Japs" had better step up to the plate and get crackin' on that suicide mission of theirs so that anonymous high-ranking US officials, not to mention senior samurai at US Westinghouse, may sleep a little easier.

You see, they-all do the calculating and we-all do the risking.

Brutal.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

*

A rarely heard Beatles slow-dancer; one of my favorites of the era. I don't really remember it charting, possibly because there was too much competition from other Fab Four hits at the same time.



My clearest memory of it is from a 6th grade party in Nicky Bajovich's basement, spring 1965, dimly illuminated and with a certain amount of Crazy Foam being sprayed about for poorly understood psychosexual stimulative reasons. (It was a sweetly innocent era, and rapidly drawing to a close.)

The song was mainly composed by Lennon, and it was one of his least favorites. I disagree.

Yes It Is, The Beatles (1965, B-side of 45 rpm single Ticket To Ride, reissued 2009 in "The Beatles In Mono" box set, Mono Masters disc 1, track 17, EMI LC 0299), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Editor's note: the YouTube version posted here is from the "Past Masters" compilations, but I cite the mono digital remaster that I have in my library. Six/half-dozen, etc....

"Housekeeping"

*

The posting has been light lately mainly because I have a freelance editing job that will take a month or two. Also, I'm trying to rethink my posting schedule so I'm not always a prisoner to the laptop on Friday and Saturday nights.

As I've implied in recent months, I'm not satisfied with the same blogging model I've been evolving for the past few years. There are plenty (i.e., way too many) of blogs that comment hypertopically on every unprecedented or heinous development domestically and worldwide. Nothing wrong with that, but my feeling now is that there's no way to keep up with it except for full-time bloggers who specialize in domestic politics, military issues, economics, whatever. I don't have the expertise, time, or energy for that. I feel my originality lies elsewhere, if only I can figure out where. So that's what I've been trying to do for the past several months.

You knuckleheads seem to like the music posts, so those will continue. But not necessarily on Friday and Saturday any more. I can have my prayer meetings and fish fries whenever the fuck I please, so that's what I will start doing shortly.

The Fifty50 keyword system is a wreck and always has been, so I'll spend some time trying to curate it so it's more helpful in finding old posts or whatever.

I want to start including more graphical content again because visual arts are important to me and I like to share. Along those lines, comic strips and animation have always been two of my central joys in life, and I find that others often take an interest if provided a helpful context.

Some readers might remember my referring to a project I called the "Model Of Everything," then scaled back to a "Diagram of Everything." That has been percolating in back of the skullbone all along, and I want to give it some more visibility soon. The point of the project, if I can even call it that with a straight face, is to step back as far as necessary to view science, on one hand, and philosophy/religion, on the other hand, as residing within the same reality context... and, in fact, providing indispensable services each to the other. More later. I do not claim that this is a modest or even achievable endeavor. But I do believe that it's necessary for practitioners in each domain to let go of their blinkered outlooks in order to break a tenacious impasse in human evolution. And if anybody can do that, the fuckin' RubberCrutch can!!!

Finally, I'm closing in on an alternative approach to political and economic commentary. It involves taking about 10 steps back from the "dailiness" of everything; contemplating a much longer timeline than political commentators normally do; and squinting like a painter does to blur out nonessential details and better see the true colors of things. The biggest challenge is to avoid getting sucked into the "dailiness" every time we're treated to a new outrage. In my continuing surveys of philosophy and history I'm finding that there's really nothing new going on. I'm interested in the historic conditions that lead to a revolutionary break from seemingly eternal political, religious, and economic impasses. They do happen, and civilization does move forward. Our jobs are to stop worrying about things that we do not individually control, keep our heads down, and squirt our chromosomes into the gene pool if we wish.

Literally speaking

*

I think this FireDogLake blogger takes John Boehner's "machine gun" imagery too seriously, as if this pickled Ohio sad sack was crafting some cunning subliminal message to god-knows-who about who-knows-what. I think a more straightforward interpretation of Bohener's remark is that people of his ilk are every bit as delusional as Colonel Qaddafi. One is left to wonder why the Times and the Post and NPR and [~] use Quaddafi as the gold standard for insanity and megalomania when we have so many competitors right here in the good old USA.

I'll acknowledge that the previous sentence was a mere rhetorical device: no one really is "left wondering" about that for very long.

Vandalizing the capital building?

*

As seen on Eschaton, an AFL-CIO blog accuses "Governor Scott Walker" of welding capital windows shut to prevent outsiders from passing food through to protesters who have been occupying the building since Sunday.

True? Who knows? I haven't heard a peep about this elsewhere. But if it is, this tactic would seem to violate any reasonable state life-safety standards and possibly cross over into the realm of criminal damage to property. Unless state governors are allowed to do whatever the fuck they want when their "subjects" assemble to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Yesterday, Paul Krugman noted the eerie silence of mainstream (i.e., corporate) news shops about the historic political demonstrations in Madison---crowd sizes unprecedented since the Vietnam era. Getting to smell a lot like Red China around here these days.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

*

Here's a sound that my friend Gurlitzer might enjoy; a jazz waltz of sorts. From a surprising source.



Gurlizer knew me back when I thought it was hip to smoke blueberry Tiparillos and wear railroad-striped bell bottoms. And that was when Frank Zappa recorded this song, a year or two after flower power had flared into full-fledged revolt in some major cities. But I was "enjoying" all that at a distance during high school, vicariously, through music, underground comix, black-light posters, incense, and other lifestyle accessories. This was the same general timeframe when a Mothers concert in West Berlin ended in a fairly violent riot instigated by German revolutionaries affiliated with the Red Army Faction, not to mention the Altamont Speedway deaths and mayhem. This recording was actually left over from the Hot Rats sessions, which produced a late 1969 jazz album of the same name. It's an odd inclusion in the Burnt Weeny Sandwich album, which is mostly avant garde rock-jazz with some straight-ahead comedy blues and other miscellany.

Zappa could have written sweet, lyrical compositions like "Twenty Small Cigars" until the cows came home. Not that he should have, necessarily. And furthermore, he might have authorized his effective but ethically dubious manager of the time, Herb Cohen, to spread around some payola---or at least some fellatiola---to get tracks like this aired on FM "underground" stations during the late '60s and early '70s. By all accounts I've read, though, Zappa always refrained from payola. But maybe he shouldn't have. And so now, maybe because he shied away from his gentle side and mostly wrote compositions better suited to frame his endless social satire and raunchy comedy, Zappa is remembered by the general public not for his astonishing writing and performing capabilities, but for novelty songs like "Don't Eat The Yellow Snow," "Dinah-Moe Humm," and "Valley Girl." And also for eating one of his own turds live on stage during a mid-'60s concert. (The last item being someone's invention, of course, and one that annoyed FZ.)

"Twenty Small Cigars" belongs to a very small category of Zappa recordings that not only documents songs that he composed with emotion, purely for beauty of melody and setting, but also performed without any of the clowning or sarcasm that marred most recordings of such compositions. There are few others like this one in Zappa's catalog. I think it's a gem

Twenty Small Cigars, Frank Zappa (1970, from "Chunga's Revenge," reissued 1995 as RykoDisc RCD 10511), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Today's doke

*

Haha!

But our Republican stalwart might not even have wanted that government job, anyway. I'd think he would have felt morally compromised by having those taxpayer-funded healthcare and paid holiday benefits forced upon him against his will. Farewell, asshole.*

Furthermore, a thought experiment: Imagine how much faster Rachel Maddow or Bill Maher would have been gone than this guy if they'd even thought of wisecracking about labor protesters expressing their Second Amendment rights at Madison.

* Even worse for Mr. Former Indiana Deputy Attorney General Jeff Cox: he was not a political appointee, as I'd assumed---he was in "career status," meaning that he might have some difficulty being rehired in the public sector. And I'd think that even conservative firms would probably want to keep hands off his resume, just to demonstrate "civility."

Separated at birth?

*

Here's a riddle for you on a lazy late-winter night:

Q: What do former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and fading Libyan Strongman Moammar Gadhafi have in common?

A: They both accuse their homegrown protestors of being on drugs.

PS: "Santorum." Hehheh heh. Heh heh....

Saturday Night Fish Fry

*

A lyric emblematic of the nation I've lived in for the past 10 years. [End of pseudo-topical but not insincere political lead-in hook.]



Oddly, and apropos of nothing, in the back of my mind this song always reminded me vaguely of Jesus of Nazareth. No, really. It may have something to do with the upbeat treatment of the narrator's comeuppance, and my derivative interpretation that Bobby Fuller was somehow really telling us that the law really didn't win.

And in the case of Fuller's 1966 death, the law really didn't win. Accounts of his demise indicate that the investigation was seriously inconclusive, and the purported cause of death (self-asphyxiation by gasoline in a closed but unlocked automobile) seems a bit farfetched as a suicide mode for a successful, rising rock star. Some theorize that Fuller was done in by the notorious LAPD due to his relationship with a mob-connected girlfriend, but if we want to theorize it would seem to make more sense that the mob might finish him off, perhaps for "dishonoring" his young lady or maybe because he accidentally ended up with some dangerous information. Not exactly JFK at Dallas, of course... but then there is that Lone Star connection with Texas native Fuller. Hurm.

Anyway, this is a neat performance from Hullabaloo. I like the rocky jailhouse set, but I think that a few more imprisoned go-go girls are called for here. As always, I wait with anticipation for the crowd-pleasing, percussive six-gun sextuplet (over a whole measure). As a kid I imagined performing this passage with a quintuplet over the measure, instead of six, to indicate a bad round in one of the revolver chambers... perhaps in order to help explain how the law beat down the irrepressible Bobby Fuller.

Personal indulgence detour: As I watched the close-up of Fuller strumming the rhythm solo at the bridge (about 1:20 into the clip), I was reminded of an occurrence at Blackburn College during fall 1977, shortly after I returned there to complete my bachelor's degree. I had dragged my thrift store 45 record collection with me to Carlinville, Illinois, stuffed in a thrift store physician's bag, and came to share many of these '60s sides with an interesting kid named Bruce Pavitt, then from Park Forest, Illinois (near my hometown). I will take credit for first exposing Pavitt, who later went on to found Sub-Pop Records in Seattle, to a number of proto-punk sounds from my 45 collection, in particular "Talk Talk" by the Music Machine. I can't remember if I actually introduced him to "I Fought The Law" or if he previously knew it, but I clearly remember that he was absolutely awestruck by the bridge; as an interested but not highly motivated guitar noodler, he confessed that he had no idea how Fuller played that solo. We listened to it over and over on the third floor of Butler Hall during my "salad days."

I Fought The Law, The Bobby Fuller Four (1965, date unknown, live performance broadcast on the pop music variety show Hullabaloo, NBC-TV), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Addendum: double-dig the groovy band intro provided courtesy of The Serendipity Singers!

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

*

A reader (I think I know who he is) planted a link to this Phil Ochs performance in the comments section of last evening's post. I feel that the lyrics of this song are much more timely now than they were in the late '60s.



I was never a big fan of folk-type singers as a youth being as my predilection was for big powerful urban sounds, so people like Dylan, Neil Young, and others flew under my radar. But whenever someone refers me to a Phil Ochs lyric I come away ever-more impressed with his mind and somewhat disappointed that I was never able to connect with him at the same time a few of my high school pals did.

This song, unlike so many of the era, is not about "recreational" revolution or a vehicle for radical chic, but (to my ears, at least) a very impressionistic thought experiment of what it might be like in this country when a majority of disenfranchised people come to one clear mind about who is the real enemy of America: the parasite class and its vassals. The galactic levels of wealth accreted to these winner-take-alls is setting the stage not for another glorious 1,000-year reich, but for the onset of decadence along every axis of human endeavor. Their heirs will not inherit their drive for earning, investing, and stealing because they will already have plenty of free money in the vault. The parasite class cannot possibly keep a lid on their laissez-faire paradise if they don't even possess the skills to change a flat tire on the BMW. The tipping point---which nobody should believe will lead directly to a New Morning In America---will be defined by the congealing of a common awareness. This will be embodied in the emergence of a new story line about what has really been going on here since the 1970s; a plot that is Occam-simple and explains pretty much everything that has happened, from the repudiation of the social contract to the dissolution of American civic comity to the end of our illusion that anyone can be "middle class" if they work hard and play by Ronald Reagan's rules.

I don't necessarily believe that the parasite class will literally come to the end envisaged here by the lyrics of Phil Ochs (read them on the YouTube page where this video comes from), but I am certain that the metaphorical content is prophetic. Hopefully in my lifetime, but if not, then certainly by the time my offspring are writing blogs in order to forestall Sudoku and crossword puzzle hell. Not that I'm a big fan of flames and violence and the like, but rebirth and renaissance are welcome concepts.

The Ringing of Revolution, Phil Ochs (1966, from "Phil Ochs in Concert," Elektra Records [catalog number not available]), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Aside to AnarchistOpposition: if you are who I think you are, then I owe you a treat from the Lummox Rock files as soon as I can come up with a worthy surprise.

Barometer of pathos

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I live in a Big 10 university community, which I believe to be the lamest in the conference. I've always been amazed by how little this town has going on for itself in any respect---musically, artistically, socially, politically. But just how pathetic is it? Well, my friends, these twin cities, occupied by close to 150,000 souls, can literally generate only two Craigslist "missed connections" ads a month... and one of them is usually spam!

This city typically has about as much life as you might expect in a place like Tuscola. The leatherfaced men gaze hatefully through dead cinder eyeballs from under the visors of NASCAR baseball caps; all women seem to be upholstered with cottage cheese and cud. I see more fire in the eyes of a single Amish lady on her quarterly field trip to Target than I can sense upon walking the entire length of Green Street in campustown, where the girls seem to use Photoshop instead of makeup, and boys roam in herds from bar to bar dreaming of their next opportunity for date rape.

Take, that, Garrison Fucking Keillor!

The Cheesehead Revolution

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From completely off my radar I'm now reading about a state governor who has ordered the state police to round up members of the Wisconsin legislature. TPM reports:

...the state's Democratic senators have left the state entirely, putting them out of the reach of the state police who have been ordered to round them up so that Republicans have a quorum and can take up Gov. Walker's union-busting budget bill.

There's a whole separate discussion we might have about the state's power to legislatively "bust" labor unions. But the thing to think about is this: since when in the United States can the executive branch of any state "round up" members of the legislature and make them participate in a session? That is how a junta works, not a democracy.

Can the governor also order the state police to round up members of the opposition party for any other reason? What is the legal theory that justifies an apparent violation of the separation of powers in any state of this union? Does the 10th Amendment permit states to establish forms of governance that are forbidden by the U.S. Constitution? What specific law are the Wisconsin legislators violating here?

An interesting aspect of this executive coup against workers' rights in Wisconsin, again according to TPM, is that

...Scott Fitzgerald, who is ordering the state police to track down the wayward Democratic senators is the son of the head of the state police, Steve Fitzgerald, who in turn was appointed to the top spot by Walker. Steve Fitzgerald is also the father of the state's speaker of the House, Jeff Fitzgerald.

The denial of a quorum by a minority group of members is a legitimate parliamentary maneuver. It's no more obstructionist than what happens in the U.S. Senate when the minority party filibusters bills that clearly have support of the majority. It's no more obstructionist than Ronald Reagan's famous "veto pen," which he smugly wagged into the Kliegl lights the many times he shot down laws passed by both chambers of Congress in the 1980s. So the issue shouldn't be whether obstructionist tactics are legal, because they are, and Republicans are much more adept at using them than Democrats.

The issue is this: is an obstructionist parliamentary maneuver by members of a state legislature illegal in the State of Wisconsin? How about in other states?

This is going to be really interesting. Wisconsin was an incubator of American progressive politics in the first half of the 20th century, and the tradition persists. Nobody knows how this will play out in terms of union busting, but it should give a significant stimulus to the concept of union solidarity in the Cheesehead state.

And in my opinion there is not a single working man or woman in this nation who has any smidgen of "enlightened self interest" in rooting for "Governor Scott Fitzgerald." "Governor Scott Walker" (duh).

For Marginalia

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In previous comments, Marginalia reminisced about an O.V. Wright single, "Gone For Good." I'd never heard of Wright, but thanks to YouTube I found the song in question. Unfortunately, the poster disabled the embed code so I can't display it on this page. But here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuCrSDFK0vk

Give it a listen. The band sounds very "Memphis," and Wright reminds me strongly of someone---Otis Redding, maybe? I like it: this sound has the unmistakable sound of a very specific place in time, and it makes the intervening years fade from memory for a coupla minutes.

And you're right, Marginalia: you really were cool listening to Stax while your pals were listening to the Rockin' Berries. (Nothing against the Berries, but I never heard them until a few minutes ago on YouTube; don't remember them ever charting in Chicago, but then there was a strong regional rock and pop scene that may have crowded them out where I grew up in the mid-60s. I'm guessing from the sound of those guys that they were a group the girls really "dug".)

Aside to Marginalia: I notice you've adopted an alias. I hope this doesn't mean you've had to enter the witness protection program....

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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I'll wrap up my current mini soul fugue, as prompted by a flash from Big Hussein Otis in last night's Fish Fry comments Thread. It's my favorite cut by the pride of Harvey, Illinois: The Dells!



Most Chicagoland kids who listened only to the city's two Top 40 stations never heard of The Dells until 1968, with the release of their first crossover single, "There Is." Several more big hits crossed over to Top 40 playlists over the next year, including "Stay In My Corner," "Oh What A Night," and this one, "Wear It On Our Face."

What we didn't know was that The Dells had been around since 1952, and were masters of doo-wop, jazz, and R&B in addition to the soul mode they hit big with in the late 1960s. And what I didn't know until tonight is that they provided backing vocals for the likes of Ray Charles, Dinah Washington, and Barbara Lewis. Neither did I know that the omnipresent Quincy Jones worked with them to help refine their sound.

As inferred by Big Otis in the comments, the Dells were at least indirectly part of the same galaxy that spawned the Twinight label in Chicago, all of them working in the orbit of a large independent soul and R&B promotional firm that handled groups signed to Chess Records, including subsidiaries Checker and Cadet (not to mention national labels like Atlantic, Motown, and Stax). But these guys were the old timers of the scene, all members having been born during the Great Depression---some of them were practically 35 when they released this side, fer crying out loud!

Wear It On Our Face, The Dells (1968, original 45 rpm release Cadet 5599, reissued on CD compilation "There Is," Chess [MCA] CHD-9288), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Maybe the love I'm looking for
Is just a wayward dream
Oh yeah...



Tonight I feel like going back to another Twinight Chicago soul recording from about 1970, which I have in my library on a CD reissue set. These compilations of little-known vintage soul recordings by The Numero Group, which I wrote about a coupla weeks ago, represent something important to me: that first-rate talent grows almost everywhere, and us ordinary citizens would get our fill of swell entertainment without Hollywood, Madison Avenue, Time-Warner, Sony, Disney, and so on.

Listen to the horn attack after the little four-bar guitar intro. That's some top-drawer shit! And the string arrangement is not merely there for "sweetener," but to help sound out the poignant atmosphere created by the plaintive vocalist, Annette Poindexter (the girlfriend of Syl Johnson, the record's producer).

The band is The Pieces of Peace, a congregation of somewhere between five and eight musicians (not clear from the skimpy documentation I've read), which was hired as the house band by the Twinight label during summer 1969. I was entertained to learn, from the Numero liner notes, that this is pretty much the complete band you hear on Young-Holt Unlimited's 1968 hit "Soulful Strut," before PoP signed with Twinight. According to the notes, "neither Isaac Young nor Redd Holt played on that session." (!)

The arrangement was powerful and beautiful, the lyrics innocent and bittersweet. I can think of only one reason, other than possibly a failure of payola, why this track didn't climb high on the soul charts, and that reason is Ms. Poindexter's performance. I don't mean that in a assily critical sense, though, because I personally enjoy it and try to dig in a bit deeper each time I listen. To the casual pop-listener's ear, Poindexter may sound like she's landing north, south and east of every other pitch, and those are the ears that promoters and radio DJs are always surrogating for. So nobody at a Top 40 or Soul powerhouse broadcaster in the mid-60s would likely give her quirky performance, ornamented with gospel sensibilities and half a dozen different kinds of blue notes, the time of day. Sides like this and others issued by Twinight in its heyday were given the "time of night," however, to brighten the hours "east of midnight" for third-shift factory laborers, cabbies, and young African American nightflies in general. In the radio business, this domain used to be known as the "lunar rotation." It was essentially a promotional "limbo" for local musicians, but probably no more hit-or-miss in quality than whatever rocketed up the national pop charts fueled with rolls of hundred-dollar bills.

Wayward Dream, Annette Poindexter and The Pieces of Peace (1970, original 45 rpm release Twinight Records [catalog number not known]; reissued on "Eccentric Soul: Twinight's Lunar Rotation," Numero 013-B), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

February thaw

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Hi. Remember me?

Reintegration of the shoulder bone has been going well, and I'm probably a week ahead of schedule in terms of physical therapy progress. Reintegration of my headbone back into the work cycle has been more difficult.

And regarding my absence from here, it's not as if my mind isn't brimming with verities that I need to share with everyone. What's going on is that it's still fairly hard to align my thoughts into sequences of words that comprise coherent sentences; takes me 45 minutes to squeeze out a 20-minute post still, at least if I want it to apply some craftsmanship.

Also, the house has sort of devolved into a virtual turd mine, and my usually pitiful organizing skills are still in the sub-remedial zone. And although I'm actually a fan of fairly robust winters, this current one has sucked rocks beyond decades of memory. It's been a miserable, bitter, relentless winter just like the ones I remember in the Chicago south suburbs as a paper boy, wearing crappy JC Penney winter jackets made out of stiff polyester and primitive fiberfill, with my skin blanching toward Edgar-Winter white on face and under under useless mittens and footwear.

But even then, we always got a February thaw. Ours here in central Illinois would appear to be on the way in the upcoming week, starting tomorrow. I'm hoping that when I kick back the slabs of compressed ice pellets we've been walking on for almost two weeks I will feel tumescent shoots drilling skyward through the scalp from my mental bulbs. I've about had it with living like a ghost.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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You'd be blue
Without a neighbor next to you



This is a Chicago band, The Notations, from 1971. I may have heard a snippet of this track while surfing the AM dial when Chicago's two Top 40 stations were either playing the same song at the same time... or crap at the same time. Edging up the dial into "police band" territory I'd sneak a listen to Chicago's mighty soul giant WVON-1450---"The Voice of the Negro." Sadly for me I never stuck around long in that radio neighborhood for it to become a habit. Having been acculturated as a South Side/south suburbs kid starting in the mid-1950s, I absorbed by osmosis the idea that there was something "wrong" with, and even "dangerous" about, listening to the negro stations at the frontiers of the dial, including Chicagoland's thousand-watt jazz beacon in Harvey, Illinois, WBEE-1570. (Fortunately for me, I rediscovered WBEE after dropping out of college in 1973, and this listening experience accounts for a considerable amount of my jazz "ear" knowledge.)

The Numero Records Eccentric Soul reissue series is a compilation of "lost" recordings from America's regional and farflung soul music markets, including (believe it or not) Columbus, Ohio; Tallahassee, Florida; and Phoenix, Arizona! This side is reissued on "Twinight's Lunar Rotation," an outstanding two-disc set of singles issued by the top Chicago local soul label. This Numero compilation is the best of the crop that I own, but there is lotsa strong stuff on the other half-dozen Numero compilations of different soul labels that I own. There are numerous tracks on this and the other compilations that were certainly worthy of charting nationally, and many others that might have charted but for a vocalist who was out of his or her league with top-drawer material.

There is no legitimate reason why "A New Day" should not have charted nationally, in my opinion. There were probably two problems, one being failure to tap into the crossover market using progressive promotion techniques (i.e., payola) and the other being that this sound is very reminiscent of hits by The Esquires (e.g., "Get On Up"). In the case of the latter problem, the issue would probably have been the "dated" sound because the top-charting Esquires hits came and went in 1967. You see, 1971 was probably thought to be light years beyond the 1967 soul style in the ears of the national labels. Nevertheless, here it is: a gem of upbeat, feelgood soul---a flawless performance, in my opinion. These Numero compilations feel like a glimpse into the soul music scene from a closely parallel universe. There's lots more where this came from.

A New Day, The Notations (1971, original 45 rpm release Twinight Records A4KM 2409; reissued on "Eccentric Soul: Twinight's Lunar Rotation," Numero 013-B), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Microeconomics

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President Barack Obama made a unilateral commitment to economic stimulus Tuesday evening before a joint session of Congress by delivering the largest shovel-ready project of his two-year administration to date: the 2011 State of the Union address.

Today's doke [updated]

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Shared with permission from Married To The Sea, 18 January 2011. The authors, Drew and Natalie Dee, give away digital carloads of "humour" for free on their website. If I wore wacky tee shirts, I'd probably buy 20% of my wardrobe there.

Update: this is a self-referential "torn rotator cuff" doke. Please make a note of it.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Following a bit on last night's subtext, here's another band and song for "purists" to hate---this time, "rock purists."



Yes, I know the costumes and slap-happy comedy was lame, and certainly performed for edification of the emergent teeny-bopper cult. Also, while I don't know anything about their production methods, it would not surprise me if most of Paul Revere's big hits were laid down by studio musicians even though the lads could play their instruments. But the hard rock sensibilities of the Raiders jab holes through the facade and production value. It would have been very uncool to admit to anyone that I liked Paul Revere upon my arrival as a buzzcut nobody at Hillcrest High School in 1967. But as I began collecting 45 rpm singles in the 1970s I could hear, through more well informed ears, that lots of pop acts---including this band and the Monkees, for example---had much more going on for themselves than the era's longhairs would ever acknowledge.

I don't think a person has to listen too hard to hear some Stones-like guitar and energy in "Good Thing" and other Raiders tracks from the mid-60s. Of special interest to me in this tune is the movement of parallel fourths and/or fifths both in the vocals and guitars---they're the odd-sounding harmonies that sound vaguely oriental and a little incomplete, which Aerosmith and many others made heavy use of decades later and to this day.

The most capable dancer, which some of the YouTube commentators seem to think is Goldie Hawn, is featured near the front of the set and distracts attention from the weird gunplay subplot that ends up getting under another dancer's feet. "Good Thing" was issued in Chicago about this time of the year in the winter of 1966-67, when there was a shortlived pop music style fascination with the Victorian and Roaring 20s eras, which accounts for the dancers' flapper-style dresses in the midst of American Revolution drag. Anyway, it's a bit of flavor from an eclectic time in American pop music; three minutes of upbeat full-color rock, dancing, and tomfoolery.

Good Thing, Paul Revere and the Raiders (1966, from "The Spirit of '67," Columbia Records CL 2595 [mono], via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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As I've maybe mentioned here before, many self-described "jazz purists" either dislike or make excuses for Charlie Parker's interest in large band and orchestra formats near the end of his life. I don't share either of those views. The quality of each recorded effort varies, of course, just like in real life. And the observation---not a profound one, really---that Parker did these performances to sustain or enhance his income is immaterial to me. As they used to say in England during the Renaissance, "Shakespeare got to get paid, son."



Entertainment corporations tell us that rock and roll is "the soundtrack of our lives," but I'd argue that for individuals born before, say, the Kennedy administration, this style of music is every bit as much a part of our "soundtrack" as rock is (at least those of us who grew up in a major urban area). I'm not saying that Parker, specifically, was necessarily a component of our collective unconscious, but rather the orchestral setting for musical treatments of jazz standards and show tunes that our parents used to have on the car radio, during folding and ironing time, and so on, was endemic and burned deeply into our little neuro nets.

To the postmodern youthful ear, which often hears pop music from the past through a filter of campy irony, this cut may sound like something that "Mad Men" used to boink the secretary to after hours. But the best of the lush sounds from this era---say 1950 through 1960---have a deep resonance to those of us who were innocent kids waiting to be fed homemade burgers and fries on Saturday night or cruising southwest down U.S. highways toward a vacation in the era immediately before rock ascended into prominence. So to all those ultra-hip jazz purists who look down on Bird's big band and orchestral digressions, I say "fuck you, asshole."

My feeling is that this track could have been the outstanding gem of Parker playing in a big band setting were it not for one inexcusable "clam" that would have sent Buddy Rich on a spree with a butcher knife had he been conducting the band. It's in the last 10 seconds of the track; should be easy to hear. The perp, Danny Bank on baritone sax, was not slaughtered after the session, however, and went on to record an estimated 10,000 tracks in his distinguished career.

I Can't Get Started, Charlie Parker with Big Band (1952, originally issued on 78 rpm single as Mercury 11096-B), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

I want a space bike!

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Space bikes aren't yet available to the American consumer---they didn't even have them on Star Trek TNG, fer chrissakes! But thanks to the Retro Thing blog I see that some progressive companies are now marketing a cunningly hybrid technology torn at the same time from the annals of the past and future. It's called a velocar, a human-powered personal vehicle built around a recumbent bicycle frame. Recumbents have been around for a least a century, and velocars almost as long. Some historians, in fact, propose that the first velocars date to a much earlier era (Illustration 1). I'd guess that they originally failed because neolithic engineers could not effectively design a power-transfer train using only rocks, pointy sticks, and animal hides.

The concept of robust human-powered vehicles, however, was both sound and feasible. Now, 21st century entrepreneurs have improved on the historic mobile phallus motif by applying advanced materials to both prehistoric and modern designs (Illustration 2).

I'm partial to the Velomobiel Quest (Illustration 3), which is faithful to its weenie-type roots while purportedly applying many simple but powerful design concepts. One big improvement, if well executed, is the isolation of the drive train from the elements in order to avoid heavy maintenance requirements. Also, the tires can be changed without removing the wheels. Another improvement is the snappy road speed made possible by using computer-assisted aerodynamic design in combination with ultralight materials, including removable weathertight hardtops.

Illustration 3. Velomobiel Quest.

Obvious issues to investigate would be user safety and theft prevention, but these are already live issues for anyone who commutes by bicycle. Retro Thing commenters complain that the vehicle is too expensive because they're "just recumbent bikes with canopies," and that you can buy a new economy car or used luxury car for the $8K--14K price tag. I feel that these concerns are too dumb to rebut directly. But consider the benefits of a weathertight, ultralight human-powered car that has enough cargo space for some groceries or a small shopping trip to the strip mall.

After manufacture and shipping, these vehicles would eliminate the burning of fossil fuels and, therefore, local carbon emissions. Human-powered commuting would inject a significant cardiovascular exercise routine into driving chores. Insurance costs should be much lower because, presumably, a velocar driver can't achieve the same level of slaughter or property damage that a drunk can behind the wheel of an SUV or a town car. One other huge, but less tangible benefit: this vehicle is probably very much owner-hackable like any bike, and like most cars were through the 1950s. Sustainable transport could reopen a niche in the citizen-engineering world, recalling a time when many ingenious Americans were more interested in playing with carburetors and crankshafts than passive entertainment and recreational shopping.

One might wonder why the fuck we ingenious Americans would have to look to the Danes to market solutions for affordable, sustainable transportation considering that the U.S. has zillions of underemployed trainable workers, lots of low-interest cash theoretically available for lending to startups, and supposedly a surplus of entrepreneurs who would like nothing more than to make some money "putting America back to work again." Caveat: I do not consider "it's not as simple as that" to be a valid response. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

A Petraeus scenario for 2011

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Longtime readers should remember my cheeky piece of 2007 political speculation which put General Dave Petraeus at the center of several presidential campaign scenarios. I evolved it to account for certain unfolding actions, but I still think any of them was sound enough to have been worthy of exploratory development by wealthy GOP "thought leaders." In all of its forms, my Petraeus speculation was based on certain non-farfetched assumptions. Not to belabor them at this time, here is the gist:

1. To win back the White House, Republicans need to stick with the strategy of nominating someone who hasn't left a long trail through Washington or the public media, because quite apart from their professed ideologies, the field of "possibles" is littered with the unappealing and the unsavory. The reason that GOP officials or their pundits can launch trial balloons for people like Barbour, Bloomberg, and Huckabee is because launching them for the likes of Boehner, Christie, and Jindahl is, prima facie, preposterous.

2. The establishment's favorite political narrative is that our nation needs "bipartisan" solutions as put forth by "respectable moderates." It is desperate to find us candidates that can "rise above partisan bickering" to continue cramming the Reagan/Bush agenda down our throats.

The GOP is so bereft of candidates who are attractive on even a casual personal level that I was convinced then (and still am now) that their only hope to win the 2012 presidential election without stealing it is to appoint a "standard-bearer" who is cut from a completely different mold in terms of superficial appeal. I believe the Republicans will quickly discover that the time is ripe for General Petraeus to step forward. First, a general has "gravitas" with the American people and, as usual, US political culture makes people stop and think real hard before criticizing a soldier. Second, I believe that Republican power brokers and rank-and-file voters consider him telegenic, and potentially even "sexy." (I may have more to say on that later assuming I don't get skeeved out thinking about it.) And third, many people perceive military general officers as dutiful public servants who are not distracted by ego and ambition, so Petraeus would be helped to whatever extent Americans are looking for a Man On Horseback to "deliver" us from our troubles.

All of that is arguable, of course; I'm just saying that for a number of superficial and calculating reasons, Petraeus would be comparatively easy to sell to the "middle wing" of our body politic. I'll tackle this topic, hopefully, in small pieces as time passes instead of continually trying to formulate "unified field theories" like I did during 2007-08.

I'm dusting off this scenario, though, because certain people in the GOP seem to be thinking along approximately the same lines. For one thing, there is a group that thinks Petraeus is entitled to some rank inflation to put him on a par---militarily and in terms of visibility---with history's handful of five-star generals such as Dwight Eisenhower. And for another thing, this right-wing "Vets for Freedom" group is already trying to push Petraeus into the limelight in preparation for a presidency bid.

Starting rehab this evening

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Hello everyone. Thanks for your attention to the matter of me and torn-up appendages thereof. Beer-D gave you a simple accounting of surgical success and my general quality of life following the event. He was not able to share with you the feeble state of my willpower and low functional achievements since Tuesday. I've found little enjoyment in being so helpless in the face of an obvious fact, which is that my body is at least 90 percent functional. Cognitive inaction takes a greater toll than an inconveniently located mashed-up shoulder. So I've decided to begin rehabilitation tonight at levels higher than clavicle.

I will catch up with greetings and throw in a handful of bon mots to prevent adhesions as I putter around the demesne tonight.

Cutty, feely open thread

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A few "housekeeping" matters for you, in the form of my first, very own "open thread." In case  you don't know, "open thread" is a blogging term for a post that is of little inherent interest but serves as a pointer to a comments section where readers may intercommunicate.

I will direct the vassals of my domain to use the comments thread, if advisable, to pass along any news of interest about my condition and wellbeing in relation to some arthroscopic surgery I'll receive on Tuesday. This will take my left shoulder offline for several days, and it probably will stymie any significant typing by RubberCrutch. My hope is that there is no news at all to report, other than "all is well," and that immobilization of the shoulder won't have me away from the keyboard for more than, say, 36 hours.

I'll probably be away from work for close to 2 weeks, and will start fast on PT in 1 week. This pretty much constitutes my "vacation" for the upcoming year, so I intend to enjoy it to whatever extent possible. I've laid in a case of assorted affordable organic wines for medicinal purposes.

I'm still a little behind on responding to commenters from over the holidays and the past weekend; I feel like a jag about this because it's always my intent to share words with people who take the time to read this page and then write something about it. To me, blogging at a third- or fourth-tier scale is the only meaningful internet social medium; Facebook and Twitter seem worse than useless for purposes of... well, anything; blogging is not only social, it's also personal. I hope to catch up with all commenters before tomorrow noon, which is showtime.

If there is anything to be reported about my condition, it will be posted in the comments section by Beer-D or Big Rock Head. Talk to you soon.

---Love, RubberCrutch

Last Giffords post, I hope

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Before I leave the political aspects of the Giffords massacre behind in preparation for several days of phony debate and false equivalency to pollute mass media channels, I'll reprint below a comment on my post entitled "And Dove bars shall issue from the assholes of the righteous," contributed by that frequent and prolific Fifty50 visitor, "Anonymous." It evidently didn't make it to the comments section because Blogger thought it was too long or something, but it came through via email notification. Without further comment (except in the comments section):

yes, let bygones be bygones. Sage advice.

I put Fox news on (something always done with utmost caution) yesterday to see how they were reporting what MSNBC and CNN were doing their 24 hour work on. Hey, on Fox we could learn about smokeless cigarettes--a news infomercial since nothing else was happening in the country.

The right was momentarily caught unprepared to spin this stuff but guys like that "Fineman" give them a break to recover and crank up their propaganda.

The 74 yr old sheriff of Pima County AZ did the country a big service yesterday by stating very clearly what the hell is happening in AZ and in the US. Let Fox spin that. But many other issues are and should come up because of this, especially once the identity and circumstances of the other victims are made public.

Such as health care: the medical help the victims require as well as the mental health help guys like the shooter never get anymore (doesn't take a psychiatric degree to read that youtube shit and diagnose a schizophrenic).

Such as gun control: why the hell is a guy like that carrying around a police/ military style weapon? Why does he have access to it any more than he does to plastic explosives? And so much for the idiotic NRA rationale that in states like AZ with open carrying gunslingers the bad guys won't stand a chance. That could have been an NRA convention and, with that weapon, he could have hit 19 people just that quickly before anyone could react.

Such as the role of government: I didn't notice any private business dealing with that mess. Like evacuating the scene, like getting the injured to medical facilities, like the state university med school they were moved to itself. The public law enforcement entities handling the crime scene and investigation (city, county, state and federal--all taxpayer supported). No, the only role I noticed for the private sector in all this shit was the strip mall stage on which it took place. There is a very good reason for the taxes a society pays-- many of them demonstrated in this tragedy.

So lets sit back, take the "fineman's" advice, give our Randian and Paulian-worshipping brothers and sisters the benefit of the doubt, and hear what they have to say. Already the Alaskan snowbilly has pointed out that the "surveyor's" sights on her website were misinterpreted. Reload babe!

Achtung, "Howard Fineman" [updated]

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For your information, "Howard Fineman," the only "connection" between 9/11 and the Giffords massacre is a cute little shorty named Christina Taylor Green, who will never walk the earth again. Thank you for your attention to this matter, you marinated schmuck.

PS: get a haircut.

Update: BoingBoing has the pseudo-hipster version of Finemanism---a pot-stirring but pointless foray into look-how-serious-I-am above-the-fray-ism. As with Finemanism, this sort of pseudo-philosophical prior restraint on discussing national-scale calamities and discussing relevant precursors has the effect of telling everybody to shut up until the right-wing noise machine takes command of the discussion, figures out a way to blame liberals and---even better---the victims themselves. After which our corporate mass media escort us off the topic and onto the next one of their choosing.

And Dove Bars shall issue from the assholes of the righteous

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Predictably, it begins: the call for "civility" by a Beltway pundit, "Howard Fineman," who hopes all of us will emulate George W. Bush "at his ardent best" on a 9/11 rubble heap, as he lathered up the nation for the willy-nilly destruction of Afghan places and people completely uninvolved with the Bin Laden cabal. Or Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband as he drooled platitudes about "God and the Bible" and "tolerance, forbearance, and love" a few days after a right-wing conspiracy executed the largest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.

This "Howard Fineman" creature is the worst that corporate media has to offer. He asserts, with only the same information at hand that you and I have right now, that the Giffords massacre was "not about politics, ideology or party." And that, therefore, an appeal to "civility" is the salve to be applied. While posing as a voice of reason and moderation, this "Howard Fineman" instructs the nation to avoid discussing the level of accountability that might be assignable to the right-wing media and political ringleaders. These animals who have clawed their way to wealth and power by trading on unvarnished prejudice and violent political rhetoric over the past several decades must not be connected with the predictable fallout of their actions. We must avoid analysis, one supposes, because this might create discomfort for "Howard Fineman" and his paymasters, and the horrible, horrible people he shares cocktails and finger foods with to gain personal validation.

Never fear. I am certain that President North Star will lap up every refined droplet of "Howard Fineman's" wise counsel. And that as a result of same we Americans can look forward to a new Era of Good Feelings that will usher in a hundred years of prosperity and peace. Long Live "Howard Fineman"!

Then and now

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As I revisited Zappa's "Mom and Dad" earlier this evening I was slightly taken aback by the condemnation of police as the Establishment's agents of political violence. I believe that was true: impulsive police disrespect for and harassment of "longhairs" was known by most of "us" in the late 1960s and early 1970s, if not from first-hand experience, then from the accounts of our friends and acquaintances, and certainly from continual news reports. Each individual circumstance differed, of course, and two reasonable people could have reached opposite conclusions about many of them. Also, cops also certainly created uncomfortable circumstances for "hippies" caught in the process of committing a crime, and I doubt that rednecks got any gentler treatment when apprehended committing the same acts. Nevertheless, after sifting through those ambiguities, it was clear then and now that the police, and even the state National Guards, were agents of suppressing lawful political assembly and expression.

This evening, in a TPM report about a possible accomplice in the Giffords massacre, here's part of what Pima County (Arizona) Sheriff Clarence Dupnik had to say to reporters at a news conference:

The sheriff spent several minutes directing his anger at the "vitriol" he said comes from radio and television personalities. "That may be free speech, but its not without consequences," Dupnik said.

"I hope that are all Americans are as saddened and as shocked as we are," he said.

"We need to do a little soul searching."

Arizona in particular, he said, has "become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

I think it's fair to say that law-enforcement officers tend to be socially conservative in any location. So it's heartening to me that one from an especially "conservative" corner of the nation would directly acknowledge misgivings to a national audience that certain social worldviews in his jurisdiction have gotten way out of hand.

I believe that the typical sworn law-enforcement officer, like the typical soldier, is indoctrinated with a clear concept of duty and professional mission that trumps individual beliefs. I know we can point to racially motivated police brutality, for example, as one of many indicators that cops are no more perfect than any other sector of society. But my point is that at this point in time, police are not largely in the business of suppressing liberal political expression. That task was "privatized" somewhere along the way.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Convened a day late this week, instead of a Fish Fry, out of respect for five six who died in the Arizona political massacre today, and the rest who were maimed or traumatized. This is Frank Zappa's tender, seething commentary on the consequences of right-wing political violence. Different era and M.O., but the victims are still innocent.



Mom and Dad, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (1968, from "We're Only In It For The Money," originally issued on Verve V6-5045X), embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Giffords on NPR

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As I suspected, the Arizona congresswoman targeted in today's assassination attempt is the same one I heard on All Things Considered while driving home from work on 5 January 2011 (had forgotten her name). I remember quickly becoming exasperated with her opening statement, smelling of namby-pamby "centrism," regarding what she intended to do during the 112th Congress:

First and foremost, work with the Republicans. I come from the state of Arizona, which is a pretty bipartisan state. I formerly served in the minority, know what it's like to work with my Republicans in the majority and in the minority. And that's truly what American people want. I do think it's important, though, to look back on the reflection. 

But her tone and her words soon became much more nuanced as she pushed back against the Republican midterm "mandate" nonsense. She easily handled the remarks of know-nothing Illinois Republican Pete Roskam while clearly and succinctly taking down the main Republican talking points against HCR. By the end of the piece I came around to thinking that she might be a good egg after all.

"Barring info...speculation benefits no one"

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That is NPR's rejoinder about the Giffords shooter and his motives. They're concerned about "speculation."

Little "speculation" is necessary when facts are available.

Rep. Giffords's Republican opponent Jesse Kelly had campaign rally shoot-in to "help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office."

The federal judge shot dead in today's incident, John Roll, had previously received right-wing death threats by telephone that required intervention by the U.S. Marshals Service.

One account, a second-hand attribution to the Democratic National Committee Western States Director, posted by Atrios, has the perpetrator calling out the name of each victim he shoots.

Anybody following national news for the past several years knows that Arizona has a highly expressive right-wing gun culture that has normalized the concept of bringing firearms to political events. (Sorry, don't have time to find a link right now.)

So, NPR, why don't you take "political junkie Ken Rudin" off the pontification beat this evening and assign him try some real reporting on the alleged shooter's internet ramblings? Based on an initial look at samples posted to TPM, the shooter would seem to have been motivated to a large extent by psychosis. But in the few of his utterances I've glanced at so far there appears to be a stack of kindling cut fresh from the right-wing noise bush. As one would expect, those political assassination attempts that are not the work of paid hit men are typically the finale of a grand vision obsessing an individual who has lost his mind. We don't have to go too far out on the "speculation" limb to write a reasonable first draft of what went wrong in Arizona today.

Hideous

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And not only hideous, but very much foreseen and publicized by DHS over a year ago.

Do you remember what happened when DHS released that memo about the rising threat of right-wing extremism? And do you remember the howling about this from right-wingers at the time, like the samples captured at the bottom of the HuffPost article linked above?

And do you remember how DHS chief Napolitano fumbled against that right-wing pushback? And, finally, do you remember how, when questioned by TPM this past September about actual examples of right-wing domestic extremism over the year since the original DHS memo had been issued, she referred to it as "ancient history"? I do.

Right-wing celebrity pundits using mainstream communications media fire up haters with eliminationist rhetoric covered by a veneer of sick humor. Right-wing politicians refuse to disavow pigs like Limbaugh or Beck, and will even express sympathy for the seething fans who are infected with this violent, schizoid ideation. How many times have you hears a senior Republican establishment figure say something to the effect of "Well, I may not agree with the rhetoric, but I certainly understand why these people are so angry."

But "centrist" shape-shifters like Napolitano and President North Star, who always approach this topic without candor in order to spare themselves a scolding from John McCain and Rush Limbaugh and Erick Erickson, share in the accountability for this abominable political massacre. I'm sure that all we'll hear about this from Responsible Democrats in the coming days are abstract platitudes about the horror of it all in This Great Nation founded on principles of blah blah blah; and boilerplate expressions of how everyone's thoughts should "be with the families" of the victims. But not a goddam meaningful word about the hate mongers or their mesmerized audience.

Editor's note: yes, I am aware that we don't have many confirmed facts yet about the alleged shooter or his motives. I see no point in being "even-handed" at this point, but I will immediately apologize for jumping the gun when it is proven that the shooter is a smelly, card-carrying ACLU socialist vegan.

Way to keep the eye on the ball

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Among President North Star's highest priorities for the new year? Using the Justice Department to intimidate WikiLeaks sympathizers not accused of any crime. Unconscionable and futile---a waste of resources and good will.

I intend to write a bit about the new era of whistleblowing the world entered last year, but there are reasons why I must select my words carefully. It's probably legal for me to say that I think this has been the most fascinating and asymmetric application of political expression I've ever been aware of. Kind of like that guy in Tienanmen Square standing in front of a column of tanks in 1989, except packing a coupla Romulan disruptors and a Jem H'Dar cloaking device.

As nearsighted, misguided security apparatchiks busily labor to make a martyr of Julian Assange, they may discover that he has something in common with the mythical hydra. Some people may still think the President really can play 10-dimensional chess, I'm pretty sure he's no Hercules. Even if he were, why not labor to decapitate the criminal Wall Street hydra, for example? (Oh wait, I already know why: because we must not hold banking racketeers accountable for their crimes, but we must instead "reach out" to them and give them high-level policy positions in our administration.)

Editor's note: my intent for the new year is to write less about topical issues like this, because it feels pointless. RubberCrutch has bigger fish to fry.

Wise sayings

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"I'm at Dapper Dan man, goddamit!"

Editor's note: yes, this is a quote stolen from my birthday twin. No, not The 59er---George Clooney! And furthermore, I hope your new year has started out exactly as you wanted it to. Thank you for your attention to this matter.