Rock On, Lady

Jane Scott, gave her grown-up life to rock & roll:

In four happy decades as a rock writer for The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Ms. Scott, who died on Monday at 92, braved mud and mosh pits, foul weather and fouler language, “a drop of bleached blond and pink polyester in a roiling sea of blue denim and black leather,” as The Philadelphia Inquirer once described her.

...

Ms. Scott, who took up her beat in 1964 at 45 and retired nine years ago at nearly 83, was often called the world’s oldest teenager, a description she hastened to correct. “Second-oldest,” she would say. “After Dick Clark.”

At a time when newspapers were famously inhospitable to women, Ms. Scott made her career by tackling a beat that few writers of either sex wanted — a beat that barely existed when she began writing about rock ’n’ roll in the mid-1960s.

Over the years, she interviewed many of the biggest names in pop music, including Paul McCartney (“such a nice boy,” she said afterward); Mick Jagger (“sweet and funny”); and Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix (“I loved them both”).

Ride on, Lady Jane. The musicians loved you, like Lou Reed himself:

“I love Jane Scott. I always have, I always will. When I was in the Velvet Underground, Jane was one of the only people I can remember who was nice to us. Interested in the music, the styles -- a very smart, guileless lady who loved music and musicians and had unbiased attitudes towards the evolving culture.”

You're gone now, and those times are riding out faster every day.

New Meets Newer

This ought to create shockwaves:

The Huffington Post, which began in 2005 with a meager $1 million investment and has grown into one of the most heavily visited news Web sites in the country, is being acquired by AOL in a deal that creates an unlikely pairing of two online media giants.

The two companies completed the sale Sunday evening and announced the deal just after midnight on Monday. AOL will pay $315 million, $300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock. It will be the company’s largest acquisition since it was separated from Time Warner in 2009.

The deal will allow AOL to greatly expand its news gathering and original content creation, areas that its chief executive, Tim Armstrong, views as vital to reversing a decade-long decline.

I recently saw founder Arianna Huffington speak at a thinkLA breakfast event and she was brilliant. Happy to see this come along, although just hoping there's no diminishment in the quality of HuffPo coverage or POV. Per Arianna:

By combining HuffPost with AOL's network of sites, thriving video initiative, local focus, and international reach, we know we'll be creating a company that can have an enormous impact, reaching a global audience on every imaginable platform.

Remember my New Year's resolution? It's coming true - and it's only the beginning of February. Let's go down the checklist: Local? AOL's Patch.com covers 800 towns across America, providing an incredible infrastructure for citizen journalism in time for the 2012 election, and a focus on community and local solutions that have been an integral part of HuffPost's DNA. Check.

Original video? AOL's just finished building a pair of state-of-the-art video studios in New York and LA, and video views on AOL have gone up 400 percent over the last year. Check. More sections? AutoBlog, Music, AOL Latino, Black Voices, etc, etc, etc. fill gaps in HuffPost's coverage. Add all that to what HuffPost is doing with social, community, mobile, as well as our commitment to innovative original reporting and beyond-left-and-right commentary, and the blending will have a multiplier effect. Or, as Tim and I have been saying over the last couple of weeks: 1 + 1 = 11.

Far from changing our editorial approach, our culture, or our mission, this moment will be for HuffPost like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet. We're still traveling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we're now going to get there much, much faster.

New media...meet newer media. And now procreate.

Spanked Birther

Anderson Cooper, God love him, performs journalism on a Republican Texas State Representative birther. Guys like this are either craven or moron -- or both:



The relentless lies of these people. I'm less inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt of sincerity each successive time. They're a blight on society.

And, yes, I think if they're still doing this after so much public evidence to the contrary, they're implicitly racist.

The Narcissism of the Baggers

Matt Taibbi has another blistering story in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, this one about his adventures at Tea Party rallies and explaining how they were fueled to prominence and whatever cohesion they have by corporate interests and Republican insiders. By far the most compelling stuff is his take on the partiers themselves:

"Let me get this straight," I say to David. "You've been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?"

"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it. Too many people are living off the government."

"But," I protest, "you live off the government. And have been your whole life!"

"Yeah," he says, "but I don't make very much." Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about..

He goes into the funding behind the Tea Party, etc., some of which you may have read before, and then digs into the race angle:

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They're completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I'm an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I'm a radical communist? I don't love my country? I'm a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.

It's not like the Tea Partiers hate black people. It's just that they're shockingly willing to believe the appalling horseshit fantasy about how white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority. That may not be racism, but it is incredibly, earth-shatteringly stupid.

Taibbi describes the scene in Kentucky, where Rand Paul is the #1 Tea Party idol, even though he's lived off government largesse via Medicare payments that he hypocritically does not want to see cut to doctors, all the time getting more and more cozy with and castrated by the Republican Party establishment that he ran against in the primary:

With all the "just for the primary" stuff out of the way, Paul's platform began to rapidly "evolve." Previously opposed to erecting a fence on the Mexican border, Paul suddenly came out in favor of one. He had been flatly opposed to all farm subsidies; faced with having to win a general election in a state that receives more than $265 million a year in subsidies, Paul reversed himself and explained that he was only against subsidies to "dead farmers" and those earning more than $2 million. Paul also went on the air with Fox News reptile Sean Hannity and insisted that he differed significantly from the Libertarian Party, now speaking more favorably about, among other things, judicious troop deployments overseas.

Beyond that, Paul just flat-out stopped talking about his views — particularly the ones that don't jibe with right-wing and Christian crowds, like curtailing the federal prohibition on drugs. Who knows if that had anything to do with hawkish Christian icon Sarah Palin agreeing to headline fundraisers for Paul, but a huge chunk of the candidate's libertarian ideals have taken a long vacation.

I've long thought Rand Paul a lightweight/milquetoast, especially compared to his very honest and mostly consistent father, Ron. Rand looks so weak next to his Democratic opponent for Senate, Jack Conway, Kentucky Attorney General and a guy who has the bearing of a sheriff:

If Rand were a Dem he's be laughed out of Kentucky -- too weak-looking for that state or many others -- but it's a crazy year and the South is crazy Republican right now.

Y'know, the worst thing that could happen to the Tea Party isn't necessarily that all their candidates lose. It's that enough of them win to take the bloom off the rose by the next General Election.

Too bad it'll be hell on America.

Dump the Tea

It's time to stop pussyfooting around and start attacking the Tea Party directly, on substance and candidates. I know that there have been attacks pointing out the racist elements of the movement as well as the astroturf aspect -- that it's been created and/or fueled by Republican-based organizations like Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey's (R-TX) Freedomworks lobbying group and Fox News. Sure, there's videos showing how ill-informed or Glenn Beck-informed so many of these people are. But I'm starting to think that's missing the point. Those aren't attacks in the political realm, just in the galleries. Screw this false notion that they are somehow made up of "Independents" -- they're overwhelmingly Republican and we need the Democratic Party to come out hard against them.

The fear is that these are jus' reg'lar folks getting involved with pollyticks for the first time, so it's all democracy in action. Don't be afraid. An attempt to create a Tea Party Exchange, essentially a customer loyalty program for card-carrying Tea Partiers that local business would opt into, including a 5% kick-back on all purchases to fund rallies, is a MASSIVE FAIL. My favorite quote about it:

"I feel like I was hoodwinked," Beef O'Brady's Family Sports Club owner Bill DeFries told the Daily News. "I think [Hutchinson] was trying to make money."

Like Ballachino, DeFries found that being a part of the Exchange pissed off more customers than it impressed. He "received threats and was called a Nazi by one woman," according to the paper.

Yep, the time is ripe to turn this Tea Party thing on its head and turn any neutral or slightly positive attitudes towards this movement with its terrible philosophy and ideas into negative sentiment. There's already anecdotal evidence that they're considered evil by some. But on substance, they are just plain wrong. As Froma Harrop writes, Be glad the tea party wasn't running the government when the recession hit:

Using econometric models, Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi argue that the bailouts, the stimulus and other extraordinary actions saved America from nothing less than another Great Depression. Blinder was vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. Zandi is chief economist at Moody's Analytics and advised Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

Had Washington not taken any aggressive steps starting in 2008, the results would have been horrific, their study says. Real gross domestic product would have fallen a "stunning" 12 percent, rather than the actual decline of 4 percent. Nearly 17 million jobs would have vanished, twice as many as the real count. And the unemployment rate would have peaked at 16.5 percent.

The campaign trail is not a welcoming place for careful analysis. Tea-party favorites routinely bash their opponents (often fellow Republicans) for having supported the stimulus and various government rescues.

Giving even a modicum of power to any Tea Party candidate is an invitation to failure. They've already failed to hold their own convention, how do they expect to solve anything in government? There's an argument to be made for sane, responsible conservative voices (witness Olson and Scarborough in yesterday's post) but the Tea Party is neither. And they are terrible students of history -- making it up or misreading/miswriting it based on their own ideological dictums. Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it, but those who lie about it have the potential to doom all of us.

Say it loud and clear: To electing any members of the Tea Party or endorsed by the Tea Party is to instantly put our nation in grave jeopardy. These people must be stopped, and we need to campaign against them, using the very name of their movement against them, ASAP. The Tea Party must be exposed, not as racist, but as dead wrong

And their candidates are certifiably insane, unstable and dangerous.

Dinnertime

Here's our Comedian-in-Chief and the new/old host of The Tonight Show at last night's White House Correspondent's Dinner:



How far we've come from when the funniest man in the room was also, by a few minutes into his routine, the most feared...

Color Me Stunned

Mark Halperin can usually be counted on to act like a typical Washington, DC villager and go with the conventional wisdom, if not bolster it. So it surprised me to read his completely against-the-grain piece on how President Obama's administration is shaping up:

It is too early to assess the ultimate measure of victory: whether the President's actions have been prudent and beneficial, domestically and internationally. But by Election Day 2010, Obama will have soundly achieved many of his chief campaign promises while running a highly competent, scandal-free government. Not bad for a guy whose opponents (in both parties) for the White House suggested that he was too green in national life to know how to do the job — and whose presidency began in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis that demanded urgent attention and commanded much of his focus.

He goes on to praise his hiring acumen with lead personnel decisions Vice President Joe Biden and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. (Compare to his opponent, Sen. John McCain, who's key personnel decision unleashed money-grubbing Sarah Palin on the world.) He goes further, enumerating goals being met:

In the months ahead, the President will likely pass a financial-regulation overhaul (despite this past weekend's snags), manage the confirmation of a second Supreme Court nominee with relatively little commotion, announce the reduction of the U.S. troop level in Iraq to about 50,000, showcase the undercovered gains on education reform, take advantage of the improving economy to tout his stimulus efforts and sharpen his "Obama-Biden future vs. Bush-Cheney past" argument to help stave off massive Democratic losses in November. He also has a decent chance to pass a small-to-medium-size energy bill. True, some promises, like comprehensive immigration reform, will remain on the sidelines, but most of his major goals will be completed or well under way.

This is why I believe that no matter the generic poll numbers right now, responsible-thinking adult voters (whom I'd like to believe are in the majority, if only by a hair) will look at what the Democrats were handed at the start of 2009 and judge the President's party more kindly than seems indicated now.

There's an old saying that the final decision on whom the public will vote in as President isn't made until after the World Series. I'm betting the same for the House and Senate -- and that passing health care reform -- under President Obama's unexpected leadership -- will look like the pivotal move that saved the Democratic Party.

Why We Don't

So here's a good reason to get out of Afghanistan:

The Feb. 12 nighttime raid left three women — two of them pregnant — and a local police chief and prosecutor dead. It was one of the latest examples of Special Operations forces’ killing civilians during raids, deaths that have infuriated Afghan officials and generated support for the Taliban despite efforts by American and NATO commanders to reduce civilian casualties.

The joint American and Afghan assault team shot five Afghans — all family members — from the roofs of buildings in a large residential compound near Gardez, in southeastern Afghanistan, where members of an extended family lived in different homes, survivors said. The Americans did the killing, they said.

At first, the American-led military command in Kabul said that the two men who died were “insurgents” who had “engaged” — in other words, shot at — the forces at the scene. The initial account also said that the troops then stumbled onto the bodies of three women “tied up, gagged and killed” and hidden in a room.

Military officials later suggested that the women — who among them had 16 children — had all been stabbed to death or had died by other means before the raid, implying that their own relatives may have killed them.

But the military later said the men were innocent civilians shot after they went outside, armed, to investigate the presence of the forces conducting the raid. Then on Sunday night they admitted that the women were also killed during the raid.

...

In the interview, Mr. Yarmand said he did not know whether bullets had been dug out of the bodies. He said he would not dispute family members’ claims, but added, “We can not confirm it as we had not been able to autopsy the bodies.”

Here's more:



Select frames here.

Can you say "war crime?"

Rachel Take Down Supreme

Yes.



This guy is a smooth obfuscator, but he's not on a Fox shoutfest, and she is clearly the smartest commentator type anchor on TV.



Journalist lives, even if relatively barren on TV.

Land of the Free

Every once in a while there's a special event that reminds us of the wonderful freedoms we do enjoy (and must be vigilant to protect) here in the U.S. of A. After 140 days in bullshit captivity by the North Korean government, the brave, young Current TV journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, have returned home to free soil thanks to the visit by President Bill Clinton.

It seems impossible not to be moved by this statement by Ling:



Impossible not to be moved except, perhaps, if you're a hardened Neocon Conservative with a worldview stuck in the Cold War:

But, since Bill Clinton has a hand in their release, someone's got to step up and naysay the effort, and predictably, that task has fallen to former UN ambassador and noted rage-walrus John Bolton, who says the "Clinton trip is a significant propaganda victory for North Korea, whether or not he carried an official message from President Obama."

Thank you, John Bolton, for once again demonstrating the completely theoretical nature of Neocon philosophy. Not only does it not take into account in any way the two American lives at stake (let alone Euna Lee's young daughter with whom she was reunited) vs. some "propaganda" belt notch, but since there's no Iron Curtain or Eastern Bloc anymore, and Kim Il Sung is as marginalized as a tinpot dictator can be, that propaganda victory may be limited to his own state-run television system.

Go play your mental games with yourself, John. This is America. You know, give us your tired, your hungry, your falsely imprisoned.

Welcome back, Laura and Euna.

Strapping In

This may be my favorite advertisement ever:



Then there's Matt Taibbi, the hardnosed young journalist who took the self-pitying resignation letter that AIG exec v.p. Jay DeSantis ran in The New York Times and not only shredded it, but has balled up the pieces into bullets and shoved them back down DeSantis' throat:

Only a person with a habitually overinflated sense of self-worth could think he deserves a $700,000 retention bonus, even if it has to be paid by taxpayers, when in reality no one "deserves" that much money. It may be that some people do get paid that much, but most people who make that much money have enough sense to realize their cushy lifestyles are an accident of fate, of birth, of class, not something that is "supported" by some unwritten natural law of compensation.

Hey Jake, it's not like you were curing cancer. You were a fucking commodities trader. Thanks to a completely insane, horribly skewed set of societal values that puts a premium on greed and severely undervalues selflessness, communal spirit and intellectualism -- values that make millionaires out of people like you and leave teachers and nurses, the people who raise your kids and clean your parents' bedpans, comparatively penniless -- you made a lot of money.

Good for you. Consider yourself lucky. But your company went belly-up and broke, almost certainly thanks in part to you, and now you don't get your bonus.

So be a man and deal with it. The rest of us do, when we get bad breaks, and we've had a lot more of them than you. And stop whining. Jesus Christ.

Taibbi's just as much fun to hear in person. Prime time's not quite ready for his truth, but he's so dead on that they're enjoying having him on the show:



But the big game is changing once again thanks to the change agent we elected last fall. Today the President picked his war, the one he said we needed to finish all throughout the campaign, and now it is upon us:

In announcing a plan on Friday that could be his signature foreign policy effort, Mr. Obama said that he would send more troops — some 4,000 — but stipulated that they would not carry out combat missions, and would instead be used to train the Afghan Army and the national police. He left himself open to the possibility of sending more as the situation warrants.

All is could think of was John Cale, whom I saw in London in 1980 performing his biggest "hit" off his career-defining Sabotage/Live album, "Ready for War". At the end of the performance I saw, Reagan ascending, Cale screamed into the microphone until the band dropped their instruments and scurried off, ultimately leaving himself only to stick his head out from behind the curtain one or twice more to scream the anthemic line again.

This performance from a few years later may end more quietly, but it says exactly what I've been thinking ever since our new President announced his War:



Strap in.

Biggest Question Mark

I've been reveling bromantical since yesterday, even going over the best part with guys friends, by phone and text, like:

"The system we have now might work for the powerful and well-connected interests that have run Washington for far too long," Obama said in his weekly radio and video address. "But I don't. I work for the American people."

I can't remember the last Democrat that I really thought was a badass. Maybe Bill Clinton when he handily won the apocalyptic-billed staredown with then House Leader Newt Gingrich. Maybe FDR:

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.

So unlike Presidents Cheney or Bush Jr., Obama's shown his toughness now months after convincing the last hold-outs that he had it in a campaign setting, now with how he has commenced governing. There's a long way to go but, like FDR, he seems to enjoy a good fight.

I believe the course he's taking on the economy, and hopefully soon the banks, is the right one, and at some level I think all of that is solvable, and that he's making the right bets. And I even believe there is a destination for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that will include both Israel's survival and the chance for a non-degraded life for Palestinian families, even if it isn't easy to get there.

But the Iran question is the most problematic of all, the conundrum. The fascist theocracy running the country has no incentive to stop building atomic energy, as the oil will run out, but it also has no incentive to stop moving towards atomic weaponry, if the regime wants to protect itself.

The good news is that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said on Sunday that Iran is not close to being capable of making nuclear weapons.

The bad news is that the regime is still evil:

A U.S. journalist has been arrested in Iran, and her father said Sunday she told him in a brief phone call she was detained after buying a bottle of wine.

Roxana Saberi, 31, has not been heard from since her last call on Feb. 10, her father, Reza, told The Associated Press on Sunday.

"We haven't heard anything," he said. The family decided to go public, he said, "because we wanted to get some information."

...Roxana Saberi is a freelance journalist who has reported for National Public Radio and other media and has lived in Iran for six years...

...Saberi's father said his daughter was finishing a book on Iran and had planned to return to the United States this year.

The book is about the culture and the people of Iran, he said. She was hoping to finish it in the next couple of months and come home to have it published.

On one hand, they're showing their hand: they're scared enough of her book to arrest her. On the other, they're very, very bad news.

My guess is that this will be the longest game of the Obama Administration. He and Secretary of State Clinton must be prepared for a very long period of engagement in hopes that the longer it goes on, the more it will weaken the existing regime, as did cultural infiltration of the Soviet Union. And think about how much easier it is now to get illicit cultural and political materials from our side into there -- it just beams in. Easier to hide, as you don't even need to store locally anymore.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but does there seem to be a knottier problem, especially with Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld having removed Iran's enemies to the West and East. Especially with Iran wanting to best Saudi Arabia in control of the region.

Especially with all that oil.

Fix for Junkies

Attention political junkies: the final Obamaporn is in, the post-game inside-the-campaigns feature stories, the king of which is Newsweek's brand (since 1984) of deeply embedded reporting, with the contractual agreement that nothing the reporters covering each campaign goes public, not a word nor a rumor, until the day after the Presidential Election.

This time they have a lot of inside Clinton, along with Obama and McCain. For those of us who read too much campaign coverage while it was happening, the most surprising news may be when the McCain senior campaign staff knew they were 90% likely to lose (the weekend before the third debate) and that McCain essentially came up with the Joe the Plumber meme himself, egged on by his wife and Lindsay Graham.

There's a highlights version, but the multi-chaptered piece is really something.

For a more succinct "why he won" covering the Obama side, Ryan Lizza does a nice job in The New Yorker. The first passage ending kind of sums up the last phase of this insanely long season:

As a practical matter, this meant that, after the Democratic National Convention, in Denver, the campaign would do all that it could to focus attention on economic matters. It had no idea, of course, how fully both the economy and John McCain would coöperate with that goal.

David Grann covers McCain, who seems more and more like a quasi-tragic character who finds honor only in losing.

Drink up, this is the last time you're allowed at the well. It's onto the future since Obama is there already, vetting cabinet choices and, one hopes, secretly governing already. After all, per Andy Borowitz, Bush is in a race against time:

Confounding the conventional wisdom that he is a lame duck president with no agenda as his days in office dwindle, President George W. Bush is redoubling his efforts to mutilate the country before his term expires, aides confirmed today.

"President Bush has spent the first seven years and ten months of his presidency doing everything in his power to leave the United States in smoldering ruins," said White House spokesperson Dana Perino. "He certainly is not going to let the final days of his tenure go to waste."

Ah, someday this, too, shall pass.