Looking Glass World: CA Must Return Its Death Row Cocktail Due To Concerns Over Its Ill Effect On Inmates

The headline ("California Refuses To Return Execution Drug To FDA") looks like another feds vs. state dispute that is emblematic of the Age of Obama, but actually it's a lot more complicated. Turns out the FDA doesn't really want the drugs back either.

California prison officials are defying a U.S. Food and Drug Administration order to return supplies of a foreign-made drug used in executions, saying they disagree with a federal judge's ruling that the drug was imported illegally without an FDA safety review. 

The FDA, which also disagreed with the judge and argued that no such review is required, said Friday that it will appeal the ruling. 

The dispute adds further uncertainty to the resumption of executions in California, blocked since 2006 by an order by another federal judge who found numerous flaws in the state's procedures for lethal injections. 

The drug, sodium thiopental, is an anesthetic used by California and most other states to render a prisoner unconscious at the start of the execution process. After the sole U.S. manufacturer stopped production in 2009, California and several other states got new supplies from a British distributor of Austrian-made sodium thiopental.

The real problem is a DC-based federal judge (a George W Bush appointee, as it happens) who ordered the FDA to demand that states return the stuff for further testing.

The FDA, which tests foreign-made medications for safety and effectiveness before allowing their distribution, approved the drug's shipments without inspection, saying a review of execution drugs was not part of its "public health role." A judge in Washington, D.C., disagreed in March and told the agency to halt the imports and to tell states to return their supplies to the FDA. 

A 1962 law explicitly requires the FDA to test all imported drugs and to baLabelsn shipments of unexamined drugs, said U.S. District Judge Richard Leon. He said the agency was violating the law and appeared to be demonstrating a "callous indifference to the health consequences of those imminently facing the executioner's needle."

I realize that topics like the death penalty, food & drug safety, and execution "cocktails" are Serious Business, but it's hard to read that last sentence without laughing. 


Younger folks might not realize this, but 20 years ago the use of drugs as tools of state execution was seen as the perfect solution to the argument that other methods (electric chairs, gas chambers, firing squads, alligator pits, deportation of illegal immigrants) constituted cruel and unusual punishment. The drugs worked silently and quickly, putting the condemned to sleep before finishing them off. They certainly worked well here in California with a number of satisfied customers going to their reward without choking to death in the gas chamber. 


But, within a few years, death penalty opponents were at it again, claiming that the prisoners experienced pain when their hearts stopped working. (yes, but it was a very short-lived pain). Drug proponents had effectively adopted the premise that all of the other methods were cruel & unusual, but now death penalty opponents were able to convince a federal judge in CA that the drug cocktail was also cruel & unusual, and - gosh darn it - there were no other methods available. So, we've had an unofficial moratorium on the death penalty since 2006. If you're starting to think it was all a set-up, well I don't think you're wrong. 

Cautionary Tale: Whitney Houston Dead at 48

The only thing more depressing than Whitney Houston's entirely predictable death by "partying" is listening to her (now 20+ years old) hits, especially "The Greatest Love of All" with its line about "they can't take away my dignity." Sadly, life rarely imitates art:

Whitney Houston, whose soaring voice lifted her to the top of the pop music world but whose personal decline was fueled by decades of drug use, died on Saturday in a Beverly Hills hotel room. She was 48. 

Her death came on the eve of the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles and at the same hotel where her mentor, record mogul Clive Davis, was holding an annual pre-event party at which she was scheduled to perform. 

A dramatic scene unfolded at the Beverly Hilton Hotel as music celebrities arriving for the party expressed shock at her death, while reporters swarmed the hotel and fans gathered to pay their respects. 

A Beverly Hills police officer told reporters they were called to the Beverly Hilton at around 3:20 p.m. PST and that emergency personnel found Houston's body in a fourth-floor room, and she was pronounced dead at 3:55 p.m. The cause of death is under investigation. 

"She has been positively identified by friends and family (who) were with her at the hotel, and next of kin have already been notified," Lieutenant Mark Rosen told reporters. Police said there were no obvious signs of criminal intent. 

Tributes poured in from around the world for a singer whose remarkable vocal range produced some of the most memorable music of her generation, including her signature hit, "I Will Always Love You."

Show business is full of train wrecks, but you have to look long and hard to find a fall as epic as Houston's. Born into a show-biz family that included Cissy Houston, Dionne Warwick, and Areatha Franklin, Houston rose literally to the top of her profession, before throwing it all away in a death spiral of drug addiction and destructive behavior that destroyed her image and her voice, the two things in the  world she needed to protect the most.

I can't say I was ever literally a fan of Houston's, but back in her heyday (1983 - 1991) she was inescable.  Whatever you might think of big league diva showstoppers as a genre of music, you had to acknowledge her skills were close to unparalleled. But, the relatively brief period that Whitney ruled the pop world saw her project an image that was starkly different than the one she has showed in the years since. Check out her video for "The Greatest Love Of All" and then ask yourself whether you can imagine her being found dead in a Beverly Hills hotel bathroom

After watching 20 years of self destructive Whitney moments, what can you conclude, but that she must have hated the song, hated the sentiment, and hated herself? The Whitney "we" loved was the soaring songbird with the clear-as-glass voice and innocent smile. Houston went out of her way to destroy that image and replace it with a horror show. What demons drove her to do that are, of course, unknown, if not unknowable. (No, it's not "Bobby Brown's fault." They appear to have had a genuinely loving, if destructive, relationship). But, I will say this: as with Michael Jackson, it's not hard to imagine that Houston must have suffered some sort of abuse, whether sexual or psychological or what have you, during her climb to the top. What else would cause someone to destroy themselves like this?

A Busy Saturday

Saturday is normally a quiet news day, but not today.

1. Did anyone actually go to the White House at 11 AM like the president ordered? Supposedly the Senate and House were negotiating a short-term deal, but that seems to have fallen apart as well.

A correspondent of Instapundit's offers this sobering thought: what if Obama and the Democrats are flirting with a market panic because they don't realize that the US is really out of $$ to fund all of their brilliant ideas?

What has me worried is the idea that the Democrats ACTUALLY DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS IS THE END OF THE ROAD. What if they actually aren’t capable of recognizing when they’ve lost? Or when we’ve run out of other people’s money? None of these people work for a living. Their concept of where money comes from and how wealth is created (and destroyed) is completely divorced from reality because they live in a government bubble. And the very small minority among them that do understand this from previous jobs and experience are okay with Progressive policies aimed at leveling/equalizing/delivering-economic-justice because they just assume that the economy can handle some siphoning. And usually it can. But not at this volume or for this time scale.

Monday should be fun.

2. Norway looks like it has been the victim of right-wing terrorism of the sort the left has been dreaming about for years. I don't think you can get away with saying Anders Breivik was crazy. The amount of planning that went into this event, and the length of time he spent carrying out his plans, belies any claim of craziness. He was simply evil incarnate. I mean, what kind of person deliberately targets children, shooting them point-blank while they beg for their lives?

A grim thought: I have no doubt that Breivik is an outlier, and that the right-wing in Norway is no more prone to violence than anyone else. But, it had to have crossed his mind that violence was the only way he could get his message out, given the appeasement offered in the face of jihadi violence.

Regardless of ideology, it's incredible the amount of destruction that one man was able to wreak in such a short time. It's also incredible how long his rampage at the youth camp was able to last. No one there seems to have had a gun or a means of quickly communicating with the police, something that is very hard to imagine in the United States.

btw, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Norwegian police have labeled Berwik's crimes to be acts of terrorism punishable by up to 21 years in prison. Gotta love enlightened Europe's approach to crime.

3. Cong. David Wu (D-Oregon) has been accused of making an inappropriate sexual advance towards - or having a sexual relationship of some sorts with - the barely-legal daughter of one of his donors. You may recall Wu's election campaign, which was suspended by his own staff the week before the election because of concerns about his mental health. Naturally, the very sophisticated voters in Wu's district returned him to office.

Althouse offers a dissent from right-wing crowing over yet another creepy lefty sex scandal.

At this point, we hear about "erratic" behavior that doesn't ostensibly involve sex. What exactly are the "new questions"? This is a cheap and ridiculous article in my view. A woman who is unhappy with her sexual relationship with Wu has called his office but has not called the police, and now we're supposed to review everything else we know about him in some new context? Is this the way we are to do politics in America now?

Note that the woman who has brought this chaos into Wu's career is shielded by the newspaper's policy not to "use the names of victims of sexual assault without their permission." That's convenient. I think if you are going to have a policy like that, you should not report at all unless the alleged victim has reported a crime to the police. It's not fair.

I was at a San Francisco French bistro a couple weeks ago. The place has racks of European and French magazines, one of which had a big cover story about the aftermath of the DSK rape case. They had published several pictures of the accuser, as well as her name, (which I don't remember), of course. And it made sense. It was, after all, a part of the story. The practice of maintaining the anonymity of rape accusers makes less and less sense.

4. China's high speed rail, which the American left from Obama to Thomas Friedman to Arnold Schwarzenegger has been touting as the wave of the future, has gone from triumph to triumph. First the trains were slowed down to "normal" speeds. Now there has been a spectacular accident, triggered by a lightning strike (wah?), leading to the deaths of 32 people.

At least 32 people died when a high-speed train smashed into a stalled train in China's eastern Zhejiang province Saturday, state media said, raising new questions about the safety of the fast-growing rail network.

The accident occurred on a bridge near the city of Wenzhou after the first train lost power due to a lightning strike and a bullet train following behind crashed into it, state television said.

The total power failure rendered useless an electronic safety system designed to warn following trains of stalled trains on the tracks up ahead, and automatically halt them before a collision can occur, the report added.

It showed one or possibly two carriages on the ground under the bridge, with another hanging above it. Several other carriages derailed in the accident near Wenzhou, some 860 miles south of Beijing.

More than 200 people have been taken to hospital, the official Xinhua news agency added.

One train was heading from Beijing to the coastal city of Fuzhou, the other was running from Zhejiang provincial capital Hangzhou, also to Fuzhou.

"The train suddenly shook violently, casting luggage all around," Xinhua quoted survivor Liu Hongtao as saying.

"Passengers cried for help but no crew responded."

In a command economy, you can command something to be done, but you can't command it to work.

5. Amy Winehouse has, not surprisingly, died. It's not just that she was well known for being a heavy drug user. Her entire image, and career, was defined by drug use. The expectation was that she would die. Perhaps there were performance incentives in her contract with a big pay-out to her heirs.

One thing I've never understood about pop stars and drug use. Why is it that the people making money off of them - i.e. their managers and the suits at the record label - don't make more of an effort to protect their investment from destruction? Winehouse's big breakthrough was in 2006, and since then she's been little more than a tabloid feature more than a singer. Did the A&R people at her label realize that, maybe she should have been making music instead of headlines? Keith Richards never let drug use or police raids stop his music making, after all.

Britney Spears, of all people, is the exception to this depressing rule. When she was on the road to oblivion, the suits and her family stepped in to

Along those lines, I remember an interview where Clive Davis lamented the early death of Janis Joplin, and said he regretted not stepping in when he saw that she had a serious drinking problem. Got that right. Can you imagine how much more music (and money) Davis would have gotten out of her if she'd just stayed alive?

Die Another Day: How to Avoid Being A Murder Victim

The Other McCain passes along some sage advice, gleaned from watching a First 48 Hours marathon, on how to avoid being murdered:

...Let’s face it, if you refuse to pay a dope dealer, and he shoots you dead, how is that anybody’s fault but your own?

Either pay the man, or don’t do dope. It’s really not complicated.

But the lowlife scum have difficulty coping with even these uncomplicated rules of street life.

It’s kind of a rarity on The First 48 for the victim to be entirely innocent. Not that anybody deserves to be murdered, but a majority of the victims in the cases featured on the show end up dead because, at the very least, they were hanging out with lowlife scum.

Lowlife scum with “street names”: Avoid them, and your chances of getting murdered are significantly decreased.

For liberals, the above is too complicated. It must be society, or The Man, or the KKK or someone killing all those bright lights in America's trailer parks, barrios, and ghettos. Personal responsibility, even at the most de minimus level can never enter into the equation.

It may be true that America is a violent place compared to other developed nations, but we're not exactly losing the next Jonas Salk (or even the next Hitler) every time some drug deal goes bad.

Problem Solved Where There Was Not, In Fact, A Problem

The most predictable political denoument of the Obama Administration came to pass yesterday, as a combined DOT-NHTSA-NASA study group has announced that, no, Toyotas do not contain electronic gremlins that cause them to suddenly - without any warning at all! - accelerate out of control. Such a deal. The government fans hysteria over "run away" cars, including Sec. of Transportation announcing that Americans should not drive Toyotas. Now that same government has taken it upon itself the mantle of Voice of Authority on what caused the problem, as if the work of rational people like Michael Fumento and Popular Mechanics were nothing. Hey, at least they got it right the first time:

Toyota Motor Corp., which built its reputation in the U.S. on safety and reliability, has been cleared by the government of electronic problems in its vehicles. Now it needs to convince consumers that it has put its safety recalls in the rear view mirror.

The Transportation Department said Tuesday that electronic flaws were not to blame for reports of sudden, unintended acceleration. Since 2009, Toyota has recalled more than 12 million vehicles globally over safety problems. The government's new findings bolstered Toyota's contention that the company had directly dealt with the problems through its recalls and is making safety paramount in its lineup.

Analysts said it would take more than a government report to repair Toyota's once pristine image for producing quality vehicles. Toyota was the only major automaker to see a U.S. sales decline last year at 0.4 percent and saw its U.S. market share fall nearly 2 percentage points to 15.2 percent. The decline came even though total U.S. sales rose 11 percent for the year.

Of course, this has been known for months among conservatives, engineers and other inhabitants of the land we quaintly call "Reality." Here's what I had to say about this last summer:

Toyota is the most egregious example of (a) government imposed "PR problem." Anyone who read PJ O'Rourke's Parliament of Whores knows that sudden-acceleration incidents in cars are a figment of the imaginations of lawyers, consumer advocates, and boat-footed drivers. But, journalists and Democrats have not read Parliament of Whores, so when sketchy reports surface of cars suddenly accelerating out of control, hustling liberals jump on them with both feet. Never mind that reputable engineers have never been able to replicate SAI's in the lab. Never mind that the most spectacular SAI - the runaway Prius in San Diego - was a hoax. (incredibly, the debunking did not receive the same level of media attention as the "runaway"). And also, never mind that Toyota earnestly tried to diagnose the problem and even established as official corporate policy that it would not blame the drivers, even though Toyota had to have suspected the drivers were at fault. No, it was much more important for Democratic congressmen to drag Toyota executives to DC for a show trial to showcase their corporate sins. Added bonus: Toyota is a competitor to Government Motors, and its executives were Japanese, i.e. Dread Furriners. This from the Party of Tolerance and Science.

The government isn't letting Toyota completely off the hook. DOT is still muttering darkly about "sticky" floormats, which were blamed for the deaths of four people in Southern California and were the subject of a recall. I don't know. On the Death By Stupidity Continuum, I'd say "Death by Floormat" is almost as dumb as "Death By Stepping on the Accelerator Instead of the Brake." Toyota, just as a matter of PR, followed the policy of determinedly refusing to blame their customers for their deaths. But Toyota execs had to have been thinking in the back of their minds, "What is wrong with Americans?!"

Many are asking the Donovan Question: where does Toyota go to get its reputation back? I'm wondering where we go to get our public discourse back. You would think most adults would know that sudden acceleration incidents are an urban myth, propagated a generation ago by some of the same journalists, bureaucrats and congressmen who fanned the flames of the Toyota SAI "scandal." Ray LaHood, Henry Waxman, and every TV station that showed footage of that bogus run-away Prius literally fanned the flames of hysteria, yet they are the same people who laugh up their sleeves over the stupidity of Tea Partiers.

What's worse is knowing that the people hyping SAI were not doing it out of some cynical ploy to help Government Motors at the expense of Toyota. Their philosophy, not to mention low IQ's, practically guarantee such a result. Democrats literally believe that a massive multi-national corporation is little more than a collection of greedy plutocrats sitting around trying to find ways to kill its customers, and legislate accordingly. That's a bigger threat to public safety than cars accelerating out of control.

Ol' Fuss & Feathers: Cock Fight Turns Deadly

We now have a definitive answer to the question: who is the cock of the walk? Turns out, it is not man:

A California man attending a cockfight has died after being stabbed in the leg by a bird that had a knife attached to its limb.

The Kern County coroner says 35-year-old Jose Luis Ochoa was declared dead at a hospital about two hours after he suffered the injury in neighboring Tulare County on Jan. 30.

An autopsy concluded Ochoa died of an accidental "sharp force injury" to his right calf.

Sheriff's spokesman Ray Pruitt says it's unclear if a delay in seeking medical attention contributed to Ochoa's death. Tulare officials are investigating, and no arrests were made at the cockfight.

Fighting Cock wrangling is much more dangerous than I realized. Must be one of those jobs that Americans won't do.

UPDATE: oh, and note that "no arrests were made at the cockfight."

Turn Turn Turn: KUSF Stops Broadcasting

Shocking news as San Francisco's legendary low-watt FM radio station, KUSF, has abruptly ceased broadcasting after 30+ years of playing groundbreaking music:

It was business as usual on Tuesday morning for KUSF music director Howard Ryan, who played an eclectic mix of music while promoting a 10 a.m. in-studio appearance from local band the Pickpocket Ensemble.

When that hour arrived, his show abruptly went off the air - part of a complicated deal that gives classical music station KDFC the college station's 90.3 frequency - and leaves KUSF off the FM dial for the first time since 1977.

University of San Francisco officials said the station's blend of music and community programming will still be available by webcast. At the station late Tuesday morning, the somber group of DJs and staff felt angry and betrayed, saying that they didn't learn about the deal until minutes before the signal went dead.

The reasons for this are complicated. USC purchased the local classical music station, KDFC, and will convert that station to a non-profit. KDFC will then move to KUSF's frequency, 90.3. Once again aging Baby Boomers are taking precious resources from Generation X!

KUSF has been one of the prime outlets for the Unheard Music: music outside - sometimes way outside - the mainstream. Although KUSF was known mainly as a punk/indie station, it also had shows dedicated to roots music, ragtime, 20th century classical, J-pop, and more. Yeah, you could jump on the internet and find that stuff, but really it was a lot of fun to be able to dial in to 90.3 and find something unexpected. KUSF was as essential to the DIY culture as Dischord Records or CBGB's, pretty impressive for a low-watt college station with a broadcast range of a couple of miles.

KUSF will take the $3.75 million that they earned from this transaction to expand their on-line presence, which is good news. KUSF will not disappear, and may well expand. But, this really is the end of an era.

Provacateur: Fred Phelps Weighs In on the Gifford Shooting

Every media jack-off in the country seems to be looking for his moment in the wake of the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gifford, but pride of place has to go to the Very Reverend Fred Phelps, who has announced plans to picket the funeral of the nine-year old girl who died in the line of fire:

The Left does some truly despicable things in this world, but this is a new low for Democrats.

Former three-time Democrat gubernatorial candidate Fred Phelps Jr. (commonly called just “Fred Phelps”) and his Westboro Hate Group have announced plans to disrupt the funeral of 9 year-old shooting victim Christina Greene.

Christina was murdered by Jared Lee Loughner yesterday in his assassination attempt on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. The little girl was born on September 11th, 2001, so her parents have been cursed with a horrific trifecta of high profile trauma: their daughter born on the worst day in our generations’ lives, their daughter murdered in an assassination attempt on a member of Congress, and Democrat Fred Phelps aiming his hate machine at their family during their daughter’s funeral.

Democrat Phelps (an enormous supporter of Al Gore’s, though the media conveniently leaves off that he’s a Democrat and instead likes to imply he’s a conservative, which he is not…he’s a Democrat, and ran repeatedly on the Democrat ticket unsuccessfully for several elected offices) disrupted the funeral of Elizabeth Edwards last month, because it is what he does.

On a day when a family is hurt the most it could possibly imagine being hurt, this horrible man makes things just a little worse for all involved.

We've been hearing a lot about "vitriol" and the " political climate" that contributed to the deaths of six people and the permanent disabling of a member of Congress. I would hope some of these earnest chin-pullers would reflect on how American law, society and culture ca. 2011 seems better able to protect the rights of Fred Phelps, than it is able to protect those of Christina Greene and her family. That has contributed a lot more to the "climate" than some silly Sarah Palin campaign graphic.

Like Laughner, everyone tries to dismiss Phelps as a nut, a loon. Sorry, but I don't think it's that easy to dismiss him. The man may be scum, but he is scum with a following, a ready-made media platform, and a serious First Amendment case pending before the US Supreme Court. Crazy he's not. Neither was Laughner. He may have been confused, his thoughts muddled; but he had a plan, and a mission, and he carried them both out to their bitter end. That's not crazy; that's evil, plain and simple.

Politics and mass movements have long attracted their share of misfits and losers. Radical politics takes those losers and cranks them up to eleven. Many of them remain trapped in obscurity. But, a chosen few find the immortality they seek. Some find themselves, as if chosen by Fate, at the exact street corner where the Archduke's car paused after making a wrong turn. Some manage to return from their outlaw existence to live a modicum of bourgeois respectability, even hosting dinners where future presidents make their political debut. And, some even manage, against all odds, to seize the commanding heights where they can inflict their sociopathy on nations, rather than their friends and neighbors.

So, yeah, I'd say there was something in the political climate that contributed to the events of last Saturday. It's a political climate where the best educated among us seem unable and unwilling to see the difference between a fundamentally decent person like Sarah Palin and a certifiable member of the lunatic fringe like Jared Laughner. (and isn't it funny how all of our modern-day Edward R Murrows couldn't tell us for hours whether Gifford was dead or alive, whether there was a "second shooter," or how many dead and wounded there were; but they knew instantly that the shooting was Sarah Palin's fault?) In an environment like that, every jerk with a gun and a used-bookstore copy of the Communist Manifesto becomes as important and impactful as one of the leading voices in the Republican Party.

The Parallax View: the Gifford Shooting

As shocking as the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and a number of other innocents was, there was a dull predictability to the aftermath which saw law enforcement looking for a (probably phantasmical) "second shooter" and progressives searching for Tea Party boogie-men. Even without that, however, this is still a disquieting moment:

A gunman targeted Rep. Gabrielle Giffords as she met with constituents outside a busy supermarket Saturday, wounding the Democrat and killing Arizona's chief federal judge and five others in an attack that left Americans questioning whether divisive politics had pushed the suspect over the edge.

The assassination attempt left the three-term congresswoman in critical condition after a bullet passed through her head. A shaken President Barack Obama called the attack "a tragedy for our entire country."

Giffords, 40, is a moderate Democrat who narrowly won re-election in November against a tea party candidate who sought to throw her from office over her support of the health care law. Anger over her position became violent at times, with her Tucson office vandalized after the House passed the overhaul last March and someone showing up at a recent gathering with a weapon.

Police say the shooter was in custody, and was identified by people familiar with the investigation as Jared Loughner, 22. U.S. officials who provided his name to the AP spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release it publicly.

His motivation was not immediately known, but Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik described him as mentally unstable and possibly acting with an accomplice.

As the shooter was a declared admirer of the Communist Manifesto and had a thing for flag burning, I think it's safe to say that he's not a right winger. Still, just as there has been a rush to judgment against "us," there has also been rush to judge this guy as little more than crazy. Sorry, but this was an attempted political assassination by a guy who went through a certain amount of effort to position himself to do maximum damage. God knows why he would target an inoffensive moderate like Gifford. Then again, moderates often take it on the chin in immoderate times. Mr. Manifesto also managed to kill a federal judge, a 9-year old girl and three bystanders in their seventies. In ways both large and small, America really is under assault.

I'm not going to point to one person on the right or the left and say that their "rhetoric" caused this. But, I will say that the last 10 years have seen a mounting fury first on the Left against the supposed war crimes of George Bush and then on the Right (and among many independents) who suddenly saw the country veer crazily from a financial crisis to a pell mell socialization of the banking, automotive and health care industries. And now, we have a resurgent Republican Party that is taking on to itself the task of dismantling at least a portion of the sprawling federal government, something you can expect will be fought tooth and nail by the people who earn their livelihoods from it.

We can only hope that violence remains a matter of rhetoric and hyperbole, but after today, I can only say: let's be careful out there.

Methods of Dance

Just heard that Mick Karn died. He was the New Wave equivalent to Jaco Pastorius, a real virtuoso on fretless bass. But instead of playing jazz fusion, Karn played in Bowie-esque bands like Japan and Dali's Car. Here he is live with Japan. Just try to follow his playing:

Amazing stuff. New Wave wasn't just about goofy haircuts.

The Dust Blows Forward 'N The Dust Blows Back: Captain Beefheart Dies

Damn! Captain Beefheart died!

Captain Beefheart, avant garde rocker, died today aged 69.

Real name Don Van Vliet, the singer passed away at a California hospital due to complications from multiple sclerosis, reports Entertainment Weekly.

Beefheart is best known for being an iconic experimental musician, from 1967 through to the early '80s.

He famously enjoyed challenging his fans and expectations about rock 'n' roll. In 1978 he said:

"People like music to be in tune because they've heard it in tune all the time.

"I really tried to break that down."

Beefheart not only left an impression on his fans, but other musicians too.

According to Spin magazine, his 1969 album "Trout Mask Replica" inspired everyone from Tom Waits and John Lennon, to Sonic Youth and PJ Harvey.

Beefheart retired from making music in 1982.

His overall record sales were low compared to the large influence his music had on others.

He spent most of the 80s focusing on his visual artwork.

The Captain was - along with the Velvets and Zappa - one of the original avant-garde rockers; a guy from the California desert who mixed Howlin' Wolf-style blues, free jazz, and goofy poetry into an instantly recognizable sound. Here he is with his classic Trout Mask Replica era Magic Band

OK, so it's not Paul Anka. That's the whole point. He was the guy you listened to if you didn't want to be a square or a hippie*. And, he was worth listening to at least for his inspired word play. Just look at the track listing for Lick My Decals Off, Baby. (one of the great album titles)

Side one:

1. "Lick My Decals Off, Baby" – 2:38
2. "Doctor Dark" – 2:46
3. "I Love You, You Big Dummy" – 2:54
4. "Peon" – 2:24
5. "Bellerin' Plain" – 3:35
6. "Woe-is-uh-Me-Bop" – 2:06
7. "Japan in a Dishpan" – 3:00

Side two:

1. "I Wanna Find a Woman That'll Hold My Big Toe Till I Have To Go" – 1:53
2. "Petrified Forest" – 1:40
3. "One Red Rose That I Mean" – 1:52
4. "The Buggy Boogie Woogie" – 2:19
5. "The Smithsonian Institute Blues (or the Big Dig)" – 2:11
6. "Space-Age Couple" – 2:32
7. "The Clouds Are Full of Wine (not Whiskey or Rye)" – 2:50
8. "Flash Gordon's Ape" – 4:15

Honestly, don't you at least want to hear what a song with a title like "I Wanna Find a Woman That'll Hold My Big Toe Till I Have To Go" sounds like?

Beefheart was inevitably "embraced" by the Europeans, even as he was "rejected" in his own country. Meh. Those Euro-weenies need to be descended from a member of the House of Lords, and go through years of art school to do a fraction of what the Captain - did he even finish high school? - accomplished. As strange as he was, he was that classic American archetype: the self-invented original who seemed to arise fully formed from the great American wilderness. Good bye, Captain.

*if you want to hear him do some semi-"regular" music listen to Hot Rats, the album he made with Frank Zappa.

Greek Fire: the Left's Innocent Victims

The Wall Street Journal had a long story over the weekend about the three Greek bank employees who were killed by Greek socialists rioting over the loss of their welfare state.

Above the seething streets of this ancient city, Angeliki Papathanasopoulou—four months pregnant and at work in a downtown bank—tried to soothe her fearful mother on the other end of the phone.

It was noontime on May 5, and the tension was palpable as angry crowds gathered in Athens's main squares, readying to protest deep spending cuts needed to earn an international bailout.

"Don't worry," Ms. Papathanasopoulou told her mother on that May day. "I'm on an upper floor." Besides, the 32-year-old was leaving work early at 3 p.m., for a doctor's appointment to learn whether the child she carried was a girl or a boy.

She never found out. Shortly after 2 o'clock, as the throngs marched past her building on Stadiou Street, hooded men shattered the window, poured gasoline on the floor and hurled in a Molotov cocktail. Toxic smoke filled the three-story bank, sending 24 people who worked there climbing out of windows or clambering onto roofs of adjacent buildings.

Ms. Papathanasopoulou and two colleagues, people who had watched her marry her husband nine months before, succumbed to the thick black fumes before they could make it out.

We keep hearing from the Left about how they have their boots on the neck on this or that corporate bad guy, about how they stay up nights making Molotov cocktails to benefit "the workers," about how they're all about afflicting the comfortable, etc. You know the litany. Yet, it's the workers who end up worse off when the Left has its way. If you are lucky, you end up like Ms. Papathanasopoulou's friends who had to choose between working for real wages overseas or staying home and living in a high tax/low employment welfare state. If you are unlucky, you end up dying in a bank branch because a bunch of rioters couldn't figure out that the "banksters" probably wouldn't be working at the teller windows in the middle of the afternoon.

The Left is not about fairness and equality. It's about revenge and envy. Yet, in order to achieve their cruel utopias, they must destroy more lives than just those among The Rich. There simply aren't enough rich people in the world to satisfy their bloodlust. Middle class strivers are in the cross-hairs, too.

Who Wants To Live Forever?

My buddy Joe reminds me that yesterday was the 19th anniversary of Freddie Mercury's death.

One of the greats and one of a kind.

Fear Eats The Soul: Stevens Prosecutor Commits Suicide

The botched prosecution and conviction of Ted Stevens, which ended with the court throwing out Stevens' conviction on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct, continues to take its grim toll. Now one of Stevens' prosecutors, who was himself under investigation for his actions during the Stevens case, has committed suicide

A federal prosecutor who was among those being investigated over the Justice Department's troubled pursuit of the late Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens committed suicide over the weekend, his attorney said Monday.

Nicholas Marsh was among several lawyers from the department's public integrity section who were under scrutiny for missteps in the prosecution of Mr. Stevens, including not turning over exculpatory evidence to the defense.

Robert Luskin, Mr. Marsh's lawyer, said the 37-year-old attorney's wife informed him Sunday of the death. Mr. Luskin said he didn't have details of how it occurred. The Metropolitan Police Department in Washington said it didn't have any information about the death. The District of Columbia medical examiner didn't respond to a call seeking comment.

A federal judge dismissed last year Mr. Stevens's conviction on corruption charges, at the request of Attorney General Eric Holder, and appointed a special investigator to probe the Justice Department's handling of the case.

Marsh's attorney says he's bewildered that Marsh would take this step, as he had "every reason to think he would have been exonerated." Of course!

The Stevens prosecution was one of the underreported outrages of the last few years. That is not to say that the story was underreported. The Stevens conviction was trumpeted from the rooftops. It was only the aftermath that has been relegated to briefs squibs on page A-15. Stevens' conviction was on his record for less than a year, yet that was enough for Stevens to lose a seat he would not have otherwise lost. And with that lost seat was also lost the 41st vote to filibuster health care reform, among other things.

Marsh was one of those supposedly "non-partisan" career prosecutors, rather than a political appointee. Yet, he participated in a political prosecution that had outsized political results.

Ride The Lightning: CA's New "Death Chamber"

California may be living through a real economic depression. Its government may lurch from crisis to crisis. And, the state may be full of soft-on-crime progressives. But, that doesn't mean we can't have a comfortable (for the witnesses) death chamber at San Quentin. Who says the system doesn't work?

Prison officials offered the first glimpse of their new lethal injection center Tuesday - one week ahead of a planned execution few think will actually be carried out - and the differences between this stark-white place and the old apple-green gas chamber are marked.

The spacious $853,000 center has three brightly lit witness viewing rooms, and each gives a considerably better view than the cramped gas chamber's lone, poorly illuminated viewing room.

In particular, the main observation room for 12 state officials and 17 media witnesses offers four wide, flat windows looking straight into a roomy, open chamber where the lethal injection gurney sits. This makes every angle of the execution visible - unlike the truncated, partially blocked sightlines of the old center.

On the north side of this main witness room is a smaller, seven-seat room for survivors and friends of the condemned inmate's victims. On the south side is an identical room with seven chairs for relatives and friends of the prisoner. Each of those rooms has two wide windows providing unimpeded views.

Saying the system works is a bit of a joke, as the first guest in the new gas chamber was sentenced to death for a crime committed in 1980, and he hasn't even exhausted all of his appeals. Still, if there's one thing we're all about in California it's "unimpeded views."

Death Be Not Proud...

...because this was too easy: Lost Cell Phone Caller Drives Into River, Dies

An Antioch woman died after she drove off a boat ramp and into the Sacramento River while she was talking on a cell phone with her daughter, asking for directions, authorities said Monday.

Kathleen Gomez Collier, 47, drove her Ford Expedition into the water near Isleton (Sacramento County) around 11:45 p.m. Saturday, said Officer Michael Bradley of the California Highway Patrol.

Collier was lost on Highway 160 and was trying to find her way back to Antioch, so she stopped at Vieira's Resort to get directions, Bradley said.

She was on the phone with her daughter when she drove onto the boat ramp at the resort, Bradley said. She paused briefly before driving into the river, the CHP said.

Just before the call was cut off, Collier told her daughter that her car was filling up with water and to phone her insurance company, Bradley said.

I think the pattern is: 911 then the insurance company. Also, who drives onto a boat ramp, pauses ... and then drives into a river?

The Grim Chipper

This is not the way you want to go. I can only imagine the horror of the people who saw this: Woodchipper Victim ID'd

Officials say a Santa Cruz County maintenance worker who died when he was pulled into a wood chipper had been an employee of the county for more than 40 years.

The worker was identified Tuesday as 60-year-old Henry Lira.

According to sheriff's reports, Lira was part of a four-person crew that was clearing brush on a rural road outside Watsonville on Monday morning when the accident happened. Lira was pronounced dead at the scene.

Lira was a 40-year county employee, which just goes to show you that the risk of death and injury can actually increase when a veteran becomes too complacent about dangerous work.