Great Guitars: Sonny Sharrock

One of the great avant-jazz guitar players, not that there's a lot of 'em, Sonny Sharrock's career divides itself neatly in two parts. Back in the free jazz Sixties and Seventies, his broken-glass style of playing landed him on some ESP sessions, a couple jams in Miles Davis' fusion band playing opposite John McLaughlin, and - most unforgettably - sent him out touring the world with flautist Herbie Mann. After recording a couple solo albums, he disappeared for a decade, re-emerging with a searing jazz-funk-rock sound captured in the above video, where he tears through a Keith Jarrett tune in front of an audience of appreciative Czechoslovakians. Sadly, Sharrock died just a few years into his second coming, but the albums he recorded back then, especially Guitar and Ask The Ages, remain vital and easily accessible.

At A Certain Point, You've Earned Enough Social Justice

It's been a week since the Zimmerman verdict and the media and the political left are still trying to stoke some sort of explosive outrage in the "community." They are sort of succeeding as there have been reports out of Oakland and Hollywood (?!) of yout's attacking people and property "for Trayvon." I'm sure Trayvon's looking down and saying "Thanks to my niggas for keeping it real."

Al Sharpton's 100-city protests were pathetic, philosophically and practically. They were hardly expressive of some wide-ranging, righteous anger. Mostly it looks like ghetto kids are looking for trouble, and now have the imprimatur of the president and the "reverend" Sharpton in their never-ending quest to show off. You say you are "just like Trayvon?" That may be. Trayvon looks like he was more of a wanna-be than an actual thug4life, but he was an idiot to turn around and attack the guy he (correctly) thought was following him. Looking at pictures of the Trayvon rallies, it looks like there are a lot of idiots in the "he could have been me" in the crowd. Well, yeah, if you're wandering around like an a**hole looking for fights, copping an attitude, and committing petty theft, you are likely to come to a bad end.

I'm sure the civil rights crowd and leaders in the "community" think all of this rabble rousing will end up being a net positive, but why would that be? Newt Gingrich is already taking fire for his comment that gang membership has increased 40% since Obama became president. This follows, of course, his earlier comments that Obama was the "food stamp president." Now, you can get mad because it upsets you to hear an old white guy from Georgia talk about gangs and food stamps, but is anyone wondering if he's (gasp) right? He was right about the food stamps, after all. If gang membership is, indeed, increasing shouldn't that be a greater concern to the "community" than the death of a guy who was, at least, a wanna-be who dressed and acted the part?

50 years ago, the "community" could riot in Detroit, and the government would convene commissions and throw money at the "community" until the rioting stopped. 20 years ago, the "community" could riot in LA and everyone would pull a long face about police brutality, rather than wonder about the out-of-control criminals and drug addicts that the police were battling in the streets. Every day for the 50 years since LBJ signed the various Great Society programs into law, checks have gone to millions of members of the "community" without fail. The only change to that system has been the well-deserved imposition of a work requirement which has since been gutted by executive fiat. The "community" has not lacked for social justice or help or resources.

Someone once said, "at some point, you've made enough money." In the case of the members of the "community" rioting self-righteously over Trayvon Martin, I would say at some point you've had all the special privileges American society can shower on you.

Great Guitars: Hank Marvin

Back in the pre-"Clapton Is God" early 1960's, The Shadows' Hank Marvin was England's greatest rock guitarist, backing up Sir Cliff Richard and taking the lead on The Shadows' many instrumental hits. Among other things, Marvin introduced the Fender Strat to England, and was an early proponent of echo effects and whammy bar bends. More important, he was one of the few rock guitar players of any era who was able to build a career as much on instrumentals as on playing off a singer wailing pop tunes. I don't know if it's still the case, but for years, The Shadows had the third largest number of songs ever on the British charts (Elvis and The Beatles were one and two). At least half were features for Marvin's sparkling leads with nary a vocal line to be heard. Sure, the times have passed Marvin by, but that's not really Marvin's fault. His playing remains flawless.

RS McCain Has The Final Word On the "Racial Angle" In the Zimmerman Case

They're not rioting in Florida (that I know of) in the wake of the Zimmerman "not guilty" verdict, but there's already been marching and rioting in the most politically left-wing major city in the United States, Oakland, CA. 

Hundreds of demonstrators marched in San Francisco and Oakland on Sunday to express outrage over a Florida jury's acquittal ofGeorge Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer who had been accused of second-degree murder for fatally shooting unarmed African American teenager Trayvon Martin. 

Joining groups in Los Angeles, New York and other cities around the country, the protesters chanted, "Shut the system down," and held signs reading "Justice for Trayvon Martin" and "Zimmerman: the people say guilty." 

Many said Saturday's acquittal of Zimmerman - whose attorneys argued that he had acted in self-defense when he killed 17-year-old Martin after pursuing him - laid bare a persistent racism in American society, in the criminal justice system and particularly in Florida's "stand your ground" self-defense law. 

"We're both new parents, and we can't believe we live in a country where a man can follow and shoot a 17-year-old boy and face no consequences," said Hillary Ronen, a 37-year-old legislative aide from San Francisco who went downtown with her husband and 8-month-old daughter. "We're outraged and sad, and we don't want to raise our child in a world like that." 

The San Francisco rally drew a few hundred people, who brought bongo drums and bullhorns. They briefly blocked some intersections as police officers formed lines beside them, and then listened to speeches in Justin Herman Plaza along the Embarcadero. 

At the Oakland rally, several hundred people listened to speeches made over a megaphone and painted signs before embarking on a long march, receiving applause from residents as they walked. 

"I don't think it's right for people to think it's OK to kill black and brown children and not pay for it," said Dina Suarez of Oakland, a 36-year-old preschool teacher. "It's enraging. It happens here in Oakland. It happened in Florida. I'm here in solidarity for the family (of Martin) and for all people of color who are tired of this repression."

I'm sure they're very sincere, but where were these clowns a few months ago when two white teen-age girls were shot by a young black man in the Fruitvale neighborhood because the girls didn't want to hang out with his GF? Where were they when a someone murdered 4 Oakland cops? Where were they last year when a young black man shot a white baby in his stroller when his mom didn't cough up some cash fast enough. Where were they when a black man who, while holding up a gas station, managed to shoot a 10-year old Hispanic boy who was playing the piano in a near-by house? I could go on, but discussing the murderousness of young black men against innocent members of society is one of the great taboos of the post-racial age. 

RS McCain offers the perfect riposte to the aggrieved "thug4life" types, teeing off of some idiot's tweet:

Here's the tweet:



And, here's McCain:

“Y’all people made us pick cotton?” 

Who is this “y’all,” and who is “us”? You never picked any cotton, Basit, and I never made you pick it. Whence this idea that there is some sort of permanent system of collective guilt and collective victimhood, where people who never once in their own lives suffered injustice can claim an eternal cause of grievance against people they don’t even know? 

My great-grandfather died long before I was ever born, but I knew his daughter — my grandmother, who lived past 90 — and she lived in a farmhouse on the red clay hills of Randolph County, Alabama, near the Little Tallapoosa River. There was no indoor plumbing. She drew her water from a well and cooked on a wood stove. 

“Y’all people made us pick cotton?” 

You never picked cotton, Basit, but my parents did. My aunts and uncles and grandparents picked cotton. Picked cotton all day long in the Alabama sun until their fingers bled, and took great pride in the fact that they earned a living by their own labor. 

When my father was 16, he told my grandmother she would never have to worry about him. He moved to West Point, Georgia, and took a job at a cotton mill to pay his room and board so he could attend West Point High School, where he made the All-Valley football team playing end for the Red Raiders. College recruiters were interested in Bill McCain, but two weeks before his 18th birthday, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He joined the Army and was a sergeant in a forward reconnaissance unit in France when, one morning in 1944, he was cooking breakfast outside a farmhouse when an artillery shell hit. A shard of shrapnel hit him at the base of his neck, and came with a fraction of an inch of killing him. The medic told him, “You got a million-dollar wound, Mack” — not crippled or maimed, but bad enough he’d never have to go back into combat. 

My Dad grew up on a Randolph County farm during the Depression, worked his way through high school, earned a Purple Heart fighting the Nazis in France, and attended the University of Alabama on the G.I. Bill. He moved to Atlanta after he graduated from Tuscaloosa, and worked 37 years at the Lockheed aircraft plant in Marietta. “Hold your head up, boy,” he’d say. “Ain’t nobody better than you.” 

“Y’all people made us pick cotton?”

"You never picked cotton and I never made you pick it." I'm gonna have to remember that one. 

Great Guitars: K.K. Downing & Glen Tipton

Judas Priest did not play hard rock back in the stoner Seventies. They did not play bottom heavy blues dirges like Black Sabbath. They did not play amped-up psychedelia like Deep Purple. They did not play blues and folk standards through a Marshall stack with lyrics about elves laid on top like Led Zeppelin. Judas Priest played Heavy Metal, and with the passage of time, it's become more obvious how much KK Downing and Glen Tipton defined metal guitar playing to the same extent Johnny Ramone defined punk guitar and Nile Rogers defined funk guitar. Their music was tough, brooding and unsentimental - power chords paired with squealing twin-guitar lead lines - and was the perfect compliment to Rob Halford's banshee wails and lyrics about death, murder, rough trade, partying, robot space invaders and the torments of hell. These guys developed a sound and style that literally launched a thousand bands. ("Dissident Aggressor," a 3 minute track from 1976(!) literally anticipated speed and death metal by a decade). It doesn't get much better than that.

As for which of the two is "better," I have no idea. Tipton tended to play more melodically and with more control, while Downing tended to play power chords interspersed with squalling, angry leads. Then again "K.K." is a much more metal name than "Glen" and Downing pioneered the Gibson Flying V, which has since become an unofficial heavy metal guitar. Hey, this stuff matters! Really it's a wash. The two of them play off and complement one another perfectly.

Some Brief, Grand Sweeping Pronouncements on the George Zimmerman Trial

Both sides have rested their cases, and the judge is getting ready to send the George Zimmerman murder case to the jury, which is the perfect time to make grand sweeping pronouncements without the burden of a jury verdict:

1. Seventeen years old, or not, Trayvon Martin was an idiot to launch into his "I'm a bad ass street thug" routine when he did. It's nighttime. It's raining. OK, there's someone following you. You know what us creepy-ass crackers do in similar situations? We get the hell home with our skittles and Snapple. For all the talk of Trayvon being the son the president never had, Trayvon is actually much more of a universal figure than his defenders realize: a bored suburban teen bouncing between his divorced parents, spending his days texting, smoking pot, playing video games, and dressing like his favorite musicians. I just described 25% of the kids from my lily-white high school. If any of them had turned and started beating up Zimmerman, they would have ended up shot just the same.

2. Sorry, George, I know you didn't hunt down and kill Trayvon Martin like so many civil rights hustlers tried to claim, but you still killed someone. Ever heard of a warning shot? Or, staying in your car? Even if you're acquitted on all charges, I would be the first one to tell Trayvon's parents to sue your a**, and I think they would win something. Treyvon, needless to say, contributed greatly to his demise, but you will, I think, find yourself with a wrongful death judgment against you in civil court.

3. Of all the racial issues raised in this case, the effort to deny and define Zimmerman's Hispanic heritage was bizarre. There was the previously unheard formulation "white Hispanic." What's next? Are we going to call Barack Obama a mulatto? Are we going to bring back the black Irish? Then, there were the media outlets that dubbed Zimmerman a "self-identified" Hispanic, as if he were a wanna-be. Have you seen his mom?! She seems pretty damn Hispanic! I don't even understand how anyone, including Treyvon could have thought of Zimmerman as being white. Sorry, he looks like someone from a Latin American background. Just bizarre.

4. All of this is happening when the American murder rate is driven by black-on-black (or black-on-someone-else) crime. If our community organizer president wants to do some good, he might want to look into this, but don't count on it. As others have said, the murderousness of blacks against other blacks and some whites is one of the great taboos of the our era.

The Obamacare Delay and What It All Means

The July 3rd Treasury Department blog post (who says blogging is dead?) announcing that the Obama Administration was delaying enforcement of the employer mandate has given rise to a number of questions, to wit:

1. Ha! Ha! Ha! Are you kidding?! I thought there was a deadly crisis in the American health care system!  

2. What happened to the fierce urgency of now? 

3. Is this even legal? Can the president just unilaterally suspend enforcement of a statute? Well, this one does, but what about a real president like Bush or Clinton? ("Real" in this case means a president who actually faces an adversarial press and effective opposition). 

4. Is this going to turn into one of those annual legislative "patches," like the Medicare "doc fix" and the now-ended AMT "patch?"  

5. What about the individual mandate? Is that still full steam ahead? Way to look out for the interests of regular people as opposed to those of Big (and Biggish) Business, Mr. Progressive!

6. What does this do to all of those glowing CBO projections that happy Dems were waving around a few years ago? 

7. What does this do to the state exchanges?  

8. Isn't there an employer reporting mandate, too? Is that suspended?

9. I know administrative officials have been busy doing the People's Business like crafting Sandra Fluke talking points, and drafting harassing IRS audits of Tea Party activists, but has anyone actually been doing any work to implement Obamacare? You've had 3 years! Say what you will about FDR and LBJ, but when they implemented destructive social legislation, they did it right away. What have you guys been doing?

10. It's an article of faith on the left that the GOP is the Stupid Party, and Tea Partiers/Conservatives are especially dim, but, admit it Lefties, this is pretty stupid, isn't it? 

11.  Is all of this some crafty back-door means of getting employers out of the health care insurance business and end the inequitable tax treatment of employer-provided health care benefits? If, yes, that wouldn't be such a bad result since many, many complaints about the health insurance system can be traced back to the third-party payer dynamic created between employers, doctors and patients. But, it's probably not, and if there was some crafty, back-door shiftiness going on, it would be in the creation of a single-payer (i.e. gov't) system. 

12. Remember this smug White House tweet in response to GOP requests to describe Obamacare in three words?  

The White House        ✔ @whitehouse

It's. The. Law. #ObamaCareInThreeWords, pic.twitter.com/yCHSmuxkKj

11:47 AM - 16 May 2013 

Haw! Haw! It is?

Of course, all of these questions are unanswerable because no one looks to be planning to discomfit Obama or his underlings with any of them. The Obama-ites have clearly calculated that 'tis the better part of valor to delay enforcement of the employer mandate beyond the 2014 election, rather than face the wrath of voters feeling the weight of a fully operational battlesta...(excuse me) health care reform law.

The obvious play for the GOP is to pass enabling legislation to suspend the whole of the Obamacare law, or at least the individual and employer mandates, and then let Dems explain why only the employer mandate should be subject to suspension. Oh sure, they'll f*** it up somehow, and end up looking like cruel accountants turning off ventilators, but it's hard to see how you end up looking the bad guy when it's the progressive hero himself who is turning his own law upside down.

Great Guitars: Jeff Beck

Kind of obvious, sure, but Beck's birthday was last week, and anyway Beck's a lot better known among guitar guys than among civilians (of all the top tier Brit Blooze guys, he's the one your wife/GF/mom is least likely to have heard of). Here he is blazing away with ZZ Top at some Spanish blues festival. That pure high-gain tone is something else.

Happy Fourth of July From the Pennsylvania Memorial!

Actually, I'm not in Gettysburg, or in Pennsylvania. I haven't even left my apartment. But, I am at the Memorial in spirit.

I bring up the memorial because, while we celebrate the Independence Day today, the just-concluded 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg deserves some note. That's because, while moderately educated Americans can be conversant about the Civil War, it's sometimes hard to understand what motivated the men who fought on the Union side and preserved the union. After all, they could have just as easily said, screw it, let the Southern slave masters keep their plantations and peons. There were plenty in the North who counseled peace, and could not abide the thought of a civil war against their countrymen.

Well, if you want to understand you should visit the Pennsylvania Memorial.

The Gettysburg Battlefield is famously covered in monuments, memorials, statuary, markers, etc. Most of them are dedicated to the exploits of the Union troops, although there are some Southern markers, including one at the top and one at the bottom of Cemetery Ridge. Most of the Gettysburg memorials were placed there by private subscription, rather than by gov't money. Often a regiment or company would get together, raise some funds, and plop something down on whatever scrap of hallowed ground they had fought over. This contributes to the hodge-podge quality of the battlefield, but it also gives you a sense of what the people at the time considered important. The memorials really do follow the lines of battle. There's no way the Park Service, or some academic board, would have managed to do better.

The bigger ones were installed by states to commemorate the veterans among their citizenry. And the biggest one of all of these is the Pennsylvania memorial.

The memorial itself is not some grand aesthetic masterwork. It is, as they say, "busy," covered in friezes depicting battle scenes, statutes of Union generals from PA (and the PA governor who valiantly signed the bill appropriating funds to construct the memorial), and all sorts of other gimcrackery. It's never really achieved national iconic status, but it should. Because the most important part of the memorial can be found wrapped around it: the names of every Pennsylvanian who was on active duty in the Army of the Potomac at the time of the battle. To look at those names, and then turn around and look down Cemetery Ridge is a moving moment for any American. These men fought and died in America, for America, to preserve America. Immortality doesn't get much better than that.

Best of all is a prominent plaque installed by the men of Pennsylvania and dedicated to the ladies of Pennsylvania. We're all familiar with the stories of Confederate gallantry - that was one of the few things we can all agree they had going for them - but the Union side had plenty of gallantry and bravery too, as this charming plaque testifies.

And, with all apologies to my Southern brethren, those gallant men didn't just win a war. They were on the right side of history and humanity. The Confederate armies were as brave and tough as they come. Many of the generals were brilliant, making more out of much less than their Northern counter-parts. The southern gentry were dashing and gallant. Etc. But, for all of that, they were fighting for the absolutely worst cause imaginable.

Slavery - a barbaric system that didn't even rise to the level of feudalism in terms of economic sophistication - was bad enough. The methods that the South used to enforce slavery spread its oppression beyond the plantations and into the wider world. It was against the law to teach blacks to read or write. It was illegal to even disparage slavery as an institution. An ounce of African blood would render one's relatives as little more than chattel. Sally Hemings, for example had less African blood that George Zimmerman. Imagine a system where your cousins or half-siblings - products of a randy relatives sexual exploits with concubines - could be bought and sold, and then worked to death.

Apologists who claim that slavery was "contained" to the South ignore the very real ways in which slavery reached North. There were the hated fugitive slave laws, which eventually cast such a wide net that free blacks could be dragged South against their will.

It wasn't just about slavery. The Antebellum Democrat Party was dedicated to not just preserving, but also spreading the "peculiar institution" throughout the territories, the Northern states, and beyond. Southern Democrats were, of course, up front about this, while Northern Dems like Stephen Douglas, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan tried to accomplish this through stealth and silence. Many Republicans from Lincoln on down argued that the Democrat presidents of the 1850's had, through benign neglect, created the legal and political atmosphere in which the Missouri Compromise broke down and the Supreme Court rendered the notorious Dred Scott decision.

If you haven't read Dred Scott, you should. It's an amazing document from the authority with the supposed final word on interpreting the Constitution. For several years, in the United States, it was a matter of constitutional law that blacks were so inferior as to be literally inhuman, and not deserving of constitutional notice. Imagine being an 1850's-era Irish immigrant, freshly arrived from  a life as a serf on some English estate. Now, you're in the Land of the Free and the highest judicial authority in the land is making distinctions about who is or is not constitutionally inferior. That might make you more than a little nervous, maybe even send you off to fight in a war to resolve the question once and for all.

July 4th celebrates the birth of freedom in this country. Gettysburg and the Pennsylvania Memorial celebrate the new birth of freedom that came 87 years later. We would do well to remember both.

Great Guitars: Dave Davies

Brother Ray gets most of the credit as the creative force behind The Kinks, but Dave's guitar really defined their sound when they were at their best. Dave played all of those riffs that Ray wrote, after all. More important (and impressive) Dave literally invented the distorted guitar sound that defines hard rock/heavy metal to this day. His tasteful solos - he plays two great ones in the video above - were also heavily influential, even if you never hear him mentioned out loud as an influence. Uh, how many Kinks songs did Van Halen cover?

And check out the crowd. The Kinks were selling out arenas in 1979! The folks in Providence loved The Kinks! And the band is so young! They were a British Invasion band on their second or third comeback and yet they are all in their mid-30's! If you're making a list of underrated rock bands, The Kinks have to be close to the top.

Clueless: Moderate Republicans And The IRS's Attacks on the Tea Party

We've spent so many decades hearing about how Richard Nixon (unsuccessfully) tried to sic the IRS on his political opponents, it was almost funny to learn that the "white hat" Obama lead an effort to systematically suppress conservative activists through abusive auditing. You would think anyone with an "R" after their name would know what to do with a scandal like this: righteous anger mixed with a resolve to fight these b**tards to the political death. But that's not what the GOP's moderate elements are doing. Instead, they are working hand-in-glove with the Obama administration to pass immigration reform while harrumphing about "special prosecutors" and generally allowing public anger to diffuse. 

As the perfect exemplar of this strain, Sheriff Michael Gerson rode into town on his high horse a couple weeks ago and declared the heated reaction by Tea Partiers to be, erm, unhelpful:

A number of libertarians and conservative populists have found data collection by the National Security Agency(NSA) to be the final confirmation of their worst fears about Barack Obama and modern government. It is an attempt, according to Ron Paul, to “deliberately destroy the Constitution.” To radio talk show host Mark Levin, it reveals “the elements of a police state.” To Rush Limbaugh, it is part of a “coup d’etat” by the Obama “regime.” 

Some on the right believe, as they say in the intel business, that they have connected the dots. All the scandals are really part of one big scandal. For Levin, it encompasses abuses by the Internal Revenue Service, the collection of DNA by policemen, Obamacare’s centralization of medical records and the use of domestic drones. “The Transportation Department, people forget, has proposed black boxes in all of our automobiles to track how they function,” Levin adds. 

Limbaugh presents a similar list, demonstrating what he calls “the totalitarian nature or the authoritarian nature of this administration,” and homes in on the NSA revelations: “The main question is, why is such a gigantic surveillance operation even necessary? What is really going on here? Who is the enemy? The tea party, we know, is an enemy of the administration. We know that conservative Republicans — and I could give you names — are enemies of this administration.” 

Let me stipulate that the IRS targeting of tea party groups is deeply disturbing andEric Holder’s Justice Department is politicized, swaggering and incompetent. Distrust of government is deep in the American DNA, and the Obama administration has often managed to justify it. 

But asserting that U.S. intelligence agencies are part of a conspiracy that somehow includes a national gun registry, drone surveillance and Lois Lerner crosses a line. 

I guess we shouldn't expect any real fight from the man who helped craft the Bush 43 administration's pathetic non-response to the scurrilous attacks the left subjected it to for years. But, come on! Doesn't any of this make Gerson angry? It should. Decent, hard-working Americans of the sort whom the GOP has historically relied on at the polls, were subject to attack and abuse by cold-hearted left-wing activists disguised as bureaucrats. The GOP base was literally being hounded and suppressed - while the left wailed about a bogus "war on women" and a mythical effort to suppress minority voters via voter ID laws! Mr. Gerson, your people were under attack and that doesn't seem to bother you, nor does it bother many of the DC-based GOP leadership. Frankly, that is almost as disturbing as the IRS asking conservative groups about the contents of their prayers. 

What's worse is that progressives have been using 501(c)(3)'s and (4)'s as political tools and income streams for years. The NAACP, NARAL, the teachers unions (and every other union), Greenpeace, PETA, and so on are all tax-emept organizations. They are also political through and through. How is that "legal" while some women organizing a Tea Party group around their kitchen tables is untoward? 

And, left-wing groups aren't just organizing tools. Rich progressives like the Kennedies use them as tax shelters and as income streams. The grant-writing liberal is not far removed from the conservative businessman going to the bank for a loan, only the liberal is looking to start an activist group and pay herself a salary. And, the non-profit sector is notorious for its prodigious fund-raising and pathetic disbursement rates. Rush Limbaugh has been saying for years that the modern left is funded by tax-payers. He's not far off the mark. Again, Mr. Gerson, doesn't it make you angry that leftists are excluded from the sort of rigorous enforcement to which conservative groups were subject?

That's not to let Tea Partiers totally off the hook. As earnestly as they wanted to comply with IRS rules, it should have been clear to anyone receiving those crazy document demands that quick approvals would not be forthcoming from Cincinnati or Ogden or wherever. As Prof. Reynolds suggests, they should have self-exempted at that point. And, while it's admirable that conservatives wanted to make sure they were crossing all of their T's and dotting their I's re: accepting donations, I have to ask whether, say, the Black Panthers or Mario Savio or the Chicago Seven or other leftist rebels ever went through the bother of complying with IRS rules. Maybe they did and there was a Black Panther 501(c)(3), but I have no idea and anyway I doubt it. They just went out and started taking care of business, committing real crimes along the way. The left's funding has always been murky with an unknown but significant portion coming from Moscow and Beijing back in the good ol' days. Somehow the Tea Party hasn't managed to figure out that successful political activism is probably inversely proportional to compliance with the rules created by the political class. 

And, finally, while the right has a compelling case that its vote was suppressed in 2012, it was hardly a case of involuntary suppression. People just stayed home and didn't vote. Excuse me? That's pathetic! You don't like Romney, or are being inundated with insane IRS correspondence, or are getting Obama robo-calls, and your response is to stay home? Voting in America is still one of the easiest public duties a citizen has available to him. Obama richly deserved to lose, whether that loss came at the hands of Mitt Romney or Rick Perry or John Huntsman should have been beside the point. 

I had no illusions about Mitt Romney, no one should have. The man was a technocrat, not an activist. All those promises about repealing Obamacare, etc. would have wilted at the first sign of leftist counter-attack. But, that would still be better than what we've got now. 

To bring it all back to Michael Gerson's plaintive whining about unhelpful right-wing rhetoric, there's a reason why the Bush/Romney/Dole/McCain/Ford/Dewey branch of the party has so much trouble winning elections. They have no fight in them, and worse, don't realize they are in a fight at all. And, if they manage to win an election, they don't fight back. They don't protect themselves, and they don't protect their voters and most active supporters. Pathetic. 

Great Guitars: Phil Manzanera

Roxy Music's guitarist had his foot in the mainstream and in the experimental side of rock for most of the Seventies; cranking out hits and touring the world with Bryan Ferry by day, and working by night as one of Brian Eno's great collaborators when the term "eno-esque" was being defined (their song "Big Day" has been a Free Will favorite for decades). Unlike most outward-bound guitarists, Manzanera has an undeniable melodic side that he never loses even as his muse soars into the ether.

It's Not Amnesty!

One thing you hear a lot from "comprehensive immigration reform" advocates is that their proposed bill is "NOT amnesty!!!!!!!" even though Ronald Reagan described the very-similar intended results of the 1986 reform as "amnesty in exchange for border security." I guess I could take their word for it, but Marco Rubio, et al. might want to know how immigration law is being marketed - in English! - by attorneys catering to the immigrant population here in San Mateo County:

(This, btw, is a rare example of Free Will shoe-leather reporting as the FW Cub Reporter and I traveled a mile down the road from our HQ to snap these dramatic photos).

The fact is that, regardless of what the old white guys in the Senate might say, the immigrant community and those who advocate for it, are telling themselves that DC's efforts to "normalize" the illegal population is amnesty, whether through the DREAM Act or through the Senate's comprehensive reform bill. That's certainly what Marco Rubio has been saying in Spanish to Spanish-speaking audiences. (if the guy doesn't like getting booed at Tea Party allies, he might want to cut down on repeated use of this Arafat-style of political persuasion). And that's certainly why we are being treated to an incomprehensible 1,000 page bill intended to mask its true effects, both intended and unintended.

Even if amnesty is not the result, we know what will happen: more masses chanting "Si Se Puede," more quavering-voiced news stories about people living in the "shadows," and an effort in the courts to obtain amnesty through judicial fiat with border security thrown to the wayside. Some form of amnesty seems inevitable, whether through legislation, judicial intervention, or pseudo-revolution. Choose your poison, I guess.

Baby, I'm A Star: Marco Rubio's Push For Immigration Reform

Hard to believe just a few months ago that Marco Rubio was the Tea Party's "New Reagan" (like the Boss used to be the "New Dylan," I guess). Now he's working with the despicable likes of Chuck Schumer and Dick Durban to pass left-wing legislation, making major policy pronouncements in Spanish, and creating an atmosphere where his aides feel comfortable dumping on American workers:

“There are American workers who, for lack of a better term, can’t cut it. There shouldn’t be a presumption that every American worker is a star performer. There are people who just can’t get it, can’t do it, don’t want to do it. And so you can’t obviously discuss that publicly.”

That crack might make some sense - not everyone can be Steve Jobs, after all - if the Schumer-Rubio bill sought to address this alleged shortfall in "star performers," but it doesn't. Instead, the emphasis is on the mass migration of low-skill, low-wage, low-education laborers, and their extended families. Maybe there's a Mexican Sergey Brin mixed in among these huddled masses, but I doubt it. Mexico's idea of a "star performer" is Carlos Slim. With the exception of an increased number of tech viasas, there is nothing in the bill that would encourage the sort of high-skilled, well educated entrepreneurial people to emigrate to the United States. Instead, we will continue the depressing, dysfunctional status quo: millions of marginal types either entering illegally or staying after their tourist visa expires get all the political attention, while immigrants educated up to the Phd level languish on waiting lists or give up and go home. 

This "star performer" stuff is a crock anyway. Since when are Americans expected to be "stars?" The expectation is that you work hard and are productive. That's all you can expect from the mass of humanity. And who are the star performers among the current population of illegals? Is there a star performer in the lettuce patch looking to pivot to avocados? 

As bad as this is, Rubio's apparent tendency to say "security first!" in English, while promising "legalization first!" in Spanish is worse. It's the old Arafat trick of saying something moderate to an English-speaking audience while saying the opposite in another language. It's the perfect tool of the demagogue, and something even Obama has not dared to do. I know, I know. George Bush used to speak Spanish to crowds too. (Bush did it! is a bi-partisan "get out of jail" card), but there is a vast difference between throwing in a sentence or two of Spanish lingo, and actually making political promises in Spanish to a Spanish-speaking audience. 

Our only hope, I guess, is that it's the Spanish speakers who are being lied to by the cynical border-firsters in the Gang of 8 (hah!), but we all know what's really going on. Rubio is the front for an obfuscatory effort to pass dubious legislation that won't even accomplish its stated goals. 

It could be that Rubio knows something the rest of us don't know about the electorate a la Obama circa 2007, and this effort will strengthen his aspirations while giving us a chance to rationalize our immigration system, but, after seeing Rubio's performance over the last few weeks I kind of doubt it. 

Great Guitars: Poison Ivy Rorscach

The Cramps' guitarist took the twangy rockabilly/Duane Eddy sounds of early rock'n'roll, mixed them with a punky sense of dread, and spent 30 years touring the world in one of the longest-lived bands of any genre (The Cramps only stopped when singer Lux dropped dead a couple years ago). Not a great virtuoso, of course, but that's really not the point.

Lone Nut Theory: Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Politics and Advocacy

If there's a living embodiment that Life Is Not Fair, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has to be Exhibit A. Born into an illustrious political family, he blew up any chance at elected office through criminality and drug addiction that persisted well into adulthood. Now an environmentalist and progressive activist, Kennedy seems perpetually in the public eye, at least that part of the eye trained on the innumerable cable news shows on which he appears. But, watching him is a painful experience. His "impassioned" advocacy quickly veers into hair-flipping rants, especially when challenged from his political right. Most people in his position are either in an early grave, in prision, or living in tiny hovels filled with yellowing "Nader For President" flyers. We all know what has saved RFKJ from such a fate: his name and his $$, but in America that's more than enough. He is the ultimate "Fortunate Son."

(not only that, he - like many progressives - is adept at using the tax code and trust law to set up non-profit foundations to hide his assets and pay himself and his family comfortable salaries. Not that the IRS has ever shown any interest in that).

Folks on the right have had his number since he first dropped out of Harvard, but for Democrats and progressives, RFKJ is still an admired figure. But, his anti-vaccination crusading has apparently freaked out the good libs at Slate:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likes to talk. When he calls you to discuss vaccines, he talks a lot, uninterruptably. He called Keith Kloor after Kloor wrote a story for Discover about RFK Jr.’skeynote address to a convention of people who think vaccines cause autism. You can read about their conversation at Kloor's blog. Phil Plait wrote a story about RFK Jr. forSlate last week, pointing out that the idea that vaccines cause autism is a crackpot theory that has been thoroughly debunked, that it is dangerous, and that RFK Jr. is one of its most effective proponents. 

RFK Jr. was displeased. His managing director emailed me (I’m the health and science editor) to say that the story was full of inaccuracies, and I offered to correct any errors right away. He said Kennedy wanted to speak to Plait or me; I requested comments or corrections in writing; we went back and forth. Eventually Kennedy got me on the phone and he talked and I listened. 

Slate doesn’t give equal time tocreationists, and given the overwhelming evidence, we would never publish a story claiming that vaccines cause autism. But it’s fascinating, in a horrified head-shaking sort of way, to hear how anti-vaxxers think. I requested a transcript or video of Kennedy’s speech to the 2013 AutismOne/Generation Rescue Conference, but neither the conference hosts nor Kennedy’s office provided them. I can tell you what he said to me instead. 

The short version of the vaccine conspiracy theory (if you are stuck on the phone with RFK Jr., you will be subjected to the long version) is that a vaccine preservative called thimerosal causes autism when injected into children. Government epidemiologists and other scientists, conspiring with the vaccine industry, have covered up data and lied about vaccine ingredients to hide this fact. Journalists are dupes of this powerful cabal that is intentionally poisoning children. 

For a guy whose family has such a distinguished record of public service, Kennedy says some pretty awful things about government employees: “The lies that you are hearing and printing from the CDC are things that should be investigated.” He spoke to one scientist (he named her but I won’t spread the defamation) who, he said, “was actually very honest. She said it’s not safe. She said we know it destroys their brains.” 

I asked the scientist about their conversation. She said there is in fact no evidence that thimerosal destroys children’s brains, and that she never said that it did.

And so on. It's probably too much to expect Slate's "Science and Health Editor" to wonder, hey, if the haphazardly educated RFKJ is wrong about vaccines, he might not be right about the other scientific matters on which he so passionately rants. 

Great Guitars: Stuart Adamson

Big Country's lead guitarist was a tone hound of heroic proportions. That "bagpipe sound" from their first album was just the beginning. All you need to know is that The Edge eulogized Adamson by saying Big Country wrote the songs he wished U2 could write.

Plumbing The Depths: Is the Stupid Party Becoming the Moron Party

Another Republican politician - this time Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) and no I've never heard of him before - is going through the media wringer after daring to put the words "abortion" and "rape" into the same sentence. He actually had good reason to as all he was trying to say was that the incidence of abortions resulting from rape were low. Not that this matters. Outrageous outrage is going down as we speak, but that's not really my concern. I'm more exorcised by the likes of ostensible center-right commentator Jonathon S. Tobin* who declares Cong. Franks to be an unfortunate manifestation of the "moron factor" sapping the GOP of it manly essence.

Republicans have spent the last several months arguing about the lessons of the 2012 election with both establishment types and grass roots activists mixing it up on a variety of issues. But if there was one conclusion that surely everyone in the party agreed upon it was that GOP candidates and officials needed to avoid mentioning rape, especially when discussing their opposition to abortion. The spectacular idiocy of Missouri senatorial candidate Todd Akin—who publicly doubted that women could become pregnant as a result of rape—didn’t just transform his opponent Claire McCaskill from a certain loser to an easy winner and sink Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock, when the latter said something not quite as foolish. It also allowed Democrats to trash all Republicans as Neanderthal nitwits seeking to abuse women. 

But apparently Arizonan Republican Representative Trent Franks didn’t get the memo. Franks demonstrated that yesterday when he claimed during a Judiciary Committee debate that the incidence of pregnancy from rape is “very low.” But Franks had to repeat the assertion even in a later clarification before he realized what he had done. With a single phrase, Franks had handed Democrats on the committee and elsewhere a chance to revive their fake “War on Women” theme that helped mobilize the Democratic base in 2012. Though it can be asserted that they didn’t need any new excuses to try the same tactic in 2014, Franks has made it a lot easier. Just as was the case in 2012, Republicans are learning the hard way that foolish statements—even if they are ripped out of their context or unfairly characterized—allow Democrats to change the subject from serious moral issues to a topic they’d rather talk about: why some Republicans are morons.

Oh, come on. Republicans will always suffer for their abortion related "gaffes" because the pro-abortion crowd only wants to discuss baby killing in the context of these sorts of meltdowns. There was nothing factually incorrect in Franks' statement. (although we don't know what the exact percentage of abortions arise from rape). I can't imagine there is a huge number of rapes resulting in pregnancy. (statutory rape is another matter, of course). And, the point he was trying to make is an important one. He's trying pass a bill outlawing abortions after 20 weeks - at this point, a six month preemie can easily survive outside the womb - and responding to NARAL types wailing about rape:

After the committee meeting, Franks told POLITICO: “My bill does nothing to restrict abortion even before the first five months, so all issues related to rape are long since dealt with.” 

He said that Democrats are the ones who “constantly want to inject” rape into the abortion debate and have done so ever since the original Roe v Wade case. By focusing on rape instead on “the child that was being killed” they try to change the dynamics of the debate, he said. “So sometimes Republicans get beat up for having to respond to it, but it’s always the left that brings it up because it results in Republicans getting beat up by it.”

Agreed that pro-life Republicans probably need a seminar to practice their lines for moments like this, but what are they supposed to say? The rape question always comes up, and it needs to be batted away, only it can't be batted away because the left brings up rape precisely to strike the sort of gaffe gold they found in Todd Akin.

Democrats make all sorts of moronic, not to mention evil, claims re: abortion. Just today Nancy Pelosi made some crazy comment that late-term abortions are "sacred ground." (ugh!) She also responded to questions about the murderous abuses of Kermit Gosnell by saying she deplored them, but, no, did not plan to work to pass any legislation that would make Gosnell's practices illegal. Give me the "moron" Trent Franks any day over this.

* can't forget the "S." Jonathon Sssssssssssssss. Tobin, ladies and gentlemen!

Edward Snowden: Hero Or Zero?

That was the question of the day on the radio and the official Free Will formulation is (drumroll): "Zero + 2."

The guy's a zero for a lot of reasons, mostly having to do with his deciding unilaterally to release classified information to the leftoid Guardian, a publication that has gone out of its way to undermine America. Then there's his laughable claim that Hong Kong was some kind of libertarian, free speech paradise. Good to know our worldly transnational sophisticates haven't caught up with the news that HK stopped being a free trade entrepot back in 1999. Snowden doesn't talk or act like a patriot, so excuse me if I don't join the "Snowden = Paul Revere" chorus line.*

Still, he gets points for making us confront an ugly reality, namely that the gov't is collecting an enormous amount of personal information about us and our interactions with the world. I get it that the NSA is making use of this information under close supervision and only when there is a probable cause rationale for running our numbers through a database. Other than that, it's just sitting there, inert. No, I don't find that reassuring. Instead, each of us now has a digital sword of Damocles over us, waiting to fall when we run the wrong google search, or receive too many phone calls from the wrong continents. The gov't won't look at you until it does, something that we have learned from the IRS and which we should not soon forget (also note that Mr. Patriot doesn't seem to have been motivated by the IRS's torment of conservatives and Tea Partiers).

But, what Snowden should be making us ask is whether all of this meta-data gathering is the best use of our time and resources. The whole point is to fight terrorism (remember that?) but it's hard to see that the system is working well when we've got a couple yokels from Chechnya blowing up the Boston Marathon without much trouble. We're seemingly spying on true blue Americans (and patting them down in airports) while studiously avoiding the Muslims who are causing all of this trouble in the first place!

There's one way to fight a war against a shadowy transnational guerrilla movement with a deadly ideology: kill as many of them as you can when you can; capture the ones with valuable information and then never let them go; seek out and destroy their leaders, etc. Doing targeted  computer searches of phone records and internet searches makes sense when you are fighting a war in such a manner. We *kind of* did that under Bush - and the left never stopped wailing about  the shredding of the Constitution and the slaughter of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan. So now we have this new strategy: drone killings from afar and electronic snooping of every American's phone and internet records. Not an improvement.

(And what about the low quality of the folks who are getting top secret clearances so they can work on all of this electronic snooping? It was bad enough that soccer mom Valerie Plame could plausibly call herself a CIA operative, but at least she was getting her hands dirty. Bradley Manning was a gay Welsh 20 year old from Oklahoma with relationship issues. In an earlier era, he would not have been in the army, but in the Obama era, he had a security clearance that gave him access to State Dept. emails. Snowden is a high school drop-out with a naive view of life and freedom in other countries and who donated money to Ron Paul - not that there's anything wrong with that, but a Paul-bot is not the sort of person you would want with top secret clearance.)

Edward Snowden committed crimes and has acted in a way that has hurt the United States. His motives are mixed at best. But, given the expense and low success rate of the intrusive programs he has revealed, it would be nice to see a re-appraisal of what exactly we are doing to ourselves in the name of national security.

* and please don't expect me to appreciate your ability to parse the difference between Snowden and the worm Bradley Manning.

Great Guitars: Piggy

Nowadays, every metal band is "experimental" in some way, but back in the late-80's, Voivod's Denis "Piggy" D'Amour was one of the few thrashers out there who were citing the likes of Robert Fripp and Blixa Bargeld as influences.