Have I done this one before? I’m too lazy to check it out. Of all the one hit wonders from the sixties, Iron Butterfly may have been the wonderest of them all. You had to be there, I guess, but who can forget In a Gadda da Vida?
Amazingly, it appears, via youtube, that those guys are still out there, still singing that song.
In answer to my query about who can forget the song, apparently the writers of the Simpsons are among the group that can’t. This little bit is hilarious:
The Constitution really is on life support.
Citing the Obama administration’s evocation of the state secrets privilege, a divided federal appeals court agreed Wednesday to toss a lawsuit against a Boeing subsidiary accused of helping the CIA transport detainees to secret foreign prisons where they allegedly were tortured.
Ruling 6-5, a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said it was bound by a 1953 Supreme Court precedent requiring judges to dismiss cases if litigating them could expose government secrets and imperil national security.
“This case requires us to address the difficult balance the state secrets doctrine strikes between fundamental principles of our liberty, including justice, transparency, accountability and national security,” Judge Raymond Fisher wrote for the majority. “Although as judges we strive to honor all of these principles, there are times when exceptional circumstances create an irreconcilable conflict between them.
“On those rare occasions, we are bound to follow the Supreme Court’s admonition that ‘even the most compelling necessity cannot overcome the claim of privilege if the court is ultimately satisfied that [state] secrets are at stake,’” Fisher continued.
The honorable judge doth protest too much, methinks. In fact, the States Secret Privilege was first adopted in a case in which the United States government committed a blatant fraud on the court, and it has been successfully employed for just that purpose ever since. It may be a “rare” case in which it is raised, but it is an even rarer case where, once raised, the claim is seriously examined. It’s hard to believe that any judge really believes that there are state secrets involved in these cases; the privilege is raised for the purpose of avoiding responsibility and publicity. As in the case above, the government’s real motivations are always painfully obvious.
It’s truly depressing that the Obama administration has utilized these doctrines, though I suppose one could argue that Justice Department lawyers are only taking advantage of a legal principle that a misguided Supreme Court established. It is expecting too much, I suppose, to hope that Obama would break the mold, take the long view, and attempt to preserve a republican form of government.
The Connecticut Democratic Committee has started a website (For all of you who have been frustrated by their official website, this is not a joke) taking aim at Linda McMahon’s bulk mailings, which have apparently been inundating mailboxes throughout the state. I say apparently, because my wife and I appear to have been exempted. We have gotten exactly one, and that was a while ago.
There’s a petition to sign, and I guess it wouldn’t hurt to sign it, so go to the link, sign, and watch the video.
I don’t know if this is an internet only campaign, in which case it’s probably just a device to build a mailing list. I refuse to believe that anyone who isn’t already committed to voting for Blumenthal would visit the site. But if they run the video on television it might actually do some good. Some people need to have irritating things pointed out before they even realize they’re irritating.
If she does the same thing with robocalls she may find that she has spent herself to defeat. Junk mail is commonplace, but no one whose ever been interrupted from a meal, or from doing something they consider more important than listening to a tape, needs to be told that they’re irritated. It’s the first thing that comes to mind. Blumenthal might consider pledging to leave our phones alone; he might gain a lot of votes that way.
Currently David Vitter, a/k/a Diaper Man, is leading his Democratic opponent in the Louisiana Senate Race. One would think that a family values guy who frequents prostitutes would be having a tough go of it, but apparently his criminal activity hasn’t made much of a dent, either on the law enforcement community or with the voters.
The Louisiana Democrats would like to change that, at least as far as the voters are concerned:
In a bid to raise awareness of David Vitter’s ethical scandals, Louisiana Democrats are raising money to run a TV ad recreating an encounter Vitter had with a prostitute.
“We need to get Forgotten Crimes on television in Louisiana,” reads a fundraising letter the LA-Dems sent to supporters this morning. “A recent independent poll found that an astonishing number of likely voters in Louisiana are unaware that David Vitter admitted breaking the law but was never held accountable.”
One would think that the Louisiana media would not allow the public to forget the incident, not to mention that one would expect that the public would have been adequately informed in the first place. If the Louisiana public is indeed as unaware as the quote suggests, then the media is incompetent, or the people are unbelievably stupid. Given that we are talking about the American South, either option is a distinct possibility.
By the way, the video is quite good, and I think it approaches the issue from the right angle, making the point that Vitter is getting away with a crime because he has friends in high places. You can view it at the link above.
Since I somewhat regularly bash the Southern states, bastions of ignorance that they are, it’s only fair that I make note of hopeful signs from that portion of our country that, generally speaking, keeps us in thrall to superstition.
A federal court has upheld the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s decision to deny accreditation to the Institute for Creation Research’s proposed graduate school’s science program, on the what appears to have been extremely politely expressed grounds that they were perfectly entitled to teach religion, but they couldn’t call it science.
Via the Panda’s Thumb:
The Institute for Creation Research has apparently closed its graduate school after being denied the authority to offer a master’s degree in science education. See the concession by Henry Morris III. The National Center for Science Education reports, however, that the ICR is opening instead a School of Biblical Apologetics, which will offer a master’s degree in Christian education, as well as a minor in creation research. The graduate school may be exempt from licensing requirements as long as it offers purely religious degrees.
Pity the poor lawyers trying to make a coherent case for the ICRG. This portion of the court’s ruling exemplifies the difficulties that they must have had. The court is discussing the Institute’s claim that the Board was discriminating against it on religious grounds:
http
Because ICRGS alternates between arguing it is merely teaching science and arguing its program is compelled by its religious beliefs, the Court is at a loss to determine what portion of ICRGS’s behavior should be considered motivated by its religious beliefs. And although its pleadings and various documents in the record (such as the report of the review panel) contain third-person references to ICRGS’s religious beliefs, the Court has no actual evidence (such as an affidavit) of what those beliefs are and to what extent they motivate ICRGS in offering the degree in question. Without any evidence of ICRGS’s specific religious beliefs and what it considers its religiously-motivated behavior, the Court is entirely unable to conduct an inquiry into whether the government action has created a substantial burden on ICRGS’s free exercise by “truly pressur[ing] [ICRGS] to significantly modify [it]s religious behavior and significantly violate [it]s religious beliefs.” Barr, 295 S.W.3d at 301-02.
Talk about trying to have it both ways.
In any event, three cheers for the Board for standing up for science. Before we give too much credit to Texas, however, we must recall that the Board’s original ruling was rendered in 2008, meaning Rick Perry has had two years to try to destroy this island of sanity in an ocean of ignorance (this is the state, remember, that is on a campaign to pervert primary and secondary education in the name of religion and conservatism).
Democrats led by Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Raul Grijalva are drawing a line in the sand before the White House’s fiscal commission: If your report recommends cuts or other changes to Social Security, they will say, you’ll lose our support.
This time, unlike when they made similar threats regarding the public option, they may, in fact probably do, really mean it. There will be nothing else in the commission’s recommendations that will be especially enticing, so there will be no half loaf to tempt them.
The more signatures the letter gets, the less likely the Republicans will realize their fondest hope: the final destruction of the New Deal, with Medicare’s destruction as an added bonus. I know the next time I see Joe Courtney I’ll be either congratulating him for having added his name, or asking him why he didn’t. Every one of our representatives should be expected to sign on.
Personally vouched for by my brother in law:
Embrace Violence
This has nothing to do with politics, or the many other subjects upon which I pontificate, but I just had to pass on some of the pictures posted at Why Evolution is True, by a photographer named Igor Siwanowicz. These are stunning examples of evolution producing animals or insects that mimic their surroundings.
Here’s a few, but check out the rest at the link above. This is a mantis that mimics a flower.
This post was partly inspired by Paul Krugman’s use of a youtube video of Al Jolson singing Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime, to which I made reference in a previous post. I decided to put together some labor themed songs.
I find that I must break a number of my self imposed rules. I try not to repeat artists and I’ve never posted videos with just still pictures as accompaniment, but those rules go out the window today. I knew some of the titles I wanted, and went searching for the best versions I could find, within the limits of the time I had to look. For some, there were no good video versions.
First up, the aforementioned Buddy, this time growled by Tom Waits. He had stiff competition, in the form of the aforementioned Jolson, and a host of others. There were two versions of this performance on youtube, both accompanied by still picture slide shows. Neither was completely satisfying to my taste. One featured modern pictures, the other, period pictures. I decided to play it safe and go with the old stuff.
And now for something completely different. What Waits does qualifies as singing, but only barely. Paul Robeson, on the other hand… I must confess that I’ve never really listened to him sing before. He’s been sort of half erased from American memory. When I heard this version of Joe Hill, it blew me away. What a voice the guy had.
Finally, something a bit more upbeat from Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie: Woody Guthrie’s Union Maid.
By they way, I reserve the right to bring Robeson and Waits back for video encores.
My friend, Bob Roth, is not a serious person. He thinks we should do something to help the unemployed and, perhaps in the process, restore this country’s economic base. He doesn’t seem to care about those scary deficits. Not serious at all.