I’m a strong believer in traditions, at least when they serve my purposes, and here at CTBlue we now have a tradition of posting this video on Good Fridays. I am adhering to this tradition for a number of reasons, chief of which being that it spares me from having to overtax my brain by coming up with something original.
Anyway, I believe that this song contains some very good advice, and the movie from which it is derived, is one of the best ever made. It may very well be that one needs a Christian religious upbringing (preferably drenched in guilt) of some sort to truly appreciate The Life of Brian.
As a bonus, here’s one of the funnier scenes from the flick. I never took Latin, but I can imagine the type of teacher that inspired this.
Wow. If you do this sort of thing long enough, you find yourself doing all kinds of crazy things. If you’d told me I would ever rise to defend Injustice Scalia, I’d have thought you were crazy, but here I go.
I was reading this firedoglake post and was struck by a quote attributed to Fat Tony, to the effect, that he has a ( and these are words from the quote) “longstanding and profound fear of homosexuals”. I googled Fat Tony’s last name along with the quote, and found the source to be the Borowitz report at the New Yorker, which bills itself as the “news reshuffled”. The quote was attributed to an interview with Fox News and the article also included the following:
“As Justices of the Supreme Court, we have a sacred duty to check our personal feelings at the door,” he told the Fox News Channel. “In my case, that means putting aside my longstanding and profound fear of homosexuals.”
Justice Scalia added that he was committed “to safeguarding the rights of all Americans—even those I personally find terrifying.”
“I take my role as an impartial arbiter very seriously,” he said. “So when I hear a case, I put all feelings of abhorrence, disgust, and revulsion completely out of my mind.”
The Justice said that when it came to the issue of same-sex marriage he would rely on the Constitution, “which makes no mention of gays whatsoever.”
“Remember, when the framers wrote the Constitution, there were no gays in America,” he said. “They didn’t come here until the nineteen-sixties.”
So, this sent me back to the search results and a quick review of the results seemed to show that a lot of folks swallowed this satire hook, line and sinker.
The guy is a bigot, but not stupid. The giveaway is that while lots of the folks swallowing this line attribute it to a Fox interview, there seems to be no verification that the interview ever took place nor is there any actual video. So, I am here to defend Scalia. He would never have said these things. He merely thinks them. Entirely different, sort of.
Pundits, be they pros like David Brooks, or amateurs like yours truly, are in the business of making predictions. It is therefore only fair that they should be held strictly accountable for those predictions. I’m no exception, particularly when I’m proven right yet again. A mere month and a half ago I wrote this in light of Amazon’s announcement that it would build a distribution center in, and start paying sales taxes to, the state of Connecticut:
We learn from this morning’s Day that Amazon will be building a “customer fulfillment center” here in the Nutmeg State, and will have to begin collecting sales taxes on in state purchases in November. Amazon, of course, has been in the forefront of the lobbying effort to keep states from collecting sales taxes on internet sales. Let’s look into the future, as Amazon approaches its goal of same day delivery throughout most of the nation.
That will require customer fulfillment centers in almost every state, subjecting Amazon to state sales taxes everywhere. Look for Amazon to have a change of heart, and support efforts to require its far smaller competitors to remit sales taxes to all states, rather than only to those states in which they have a physical presence. This is actually good public policy, but at that point it will be used by Amazon as a cudgel to destroy its smaller competitors.
Today, we learn this about a Congressional proposal to require internet retailers to collect sales taxes for all states to which they ship:
Guess who else supports the bill? The one company whose business would seem to be more deeply affected than any other if such a bill were to become law — and the one company at which this legislation would appear to be directly aimed: Amazon.
Believe it or not I am slowly, and hopefully surely, making my way through the Senate Banking Committee’s report on the JPMorgan “Whale” fiasco. I have to pass a quote along. Here’s the context: JPMorgan, for a time, hid it’s mounting losses by changing the way it valued the investments in which it was trading. This, by the way, was apparently done with the full knowledge of the higher ups, including Jamie Dimon, but let’s put that criminality aside for the moment. This jumped out at me:
The bank told the Subcommittee that, despite the favorable pricing practices noted in the May memorandum, it did not view the CIO as having engaged in mismarking until June 2012, when its internal investigation began reviewing CIO recorded telephone calls and heard CIO personnel disparaging the marks they were reporting. On July 13, 2012, the bank restated its first quarter earnings, reporting additional SCP losses of $660 million. JPMorgan Chase told the Subcommittee that the decision to restate its financial results was a difficult one, since $660 million was not clearly a “material” amount for the bank, and the valuations used by the CIO did not clearly violate bank policy or generally accepted accounting principles. The bank told the Subcommittee that the key consideration leading to the restatement of the bank’s losses was its determination that the London CIO personnel had not acted in “good faith” when marking the SCP book, which meant the SCP valuations had to be revised.
I know a million dollars is not what it used to be (just ask Doctor Evil), but 660 millions is still a “material” amount of money to most of us. It is truly amazing that these bankers can suggest that it’s a trivial sum, hardly worth mentioning. By the way, if you read the report, you can’t help but conclude that all of JPMorgan’s rationalizations summarized in the quoted paragraphs were bunkum, when they weren’t out and out lies.
The report, by the way, is a fascinating thing. It spells out a massive fraud in great detail, clearly states that the malefactors knew just what they were doing, and establishes quite clearly that Congress is totally aware of the criminal behavior of the bankers. It should come as no surprise that the same Congress is considering doing something about this criminal behavior:decriminalizing it.
Matt Stoller writes: Earlier this week, the House Ag Committee marked up some bills deregulating derivatives. I don’t think they were expecting anyone to really notice, but there was a bunch of press on what they did.
The next step in the legislative process is for the House Financial Services Committee to look at the bills. That will take place in April.
Needless to say, this push to license criminality is being done in “bipartisan” fashion, with Connecticut’s Jim Himes taking a prominent role on behalf of the Democratic enablers. The sad fact is that nowadays, more than ever (as the rule almost always holds true), anything done in a “bipartisan” fashion is an imminent threat to the Republic.
A week or so ago I realized that I did not have A Whiter Shade of Pale either in my CD collection or on iTunes, and I set out to correct this massive oversight. I’ve done so, but in the process I learned a lot about this venerable song. First, I found out that the CD of the original Procol Harum album is prohibitively expensive, so I went with their Greatest Hits. But, more importantly, I learned from Wikipedia that:
It was the most played song in the last 75 years in public places in the UK (as of 2009), and the United Kingdom performing rights group Phonographic Performance Limited in 2004 recognised it as the most-played record by British broadcasting of the past 70 years.
and
More than 1000 recorded cover versions by other artists are known.
Since I got those quotes from Wikipedia, they must be true.
There is even a website devoted to cataloging these cover versions, which you can peruse here. It is truly reassuring to know that the world is big enough to contain at least one person obsessive enough to collect every version of this song ever made.
So I decided to visit youtube and find some of these cover versions. This is not unprecedented; I recall doing the same for Stephen Foster’s Hard Times Come Again No More. If you’re not interested in checking these out, skip to the last video, which will surely be worth your while, and of course, feel free to pick and choose.
I want to assure you that I’ve been selective here. Sara Brightman, who apparently has sung the song often, didn’t make the cut. Absolutely awful.
Before we start let me say that the song deserves the multiple covers, even if I can say with some assurance that I defy anyone to give a coherent explanation of the lyrics. It truly is one of the greatest rock songs ever.
First, a moment of silence for some that didn’t make the cut for reasons other than awfulness. I decided not to break the rules and post a version featuring Eric Clapton, as it has no video. For the same reason Johnny Rivers didn’t make it. Clapton’s version was great, and featured Procol Harum’s Gary Brooker on vocals. River’s wasn’t actually too bad, but the most surprising also ran was Willie Nelson, who would have made it had there been video to go along.
So, let’s start.
First, in honor of the new Pope, here’s Gregorian, giving us a slightly different take, but nonetheless an interesting one, on this worthy song:
Here’s Percy Sledge, and while I wouldn’t have come up with him as a candidate, once I saw he’d covered the song, it seemed like a natural fit.
As did Joe Cocker:
We can’t be parochial about this. Here’s an Italian guy I never heard of named Claudio Baglioni teaming up with Michael Bolton:
Before we get to the finale, here’s an instrumental version by King Curtis and the Kingpins:
Now, the video you’ve all been waiting for. As the old song said, the original is still the greatest. Brooker sounds the same now as he did back in 1967. This was recorded in 2006 in Denmark. The group is backed by the Danish National Concert Orchestra. It’s just great.
Sometimes, a bloggers life is not a happy one. On those days, becoming more frequent of late, that I have trouble bestirring myself to comment on the sad state of the world, I feel a vague sense of guilt, as if I have some obligation to satisfy the reading requirements of what is a largely non-existent readership. These days, life is tough. As Yogi Berra probably could have said, it’s always deja vu all over again. The gun bill won’t see the light of day, or maybe it will, but either way it will go down to defeat, Harry Reid is mysteriously disappointed that his toothless filibuster reform has proven to be—wait for it– toothless, Wall Street Banks are still too big to prosecute, and our media is still too easily led astray by the memes propagated in the Beltway to distract them, and by extension the American people, from the real problems we face, and the real solutions to those problems. What else is new?
So, something completely different, and rather cool:
A nine-year-old girl has had a prehistoric beast named in her honour after fossilised bones she found turned out to be an undiscovered species.
Daisy Morris from the Isle of Wight stumbled upon the remains on Atherfield beach four years ago.
A scientific paper stated the newly discovered species of pterosaur would be called Vectidraco daisymorrisae.
Fossil expert Martin Simpson said this was an example of how “major discoveries can be made by amateurs”.
Daisy’s mum Sian Morris said her daughter had started fossil hunting aged three and came across the blackened “bones sticking out of the sand” in 2009, when she was four years old.
Apparently the Vectidraco daisymorrisae represents a brand spanking new genus, so Daisy’s achievement is quite impressive.
There is no obvious political component to this story, but it was so neat I had to pass it on in lieu of engaging in another futile rant. It brings back happy memories of my younger son, who spent several years living with a dinosaur obsession. Alas, he never discovered a species of his own and at some point his ardor cooled, for he is not now, nor will he ever be a paleontologist. Still, while the obsession lasted, it was great fun.
In August 2008, as the right wing of the Republican Party grew increasingly disenchanted with the party’s direction, the men from Russo, Marsh and Associates sensed opportunity: They created a political action committee, Our Country Deserves Better, and in time launched the Tea Party Express.
Russo, Marsh—an established California outfit of Republican consultants—was just getting started. The firm formed a second political committee, this one with a pro-military agenda. And eventually, seizing on the President’s unpopularity in certain circles, they opened a third, the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama.
Throughout the 2012 election cycle, the committees were relentless. In email after email, they pleaded for small donations to run ads supporting candidates who would defeat President Obama’s “socialist” agenda. And it worked: They collected more than $14 million in donations – from all over the country, and from donors who gave as little as $10 to elect Ted Cruz as a Republican senator from Texas or to put Mitt Romney in the White House.
Yet an examination of the PACs’ expenditures shows they spent a small percentage of the money they raised on work directly aimed at getting candidates elected – paid ads, say, or contributions to other political committees. Mainly, they paid consultants. And the biggest chunk of that consultant money went to Russo, Marsh and Associates, and people connected to the firm.
Of the $9.3 million spent by Our Country Deserves Better, more than $3.8 million went to Russo, Marsh and Associates, employees or others connected to the firm. Of the $3.9 million spent by the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama, $2.4 million went to the firm and its associates. The pro-military Move America Forward Freedom PAC spent almost $143,000. Of that, $92,000 went to the firm and people connected to it.
If there’s anything like this on our side, it’s well hidden. If you’re interested in grifting, after all, you go where the marks are. It would be interesting to know how far the right wing dollar goes compared to a dollar donated to progressives. Maybe their money advantage is not as great as it looks.
Ultra-secret national security letters that come with a gag order on the recipient are an unconstitutional impingement on free speech, a federal judge in California ruled in a decision released Friday.
U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ordered the government to stop issuing so-called NSLs across the board, in a stunning defeat for the Obama administration’s surveillance practices. She also ordered the government to cease enforcing the gag provision in any other cases. However, she stayed her order for 90 days to give the government a chance to appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The judge is obviously right, but I wouldn’t bet money on this ruling surviving on appeal. The Ninth Circuit might go along, but not the Supremes, unless their Obama hatred gets the better of them. Sometimes good things happen for bad reasons.
Sarah Palin has raised the art of grifting to a new high, and we lefties couldn’t be happier:
These days, many of Palin’s Facebook posts are about her family’s latest exploits; her scorching political missives seem fewer and farther between. Her political action committee, Sarah PAC, collected about $5 million during the 2012 election cycle, most of which went to operating expenses. Palin’s PAC sent just $306,000 to Republican candidates during the cycle, including the maximum of $5,000 to Romney for President – on Oct. 17, 2012, just 20 days before the election.
Keep in mind, “operating expenses” in this context means supporting Sarah in the style to which she’s become accustomed. So, that’s about $4,694,000.00 that she drained from the pool of money available to help Republicans. I know it seems like they have an infinite supply, but that’s still a lot of money, and it mostly came from people who probably couldn’t afford to donate elsewhere. After all, the smart money has moved beyond Sarah.