It's Friday, and that means it's time for our weekly dose of plagiarism speculation, Friday Night Ripoffs (?), though I must say that the question mark barely belongs this week.
Tom Petty has a respectable row of great songs well past his career's 15 year mark, and Mary Jane's Last Dance (1993) heads the list. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, on the other hand, have had a barrage of mostly tossed off, derivative and sterile Grammy-winning drivel since 1991's Blood Sugar Sex Magick, and "Dani California" heads that list. If you think the similarity of the first verses of these songs is merely coincidental, please inquire about the bridge in Brooklyn I am trying to sell.
Anyway, good artists borrow and great artists steal, and without a healthy dose of both, we would've missed out on a lot of great songs over the years. I can hardly fault the Peppers for wanting to build on Petty's gem. Leave some suggestions for next week's finger-pointing in the comments.
It's long been speculated that there was more to Rolling Stones guitarists death than a bad combination of drugs, alcohol and a swimming pool -- see above clip from Crimewatch in 1994. However, new developments have led Sussex police to re-examine Jones's death, the BBC reports.
Police in Sussex were handed new information connected to the musician's untimely death 40 years ago.
Mr Jones, was found dead at the bottom of a swimming pool at a house in Cotchford farm, Hartfield, East Sussex.
An inquest recorded a verdict of death by misadventure but speculation continued that he was murdered.
A spokesman for Sussex police said the force had been handed documents connected with Jones's death, prompting the review.
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(In Warsaw an eerie and perplexing calm)
As diplomatic attempts kept going up to the eleventh hour, preparations were being made for the eventuality of war.
The news was filled with precaution and speculation. The broadcasts on this entry start with BBC World Service news, followed by a report from commentator Arthur Mann for Mutual and then Sigrid Schultz reporting from Berlin and finally a newscast from the North American service of Radio Berlin.
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(Celebrating a few days early)
Back to basic history today - August 10, 1945 was when everyone got their hopes up World War 2 was finally over.
Well, no - not for a few days. Speculation was rife that the Japanese Government had accepted the Allied ultimatum, hot on the heels of the Atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki only days earlier.
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(Lest we all forget - only thirty-five years ago)
Hard to imagine it was only thirty-five years ago that President Nixon announced his resignation. It certainly answered weeks of speculation and the end to a long and bitter fight that erupted in the White House and almost took the country down with it.
Nixon: "I have never been a quitter - to leave office now is abhorrent to everything in my body. But . . . . "
I'm not sure we actually ever recovered from Watergate and the Nixon years. To many, it seems to be the gift that just keeps on giving.
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Media Matters' Karl Frisch takes us through just how the right wing noise machine works, and a photo that starts out being criticized on Free Republic ends up making its way into the main stream media.
A classic example of how the right-wing noise machine works was unfolding before the American people. A non-story starts on a right-wing website and works its way into the mainstream. It usually involves Drudge, the fedora-wearing boy who cries wolf (almost daily) on the Internet, and mainstream news outlets follow his lead, offering up under-researched and factually inaccurate story lines.
Had the mainstream media done their job -- you know, checking the video to get the context from which the photo was taken -- they would have clearly seen that Obama was attempting to navigate high steps, while reaching back to help someone behind him do so as well. As Fox News host Greta Van Susteren said after airing video of the event, "Yes, a still picture can lie. And this one does."
Of course, the next morning after Van Susteren's show, the Fox & Friends crew went right back to trashing the president with lascivious speculation that was contradicted by easily accessible fact.
Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty held a press conference this afternoon to tell the media that he's not planning on running for a third term for governor.
A source close to Republican Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty confirms to First Read that Pawlenty will announce today that he will not be running for a third term in 2010.
This announcement, of course, will raise speculation about whether Pawlenty plans to spend the next three years preparing for a presidential bid in 2012.[..]
Pawlenty gave a firebrand speech at the Republican Governor’s Association meeting in Miami, a week after the party’s sound November election losses. He gave some tough medicine to the party, saying, “It needs to get younger, more diverse and build a broader coalition,” we wrote at the time. "If we're going to successfully travel the road, as a Republican,” he said at the time, “we need to see clearly, and be honest about where we've been and where we're headed. … If we're going to be the majority, we're going to have to see we need to grow the party. We cannot compete in the Northeast, the West; we're losing seats in the Great Lakes region. We have a large deficit with women, Hispanics, African Americans -- people with modest financial circumstances. That is not a formula for a majority." In the halls at the meeting, Pawlenty was lukewarm toward another potential 2012 GOP candidate, Sarah Palin. In fact, during his speech “he delivered a line that might sound like an opening 2012 shot at Palin,” we wrote then.
"'Drill baby, drill' by itself is not an energy policy," he said. "It's not enough. We're going to need wind and solar and bio mass."
Pawlenty neglects to mention that even if he did dare try for a third term, he'd be unlikely to win re-election. Just a few days ago he acknowledged to local press that winning a third term would be an uphill battle, even though last year he has said he'd make his decision in early '09. His continued support of Coleman hasn't helped him at all in his state. The Minnesota DFLs tell Pawlenty "Don't let the door hit you..."
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(Not thrilled to be there)
As the numbers swelled into the hundreds of thousands, the political tug-of-war continued. The students called off their hunger strike and rumors were everywhere. Deng Xiao Peng fell in step with the hardliners and pledged to break up the demonstration by sending in troops at dawn on the 21st if the student leaders didn't quit.
Dawn came and went and the PLA were still outside the city limits of Beijing, reluctant to move against the students, with thousands of students swarming to meet the troops pleading with them to join them. The waiting game was in full gear.
Here are clips from May 19-21, with reports and speculation flooding the airwaves.
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There's no blithering un-self-awareness quite like right-wing blithering un-self-awareness.
Especially when Bill O'Reilly's part of the program, as he was during The O'Reilly Factor last night. He opened with a scathing attack on the New York Times for its own scathing cartoon.
Somewhat hilariously, O'Reilly speculates wildly about the effects of the release of the photos of prisoners being tortured, saying it's "beyond question" that American servicemen and women abroad will be harmed because their publication will foment so much resentment -- even though, of course, he can produce no evidence to support that speculation at all.
Nonetheless, it's enough for O'Reilly to call the cartoon an "atrocity" and "garbage" and accuse the Times of "pushing a hateful, far-left agenda," while the heads of the Times, NBC, and other "far left" outfits are "doing an enormous amount of damage to this country" and are "haters."
Then he invites on Karl Rove to talk about that NYT cartoon, and Karl happily obliges by making the subsequent attack on NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger as vicious and personal as he can:
O'Reilly: What did you think when you saw that cartoon in the New York Times yesterday of the Statue of Liberty with a whip? What did you think of that?
Rove: I thought Pinch Sulzberger was right to worry about why he had to sell his building and his stock is in the toilet, and I'm glad it is.
O'Reilly: But weren't you offended as an American? I mean, that is just the lowest!
Rove: Look look look, I'm from Texas! I've met this little Pinch Sulzberger. He is an elitist, effete snob, who thinks he knows better than the rest of America and has views that are distinctly outside the mainstream of what America's all about.
No, it seemed the entire Village was in an uproar. Especially over at Fox, where the dismay was universal. Especially funny on Fox's All Star Panel yesterday afternoon was Morton Kondracke, the Faux Designated Liberal, who blamed it all on MoveOn.org and the liberal bloggers.
Oh, and NBC and the New York Times, too.
Wait. Can we blame it on the French somehow too, while we're at it?
The NYT today has a speculative piece on how each candidate might build their White House team. Most commentary on the article so far has focussed on a possible Obama cabinet - mainly because McCain's campaign just seems to be "going through the motions" at this stage. It quotes anonymous advisers (aren't they always?):
Obama advisers mention Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, as a possible White House chief of staff, and Timothy F. Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as Treasury secretary. To demonstrate bipartisanship, advisers said Mr. Obama might ask two members of President Bush’s cabinet to stay, including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.
...Mr. Obama has several possibilities for White House chief of staff, most notably Mr. Daschle, his close adviser, although that could be complicated because Mr. Daschle’s wife is a lobbyist. Other possibilities mentioned by Democrats include Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, former Commerce Secretary William M. Daley and Mr. Obama’s Senate chief of staff, Pete Rouse. Mr. Podesta, who held the job under President Bill Clinton, could also be recruited for another tour of duty.
Besides Mr. Gates, some Obama advisers favor keeping Dr. James B. Peake, the veterans affairs secretary. But Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. has made clear to colleagues that he has no desire to stay on no matter who wins, and neither nominee is inclined to ask him, associates say. Instead, Obama advisers are weighing a short-term appointment of an elder statesman to get through the current crisis and help instill confidence in global markets. The names being mentioned include the former Federal Reserve chief Paul A. Volcker and former Treasury Secretaries Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers.
Matt Y is sure it'll be a fresher face at the Treasury, though, and Booman is sure he doesn't want gates to continue as SecDef even though he thinks he's done a creditable job as one of the very few adults in the Bush administration. I'm not going to argue with either of them.
Looking at a possible McCain administration, there's a couple of names that jump out as "not just no, but F**k No!"
Many Republicans believe Mr. McCain would bring his top campaign staff with him to the White House, including Rick Davis, the campaign manager, whose history as a lobbyist has come up repeatedly during the election. Others who would most likely accompany Mr. McCain to the White House include Mark Salter, his adviser and alter ego; Douglas Holtz-Eakin, his economics adviser; and Randy Scheunemann, his national security adviser.
I've no real objection to Holtz-Eakin, although he's a campaign shill who is holding a book until after the election that, no matter what his boss might say on the stump, admits the next administration is going to have to raise taxes if it wants the books to be anywhere near balanced.
But Rick Davis - friend to Russian oligarchs and Italian fraudsters - would probably get tapped as McCain's chief of staff, which would in short order explode the myth of the maverick reformer, bane of K Street, and should give even conservatives collywobbles. And Scheunemann as NSA? My mind positively reels over the many conflicts this war-boosting, lobbying neocon could embroil America in.
It's just as well that the McCain campaign are treating transition as a purely intellectual exercise and that the wider conservative base are settling down to four years of Clenis-esque innuendo, argument from assumption, and downrightparanoidmythmaking to excuse their own abject failure in being a viable alternative for government.
Back in August 2007, Obama outlined his criteria for choosing a cabinet at a private rally.
Over at TPMCafe, Elizabeth Warren has a new theory to throw into the bailout ring:
At a Harvard panel discussion yesterday, economics professor Ken Rogoff made an interesting point: The liquidity crisis isn't real. Or, to restate it: Any liquidity crisis is caused by the promise of a government bailout. Ken said that his many friends in investment banking said that there is plenty of money to invest in financial services, but right now it is "sitting on the sidelines." Why? Because the financial services industry does not want to pay the terms demanded. As he put it, why do business with Warren Buffett who will negotiate a tough deal, if you believe that the government will ride in soon with cheaper cash?
Now, I think Rogoff is exaggerating some here - waiting for a bailout is not the sole cause of the problem, because the problem was there before anyone talked of a bailout - but he has some goodly part of a point now that a bailout seems imminent.
And this is partly why only a bailout "in exchange for equity stake" plan makes any kind of sense. Once they're faced with losing sizable amounts of their company shares to the government as stakeholder, we'll see that Rogoff is partly right and financiers will suddenly decide that some of their "toxic debt" isn't so smelly after all if they're going to be punished for offloading it. Then, if the bankers think they can make more money for themselves from using their own money to inject liquidity into the system than by letting the government do it at a cost in shares, we'll see credit markets unfreeze some of their own accord. It's like Pavlovian conditioning for financiers.
That in turn means any rescue attempt - which I still think has to happen in some form, although I favor Bernie Sanders' version - can be smaller and fits perfectly with the Dem plan to allocate money in tranches.
