Hank Williams, Jr. has put his new album of mostly Tea Party-themed I-Hate-the-President music, Old School New Rules, on YouTube. You may not be able to get through it. But I listened for you.
Readers may or may not remember Hank lost one of his big money gigs last year, getting tossed as the opening theme to Monday Night Football, for comparing the President to Hitler. Country music did not rally to his cause.
And it won’t this time. Because while the genre and fans won’t tolerate the Dixie Chicks, and even went out of their way to ruin them, they also won’t publicly indulge anything like him.
Darryl Worley found it out with Keep the Change, an anti-Obama single he peddled to the Tea Party, hoping grass roots interest would force country music radio and television to play it. (If Worley made a penny of business value for every play on the fan-made video for it, he’s grossed about 2300 dollars. Boosted to a dime per play it’s still a sub-poverty wage for one office worker with a family. So while the numbers superficially looked like support from the standpoint of a major label artist who had previously had a hit single, they meant nothing.)
The best Darryl Worley could manage was an appearance on Huckabee. His record, promised after the release of the “Keep the Change” single never materialized. Instead, his company went out of business.
Like with Worley, Hank’s dilemma is that country music is emotionally embalmed. (He has also stupidly put his old anti-Obama tune with the exact same title, “Keep the Change,” on the new LP. It smells strongly of desperation.)
It’s classic rock refugee music for white people desperate to hold onto the delusion that if they’re just good enough, family-loving, God worshiping, hard workers, everything will turn out right in the end.
And what strikes fear in them is the wisp of any idea that this isn’t the way things are, that the country they think they live in hasn’t been the way they thought for a long time. Reality, looming over everyone like an unstoppable slow motion avalanche, threatens everything they believe in.
The music must therefore remain cheesy comfort.
Hank Williams Jr. is cheesy but not a comfort. And if there are songs that blame the President for everything, tunes that vow vengeance at the voting booth — well, the audience might find it agreeable privately but they won’t buy it and country music radio won’t play it. All the buxom young cut-off wearing girls on the summer tour circuit will find the mood harshed by Hank’s clumsy song to the small businessman, “Who’s Lookin’ Out for Number One.”
Counry music fans just don’t, don’t, don’t want trouble.
And Hank’s music is angry and a bit psychologically troubling but also not that great, expertly played by ringers and sung in two ways, either as a smooth ham or a mild boor tilting at the government.
In other words, if you want to have a genuine shit fit maybe you should really have one, instead of a big Nashville-session-man-and-buddies-middle-of-the-road imitation of it.
“I want to dedicate this song to every working man and woman in this country and everyone trying to run a business constantly punished, taxed and regulated by the federal government,” declares Hank Jr on the previously mentioned small businessman’s anthem.
“Our glorious leader just got back from China and Japan where he gave away our jobs, put us down and sold out our plans,” he sings. “We don’t need to be givin’ all that money away to other folks.”
It just doesn’t work as catchy music.
The first tune, “Takin’ Back the Country,” features his dead dad, autotuned. One presumes a few people in the studio thought this a bad idea but declined to say anything on the matter.
Hank Williams, Jr would desperately love Cow Turd Blues, from his new album, to be a Tea Party anthem.
This week, we learned that Mitt Romney and the Republican Party outraised us for the second month in a row. This time, it was by more than $35 million.
Now, we don’t need to win the fundraising race to beat Mitt Romney. But the gap is growing at an alarming rate, and if we don’t start closing that gap right now, it will be too late.
It’s up to you.
President Obama and Democrats across the country are counting on our grassroots operation. Please donate $3 or more today.
In 2008, we showed that elections can be waged, and won, based on the idea that many voices could overpower those of a few.
And it worked.
This year, we need to prove it in the face of unprecedented spending from super PACs and outside groups. We need to show that ordinary people can still control the outcome of an election.
I hope you’re ready to fight — one supporter, one dollar at a time.
Let’s show what we’re made of. Pitch in whatever you can to help close the fundraising gap today:
Hildy Kuryk, the daughter of Judith Frisch Kuryk and David Kuryk, both of New York, is to be married this evening to Jarrod Neal Bernstein, a son of Roberta and Edward Bernstein of Merrick, N.Y. Rabbi Joseph Menashe is to officiate at Sky Studios, a loft in New York.
The bride, 29, is a political fund-raiser in New York. She is the senior New York finance consultant for Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. She graduated from Vanderbilt.
Her father is the director of editorial services at Barnes & Noble in New York, where he writes documents for the corporate communications department. Her mother retired as a creative director at Grey Advertising in New York.
Every other day, the Daily Dun depreciates a little more, the salami sliced a little thinner. From $5, now to $3.
On Tuesday, the US Olympic Committee officially unveiled the threads Team USA will be wearing during the Opening and Closing Ceremony Parade at the London Olympics this summer. As usual, the uniforms have drawn mixed reviews. Similar to the way people felt at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, some are saying they reek of military propaganda while others appreciate the nostalgic feel of the navy blazers, white pants and berets. Those are simply opinions, but the fact of the matter is the uniforms are made in China.
While they were designed in America by the famous Ralph Lauren himself, the US athletes will be covered in head to toe with garments and accessories that are labeled “Made in China.??? Like many others, US fashion designer Nanette Lepore said she is shocked that the uniform manufacturing was outsourced.
“These days, Romney rails against China for swiping American jobs and proclaims, ‘For me, it’s all about good jobs for the American people,'” it reads.
China didn’t swipe the jobs. We sold the jobs.
But who would believe what Mitt Romney says, anyway? In fact, if he said something, you would be safer in believing the opposite, on any subject.
It recommended everyone write their Congressman to join a number of radical House Republicans in an investigation of Muslim infiltration of the US government.
Brewing for a few months, we’ll get to the culprits/instigators in a minute.
Rep. Michele Bachmann says the Muslim Brotherhood, the international Islamist movement that recently came to power in Egypt, has made “deep penetration??? within the U.S. government, and she wants an investigation of its influence within five federal agencies …
[Bachmann,] R-Stillwater, and four other members of Congress see the Muslim Brotherhood as a domestic threat.
The lawmakers singled out the movement last month in letters to federal defense, diplomatic, intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, requesting investigations into whether — and through whom — the Muslim Brotherhood is exerting influence within President Barack Obama’s administration …
Bachmann’s letters are addressed to the inspectors general — the independent offices within federal agencies responsible for ensuring they operate efficiently and legally — for the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice and State, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Reps. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, Thomas Rooney, R-Fla., and Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga., joined Bachmann in cosigning the letters, which cite people or actions by the agencies that raise the lawmakers’ concerns.
The letter to the State Department singles out Huma Abedin, a deputy chief of staff for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and asserts that three of Abedin’s family members are connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. It says Abedin’s position affords her access to Clinton, and adds that the department has “taken actions recently that have been enormously favorable to the Muslim Brotherhood and its interests.???
The letter to the Department of Defense charges the U.S. Army with failing to “characterize accurately the jihadist motivations??? of Major Nidal Hassan, the alleged Fort Hood shooter …
The GOP extremists have been pursuing Abedin, the wife of the disgraced Anthony Weiner, for months.
Did you know Islamic subversion is infiltrating the highest levels of US government?
Today, Bill Gertz of the Washington Times published the claim that Hillary Clinton might be associated with it, all revealed in a course offered by Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy and Islam-o-phobe Frank Gaffney.
Gaffney’s a birther. And [for the past few years] a great deal of his business [has been] centered around the alleged security threat of shariah-law permeating the US justice system.
Wrote Gertz, for the WaTimes:
Islamists linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and similar groups are working to undermine the U.S. government through “civilization jihad??? aimed at imposing Islamic law rule in the United States.
That is the conclusion of a new 10-part online video course produced by the Center for Security Policy (CSP), a Washington think tank, that was made public Tuesday.
The briefing-style educational video, “The Muslim Brotherhood in America: The Enemy Within,??? features lectures by CSP chief Frank Gaffney.
The video includes a detailed section on “Team Obama??? that identifies six people working close to or inside the Obama administration that the course says are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood or similar Islamist groups through numerous front organizations.
They include Rashad Hussein, special envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation; Huma Abedin, deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton …
The GOP’s new McCarthy’s have not ignited the same hysteria the original did in 1950 in what is recognized as one of the very dark moments from US history.
But it has not been for lack of trying.
The Islam-o-phobes pursue their persecutions with great tenacity, making up claims based on fictions, all for the tarring of enemies. Directly, they have been responsible for absurd anti-shariah law party platform planks and legislation in states controlled by the GOP/Tea Party. They’re a disgrace to the nation.
But one can guarantee that whatever the oral or written response is from the various government agencies targeted by the new McCarthy’s, it won’t be the end of the matter.
The misconduct of the financial industry no longer surprises most Americans. Only about one in five has much trust in banks, according to Gallup polls, about half the level in 2007. And it’s not just banks that are frowned upon. Trust in big business overall is declining. Sixty-two percent of Americans believe corruption is widespread across corporate America. According to Transparency International, an anticorruption watchdog, nearly three in four Americans believe that corruption has increased over the last three years.
We should be alarmed that corporate wrongdoing has come to be seen as such a routine occurrence. Capitalism cannot function without trust. As the Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow observed, “Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust.???
The parade of financiers accused of misdeeds, booted from the executive suite and even occasionally jailed, is undermining this essential element. Have corporations lost whatever ethical compass they once had? Or does it just look that way because we are paying more attention than we used to?
The story is not the best the Times could have done.
The truth is more complicated. In anonymous polls, and to friends at home, a majority of Americans may say they don’t trust corporate America. However, in public it’s another matter.
My frequent impression is that, no matter how poorly they have been treated by a rigged economic system, many resent being told it is that way because of moral failure in big business.
Pity the Billionaire portrays it well. When many people were the most riled up about the economic collapse, they were told a fabulist’s story on how it was big government’s fault. And that if big government hadn’t been so corrupt and tyrannical, the banks would have never had to give all those loans to people who didn’t deserve them.
Pure unfettered capitalism is the answer and the economic collapse occurred because we no longer had it.
If, indeed, Americans distrust corporate America, why is it so easy to find examples like the pugnacious-looking fellow in Mean Future, marching along with his absurd “I Love Capitalism” sign?
“It’s hard to fathom the broader social implications of corporate wrongdoing,” reads the chin-scratcher at the Times. “But its most long-lasting impact may be on Americans’ trust in the institutions that underpin the nation’s liberal market democracy.”
Even the journalist, given an opportunity to state the obvious, hedges his bets. Working and playing in Wall Street’s backyard, he has too much to lose.
“This is stewpit blah blah blah,” wrote a 61 year-old white guy before I sent him to the trash can.
We’re getting outraised — a first for a sitting president, if this continues. Not just by the super PACs and outside groups that are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into misleading ads, but by our opponent and the Republican Party, which just outraised us for the second month in a row.
We can win a race in which the other side spends more than we do. But not this much more.
So I need your help. If you believe that regular people should decide elections, then please chip in $4 or more today.
This isn’t about me or the outcome of one election.
This election will be a test of the model that got us here. We’ll learn whether it’s still true that a grassroots campaign can elect a president — whether ordinary Americans are in control of our democracy in the face of massive spending.
I believe we can do this. When all of us chip in what we can, when we can, we are the most powerful force in politics.
But today is the day to prove it. Donate now:
https://donate.barackobama.com/Outraised
Thank you — for everything you’ve done before and everything you’re doing now. It matters.
Barack
Mr. President, can’t help. Broke and strapped in the economy that makes and does nothing except sell apps, smartphones, financial services, arms and artisan goods for the wealthy.
But you’re on the right track. Be more populist, I know it’s hard. Play the class warfare hand for everything. It may not be too late.
Mitt Romney should have been an easy mark but you tried to work with the enemy and they tied you up and imposed their will on the country through paralysis, sabotaging the economy and you.
Now you must spend all your time pointing out the obvious, that Mitt Romney is as odious an example of great wealth and indifference toward everyone else in 2012 America as there is.
That might win it. But I won’t be part of the crowd-sourced money thing anymore. I don’t have the juice to fight Citizens United and crazy right-wing sugar daddies, not even close. And if I’m going to be another grain of sand on the beach at least it will be with another four dollars in my pocket. No more celebrity lottery tickets. I don’t believe in them anymore than I believe that if I drop a few extra at the liquor store on a state-issued piece of paper it might pay off.
In fact, that’s what the automated Daily Dun means to me. Another day at the liquor store watching someone else stupidly purchase a Five Dollar Scratcher. I’ll keep that cash money and buy something cheap and intoxicating at Trader Joe’s instead.
I know I am setting a bad example but in this way I do my part to help the economy keep limping along.
And I’ve given you this funny little story and a song.
David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, his account of the policy-makers in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and the nature of the Vietnam disaster, is a classic on the delusions of American power. Everything Halberstam described then is present today. Only conditions and decision-making at the highest level are more deteriorated.
This voluminous book maps the roots of the war in post WWII decision making and American dealings in China as the communist insurgency battled with an American client named Chiang Kai Shek, a man who’d been an ally against the Japanese.
Th Americans on the ground in China, diplomats and old soldiers like Joe Stilwell, knew the Chinese detested Chiang, a descendant of mandarins, and that there was no popular support for him. China was going to crumble, the communists were going to win and take power. Despite having people who knew the score the US government backed the wrong horse.
Truman became known as the President who lost China to communism.
The McCarthy era was ushered in and everyone who had a rational idea about what to do in southeast Asia was either tarred or banished in the hysteria over alleged communist infiltration of US government.
As a result, America’s leaders, including those in the Eisenhoiwer and Kennedy administrations, refused to view the Vietnam insurgency, first with the Vietminh against France and later the Vietcong in the south, as an anti-colonial struggle deeply rooted in the people of that country.
Only the views that Communism was monolithic, that every Communist country was exactly the same as Joe Stalin’s Soviet Union, were allowed to prevail.
Thus was born the Domino Theory, as countries — one after another, tipping into each other — would be said to fall if the Communists were not stopped in one poor small nation which had waged an endless war to free itself from western colonialism.
Anyone with dissenting views was purged or learned to be silent. The role of the State Department became virtually non-existent, except as an adjunct to the Pentagon.
The decision-makers held the beliefs, common now, that American technological supremacy and military might were the only answers. The government became obsessed with quantifying the unquantifiable, believing that if enough bodies were amassed (today, it’s the tabulation of al Qaeda and Taliban leaders killed in drone strikes, always advertised as a new kind of war), enough tonnage in bombs dropped, the Vietcong would be beaten.
Reports from the field that programs like the making of “strategic hamlets” in the Mekong Delta were a complete failure, that the Vietcong were much better than the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, that the enemy controlled most of the places continuously claimed to be pacified by the US military, that the natives — as with the Chiang government in China, despised the Diem government in Saigon, were either sanitized or completely suppressed. Critics were silenced. If you were right, you were fired. If you were wrong you were promoted.
Today there is no David Halberstam, or Neil Sheehan or Malcolm Browne to make news reports and books that would expose such matters.
Still, news can be gleaned of the same fossilized strategy at the top, the poisoning of critical thinking so that nothing is allowed to get in the way of the prosecution of war.
The US isn’t fighting communism and it is not in a country struggling to rid itself of foreign interference. Vietnam deeply damaged faith in the US military as an institution. It had cost 60,000 lives. Today, American faith in the military remains high, one assumes at least part due to the fact that almost all of us have not had to go to war. In the Sixties many Americans could name General William Westmoreland and Secretary of Defense Bob McNamara. Today nobody knows the names of American fighting generals. And only perhaps slightly over half of the educated could probably name the fellow who is the definition of the
civilian functionary, the Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta.
But al Qaeda has been substituted for communism and the endless battleground has become the failed states of the Middle East, Asia and Africa
In these places, the war can never end because all insurgencies and very little wars between bad people are viewed through a dark lens created on 9/11, one that colors the world much as the old Cold Warriors saw communism, a monolithic threat that can only be smashed by the immediate application of military power before it poses a threat to the homeland.
With such thinking ascendant every failed country becomes a place where the line must be held.
[The] crash in Mali has revealed some details of the commandos’ clandestine activities that apparently had little to do with counterterrorism. The women killed in the wreck were identified as Moroccan prostitutes who had been riding with the soldiers, according to a senior Army official and a U.S. counterterrorism consultant briefed on the incident, both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
U.S. counterterrorism officials have long worried about Mali, a weakly governed country of 14.5 million people that has served as a refuge for Islamist militants allied with al-Qaeda.
With only 6,000 poorly equipped troops, the Malian armed forces have always struggled to maintain control of their territory, about twice the size of Texas …
About six years ago, the Pentagon began bolstering its overt aid and training programs in Mali, as well as its clandestine operations …
In what would have represented a significant escalation of U.S. military involvement in Mali, the Pentagon also considered a secret plan in 2009 to embed American commandos with Malian ground troops, diplomatic cables show.
Under that program, code-named Oasis Enabler, U.S. military advisers would conduct anti-terrorism operations alongside elite, American-trained Malian units. But the idea was rejected by Gillian A. Milovanovic, the ambassador to Mali at the time.
In an October 2009 meeting in Bamako with Vice Adm. Robert T. Moeller, deputy chief of the Africa Command, the ambassador called the plan “extremely problematic,??? adding that it could create a popular backlash and “risk infuriating??? neighbors such as Algeria.
It might as well be taken from the pages of The Best and the Brightest in its disregard of the State Department in favor of whatever the US military wishes to do.
Once again, the military, which runs our wars, as decades ago, brooks no interference. The security bureaucracy wants someone from the State Department ousted. After more than a decade of war, the US military and national security leadership are now as rotted as they were during Vietnam.
Paradoxically, it’s Richard Holbrooke who the military core of Obama’s advisory group wanted deposed. Holbrooke was actually a young man at the Paris peace talks which were the beginning of the end of the US involvement in Vietnam. Only intervention by the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, momentarily saved his job, according to the Post’s reporter. Eventually the military’s problem was solved: Holbrooke died two years ago.
As in Vietnam, where the people loathed the government propped up by American forces, the Afghan people — logically — despise the American toady in Kabul, Hamid Karzai. If there was any goodwill after the Taliban were overthrown, it was lost many years ago:
In Afghanistan, the military surge, argues Chandrasekaran, was a mistake.
“What we fail to understand was that the Afghan people largely wanted to be left alone and they hate their government, in many cases, as much as they hate the insurgents. And when we went to them and said, ‘Ah, we’re coming here to help bring your government to you.’ They said, ‘Whoa we don’t want our government!’
It’s presented as diverting froth from the war on terror, something to be clucked over on the evening news for a few minutes. And so it will be taken.
This morning it was Anne Marie Habershaw, asking for four bucks. This afternoon, it’s Patrick Gaspard of the DNC, depreciating the request to three dollars, perhaps detecting a loss of enthusiasm among the crowd-sourced:
George —
Our fundraising numbers from June are in. Along with President Obama’s campaign, we raised $71 million, making this month our biggest yet. That’s something to be proud of.
But we still got beat. Mitt Romney and the Republican Party raised more than $106 million — making it the second month in a row that they outraised us, this time by $35 million.
That’s a big gap. And if we don’t do everything we can to close it now, we risk losing more than just a fundraising race in November.
Donate $3 or more today to close the gap.
We’ve got to do everything we can to put a stop to the Republican momentum — so donate $3 or whatever you can to close the gap. It can’t wait another day …
The looming $500bn US defence budget cut is already paralysing company investment and hiring decisions and would have a devastating effect if it came into force at the start of next year, defence industry executives warned on Sunday.
Dennis Muilenburg, president and chief executive of Boeing Defense, Space and Security, the US’s second largest defence contractor by sales, said on the eve of the Farnborough Air Show: “Sequester will have a devastating impact …???
So far the industry has been cautious about offending its biggest customer, with many of its warnings coming from Bob Stevens, chief executive of Lockheed Martin, who will retire before any sequester would come into effect …
The message from industry is that defence cuts mean lost jobs.
Here’s the story over the last few years. Any government “stimulus” is bad and doesn’t create jobs, which is a lie, but bear with me. But all government “stimulus” that goes to arms manufacturers is necessary and good, so we don’t shed jobs.
Ted Nugent’s rock fans are the bottom out-of-sight riff-raff and wife-beaters of American country fairs, casinos and dive bars. After years of playing to them as a musician in Nugent’s band, and having to deal with Ted himself, I would think it understandable if you drank heavily:
People are always fleeing police, but usually it’s in a vehicle where they have a chance to get away. That wasn’t the case for Mick Brown, drummer for Ted Nugent, who tried to make his escape in a golf cart, according to the Bangor, Maine police department.
According to the police department, Brown, 55, reportedly stole a golf cart after a Bangor concert featuring Nugent, Styx and REO Speedwagon at Bangor’s waterfront pavilion.
Brown, who was reportedly intoxicated, evaded several people who tried to stop him and somehow picked up two women along the way, the department says on its Facebook page …
Brown was arrested and later released on $4,000 bail, and faces a court date of Aug. 15 for charges of operating under the influence of alcohol, driving to endanger, theft, and assault …
Ted Nugent himself has been in the news lately for his political opinions, most recently for suggesting that the South should have won the Civil War.
Q: Michigan hasn’t gone Republican in a presidential election since 1988 and has been decidedly Democratic in the most recent presidential elections. However, recent polls suggest the state is up for grabs. Why do you think that is?
“Even those feeble-mined Michiganiacs on the receiving end of the government’s communist offenses of redistribution are waking up to how unfair and suicidal this system is for any meaningful quality of life in MI and America. This waking up is alarming all smart people to the disastrous results of the liberal democrats’ destruction of our great state.
