RIP: Paul Newman

I am weeping real tears right now. This is devastating news.

The sequence in this video is my favorite in “The Hustler”. It is the heart of this great film, and one of my favorite sequences in any movie ever made. What an amazing performance Paul gives here, along with George C. Scott and Jackie Gleason.

Paul Newman was a close friend and colleague of my mother, and I first met him at the age of ten when she brought me to work with her one night on the set of “The Hustler”. He and Joanne would have dinner at our New York City apartment regularly. And early in my career as a sound re-recording mixer I had the privilege of working with Paul on two of the films that he directed, “Harry & Son” and “The Glass Menagerie”, and also the sequel to “The Hustler”, Marty Scorsese’s “The Color Of Money”.

Paul was an intelligent and articulate progressive. He had an amazing sense of humor and was a real professional, and a real gentleman. I will always value the time I had to spend with him. The work he did as an actor and a director, as well as what he did with his humanitarian food company, will live on for generations.

Rest in peace, Fast Eddie.

Are You Ready To Play, “Wall Street Reckoning?”

I’ve never seen of heard or Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) before this morning, but I’ve got to say, when they say that we need to elect more and better Democrats, Rep. Kaptur is the kind of Democrat they’re talking about. What a great speech.

“Right down to the tires on their Mercedes…”.

Beautiful.

h/t to TRex and Sully for this gem. It reminds me a little of that old Firesign Theater routine, “Beat The Reaper”

What Just Happened?

If you are sitting around on this Monday morning like I am feeling dazed and confused after a weekend of wondering what just happened to the economy of the United States and with a foggy uncertainty about what this all of this talk about $700 billion and Credit Default Swaps means to us and the people closest to us, then take stroll over to The Daily Kos and read the article entitled “Three Times Is Enemy Action” and it will be explained to you. It begins this way:

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is Enemy Action.”
— Auric Goldfinger

James Bond’s wealthy nemesis may have had an obsession with gold, but he judged, quite correctly, that if people keep putting your plans awry, that was likely their intent.

This is a long and in depth article so I will not attempt to rehash it here, but it is a history lesson, and I’m sure it’s one that hasn’t been taught in many schools in recent years. It concludes this way:

This week, the Bush administration announced the beginnings of a plan to salvage what remains of the financial markets. At first glance, it appears that the plan will consist mainly of creating a kind of “garbage pit,” a fund or group of funds — cousins of the Resolution Trust that was created during the S&L crisis — into which those people who have dabbled in bad debts can toss their problems. Only this time the cost to the taxpayers is at least $700 billion… and a big bite out of representative democracy.

The expansion of unregulated Savings and Loans in the 1980s brought on the collapse of that industry, a crippling of the economy, and left taxpayers holding the bag. Maybe that was only happenstance. Those pushing for the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act may not have known what they were doing.

The deregulation of the California electricity market, along with the protections provided to Enron through Phil Gramm’s lobbyist-written legislation brought blackouts, fiscal and political chaos, and left taxpayers holding the bag. But the people who engineered that event — people like Gramm and Greenspan — had already seen what happened with the S&Ls. They should have known better. Still, perhaps that was only coincidence.

The sub-prime mortgage crisis that has not only come so close to utterly destroying the markets, but has ruined the value of many people’s homes and left millions with mortgages they can’t pay, was also the outcome of the deregulation created by these men. The very predictable outcome. When taxpayers are left holding the bag for $1 trillion this time around, it’s hard to believe it’s any sort of accident.

This is enemy action. This is a bullet deliberately fired into the economy by men willing to exercise their ideology regardless of the cost to taxpayers. Men who have every expectation that they can plunder the system again and again, while the public picks up the tab. John McCain may not have had his finger directly on the trigger, but he was there. He assisted. These were his personal friends and philosophical comrades. He may not be the high priest, but he has been a loyal acolyte in the cult of deregulation.

It may come as a surprise to the champions of deregulation, but nobody likes regulation. The restrictions that were placed on banks, S&Ls, and other institutions in the 1930s weren’t put there because someone thought it would be fun. They were put in place because they addressed problems that had just been clearly and painfully revealed. They were put in place because they were necessary.

It’s bad enough if John McCain didn’t know that. It’s far worse if he did.

Please take the time to go over to dKos and read the whole thing though, because it makes clear what has happened to bring us to this point, and it also makes clear that one of the Presidential candidates may have played and enormously large role in the collapse of Wall Street, and that candidate is the one who looks like the guys pictured on the money.

While Rome Burns

Well, it looks like the world is going to hell in a handbasket, so why don’t we just sit back today and listen to some really great music. Here’s Tommy Emmanuel at the Sheldon Concert Hall in St. Louis in 2000. I’ve posted the first 2 parts of a 12 part concert. You can find the rest on Youtube if you’d like (and I recommend you do).

The bride and I caught his show in a small club in New York back in June. It was totally mesmerizing. This guy never took a lesson.

Of course my favorite would be the one that is split right in the middle between Parts 1 and 2.

Late Night Music: Jim Croce & Maury Muehleisen

35 years ago today Jim Croce and Maury Muehleisen, Croce’s longtime lead guitarist, died in a plane crash. Here’s a little history from a nice bio site about Jim Croce.

After playing mostly in some pretty tough bars, he and his wife, Ingrid, whom he had married on August 28, 1966, moved to New York and began working in coffee houses. Tommy West, who had attended Villanova College with Jim, introduced them to Terry Cashman, and in 1969, Cashman and West produced an album for called “Jim and Ingrid”. They remained on the coffee house circuit for a year and a half, involving themselves in the music business and collecting guitars. They soon became discouraged by the agitation and pressures of city life, and moved to Lyndell, Pennsylvania, where they had their son, Adrian James. Ingrid learned to bake bread and to can fruits and vegetables and Jim, like a rich lady selling her jewels, sold the guitars he had accumulated, one by one. When the guitars ran out, he worked in construction again and did some studio work in New York. “Mostly background ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ for commercials. I kept thinking, ‘maybe tomorrow I’ll sing some words.’”

When Jim got a chance to record again, he turned out an album called “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim” and the title track was released as a single. Surprisingly, it reached the U.S. Top 10 and Jim’s easy going style suddenly made a definite impact on the American public. The second single pulled from the album, “Operator” received substantial radio air-play and was respected by music people even more than his first single. “One Less Set of Footsteps” was played but never sold very well nor was it too highly regarded for its artistic merit. The fourth single, however, “Bad Bad Leroy Brown” became a gigantic single record reaching #1 on the national charts in July of 1973, ultimately selling more than 2,000,000 copies.

By August 1973, “Bad Bad Leroy Brown” was the #1 single in the country. Jim travelled back and forth across the United States playing every major coffee house and club and appearing in hundreds of concerts. He had appeared on national television no fewer than seven times. In June of that year he hosted The Midnight Special, recorded “I Got A Name” and had sold out the prestigious L.A. club, The Troubadour, for a solid week’s engagement. In late July he drew 12,000 people to the Ravina Folk Festival outside Chicago and all involved in his career realized that these events were the sure signs that long-term success was inevitable.

In the early part of September, Jim’s own song, “Time In A Bottle,” was used as the theme of an ABC Television movie called “She Lives.” This movie was seen nationally and the next day major radio stations across the country began receiving an extraordinary number of requests for the relatively obscure album cut. “Time In A Bottle” was destined then to become another #1 record for Jim.

But Jim Croce would never see his song top the record charts. On September 20th, just after playing what would be his last concert, at Northwestern State University, Natchitoches, Louisiana, his small charter plane, a Beechcraft D-18, was taking off in bad weather and hit a tree just after take-off. He and Maury Muehleisen, his lead guitarist, were both killed in the crash, along with the other members of the plane’s crew.

Jim Croce was one of the most superb songwriter/guitarist of his time. His ability to create songs was almost unmatched. He used no amps, just an acoustic guitar, and a microphone. Maybe this is part of what makes his music so incredible. No electric effects or distortions, just plain, good, old acoustic guitar.

Jim was described by everyone who knew him as “an easy going, all around, nice guy.” A lot of this is shown in the majority of his songs. His songs were “human” in nature, almost all of which deal with real life situations. Speaking about his style of music, Croce said, “I kinda like to write songs about things that a lot of people have experience with, ’cause it really makes the songs communicate”.

After Jim’s death, “Operator” started getting even more airplay and the singles “I Got a Name,” “Time in a Bottle,” “I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song, and “Workin’ At The Car Wash Blues” were posthumous Top Ten hits. A fourth album, “Photographs & Memories” was packaged as a greatest hits collection in Fall, 1974.

Jim is buried at Haym Salomon Memorial Park in Frazer, Pennsylvania. Ingrid opened an upscale restaurant, called Croce’s, which is located in the Gaslamp Quarter in San Diego, that is dedicated to Jim’s memory. Jim’s son, A.J. Croce followed his father’s footsteps and released an album called “Fit to Serve”.

In 2000, the Martin guitar company produced 73 guitars in honor of Jim Croce. In each of these guitars, an uncirculated 1973 dime was inserted in the neck near the third fret, in reference to the final line, “You can keep the dime.”

Holy Windowsills, Batman! Jim Cramer Looks Ready To Jump

I know that this guy has made himself a fortune whoring his persona as the angry, arrogant, Republican Everyman, but I really get the feeling here that he ain’t-a-kiddin’ and is looking around the desk for a razor blade or window to jump from. This is really kind of scary. Cramer seems to be genuinely freaking out.

One might think that I’d be chowing down on a big ole slice of that yummy, yummy Schadenfreude Pie right about now, but this isn’t funny and there are too many people who will be devastated by this to be snarky right now. Something tells me this thing is just getting started, so we all need to so tighten up those seat belts and hang on for the ride of our lives.

h/t to TREX, who comments:

Nobody’s coming to take away my shitty old car and my landlord can’t raise my rent until this lease runs out next August. Not to say that the next year is going to be a cake walk, financially, but right now I’m pretty glad that no part of my personal worth is tied up in a bunch of pieces of paper relating to mythical amounts of money connected to other people’s pieces of paper to generate mythical income from a bunch of hypotheticals.

In other words, hey, I’m already poor. If any of you financial wizard robber baron types need my recipe for Ramen Noodle surprise, you can reach me by email.

Les Misbarack – “One More Day”

Sully is right, the McCain Campaign could NEVER pull this off.

Humor. Irony. Satire. Republican.

Which word doesn’t belong?

Who Is Running For President?

Excuse me, but after watching this video, I have to ask, has John McCain become Sarah Palin’s running mate?

We need to hammer this meme. The Republicans have managed to slide McCain over into a secondary position on their ticket and SarahBarra seems to have assumed the top spot..

Just sayin…

Todd Palin: Shadow Governor?

Good question.

The answer may be here:

In the aftermath of the Walt Monegan firing, one question keeps surfacing over and over again; why does the governor’s husband, Todd Palin appear to hold so much power? After all, Nancy Murkowski or Susan Knowles were never accused of pressuring a commissioner or inappropriately sitting in on meetings that should have been private.

The stories started last year when Representative Ralph Samuels told me about going into a meeting, he thought would be private, with Governor Sarah Palin. Much to his surprise, Todd Palin was there and proceeded to sit through the entire meeting.

Other lawmakers have shared similar stories and were shocked at how inappropriate Todd’s presence was at meetings with the governor.
[...]
The most alarming indication of Todd Palin’s reach into state government came just yesterday.

Last month, a group of Alaskans filed a freedom of information act for emails sent from the computers of both Frank Bailey and Ivey Frye. Along with several boxes of documents, they received a cover letter along with 78 pages detailing the emails that were not released due to “Deliberative Process and Executive Privilege”. (Privilege log attached) Page 1 of the list showed seven emails from both Governor Sarah Palin and Lt. Governor Sean Parnell within a three hour time frame on Feburary 1, 2008 that were described as “Email re Andrew Halcro”. The serious concern about these emails is that they were prohibited from being released to the public due to executive privilege, even though Todd Palin was copied on these same emails. Todd Palin is not a member of the executive branch, nor is he even a government employee. Todd Palin is a member of the general public. So why in the world is Todd Palin getting copied on emails that his wife’s administration is classifying as confidential?

Furthermore there is something incredibly suspicious about these emails. The first email was sent on Feburary 1 at 7:41am from Lt. Governor Sean Parnell to Governor Sarah Palin. Obviously something was burning Parnell to make him fire off an email to the governor so early in the morning about Andrew Halcro. This in turn set off a flurry of email activity that spanned the next three hours and encompassed five different people including Todd Palin.

Judging from the blogs I posted on January 31, the night before, this very well could be about the 2004 TransCanada proposal that Parnell help negotiate when he was an attorney in the oil & gas division that has been kept sealed ever since. TransCanada has insisted to this day that it remain confidential.

These emails should be released to the public…after all Todd Palin has no standing to claim executive privilege. By including him in the email loop, the Palin administration has arguably breached any claim of executive privilege.

What do you bet that they find an activist judge to uphold the claim of Executive Privilege?

The Razzle Dazzle

by Stephen Fleischman

Razzle Dazzle ‘em
Give ‘em an act with lots of flash in it
And the reaction will be passionate
Give ‘em the old hocus pocus…
Bead and feather ‘em
Razzle dazzle ‘em
And they’ll never catch wise!

–Richard Gere
“Chicago”

We’ve been through two weeks of bread and circuses. Nothing new. It’s an old tradition, an ancient Roman metaphor for people choosing food and fun over freedom.

The Democratic and Republican presidential conventions gave us bread and circuses without the bread. They’re history, now. The show is on the road.

Barack Obama may have some razzle left but John McCain’s dazzle has fizzled and his “Straight Talk Express” is something closer to a morgue on wheels. But we have the Alaskan Baracuda, the VP nominated Sarah Palin, to make up for it.

Sarah is a hard Christian right-winger and it’s obvious her selection was made to shore up McCain’s Evangelical base, if not to corral some of Hillary Clinton’s disgruntled supporters.  Sarah has enhanced her anti-abortion, pro-life credentials by bringing a Downs Syndrome child into the world, apparently to advance her political career.

The vice-presidential pick on the Democratic side wasn’t much better. Joe Biden, establishment hack, supporter of war from Serbia to Iraq and congenital plagiarist, knocked Barack Obama off his high road. Not much hope and change in Joe Biden. We’ll see how well he does against the Baracuda in the upcoming vice-presidential debate.

“The Federal Election Commission (FEC) – the body that supposedly enforces campaign finance laws in this country – has been out of business for more than six months,” says Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone Magazine (Aug, ’08). In a hard-hitting investigative report, ‘Candidates for Sale’, he provides irrefutable evidence, with facts and numbers, showing that both candidates, McCain and Obama, are in the pockets of the corporate oligarchy – the same big donors who will expect to have their way no matter who wins. “Normally,” says Taibbi, “the FEC tries to root out infractions and loopholes – fining campaigns for incomplete reporting, or for taking short cuts around spending limits – in the early months of a campaign season. But that ship sailed way too long ago to take the stink off the 2008 race.”

The main concern of the oligarchy is to get you, the taxpayer, to clean up the mess left by the loose canon stampeding around this country for the last eight years. You’ve already taken care of Bear Stearns and now you’re kicking in to salvage Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. There’ll be plenty more before the crash. Looks like Lehman Brothers is next.

Corporate America has devised a new gimmick for campaign fund raising called “joint committees”. Donors can dump huge amounts into them. Although only the legal limit of $2,300 per individual can be given to the candidate, the bulk of the moolah can be given to the political party and used in the candidate’s behalf.

Sixty-three million has been laid on John McCain via these joint committees from more than 1000 megadonors. McCain should be their poster boy but Wall Street is putting its money on Barack Obama, the Senator from Goldman Sachs, to do the dirty work. The Obama campaign tries to imply that most of Obama’s funds are coming from contributions of individuals giving $200 or less. But there is another side of the story they aren’t telling you.

Taibbi says, “Obama is flat out kicking McCain’s ass when it comes to Wall Street contributions, raking in nearly $9 million from securities and investment executives, compared to $6.2 million for McCain. Obama has received more contributions from Goldman Sachs than from any other employer, more than $627,000 at this writing not to mention $398,021 from JP Morgan Chase, $353,922 from Lehman Brothers and $291,388 from Morgan Stanley.”

Barack Obama knows he can’t deliver on his promises but his liberal and progressive following are so bedazzled by his charm and rhetoric and the idea of a black man in the White House, they blind themselves to the obvious.

So once again, your choice is limited to the lesser of two evils.

This doesn’t mean there are no other presidential candidates to vote for, but they’ve been blacked out by the mainstream media, as with a grease pencil.

There’s Cynthia McKinney, Congresswoman from Georgia’s 11th District, candidate for president on the Green Party ticket.

There’s Bob Barr, also from Georgia, a former Congressman from the 7th District, the Libertarian Party nominee for president.

There’s Chuck Baldwin, pastor and radio talk show host nominated by the Constitution Party.

And, of course, there’s Ralph Nader, who chose to run, this year, as an Independent.

The two main parties, Democratic and Republican, have successfully maintained a stranglehold on our electoral system in recent years.  They have colluded in creating the Commission on Presidential Debates to establish the way that debates between candidates for President of the United States are run. The Commission is set up to restrict independent and third party candidates from participating in presidential and vice presidential debates. That precludes any dark horse from threatening either of the two major parties.

The last candidate to break through that barrier was Ross Perot and his Reform Party in the 1996 election. He brought some dissent into the discussion by opposing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and he aptly described the “sucking sound” as American jobs flew overseas. Ross Perot addressed vital problems largely ignored by the two major parties. On these strengths, he won two of the three presidential debates and placed second in the other, according to some polls at the time. He ended up receiving about 18.9% of the popular vote, a record level of popularity not seen in an independent candidacy since former President Theodore Roosevelt ran on the “Bull Moose” Progressive ticket in 1912.

Third parties have always been the stimulus for new ideas eventually adopted by the two major parties. Third parties allow for dissent.

Dissent is democracy.