Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Published on Apr 29, 2014
A Townes Van Zandt Song. Emmylou gave him his first big hit .1982

Thanks to orvsha.

Cliven Bundy: Clown Car or Trojan Horse?

William Rivers Pitt is soooo good!

Fox News, and especially Sean Hannity, immediately began hyping the story all day and night, elevating Bundy to the status of instant Founding Father. How could they resist? Here was a guy who denies the existence of the US government while riding his horse on federal lands with an American flag strapped to his saddle. Cognitive dissonance is the meat and mead of Fox News, and the dissonance in that one image was weighty enough to bend the very light (my em).

It took about two weeks for everything to go sideways.

First, Mr. Bundy delivered his now-infamous rant about Black people being happier picking cotton as slaves, a statement he doubled down on later by comparing himself to Rosa Parks before saying that if Black people didn't like his opinions, it's because "Martin Luther King hasn't gotten his job done yet."

Skreeeeeeech went the needle off the record. Every right-wing media personality and politician who had rushed to publicly embrace Cliven Bundy immediately fled his presence as if he was covered in Goliath tarantulas. I think there still may be a Hannity-shaped hole in the studio wall at Fox News.

His ardent gun-toting supporters at the ranch stood their ground...until a few days ago, when there was a sudden falling-out between Bundy's own ranch security - commanded by a man actually named Booda Bear - and a contingent of Oath Keepers who had come to the ranch because Jesus, or something. Their leader, one Stewart Rhodes, informed Booda Bear (God, I could type his name all day) that he had "intel" from a "source of intelligence of high value" that Eric Holder and the Justice Department were going to deploy a "hot drone strike" against the Bundy Ranch within the next 24 hours. Because of this, the fearless leader was forced to re-deploy his stalwart troops off the ranch and into hotels with room service back in town.

This did not sit well with Booda Bear, who told Radio Free Redoubt's John Jacob Schmidt, "This is a battle front in some sense of the word and to remove them is kind of, ah, that's some yellow curd, ya know, spineless backbone piece of shit maneuvering right there. He had pretty much said, 'Well, I need to pull my guys back so they can allocate resources to the exterior of the area,' meaning go into the next town and get hotel rooms, get showers, gamble, eat steak dinners, while we're out here on the battle front...and just so everybody knows, as Booda, head of security for the Bundy family, I can swear on the white skin that covers my ass there will not be an Oath Keeper - there WILL NOT BE AN OATH KEEPER allowed to set foot on the internal ranch property."

And so not with a bang, but with a Derp, solidarity at the Bundy ranch "battle front" fell to dust that swirled and eddied around the white skin of Booda Bear's ass.
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...and note you well: here in America, you can point a high-powered rifle at federal officers and get off scot-free with your gun still in your hand. Sit down at a peaceful Occupy protest on the campus of UC Davis in California, however, and you get a gushing face full of Mace for your trouble...while the cop who sprayed you gets $38,000 in compensation for "anxiety and depression."

Far more insidious is the fact that, until he pulled his little "What, Me Racist?" number for all the world to see, Mr. Bundy's most dedicated supporters were a couple of billionaire brothers named Charles and David Koch. The Koch Brothers, if truth be told, could not give less of a damn about Cliven Bundy and his band of merry men, but until Bundy blew out like an old, racist tire, they were intensely interested in using him as the avatar for a fight they've been waging for twenty years: placing control of publicly-owned federal lands back into the hands of the states, so the states can lease or sell those lands to companies like Koch Industries for cattle grazing, mining, drilling, fracking, and lumbering.

Right now, those lands are protected from such activities, but the Koch Brothers were hoping to ride Cliven Bundy's cause to a massive land grab. The fact that Cliven Bundy upended the intentions of the Koch Brothers by being a racist idiot on television does not change their intentions one whit. They want to drill, to mine, to frack, and to profit off those lands that belong to us, for now.

So, as matters currently stand, Cliven Bundy can certainly be quantified as a human clown car. Do not, however, lose sight of the real story here: Mr. Bundy was also a Trojan Horse filled with Koch Industries drilling equipment until he blew it. Bundy may be gone from the news soon, but the Koch Brothers still want that land, because the world is not enough for guys like that, which is why, to no small degree, the rest of us can't have nice things like clean air and water that doesn't catch on fire coming out of the tap.

The moral of the story is that, to the Kochs and their ilk, it's always about the Benjamins and these wannabe militia goons are useful idiots to their ends.

The NRA has declared war on America

Ana Marie Cox at The Guardian. links at site.

Wayne LaPierre and Co are not out merely to defend the Second Amendment or Newtown or gun laws anymore. They want you to pay the price for freedom and they want their money now

...NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre exhorted the crowd to a morally obligated vigilantism. He drew a vivid picture of a United States in utter decay and fragmented beyond repair, Mad Max-meets-Hunger Games, divided by Soylent Green:

We know, in the world that surrounds us, there are terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and car-jackers and knock-out gamers and rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping-mall killers, road-rage killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all.

LaPierre's bleak vision is exaggerated dystopianism in service of sedition, a wide-ranging survey of targets that put justice against the intrusions of the IRS on a continuum with (as an advertisement he ran during his speech put it) workplace "bullies and liars".
...


You cannot have it both ways. You cannot be both winning and losing, alone but united, the minority but the majority. It is almost (almost!) as if Wayne LaPierre intended to mislead his audience with this whiplash oratory, intended to dizzy them into acceptance of his underlying message, which is almost disappointingly mundane: give us money. Give the NRA money. Give us money so we can create the legal environment that allows gun manufacturers to make more money so that they can give us more money.

Conspicuously absent from LaPierre’s list of grievances was any serious consideration of the economic system that might have a role destabilizing the society for which he pantomimes such concern. [...]
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The problem with the NRA lies with the people who lead it.

No shit. I joined the NRA when I was in the service, in the days when you had to be sponsored ny an NRA member to join. My company commander sponsored me. I like firearms and the shooting sports and I enjoyed their magazine and that was about it.

I dropped my membership like a hot rock when the NRA went right-wing in the late '70s. It wasn't all that political before that.

It's WAY worse than that now. Now it's part of the "domestic enemies" that I swore to defend the Constitution from in my Oath of Enlistment which I never un-took.

BTW, there was a shooting near a town in Georgia today where folks are required by law to keep a gun. Where were all the "good guys with guns" anyway? Another right-wing lie perhaps? Or are they just afraid to actually go in harm's way and maybe get their AR-15 giant penises blown off?

Headline of the Day

This just in. Choices have consequences and words are choices. This is just a bitch slap to a billionaire but I'm down wid it.

NBA Bans Donald Sterling For Life

Fixer has chimed in on this and says he's impressed with NBA commissioner Adam Silver. So am I. Neither of us are basketball fans but we're interested in speaking truth to power.

Oh. the irony

Ironic Times

VATICAN: TWO POPES CANONIZED
In historic “Buy One, Get One Free” ceremony.

Bill Introduced in Congress Would Create National Park on the Moon
Already, the wait for a decent campsite is 6 months.

Claiming an Error, Feds Rescind Approval of Powdered Alcohol Product “Palcohol”
Seemed like a great idea, until they sobered up.

Those who'd rather mainline booze directly into their bloodstream are also in luck. Palcohol can be snorted!

What could possibly go wrong ... ?

Los Angeles Clippers Owner Caught Telling Girlfriend to Not Bring Blacks to Games
Clippers, with only J.J.Redick and Hedo Türkoglu available, lose to Golden State, 319-12.

Recent Book Proposes U.S., Canada Merge
We get oil, maple syrup, hockey players, they get Bible belt, high fructose corn syrup, baseball players.

War with Canada on the horizon...

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Thanks to OldTyme TunesFour.

WOO HOO!!!

This is so good I just swiped the whole thing!

Burning Man organizer plans anything-goes ‘Bundyfest’ to mock scofflaw rancher (via Raw Story )

Some of the organizers of the annual Burning Man festival are planning an event aimed at mocking the claims of a Nevada rancher who refuses to pay government-mandated fees for using federal lands. “For years, we paid permitting fees to hold Burning…

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Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

BERLUSCONI SENTENCED TO ONE YEAR COMMUNITY SERVICE WORKING WITH ELDERLY
Court rejects his request to work with troubled teens.

Heh. Will he get any bunga-bunga? Depends...

Fired Yahoo! Exec Receives $58 Million Severance Package After Just 15 Months on Job
“Yahoo!” he exclaims, and files for unemployment.

Only 1 in 6 Americans Can Find Ukraine on a Map
Only 1 in 600 Americans can find a map.

NCAA Approves Unlimited Food for Division I Athletes
If they sign an agreement before each meal not to unionize.

Real, phony, mox nix. Fuck each other up toot de sweet. For the children...

The Difference Between Real And Phony GOP Civil Wars

Just a taste:

[...] But as we learned the last week, Paul is exposed as a heretic whenever his positioning takes him beyond standard GOP Obama-bashing into the past or future.

The 2009 video of Paul suggesting that the 2003 Iraq War was in no small part the product of Dick Cheney’s concerns for Halliburton profits didn’t just anger hard-core neoconservative defenders of the nobility of that war. It also carried him well beyond the pale of acceptable criticism of GOP foreign policy and of the two-term elected GOP Vice President of the United States.
...

In the end Paul may have made at least mild dissent from decades of Reaganite pro-military orthodoxy a bit more acceptable within the Republican Party. But anything more fundamental would indeed require a “civil war.”

Prediction: Not only will Ayn Rand Paul never be President, the next Repug President hasn't been born yet. Other than that, I hope all the different Repug factions stomp each other into mudholes and walk each other dry.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

CORRECTION: Mrs. G informed me that we sat two rows behind Linda and Bernie Leadon at the Ash Grove when we went to see Country Gazette. If the memory ain't the first to go, I can't remember what is...

I have been a Linda Ronstadt fan since before I even heard of Emmylou. The closest I've been to her is the width of Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood. I worked at the Standard Station across the street from The Troubadour where she played frequently in the late '60s. This is about Linda.

Published on Apr 11, 2014
A tribute to Linda Ronstadt. With Glenn Frey. Recorded in Brooklyn, NY on April 10, 2014

Thanks to Johnny Rotten.

Bonus Twofer:

Published on Apr 14, 2014
Inductor Glenn Frey of The Eagles and friend Emmylou Harris each talked about the talent, friendship, and health of Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame inductee Linda Ronstadt as she was tributed with an all-star singing cast of Harris, Stevie Nicks, Bonnie Raitt, Carrie Underwood, and Sheryl Crow.

Thanks to ArtisanNewsService.

Bundy is a lawbreaker, freeloader, and thief

There's been an awful lot of stuff on RWNJ rancher Bundy and his standoff with the feds out in East Cow Pie, Nevada.

States' rights activists flock to Nevada (video)

"Cliven Bundy is not a hero; he's not a victim. He's a guy who got away with breaking the law for 20 years." –Nevada political journalist Jon Ralston"

But ... IOKIYAR

Cliven Bundy Exposes the Cravenness of the Modern Right

Call it "individualism" or "libertarianism" or whatever you want, but those who declare themselves a Republic of One and raise their own flags are in a very literal sense being unpatriotic.

That's why I'm alarmed by the support in many conservative precincts for the Nevada scofflaws who have been exploiting public lands for private purposes and refuse to pay for the privilege because they choose not to "recognize" the authority of the United States. Totally aside from the double standards involved in expecting kid-glove treatment of one set of lawbreakers as opposed to poorer and perhaps darker criminal suspects, fans of the Bundys are encouraging those who claim a right to wage armed revolutionary war towards their obligations as Americans. It makes me really crazy when such people are described as "superpatriots." Nothing could be more contrary to the truth.

The details of the Bundy case have gotten a lot of attention at conservative sites, but the details really don't matter. Bundy has a baroque claim that the United States has no legal right to grazing land in Nevada; for over a decade, every court has summarily disagreed. It's federal land whether Bundy likes it or not, and Bundy has refused for years to pay standard grazing fees—so a couple of weeks ago the feds finally decided to enforce the latest court order allowing them to confiscate Bundy's cattle if he didn't leave. The rest is just fluff, a bunch of paranoid conspiracy theorizing that led to last week's armed standoff between federal agents and the vigilante army created by movement conservatives.

Read "Koch brothers' AFP".

The fact that so many on the right are valorizing Bundy—or, at minimum, tiptoeing around his obvious nutbaggery—is a testament to the enduring power of Waco and Ruby Ridge among conservatives. The rest of us may barely remember them, but they're totemic events on the right, fueling Glenn-Beckian fantasies of black helicopters and jackbooted federal thugs for more than two decades now. Mainstream conservatives have pandered to this stuff for years because it was convenient, and that's brought them to where they are today: too scared to stand up to the vigilantes they created and speak the simple truth. They complain endlessly about President Obama's "lawlessness," but this is lawlessness. It's appalling that so many of them aren't merely afraid to plainly say so, but actively seem to be egging it on.

I'm not going to rehash Ruby Ridge which was an FBI fuckup or Waco which didn't have to happen either.

Here's the deal - that land is our land which the feds administer for us and usually not very well, but Bundy is refusing to pay us for its use to his own profit. He's a lawbreaker, freeloader, and thief in the guise of a "patriot", in other words. an average wingnut teabagger.

Note to Bundy: Yo dude, ass, gas, or grass, nobody rides for free. Cough it the fuck up.

If it had been me in charge, I would have rounded up his cattle, sold them on the free market, and given him the change on his prison commissary account.

Further, I would have gone all Louis L'Amour on the fucking militia wannabes that gathered around him. Metaphorically speaking I'da flipped the loop off the hammer of my revolver and told 'em to open the ball. When the dust cleared, it would have been from them making tracks running away.

I know the feds don't want a shooting confrontation and that's why they returned his cows, but dammit, someone needs to take those fuckers on and settle it once and for all.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Rand Paul: GOP Can't Just Be “Party of Fat Cats, Rich Guys”
Shown: speaking before group of fat cats, rich guys.

Report: Hillary Clinton “Thinking” About Running for President
Also “thinking” about when to take next breath.

Heh.

By 2030, ¼ of U.S. Licensed Drivers Will Be Older Than 85
Blind as bats, mostly lost, mad as Hell.

You rang, bunkie?

Colorado's First Pot Vending Machine Operational
Not shown: line three miles long waiting to use it.

The United States of John Roberts

Watch it on Vimeo.

United States of John Roberts from MarkFiore on Vimeo.

Thanks to Seniors for a Democratic Society.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

"Long Black Veil" is a classic old Lefty Frizzell tune.

Thanks to Larry Privat.

Oh. the irony...

Ironic Times

1/3 of Top 1,000 Donors to Campaigns in 2012 Worked in Finance, Real Estate, Insurance
All the rest in drug smuggling, arms trafficking, murder-for-hire.

Putin's Divorce Official
She gets Crimea.

Clapper Admits NSA Performed Warrantless Searches on Americans
Won't say any more until he's out of office and has a seven-figure book deal firmly in hand.

Goblet in Spanish Church is Holy Grail, Says New Book
With other Holy Grail claims across Europe, experts now believe Jesus gave them out as Last Supper souvenirs.

To go with the biggest PR stunt of all time - the "resurrection", wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Heh.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Thanks to Rick Medina.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

GOP INSIDERS LEANING TOWARD JEB BUSH IN 2016
But not sure he'll be willing to change his last name.

Wouldn't do any good. We know...

Two More Giant Pharaoh Statues Unveiled in Egypt
An expedition is immediately dispatched from London to steal them for the British Museum.

Spain Reaches Out to Jews, Expelled in 1492
They can return, no questions asked.

Vocabulary Builders
Oligarchy n., look around you.

GOP Strippers in Vegas

A "must read" by The Rude Pundit!

Whether its super-rich Jews in Vegas, super-rich Christians in Virginia Beach, or super-rich Muslims in Buffalo, there's just something crazy creepy about gatherings of religion-based political groups. Fuck, it's creepy that this is what politics has come to in the United States: pleasing the oligarchs. It's even creepier when the aforementioned Jews in Vegas, the Republican Jewish Coalition, met this past weekend because essentially the event was all just a chance for potential presidential candidates to do a shimmying striptease in front of gratuitously wealthy billionaire, Sheldon "Poster Child for Everything Wrong in America" Adelson.

Adelson is the owner of the Venetian Hotel and Casino, the Sands Convention Center, and loads of other shit. His money is made from gambling and the availability of legal whores, so, of course, he is the Uncle Sugar of the Republican Party. And he's a Jew. That's significant because he bankrolls the RJC and the RJC, while also concerned about general Republican nonsense (which mostly is "Fuck that Obama"), it is mega-concerned with Israel. The RJC has an Israel dildo so far up its ass that they yell, "Bibi!" when they ejaculate (my em). This means, of course, that if you're a Republican, you better say that you will stone cold murder anyone who throws the stink eye at Israel. You better shut that shit about giving rights to Palestinians. You better be willing to bomb the fuck out of Iran. Otherwise, if you just blow Israel's circumcised cock and neglect the balls, like Obama, you are not a "friend" to the Jewish state.

So it was at the RJC's Spring Leadership Meeting, and what a time it was. What with war criminal and former VP Dick Cheney defending the NSA at the Gala Dinner, a poker tournament where the buy-in was probably more than most of us make in a year, and a chance to watch madman John Bolton talk about what a pussy President Obama is, it was like a bar mitzvah on top of a Gaza missile strike of a party.
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Then New Jersey's Chris Christie came out like a meth-craving slut at a South Amboy truck stop/all-nude club. He was down to a g-string about two minutes into his 40-minute speech, tossing out incomprehensible-but-tough-sounding bullshit like "I am not in this business to win the argument. I am in this business to win elections." Then he ripped off the g-string and bent over to present his puckered asshole to Adelson when he talked about meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "The Greatest, Braves Living Man Living" Netanyahu: "I was extraordinarily taken by his strength and resolve under circumstances that none of us can imagine." Except, oops, looks like while he was standing there, Christie ended up farting. He said, "I took a helicopter ride from the occupied territories," and those last two words are apparently the worst thing you can say ever because Christie had to let Adelson's personal assistant fuck his ass later while Adelson giggled and clapped and threw hundreds at them both.

Ever so much more! Read on!

Ukraine’s Inconvenient Neo-Nazis

When Ukrainian neo-Nazis – infuriated over the killing of an ultranationalist leader – surrounded the Parliament in Kiev, the incident presented a problem for the U.S. news media which has been trying to airbrush the neo-Nazis out of the Ukraine narrative, Robert Parry reports.

The U.S. media’s take on the Ukraine crisis is that a “democratic revolution” ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, followed by a “legitimate” change of government. So, to mention the key role played neo-Nazi militias in the putsch or to note that Yanukovych was democratically elected – and then illegally deposed – gets you dismissed as a “Russian propagandist.”

But Ukraine’s neo-Nazis are not some urban legend. Their presence is real, as they swagger in their paramilitary garb through the streets of Kiev, displaying Nazi insignias, honoring SS collaborators from World War II, and hoisting racist banners, including the white-power symbol of the Confederate battle flag.

Over the past few days, the neo-Nazis have surged to the front of Ukraine’s unrest again by furiously protesting the killing of one of their leaders, Oleksandr Muzychko, known as Sashko Bily. The Interior Ministry reported that Muzychko died in a Monday night shoot-out with police in Rivne in western Ukraine.

But the right-wing paramilitaries claim that Muzychko was murdered in a cold-blooded contract hit, and these modern-day storm troopers have threatened to storm the parliament building if the interim Interior Minister is not fired.

There is no such thing as "cold-blooded murder" of Nazis. They should be shot on sight, in my not so humble opinion.

This renewed disorder has complicated the storytelling of the major U.S. news media by challenging the sweetness-and-light narrative preferred by U.S. policymakers. The New York Times, the Washington Post and other leading news outlets have worked hard to airbrush the well-established fact that neo-Nazi militants spearheaded the coup on Feb. 22.

There's more, including Crimea voting itself Russian, but here's my bottom line:

If neo-Nazis take over Ukraine, we should HELP Putin take it back. We rid the world of that scourge once at great cost, and should stomp it out much more quickly when it raises its evil head or we didn't learn a damn thing from WWII.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Published on Mar 26, 2014
[Stereo feed] Ms. Harris performs this song on late night USTV, and tells an interesting story of tracking down a steel guitar while on tour in Ireland, during the interview.

Funny interview!

Thanks to What's for afters?