The first single from Slipstream* due out April 10th on Redwing Records!
http://www.bonnieraitt.com
She has a custom purple Larry Pogreba resonator guitar made of salvaged wood and recycled aircraft aluminum, with a big round metal R (for Raitt) that was a 1951 Rambler hubcap.
Bruce Springsteen & Jimmy Cliff "Harder They Come" at Austin City Limits (SxSW 2012)
But the most memorable moment, the one that demands immediate distribution, came after the “Apollo Medley”—a medley of Smokey Robinson a cappella and a rafter-raising version of “634-5789.” Suddenly, the mood went sombre and Springsteen said, “This is for Trayvon.” I first heard “American Skin (41 Shots),” at Madison Square Garden a dozen years ago, but now the lament, as the circumstances changed from the shooting of Amadou Diallo, in New York, to Trayvon Martin, in Florida, was less subdued, far tougher, as if to underline the outrage. Like “Born in the U.S.A.” and the new “We Take Care of Our Own,” “American Skin” belies its easy reading; it attempts to get at the complexity as well as the grief and fury of its subject. But better to just let you experience the song. Here it is, performed in Tampa, last week:
You know how there are people you love to hate? Well, here’s a grease spot of a guy that you simply loathe, no fun, “love,” or snark involved whatsoever. You all remember Deadbeat Dad Joe Walsh, the disturbingly crass GOP/tea bagger Congressman from Illinois, right? Yes, that Joe Walsh.
Per VoteVets.org, he’s sunk to a new despicable low. Here’s the press release:Chicago, IL - In an appalling new low, Congressman Joe Walsh today slammed his opponent Tammy Duckworth’s military service. Walsh told Politico, “What else has she done? Female, wounded veteran … ehhh.” Duckworth served as a Black Hawk helicopter pilot in Iraq in 2004, and lost her legs and part of the use of her right arm. She was awarded the Purple Heart for her combat injuries and is still active as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Illinois National Guard.
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“Just when you think Congressman Joe Walsh couldn’t sink any lower, he insults the service and sacrifice of our Veterans, particularly one like Tammy who lost her limbs in the line of duty. Congressman Walsh owes Tammy Duckworth and all Veterans an apology for his outrageous disrespect for their service,” said Jon Soltz, Iraq War Veteran and Chairman of VoteVets.org PAC. “But it’s not just that. If you think working for America’s veterans at the VA both in Washington and Illinois is nothing, if you think working to improve the economic lives of veterans is nothing, then Joe Walsh’s record is below nothing. He represents the do-nothing, obstructionist, extreme Tea Party wing of the GOP, not the values that Tammy stood up for.”
The local Republican Party is pretty much in shambles. The George Bush/Dick Cheney Administration killed the Party off as rural people finally decided they'd been had on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and their dead and buried kids had died for nothing but lies.
So the Tea Party came riding into town to save the day and rebrand the conservative image. Most of the local Tea Party members don't look anything like the rest of us here. The leaders are high-heeled women who wear pearls when they "garden" and impressive diamond jewelry to local public hearings. It's clear they've never put in a day's work in their lives. But, by god, they're determined to whip the rest of us into submission.
Which brings me to the debate forum between the Appalachian State University (my em) College Democrats and College Republicans this past Tuesday night.
The deer began to put their texting on hold when they heard the College Republicans argue that, among other things, women had no rights to mandatory insurance coverage for contraception: "if women want to avoid getting pregnant, they should stop having sex" and "just because I want a diet coke every hour doesn't mean the taxpayers should have to pay for it." (One of the College Democratic debaters asked him if he'd ever had a period.)
There was other "good stuff." The College Republicans argued that prison life was really just a piece of cake ("they get cigarettes, gourmet food and a soft mattress"), and the proposed same-sex Constitutional Amendment that will be on our primary ballot this May is essential because gay and lesbian couples' children are more likely to commit heinous crimes and do poorly in school.
Then there was this:
A study conducted by Echo Research and Makovsky found that the “Occupy Wall Street” movement had an impact on marketing and communications executives at financial services firms.
However, professor Robert Reich said Thursday that marketing specialists might understand how angry the public has become at Wall Street, but CEOs and major traders — “the real power” — have probably not been effected.
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In order to believe the highly-connected-to-the-system family of George Zimmerman, here's what you have to believe transpired the night Trayvon Martin was killed:
1) You have to believe that after George Zimmerman started heading back to his van, Martin, who had already expressed concern to his girlfriend about being followed, picked a fight with a guy who outweighed him by about 100 pounds.
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WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) March 29, 2012 – The following message was released today by the National Alliance of Funeral Directors:
This week, several Republican Supreme Court Justices have argued that the Affordable Care Act supported by the Obama Administration is unconstitutional. At the National Alliance of Funeral Directors, we couldn't agree more.
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Let's take a look, if you will, at the Second Amendment of the Constitution, which protects every American's right to shoot another American. It says nothing about giving the person who is shot health insurance to prevent him from dying. This cherished constitutional right to shoot people and make them dead is currently recognized in all fifty states, most recently Florida.
In commenting on the Affordable Care Act this week, Justice Samuel Alito compared the Obama healthcare plan to burial insurance. Coincidentally, burial insurance is the Republican healthcare plan, and one that we enthusiastically support. Under this plan, every American would be mandated to buy a coffin from one of our member-owned and operated funeral homes. May we recommend the Peaceful Valley Royale,™ a luxury mahogany casket with sienna satin interior and the finest imitation antique nickel handles ($2899).
As the organization representing America's funeral directors, gravediggers, embalmers and cremators, we are confident that the Supreme Court will ultimately do the right thing and decide that healthcare flies in the face of every American's constitutional right to the pursuit of deadness. And when they do, we'll be waiting for you.
Before he temporarily stepped down from his position last week as chief of the Sanford, Fla., police department, Bill Lee Jr., gave an explanation of his decision not to arrest George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin. Lee said he had no reason to doubt Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense. Though Lee is no longer in the spotlight, his words linger for at least one compelling reason: his explanation bears an eerie resemblance to cases brought under the Fugitive Slave Law during the Antebellum period. Today, a legal standard that allowed the police chief to take Zimmerman at his word recalls the dark past of slave-owners claiming their property. The writings of Martin Delany, the African American political philosopher and activist, shed light on the uncanny resemblance.
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On Delany’s account, the effect of the Fugitive Slave Law, at least as Judge McClean interprets it, is to subject all unowned black persons to the domination of all white persons. For by requiring that the self-proclaimed slave catcher be taken at his word, the law leaves unconstrained the ability of any white person to arrest and seize any black person. In effect, it renders all titularly free blacks vulnerable to the power available to all whites in exactly the way that, according to Frederick Douglass, a black slave is vulnerable to the power exercised by his or her white master.
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In short, it appears that whites (or other non-blacks) may hunt down blacks with immunity from arrest so long as they leave behind no clue that they were not acting to defend themselves; or, to echo Martin Delany, that Florida’s Stand Your Ground law threatens to render some citizens subject to the arbitrary wills of others.
If it seems a stretch, finally, to paint Zimmerman in the image of the slave catchers of yesteryear, recall that he himself invited the comparison when, while stalking the African-American teenager against the advice of a 911 dispatcher, he complained, using an expletive to refer to Trayvon, that they “always get away.”
These are days where, in the name of freedom of the individual, the individual is crushed.
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One of the things it has always been easy to admire (yes, admire) about Santorum is that the motherfucker may be crazy as a shit fight in a monkey house, but he believes what he's saying. He's all-in. If you're gonna base your candidacy on your belief that Satan wins if you don't, own that shit. And nothing says nutzoid like Santorum's latest video from his campaign, not a Super PAC, wherein he imagines the color-drained hellscape that America will become if Barack Obama wins a second term. Because apparently you can put anything after the President's last name, it's called, "Obamaville":
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“We’ll look at a circumstance where someone is ill and hasn’t been insured so far,” Romney said, “but people who have the chance to be insured — if you are working in the auto business, for instance, the companies carry insurance, they insure their employees, you look at the circumstances that exist — but people who have done their best to get insured are going to be able to be covered.”
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“If they are 45 years old and they show up and say, ‘I want insurance because I have heart disease,’ it’s like, ‘Hey guys. We can’t play the game like that. You’ve got to get insurance when you are well and then if you get ill, you are going to be covered,’” Romney said.
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The man has a large subterranean lair, a car elevator, his own lobbyist, and proclaims the Russkies our No. 1 enemy.
Give Mitt a lap cat and he's a Bond-Villain.
But when Frothy Santorum stopped to perform in an alley in La Crosse, he suddenly got controlling. According to Reuters reporter Sam Youngman, Santorum said to a young man bowling with him:
You’re not gonna use that pink ball. We’re not gonna let you do that. Not on camera.
Wait, what exactly is wrong with a pink bowling ball? And what if that bowling ball was the one closest in weight for the guy’s playing needs? Is this what we have to look forward to if Frothy Santorum is elected–the government telling us what color balls we can play with? That men can’t stick their fingers into something pink?
Woody Harrelson championed the environmental benefits of hemp. Giorgio Armani and Calvin Klein incorporated it into their collections. Now a company promoting hemp as the eco-building material of the moment said it wants to build California's first hemp house.
There are plenty of things to concern yourself with. There are far too many things that wish to stress you out, slap you asunder and make you feel heavy, sad, lost. These should not be among them. Starting with:
1) Rick Santorum. Isn't he just the skeeviest little disruption, like fingernails on the chalkboard of human delight? Is he not the weirdest, bitchiest little dog whose cute scruffiness belies the fact that, when he opens his mouth, the strangest, most hideous sounds come out?
Good news: Rick is about as much of a threat to the attuned way of life as flea is to a pack of wolves. You only worry about him the way you worry about an errant wart on your elbow, the one you only notice when you lean in to watch "True Blood" on your laptop and you go, "Oh right, I need to get that dry little nub excised, pronto," and then you go back to enjoying all the other good things in life -- which, when compared to Rick Santorum, is pretty much everything.
9) Massive, unstoppable global socioeconomic meltdown. Look, 53 percent of the world claims they're "happy." Which seems utterly impossible, given how they can't all have unlimited access to iPads and iPhones and free porn and bacon-flavored vodka and Leonard Cohen records and Burning Man and Ducati motorcycles and sweaty yoga and artisan whisky and leather, like you do. What is wrong with them? Might they be onto something? What do they know that you don't?
Instead, spend your energy on figuring out how to adapt, evolve, and fight the zombies.
The McNicholas, the Posalskis, the Smiths, Zerillis too
The Blacks, the Irish, Italians, the Germans and the Jews
They come across the water a thousand miles from home
With nothing in their bellies but the fire down below
They died building the railroads, they worked to bones and skin
They died in the fields and factories, names scattered in the wind
They died to get here a hundred years ago, they're still dying now
Their hands that built the country we're always trying to keep out
Gingrich campaign charges $50 for photos
We see this again and again. A black male who captures the imagination of the nation must be degraded by the right. He must be turned into something else, some Other. President Obama can't simply be an educated black man from a lower middle-class background with whom they disagree ideologically. No, he's got to be an enemy, a foreigner, a nigger. It's hard to denigrate someone who might be like you, conservatives. But it's easy to attack a nigger because he's just a nigger. Or a coon.
Can We Trust the Cops’ New Account of Trayvon Martin’s Killing?
CHENEY UNDERGOES HEART TRANSPLANT
Gets heart of young Chinese dissident.
U.S. Can Still Win in Afghanistan, Says Top Commander
Iraq and Vietnam, too.
Employers Expect to Hire 9.5% More Graduates This Year Than Last
Do you want fries with that?
??? - News Quiz - ???
Oil prices are rising and are expected to continue rising through the spring, summer and fall because:
A ) supply is tight.
B ) the invisible hand of the free market system is moving in mysterious ways.
C ) UFOs are using alien technology to siphon off our reserves for Mars.
D ) there's a Presidential election coming up, and Wall Street, Big Oil, and the banksters would really love to have a Republican in the White House.
Hint: supply isn’t tight, the hand ain’t invisible, and Mars doesn’t run on oil.
