A Smashing Win for a Democrat

Hot news and politics, plus excerpt from new Sinead O'Connor memoir and the time Dylan fans booed her off stage--plus music from Sinead, Bonnie Raitt, Bo Diddley, and Bruce Springsteen.

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News & Politics

Democrat Melanie Stansbury won election to U.S. House—succeeding Deb Headland—in New Mexico's special elction. The question was margin and if it would hint at Dem prospects for 2022. Well, with a 25% bulge, she topped both Biden’s and Haaland’s margins in 2020. Ace election watcher Dave Wasserman had forecast that anything over 15% would mean a very good night for the Dems.

NOT The Onion: From The Daily Beast, “Secret Service Spending $34,000 on Fancy Porta Potties in Bedminster This Summer.” And from The Sun: “Donald Trump Jr. flogging $599 videos on celebrity website Cameo.”

Don’t think twice, it’s all right: AP reports that a man living in San Francisco has mailed a Bob Dylan double album back to an Ohio library where it was overdue by 48 years. He had checked it out as an 8th grader, god bless him. The man apologized for his tardiness and sent the library a $175 replacement fee. Well, Blonde on Blonde was surely worth it, no? Uh, actually, it was for the far inferior Self-Portrait. The library in University Heights told him no worries—they don’t charge overdue fines anymore if they get the thing back.

It’s not much—41 companies on the 67th annual Fortune 500 are led by women CEOs —but that’s an all-time record. Also CVS (at #4) becomes the highest ever run by a female.

Bummer in the Summer: Maggie Haberman of NY Times reports, "Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August….He is not putting out statements about the 'audits' in states just for the sake of it. He's been laser focused on them, according to several people who've spoken with him." Michael Beschloss comments: “Is there a medical term for a defeated ex-President who is reported to be telling people he expects to be soon ‘reinstated?’"

Sean and the Cred: Meanwhile, Michael Bender of the WSJ reports that "Sean Hannity scripted a TV ad for Trump in final weeks of the race and the campaign paid $1.5 million to air it on his Fox show.⁩" As Maggie Haberman points out, "Hannity, who routinely lectures journalists about journalism from his show, had a hand in writing a campaign ad." Bender’s book Frankly, We Did Win This Election:' The Inside Story of How Trump Lost will come out August 10.

One hundred scholars have signed letter warning that our democracy is in danger, covered here by Wash Post.

“We urge members of Congress to do whatever is necessary — including suspending the filibuster — in order to pass national voting and election administration standards,” the scholars write, in a reference to the voting rights protections enshrined in the For the People Act, which passed the House and is before the Senate. What’s striking is that the statement is signed by scholars who specialize in democratic breakdown, such as Pippa Norris, Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky. Other well-known names include Francis Fukuyama and Jacob Hacker….

“The playbook that the Republican Party is executing at the state and national levels is very much consistent with actions taken by illiberal, anti-democratic, anti-pluralist parties in other democracies that have slipped away from free and fair elections.” Among these, the scholars note, are efforts by GOP-controlled state legislatures everywhere to restrict access to voting in ways reminiscent of tactics employed before the United States became a real multiracial democracy in the mid-1960s.

All in the Family: The Bezos-owned Wash Post (surprisingly?) takes Amazon to task over its lousy record on worker injuries. “Amazon, the second-largest private employer in the United States, is also a leader in another category: how often its warehouse workers are injured. New work-related injury data from OSHA showed those jobs can be more dangerous than at comparable warehouses. Since 2017, Amazon reported a higher rate of serious injury incidents that caused employees to miss work or be shifted to light-duty tasks than at other warehouse operators in retail.”

Israel will ask the U.S. for $1 billion in additional emergency military aid this week, Axios reports. Go deeper.

Politico scoop:

It’s time for the EU to become a global military power — and for the U.S. to stop thwarting Europe’s ambitions on defense. That’s according to a new report by the Center for American Progress, the Washington think tank with close ties to the Biden administration. The report, obtained by POLITICO ahead of its release Wednesday, urges Biden to encourage the EU to develop hard-power military capabilities and calls on him to abandon decades of opposition to EU defense integration by previous U.S. leaders.

Music

After dinner Brandi: Cool pic from birthday bash (her #40, as I noted yesterday) for Brandi Carlile, thrown by, ahem, Joni Mitchell, and with Sir Elton in attendance.

The new Sinead O’Connor memoir gets an excerpt in Rolling Stone this week, and here she describes the infamous night she tore up that picture of the Pope (pretty much derailing her career).

It happens I’ve been pissed off for a few weeks because I’ve been reading The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (a contrarian, blasphemous history of the early church) but also finding brief articles buried in the back pages of Irish newspapers about children who have been ravaged by priests but whose stories are not believed by the police or bishops their parents report it to. So I’ve been thinking even more of destroying my mother’s photo of JP2.

And I decide tonight is the night.

I bring the photo to the NBC studio and hide it in the dressing room. At the rehearsal, when I finish singing Bob Marley’s “War,” I hold up a photo of a Brazilian street kid who was killed by cops. I ask the cameraman to zoom in on the photo during the actual show. I don’t tell him what I have in mind for later on. Everyone’s happy. A dead child far away is no one’s problem.

I know if I do this there’ll be war. But I don’t care. I know my Scripture. Nothing can touch me. I reject the world. Nobody can do a thing to me that hasn’t been done already. I can sing in the streets like I used to. It’s not like anyone will tear my throat out….

The second song is set up beautifully. With one candle beside me and my Rasta prayer cloth tied to the microphone, I sing “War” a cappella. No one suspects a thing. But at the end, I don’t hold up the child’s picture. I hold up JP2’s photo and then rip it into pieces. I yell, “Fight the real enemy!” And I blow out the candle.

Total stunned silence in the audience. And when I walk backstage, literally not a human being is in sight. All doors have closed. Everyone has vanished. Including my own manager, who locks himself in his room for three days and unplugs his phone….

I am in my dressing room with my personal assistant, Ciara. We pack up my bags and leave the building. Outside 30 Rock, two young men are waiting for me and they throw a load of eggs at us both.

“This must be one stupid broad,” Frank Sinatra would tell the audience at one of his shows in Jersey. “I’d kick her ass if she were a guy. She must beat her kids to stay in shape.”

So the above incident is known by most of you. But how many recall that just 13 days after the SNL broadcast, O’Connor was booked to perform at Bob Dylan’s 30th-anniversary concert inn Madison Square Garden (which I watched live via on-demand). She took the stage to hearty and persistent boos from much of the crowd—at a tribute to Dylan, no less—and rather than do the song she’d rehearsed, one of his best from mid-career, “I Believe in You,” she vamped into a shouted version of “War,” shaking, before rushing off stage. You can watch that below. And then, below that, her version of the Dylan song that she performed a few years later.

On this day in 2008: Early (though sometimes overlooked) rock pioneer and guitar legend Bo Diddley died at the age of 78. Was so great he even invented an enduring “rock ‘n roll beat” named for him —see, e.g. “Not Fade Away” or, below, “Hey Bo Diddley.” Then watch Springsteen’s tribute to Bo and how he used that signature beat in “She’s the One.”

Song Pick of the Day

A little more Bo here, from his later years, with Bonnie Raitt, on his classic “Who Do You Love?”

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Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. His new film, Atomic Cover-up, just had its world premiere and is drawing extraordinary acclaim. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.