Canceling Vaccines--and Springsteen

Latest news and politics takes, cartoons, and music from the Rolling Stones, The Band, Gram Parsons and Rhiannon Giddens.

And away we go for Wednesday. Don’t forget to comment, share, tweet, subscribe (it’s still free).

News & Politics

Stephen Colbert claims CPAC (the rightwing conference just wrapped up) actually stands for “Caucasian People Are Complaining.”

The Onion: “Study Finds 70% Of Americans Have Less Than $1,000 Saved To Go Into Space.”

Amy Poehler: “I think we all understand the obsession with the rockets, right? Really: The rockets are dicks. Even Freud is like, 'You don't need me for this, right? Those rockets are dicks.'"

Will progressives (and Manchin?) accept this modest goal announced last night: Democrats Propose $3.5 Trillion Budget to Advance With Infrastructure Deal

Chuck’s stake: Politico headline, “Schumer launches long-shot bid for legal weed: The majority leader backs marijuana legalization, but he still needs to convince his party, Republicans and even the president.”

The Guardian:

Ken Starr, the lawyer who hounded Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, waged a “scorched-earth” legal campaign to persuade federal prosecutors to drop a sex-trafficking case against the billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein relating to the abuse of multiple underaged girls, according to a new book. In Perversion of Justice the Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown writes about Starr’s role in securing the secret 2008 sweetheart deal that granted Epstein effective immunity from federal prosecution. The author, who is credited with blowing open the cover-up, calls Starr a “fixer” who “used his political connections in the White House to get the Justice Department to review Epstein’s case”.

History Hysteria: “The obscure foundation funding ‘Critical Race Theory’ hysteria…A Popular Information investigation reveals that many of the entities behind the CRT panic share a common funding source: The Thomas W. Smith Foundation.”

The latest POLITICO/Morning Consult poll out this morning finds that 59% of registered voters support the plan to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by the end of next month, compared to only 25% opposed. The support includes 76% of Democrats, 59% of independents and 42% of Republicans.

Olivia Rodrigo, teen pop sensation, will visit the White House today to meet with President Biden and Dr. Fauci aboutrecording videos promoting vaccinations among young people. Meanwhile, the Tennessee Department of Health has halted all vaccine outreach to kids – not just for COVID-19, but all diseases – amid pressure from GOP. Plus: Top Tennessee Vaccine Official Says She Was Fired Over Shots for Teens.

The O’Reilly factor: “Bill O’Reilly’s Accuser Finally Breaks Her Silence….Today, Andrea Mackris recalls to The Daily Beast for the first time intimate and graphic details of O'Reilly’s alleged harassment, including lewd, menacing telephone calls and conversations in which she says he forced her to listen to his sexual fantasies about her.”

Right-wing drips: Can this coffee company become the Starbucks of the right?

My “Countdown to Hiroshima” offering today over at my Pressing Issues blog include final assembly of the bomb for its first test—and more on the John Hersey article and book.

Steve Brodner at his own Substack:

Music

Canceling the Boss: Lot of outraged chatter yesterday over news that "Am I the Only One" by Aaron Lewis—formerly with the mediocre rock band Staind—had reached number one on the Billboard country singles charts. And why do we care? The song, boosted by Fox News, includes the line: Am I the only one who quits singing along every time they play a Springsteen song” as well as:

Am I the only one willing to fight for my love of the red and white and the blue / Burning on the ground as the statues coming down in a town near you/ Watching the threads of Old Glory come undone.

We noted the passing of fiddle great Byron Berline yesterday and the fact that he played with many top stars in sessions, such as on Dylan’s Pat Garrett soundtrack. Earlier he had joined the groundbreaking country duo Dillard & Clark—and later formed his own band, Country Gazette. And on and on. So here is a collection of just a few of the many tunes that he helped propel.

“Country Honk” for The Rolling Stones (he was recommended to them by Gram Parsons, and this song actually partly recorded out on street outside studio, with car horn left in)

Gram’s own “Hickory Wind,” here with fake live crowd noise.

On one of The Band’s best late-career cuts, “Acadian Driftwood.”

Film/TV

Dan Kennedy points out that after my widely-linked piece last week revealed that some of the allegedly "lost" or "buried" footage for Summer of Soul had been up at YouTube for years--by Nina Simone and Sly, for example—Disney got it all removed there. Sorry!

For Bastille Day, from Casablanca:

Song Pick of the Day

One of our faves, Rhiannon Giddens, has recorded a “mini-memoir” for Audible for its “Words + Music” a series that has top musicians speaking as well as singing. Listen to a bit here. And one of her songs, “Ruby,” live from a few years back:

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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.