Love Minus Zero

No limit to the nutty political news and gun craziness, but try to enjoy Chrissie Hynde doing Dylan, Springsteen covering Carole King, and Al Green paying tribute to Tina Turner.

Enjoy it while you can….

News & Politics

Jimmy Fallon on canceling Liz Cheney: “Republicans haven’t turned on someone this fast since they tried to murder Mike Pence.” Stephen Colbert: “They made her turn in her badge and her gun, and her other gun, and her other, other gun. They really like guns.” Trevor Noah: “I mean, here they are, trying to move past the attempted coup—and focus on the next attempted coup—but Cheney just wouldn’t let it go.”

Got to say, good old George Takei put it best yesterday: “Elise Stefanik is the worst.”

The Onion: “New Program Encourages Americans To Get Vaccine To Prevent It From Going To Foreigners.” Hesitancy rate allegedly drops by 87%….

Andy Borowitz: “Fauci Says Nausea and Splitting Headache Are Symptoms—of Talking to Rand Paul.”

Steve Brodner at his Substack:

Ari Berman: “Ousting of Liz Cheney, insane 'audit' in AZ, avalanche of GOP voter suppression bills all have same goal: to institutionalize Trump's Big Lie & rig future elections in their favor. GOP assault on democracy most important story in American politics today.” Jay Rosen: “I would go further. It's the most important story—and it scrambles the mind of the press. Accustomed to treating the GOP as part of American democracy, it now has to shift frames to GOP vs. democracy.” Joan Walsh: “Ousting Cheney proves that Republicans are committed to trying to win elections by any means necessary—even by inciting violence, as Trump did on January 6. They don’t stand for anything but that. It’s a very scary moment.” Jonathan Chait: “The Republican Party is sliding into authoritarianism at a terrifyingly rapid clip. That fate of American democracy is the biggest issue in American politics.”

Headline of the Day, from the New Yorker: “The Mysterious Origins of the Cerne Abbas Giant: On a hillside ages ago, people inscribed a naked man with a twenty-six-foot-long erect penis. Why did they do it?” Then there’s this from Slate: “The Man Who Put Donald Trump’s Face on Toilet Paper: Biden toilet paper is now outselling Trump toilet paper, one presidential butt-wipe mastermind says.”

What’s new on the Sinema? A Mother Jones profile: “From Radical Activist to Senate Obstructionist: The Metamorphosis of Kyrsten Sinema.”

Both Sides Now: With the NY Times and other major media outlets playing the usual “both-sideism” and “well, what can you do?” games in covering the current Israeli-Palestinian horrors, leave it to The Onion, of all places, to nail the conflict—and the media performance—in a fictional report. Here’s the headline and then an excerpt: Palestinian Family Who Lost Home In Airstrike Takes Comfort In Knowing ‘This Is All Very Complicated.’

“You know, having your longtime family home demolished by an Israeli missile is a tough pill to swallow, but at the end of the day, you gotta realize there’s two sides to every story,” said Rabia Al-Natsheh, the matriarch of the family, adding that, despite the fact that her 5-year-old son was killed in the attack while her husband suffered third-degree burns, she ultimately found peace of mind in knowing that it’s a very nuanced issue that can be pretty complex when you look at it.

“Sure, we have experienced incredible hardship and been forced to the brink of destitution, but then again, it’s not a black-and-white thing. It’s honestly a relief knowing that the loss of our home is simply a part of a long, inscrutable series of events, the root causes of which are too difficult for anyone to objectively assess.” Al-Natsheh added that she was grateful to have plenty of time to read multiple different perspectives on the subject at her new refugee camp.

Robert Reich: “Let's get one thing straight: there is no labor shortage. There is a shortage of employers willing to pay their workers a living wage.”

Trump and Extradition: Politico this morning reveals, “Law enforcement officials in Palm Beach County, Fla.,have actively prepared for the possibility that Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance could indict Trump while he’s at Mar-a-Lago, according to two high-ranking county officials involved in planning sessions. Among the topics discussed in those meetings: how to handle the thorny extradition issues that could arise if an indictment moves forward.”

The whitest wine in the world: You may be surprised to learn from Slate that Trump Wine is still a thing, as “it seems that at least one Trump enterprise might not only have benefited from his initial White House run, but continued to flourish through the ups and downs of his Oval Office tenure and into his post-presidential era. That would be the Trump Winery, the apparent success of which is nothing if not a testament to the triumph of politics over taste.” The vineyard in Virginia is actually the largest by acreage in the state.

Biden Goes Native: There are only two Native American federal judges out of hundreds on the federal bench. Biden just nominated a third.

Weak in Review: New edition of odd nuggets from Harper’s…

In the United States, a new study estimated that the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 has reached 900,000 people, a number that is 57 percent higher than the official count….South Carolina’s legislature approved death by firing squad as a legal means of capital punishment, and evidence showed that the DNA of an Arkansas man who maintained his innocence before his execution in 2017 did not match genetic material from the crime scene…..“The sexual nature of this organ is irrelevant,” said a Canadian judge who ruled that an officer had acted lawfully when he grabbed and twisted a man’s genitals to garner compliance in an arrest.

After a church warden with the keys to a polling location overslept, residents of Oxford, England, cast votes for local elections in the trunk of a car....Nebraska governor Pete Ricketts endorsed the Nebraska Beef Passport, and more than 45,000 people applied to cull bison herds in the Grand Canyon National Park…In Nashville, Tennessee, a man was arrested outside Kid Rock’s Big Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll Steakhouse after swinging his colostomy bag at police officers.

Music

Not that we care, and the picks are always debatable, but the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced this year’s inductees yesterday: Foo Fighters, Carole King, Tina Turner, Go-Gos, Jay-Z and Todd Rundgren. If you are wondering how Carole and Tina had not made it before—King was already in as a songwriter and Turner as half of Ike &. Additionally, Kraftwerk, my former Crawdaddy columnist Gil Scott-Heron and Charley Patton will get an Early Influence Award. Paying tribute to Tina earlier, below, are Rev. Al Green and full choir at her Kennedy Center Honors, with his early hit—and her later one—“Let’s Stay Together.”

And here is little-known Bruce Springsteen live cover of Carole King’s “Goin’ Back,” earlier done by Dusty Springfield and The Byrds.

Film/TV

Do one gun thing: That was the theme of last night’s Sam Bee episode, and here she is joined by a bunch of celebs to demand that politicos do “one fucking thing” about gun control. Just one. Special pleaders include Regina King, Ilhan Omar, Josh Groban, Kamau Bell, Gabby Giffords, Tenacious D, Michael Imperioli.

PBS announced yesterday that a four-series on Muhammad Ali directed by Ken Burns will air this fall. I’ve been a huge Ali fan since the early 1960s but—come on, there have been at least four major docs or films about Ali in the past few years alone, move along now, for awhile….

Song Pick of the Day

Here’s a second preview of upcoming Chrissie Hynde doing Dylan, this time a jangly “Love Minus Zero/No Limit.”

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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.Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.