These Bots Are Made for Stalking

Plus John Oliver and Andrew Yang controversies, and music from Tom Petty & Stevie Nicks, Bruce Springsteen, Nancy Sinatra, Carole King (with Geraldo Rivera), and a banned Procol Harum video.

In a white room, with no curtains…

News & Politics

Jimmy Kimmel on Marjorie Taylor Greene comparing mask mandates to the Holocaust: “Where the hell are those Jewish space lasers when you need them?”

“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” will finally welcome back a full and fully vaccinated audience starting June 14. As Stephen said last night, that means Rand Paul is not invited, adding, “Thankfully, most people are not Rand Paul.”

The Onion: “New Orleans Airbnb Touts Location In Heart Of Historic Airbnb Quarter.”

The Devil’s Right Hand: “Texas poised to allow unlicensed carrying of handguns. It is on verge of removing one of its last major gun restrictions after lawmakers approved allowing people to carry handguns without a license (and any background check). Meanwhile: America has already endured 230 mass shootings and 13 mass murders in 2021, including 12 mass shootings over the past weekend.

One year after George Floyd’s murder: A new Axios-Ipsos poll finds 79 % of white Republicans saying America has done enough to ensure equality, versus only 12 % of white Democrats who said the same. Plus:

Today, Republican voters are less sympathetic to Black Lives Matter than they were a year ago, the political scientists Jennifer Chudy and Hakeem Jefferson have shown. Support among Democrats remains higher than it was before Floyd’s death—but is lower than immediately afterward. There are a few broad areas of agreement. Most Americans say they have a high degree of trust in law enforcement — even more than did last June, FiveThirtyEight’s Alex Samuels notes. Most also disagree with calls to “defund” or abolish police departments. Yet most back changes to policing, such as banning chokeholds.

Amazon going nuclear—same day shipping!

A Lion’s Share: Breaking overnight, Amazon is nearing a deal to buy Hollywood studio MGM Holdings for almost $9 billion, including debt. The deal would be Amazon’s second biggest after Whole Foods.

America’s worst congressman—except for a handful of others—is Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who has remained in office only because his district is the most gerrymandered in the USA. In fact, it is now shaped like a duck. But now there’s hope: Ohio loses one seat in the next Congress due to the census returns, and Jim is most likely to lose this. Honk—or quack—if you like this.

Giving you the finger: The viral video “Charlie Bit My Finger” will leave YouTube in its original 2007 form—after the creators sold it as an NFT.

No fowl play: New advice from the C.D.C.—Don’t kiss or snuggle your ducks and chickens.

Oliver Darcy of CNN:

Two local TV stations are conducting reviews after a humiliating segment by HBO's John Oliver. The segment about sponsored content was aimed at highlighting how easy it is for less-than-honest characters to purchase their way onto shows that look and feel similar to a newscast. To do this, Oliver duped three stations into running promotional spots for a bogus 'sexual wellness' blanket supposedly using Nazi Germany-era technology. A spox for KVUE-TV told me that 'while it is a commercial spot, it was an error to air it, and we are reviewing our processes, so this doesn’t happen again.' And a spox for Scripps, KMGH-TV's parent company, said it is 'vetting our review processes for non-news segments to ensure our stations follow the proper standards.' A spox for KTVX-TV parent company Nexstar, however, declined to acknowledge any error and said it had no comment...

Here’s the Oliver segment, cued up for the final four minutes of the program:

Beto Off? O’Rourke has teased another run for gov of Texas next month but according to AP today he is still playing coy.

Did AP misfire? Buzzfeed reports on story we covered last week: AP Staffers Demanded To Know Why Emily Wilder Was Fired After A Conservative ‘Smear Campaign’ Over Her Pro-Palestinian Activism. “More than 100 Associated Press employees have criticized the way the news organization fired a young journalist last week after a conservative ‘smear campaign’ over her pro-Palestinian activism in college.” And Wash Post staffers want to know the full role of their new editor who was still running AP—see Eric Boehlert here. See denies involvement.

Cartoon controversy: As a promoter of editorial cartoons for decades, I always look for the controversies they spark, though now they are rare. But this week there’s a fresh one. Andrew Yang, a frontrunner in the upcoming Dem primary for mayor of NYC, recently named the wild, touristy, Times Square subway station as his favorite, inspiring much mockery—as he is often accused of being an outsider in the city. Bill Bramhall of the Daily News, whose work we have featured in the past here, responded with the cartoon below. Now some are charging racism. Yang’s wife Evelyn, for example, tweeted: “I can’t believe my eyes. To publish this racist disfiguration of @andrewyang as a tourist, in NYC where I was born, where Andrew lived for 25 years, where our boys were born, where 16% of us are Asian and anti-Asian hate is up 900%.”

Well-stated: From NBC, “Dozens of constitutional scholars tell Congress it has power to make D.C. a state.”

Music

We’re a day late but they were 50 years short….

On this date in 1965, legendary blues harmonica player/ singer/ songwriter, Sonny Boy Williamson died in his sleep. Earlier in the decade he had survived an incident where he reportedly set his hotel room on fire while trying to cook a rabbit—in a coffee percolator.

On this date in 1967: Procol Harum's first Bach-influenced single “A Whiter Shade of Pale” entered the charts. The first video was shot in the ruins of Witley Court in Worcestershire, England. But director Peter Clifton inserted some Vietnam War news footage, which caused it to be banned from airplay. So they soon made made a safer video. Here’s the original, of course.

On this day in 1973, Carole King, then one of the most popular music artists, played a (then-rare) free rock concert in Central Park. I’m sure you’d like to watch how young Geraldo Rivera covered it (his segment ran a month or so later).

Books

California Dreaming: New book by veteran music scribe Joel Selvin getting some good reviews. Hollywood Eden: Electric Guitars, Fast Cars, and the Myth of the California Paradise is set between 1957 and 1967—in other words, it covers that period before hippiedom’s rise (Monterey) and fall (Altamont). Instead it’s “Gidget set to a rock ’n’ roll beat” when cars became “a symbol of freedom, possibility, self-sufficiency, the romance of the highway, all tied to life in Southern California.” The stars, naturally, include Brian Wilson, Jan & Dean, Kim Fowley, The Mamas & The Papas, Herb Alpert and Nancy Sinatra, whose boots were made for walkin.’

Song Pick

I can report firsthand that the British group The Searchers were a strong, if not always recognized, influence on Bruce Springsteen—as he told me back around 1974, playing on his little record player in Jersey their “When You Walk In the Room” (written by Jackie DeShannon). He was polishing his breakthrough single, “Born to Run” at the time, quite obviously. Check Bruce out below paying homage to that song, and then another Searchers hit, from Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks, “Needles and Pins.”

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“Always worth reading.” — Frank Rich, New York magazine, Veep and Succession

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.