There are some things you can't cover up with lipstick and powder

Politics is so awful these days, it's hard to know where to start. My supply of outrage seems to have limits, sadly.

Oh, and the Republican Party has no one working in it that is sane, and wants a better America. Sorry, R friends, you may be decent people, but your party has become traitors and loons.

On a happier note, here's a perfect pop song, too often overlooked:

A little people magic if you will

That line makes me mindful of the good folks in Wisconsin, fighting a corrupt dishonest felonious governor and state Senate.

Meantime some fun, artful, no-holds-barred rock'n'roll with the lyric in its original context:





And how special was Freddie? Talent that can't be taught, only perfected. Thank you for being you. RIP.

I cried a river over you

Perfect music, performed perfectly:



Guitar: Barney Kessel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barney_Kessel

Bass: Chuck Domanico: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Domanico

Julie London:

I Feel Fine

Dear nuclear power supporters: Please buy an airline ticket to Japan and camp out near the Fukushima reactor. Unless you're willing to do that, fuck you.

Update:

Reactors at two Japanese power plants can no longer cool radioactive substances, a government official said Saturday, adding that a small leak had been detected at one of the facilities.

Atomic material has seeped out of one of the Fukushima Daiichi plant's five nuclear reactors, about 160 miles (260 kilometers) north of Tokyo, said Kazuo Kodama, a spokesman for Japan's nuclear regulatory agency.

Potentially dangerous problems in cooling radioactive material appear to have cropped up there, as well as at another of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. nuclear plants, Ichiro Fujisaki, Japan's ambassador to the United States, confirmed to CNN.
The Fukushima Daini and Fukushima Daiichi power plants are separate facilities located in different towns in northeastern Japan's Fukushima prefecture. Each one has its own set of individual nuclear reactors.

Kodama said the cooling system had failed at three of the four such units of the Daini plant.

Temperatures of the coolant water in that plant's reactors soared to above 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit), Japan's Kyodo News Agency reported, an indication that the cooling system wasn't working.

Authorities subsequently ordered residents within 3 kilometers of that facility to evacuate as "a precaution," Fujisaki said. That plant was also added to the Japanese nuclear agency's emergency list, along with the Daiichi plant.

This is exactly why I don't support nuclear power anytime soon for the US:

The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency is trying to confirm a report that an explosion occurred at a nuclear power station in quake-hit Fukushima Prefecture.

The agency said on Saturday that a person at the Fukushima Number One nuclear station reported that an explosion was heard and smoke was seen near one of the reactors at around 4PM.

The power station operator Tokyo Electric Power Company told the agency that 4 people were injured.

Video of the reactor in question shows the outer wall of the building that houses the reactor has disappeared.

Prefectural authorities say the power company informed them that the ceiling of the building collapsed after an explosion.

Tokyo Electric Power had been releasing air from the container of the reactor to lower pressure.

Pressure inside the container had been rising after the reactor's cooling system broke down due to power failure.

Radioactive substances have been detected near the reactor.

Indeed.

Of course, the Republican idiots running congress are on top of it:

Back in February 2009, Republicans found a lot of risible spending in the stimulus bill. In his response to the State of the Union, Gov. Bobby Jindal, R-La., derided the stimulus for including "$140 million for something called volcano monitoring." The gripe was mostly that the funding, mostly for U.S. Geological Survey upkeep, wasn't stimulative. (This is a pretty good argument.) But Democrats honed in on that comment to decide that Republicans were going to try to cut funding for natural disaster monitoring.
This isn't wrong. The continuing resolution passed by the GOP House, the one that just failed in the Senate, reduces funding for the federal agencies that monitor and react to disasters.

But wait, there's more:

The GOP budget plan that passed through the House last month aimed to cut funding for a tsunami warning center that issued a slew of warnings around Japan's devastating earthquake.

Complete Coverage: Earthquake in Japan

The budget, which proposed about $60 billion in budget cuts, would slash funding for the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). That would potentially cripple the effectiveness of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, which issued a series of warnings over the past several days regarding the situation in Japan, where an 8.9 magnitude earthquake triggered a massive tsunami along the nation's east coast. (The PTWC is a part of the National Weather Service, which falls under the umbrella of NOAA - the organization responsible for providing tsunami warnings in the U.S.)

The Republican's proposed "continuing resolution" to fund the government, which was defeated in the Senate this week, aimed to cut $1.2 billion - or 21 percent - of President Obama's proposed budget for NOAA, ClimateProgress.org reports.

Bastards. Delusional ignorant ideology-above-all-else motherfucking bastards.

Now don't you wait or hesitate

Who is the best male Rock'n'Roll singer working today? Probably a stupid question; there are many fine ones.

But I think a case can be made for this guy:

R.I.P. Gary Moore

Sad news in the guitar-playing world today:

Thin Lizzy guitarist Gary Moore found dead in hotel room

Rock guitarist and former Thin Lizzy star Gary Moore has died in Spain.

The 58-year-old, originally from Belfast, was found dead in a hotel room on the Costa del Sol.

Thin Lizzy founding member Brian Downey paid tribute to his friend.

"I am in total shock," he said. "He will always be in my thoughts and prayers and I just can't believe he is gone."

Moore had a successful solo career but it was for his time in Thin Lizzy that he will be best remembered.

He joined the band in 1973 after the sudden departure of guitarist Eric Bell but only played with them for four months.

Four years later he returned and went on to play on the band's Black Rose album.

Thin Lizzy guitarist Scott Gorham said it been a pleasure to share a stage with him.

"Playing with Gary during the Black Rose era was a great experience, he was a great player and a great guy," he said.

"I will miss him."

Niles Stokes, editor of Hot Press music magazine, had known Moore for almost 50 years. He said: "He was a phenomenally good guitarist after starting in the music industry at the age of about 15. Not only did he have success with Thin Lizzie but he had a successful solo career. His contribution to the Irish rock cannon was immense."

Thin Lizzy's frontman Phil Lynnot died in 1986.

The band reformed at various times since then and continue to tour today.

Moore played with some of his former bandmates in 2006.

Repost, from 3.9.07

In music, as in all arts, there are those who innovate (think Picasso), and those who "kick it up a notch".

Gary Moore wasn't the first guy to strap on a Les Paul and plug it into a Marshall, but he injected something special into that equipment combination. From wikipedia:

Gary Moore (born Robert William Gary Moore, 4 April 1952, in Belfast, Northern Ireland) is a guitarist. In a career dating back to the 1960s he has played with bands/artists including Thin Lizzy, Colosseum II, Greg Lake and blues-rock band Skid Row as well as having a successful solo career.

Moore started performing at a young age, having picked up a battered acoustic guitar at the age of eight, and got his first quality guitar at the age of fourteen, learning to play the right-handed instrument in the standard way despite being left handed. His career has lasted over thirty years.

Gary Moore now appears as a regular radio host every Sunday and Monday on 'Planet Rock' radio. His show is entitled 'Blues Power' and plays many classic blues tracks, as well as some of Moore's own tracks.

Gary added an element of . . . I guess, precision to the rock lexicon. He rocked as hard as all the acolytes of Clapton, Beck, & Buddy Guy from the '60s, but was somehow smoother and more polished. The level of virtuosity was raised, without sacrificing any of the "soul".

Here's a video of Gary during his Thin Lizzy days:



And here he is with Thin Lizzy's Phil Lynott doing the overblown yet delicious "Parisienne Walkways" live:



And finally, here's Gary more recently, in '04, paying homage to Jimi with "Red House", with bassist extraordinaire Pino Pallidino:



And best quote ever from YouTube comments:

Shit, if I could play like that, I'd have my head shaved, my balls out, be drunk all the time and wear rabbit slippers and I'm pretty sure people wouldn't notice!

Indeed.

Gotta Lovett

If You Were to Wake Up:

Don't Want To Be An American Idiot

My friend Mark Kleiman is a smart guy and a fantastic blogger. His take on the SOTU speech is so good that I've included this whole post:

Sometimes your opponents can see what you’re doing more clearly than your friends can. Some progressives were put off by the rather Reaganesque rhetoric of the State of the Union address, but Mark Thiessen of AEI recognized it for what it was: an attempt to harness “American exceptionalism” to pull the plough of activist government. When Wes Clark tried the same thing either Andy Sabl or I called it “the liberalism of national greatness.” I thought it was a winner then, and I think it’s a winner now.

And – contrary to the more conventional Reaganite rhetoric – Obama’s message is fully consistent with one strand of the Founding. One of the striking features of The Audacity of Hope was Obama’s identification with the thought of Hamilton, carried into the second generation as Henry Clay’s American Plan. From the Louisian Purchase, the Erie Canal, and the transcontinental railroad to land-grant colleges, homesteading, rural electrification, the GI Bill, interstate highways, and the Internet, the Federal government has again and again been the agent of crucial economic innovation. The Springfield Armory was turning out mass-produced rifles when Henry Ford was still in diapers.

Of course the feds have also sponsored boondoggles from manned spaceflight and coal gasification to the Bureau of Reclamation, the Army Corps of Engineers, and corn ethanol. If you take risks, you sometimes fail, and if you make stupid decisions under political pressure you’re that much more likely to fail. But the notion that the gummint ought to keep its nose out of the economy – or, for that matter, that a monopoly granted by a patent is somehow not a governmental intervention in the market – accords with neither logic nor history.

Indeed. Thiessen is usually awful, as are most at the American Enterprise Institute, and tries to spin his conclusion in a predictable right-wing manner. But Kleiman gets it exactly right, IMHO.

But I always thought that I'd see you again

So there's this girl I met in 7th grade and we went to the movies and stuff, and dated and fought, and stuff. And I saw her again a few years later and we dated and fought and stuff. And we lived together, and dated, and fought and stuff.

In between times she and I moved a thousand miles apart, she got married, I got tours, she got un-married and I got her. And we dated and lived together and stuff, and fought.

Over the years I proposed to her twice. Years apart. She was right to turn me down, I ain't, or at least wasn't, husband material. Smart girl, smart woman. I probably broke her heart more than she broke mine, but I never forgot about her. Years later, when I lived 3 thousand miles away I heard she got married again and moved a thousand miles away.

In the last few years I've been trying to contact her, mainly just to apologize for being a jerk, but kinda maybe hoping somehow in the back of mind that maybe she was un-married again. Hell, I even joined FaceBook just in case she ... but it's hard to find your friend on FB if you don't even know her last name.

But then I got a call from a mutual FB friend that she had died 3 years ago in an accident. I called that person a liar. Then I got angry at that person. The Kubler-Ross steps aren't quite as defined as they look in print. But if this a joke, it's a pretty fucking elaborate one to put a headstone in the ground.

Of course I'm handling it in the mature way that I've now grown up in. Fist sized holes in the wall, and "I ain't drunk, I'm just drinkin'" For my friends who are tempted to call me? Please don't, I don't feel like talking. I'm OK, just going thru the shit we all do.

For Debbie, I'm sorry, you deserved better than me for years, I hope you found him. "But I always thought that I'd see you again"

If there are rain puddles in Heaven, Christina is jumping in them today.

Today once again I'm glad Barack Obama is our President.