I've got a new Think Again called "The Conspiracy Nuts Take Over," which compares media coverage of "truthers" vs. "birthers" and you can find it here.

Also, my old friend and history professor, Dick Polenberg is continuing to host his web-based Slope Radio program on the blues and folk music. Called "Key to the Highway," it's back at its old time slot: from 7 to 8 pm on Wednesdays. The shows are archived, though, so you can hear them whenever you wish. All of the past programs - more than thirty of them--are also still available and I think they are our kind of thing.

You can log on at the following site. No username or password is necessary.

http://slopemedia.org/tag/key-to-the-highway/

He writes: "Last spring I concluded with programs about the music of John Lee Hooker and Django Reinhardt. This season's first program -- Episode 32 -- is devoted to Dinah Washington, who began her recording career in 1943 at the age of 19. She later released an album called Dinah Sings Bessie Smith, and one of her last albums, which appeared in 1963, was fittingly entitled, Back to the Blues. Future programs will deal with the famous Anthology of American Folk Music compiled by Harry Smith in 1952, with songs written about the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, and with musicians such as Cassandra Wilson."

Now Shana Tova, and here's Pierce:

CHARLES PIERCE
NEWTON, MA.

Hey Doc:

"White House said, put the thing in the pool room/Vatican said, no, it belongs to Rome/Jody said it's mine, but you can have it for $17 million."

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Rocks In My Bed" (Ivy Anderson)--I am perfectly willing to stand in the well of the House and apologize to everyone there for how much I love New Orleans.

Short Takes:

Part The First: Sometimes, you just have to admire their lateral quickness. I mean, honestly, this makes the old Soviet approach to history look positively scholarly. Don't go to the opera, W.

Part The Second: Holy hell. It turns out that Waldo The Drunk Security Guard, who may be familiar to the readers of these dispatches for being constantly derelict in his duties at Salon, has a drunken brother who seems to have landed a job guarding the studios at NPR, with predictable results.

Part The Third: Oh, Michele, don't worry. As I have said repeatedly since you first burst on the national stage, you can just eat me, OK?

Part The Fourth: Not to harsh Andrew's mellow beyond how badly it's already been harshed, but what in the hell is he on about here? Does he honestly think that the "small-government, balanced-budget" element of last weekend's Orc Cotillion is any less nutty than the Christianists are? That people who believe that hollering "socialism" every time Olde Country Buffet runs out of tapioca are the route back to political legitimacy? That supply-side economics is really less detached from empirical reality than the Birthers are? Andrew, laddybucks, the whole conservative movement always has been about fifty bulbs short of being a chandelier. You ran with the pack once. Deal with it.

Part The Fifth: This was nice comic interlude. Howie The Hack marvels at how crazy conservatives have become. David Brody demonstrates what he's talking about. Sam Tanenhaus plugs a book and pretends this all started last weekend, and Ceci Connolly is brought in to see how fast they all can kill poor Bob Somerby.

Part The Sixth: I'd like to say, for the record, that it is truly an honor to be called a "clod" by this sweaty third-string unemployable. The above essay, of course, will be included in the upcoming anthology, Cahiers du Pantloade.

Part The Seventh: Bookmark this sucker. Yeah, they said nice things about the book. Whatsit to ya? But Texas liberals are always worthy of support. And what can you say about a site that helped me find this which absolutely, 100-percent, solid-gold made my week?

Part The Eighth: Thanks to Glennzilla for pointing this out. I have no doubt that The Atlantic's method for compiling these rankings is at least as credible as that used by, say, the BCS. More's the pity. Look at this incredible parade of omadhauns. Numbers 2, 7, and 11 are complete radio rodeo clowns. Number 10 is indictable. Number 13 believes in Magic Dolphins and listens to the tiny little Reagan in her head. Number 26 is a toe-sucking charlatan. Your mileage on most of the others may vary. We are so screwed. I swear, someone should write a book.

Part The Penultimate: Yeah, I was happy to see THIS, too, but at the risk of going all Howler on everyone, this line right here--"--no Democrat ever shouted "liar" at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq--" is meaningless unless followed by the phrase, "Not that you did either, sweetie." It's moments like this when it's useful to remember Harvey Keitel's advice from Pulp Fiction as to what it is not yet time to do to each other yet.

Part The Last: It's finally on this Sunday at Pairc an Chrocaigh. And, not for nothing, but my grandparents came from the place represented in Dail Eireann by the Up The Kingdom!

p.s. -- I'd just like to thank the redoubtable Amanda Marcotte for the kind ones, and tell her that, the next time I'm in Austin, the first plate of ribs at Stubbs is on me.

Last week, through serendipitous circumstance, I found myself staring down the very nasty gun-barrel of the despicable way we do "healthcare" in this country. The details are unimportant, but I can say that it had something very much to do with this Kaiser Foundation study that Ezra Klein limns here. This concentrated my mind wonderfully on the current dilemma. I came to the not unreasonable conclusion that most of the politicians involved in this business--up to and including the lemon in the White House--don't care about the simple fact that this country is going to allow people to sicken and die because they can't afford to do anything else. Period. Everything else is dumbshow, a WWE card covered by people engaged in a really bad form of sportswriting--people, I might add, who could care less themselves that this country is going to allow people to sicken and die because they can't afford to do anything else.

Does anyone honestly believe that this White House has acted in good faith? With its allies in Congress? With its constituents? Hell, with its own campaign promises? Does anyone honestly believe that, say, Chuck Todd gives a rat's ass how many people out in the country slowly sicken and die as long as Chuck can tell us who's up and who's down, and what's politically feasible and what's not, and that he can still get a good table at the Palm? Never in my long career as a professional cynic have I seen an spasm of Beltway bubblehood so far removed from the actual concerns of people's lives--so far removed that, last weekend, we had a gathering of the politically halt, lame, blind, and crippled in Washington, gathered for the sole purpose of petitioning various oligarchs to keep screwing them with their pants on. Never in my long career as a professional cynic have I seen a spasm of Beltway bubblehood so far beyond even the limits of Irish Smartass to describe it. The political class in this country--politician and journalist, lobbyist and legislator, Republican and Democratic, Executive and Legislative -- has made a collective decision to protect the profits of one of the least popular industries in the history of the Republic, to preserve the iron grip of corporate bureaucrats over the practice of medicine in America, and to refuse vitrually without serious discussion to adopt measures favored by 77 percent of the voting public. It is to be in awe, is what it is.

And I hate to personalize this, but one of the prime Democratic waffle salesmen throughout this whole unholy mess has been Senator Mark Udall (D-Colorado) Now, as it happens, I spent half of 1975 and almost all of 1976 working to get Mark's pappy--Mo, of sainted memory--elected president. In the course of my duties, I handed out--or arranged to have handed out--about eleventy bajillion of these handbills. I handed them out at diners in New Hampshire, and hung them on people's doors in Massachusetts. I sent people out at 5:30 in the morning to distribute them at factory gates in Wisconsin in the middle of February. I even brought them (briefly) to the land of the Amish, where nobody votes and few people own telephones. Looking at the old flyer now, I am struck by this passage right here:

Why in America, with our immense wealth, should the poor get sicker and the sick get poorer? We have been promising ourselves a systemof national health insurance for a quarter of a century. I am tired of apologizing year after year as we fail to achieve it. We have put a premium on conversation instead of coverage. America is the only industrialized nation in the world which does not provide basic health service as a universal right. As President, I will make sure that we do.

I didn't freeze my cojones off in front of the Allis-Chalmers plant so Senator Udall one day could calculate a half-dozen good political reasons why some people simply have to die. I didn't nearly get killed on a dark road outside Manchester in the snow so Mark Udall could come along thirty-three years later and quibble about which insurance company gobbler can suck up the biggest bonus this year. Jesus, Mark, if you won't listen to the people out there, at least listen to the spirit of the great man who was your father.

Name: Steve Thorne
Hometown: Somewhere in California

I'm guessing that the reasons we're using contractors to guard embassies in dangerous places instead of Marines is that: a) We're a little short of Marines right now with all the deployments they're on and b) Marines would be such tempting targets for any knucklehead walking or driving past the embassy that we'd lose them for no good reason and c) Marines receive medical and VA benefits and have military honors rendered to them if they're killed while contractors' families get insurance checks and no press coverage at Dover AFB or Arlington and d) losing a Marine pisses off more people than losing a "contractor" and might lead to losing more Marines in the attempt to get even.

The Marines have worked very hard to make their uniform a symbol of the might and power of the United States and that has some unfortunate side effects in hostile nations.

Protecting Americans from their foreign policy mistakes is a "team sport." Here in "Somewhere" there's a lot of Marines about. And while it is my duty as a Soldier to give them as much shit as possible, I do respect that they're too important to the "team" to lose just for looking sharp outside a building located someplace we probably shouldn't be in the first place.

Name: Steve Nelson
Hometown: Ket, WA

While much of this story is anecdotal I totally agree. My mother-in-law lives by herself and watches TV a lot. Between Mariners games and soap operas she used to watch a lot of news (mostly FOX). Over time we noticed a huge difference in her outlook. She was becoming increasingly depressed and paranoid to the point we were worried that she was on her last legs. With a stroke of brilliance my wife convinced her to stop watching so much news and the few times she did then she should try other news stations than FOX. Voila, within a month she was back to her old self.

Name: Chuckie Fitzhugh
Hometown: Chandler, AZ

Regarding Tim Kane's email about Fox and right-wingnut radio preying on the elderly, I never previously thought about the possibility, but at first blush it would seem to make a lot of sense. I have never been able to comprehend how they get the HUGE mid-day radio ratings that they do, but if you think about it, it makes some sense. Who is listening to radio during the middle of the day (beyond the background noise of an isolated office-cube or two)??

Their message is always simple, and repeated ad nauseum... Who does this vitriol and animosity appeal to? I would imagine that even conservative "thinkers" like to break-down a topic and discuss in more detail than you'll ever hear on Hannity or Beck, or any of those loons. Simple, repeated messages, and the occasional reference to "back in the day when America was great"; all joking aside, I always thought it required some diminished mental capability to find their drivel entertaining; sadly, maybe the elderly actually are their intended target-audience.

Name: Frank Lynch
Hometown: Really Not Worth Archiving - http://www.samueljohnson.com/blog/

Hi Eric, with Friday the 18th being Samuel Johnson's Tricentennial, I don't mind weighing in with some thoughts on the great man. And being an amateur Johnsonian with a highly recommended Johnson web site (and who wishes to be in England right now but is not), perhaps some of the following might be interesting to slip in to the mix...

1. Conservatives love to claim Samuel Johnson as one of theirs, thanks to his love of country and his respect for the established forms of government and religion. But they also love to claim Edmund Burke as one of their own, and while Johnson had the utmost respect for Burke's intellect, he detested his politics. In fact, it would appear that Johnson's famous line "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" was provoked by a discussion of Burke and others in the 18th c patriot movement. (In Boswell's journals, the sequence is a discussion of Burke followed by the quip; in Boswell's Life of Johnson Boswell switches the order and puts them in different paragraphs, presumably to spare Burke.) Johnson's essay "The Patriot" is full of disparaging comments about the practices of Burke's party.

2. Johnson was a great example of how someone could love his country without blindly loving everything the country does. In an explanation of the events leading up the Seven Years' War, Johnson compared the way the British colonists treated our Native Americans to how the French did, and found the British dishonest and opportunistic. "No people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous," he wrote.

3. Although Johnson adhered to the established order, he did not believe that mere tradition and history were significant. He wrote an essay arguing for leniency in punishment (forgery and robbery were capital crimes in those days). He also took the side of women, writing on the need to provide them with better education, as well as social forces which can drive a woman to prostitution.

Johnson also understood the plight of the poor, and would load his pockets with change before he went out, in order to give it to the beggars he encountered. At a dinner party, when some said it was wasteful to give money to the poor (they would only spend it on tobacco or gin), he upbraided them for wanting to deny them even that: "Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer, and are not ashamed to shew even visible displeasure, if ever the bitter taste is taken from their mouths."

I have nothing but the highest admiration for Johnson, and wish he were better known.

Best always, Frank

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