Happy Birthday to The Greatest Rock & Roll Band in the World

50 years ago tonight, "The Rollin' Stones" played their very first gig at the Marquee Club on Oxford Street in London. They went on to meet with some success after adding the dropped "g".

 Here they are playing one of Robert Johnson's biggest hits in 1969:

The Running-Mate Anagram of the Day

If Mitt Romney decides that he needs to placate the true-believing nutjob base that has been uninspired by his Olympic-caliber Flipping and Flopping, he may be tempted to reach out to their patron saint: Rick Santorum.

If this dream team ever were to make it to the White House, we could probably (among other atrocities) say goodbye to  support for NPR, PBS, the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, and anything else that smacked of secular American culture.

Therefore, "Romney Santorum" = "Mourn Arts Money"

Romney has already said that Sesame Street should support itself with advertising. He'd have no trouble cutting other arts funding, even without VP Santorum pushing him harder in that direction.


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Catch up with earlier running-mate anagrams here: Ayotte, Pawlenty, Christie, and Portman. 

World Trade Center construction update (with bonus MZ-3A airship)

Here's a picture of the new World Trade Center site taken from my phone a little before 1 this afternoon.  The airship above it was -- amazingly -- not covered with advertisements, so I took a closer look.

It seems that there is only one manned US Navy airship, so it was the MZ-3A that flew up over the Hudson River this afternoon.

#MittsMissingReturns (Part Three)

Here's just a quick video update of how the media are starting to pick up and run with Mitt Romney's evasion of this tax-return issue:

Mitt has come continued to dodge the question in a radio interview in Iowa today, saying there's nothing hidden in his tax returns that we need to worry our little heads about and besides, "I don't manage them. I don't even know where they are." In other words, the buck stops with the hired help. If anything untoward or illegal is found in the pages of documents when (or if) they're released, he's already planning to blame an underling. Klassy. With a Kapital "K".

Thanks to everyone who's been tweeting with the hashtag #MittsMissingReturns on Twitter. Please keep it up until Mitt comes clean (or cleanish).

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UPDATE (11:43 am, 7/10/12):
Here's another must-see video of Ryan Lizza on CNN standing up to a stonewalling Romney surrogate, Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah):

RYAN LIZZA: Just yes or no, should he release them or not.
JASON CHAFFETZ: No! No, I don’t…He’s been very successful, he’s released everything that he’s required to release, including paying more than 16 percent of his income to charitable givings. I think it’s a diversionary tactic. Most people, they don’t care about this. Governor Romney’s been very successful, get over it. It’s a reality.

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And in case you missed the previous installments of mine on this topic, here are links to:

• #MittsMissingReturns [part one], July 3 

• #MittsMissingReturns (Part Two), July 6 

A Modest Proposal to Prevent Voter Fraud by the 1%

Proposal: 

Ban the use of private jets on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

The Republicans have only one simple and cynical strategy for success in this November's Presidential election. It involves sabotaging the economy by Congressional intransigence, magnifying any slowdown they cause in the economy with their well-financed on-message GOP Pessimism Machine, and denying the voting franchise to as many potential Obama voters as possible.  They want to disenfranchise millions of mostly low-income voters in the name of preventing voter fraud, even though they have trouble citing a single concrete example of fraudulent voting.

Well, I have little concrete evidence that any multi-millionaires have hopped into private jets and voted at all their addresses in California, Utah, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire on the same first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, but that's no reason not to pass a law to keep ultra-rich voters grounded until election day is over.

*    *    *

(Seriously, there is another potential voter fraud scandal involving Mitt Romney not involving private jets, but which can only be resolved if he returns his Massachusetts tax returns.  Click the BradBlog link for more information)

#MittsMissingReturns (Part Two)

When I was tweeting with the #MittsMissingReturns hashtag earlier today, I started getting replies from the dark side of Twitter equating our calls for the release of Mitt Romney's recent tax returns with their calls for the release of "Obama's Sealed Records."  I wasn't sure which records they meant, but a quick search showed what all the fuss was about. Nothing.  Unless you consider it vital to know about the President's kindergarten and baptismal records from the 60s or his parents' marriage license or his college grades from the 80s.  The college transcripts seem to cause the most excitement; this seems to have been started by Donald Trump after the release of Barack Obama's birth certificate took some of the steam out of The Donald's earlier birtherist crusade, back when he was toying with the idea of running for President in the Spring of 2011.

"I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?... I'm thinking about it, I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records."
-- Donald Trump

This insinuation plays into the deepest racist resentments -- that somehow a less-intelligent black man was given the place at Columbia University and Harvard Law School that could have gone to a more deserving white right-wing nutjob. (Of course it probably never bothered these same people that our previous President, a proud C student, used the more traditional form of affirmative action to grease his easy path through Yale University and Harvard Business School.)


"My point is, it's all fun, it's all a circus, it's all a rodeo, until it starts to smack of racism, and then it's no longer fun." David Letterman on Donald Trump April 28, 2011.  The quote comes at the 1'30" point in the video up above, but watch the whole thing to see how Letterman won't let Dr. Phil jokingly let his friend Donald off the hook. "If he comes back on this show -- and I'm not sure we want him back on the show under those circumstances -- he ought to be prepared to apologize ... ought to be prepared to apologize just for that kind of behavior."

Needless to say, I was shocked that this racist call for the President's college records was resurrected by a number of people on Twitter today and equated with the call for Mitt Romney's hidden tax returns. It's a false equivalency, to say the least.

Then it got worse.

There's also the ridiculous new issue of the legitimacy of President Obama's Social Security number that was brought up to me today by a number of people on the Right side of Twitter.

And then I was sent a link to this birther video with the message "Michelle Obama can't remember where her husband was born".  That's when I needed to turn off Twitter for a few hours.

* * *

All of these things may have been disproved over and over again. All of them may be irrelevant to the qualifications of the person who's been serving effectively in the White House since January 2009, but there will be a continued drive to create a false equivalency between these fringe concerns and the very real need for us to get information about the very complicated personal business and taxes of his challenger who is running on a platform of business and taxes.

A Bonus Running-Mate Anagram of the Day

Mitt Romney's July 4th march through Wolfeboro with New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte yesterday led many scribes in the stenography pool of our major media outlets to refer to the freshman Senator from the Granite State as another on the lengthening short list of Republican Vice Presidential candidates.

The ineluctable intelligence of the anagram shows that this may be a poor choice. Pairing neighbors from New Hampshire & Massachusetts (& Michigan & Utah & California & New Hampshire & Cayman Islands & Switzerland & ...) may not be the best strategy for fundraising in the GOP's deep-South and Western homes.

The day the Romney and Ayotte ticket is announced could turn out to be A Rotten Money Day.

Click on the names to catch up with previous running-mate anagrams for Pawlenty, Christie, and Portman.

Running-Mate Anagrams of the Day

There seems to be a growing consensus among the consensus-makers of our airwaves, newsprint, and cables that  Mitt Romney will need to pick someone even more anodyne, colorless, and boring than the MittBot2012 himself as his running mate. Rising to the top of this list is Senator Robert Jones "Rob" Portman, who was the Director of George W. Bush's Office of Management and Budget (please don't fall asleep yet).

I liked the Pynchonian overtones of this anagram:

Random Entropy indeed, man. You can just feel the energy being sucked out of our political theater. There's just something very right about this to me, but then I'm someone who's read Gravity's Rainbow four times, and some people might find something wrong about that.

I also happened upon the least relevant anagram for this particular duo:

Obviously ridiculous. Not even the most dangerously hooked political addict (or pornography fiend with a bland-white-person fetish), would find this combination of automatons even vaguely titillating, even momentarily.

If the animations up above aren't working,
the first reads: "Romney and Portman" = "Random Entropy, Man"
the second reads "Romney Portman" = "Momentary Porn"

Hey Right Wingers, Here's a New Conspiracy for You! (and it's true)

I've noticed that every day those of you on the Right are promoting another new Lie/Myth/ConspiracyTheory in the echo chamber of your email chains, tweets, and blogs.  These are not the normal Fox News half truths and GOP talking points, but the stories about President Obama spending today in Paris (false, he's celebrating the 4th of July at the White House) or that the Affordable Care Act will implant RFID chips in all Americans by the strangely specific date of March 23, 2013 (false, of course, but still very alive on Twitter), or ... well there are a million of them that percolate below the surface until they bubble up into the general conversation like the Swift Boat lies in 2004 or the Birtherist myths in 2008.

But, my fellow citizens on the Right, here's something you can pick up and run with that is actually true!  I know that's a new concept for you all, but bear with me.

The Google Doodle this morning is quoting the words of an actual Communist:

Woody Guthrie was the writer of a regular column for the People's World and Daily Worker.  And if you don't believe that "This Land Is Your Land" is a Communist anthem, here are the last two verses, which don't get as much airtime as the "ribbon of highway" and "endless skyway" first verse.

As I was walkin'  -  I saw a sign there
And that sign said - no tress passin'
But on the other side  ... it didn't say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me
In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me

And if you want to complete your Google/Obama/Communism circle, here's a video of Bruce Springsteen singing this Communist anthem at an Obama rally in Philadephia in 2008 bracketed by "Yes We Can" chants (yes, I  was one of those chanters).
He leaves out the most incendiary penultimate verse attacking private property, but he does sing the last  "relief office" verse (yes, I was one of those who yelled "YEAH!" when he sang these neglected words).

The question is, how can Chris Christie continue to state that he's Bruce Springsteen's biggest fan? Doesn't he realize that songs have words?

Happy Independence Day. 

Running Mate Anagram of the Day

Chris Christie is on ABC's Nightline as I write this.  He's still thinking that he may be on Mitt Romney's potential Veep list, so we'll humor him by making him the anagram of the day.

If the animation up above isn't working, "Romney and Christie" = "Riches and Enormity".

(And if you missed it, here's another running-mate anagram)