This is a band called the Lolas, from northern Alabama, and while this tune is relatively tame compared to some of the other stuff I’ve heard from them, I like this sound so much that if I was 20 years younger, no kids and such, I’d go try to be in this band - or one like it.

Very cool. This would be the Wondermints - L.A. band which, if you’ve ever heard of them at all, you might know from their contribution to the Austin Powers soundtrack. But the band also has served as part of Brian Wilson’s backup band on some of his recent solo tours, including the “SMiLE” tour - and as such I’ve seen them twice, and they’re unbelievable musicians. This is a cover of the Monkees’ “The Porpoise Song” (written by Goffin-King!) from the prefab four’s movie “Head.” Good stuff all the way around.

Vid of the week is up.

Via MeFi - you’ve heard of the Failblog. But how about the Succeedblog?

I find it hard to believe that this isn’t a Pepsi commercial, actually. But amusing nonetheless.

Sullivan links to a Politics Daily story describing yesterday’s teabaggery:

The angry folks at the protest — which attracted several thousand conservatives — held up signs with messages of hate: “Get the Red Out of the White House,” “Waterboard Congress,” “Ken-ya Trust Obama?” One called the president a “Traitor to the U.S. Constitution.” Another sign showed pictures of dead bodies at the Dachau concentration camp and compared health care reform to the Holocaust. A different placard depicted Obama as Sambo. Yes, Sambo. Another read, “Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds” — a reference to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory holding that one evil Jewish family has manipulated events around the globe for decades.

Little Black Sambo!

But I bet the guy holding it would be OUTRAGED!!! at anyone suggesting he might be racist!

Here’s that Holocaust sign, by the way:

Dachau = Health care reform.

Right. So then after posting this, Sullivan goes on to say:

This kind of rhetoric - on the same day that the Fort Hood massacre took place - is gasoline on a fire of atavistic hate. Someone in the GOP leadership needs to call it out - before its logic propels us toward more violence and social division.

Hahahahahaha.

The GOP is attempting to ride that social division - and the violence it must create - back to power. It’s their only path to power.

I said this back in the video “Teabag Hippies” - what we’re seeing here are the remnants of a once-dominant political sentiment reduced to minority status. And they resent it, and the extremism flows from that. Just as the Weathermen grew out of the Students for a Democratic Society, just as Stokely Carmichael emerged from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, so too do radical right-wingers now emerge from once mainstream, or more mainstream, conservative Republican constituencies.

And for the very same reason: They’re not being listened to! The Weathermen went on their “Days of Rage” rampage because the establishment wasn’t listening to its demands that the U.S. get out of Vietnam. And so the only way to make the establishment listen was to get violent.

Is there anyone who’s going to seriously deny that the teabag right has the exact same attitude now? Of course it does; it must. Nancy Pelosi won’t listen! Nancy Pelosi must be made to listen; and if you can’t dislodge her via the ballot box, and the teabag protests don’t do it - what will?

Simply unbelievable.

Employees of Goldman, the Fed, Citigroup, and other banks are getting H1N1 vaccine allotments out of proportion to what can be justified from a public health standpoint. In particular, Goldman has gotten more than Lenox HIll hospital, which needs it not just for the sick but more important, for workers

Update: More, from Reuters:

New York City health officials scrambled to explain themselves on Thursday in the wake of media reports about bankers who got scarce H1N1 flu vaccines through their employers.

Members of Congress fired off letters demanding immediate explanations and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reminded state and city health officers of the need to make sure the most vulnerable people get shots first.

“I am concerned that the distribution of the vaccine is resulting in favored treatment for the privileged,” New Jersey Democratic Representative Frank Pallone said.

Favored treatment for the priveleged? Isn’t that the American way?

You know who the real oppressed minority is in this country? Southern white male judges, that’s who.

Hilarious

Local right-winger (one of my many winger correspondents) always copies me on stuff he sends to Glenn Beck, Rush, etc. Here’s what shows up in my in-box this morning, referencing yesterday’s shooting at Fort Hood:

Another *^&  #%$^ Muslim murders Americans and the “news” people say he might have been depressed because he was picked on for being Muslim.

Yahoo disabled comments on the story and said it may be because of technical difficulties or violation of posting rules. I think it the latter because Americans posted what they think should be done with a certain segment of this country’s population.

Concentration camp?

Einsatzgruppen take them out and shoot them?

You begin to understand why this country interned Japanese-Americans during WWII. You’re amazed, sometimes, that we didn’t do worse.

Seven dead, 20 wounded, the base has been shut down.

More here.

Greed is love, and taking is sharing.

And Jesus would have loved Goldman Sachs!

Now this is interesting. The teabaggers have started storming the Bastille Congress - attempting to go shout at representatives who, you know, don’t actually represent their district - but are having a hard time getting in, and TPM is reporting some arrests (with teabaggers hilariously invoking “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”) Your usual teabag outrage.

But Drudge hasn’t touched it.

I mean, get a load of this - this is Drudge right now, 2:46 p.m.:

I got one small link to Bachman’s teabaggery, and that’s it.

There’s a reason for this. It ain’t an oversight on Drudge’s part - normally he’s got the siren blaring, big pics, and maybe he’ll have that later.

But either some intern’s falling down on the job - or Drudge, a primary right-wing source of information, isn’t supporting this. Which would be extraordinarily significant.

Today’s teabaggers have called their event not a protest but a “press conference” - and did so specifically because they were whining about a “media blackout” of today’s event, as if every time they get together to teabag they’re entitled to the front page and if they don’t get it it’s PROOF OF BIAS!!!!

But hell - they barely even made the front page of Drudge.

Update: Via colleague SK, Wolcott notes a similar dynamic on - of all places - Fox News:

I wonder if Fox News may be deciding to dial back its bug-eyed tea-bagginess. Because despite the screen grab shown here at TPM, Fox News has been giving this flocking of the loons at the Capitol rather cursory treatment so far this midday, its sidebar of the breaking stories they’re tracking including the climate bill, Bernie Kerik’s guilty plea, and a promising new hurricane, but not, not, the valiant effort to find Nancy Pelosi’s office and stage a die-in, swooning to the carpet like asphyxiated musketeers. Indeed, as I type, Fox News has cut to a live announcement from the unholy one–Obama, feast of evil–and left the tea baggers’ GOP supporters marooned at C-SPAN 3, where a protester is shown toting a homemade sign declaring “Maoism Is Not Neform.” Now Jean Schmidt is at the podium, looking like an embittered baked apple. But mostly it’s Southern white men in shiny ties lecturing the wind. I wonder if rightwing bloggers will excoriate Fox News for short-shrifting this revolutionary exercise in live-human puppet theater. Perhaps Fox has been intimidated by the recent blowblack against their relentless teabagger promotion, which put Glenn Beck temporarily out of commish after his appendix staged a suicide bomber attack. All I know is that while Republican congresspeople speak truth to power while trying not to get their hair mussed, the story currently up on Fox News is “5 Senior Citizens Break into Nuke Missile Depot Undetected,” which sounds like a possible test run for yet another sequel to Cocoon.

I’m sorry, but this is just a plain lie:

House Minority Leader John Boehner addressed the tea party crowd on Capitol Hill today, telling them that health care reform is “the greatest threat to freedom” he’s seen as a congressman.

“This bill is the greatest threat to freedom that I’ve seen in the 19 years I’ve been in Washington,” he said.

TPM asks:

Which freedom?

“The freedom to buy health insurance on your own,” and choose your own doctor, he said.

Garbage.

This is actually the topic of the print edition, this yammering about how health care reform usurps our freedoms! and when you try to figure out which specific freedoms are being usurped… you come up empty.

Does Boehner think that those who have health insurance and are required to see a doctor in-network now have the right to choose their own doctor? Sure - so long as it’s in network, or you want to foot the entirety of the bill yourself.

Do these people not know how employer-based health insurance works?

People can buy health insurance on their own now, Mr. Boehner. And that’s the crux of the problem, because unless they’re lucky enough to have employer-based health care, too often that insurance they’re “free” to buy, they can’t afford.

The teabaggers keep invoking “freedom” but this doesn’t have a damned thing to do with freedom. Which actual freedoms are being infringed - the right of free speech, the right to assemble, the right to a speedy trial? Which one? None of them.

Instead, the teabag crowd has a paralyzing/infuriated fear of change, and they’re interpreting that fear as an assault on Teh Freedom! My side lost and now reforms are going to be enacted that I don’t like = tyranny.

You might have more luck trying to reason with an actual teabag.

He was looking for a brain to steal.

It must be so confusing to be a religious conservative.

Not only is Sarah Palin going to avoid potentially unfriendly interviewers as part of her book blitz - she’s going to avoid potentially unfriendly towns:

Sarah Palin’s book tour is a gift for her base.

No stops are planned in Seattle, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and other major cities and book-buying communities that are standard for authors on the road, but where the voters tend to be Democrats.

Beyond a Nov. 16 television interview with Oprah Winfrey, nothing is scheduled for Chicago. New York will feature media appearances only. Instead, the itinerary for Palin, whose “Going Rogue” comes out Nov. 17, includes Noblesville, Ind.; Washington, Pa.; and Rochester, N.Y.

“She wants to be unconventional. She is unconventional,” HarperCollins spokeswoman Tina Andreadis said Wednesday. “She feels like this is where her fans are and Harper feels this is where she’ll sell the most books.”

This is all part of the perpetual debate/war between rural and urban America, something that’s been going on almost since the country’s founding. Urban types see themselves as worldly and see rural types as bumpkins. Rural types see urban types as condescending and sinful and out of touch with “real” America.

Rural Americans have always considered themselves “real” Americans. Always. But the reality is they never had a lock on what it meant to be an American; the guy in south Philly or the Bronx or Pittsburgh’s Northside has every much a right to “America,” and to define America, as the farm boy out in rural Lancaster County. And the thing about rural folks, I think, is that they’ve never accepted that - and still don’t.

Hey, Wingnut Queen Michelle Bachmann is sponsoring her very own tea party today!

And Republican members of Congress are falling in line - as they must. And she’s even talking about leading the teabaggers through the halls of Congress to find Congress critters who might dare vote for health care reform and shout at them in their offices.

Maybe they’ll bring their guns!

But what’s interesting here is the fact that this has all been organized on the fly, on short notice - yet Bachmann’s trying to claim it’s all organic:

The speed in which the protest was put together was clear on the calls, with protesters conferring about parking, timing and other arrangements on the fly as they chatted on the conference lines. …

<snip>

Bachmann called tomorrow’s protest a “desperate act,” but one that grew from a fear among the public of what might happen if the Democratic health reforms come to pass. “There’s no organization here,” she told the callers. “It’s a total organic act.”

Bull.

This is going to be the usual crowd of official GOP activists, laced with a few folks who managed to convince their bosses to give them yet another day off work to go teabagging.

And I love the idea that random teabaggers are going to be “lobbying” Democrats who don’t represent them and whom they would never vote for anyway.

Perhaps I’ll bring in a busload of people from Nancy Pelosi’s district and crash Joe Pitts’s office so they can scream at him and demand he do exactly what they say. Same thing.

Update: Not quite sure how to explain this to the teabag crowd, but no, the Pledge of Allegiance doesn’t drive liberals crazy.

Cartoon characters living in a cartoon world of good and Eeeeeevil!

Once again.

Another half-million people are out of work! And this is GOOD news!!!

The number of newly laid-off workers filing claims for unemployment benefits last week fell to the lowest level in 10 months, evidence that job cuts are easing as the economy slowly heals.

Call this Endless Sunshine reporting, happy always. Boost your confidence; ring up those holiday purchases, all of it on credit. Because things are getting better, and this means you can start racking up the debt again! Because if you don’t, things will never get better!

Pretty amazing:

As everyone now knows, Bill Owens will be the first Democrat to represent New York’s 23rd since the mid-19th century, after defeating Doug Hoffman yesterday. This got me thinking about the representation of the region.

New York has 29 congressional districts. As of today, the state is represented by 27 Democrats. As recently as a few years ago, Dems had “only” 21 seats from New York.

What’s more, New England, made up of six states, has 22 congressional districts. Currently, the region is represented by 22 Democrats.

So, north of the Pennsylvania border, there 51 congressional districts representing 34 million people. Republicans have a whopping two seats.

Ain’t it, tho?

On her Facebook page yesterday, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin announced that she was “very excited about the upcoming road trip” to promote her book, which will be released later this month. As CNN’s Alexander Mooney notes, Palin “hinted she’d likely sit down with a string of friendly faces during the tour that begins in two weeks.” Indeed, Palin is hoping to do interviews mainly with Fox News hosts and contributors:

We’re in the process of arranging interviews with local and national media. An interview with Oprah Winfrey is already scheduled, and I’m also hoping to have the opportunity to talk with Bill O’Reilly, Barbara Walters, Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, Dennis Miller, Tammy Bruce, and others, including local Alaska personalities Bob & Mark and Eddie Burke. (Variety is the spice of life!)

See? Variety! Fair and balanced!