Month: April 2018

Until the bitter end

by digby

Paul Ryan will always be an an asshole …

Speaker Paul Ryan said he doesn’t believe there is a need for Congress to pass any kind of legislation aimed at protecting special counsel Robert Mueller from termination.

“I don’t think it’s necessary,” the Wisconsin Republican said during an interview that aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” when specifically asked whether he would bring such a bill to the House floor if it passed the Senate. “I don’t think he’s going to fire Mueller.”

“First of all, I don’t think he should be fired,” Ryan reiterated. “I think he should be left to do his job, and I don’t think they’re really contemplating this. We’ve had plenty of conversations about this. It’s not in the president’s interest to do that. We have a rule of law system. No one is above that rule of law system.”

That’s nice that he believes that. That he thinks Trump believes it or even understands it is not believable. He knows very well that Trump could easily pull the plug at any minute and he obviously thinks it’s a good idea for him to have that ability and know that his Republicans will stand aside and let him do it.

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Sarah Huckabee Sanders: stopped clock

by digby

Let’s give her credit. She may be the most dishonest White House press secretary in history but once in a while she does manage to tell the truth:

James Comey’s acknowledgement that he may have subconsciously expected Hillary Clinton to win the presidency when he disclosed days before the 2016 election the reopening of a probe of her emails shows that the then-FBI chief was driven by political motivation and self-interest, a White House spokesperson said.

“The guy knew exactly what he was doing,” White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders told ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos on “This Week” on Sunday. “He thought that Hillary Clinton would win, and he thought that this would give him some cover. He made these decisions based on the political landscape and not the facts of the case,” White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders told ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos on “This Week” on Sunday.

Yes, that’s all true. He thought she was going to win so he went out of his way to show his “independence” a week before the election. But the rules against doing that are there for a reason. He substituted his bad judgment for the judgment of the Department of Justice for his own sake. I don’t think there’s any other way to see it.

However, watching the Trump White House wring its hands and clutch its pearls is a bit rich considering this:

OCTOBER 28, 2016 – The day Comey announced the FBI was investigating new Clinton emails

“The FBI – after discovering new emails, is re-opening their investigation into Hillary Clinton,” Trump said at a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire. “I have great respect for the FBI for righting this wrong.” (You can watch him say it, here.)

In the days prior to Comey’s announcement that the FBI was investigating new emails found on a computer belong to Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s husband Anthony Weiner’s computer, Trump made repeated statements on Twitter and at rallies that the election was being rigged against him.

OCTOBER 31, 2016 – Trump holds a rally in Grand Rapids, MI

“You know that. It took a lot of guts. I really disagreed with him. I was not his fan,” Trump said of Comey. “I tell you what, what he did, he brought back his reputation. He brought it back. He’s got to hang tough. A lot of people want him to do the wrong thing. What he did was the right thing.”

While speaking to supporters in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump again offered praise for the FBI and this time mentioned Comey by name. Trump said that Comey has effectively saved his reputation by re-investigating Clinton.

On November 6, Trump again criticized Comey at a rally after the then-FBI director again announced no charges would be brought against Clinton.

I don’t think people realize just how much of Trump’s anger at Comey stemmed from the fact that didn’t agree to lock her up. He was thrilled when he sabotaged her campaign in the last week.

So this whole line about how terrible it was that Comey was “covering for himself” by re-opening the campaign is incoherent garbage. Trump praised him in real time for doing just that!

These people are trying to drive us mad. And I think it’s working.

Update: By the way, Sarah really needs to have a talk with him about this:

First, he was four years into a ten year term. Second, sabotaging her campaign in the last week of the campaign wouldn’t have been a resume builder.

Trump’s more addled than usual. Somebody should give him a bottle and put him to bed.

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Trump’s Sunday Sermon

by digby

First there’s this, which is one for the ages:

He is the last person to understand that declaring Mission Accomplished when the mission has not been accomplished is the problem. He never tells the truth so this is beyond his ability. Of course he will declare “Mission Accomplished” no matter what. He does that in every facet of his presidency.

But that was the only tweet that even slightly refers to an affair of state however, petulant and whining.

This is what was on his mind:

Your president, ladies and gentlemen. Threatening his political enemies with jail is just a routine part of his presidency.

But don’t worry. It’s no big deal.  This means nothing. Carry on.

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Plucking the chicken one feather at a time

by digby

I posted an interview with Madeline Albright earlier in which she quotes Mussolini saying “if you pluck a chicken one feather at a time nobody notices.” Here’s a feather:

The Supreme Court is set to hear a seemingly minor case later this month on the status of administrative judges at the Securities and Exchange Commission, an issue that normally might only draw the interest of those accused of stock fraud.

But the dispute turns on the president’s power to hire and fire officials throughout the government. And it comes just as the White House is saying President Trump believes he has the power to fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

Trump’s Solicitor Gen. Noel Francisco intervened in the SEC case to urge the high court to clarify the president’s constitutional power to fire all “officers of the United States” who “exercise significant authority” under the law.

“The Constitution gives the president what the framers saw as the traditional means of ensuring accountability: the power to oversee executive officers through removal,” he wrote in Lucia vs. SEC. “The president is accordingly authorized under our constitutional system to remove all principal officers, as well as all ‘inferior officers’ he has appointed.”

In addition to representing the administration before the Supreme Court, Francisco, a former law clerk for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, could be in line to oversee the Mueller inquiry if Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein is fired. Atty. Gen Jeff Sessions has recused himself from the investigation.

Peter Shane, a law professor at the Ohio State University, called Francisco’s argument a “radical proposition,” and one that goes beyond what is at issue in the case. The justices said they would focus only on how the SEC in-house judges are appointed. But Francisco is asking them to go further and rule on the “removal” issue.

“The solicitor general is obviously trying to goad the court into a broad statement about the removability of all officers of the United States,” Shane said. “Were the court to make any such statement, it would surely be cited by Trump as backing any move by him to fire Mueller directly.”

For decades, constitutional experts have fundamentally disagreed about the balance of power between Congress and the president.

Many of them, especially liberals, argue that because Congress has “all legislative powers,” it can structure the government as it sees fit, including by creating independent agencies that are not under the president’s direct control.

But others, mostly conservatives, adhere to what is sometimes called the “unitary executive” theory. They argue that because the Constitution puts executive power in the hands of one president, he is thereby entitled to hire and fire all those who wield significant executive authority.

Francisco points to two provisions of the Constitution as giving the president very broad authority. One says the president shall appoint ambassadors, judges and “all other officers of United States.” The other says the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

“The president’s constitutional responsibility to faithfully execute the laws requires adequate authority to remove subordinate officers,” Francisco told the court in February. “The framers understood the close connection between the president’s ability to discharge his responsibilities as head of the executive branch and his control over its personnel…. The president’s ability to execute the law is thus inextricably linked to his authority to hold his subordinates accountable for their conduct.”

Francisco’s defense of broad presidential power is likely to win favor with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s other conservatives. In 2010, Roberts spoke for a 5-4 majority that struck down a provision in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which created an independent public accounting board at the SEC whose members could be fired only for “good cause.”

Roberts said shielding these “officers of the United States” from presidential control was unconstitutional. “Since 1789, the Constitution has been understood to empower the president to keep these officers accountable — by removing them from office, if necessary,” he wrote in Free Enterprise Fund vs. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.

It’s possible that the conservatives on the court will finally see the folly of the unitary executive now that we have a cretinous demagogue as president. But I wouldn’t count on it. This has been fundamental to modern conservative legal thinking. You’d think Donald Trump would force them all to re-evaluate the idea that it’s good to put so much power into the hands of one man but Trump doesn’t seem to have changed the conservative movement’s ideas much in other ways so I’m not sanguine that they’ve evolved in this way either.

The fact that the man making the argument to the Court is the one in the succession if Trump fires Mueller is just icing on the cake.

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It starts with a demagogue

by digby

This interview with Madeleine Albright about her new book Fascism: A Warning is worth watching. It’s quite unfashionable in many left wing circles to suggest that Donald Trump represents anything more threatening than politics as usual. Perhaps he’s a little crude but he can’t really get anything done.

Except it isn’t politics as usual. Trump is not happening in a vacuum. This phenomenon is global.

Michelle Goldberg wrote about it on Friday:

Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, was born into a totalitarian age. She was only a toddler when she and her parents, who were of Jewish descent but later converted to Catholicism, fled Czechoslovakia after Hitler’s invasion in 1939. They returned following the war, but fled again in the wake of the Communist coup in 1948.

Her father, the diplomat Josef Korbel, sought asylum for the family in the United States, writing in a letter to an American official that if they returned home he’d be arrested “for my faithful adherence to the ideals of democracy.” America took them in as refugees. Korbel became an eminent foreign policy scholar, and in 1997 Bill Clinton made Albright the country’s chief diplomat, the first woman to hold that position.

At the time, the Cold War was over and the great ideological battles of the 20th century appeared settled. Liberal democracy was ascendant, and Albright’s adopted country was its most powerful champion. The arc of her life seemed to coincide with a global evolution from widespread tyranny toward expanding freedom.

So it is sad and jarring that Albright, now 80, has just published a book with the stark title “Fascism: A Warning.” The book is not just a warning about Donald Trump; Albright is concerned with the eclipse of liberal democracy all over the world and told me in a recent interview that she had planned to write on the subject before Trump’s election. But the president looms over her project. “If we think of fascism as a wound from the past that had almost healed, putting Trump in the White House was like ripping off the bandage and picking at the scab,” she writes.

The mere fact of this book would be astonishing, if Trump hadn’t pulverized our capacity for astonishment. Albright has long been an optimistic exponent of American exceptionalism, a consummate establishment figure not given to alarmist diatribes. It should be shocking that she feels the need to warn us not just about fascism abroad, but also at home.

[ALSO READ: Madeleine Albright asks if we will stop Donald Trump before it’s too late]

In January, Freedom House, an international democracy watchdog, reported that 71 countries suffered declines in political rights and civil liberties last year, while only 35 saw improvements. Rather than standing against this trend, America under Trump has become part of it. As Freedom House concluded, “A major development of 2017 was the retreat of the United States as both a champion and an exemplar of democracy.”

Albright is not accusing Trump of being a full-blown fascist. He has yet to resort to extrajudicial violence — except, of course, for encouraging his acolytes to beat up protesters at rallies — and his efforts to undermine the rule of law have had only mixed success, in part due to his own fecklessness.

But Trump is, Albright told me, “the most undemocratic president” in America’s modern history. He empowers authoritarianism globally and is in turn empowered by the international growth of right-wing populism. As she writes in her book: “The herd mentality is powerful in international affairs. Leaders around the globe observe, learn from, and mimic one another.”

The historian Roger Griffin once described the core vision of fascism as “the national community rising Phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it.” (His italics.) Albright’s definition is broader than most academic taxonomies; she tends to use “fascism” as a synonym for authoritarianism.

Her book includes Italy’s Benito Mussolini and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, but also Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and North Korea’s Kim Jong-il, who was succeeded after his death by his son Kim Jong-un. Except for Mussolini, she has met all these men. “What they do have in common,” she said, “is this assumption, or decision, that they embody the spirit of the nation and that they have the answers and that their instincts are good, that they are smarter than everybody else and can do things by themselves.”

Trump conflates himself and the state in just this way. Many of the details in Albright’s pocket histories of various dictators are similarly familiar. Before reading it, I hadn’t realized that Mussolini had promised to “drenare la palude,” or “drain the swamp,” and that his crowds jeered and booed clusters of reporters at his rallies. (Nor did I know that Mussolini, like Trump, thought it unsanitary to shake hands.) Of Chávez, Albright writes, his “communications strategy was to light rhetorical fireworks and toss them in all directions.” He gloried in dominating the media, “boasting about his accomplishments and deriding — in the crudest terms — real and suspected foes.” (Many of his followers, incidentally, wore red baseball caps.)

The book’s echoes of the present are intentional. “One of my editors said, ‘Make the reader work for it,’” Albright said. “So you can kind of see the various steps.”

I asked Albright how she avoids despair, seeing the authoritarianism that marked her childhood now sweep the globe in her old age. “It’s something that I really do think I learned from my parents,” she said. “You have to make a way of dealing with the problems that are out there in order to avoid despair, and not just be an observer of it. And realize that we all have a role.” Her role right now is to speak out, with whatever authority her history and career confer.

Albright is well known for her collection of brooches, which she uses like shiny emojis to send subtle diplomatic messages and make wry jokes. (The Smithsonian once did an exhibition of them.) In 1999, she found out that Russia had bugged a conference room near her State Department office; at her next meeting with Russian diplomats, she wore an insect pin. When I spoke to her, she was wearing a silver brooch of a winged figure. I asked her what it was. “It is Mercury,” she said. “The messenger.”

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More men like him than ever

by digby

A lot of white men just like the cut of his jib. Everyone else loathes him.
New polling from ABC:

The president remains poorly rated overall in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll -– 56 percent of Americans disapprove of his job performance, versus 40 percent who approve, and “strong” disapprovers outnumber strong approvers by nearly 2-1.

His average approval rating after 15 months in office (38-57 percent approve/disapprove) is the lowest on record in polls dating to the Truman administration.

If the economy helps Trump, his personal style appears to hurt him. By a nearly 2-1 margin (61-32 percent), the public sees him unfavorably “as a person” in this poll, produced for ABC News by Langer Research Associates. There’s a close link between this view and his job rating: Among those who dislike him personally, 84 percent also disapprove of his work in office.

That’s not always the case. In March 1999, after his impeachment trial, Bill Clinton’s personal favorability rating was even worse than Trump’s today, 67-30 percent, unfavorable-favorable. But Clinton managed a 64 percent job approval rating at the same time. His personal popularity was much less correlated with his job approval than Trump’s is today.

Trump’s rating for handling the economy, while better than his overall approval, also is weak in comparative terms. The last time consumer confidence was this high, Clinton had just left office with 76 percent approval for his handling of the economy, 30 points higher than Trump’s now. Clinton’s overall job approval was 65 percent, 25 points higher than Trump’s.

Additionally, while the economy helps Trump, he faces skepticism on one prominent economic initiative, the trade tariffs he’s threatened. Americans are more apt to think these tariffs will be bad for U.S. jobs than good for them, 49-36 percent.

That said, the tariffs –- aimed at cheap steel and aluminum imports -– are better received in the Midwest, where there’s an even division on whether they’re good or bad for jobs. And Trump’s approval rating has jumped 12 points in the Midwest since January to a new high, 48 percent.

Trump also is at a numerical high (by a single point) in job approval among men, at 49 percent approval; at majority approval (53 percent) among whites for the first time in a year; and has jumped to a new high among conservatives, 74 percent approval, up 9 points just since January. At the same time, his approval rating among nonwhites, 17 percent, is its lowest on record.

Among the most prominent elements of public attitudes toward Trump is the vast gender gap in his basic ratings. While men divide evenly on his job performance, 49-47 percent, women disapprove by a 2-1 margin, 32-64 percent. And while men see him more unfavorably than favorably as a person by 12 points, 53-41 percent, women do so by a 44-point margin, 68-24 percent.

Education and race are additional factors. Seventy-three percent of college-educated white women see Trump unfavorably as a person, while just 35 percent of non-college white men share that assessment. Conversely, 70 percent of non-college white men approve of his job performance; only 34 percent of college-educated white women agree.

Trump’s challenges among women are evident in other data. As reported Friday, women are much more apt than men to support extending special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether or not Trump’s associates paid hush money to women who claimed they’d had affairs with him. Sixty-five percent of women support such an investigation, vs. 50 percent of men.

Another one from NBC:

An advantage in intensity — against President Donald Trump and for voting in November — is fueling Democrats ahead of the midterm elections that take place more than six months from now, according to a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

But the poll doesn’t show “knockout numbers” for Democrats, which gives Republicans a chance of retaining control of Congress, says Republican pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies, who conducted this survey with Democratic pollster Peter Hart and his team at Hart Research Associates.

“You don’t see knockout numbers here in April. You see problematic numbers [for Republicans],” he said.

In the poll, Democrats enjoy a 7-point advantage in congressional preference, with 47 percent of voters wanting a Democratic-controlled Congress, and with 40 percent preferring a GOP-controlled Congress.

That’s down from the Democrats’ 10-point edge in March, 50 percent to 40 percent, although the change is well within the poll’s margin of error.

In past wave cycles for Democrats — in 2006 and 2008 — the NBC/WSJ poll typically found Democrats with a solid double-digit lead in congressional preference.

But the current poll shows Democrats with a significant advantage in enthusiasm, with 66 percent of Democrats expressing a high level of interest (either a “9” or “10” on a 10-point scale) in November’s elections, versus 49 percent for Republicans.

That’s a reversal from the merged NBC/WSJ polling data in 2010 — a wave year for Republicans — when 66 percent of Republicans expressed a high level of interest, compared with 49 percent for Democrats.

And among these high-interest voters in this new poll, Democrats lead Republicans in congressional preference by 21 points, 57 percent to 36 percent.

“That enthusiasm is a very powerful signal of a Democratic edge,” McInturff said, but he cautioned that high-interest voters “are a fraction of all overall voters.” (Not every voter is a “9” or “10.”)

The NBC/WSJ poll also finds Trump’s job-approval rating among all adults at 39 percent — down four points from last month. Fifty-seven percent say they disapprove of the president’s job performance.

Nobody has a good thing to say about Democrats so it isn’t surprising that it isn’t going to be a slam dunk. Don’t be shocked if they don’t pull it off. We are in a period of bizarre extremes and structural strain and it’s unknown whether this presidency is going to be seen as an anomaly or a precursor.

I wouldn’t take anything for granted.

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Moscow on the Hudson
by Tom Sullivan

The jury is out on whether McClatchy’s report about Trump attorney Michael Cohen visiting Prague. “Count me cautious,” tweeted Benjamin Wittes, describing the sourcing as “relatively thin.” Here is the gist from McClatchy:

The Justice Department special counsel has evidence that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and confidant, Michael Cohen, secretly made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Confirmation of the trip would lend credence to a retired British spy’s report that Cohen strategized there with a powerful Kremlin figure about Russian meddling in the U.S. election.

The date of the supposed visit is not clear and Cohen’s repeated denials he ever visited Prague have been unequivocal. But this is Michael Cohen. Marcy Wheeler noticed something in his lawyer’s motion to show cause, filed over the FBI raid on his home and offices:

But the entire paragraph claiming that the investigation into him derives from the Steele dossier — aside from being false both in this investigation into his taxi business and hush payments, and false in the larger Russia investigation that also pertains to his attempts to set up a Trump Tower in Moscow — is not backed by a sworn declaration at all. Indeed, Harrison is silent on the issue of the Steele dossier.

Cohen would like Judge Kimba Wood to believe that the dossier has been debunked. But his lawyer is unwilling to stake his own legal reputation on the claim.

This is a more subtle version of what Cohen tried in his declaration to the House Intelligence Committee. That declaration stopped short of outright denying the dossier’s allegations (aside that he went to Prague) then, and this one falls even further short.

So whether or not Cohen went to Prague, it seems that his lawyer is unwilling to claim the other things in the dossier are false.

Trump and those in his circle seem to make a habit of over-denying certain allegations and coming back to them again and again. Trump’s repeatedly bringing up the “pee tape” mentioned in the Steele dossier caught former FBI chief James Comey’s attention, as mentioned in his new book.

Cohen’s insistence he never, ever visited Prague leads one wondering as well, not to mention (as Wheeler did), his lawyer’s reluctance to take a stand on the claim. Andrew Prokop writes at Vox:

If the McClatchy report was accurate, it would utterly devastate one of the Trump team’s leading arguments that there was no Trump-Russia collusion. That’s because, to be blunt, there is no reason for Cohen to try to debunk the Steele dossier by lying and saying that he didn’t visit Prague at all if he actually did, unless he was trying to cover up extremely serious wrongdoing that happened during that visit.

But like many of Trump’s circle, Cohen might be the sharpest tool. As his lawyers fought for him in a federal investigation into his business dealings, photographers spotted Cohen casually smoking cigars with friends outside the Loews Regency Hotel on Park Avenue.

Photo of Michael Cohen taken by my NY colleague Lawrence Crook- who reports that he’s sitting outside the Loews Regency now with a group of friends smoking cigars pic.twitter.com/5DzcHpOvE5— Elizabeth Landers (@ElizLanders) April 13, 2018

Trump’s need to believes himself the smartest guy in the room explains a lot of his hiring decisions.

See Josh Marshall’s take.

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

’68 was ’68: 10 essential rock albums

By Dennis Hartley

For some reason, whenever someone refers to the 1960s as “a turbulent decade”, I always think of one year in particular. If I may co-opt the meteorological “F-Scale” as a metaphor, while most years of that decade were stormy, 1968 was the only one to hit F-5.

As Jon Meacham wrote in a Time article from January of this year:

The watershed of 1968 was that kind of year: one of surprises and reversals, of blasted hopes and rising fears, of scuttled plans and unexpected new realities. We have embarked on the 50th anniversary of a year that stands with 1776, 1861 and 1941 as points in time when everything in American history changed. As with the Declaration of Independence, the firing on Fort Sumter and the attack on Pearl Harbor, the events of ’68 were intensely dramatic and lastingly consequential. From the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April and of Robert F. Kennedy in June to the violence at the Democratic National Convention in August to the election of Richard Nixon in November, we live even now in the long shadow of the cascading crises of that year.

So obviously, I am not alone in this “F-5” assessment. In fact, you may have already had it up to “here” with the 50th anniversary retrospectives, and are rolling your eyes and considering bailing on this very piece (all I am saying, is-give my piece a chance…man).

No, I’ll leave historical perspective to the historians and humbly stay “in my place” as the (alleged) pop culture maven around these here parts. I’ll be keeping it real at 33 and a 3rd.

I’ll start at 45 RPM. If you were to use Billboard’s top 10 hits of 1968 as a barometer, you might not catch wind of that sociopolitical “turbulence”. Countin’ them down like Casey Kasem: #10 was “Tighten Up” by Archie Bell & the Drells, #9 “Mrs. Robinson” by Simon & Garfunkel, #8 “The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly” theme by Hugo Montenegro, #7 “This Guy’s in Love with You” by Herb Alpert, #6 “Sunshine of Your Love” by Cream, #5 “People Got to Be Free” by The Rascals, #4 (Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding, #3 “Honey” by Bobby Goldsboro, #2 “Love is Blue” by Paul Mauriat, and the #1 song of 1968 was (drum roll please) “Hey Jude” by The Beatles.

So that is a fairly eclectic mix of soul, R&B, rock, easy listening and solid MOR on that list. With the exception of The Rascals’ plea for love ‘n’ peace and the droll social satire of “Mrs. Robinson”, nothing much deeper than I love you, I miss you, the sky is blue, so let’s tighten it up now. Then again, Top 40 radio has never been a gauge of who was bringing the message to the people…but rather who is taking the most money to the bank.

Meanwhile, in 1968 the genre broadly referred to as “rock ‘n’ roll” was progressing by leaps and bounds. You could say it was “splintering”. Sub-genres were propagating; folk-rock, blues-rock, progressive rock, country rock, hard rock. And in the wake of the success of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (an album which notably yielded no singles) many artists were beginning to rethink the definition of an “album”. Maybe an LP didn’t have to be a 12” collection of radio-friendly “45s” with a hole in the middle; perhaps you could view the album as a whole, with a unifying theme as its center.

This was moving too fast for AM radio, which required a steady supply of easy-to-digest 3 minute songs to buffer myriad spot breaks (OK, “Hey Jude” was over 7 minutes-but The Beatles were the exception to many rules). Yet, there was something interesting happening over on the FM dial. The “underground” format, which sprouted somewhat organically in late 1967 on stations like WOR-FM and WNEW-FM in New York City, had caught on nationally by 1968, providing a perfect platform for “deep” album cuts.

But hey, (in the immortal words of Marty DiBirgi) enough of my yakkin’. Here are my picks for the top 10 rock albums of 1968 (listed alphabetically by LP title…not by rank).

Astral Weeks – Van Morrison

From the late great Lester Bangs’ astounding 3700 word essay regarding this album:

Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It’s no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment’s knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.

Erm, what Lester said about the dichotomy of good art. Indeed, gone was the Van who was “…making love in the green grass/behind the stadium” with his “Brown-Eyed Girl” a year earlier. In his second studio album, Van was evolving, eschewing pop formulas and dipping deep into that Celtic soul that would become his stock-in-trade on later LPs like Veedon Fleece. Choice cuts: “Astral Weeks”, “Cyprus Avenue”, and “Madame George”.

The Beatles (White Album) – The Beatles

From its decidedly anti-commercial, minimalist cover art, to the sprawling, 30-song set within, the Fabs at once surpassed and deconstructed everything that had previously defined them musically with this double album. With the benefit of hindsight, you could say this was really 4 solo albums rolled into one, as many of the sessions were actually assembled sans a Beatle or two (or even three). There were even a few guest musicians brought in by individual band members to sweeten some of the tunes to their own liking.

The resultant juxtaposition of scattered eclecticism was almost scary. As groundbreaking as the previous year’s Sgt. Pepper may have been, nothing prepared unsuspecting fans for the proto-thrash of “Helter Skelter”, the faux-country novelty of “Rocky Racoon”, the reggae/ska-flavor of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”, the absurdist “Wild Honey Pie”, the bluegrass-flavored “Don’t Pass Me By”, or the avant-garde mindfuck of “Revolution 9.”

Still, there are many diamonds in the rough; from rockers like “Back in the U.S.S.R.”, “Glass Onion” and “Birthday”, to beautiful ballads like “Cry Baby Cry”, “I Will”, “Julia”, “Blackbird”, “Mother Nature’s Son”, and “Long, Long, Long.” Other highlights include John’s “Dear Prudence” and George’s epic “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”.

If you listen carefully, you can still glean direct influences from this album in modern rock. For example, I can hear future echoes of Kurt Cobain in Lennon’s “Happiness is a Warm Gun”. Aside from the “loud soft loud” flux of the arrangement, note how John intones “Mother Superior jump the gun” until it almost becomes hypnotic; repeating a lyrical phrase was one of Cobain’s songwriting tics (“No I don’t have a gun…). Spooky!

Beggar’s Banquet – The Rolling Stones

Released a month after the Beatles White Album hit record stores, this set demonstrated that the Stones’ half-hearted flirtation with psychedelia on the previous year’s Their Satanic Majesties Request had been just that…a flirtation (and frankly, a Sgt. Pepper knock-off). However, any suspicions that the band had been floundering were quashed once the needle dropped on Side 1, Cut 1: “Please allow me to introduce myself/I’m a man of wealth and taste…” With that meticulously constructed invocation known as “Sympathy for the Devil”, the Stones finally became “the Stones”. They had arrived, with a strong, distinctive set that includes the spunky, anthemic “Street Fighting Man”, hard rocking “Stray Cat Blues”, and a fair amount of rootsy, acoustic-based country blues like “Prodigal Son”, “No Expectations”, and “Salt of the Earth”. One of their finest efforts.

Bookends – Simon & Garfunkel

Even Simon & Garfunkel took a cue from Sgt. Pepper, taking their stab at a “concept” album (a song cycle about birth/life/death) with this 1968 release. Clocking in at a breezy 30 minutes, this set contains some of Paul Simon’s most enduring compositions. Interestingly, Simon was said to have been suffering from writer’s block at the time-but you wouldn’t know it, with the likes of “Save the Life of My Child”, “America” (his best road song), “Punky’s Dilemma”, “A Hazy Shade of Winter”, “At the Zoo”, and of course the bonafide classic “Mrs. Robinson” (recorded in 1967 for The Graduate soundtrack).

Electric Ladyland – The Jimi Hendrix Experience

Double albums from rock bands were still considered a novelty in 1968; you could count all previous on one hand (namely, Freak Out! by The Mothers of Invention and Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde in 1966, and Donovan’s A Gift from a Flower to a Garden in 1967), yet the year saw double-LP sets from two significant acts: The Beatles (see above) and The Jimi Hendrix Experience. This was Jimi’s final studio album with the Experience; while it was his most commercially successful effort, it was also his most experimental.

It’s been said that Jimi drove bandmates and studio engineers nuts with his perfectionism on this project, especially with endless lead vocal takes (he was famously insecure about his voice-and of course he needn’t have been, silly man!). A majority of the cuts could be classified as “psychedelic blues-rock”, yet there are interesting side trips along the course of its four sides. “(Have You Ever Been) To Electric Ladyland” is a soulful, 2-minute Curtis Mayfield-style kick-off belying unexpected turns to follow, from the lead kazoo solo on “Crosstown Traffic”, a powerful 15-minute slow blues rendition of “Voodoo Chile”, the epic 13-minute psychedelic tone poem “1983…(A Merman I Should Turn to Be)”, the now-classic cover of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”, and of course, to the most scorching, heaviest “Hendrixian” song of them all, “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”.

In Search of the Lost Chord – The Moody Blues

So how did the Moody Blues follow up their pioneering 1967 “symphonic rock” opus, Days of Future Passed? Well, they followed it up with an even more solid masterpiece. As the title implies, this is a concept album about quests; quests for knowledge, for meaning, for truth (you know-nothing too heavy). Just in case you don’t understand that you are embarking on a musical journey, the band opens the album with a song called (wait for it) “Departure”. And…you’re off (with or without chemical additives-your call). An outstanding LP, impeccably produced and sonically dynamic (headphones!). Choice cuts: “Ride My Seesaw”, “House of Four Doors”, “Legend of a Mind”, and “The Actor”.

The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society – The Kinks

Ray Davies fully realized a perfect musical evocation of pure distilled “Englishness” with this album. It is a suite, of sorts, weaving a portrait of a sleepy English hamlet; replete with its local flavor, rendered chiefly via stories centering on its eccentric inhabitants. You can almost smell the tea and biscuits. Pete Townshend summed it up best when he said of this collection, “For me, Village Green Preservation Society was Ray’s masterwork. It’s his Sgt. Pepper, it’s what makes him the definitive pop poet laureate.” Amen. Choice cuts: “The Village Green Preservation Society”, “Picture Book”, “Johnny Thunder”, “Village Green”, “Starstruck”, and “People Take Pictures of Each Other”.

S.F. Sorrow – The Pretty Things

Contrary to popular belief, The Who’s Tommy was technically not the first “rock opera”, because the UK band The Pretty Things beat them by a year with this concept album. The band’s lead singer Phil May wrote a short story that eventually morphed into this project. Not unlike Howard the Duck, the angst-ridden protagonist here (a Sebastian F. Sorrow) is trapped in a world he never made. It’s actually a pretty gloomy tale (presaging Pink Floyd’s The Wall), but the music is excellent (the tunes all stand on their own quite well). Choice cuts: “S.F. Sorrow is Born”, “Private Sorrow”, “Trust”, and “Loneliest Person”.


Waiting for the Sun – The Doors

After releasing a flawless debut (The Doors) and a more hit-and-miss sophomore effort (Strange Days) the previous year, the pressure was on for the Doors to prove they could deliver on that promise to “break on through to the other side”. And deliver they did. Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Robbie Kreiger and John Densmore stretched out a little more than previous on this release, which yielded a hit single (“Hello, I Love You”) gave birth to Morrison’s “lizard king” persona (“Not To Touch the Earth”) and put forth an ominous clarion call for revolution (“Five to One”). Other choice cuts: “Love Street”, “Summer’s Almost Gone”, “The Unknown Soldier”, “Spanish Caravan”, “Yes, the River Knows”.

We’re only in it for the Money – Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention

Leave it to that sly musical provocateur Frank Zappa to gleefully mock the peace love and dope ethos of the “summer of love”, while his fans were essentially still in its thrall:

Walked past the wig store
Danced at the Fillmore
I’m completely stoned
I’m hippy and I’m trippy
I’m a gypsy on my own
I’ll stay a week and get the crabs
And take a bus back home
I’m really just a phony
But forgive me—‘cuz I’m stoned.

Importantly, that is what differentiates this album from the previous 9; while the lineage of nearly all can be traced in one way or the other back to Sgt. Pepper, Zappa is openly ridiculing the concept of Sgt. Pepper. This is a concept album expressly constructed to parody concept albums (while they were still in their infancy). I mean, who DOES that?!

Choice cuts: “Who Needs the Peace Corps?” (source of the excerpted lyrics), “Absolutely Free”, “Flower Punk”, “Let’s Make the Water Turn Black”, and “The Idiot Bastard Son.”

Previous posts with related themes:

Deconstructing Sgt. Pepper
When You’re Strange
Eat That Question
La Maison de la Radio

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–Dennis Hartley

Rules for thee but not for me

by digby

The Daily Beast reports that the Trump Hotel employee handbook shows Trump and his organization understand the dangers of nepotism, collusion and conflict of interest very well. They just don’t think it applies to themselves:

The handbook has strong words about hiring family members.

“While TIHLV [Trump International Hotel Las Vegas] does not wish to deprive itself of the services of potentially valuable Associates by establishing a policy excluding the employment of relatives, it must be acknowledged, that such employment can result in the appearance of a conflict of interest, collusion, favoritism, and other undesirable work environment conditions,” the handbook says. “Therefore, management reserves the right to limit the employment of relatives in situations within the company if a conflict of interest is deemed to exist.”

The handbook bars relatives from working “under the direct or indirect supervision of a relative.” It also bars relatives from working “in situations that create the possibility of conflicts of interest,” without the written approval of senior management officials.

“Prohibited activity includes ‘offensive sexual jokes, sexual language, sexual epithets, sexual gossip, sexual comments or sexual inquiries’ and unwelcome flirting.”

This rule, however, clearly didn’t apply to the Trump family. The handbook includes photos of Trump himself, as well as his daughter Ivanka and his sons, Don Jr. and Eric. Don Jr. was hired by his father in 2001. Ivanka and Eric followed in 2005 and 2006, respectively.

It worked out so well for him that he brought his son-in-law on board.

And lord knows Trump and his sons have never said or done anything sexually inappropriate while on the job.

Clueless

by digby

I just …

A perfectly executed strike last night. Thank you to France and the United Kingdom for their wisdom and the power of their fine Military. Could not have had a better result. Mission Accomplished!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 14, 2018