I can’t say this holds any answers but it is reassuring that someone is willing to discuss the intensely frustrating complexities of what’s going on in Israel:
Barack Obama offered a complex analysis of the conflict between Israel and Gaza, telling thousands of former aides that they were all “complicit to some degree” in the current bloodshed.
“I look at this, and I think back, ‘What could I have done during my presidency to move this forward, as hard as I tried?’” he said in an interview conducted by his former staffers for their podcast, Pod Save America. “But there’s a part of me that’s still saying, ‘Well, was there something else I could have done?’”
Mr. Obama entered the White House convinced he could be the president who would resolve the decades-old conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. He left office after years of friction and mistrust with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who was frustrated by the president’s masterminding of the Iran nuclear deal and by his demands that Israel suspend new settlements.
In his comments on Friday, delivered at a gathering of his former staff in Chicago, Mr. Obama acknowledged the strong emotions the war had raised, saying that “this is century-old stuff that’s coming to the fore.” He blamed social media for amplifying the divisions and reducing a thorny international dispute to what he viewed as sloganeering.
Yet he urged his former aides to “take in the whole truth,” seemingly attempting to strike a balance between the killings on both sides.
“What Hamas did was horrific, and there’s no justification for it,” Mr. Obama said. “And what is also true is that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable.”
He continued: “And what is also true is that there is a history of the Jewish people that may be dismissed unless your grandparents or your great-grandparents, or your uncle or your aunt tell you stories about the madness of antisemitism. And what is true is that there are people right now who are dying, who have nothing to do with what Hamas did.”
Still, Mr. Obama appeared to acknowledge the limits of his musings about bridging divides and embracing complexity.
“Even what I just said, which sounds very persuasive, still doesn’t answer the fact of, all right, how do we prevent kids from being killed today?” he said. “But the problem is that if you are dug in on that, well, the other side is dug in remembering the videos that Hamas took or what they did on the 7th, and they’re dug in, too, which means we will not stop those kids from dying.”
I don’t have the answers. Neither does he. Neither does anyone who can see the fear, the threats, the injustice of everything that’s gone before and is happening now. It’s just … sigh.
Josh Hawley is at it again. Over a brief career in Washington, the elfin senator from Missouri—when he’s not egging on and then fleeing from insurrectionists—has attempted one pseudo-populist or culture-war gimmick after another to propel him to a higher level of celebrity than he currently enjoys. Alas, while his ideas have gained some prominence on the right, Hawley’s own star isn’t ascending at nearly the same rate. But he is nothing if not undaunted, and this week he unveiled a plan to “overturn Citizens United.” I’m putting that in scare quotes for a reason. Hawley’s latest legislative burlesque is wholly fake—and threadbare even by his gutter standards.
There are many—mainly on the left—who’d like to somehow overturn Citizens United v. FEC, the execrable 2010 decision that unleashed a tidal wave of funny money into our politics and demonstrated that the Supreme Court didn’t need to have a 6–3 conservative tilt to cock up the entire country. It would be great if we could pass a law and set things right, but here’s the rub: Congress can’t fix it, sorry! As MSNBC’s Jordan Rubin explained, overturning the decision would require one of two unlikely events: the Supreme Court choosing to reverse itself or the successful enactment of a constitutional amendment. “That’s because the 2010 case was decided on constitutional grounds—under the First Amendment—as opposed to statutory grounds,” writes Rubin.
The fact that Hawley, even with the assent of Congress and the president, literally cannot “overturn” Citizens United makes this matter done and dusted. But it’s still worth prodding his proposal to assess the full measure of his ambitions—which turn out to be appropriately deceptive. You see, for all of Hawley’s bluster, he’s only targeting one sliver of the boodle that the Supreme Court’s allowed to come sluicing through the gates: corporate money. For all this posturing, Hawley would leave unchecked the flood of dark money.
If you’re authentically aggrieved by the Citizens United decision, this is where the profound misrule lies: Political nonprofits—mainly 501(c)(4)s—can accept unlimited donations and don’t have to disclose their donors, even when the nonprofit then sends the money to super PACs, which do have to disclose donors. As Open Secrets has documented, contributions from shell companies and dark money sources have ballooned in the last two election cycles, with more than $612 million flowing into federal political committees in 2022. Rubin reports that “the nonprofit One Nation donated $53.5 million to the GOP-aligned Senate Leadership Fund, the largest political contribution of any organization that election cycle.”
“Safe to say,” Rubin concludes, “leaving nonprofits out of the equation wouldn’t solve the dark money problem.” But this is what Hawley’s proposal pointedly does.
It really doesn’t take a ton of spelunking to get to the bottom of what Hawley’s trying to do with this sudden stance against Citizens United: This is just a new layer of the senator’s song and dance against what he terms “woke” corporations, and of the broader project of conservative nationalism that TNR contributing editor Osita Nwanevu characterized as “Trumpism for intellectuals,” in The New Yorker back in July 2019.
TNR’s Matt Ford saw a similar level of playacting in a previous Hawley proposal to belatedly jump into the right’s war against Disney with a stunt bill purportedly aimed at reducing the value of the entertainment conglomerate’s valuable copyrights. As Ford pointed out, however, not only was that proposal extremely unlikely to pass constitutional muster, it would very likely “lead to taxpayers giving a multibillion-dollar payout to Disney for its property losses” if it was successfully enacted.
It’s extremely unlikely that Hawley doesn’t understand the fatal flaws in the ideas he’s going to such flamboyant lengths to promote. The senator, after all, has degrees from the two schools that are locked in tight competition to be America’s Slytherin—Stanford University and Yale Law. As Rubin notes, Hawley also used to clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts, so surely he understands the difference between constitutional and statutory grounds.
The political press has been on a recent tear of ignominy lately. Media Matters’ Matt Gertz caught multiple outlets selling the GOP’s recent proposal to pay for the proposed Israeli aid package with deficit-ballooning cuts to the IRS as an “offset” this week, in another example of a framing that could have been avoided if anyone bothered to acquire some basic literacy about the legislative process and operating budgets. That Hawley’s sham of a bill has no chance to “overturn Citizens United” doesn’t take a deep dive into the particulars to figure out. To be honest, many of the ruses perpetrated by George Santos, who survived an expulsion vote on Wednesday, were a lot harder to penetrate than Hawley’s latest caper, if only anyone would bother to try.
Count him among the whole group of right wing populist pretenders who see the political utility to pretending to oppose “woke” big money while enabling fascist big money at every turn. (See: DeSantis, Ron.) You can’t ever take this guy at his word. There’s always an agenda.
The entire GDP of Hungary is $189 billion. Annual inflation in Hungary is around 20 percent. Orban is an authoritarian. Hungary does not border Russia no matter how many times Trump keeps saying it does in every speech he gives where he praises Orban. https://t.co/IHbZw0Uu9A
Trump: And we will together restore law and order in our country. We will completely overhaul the doj to investigate every marxist prosecutor in America for their illegal racist in the reverse enforcement.. pic.twitter.com/eftLSe9vX5
Trump: And when you think of it how important elections are, you have millions of people alive right now if the election was not rigged. They would be alive. Ukraine, Israel. pic.twitter.com/0h2spbhJzA
According to this timeline from Wikipedia, there were 19 terrorist attacks during his term. of course many of them were perpetrated by white supremacist supporters so I suppose he doesn’t consider that a problem. And that’s not counting the hundreds of mass shootings. Or the pandemic that killed over a million people. But yeah, it was “perfect.”
Trump: Everything is a lie. The whole thing is a lie. The whole election was a lie pic.twitter.com/73NQT6z5gX
This poll is giving everyone a heart attack today and driving all the news. The media is downright gleeful. Fun for them!
President Biden is trailing Donald J. Trump in five of the six most important battleground states one year before the 2024 election, suffering from enormous doubts about his age and deep dissatisfaction over his handling of the economy and a host of other issues, new polls by The New York Times and Siena College have found.
The results show Mr. Biden losing to Mr. Trump, his likeliest Republican rival, by margins of three to 10 percentage points among registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden is ahead only in Wisconsin, by two percentage points, the poll found.
Margins are calculated using unrounded figures.
Nevada+10 rep
Biden
41%
Trump
52
Georgia+6 rep
Biden
43%
Trump
49
Arizona+5 rep
Biden
44%
Trump
49
Michigan+5 rep
Biden
43%
Trump
48
Pennsylvania+4 rep
Biden
44%
Trump
48
Wisconsin+2 dem
Biden
47%
Trump
45
Based on New York Times/Siena College polls of 3,662 registered voters from Oct. 22 to Nov. 3
Across the six battlegrounds — all of which Mr. Biden carried in 2020 — the president trails by an average of 48 to 44 percent.
Discontent pulsates throughout the Times/Siena poll, with a majority of voters saying Mr. Biden’s policies have personally hurt them. The survey also reveals the extent to which the multiracial and multigenerational coalition that elected Mr. Biden is fraying. Demographic groups that backed Mr. Biden by landslide margins in 2020 are now far more closely contested, as two-thirds of the electorate sees the country moving in the wrong direction.
Voters under 30 favor Mr. Biden by only a single percentage point, his lead among Hispanic voters is down to single digits and his advantage in urban areas is half of Mr. Trump’s edge in rural regions. And while women still favored Mr. Biden, men preferred Mr. Trump by twice as large a margin, reversing the gender advantage that had fueled so many Democratic gains in recent years.
Black voters — long a bulwark for Democrats and for Mr. Biden — are now registering 22 percent support in these states for Mr. Trump, a level unseen in presidential politics for a Republican in modern times.
Add it all together, and Mr. Trump leads by 10 points in Nevada, six in Georgia, five in Arizona, five in Michigan and four in Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden held a 2-point edge in Wisconsin.
In a remarkable sign of a gradual racial realignment between the two parties, the more diverse the swing state, the farther Mr. Biden was behind, and he led only in the whitest of the six.
Now how and why is this happening? If we turn to another cyberpage of the Gray Lady we find a chatty cheerful conversation among four of its op-ed columnists, entitled “The Presidential Fantasy Draft,” with the sub-headline “Our 2024 options are terrible. Can we hope for more than Biden or Trump?”
The gist of this symposium is that Joe Biden is old and boring, and people — especially journalists needless to say — want somebody fresh and exciting to run against Trump, because somebody like Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom would obviously beat Trump easily (obviously). The evidence for this proposition is not presented, apparently because it’s too self-evident to require doing so.
Nor is there really any hint in this delightfully frivolous back and forth in this bien pensant salon that Trump might be “terrible” in some way that’s fundamentally different than the ways — old, boring — Joe Biden is “terrible.”
America is on the edge of installing a fascist dictatorship via a presidential election. This really shouldn’t be in any way controversial. I mean if you want to get all technical and pedantic you could say America is on the edge of installing an authoritarian dictatorship with a number of strikingly fascist-like features, so we don’t have to get into a stupid argument about whether Donald Trump actually meets the fascist minimum, whatever that might be defined to require.
And one reason this is about to happen is that our media elites simply refuse to acknowledge this extremely obvious fact. If they did, they couldn’t possibly hold chummy conversations among themselves about how Biden and Trump are both unsatisfactory options — a view I share if “unsatisfactory” in one case means “this pizza is slightly overcooked and therefore unsatisfactory,” while in the other case it means “this bubonic plague is an unsatisfactory disease.”
This poll shows that part of the problem is that people don’t know about Biden’s accomplishments. In fact, they are astonishingly uninformed about it and tend to be impressed when they do hear about it.
This is one good way of doing that. The contrast is super important. Apparently people have forgotten.
Orlando Health South Seminole Hospital (from website).
This horror story from Florida (where else?) should give anyone pause who lives alone away from relations “as 3 out of 5 Americans in their 80s do.” Or if you have a family member who does (Washington Post):
When Douglas Hulse pulled his Ford Mustang convertible into a Florida gas station three years ago, he looked so distressed that someone called 911.
An ambulance rushed him to Orlando Health South Seminole Hospital, where doctors said he had a stroke. At 80, the retired pilot who had flown famous passengers around the country could no longer care for himself.
[…]
A hospital can be liable if a patient is discharged into an unsafe environment. Because Hulse lived alone and the hospital officials saw no sign that he had family, that put them in a bind when his health didn’t improve. So they argued in court that he was no longer capable of making his own decisions and needed a guardian — a caretaker with enormous legal power.
Medicare “pays the hospital by diagnosis, not length of stay,” so when Hulse started costing the hospital money, they quickly washed their hands of him. The court assigned as Hulse’s guardian Dina Carlson, a 51-year-old former real estate agent, the Post reports.
The guardian a year later sold his home in an unadvertised sale to realtors in her neighborhood for $215,000. “A company called Harding Street Homes bought Hulse’s home and resold it a few months later for $347,000 — $132,000 more than Hulse got for it.”
“It’s unclear what efforts the hospital made to track down any relatives,” the Post reports. The guardian initially made none. Hulce’s niece in Pennsylvania had not heard from him in a while and could neither reach him nor find out where he’d gone. Only when she typed his name into Westlaw did she spot Hulce’s name in a guardianship case.
“If they just called me none of this would have happened,” she told the Post.
There’s much, much more, including a state and Washington Post investigation:
The inspector general’s office, lacking the investigative power of law enforcement, including the ability to subpoena bank records, pushed for a criminal investigation. It urged law enforcement to look into the handling of Hulse home and two others Carlson sold with the same real estate agents, stressing it had found “probable cause” that Carlson and the real estate agents “engaged in a scheme to defraud.”
[…]
On March 16, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said its preliminary inquiry found “no evidence” to warrant a criminal investigation “at this time,” according to an email received in the FOIA request.
Advocates for the elderly say police and prosecutors often do not treat financial exploitation of elderly people seriously enough and are reluctant to sink time into cases where the only witness has dementia, if still alive.
Two days after the state declined to pursue a criminal investigation, Hulse died.
A spokesman for Orlando Health South Seminole Hospital “urged people to draw up a will or designate someone to make their health decisions and to note this in their medical file.”
Too little, too late for Hulse and his family.
The Florida Department of Elder Affairs, after being contacted by The Post, reprimanded Carlson for her failure to file timely reports. Her penalty: She must take eight more hours of classroom training.
Filing for the 2024 elections in North Carolina opens in four weeks: at noon on Monday, Dec. 4.
Democrats are already in court fighting the usual tricksy maneuvers from the Republican legislature. State Republicans roll their eyes and complain bitterly that Democrats filing lawsuits is more of the same tiresome resistance to their gerrymandered majorities. Naturally, Democrats would not be expending campaign resources on court so often if the GOP was not so routinely engaged in voter disenfranchisement and power grabs.
… Republican lawmakers introduced bills to, among other things, require State Senate confirmation of cabinet appointments; slash the number of employees who report to the governor to 300 from 1,500; and give Republicans greater clout on the Board of Elections, the body that sets the rules for North Carolina’s notoriously burdensome balloting.
The graboids are back, bigger and badder than ever now that they have supermajorities in both chambers thanks to Rep. Tricia Cotham. This time they hope to change the rules ahead of the 2024 election with bills the GOP passed over Cooper’s vetoes.
Senate Bill 512, said Cooper’s Oct. 10 press release, “takes away the Governor’s majority of appointees on important boards and commissions, including the Board of Transportation, the Commission for Public Health, and the Environmental Management Commission among others.” It clearly violates “the separation of powers established in the North Carolina Constitution.”
Cooper’s Oct 17 press release describes the second, Senate Bill 749 (the doozy), as another violation of the separation of powers:
The bill, which Governor Cooper vetoed, would establish an eight-member State Board and four-member county boards, with all members appointed by the General Assembly and an even partisan split. The current State Board has five members appointed by the Governor, with at least two members from each major political party, and has successfully implemented fair elections in each cycle.
NC Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore legislated an end to that “fair” nonsense. This time they hope the GOP majority won last year on the state Supreme Court will have their backs.
In 2018, the North Carolina Supreme Court rejected the attempt by legislative Republicans to create an eight-member, evenly divided State Board of Elections. Following that loss, Republicans tried to amend the Constitution to do the same thing, however it was rejected soundly by the voters with 61% of the vote.
“The deadlocks that will be created on these new Boards of Elections at the state and local levels likely will reduce early voting and create longer lines at the polls. It will also undermine fair elections and faith in our democracy by sending disputes to our highly partisan legislature and courts,” said Governor Cooper. “Both the Courts and the people have rejected this bad idea and the meaning of our Constitution doesn’t change just because the Supreme Court has new Justices.
Cooper’s court filing challenging Berger and Moore’s attempt to eviscerate the separation of powers does not use “power grab,” but it does get colorful (emphasis mine)
Showing flagrant disregard for these constitutional principles, the North Carolina General Assembly takes direct aim at established precedents and once again seeks to significantly interfere with the Governor’s constitutionally assigned executive branch duty of election law enforcement and to take much of that power for itself.
Like Gollum reaching for the One Ring, Legislative Defendants are possessed by the power it brings. When it comes to seizing control of the enforcement of the State’s election laws, neither the clear rulings of the Supreme Court, nor the overwhelming vote of the people, will deter them.
To be clear, nothing has changed since the last time Legislative Defendants tried—and failed—to cripple the State Board of Elections, except, of course, the composition of the Supreme Court. But Defendants Berger and Moore hope that is enough—that the new Court will discard the principle of stare decisis to give Legislative Defendants what they so desperately want.
What the NC GOP wants is to devolve all power over elections administration to Berger and Moore (or to Moore’s replacement as speaker; he’s expected to run for Congress in a district he just drew for himself). They’re counting on deadlocks in election boards the GOP-dominated legislature will appoint the way Trump means to pack executive branch agencies with loyalists if he wins the presidency. Cooper’s filing makes this clear. Senate Bill 749 (Session Law 2023-139) is a “Where’s Waldo” of graboids Berger and Moore.
If “for any reason”—including deadlock,” the eight-member state Board fails to elect a chair within 30 days of appointment, “either the President Pro Tempore of the Senate or the Speaker of the House of Representatives (depending on the year)” will. Berger or Moore.
“If for any reason”—including deadlock—“the position of Executive Director is not filled within 30 days . . . the position may be filled by legislative appointment.” Guess who?
If an Executive Director is not selected by January 10, 2024, Section 8.3 of Session Law 2023-139 permits the President Pro Tempore of the Senate to make the appointment. Berger again.
The same will hold in 100 counties. Three-and-two boards presently appointed by the governor, two members from each major party with the fifth matching the party of the incumbent governor, become two and two. The new law cuts the governor out of the loop: one each appointed by President Pro Tempore of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the minority leader of the Senate, and the minority leader of the House of Representatives. Berger or Moore and two Democrats.
And should these four-four county Boards not elect a chair within 15 days of their first meeting or within 30 days of a vacancy, the position of chair may be filled by either the President Pro Tempore of the Senate or the Speaker of the House of Representatives, depending on the year. Berger or Moore again.
Section 8.2 of Session Law 2023-139 permits the President Pro Tempore of the Senate to fill the office of the chair of any county board of election that does not select a chair by January 10, 2024. By who else? Graboid Berger.
S 749 also sets up the potential for long lines for early voting, as Cooper explains in his August 24 statement:
Under Senate Bill 749, if the State Board were to deadlock on a county’s early voting plan – which is likely under a 4-4 split – then the plan reverts to just one early voting site in that county. That will result in long waits for the increasing number of North Carolinians who vote early.
Over 100,000 voted early here in 2020 at 16 early voting sites. Our early voting plan for the March 5 primary (11 sites) has already been approved by the local elections Board. I told a gathering last week that if the GOP tried that single-site business in my county next October-November, there would be a riot.
Then again, chaos is the plan.
Cooper’s filing reads like a slam-dunk case. Then again, who knows how far a stacked state Supreme Court will go to deliver for graboids Berger and Moore.
The last Beatles song featuring the voice of late member John Lennon and developed using artificial intelligence [was] released on Thursday at 1400 GMT alongside the band’s first track, record label Universal Music said.
Called “Now and Then”, the song – billed as the last Beatles song – will be released in a double A-side single which pairs the track with the band’s 1962 debut UK single “Love Me Do”, Universal Music Group (UMG.AS) said in a statement.
The Beatles’ YouTube channel premiered late on Wednesday the short film “Now And Then – The Last Beatles Song” ahead of the release of the track.
Directed by Oliver Murray, the 12-minute clip features exclusive footage and commentary from members of the band, Lennon’s son Sean Ono Lennon and filmmaker Peter Jackson, who directed the 2021 documentary series “The Beatles: Get Back”.
In the clip, Jackson explains how his team managed to isolate instruments and vocals from recordings using AI, including the original tape of “Now and Then” which Lennon recorded as a home demo in the late 1970s.
The song also features parts recorded by surviving members Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr as well as the late George Harrison.
“That ultimately led us to develop a technology which allows us to take any soundtrack and split all the different components into separate tracks based on machine learning”, Jackson says in the video.
And in the end …how did it all turn out? Give it a spin-and I’ll meet you on the flip side:
I think it’s quite lovely, and couldn’t have arrived at a better time (most of the news as of late has been…soul crushing). In fact, out of the 3 resurrected and studio-sweetened John Lennon demos borne of Paul, George, and Ringo’s Beatles Anthology sessions in 1995 (the other two being “Free As a Bird” and “Real Love”), I think this one is toppermost of the poppermost.
“Farewell, hello. Farewell, hello.”
-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
I don’t know why you say, “Goodbye”, I say, “Hello”
-The Beatles, “Hello Goodbye”
Beatles forever!
(It’s a good week to say “hello” to one of my older posts-restored and remixed)
I Saw A Film Today: A Top fab 14 list
(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on December 16, 2017)
By Dennis Hartley
Here’s a Fab Four fun fact: The original U.K. and U.S. releases of the Beatles LPs prior to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band did not contain all the same songs (even when the album titles were the same). This was due to the fact that the U.K. versions had 14 tracks, and the U.S. versions had 12. That’s my perfect excuse to offer up picks for the Top 14 Beatles films.
I don’t really want to stop the show, but I thought that you might like to know: In addition to documentaries and films where the lads essentially played “themselves”, my criteria includes films where band members worked as actors or composers, and biopics. As per usual, my list is in alphabetical order:
The Beatles Anthology-Admittedly, this opus is more of a turn-on for obsessives, but there is very little mystery left once you’ve taken this magical 600 minute tour through the Beatles film archives. Originally presented as a mini-series event on TV, it’s a comprehensive compilation of performance footage, movie clips and interviews (vintage and contemporary).
What makes it unique is that the producers (the surviving Beatles themselves) took the “in their own words” approach, eschewing the usual droning narrator. Nicely done, and a must-see for fans.
The Compleat Beatles– Prior to the Anthology, this theatrically released documentary stood as the definitive overview of the band’s career. What I like most about director Patrick Montgomery’s approach, is that he delves into the musicology (roots and influences), which the majority of Beatles docs tend to skimp on. George Martin’s candid anecdotes regarding the creativity and innovation that fueled the studio sessions are enlightening.
It still stands as a great compilation of performance clips and interviews. Malcolm McDowell narrates. Although you’d think it would be on DVD, it’s still VHS only (I’ve seen laser discs at secondhand stores).
Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years– As a Beatle freak who has seen just about every bit of Fab Four documentary/concert footage extant, I approached Ron Howard’s 2016 film with a bit of trepidation (especially with all the pre-release hype about “previously unseen” footage and such) but was nonetheless pleased (if not necessarily enlightened).
This is not their entire story, but rather a retrospective of the Beatles’ career from the Hamburg days through their final tour in 1966. As I inferred, you likely won’t learn anything new (this is a well-trod path), but the performance clips are enhanced by newly restored footage and remixed audio. Despite the familiar material, it’s beautifully assembled, and Howard makes the nostalgic wallow feel fresh and fun.
A Hard Day’s Night– This 1964 masterpiece has been often copied, but never equaled. Shot in a semi-documentary style, the film follows a “day in the life” of John, Paul, George and Ringo at the height of their youthful exuberance and charismatic powers. Thanks to the wonderfully inventive direction of Richard Lester and Alun Owen’s cleverly tailored script, the essence of what made the Beatles “the Beatles” has been captured for posterity.
Although it’s meticulously constructed, Lester’s film has a loose, improvisational feel; and it feels just as fresh and innovative as it was when it first hit theaters all those years ago. To this day I catch subtle gags that surprise me (ever notice John snorting the Coke bottle?). Musical highlights: “I Should Have Known Better”, “All My Loving”, “Don’t Bother Me”, “Can’t Buy Me Love”, and (of course) the classic title song.
Help! – Compared to its predecessor (see above), this is a much fluffier affair, from a narrative standpoint (Ringo is being chased by a religious cult who wish to offer him up as a human sacrifice to their god; hilarity ensues). But still, it’s a lot of fun, if you’re in a receptive mood. The Beatles themselves exude enough goofy energy and effervescent charm to make up for the wafer-thin plot line.
Marc Behm and Charles Wood’s script has a few good zingers; but the biggest delights come from director Richard Lester’s flair for visual invention. For me, the best parts are the musical sequences, which are imaginative, artful, and light years ahead of their time (essentially the blueprint for MTV, which was still 15 years down the road).
And of course, the Beatles’ music was evolving in leaps and bounds by 1965. It has a killer soundtrack; in addition to the classic title song, you’ve got “Ticket to Ride”, “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”, “The Night Before” and “I Need You”, to name a few. Don’t miss the clever end credits!
I Wanna Hold Your Hand-This was the feature film debut for director Robert Zemeckis and writer Bob Gale, the creative tag team who would later deliver Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Sort of a cross between American Graffiti and The Bellboy, the film concerns six New Jersey teenagers. Three of them (Nancy Allen, Theresa Saldana and Wendy Jo Sperber) are rabid Beatles fans, the other three (Bobby Di Cicco, Marc McClure and Susan Kendall Newman) not so much.
They end up together in a caper to “meet the Beatles” by sneaking into their NYC hotel suite (the story is set on the day the band makes their 1964 debut on TheEd Sullivan Show). Zany misadventures ensue. Zemeckis overindulges on door-slamming screwball slapstick, but the energetic young cast and Gale’s breezy script keeps this fun romp zipping right along.
Let it Be– By 1969, the Beatles had probably done enough “living” to suit several normal lifetimes, and did so with the whole world looking in. It’s almost unfathomable how they could have achieved as much as they did, and at the end of all, still be only in their twenties.
Are there any other recording artists who have ever matched the creative growth that transpired over the scant six years that it took to evolve from the simplicity of Meet the Beatles to the sophistication of Abbey Road ? So, with hindsight being 20/20, should we really be so shocked to see the four haggard and sullen “old guys” who mope through this 1970 documentary?
Filmed in 1969, the movie was intended to document the “making of” the eponymous album (although interestingly, there is also footage of the band working on several songs that ended up appearing on Abbey Road). There’s also footage of the band rehearsing on the sound stage at Twickenham Film Studios, and hanging out at the Apple offices.
Sadly, the film has developed a rep as hard evidence of the band’s disintegration. There is some on-camera bickering (most famously, in a scene where George reaches the end of his rope with Paul’s fussiness). Still, there is that classic mini-concert on the roof, and if you look closely, the boys are actually having a grand old time jamming out; it’s almost as if they know this is the last hurrah, and what the hell, it’s only rock ’n’ roll, after all. I hope this film finally finds its way to a legit DVD release someday (beware of bootlegs).
The Magic Christian– The original posters for this 1969 romp proclaimed it “antiestablishmentarian, antibellum (sic), antitrust, antiseptic, antibiotic, antisocial and antipasto”. Rich and heir-less eccentric Sir Guy Grand (Peter Sellers) meets a young homeless man in a public park (Ringo Starr) and decides to adopt him as his son (“Youngman Grand”).
Sir Guy sets about imparting a nugget of wisdom to his newly appointed heir: People will do anything for money. Basically, it’s an episodic series of elaborate pranks, setting hooks into the stiff upper lips of the stuffy English aristocracy. Like similar broad 60s satires (Candy, Skidoo, Casino Royale) it’s a psychedelic train wreck, but when it’s funny, it’s very funny.
Highlights include Laurence Harvey doing a striptease whilst reciting the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet, a pheasant hunt with field artillery, and well-attired businessmen wading waist-deep into a huge vat of offal, using their bowlers to scoop up as much “free money” as they can (accompanied by Thunderclap Newman’s “Something in the Air”).
Badfinger performs the majority of the songs on the soundtrack, including their Paul McCartney-penned hit, “Come and Get It”. Director Joseph McGrath co-wrote with Sellers, Terry Southern, and Monty Python’s Graham Chapman and John Cleese (both have cameos).
The enormous cast includes a number of notable supporting players to keep your eye peeled for (mainly cameos), including Wilfrid Hyde-White, Richard Attenborough, Raquel Welch (Priestess of the Whip!), Spike Milligan, Roman Polanski, Christopher Lee, and Yul Brenner.
Magical Mystery Tour– According to a majority of critics (and puzzled Beatles fans), the Fabs were ringing out the old year on a somewhat sour note with this self-produced project, originally presented as a holiday special on BBC-TV in December of 1967. By the conventions of television fare at the time, the 53-minute film was judged as a self-indulgent and pointlessly obtuse affair (it’s probably weathered more drubbing than Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate combined).
Granted, upon reappraisal, it remains unencumbered by anything resembling a “plot”, but in certain respects, it has held up remarkably well. Borrowing a page from Ken Kesey, the Beatles gather up a group of friends (actors and non-actors alike), load them all on a bus, and take them on a “mystery tour” across the English countryside.
They basically filmed whatever happened, then sorted it all out in the editing suite. It’s the musical sequences that make the restored version released on Blu-ray several years ago worth the investment. In hindsight, sequences like “Blue Jay Way”, “Fool on the Hill” and “I Am the Walrus” play like harbingers of MTV, which was still well over a decade away.
Some of the interstitial vignettes uncannily anticipate Monty Python’s idiosyncratic comic sensibilities; not a stretch when you consider that George Harrison’s future production company HandMade Films was formed to help finance Life of Brian. Magical Mystery Tour is far from a work of art, but when taken for what it is (a long-form music video and colorful time capsule of 60s pop culture)-it’s lots of fun. Roll up!
Nowhere Boy– This gem from U.K. director Sam Taylor-Wood was one of my 2010 Seattle International Film Festival faves. Aaron Johnson gives a terrific, James Dean-worthy performance as a teen-aged John Lennon. The story zeroes in on a crucially formative period of the musical icon’s life beginning just prior to his meet-up with Paul McCartney, and ending on the eve of the “Hamburg period”.
The story is not so much about the Fabs, as it is about the complex and mercurial dynamic of the relationship between John, his Aunt Mimi (Kirstin Scott Thomas) and his mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff). The entire cast is excellent, but Scott Thomas handily walks away with the film as the woman who raised John from childhood.
Produced by George Martin– While no one can deny the inherent musical genius of the Beatles, it’s worth speculating whether they would have reached the same dizzying heights of creativity and artistic growth (and over the same 7-year period) had the lads never crossed paths with Sir George Martin. It’s a testament to the unique symbiosis between the Fabs and their gifted producer that one can’t think of one without also thinking of the other. Yet there is much more to Martin than this celebrated collaboration.
Martin is profiled in an engaging and beautifully crafted 2011 BBC documentary called (funnily enough) Produced by George Martin . The film traces his career from the early 50s to present day. His early days at EMI are particularly fascinating; a generous portion of the film focuses on his work there producing classical and comedy recordings.
Disparate as Martin’s early work appears to be from the rock ’n’ roll milieu, I think it prepped him for his future collaboration with the Fabs, on a personal and professional level. His experience with comics likely helped the relatively reserved producer acclimate to the Beatles’ irreverent sense of humor, and Martin’s classical training and gift for arrangement certainly helped to guide their creativity to a higher level of sophistication.
81 at the time of filming, Martin (who passed away in 2016) is spry, full of great anecdotes and a class act all the way. He provides some candid moments; there is visible emotion from the usually unflappable Martin when he admits how hurt and betrayed he felt when John Lennon curtly informed him at the 11th hour that his “services would not be needed” for the Let it Be sessions (the band went with the mercurial Phil Spector, who famously overproduced the album). Insightful interviews with artists who have worked with Martin (and admiring peers) round things off nicely.
The Rutles: All You Need is Cash– Everything you ever wanted to know about the “Prefab Four” is right here, in this cheeky and hilarious 1978 mockumentary, originally presented as a TV special. It’s the story of four lads from Liverpool: Dirk McQuickly (Eric Idle), Ron Nasty (Neil Innes), Stig O’Hara (Rikki Fataar) and Barry Womble (John Halsey). Any resemblance to the Beatles, of course, is purely intentional.
Idle wrote the script and co-directed with Gary Weis (who made a number of memorable short films that aired on the first few seasons of Saturday Night Live). Innes (frequent Monty Python collaborator and one of the madmen behind the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band) composed the soundtrack, clever mash-ups of near-Beatles songs that are actually quite listenable on their own.
Mick Jagger, Paul Simon and other music luminaries appear as themselves, “reminiscing” about the band. There are also some funny bits that feature members of the original “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” (including John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd). Look fast for a cameo from George Harrison, as a reporter. Undoubtedly, the format of this piece provided some inspiration for This is Spinal Tap.
That’ll Be the Day-Set in late 50s England, Claude Whatham’s 1973 film (written by Ray Connolly) is a character study in the tradition of the “kitchen sink” dramas that flourished in 60s UK cinema.
David Essex (best-known for his music career, and hit, “Rock On”) plays Jim MacLaine, an intelligent, angst-ridden young man who drops out of school to go the Kerouac route (to Mum’s chagrin). While he’s figuring out what to do with his life, Jim supports himself working at a “funfair” at the Isle of Wight, where he gets a crash course in how to fleece customers and “pull birds” from a seasoned carny (Ringo Starr) who befriends him.
Early 60s English rocker Billy Fury performs some songs as “Stormy Tempest” (likely a reference to Rory Storm, who Ringo was drumming for when the Beatles enlisted him in 1962) Also look for Keith Moon (who gets more screen time in the 1974 sequel, Stardust).
Yellow Submarine– Despite being a die-hard Beatles fan, over the years I’ve felt somewhat ambivalent about this 1968 animated feature “starring” the Fab Four; or rather, their cartoon avatars, voiced over by other actors. While I adored the music soundtrack, I never quite “got” all the fuss over the “innovative” visuals (which could be partially attributable to the fact that I never caught it in a theater, just on TV and in various fuzzy home video formats).
But, being the obsessive-compulsive completest that I am, I snapped up a copy of Capitol’s restored version a few years ago, and found it to be a revelation. The 2012 transfer was touched-up by hand, frame-by frame (an unusually artisan choice for this digital age), and the results are jaw-dropping. The visuals are stunning.
The audio remix is superb; I never fully appreciated the clever wordplay in the script (by Lee Minoff, Al Brodax, Jack Mendelsohn and Erich Segal) until now. The story itself remains silly, but it’s the knockout music sequences (“Eleanor Rigby” being one standout) that make this one worth the price of admission.
This guy is nuts and he’s leading a small army of nuts. We just have to hope that if he gets on the ballot that more right wing nuts than left wing nuts vote for him:
At an anti-vaccine conference in Georgia on Friday, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. confirmed his commitment to the cause and spoke to his base about how he, as president, would serve the movement he built.
“I feel like I’ve come home today,” he said to a standing ovation, crediting the assembled audience with his candidacy.
He then laid out his vision for a Kennedy presidency, which would include telling the National Institutes of Health to take “a break” from studying infectious diseases, like Covid-19 and measles, and pivoting the agency to the study of chronic diseases, like diabetes and obesity. Kennedy has suggested without evidence that researchers and pharmaceutical companies are driven by profit to neglect such chronic conditions and invest in ineffective and even harmful treatments; he includes vaccines among them.
“I’m gonna say to NIH scientists, God bless you all,” Kennedy said. “Thank you for public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.”
I’m pretty sure that infectious diseases aren’t going to give us a break though.
I don’t know what makes loons like this tick but it’s dangerous as hell that one of the two major political parties embraces the kooks who believe this garbage.
Florida’s top public health official, a leading voice behind Gov. Ron DeSantis’ controversial pandemic approach, joined his boss on the campaign trail Wednesday for an unusual appearance that further blurred the lines between the Republican presidential candidate’s day job and his political aspirations.
Taking the stage to the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” — a campaign playlist staple — Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo conveyed his unease speaking before the New Hampshire crowd but said he was compelled to visit the first-in-the-nation GOP primary state to “support a man that I have a great deal of admiration for.”
“There’s no one, no one right now, who is running in this election who has the critical qualities that Gov. DeSantis has — the integrity, the courage, the intelligence,” Ladapo said.
While it’s perhaps not atypical for public officials to heap praise on their bosses, it is rare for a government employee to be a featured act at a high-profile political event. But DeSantis, one of the few candidates running for the GOP nomination who are also currently in office, has at times flouted the distinctions that separate candidates from their elected offices.
DeSantis routinely faces questions back home about the cost of state resources used to support his White House bid, including after state law enforcement agents were involved in a multi-vehicle accident while providing protective services during a fundraising trip to Tennessee. Before announcing his presidential campaign, DeSantis signed a law that shields disclosures related to his security and travel from Florida’s robust public records laws.
[…]
Advertised as a town hall on “medical freedom,” the event served as a platform for Ladapo and DeSantis to cast aspersions on measures taken to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus during the pandemic and to sow doubts about the Covid-19 vaccine — an area on which the Florida governor has attempted to distinguish himself from former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 GOP nod, whose administration helped develop the vaccine in record time.
Ladapo told the crowd he had “nothing against Mr. Trump.” DeSantis, though, put Trump’s pandemic record on blast.
DeSantis vowed to overhaul the nation’s health regulators and disease response agencies if elected president, noting that he had championed laws in Florida to prevent pandemic-related restrictions in the future.
“We’re going to do a lot of different things right off the bat,” DeSantis said. “It’s going to change the way the federal government is going to be able to approach anything like this in the future.”
Ladapo recounted how he was plucked by DeSantis from UCLA, where he had ruffled feathers by penning op-eds increasingly critical of how governments were responding to the spread of the coronavirus and controversially pushing unproven Covid-19 treatments. DeSantis, who once celebrated the coronavirus vaccine’s arrival, appointed Ladapo as Florida’s surgeon general in the fall of 2021, putting him in charge of the state department of health just as he was cooling on the shots.
In another outlier position, Ladapo this September advised Floridians not to get another dose of the vaccine after the federal government approved a new formula to improve immunity to recent strands of the coronavirus, similar to its method for annual flu shots.
Ahead of that announcement, with DeSantis videoconferencing via Zoom amid a campaign blitz, Ladapo helped lead a digital forum hosted by the governor’s office featuring the slogan “No way FDA.”
Though a state event, DeSantis introduced himself as though he was speaking to a national audience, saying, “I’m Gov. Ron DeSantis from Florida.”
Simon Rosenberg, who called the red trickle in 2022, wrote this on twitter:
As folks ready their election takes for Tuesday night, it’s important to check in on the big advantages Congressional Dems have opened up in recent months. Perhaps most important polling data out there right now.
Tuesday is off-year election day and because the Virginia Governor’s race overly excites the beltway press we’ll all be watching to see how the Great Whitebread hope Glenn Youngkin does. His race doesn’t really mean anything nationally but they will say it is a bellweather despite their huge miss in 2022. And whether or not this discontent with the GOP congress transaltes to other races is unknown. But it’s not good for them. And with MAGA MIke in charge it’s probably going to get worse.
In February 2012, Mike Johnson sent an aide on an urgent mission at the college where he had been working to open a law school: Locate a study that he believed would provethe project was financially possible.
For more than a year, Johnson — the dean of the not-yet-opened law school — had been telling donors and the public that the institution, which would focus on training Christian attorneys in northwest Louisiana, was not only achievable, but inevitable.
“From a pure feasibility standpoint,” Johnson, then 38, told the local Town Talk newspaper in 2010 after becoming dean, “I’m not sure how this can fail because … it looks like the perfect storm for our law school.”
But he had still not actually seen a feasibility study commissioned by the parent school, Louisiana College,a private Southern Baptist college in Pineville, La., now known as Louisiana Christian University.
The aide soon returned with disturbing news: The study had been buried in a filing cabinet. And it was all but useless.
Six months later, in August 2012, Johnson resigned as dean of the new school, which never opened even though the college spent $5 million to buy and renovate a Shreveport headquarters, among other expenses detailed in local media accounts.
The feasibility study was a “hodgepodge collection of papers,” with “nothing in existence” related to the need for the new law school, market studies, or “funding sources and prospects,” Johnson wrote the following year, describing the episode in what he called a “confidential memorandum” responding to questions from the Louisiana College Board of Trustees
Johnson’s April 2013 memo, which was obtained by The Washington Post, reveals how he navigated a previous executive management experience as he takes over a much larger organization, the U.S. House of Representatives, and becomes second in line to the presidency. The memo suggests that Johnson encouraged and agreed to lead what he later described as a sparsely researched effort that collapsed soon after he left.
The new speaker’s congressional biography makes no mention of his tenure as dean of the never-opened law school.Before winning election to the Louisiana legislature in 2015, and Congress a year later, Johnson mainly worked as a litigator for conservative causes, once remarking that his profession was “legal ministry.” He has also taught college courses, according to his House financial disclosures.
A spokesman for Johnson did not respond to a request for comment about the failed law school. Several others involved in the effort said Johnson had worked hard to make the project a reality and was not to blame for its failure.
The 2013 memo suggests, however, that when given a leadership opportunity, Johnson oversold his project’s prospects and failed to divulge key problems until after he left the job. In the memo, he blamed others for the problems,writing that the project collapsed because of larger issues at Louisiana College. He also faulted administrators for failing to send him the feasibility study, and said that a crisis involving the college’s accreditation agency undercut his effort to have the law school win operational approval.
“The ordeal created a real hardship for me and my family,” Johnson wrote, saying that he resigned “with great sadness and only as a last resort.”
Joe Aguillard, the president of Louisiana College,later offered an alternative explanation of events — pinningthe blame for the law school’s failure on Johnson, according to a memo written at the time by another board member, Heath Veuleman. Aguillard said that Johnson’s resignation was a selfish decision to pursue a “dream job,” according to the memo,which was obtained by The Post.Aguillard also blamed Johnson’s resignation “for the Law School’s present delays in opening its doors.” After leaving the school, Johnson said in a memo that he had accepted a job at a conservative legal institute in the Dallas area.
Veuleman wrote that Johnsonhad denied these allegations and said in an interview with The Post that the college’s financial and management turmoil made Johnson conclude that he “couldn’t be dean. He was constantly being usurped. … I remember phone calls in which Mike would say, ‘I can’t keep doing this.’”
Aguillard said in a brief phone conversation that he was hospitalized and could not give an interview. His wife, Judy Aguillard, later texted that “my husband loves Mike and mentored him. They are very close.”
Johnson had raised hopes in Shreveport that his project could be transformative for Louisiana’s third biggest city by bringing in its first law school. Today, civic leaders say that whoever was responsible for the failed effort, it was a significant missed opportunity.
He was the leader. And he was clearly unable to get the job done. Maybe he’s learned something since then. If so, I’d guess he’s learned how to grift off the wingnuts even better.
It just doesn’t get any better than this:
The law school was to be named for Paul Pressler III, a retired Texas judge and leader of the Southern Baptist Convention who, after the school’s collapse, was accused in a lawsuit and court affidavits of sexual misconduct or assault by multiple men, including some who said they were underage at the time of the alleged activity.Tim Johnson, who was executive vice president of Louisiana College at the time of the law school’s launch, said there was pushback about making Pressler the namesake due to his “ultraconservative” biblical views, but that the assault allegations were unknown at the time.
Pressler’s lawyer, Ted Tredennick, said the 93-year-old was unable to respond directly due to dementia but rejected the assault allegations on his behalf. “He denied those allegations categorically when they were first made 20 years ago; he has continuously and consistently denied them since; he would deny them today if he were able.” A trial in the lawsuit has been delayed but is expected early next year.
Here’s a good example of his leadership skills:
Gabriel Little, who was in charge of the capital campaign, said Johnson led an impressive effort to recruit faculty, create a curriculum, and present a proposal to win certification from the American Bar Association.
“He put together one heck of a presentation for accreditation” by the ABA, Little said.
But as Johnson prepared to do that, he later wrote in his memorandum to trustees, he learned that Louisiana College had run into a roadblock in its own effort to bolster its accreditation statusfrom the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Johnson wrote that the college’s problem with accreditation meant hecould not win ABA approvalfor the law school.
Around the same time, the college faced other struggles. As it moved in a more conservative theological direction, its leaders seized on doctrinal disputes within the Southern Baptist convention to discredit critics, sparking protests by students and some faculty.
Rondall Reynoso, a previous head of the college’s art department, said a culture of fear pervaded the campus — to the point that he stopped using his work computer because of concern that he was being surveilled.
“It was an inquisition-type atmosphere, almost,” Reynoso said, attributing the unrest to what he called the undue influence of the Southern Baptist Convention.
A spokeswoman for Louisiana Christian University, as the school is now known, said no one currently in leadership was serving at the time of the failed law school. The new administration, which took over in 2015, “has worked to address previous deficiencies,” the spokeswoman said, resulting in a 2021 review that affirmed the university’s accreditation “with zero findings of noncompliance.”
Johnson wrote in his memo that the “unrest” on campus was shocking, but others said he should have been well aware of the turmoil from news reports about threats to the college’s accreditation.
“By the time Johnson gets involved, the problems are well-known, but they’re dismissed by hardcore conservatives as a liberal attack,” Reynoso said.
At the same time, concern grew at the college about millions of dollars of deferred maintenance at the Pineville campus, raising questions about plans to spend money to start the law school and other projects.
Johnson wrote in his confidential memorandum that Louisiana College’s conflicts undercut his plans and he had “no choice” but to delay the ABA filing. In addition, he needed to provide information from the law school feasibility study to win over the ABA.
The problem was that he had never seen the study, notwithstanding his bold statement more than a year earlier that the school’s feasibility was beyond question.
He’d heard about the feasibility study but hadn’t seen it. He asked for it bu they just didn’t get it to him. What could he do? Well, he quit:
“… when the law school struggled to raise funds, along with the accreditation issues, “Mike probably saw that it was going to be a long time to do it, if it ever got done, and he was a bright young man and just chose to pursue another path.”
Admitting nothing he covered his ass and moved on.
On Aug. 15, 2012, Mike Johnson wrote Aguillard a letter of resignation. He said that developments “beyond our control” had affected his ability to run the school, citing the college’s accreditation problems that had made it difficult to raise funds and recruit students and faculty.
“Our hands are currently tied,” Johnson wrote, adding that he needed to look out for his family.
Privately, Johnson worked with the college on a public relations strategy to cast the resignation in the best possible light, according to internal documents reviewed by The Post.
The talking points included, “Minimize publicity on Mike’s resignation and keep all necessary messaging brief, positive and consistent,” and “Do not concede law school, but maintain it as a temporarily delayed and scaled-down future project.”
That didn’t happen. The law school never opened. Johnson, meanwhile, was elected as a state representative and then in 2016 to the U.S. House, followed by his elevation last month to the speakership.
It sounds as though the new speaker has the skills to run the House like Trump ran the Trump Organization. Great.
