Music Video Of the Week - February 10, 2012

"No More Mr. Nice Guy" by Alice Cooper (Go to the link in the upper right hand corner.)

The Land Ain't Got No Culture

Oh, Christ, are the culture wars starting up again?

The Obama administration has issued a directive stating that Catholic schools and hospitals have to provide coverage for contraceptives and birth control pills without co-pays in an effort to broaden health access for women. Republicans have jumped on this issue like vultures on a carcass signifying their opposition to force Catholic institutions to pay for medical practices they're philosophically opposed to, calling it an affront to religious freedom and an attack on the Catholic Church. Noted Republican Catholic lawmakers such as House Speaker John Boehner and U.S. Senators Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Marco Rubio of Florida vow to support legislation to overturn Obama's directive. Meanwhile, noted Democratic lawmakers such U.S. Senators Charles Schumer of New York Barbara Boxer of California and Illinois congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, along with Judith Waxman and Marcia Greenberger of the National Women's Law Center, praised the administration's efforts for expanding coverage for women.

By the way, while there are many Gentiles who back the President as well, I narrowed my examples of individuals supporting this new policy to Jews for a reason. I have long suspected that contraception opponents are as anti-Semitic as they are misogynistic, because many women's health advocates tend to be Jewish.  And, whenever Catholics and evangelicals complain about assaults on their religious liberties and their anti-contraception, pro-life beliefs by the liberal elites, it's a slippery slope to blaming the "New York" or "Hollywood" elites, which are both code phrases to refer to Jews. Catholics and evangelicals say they're defending themselves against what they call the "secular Jewish assault" on their faith, without stopping to think how a people who spend a day in early autumn atoning for their sins are a secular people.

Whether or not conservative Christians see any stand in favor of reproductive rights as being redolent of Jewishness, their stand on denying women their right to control their own bias reeks of being elitist itself - a mostly male elite telling women of different religious and economic backgrounds how to run their lives, including the non-Catholic female employees of Catholic universities and hospitals who need this coverage. Republicans think they may have found the issue to swing enough votes - Catholic votes - their way to unseat Obama in November. It's all good and fine to say that many Catholics use birth control and don't automatically subscribe to church dogma, but there are many more Catholics disgusted enough by how the GOP has framed this issue - and by the way, 335,000 houses of worship have been exempted from this directive - to desert Obama and Democratic congressional candidates at the polls. Obama can count on the support of every critical thinker in America who recognizes the value of his decision. But as Adlai Stevenson II would have said, he needs a majority to get re-elected.

And even though a poll found that a majority of Catholics support contraception coverage, many of them may be uncomfortable with the government ordering Catholic institutions to provide it. More on that later.

Activists for women's health rights, though, are on a roll. They successfully forced the Susan G. Komen Race For the Cure foundation, a leading breast cancer awareness group, to reverse its decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood due to a congressional investigation into Planned Parenthood's alleged use of taxpayer funding for abortions, and Karen Handel, a senior Komen vice president and a failed Republican candidate for governor of Georgia, was forced to resign. Although Planned Parenthood has been assured continued funding to help poor women get breast examinations they can't get anywhere else, many women's health advocates are going to have a hard time trusting the Komen foundation again. But Komen's 180 is still a victory.

And, as all this was going on, the Washington state legislature just passed a bill legalizing gay marriage, which Governor Christine Gregoire supports, even as California's anti-gay marriage law has been struck down by federal appeals court - a decision that will soon be reviewed ultimately by the Supreme Court. The trend in favor of gay marriage has pleased at least one conservative - Rick Santorum, who now has a lot of momentum from anti-gay activists to propel his presidential campaign.

With Obama trying to defuse a politically charged health issue, and a new battle over gay rights having been joined, the culture wars are on again, and Americans are fighting over how this nation's culture should be defined. The joke's on them; we Americans have no culture to fight over. The closest we come to showing any culture is that annual ritual that takes place every February, where overpaid contestants battle it out in a public arena for supremacy and glory, where the winners are lauded and the losers are ridiculed, and with a hideous musical number midway through the show - for all the world to see on television. I am, of course, talking about the Oscars. :-D

Clarification and Follow-Up: February 8, 2012

I have been told that a long blog entry is no good, because it's too cumbersome to read online.  There's another problem: When you write a long blog entry and you have to get it out as soon as possible owing to the timeliness of the subject, it can be completely free of spelling errors but still have something wrong with it. So I need to issue a clarification of my long annual winners and losers lists for 2011" In declaring Woody Allen a winner of the year because of his latest movie, his "love letter to the American literature and music of the 1920s," I omitted the title of the movie.  It was, of course, Midnight in Paris.  I have since corrected the original post.

Meanwhile, I'm guessing that one of my posts has offended fans of an overrated fiftysomething Italian-American scam artist with a large following.  I am, of course, talking about Rick Santorum.  Earlier today I made reference to the fact that he and his wife slept in a hospital bed with their dead baby son between them by saying his Lakota Indian name would be "Sleeps With Dead Babies."  Admittedly, this makes him sounds sick.  Because, he is.  Some people might think that I should apologize to Santorum for offending his sensibilities.  Well, here again is some of the shtick about Rick.  He opposes all forms of health care reform.  He hired a campaign  staffer who says that God decreed that a woman shouldn't be President of the United States.  He says global warming is a hoax.  He likened homosexual relationships to bestiality.  He dismissed black people as parasitical welfare dependents.

So here's my point: I'll stop offending Rick Santorum's sensibilities when he stops offending mine.

Much Ado About Nothing

Rick Santorum - also known by his Lakota name, "Sleeps With Dead Babies" - is the man of the hour in the Republican presidential nomination contest, having swept the caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota and won a primary in Missouri, a state considered a microcosm of America at large. He's shaken up the Republican race by winning 28 convention delegates for a total of 45 so far, putting him ahead of Newt Gingrich and damaging Mitt Romney's aura of inevitability as the Republican nominee. Gingrich has to find a way to keep his campaign going in the month leading up to Super Tuesday on March 6, when many Southern states with voters friendly to his proposals are holding primaries and caucuses, while Romney has to avoid freaking out.

But wait a minute! Isn't the focus on this Santorum sweep just a lot of hype from a mainstream media eager to keep the GOP race alive? I think so. As someone who wants to see those Grand Old Partisans go down this autumn, I hope this does keep the race alive. But how can it be anything other than hype when the caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado are in fact the first step in a complicated process to award delegates to the Republican convention, and the delegates Santorum won last night are not bound by the caucus results? And shouldn't it matter that Missouri didn't matter? Missouri's primary was nonbinding; the state Republican party chooses its convention delegates through a series of caucuses and state conventions starting next month. Why have a primary that doesn't count? And why should Santorum brag about winning it? This would be like Jon Cryer bragging about winning a best TV actor poll on Facebook - or, for that matter, a People's Choice award.

Holding nonbinding primaries is a useless gesture, it wastes taxpayers' money, and it gives Chris Matthews way too much to talk about. Besides, we already have political contests in this country that don't count. They're called general elections. :-p

New Flickr Link

A technical error involving the Flickr gadget that showed my photostream at the bottom of my blog has caused me to remove it, so until further notice, I have a link to my Flickr page under my "Miscellaneous Links" list instead.  Sorry.

Tick Me Off

They haven't been around that long- their first album came out in 2007 - but the Rhode Island band Deer Tick has already become as annoying as the insect they named themselves after. Their most recent single of this writing, "Miss K," with its sparse, traditional guitar arrangement, purports to be a savvy, modern take on rock and alternative country. Instead, it sounds like a warmed-over Spin Doctors record. I've written here before that hip-hop is relentlessly pushing rock and roll out of the way, but if Deer Tick is rock's way of fighting back, we might as well surrender right now.

As far as I can discern, "Miss K" is about a free-spirited, spacey chick that the narrator wants to get more personal with. It sounds like a daring song, but its only daringness is throwing in an expletive that the college indie stations that play it are only going to bleep out anyway. The music is so low in key it almost evaporates, and the male protagonist's directives the woman in question almost sound like the sexual musings of a high school freshman - "Come on, Miss K, put you lovin' arms around me / Talk dirty, turn me on, let's get goin'."

Maybe there's more to Deer Tick than this song, but I doubt it. As John Cafferty proved back in the eighties, no band from Rhode Island should be taken seriously.

Also, no band named "Deer Tick" is ever going to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Beatles, yes. Deer Tick, no.

No Dedication To Transit

I've constantly asked myself what could possibly make normal Americans hate mass transit. Oh, I know why abnormal Americans - that is, Tea Party Republicans - hate it. They complain that it has to be subsidized (like the highways, like aviation) that it's an inefficient boondoggle (despite the fact that mass transit moves more people than highways for less money), and that it's an attack on the freedom to go where and when you want (never mind that commuting to your job isn't a trip you necessarily want to take) - I get all that. But why would sane Americans oppose it?

It turns out that normal people don't hate mass transit, really. Because a large number of them wrote to the House Ways and Means Committee to protest a proposed plan to end dedicated funding for mass transit and leave such funding to the whims of politicians during annual appropriation disputes. How many? How about five thousand individuals and six hundred groups representing thousands more? In a country as complacent as ours, that's actually pretty impressive!

But not good enough for the GOP-dominated House Ways and Means Committee, which voted mostly along party lines - 20-17 - to kill dedicated transit funding. (Two Republicans sided with the Democrats.) Apparently they had no interest in siding with un-American, pinko subversive groups who support dedicated transit funding that allows people to get around without cars - groups like the Club for Growth, whose alumni include noted lefties Stephen Moore and Pat Toomey, along with those defenders of European-style socialism, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The proposal wouldn't save any money; it would just redirect the 2.86 cents out of the total 18.4-cent motor fuel tax currently put into Highway Trust Fund's transit account and pour it into more spending on highways. The committee essentially told Americans who rely on trains, buses and light rail to get around that they don't matter. They zealously want to cut money on public programs like transit and promote a new American order in honor of Ronald Reagan's legacy.

Except for one thing: The idea to have a dedicated transit funding component in the Highway Trust Fund came from President Ronald Reagan himself. Even though Reagan was famous for saying foolish things about mass transit - like, when he said that no one used it - he probably did more for transit than many Democratic leaders have.

The bill will be sent to the whole House, where it will likely be voted on and sent to the Senate, so here are plenty of opportunities to reverse this hideous decision. But I'm not holding my breath.

American Strife

So who's going to win Super Bowl XLVI tomorrow? Guess what - I don't give a twit. The Super Bowl is a vulgar display of excess, grandiosity, spectacle, and crudity. In that sense, it's a latter-day Roman Coliseum, and a sorry reflection of who we are as Americans. The Super Bowl is so mired in cheap showmanship that the game no longer matters.

So it seems all too appropriate that Madonna is performing in the halftime show.

I have long regarded Madonna as the musical equivalent of the Iraq War. By that, I mean she's a crime against civilization that America must someday be punished for, but nothing that's my fault. It just completely nauseates me that a novelty-act disco singer with a cheap gimmick - a churlishly slutty image that deliberately contradicts her name - could somehow become a pop icon. In the past thirty years, she has completely destroyed American popular music; her influence has led it to become more style than substance, where spectacles in musical performances count for more than the music itself.

Her relentless emphasis on music videos as an art form rather than as the commercials they are led many record companies to push promotional videos rather than spend money on tours that are so vital to the growth of young bands and solo performers. Madge's music is itself all sizzle and no steak - mindless drum machine beats driving insipid melodies played on cold synthesizers, all topped by her tinny, whiny vocal styles that sound like breaking glass scratching a blackboard. She is the reason for talentless phonies like Britney Spears and walking disasters like Lady Gaga. Her use of rap lyrics has also helped popularize hip-hop, easily the worst musical form ever conceived. She may be the only pop performer who has had fans eagerly awaiting her next outrageous publicity stunt more than her next record. She's a very big reason you don't hear traditional rock and roll so much anymore; a whole generation of performers has tried to emulate her lamebrained disco/hip-hop style, and our popular culture is all the more unbearable for it.

And yet, despite her obvious lack of taste, despite her equally obvious attitude toward music as just a vehicle to achieve fame and fortune with, despite all of that, she has the nerve to insist that her career has always been about the music.

If I sound cynical, perhaps you should bear in mind that every move Madge has made in the past three decades - from dating a record producer to trying to break into movies - has been coldly calculated. For example, she let listeners of her early records think she was black by keeping a low profile and by saying in early promotional material that she danced in the Alvin Ailey company, a dance troupe not known for its affirmative-action outreach programs for Caucasians. Every time I hear her 1986 single "La Isla Bonita" - not often, of course, but always unwillingly - it sounds like Madge woke up one morning, read over breakfast that Hispanics were the fastest-growing population segment in the United States, and decided to craft herself a Latin ballad to pander to an increasingly important demographic. She's recorded a song for every possible radio format except rock and country, two formats that aren't exactly thriving right now thanks to her own influence.

What's worse is that she's inescapable. And not just for this weekend, when she's promoting her upcoming record and the new movie she directed - yes, directed. I've always agreed with the notion that if you don't like some kind of music, you simply shouldn't listen to it. It makes sense, until you go into a restaurant or a store and suddenly her one of Madge's songs leap out of the radio or piped-in music system on the premises. I can't tell you how many times her tinny voice and her smug emoting ruined my lunch or my shopping experience . I go into a store, I hear her - well, I hesitate to call it music - and even if I need something in the store, I just walk right out and wait out in the freezing cold or the blistering heat for at least five minutes. Every one of Madge's songs seems to be five minutes long. Sometimes they seem longer.

I publish this Madonna-bashing post knowing I'll get a lot nasty comments for daring to be critical of her. Because her fans are even nastier than they are; if you so much as mildly criticizes her records, her fans accuse you of being a sick, hateful person with a snobbish attitude toward popular music. I don't find many people agreeing with my mindset in the pop press either; critics are always defending her as a daring courageous artist for "pushing people's buttons," and the veteran pop critic Dave Marsh even accused white male music fans of being prejudiced against her for being a female performer with a large black and Hispanic audience. Madge loves all of it. She likes to say, "I hate people who hate." What she really means is, "I hate people who hate me."

I admit, it's rather difficult to express a negative opinion of Madonna when the only person who agrees with you is Rick Santorum.

It turns out that a lot of people find her a hateful person. I've heard stories of Michael Jackson having been put off by her nastiness, and she's been known to even treat her own fans with contempt. When two young girls one approached her for her autograph, Madge told them that she singed autographs for them she'd have to sign autographs for every fan who approached her. "Who are you?" she told them. "You're nothing."

Oh yeah, a security officer at an airport once asked her for an autograph. She wrote on a piece of paper and handed it to him before moving on. The paper scrap bore the following words: "F--- you." And the press finds stories like this amusing.

I was hoping that the bias against elders in America and particularly against women over 50 would finally bring her down. I've seen far more competent singers and actresses see their careers end at 40, and so I looked forward to the day Madge would be cast aside by misogynistic ageism. Wouldn't you know it - there's an exception to the rule . . . and she's it!

She is pure evil.

Personally, I think the damage Madonna has wrought on American popular culture in general and American popular music in particular - it's become so tawdry, vulgar and irredeemable - has been so great that we Americans won't be able to set things right until enough of us admit that something went horribly wrong on December 16, 1984, the day "Like a Virgin" began its six-week run on the pop singles chart. That's not likely to happen. Madge has returned with a vengeance, and her Super Bowl appearance is just the beginning of a manufactured media onslaught tied around her new LP, her movie (about a frustrated Manhattanite who identifies with Wallis Simpson, or something like that) that no one will be able to deny, ignore or resist. And enough of us will be taken in by her pretentious aspirations to "artistry" to make her latest endeavors huge hits. And we Americans will get the popular culture we deserve.

Just like we're going to get the Super Bowl.

Music Video Of the Week - February 3, 2012

"Carrie-Anne" by the Hollies (Happy birthday, Graham Nash, 70 years old as of yesterday! Go to the link in the upper right hand corner for the video.)

The Latest Weather

Yesterday it got up to 65 degrees Fahrenheit in the afternoon in northern New Jersey, despite the fact that it was the first day of February. Meanwhile, much of Europe is going through a deep freeze. The worst of the cold has been in Poland, Russia, Ukraine and the Balkans: Moscow saw temperatures of six degrees below zero Fahrenheit, while Romania has seen temperatures plummet to 26 below Fahrenheit. Several people in numerous European countries have died of hypothermia. Several villages in Bosnia and Serbia have been cut off by cold and snow, with supplies and rescues having to be made by helicopter.

The United Kingdom is experiencing a more moderate winter, certainly more moderate than the deep freezes of more recent years, with temperatures in London right around the freezing mark, but still below normal. The cold snap was big enough news in Britain to get disc jockeys on BBC Radio 2 to comment on it. So, yeah, it's a big freakin' deal.

The abnormally warm temperatures in the American Northeast should also be a big deal. I don't see spring- like days in early February as a good thing. I see it as the planet being completely out of whack. Because climate change means that not only is North America getting warmer, it means that much of Europe could end up in a new Ice Age. A good deal of Europe sits above the 50th parallel, and the Gulf Stream pretty much makes human habitation possible in Great Britain, Ireland and Norway.  Melting polar ice caps may have a tendency to skew the Gulf Stream rather considerably.

Back in the U.S., many folks in the Northeast took advantage of the abnormally (soon to be normally) warm temperatures, and I doubt many of them knew about the cold snap in Europe - especially if they read USA Today. People were in New York's Central Park soaking up the sun. In February. Don't they get it? It's like Michael Moore once said - If the sun rose at night, you'd be freaking out, yet warm temperatures in the northern U.S. in February are just as abnormal and unnatural. Wake up, America: Climate change is real!

And yet, I don't mind if it continues to be mild in my neck of the woods.  I hate myself right now.  

Oh yeah, today's Groundhog Day. Punxsutawney Phil in western Pennsylvania saw his shadow, meaning six more weeks of winter, but it New York City, Staten Island Chuck (Chuck?) did not see his shadow, meaning an early spring. Climate change even has the groundhogs confused.

Wednesday Night Television

ABC now has four consecutive sitcoms on Wednesday nights that don't rely on a laugh track. And the newest of the lot, "Suburgatory," may very well be the best new sitcom of the 2011-12 season.

As the title suggests, "Suburagatory" (on at 8:30 PM ET, after "The Middle") sounds like just another piece of entertainment depicting how much the suburbs suck. But it's more than that. The suburbs here are not a Levittown on Long Island or in Bucks County, Pennsylvania but a fictional upper-class Westchester County (New York) enclave. The perspective of this upper-crust suburbia is not that of a cynical punk rock burnout but that of a savvy high school girl wise beyond her years who has lived in Manhattan and knows there's more to life than an upper-class subdivision.

Tessa Altman (played by Jane Levy) is the high school girl, uprooted from New York City by her architect father, George (Jeremy Sisto) who decides to move to Westchester County after finding a box of unopened condoms in Tessa's drawer. The lure of illicit behavior has convinced him to move himself and his daughter to suburbia so that Tessa can have a better life. Actually, Tessa is worse off, cast in a sea of shallow phonies and complacent conformists she has nothing in common with. Her father George is hoping she'll be able to reach maturity in a safer and more comfortable environment, but it turns out he's the one who needs the comfort of the suburbs. He's a single dad who can't relate to his daughter and is learning by experience how to raise a teenager. And, it turns out she's savvier than he is; he's still finding his way in the world, trying to navigate his way around this alien culture Tessa can see right through. He's also having a hard time finding true love; Frasier Crane had better luck with women by comparison.

As Dallas Royce, a seemingly shallow housewife with an absent husband and who only hints to George that a love interest is possible, Cheryl Hines gives a sense of substance and warmth underneath her character's plastic persona. Even more interesting is the friendship between Tessa and Lisa Marie (played by Allie Grant), a nerdy but sweet girl who's embarrassed by her family. The various twists and turns that ensue - along with Tessa's attempts to adapt to or at least cope with her surroundings (with the pain of having to deal with Dallas's glamour queen daughter Dalia) are fascinating.

So, yes, I'm a fan of this show, which replaced "Better Than You" in ABC's 8:30 PM ET time slot. And after several trial-and-error program schedulings, it looks like ABC finally has a solid Wednesday night lineup. This includes "Happy Endings" at 9:30 PM Eastern (after "Modern Family"), a sitcom that's definitely an acquired taste, plus the one-hour drama "Revenge," with Emily VanCamp, at 10 PM Eastern. I haven't seen that, but it appears to have succeeded where at least three ABC dramas in that same time slot have failed in as many years.

I watch the first three shows in ABC's Wednesday night lineup regularly, and that's actually more shows than I watch on NBC for the whole week. I believe I'm not alone in that respect.

(Aside: NBC is debuting a new series produced by Steven Spielberg (who famously graced NBC with the series "Amazing Stories" in the eighties) about staging a Broadway musical, "Smash", which, I'm led to understand, is basically a scripted version of talent contest shows (or a "Glee" ripoff). It's about a musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe and stars Debra Messing - Debra Messing - as one of its writers. Debuting this coming Monday at 10 PM Eastern, it displaces Brian Williams' newsmagazine "Rock Center," which will go against "Modern Family" and "Happy Endings" at 9 PM Eastern on Wednesdays. Next Wednesday: an interview with yet another woman who claimed she was seduced by John F. Kennedy. It's official: NBC is beyond desperate.)

To The Moon?

The Florida Republican presidential primary is today, and I'll be glad when it's over. Not because it'll bring an end to the sniping and snarling from Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich for awhile - that's going to resume in time for Saturday's Nevada caucuses - but because after Florida, it'll be the last we hear of Newt Gingrich's cockamamie scheme to colonize the moon in eight years' time. He only proposed it in Florida because of all of the jobs there connected to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and even after that, he's still behind in the polls.

Gingrich's 2020 vision of a permanent lunar base is a relic from a time when Americans thought that they could accomplish anything if they banded together (and we did make it to the moon, of course), and when space exploration hinted at a future dramatically different from what existed in the 1950s and the 1960s. It was expected that one day we'd be driving around in flying cars, vacationing on Mars, and eating capsules instead of real food. The only thing that came true is that we don't eat real food anymore.

A permanent lunar base, once entertained by both the Americans and the Soviet-era Russians, is a spectacularly bad idea, because it diverts resources toward establishing an unnecessary habitation project and away from doing things like trying to house people and fight poverty here on earth. I understand that Gingrich is suggesting a scientific base like the one at the South Pole, not a Tomorrowland-style city, but if the goal is to expand knowledge of the sciences, we can do it more efficiently with robotic vehicles on the moon, like the ones we sent to Mars in the nineties.

It's easy to understand Gingrich's obsession with a lunar base, since his politics and policy proposals border on megalomania. Harder to understand is Neil deGrasse Tyson's interest in the proposal. Neil deGrasse Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, and he's actually enthusiastic about the idea. His objection to Gingrich's proposal is not to the idea itself but to Gingrich's failure to explain how to do it or why to do it. But Tyson thinks it would be wonderful if we had such an ambitious project like a lunar base that would encourage young people to engage in and study the sciences (and a lunar base would necessitate study of biology, chemistry, physics - pretty much the complete works).  Never mind that it's impractical. He laments that we haven't done anything like that in nearly forty years.

Hmm . . . forty years . . . the early seventies. So, what happened in the early seventies that changed our big-picture outlook? How about the Arab oil embargo? The sudden shortage of oil that resulted from American support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War reminded us that limits exist not only in the mind but in the real world. Once we had trouble running our tech-happy civilization on earth, colonizing the moon or Mars and trying to begin a new civilization elsewhere seemed pretty silly. True, we did get some amazing technological breakthroughs from NASA's space exploration programs, such as the Internet and ready-mix foodstuffs, and I am grateful for a computer network that has allowed me to write this blog, but why should I care about Tang?

Besides, the space race with the now-defunct Soviet Union was an extension of the lamebrained Cold War psychosis that led both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to spend lots of money to demonstrate whose economic system was better. When the Cold War ended, it turned out that neither side won. Both the U.S. and post-Soviet Russia were flat broke.

If we're going to have a massive technological project to expand our capabilities and grow our economy, I'd obviously prefer that we focus on something that can give us real value. I'd prefer we focus on building a national high-speed rail network - and build one that's accessible to everyone by 2020, not build one that's accessible to four out of five Americans by 2035, as President Obama's pathetic piecemeal approach would do. The only problem is that even Obama's modest plan has been repeatedly attacked as a government boondoggle (and Florida's own attempts to build high-speed rail lines keep getting canceled by Republican governors), so if Obama proposed something bolder and more dramatic, opposition to such a program might be even more hostile. And no one seems to be interpreting Newt's moon plans as anything other than the boondoggle it is. Romney has said if he ran a company that did business with NASA and someone came to him with that idea, he'd fire him. Good for him.

But Romney - no big thinker - would as President probably fire a Transportation Secretary who proposed a national high-speed rail network as well.

Flickr In Trouble?

I was in New York with my friend Clarisel yesterday, and we got to talking about our various media endeavors. She told me that Yahoo, which owns Flickr, is losing money, and so it's possible, however unlikely, that Flickr could be terminated and anyone who posts photos there could lose them. Clarisel has ten times the number of pictures I have, and I have a lot, and she's already considering which ones she hopes to save.

Let me stress and re-assert that neither one of us has any firsthand knowledge of any possible shutdown of Flickr. This is pure conjecture and speculation on our part. And, if not for a technical difficulty in posting of photos I made tonight (January 29) on Flickr, I wouldn't have even considered such a possibility.

I uploaded three pictures, and it took forever for Flickr to process them due to an error on the page. I never got the message saying that it was finished processing; I simply checked my photostream in another window to see if they took. When I saw that they did, I closed the upload page and added descriptions and tags on each individual photo - i.e., the hard way -in the other window. This led me to suspect one of two things: Flickr is struggling all of a sudden and could be in serious trouble, or; something is wrong with my computer. As I depend on Flickr for photo sharing and publicizing my amateur photography, I find myself in the unenviable position of hoping it was my PC.

Okay, not really - my PC is only nine months old. But it would be terrible if Flickr suddenly went away, despite the problems I've had with it of late. (Sometimes the Facebook feed doesn't work.) Be that as it may, Yahoo is trying to do something about it. Yahoo has made a three-month version of its Pro service option, which includes unlimited uploads, for $6.95, with the cost for the two-year version (which I have) reduced to $44.95 from 47.99, in an effort to get more customers who have otherwise balked and longer-term subscriptions. (The one-year subscription remains $24.95, which is much less economical than four three-month subscriptions - do the math.) But with other social network sites gaining popularity for photo sharing, and with Flickr remaining mostly unchanged with few new features added over the years, it's in danger of becoming the photographic equivalent of MySpace.

My experience with Flickr tonight notwithstanding, Flickr has remained fairly solid, and that very staidness may help buy time for Yahoo while it tries to figure out how to keep Flickr relevant . "Flickr is a reliable photo sharing and storage service," writes Tom Warren of The Verge, "but it could offer a lot more, potential that we'd like to see Yahoo invest more in."

I don't mind if Yahoo adds more features to Flickr or not; I'm happy with the way it is. I just hope they can at least get the upload screen to work right again.

Winter: So Far, So Good

It was fairly warm in the American Northeast today, and it's been mild overall this January. Don't tell me there's no climate change! Seattle had a devastating snowstorm earlier this month, the very kind of storm New York is used to seeing in the winter. We in the Greater New York area have been getting mostly rain, the same kind of winter weather you normally see in . . . Seattle. (Alas, New York hasn't adopted Seattle's grunge rock culture, but that's another post.)

The only snow we Tristaters have gotten this winter so far is the snowfall of last Saturday (January 21), which barely amounted to three inches and melted within almost as many days. So far we've had a manageable winter in the Greater New York area, and while I hope it continues to work out that way, I know the weather could turn nasty and cold any time now.

Meanwhile, the forecast around her calls for temperatures in the mid-forties for the coming week. I'll take it.

Christie's Gambits

Chris Christie is suddenly looking very foolish. Faced with resurgent Democratic majorities in the New Jersey state legislature, the state's supersized governor is proposing a popular referendum on gay marriage to skirt the issue and keep it off his plate. See, if the New Jersey legislature passes a bill legalizing gay marriage, Christie will feel compelled to veto it to burnish his social conservative credentials for a possible future presidential run, and his veto could be overridden. So he's proposing that it be put to a popular vote, insisting that voters should have the final say on an issue that he says is better left to the people than to the politicians.

Since when did voters - who usually cast ballots out of self-interest, which is why politicians appeal to their self-interest in the first place - ever vote to expand the civil rights of others? New Jersey actually had the extension of suffrage to women on the ballot in 1915, and the all-male electorate soundly defeated it - a result invalidated by the Nineteenth Amendment five years later.

Speaking of self-interest, Christie only wants something put to a popular vote if he thinks it will benefit him. It's all about strategy. Certainly a public referendum on gay marriage will spare him the responsibility of taking a stand on the issue. But having an early Republican presidential primary in the state and opening up the possibility of his candidate, Mitt Romney, faring poorly - nope, can't have any of that. So Christie had the New Jersey presidential primary moved back to the first Tuesday following June 1, in tandem with the primary elections for state and local offices. Genius! Romney was expected to have clinched the Republican presidential nomination by April. So, by moving the presidential primary back to June, Christie could endorse Romney and ensure that he would win New Jersey . . . because by June, Romney was expected to have token or even non-existent opposition for the nomination. Also, Christie could enjoy the same position of a neutral politician when the primary occurred, because Romney would already be the last man standing and Christie would never worry about having to deliver the state to his candidate. He wouldn't have to do any heavy lifting in his own state . . . and Christie, from the looks of things, obviously hates lifting heavy things. It seemed so clever . . . until Newt Gingrich surged in South Carolina and turned Romney's lead in the polls leading up to the Florida primary to a dead heat, turning the whole race upside down.

More recently, Romney has bounced back, and now he's likely to win the Sunshine State's winner-take-all primary. But other battles - including the Nevada caucuses on February 4 - await Romney, and Gingrich doesn't look like he's going to quit the campaign even if he loses Florida. This race could go all the way to May . . . or even June.

Genius!

Music Video Of the Week - January 27, 2012

"Beauty Queen Sister" by the Indigo Girls (Go to the link in the upper right hand corner.)  

"Work It" Out

You know a TV show is spectacularly bad when it airs on ABC for only one or two episodes, because even NBC, which no one watches, has aired shows that have lasted longer than that. But, as it happens, "Work It," a sitcom about guys who dress as gals to get jobs in a bad economy, was canceled after two episodes, ironically putting everyone involved with that show on unemployment.

An attempt reworking the formula that produced "Bosom Buddies," the cross-dressing sitcom that introduced us to Tom Hanks, "Work It" turned out to be the most offensive sitcom in recent memory, with many critics finding it too broad (no pun intended) and aiming too much for cheap laughs. As someone who remembers "Bosom Buddies," I don't recall that show being either broad or cheap. And in these more sensitive times, the sensitivity and relative subtlety of the earlier show could have come in handy for the producers and writers of "Work It." The show offended homosexual and transgender activists as well as Puerto Ricans, when one Puerto Rican character said that his ethnic background gave him a natural ability to "sell drugs" for a pharmaceutical sales job. It also offended the unemployed by making fun of jobless folks who have to humiliate and degrade themselves just to put food on the table if they're even lucky enough to work.

The funniest thing about "Work It," apparently, was that ABC was promoting it as a "new hit comedy" after its initial airing. So much for truth in advertising - there was nothing accurate about that claim.

ABC attempted to present sitcoms that explored (explored? explored? a pretentious word) men holding on to their masculinity in a feminized America, but the network's efforts with three such shows fell far short of the mark. Tim Allen's "Last Man Standing," according to Star-Ledger TV critic Alan Sepinwall, has morphed into a clone of his earlier (and inoffensive) sitcom "Home Improvement" after it tried to be a latter-day "All In the Family," with Allen's character very misogynistic and mildly racist. But anyone who's seen Tim Allen knows that he has more in common with Archie Andrews than Archie Bunker. "Man Up!" was canceled. (I covered that show already.) And now "Work It" is gone. It all makes sense. Pussy-whipped men are not funny, and the idea of men complaining about being pussy-whipped (especially when they're really not) isn't funny either.

Anyway, ABC, having inexplicably shelved "Cougar Town" despite its solid and solidly loyal audience, is bringing it back and inserting it in the 8:30 PM Eastern time slot on Tuesdays, in place of the two failed sitcoms "Man Up!" and "Work it" and following the now appropriately titled "Last Man Standing," beginning February 14. Meanwhile, it appears that the alphabet network finally has a solid Wednesday night lineup. I'll comment on that in another post.

Union Busting

I couldn't watch President Obama's third (and maybe last?) State Of the union address last night, but I understand the base of the Democratic party was pleased. That's not necessarily a good thing. The base of either party swoons too easily to partisan presidential rhetoric.

Anyway, the President, as I understand it, demanded that Republicans work with him on restoring fairness to the tax code and have the wealthy pat their fair share, along with urging action on immigration reform, tax credits for companies that invest in factories in America, and clean energy incentives. Republicans responded by saying - angrily, of course - that the President was was just trying to divide people along class lines and stuff big government down our throats.

So what did I miss?

Anyway, Obama hoped to sharpen the definition between what the Democrats stand for (assuming they stand for something) and what the Republicans stand for, and show that the Democratic vision of America is more populistic and more equitable, with the hope of getting people to start debating over just what kind of country we want to live in.

Hmph. I know what kind of country I want to live in, and this ain't it. Because every public amenity I support that makes any country worth living in - public medical insurance, high-quality surface mass transit, world-class public schools, a federal department of artistic and cultural affairs (which Quincy Jones supports), and public broadcasting that's more like the BBC (the Best Broadcasting Corporation) than PBS (Pro-Business Soapbox, Pathetic Broadcasting Service, Pretentious Blowhard Shows) or NPR (Not Particularly Riveting) - isn't likely to become reality any time soon. Nor is any other legislation I support - tougher gun laws, re-introducing the Equal Rights Amendment, overturning Citizens United. I know what I want to United States to be like, and it isn't. And realities that have nothing to do with Democratic politics or Republican politics but, rather, American thinking will continue to prevent my America from materializing.

Goodbye, Gabby

It should have become apparent to anyone who realized just how badly wounded Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was in the January 2011 shooting in Tucson that she would eventually have to resign her seat. So it was no surprise when Giffords announced that would in fact quit the House of Representatives this week to concentrate on her ongoing recovery. She was able to put the announcement in her own words, literally - she made the announcement in a video release - so the woman who has been an inspiration to many has a very good chance of recovering fully. And she's vowed to remain active in politics regardless.

Alas, she won't be an inspiration to pass meaningful gun control legislation, which has a very good chance of getting defeated in Congress - if anyone has the gall to even bring it up. (Every time a horrendous shooting occurs in this country - which happens frequently enough to feel like an everyday occurrence - Chris Matthews asks the panelists on his Sunday broadcast show if gun control legislation has a chance of even getting considered, and his panelists respond with an imitation of Marcel Marceau in Mel Brooks' Silent Movie - "No!") This isn't so much a partisan condition as it is an American condition - a peculiarly and insufferably American love of firearms.

Am I suggesting that Americans are peculiar and insufferable? You can draw your own conclusion.

On the other hand . . .. Sarah Palin - one of the most peculiar and most insufferable Americans in recent memory - has seen her stature reduced a result of the Giffords shooting. In the 2010 midterm election campaign, Palin posted a map of Democratic House districts targeted by Republicans, depicting the districts with rifle crosshairs over them - one of them was Giffords' district. After the shooting, she gave such a mean-spirited defense of her actions in the wake of charges that she incited violence that her rising star dimmed quickly. So some taste survives here, enough to not only lessen Palin's visibility but to also eliminate the Minnesota Twins (Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann) from the Republican presidential nomination contest early.

Who Won?!?

Newt won the South Carolina primary?

This cancels out what I said about him a week and a half ago.

And Santorum actually won the Iowa caucuses?

This cancels out everything I've said about Mitt Romney since the year began.

Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride.  

Countdown To Exiting

It's about a year from Inauguration Day. Could this be Barack Obama's last year in office?

The campaign for the South Carolina Republican presidential primary, taking place today, has taken numerous twists and turns. Newt Gingrich had turned the tide against Mitt Romney only to face new questions about his fidelity in his previous marriage - and then turned it into an asset by throwing the issue back at CNN's John King during a debate after King brought it up. Mitt Romney still won't release his tax returns, thinking that Republican voters don't care about how much money he makes and confusing that with their interest in how much money he pays. President Obama must be watching this with glee, hoping that the Republicans protract their nomination fight to the point where the eventual nominee is so weakened and bloodied, it will be an easy victory for the Democrats in November.

No, it won't. And the Democrats could still lose. Some pundits have noted that the eventual winner of the Republican presidential nomination could be toughened up enough to take the fight to Obama hard, just as Obama was toughened up by his long fight against Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. A more apt comparison might be the internecine warfare between Walter Mondale and Gary Hart in the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination contest that eventually weakened Mondale in his campaign against President Reagan that fall, as both Mondale did and the eventual 2012 Republican presidential nominee will go against an incumbent. But even that comparison has problems. Reagan was overseeing an improvement in the economy and renewed faith in the country's standing in 1984. Obama is currently overseeing little of either, and his mealy-mouthed campaign commercial touting his clean energy initiatives in response to a Koch brothers-funded onslaught is the textbook example of starting off on the wrong foot.

One year from now, the winner of the November election will be sworn in, and don't be surprised if Obama is an outgoing President swearing under his breath. His approval rating is at 44 percent, the economy isn't growing fast enough in 2012, like it was in 1984, the chances of Democrats regaining the House and holding onto the Senate are statistically difficult, and one of these Republican candidates could indeed very well be in a strong position going into the fall campaign. The clearest evidence that Obama could (will?) still lose is that his opponents obviously want to get rid of him more than his supporters (just as obviously) want to keep him.

Music Video Of the Week - January 20, 2012

"Do It Again" by the Kinks (Go to the link in the upper right hand corner.)

Power To the People

My, oh my, it's amazing what a little populism can do to the sociopolitical landscape, isn't it?

Yesterday's protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act were more successful than anyone could have imagined. While the latter bill remains on track for a vote in the Senate this coming Tuesday, the demonstrations against the bills - from street protests in Manhattan to blackouts of various Web sites - caused several House members to drop their sponsorship of the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Meanwhile, out in Wisconsin, petitions with a million signatures calling for an election to recall Governor Scott Walker like a defective Pinto were turned in at the state government accounting office in Madison - almost twice the 540,208 signatures required. Walker says he's confident that he can survive a recall election because 80 percent of the state's population didn't sign the petitions. Bear in mind that about a third of the people in Wisconsin who didn't sign the petitions couldn't have signed them, as they were too young to vote. What Walker conveniently forgets is that he got in to office with 1,128,941 votes out of only 2,133,244 votes cast, or 52.25 percent of the vote, between him and his Democratic challenger, Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett. If everyone who signed the petitions votes in the recall election, Walker stands a pretty slim chance of holding on to his office.

Meanwhile, public opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline on environmental grounds - particularly the idea of the pipeline on environmentally sensitive grounds - caused President Obama to cancel the project. The Republicans in Congress wanted a decision on the pipeline, which would originate in Canada and carry dirty tar sand oil to Texas, by February 29. President Obama, having decided that not even an extra day in February allowed enough time for a proper environmental assessment, just said no. Republicans complain that Obama missed out on an opportunity to create more jobs and lessen our dependence on foreign oil (even though tar sand oil from a pipeline would make its way out of Texas to the global petroleum market).

Hey, I have a great idea on how to create jobs and lessen our dependence on foreign oil: Build more mass transit networks, especially high-speed train lines!

Which returns me to the unpleasant topic of Scott Walker. Walker canceled Wisconsin's high-speed rail project and is shifting transportation funding to highways. Yes, he has oil refinery and highway construction interests to repay for funding his gubernatorial campaign in 2010, but it turns out that Walker is not a big fan of mass transit in any circumstance. He's opposed expanding it since he began his political career in the Wisconsin state assembly.

These victories are not the last word on any of these issues. Anti-piracy legislation still has broad support in Congress. Scott Walker hasn't been recalled yet. And TransCanada, the company that wants to build that pipeline, can re-apply for permission to build it. In each case, battles, not wars, were won. But these wins all prove that populist movements can succeed. And you don't have to camp out in a park or dress in a silly costume to make your point - and a lot of Occupy Wall Street protestors did both.

(Note: Occupy Wall Street protestors may sometimes resemble "Let's Make a Deal" contestants, but there's a difference between the two. "Let's Make a Deal" contestants are known to win! :-p )

My Special Announcement

(This post is an act of protest. I'm showing you what my blog could look like if SOPA or PIPA becomes law. Don't waste your time by coming back to this blog later today for a new post - come back tomorrow!)

SOPA Stopped - PIPA Moving

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which would fundamentally alter the Internet and the way it is used, has been shelved from consideration by the U.S. House of Representatives. This is good news, but SOPA's sister bill, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), is up for a vote in the U.S. Senate next Tuesday. Many of the provisions in that bill are similar to SOPA, which is adamantly opposed in the House by Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA), and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has threatened to filibuster PIPA if it comes up on January 24 as scheduled.

The provisions of PIPA include the right of Internet service providers to voluntarily block sites suspected of even the mildest copyright infringement and punitive action against sites that give Internet users information on how to access blocked sites. Any site can be blocked or shut down by the federal government at whim if it is suspected of copyright infringement of any sort. Essentially, it (like SOPA) advocates Internet censorship.  Also, SOPA as written would allow domain name servers to be filtered or blocked, which computer experts say could weaken the global Internet, as the provision would have a long, global reach against all Web sites irrespective of country of origin.

With progressives and Tea Partiers alike opposing these bills (and with Wikipedia's English-language pages  going black for tomorrow in protest), the prospects for their eventual defeat are fairly bright. They just got brighter, in fact, with a statement from White House, which said that it could not support "legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet." President Obama, however, hasn't flatly ruled out signing whatever bill comes to his desk.

I myself could be affected by this legislation. If YouTube is shut down for having too many videos infringing on copyrights, I won't be able to continue my Music Video Of the Week feature on my blog. This blog itself could easily shut down by using quotes from other sources, credited or not. And since I use photos on my beautiful women picture blog that are not my own (like I can really use a picture of Reese Witherspoon that I took myself) and come from a variety of sources, every goshdarn picture could be deemed an illegal copyright infringement.

I have a special post on this subject planned for tomorrow. Tune in then to see what is.

The Depth Of Our Idiocy

I have a dream that when one of our greatest historical figures speaks out for what is important and pertinent in our lives, his quote will not be mangled by abridging it, which is what happened with a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. on a wall at his memorial in Washington. King said, two months to the day before his assassination, "If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter." On the wall of the national Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, only part of the quote was used: "I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness." It makes Dr. King sound like an arrogant braggart. That is, it makes him sound like a Republican.

I have a dream that, if engineers can't find a stone tablet strong enough to include the entire quote, they'll find a similarly suitable one that can be placed on stone tablet in thirty days, as Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has ordered the National Park Service to do. I have a dream that, when we honor someone else with a national memorial, the advisory board will be smart enough to exclude quotes too big for stone tablets and not place on such tablets truncated versions of said quotes taken out of context. Correcting a technical error after the fact is not how you erect a memorial. It's how you blog. :-p

I also have a dream that statues for future national memorials will not, as this one was, be carved in China. Ye gods, now we're outsourcing statues to the Chinese?

I have a dream that one day we'll be able to stand by an expertly crafted piece of public art, and join in the old American battle cry, "Made In the USA!"

Talkin' 'Bout Our Generations

Two things happened recently that prompted me to write about something I've been pondering for awhile. The first is that, earlier today, I walked into the kitchen while my mother was watching Follow The Fleet, a 1936 Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie with songs by Irving Berlin, on television. Just before I walked into the room I heard Ginger Rogers singing a song I did not recognize, and, in complete ignorance of who was singing and who wrote the song, thought to myself, "Oh, man, what is that corn?"

The second thing is that rapper-entrepreneur Shawn Carter (Jay-Z to you, ofay!) and his lovely wife Beyoncé Knowles (but please call her by her first name only) just sired a baby girl, whom they named Blue Ivy Carter. Right after the birth, Mr. Carter recorded a new rap song, "Glory," about his baby daughter . . . with little Blue Ivy's cries added to the recording. Going beyond Stevie Wonder's addition of his baby daughter's sounds on his 1976 hit "Isn't She Lovely," Mr. Carter gave a credit to Blue Ivy on the record. "Glory" was quickly released, and five days after the baby's birth, it would debut at number seventy-four on the Billboard hip-hop and R&B charts, making Miss Carter the youngest person to debut on the Billboard charts.

So what do these two events have to do with each other? Simply this: A pop record that sounds contemporary when it's first released may seem dated many years from then. A song from a thirties Hollywood musical sounded antiquated just two decades later, when Elvis burst upon the scene, and Jay-Z's own record will likely sound passé by the time Blue Ivy is old enough to make her own records, assuming she goes into the family business.

Look at the popular music that existed before rock and roll - solo singers backed by large bands, as well as bandleaders who were stars in their own right. All of this music was considered rather hokey by young people in the mid-1950s, and when rock and roll burst upon the scene, it became, or should have become, apparent that the old pop establishment was headed for decline. Irving Berlin had been American popular music's greatest songwriter for decades; then, in 1956, with Elvis Presley on top of the charts, Berlin was faced with a new form he had no ability to write for.

This is something we rock and roll fans, as we watch our favorite musical form slip into irrelevance and possibly extinction, fail to understand. Popular music is an expression of its generation, and whatever music a generation produces or consumes usually has a hard time surviving its generation. No, rock and roll is not the cultural force it used to be, but given that most of it was a product of Depression children like Elvis, Baby Boomers, and Generation X elders, it's astonishing that it's lasted as long as it has. But rock and roll is also mainly the province of white guys with guitars, and there are a lot fewer of both today as the American population gets more diverse and as popular music and the methods in which it is made become more fragmented - and many young white males prefer hip-hop these days anyway. So it's not surprising that rock and roll has lost most of its audience and most of its relevance to rap, never to regain either.  We act as if we can prevent it from dying out.

And before you rap fans start chanting, "Hip-hop hurray!", let me put you on notice: Your music has an expiration date as well. Sure, rap is in better shape 33 years after the first big-selling rap record, "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugar Hill Gang, than rock was in 1988, 33 years after Bill Haley and the Comets topped the charts with "Rock Around the Clock" - but the clock is ticking down to the day hip-hop will be as irrelevant as rock.

Let me, if I may, explain what I now call the "Blue Ivy Rule." The greatest figures in English-language popular music were all born at a time when the musical forms they would go on to work in didn't exist; the music that existed at the time they were toddlers wouldn't survive their own influence on pop. When Frank Sinatra was born in 1915, no one listening to "Alabama Jubilee" or "The Old Grey Mare, She Ain't What She Used to Be" on their Victrolas could have imagined the large, brassy big-band sound that Ol' Blue Eyes would personify. When the big jazz and pop bands of the forties dominated the Hit Parade, no one could have imagined rock and roll - or that four little boys in Liverpool, England would grow up to bring such a music to a global audience. Likewise, in the late sixties and early seventies, when rock and roll seemed destined to rule the earth, the babies that would grow up to create and dominate rap were in their cribs - and had different names from the ones they're known by today. (Jay-Z himself was born in 1969, the year of Woodstock and the release of the Beatles' Abbey Road.)

Right now, even as hip-hop is dominant, there are babies being born that will one day create the music that displaces rap. It's a musical form that has not yet been invented, and which we do not yet recognize. And don't be surprised if Blue Ivy Carter is at the forefront of it.

Show Me The Money

President Obama may be in trouble.

Much has been made of the use of super-PACs in the Republican presidential primary/caucus campaign, in which Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have confederates to attack each other's campaign and evade personal responsibility for the attacks - all made possible by the Citizens United decision from the Supreme Court. But this is a taste of what Obama can expect in the fall campaign from Republicans. And the President's own campaign may not be as well-equipped to handle it as many believe.

Jim Messina - Obama's campaign manager, not the guy who recorded with Kenny Loggins in the seventies - reports that the Obama campaign raised $42 million for the President and $24 million for the Democratic National Committee - in the last quarter of 2011. But while Messina admits that this is impressive - especially with so much of this $68 million coming from small donors - he says that the campaign has not raised enough to be competitive with the Republicans, who are expected to get a lot of support from super-PACs that are currently raising more money than their Democratic super-PAC counterparts.

The poor economy has also been cited as a possible disincentive to contribute to the Obama campaign. Messina, for his part, notes the oft-reported speculation that Obama is well on the way to raising a billion dollars and so does not need any help.

"Too many Obama supporters," Messina wrote in a fundraising e-mail, "genuinely believe that this campaign doesn't really need their donations, or doesn't need them yet, in order to compete and win. That's wrong. The reason we won in 2008 is that Obama supporters and volunteers viewed their individual role as crucial to the outcome of that election. But there's no secret strategy that we can count on in 2012. This is not a billion-dollar campaign and it's not going to be. We're not taking a dime from Washington lobbyists or special-interest PACs. All of the money that funds this campaign will come from grassroots supporters like you."

You know, after Citizens United, that may not be the wisest of strategies. And, given all of the liberal interest groups who are ticked off at the President for one reason or another, the poor economy may not be the only reason grassroots donors are happy to let Obama work what he already has in the bank.

In his commentary on PBS last night, David Brooks opined that, with hundreds of millions of dollars floating around, the possibility of Obama having a hundred million dollars less than he had in 2008 won't make a difference - especially with the abundance of free media to consider. Maybe he's right. But historically, the moneyed interests usually get the outcome they want in an election because they have more money to promote their agenda. The moneyed interests tend to support the GOP more generously. And until a constitutional amendment expunging the Citizens United decision is ratified, we can expect money to remain an influence in American politics.

Music Video Of the Week - January 13, 2012

"Drift Away" by Dobie Gray (Go to the link in the upper right hand corner.)

Adventures In Capitalism

You know the appeal of venture capitalism is losing its bite in America when even Republicans doubt it.

Mitt Romney used his New Hampshire primary win to denigrate the opposition for playing politics with the American capitalist system - not just President Obama but fellow Republicans like Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry. Romney says that both presdiential candidates focus more on the resentment of those who geet laid off in a bad economy rather than come up with a more positive economic message like his own - about how how government can help people become wealthy.  Both Gingrich and Perry have attacked Romney for how he made money in his job at Bain Capital - buying companies and firing a lot of people to make them more "competitive." Rather than explain how a venture capital firm works and explain to voters why this is a preferred method for resuscitating companies, Romney instead re-iterated his desire to help everyone become rich and accused his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination of giving the Democrats fodder for the fall campaign while accusing President Obama of wanting to transform America into a European-style social welfare state.

With Romney having moved to the right in his party, Obama is now obliged to defend his own turn from the center of American politics and explain how his leftward drift on economic issues - taxation, health care - is meant to benefit everyone. For the President, the 2012 campaign will be an effort to present the case for more government intervention in the economy even as Romney is already making his case (again, the old adage that our system allows people to work hard and hopefully become wealthy) against it.  But fewer people are buying that Horatio Alger message these days. Expect Obama's talking points to reflect the economic speech he gave in Kansas in December.

Obama doesn't have to worry about being called a socialist - he's not even that much of a liberal. But he can point to how he's created more jobs than Mitt Romney. General Motors has been hiring lately. Chrysler's sales were up 26 percent in 2011. Bailing out auto companies with government money did more for capitalism than taking over companies and firing people - or just letting them go bankrupt and possibly out of business, as Romney advocated in his opposition to the auto company bailouts.

Solid As Granite

Mitt Romney's commanding victory in yesterday's New Hampshire primary - winning 39 percent of the vote - makes him the one to beat . . . for President Obama. It's become obvious that there really is no conservative alternative to a "moderate" Romney; Romney is the conservative alternative to the centrist incumbent President. Romney is opposed to an agenda that would impose a European-style social democratic system on America, but then, so is Obama.

With libertarian Ron Paul finishing a distant second in New Hampshire with 23 percent of the vote, mainstream arch-conservatives like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum hope instead to make inroads in South Carolina, where the unemployment rate and the intolerance for gays are both higher than in New Hampshire. Jon Huntsman's respectable third-place showing at 17 percent gives him reason to carry on. But Romney's ability to do better than expected in the Granite State- even after all of his recent gaffes marking him as a clueless CEO type - puts him on a clear path to the Republican presidential nomination and gives him more of an opportunity to hit the President south of the suspenders.

Romney can thank Florida for this victory, as Florida voted to have its primary on January 31, before the Iowa and New Hampshire contests scheduled for February - forcing both states to move their contests up to early January. Florida thus spared Romney of spending more time campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire and possibly seeing his numbers go down more over a longer period. Now he can spend more time than ever before focusing squarely on Obama and swat away the GOP also-rans like so many mosquitoes.

My advice to the Obama team: Start working on your Romney counterpunch.

Hiring, Firing and Quitting

Mitt Romney is so convinced that he is going to be the Republican presidential nominee when all is said and done that he's already acting like a general election candidate, taking pot shots at President Obama and striking a more moderate tone in his discourse. Except his efforts to relate to ordinary people haven't helped him; indeed, they've hurt him. Trying to empathize with laid off workers, the noted corporate downsizer for hire said today that, like any worker, he too has had a fear of getting laid off. It is true that investment capitalists like Romney could easily be fired by the boards of their firms for not making enough money, but executives in Romney's position often get golden parachutes with their pink slips. They never have to worry about paying the mortgage on their mansions because they paid for it up front long ago in cash.

But what really got people's ears pricked up was Romney's insistence that health care should remain privatized because of the incentive for health insurance companies to provide quality services. It wasn't because of his failure to understand that many people in high-risk brackets have been unable to get health insurance for so long, at least until the Obama health care law was passed. It was because of his wording of how, under his version of health care, you can dump one insurance company for another: "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me if someone doesn't give me the service I need."

Okay, so maybe Romney was merely expressing a desire to being competition to health insurance. But it sure didn't sound like it. His perceived insensitivity to workers has gotten so obvious that even Rick Perry and  Newt Gingrich have assailed him for his remarks, as well as his fellow Latter-Day Saint Jon Huntsman. "What's clear is he likes firing people," Huntsman said. "I like creating jobs."

Tellingly, Rick Santorum - a presidential candidate whose economic policy is pretty much an endorsement of serfdom - didn't take part in the Romney-bashing.

The Romney campaign is trying to present a kinder, gentler Mitt - a "New Romney." Right. New Romney is an English village in Kent.

Meanwhile, President Obama, on the side of the Democrats, has given me another reason to wish for a third presidential candidate to vote for in November rather than hire the President for another four years.  On December 31, he signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law, which allows the indefinite military detention of American citizens without trial - a clear violation of the Bill Rights and the an assault to our liberties right up (or down) there with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 at a time of possible war with Napoleonic France and Franklin Roosevelt's order to round up Japanese-Americans after the Pearl Harbor attack. "Under separate government powers expanded by the PATRIOT Act," Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Committee, writes, "non-violent dissent is increasingly classified as terrorism." Though President Obama issued a signing statement saying he would neither use nor recognize the bill's detention powers, any future president, Buttar adds, could "use the NDAA’s detention powers as a tool of political repression."

And what about that signing statement? Obama signed a bill with an unconstitutional provision, but then he violated his constitutional obligation to enforce a law that he signed? When you sign a bill as President., it's all or nothing. If Obama objected to the detention clause, as well he should have, he should have sent it back to Congress.

Perhaps that's why William Daley, the President's chief of staff, quit today; he couldn't stand living in the Carrollian Wonderland that is Washington these days. Reports out of Washington suggest that Daley hasn't been able to bring the order and sense of functionality to the White House that he was supposed to being when he arrived at the West Wing a year ago, although he claimed that he wanted to spend more time with his family. President Obama hopes to move forward and present a clear case for his re-election, though I'm increasingly having a hard time figuring out what it is.

Rock Is Dead, They Don't Say

An article by entertainment writer Shirley Halperin of the Hollywood Reporter caught my eye recently. Halperin noted that overall album sales were up in 2011 for the first time in seven years, with digital album sales up by 20 percent (as opposed to digital sales of individual tracks). Compact disc sales had a smaller sales decline than in previous years - 5 percent - suggesting that the downward spiral for sales of tangible recordings has at least been checked for now.

Halperin noted that this sales surge was largely due to the success of female artists -specifically, Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Adele. They, along with Katy Perry, were credited for putting across strong personas, touring extensively, and/or appearing on television as often as possible, which produced several radio hits that drove sales. Even Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears - veterans by today's standards - had success. Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and Nicki Minaj were singled out by Halperin for creating alter egos with their music, which appealed to their mostly female fan bases, while Adele scored with direct realism; both trends suggest a golden age for "girl power."

But here's the thing. What Halperin didn't point out, and quite frankly didn't need to point out, was, with the possible exception of Perry, none of these performers are rockers. They mostly represented soul, disco, and pure pop. Not a Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, or Stevie Nicks among them - and certainly no one who could draw comparisons to Ann or Nancy Wilson of Heart.

I think it's taken for granted that rock and roll, if not extinct, is irrelevant outside the college indie radio station circuit. And such stations, which broadcast at the low end of the FM dial, probably have more megahertz in their frequencies than they have listeners. Halperin's article gave barely a mention of Foster the People, a rock band that got a modicum of attention in 2011 with "Pumped Up Kicks," and albums from bands such as Iron and Wine, the Decemberists, My Morning Jacket, and Florence and the Machine obviously didn't get mentioned at all. If you love these bands and the LPs they put out in 2011, fine. But they're not going to define their generations or any other. Adele is pretty much the only mainstream artist with indie appeal -or is that the other way around? - and she's an exception either way.

So who were the top male artists of 2011? According to Halperin, they were a slew of rappers - Li'l Wayne, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Wiz Khalifa, DJ Khaled, and a Canadian rapper named Drake - all extolling the virtues of making lots of money and spending lots of money, which doesn't exactly jibe with rock's egalitarian, communal, set-my-spirit-free message. Even if white suburban male teenagers can't participate in hip-hop, they still relate to the current crop of rappers more than to whiny leftie guitar groups like the Decemberists, who probably remind them too much of the early-seventies bands their fathers love.

I've heard a lot of talk about retrograde rock bands, groups who try to bring back a sound from the past without realizing how redundant the term "retro rock" is - all rock is retro. And even rock's greatest heroes don't seem to captivate people's imaginations like they once did.

Today is Elvis Presley's birthday anniversary. For decades after his death in 1977, Elvis was like Bogart - someone who remained as relevant a cultural figure in death as he was in life. Does Elvis still matter? Well, I looked in my local TV listings today for any Elvis movies or documentaries that might have been on. I didn't find any. Maybe Elvis fans now spend their time watching their idol on YouTube and communicating on Facebook, but that only shows how the King is no longer a mass media hero. Like rock and roll itself, he's just another cult favorite now. :-(

Music Video Of the Week - January 6, 2012

"Fox On the Run" by Sweet  (Go to the link in the upper right hand corner.)

Ricko The Sicko

I'm sorry I never got to comment on Newt Gingrich while he was the right-wing white ring's flavor of the month, but fortunately (for the sake of having someone to bash), Richard John Santorum has stepped in to fill the void and is widely expected to by the main conservative alternative to Mitt Romney in the Republican presidential nomination contest.

Before you start thinking that a nice, upstanding family man like Santorum can't possibly be as horrid as Rick Perry or as dumb as Michele Bachmann, here are some things you ought to know about the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania hoping to become the nation's 45th President, some of which I may have mentioned in earlier posts:

 Rick Santorum told a crowd at a Christian college, in response to a student's suggestion that maybe God doesn't appreciate the fact that Americans die because they have no health insurance, that he rejected such a suggestion. "People die in America because people die in America. And people make poor decisions with respect to their health and their health care. And they don’t go to the emergency room or they don’t go to the doctor when they need to," he said. "And it’s not the fault of the government for not providing some sort of universal benefit." In fact, a 2009 Harvard Medical School study found that 45,000 deaths in the U.S. are attributed to lack of health insurance every year.

He complained about regulations forcing states like Iowa to sign more people up for Medicaid, which he saw as an expansion of the welfare state. He also added that the last thing he wanted to do was give black people welfare when he wanted to incentivize them to work, as if everyone on welfare were black.

He not only advocates the re-instatement of "Don't ask, don't tell" in the military, he supports a constitutional amendment that would invalidate same-sex marriages. Santorum supports an anti-abortion policy that would throw abortionists in jail for murder. He also likened homosexuality to "man-on-dog" sex.

I didn't want to bring this up again - even though this is primarily why I call him Ricko the Sicko - but he and his wife slept with a dead baby between them. After their son Gabriel was born prematurely and lived only two hours, the Santorums - the Santora? - slept in a hospital bed, separated by the corpse of their infant son. They brought his lifeless body home to present them to their children. Two of their children, Elizabeth and Johnny, held the baby "with so much love and tenderness," Mrs. Santorum later wrote, addressing her deceased son in the second person. "Elizabeth proudly announced to everyone as she cuddled you, 'This is my baby brother, Gabriel; he is an angel.'"

Mitt Romney, as a Mormon, believes in magic underwear, eternal marriage, and, speaking of angels, an angel named Moroni who will announce the return of Christ just before the world ends. Frankly, I don't see him to be nearly as daffy as Santorum.

Single Digits

So let me get this straight . . ..  Out of sixty thousand votes cast between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum at the Iowa caucuses yesterday, Romney won by eight.  I'm sure Romney would have preferred to win by more than eight thousand votes.  But when I say eight, I don't mean eight thousand.  I mean . . . eight.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . eight.

Romney won 30,015 votes in Iowa last night.  He would have had to win 36,000 votes to get at least 30 percent and pull out of the 25 percent bracket he'd been in through various opinion polls for months.  As it was, he couldn't win 36,000 votes.  In fact, compared to his 2008 total in Iowa, Romney was off by six.  

Not six thousand.  Six.  One, two, three, four, five . . . six.

That's right, Romney won six fewer votes in Iowa in 2012 than the 30,021 votes he won in 2008.

So, not only did 75 percent of all Iowa Republicans vote against Romney, those that did vote for him gave him a Pyrrhic victory with a margin in single digits over Santorum.  And after all the time and money he spent in Iowa, his vote total was smaller than when he lost the Iowa contest to Mike Huckabee in 2008 - by single digits.  

Meanwhile, Michele Bachmann - a woman whose intelligence quotient is likely measured in single digits - dropped out of the race.  The number of people who will miss her can be counted with a single digit - 0. 

Pardon My French

Mitt Romney recently tried to compare President Obama tom Marie Antoinette in a pathetic attempt to make the President look elitist. The multimillionaire said of Obama, "When the president's characterization of our economy was, 'It could be worse,' it reminded me of Marie Antoinette: 'Let them eat cake.'"

Yeah, well, when we cried for jobs, Mitt Romney's fellow Republicans in Congress let us have anti-abortion legislation. And when autoworkers cried to have their jobs saved, Romney himself pretty much said, "Let GM and Chrysler go bankrupt."

But that's not why I bring this up. I bring this up because Romney, like most Republicans these days, not only tries to avoid putting on airs to avoid looking elitist himself, he even tries to avoid looking educated - especially when it comes to his bilingualism. When Chris Matthews of MSNBC asked Romney if he could say "Let them eat cake" in French, Romney replied by saying, "I can, but I won't."

Jeez, even George Walker Bush spoke conversational Spanish in public.

Romney not only has to appeal to Republicans who are undereducated - i.e. most of them - he's trying to downplay his experiences in France as a Mormon missionary to appeal to Republicans who are Francophobic - i.e., all of them. I don't get the Republican hatred for all things French. Just what don't they like about the French, the people who invented photography and milk purification? Is it that they dress too prettily? Or maybe, oh, I don't know, enough Republicans bought Renaults and got stuck with a lemon? Is it the fact that the French think a lot? Did all of these Republicans like Catherine Deneuve in those Chanel ads until they found out she was a serious actress who had a brain? Did they go to one of her movies and, I don't know, have trouble reading the subtitles? Or maybe had a hard time wrapping their tiny little minds around the philosophical ramifications of the plot?

By the way, Mitt, you looked silly distancing yourself from all things French while campaigning in a state whose capital and largest city is called "Des Moines."

Hawkeye Piercing

Are the Iowa caucuses tomorrow? Good, I'm getting sick of hearing about them, and quite frankly, I'm getting sick of hearing about Iowa. Maybe it's only because it's strictly a Republican contest this time, but that's a pretty good reason. Iowa Republicans are an extremely conservative lot (to be fair, Iowa Democrats are just as liberal), and so the caucus campaign is heavily focused on social issues like abortion and family planning, making us Americans look more unsophisticated and heathen-like in the international media than we already are.

Iowa may be seen as irrelevant in the nominating process after this election, especially if Mitt Romney (whom I believe will be the eventual Republican nominee) doesn't win. After all, the state is overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly rural, and the last time that counted for anything was when Barack Obama won the Democratic caucuses there in 2008 and proved that an urban black candidate could win there and thus win anywhere. But the state is nonetheless too homogenous to count as a bellwether in any other circumstances. Besides, the state's economy is based on corn and corn by-products, which are a reason for why so many Americans are so grossly fat. I don't think Iowans are going to be so supportive of the President in November when they figure out that his wife's healthy eating initiative is bad for their business.

I'm sure Iowans have made several worthy contributions to civilization, and when I think of any, I'll list them here. Right now, I can only think of that sculptor who carved a statue of Jesus out of butter. Iowa isn't even politically relevant beyond the caucuses - its only native son to become President was Herbert Hoover, and he left as a young man to attend Stanford (he was in its first graduating class), never to return.

Carteresque?

Barack Obama in 2012 is nothing like Jimmy Carter in 1980. Just because Obama is the most vulnerable incumbent President running for re-election since 1980 (according to the polls), just because he inherited a sluggish economy that has yet to fully recover, just because Iran is suddenly a bone of contention for him, just because fuel prices could suddenly go up as a a result of an Iran-related crisis, just because it's been difficult if not impossible to borrow money in this country, just because his handling of Afghanistan is an issue, just because some voters personally like him but think he's in over his head, just because he has a million-watt smile . . .

. . . and just because there's a very good chance that Obama could lose the presidential election this year to an intellectually challenged, opportunistic Republican incompetent, that doesn't mean voters could think Obama's effort at changing the country for the better is all . . . peanuts.

But, unlike Carter, at least Obama wasn't frightened by a WHITE RABBIT!

Feed your ego, baby.  Happy new year. ;-)

Happy New Year

Well, it's December 31, another year over.  I suppose I should look forward to the new year, and I usually believe that a new year that begins on a Sunday offers the freshest of starts; a new year, a new day, a new month, a new week.  But not if it's a leap year.  January 1 of leap year falling on a Sunday means that February 29 falls on a Wednesday - giving the bleakest month of the year five hump days - and it means that next December 31 will be a Monday.  Who wants to end a year on a Monday?

Be that as it may, I have something to tell my readers. For years, I've been dreaming about traveling overseas, something I've never done.  I'd love to go to London; a friend of mine who went there said she noticed my  "London envy" when I commented on her pictures of her London vacation on Facebook.  I'd also like to see Paris and Munich, and I would like to go with my mother to Italy and see the seaside town on the Adriatic where her father was born.  I'd also like to find myself a girlfriend, and I would like to start looking by going on something I've never experienced - my first date. Finally, my mother has been pressing me to go back to school and get a master's degree, preferably in education so  I can become a teacher, or take some graduate courses in journalism.

So here's my announcement: I'm not going to do any of those things in 2012, and this time next year, I probably won't have any plans to do these things in 2013 either.

See you next year? Happy holidays.

2011: Winners and Losers

Well, it's that time of year again, which hasn't been around since . . . last year. And it's my favorite time - to take stock of the winners and the losers of the year gone by.

So many things happened in so many different walks of life this past year, and there are some momentous and monumental events that really don't have a place on this list. The tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan isn't a case of win or lose; it's a tragedy of huge proportions that the Japanese people weathered as best they could. Ditto for Irene, the first hurricane to hit New Jersey since 1903. So there'll be no assigning of winning and losing to people who were affected by such large natural disasters - that's not what I'm after. I will be assigning a loss to a group of people for the way they handled things in the aftermath of a less serious but somewhat freaky natural disaster - see below.

And, incredible as it may seem, there will be no mention of anyone who's associated with "Two And a Half Men" on this list. Charlie Sheen may not be "winning," but he isn't losing either, having secured himself a new show and made a bundle off audiences full of suckers who went to see his stand-up non-comedy routine. And the show itself is still on and enjoying strong ratings, despite earlier reports and rumors of an early cancellation, so I won't be bothering with that either.

You'll also notice that I don't have many politicians on either the winners or losers list. Apart from Mitt Romney, who has survived onslaughts from several more conservative opponents for the Republican presidential nomination, you don't see many politicians who are winners these days. As for losers, you'll see nothing about Michele Bachmann, no nasty comments about Rick Perry, no mention of Herman Cain. I could try to tell you that this is because I don't like to kick people when they're down, but if you've read what I've said before about Democrats, I don't think you'll buy that. I decided to concentrate on only the most egregious political stumbles for this list; if I focused on every political loser of the year, I'd be here until Leap Day. Leap Day 2016.

So here, in no particular order, are my winners for 2011:

Adele. Once, the British pop singer was expected to fizzle in the United States, but she's since conquered her personal demons and since conquered America with just her singing - no pink hair, no kissing Britney Spears, no meat dresses. Sometimes well-behaved women do make history.

Woody Allen. Midnight In Paris, Woody's love letter to the American literature and music of the 1920s, was not only received ecstatically by the critics, it's his highest-grossing film in a quarter century.

Zooey Deschanel. It's hard not to love this bubbly actress/singer, and maybe that's why her sitcom "New Girl," about an ebullient young woman who moves in with three guys - is the biggest hit of the 2011-12 season.

the Dallas Mavericks. Pluck and persistence throughout the basketball team's history - and against the Miami Heat - paid off, as the Mavs won their first NBA championship ever.

Mitt Romney. His campaign for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination survived challenges to his right from Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and more recently, Newt Gingrich, and at this writing, he's on his way to winning to the Iowa caucuses . . . and becoming a formidable opponent for President Obama.

David Beckham. American soccer fans finally understand what the fuss over this guy is all about. He helped lead the Los Angeles Galaxy to their first Major League Soccer championship in six years. Bend it!

the Boston Bruins. Thirty-nine years is a long time to wait for your favorite hockey team win the Stanley Cup, but the Bruins, who last won it when Nixon was President, finally brought the cup back to Beantown.

Keith Olbermann. Separated from MSNBC in the wake of the Tea Party's rise to power in January, the left's clown prince of commentary has found a new home on Al Gore's Current TV, where Olbermann is just as irreverent as ever. By saving his career, the Current TV folks are the best persons . . . in the world.

Prince William. One could argue that Kate Middleton had a good year, becoming Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, and positioning herself to become queen consort of Britain one day, but the prince, the future King William V, deserves applause for marrying her. The affable William proved that nice guys sometimes finish first.

Volkswagen. I have a personal bias toward the German automaker, of course, but you can't argue with its recent success in the United States; its U.S. sales are up 24 percent over 2010, the new Tennessee-built Passat won Motor Trend's coveted Car of the Year award for 2012, and the American division is slated to make its first profit in eight years. Now if Volkswagen of America could only improve the Jetta and bring the Polo over . . ..

And now, without any ado, the losers of the year:

Libidinous politicians. Remember when Anthony Wiener was going to be the next mayor of New of New York? Or when Dominique Strauss-Kahn was the next president of France? Well, now you can forget it.  And Arnold Schwarzenegger's sexual post opened cans of worms from how he goverened California, tarnishing his reputation.

LeBron James. So, LeBron, let me see if I have this straight . . .. You left the Cleveland Cavaliers and your home state of Ohio to join up with the Heat in sunny Miami in hopes of getting to the NBA championship only for your new team to collapse against the Mavericks for the trophy? Congratulations, big guy, you missed the brass ring and you ticked off people in two cities in the process.

Former Northeastern U.S. governors. Eliot Spitzer, hoping to re-invent himself as a talk show host after a sex scandal forced him out as governor of New York, saw his CNN show canceled. And when former New Jersey governor Jon Corzine tried to re-invent himself by going back to Wall Street and running MF Global, $191.6 million went down the tubes as a result of trading on European government bonds - including billions in customer assets. Ironically, Spitzer might have been a position to keep Corzine from fooling around had he not fooled around in a different way.

Tom Hanks. Hollywood's favorite everyman acted and directed in Larry Crowne, about a middle-aged man who loses his job and go back to college. So what? Critics and audiences said the same thing. The first indication that it wasn't going to work out was that he wrote the screenplay with . . . Nia Vardolos, the answer to a trivia question whose entire career is based on knowing Tom Hanks. You can get in a lot of trouble if you don't pick your friends well.

Jennifer Finnigan. Apparently sensing a decline in the popularity of daytime dramas, the Canadian TV actress must have thought she made a smart move by leaving CBS's "The Bold and the Beautiful" for the ABC sitcom "Better With You." But while "The Bold and the Beautiful" remains on CBS even as ABC daytime dramas are going off the air, "Better With You" was canceled after one season. Her only saving grace? She didn't appear on an NBC show (see below).

Rock and roll. R.E.M. broke up, another contemporary rock station in New York City failed, and the biggest story in rock in 2011 was not Foster the People or the Black Keys but the twentieth anniversary of the release of Nirvana's Nevermind. Small wonder most of the pop performers profiled on "60 Minutes" lately have not been rockers. And all rock has to offer in 2011 is Dawes? A band that retreads the blandest 1970s LA rock clichés? Rock fans may not give in, but they'll keep living in the . . . past.

Jersey Central Power & Light. I lost my power for three days after the freak October snowstorm. As Public Service Electric and Gas customers, my mother and I were lucky; New Jersey's Jersey Central Power and Light took up to three weeks to restore electricity to some of their customers, giving the utility a huge black eye for how they handled a huge blackout.

NBC. The question "Is that still on?" normally applies to TV shows. Never before has it applied to a whole broadcast TV network.

MSNBC. So they start out booting Keith Olbermann in January and moving Ed Schultz to 10 PM Eastern, and Lawrence O'Donnell moves from 10 PM Eastern to 8 PM Eastern, and Cenk Uygur takes over at 6 PM Eastern to host a show without a name. Then Uygur gets thrown out in July and replaced by Al Sharpton, whose show is finally named "PoliticsNation." Meanwhile, Savannah Guthrie leaves "The Daily Rundown" at 9 AM Eastern, to be replaced by Chuck Todd's goatee, and then Alex Wagner gets her own show, while Ed Schultz and Lawrence O'Donnell trade time slots in October and . . .. Ahh, forget it - how do you take seriously a cable news channel whose most consistent star is Chris Matthews?

Pennsylvania State University. The scandal there is too sad for words, or for satire.

The only reason Teri Polo does not appear on this list for appearing in a sitcom expected to be hit only to see it canceled after seven weeks is because it hurts too much for me to include her.

That's it for the winners and losers of 2011. Happy new year.