Nashville Needs Nesmith

The CMA Awards went down and not everyone was pleased with it. That modern country is basically MOR pop with twangy guitars and occassional fiddle is true enough, but what makes it such a frustrating subject among fans is that the overall quality of its biggest groups, and some of its lesser-known stars, is at best debatable. Certainly, listening to Lee Ann Womack or Sugarland or Keith Urban et al doesn't bring that much pleasure - Sugarland in particular is a textbook case of MOR country and the blandness contained within; their biggest hit to date is Love, Your Baby Girl, a vocal letter from the song's subject matter on her quest to make it in music. It's not a bad song, it's just not inspired - blandly sung, lacking any kind of interesting hook, bereft of what makes songs great.

SheDaisy, to date empty handed in CMAs, is an even worse example - sporting a tough veneer, SheDaisy isn't very tough at all. The Utah-born Osborn sisters have pretty harmonies but dreadful material, all of it composed or co-composed by eldest sis Kristyn. Their first album The Whole Shebang had freshness to it, but their follow-ups have been boring.

And it appears lead songwriter Kristyn Osborn is a little thin-skinned. SheDaisy's most recent hit, the I'm A Believer rip-off Passenger Seat, was the subject of an incredibly stupid article on the Slate website that accused the song and its accompanying album of promoting female passivity - as though the song's subject, enjoying friendship and also life when in love, somehow can be equated with condoning anything resembling a belligerent dominating relationship by a man toward a woman.

Well from the group's new single "I'm Taking The Wheel" it appears such criticism got to Kristyn - which isn't the first time feminazi whining kowtowed a pop singer into concocting a PC follow-up to a mildly racy single. Sheena Easton scored a hit in the late 1970s with Morning Train but came under fire from feminazis who claimed the song promoted passivity and dependance on a husband - and it kowtowed Easton into recording Modern Girl, which made a point of emphasizing its subject lady's independance but still stayed within believable parameters.

Not that I'm Taking The Wheel is a bad song - it actually covers the same ground as Passenger Seat. All the same, Kristyn should have stood up to such critics and pointed out that Passenger Seat contains a positive outlook on life that most people can associate with.

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One can trace the MOR-ization of country to the late 1960s and the fusion of California country with rock music. It is here that we find the unheralded pioneer of this fusion, Michael Nesmith. Unlike modern MOR country, Mike Nesmith had strong qualities that remain superior today - a baritone mixing tenderness with genuine force, innovative lyrical content, strong musical hooks, and innovative studio production. Mike's Monkees-era country-rock anthem Sweet Young Thing is an intoxicating fusion of fiddle and fuzztone, a level of quality he maintained throughout his stint with Micky Dolenz and pals and on through his 1970s solo efforts.

Nashville has recently begun mining old MOR pop tunes as covers for modern country songs - here are some song ideas -

Little Red Rider
The Crippled Lion
Silver Moon (Martina McBride would be perfect for this song)
Grand Ennui
Nevada Fighter
Tomorrow & Me
Two Different Roads
Keep On Keeping On
Roll With The Flow
Some Of Shelley's Blues

And there are more - Nashville needs Nez.

Eugene McCarthy, Sirhan Sirhan Sympathizer

We'll bet you didn't know this about Eugene McCarthy. Yet after Robert Kennedy's assassination, McCarthy said that Kennedy's support for Israel provoked Sirhan Sirhan to assassinate him.

Of course the MSM glossed over this little fact, but it is in keeping with McCarthy's despicable ideology, an ideology that sympathized with America and the Free World's enemies instead of with the defenders of civilization. This same ideology lives in the perennial antiwar movement, where not a word of blame was or is directed at Islamo-Arab imperialism, Soviet/Chinese/Vietnamese/Latin American Communism - any of America's enemies. It shows also in the decades of condemnation for the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, never mind that these were legitimate acts of retaliatory war against an imperial predator that had slaughtered 20 million people and was continuing to massacre hundreds of thousands across Asia to the very end of World War II.

Many years ago National Review wrote a one-line eulogy for a very high-ranking North Vietnamese leader after his passing - "The father of the boat people died in Indochina." It is an appropriate summation of Eugene McCarthy and his ilk.

Winning Iraq: The Untold Story

Check the local FOX News listings for Winning Iraq: The Untold Story a much-needed visual defense of the liberation of Iraq and the fight to finish off Islamo-Arab imperial fighters within.

Ineptitude Worldwide

The CIA has been engaged in the active sabotage of the War Against Islamo-Arab imperialism for at least three years, and their preferred method is leaking . The harm this anti-US disinformation campaign has caused needs more exposure.

The ineptitude of the CIA is mirrored by the continuing failure of the UN, this time in Cyprus. And the intellectual ineptitude of denunciations of "torture" by the US against Islamo-Arab terrorists gets a much-needed comeuppance.

The Stupidity Of Danica Mania

During NASCAR's awards banquet weekend in New York, Bobby Rahal defended Danica Patrick, this despite a near-total void of criticism of her. "Patrick won three poles and had two top fives.....Her fourth-place finish at the Indianapolis 500......vaulted her to the cover of Sports Illustrated."

The story neglects to mention that she never finished in the top five again in the 2005 IRL season and fell out of the top ten in points from Indy on, this despite having one of the strongest cars in the field week after week.

And here we see the nonsense of Bobby Rahal's assertion that "Women face every negative that there is out there." It is difficult to square this assertion with reality, where press coverage of female racers is consistently fawning and criticism is all but nowhere to be found.

NASCAR Sportsman Series team owner Tad Geschtickter chimes in by saying, "She (Patrick) can't be a novelty, she can't be a gimmick." Trouble is she can be a gimmick - she was irrelevent to the IRL season once the field figured her out, and Rahal misses the point when he says, "there will be the complete expectation that she is going to win," because in 2005 she was able to sneak up on the field; now she can't.

Danica Mania helped get Erin Crocker into NASCAR and she responded by wrecking in all her BGN and Truck starts in 2005. Rahal claims female racers are held to a higher standard to define success, but the utter lack of criticism of Patrick shows otherwise, and Geschtickter's defense of Erin Crocker shows the real standard held to female racers - "if you looked at them closely, I'll bet you 80 percent of them were because people were driving over their heads around her. They were saying, 'I've gotta pass her, I've gotta pass her.'"

This is fraudulence, because in her wrecks she lost control, not other cars. At Richmond she spun out in practice and again in the race. At Memphis she tried to force the issue entering a corner even though Steve Grissom had the corner, and the result was another wreck.

Far from being held to a higher standard, female racers are not held to any serious standard of success. Any kind of criticism is met with scorn and defensiveness, utterly lacking any kind of objectivity. It showed very graphically in Deborah Renshaw's excuse for a career and it shows again with Erin Crocker and Danica Patrick.

Racing is supposed to be about tough guys - guys like Tomas Scheckter, the Foyts, the Andrettis, Sam Hornish, Tony Stewart, the Pettys, the Woods, the Earnhardts, etc. Danica Patrick is making motorsports LESS appealing instead of more.

White Lies About White Phosphorus

An Italian TV network recently released an internet "documentary" titled Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre alleging the US sprayed white phosphorus on civilians, killing many, during the US offensive to clean out Islamo-Arab terrorist cells within the city. Trouble is that the piece is false, as shown here and also by a witness to Fallujah. And speaking of "witnesses," the credibility of the primary accuser in the Fallujah film has to be questioned.

John Murtha Isn't That Stupid, Is He?

What is Pennsylvania representative John Murtha talking about? His recent call for withdrawal from Iraq is based on the assertion that "US troops have become the primary targets of the insurgency." This, though, is palpably false - US troops are on the offensive, not sitting idly by waiting to be attacked, and the main target of the insurgency has been civilians, because the insurgency CAN'T make US troops its primary target - espeically when Al Qaida's recent bombing attacks reek of desperation to turn around a situation improving for the Allies.

Murtha served in Vietnam, so why he would say something any Vietnam veteran worth his salt would see as brainless stupidity is baffling.

More Myths & Realities In Iraq

Continuing to set the record in Iraq straight, "Mac" Owens took a look at the big picture while we also look back atwinning over ordinary Iraqis little by little.

Myths and realities aren't confined to Iraq - since Iraq is pivotal to the war on Islamo-Arab terror, looking back at myths about the war on Islamo-Arab terror is also in order.

Liberals Get Rove-d

So liberals are up in arms about Karl Rove's speech mentioning how MoveOn fought against the War On Terror. So typical - liberals always play dumb when caught out. Of course playing dumb was just part of Senator Ted Kennedy's whining during recent Congresional testimony by Donald Rumsfeld, just the latest such hysteria that consistently forgets when liberals ran the recent Yugoslav war and also wallows in the pity brought about by "multiculturalism." It's yet another reason why liberals cannot be trusted to defending ourselves.

Of course Senator Chappaquiddick wasn't the only idiot - Chuck Hagel made a fool of himself claiming the US is losing in Iraq. As usual the facts prove otherwise. And kudos to The Belmont Club for catching a telling accidental admission from war critic Carl Levin - an admission of a relationship between the US advance into Iraq and the blossoming of democracy there - a vindication of the Bush Doctrine amid continued doubt about it in political circles.

Getting back to Karl Rove, the liberals expected an indictment of Rove over the "outing" of Valerie Plame - except there never was any outing. There's been a lot of doubletalk about this bogus "outing," but the reality is the "case" was a fraud.

Is Erin Crocker - And NASCAR Diversity - A Fraud?

We've now had three races in NASCAR's BGN series for highly-touted lady racer Erin Crocker, a driver for the powerful Evernham Motorsports team. To this we can add a Craftsman Truck race at Phoenix, AZ in early November. And in those races the result has been the same -

RICHMOND - DNF - Crash

DOVER - DNF - Crash

MEMPHIS - DNF - Crash

PHOENIX Trucks - Crash

It's just three races, but the record in those three races is disturbing enough to warrant questions about Erin Crocker's judgement and ability to drive a NASCAR racecar - in the Richmond wreck she'd already crashed in practice and in the race lost it by herself and took another car with her. At Memphis she tagged Steve Grissom and took him and herself into the wall - and tried to blame it on Grissom even though he had the corner.

Crocker ran in the ARCA Supercar Series in Evernham Dodges and had several top five finishes, but lost here is that ARCA is a series so starved of resources and money that only about six or seven cars in that series are any good.

It also raises questions about NASCAR's recent quest for "diversity." Crocker is part of Dodge's extensive driver diversity initiatve, an initiative that dovetails nicely with NASCAR President Brian France and his mildly obsessive quest for "diversity" in the sport.

Dodge's diversity efforts have been going since 2001, when they slotted Willy T. Ribbs in one of Bobby Hamilton's Dodge Trucks. Willy T. attempted to run in NASCAR in the late-1970s and mid-1980s. In 1978 he was slotted for a drive with Will Cronkite in an ex-Bud Moore Ford at Charlotte, a deal arranged by Bruton Smith. But Ribbs failed to appear at two scheduled practice sessions and was later arrested for driving the wrong way on a one-way street with a car rented by the speedway. He was canned from the ride and local short-tracker Dale Earnhardt drove Cronkite's Ford.

Ribbs tried again in 1986 with DiGard Racing, a team on its last legs at that time, and the effort went nowhere. Ribbs also tried CART Indycars with a team co-owned by Bill Cosby, and went nowhere. In the Hamilton #8 Dodge, the form chart took over again - he went nowhere and was gone by the end of the year.

More recently the Hamilton #8 has been driven by Deborah Renshaw, who raced at the Nashville Fairgrounds speedway and became a cause celebre when she was disqualified following a rancorous protest of the cars driven by her and her teammate; some very tedentious media coverage made the incident to be a sexist conspiracy by other racers against Renshaw because she'd briefly led the track's point standings.

Renshaw made it to ARCA in late 2002 and everything blew up in the savage crash at Charlotte during an ARCA practice session that killed racer Eric Martin. Martin spun to a stop on Charlotte's frontstretch and several cars split around him. He was stalled but none the worse for wear - until some fifteen seconds later Renshaw blasted full speed out of the corner and T-boned Martin through the left side door.

Again, tedentious media coverage passed the buck away from Renshaw, focusing on the "lack of spotters during practice sessions," raising questions about the visibility of the caution lights - everything but the fundamental judgement of Deborah Renshaw as a racer. NASCAR passed a new rule requiring spotters during any time a racecar is on the track at speed, never mind the fact that the wreck happened because Renshaw refused to pay attention to the caution lights or even past the nose of her racecar.

Of course this season saw Danica Mania, as Danica Patrick was slotted into one of the IRL's strongest cars, the primary Bobby Rahal-David Letterman car #16. Patrick snuck up on the other drivers and posted two stunning fourth-place finishes, including at Indy. But after that her performances dropped dramatically, especially on open-throttle drafting tracks where she was skittish in traffic and showed no consistent ability to pass anyone. Her season began with a bad wreck at Homestead in which she never cracked the throttle and instead bludgeoned into the wreck scene, and it ended with a hard wreck at Fontana.

Racing, however, seems determined to press on with "diversity" despite the fact it adds nothing to the sport, nor does it add anything to any serious endeavor.

Unhinged Dishonesty

First we had the insanity that was Harry Reid's grandstanding about hearings into Iraq war intelligence and then we had a typical New York Times disinformation campiagn in the form of a butchered letter from a pro-war GI. And we wonder where honesty went - though we know there is no honesty to be found in fawning media coverage of Broadway Joe Wilson and his bogus tales about George W. Bush, tales that are part and parcel of the disinformation campaign of a CIA acting to undermine American victory.

They Couldn't Start 53 Cars At Atlanta?

53 cars entered the Dixie 500 at Atlanta but only 43 made the race. Among the cars that didn't make it were Robby Gordon, Bobby Hamilton Jr., and Mike Wallace, all drivers who entered every race and worked harder than the one-off teams that did make the race.

It is a continuing flaw in the NASCAR system - why couldn't they have started all entries? It isn't that Atlanta can't fit 53 cars on pit road - especially with multicar teams like Hendrick and Roush that can easily afford to have some of their teams share pits. It isn't that the cars that didn't make the race were so slow they could not keep up in race conditions.

It has been a problem since the early 1990s when new teams began entering the sport at a growing rate and more and more of them were squeezed out of the sport because of qualifying. NASCAR's quasi-official newspaper Winston Cup Scene editorialized years back that this flaw in the system was somehow good for the system because it supposedly showed the intense competitiveness of NASCAR - except that it is number of lead changes in the race that show competitiveness. Sending teams home after qualifying has never improved any facet of the sport - it didn't make those teams better, since denying them track time guarantees they can't improve as teams.

And with NASCAR wanting new teams to come in - i.e. Toyota teams on the absurd notion that the notoriously predatory Toyota motorsports program will somehow infuse new money into a sport that is living up to Robert Yates' famous analysis of the flaws of DiGard Racing, "If there is such a thing as too much money, we (DiGard) had it" - the sanctioning body has even more reason to reevaluate sending anyone home after qualifying.

Al Qaida In The News Again

Al Qaida made the news again with its July London terrorist attack, a tragedy that ironically also showed how much weaker the organization is compared to six years ago, given the crudity of the bombs used compared to their previous strikes. With these guys back in the news we have continued denial of their alliance with Saddam Hussein's Iraq in some circles, even as the evidence continues to prove Iraq's alliance with Al Qaida. As for the oft-repeated claim by the Left that the liberation of Iraq has caused an increase in Al Qaida activity, the facts prove otherwise, and they include the inevitable decline in enemy aggression after two years of fruitless wastage.

Add to this the recent stories about Able Danger, the US Army's data-mining project that in 2000 identified Mohammed Atta and several other terrorists who would do the dirty work of the September 2001 hijackings, only to be rebuffed by a Clinton administration unwilling to take terrorism seriously (which some have speculated is the reason for Sandy Berger's destruction of archives after the Clintons left the White House, for which he got caught). As The Weekly Standard points out, German police arrested several Iraqi intelligence agents in February 2001 and found they were working with Osama Bin Laden, and also notes the illogic behind the 9/11 Commission's agnostic conclusion about the meeting of an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague in April 2001 with Mohammed Atta, a conclusion recklessly cited by the antiwar crowd to deny Iraq's alliance with Al Qaida.

It has to be said again - 9/11 was an act of war against the US.

Hurricane Stein Destroys Katrina Monday-AM Quarterbacking

It was inevitable that Hurricane Katrina would lead to endless Monday morning quarterbacking from the Bush bashers, an activity that gets its comeuppance here and gets an even nastier comeuppance to novelist Anne Rice.

De-commison The 9/11 Commission

The credibility of the 9/11 Commission has taken a severe mauling lately, and it's about time.

A "Disaster" To Be Proud Of

While working my day job back in June I came across a mail room employee at a company in Brighton, MA, who is an avid Air America fan and who apparantly no longer works there, as he has not been seen in my subsequent visits. (Yes, believe it or not, there are fans of Radio Moscow Redux) On the air was Stephanie Miller, who mixes being generally obnoxious with a high-pitched whiney voice more appropriate for WEEI's equally useless Michael Felger. Miller was talking about the "disaster in Iraq" and "George and Dick's excellent adventure," which might actually be funny if Air America didn't always play dumb by whining about "mean-spirited" Republicans.

What is amazing is that Comrade Steph cited US News & World Report to buttress an argument about terrorism in general - as if the Mainstream Media has any credibility anymore. Certainly the "disaster" in Iraq can only be called such by taking MSM seriously - which can't be done since the "disaster" isn't. The credibility of the MSM has long been absymal, especially on their military coverage.

Meanwhile, further disproving the kidiots of Air Amerika was the continuing Good News From Iraq, from several months ago, from more recently, and from the end of August. (Kudos to Winds Of Change) There is also the utter lack of logic in the Left's serial complaint about "breeding more terrorists" - a claim they've been making every time the US fights back against the enemy from the 1986 bombing of Libyan military bases after the Libyan-backed bombing of a Berlin discoteque (they also tried to deny Libyan involvement there, too) onward. It reminds me of a brief mini-popularity back in the 1970s among some psychiatrists against fighting back against rapists, their logic being that rapists become more violent and liable to kill if women fight back. No, it doesn't make any sense, and the new version of don't-fight-back perpetuated by the Left is akin to that.

It all boils down to that we have irresponsible people belitting what is truly a noble cause.

The Monkees And Robert Moog

With the passing of synthesized keyboard designer Robert Moog, numerous retrospectives have noted how music groups of the latter 1960s made use of his revolutionary compact Moog synthesizer. Virtually all these retrospectives note how The Beatles used the Moog synthesizer in 1969 and how it got substantial usage in the early-70s' progressive rock phase.

And I have yet to find a national retrospective that notes the group that introduced the Moog to pop records - The Monkees. In 1967 Micky Dolenz was among the first people to purchase a Moog synthesizer, and he integrated it into the making of the group's fourth long-player album, Pisces Aquarius Capricorn & Jones Ltd. Micky played the Moog for the album's cryptic exploration of 1967 rioting on Sunset Strip Daily Nightly while Moog retailer Paul Beaver handled the keyboards for the group's rip-roaring put-down of groupies Star Collector. The use of the Moog on the album was a mixed blessing; Micky's random Moog riffing on Daily Nightly is ultimately a distraction despite showing some cleverness, while Beaver's perfectly synched riffing on Star Collector (other than on the song's admittedly overblown and prolonged ending) adds enormously to the song's power.

It was the first time a Moog synthesizer found use on a mainstream pop album, and yet this fact goes unmentioned in media retrospectives. As Michael Nesmith once put it about media coverage of the Sunset Strip rioting, it is one of the goofball moments in press coverage.

Wanted: Iraq War's Peter Braestrup

"Mac" Owens took a look at the recent river campaign by Allied forces in shutting down ratlines from Syria and elsewhere trying to resupply Islamo-Arab guerrillas in Iraq. In discussing this campaign, Owens notes how recent coverage by the Boston Globe is inaccurate, and it is just the latest such example, going with a claim that "indig" Iraqi units aren't combat ready. And if coverage isn't just misleading (did you know that the US is REDUCING its forces in Iraq? I didn't, either, until I found this out away from the MSM) it is downright dishonest, and not only with regard to "indigs," but even more so to pre-war intelligence memos, and to Iraq's alliance with Al Qaida. And on that angle the deniers of Iraq's alliance with Al Qaida won't quit, nor are the know-it-alls of the press quitting about Guantanamo, even though there never was any "torture".

It all leads to a depressing reality - that even with the proliferation of media and the decentralization of media, the hard-left Main-Stream Media still holds sway in coverage of the war and the world, and it brings to mind the late Peter Braestrup, the reporter and scholar whose landmark 1977 book "Big Story" showed in vivid detail the sensationalism and inaccuracy that permeated media coverage of the 1968 Tet Offensive, covering what was a calamitous Communist defeat and portraying it as a colossal enemy victory.

The Iraq war is in need of a Peter Braestrup.

Joe Wilson And Iraq's Niger Uranium

Why the left keeps denying Saddamite Iraq was building nuclear weapons is a rhetorical mystery - I say rhetorical because the reason they deny it is obvious - to acknowledge that Iraq was building nuclear weapons is to acknowledge that Bush was right, the liberals' eight-year policy of refusing to act on the building threat was wrong, and the philosophy behind the popular bumper sticker "War is NOT the answer" is not just wrong, but dishonest.

Which leads to this look back at the 500 tons of weapons-grade "yellowcake" uranium (which had zero peaceful application and had undergone some enrichment) found by the US Army at the Al-Tuwaitha nuclear research center (see also this 2008 followup). As the piece's author Rick Moran notes, the site where the Iraqi weapons uranium was stored was under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which ostensibly was charged with making sure Iraq didn't use it for weapons but basically didn't try to stop Iraq from stockpiling such "yellowcake" uranium, and it offers some insight (conspicuously missing from mainstream coverage of "Broadway Joe" Wilson and his phony search for Iraqi efforts to acquire yellowcake from Niger) into why there is such a bureaucratic snit over President Bush's remarks that Iraq sought this yellowcake from Niger.

Basically what is coming out is that Broadway Joe Wilson was not a courageous whistleblower, but an errand boy for an intelligence agency that wanted to spike data supporting war. The CIA suddenly found it had underestimated the enemy's potential and worked to cover its butt - Saddamite Iraq was trying to build nuclear weapons and the CIA, Joe Wilson, and his wife Valerie Plame were fighting against US interests on this matter.

And they accuse Bush of politicizing intelligence?

Remember Fallujah?

Remember Fallujah? It was the biggest base for Iraq-based terrorists fighting Allied forces in 2004. Needing to wait until after the election to take it down (and it says a lot about the integrity of the Democratic Party and their Main-Stream Media allies that he had to), George W. Bush promptly did so in November 2004, and the war against Islamo-Arab redoubts in Iraq has steadily gone better for Allied forces since.

Well it's been a while since we heard about Fallujah, as the above-mentioned MSM continues to focus on car bombings and the like while living up to George Orwell's observation about propaganda being what gets left out - such as this look at Fallujah in rebuilding.

Then there is Baghdad, where there are still bombings but also continued rebuilding and a steady return to normality, such as resumption of intercity air travel.