Alby's Latest Posts
Song of the Day 1/6: Lynyrd Skynyrd, “That Smell”
Given the media’s eight-year obsession with Donald Trump, you would think the fact that he’s odiferous would have emerged before now. A person of my close acquaintance who interviewed him several times back in the ’90s, when he was having an affair with Marla Maples and doing his best to pretend he wasn’t, said at […]
Song of the Day 1/4: Coven, “One Tin Soldier”
Unless you grew up in the ’60s, it’s hard to imagine how naive the Boomers were in their youth. They actually thought singing about peace could bring it about. Nowadays music venues are frequent targets for mass violence, from the Pulse nightclub to the Las Vegas country music festival to the Nova music festival in […]
Song of the Day 1/4: T Bone Burnett, “Humans From Earth”
T Bone Burnett is well-known and widely respected as a producer, but before he embarked on that career he was a guitarist – he played in Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in the ’70s – and started a solo career that saw him release albums in musical styles ranging from New Wave to country. This song […]
DL Open Thread Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2024
Gold Bar Bob Menendez used his position as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to run quite a racket, according to his new federal indictment. It doesn’t add any new charges, but the details of how Menendez did favors for his wheeler-dealer campaign contributors and foreign governments, including Qatar as well as Egypt, illustrate […]
Song of the Day 1/2: Green Day, “The American Dream Is Killing Me”
Punk-pop veterans and Rock Hall of Famers Green Day waded into America’s politico-cultural wars on New Year’s Eve when frontman Billie Joe Armstrong altered a line of the band’s signature song, “American Idiot,” by proclaiming, “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda.” MAGAts reacted predictably, but they shouldn’t have been surprised. The song was written […]
DL Open Thread Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2024
Former labor secretary Robert Reich used his year-end column to make a point I’ve long believed: The perception that America’s quality of life is declining is linked to the fact that wealth is increasingly concentrated in fewer hands. In his words, the American Dream is vanishing. Over the past 40 years, the earnings of the […]
Song of the Day 1/1: Uptown String Band, “I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover”
The Mummers Parade is hanging in there, even if it’s much diminished. The march nowadays runs only from City Hall to Washington Street, in the wrong direction, and it doesn’t air on WPHL-17 anymore (you can livestream it, though). As critics note in this Philadelphia Inquirer article, the parade has roots in minstrelsy, and a […]
DL Open Thread Monday, Jan. 1, 2024
Benjamin Netanyahu must think the high road has been mined, because he steadfastly refuses to take it. As the slaughter in Gaza continues, he promised to continue what he calls a war for another year. I think history is more likely to call it a massacre. Frustration makes people say things they haven’t thought through. […]
Song of the Day 12/31: Ella Fitzgerald, “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”
We apparently have the Romans to thank for the annual night of bacchanalia that accompanies the final hours of the waning year. But it’s German folklore, which held that how you rang in midnight determined your luck for the coming year, that made the midnight kiss a tradition. That’s why New Year’s Eve is, after […]
Song of the Day 12/29: Matthew Sabatella & The Rambling String Band, “The Battle Cry of Freedom”
Nikki Haley’s answer to the trick question “What caused the Civil War?” has caused her no end of grief in much of the country, but should sound familiar to anyone educated in the South. Public schools there might not call it the War of Northern Aggression anymore, but I’ll bet a lot of the home […]
Song of the Day 12/28: The Smothers Brothers, “Boil That Cabbage Down”
Tom Smothers, the comic half of the squabbling Smothers Brothers, died Tuesday at age 86. Though they’ll always be remembered for having their top-rated variety show axed by CBS in 1969 for its criticism of the war in Vietnam, I remember them more for bringing some levity to audiences years earlier, during the Great Folk […]
DL Open Thread Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2023
Thom Hartmann warns that Trump is following the fascist playbook by goading his supporters to violence. And it wasn’t just WWII-era fascists – Orban is doing the same thing in Hungary today. Story after story tells us that Trump is winning the 2024 presidential race. What they don’t tell you: Those same polls show that […]
DL Open Thread Tuesday, Dec. 26, 2023
Pope Francis, fresh off his controversial decision to allow the blessing of same-sex relationships, used his Christmas message to take aim at the weapons industry, which means he took aim squarely at the United States, arms merchant to the world, even if he didn’t say so directly. One Democratic congressman from North Jersey illustrates the […]
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