- Via the NYT: Weird Al is Enjoying His Rock-Star Moment.
- Via The Independent: Trump once hosted party for ‘young women’ where Epstein was the only guest, says report. That doesn’t sound fishy at all!
- Via The Independent: JD Vance flew to Montana for secret meeting with Rupert Murdoch and Fox News executives.
- In case you missed it, via Politico: Maurene Comey, daughter of James Comey and prosecutor of Jeffrey Epstein, is fired.
- Via the AP: Trump administration hands over Medicaid recipients’ personal data, including addresses, to ICE.
- Also via Politico: Maurene Comey warns her former colleagues: ‘Fear is the tool of the tyrant’.
- Worth a read from Status: Colbert and Capitulation.
- From G. Elliot Morris: Trump’s approval hits new low as Epstein pressure mounts.
- A must-read via the Tufts Daily: Op-ed: ‘Even God cannot hear us here’: What I witnessed inside an ICE women’s prison.
- Via Politico: Trump launches next round of third country deportations with new flight to Eswatini.
- Via the NYT: Justice Dept. Asks for 1-Day Sentence for Ex-Officer Convicted in Breonna Taylor Raid.
- Via Politico: Russ Vought: Appropriations process ‘has to be less bipartisan’.
Lazy Sunday Tabs
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13 responses to “Lazy Sunday Tabs”
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One day sentence? ONE? DAY? SENTENCE????????
Nah, IMO, justice would much more closely served by him being stripped of badge and authority, serving time, and if he survived prison, spending the rest of his life living the severely restricted life the felony-convicted ex-con lives.
But as we all know, I am but an Ignorant Cracker (adjacent) Luddite.
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The legal battle over third country deportations came to a head earlier this month, when the Supreme Court cleared the way for eight men to be sent to South Sudan after they were detained for six weeks in a shipping container on a U.S. military base in Djibouti while the administration fought to deport them in the courts.
8 human beings detained in a shipping container? For SIX WEEKS? In Djibouti? If you think this is rational or humane, go fwk yourself.
Good goggly moggly, doggy, what kind of monsters … support a government promoting these …
ARRRRGGGHHHH! I’ma gonna have to go watch cat videos for a while until my blood pressure drops. Or maybe Weird Al videos. -
I’m on a one person crusade to stop referring to the renditions to third countries as “deportation”.
Deported people are returned to their nativ eland and set free.
What the administration is doing is imprisoning people without charges or trials or any recourse to protest their imprisonment, and leaving them for some indeterminate time, possibly life, depending on the whim of the government.
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OTOH, his first hit was 1979? Hmmm, think I heard him on Dr. Demento years before that.
I had to look up Dr. Demento, and what I will say is that, just because some of Weird Al’s music was being heard in some places on radio doesn’t change the fact that his first actual hit was in 1979.
Some musicians remain purely local for their entire career. Growing up in Baltimore in the ’80s and ’90s, I was familiar with a song parodist named Bob Rivers, who was regularly played on 98 Rock. Whether he was as good as Weird Al or not, he was definitely at least as prolific. (Here’s an example of his work.) Looking him up now, I just found out he passed away a few months ago from cancer; he was 68.
Weird Al’s first few albums are somewhat amateurish-sounding, consisting basically of his playing accordion and little else. It was when he hooked up with Rick Derringer (who also passed away this year) that the quality of his work improved exponentially. Derringer is a bit like Jeff Lynne of ELO, in that he did have a band with hits of its own (he was lead singer for the McCoys in the ’60s), but he’s underappreciated for his behind-the-scenes work with other musicians. When I first heard “Eat It,” I was rather amazed at how good a job they did of the guitar solo which in the original was done by Eddie Van Halen. In the Weird Al version, it was Derringer who performed the solo. That’s the level of talent behind most of Weird Al’s music since about the mid-’80s.
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Here we go again. No, no, no, Trump’s approval has not hit a record low. His disapproval has risen a little, his approval has remained rock steady. That may change, I hope it changes, but his approval is stuck hard at about 45%. According to Nate the gap is currently just under 9 points – which is where it was in April. Polls mean nothing until that 45% floor cracks.
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@Kylopod:
Totally agree with you. I was musing on how genuinely he is enjoying the life in music he’s created and peripherally musing about my age.
I was pondering that old joking truth (I’ve heard attributed to several musicians over the years) when complimented on their “overnight success,” and “not paying their dues,” to wit,
paying our dues? PAYING OUR DUES? We’ve been paying our dues for YEARS!”
Truly, the arts seldom pay well, and artists (like prophets) are seldom appreciated in their lifetimes or homelands. He’s another exception to the rule, and a gracious one at that.
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@Michael Reynolds: In fairness, it doesn’t say “record” and it is referring to his index.
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@Flat Earth Luddite: Yes, the musicians, actors, and so on who make it to stardom are a very, very small group, leaving behind millions of artists who, if they’re not starving, have found other ways of supporting themselves. (One of my favorite bits of trivia is that several of the members of Queen have degrees in science or engineering.) And we can’t pretend for a moment that it’s a meritocracy. After getting past family connections, economic advantages, and the biases of record company owners, you need a billion doses of plain old dumb luck before you can hope to get anywhere.
That’s why every once in a while I have to pause and question the conventional wisdom about the actual talents of those at the top. Why is Weird Al the GOAT to just about everyone? Why does he not only dominate but practically monopolize the genre of music parody? Where’s the genius in changing the lyrics of popular songs to reference food, the theme of at least a third of his body of work? Are we all fooling ourselves? Does the emperor of parody have no clothes?
That’s why I think the competence of his musicianship, a factor people tend to overlook, is essential to understanding his success. It’s not just his ideas, it’s the professionalism in how he executes them. Like comedians who do impressions, he creates songs that sound a lot like the originals but with enough exaggeration to make them funny. And in many cases his videos are just as much part of the show. My personal favorites are “I Lost on Jeopardy,” “Fat,” “Smells Like Nirvana,” and “Amish Paradise,” and to fully appreciate them, it helps a lot to be familiar with the original videos to the songs he’s imitating.
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@Flat Earth Luddite:
w.r.t. the 8 prisoners detained for six weeks in Djibouti, recall that the administration was the source of the sensational headlines in their attempt to blame the courts for DHS’s decision to have ICE agents “stranded” with prisoners in a shipping container on a Navy base in Djibouti. But a more complete read of the situation revealed that the prisoners were kept in a converted conference room, apparently of the transportable containerized variety, that the ICE agents had separate sleeping quarters in a trailer, that both were likely powered and air conditioned, and that restrooms were nearby.The situation for the 8 prisoners, who maybe are guilty of committing serious crimes, is probably far more grim now that they’ve been delivered to South Sudan. DHS is unable or unwilling to give further status on them, such as whether they’re still alive. And we have no idea what agreement the US has with South Sudan for accepting them. As the article says for the shipment of 5 migrants to Eswatini,
It was not immediately clear the scope or scale of any agreement the Trump administration may have come to with Eswatini before Tuesday’s deportations.
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@Eusebio:
And as you can expect from Luddite, I’m shaking my head as to how the fwk Trump and His Cronies* even found Eswatini to make a deal with them, never mind what kind of a deal they made.
Le sigh, these folks are giving old fat white dudes a bad name, eh?
*(hey, that’s a name for a really sucky bar band, IMO)
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The article is misleading. They were housed in what is called a “CLU” or Containerized Living Unit – a shipping container converted into housing. The US military uses these quite a lot and I lived in one for a couple of deployments including Djibouti a decade ago. Contrary to what it may seem, they are actually quite nice and include AC – much better than a tent, especially in a place like Djibouti.
That said, we should not be deporting anyone to South Sudan except maybe criminal South Sudanese nationals.
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Here we go again. No, no, no, Trump’s approval has not hit a record low. His disapproval has risen a little, his approval has remained rock steady. That may change, I hope it changes, but his approval is stuck hard at about 45%. According to Nate the gap is currently just under 9 points – which is where it was in April. Polls mean nothing until that 45% floor cracks.
45%? That seems wildly optimistic. Maybe I’m overly pessimistic, but, I’ve been telling friends, ‘wake me when his polling goes below 33% among Republicans.’
