Occasional Forgotten Video: The Fixx, "Saved By Zero"

Blogger Erik had a great post recently about music, mentioning this odd world where we're hearing the songs of our illustrious youths in commercials now.

That in mind, I was shocked recently to hear a Fixx song from the early eighties in a car commercial-- Zero percent financing, "Saved By Zero." With GM's stock under five bucks a share, I don't know that even that can help them.

The Fixx bridged the gap between art rock and new wave. They had a handful of hits in the eighties, such as "Red Skies At Night," "Stand Or Fall," and "One Thing Leads To Another."

The video for "Saved By Zero" is vaguely conceptual, telling the story of an artist who makes it, but leaves behind his bohemian life and friends that might have been the better part of his life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swzK7Q8teSM

Where Have All The SUV's Gone?

Coming back from the grocery store this morning, I made an observation about my north side Chicago block: most of the SUV's have disappeared.

If you had taken this same picture a few years ago, when gasoline was below $2 a gallon, nearly half the cars on the block were SUV's and trucks, including my Blazer. With gasoline above $4 a gallon most of the summer, I, and many of my neighbors got rid of the gas-guzzlers and got Toyotas, Hondas and other gas-sippers. The Prius in the foreground is one of at least three on the block. Tres Cool!

The "Yes, It Can Get Worse" Friday Random Ten

I opened my mail yesterday to discover that my retirement account lost nearly a third of its value recently. I really, really hate these assholes in the White House.

I'll just have to sit on the account, hope that we get some good news in November and hope my retirement account eventually regains its value.

In the meantime, there's still great music to listen to...


1. Jimmy Mack- Martha Reeves and the Vandellas
2. El Condor Pasa (If I Could)- Simon and Garfunkel
3. Humdrum- Peter Gabriel
4. Blue Sky- The Allman Brothers Band
5. We Will Not Be Lovers- The Waterboys
6. D.C.B.A- 25- The Jefferson Airplane
7. Wreck On the Highway- Bruce Springsteen
8. She's About A Mover- Sir Douglas Quintet
9. Brand New Cadillac- The Clash
10. Ain't Got No Money- Frankie Miller


Notes:
1. Their best-known hit was "Heat Wave," but this one is my favorite.
2. From "Bridge Over Troubled Water," S & G's best selling album.
3. Peter Gabriel scored a homerun on his first solo album after leaving Genesis.
4. I love me some Allman Brothers!
5. From the fabulous "Fisherman's Blues" album.
6. Surrealist Pillow, which this is from, is one of my "desert island" albums.
7. The closing track on "The River," which was released 28 years ago. Doesn't that make you feel old?
8. Has one of my favorite lines in a song: "Yeah she strolled on up to me/And asked me "big boy," what's your name?" The band, form Texas, was marketed as a British invasion band. To hide the fact that two members of the band were latino, their first album cover had them in silhouette.
9. "I said 'Jesus Christ, where did you get that Cadillac?"
10. Bob Seger popularized British pub-rocker Frankie Milller's song. This is the original.

The Final Nail In The Coffin

Thanks to Vikki for pointing me toward this article in the Rolling Stone about "Maverick" McCain.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23316912/makebelieve_maverick/print

You owe it to yourself to read this article and then send a link to it to everybody you know, for god's sake. I knew most of the facts that it states, but to have them put together paints an absolutely devastating portrait of McCain, who has run on his purported "character." He's a total opportunist politically and a creep personally. A McCain presidency would be a disaster.

BTW, it looks like the attempt at character assassination via the non-existent Ayers/Obama connection isn't working. According to Gallup, Obama is up a percentage point and McCain down one. Obama leads 52% to 41%. Not even an endorsement from the NRA seems to be able to save McCain.

Why Yes, It Is Funny-- Because It's True

On Monday night, at my Evanston job, this cartoon was making the rounds of the employees. I'd seen it a couple of days before, when someone emailed it to me.



At some point, a copy of it made it into the hands of the manager, a hired hand, who, unlike the owners, is one of those whack-job conservatives who believes that Democrats are either idiots, the anti-Christ or both. (Needless to say, we don't get along well). He looked at it, and sputtered "What, is this supposed to be fuckin' funny, or something?"

I walked away without saying anything, but in my head my answer was "Yes, for two reasons. One, because it's true. And secondly, because it pissed you off so much."

Gee, It Smells Like Desperation In Here...

I watched the debate last night, and actually took notes to comment on it.

McCain was incredibly bad, in so many ways.

First off, even he, I think, must realize that the economy is first and foremost on everybody's mind. So it probably wasn't the best thing in the world to use Ebay as an example of the booming U.S. economy-- apparently John had not gotten the word that Ebay had laid off 10% of its workforce the day before.

Then McCain started hammering Obama "and his cronies" on their lack of oversight of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the two big federal mortage agencies. Yeah, John-- Obama, in his two years in the Senate, versus your 28 years-- what happened to your oversight of it?

And I was waiting for Obama to point out-- and he did-- that McCain's campaign manager was a lobbyist paid to prevent regulation of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

McCain tried to spring a surprise-- the idea to buy up all of the bad mortgages in the country to prop up the sagging equities of millions of homes in America. So much for getting the government out of our lives and the economy.

I did a little quick math. Lowballing both the number of mortgages to be bought out and the amount of the homes-- 5 million homes costing $300,000 each-- that's a trillion and a half dollars. That's a little over double last week's bailout. Tack onto that a trillion dollars or so for the Iraq war. All while lowering taxes. Where is all of this money going to come from then? Looks like it's the classic "borrow and spend" conservatism.

He kept hammering away at offshore drilling as a panacea for our energy problems. He failed to point out that one, it takes years and even decades to develop offshore drilling platforms. Secondly, even if this happens, it would increase domestic production only 3%. And of course, as Mr. Obama pointed out, it would exacerbate, not help the global warming problem.

I loved when Mr. Brokaw asked them what their foreign policy "doctrine" was. Mr. Obama was straightforward, stating that there is a need to balance the moral and political imperatives in foreign intervention with the realities of the situation. McCain, however, took a page from the "Palin Doctrine"-- to ignore the question and make a statement unrelated to the question.

At least twice, McCain invoked the memory of his "hero" Ronald Reagan. Again, he showed staggering stupidity. Guess what, John? First off, for a good number of voters, he means nothing. Young voters in particular. Secondly, many of the "Reagan Democrats" have wised up. They saw how Reagan's bullshit "prosperity" was a smokescreen, benefitting mostly the rich. They saw that the tax cuts for the rich left a huge deficit that Clinton had to clean up. They read newspapers. They remember that Clinton left office with a huge surplus. Not only is that surplus gone, we're back to the "borrow and spend conservatism" of the Reagan years.

Barack Obama was great, making it clear that he has the intelligence and wits to hold the office of President. McCain blustered, obfuscated, out and out lied and in general made it clear, to me, that I don't want him to be President.

In these last weeks before the election, it'll be interesting. McCain's "bad cop," Sarah Palin, is doing her job, going before paranoid, ignorant Republicans and trying to tie Barack Obama to former radical who he was guilty of having loose associations with years after the former radical had become a mild-mannered school reformer. What was the response of the voters? Obama went up another percentage point in Florida, Virginia, Colorado and Ohio, all states he was expected to lose. He's leading all four. He's up by a fraction of a percentage in Missouri, a state no one dreamed he'd capture. In Minnesota, where Republicans had a fantasy they might have a chance, Obama is up by over 10%. He's leading by comfortable margins in Wisconsin and Michigan, where pundits thought he'd have trouble. He's leading in solidly Republican New Hampshire. And now the McCain campaign is in a dither because they're afraid they might even lose Indiana, a state that hasn't gone for to a Democrat since Johnson in 1964.

As we get closer, there are two wild cards at work. First, as Bubs pointed out, is the Bradley Effect. This refers to the fact that there is a difference between the number of people polled who say they're going to vote for an African-American candidate and those who do. It's named after former Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, who was leading in the polls going into the 1982 California governor's race, but lost by a narrow margin. The "Bradley Effect" is thought to be about 5%. In many of the races I mentioned above, the margin is smaller than that. Obama's numbers are steadily rising in all of those states-- let's hope he gets above the 5% margin.

The other factor-- or factors, really-- are young people and cell phones. Back when I studied Political Science, we were taught that the Achilles Heel of many polls are that they're done by telephone. Back in the early eighties, when I was studying it, the problem was that telephones were one of the first things people lost when they had financial difficulties. That meant that poor people were often underrepresented in polls.

This was balanced out by the fact that there is a direct correlation between "socio-economic status," as we called it in my classes, and voting rates. Poor people tend to vote at much lower rates, middle class at higher rates and rich people at very high rates.

These days, the issue is cell phones. Many people have ditched landlines and use only their cell phones. The tendency increases the younger the person is. There is a correlation between voting and age that is similar to socio-economic status and voting rate-- the older one is, the more likely one is to vote.

This campaign has energized young people like no election in decades. I'll be curious after the election to see if there's a decrepancy between the polls and the actual vote due to the fact that younger voters were underrepresented in polls because their names were not in the phone book (that's the way pollsters usually do it-- picking names at random out of phone books)

As we get close to the election, it'll be interesting to see what factor winds up being the deciding factor: Obama's increasing popularity and incredible organizing machine vs. the Bradley Effect, and the cell phone factor vs. the apathy of youth. I think you know which factors i hope win out.

The Last Out of the Season

Last night at work, at my Evanston job, they had a television on, which is a rarity there. One of the owners is a big baseball fan. The only odd thing about this is that he's Irish. He's obviously assimilated very well into his adopted country.

In any event, I kept peeking over to see what was going on in the game, which was the fourth playoff game between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Chicago White Sox. The Rays were up 2-1 in the best-of-five series. They got off to an early lead and never gave it up.

The ninth inning arrived and the White Sox got two outs. Future Hall of Famer Ken Griffey, a midseason acquisition for the White Sox, came to bat.

I was suddenly transported to past little seasons for Adam. At least two of his six baseball seasons, he ended up in that situation in his little league playoffs-- at-bat with two outs in the last inning, the last chance that his team had to stay alive. I remember that each time, my ex- and I would look over at one another, and each of us knew that the other was thinking the same thing:

"Please, please, PLEASE don't let him get the last out of the season..."

Both times, he drew walks, and my ex- and I breathed sighs of relief. We knew he'd have been really upset with himself if he'd gotten the last out of the season.

Ken Griffey wasn't so lucky last night. He got the last out, and the Sox were eliminated from the playoffs.

Reality-Based Politics

I have come up with a new name for the Republicans: "The Reality-Challenged."

Three things I have read or seen the last couple of days have drawn me to come up with this new name for them.

First and foremost was the recent Sarah Palin speech in which she talks about Barack Obama "palling around with a domestic terrorist." She cites an article in the New York Times about Barack Obama's relationship with former radical Bill Ayers.



It's funny, because I get the New York Times delivered to my house every day, and I read that very same article. I somehow read something completely different. Here is the article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/us/politics/04ayers.html

Here is a direct quote from the article:

"...the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.”

Non-Chicagoans may need an introduction to Bill Ayers. He was a student radical who was originally part of the Students for a Democratic Society, a non-violent group in the sixties that did a lot of good work. Ayers, who is the son of Tom Ayers, who was for many years the Chairman of the Board of Commonwealth Edison, the main electrical utility in Northern Illinois, was one of a group of mostly rich kids who split off from the SDS and formed first the Weathermen, who were violent, and the Weather Underground, which was even more violent. They were dangerous, but mostly to themselves; in March of 1970, a Greenwich Village townhouse that was used as a "safe house"-- and a bombmaking facility-- by the Weather Underground blew up, killing three members of the group.

After the explosion, Ayers went "underground" with girlfriend Bernadine Dohrn, who was also in the Weather Underground. Charges had been filed against both of them. In 1980, they turned themselves in.

However, federal charges had been dropped because of prosecutorial misconduct and because any evidence allegedly gathered against them was through the notorious COINTELPRO program.

Since then, Ayers has become a respected authority on education, whom Chicago Mayor Daley frequently consults with. He is a professor at The University of Illinois at Chicago-- the same school I plan on getting my pharmacy degree at. He has, as the New York Times article pointed out, become "reahabilitated" in Chicago, to the point where our own very conservative Mayor Daley said:

“He’s done a lot of good in this city and nationally..This is 2008. People make mistakes. You judge a person by his whole life.”

So I guess Mayor Daley is "palling around with terrorists" as well.

But to repeat what Barack Obama actually said, if Palin had actually read the article ("Oh, you know there's so many big words in dat dem big city paper, ya know!"?

He called Ayers "“somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.”

And what the fuck is "exceptionalism?" My god, is she stupid.

Today's New York Times has an article calling Palin out on her gross distortion.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/us/politics/05palin.html

And CNN did the same. Thank god the media is not laying down for McCain like it did in 2004 with the "Swiftboating" of John Kerry.



I smell desperation. In fact, CNN, in covering the story, quoted an unnamed McCain aide who said that the McCain campaign is desperately trying to get public attention off of the economy. Gallup now has Obama leading 50% to 42% and rising. According to Real Clear Politics, he is ahead in Colorado, Ohio, Florida, Virgina and Nevada, all states he was behind in a few weeks ago. And of course, the McCain campaign has written off Michigan, a state that pundits also thought Obama might not be able to win just a few weeks ago.

Next in our list of the "Reality-Challenged" (formerly known as Republicans) is the New York Times' conservative columnist William Kristol (who was himself a left-wing student radical at one time-- who did he "pal around with?"), in his column "How McCain Wins."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/opinion/29kristol.html

(You can only access the editorial pages if you have a New York Times subscription, but I'll quote some of the column).

First, he defends McCain's blatant, pathetic grandstanding during the financial meltdown:

"McCain’s impetuous decision to return to Washington was right. The agreement announced early Sunday morning is better than Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s original proposal, and better than the deal the Democrats claimed was close on Thursday. Assuming the legislation passes soon, and assuming it reassures financial markets, McCain will be able to take some credit."

McCain, of course, had nothing to do with the deal finally going through. We in the "Reality-Based Politics" world know that.

Then yesterday, in The Weekly Standard, Kristol further demonstrates his qualification for membership in the "Reality-Challenged" world in a column about how McCain can still win:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/647fpfdp.asp

He points out that the Gore-Lieberman ticket gained 6 points in the final 2 weeks of the 2000 campaign and that the Ford-Dole ticket gained 20 points in the final two months of the 1976 race. Here's the thing, Bill: in both cases, they lost the election (well, not really in the 2000 race).

He then states:

So while there's reason for McCain-Palin supporters to worry, there's no reason to despair.

Despair is what the Obama campaign is hoping and working for. If a campaign can convince supporters of the other candidate that the race is effectively over, the enthusiasm and volunteer efforts drop off--as does, ultimately, their turnout on Election Day.

Um, no, Bill, actually the consensus seems to be that the Obama campaign is energizing a lot of people who were disengaged from the political process. I'd hardly call that despair. And looking at the numbers from Gallup and others, it's obvious the "undecideds" are not choosing not to vote. They're actually choosing to vote-- for Obama.

He then mentions that "Sarah Palin more than held her own in the vice-presidential debate against Joe Biden" and "She may well have stopped the McCain campaign's slide and, with her assaults on Obama's tax-and-spend liberalism and his willingness to lose in Iraq, set up McCain for a strong performance in Tuesday night's debate."

Where do I start? The fact that Sarah Palin didn't look like a complete idiot-- just a pretty big idiot-- during the debate was hardly a victory. Funny thing is that everybody noticed that she didn't answer the questions given to her; she just recited one of the canned answers her trainers had desperately programmed her with in the weeks leading up to the debate without bothering to consider whether the answer had anything to do with the question that had actually been asked.

And "tax and spend liberalism?" As my father points out, as opposed to what-- "borrow and spend conservatism?"

And referring to Obama's "willingness to lose in Iraq?" Lose what? More American troops? That's the Republicans' job. Kristol apparently hasn't been keeping abreast of things; there were never any "weapons of mass destruction," there was no Al Queda in Iraq (until after we invaded). What is a "victory" in Iraq? Getting out of there with the least loss of American lives, while not leaving behind a "failed state" that would actually become a safe haven for enemies of the United States.

I read a great analogy of McCain and the Republicans on Iraq: they are like arsonists who set fires, and then rescue people from the building and claim credit as heroes. Bill Kristol and Sarah Palin are their cheerleaders.