The Wrongologist – Page 223 – Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Friday Music Break – January 23, 2015

What is the real State of the Union? Polarized, now, and for the rest of our lifetimes.

With that in mind, today is a good day to chill, and here a few songs to promote chillin’. We start with the very funny song “I’ll Never Smoke Weed with Willie Again” during Willie Nelson’s 70th birthday celebration. It is sung by Toby Keith and Scott Emerick, with Willie Nelson laughing in the background:

Sample Lyrics:
I always heard that his herb was top shelf
I just could not wait to find out for myself
Don’t knock it ’til you tried it, well, I tried it my friend
And I’ll never smoke weed with Willie again

For all you old hippies out there, here is “Willin” and “Don’t Bogart that Joint” by Little Feat, that is, the Lowell George-led version of Little Feat, not the several incarnations of bands using that name that have been working since Lowell died in 1979. These two tracks were recorded at Lisner Auditorium on the campus of George Washington University in August of 1977:

For the Wrongologist’s (not substantial) money, Waiting for Columbus is one of the greatest live recordings. However, it is not completely a “live” album. It doesn’t take anything away from WFC or Little Feat, but there were overdubs done later, prior to release, to enhance the sound on a few cuts.

If you don’t know this album, buy the 2002 Deluxe Edition CD, you will never be sorry. Don’t buy the version on Amazon, it only has 20 songs, the actual deluxe CD has 27.

We can’t end without another Waiting for Columbus tune. WFC was recorded in London in addition to Washington DC. There were 4 dates in London. Here is “Dixie Chicken”, recorded at London’s Rainbow Theater on August 3 & 4, 1977:

That’s Bill Payne on the piano solo. Here, Little Feat combined jazz, honkytonk, swing, ragtime and dixie into one great song.

WFC is a go-to experience on any road trip for the Wrongologist.

See you on Sunday.

Politics Is Usually Not The Answer

For the first time in his six SOTU speeches, the president’s economic message on Tuesday was not: “yes, the economy’s weak, but it’s getting stronger” or “we’re on the right path, but we’re not out of the woods.” Instead, he called 2014:

A breakthrough year for America, [as] our economy is growing and creating jobs at the fastest pace since 1999. Our unemployment rate is now lower than it was before the financial crisis. More of our kids are graduating than ever before; more of our people are insured than ever before; we are as free from the grip of foreign oil as we’ve been in almost 30 years.

He added: “this is good news, people!” What President Obama meant was, now that we’ve have sustained economic growth in place, we need to start talking about the policy agenda that will give all of us a chance to benefit from that growth.

But the spin afterwards spoke about things like “leadership”, “redistribution” and “class warfare” that the many, many GOP presidential candidates and their surrogates will parse incessantly, without offering any solutions for our economic future, or those domestic problems that continue to dog America.

Speaking of politics that have not led to solutions, Mr. Obama spoke of his opening with Cuba. Here is what he said:

In Cuba, we are ending a policy that was long past its expiration date. When what you’re doing doesn’t work for 50 years, it’s time to try something new. And our shift in Cuba policy has the potential to end a legacy of mistrust in our hemisphere. It removes a phony excuse for restrictions in Cuba. It stands up for democratic values, and extends the hand of friendship to the Cuban people. And this year, Congress should begin the work of ending the embargo.

But anti-Castro politics, mostly fostered by Republicans, have embargoed some things that have potentially really cost American citizens. No, it’s not Cuban Rum. The Cubans have developed a drug called Heberprot-P, that appears to be very effective in curing advanced foot ulcers in people with diabetes. It could have been licensed for US clinical trials since 2007. It is patented in over 30 nations, including here in the US, and in the European Union.

Most of us have never heard of Heberprot-P. The drug uses a form of epidermal growth factor (EGF) to help regrow cells lost to diabetic foot ulcers (DFU). According to the American Diabetes Association, DFU causes about 73,000 non-traumatic lower-limb amputations in US adults aged 20 years or older who were diagnosed with diabetes.

The idea behind Heberprot was developed in St. Louis years before the embargo by biochemist Stanley Cohen and neurophysiologist Rita Levi-Montalcini. They received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discoveries of epidermal and nerve growth factors. They discovered that protein recumbent epidermal growth factor stimulates cell growth. The Cubans applied that idea to foot ulcers.

Because of the embargo, we haven’t brought the drug to the US for clinical trials. But, Mr. Obama could immediately license the import of Heberprot-P without waiting for Congress to debate the end of the embargo.

In fact, US scientists heard first hand from Cuban scientists about the Heberprot-P at two forums held here in 2014. One of them was a meeting of the Conference on the Management of Diabetic Foot Ulcers (DFCON, 2014), the largest meeting of US professionals treating patients with this ailment.

So, despite the politics and the hurdles presented by Cuban-American politicians, the President could license the importation of the drug for study and use in clinical trials, followed by an application for approval of Heberprot-P by the Food and Drug Administration. It could then be researched further by American scientists that wish to test different cell growth rates using incubation equipment and see if this treatment could in fact be applied to helping the regrowth of lost cells in humans due to DFU.

In fact, there is a precedent. In July, 2004, the federal government permitted a California biotechnology company to license three experimental cancer drugs from Cuba. That required permission from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

At the time, a State Department spokesperson said that an exception had been made because of the life-saving potential of the experimental Cuban drugs. A government condition of permitting the license required that payments to Cuba during the developmental phase were to be in goods like food or medical supplies, which are permitted under the embargo, while there are rules against providing the Cuban government with foreign currency. In 2004, the ruling was that after drugs reach the market, payments could be half in cash.

Many Americans are mutilated or die every year because of diabetic foot ulcers. First the toes go, then the feet, and later the legs. Death often follows.

And this drug could have been available for trials since 2007 and wasn’t, because of politics?

We should ask Republican politicians why. Maybe the Republican agenda has been helped by calling the Castro brothers sponsors of state terrorism, but it hasn’t done anything to help people with diabetes in the US keep their toes and feet.

Thoughts Before Tonight’s SOTU

Mr. Obama will make the State of the Union (SOTU) speech tonight. Much of what he is likely to outline as his program for 2015 has been leaked, and pundits have focused on the tax cut for the middle class and tax increases for the 1%. Given that the Republicans control both houses of Congress, this is never going to happen, so why now, and not in 2009 and 2010?

On Sunday, the Wrongologist wrote about Mr. Obama’s appalling coattails. Among the reasons his party lost 13 Senate seats, 69 House seats and 11 Governorships since 2010 is that Dems think they can win as “Republican Lite”. In the case of Democrats, they became the “less taste, less filling” brand.

It’s a lot easier to propose these tax policies when there is absolutely no prospect that these policies will ever be enacted. So, the real significance of these proposals will be how it sets up the eventual Democratic nominee for the contest against Bush 3.0, or Romney 3.0, or whoever winds up with the Republican nomination in 2016. But, will the electorate care that the president proposed something that the Republicans laughed out of town over the weekend? Probably not.

Political scientists point out that the 2016 congressional elections will be more favorable to the Democrats than the 2010 or 2014 elections were, because of the higher turnout in the presidential elections and the makeup of Senate seats that will be contested in 2016.

So, why won’t Democrats turn out for off-year elections? Think about it: Voters seem to be perfectly capable of finding their way to the polls in certain years and are motivated enough to take the time to do so. Yet, these same people consistently lose either their motivation or sense of direction, two years later. Democratic pros say that turnout is all about how to “message” better, which for Democrats means how to say the same old things in new ways. But, Democratic candidates, and their messaging have lost credibility, or are no longer relevant to the day-to-day issues of average people. So voting for Democrats is no longer a priority.

Nor is election turnout the only answer. In 2006, Democrats did extremely well with a 37.1% turnout. Yet, Democrats did poorly in 2010 when turnout was 37.8%. Turnout was higher in 2008 than it had been in any Presidential election year since 1968, probably due to the Obama factor. But, turnout in 2002 when Republicans did well, was only slightly off from 2006 when they did badly, at 37.0%.

Strategically, Republicans may not have much left in the potential electorate to motivate, if demographics are now really tilting towards Democrats. Thus, the R’s have no choice but to repress (or suppress) unenthusiastic and unmotivated Democratic voters.

The R’s got a huge assist in 2014 from Democratic candidates that didn’t stand for much, except the meta-message of “we suck less.” Even if a majority of the electorate sort of agrees with that, a certain portion also says, “Yeah, but not enough to care who wins.”

The issue is what strategies will work politically. The bind can be explained simply: to be successful, Democrats must convince the electorate that Washington can and should do things to improve their lives, but the Republicans have enough firepower to ensure that the D’s premise is a loser. With Hillary, Dems won’t beat them badly enough in 2016 to change that.

It’s clear that electing Democrats (usually) leads to better outcomes than electing Republicans. Change came in bunches: in 1933-1945, 1961-1973, 2009-2010. Think about it, in that 35 year period, Dems passed financial regulation, FDIC, SEC, Social Security, Medicare, Civil Rights Act, Equal Opportunity, Voting Rights Act and Obamacare.

If you doubt this, look at the 50 states. Each has its own set of policies. In many cases, states have adhered to a generally consistent policy for decades. So the economic conditions in the states is a strong indicator of the effects those policies. To see whether the economy performs better in red states or blue states, simply look these 2014 statistics for red vs. blue states. The differences in that regard are stark:

Or, you can look at poverty by red vs. blue state:

Or, per student education spending by state:

This may suggest a strategy on the state and local levels, based on: “Why can’t we have the success the blue states have?”

On the federal level, Democrats have not received credit from voters for proposing popular policies that never came to pass. In fact, the entire success of the Republicans in the 2014 elections was predicated on the idea that the president would receive more blame for gridlock and dysfunction in Washington than they would for causing it.

They were correct. And there are zero reasons to believe that the same playbook won’t work again. You can already hear Republicans decrying the “Obama/Clinton failed policies” of the past 8 years.

See what YOU think after the SOTU tonight.

Happy Martin Luther King Day!

Although it was first observed in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. Day wasn’t recognized by all 50 states until 2000. It isn’t simply a day about the man; it’s a day about a Dream. MLK remains the hero of a certain generation of Americans for whom activism was a building block of their personal journey to adulthood.

In most ways, our nation has lost that sense of can-do, that all things are possible if you follow your Big Idea, because sadly, we no longer have people who can rally us to make Big Ideas happen. And isn’t it fascinating that the three men of the 20th Century who had big ideas and brought them to fruition, Gandhi, Mandela and Dr. King, all faced “it can’t be done” opposition, often violent, from the white power base in their countries. All three modeled non-violence for their followers, and all three lived to see their Big Dream become a reality in their own country.

Since it is Wake Up Monday, here are 3 songs that pay tribute to Dr. King, his ideals and his relentless drive for equality. It is important to remember that he was just 39 when he was killed.

First, “Glory” by Common and John Legend from the soundtrack of the current movie “Selma”:

50 years later, we are far from completely erasing our race-related issues, except on TV, where all day, every day, commercials show people of all races having fun together while shopping for fast food.

Let’s work together to make it a reality outside of TV before too many more MLK days come and go.

Next, U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)“. From their 1984 album, “The Unforgettable Fire”:

If listeners have any doubt that Martin Luther King Jr. is the subject of the song, these lyrics drive the point home:

Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride.

But, MLK’s assassination took place in the early evening, rather than the early morning. That didn’t matter, everyone loves the song, and the Edge’s guitar at the start is one of the most recognizable riffs of the 1980’s.

Finally, the Wrongologist’s favorite MLK song, “Southern” by OMD from their album “The Pacific Age“. On April 3, 1968, in Memphis, King delivered his last speech, which we now know as his “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech. He was assassinated the next day. OMD samples some of the content of that speech for their song “Southern”:

Although everyone knows the “I’ve been to the mountaintop” part of the speech, Wrongo thinks our focus should be on the following:

I want young men and young women, who are not alive today
But who will come into this world, with new privileges
And new opportunities
I want them to know and see that these new privileges and opportunities
Did not come without somebody suffering and sacrificing
For freedom is never given to anybody

Why should we focus on that part of the speech? Because one day down the road, and it will not be long, young people will have forgotten what MLK meant to America, and how whatever remains of their rights came to be.

They won’t know anything about the intellectual foundations of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Or, how the 13th Amendment ending slavery came about, and why, 100 years later in 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed, or how 48 years later, in June, 2013, the Roberts Court eviscerated it.

So, today, teach a child about why MLK is important.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – January 18, 2014

With the media and the political parties now shifting their focus to 2016, once again, the Democrats need to remember how badly they have been shellacked under the Obama presidency. The WaPo reports that Republicans have gained more than 900 state legislature seats since 2010. Here is the sorry record:

Mr. Obama now holds the record for “worst coattails” by a modern president, eclipsing even Nixon. There are more than 7,000 state legislative seats in the USA, so the Democratic losses between 2010 and 2014 amount to 12% of all state legislative seats nationwide.

Republicans now control more than 4,100 seats, their highest number since 1920. After taking over 11 legislative chambers from Democrats in 2014, Republicans now control 30 state legislatures completely, and have full control of state governments (legislatures and governorship) in 23 states.

Democrats, by contrast, have full control of 11 state legislatures and total control of state government in just seven states. This isn’t just Obama’s fault, Democrats have focused almost exclusively on the winning the Electoral College since Mr. Clinton left office. Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy is long dead. This loss of state legislatures owes much to the spectacular failure of Democrat’s leadership. Democrats should throw out their entire leadership team and start over. Why would any candidate want to brand themselves with the organizations run by Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and whoever it was that said Democratic candidates should run content-free campaigns in 2014?

How bad is this? Remember that policy is made first at the state level. With Republicans in control of so many state governments, the policy track record for their side will be vastly superior to what Democrats can do at the state and local levels. Also, State legislatures and governors redraw congressional lines. In most states, how the nation’s 435 House districts will look after the 2020 Census will be determined by governors and state legislators. Republican legislators are more likely to draw lines that are friendly to their side. Unless Democrats can reverse their state House and Senate losses before the 2021 redraw, Republicans will control the House for a very, very long time. Finally, State legislatures are the minor leagues of politics. Most politicians − President Obama included − who go on to great things, hone their craft in the state legislature of their home state. The Republicans’ farm system is now significantly larger than that of Democrats.

So begins the Republican’s discussion about 2016:

Mitt’s lessons learned in 2012:

GOP opens the 114th Congress with an anti-immigration statement:

Mr. Obama should have bought a clue:

The GOP has an impossible task ahead in certain states:

Tomorrow is MLK Jr. Day. There have been gains and losses since his death, but some things are unchanged:

Friday Music Break – January 16, 2015

Today, Wrongo is remembering Doug Sahm, the founder of two great groups, the Sir Douglas Quintet, in 1964 and the Texas Tornados in 1990. Sir Douglas had a hit in 1965 with the song “She’s About a Mover”, which was renamed from “She’s a Body Mover” so it could be played on radio.

Here is a video from the NBC-TV show “Hullabaloo.” That night’s host was Trini Lopez. At the end, you will hear Trini explain that the band is not from England, but is actually from Texas. Doug Sahm, formed the Quintet in 1964 with longtime friend Augie Meyers.

The Quintet was part of a cross-cultural south Texas musical melting pot that included the sounds of Mexico, Poland, Germany, and Africa. But you also see the Brit-Pop influence in their haircuts and outfits:

Next, Sahm and Meyers formed the Texas Tornados, along with the great Freddy Fender and accordionist Flaco Jimenez. This was a true Tejano fusion band, and stayed active from 1990 when they got together, until 1999 when Sahm died. Fender died in 2006. Their 1996 single “A Little Bit is Better Than Nada” was in the opening credits of the movie Tin Cup. Here they are singing the Wrongologist’s favorite from their album “Texas”, “Guacamole”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIW2Teg4F6k

Transformative Ideas, Part II – Reestablish Compulsory Military Service

This is Part II of a continuing series in 2015, bringing forward for your review, ideas that have the potential to transform and end the ossification of our country. Part I was about ending our love affair with the unregulated free market.

In Part II, we argue for re-establishing compulsory military service. In response to the anti-military opinion during the Vietnam War, Nixon replaced the compulsory military draft with an all-volunteer force in 1973. This facilitated our ability to make decisions about conducting wars without worrying about who fights them.

Registering for the draft (as differentiated from compulsory service) is still the law for young men in America. If you were born in 1996 or earlier, that means you’re potentially on the hook if America runs out of professional military during wartime.

There are two problems that compulsory military service will help to ameliorate. First, the permanent state of war that our politicians and defense contractors have fostered in the past 40 years. Charles F. Wald, retired Air Force general who oversaw the start of the air war in Afghanistan in 2001 told the WaPo in September:

We’re not going to see an end to this in our lifetime.

Second, a professional military has dangerously skewed the demographics of our professional military compared to our society at large.

We have a permanent state of war because the price we pay is opaque, or meaningless to most citizens, despite some estimates that Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan cost more than $4.4 Trillion, including future obligations for the disabilities of American soldiers. Reinstating the draft would compel the American public to have “skin in the game” for the wars we fight. James Fallows in a very important article for The Atlantic gives us some perspective relative to when we had the draft and what goes on today: (brackets and parenthesis by the Wrongologist)

At the end of World War II, nearly 10% of the entire US population was on active military duty—which meant most able-bodied men of a certain age (plus the small number of women allowed to serve).

[Today] the US military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.

(Out of a population of 310 million, or about three-quarters of 1%, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many, many of them more than once)

Since 1970, the population of the US has grown by about 50%, from roughly 200 million to 300 million. Over the same period, the number of active-duty armed forces has fallen approximately 50%, from 3 million to 1.4 million. Fallows quotes Admiral Mike Mullen, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George W. Bush and Barack Obama: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

My concern is this growing disconnect between the American people and our military…I would sacrifice some of [our military’s] …excellence and readiness to make sure that we stay close to the American people. Fewer and fewer people know anyone in the military. It’s become just too easy to go to war.

Moving to the demographic differences between the professional military and American society at large, Charles J. Dunlap Jr., a retired Air Force major general who is at the Duke Law Schools says: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

I think there is a strong sense in the military that it is indeed a better society than the one it serves…In the generation coming up, we’ve got lieutenants and majors who had been the warrior-kings in their little outposts…They were literally making life-or-death decisions. You can’t take that generation and say, ‘You can be seen and not heard.’

Dunlap told James Fallows: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

[The military is] becoming increasingly tribal…in the sense that more and more people in the military are coming from smaller and smaller groups. It’s become a family tradition, in a way that’s at odds with how we want to think a democracy spreads the burden.

Making Dunlap’s point, Danielle Allen, of the Institute for Advanced Studies on Military Service wrote about the political implications of a professional military in the WaPo:

By the end of the draft in 1973, military service was distributed pretty evenly across regions. But that is no longer true.

Tellingly, changes to the map of military service since 1973 align closely with today’s red and blue states. Montana, Alaska, Florida, Wyoming, Maine and Texas now send the largest number of people per capita to the military. The states with the lowest contribution rates? Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. What’s clear from the data is that a major national institution, the US military, now has tighter connections to some regions of the country than to others. The uneven pattern of military service is not an insignificant reflection of the cultural differences that characterize different regions of this diverse country. This has broad ramifications for our future.

Heidi A. Urben, a Lieutenant Colonel, studied the attitudes of the officer corps, and found that about 60% said they identify with the Republican Party, and that 70% had not changed their party affiliation, despite two long wars.

The Pentagon reports that bringing back conscription would be costly at a time when the US Army is drawing down its forces. It might cost billions to reinstate the draft, while maintaining the present quality of armed forces. But it may be the only way to wake up a detached and nonvoting public that has depersonalized military service. The additional cost of managing a draft and training all Americans for some kind of government service would pay dividends:

• A draft would ensure that government decision-making regarding military involvement would be undertaken only after the fullest debate — a debate today that seems to not be part of the national consciousness and hardly registers any interest by the public.
• A draft would narrow the gap between people in power in Washington and the men and women at peril in fighting our nation’s battles.
• A draft could re-balance the skewed demographics of the military.

A draft could mean that voting on Election Day would be more important in our now-fragile democracy. It could mean that going to war is worth having every citizen sacrifice, or it isn’t worth any soldier’s life.

Monday Wake Up Call – January 12, 2015

Rod Stewart turned 70 over the weekend. Married three times with eight children, he is worth about $150 million, give or take, and is still working. There are hundreds of Stewart songs to choose from, but here is the Rodster with Jeff Beck and Ronnie Wood, from the Jeff Beck Group’s album “Truth” recorded in 1968, doing “Rock My Plimsoul”:

A Plimsoul is a guitar pedal. While Beck and Stewart give themselves writing credit for “Rock My Plimsoul“, it is actually by BB King, written in 1964. Here is his “Rock Me Baby“:

Monday linkage:

Remember sub-prime loans? They’re back as auto loans, with the same delinquencies:

Over 8.4% of subprime auto loans taken out in the first quarter of 2014 were already delinquent by November, according to an analysis of Equifax data by Moody’s Analytics…That’s the highest rate of early subprime delinquencies since…2008.

Is our nuclear waste a goldmine? Possibly.

Professional Cuddlers: The Snuggling Industry Takes Off, but Clothes Stay On. The WSJ is on top of all the new trends.

Doctor offers abortions from a ship: In her documentary, “Vessel”, Rebecca Gomperts, provided abortions on a ship in offshore waters.

Tiny computer with Windows 8.1, 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage for $149, debuts at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas:

Is it time for another George Zimmerman defense fund? Who could have predicted that Zimmerman would be in trouble again? Well, anyone with two functioning brain cells could have predicted it.

5 months of air strikes in Iraq and Syria in 4 charts: Since Aug. 8, the US has carried out 1,689 strikes in Iraq and Syria against more than 3,200 ISIS targets. From the first day of strikes through Jan. 2, the bombing has cost $1.2 billion, with an average daily cost of $8.2 million a day.

Analog search before Google: People sent their questions to reference librarians, no matter how strange. The New York Public Library had the foresight to write the questions down, including ones pre-dating the library’s reference desk itself. Like this one:

Ya sleep with a guy worth $27 million, and you don’t get his name? You deserve to remain single and poor.

Thought for the week: Give up on trying to appeal to reason. If appeals to reason worked, the GOP would get fewer votes than the Libertarians or Greens. During Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out: “Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!”

Stevenson replied: “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!”

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – January 11, 2015

This was a week when cartoonists and free speech came under assault. The cartoonists died. Free speech will survive. From cartoonist Tom Toles, whose work appears here often:

The one response I saw to the Paris murders that I didn’t care for is that they were killed for ‘just cartoons.’ The event proves the opposite. Amidst the floodtide of ‘content’ that contemporary communications are generating, it was precisely the cartoons that stood out as having so much power that someone felt they needed to be silenced. They still have that kind of power.

Free speech is the single most important aspect of what makes a “free society” free. As a free society, we can debate what is a wise use of our free speech rights. But, we have just been reminded in the most terrible terms, how important and vulnerable it can be. Cartoonist David Horsey, whose work also appears here often, (including today) said this week:

Not only can freedom not exist without truth tellers, freedom cannot exist without obnoxious expressions of opinion, no matter who is offended.

Ted Rall, a cartoonist who also appears here occasionally, said this on his blog:

There could never be a mass shooting of staff political cartoonists in the United States, because American newspapers and magazines have fired almost all of them.

He estimates that today, there are only 30 or so cartoonists employed full-time by American newspapers and magazines. The declining number of cartoonists has made curating Sunday cartoons for this blog more difficult over the years.

How do we move forward? The Wrongologist does not usually quote any Catholic Pope, but this from Paul VI seems appropriate today:

“If you want peace, work for Justice”

What does that mean in practical terms today?

• Work toward achieving economic equality everywhere
• Include the topics “Understanding Cultures” and “Promoting Cultural Integration” in school curriculums. This could help reduce fear of “The Other”, a common human trait
• Encourage moderate Muslims living in the West to root out the extremists among them
• Ask Muslim countries to do more than to offer condolences to France

On to cartoons. If you stop cartooning, the terrorists win:

Their real motivator wasn’t Allah:

In other news, we had a semi-favorable jobs report:

Republicans took over the Congress:

The NYPD continued their soft coup:

NYPD Job Action continued:

Friday Music Break – January 9, 2015

You’ve probably never heard of Tony Joe White. If you know him at all, it is because you know some of the songs he wrote, like “Polk Salad Annie“, or “Rainy Night in Georgia“, songs covered by many artists. He also wrote “Steamy Windows” and “Undercover Agent for the Blues“, both hits for Tina Turner. Mark Knopfler, (who was Turner’s producer at the time) brought those two songs to her.

Here is Tony Joe White with “Bayou Woman”:

After you listen to “Bayou Woman”, you can hear the strong influence Tony Joe had on Knopfler’s “Sultans of Swing”. TJ toured with Knopfler in Europe in the early 1970s.

When Tony Joe appeared with the Foo Fighters doing “Polk Salad Annie” on Letterman, Dave pointed at Tony Joe and said: “”If I was this guy, you could all kiss my ass”.

Today is also Elvis Presley’s birthday, he would have been 80. Here he is doing “Polk Salad Annie”:

If Letterman was Elvis, we would all probably kiss is ass, too.