From The Loyal Opposition:

At an early-morning rally today, a few hours before the Iowa caucuses begin, [Romney] discussed his love for the patriotic song — probably the most beloved in the canon — and recited several of the song’s verses, strongly suggesting that its vision of the country differed from President Obama’s…

The lyrics were written in 1894 by the Massachusetts poet Katharine Lee Bates, an ardent feminist and lesbian who was deeply disillusioned by the greed and excess of the Gilded Age.

Her original third verse was an expression of that anger:

America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!

From humble beginnings as a gramophone (like this one in the National Museum of Scotland) grew first the primitive Walkman, which was eventually to culminate in today’s magnificent iPod.

My God, what have they turned me into? Just now, watching the news from Alaska, I discovered myself rooting for Lisa Murkowski:

This showed up in my inbox just now. I pass it along as evidence that there may be hope for our species yet. (H/T to commenter mfd)

On Saturday, April 24th, the Opera Company of Philadelphia teamed up with the Reading Terminal Market Italian Festival for a large-scale “Flash Opera” event! Over 30 members of the Opera Company of Philadelphia Chorus and principal cast members of LA TRAVIATA performed the famed “Brindisi” in the aisles of Reading Terminal Market.

Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, one of the increasingly few reasons America’s newspapers should not be taken out behind the barn and shot, gives judicious consideration to the speech given by the GOP’s Heart Throb of the Week, Marco Rubio, before the Conservative Political Action Conference yesterday. Rubio outlined a bold new agenda of cutting taxes on estates, capital gains, interest, dividends and corporations.

To which Bookman replies:

Let me be blunt: That’s infantile. It’s an infantile appeal to an infantile sentiment. Politicians of every stripe make promises they can’t keep and tell us things we want to hear, but rarely is the disconnect from reality so blatant.

I mean, let’s just do away with taxes altogether — nobody likes ’em, right? — and then the national debt will surely vanish altogether! It’s like shooting yourself in the face and calling it cosmetic surgery. It’s like saying four minus two equals eight, and then building your economic future on that “fact.” It’s a world of fantasy.

Or as the great Merle Haggard would put it:

“When they find out how to burn water,
And the gasoline car is gone.
When an airplane flies without any fuel,
And the satellite heats our home.
One of these days when the air clears up,
And the sun comes shinin’ through.
We’ll all be drinkin’ free bubble-up,
An’ eatin’ that rainbow stew.”

And when that happy day comes, Marco Rubio will be right there, dishing out heapin’ servings of that delicious rainbow stew for everybody, with Jim DeMint looking on, crying in happiness.

First a little background from BBC News:

A 47-year-old church volunteer from West Lothian has become an unlikely overnight singing sensation with millions watching her perform online.

Susan Boyle, from Blackburn, stunned judges on ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent with her performance of I Dreamed A Dream from Les Miserables on Saturday…

Ms Boyle, who told viewers she had “never been kissed”, said she had always wanted to be a singer…

Now go here. Don’t ask questions. Just do it.

Here and there small groups of misinformed and manipulated citizens are gathering today throughout this great land for the purpose of dropping tea bags into liquids. They have been told by Fox News and a billionaires’ lobbyist named Dick Armey that this orgy of tea bagging will put an end to taxation with representation. Or something.

Most of the foot soldiers in this army of Dick’s seem not to know that tea bagging has a very specific meaning in the adult entertainment world, a meaning which has nothing to do with relieving the anguish of the very richest Americans at the prospect of being taxed once more at the same rate that existed the last time the nation’s budget was balanced.

Nor are most of these poor saps likely to be aware that their movement has its very own song, like The Internationale, or Boola Boola. The tea baggers’ fight song is called “I Love It When They Bounce,” and Karen Marie has been kind enough to call it to our attention. Here it is, performed by Supafloss:

According to Wikipedia, Mama Afrika’s real name was Zenzile Makeba Qgwashu Nguvama Yiketheli Nxgowa Bantana Balomzi Xa Ufun Ubajabulisa Ubaphekeli Mbiza Yotshwala Sithi Xa Saku Qgiba Ukutja Sithathe Izitsha Sizi Khabe Singama Lawu Singama Qgwashu Singama Nqamla Nqgithi. She deserved every syllable.

Miriam Makeba is a great loss. A voice of strength and perseverance, and class. A voice for the human spirit against the domination of the societal machine. A beautiful voice in every sense.

Update: Reports say she collapsed and died at the end of a concert. What more fitting end could one imagine for a great voice?

From The Guardian:

Two hours later, they had filled the centre of the 8,500-seat stadium (though there were still empty seats in the stands) and were kept stamping their feet in the damp cold — first to a Christian rock group and then to Hank Williams, Jr, who sang one populist tune after another, some of them tailored to the current election.

In the original version of his song, Family Tradition, Williams defended his hereditary penchant for drinking Jim Beam and smoking dope. But rewritten as “McCain-Palin Tradition,” the song encourages voters to ignore the “leftwing liberal media” and support the Republican ticket “cuz they’re just like you and ol’ Hank.”

He goes on to explain the causes of the financial crisis: “The bankers didn’t want to make all those bad loans / But Bill Clinton said ‘you got to!’ / Now they want to bail out, what I’m talking about / Is a Democrat liberal hoodoo!”

Williams’s tribute in song to Sarah Palin compared her to a “mama bear” who could be counted upon to “protect your family’s condition” because “If you mess with her cubs, she’s gonna take off the gloves, / That’s an American female tradition.. It ended with a musical question to the vice-presidential candidate: “How can you be so smart and be such a good lookin’ dish?”

“The most exciting woman on earth,” Orson Welles once called Eartha Kitt. Unfortunately for us, she made antiwar statements during a visit to the Johnson White House and was essentially blackballed in America for years. Our loss was Europe’s gain.

Here she is, at the age of 81 and looking a good 30 years younger. Astonishing. See for yourself:

...if we don’t change our ways, someone will be singing the American version of this song one hundred years from now. John McCain’s name will be an integral part of the song unless we can learn to get along. Oh well, I’m singing to the choir. The great unchurched masses who want you and me to be left behind probably will never change their ways.

Who’s young enough to remember this one?

Quoth Eno: “I’m an anti-musician. I don’t think the craft of music is relevant to the art of music.”

“Dead Finks Don’t Talk is the most randomly generated of my songs. I wrote the lyrics at home with my girl-friend with a cassette of the backing track from the studio. I sang whatever came into my mind as the song played through. Frequently they’re just nonsense words or syllables. First I try for the correct phonetic sound rather than the verbal meaning. Off the top I was singing ‘oh-dee-dow-gubba-ring-ge-dow.’ So I recorded these rubbish words and then I turned them back into words. It’s the exact opposite of the technique used in phonetic poetry where words are changed into pure sounds. I take sounds and change them into words.”

Oh cheeky cheeky
Oh naughty sneaky
You’re so perceptive
And I wonder how you knew.

But dead finks don’t walk too well (oh no)
A bad sense of direction (oh no)
And so they stumble round in threes (oh no)
Such a strange collection.

Oh, you headless chicken
Can those poor teeth take so much kicking?
You’re always so charming
As you make your way up here.

And dead finks don’t dress too well
No discrimination
To be a zombie all the time
Requires such dedication.

“Oh please sir, will you let it go by,
’Cos I failed both tests with my legs both tied
In my place the stuff is all there
I’ve been ever so sad for a very long time.

My my, they wanted the works:
Can you this? and that? I never got a letter back
More fool me, bless my soul
More fool me, bless my soul.”

Oh perfect masters
They thrive on disasters
They all look so harmless
Till they find their way up here.

But dead finks don’t talk too well
They’ve got a shaky sense of diction
It’s not so much a living hell
It’s just a dying fiction.