Friday, July 31, 2015

Stanley Jordan - Eleanor Rigby

 Live at NAMM 2015.

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Muddy Waters with Buddy Guy - Wee Baby Blues (Oh Wee Baby)

Happy birthday to Buddy Guy. This was recorded in 1963.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Tommy Johnson - Cool Drink Of Water Blues

I've posted this before but the clip has disappeared. Recorded in 1928.

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band - East-West

Today would have been Mike Bloomfield's seventy-second birthday. He takes the final solo on this track, the one that raises everything to another level. Butterfield never played this song again after Bloomfield left the band.

Saturday, July 25, 2015

Friday, July 24, 2015

Sunday, July 19, 2015

Saturday, July 18, 2015

Steely Dan - Babylon Sisters

I've posted this before, but a while ago, so it's ripe for the plucking.

Friday, July 17, 2015

G.F.Handel - Water Music

First performed two hundred and ninety-eight years ago today. John Eliot Gardiner conducts the English Baroque Soloists.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Main Title Theme (Billy) - Bob Dylan

From Dylan's soundtrack to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. The real Billy was shot to death by the real Pat on this date in 1881.

Sunday, July 12, 2015

Thursday, July 9, 2015

Greenhouse on the "Liberal" Supreme Court

Longtime Supreme Court journalist Linda Greenhouse has gradually become one of the sanest of the better-known inside-the-Beltway journalists, bucking the trend to hew to the center-right line and instead actually speaking sense. Here's an example.

The court typically takes cases in order to resolve a conflict among the lower courts, making a grant of review an essentially neutral act from which little can be concluded. Rather, it is cases like King v. Burwell and the Fair Housing Act case that tell the tale. On neither question was there a circuit conflict. Affirming the lower court decisions was a vote for the status quo at least as much as for a “liberal” result. That was especially true in the Fair Housing case. Not only the Fifth Circuit, one of the country’s most conservative courts, but every other circuit had ruled that the Fair Housing Act did not require proof of intentional discrimination. For the Supreme Court to have gone the other way, as most people expected (or else why did the court take the case?) would have manifested right-wing activism in the extreme.

Monday, July 6, 2015

Krugman on the Greek Referendum

The basics.

The truth is that Europe’s self-styled technocrats are like medieval doctors who insisted on bleeding their patients — and when their treatment made the patients sicker, demanded even more bleeding. A “yes” vote in Greece would have condemned the country to years more of suffering under policies that haven’t worked and in fact, given the arithmetic, can’t work: austerity probably shrinks the economy faster than it reduces debt, so that all the suffering serves no purpose. The landslide victory of the “no” side offers at least a chance for an escape from this trap.