The Lulus - The Lottery Song

A nice cover of one of my favorite Nilsson-penned songs. There's a bit of goofiness after the song ends.

The Monkees - What Am I Doing Hangin' Round

One of my favorite songs by the Monkees. It was written by Michael Martin Murphey, later famous for "Wildfire" among others.

Krugman on "Rugged Individualists"

The Bundy effect.

At the heart of the standoff was a perversion of the concept of freedom, which for too much of the right has come to mean the freedom of the wealthy to do whatever they want, without regard to the consequences for others.

Start with the narrow issue of land use. For historical reasons, the federal government owns a lot of land in the West; some of that land is open to ranching, mining and so on. Like any landowner, the Bureau of Land Management charges fees for the use of its property. The only difference from private ownership is that by all accounts the government charges too little — that is, it doesn’t collect as much money as it could, and in many cases doesn’t even charge enough to cover the costs that these private activities impose. In effect, the government is using its ownership of land to subsidize ranchers and mining companies at taxpayers’ expense.

Finnish Lullaby

Hat tip to Echidne at eschatonblog.

nada is just around the corner

Damn. Second Saturday in a row I've forgotten to post. Can you forgive me? All three of you?

Krugman on the Conservative Response to Piketty

About what you'd expect.

 For the past couple of decades, the conservative response to attempts to make soaring incomes at the top into a political issue has involved two lines of defense: first, denial that the rich are actually doing as well and the rest as badly as they are, but when denial fails, claims that those soaring incomes at the top are a justified reward for services rendered. Don’t call them the 1 percent, or the wealthy; call them “job creators.”

But how do you make that defense if the rich derive much of their income not from the work they do but from the assets they own? And what if great wealth comes increasingly not from enterprise but from inheritance?

Harry Nilsson - This Could Be The Night

The clip starts with a snippet of another song, "Superman,"  by Nilsson, but then pivots into "This Could Be The Night." TCBTN is a curiosity because it was co-written with Phil Spector sometime in the early to mid sixties. It shows what a careful student of songwriting Nilsson was, both because he was willing to apprentice with an established figure like Spector, and because the style is so different from his better-known work. Might have been a hit for someone, but in the end wasn't.