OH, AND ONE LAST POINT (FROM DANGEROUS MINDS)

Thanks to my older son Miles for hipping me to this scientific perspective on those like Rush and the deleted one et. al.

AND ABOUT RUSH

This blog has become a little too heavy on the political side and not enough on the art and music and movies and books and all that good creative stuff side. But just because people have asked, my response to the Limbaugh ridiculousness is it's about time he stepped in sh*t and finally came out smelling like it.

I used to call his show back when it first began to be subsidized (that's right, look it up), by the big money rightwingers who got him into stations by giving it to them for free etc. and often in the beginning I would get through to the screener, BUT, as soon as they found out what I intended to say I would either be cut off or put on hold until the show ended and never get on.

After a year or so of that I stopped trying because it was clear he didn't want to argue, he wanted to bully and dictate taste and opinion for those malleable enough to fall for his lies and misinformation in the service of his own greed and that of the corporate and wealthy interests he serves.

WILL THEY RETRACT THIS BIG LIE?

So it turns out for the first time in years the USA is exporting more oil than it's importing. We are using less foreign oil than under Bush/Cheney and exporting more. So the big question is, will anyone on the Republican and Tea Party rightwing side acknowledge that Obama has achieved what they've been screaming about and criticizing Obama and the Democrats for, i.e. making us more dependent on foreign oil now that that has been proven to be incorrect?

Or...will they continue to lie about that?

Whatcha think?

MAUREEN DOWD IN TODAY'S TIMES (MAYBE THE BEST COMMENT ON THE WHOLE RUSH-CALLING-CONGRESSIONAL-WITNESS-NAMES-RIDICULOUSNESS)

Here. [Be sure to read both pages.]

TIMELY QUOTES

"Santorum said that the Affordable Health Care Act will add trillions to the debt. Romney said so, too. And Gingrich said that President Obama favors legalizing infanticide. None of these things are true. Like victory, lies have many fathers."  —Hendrik Hertzberg The New Yorker Mar. 5, 2012

"On the snowy Tuesday when the petitions [to recall Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin], weighing three thousand pounds, were filed with the Accountability Board, in Madison, Scott Walker was on Park Avenue, in New York, attending a five-thousand-dollar-a-couple fund-raiser for the anti-recall effort. The event was hosted by Maurice Greenberg, the billionaire former chairman of American International Group, the insurance company that was rescued from bankruptcy in 2008 by the largest federal bailout for a single institution in United States history—$182 billion."  —William Finnegan The New Yorker Mar. 5, 2012

[The irony, of course, is that Walker accused the petitioners for his recall of being supported by people outside Wisconsin, and that the Greenberg bailout was under Bush/Cheney.]

SANJIBAN SELLEW R.I.P.

No need to write any more about Sanjiban Sellew's unique contribution to the lives of his family friends and fans, I was one of the latter, than I just did not that many days ago here. And added to here. He will be missed.

DAVY JONES R.I.P.

I never met the man but he certainly was at the heart of what made the Monkees popular and am sad to see him go and only 66.

As those who read this blog know, I try to bring my personal experiences as a musician, poet, writer, actor and political activist, among other things, into my daily posts as much as possible to give a reason to write it and I hope for someone else to find it interesting.

So my condolences go out to Jones' family and friends and fans, of which I was one. But I must admit I didn't really pay much attention to The Monkees when they first came on the scene, nor did I think much about their music. I knew of them originally because a guy from my hometown, from the hill where the wealthy lived, was one of the group that created The Monkees as an American TV version of The Beatles. His name was Burt Schneider and he passed not long ago himself.

Burt eventually became a film producer and I got to know him a bit in my Hollywood days. He was friends with my second wife, if I remember correctly, but I hung around with him in the years when she and I were no longer together at parties and possible movie projects that nothing ever came of.

Initially I found the idea of The Monkees an insult to what I thought the Beatles had and were accomplishing. But then, I resisted The Beatles at first too, until I worked out a few of their early tunes on piano (like "Do You Want to Know a Secret") and realized they were really great song writers. I've been way ahead of the curve on many things, but way behind it on some others, including The Monkees.

I didn't really get how great they actually were until my older son, when he was in a band during his high school years called The Dreadsteins ("Rasta from Jerusalem" they claimed, my son wasn't Jewish like some of his band mates but did have dreadlocks for several years) and did their reggae versions, if I remember correctly, of "Stepping Stone" and "Last Train to Clarksville."

Whatever Monkee tunes my son Miles' band did back then, again, way too many years late, it helped me see how great The Monkees were at helping create and put over songs that were better than I originally noticed.

My only other conact with any of The Monkees, besides seeing them here and there around L.A. when I lived there, was going up against one of them in the early '90s for the role of a wealthy gay philanthropist in an independent movie. I figured I'd never get it because of my competition's Monkee fame, but I did get it, and then the film was hardly released and as far as I know isn't available anywhere.

I think that Monkee was Michael Nesbith, whose mother, I was told, (I think by him actually) was a secretary when she invented white out. Whoever he was, he was a totally unpretentious sweet man. We were kept waiting and brought back, as I remember it, so had time to either ignore each other and prepare or chat and get to know each other, which is what we did and was rare in my experience.

I got the idea from watching Micky Dolenz on CNN that he's a sweet unpretentious guy as well, and that all of The Monkees were. Which is what was so appealing to their audiences I'd guess. But it was Davy Jones who everyone agrees was the main reason the teenage girls swooned and screamed and watched the TV show that made these talented guys stars, first by controlling every move they made and then by letting them do their own music which proved to be more lasting then a lot of folks would have predicted at the time, including me.