Rex Murphy’s passionate appeal for Canada to honour Réné Levesque.
Watch:
Archives for April 2017
One year since his passing: The Day Prince’s Guitar Wept the Loudest
Look, I’m not sure if “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is one of the greatest terrible songs ever written, or perhaps one of the worst great songs, but one night in 2004 something magical happened as an all-star group was joined by one of the great guitarists in history. As George Harrison was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Prince joined the band – and completely demolished Harrison’s signature Beatles song. Love the song or hate it – this performance is truly magical.
It’s now a year since Prince died, and amongst the hosannas is this amazing oral history of the event from The New York Times.
His three-minute guitar solo is a Prince milestone, a chance to see him outside of the purple-tinted (for once, he is dressed in red) context of his own meticulous studio craft. This was Prince the Lead Guitarist — those chops apparent on songs like “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?,” “Electric Chair” and “When Doves Cry” were given free range to roam. And when he tossed his instrument into the air at the very end of the song, it never appeared to land; it was almost as if Mr. Harrison had grabbed it himself
Source: The Day Prince’s Guitar Wept the Loudest – The New York Times
It’s true – the guitar never does come down. Watch:
Josh Marshall: Feel The Propaganda, Feel the Hate
Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo about the core deceptions at the heart of the administration’s twin crime and immigration policy stances.
We’re familiar with President Trump’s dystopian vision of an America in chaos, preyed on by foreigners and awash in citizens violated by feral criminals and “illegals.” Through last year’s campaign and into this year, Trump has repeatedly lied about the national crime rate, murder rates and much more. Here though is a case where anti-immigrant policies continue to be justified by at least deliberately misleading statements and what can only be called incitement. […]
There’s not much more to say. If this were one deception it might be dismissed. But of course it is not. It is a single illustrative example of deception as policy, one peep in a symphony of lies that President Trump, Attorney General Sessions and all their fellow travelers and appointees use regularly to sell their anti-immigrant crackdown and attempt to return to the ‘tough on crime’ policies of the past.
Lizza: The Continuing Fallout from Trump and Nunes’s Fake Scandal
Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker on the scrambling reaction to unprovoked and made-up Tweets from President Trump about how he had supposedly been surveilled the the previous administration. Strong stuff.
The intelligence source told me that he knows, “from talking to people in the intelligence community,” that “the White House said, ‘We are going to mobilize to find something to justify the President’s tweet that he was being surveilled.’ They put out an all-points bulletin”—a call to sift through intelligence reports—“and said, ‘We need to find something that justifies the President’s crazy tweet about surveillance at Trump Tower.’ And I’m telling you there is no way you get that from those transcripts, which are about as plain vanilla as can be.” (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)
Source: The Continuing Fallout from Trump and Nunes’s Fake Scandal – The New Yorker
