I thought Meade was playing "For What It's Worth" because I'd written a post this morning with the title "What's that sound?"

My post was about that goofball sound Cardi B made when she was interviewing Joe Biden. I was thinking about the song as I wrote the post...

I think it's time we stop
Children, what's that sound?
Everybody look what's going down

... because the question "what's that sound?" is so familiar from that old song.

But that's not at all why Meade was playing the song. Unbeknownst to me, that song was played at the Democratic Convention last night! They brought out old Steven Stills and paired him with trendy Billy Porter:

Thanks @theebillyporter + Steven Stills for helping us close night one of the #DemConvention! 🎵

So much more to come! Come back tomorrow ⬇️https://t.co/NEJtNqxFPV pic.twitter.com/vqXfLCUVfk

— 2020 #DemConvention 🇺🇸 (@DemConvention) August 18, 2020

Were people listening to the lyrics?

A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and a-carryin’ signs
Mostly say, "Hooray for our side"

Well, that's a convention, isn't it? Hooray for our side.

Perhaps the most striking line in the song is: "Paranoia strikes deep/Into your life it will creep." That's why you need to stop and pay attention — Everybody look what's going down.

"Democrats Have Abandoned Civil Liberties/The Blue Party’s Trump-era Embrace of Authoritarianism Isn’t Just Wrong, it’s a Fatal Political Mistake."

Writes Matt Taibbi (at taibbi.substack.com):

Whatever one’s opinion of [Michael] Flynn, his relations with Turkey, his “Lock her up!” chants, his haircut, or anything, this case was never about much. There’s no longer pretense that prosecution would lead to the unspooling of a massive Trump-Russia conspiracy, as pundits once breathlessly expected. In fact, news that Flynn was cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller inspired many of the “Is this the beginning of the end for Trump?” stories that will someday fill whole chapters of Journalism Fucks Up 101 textbooks....

The Flynn case was built on surveillance gathered under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, a program that seems to have been abused on a massive scale by both Democratic and Republican administrations.... Anyone who bothers to look back will find hints at how this program might have been misused. In late 2015, Obama officials bragged to the Wall Street Journal they’d made use of FISA surveillance involving “Jewish-American groups” as well as “U.S. lawmakers” in congress, all because they wanted to more effectively “counter” Israeli opposition to Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran....

Democrats clearly believe constituents will forgive them for abandoning constitutional principles, so long as the targets of official inquiry are figures like Flynn or Paul Manafort or Trump himself. In the process, they’ve raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent. Blue-staters have gone from dismissing constitutional concerns as Trumpian ruse to sneering at them, in the manner of French aristocrats, as evidence of proletarian mental defect.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where the almost mandatory take of pundits is that any protest of lockdown measures is troglodyte death wish....

Much more at the link. Well done.

Democrats have "raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent." Why does the new generation allow itself to be raised by a political party intent on expanding its power? What makes people grow up to be followers? That's not the way we Boomers experienced youth! And yet somehow we Boomers grew up to raise kids to follow and to feel contempt for the values that we thought were fueling our rebellion against our elders.

"[Stephen] Stills may be hobbled by arthritis—backstage he bumps fists rather than shakes hands with fans..."

"... he has carpal tunnel and residual pain from a long-ago broken hand, which affects his playing—and he is nearly deaf, but his performance life has continued. Drugs and alcohol may have dented him somewhat, forming a kind of carapace over the youthful sensitivity and cockiness one often saw in the face of the young Stills. Some might infer by looking at the spry James Taylor or Mick Jagger that heroin is less hard on the body than cocaine and booze, which perhaps tear down the infrastructure. ('Stills doesn’t know how to do drugs properly,' Keith Richards once said.) But one has to hand it to a rock veteran who still wants to get on stage and make music even when his youthful beauty and once-tender, husky baritone have dimmed. It shows allegiance to the craft, to the life, to the music. It risks a derisive sort of criticism as well as an assault on nostalgia."

The novelist Lorrie Moore writes a book review (NYRB) for a biography of Stephen Stills. 

I'm interested in reading the review because Lorrie Moore wrote it. I don't particularly care about Stephen Stills, but if Moore wants to describe him, I'm up for hearing about his carapace and his infrastructure. And I do love this one song...



... which I believe somebody brought up in one of the comments sections this morning. Let's see. Ah, yes. Here it is: pacwest said: