My homage to Halloween tonight. And frankly, why not? A nice song about the Bermuda Triangle, played by one of the undisputed High Priests of Psychedelia Roky Erickson, whose 60's legend as a member of The 13th Floor Elevators firmly places him in the annals as one of the true innovators and practitioners of the melted mind.

Bermuda is the A-side of a one-off single put out by Rhino Records in 1977. It's not really clear if it was destined to be part of a larger volume of work, but this track stands on its own quite nicely.

If you aren't familiar with Roky Erickson or his work with The 13th Floor Elevators, by all means check it out.

The whole world is waiting.

A little bit of the fun from today's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear with peace trains, crazy trains and love trains. Apparently the appearance by Yusuf Islam formerly known as Cat Stevens didn't sit too well with some conservatives.

TPM has more -- Cat Stevens Appearance At Sanity Rally Rankles Right Winger. The "right winger" they're talking about that got his panties in a bunch over Islam's appearance is our old buddy Michael Goldfarb who David posted about here and here.

From TPM as well, here are some pictures their readers submitted of the rally.

Time for your weekly podcast with The Professional Left, our own Driftglass and Bluegal. Have a great weekend everyone, and happy birthday to Driftglass.

You can listen to past editions or make a donation to help keep these going at http://professionalleft.blogspot.com/. And here is the article from Esquire magazine which was discussed during the podcast.

How to Balance the Federal Budget (in Three Days)

In the Republican response to President Obama's Weekly Address, John Boehner thinks the country has amnesia. He said the Republicans are offering a "new way forward" this election, or in other words, the same tired crap we've been repeating but don't mean for the last two years, and we want our tax cuts for the rich dammit.

I guess John Boehner thinks no one noticed that Republicans never care about deficits until a Democratic President gets elected. These people have no interest in governing. They think government should be used for their and their campaign donors personal piggy banks.

BOEHNER: Hello. I’m John Boehner.

Before I served in Congress, I ran a small business here in Ohio, and I saw first-hand how politicians in Washington can make it harder for small employers to meet a payroll and create jobs.

In the final days of the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama promised to ‘change this country and change the world.’

Well I don’t know about the world, but here at home, Americans haven’t experienced the change President Obama promised. One in ten of our fellow citizens is out of work. Our national debt has grown by $3 trillion Trust in government has fallen to an all-time low.

These problems didn’t start under President Obama. But instead of fixing them, his policies have made them worse. A ‘stimulus’ spending spree that created jobs in China and El Salvador, while millions of Americans lost their jobs here. A job-killing national energy tax. A government takeover of health care.

All these things have combined to create massive uncertainty for small businesses, the engine of job creation in America, while our children face a future clouded by debt.

Americans are demanding a new way forward in Washington – an approach that neither party has tried.

It starts with cutting spending instead of increasing it; making government smaller and more accountable; and helping small businesses get back to creating jobs again.

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I can imagine that this clip scared the crap out of some parents when it originally aired. Screamin' Jay always brought the wow. Be safe tonight and watch out for monsters.

And don't forget our sister site Newstalgia has for its Backstage Weekend concert Pretty Things Live in London, 1973.

I'm sure President Obama knows full well he's not going to get any cooperation from Republicans, but I can understand why he's already laying the ground work for making them look like the obstructionists they are when they continue blocking anything that might get our economy back on track after the mid-terms.

We've got a rough two years ahead of us when we can't afford any more of their political games. Even if they don't win back either house of Congress, they're going to gain enough seats to grind everything to a dead halt.

From The White House blog -- Weekly Address: President Obama Calls on GOP Leadership to Put Aside Partisan Politics and Focus on Strengthening the Economy:

In his weekly address, President Obama called the recent comments by the GOP leadership, which put scoring political points over solving the problems facing the country, “troubling,” and asked Democrats and Republicans to work together to move the country forward. Regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s elections, leaders on both sides of the aisle owe it to the American people to put aside politics and work together on a number of issues that have traditionally had bipartisan support, like tax breaks for middle-class families and investing in infrastructure.

Transcript below the fold.

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Lest we all forget, it was a scant 8 years ago the Republican party kept control of the House and took control of the Senate during the mid-term elections of 2002. So we had a Republican President and a Republican majority in the House and Senate - something of a mandate, wouldn't you say?

And suddenly the Democrats were labeled as the Party Of No and the ones with no ideas. Funny what happens when the shoe suddenly winds up on the other foot. Majority Speaker Dennis "I-have-never-been-gay" Hastert had a few telling, and somewhat ironic comments on the day after, during his interview with NPR's Bob Edwards from Morning Edition and their wrap up of the previous days activities

Dennis Hastert: “I think the Healthcare issue is an important issue and I think we may certainly move forward on pharmaceuticals again, but Healthcare is something I t hink we really need to focus on.”

Bob Edwards (NPR): “What do you think happened to the Democrats this election?”

Dennis Hastert: “Well, ya know I don’t think they had a message. And you know, they had a new message or trying to find a silver bullet every week and nothin’ stuck. And, you know they had just been against everything and hadn’t been for anything and I think that’s hurt ‘em.”

Edwards: “Well, with the election over maybe they can get a little more aggressive.”

Hastert: “Well, we’ll see. I hope that we would be able to join hands and work with them on some things.”

And there was Trent Lott's bon mot:

Trent Lott: “We can do things to help people with their retirement security. We can finally, hopefully quit just talking about helping elderly poor that need prescription drugs and get something done. We can get a Homeland Security Department done. It won’t be easy. The Senate moves very slowly and quite often you need 60 votes to make anything happen, but I accept the challenge.”

The irony.

Neil Cavuto interviewed former welfare recipient and now wingnut welfare recipient Star Parker who is running for the US House of Representatives in California. What's sad is her incoherent nonsense actually represents what the Republicans are running on this year, Social Security privatization. And the voters are going to love an "independent thinking" Republican that promotes this platform. There's nothing "independent" about it and if they think the voters are going to like this, they're sadly mistaken.

That won't stop them from coming on the air day after day pretending we need to hand our social safety net over to Wall Street though in order to "save it" though.

Parker: Well we know that Republicans are going to sweep the House and perhaps even the Senate because people are looking at what Nancy Pelosi has done which is build out bigger government and they are frustrated. We've already seen the damage of large government. We can look into any inner city in this country and see the damage of big government.

And even union workers now are getting pink slips. We're falling apart in California and we're falling apart as a nation, so she's... the referendum is on Nancy Pelosi.

Cavuto: But it's not necessarily a love hug for you and the Republicans right? I mean they just hate you guys less pretty much, right?

Parker: Well, that might be true. It just depends on what type of Republican is sitting in that room when we have our orientation. I'm going to win my district, the 37th here in California. So it just depends if it's an independent thinker, if it's somebody that perhaps has looked out at this type of debt and said we cannot go this way any longer and we're going to be willing to make the hard choices, then they will fall in love with Republicans.

Cavuto: When you say hard choices, so what are they? […] I always hear there are hard choices... like what?

Parker: Hard choices like the collapse of Social Security. Hard choices like the collapse of Medicare. (crosstalk)

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Another election, another round of Republican dirty tricks and voter intimidation. And Fox's Jon Scott, supposedly part of their "straight news" coverage as opposed to what they admit is "opinion" does his best here to carry some water for them and try to convince everyone up is down and black is white. It's not these teabagger "poll watchers" intimidating voters that are the problem. No, they're the victims now according to the King Street Patriots' leader Catherine Engelbrecht and her attorney Jonathan Saenz.

Heaven forbid those evil minority voters they're targeting got sick of these bullies breathing down their necks while they're trying to vote. How dare they! Apparently Engelbrecht isn't too happy with the local ABC affiliate down in Houston's reporting on her group's activities either. She wrote this little screed a couple of days ago (warning, goes to Breitbart's Big Government site) -- Houston ABC Affiliate: Mouthpiece of the Left; Sends Dem Scare Message to Tea Party Poll Watchers

Here's a reminder about this lovely little group's activities -- Voter Registration Group Receives Threatening Emails After Being Targeted by Tea Party Patriots. The good news out of this is that the Department of Justice is going to get involved, but whether their presence will be enough to counter this sort of activity remains to be been.

Here's more from TPM on that -- Justice Department To Monitor Polls In Harris County, Sheriff Joe's Turf:

Harris County, Texas and Maricopa County, Arizona are among the 30 jurisdictions in which federal observers will monitor polling place activities or Justice Department personnel will monitor the election, DOJ announced late Friday.

The Tea Party-backed group True the Vote, the Texas Democratic Party, Rep. Shelia Jackson Lee and even the New Black Panther Party have traded accusations of voter intimidation in Harris County and called for federal elections monitors to be deployed to the area.

Maricopa County is the territory of controversial anti-illegal immigration Sheriff Joe Arpaio. He sent out an e-mail asking supporters to "help [him] STOP ILLEGALS FROM STEALING THIS ELECTION!" and has also been under investigation for allegations of discrimination in his enforcement of immigration law and treatment of prisoners.

The Civil Rights Division of DOJ will deploy over 400 federal observers and department personnel to those 30 jurisdictions in 18 states for Tuesday's election.

Back when the FCC was . . .well, the FCC, Chairman Frank McNinch wielded a rather heavy club when it came to enforcing codes, pulling licenses and posting fines.To say he went overboard in a few places was probably an understatement - the most famous being his feud with NBC over an episode of a variety program featuring then-sex siren Mae West in a double entendre laced skit on the subject of Adam and Eve. NBC nearly lost its license to broadcast and Frank McNinch was a man to be feared. Much the same way Will Hays reeked havoc with the film industry, McNinch was a strict enforcer of morality - sometimes to the point of absurdity.

But that was the FCC back then, brought about as the result of a public communications medium in its infancy which ran the very real risk of abuse and manipulation. That was 1938. And this was Frank McNinch:

Frank McNinch: “For most of us, radio has become a vital part of our daily lives. It grows more and more important every day. Yet a host of questions surround it about which few persons altogether agree. There is not even unanimity about the value of radio as we have it today. There are millions who love it for the entertainment value and its accomplishments, which, so short a time ago, we would have called miraculous. They smile indulgently at its imperfections. Many others decry it, complain loudly and bitterly of its being too often trivial and ineffective, or that it is being abused or misused.”

Certainly a far cry from how it is today; a deregulated, ransacked shell of its former self. Sometimes things go from one extreme to the other before a semblance of balance comes about. Perhaps that's wishful thinking.