During those halcyon days of AM Top-40 radio, it was possible to have a song that crossed over into many different genres because Top-40 Radio could do that. It didn't discriminate and it wasn't narrow in its vision. If you tossed it out there and the audience liked it, who cared? I will admit that, if it wasn't for Top-40 radio I probably never would have heard Buck Owens.

But as music began to change and audiences tastes were being gradually weaned away from Top-40 and into the extended-solo laden territory of FM Underground, it became harder for groups that didn't exactly fit snugly into one musical style or another to get airplay. Especially if your group had something of an identity crisis.

Case in point, The Sandpipers. Believe it or not, they were initially trying to go after the Folk-Rock market (a-la The Association, hence the snappy suits in the photo above) and out of the starting gate had their first (and biggest) hit Guantanamera which drove a lot of people crazy because it had something to do with Castro and the Cuban Revolution. But the fact of the matter was, The Sandpipers just weren't edgy enough. And in 1966 things were starting to change. A lot of bands lost their way and either broke up or went strictly commercial (like The Association, who went from Bob Dylan's One Too Many Mornings to the syrupy Never My Love in less than a year). With The Sandpipers, it was attempting to keep the momentum of the first hit going while trying to morph into something else that would have audience appeal for a second hit.

That's where tonight's track comes in. Glass came out in 1967, right about the time the music went Paisley. And rather than go back to their folk-rock roots, The Sandpipers' label A&M decided they would do best to briefly embrace the Sunshine/Pop-Psych genre made popular by groups like Sagittarius ("My World Fell Down"), and if you're familiar with that song, you will notice they borrowed from it liberally, and try their chances with that.

The end result was a track that, like Raymond Lefevre from last night, was played a lot, not identified very much and stuck firmly in your head on a purely unconscious level until the middle of most nights.

Glass was popular but it didn't chart and The Sandpipers scrapped the Sunshine/Psych format in favor of what became Middle Of The Road. And stayed like that until they finally called it a day in 1975.

It's been considered a "best of" by A&M since then and was reissued on CD in 2002. But tonight it's the 45 mono mix of Glass, and sounds considerably different than the stereo one. As was often the case with pop music in the Top-40 era, hours and days were spent making the mono mix perfect for AM radio and the Stereo mix was often an afterthought, slapped together in less than 15 minutes.

And that's today's lesson for "Why music gets that way".

Stay tuned - we're not even at the mid point yet.

I was shocked at first to hear CNN's Erick Erickson say on the air "Watching a hippie protester get tased just makes my day." He was speaking of a member of Occupy DC who was tased recently by Park police. After I recalled exactly who Erickson is, and how he referred to former Supreme Court Justice David Souter as a "goat f-cking child molester," not so shocked anymore.

Eternally disappointed in CNN, yes, but not shocked.

These are the videos that show the Occupy DC protester, Lash, being tased by the Park police. The video on the bottom of the post is the one that shows Lash suffering what appears to be a seizure as he lays face down on the pavement.

I don't think I care to know anything else about Erickson, ever.

I'm not sure if Rick Tyler just won the country for Newt or handed the primary to Mitt Romney, but on a day where a major breast cancer charity has chosen to turn their back on poor women in need of breast cancer screenings (including poor black women), this is beyond despicable. Here's the part I zeroed in on as he spoke the words:

TYLER: More people are on food stamps today because of Barack Obama, they fail in the schools, you can ask Al Sharpton, the Democrats have failed in the public schools with the African-Americans, they abort their babies, they've done nothing to lift them out of poverty.

And then he doubled down a few seconds later.

98 percent of African-Americans vote Democrat, okay? What have they gotten for it? Poor schools, poor neighborhoods, crime-ridden neighborhoods, a destruction of the family, and the Democrats want to abort their babies. That's their position. I'm not going to defend that.

Wow. Got that, folks? If you're a Democrat, you presumably want to abort black babies. Really? That's just loaded code right to the core.

Also, about that whole "they've done nothing to lift them out of poverty thing?" According to this 2011 Brandeis study, the single most destructive economic factor in African-American communities is...debt.

Economic stagnation and decline was experienced by both low-wealth whites and low-wealth African-Americans. However, African-Americans were found to be more likely to have very low levels of wealth. In fact, for every year of the study at least one in four African-American families had no assets at all. The increase in negative wealth experienced by many households at the lowest positions on the wealth distribution reveals a new dependence on credit to make ends meet. Among those with no financial assets, credit is often an emergency resource. Summing all assets and debt, one in ten African-Americans owe at least $3,600 (see Figure 3), while their debt burden in 1984 at was about half of this in real terms in 1984 ($2000). In sum, many African Americans hold more debt than assets.

Now I ask you. Whose policies would have put African-Americans in this position? Democrats who "want to abort black babies"? Or Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich's sugar daddies?

Rick Tyler is a worm of a human being who will someday see his ugly heart strangle him in the mirror. But looking beyond his disgusting words, what really makes him the liar he is are the statistics which stamp the word "LIE!" across everything that came out of his smarmy little mouth.

Joan Walsh called it the Republican id unleashed. I'd say that might start to describe it, but it's something more than that. It's as though the last 30 years of barely-veiled hate has bubbled up and is erupting like a volcano filled with the hottest, stinkiest, most disgusting offal we've seen. They're spewing it all over the nation, because they're that desperate to see our first African-American President fail.

A very special shoutout to Reverend Al Sharpton for calling it what it is and standing up for what's right. He was the only one in this segment to come out without being covered with what Tyler served and continues to serve on Twitter. Here's one reply he sent out to someone I follow:

@4lgsgood democrats are pro-abortion. It's in their platform.A disproportionate number of the babies aborted are black.

— Rick Tyler (@rickwtyler) February 1, 2012

Full segment follows below the fold. If you'd like to see what Jamil Smith, former Rachel Maddow producer currently working on the new Melissa Harris-Perry show debuting in February and Mr. Tyler discussed, I've embedded a series of tweets there, too.

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Are they having FUN yet? Open thread below....

Occupy Miami has been notified by county officials that anyone remaining in the encampment on the lawn of the Stephen P. Clark Government Center after sun set Tuesday would face arrest.

Many packed up their tents and left earlier in the day, but more people arrived come sun set to join the remaining occupiers.

In a statement, county leaders said the permit’s latest weekly renewal was denied because unsanitary conditions and safety issues.

Miami Herald:

“The Victorian Sunshine Corporation’s permit to use the West Lawn at the Stephen P. Clark Center was denied based on the unsanitary site conditions and unsafe activities, which have resulted in a number of arrests by the Miami-Dade Police Department,” said the statement from Miami-Dade spokeswoman Suzy Trutie.

Occupy Miami issued their own statement as well:

Occupy Miami issued its own statement, saying the eviction would not put an end to its efforts to shed light on issues such as wealth inequality and student loan fraud.

“Tuesday’s eviction does not signal its demise, but rather the tangible shift to an exciting, new phase in a movement continually growing stronger, larger, and more powerful. Occupy Miami could never be encompassed by a camp, since its efforts are as diverse and flexible as the occupants of Miami itself. While the County may try to evict the camp, they can never evict the idea.”

Waiting...

I don't know if there is a harder worker in the business of show than Jack White. His Nashville based Third Man Records has become an empire, and King Jack makes sure to keep the masses fed; whether it's with one of his own various bands, or a collaboration with anyone from Alicia Keys to Insane Clown posse, or singles/records for other bands that White himself produces. Yesterday he released the first single off of Blunderbuss, his forthcoming solo album, the first since the breakup of the White Stripes. Check it out.

After MSNBC's Chuck Todd suggested that Mitt Romney is going to have to offer something to the "tea party" right-wingers in the Republican base if he's going to win the Republican nomination and ultimately the general election and that they might find him acceptable if he came out with some new tax plan they found acceptable, Chris Matthews went off on a rant, but actually described pretty concisely what Mitt Romney's problem is when relating to any of the people who were showing up at those rallies. He's never had to struggle for anything in his life.

Matthews blasted Romney for his offshore tax havens, for the fact that he's perfectly content to live in an America where he's part of the ultra-rich one percent and for trying to claim he didn't inherit his wealth when it's quite obvious he was born on third base.

MATTHEWS: I don't think Mitt Romney shares that. There's nothing in this guy's face, nothing in his background to suggest a yearning, an immigrant's aspiration if you will for a better society. He's got all he wants. His family has all they want. They've gotten their take. And by the way, when you spend your money, or you're sheltering it overseas, when you're hiding your money from the tax collectors so you can have an even fatter life, you know, you don’t really identify with the person out there who's trying to scrabble along and make it in our society, who is a true patriot, left, right or center. Why are you hiding your money overseas if you are a patriot? It seems like you are part of the problem. In fact, you're one of the bad guys.

So I think he has a very, very difficult time identifying with the yearnings of the American people for a better country and he’s earned that problem. He has a problem that he's earned. He has not identified with the revolutionary struggle of this country for its last 200 years. He is not anywhere in his bones, a revolutionary, anywhere in his bones, is he dissatisfied with the America he was born to.

He was born to that weird small portion of America that had it handed to him. He says he didn’t inherit it, he inherited everything. He inherited his education, his status, governor father, his father was head of an auto company. Everything about him basically handed to him, except the money that came from that.

Now for him to say he's part of that revolutionary spirit of the tea party, he wouldn’t be caught dead at a tea party meeting, it's below him. And I think they know it. And I don't think any way, Chuck you suggest that there's a way for him to pretend he's a leader of the movement. He's not even in the movement left, right or center. He's never been in any movement. Did he ever rally against the war in Vietnam? Did he ever take off his sports coat and show a protest at anything that's ever happened in American life? No, because he's been fat and happy. He's benefited from the way things are, from the status quo... How can he pretend to be at the barricades Rachel? I don't know any consultant that can help him do that.

I could hear right-wingers heads exploding simultaneously as Matthews was speaking.

And one last note on this segment in regard to Chuck Todd's remarks. When is the last time you ever heard one of our Villagers in the media insist that Democrats had better do something for their progressive wing because they're making a lot of noise? They will never say that, but they'll always claim that the Republicans had better yield to their AstroTurf "tea party", a.k.a. the Koch brothers and their ilk, and their demands. I know Matthews was talking about those showing up at the rallies that have been duped by them, but Todd was carrying water for the leadership, which is nothing but the extreme right wing of the Republican establishment and is not grass roots.

What kind of woman supports Rick Santorum?

I've always, you know, I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created— in the sense of rape—but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you.

We don't know, so we had to imagine. Rick is still seen by some as a promising candidate, supportable by right wing fundamentalist leaders. This enthusiasm is only dampened by the fact that nobody outside of right wing fundamentalist leaders particularly gives a flying fuck about Rick Santorum.

But as his campaign flounders awkwardly along like—Oh, I dunno—a man-on-dog sexual pairing trying to jog mid-tryst, it's a good time to be reminded: There are piggish elements within our body politic who will always, always, always abuse women's rights for political gain. And that Rick Santorum's "google problem" was never just Dan Savage's brilliant gag, it has always been the things that he actually says and does.

Frothy lube may stain your futon, but Santorum stains the American political landscape—until such time as his well-established inability to win actual votes brings the Santorum slide to a messy end.

A former Catholic Priest and nonviolent civil resistance trainer was sentenced to 30 days in jail today after he was arrested during an Occupy Des Moines protest at the Iowa state capitol last night.

[Via]

Six Occupy Des Moines members are serving time in the Polk County Jail following a Sunday night protest outside the Iowa State Capitol.

At a hearing on Monday, Judge Cynthia Moisan sentenced longtime Des Moines activist and Catholic Worker Frank Cordaro to 30 days in jail after he pleaded guilty to three criminal trespassing charges. Protester Eddie Bloomer, also a Catholic Worker, was sentenced to 25 days in jail after he pleaded guilty to three trespassing charges and a failure to appear in court.

Both Cordaro and Bloomer’s charges result from Sunday’s protest at the Capitol and from Occupy Des Moines protests leading up to the Iowa Caucus in December.

In total, 6 out of the 11 people arrested at People's Park at the Iowa state capitol yesterday were sentenced to between 5-30 days in jail:

Frank Cordaro, sentenced to 30 days

Eddie Bloomer, 14 days

Christopher Jordan Gudenkauf, 5 days

Brian Latimer, 5 days

Daniel Bragg, 5 days

Ryan Laudick, 5 days

Kaylynn Lee Strain, bonded out

John Franklin, Jessica Reznicek, Julie Brown, and Leslie Davis all posted bail or were otherwise released.

There have been 6,436 arrests at occupy events across the country since September 17, according to www.occupyarrests.com, including 116 in Des Moines and Urbandale.

Occupy Des Moines is gearing up for the "American Spring" which kicks-off nationwide on May 1, International Workers Day. A "No war with Iran" rally is scheduled for 11am Saturday at Nollen Plaza.

From the man who hates Europe so much he hid out there to avoid going to Vietnam and who has two degrees from Harvard, we got more of the Barack Obama is a European Socialist-loving, elitist, Harvard professor who hates America during his victory speech in Florida.

This man has exactly zero self-awareness to be able to give a speech like this.

Romney came pretty close to just recycling the same dishonest speech he gave after his victory in New Hampshire.

Full text of Romney's prepared remarks below the fold for anyone who can't or doesn't want to watch the video.

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