Sarah Palin, Fox News and The Tea Stooges

The universe is finally in order. The circle has been completed. America will survive because the three elements of conservative right wing craziness are now in symbiosis. First we had Fox News, the “unfair and imbalanced” network which prides itself on promoting non-fact based opinion as news. Next we had Sarah Palin, the confirmed lying, uneducated, language-challenged, manic depressant former ex-quitting governor of Alaska. Then we had the formation of the Tea Baggers, that crazy bunch of racist, hate spewing, paranoid, spelling-challenged, directionless know-nothings. The problem for these three misguided entities however, was that they were all independently orbiting their own inner moron with no real atmosphere to bind them as one. Not anymore, the problem has been solved.

First, Fox News began promoting every Tea Bagger event that it could find or imagine. The network’s hosts such as Glenn Beck began referring to those lunatics as “true patriots”. Fox even went so far as to have its employees attend Tea Bagging events under the false suggestion that they were there only to cover the event. That charade was exposed however, when the Fox employees were filmed by other networks actually taking the stage and inciting the crazy protesters. Hence, Fox News and the Tea Baggers had joined forces.

Next we had Sarah Palin constantly praising Fox News and its hosts while simultaneously bashing every other media outlet that she could name. Luckily for some of them however, Katie Couric revealed that Palin was incapable of naming any brands of print media. Palin’s next step was to begin praising the Tea Baggers and encouraging them with the big lie known as “death panels”. Finally, Sarah Palin has accepted the invitation to be the keynote speaker at the first Tea Party Convention in Nashville this February. It remains to be seen however, if she will actually attend the event because she has a habit of pulling no-shows or dare we say, quitting things (but that is a story for a different post).

Finally, things came full circle this week when it was announced that Sarah Palin has accepted a position to appear as a guest host on Fox News. The stars have aligned. Palin, Beck, Hannity and an assortment of other misguided gasbags like Ann “The Man” Coulter and Michelle “Anchor Baby” Malkin can go on encouraging the Tea Baggers in the name of fair and balanced journalism and Palin and the network can instruct the Tea Baggers to promote Palin for President in 2012. The Tea Baggers will in turn continue to get all of their misinformation from Fox News. All of this of course, is being financed by Rupert Murdoch.

Let’s celebrate by looking at various photos of this insane contingent. After all, isn’t a picture worth a thousand words?

Morans?

Now that's classy.

Hmmm?

Some witty Tea-Party-Crashers!

Please remember to click on the song link below to familiarize yourselves with the tune and to have more fun singing along with today’s song parody.

It’s My Party song link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRbsz1Ha7Zo

IT’S OUR TEA PARTY

(sung to the Lesley Gore song “It’s My Party”)

It’s our tea party, and we’ll cry if we want to
Lie if we want to, die if we want to
You would cry too if you were in our zoo

Nobody knows just what planet we’re from
We have all lost our minds
But we will follow the plan
And misspell all of our signs

It’s our tea party, and we’ll cry if we want to
Lie if we want to, die if we want to
You would cry too if you looked like we do

Playin’ the race card because we’re all white
Swastikas define our style
When Glenn Beck’s eyes get teary
That just makes all of us smile

It’s our tea party, and we’ll cry if we want to
Lie if we want to, die if we want to
You would cry too if you were in our zoo

(musical interlude)

Our Sarah Palin behaves just like a whore
She’s a mean ding-a-ling
She tells us nothing but lies
We believe everything

It’s our tea party, and we’ll cry if we want to
Lie if we want to, die if we want to
You would cry too if you looked like we do

Oh, It’s our tea party, and we’ll cry if we want to
Lie if we want to, die if we want to
You would cry too if you were in our zoo

Oh, It’s our tea party, and we’ll cry if we want to
Lie if we want to, die if we want to…

Tuesday Night Music Byte

Love was an American rock group of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were led by singer, songwriter and guitarist Arthur Lee and the group’s second songwriter, guitarist Bryan MacLean. One of the first racially diverse American pop bands, their music reflected different influences, combining elements of rock and roll, garage rock, folk and psychedelia. Love started playing the L.A. clubs in April 1965 and became a popular act. At this time, they were playing extended numbers such as “Revelation” (originally titled “John Lee Hooker”) and getting the attention of such contemporaries as the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds. The band lived communally in a house once owned by horror actor Bela Lugosi, and their first two albums included photos shot in the garden of that house.

Their musical reputation largely rests on two albums issued in 1967, Da Capo and Forever Changes. Da Capo, released in January of that year, included rockers like “Stephanie Knows Who” and “7 and 7 Is,” and melodic songs such as “¡Qué Vida!” and “She Comes in Colors.” Gone were the Byrds influences and jangly guitars, replaced by melodically airy art-songs with predominantly jazz and classical influences. Some critics derided it as a one-side album, with the six songs on Side One contrasting markedly with the lack of focus displayed on the other side, which was devoted entirely to the 19-minute “Revelation.” Cantrelli and Pfisterer soon quit the band, leaving it as a five-piece once again.

Forever Changes, released in November 1967, is a suite of songs using acoustic guitars, strings and horns that was recorded while the band was falling apart as the result of various abuses. Producer Bruce Botnick originally planned to record the entire album with session musicians backing Lee and MacLean but after two tracks had been recorded in this way the rest of the band were stung into producing the discipline required to complete the rest of the album in only 64 hours. Writer Richard Meltzer, in his The Aesthetics of Rock, comments on Love’s “orchestral moves,” “post-doper word contraction cuteness” and Lee’s vocal style that serves as a “reaffirmation of Johnny Mathis.” Forever Changes included one modest hit single, the MacLean-written “Alone Again Or”, while “You Set the Scene” went on to receive airplay from some progressive rock radio stations. By this stage, Love were far more popular in the UK, where the album reached #24, than in their home country, where it could only reach #154. Love did, however, have a strong following in the U.S. at the time among critics.

MacLean, suffering from heroin addiction, soon left the band, as did all the other members except Lee. MacLean later emerged as a Contemporary Christian artist. Echols and Forssi also experienced the ravages of heroin addiction and disappeared from the scene. Arthur Lee, as the only remaining member, convened a new lineup and continued recording as Love. The reconstituted version of Love, which included Jay Donnellan and Gary Rowles on guitars, Frank Fayad on bass, and George Suranovich on drums, played in a blues-rock style very different from the band’s previous line-up. Three albums were released by various permutations of this lineup: Four SailOut Here (1969), and False Start (1970). The latter featured a guest appearance by Jimi Hendrix. Arthur Lee released the solo album Vindicator in 1972, followed by a final official Love album, Reel to Real (1974), recorded by Lee and session musicians. Love was finally discontinued in the late 1970s, and various plans to reunite various Love lineups in the following years did not come to fruition. Lee reemerged with the one-off single “Girl on Fire” in 1994.

After spending six years in prison from 1995 to 2001 for firearms offenses, Arthur Lee began to play Love’s classic songs in concert by reuniting with the members of Baby Lemonade. In the early 2000s, co-founder of Love and original guitarist Johnny Echols rejoined Lee, in this line-up and performed as “Love with Arthur Lee and Johnny Echols.” This reformed group toured for several years, frequently performing Forever Changes in its entirety.

Ken Forssi died of a suspected brain tumor in his home state of Florida on January 10, 1998, at age 54. Bryan MacLean died in Los Angeles of a massive heart attack at age 52 on December 25, 1998, while having dinner with a young fan who was researching a book about the band. Arthur Lee died in Memphis, Tenn., on August 3, 2006, of complications from leukemia at age 61.

Please enjoy Love performing two songs from the Forever Changes album, “Alone Again Or” and “A House Is Not A Hotel”.