Topiary Animals

For your consideration:

• While perusing Brilliant at Breakfast, I followed a link leading to Tom Degan's The Rant, which celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' first studio session.  That reminded me of my own poor story (hearing their first song, unidentified, on Radio Luxembourg), which in turn brought memories of the other two songs I remember hearing, one of which was equally mysterious and was not resolved by the band coming to the US with the rest of their output.  So I googled, and lo!  it turns out that the songwriters were quite prolific and well-known.  The song was "Poof" by Kenny Lynch.  So now I know.
• Via skippy, more misogyny from Joe Walsh.  No, not that one (a point also made at the linked article.  Joe [the real one] might want to talk to his publicist).
• "School choice" is "vouchers" by another name:

  When given a clear choice, voters across the United States have consistently opposed school vouchers. Between 1966 and 2000, state ballot initiatives to allow public funding for private schools were rejected 24 out of 25 times. This dismal record led the pro-voucher strategists to rebrand the movement as “school choice” and as beneficial to public schools. In 2002, Dick DeVos suggested to a Heritage Foundation audience that the school choice movement should conceal its conservative roots. He advised that “properly communicated, properly constructed, [school choice] can cut across a lot of historic boundaries, be they partisan, ethnic, or otherwise.”

  (Article found via an old post of mine linking to a progressive blog which had this article on a sidebar. Is serendipity not wonderful?)
  
• Robert Reich last week had an opinion piece at SFGate.com which apparently I didn't catch.  It's about how the Republican falsehood machinery works:

  The answer is that the Republican Party has developed three means of bypassing the mainstream media and its fact-checkers.
  The first is by repeating big lies so often in TV spots - financed by a mountain of campaign money - that the public can no longer recall (if it ever knew) that the mainstream media and its fact-checkers have disproven them.
  
  [...]
  
  The second means the GOP has developed to protect its mistruths is discrediting the mainstream media - asserting that it's run by "liberal elites" who can't be trusted to tell the truth. "I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans," Newt Gingrich charged at a Republican debate in January in what has become a standard GOP attack line.
  
  [...]
  
  The third means the GOP uses to protect itself is its own media outlets - led by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and his yell-radio imitators, book publisher Regnery and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, along with a right-wing blogosphere. Even if these outlets don't spread the lies directly, they can at least spread doubt about what's true.
  
  Together, these three mechanisms are creating a parallel Republican universe of Orwellian dimensions, where anything can be asserted, where pollsters and political advisers are free to create whatever concoction of lies will help elect their candidate and where "fact-checkers" are as irrelevant and intrusive as is the truth.
  
  [...]
  
  The Romney campaign has decided it won't be dictated by fact-checkers. But a society without trusted arbiters of what is true and what is false is vulnerable to every lie imaginable.

• Better news:  most of the anti-collective bargaining law championed by Scott Walker in Wisconsin has been struck down as violating both the state and US constitutions.  Mr. Walker will appeal, of course.  
• Who's afraid of the Big Bad Wolf Occupy Wall Street?  NYPD.  Checkpoints, Charlie.

Time to retreat to a nice scary Stephen King novel, where the horrors, though drawing from the subconscious, are only on the page.

Also, my baseball team won yesterday.