Serge Prokofiev's 120th

I wanted to write something about the 120th anniversary of Russian composer Serge Prokofiev's birth back on April 23rd, when it occurred, but got too busy.

Surprisingly, Prokofiev is the most played 20th century composer after Richard Strauss. Strauss had a much longer career, but Prokofiev was more influential. His melodic gifts and sense of irony were among the greatest in the history of Western music.

Perhaps his most melodic longer work is the ballet, written between 1940 and 1945, Cinderella, which is a comedic masterpiece, portraying the stepsisters and stepmother as less ruthless, more idiotic or crazed, than most versions of the fairy tale.

Here's the dynamic ballerina Alina Cojocaru as Cinderella, with Johan Koburg, in the second act Pas de Deux, also known as "Cinderella and the Prince," from a 2003 Royal Ballet production:


In two weeks, I'll be conducting the Anchorage Civic Orchestra in Prokofiev's most popular work for young people, Peter and the Wolf, with Shannyn Moore as narrator. Here's our poster:

Breitbart and Maher Wax Sexist, Ignoring Laura Flanders, as They Compare Racist Notes

When I first started calling Andrew Breitbart a racist here and at firedoglake, people resisted. They don't anymore. The Shirley Sherrod episode settled it in many minds.

In this give-and-take at Bill Maher's place, both Breitbart and Maher tend to ignore any and all points Laura Flanders brings to the fore. As they are pointed toward Breitbart by Flanders, not toward Maher, you'd think Bill would be more neutral.

He isn't exactly sucking up to Breitbart, though. It is ironic that Maher, who starts out asking "Do you think you can be a racist and not know it?" ends up quipping rhetorically to Donald Trump, "I have a feeling, if you have such a great relationship with 'the Blacks,' walk through Harlem this weekend without security." The audience erupts in laughter.

Yes, Bill, you can.

Breitbart attempts to both suck up to Maher and bait Flanders with his statement, "We'd like to know about his relationship with ..... Prof. Edward Said, there's a lot of mysterious things in his background that people would like to....."

You can't even understand Flanders' attempt to get back into the conversation, as Breibart yells "What's wrong about that? I would like to know the three ....."

Breitbart attempts to paint some bizarre conspiracy having to do with Obama's movements and Said's, between Columbia University and the University of Chicago. The conversation drifts off into borderless territory Breitbart excels at scooping up the wreckage from, as he demands that we find out - turning toward Islamaphobe and Israel apologist Maher for his final appeal - "We'd like to know if he's pro-Israel, if his people are pro-Israel, we'd like to know what his orientation is, what kind of classes he took."

To his credit, Maher doesn't take the proffered bait and moves on to sum up the segment.

The Paradox of April - Part III

I call Cottonwood Creek "Wasilla Creek" on the video. Wasilla Creek doesn't even come close to Wasilla, but Cottonwood Creek runs right through it, including feeding Wasilla Lake.

Hopefully, the community cleanup will deal with this mess, eh?

Drudge Leads the Afterbirthers - Romney Leads the Lynch Mob

According to TPMDC, the Drudge Report spent a lot of time Friday pimping for a strange "study" of the newly released "long-form" birth certificate for Barack Obama:

In a predictable turn, conspiracy theorists are now rallying behind a bogus claim that President Obama's long form birth certificate is a Photoshopped forgery -- with a huge helping hand from one of conservative media's biggest names.

The fringe theory's rapid spread within hours of the certificate's release presents almost a perfect example of one of the White House's justifications for taking on the birther issue -- namely, that thanks to the internet, conspiracy theories can migrate quickly from the fringe and into the mainstream if left unchecked.

In this case, it took only hours. The forgery claim appeared to have first started as an offbeat blog post from an Atlanta-based art director at an ad firm, Bryan Michael Nixon, less than two hours after Obama's statement. By the end of the day it had become a headline on Drudge Report, one of the single most trafficked news sites on the internet. The debunked forgery revelation drew thousands of comments on messageboards, migrated to birther and truther conspiracy guru Alex Jones' site, while a video explanation was viewed over 160,000 times on YouTube.

Here's the Youtube:

Here's another Youtube, this one of Mitch Romney wanting to "hang the misery index around Obama's neck"

I'm no great fan of Obama, but this stuff - pandering to the white racists who can't accept Obama as American, or to references to hanging a black man, are intentional, and designed to subliminally create dread of Obama.

Saradise Lost Book 5 - Chapter 51: Reading Geoffrey Dunn's The Lies of Sarah Palin

I wrote some time back that there is a danger that at some point more will have been written about Sarah Palin than about everything else in Alaska combined. Who knows, we may have reached that point already.

A lot of what has been written about Palin has been web-based, but there are already more books about her than any other person in our state's short history. And several more are due to be released.

The only book on Palin I read fully was Going Rouge, the collection of critical articles about her, published in November, 2009. I had already read most of the chapters when they appeared as articles.

I didn't read either of the books published under her name. She had had somebody else write them for her, so I let somebody else - Jeanne Devon - read them for me. Her articles on both Palin books are hilariously illuminating, as she tore apart and deeply into the layers and layers of fabrication that are truly Palin's only imprint upon those books.

Friday, I received my review copy of Geoffrey Dunn's The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power. I'll be hosting the firedoglake Book Salon with Geoffrey on Saturday, May 7th, from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm Alaska time. Both he and I will be there on-line to answer any questions from people there (you have to be a member of firedoglake's commenting community to participate).

The Lies of Sarah Palin is a remarkable book. It goes far beyond any of its predecessors in its critical research into Palin, from her beginnings, and it ends with coverage of Palin's near meltdown this past January, in the wake of the awful Tucson shootings and murders.

It is somewhat eery reading such thorough detail about one's own town. Dunn spends six pages (pp. 41-46) on Sarah Palin in the 8th grade, for instance. I know almost all the characters, some of them quite well.

Page after page, I'm reminded of what Judy told me back on September 1st, 2008, as we were canvassing for Obama in Wasilla. At the time - a little less than a week after Palin's selection as McCain's running mate, she said, "I can't believe how much you've forgotten about Sarah." Two weeks later, after being questioned about all sorts of past events involving Palin, by one reporter or blogger after another, Judy admitted, "I can't believe how much I've forgotten about Palin."

One thing abourt this book that strikes me as seminal is how irrefutable much of what Dunn presents is. The lies Palin will have to spin denying the truths between its covers will most likely deserve another book by another author. Too bad Soapy Smith isn't around to appreciate all this.

A Wasilla Greenhouse on the Last Morning of April

More sun and warmth this past week would have helped spur things along, but the greenhouse is sheltering 356 containers full of growing, living plants:

nine kinds of lettuce
seven kinds of beets
four kinds of basil
four kinds of tomatoes (second and fourth generation home-grown seeds)
three kinds of zucchini
three kinds of broccoli
two kinds of cabbage
Japanese cucumbers
corn
burdock
daikon radish
dill
cilantro (14th generation home-grown seeds)
parsley
rosemary
arugula (seventh generation home-grown seeds; we're already eating it)

Saradise Lost - Book 5 - Chapter 50: On the Veracity of David Weigel

Sarah Palin is like the little town of Whittier, Alaska. I lived in Whittier, Alaska for over seven years. One thing I observed near the end of my sentence there (we actually had T-shirts made back then, that read POW on the front and Prisoner of Whittier on the back), was that Whittier doesn't bring the best out in anyone. So it seems to be with Sarah Palin.

David Weigel, who writes at Slate.com, first came to Sarah Palin's defense after he was one of the prime victims of the JournoList fallout in June-July, 2010. He wrote then that he had learned to "stop worrying and love Sarah Palin" (a reference to the entire title of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove - Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb):

Over the first churning forty-eight hours of this whole mess, I resisted — and then accepted — a new sympathy for a politician I'd never pretended to admire much: Sarah Palin. A political celebrity who raises money and appears on TV needs the media in a way that a reporter doesn't. But damn if I didn't feel sorry for the way every utterance Palin ever makes is taffy-pulled and inspected for lies. During the trial of a boy who hacked into Palin's private e-mail account, I debunked a rumor while appearing on MSNBC — where I am now a contributor — that she had "perjured" herself on the stand. She hadn't. She'd spoken correctly, if clumsily, about some of her old e-mails. Like I said: screwed, and then a new sympathy. (Of course, journalists would have had an easier time reaching me than Palin, who is notoriously difficult to get a comment from unless you happen to be a Fox News host.)

Weigel not only tried to identify with Palin in that Esquire column, through the empathy he described above, he aligned himself with Palin in the rest of the column too, no doubt unintentionally, by showing how pathetically narcissistic he is.

I don't have a lot of time to waste on this pimply, baby-fat saddled kid's tripe today, but one of his least satisfactory statements (or quotes - one can't quite be sure) in his story today, about calling the Mat-Su Regional Health Center earlier in the week regarding TriG Palin, was this:

Why'd I call the hospital? One of the original concerns Sullivan had with the Trig Palin story -- one that's based on an absent fact, and not on innuendo -- was that Mat-Su Regional did not list Trig Palin's birth on its website. There's a portion of the web site, the baby nursery, where newborns are listed. Trig, born on April 18, 2008, is not there. And that's somewhat curious. So: Is every baby born at the hospital listed on the web site?

"No, it's not automatic," said the clerk. "Truth be told, we do take security photos of all the babies, but if the parents want their babies listed on the web site, they can request it. We're really sensitive about it, though. I think the hospital took up the policy not to publish names automatically because of possible baby kidnapping issues."

The clerk, realizing that Washington, D.C. reporters don't typically cold call her hospital, asked me if this call was about "our former governor." It was. Was Trig Palin born there?

"Oh, that's not even a question," she said. (If my reception was better I could have heard her eyes rolling at this point.) "Yes. Everybody here remembers that. Yes, this is where the Palins come -- this is their family hospital."

Ideally, I would have gotten the family birthing center's director on the phone and gotten more confirmation with a name to go with it. But is anything preventing Andrew, or one of the Daily Dish's assistants, from making that call?

"Yes, this is where the Palins come -- this is their family hospital."

How sweet - "their family hospital." Perhaps it is, but had Weigel done the level of research he claims is Sullivan's inherent obligation, he could have discovered that the statement he uses to support his case, is wildly inaccurate and useless to back Weigel's claim.

The quote is used in a a way to make it seem that TriG was merely the latest Palin to have been delivered at "their family hospital." That would be impossible. TriG was born in 2008. The Mat-Su Regional Medical Center was finished in January, 2006. Piper Palin, youngest of the brood save for TriG, was born in 2001. At that time, the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center was a vacant, wind-swept field behind the Mat-Su Visitors Center and Veterans Wall of Honor.

Dave - you owe Andrew an apology.

I'll have more on Weigel soon. Suffice it to say, his rep from his Alaska trip last summer was way beyond Cheechako-ish. More like "fucking ingrate, don't let the door hit you on the way out."

David Rovics: Still Waiting for the Change - His Best Song in a While

A song for President Obama.

Lyric:

Still Waiting for the Change

I remember in 2008
A Democrat became head of state
His party won the Congress too
Then we watched to see what they would do
Vague promises and hopeful signs
Just try to read between the lines
These things take time, that's understood
And I know that patience can be good
And I'm no genius, but I'm not dumb
And I'm still waiting for the change to come

Many thought it had arrived
We felt lucky to have survived
All those years of rightwing rule
Using fear and hatred as the fuel
Now we're on the other side
And we're still swimming against the tide
The wars go on, good people die
Missiles rain down from the sky
Once I dreamed you were my best chum
But I'm still waiting for the change to come

The prisons fill up with the poor
Victims of the same drug war
Bankers fly in First Class seats
While families move into the streets
Across the country schools close down
In another bankrupt town
Oil sits on the sea floor
And now you want to drill for more
And like everybody where I'm from
I'm still waiting for the change to come

I don't know but I'd like to think
We can pull each other from the brink
I've heard it said with a sigh
This nation is too young to die
But the system's broke and what I glean
Is change must come by other means
Can you hear the whispers in the air
What we need is Tahrir Square
Until then in Washington
I'll be waiting for the change to come
Still waiting for the change to come

Saradise Lost - Book 5 - Chapter 49: Revisiting Palin's Claim to Having Produced TriG's Birth Certificate

The TriG birth certificate push-back bullshit keeps happening today, as more columnists, journalists and political bloggers pile onto Andrew Sullivan, who - like Joe McGinniss and me - is, like Joe says, "Trignostic."

Here's Sullivan today, hitting back against Ben Smith and Justin Elliot in his essay's conclusion:

When a politician has publicly claimed she has produced a birth certificate and hasn't, is it illegitimate for the press to ask why she simply lied about this? Can any sane person misremember such a thing? And if she's claimed she has released it, what on earth is the ethical reason for not asking her to do it along with medical records? When she publicly derides skeptics in speech after speech, is it not the press's duty to see if her derision has empirical validity? Or are we skeptics supposed to just sit back and be mocked by a pathological liar putting her own credibility against ours?

We all have cognitive biases. I have one - profound skepticism of anything Palin says - and may be judging evidence in ways that others wouldn't. But so do Justin and Ben and Weigel who have an interest in dismissing the possibility that they may have missed uncovering the biggest hoax in American political history. That same cognitive bias question applies to Loy and Quinn. It does not mean they they may not be right. It just means that their cognitive bias is as real as my own.

It seems to me that when some simple, readily available medical records could end this excruciating debate in one easy swoop - and could have more than two years ago - it is professional negligence that the MSM won't even ask for such proof, and devote far more energy to defending their own past than the facts at hand.

Here's Palin claiming she had produced TriG's birth certificate on the Rusty Humphries Show, on December 4, 2009:

Here's my post on the December 4, 2009 show, from that same day, reprinted:

Thursday, on the Rusty Humphries radio show, Sarah Palin lied. She insinuated President Obama has never shown his birth certificate, and that she had shown her son Trig's. Both statements are lies.

About President Obama's birth certificate, here's the exchange:

HUMPHRIES: Would you make the birth certificate an issue if you ran?

PALIN: Um, I think the public, rightfully, is still making it an issue. I don't have a problem with that. I don't know if I would have to bother to make it an issue, because I think enough members of the electorate still want answers.

HUMPHRIES: Do you think it's a fair question to be looking at?

PALIN: I think it's a fair question...

About her youngest son Trig's birth certificate, here's the exchange:

HUMPHRIES: I mean, truly, if your past is fair game and your kids are fair game, certainly Obama's past should be. I mean, we want to treat men and women equally, right?

PALIN: Hey, you know, that's a great point. That weird conspiracy theory freaky thing that people talk about, that Trig isn't my real son, a lot of people say, "Well, you need to produce his birth certificate, you need to prove that he's your kid," which we have done, but yeah, so maybe we should reverse that and use the same type of thinking on the other one.[ emphasis added]

Sarah and Todd Palin have never produced a birth certificate for Trig Palin.

The only document they have produced regarding the boy's birth is a letter from Palin's personal doctor, Cathy Baldwin-Johnson, that was issued the day before the 2008 national election. At some blogs, the Baldwin-Johnson letter has brought forth as many questions (PDF) as the documents or purported documents related to George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard service raised.

As part of the messy cleanup on aisle CW caused by Palin's statement on the Rusty Humphries show, Palin's ghost facebook writer has issued the following clarification:

Voters have every right to ask candidates for information if they so choose. I’ve pointed out that it was seemingly fair game during the 2008 election for many on the left to badger my doctor and lawyer for proof that Trig is in fact my child. Conspiracy-minded reporters and voters had a right to ask ... which they have repeatedly. But at no point -- not during the campaign, and not during recent interviews -- have I asked the president to produce his birth certificate or suggested that he was not born in the United States.

Whooh! That cleared everything up, didn't it? No, it didn't.

I live in Wasilla and will have known Sarah Palin for 19 years, come February 2010. The doctor, Cathy Baldwin-Johnson, who wrote the letter Palin alludes to in the latter's statement, "you need to prove that he's your kid, which we have done" was one of my wife's doctors for both of our kids, and was both kids' pediatrician.

CBJ, as she was often called locally, was a very public fixture around Wasilla up to the time of Trig's birth. Our daughter attended ballet with one of CBJ's kids for years, and I often saw CBJ somewhere or another around Wasilla or Anchorage at least once a week for well over a decade. Between the time of Trig's birth - early 2008 - and the issuance of the election eve letter purported to be from her, CBJ was far less evident. Since the letter was issued, CBJ has been unavailable to comment on it or on any other matter related to Trig and Sarah Palin:

Cathy Baldwin Johnson has never given a simple statement that Trig Palin was born at Mat-Su Hospital on April 18th, that Sarah Palin is his biological mother, and that she - Dr. Baldwin-Johnson - was physically present at the delivery. She would not do this at the following junctures:

1. Back in April, when Trig Palin was allegedly born. She gave ambiguous statements to the press about the circumstances of the birth (several of which contradicted explicitly statements Gov. Palin made) and then she clammed up.

2. On August 31st (when announcing it would have scotched the necessity of announcing – the next day – seventeen year old Bristol's pregnancy);

3. In the letter released before the election

4. To the ADN [Anchorage Daily News] in December when they asked AGAIN [PDF].

I've written about Sarah Palin a fair number of times, but have avoided taking up the"birther" subject unless it became germane to something Palin herself had said. I've written about the four most common birth scenarios involving Palin and Trig elsewhere, but not here - I'm not a "birther." But many questions have arisen, none of which have been answered by the Palins.

Regarding Palin's statement on the Humphries show, memeorandum now lists 49 articles and blog posts. Of them, only one seems to address the falsity of Palin's claim to have released a birth certificate for Trig:

So Palin is saying that he should show his because she has shown hers. Except she hasn't! And he did! And Palin-logic hurts. Where is the birth certificate, Sarah?

Is Palin going to get a pass on this?

Where's Dan Rather when you need him?

Here's part of the post I wrote the following Saturday (December 5, 2009):

A tribute to what Gryph calls "Sarah Palin's Least Favorite Blogs."

Last Thursday, Sarah Palin, as she often does, reverted to her Crazy Woman persona, when, during a radio appearance on the Rusty Humphries talk show, she stated, "That weird conspiracy theory freaky thing that people talk about, that Trig isn't my real son, a lot of people say, "Well, you need to produce his birth certificate, you need to prove that he's your kid," which we have done..."

The first part of Palin's exchange with Humphries, which was about the possibility that President Obama's birth certificate might not be genuine and that the issue deserves further scrutiny, garnered a lot of attention. Within a few hours, the news aggregator site memeorandum cited 47 articles about the first part of Palin's birth certificate exchange with the talk show host, but only one link to an article that noted the falsity of the second part of the statement. Now, 36 hours later, national attention, as tracked at memeorandum, is becoming focused on Andrew Sullivan's post on this, which uses information that wouldn't be in the public domain without Sarah Palin's least favorite blogs. Sullivan's curiosity about Palin's most recent pregnancy has been long-known nationally, but the mainstream Alaska press, since the Anchorage Daily News forays in this direction ended in a stone wall, has kept well away.

Sullivan's post has elicited responses from out-of-state blogs:

Robert Stacy McCain, dissing Sullivan, fails to mention Palin's Thursday lie.

David Horowitx, excoriating Sullivan, fails to mention Palin's lie.

Mark Milian, in the Los Angeles Times, while more critical of Palin over the first part of her Humphries statement, neglects to question the varacity of her own birth certificate claim.

Gottalaff, at the Political Carnival, while quoting Sullivan on his Palin birth certificate question, fails to really get into questioning Palin's veracity.

Riehl World View and the blog's commenters wander off to the tea party, blithely predicting Palin as next president, while dissing Sullivan.

Maria Newman, writing an abridged summation of blog posts for the New York Times, on Palin's Humphries appearance, totally neglects quoting Palin's lie.

Rick Moran, blogging for Pajamas Media, writes:

And no, not “a lot of people say” that we need to see Trig’s birth certificate. What planet is she on? Who, besides Andrew Sullivan and the same kind of fringe kooks on the left who mirror the righty loons wondering if Obama is eligible to be president, is concerned one whit about Trig’s parentage?

but neglects to observe that Palin's claim is false.

and so on......

Will Alaska's mainstream and non-progressive online mediaaddress Palin's most recent, most national lie? Checking the Saturday morning editions of all of them, the only sign of anyone noting Palin's radio appearance is a snarky, shallow post at the Alaska Dispatch by Scott Woodham:

According to comments former Gov. Palin made on conservative talk radio recently, she thinks it's fair for people to ask President Obama to provide proof that he was indeed born in the United States. While discussing the issue of what is "fair game" for press inquiry, she mentioned that some people have repeatedly asked her to provide proof that she gave birth to her youngest child. "Which we have done," she said (Andrew Sullivan must've not been invited to that press conference). She also said that ANWR is "frozen year-round," and thanked God for the leaked correspondence of climate scientists. Politico has an excerpt from the interview's transcript, as well as an embedded recording of the complete interview, here, (the birth certificate stuff happens around 9 minutes in).

Like many posts at the Dispatch, Woodham's statement has elicited no comments.

Chernobyl - 25 Years Later

25 years ago today Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl power station north of Kiev in the Ukrainian SSR exploded and caught on fire, releasing deadly radiation and melted radioactive graphite pollution over a wide area. Estimates as to the number of victims then and since from the disaster vary widely, but few doubt the disaster killed or injured more than the atom bomb blast at Hiroshima in August 1945.

The combination of the ongoing catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi complex in Japan, the need for a new containment regime at the Chernobyl site, and the 25th anniversary, should help people to more deeply contemplate the inherent dangers of the nuclear age and its legacy.

Here are some videos of aspects of the disaster's ongoing legacy: