Sad Irony Alert!

An article today from... that's right... Pravda, the "paper of record" for Russia, and the former house organ for the Soviet Union:

These days, there are few things to admire about the socialist, bankrupt and culturally degenerating USA, but at least so far, one thing remains: the right to bear arms and use deadly force to defend one's self and possessions....

To this day, with the Soviet Union now dead 21 years, with a whole generation born and raised to adulthood without the SU, we are still denied our basic and traditional rights to self defense. Why? We are told that everyone would just start shooting each other and crime would be everywhere....but criminals are still armed and still murdering and too often, especially in the far regions, those criminals wear the uniforms of the police....

For those of us fighting for our traditional rights, the US 2nd Amendment is a rare light in an ever darkening room. Governments will use the excuse of trying to protect the people from maniacs and crime, but are in reality, it is the bureaucrats protecting their power and position. In all cases where guns are banned, gun crime continues and often increases....  

The excuse that people will start shooting each other is also plain and silly. So it is our politicians saying that our society is full of incapable adolescents who can never be trusted? Then, please explain how we can trust them or the police, who themselves grew up and came from the same culture?

No it is about power and a total power over the people. There is a lot of desire to bad mouth the Tsar, particularly by the Communists, who claim he was a tyrant, and yet under him we were armed and under the progressives disarmed. Do not be fooled by a belief that progressives, leftists hate guns. Oh, no, they do not. What they hate is guns in the hands of those who are not marching in lock step of their ideology. They hate guns in the hands of those who think for themselves and do not obey without question.

Russia, pro-guns and low taxes!

Who'd a thunk it?

The Regular Guy's List of the Top 20 Rolling Stones Songs (#3)

We're getting down to it and there shouldn't be many surprises from here on out.   So far, here's 4-20:

Here's where we stand in the countdown:

20. Loving Cup (Exile on Main Street)
19. Wild Horses (Sticky Fingers)
18. Bitch (Sticky Fingers)
17. Monkey Man (Let it Bleed)
16. Let it Loose (Exile)
15. Prodigal Son (Beggar's Banquet)
14. Can't You Hear Me Knocking (Sticky Fingers)
13. Shattered (Some Girls)
12. Happy (Exile)
11. Rocks Off (Exile)
10. (tie) Jumping Jack Flash (single only)
10. (tie) Street Fighting Man (Beggar's Banquet)
9. You Can't Always Get What You Want (Let It Bleed)
8. Honky Tonk Woman (single only)
7. Midnight Rambler (Let It Bleed)
6. Start Me Up (Tattoo You)
5. Tumbling Dice (Exile on Main Street)
4. Satisfaction (Out of Our Heads)

If Satisfaction has the greatest guitar riff of all time, then the next song is simply the most perfect, most crystallized example of a rock and roll song ever.   The riff, the lyric, the structure, the bridge, the end, the cleverness, the edginess, the heat, the sex, the sax for crying out loud.

Ladies and gentlemen, hear him whip the women just around midnight:

3. Brown Sugar (Sticky Fingers)

On the Hall of Fame Vote

Regular readers (that's right, I mean you, Mom) will know that the Regular Guy is a big baseball fan.   I've been a lifelong Cardinals fan ever since my Dad took me to my first game in the 1964 World Series, although my real fandom didn't begin until I spent a glorious summer at age 9 in 1968 listening to Jack Buck and Harry Caray call 3-hit shutout after shutout for Bob Gibson on his way to the miraculous 1.12 ERA season.

So I was interested in the Hall of Fame vote that came out yesterday revealing that no one had been elected.   Not one player.

Not Barry Bonds, the all-time home run leader.

Not Roger Clemens, who won seven Cy Young awards.

Not Craig Biggio, who had 3,000 hits.

Not Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa or Rafael Palmeiro, all of whom had well over 500 home runs and, in the case of Sosa, is one of only six players with more than 600 (Ruth, Mays, Aaron, Rodriguez, Bonds are the others).

Why?   How can this be?

Steroids.   It's the steroids era.   Pasty-faced baseball writers who never played sports on the major league level, who never had the competitiveness or the will or the talent or the body to play major league baseball, are punishing everyone who played during the era.   Cheaters, they say.

Well, here's what I say.

Why do we hate cheaters?   Because they gain an unfair advantage over other players and distort the statistics by which we measure greatness in the game.

OK, but weren't the statistics in the 1920s and 1930s and on through most of the 1940s distorted by the fact that African-Americans weren't allowed to play in the major leagues?   Didn't those white players like, oh, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and Ty Cobb and Rogers Hornsby gain an unfair advantage because they didn't have to play against great Negro League pitchers in their prime like Satchel Paige?   Didn't Walter Johnson or Christy Mathewson have an unfair advantage because they didn't have to pitch to Josh Gibson?

And which is a worse sin, the tolerance of performance-enhancing drugs by baseball in the 1990s, or the tolerance of institutional racism in the 1920s and 1930s?

Drudge is Not F'in Around

Here's what's on the most-viewed political website in the world right now:

Girl of the Day - Susannah York

Born today in 1939, the British actress Susannah York is perhaps best known for her role as Albert Finney's love interest in the great historical comedy, Tom Jones.   I also remember from an obscure movie about code-breaking from the 1960s called Sebastian.  

Here's a great scene from Tom Jones:

The Regular Guy's List of the Top 20 Rolling Stones Songs (#4)

Here's where we stand in the countdown:

20. Loving Cup (Exile on Main Street)
19. Wild Horses (Sticky Fingers)
18. Bitch (Sticky Fingers)
17. Monkey Man (Let it Bleed)
16. Let it Loose (Exile)
15. Prodigal Son (Beggar's Banquet)
14. Can't You Hear Me Knocking (Sticky Fingers)
13. Shattered (Some Girls)
12. Happy (Exile)
11. Rocks Off (Exile)
10. (tie) Jumping Jack Flash (single only)
10. (tie) Street Fighting Man (Beggar's Banquet)
9. You Can't Always Get What You Want (Let It Bleed)
8. Honky Tonk Woman (single only)
7. Midnight Rambler (Let It Bleed)
6. Start Me Up (Tattoo You)
5. Tumbling Dice (Exile on Main Street)

So this is probably not that surprising.   The greatest guitar riff ever:

4. Satisfaction (Out of Our Heads)

Depressing View on Hagel

But, unfortunately, David Brooks is probably right:

Chuck Hagel has been nominated to supervise the beginning of this generation-long process of defense cutbacks. If a Democratic president is going to slash defense, he probably wants a Republican at the Pentagon to give him political cover, and he probably wants a decorated war hero to boot.

All the charges about Hagel’s views on Israel or Iran are secondary. The real question is, how will he begin this long cutting process? How will he balance modernizing the military and paying current personnel? How will he recalibrate American defense strategy with, say, 455,000 fewer service members?

How, in short, will Hagel supervise the beginning of America’s military decline?

Rolling Stones Songs That Didn't Make My Top 20

Over the next few days I'll be finishing up my top 20 list of Rolling Stones songs, but it's probably pretty obvious what's left, so I thought I'd go back and review what didn't make the list.   When you think of Beatles songs or Springsteen songs that wouldn't make the top 20 for those artists, you get a sense of just how great a group was -- even their second-tier songs are terrific. 

Anyway, here are some of the Stones songs that didn't make my top 20:

Angie
Fool to Cry
Beast of Burden
Miss You
Sway
Stray Cat Blues
Soul Survivor
Sister Morphine
Moonlight Mile
It's Only Rock and Roll
Respectable
She's So Cold
Just My Imagination
Let's Spend the Night Together
Paint It Black
The Last Time
Ruby Tuesday
Get Off of My Cloud

Wow!   That would be most group's greatest hits, but for the Stones it's a list of songs you might sometimes skip through on the CD player to get to the earth-shattering greats.   Consider Sister Morphine and Moonlight Mile, two unbelievably great songs, yet they are #8 and #10 on Sticky Fingers' second side, and they pale in comparison with Brown Sugar, Wild Horses, Can't You Hear Me Knocking, and Bitch.   Meanwhile, on the same record you also have Sway and Dead Flowers.   Moonlight Mile might actually be the sixth or seventh or even eighth best song on the album!

Unbelievable:

The Regular Guy's List of the Top 20 Rolling Stones Songs (#5)

The countdown is getting close to the bone now.   The remaining songs are among the greatest rock songs ever, which means they are among the greatest examples of the dominant musical art form of the past half century.   Here's where we stand:

20. Loving Cup (Exile on Main Street)
19. Wild Horses (Sticky Fingers)
18. Bitch (Sticky Fingers)
17. Monkey Man (Let it Bleed)
16. Let it Loose (Exile)
15. Prodigal Son (Beggar's Banquet)
14. Can't You Hear Me Knocking (Sticky Fingers)
13. Shattered (Some Girls)
12. Happy (Exile)
11. Rocks Off (Exile)
10. (tie) Jumping Jack Flash (single only)
10. (tie) Street Fighting Man (Beggar's Banquet)
9. You Can't Always Get What You Want (Let It Bleed)
8. Honky Tonk Woman (single only)
7. Midnight Rambler (Let It Bleed)
6. Start Me Up (Tattoo You)

At number 5, one of the Stones' coolest and most perfect songs, with maybe the greatest single phrase in the history of rock -- "fever in the funkhouse."   Not sure what it means, but it's nasty and cool and tough and rough and sexy and crazy all at once.   Ladies and gentlemen:

5. Tumbling Dice (Exile on Main Street)

The Hypocrisy of Liberal Elites

Today on NRO Victor Davis Hanson analyzes the phenomenon of liberal elites preaching about raising taxes on the 1% while taking pains to avoid taxes themselves:

Take former vice president Al Gore. He has made a fortune of nearly a billion dollars warning against global warming — supposedly shrinking glaciers, declining polar-bear populations, and the like — while simultaneously offering timely remedies from his own green corporations, all reminiscent of the methodology of Roman millionaire Marcus Licinius Crassus, who profited from fires and putting them out. Now Nobel laureate Gore has sold his interest in a failing cable-television station for about $100 million — and to the anti-American Al-Jazeera, which is owned by the fossil-fuel-rich royal family of Qatar. Gore rushed to close the deal before the first of the year to avoid the very capital-gains tax hikes that he has advocated for others less well off. That’s a liberal trifecta: enhancing a fossil-fuel consortium, attempting to beat tax hikes, and empowering an anti-American and anti-Semitic media conglomerate run by an authoritarian despot — all from a former vice president of the United States who crusades for ending our reliance on fossil fuels and for raising taxes on the wealthy.

If I were a Republican, I would propose a federal law saying that any Congressman, Senator, or executive branch official who leaves government service and enters the private sector must for a period of ten years thereafter pay a 50% surcharge on any salary, stock grants, stock options, director's fees, capital gains, dividends, etc.   That's a millionaire's tax I could get behind.

Re Gore too:   it occurs to me that someone ought to analyze whether Current TV actually had a market value of $500 million.   It seems to me that OPEC would have a significant interest in a payoff to the world's most prominent supporter of global warming hysteria.   Has OPEC profited by America's unwillingness to exploit its own natural resources in offshore oil, oil in Alaska's ANWR, shale oil, natural gas (via fracking), etc.?   You bet they have.   Will they continue to profit if America continues to throw roadblocks up in front of development of our oil and natural gas fields?   Sure.   Would I put it past them to play a long game of propaganda, getting the West to adopt draconian environmental policies while at the same time remaining dependent on Middle Eastern oil?   No, I would not.

In other words, is Gore being paid for the value of his TV network?   Or is he being paid off to continue to propagandaize for a position that helps OPEC?   A real news organization would pursue these questions.

An Even Worse Music Video from Mick Jagger

OK, so I thought Start Me Up's video was the worst thing ever.   This monstrosity tops it, and it's not close:




I cannot say what I'm thinking due to political correctness concerns.  

The Regular Guy's List of the Top 20 Rolling Stones Songs (#6)

Well, it's Monday morning.   And it's mid-winter in Wisconsin.   Who wouldn't need a jump?

6. Start Me Up (Tattoo You)





By the way, this is possibly the most embarrassing video performance ever by a major rock group. Mick looks like he's leading a geriatric Jane Fonda workout, mincing about in his old lady sweatpants. And nothing says early 1980s gender-bending like a forty year-old man in a skintight purple blouse. Eeek! No wonder Charlie Watts looks so amused.

***

Here's where we stood before today:

20. Loving Cup (Exile on Main Street)
19. Wild Horses (Sticky Fingers)
18. Bitch (Sticky Fingers)
17. Monkey Man (Let it Bleed)
16. Let it Loose (Exile)
15. Prodigal Son (Beggar's Banquet)
14. Can't You Hear Me Knocking (Sticky Fingers)
13. Shattered (Some Girls)
12. Happy (Exile)
11. Rocks Off (Exile)
10. (tie) Jumping Jack Flash (single only)
10. (tie) Street Fighting Man (Beggar's Banquet)
9. You Can't Always Get What You Want (Let It Bleed)
8. Honky Tonk Woman (single only)
7. Midnight Rambler (Let It Bleed)

The Regular Son picked my final six in order yesterday.   I guess maybe we've talked through our Stones preferences before, or something.   There probably won't be many surprises.   But there will be great rock.

The Regular Guy's List of the Top 20 Rolling Stones Songs (#7)

We've been counting down, and now we are getting into the true heavyweights.   The Regular Son and I have the same top 7, although in slightly different orders.   But there's no denying the greatness of the remaining songs.    Here's where we stand:

20. Loving Cup (Exile on Main Street)
19. Wild Horses (Sticky Fingers)
18. Bitch (Sticky Fingers)
17. Monkey Man (Let it Bleed)
16. Let it Loose (Exile)
15. Prodigal Son (Beggar's Banquet)
14. Can't You Hear Me Knocking (Sticky Fingers)
13. Shattered (Some Girls)
12. Happy (Exile)
11. Rocks Off (Exile)
10. (tie) Jumping Jack Flash (single only)
10. (tie) Street Fighting Man (Beggar's Banquet)
9. You Can't Always Get What You Want (Let It Bleed)
8. Honky Tonk Woman (single only)

At number 7 (drum roll please)....

7. Midnight Rambler

The 1960s were about a lot of things.   Freedom.   Liberation.   Civil rights.   Community.   Peace.   Love.   At least that's what the boomer liberals want to tell you.   But the 1960s were also about sexual license, violence, drugs, disorder, mayhem, and murder.   Some of rock and roll captured the former, some the latter.   Imagine the late 1960s from the perspective of a middle-class father, a World War II veteran perhaps, hard-working, married, church-going, conservative.   What would he think if he saw pictures of Woodstock?   What would he think if he saw pictures of Altamont?   Are we really so unsympathetic to disparage him if he wondered to himself whether this was what he had risked his life for, these unruly, long-haired, violent college kids?  

If you were a college kid who grew up in suburbia in peacetime, chaos might look exciting.   But if you fought your way ashore on D-Day when you were about the same age, chaos doesn't look so hot.   Chaos means battle, and battle means death or dismemberment or disfigurement for you or your friends.  

The Rolling Stones, maybe more than any other band, captured the sheer menace of the late 1960s, and none of their songs does that more than the second-side opener for Let It Bleed, the rape-murder-serial killer fantasy, "Midnight Rambler."   I don't think there's ever been another song like it.  

The Regular Guy's List of the Top 20 Rolling Stones Songs (#8)

We're getting into the top 10 now.   So far, we've got this list of great, great songs:

20. Loving Cup (Exile on Main Street)
19. Wild Horses (Sticky Fingers)
18. Bitch (Sticky Fingers)
17. Monkey Man (Let it Bleed)
16. Let it Loose (Exile)
15. Prodigal Son (Beggar's Banquet)
14. Can't You Hear Me Knocking (Sticky Fingers)
13. Shattered (Some Girls)
12. Happy (Exile)
11. Rocks Off (Exile)
10. (tie) Jumping Jack Flash (single only)
10. (tie) Street Fighting Man (Beggar's Banquet)
9. You Can't Always Get What You Want (Let It Bleed)

You may have noticed that the bulk are from the "golden age" of Stones albums from 1968's Beggar's Banquet to 1972's Exile on Main Street.  To break it down by album, we've got

4     Exile on Main Street
3     Sticky Fingers
2     Let It Bleed
2     Beggar's Banquet
1     Some Girls (1978)
1     Single only

For our number 8 Stones song we return to that great 1960s tradition -- now back with a vengeance in the iTunes universe -- of songs that were released as singles independent from any album.   Ladies and gentlemen, I give you....

8. Honky Tonk Woman





The Stones are underestimated as lyricists because, for the most part, they weren't trying to be deeply deep... they were just trying to tell good stories and tell them well.   They weren't pretentious, but they were funny and clever and smart.  This one has one of the best Stones lines that captures the dangerous fun of rock-and-roll... "I just can't seem to drink you off my mind..."  ... that's just about perfect, and hilarious.

And We Re-Elected Obama... Why?

This chart says it all.   Look, we have recessions.   They happen.  The problem of governing is to get out of the way of the natural bounce back from a recession that inevitably occurs when inventories dwindle and equipment ages and needs and desires for new things return.   Even deep recessions can have quick bounces back to prosperity if the governing philosophy allows the economy to fix itself.   That hasn't happened since 2007, as this chart shows:

Schadenfreude Alert!

Apparently a lot of people were unaware that the Social Security payroll tax was going to go up this year from 4.2% to 6.2% as part of the expiration of the Bush tax cuts.   Here's some of the tweets Twitchy has catalogued so far:

Where Does George Bush Go For An Apology?

Hmmmm... one way way to intepret the fiscal cliff deal is that 98% or more of the evil "Bush tax cuts" were actually good things that liberal Democrats were happy to support almost unanimously, i.e., the "cuts" to taxes for people making under $400,000 a year.

Couple that with the fact that Obama hasn't closed Guantanamo, and recently signed a law extending Bush's anti-terror measures, including for indefinite detention without trial for terror suspects.

Now consider that news reports (and even the touted-for-an-Academy-Award movie Zero Dark Thirty) support the conclusion that enhanced interrogation techniques helped lead to finding Osama bin Laden:

The film suggests that waterboarding directly contributed to obtaining vital information about bin Laden’s courier — a break that eventually led to the al-Qaeda leader. Opponents of the CIA are quick to insist that waterboarding played no role in tracking him down. Both the movie and those critics are wrong.

The first substantive information about the courier came in 2004 from a detainee who received some enhanced interrogation techniques but was not waterboarded. Although we had heard the nom de guerre Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, until that time we were unaware of the central role he played in bin Laden’s communications. Subsequently, as we always did, we checked out this information with other detainees. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who had been waterboarded, was by then cooperating with us to some extent. He denied any knowledge of the courier, but so adamantly that we knew we were on to something. We then intercepted secret messages that Mohammed was sending to other detainees, ordering them to say nothing about al-Kuwaiti.

Where does George Bush go for an apology for all the calumny that was heaped upon his head for so many years?   Or are all of these things different morally simply because a Democrat now does them and profits politically by doing so?

What's The Matter With Detroit?

Remember a few years ago when the book What's the Matter With Kansas? got some splash by offering the thesis that rural whites who are relatively less affluent vote against their own economic self-interest by voting Republican?   I wonder why there isn't a similar question being asked about African-Americans under Obama:

Government unemployment numbers for December showed that while the general unemployment rate remained flat at 7.8 percent, unemployment for... African-Americans rose despite an economy that created 155,000 jobs.


Unemployment... forAfrican-Americans rose sharply to 14.0 percent from 13.2 percent in November.

Unemployment among African Americans has remained quite high throughout the sluggish economic recovery of the past several years, despite the steady decline in overall unemployment in the economy generally.

The number of employed African Americans actually fell in December – a month that typically sees a spike in job creation as employers add temporary positions to handle the holiday shopping season.

The number of employed African Americans fell from nearly 16 million to 15.8 million in December.

By contrast, the unemployment rate for Whites remained nearly a full point below the national average at 6.9 percent in December.

But I guess the fact that the unemployment rate for African-Americans is double the rate for whites must be George Bush's fault.  

File This Under "Life Imitates The Onion"

You couldn't write this stuff for a parody magazine and get away with it:

Ooh la la! Guess who’s switching from brie to borscht?

Gerard Depardieu, the enigmatic French actor, has become a Russian citizen. The announcement that Depardieu had officially been approved (by President Vladimir Putin himself, apparently) followed a flurry of exchanges between Depardieu and Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault over French President Francois Hollande‘s plans to raise taxes in Depardieu’s native country....

Depardieu, who is much beloved in Russia, opted to take Putin up on the offer, largely, it appears to take advantage of Russia’s flat tax rate of just 13%.

The public spat – and Depardieu’s move – has called attention to the concern over France’s economy. As in the U.S., public debt is high as is unemployment. French President Hollande introduced the so-called millionaire’s tax of up to 75% on individuals making more than 1 million euro ($1,318,499.34 US) as a temporary measure to raise revenue. As expected, the proposal didn’t thrill high income taxpayers, including Depardieu.

America in 2013 is more socialist than Russia!   Who'd a thunk it?

The Regular Guy's List of the Top 20 Rolling Stones Songs (#9)

To recap, so far we've counted down from 20 with these songs:

20. Loving Cup (Exile on Main Street)
19. Wild Horses (Sticky Fingers)
18. Bitch (Sticky Fingers)
17. Monkey Man (Let it Bleed)
16. Let it Loose (Exile)
15. Prodigal Son (Beggar's Banquet)
14. Can't You Hear Me Knocking (Sticky Fingers)
13. Shattered (Some Girls)
12. Happy (Exile)
11. Rocks Off (Exile)
10. (tie) Jumping Jack Flash (no album)
10. (tie) Street Fighting Man (Beggar's Banquet)

Now we get to, as the Beatles would say, "number 9, number 9, number 9."   The Stones had a cool habit of putting a longer, run-out song last on their classic albums from the "golden age" from 1968-1972.   On Beggar's Banquet it was "Salt of the Earth."  On Sticky Fingers it was "Moonlight Mile."   On Exile it was "Soul Survivor."  All great songs to end great albums.   But the greatest "run-out" ending song was from Let It Bleed in 1969, and it's our number 9.


9.  You Can't Always Get What You Want

Frankly, this isn't my favorite Stones song... perhaps because I remember it from the self-indulgent, pat-ourselves-on-the-back Boomer fantasy from the early 1980s, The Big Chill.   But it's hard to say that it shouldn't be in the top 10, so here it is:

More Art from the Regular Son!

The kid likes John Singer Sargent, I guess.   But, then, he was 28, and not 15, when he did this:

Everything You Need to Know About Al Gore

Everything you need to know about liberals, the Democratic Party, the media propaganda machine, and Al F'in Gore is in these two sentences:

Glenn Beck's Blaze Media approached the struggling cable news network [Al Gore's Current TV] last year, the Wall Street Journal reports, but was rebuffed because "the legacy of who the network goes to is important to us and we are sensitive to networks not aligned with our point of view."

Instead, Gore went with the Emir of Qatar-funded Arab news channel Al-Jazeera. 

So a Christian Republican American is too distasteful to sell your TV network to, but Al-Jazeera is just fine, so long as the check for $500 million clears.   Apparently Al-Jazeera's anti-American viewpoints are more "aligned" with Gore's liberalism. 


Oh, and he pushed to have the deal completed before the end of the year, so he could avoid the new taxes his party and his President pushed for.

Hypocrites.    To think this jerk was almost President.

Democrats and The Sopranos

I've been watching a lot of The Sopranos series over Christmas. I know, I know. I'm late to the party.

Anyway, there's a storyline early in the series where a regular john businessman loses at cards in a game run by Tony's crew, and they end up becoming "partners" with him in his sporting goods store. What they do is run up the debt of the business, buying things on credit that they then take for themselves, until the regular john (who had been a high school friend of Tony's and assumed that he wouldn't screw him) is bankrupt and ruined.

Republicans are like the regular john who thinks the Democrats are buddies (i.e., a normal political party composed of American citizens who love their country and want what's best for it, and who will end up compromising to save it), but doesn't realize that they are actually an organized criminal enterprise whose purpose is not governance, but looting the treasury. The goal of the Democratic Party is to transfer as much of the wealth of America and as much of the wealth of the world they can borrow on the country's credit to their own constituencies and cronies, before the country goes bankrupt.

We have to stop pretending that the Democrats will ever do the right thing. They won't.  They are gangsters.   We have a gangster government.

And you wonder why gun stores have trouble keeping inventory in stock.

The Regular Guy's List of the Top 20 Rolling Stones Songs (#10a and 10b)

I got some grief from the Regular Son about my list of Stones' songs 11-20.   He argues (probably correctly) that Happy is a greater song than Rocks Off, and that there's no way that Rocks Off is the 11th best Rolling Stones song, or even close (although it's a great song, no doubt).   I guess that's what a list like this is for... generating discussion about something we both love.   Sort of like arguing about who's better, Ruth or Gehrig, or Mays or Aaron, or Clemens or Maddux.  

Anyway, moving on to the top 10, these should be a little less controversial, by which I mean that no one could possibly think they aren't great.

10.  (tie) Street Fighting Man and Jumping Jack Flash.

Two great, great songs with classic Keith rhythm guitar lines.   This is the Stones as they are entering their "golden age" in 1968... post-Brian Jones, post-psychedelia.   This is the Stones doing what they did best... classic, tough, man-sized rock songs.   As the Regular Son and I have commented, when the Beatles put these songs on the turntable and listened to them, this is about when they started to realize that the Stones were better than they were, and it wasn't close.







UPDATE:   Here's a list published last summer from someone else.   It's interesting to see what different people like... this guy's list, for instance, has songs in its top 10 that don't make my top 20, including Angie, Dead Flowers and Under My Thumb.   All great songs, but just not my cups of tea.   On the other hand, this guy also unaccountably leaves Satisfaction off his list of top 20 Stones songs.   That can't happen and (spoiler alert) won't happen in my list.   The greatest rock guitar riff ever has to be on the Stones' top 20 list, and near the top.

Girl of the Day - Victoria Principal

She turns 62 today.   (Or 66, or 67, depending on where you look on the Internet.)  If you grew up in the 1970s watching Dallas, you know how weird any of those numbers sounds. 

Tempus fugit, again and again. 

Finally

Absentee Fathers and the Newtown School Shooting

Adam Lanza was not normal. He suffered from morbid shyness and an inability to connect with his student peers and anyone else—a cold, withdrawn, hollow shell of a person to his classmates, an Asperger's patient to professional psychologists. Even under the best of circumstances—with a loving, caring, two-parent family consisting of a husband and wife who complemented each other’s strengths and worked together as a team—raising someone like Adam Lanza would be a real challenge.

One can't say how he might have turned out under different circumstances, but statistics show that having divorced parents, as Lanza did, plus a father who moves out of the household, remarries, and has little contact with his son for long stretches of time, is not the ideal formula for successful childrearing. Yet what sociologists call “family structure issues” were rarely discussed in the media, not even on conservative talk radio where one might have expected them to have a preeminent place. Most Americans, it seems, have so many divorced or single-parent neighbors, friends, and relatives (if they are not themselves divorced or living as single parents) that discussing family structure is simply too painful and too sensitive to be taken up in any honest or candid manner.

I'll go a little further.   People talk about how women "can't have it all" -- a job, motherhood, personal fulfillment, etc.   But men can't have it all either, not if they want to be real fathers.   And that's not just paying the bills.   It's not just showing up to the occasional soccer game or graduation ceremony.   It's being there every day for long stretches of time.   It's having long conversations.   It's about sharing interests.   It's about a lot of yelling and a lot of hugs over a long, steady period of time.  

The evidence suggests that Adam Lanza's father was neglectful of his son.   We lawyers have a term for that:  negligence.    His negligence was causal, perhaps not the largest cause, but still enough to earn him a line on the verdict form.  

The same, of course, is also true about all the absentee fathers in our inner cities whose children, young, neglected men and boys, commit murders in the ongoing insanity of our drug and gang wars.

Depression, Via Ace of Spades

Ace, writing about the pork-laden Sandy-relief bill:

The reality is vox populi, vox dei -- the voice of the people is the voice of God. And the voice of this particular shabby god has decreed that we shall be financially reckless and we should go through a national bankruptcy, and there's no sense trying to avoid it, so we'll just run up a huge tab buying multiple 65 inch 3D tvs before we crash.

Given that the people wish to spend money they do not have, and soon will not have (for all the same reasons that people with bad credit can't rent a car -- your ability to borrow is precisely related to your projected future ability to make good on your loans), and will not be diverted from this disastrous course, what can anyone do?

People used to call people who expected other people to pay for them "freeloaders."   And people used to call people who ran up huge debts that they had no intention of paying "bums" or "frauds."  

And "bankrupt" used to be a term of opprobrium, signifying both financial and moral ruin, with the latter having been the proximate cause of the former.  

If you base a political economy on moral hazard, don't be surprised when both your politicians and your people act immorally.

Girls of the Day - Downton Abbey Returns!

Downton Abbey returns this Sunday, hopefully sans ouija board.   We can't wait, not least because Dexter and Homeland finished their seasons, and we've a long way to go until Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

The Regular Guy's List of the Rolling Stones' Top 20 Songs

We listened to a lot of Rolling Stones over the Regular Family's trek across the Midwest for Christmas, and I thought after reflection I'd produce the Regular Guy's list of top Stones' songs.   So here goes, with the second ten first, in descending order:

20. Loving Cup (Exile on Main Street)
19. Wild Horses (Sticky Fingers)
18. Bitch (Sticky Fingers)
17. Monkey Man (Let it Bleed)
16. Let it Loose (Exile)
15. Prodigal Son (Beggar's Banquet)
14. Can't You Hear Me Knocking (Sticky Fingers)
13. Shattered (Some Girls)
12. Happy (Exile)
11. Rocks Off (Exile)

This is a pretty idiosyncratic list, more so than the top 10 will be.   Numbers 20-17 will look pretty standard -- great Stones songs that nearly everyone likes.   But after that are simply some of my personal favorites.   Let it Loose was my favorite song from Exile for a long time, and the way the female voices come out of nowhere at the end always catches me emotionally.   Prodigal Son captures Mick and Keith channelling Southern black blues almost perfectly, and reminds me how much of rock came from taking traditional song structures and running with them.   Can't You Hear Me Knocking just has the nastiest Keith rhythm guitar lick... which is what we listen to the Stones for in the first place.   Meanwhile, the last three are not great epochal songs the way the final ten will be, but they represent the Stones at their best... hard-rocking fun party music, which is what rock-and-roll is supposed to be.  

In particular, Rocks Off is the worst of the opening tunes of the four greatest Stones albums from their Golden Age:  the period from Beggar's Banquet in 1968 through Exile in 1972.   But it's still one of the greatest and most raucous opening numbers of any album from the rock era:

Chart of the Day

From Zero Hedge.   Literally (as Joe Biden might say) all you need to know about the joke "fiscal cliff" deal:

Raising taxes on the "wealthy" (those families who take in more than $450,000 in adjusted gross income) simply isn't going to come close to closing the budget deficit the Democrats are running.   And that's assuming, of course, that the $62 billion per year calculated to come from the higher taxes in the fiscal cliff deal actually materialize.   Here's a tip -- they won't.   These taxes on our most productive citizens will slow their productivity.   For small businesses who file as S-corporations, they'll higher fewer people, build fewer new facilities, buy fewer new pieces of equipment, etc.   Meanwhile, these highly compensated individuals will also have high incentives to find ways to avoid taxes.   The federal government won't get $62 billion extra this year, or any year.

Meanwhile, put aside the pragmatic aspect of this mode of "soak the rich" taxation.   There's also the moral aspect.   The "rich" already pay their fair share and then some:

We are a nation of freeloaders.