Joni Mitchell:

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Bob Dylan:

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Carole King with James Taylor and Charles Larkey, her bass player and husband (and eventually her ex-husband). From what I read, he was kind of an asshole — but he’s a really good bass player:

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Enthroned in the corporate media!

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Otherwise known as “incompetence rises to the top”!

Christina Romer, chairwoman of Pres. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, has decided to resign, according to a source familiar with her plans.

Romer, an economics professor at the University of California (Berkeley) before taking the key admin post, did not respond to repeated calls to her office.

“She has been frustrated,” a source with insight into the WH economics team said. “She doesn’t feel that she has a direct line to the president. She would be giving different advice than Larry Summers [director of the National Economic Council], who does have a direct line to the president.”

“She is ostensibly the chief economic adviser, but she doesn’t seem to be playing that role,” the source said. The WH has been pounded for its faulty forecast that unemployment would not top 8% after its economic stimulus proposal passed.

Instead, the jobless rate is 9.5%, after exceeding 10% last year. It was “a horribly inaccurate forecast,” said Bert Ely, a banking consultant. “You have to wonder why Summers isn’t the one that should be taking the fall. But Larry is a pretty good bureaucratic infighter.”

Remember when everyone was explaining to me that Obama had “executive ability” because of how well his campaign operated, and I tried to explain that it wasn’t true? This is what I meant.

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Thank God we have the government to protect us from drawing our own conclusions!

The government took the threat of UFOs so seriously in the 1950s that UK intelligence chiefs met to discuss the issue, newly-released files show.

Ministers even went on to commission weekly reports on UFO sightings from a committee of intelligence experts.

The papers also include a wartime account claiming prime minister Winston Churchill ordered a UFO sighting be kept secret to prevent “mass panic”.

The files show reports of UFOs peaked in 1996 – when The X Files was popular.

The Joint Intelligence Committee is better known for providing briefings to the government on matters relating to security, defence and foreign affairs.

But the latest batch of UFO files released from the Ministry of Defence to the National Archives shows that, in 1957, the committee received reports detailing an average of one UFO sighting a week.

The files also include an account of a wartime meeting attended by Winston Churchill in which, it is claimed, the prime minister was so concerned about a reported encounter between a UFO and RAF bombers, that he ordered it be kept secret for at least 50 years to prevent “mass panic”.

Nick Pope, who used to investigate UFO sightings for the MoD, said: “The interesting thing is that most of the UFO files from that period have been destroyed.

“But what happened is that a scientist whose grandfather was one of his [Churchill's] bodyguards, said look, Churchill and Eisenhower got together to cover up this phenomenal UFO sighting, that was witnessed by an RAF crew on their way back from a bombing raid.

“The reason apparently was because Churchill believed it would cause mass panic and it would shatter people’s religious views.”

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For one thing, it would be a lot cheaper and parts would be easier to get!

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Every wacky wingnut in the world is on the teevee today to bemoan the “discrimination” against God-fearing Christians if the courts allow gay marriage. Now Wingnut Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America is on Hardball talking about what this does to “the children” of America and how Christians will be “persecuted” for living their “beliefs.”

You remember that for a very long time, these were the same arguments advanced by the godly right wing against the legalizing of interracial marriage. They seem almost quaint now, don’t they?

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Thank heavens we have such caring men around to raise children right:

At approximately 8:25 p.m. last Sunday night, the New York State Police on Long Island logged a 911 call about a toddler in cardiac arrest. The boy, 17-month-old Roy Jones, was rushed from the Shinnecock Indian Reservation in Southampton, N.Y. to Southampton Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 9:11 p.m.

According to authorities, the toddler had endured a savage beating. His tiny body had been repeatedly punched with closed fists and grabbed by the neck. By the time 911 had been called at dusk, he was already in cardiac arrest from the sheer brutality of the assault and it was too late to save his life.

Charged with manslaughter in the first degree and held without bail is the toddler’s mother’s live-in boyfriend, 20-year-old Pedro Jones, who was babysitting. The pair lived together on Shinnecock Nation tribal land, though Jones himself was not a member of the tribe. They were reportedly to marry, and Jones called the toddler “my baby,” though Roy was not, in fact his baby.

“I was trying to make him act like a boy instead of a little girl,” Jones explained. “I never struck that kid that hard before. A one-time mistake, and I am going to do 20 years.”

He told troopers that the little boy had been too feminine and that he’d been trying to toughen Roy up by literally beating the life out of him.

“I’m sorry,” he said “That’s my baby. I loved him to death.”

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Still fine!

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