If you watch the federal courts for any length of time, you may well come to the conclusion that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — the district that includes California and most of the Pacific Northwest — is off-the-charts liberal. This is the gang that declared the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional, backed medical marijuana, and (if I’m not mistaken) has overturned tons of death penalty sentences.

USA Today has a good piece this weekend about the 9th Circuit, arguing that the judges are not so far left as you might think — and that its approach to the law may have more to do with the differences between East and West than Left and Right.

 

Everyone has their daily on-line routine — the dozen or so websites that you check out of interest or habit. You should add one more, because 2004 gets closer every day.

By mid-morning every weekday, ABC News’ Political Unit puts together something called The Note. It culls the best of Big Media’s political reporting for the day and distills it into a zeitgeist. (It’s so hard to find a good distilled zeitgeist these days. Most liquor stores hardly keep it in stock.) More than a “who’s up/who’s down,” The Note details who says who’s up and who’s down — and puts the lie to the notion that Big Media walks in lockstep while simultaneously illustrating how it picks a direction to drift in. They’d probably hate the description, but it’s a hell of a weblog.

Hard as it may be to believe, George W. Bush is up for re-election in only 640 days and people are already choosing up sides. If you want to know who, why and how, read The Note.

 

A few months ago, I got to perform in the New York premiere of The Water Passion after St. Matthew, by the Chinese composer Tan Dun. (If the name sounds familiar, it’s probably because wrote the Oscar-winning soundtrack for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.)

One of the other members of the chorus (and a good friend) was Jeff Lunden, a composer and independent producer whose work frequently appears on NPR. Jeff was so moved and impressed by the experience — which indeed pinned the needle on the Coolness meter — that he produced this piece, which aired on NPR this weekend.

 

From Reuters:

Men who don’t shave every day enjoy less sex and are 70% more likely to suffer a stroke than daily shavers, a new study shows.

A team at Bristol University in England who examined the link between shaving, coronary heart disease and stroke in 2,438 middle-aged Welsh men found that men who did not shave every day were also more likely to suffer a heart attack.

Heard any good jingles lately? I thought not.

A piece in AdAge points out that

For New York music houses — recording studios with paid staff and a stable of exclusive writers and producers — the estimated $150 million business was off by 25% last year, according to the Association of Music Producers. That’s following a soft 2000 and 2001.

What’s taking their place? Pop songs. You hear them all over, usually in ludicrous places. The Stones’ “Start Me Up” for Ford and Microsoft. The Clash’s “London Calling” for Jaguar — an link so inappropriate as to be almost obscene. And nearly an entire album of Beck’s has been culled for advertising use.

The trouble is twofold. The first, and lesser, issue is that brands suffer from this. A successful jingle is for the ages. Think “two all beef patties.” Think “the heartbeat of America.”

More troubling is what this means for pop music. It’s not exactly news that what used to be revolutionary and counterculture is now mainstream. But something important is lost when the soundtrack of our lives — the personal connection we have with certain songs — can be co-opted in an attempt to plug that emotion into building loyalty to a product. The Beatles had it right by not licensing anything; Michael Jackson screwed it up by letting Nike use “Revolution.”

Much of this is a lost cause, I know. But so help me, I’ll bust the first TV that I hear using “What’s Going On” to sell me something.

 

From the AP:

 PANAMA CITY BEACH, Fla. 淼 A couple is suing the franchisee of a McDonald’s restaurant, claiming an improperly prepared bagel damaged the husband’s teeth and their marriage.

 <snip>

 Tracey Johnstone, owner of Johnstone Foods, said she never before had a bagel complaint and had no idea how it could have been prepared in a way that would damage teeth.

“It’s a bagel,” she said.

Newsday’s got a story about how young folk get their news from the Web instead of TV or print. The headline:

Why Won’t Johnny Read?

… missing the point completely that getting information online is reading. Maybe it should have been “Why Won’t Johnny Pay Us $1/Day to Get Only the Information We Want to Give Him in a Format He Doesn’t Want?”

 

Astonishing story from the Boston Globe. Sen. John Kerry, D-MA, presidential candidate, practicing Catholic, member of the prominent Winthrop and Forbes clans, husband to the Heinz food fortune is (wait for it)….

Jewish.

The Globe did some deep genealogical research into Kerry and dug out stuff like his grandfather committing suicide in the men’s room of the Copley Plaza Hotel (with considerable press coverage of the event). And in among it all, they tracked Kerry’s family back to what is now the Czech Republic and a man named Fritz Kohn, who became Frederick A. Kerry.

The senator has known he had a Jewish grandmother for about 15 years but didn’t know much about her, and claims to have long tried to disabuse people about his presumed Irish heritage. The Globe sounded awfully surprised — five grafs worth — to learn that he’s not of the Auld Sod:

Numerous publications, including the Globe, have stated that Kerry is Irish-American.

”I’m sure some people see the name and say, `Hey, I think it’s this or that,’ but I’ve been clear as a bell,” Kerry said. ”I’ve always been absolutely straight up front about it.”

Kerry spokeswoman Kelley Benander said the senator has corrected any misstatement he became aware of. When she was read three examples from Globe clippings in which the senator was misidentified as Irish-American, she repeated that Kerry had corrected misstatements when he read or heard them.

Kerry ”has never indicated to anyone that he was Irish and corrected people over the years who assumed he was,” Benander said.

”It is certainly an understandable misimpression,” she said. ”His name was Kerry, he represents Massachusetts, and he attended the St. Patrick’s Day breakfasts, like everyone else in public life in the state.”

 

Dreadful news today. Just awful. My heart goes out to the family, friends and colleagues of the astronauts.

 

The Editorial Auction story keeps getting better.

Lee Scheslinger, the brains of the operation, says eBay’s now yanked the whole thing. Hardly matters, though, because the story’s now run in the Boston Globe, Wired, and UPI. Lee’s been interviewed on the local Boston Fox News station and has been interviewed by the NYTimes and Reuters. And it made FuckedCompany, which isn’t as important as it used to be, but still counts for something.

This afternoon, another colleague on a private e-mail list we’re all on dropped a line to Reese Schonfeld, a UPI alum and founder of CNN. The upshot is that CNN Headline News will probably be running a story on the whole megillah come Monday.

Sure beats sending out resumes.