The Political Whore

By Mitch Perry
PoHo contributor
Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio.

With the recording industry in freefall, the manager of one of the most respected bands in rock announced last month a new sort of record label, perhaps more akin to a venture capital company.

Brian Message represents Radiohead. But now with Polyphonic, a new company he’s helping to create, new artists will be signed and given funding but then will record their own music and choose outside contractors to handle their publicity, merchandising and touring.

According to the NY Times,

Instead of receiving an advance and then possibly reaping royalties later if they have a hit, musicians will share in all the profits from their music and touring. In another departure from tradition in the music business, they will also maintain ownership of their own copyrights and master recordings — meaning they and their heirs can keep earning money from their music.

Meanwhile, Nielsen reports that sales of physical albums fell off , while individual digital tracks rose  27 percent. That follows news from earlier this year that indicates that teenagers are not only buying fewer CD’s (nothing too radical there), but also fewer digital downloads of music, prompting a market researcher to remark, “ These declines could be happening due to a lack of excitement among teens about the music available, but it could also reflect a larger shift in the ways teens interact with music, given that so much music is now available whenever and wherever they want it.”

Intrigued, I asked one of the veterans of the music industry, Danny Goldberg, what he makes of what’s happening in the industry he’s worked in for his entire adult life.  He said these developments are part and parcel of the radically different environment in the music industry.

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By Lorna Bracewell
PoHo contributor

Confronted with a news story involving lesbian penguins at a German zoo, you would think that evil geniuses Bill O’Reilly and Dennis Miller could muster at least one decent lesbian joke.

Watch their pathetic attempts after the jump.

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Mitch Perry
PoHo contributor
Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio

The shocking assassination of late-term abortion doctor George Tiller on May 31 has brought back the volatile issue of abortion on to the national landscape.

Of course, it’s never gone away. But the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor by President Obama to the Supreme Court — and her relatively scant record on abortion issues — has elicited analysis that, perhaps unlike every previous Supreme Court nomination over the past few decades, her nomination won’t be heavily focused by her thoughts on Roe v. Wade.

Pro-choice advocates were stunned when Gallup reported last month that for the first time since it began asking the question, a majority of Americans now call themselves pro-life vs. pro-choice (although a review of other similar polls taken over the past year continue to reflect a majority pro-choice America.)

If that wasn’t at least a soft blow to those reproductive rights advocates, Tiller’s death by the hands of 51-year-old Scott P. Roeder absolutely was.

And for a portion of the public, upon learning of Tiller’s death, thoughts immediately turned to Bill O’Reilly, who focused relentlessly on the controversial doctor’s status as one of just a handful of M.D.’s in the country who continued to perform late term abortions.

Some liberal commentators and bloggers immediately blamed the cable news analyst for inciting Roeder to commit murder.  O’Reilly, predictably, pushed back, and used the opening moments of his show last week to argue that his foils, NBC News and company, were just as responsible for the murder of U.S. soldier William Long in Arkansas by a Muslim convert.

For many in the abortion rights movement, Tiller’s death brought back the dark days of the 1990’s, when doctors David Gunn, Bernard Slepian and John Britton were killed for their work as abortion providers.

Sarasota resident Sherry Svekis received a late-term abortion from Tiller in 1985. Not being a regular Fox News viewer, she was unaware of the very public campaign O’Reilly had wrought against Tiller over the years until his death.

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By Mitch Perry
PoHo contributor

Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio.

As the Dow Jones Industrials and the S&P 500 continued their dismal descent last week, conservative commentators appeared proud that they alone have deciphered the reason why – it’s President Obama’s economic proposals, of course.

From the Wall Street Journal’s lead editorial on Friday:

What’s worrying about the plunge in equities since January 2, and especially in the last week since Mr. Obama released his radical budget, is that it has come amid the unveiling of the President’s policy agenda. Equity prices have reacted to those proposals by signaling that they expect a much deeper and longer recession.

And on the next page, former Bush 41 Economic Advisor Michael Boskin wrote under the doomsday headline “Obama’s Radicalism is Killing the Dow:”

It’s hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president’s policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis.

And so on. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly led off virtually every one of his “Talking Points” segments by also blaming the president’s “Socialist spending sprees” as further evidence that Wall Street is not impressed.

But is this really correct? One political theorist laughed when I asked him this last week.

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Two vids making the rounds. First, the Obama campaign’s self-promotion. I can almost hear the crowd chanting “no rain, no rain, no rain …” in the background:

and O’Reilly, the dance remix (NSFW):