FMJRA 2.0: Space Age Love Song

Look at the date on that New York Times story — how did it happen that, in August 2016, Ukraine’s “newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau” took an interest in Donald Trump’s campaign manager and these reporters had no trouble finding sources in Kiev telling them all about these “ledgers”? What that just a coincidence? Or does it seem to you more likely, as Ace of Spades suggests, that this story was about protecting the interests of the U.S. political establishment?

Remember, it was critical to Hillary Clinton that the FBI have active investigations opened into the Trump campaign, because she had a high profile investigation into her own actions, and she desperately needed to be able to play the They Do It Too Card.

Do you believe in coincidences like that? A powerful politician needs to smear her opponent and — oh, what a coincidence! — sources direct reporters for the New York Times to the Ukraine, where investigators cite a “secret ledger” that appears to prove wrongdoing by the opponent’s campaign manager. Well, guess what? Three years later, we discover that (a) the “ledger” was probably a forgery, and (b) the FBI was actively engaged in feeding this stuff to the media:

In search warrant affidavits, the FBI portrayed the ledger as one reason it resurrected a criminal case against Manafort that was dropped in 2014 and needed search warrants in 2017 for bank records to prove he worked for the Russian-backed Party of Regions in Ukraine.
There’s just one problem: The FBI’s public reliance on the ledger came months after the feds were warned repeatedly that the document couldn’t be trusted and likely was a fake, according to documents and more than a dozen interviews with knowledgeable sources. . . .
Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Konstantin Kilimnik, a regular informer for the State Department, told the U.S. government almost immediately after The New York Times wrote about the ledger in August 2016 that the document probably was fake.
Manafort “could not have possibly taken large amounts of cash across three borders. It was always a different arrangement — payments were in wire transfers to his companies, which is not a violation,” Kilimnik wrote in an email to a senior U.S. official on Aug. 22, 2016. . . .
[T]he FBI and Mueller’s office did not cite the actual ledger — which would require agents to discuss their assessment of the evidence — and instead cited media reports about it. The feds assisted on one of those stories as sources.
For example, agents mentioned the ledger in an affidavit supporting a July 2017 search warrant for Manafort’s house, citing it as one of the reasons the FBI resurrected the criminal case against Manafort.
“On August 19, 2016, after public reports regarding connections between Manafort, Ukraine and Russia == including an alleged ‘black ledger’ of off-the-book payments from the Party of Regions to Manafort — Manafort left his post as chairman of the Trump Campaign,” the July 25, 2017, FBI agent’s affidavit stated.
Three months later, the FBI went further in arguing probable cause for a search warrant for Manafort’s bank records, citing a specific article about the ledger as evidence Manafort was paid to perform U.S. lobbying work for the Ukrainians.
“The April 12, 2017, Associated Press article reported that DMI [Manafort’s company] records showed at least two payments were made to DMI that correspond to payments in the ‘black ledger,’ ” an FBI agent wrote in a footnote to the affidavit.
There are two glaring problems with that assertion.
First, the agent failed to disclose that both FBI officials and Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who later became Mueller’s deputy, met with those AP reporters one day before the story was published and assisted their reporting.
An FBI record of the April 11, 2017, meeting declared that the AP reporters “were advised that they appeared to have a good understanding of Manafort’s business dealings” in Ukraine.
So, essentially, the FBI cited a leak that the government had facilitated and then used it to support the black ledger evidence, even though it had been clearly warned about the document.
Secondly, the FBI was told the ledger claimed to show cash payments to Manafort when, in fact, agents had been told since 2014 that Manafort received money only by bank wires, mostly routed through the island of Cyprus, memos show.

So, Manafort was forced to resign from the campaign after someone fed this fake “secret ledger” story to the New York Times and then, in order to justify search warrants for Manafort’s bank records, the FBI leaks more “secret ledger” stories to the media, then cites those stories as “evidence” to claim probably cause on the warrant application. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me the people responsible for this need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. This kind of “Deep State” stuff — government bureaucrats acting improperly to exercise a corrupt political infleunce, and exploiting the news media in the process — is why every American should be glad Hillary lost. If she had won, we never would have learned what kind of shenanigans were going on at the FBI.

Category: Donald Trump, Media Bias, MuellerGate, Ukraine

The Worst #MeToo Smear Yet

Posted on | June 22, 2019 | 2 Comments

Imagine you’re a famous billionaire real estate developer. Now imagine you’ve got nothing better to do than to hang around department stores, raping magazine columnists in dressing rooms:

President Donald Trump strongly denounced an allegation of sexual assault from author E. Jean Carroll on Friday, saying that he never met the woman in his life.
“I’ve never met this person in my life,” Trump said in a statement sent to reporters. “She is trying to sell a new book — that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section.”
Carroll published an excerpt of her story in New York Magazine claiming that Trump raped her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in 1995. Bergdorf Goodman confirmed that they had no surveillance video of the alleged incident.
Carroll is now 75, is an advice columnist for Elle, and wrote magazine features for Playboy and Esquire.
Trump noted that there was no pictures, no surveillance, no video, no reports, and no sales representatives who could prove the assault.
“It’s just as bad for people to believe it, particularly when there is zero evidence,” Trump said. “Worse still for a dying publication to try to prop itself up by peddling fake news — it’s an epidemic.”
Trump also denounced false rape accusations for diminishing the seriousness of real assault cases.
“If anyone has information that the Democratic Party is working with Ms. Carroll or New York Magazine, please notify us as soon as possible,” Trump wrote. “The world should know what’s really going on. It is a disgrace and people should pay dearly for such false accusations.”

The media have called attention to photos showing Carroll in attendance at a 1995 event with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, which would seem to refute his claim that he “never met this person,” but so what? Trump is a famous guy who meets lots of people, and he can’t remember all of them. Besides which, Carroll claims their encounter happened in midtown Manhattan, not Palm Beach, Florida. My hunch is that this story, which got saturation coverage on CNN and MSNBC yesterday, will have zero political impact. Only people who already hate Trump will believe it, and everybody else will see it as further evidence that the #MeToo movement has become a witch hunt. Even if you believe Jean Carroll is telling the truth, how convenient is it that she saves the story of this alleged felony for a book published nearly 25 years afterwards?

Category: Donald Trump, Media Bias

In The Mailbox: 06.21.19

Posted on | June 22, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Knowledge Buffet: The Last Straw – The When Of Making Ourselves Ungovernable
EBL: Illegal Alien Gets Nine Months For Rape, Gets Released Without Notice To ICE Or Victim – And Rapes Her Again
Twitchy: Michael Moore Warns Left About Trump’s Base Ahead Of The 2020 Elections
Louder With Crowder: AOC & Democrats’ Five Insane Holocaust Comparisons, also, Condoleeza Rice Has No Time For NBC Reporter’s Race Baiting
According To Hoyt: “But For Wales, Richard?”
Monster Hunter Nation: My Russian Bot Review Of The Last Jedi
Vox Popoli: Mailvox – We Have An Answer

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: How SJWs Treat Their Own, also, Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Get On With It Edition
American Greatness: We Need A Higher Education Reformation
American Power: David Horowitz, Uncivil Wars
American Thinker: Liberals’ National Popular Vote Scheme Is Unconstitutional & Dangerous
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Bigfoot Friday
Babalu Blog: Brazil’s Bolsonaro Investigating Questionable Loans To Cuba, Venezuela By National Bank
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For June 21, also, Texas Sends 1000 National Guardsmen To Border To Address Illegal Alien Surge
CDR Salamander: Cooling’s Last Stand, also, Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: The Best Fight Is Living Your Life In The Real World
Don Surber: The Art Of The Iranian Deal, also, WSJ Pouts About The Donald
Dustbury: Dissociated Press
First Street Journal: Roy Moore Wants To Re-Elect Doug Jones
The Geller Report: Polish MP Challenges Occasional Cortex To Visit Hitler’s REAL Concentration Camps, also, Two Chicago Muslims Convicted Of Aiding & Abetting ISIS
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, Bonus Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: Riverdale Creator – How I Made Archie Matter Again
JustOneMinute: California Dreamin’ Comes East
Legal Insurrection: Portland, OR Using Boulders To Deter Homeless Camps, also, David Gibson Kept Fighting Oberlin So His Dad Wouldn’t Die “Being Labeled A Racist”
The PanAm Post: Bachelet’s Useless Visit To Venezuela Could Have Been Conducted Via Skype
Power Line: Thoughts From The Ammo Line, also, The Times Tips The FBI
Shark Tank: Another Sex Abuse Claim At Miami Migrant Center
Shot In The Dark: The Problem…
The Political Hat: Firing Line Friday – The Avant Garde
This Ain’t Hell: Valor Friday, also, The Navy Needs To Return To Subic Bay
Victory Girls: Hope Hicks Testimony Makes The Democrats Look Foolish
Volokh Conspiracy: SCOTUS Overrules Catch-22 For Property Owners Trying To Bring Takings Cases
Weasel Zippers: Judge Appoints Special Prosecutor To Examine Handling Of Smollett Case, also, University Of Oregon Students Claim “Oppression” From Pioneer Statue, Demand Its Removal
Mark Steyn: A True North Stronger & Freer, also, Working It Out

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Category: Linkagery

Real Courage: Jewish Journalists Address Jewish Role in Communist Subversion

Posted on | June 21, 2019 | Comments Off on Real Courage: Jewish Journalists Address Jewish Role in Communist Subversion

The editors of Mosaic deserve tremendous credit for publishing “The Death of Morton Sobell and the End of the Rosenberg Affair,” by David Evanier, and two responses, “Few American Jews Were Communists, and Many Fewer Were Spies,” by Harvey Klehr, and “Why It’s Necessary to Bring Jewish Communism into Full View,” by Ruth Wisse.

These essays help provide a factual understanding of a complex phenomenon that most historians and journalists have tried to avoid, with the result that silence and ignorance have given rise to paranoia. You cannot suppress anti-Semitism by avoiding unfortunate facts, and the fact is that Communists used false accusations of anti-Semitism as part of their propaganda efforts against the United States during the Cold War. Yes, there were a disproportionate number of Jews involved in the CPUSA, and many Jewish Communists (including Morton Sobell and the Rosenbergs) were also among those engaged in Soviet espionage. However, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, with the crimes of Hitler still a very fresh memory, the Soviets and their CPUSA henchmen cleverly exploited this to their advantage, accusing American anti-Communists of being Jew-hating “fascists” while proclaiming the innocence of the Rosenbergs and other Soviet spies. As Wisse points out, this Big Lie isn’t just some remote historical controversy, but it has consequences down to this very day, persuading many Jewish Americans that they must always identify with those allegedly “oppressed” by American society. Furthermore, because our universities and media institutions have been unwilling to address this topic directly, they have unwittingly given aid and comfort to anti-Semites, who love to depict Jews as inherently subversive, while claiming that powerful Jews use their influence to conceal the extent of this subversion.

To depict all Jews, collectively, as responsible for the bad actions of a minority within their community, is the kind of guilt-by-association smear that ought never to be tolerated. The truth is the only possible antidote to such smears, and this means we have to be able to acknowledge unpleasant truths that we might prefer to sweep under the rug. It’s a simple fact that the Communist Party included a lot of Jews, as Harvey Klehr makes clear:

Although Jews made up a disproportionate share of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) — perhaps as much as 40 percent in 1939 — the party itself never held more than 100,000 members. So, in an American Jewish population of several million, a tiny percentage were Communists. . . .
In 1945, three of the six people arrested in the Amerasia case, the first espionage case of the cold war, were Jewish. (None was ever successfully prosecuted for spying.) In 1947, six of the Hollywood Ten who on First Amendment grounds refused to answer questions when subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Commission (HUAC) were Jewish. In 1949, five of the eleven top leaders of the CPUSA convicted under the Smith Act of conspiring to teach and advocate the overthrow of the American government were Jewish. In the 1948 presidential election, Henry Wallace, formerly FDR’s vice-president now running on the Progressive ticket with Communist backing, drew only a little more than a million votes altogether; but, by one estimate, about a third of American Jewish voters, a much larger percentage than the number of Jews in the CPUSA, cast their ballots for him.

In other words, if you were concerned about Communism circa 1947-49, a certain level of suspicion toward Jews was justified, even though the vast majority of Jews were not Communists. And to look at the obverse of the case, it might be that an ordinary Jew-hater would engage in anti-Communist rhetoric as a way to promote his pet prejudice, but this certainly doesn’t mean that every anti-Communist was a Jew-hater.

You cannot protect the innocent by denying the guilt of the guilty. You cannot solve a social problem by pretending it doesn’t exist, by minimizing it, justifying it or rationalizing it. Communism was a grave threat to constitutional liberty in America, and to U.S. national security, and the role of Jews in supporting Communism needs to be confronted soberly by historians, especially by Jewish historians. One thing I like to point out, whenever anti-Semitism rears its ugly head in discussions of the Cold War, is that while the Rosenbergs were Jews, the federal judge who sentenced them to death, Judge Irving Kaufman, was also Jewish.

Part of the problem is that Cold War history is either ignored in our schools, or taught from a pro-Communist perspective, recycling Soviet propaganda claims about the irrational “paranoia” of the 1950s, with “McCarthyism” made to seem a greater menace than Stalinism. Young people generally know nothing about the Bolshevik Revolution or the atrocities committed by Communist regimes. Sympathetic portrayals of accused Communists as being victims of a right-wing “witch hunt” in the 1950s are part of a liberal mythology that Jeanne Kirkpatrick once summarized succinctly: “They always blame America first.”

To augment that mythology by falsely accusing anti-Communists of anti-Semitism is dangerous for several reasons, particularly because Jew-haters are likely to exploit this for their own purposes, and the editors of Mosaic deserve credit for taking direct aim at this myth.

Category: History

Report: Trump Cancels Strike Against Iran

Posted on | June 21, 2019 | Comments Off on Report: Trump Cancels Strike Against Iran

If true, this is good news:

Officials said the president had initially approved attacks on a handful of Iranian targets, like radar and missile batteries.
The operation was underway in its early stages when it was called off, a senior administration official said. Planes were in the air and ships were in position, but no missiles had been fired when word came to stand down, the official said.
The abrupt reversal put a halt to what would have been the president’s third military action against targets in the Middle East. Mr. Trump had struck twice at targets in Syria, in 2017 and 2018.
It was not clear whether Mr. Trump simply changed his mind on the strikes or whether the administration altered course because of logistics or strategy. It was also not clear whether the attacks might still go forward.
Asked about the plans for a strike and the decision to hold back, the White House declined to comment, as did Pentagon officials. No government officials asked The New York Times to withhold the article.
The retaliation plan was intended as a response to the shooting down of the unmanned, $130 million surveillance drone, which was struck Thursday morning by an Iranian surface-to-air missile, according to a senior administration official who was briefed on the military planning and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential plans.
The strike was set to take place just before dawn Friday in Iran to minimize risk to the Iranian military and civilians.
But military officials received word a short time later that the strike was off, at least temporarily.

My hunch is that this report is true, and that the reason a “senior administration official” would share this information with the media is because President Trump wants Iran to know how close they were to getting hammered. The president approved the strike and then decided against it — we were this close to war, and Iran really doesn’t want that.

Category: Iran, Military

In The Mailbox: 06.20.19

Posted on | June 20, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 06.20.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Bacon Time: The Search For An Effective Police Handgun
357 Magnum: The Media Is Not Giving Us The Whole Story – Again
EBL: Housing Alone Will Not Solve Homelessness
Twitchy: Comfortably Smug Reminds Us It’s National Jon Ossoff Lost Day
Louder With Crowder: Dan Crenshaw Says Democrats Are “Living In A Different World”

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: New Zealand Is On Its Way To Becoming A Totalitarian State
American Greatness: We Hold All The Cards In The Showdown With Iran
American Power: Inside The Secret Meeting That Changed Red China
American Thinker: Trump’s Orlando Speech – Unprecedented & Remarkable
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Random Notes News
Babalu Blog: President Trump Enjoying Strong Support From South Florida’s Cuban-Americans
BattleSwarm: Deposed Egyptian Islamist President Morsi Dead
CDR Salamander: Sorry, No Tanker War This Week
Da Tech Guy: Metallica – Heavy Metal Monsters With A Libertarian Message, also, Association > Definition
Don Surber: Democrats Embrace Their Segregationist Past, also, Three Good Court Rulings Today
Dustbury: Almost Erie
First Street Journal: The Compulsory Approval Doctrine & Mandatory Acceptance Of Transgenderism
The Geller Report: OR Republicans Refuse To Vote On Marxist Bill & Walk Out – Governor Orders State Police To Arrest Them And Bring Them Back, also, More Than 1500 Migrants In Central American Caravans Have US Criminal Convictions, Including At Least Three Murderers
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, First Amendment News
Hollywood In Toto: Hollywood is Trump’s Secret Weapon In 2020
JustOneMinute: Oh, Boy! Say It Ain’t So, Joe
Legal Insurrection: Democrat Aide Who Doxxed Republican Senators During Kavanaugh Hearings Headed To Jail, also, Oberlin College Issues Tendentious FAQ On Gibson’s Bakery Verdict
Michelle Malkin: Dear Oberlin – You Had It Coming, And You STILL Don’t Get It!
The PanAm Post: Venezuela’s Professional Baseball Players – Many Zeroes, Few Heroes In Struggle Against Maduro
Power Line: What Was Mueller Up To? His Victims Speak, also, Roy Moore Will Run For The Senate Again
Shot In The Dark: Sins Of The Fore-Fore-Forefathers
STUMP: Mortality With Meep – The Dominican Republic & Raw Death Rates
The Political Hat: Nature Unnatural – Re-Engineering Humans, Nature Over Humans, & Abolishing Human Families
This Ain’t Hell: The Sky Is Falling! Save The Mantis Shrimp! also, Chief Gallagher’s Case Takes Another Turn
Victory Girls: September 11 War Authority Repealed By House
Volokh Conspiracy: Why We Shouldn’t Treat Survivors & Victims As Authorities On Policy Issues
Weasel Zippers: Burgess Owens Torches Democrats On Slavery, Abortion, The Klan, And Jim Crow, also, MSNBC Anchor Identifies Segregationist Senators As Republicans. Just One Problem…
Megan McArdle: Facebook Must Like Trouble, Because Its New Cryptocurrency Just Means More Of It
Mark Steyn: Where’s That Vatican Border Wall?

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Category: Linkagery

‘All the Leaves Are Brown …’

Posted on | June 20, 2019 | 1 Comment

One thing I’ve tried to do with my kids is what I call “cultural education.” Like, there’s no reason children should grow up without an awareness of rock-and-roll classics, and I’ve had many rewarding experiences like the time I heard my youngest son, born in 2000, in the shower singing along to his Spotify rotation of Led Zeppelin. How cool is that?

A couple of days ago, I was driving my youngest daughter (born in 2002) to her summer internship and told her to look up “California Dreamin'” on her Spotify. Why was that song in my mind? Probably some headline I’d read about California’s recent descent into Third World chaos. It’s a forlorn bit of nostalgia to recall what California signified in the 1960s, before Democrats turned it into a socialist nightmare of typhus infections, homeless encampments and heroin needles. At any rate, the song had been stuck in my head and so I asked my 16-year-old daughter to play it on her phone — she’d never heard it before — and when it ended, I said, “That was Number One for the Mamas and Papas in 1966.”

My daughter is quite the chip off the old block, however, and she quickly Googled up the fact that “California Dreamin'” only made it to #4.

That seemed wrong, an injustice. From the first notes of the classical guitar intro to the sonic crescendo of the vocal harmony ending, “California Dreamin'” is a musical masterpiece, two-and-a-half minutes of pure genius in the key of A-minor. In 2004, when Rolling Stone published its list of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” this 1966 hit was #89 on the list and yet it never actually topped the charts? When I got home, I decided to explore this mystery further and, being rather obsessive about research, I dived in deep.

The Mamas and the Papas were formed in 1965 after the breakup of John Phillips’s first group, The Journeymen. Phillips, the son of a Marine Corps officer, had grown up in Alexandria, Virginia, attended a military school and won an appointment to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, but quit during his first year and then enrolled at Hampden-Sydney College before dropping out to pursue his musical career in New York City. Phillips became part of the folk-music scene in Greenwich Village, and The Journeymen landed a record contract in 1961, when Phillips was 25. (Click here to watch the group on the TV show Hootenanny in 1963.)

In 1962, while touring with The Journeymen, Phillips met a long-legged 17-year-old model in San Francisco. He divorced his first wife and married the model, Michelle Gilliam, but this new romance was one of the factors that contributed to the breakup of The Journeymen. The other factor was the arrival of The Beatles and the subsequent “British invasion,” which put an end to the folk-music scene. For a while, Phillips tried to keep going down the folk road, teaming up with Denny Doherty (from another Greenwich Village group, the Mugwumps) and Michelle to perform as The New Journeymen, but with little success. It was Doherty who suggested adding his former Mugwumps colleague and occasional girlfriend Cass Elliot (neé Ellen Cohen) to form a quartet. The new group’s name was inspired by the notorious Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, who referred to their girlfriends as “Mamas.”

Meanwhile, there was a song inspired by Michelle Phillips’s first trip to New York in 1963. According to John Phillips, the couple went for a walk around the city “and all she had was California clothing . . . tennis shoes and . . . a tank top and jeans or something.” There was snow on the ground and Michelle was cold, so the couple went into a church to escape the weather and let her warm up for a few minutes. That night, in their Greenwich Village hotel room, Michelle was asleep while John was playing his guitar when the song began to take shape:

So I tried to wake Michelle up to write the lyrics down that I was doing. And she said, “Leave me alone. I want to sleep.”

He persisted until she did wake up, thus earning herself half the songwriting royalties of one of the greatest songs of the decade. The couple offered the song to folk singer Barry McGuire, who did them the favor of introducing them to Dunhill Records chief Lou Adler. The Mamas and the Papas performed background vocals on McGuire’s version of the song, but his gruff baritone didn’t give the record much energy. So what happened next is that, after Adler signed the Mamas and the Papas to their own contract, John Phillips took the master tape of the session, erased McGuire’s voice, and replaced it with him and Doherty singing the lead in duet. On the second verse (“Stopped into a church”), Doherty sings the solo lead in a strong bluesy tenor and then comes the song’s real magic moment. McGuire’s version of “California Dreamin'” had included a forgettable harmonica solo, but for the Mamas and the Papas version, Phillips brought in top studio pro Bud Shank, a veteran L.A. jazz musician. Shank listened to the track, improvised the alto flute solo, and “nailed it on the first take.” It was absolutely brilliant.

The success of “California Dreamin'” had an important influence on pop music in the 1960s, showing that the fusion of rock and folk — pioneered in 1965 by the Byrds — was a durable phenomenon. It helped establish the West Coast as the main scene for American rock music, solidified in 1967 when Jon Phillips organized the Monterrey Pop Festival, with a number of subsequently famous acts, including Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead, performing in a show with the Mamas and the Papas as headliners. It’s possible that the subsequent careers of acts like the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne might never have happened had it not been for “California Dreamin’.”

OK, so why did it never make it to Number One?

When my daughter informed me that “California Dreamin'” peaked at #4 on the Billboard Hot 100, my assumption was that this was because the top three slots at the time must have been held by classic hits by major groups — the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, various Motown hitmakers. And indeed, after the song was first released in December 1965, the songs at the top of the chart included many such big hits by big names. For the week of Jan. 29, 1966, when the Mamas and the Papas were at #44, the Beatles had the #1 spot with “We Can Work It Out,” and upper reaches of the chart also included Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (“Going to a Go-Go,” #23), Stevie Wonder (“Uptight,” #21), the Rolling Stones (“As Tears Go By,” #6) and the Beach Boys (“Barbara Ann,” #2). But these weren’t the artists who ultimately froze “California Dreamin'” out of the top spot. Instead, on the week of March 12, when the Mamas and the Papas’ record peaked at #4, the song in the third-place spot was a wretched piece of drek by Herman’s Hermits. Why was this inspid tune, “Listen People,” at #3? Apparently because it was featured in a Connie Francis movie, When The Boys Meet The Girls.

OK, that was a fluke. Maybe there was some Hollywood payola involved, but what about the #2 slot that week in March? A one-hit wonder, “These Boots Are Made for Walkin'” by Nancy Sinatra. What luck, eh? But the real shocker was that the #1 song that week was another one-hit wonder, a patriotic tune by a military hero: “The Ballad of the Green Berets” by Army Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler. Not a rock classic, to say the least.

Imagine that. You record one of the greatest records of the decade, but never get to Number One because of a stupid song from a crappy teen movie, a novelty tune by Frank Sinatra’s daughter, and a flag-waving tribute to militarism. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!”

So that was this week’s “cultural education” lesson. Kind of depressing, and the fate of the Mamas and the Papas makes it even sadder. The group broke up in part because Michelle Phillips cheated on her husband, first with Denny Doherty and then with Gene Clark of the Byrds. John Phillips became a heroin addict and, allegedly, raped his own daughter.

What’s perhaps weirdest of all about the Mamas and the Papas is that, whereas John Phillips was the leader of the group, Doherty sang lead on their first hit, and Michelle was movie-star beautiful, “Mama Cass” was the fan favorite, and the only member to have any musical success after the group broke up. The obese daughter of a Baltimore delicatessen owner, she had an IQ of 165 and had toured in a road company of The Music Man before becoming involved in the folk music scene.

Alas, Cass Elliot died at age 32, reportedly choking on a sandwich.

All this, you see, from a song stuck in my head and a conversation with my teenage daughter. The car broke down today. Hit the freaking tip jar.

UPDATE: The comments immediately included objections to my statement that Cass Elliot’s death was “reportedly” from choking on a sandwich. As I said in reply to these comments, I linked to a contemporaneous Rolling Stone article that included this version, attributed to a “post-mortem” examination and a “coroner’s hearing.” This account was also part of the New York Times obituary: “According to The Associated Press, her physician said the singer probably choked on a sandwich.”

(Click to enlarge the image.) Yes, of course, I was aware that this has since been classified as an “urban legend,” although I have found only unsourced secondhand stories of how this legend allegedly got started: Supposedly, when they found Mama Cass’s body — she was in England, where she’d just played the London Palladium — there was a sandwich on the nightstand, and this led the coroner to jump to an erroneous conclusion that she had asphyxiated. Heart failure was apparently the actual cause of death, and it has been suggested that Elliot’s health had been impaired by her extreme diets in an effort to lose weight. She had been hospitalized a few months earlier after collapsing prior to a scheduled TV appearance. Certainly, it was not my intention to malign Cass Elliot — a talented performer I always admired — by repeating a disproven story. However, in point of fact, I am still not certain the death-by-choking story has been disproven, because I could not find online any well-sourced account explaining how the original (and supposedly discredited) report made it into the mainstream media before the truth was discovered. So I guess the bottom line here is the same as always: Never trust the New York Times.

Oh, and what I said about my car breaking down? Not an urban legend. Our ancient Nissan overheated on the interstate and I’ve now got a tow bill to worry about, not to mention whatever the repairs cost, so please remember the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

Category: California, History, Music

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FMJRA 2.0: Space Age Love Song

The Fake Ukrainian Ledger Angle: How the Media Colluded With the ‘Deep State’

The Worst #MeToo Smear Yet

In The Mailbox: 06.21.19

Real Courage: Jewish Journalists Address Jewish Role in Communist Subversion

Report: Trump Cancels Strike Against Iran

In The Mailbox: 06.20.19

‘All the Leaves Are Brown …’

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HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

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