The Commentariat -- April 8, 2015
Internal links removed.
Julie Davis of the New York Times: "President Obama's push for a historic opening with Cuba faces its first major test this week as he travels to a summit meeting in Latin America, where he hopes to highlight momentum toward ending a half-century of isolation from the island nation.Even before Mr. Obama was to board Air Force One on Wednesday, White House officials signaled that the administration was nearing a decision on whether to remove Cuba from its list of state sponsors of terrorism." ...
... Karen DeYoung & Nick Miroff of the Washington Post: "Cuba ends more than five decades of official isolation in the Western Hemisphere this week when President Raúl Castro attends a regional summit with up to 35 heads of state and government, including President Obama. The White House said there will be 'many opportunities' for conversations between the two leaders at the two-day Summit of the Americas that begins Friday in Panama, but noted that no formal bilateral meeting had yet been planned."
Dana Milbank on "the rush to humiliate the poor": Missouri's "surf-and-turf bill is one of a flurry of new legislative proposals at the state and local level to dehumanize and even criminalize the poor as the country deals with the high-poverty hangover of the Great Recession.... Last week, the Kansas legislature passed NPR study last year found that defendants are routinely charged for public defenders, room and board in jail, parole supervision and electronic monitoring devices -- items that were once free.... In their budget plans in Congress, Republicans propose 'devolving' food stamps and other programs to state control by awarding block grants with few strings attached." ...
... The Double Standard Imposed on the Poor. Emily Badger of the Washington Post: "There's virtually no evidence that the poor actually spend their money [on luxuries].... The strings that we attach to government aid are attached uniquely for the poor.... Many, many Americans who do receive these other kinds of government benefits -- farm subsidies, student loans, mortgage tax breaks -- don't recognize that, like the poor, they get something from government, too.... We begrudge [the poor] their housing vouchers, for instance, even though government spends about four times as much subsidizing housing for upper-income homeowners." ...
... Speaking of Double Standards.... Greg Sargent: "The debate is intensifying in Congress over what lawmakers should do to place limits on President Obama's authority to implement a deal with major world powers and Iran over the future of that country's nuclear program.... At the same time, however, the discussion among lawmakers has vanished entirely on ... whether Congress will vote to limit Obama's authority to wage war against ISIS. This double-standard was pointed out to me by Senator Chris Murphy..., who is emerging as a voice of sanity on Iran."
Judging Chuck. Ed Kilgore: "... if Schumer thinks representing New York means viewing Wall Street and Bibi Netanyahu as needy constituents, who cares if he's feeling no electoral pressure? So let's see how Schumer handles this year and next and then decide whether it's worth the trouble to stage noisy protests over this man's supposedly inevitable ascension to the leadership." ...
... Alexander Bolton of the Hill: "The White House is trying to bottle up bipartisan legislation that would give Congress 60 days to review a final Iran nuclear deal. The pushback may be having an effect": -- Senators Chris Coons & Mark Warner, who the GOP counted in their court, are now saying they're thinking about it. Also Ben "Cardin, who took over the top Democratic slot on the panel after [Robert] Menendez stepped aside in the wake of corruption charges, indicated in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer Tuesday that he wants to see changes to the bill to address the administration's concerns." ...
... Thomas Erdbrink of the New York Times: "Senior officials, important clerics, lawmakers and Republican Guard commanders [in Iran], who in the past have reflexively opposed any accommodation with the West, now go out of their way to laud Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and his team of negotiators [of the pending nuclear deal], as well as the government of President Hassan Rouhani."
AFP: "Washington deepened its involvement in the Saudi-led air war in Yemen on Wednesday as aid agencies scrambled to deliver help to civilians caught up in the campaign now heading into its third week. The Red Cross has warned of a 'catastrophic' situation in main southern city of Aden, where militia loyal to the fugitive president Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi have been holding out against Houthi Shia rebels and their allies within the security forces.... The US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Washington was stepping up weapons deliveries and intelligence-sharing in support of the Saudi-led coalition."
Evan Perez & Shimon Prokupecz of CNN: "Russian hackers behind the damaging cyber intrusion of the State Department in recent months used that perch to penetrate sensitive parts of the White House computer system, according to U.S. officials briefed on the investigation. While the White House has said the breach only affected an unclassified system, that description belies the seriousness of the intrusion. The hackers had access to sensitive information such as real-time non-public details of the president's schedule."
Presidential Race
Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post fact-checks Rand Paul's announcement speech. You'll find a heavy presence of words like "misleading," "falsely," & "myth." ...
... Nate Cohn of the New York Times: "... libertarians remain too young and too few to present Senator [Rand] Paul with a realistic path to the nomination. He has to win over a much larger share of more reliable Republican primary voters, who will have considerable reservations about Mr. Paul's policies. The other problem he faces: Many of the voters most receptive to libertarian views tend not to vote." ...
[E]very piece of anti-discrimination legislation passed over the past few decades ignores one of the basic, inalienable rights of man -- the right to discriminate. -- Rand Paul, 1982, op-ed in Baylor U. newspaper
The arc of history bends toward the 1870s.... ** Rutherford B. Paul. Ian Millhiser of Think Progress: "Rand Paul would be the worst president on civil rights since the 1800s.... Paul continued to espouse the same opposition to civil rights laws that he expressed as an undergraduate until months before his election to the Senate. And, while Paul has since learned to be more careful in his rhetoric, his public statements on the Constitution are entirely inconsistent with a legal regime that protects women and minorities from businesses that engage in discrimination.... Paul lives in a world of theory untouched by the lessons of history and evidence." ...
... Our Screwed-up Liberal Democracy Has Usurped Li'l Randy's FREEEEDOM to Violate Copyright Laws. Philip Bump of the Washington Post: "If you're looking for Rand Paul's presidential announcement on YouTube, bad news. As of writing, the video has been blocked by the video streaming site, thanks to a copyright claim from Warner Music Group.... Rand Paul's spirited cry against government intervention has been blocked from view because YouTube lets huge music companies preemptively apply copyright law." CW: Still down at 11 pm Tuesday. ...
... AND still down at 10 am Wednesday. Maybe Randy doesn't think this presidential announcement thing is important enough to get right. Or maybe he's planning to use this glitch to finger the vast left-wing conspiracy. Also, see Nisky Guy's commentary in today's thread. ...
... Here's a screenshot of Paul's presidential announcement video:
... McKay Coppins of BuzzFeed: "One of the high points from Sen. Rand Paul's presidential campaign kickoff Tuesday came when a black local pastor named Jerry Stephenson delivered an impassioned mini-sermon on behalf of the candidate.... After the event, however..., Stephenson got on the subject of the religious freedom debate and ... began musing about why he believed President Obama wasn't backing up conservative Christians. 'In five years we'll find out what [Obama's] real religion is,' Stephenson said." ...
... Emily Atkin of Think Progress: "Don't let Rand Paul fool you on climate change. He's a not-so-secret denier posing, if briefly, as a realist.
David Gram of the Atlantic provides "a cheat sheet" on GOP presidential candidates. He begins with this note about Rand Paul's announcement: "... he marked the kickoff with a speech at the Galt House Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky (The name seems a little on the nose.)"
Jamelle Bouie of Slate: "... late last month, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders helped push the Democratic Party a little to the left.... Social Security expansion has entered the Democratic mainstream, touted by lawmakers and pushed by presidential candidates like Martin O'Malley.... But the real test of Social Security's resurgence as a liberal cause is Hillary Clinton. When Social Security solvency meant benefit cuts, she was open to benefit cuts. Now it doesn't. But we don't know where Clinton will fall.... That, after all, is what primaries are for." ...
... Digby has an excellent essay on the same subject in Salon. She assumes Hillary Clinton will have "evolved," along with most of the Democratic party, on expanding Social Security. "... the people who stand to benefit the most from this are the most hardcore members of the Republican base. Will they turn down a raise?" ...
... Kate Brower, author of the book The Residence, which is based on interviews of White House service staff, dishes on Bill & Hillary Clinton in a Politico Magazine piece. CW: Expect a lot of this type of "journalism" in the coming year-and-a-half; I hesitated to link the story, but decided WTF. You can show better taste by deciding not to read it.
Beyond the Beltway
NBC 5 Chicago "Rahm Emanuel won his re-election contest Tuesday night and bested challenger Jesus 'Chuy' Garcia to remain in charge of Chicago for another four years, the Associated Press projects."
John Eligon of the New York Times: "... voters [in Ferguson, Missouri,] elected two black candidates to the City Council on Tuesday, increasing the number of African-Americans on the governing body to three. But in a blow to the protesters who had pushed for sweeping changes to the city's law enforcement and judicial policies after the shooting last August, voters rejected several candidates who had the direct backing of protest activists." ...
... Stephen Deere of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "Perhaps the most significant aspect of the results for Ferguson City Council was that 30 percent of the city's 12,738 registered voters cast ballots -- more than double the typical turnout."
Michael Schmidt & Matt Apuzzo of the New York Times: "A white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., was charged with murder on Tuesday after a video surfaced showing him shooting in the back and killing an apparently unarmed black man while the man ran away. The officer, Michael T. Slager, 33, said he feared for his life because the man took his stun gun in a scuffle after a traffic stop on Saturday. A video, however, shows the officer firing eight times as the man -- Walter L. Scott, 50 -- fled. The North Charleston mayor announced the state charges at a news conference Tuesday evening." It appears Slager planted the stun gun near Scott's body." Includes video. ...
... Judd Legum of Think Progress shows how the police department initially told the story before the video surfaced. "On Saturday the police released a statement alleging that Scott had attempted to gain control of a Taser from Slager and that he was shot in a struggle over the weapon.... By Sunday, the police department had clammed up...."
News Ledes
Boston Globe: "A federal jury found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev guilty on all 30 charges for his role in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three and injured more than 260, ruining lives and limbs and a city's sense of peace. He was also found guilty in the murder of a police officer. Tsarnaev is now eligible for the death penalty." ...
... The New York Times story is here.
Guardian: "The former head of the CIA in Pakistan should be tried for murder and waging war against the country, a high court judge ruled on Tuesday. Criminal charges against Jonathan Banks, the former CIA station chief in Islamabad, were ordered in relation to a December 2009 attack by a US drone which reportedly killed at least three people."
Reuters: "US Secretary of Defence Ash Carter kicked off his first Asian tour on Wednesday with a stern warning against the militarisation of territorial rows in a region where China is at odds with several nations in the East and South China Seas."
Washington Post: Stan "Freberg died Tuesday in Santa Monica, Calif. at age 88.... Before National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live, way before, there was Stan Freberg."
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Reader Comments (19)
On CSPAN radio during this morning's commute, a call-in topic was the murder charge in North Charleston NC, in which a white policeman killed a fleeing black man with eight shots.
A policeman from Yakima, WA, called in to say that the problem is that whenever a citizen does something that violates the law, black or white, the citizen needs to be controlled by the police. The moderator asked if that justified shooting a fleeing man, and the caller said "Yes, he needed to be shot." The caller didn't sound like he had been drinking or doping, as do so many on the moring call. But he clearly believed that fleeing miscreants need to be restrained and bullets are an acceptable method of controlling citizens.
Holy shit.
Lest we forgot about Rand Paul's flirtation with plagiarism, Rachel reminded us last night and cited many more instances than I thought possible. The kicker was when confronted by all this during some interview Rand got all red in the face, was visibly angry, and said, well, gosh darn it, being a junior senator was hard work with all the things one had to do, papers are handed to him to sign in his car on the way to work when he didn't even have his coffee and sweet bun, it's just one crisis after another, blah,blah,blah––––––And the question that should be asked NOW is "And given your level of frustration and anxiety you want to be President????"
Even if Rand appears to be moving to the Hawk's way of doing away with the roadkill, they aren't gonna let him in their group. They swoop down and devour while Randy will remain in the trees and they know it.
The Bump article on Rand Paul's announcement video has so many levels of "Doh" in it: His message being quashed by a corporation exerting its rights, and the fact that the song in question is "Shuttin' Detroit Down" from 2009.
If I recall, that was when the economy was in a tailspin because of Republican non-governance. I also recall that those auto companies are still in business because of, how shall we say it, help from the government.
I think this may even surpass Reagan's use of "Born in the USA" for inadequate research into the meaning of a song used for campaign purposes.
I did listen to the song. It does say something about DC bailin' out Wall Street but they're shuttin' Detroit down. Maybe the song predates the auto deal. Otherwise it's just a bit more denial of the good the government can do.
@ Patrick: Holy shit is right! and if you want more of the same please click on the link I gave yesterday on Evolution in Kentucky (Rand's home away from home). We can make fun of these people calling them all sorts of names, but it really is horrifying when you realize how many think like this.
http://ourfuture.org/20150408/five-things-you-should-know-about-rand-paul?utm_source=progressive_breakfast&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pbreak
Like Lil' Randy's position on a given issue? Don't worry it'll change.
He has a history of coming down on all sides of an issue, as Terence Heath points out in the link above.
Patrick,
That caller from Yakima may not have been drunk or doped up but he's seriously in need of a refresher about the law.
According to a story this morning on NPR, reporter Martin Kaste relates that according to the Supreme Court, police cannot just shoot someone for attempting to flee. There must be some sense that the suspect's escape would be cause for some additional danger or threat. I heard an interview with another former LA cop who agreed that police are taught not to shoot suspects in the back if they're running away unless there is an overriding concern for public safety.
But what if there had been no video? The cop's story would stand and we'd have a dead man who had been murdered in cold blood and framed into the bargain.
Rand Paul has put a price on his services: a double sawbuck will get you your very own Rand Paul flip-flop.
To celebrate Bad Toupée's run for glory, I thought I'd check out his campaign website where, he is selling--and I'm not making this up--Rand Paul Flip-Flops.
Shouldn't these guys have someone on staff with common sense? The flip-flops are called "sandals" on the page but the URL still says "...fun-stuff/rand-paul-flip-flops.html"
Ha-ha-ha.
We've already seen quite a few Rand Paul flip flops, but now he's selling them to anyone willing to fork over twenty bucks. $20 for a presidential candidate's flip-flops?
Such a deal!
Okay, @Akhilleus, you beat me. I didn't think anyone could top the downed video as Hilarious Rand Paul News of the Day, but Rand Paul's selling flip-flops is clearly the winner.
Marie
Winning one more for the Gipper.
Republican idol worship of Ronald Reagan continues unabated. If St. Ronald did it, it must have been glorious, not to mention a great idea, so let's see if we can't out-Reagan Reagan.
So let's see now, name something that Reagan hated, but something he created more of. A lot more of.
I know! Poor people!
So let's fuck with poor people. Let's make it harder for them to even live, and people who are borderline poor? Let's drag them down into poverty and grind their faces into the mud.
This (I was going to write "seems to be" but there's no seems about it) IS the goal of all those holier than thou, Jesus loving patriots on the right.
As Reagan did, modern day rapacious douchebags like famous moocher Paul Ryan proclaim that LBJ's War on Poverty was a failure. And like the Gipper, who invented the famous example of a welfare queen who drove Caddies and made $150,000 a year on welfare, we now have wingnuts making up stories about welfare recipients dining out on Filet Mignon and crab legs, stories designed to whip their equally spiteful base into a frenzy of hatred against yet another group. Don't they ever tire of all this maliciousness? I just don't get it. Hatred is so fucking exhausting.
But the best thing about shivving the poor is you don't have to worry about them coming to get you. Do you think any winger pol in his or her right mind would ever try to take undeserved goodies away from the real welfare cheats like the Kochs? But the poor? They can barely put one foot in front of the other, so let's help them out by forcing them to walk through a mine field just to feed their kids. That'll show 'em. Lazy moochers.
A larger problem of all this enmity and vengeance against the poor for fantasy transgressions is the dramatic decrease of health, intellect, and economic viability of millions of children for generations to come, problems we will, as society, have to deal with.
The effectiveness of food stamps and assistance programs on improving health and helping to raise a family out of poverty is undeniable. The right has no such facts to support their War on the Poor, just "gut feelings" that the poor don't deserve this help. The fact is, just as the War on Poverty was really making progress, Reagan, the source of so many terrible things in this country, pulled the plug and declared government the problem.
But government is perhaps the best and maybe the only way to realize dramatic results in fighting the scourge of poverty. Beginning in the late 90's, Great Britain, implementing their own war on poverty was able, using standard policy tools, to cut childhood poverty in half in less than a decade.
But here, in the US, we still hear Confederates talk about mysterious forces ("woooooo...")emanating from Food Stamps that cause the poor to lose "energy" and cause them "not to dream anymore".
The facts (something anathema to wingers) tell a different story. A study on the long term effects of access to social safety nets indicates "...that the food stamp program has effects decades after initial exposure. Specifically, access to food stamps in childhood leads to a significant reduction in the incidence of “metabolic syndrome” (obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes) and, for women, an increase in economic self-sufficiency. Overall, our results suggest substantial internal and external benefits of the safety net that have not previously been quantified."
Wasn't Jesus partial to helping the poor? But not the current batch of Jesus freaks in power. They would rather satisfy their need to bash someone...anyone...and preferably someone who can't bash you back, rather than extending assistance to the poorest among us, and helping raise the economic and overall physical welfare of the entire country into the bargain.
Confederate ideology is toxic in so many ways. And thanks to Ronald Reagan's perversion of the American Dream and what it means to live in a society which chooses to not just cut loose the most vulnerable amongst us, but to push their heads underwater as an added bit of viciousness, we are finding out just how toxic it can be.
Rand Paul is nothing if not consistent. In the Objectivist Philosophy of his hero, Ayn Rand, the only moral imperative is the selfish pursuit of one's own happiness and self interest. Even criminal acts are justifiable in this pursuit. Such trivialities as lying, cheating and hypocrisy are not worth a moments pause.
Some of us went through an Ayn Rand phase in our youth. Most of us outgrew it by the time we were Sophomores -- High School Sophomore, in my case. The only puzzlement is what accounts for Paul's arrested moral and intellectual development. And that of his followers, and the rest of the right wingnuts.
Reagan succeeded in making "The Government" a Devil Term. I've found a good way to annoy wingers. Every time they utter the words, insist they substitute: "We the People". Does force a different perspective on their maundering.
Just for fun: Bring up the text of any Republican candidate's speech, and "select all", "global replace", "the Government", with "We The People". Print the revised text and hand it to your favorite winger.
D.C.,
Interesting that the Little One chose to make his announcement in Louisville and not Bowling Green, where he lives. I wonder if it had something to do with his Ayn Rand fascination. He kicked off his run for personal aggrandizement and self-interest in a Louisville hotel called The Galt House.
Akhilleus,
Could be, the original Galt House Hotel on the site has an interesting history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galt_House
I can't find any direct connection to the works of A.R. but who can fathom how such minds work.
The Emily Badger piece on the double standards imposed on the poor is excellent - as is Akilleus's comment on the same. Both Badger and Akilleus support their arguments via hyperlinked citations - something I've noticed is generally absent in conservative articles and blogs. I wonder why.
I was curious how upper income housing is subsidized, so I clicked on that link at the end of the Badger column, which led to a very eye-opening (for me anyway) article on mortgage deductions, and how, yes, they are a HUGE subsidy for the wealthy. It's a very thorough report, and includes suggested fixes, which will unfortunately probably never be made.
I also think D.C.'s suggestion of replacing "the government" with "we the people" is a good one. Somehow I've got to try to remember all these tips and facts when I hear my conservative family bashing the poor or the government or whatever's got their knickers in a twist at the moment.
Charlie Pierce has noted that if you listen to one of the Pauls long enough (around five minutes) you will start to hear the crazy.
Sometimes it doesn't even take that long.
Rand Paul often sounds pretty fucking confused about a lot of things. For a guy many consider "serious" his thinking often rests on bad or weird assumptions and poor command of facts, data, and history, which leads to a general mental discombobulation. It's not clear if he sometimes tries to bullshit his way through an interview or speech or if he truly doesn't understand the necessity for internally consistent thought patterns.
I was looking for his stance on Citizens United and I found this clip of the Little One talking at David Axelrod (yeah, that David Axelrod).
So first he says that he agrees that money is speech, agrees with Citizens United, and the importance of the First Amendment, but then he says that anyone doing business with the government should have to sign a piece of paper waiving their First Amendment rights because they could use those rights to hire a lobbyist and, you know, something, something.
Say what?
But then he starts talking about how the Chicago Tribune gets to say whatever they want but all those things have been found to be unconstitutional. Huh?
Okay, but when the Chicago Tribune speaks, you know who is speaking. Reporters and editors are not hidden. And what exactly is unconstitutional? He does say that he would support the suppression of First Amendment rights, especially of unions and corporations even though that would be unconstitutional. Ahhh....okay, so you're for implementing something that would be unconstitutional. But then in the next sentence he says that this idea would "pass constitutional muster".
All I could think of was that Axelrod must be wondering to himself "What the fuck is this guy talking about?"
Axelrod then asks him directly about the secrecy that the Citizens United ruling allows for. The answer? (and this is a beaut) Paul states that it's not a good idea to let people know who is behind something and he uses a famous civil rights ruling NAACP v Alabama, to say that putting names out in public who supported the NAACP could lead to violence against those people. But I don't think the Ku Klux Klan--or anyone else--is going to ride into Topeka and storm the Kochs' offices. But right after that he says he's for disclosure of names. Until Axelrod asks him about the way groups pour dark money into affecting campaigns. Li'l Randy concludes that disclosure in that case would lead to violence against people who are only using money to support their beliefs. So he's for disclosure but then he's not. In almost the same sentence.
What?
It's like trying to figure out the answer to a riddle that has three middle sections, none of which lead anywhere. There really is no one answer. But this is Rand Paul. He needs to have it both ways. He rarely gives a straight answer. Instead he dances around questions, throws out references to NAACP v Alabama and the First Amendment. But at the end of this clip I defy anyone to tell me exactly what he's for.
You can't. Because ultimately, Rand Paul is for himself, and as D.C. points out above, that gives him permission to do and say anything as long as it benefits him. Doesn't have to be true, or consistent, or rational.
But interestingly for Paul, that dark money he was so in favor, or sort of, sometime--it depends on whose spending it--in favor of, is now coming for him. And he doesn't like it. But he thinks it proves that he's right.
Whatever.
This guy is a joke. And shame on the media for giving this egotistical, pretentious imposter the mantle of a serious person worthy of anyone's time.
D.C.,
The connection is to the name of the hotel itself, redolent of Ayn Rand's prototypical selfish prick, John Galt.
Akhilleus,
Got the Galt right off, just wondering if there was something deeper. Perhaps the next step will be Randy linked to Roark Capital Group, which actually is named for Howard Roark, protagonist of The Fountainhead. Possibly an even bigger prick than John Galt.
Jonathan Chait has got a good analysis of what Dick Cheney's latest anti-Obama actually reveals about the rotten innards of the Confederate brain nowadays. He points out that Cheney's derangement goes deeper than just claiming Obama's incompetent or a failure, but rather Obama is intentionally subverting our entire country's history and standing in the world because he fucking hates everyone and probably laughs at night thinking of new ways to sabotage America.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/04/cheneys-ongoing-descent-clarifies-iran-debate.html
While this analysis is nothing new, Chait makes a damning case against the entrenched insanities of Cheney and what they really mean. But for me it's not THIS article that disturbs me but rather the continuous quantity of such commentaries that are slowing building up, surrounded by an ever-growing crowd of loud and crazy hard-liners, in office and out.
Because a lot of the hatred toward Obama is rooted in "invisible" racism where the racists can't ever talk about racism, I got to wondering. What would happen if, in the quest for new faces, new voters and new momentum, the Democratic party flipped the unconventional switch again and threw the mostly unknown Julian Castro from Texas onto a national ticket? Maybe not even this election cycle but the next one... How would all those good ol' boy GOP faithful handle having ANOTHER colored guy in the White House? This time he would represent a whole new alien culture speaking foreign language and surely bringing all his 'amigos' illegally over the border with him. I can hardly imagine the paranoia and self-pity that would bellow from their empty brains, while the NRA scaremongers further grows the ranks of disenchanted white men signing up for their local militia and preparing for battle.
As today's thread started, once you start adding up all the crazy delusions going on in GOP land today, and the near total absence of balancing forces within the their movement, that shit's getting kinda' scary.
Re. Stan Freberg's obit: For any unfortunates who have not heard it, treat yourselves to his prescient "United States of America, The Early Years." Lyrics by Freberg, magnificent score by Billy May, and top shelf cast. As relevant today as in 1961, maybe more so, and funnier, considering the depths to which so much putative comedy has since sunk. Should be required for AP history. Except in texas.