Good Music Video News

Congratulations to my writer/researcher Laura Ainsworth. She’s also an award-winning retro jazz vocalist whose late dad played with everyone from Tommy Dorsey to Freddy Martin. Her new album of requested standards, “You Asked For It,” is getting rave reviews.

Her lounge/jazz reinvention of “Goldfinger” from that album was named one of “The Best of the Best of 2022” by the international podcast Cocktail Nation. And now, a cool film noir lyric video has just premiered on the Rock and Roll Globe magazine website, founded by renowned music writer Ron Hart.

Check the video and an article about her here:

https://rockandrollglobe.com/jazz/listen-laura-ainsworth-shares-goldfinger/

You can find all of Laura’s terrific music and more at http://www.lauraainsworth.com and the new album on digital download or deluxe Japanese import CD with bonus track “As Time Goes By” exclusively at Bandcamp:

https://lauraainsworth.bandcamp.com/

Thank you, FBI

Thankfully proving that they still can arrest someone other than parents and pro-life activists, the FBI has arrested a man and a woman for allegedly plotting to attack electrical substations and take down the power grid of Baltimore.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/fbi-arrests-man-woman-extremist-views-alleged-power-grid-attack-plot-targeting-5-substations

The two reportedly have prior prison records for serious crimes and hold “extremist” neo-Nazi views. There’s much more detail at the link above. Here's a big salute to the agents who caught them.

Lead Balloon

I think it’s safe to say that the White House press secretary’s explanation of the Chinese spy balloon fiasco went over like a lead balloon.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-users-scorch-karine-jean-pierre-mumbled-explanation-trump-admin-informed-spy-balloon

In case you missed it: Biden's State of the Union speech

Tonight, President Biden gives his second State of the Union Address, and the media is filled with speculation about what’s going to happen. But I don’t need to speculate. I know exactly what’s going to happen. I’m going to spend over an hour staring at my watch and waiting for my daughter Sarah to give the Republican response.

Up to that point, I’m going to be forced to endure the kind of speech that you could only swallow if you’ve lived the past few years with a virtual reality headset on, cut off from reality, or watching nothing but CNN and MSNBC (same thing.) I think Newt Gingrich nailed it when he said it’s going to be a fantasy speech from an alternate reality. And that fantasy will begin with the words, “The state of our union is strong.” No, unfortunately, it’s not. Thanks to this Administration’s radical divisive policies, we’re struggling just to remain a union.

Judging by Biden’s previous public statements, it’s going to be a Democrat campaign speech, with precisely the level of honesty that suggests. We’re going to hear him boast of how his brilliant policies and “economic plan” (showering trillions of borrowed dollars on cronies and donors) have created a record 10 million jobs, including over half a million just in January, while bringing down inflation and gas prices.

(For those just taking off the virtual reality sets: gas is still about a dollar a gallon more expensive than when he took office, although it is down from the all-time record highs it hit in his first year. Inflation is down a bit from his first year, but nothing’s getting less expensive, it’s just getting more expensive at a slightly slower rate. And this month’s inflation is added on top of the previous year’s inflation. Even that number is misleading since anyone who goes to a grocery store knows that many items don’t cost 16% more than in 2020, they cost twice as much or more. And even the current “lower” inflation rate is still almost three times what it was under Trump. Finally, the jobs: reopening an artificially shut-down economy and letting people go back to work is NOT “creating jobs.” Also, the January numbers included many jobs that aren’t new jobs at all but jobs marked for layoffs that got delayed.)

And of course, we’ll hear that he could solve the border problems if only the Republicans would stop fighting him. That would be the open border that he deliberately created by unilaterally reversing all the Trump policies that were working. And his “solution” is “comprehensive immigration reform,” or legalizing the record numbers of illegal migrants who’ve entered in defiance of our immigration laws that he’s sworn to enforce. I also expect to hear some reminders of "the darkest day in American history" (January 6^th) and semi-fascist “MAGA Republicans” as red meat (or more appropriately, organic tofu) for his base.  

And I expect to hear a lot of promises about how any problems that still remain (like that baby formula parents have been trying to find for two years now) will be solved, and then nothing whatsoever will be done to solve them. How do I know? Because that’s exactly what he did last year. See for yourself:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-repeatedly-fell-short-promises-he-made-2022-state-union-address

Speaker McCarthy has far too much class and respect for the office to rip up his copy of the speech on TV, the way Nancy Pelosi did with Trump. But if Republicans want to create a perfect visual image to convey their opinion of this presidency without making a sound or a rude gesture, a friend of one of my writers had a great suggestion: they should all arrive for the speech holding a white helium balloon on a string.

If the Capitol Police refuse to let them bring the balloons in due to “safety and security concerns,” the admission that Biden is scared of a balloon would speak volumes.

I JUST WANTED TO SAY: