War is not the best engine for us to resort to;
nature has given us one in our commerce,
which if properly managed, will be a better instrument
for obliging the interested nations of Europe to treat us with justice.
Thomas Jefferson
Phillip Phillips: American Idol 2012
Thumbs UP!
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| Courtesy of AmericanIdol.com |
I have been an unabashed middle-aged fan since the start of the show; I have written a few commentaries on the show, and ironically one of the most read posts in the history of the blog is when I wrote an extended commentary how I would rework the show.
I was thrilled for Phillip; Phillip is really an example of what American Idol is really all about; producer and AI mentor Jimmy Iovine recently mentioned that he didn't know why Phillip hadn't been already been discovered and signed away by a major label. Phillip is more than just an able blue-eyed soul vocalist with pitch-perfect technique: he has a distinct style all his own, he has had the most creative remakes of songs I've ever heard in the history of the show, and he's a singer-songwriter and a musician in his own right. The reader is invited to play what should be Phillip's first single (which I hope will go to #1), "Home". I was trying to figure out how to describe the song; I guess I would compare it to a cross between Paul McCartney & Wings' "Mull of Kintyre" and Bruce Springsteen's "I'm on Fire". Okay, you can stop laughing now... What do I know about music? I'm just an obscure political blogger...
(In case you're wondering, if Jessica had won, I planned a lead photo with the caption 'America's Sweetheart'; I think she still is America's sweetheart.)
Another interesting first: Adam Lambert, a former AI runner up I had voted for, just hit #1 on the Billboard 200 (albums/CD's) chart, replacing American Idol Carrie Underwood on the chart. (I thought Seacrest said Kelly Clarkson, but I could be mistaken.)
The finale is always interesting;
- Phillip sang two great CCR tunes with John Fogerty himself, one of the greatest rock vocalists ever, a personal all-time favorite moment.
- I loved the teasing they did to Randy Jackson, whom always praises certain contestants saying they could sing the phone book, so they had a choir of contestants singing from the phone book. (I kept waiting for the guys to split off and start singing "867-5309/Jenny" or "Rikki, Don't Lose That Number" or the girls to start singing "I Just Called to Say I Love You", but it didn't happen.)
- What can I say? We finally got to hear AEROSMITH live! (Jennifer Lopez frequently does her thing on the Idol stage, not to mention musical video clips.) Any faithful reader knows that I wanted to hear "Angel"; I also probably would have covered their most mainstream single "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing", but who am I kidding? I would have marked out for Steven Tyler singing the phone book.
- Joshua Ledet got on my nerves a couple of times going on these shrieking runs (during the "phone book song" and in a Robin Gibb tribute where Joshua also did the same thing to "To Love Somebody", which he had performed brilliantly in a recent episode but in this context came across as a little contrived and indulgent.)
- I did not like the Jennifer Hudson-Jessica Sanchez duet, although Hudson deserves most of the blame, as she did the same type thing I just criticized Ledet for doing. The crowd seemed to love it; maybe I'm in the minority here. But I think that the crowd reaction was more a polite, politically correct tribute to Hudson, the Oscar-winning former contestant, than for the performance which I found indulgent and annoying, almost painful to listen to. In many things, I find less is more, which is exactly one of the things I like about Phillip Phillips' style.
- The surprise marriage proposal from season 5 #7 finalist Ace Young to season 3 runner up Diana DeGarmo was endearing. (The two met during a prior Broadway run of 'Hair'.) I knew it the second Seacrest asked both of them to come up to the stage after pointing out they were an item.
- I liked the tribute they did to Robin Gibb; "Words" was perfect, but I would have substituted for the other songs, and have included a sample of his last work, the Titanic Requiem ("Don't Cry Alone"). (I didn't embed it in my own tribute but I had done so in the earlier segment when Robin was in a coma,)
Senator Quote of the Day
The federal deficit last year reached $1.3 trillion: the federal government brought in tax revenue of $2.3 trillion and spent $3.6 trillion. The interest on the national debt is the fourth largest item in the federal budget behind Medicare-Medicaid spending, Social Security and the Department of Defense. The annual interest payment on that debt is now $474 billion, which is more than we pay annually for the Departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury and the Environmental Protection Agency COMBINED. GAO predicts that interest on the national debt will be the single largest item in the federal budget in the next decade.
Tom Coburn (R-OK) (my edits, Citizens Against Government Waste mailing)Barack "$16.4T Is Not Enough " Obama and his fellow spendthrift "Don't Worry; Be Happy" Congressional Democrat obstructionists on fiscal sanity are leading Americans in a forced march on the road to Greece:
"S&P's downgrade on us was right, matter of fact we're going to get another downgrade, because we have not done the structural things that will fix our country." Coburn, who was a member of President Obama's fiscal commission, called for changes to Medicare and Social Security, saying in order to stem the mounting U.S. debt, earnings limitations and age requirements will have to be reformed.
You Cannot Be Serious:
Director of Secret Service in a State of Denial
Who does Mark Sullivan think that he's fooling with this predictable nonsense about the Colombia prostitution / Secret Service scandal being an isolated incident. I understand the basic issue here, which would be to compromise security. Keep in mind the only reason we know about this issue is because one of the Colombian prostitutes complained to the Colombian police about being shortchanged by the Secret Service agent in question. One of the issues behind the Lewinsky scandal was the fact that an unauthorized Lewinsky overheard confidential phone calls received by Clinton in the Oval Office during their encounters. Depending on the nature of the information, Lewinsky could have blackmailed Clinton.
I have described in past posts some of the academic dishonesty activities I uncovered while at UWM. I had caught a number of Asian students turning in as a graduate systems analysis group project completely (except maybe the paper title) a cut and paste of unattributed sources--I could and did point out the multiple original sources they used. Almost invariably the first--and only--thing that guilty students ask is: how did you find out? Anyone with at least average intelligence knows that the guilty parties aren't really sorry about cheating, just sorry they got caught, and they want to know how you found out so they could do a better job of hiding their tracks next time.
In this one case, I called in the students; some quickly fell on their swords, appealing for mercy, and others, including this one guy, were defiant. This piece of work called plagiarism an American cultural bias. I decided not to escalate the issue (a mistake in hindsight), thinking everyone deserves a second chance, but I told the students in no uncertain words this behavior was unacceptable and not to be repeated.
A semester later one of the new MIS faculty members who had inherited my graduate DSS class (which I had given up in one of the worst decisions I ever made, in order to teach a couple of undergraduate classes in COBOL) came in and asked me to look at one of the student papers which "sounded too professional". I immediately recognized the unattributed passages as being lifted wholesale from classic papers on group DSS from Gerry DeSanctis. Then for the first time I saw the student's name on the paper and discovered it was Mr. "American cultural bias". (My new colleague refused to pursue the issue because of pressure from senior faculty and/or the business school.) I then went to my best faculty friend Bob, whom was teaching the MIS core class, and mentioned the story when Bob all of a sudden said that the same guy was also in one of his classes. I asked, just for kicks, if he had any papers left from the student; he said no, unless the student failed to pick up his paper at the end of the semester.
Sure enough, the student had not bothered to pick up his paper. Bob had given him a B+, didn't see anything obviously wrong and let me look at it. To say I was livid is an understatement: this guy had stitched together passages USING MY CLASS TEXTBOOK AND REQUIRED READINGS. It was like he was cheating in my face. (In hindsight, it's sort of funny how Bob gave a plagiarized paper of published, reviewed writings a B+.) I quickly showed Bob the original sources to some of the initial plagiarized passages. Bob's reaction was one laced with expletives: he did not like being made a fool of by this piece of work. He became almost obsessed, asking for my course materials and eventually found the original source for everything in the paper. But he also backed down from pursuing the issue under pressure from senior faculty and the business school. (I was seen as someone out to sabotage their foreign student recruitment program.)
The point is, of course, that it would have been astounding odds for me to have hit on this guy's only three cases of plagiarism--these were the only 3 papers I had ever seen from him. He nearly got past two other professors, only one of whom was at all suspicious. I hardly think that there were two patterns of behavior: that this guy turned in: cheating under nontenured MIS professors and honest work for everybody else. I have no doubt that he used it because it was working for him in other classes under the nose of clueless professors.
We know the tragic story of shunned half-black Vietnamese orphans in the aftermath of the war (this is not intended to be a racially motivated observation but merely to point out the obvious fact that some American GI's engaged in sexual relations with local women.)
Now I'm somewhat sympathetic to Mark Sullivan in the sense I think a lot of what's going on here is political grandstanding, and I think this incident is not a fair representation of men whom risk their lives every day to protect the leader of the free world. As a libertarian I don't have an issue of the voluntary behavior between Secret Service agents off the clock and local ladies in other areas. What concerns me is the fact that these ladies (say, a Latina Anna Chapman) may have gotten access to privileged data without proper vetting.
The issue is one of a consistent security policy, not the personal sex lives of Secret Service agents. Chances are, if and when the President was in Colombia, these ladies likely would have never gotten in the building. But Sullivan should not be putting lipstick on a pig, whitewashing everything. Nobody is doubting the professionalism of Secret Service agents or the valor of their service. But the American people are not stupid.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Rolling Stones, "She's So Cold"
