Rocking with the Judge

I'll keep my comments about the vital libertarian TV show FreedomWatch (now daily at 8pm Eastern on Fox Business Network, with host Judge Andrew Napolitano) to a minimum after today, since I don't want to imply that I'm still an official part of the team.  (I left for more money and creative flexibility just a couple weeks ago, freelancing and ghosting for clients who shall remain nameless, as if my year hadn't seen enough upheavals.)  I must at least note, though, as I look back upon my time with the show, the Top Five Cases of FreedomWatch Literally Rocking:


5.  Guest Gene Simmons, complete with the caption "Tea Party Ev-er-y Day"

4.  A Department of Transportation safety story with the caption "Here in my car, I feel safest of all" (inspired, of course, by pale, libertarian, Asperger's-suffering, sci-fi-influenced New Wave musician Gary Numan, which is to say, a near-perfect human being)

3.  Guest Kurt Loder of MTV News (who I went on to bump into two more times in about a two-week period, oddly enough, once coming out of a movie and once at last week's Reason-hosted, Weimar-like event at the burlesque club the Box, which featured more libertarians and fellow-travelers than you can shake a stick at -- including S.E. Cupp, Megan McArdle, NR's Kevin Williamson, and Greg Gutfeld, the man whose insightful words are now my blog epigram -- though for some mysterious reason Gawker decided to depict the event with photos of cute, scantily-clad female performers; the guest of honor, pornographer John "Buttman" Stagliano, had, honest to gosh, just won a heroic courtroom victory for free speech after an attempt to censor his film Milk Nymphos, leading to the "community standards" litmus test essentially being ruled obsolete, an important chapter in the anals of First Amendment law)

2.  Guest (and ex-MTV VJ) Kennedy -- who was not only on the same week as Loder but was on the same week I met Palin and saw my skeptical hero and inspiration James Randi speak at the New York Academy of Sciences (perhaps Kennedy should set to music her poem "Fishy fishy in the sewer/ How many doggies did manure?")

1.  Guests the Sons of Liberty actually singing rock songs about the Constitution.


Speaking of FreedomWatch guests, I should note in reply to one reader comment yesterday that while
Sarah Palin is not a libertarian, she did indeed say on FreedomWatch that she thinks police could spend their time on things more productive than arresting pot-smokers.  And at least one more thought about Julian Assange: I love the fact that one of the diplomatic communications leaked by WikiLeaks laments that Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe (arguably the worst-governed country on Earth) believes that "his eighteen doctorates give him the authority to suspend the laws of economics."  Maybe he's more like a Western politician than I realized.  If we can just get really smart people in office...they'll know how to appoint people who can inflate currency without actually causing inflation...and nationalize things without negative economic effects...and...

In other musical news:

•On FunnyorDie, Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly have parodied the Bowie/Crosby Christmas duet from 1977 (in which, I'm told, Bowie was improvising, since he really is a god, unlike that phony-baloney ancient carpenter guy).  In all fairness, though, it should be noted that Craig Kilborn and Bob Mould parodied the Bowie/Crosby duet fourteen years ago.  Time flies. 

•I should also note that Mom has once more been proven right about the horribly depressing effects of the deadly-dreary 70s ballad "You Light Up My Life," which she always hated ("shit-rock" she sometimes called mellow 70s fare, as I recall, readying me at a very early age to escape into the 80s and 90s).  The song's composer, Joseph Brooks, has not only been charged with multiple counts of rape, but it now appears his son has been charged with murder.  Will they have hope...to carry on...? 

•A libertarian I know from college who still sends out a personal newsletter the old-fashioned way, via snail mail, is interviewed in the new issue of that newsletter by his friend Kevin Huffman, the winner of the recent Washington Post become-a-guest-columnist contest.  The newsletter editor says the fortunes of the nation tend to track the career of Liz Phair (meaning the U.S. peaked around 1993 and is asymptotically approaching zero now) and says that if his neighbor called him a "filthy libertarian," he would retaliate by mowing his lawn while wearing only a Bob Barr bumper sticker.  I'm just glad the WaPo victor has an alternative rock/libertarian influence in his life, not to mention a Brown survivor. 

•In TSA news, I just want to note that the ill man who urinated on himself, who recently became one of the horror stories about excessive airport security, is named Tom Sawyer (and hails from a town called Romulus).  There may be some sort of very strange pro-liberty rock video possibility there using the Rush song by that name:

Mean, mean stride...

Naked as his eyes are wide...

Riding out the day's events/ The river...

Space he invades...

Etc.

•In more serious and encouraging rock news, Christine Caldwell Ames informs me that Jack White -- Catholic and capitalist, like the aforementioned Judge -- was recently cited by the Onion A.V. Club as harshly condemning whining fans who don't understand that rare premium collector's editions of albums are by definition supposed to be more valuable and thus fetch a higher price on eBay -- and that it wouldn't otherwise make sense to sell them, given basic economics.  This admirable display of non-socialism by a rocker makes me feel better about having the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army" stuck in my head for several years now (finally displacing a Nirvana song stuck there for about a decade).  And my continual enjoyment of the song doesn't cost me a dime.  Not wishing to be a whiner or ingrate, I humbly thank Jack White.  (They're well worth paying to see in concert, too, by the way -- but next month it's Broken Social Scene and Iron & Wine for me.)