Mark Penn

He then stepped off the cliff by saying that President Obama needed a “similar event” to achieve that reconnection following his party’s midterm losses. (h/t Eyeblast)

Host Chris Matthews, however, barely notices, as he’s already started his next question:

It is a bit of tone-deafness to make you nostalgically reach for your Yoko Ono records, but Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey puts it in proper perspective:

Occasionally, political pundits get so wrapped up in their analysis that they don’t think through all of the implications of their commentary. That happened to Mark Penn, longtime Democratic pollster, in his appearance on Hardball last night, in the most charitable explanation possible.

Either way, here’s hoping the President gets to reconnect with the American people using a less-deadly medium. Slurpees, anyone?

The video is below, but here’s the thing: It wasn’t created by Google, it was created by the John Lennon YouTube channel, which is inviting people from around the world (er, across the universe?), to submit birthday messages for Lennon, and words of peace in honor of the day, and, obviously, of the pervasive message of Lennon through songs like “Imagine” and “Happy Christmas (War is Over).” (This is probably not the time to bring up my grammatical quibble with the now-iconic refrain of “War is over, if you let it.” So I won’t.)

Anyhow – the John Lennon YouTube page is actually a treasure trove of messages from not only from people across said universe, but artists like Brian Wilson, Aerosmith, DMC, Heart, the Jonas Brothers (really), George Thorogood, a dude from Incubus, jazz prodigy Nikki Yanovsky, Brett Michaels, REO Speedwagon (really) plus people like basketball player Grant Hill, skateboarder Tony Hawk, comedian Penn Jillette, and, weirdly, the cast of Cirque du Soleil. Also some Polish band whose favorite Lennon song is “Don’t Let Me Down” (they’re called Sublim, and I thought I was clicking on Sublime – my bad). And, of course, Yoko Ono, thanking him “for giving us so much in his short and intense life on this planet,” —and who, like her or not (as some fans do, er, not), has been the faithful custodian of his legacy for the past 30 years (and, it should be said, was the partner Lennon himself chose). The result is an odd, sometimes awkward but ultimately compelling mish-mash of off-the-cuff video tributes, some surprisingly moving. We’ve got a selection on the next few pages, but for now, here’s Google’s take:

>>>NEXT: Lennon Tribute Videos from Yoko, Ringo Starr, Aerosmith, DMC, Brian Wilson, the Jonas Brothers, George Thorogood and a truly random assortment of people

This oil spill story has been awful for me. It has completely crowded out such fish-in-a-barrel subjects as the Tea Party and masturbating financial regulators, and everyone already beat me to the best jokes about it. What’s left is a molasses mushroom cloud, a slowly unfolding disaster that’s a real pain in the ass to write about. How many times can you report ever-increasing estimates of the size of the leak (today’s guesstimate: 210,000 gallons a day) that aren’t worth the paperless environment they’re printed on? How many synonyms for “clueless” and “inept” can you use before you run out?

Still, I was managing to eke out some content, courtesy of some back-and-forth between Robert Gibbs and Fox News’ Neil Cavuto. I even had a great BP Oil Spill question all worked out for Monday’s briefing. President Obama had talked about the federal government’s share of the blame, so I was going to ask when someone at Minerals Management Service or the Department of the Interior was going to be held accountable for granting BP an exemption from an environmental impact study, along with anyone else who asked for one. It’s true, I got 3 of them myself, just for kicks.

Unfortunately, Chuck Todd got word (via his Blackberry) of Interior Dept. official Chris Oynes‘ retirement, and asked if it was related to fallout from the leak. Robert Gibbs promised to check on it (the official response would be that Oynes’ exit was not related to the BP spill), effectively killing my question. Does that entitle me to some of that $75 million damages cap? Probably not, but I’ve got my fingers crossed that the Republicans will eventually get out of the way and let that cap go to $10 billion. Then, I’m in the game.

As I drove home from DC last night, I played several news programs on my laptop (I always do. It’s the only way to stay caught up while spending 7 hours driving in 1 day). Pretty much everyone agreed that everything that can be done is being done, but that the depth, location, and scale of this leak makes this an almost impossible task, and that the best solution would have been to not let them drill there in the first place. Great. That and a flux capacitor will get you a clean ocean.

So, what happens when the next several attempts to stop this leak fail? What future testicular damage will all these dispersants do? Why is there never an environmental catastrophe that threatens to wipe out mosquitoes?

Burning questions, all, but I found myself wondering most of all, how much oil is in this goddam well? What if this thing just keeps going and going? Will this give rise to a species of oil-resistant Superfish that will figure out how to enslave us?

I’m no scientist, so maybe this will all turn out not-so-bad, I don’t know. It looks really bad to me. It’s tough to find a good guy here. I know Ken Salazar had only been in office for a few months when that exemption was granted, but by all accounts, that was (and continued to be) business as usual. The Democrats’ scaredy-cat, baby-steps approach to reform has been, and will continue to be, grossly insufficient. Is it better than no reform at all? I don’t know, I just know that a non-poisonous ocean is better than both of those things.

Here’s the thing. When it comes to the environment, I keep a healthy dose of skepticism for both sides. If putting an extra lane onto the Garden State Parkway means displacing some rare chipmunks, well, I’ll be there to pay for the Habitrail. They put on a helluva Christmas album, but I got places to be. On the other hand, when companies lobby for voluntary pollution standards, I think about how well voluntary parking rules would work out. The point is, I’m no alarmist. It’s just that crude oil pouring into the ocean at a rate of *shrug* is, well, pretty damned alarming.

I stopped for gas about halfway home, and I saw that the station was selling toy trucks for only five bucks. My dad worked for Hess for awhile when I was little, so I’ve always had an affinity for those toy trucks, even if I could never quite understand why they chose to parody “My Boyfriend’s Back” in their commercials. My 4 year-old really misses me when I’m gone, so I thought the little truck would make a nice present for him.

It wasn’t until I got home that I realized that I had purchased a toy BP truck. So, there’s the silver lining; a cheap toy truck that I can give to my son, which he can someday use as an offering to his Superfish overlords in a bargain for his life.

– Glenn Beck on yesterday’s ‘Fox and Friends’ suggesting that FOX and talk radio are the only things standing between the United States and a communist/fascist/socialist/dictatorship.

Does it follow then that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Beck are now playing the role of Founding Fathers? Hey, who’s to say that when Franklin said “a republic, if you can keep it” he wasn’t actually looking to cable news hyperbole as the keeper! Meanwhile, Lee Siegal says Beck and his followers are actually the 21st century’s version of the hippies of the 1960′s.

In society, culture and now politics, what was once considered countercultural is today the establishment. And so it’s no surprise that what was once considered the establishment—the war cry of patriotism, religion, and morality—is the new counterculture. The parallels between today’s right-wing radicals and radical tactics of the 1960s are striking. Sixties’ Dada theatrics—e.g. Allen Ginsberg leading people in an attempt to levitate the Pentagon (my favorite)—are echoed in the alarmist and conspiratorial theatrics of right-wing cable television. Then, too, just as the radical left was inspired by a few personalities—Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Mark Rudd et al.—today’s radical right is whipped up by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin et al.

Does this mean we should expect a Glenn Beck bed-in as the logical follow-up to last weekend’s 9/12 event?

And while your mother screams and pulls her hair waiting for the game to come out, you can dig into a piece like New York Times Magazine “While My Guitar Gently Beeps,” which paints a comprehensive picture of what it all means (and what Paul and Ringo think of it). But it takes a technology-savvy magazine like IEEE Spectrum to explain the technological feats that made the magic possible.

Says “The Making of The Beatles: Rock Band” by David Kushner:

Rock Band requires that each instrument — drums, bass, guitar, and vocals — be laid down onto a separate track. This works fine for a contemporary song recorded on a 48-track system. But roughly the first third of the Beatles’ catalog had been engineered using much simpler recording equipment.

Though the Beatles were innovators in the use of two or four tracks, they often put all the instruments on a single track and then used the remaining tracks for ancillary sounds and effects. Apple Corps wanted the game to cover the span of the band’s career, so Harmonix would have to find a way to extract the different instruments from those early songs.

Now, here comes the interesting part, when The Beatles meet CSI (and, no, Paul is not dead):

[The software developing] team turned to audio forensic software normally used by law enforcement and in restoration projects. These tools, equipped with advanced digital-signal-processing capabilities, include more controls than those offered by most audio-filtering packages. Myriad audio parameters can be tweaked in order to zero in on specific sound elements.

(See a detailed explanation here.)

Another interesting piece of information the article gives all you Yoko-haters out there: you need to thank her for the Fab Four looking alive in the game. When she saw the initial animations, she demanded that they were given more “soul.” (Now, be good to her for a change, and repeat “Thank you, Yoko”.)

The game comes out on September 9, which is “909”. Get it, man?

Wait—shouldn’t it come out the day after that… Or is the date “090909,” which, you know, would be a reference to “Revolution 9”? Hm.

Can you play the game backwards?

Ok, I’ll stop.

BONUS TRACK: Best joke on The Beatles: Rock Band so far came from Ben Greenman in McSweeney’s:

“If you depress X and Y while pulling the right stick downward, Yoko Ono will meet John and be unfairly blamed for the breakup of the band.”

Video: The Beatles Rock Band Trailer

Where was I? Oh yes: He’s having a good week. Why? Well first, he revealed on his blog  that he’d been hired at The Daily Show (replacing writer Rob Kutner, who departed last month for L.A. to join the writing staff of the Tonight Show). Anyone who reads Radosh regularly knows he possesses a smart, dry wit (cf. today’s “Gefilte Girl” post), plus, as Gawker’s John Cook points out, he brings a real news cred to the fake news industry.

As if that weren’t enough, he’s got another nice feather in his multi-feathered cap: He’s got the cover story on this week’s New York Times magazine, about The Beatles: Rock Band, called “While My Guitar Gently Beeps.” He says it took seven months, and he got to interview both Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr for it, one of whom was his childhood idol. (It was….RINGO! He was 10, he was beautiful, and he liked the least-popular Beatle.) It’s 8,000 words and will probably delight Beatles fans, though it may make them sad, or at least wistful. In the end, the love you take is equal to the high score you get on Rock Band.

Anyhow: Congratulations, Daniel Radosh! And thanks for having such a good week, because now we’re going to make this a recurring feature. We love to celebrate good things happening to media people! Hooray – now we’re all having a good week.

Update: Radosh informs me that the Ringo thing was a joke. “Nobody wanted to be Ringo when they were 10. Not even Ringo.” Whoa. Harsh. Well anyway, it sounded like something offbeat and demented, precisely what a ten-year-old who might grow up to be a writer/blogger/comedian might dream of. But whatever.

If you know someone who is Having A Good Week, email us here. Perhaps we will write about them!