Robert Plant - Early Vocal Range

(Posted by jowox on YouTube)
___________
1. a solid A2 from "going to california".
2. An emotional D5 from "since i´ve been loving you".
3. A E5 from "rock´n´roll".
4. A F5 from "communication breakdown".
5. A F#5 from "babe, i´m gonna leave you".
6. A F#5 from "how many more times" live 1968-12-30.
7. A powerful G5 from "operator".
8. A classic G5 from "since i´ve been loving you", lots of chest tone here.
9. A G5 from "how many more times" live 1968-12-30.
10. and another one.
11. A strong G#5 from "i can´t quit you".
12. a G#5 from "how many more times" live 1968-12-30.
13. a primal scream G#5 from 1979 song "i´m gonna crawl".
14. the famous A5 from "black dog", a bit thin though.
15. a short A5 from "since i´ve been loving you" live 1973 Madison Square Garden.
16. a powerful A5 (almost a Bb5) from "how many more times" live 1968-12-30.
17. a squeaky falsetto C#6 from "you shook me" 1969-01-10.
18. and lastly the famous "duet" with Jimmy Page off "you shook me" with a G#5 in the beginning followed by many G5:s.

More Bull From Mr. Straight-Talk

Questions Abound About McCain Criticism of Obama Trip

By Michael D. Shear and Dan Balz
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has now joined his voice to the chorus of aides and campaign surrogates who have been alleging that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) canceled his visit to a U.S. hospital in Germany because he couldn't bring a media entourage.

McCain said Monday on CNN's "Larry King Live": "I know that according to reports that he wanted to bring media people and cameras and his campaign staffers ... "

And the campaign released another statement this afternoon, this time from a former Sergeant Major who worked at the hospital, who said, "if Senator Obama isn't comfortable meeting wounded American troops without his entourage, perhaps he does not have the experience necessary to serve as commander in chief."

In fact, there's no proof that Obama ever sought to bring the media or any entourage.

In essence, the McCain charge is this: Obama cares so little for the welfare of wounded American soldiers that he canceled the visit when he was informed he could not bring reporters and television cameras to document it.

But there is no evidence that Obama ever planned to bring anyone to the hospital other than a single military adviser, whose status as a campaign staffer sparked last-minute concern among Pentagon officials that the visit would be an improper political event. The Obama campaign has cited those concerns as the reason for canceling Obama's visit.

After being asked repeatedly for the "reports" McCain was talking about on "Larry King Live," McCain's campaign staff provided three examples, none of which made the allegation that Obama had wanted to bring media to the hospital.

Instead, all three reports -- from Fox News, The Washington Post, and MSNBC -- mentioned that the Pentagon had informed Obama of the prohibition against media and campaign visits, leaving the readers and viewers to make the leap about Obama's motive -- as the McCain campaign clearly wanted.

Obama and his top aides have all denied that the campaign ever planned to take reporters or cameras or additional campaign staff to the hospital. "Absolutely, unequivocally wrong," spokesman Tommy Vietor e-mailed just moments after McCain's "Larry King" appearance.

That is supported by reporters who traveled with Obama.

The first indication reporters got that Obama was planning, or had planned, to visit the hospital came on Thursday morning shortly after the traveling entourage arrived in Berlin. On the seats of the press bus were schedules for Obama's stop in Germany and the final entry -- a Friday morning departure -- indicated that the senator's plane would fly from Berlin to Ramstein Air Base.

When a reporter asked Obama spokeswoman Linda Douglass that morning about the trip to Ramstein, she said the schedule was incorrect and out of date, that the trip had been considered but that Obama was not going to go there after all. At that point, the campaign provided no other information.

Later that night, after Obama's speech in Berlin, a campaign source talked on a not for attribution basis about the canceled trip. This official said that the original plan called for Obama to visit the hospital but leave the press on a chartered airplane on the tarmac at Ramstein. This official said that the trip had been canceled after the Pentagon informed a campaign official that the visit would be considered a campaign event.

Overnight the campaign issued two statements, one from senior official Robert Gibbs, the other from retired Air Force Major General Scott Gration, an Obama foreign policy adviser who was on the trip.

Gibbs's statement said the trip had been canceled because Obama decided it would be inappropriate to go to the hospital as part of a trip paid for by his campaign. Gration said the trip had been canceled because the Pentagon had informed the campaign the visit would be seen as a political trip.

Those two statements, while not inconsistent, left open questions as to the real reason the trip was canceled. Was it canceled in reaction to Pentagon concerns -- or did Obama simply make the decision himself out of concern for appearances? By this time the issue was blowing up back in the U.S.

On Friday afternoon, en route from Berlin to Paris, Gibbs briefed reporters traveling with Obama. Gibbs said the two statements were consistent: Gration had been informed on Wednesday night that the trip would be considered a campaign event and, on that basis, Obama then decided on the flight from Israel to Germany to cancel, Gibbs said, rather than to put wounded servicemen and women into an uncomfortable position.

Gibbs said the hospital visit had been on the schedule for several weeks and that Gration had been dealing with several military units to coordinate the stop. He added that officials at Ramstein and the Secret Service told them they needed prior approval to land a non-Air Force aircraft at the air base -- something known as a PPR (for Prior Permission Required) and that the campaign had received that PPR.

"Gration told them we would like to come -- not as a campaign event and without any press -- to make a visit," Gibbs said.

At one point a reporter asked Gibbs what the campaign had planned to do with reporters once the plane had landed at Ramstein. "You would have stayed on the plane," he replied.

Gibbs said today that the campaign had planned to inform the traveling press sometime on the morning of the flight to Ramstein that Obama was intending to visit the hospital but had made no plans to take any reporters -- including even the small, protective press pool that now accompanies Obama most places -- to the hospital.

Reporters, he said, likely would have been able to get off the plane but not leave an air base facility close by. "We had made absolutely no arrangements to transport the press to the hospital," he said. "I asked the advance guys today, 'Had we made any preparation to do that?' and they said, 'No.'"

Gibbs noted that Obama had visited with wounded soldiers several weeks earlier at Walter Reed in Washington, D.C., and at a combat support hospital while in Iraq earlier in the week -- both times without reporters.

At another point a reporter asked, "Why not just say it is never inappropriate to visit men and women in service -- what is your response to that?"

"Again, I would reiterate that we would not want to put anybody who had been wounded in service to our country in the potential position to be part of the political back and forth ... It is entirely likely that someone would have attacked us for having gone. And it is entirely likely -- and it has come about -- that people have attacked us for not going," said Gibbs.

On Saturday in London, Obama addressed the controversy during a press conference. He said Pentagon concerns about Gration's status triggered the decision not to make the visit.

"We got notice that he [Gration] would be treated as a campaign person and it would therefore be perceived as political because he had endorsed my candidacy but he wasn't on the Senate staff," Obama said. "That triggered then a concern that maybe our visit was going to be perceived as political, and the last thing that I want to do is have injured soldiers and the staff at these wonderful institutions having to sort through whether this is political or not, or get caught in the crossfire between campaigns."

Obama's explanation, which came after more than a day of controversy, was the clearest in noting that it was Pentagon concerns about Gration accompanying Obama to the hospital that forced Obama to reconsider and ultimately to cancel the visit.

He also noted that he had made previous visits to see wounded soldiers without reporters, and that while the visit to the hospital in Germany had long been on the schedule for the overseas trip, it had deliberately been left off the schedule given to the press for that reason.

Gibbs reiterated Obama's explanation again last night, saying on MSNBC that it was the Pentagon's concerns about Gration that prompted the cancellation.

"The Pentagon said that his participation would make that trip a campaign trip and we decided at that point, rather than put the men and women, who served our country and protected our freedom and had been injured, rather than put them in a political situation in the middle of a campaign fight, that we would just not go and not use them as props in this kind of fight," Gibbs said.

And he was more definitive today in denying the McCain campaign charge. "That's completely untrue and I think honestly they know it's untrue," Gibbs said.

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds insisted again today that McCain's version of events is correct, and that Obama canceled the trip because of the inability to take reporters and cameras into the hospital.

"It is safe to say that according to press reports Barack Obama avoided, skipped, canceled the visit because of those reasons," Bounds said. "We're not making a leap here."

Nicolle Wallace, another spokeswoman for McCain, said the campaign's understanding of the event, which was "pieced together from public sources" was that "Obama was told he could go to see the troops as long as he wanted to. At some point, the campaign apparatus" was raised as an issue. "When you say 'campaign apparatus,' it's staff, pool, protection, whatever. That's what our understanding of what campaign apparatus is."

Wallace said at this point the actual details of the incident are less relevant because "This is what it is. People know this. People will draw their own conclusions."

"It probably wasn't enough to ruin the trip," she added, "but there is a very worrisome Obama narrative shaping up" in which he's ignoring the advice of military officers such as General David Petraeus and he's not fully paying attention to "the importance of seeing the troops, no matter how logistically challenging it might be."

Bounds later added in an e-mail: "The only reported stipulation was that Barack Obama had to leave his celebrity entourage at the door, but he skipped on the injured troops anyway, so it's fair to question his judgment and we'll keep doing it."

Washington Post Staff Writer Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.

Posted at 4:37 PM ET on Jul 29, 2008

Neil Young

Neil Young documents anti-war tour in film

By DAVID BAUDER, Associated Press WriterWed Jul 23, 5:11 PM ET

Not every musician will make a film that features a fan facing him from a concert audience with two arms raised, middle fingers extended — more than one fan, in fact.

Neil Young was singing protest songs on a "Freedom of Speech" tour with David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash at the time. Ignoring that kind of nonverbal speech would contradict the message, wouldn't it?

It was an easy call. Using the nom de plume Bernard Shakey, Young directs "CSNY: Deja Vu," a film that uses the tumult surrounding CSNY's 2006 concert tour as a backdrop for exploring divisions in the country over the Iraq war. It opens in theaters on Friday.

Before the tour, Young had released "Living With War," the blunt anti-war album where he was backed by a full chorus on songs like "Let's Impeach the President." There was little mistaking his intentions; one of the film's funniest moments shows Young almost physically knocked back when a CNN reporter mentioned the song and asked him, "What's that song about?"

Young invited journalist Mike Cerre along to speak to members of the audience.

"The interviews we got were more positive than negative," Young told The Associated Press. "But we tried to represent the people who didn't come by, trying to equalize the positive and negative."

It wasn't hard to find unhappy fans at a handful of shows, most obviously in Atlanta. Many streamed out, or stayed to offer hand signals. Some had inexplicably expected a greatest-hits show. Young said he was blown away watching families fight, the children wanting to stay while their parents were eager to leave.

He also had narrators read from concert reviews, positive and negative. One critic said, "I don't want to be told how to think by four aging hippies." Another said CSNY wasn't interested in free speech, "just the kind they believe in."

Plainly, he had struck a nerve. No one likes seeing angry fans, but Young had no interest in backing down.

"Just because I'm famous doesn't mean that I work for the audience," he said. "I'm not obligated to do anything. I'm an artist. I will do what I want to do. Whatever the consequences ... I certainly hope that it's a civilized reaction."

Through Cerre's contacts, "Deja Vu" tells stories of people band members met along the way. The characters include songwriter Josh Hisle, now a performing musician after two tours of duty with the Marines in Iraq; Gold Star mother and anti-war activist Karen Meredith; and Patrick Murphy, an Iraq veteran now a freshman congressman from Pennsylvania.

The title "Deja Vu" is also a hint that Young seeks to draw connections to CSNY's activism against the Vietnam War roughly 40 years ago.

Young has resisted playing one of his best-known songs, "Ohio," about the shooting of anti-Vietnam War demonstrators in Kent State, because he didn't want to seem like he was exploiting the victims' memories. The song was dusted off and given new context in the "Freedom of Speech" tour.

When he released his album, Young had said it was a shame that someone older had to write those songs, implicitly criticizing the generation fighting the Iraq war. He's since been set straight, finding a lot of music addressing the topic was being made; it just hadn't found an outlet. Young now features a lot of it on his Web site, which keeps a constantly refreshed chart on which songs are being played the most.

Young never wants to do such a tour again, and not just because he hopes for peace.

"It's too draining and terrifying," he said. "I was committed to it ... and I followed it all the way through to the end, but it's very dangerous and it's not fun. Singing those songs every day and meeting the soldiers and meeting people who were crying about their lost loved ones every day? We did that ... but I don't want to spend the rest of my life replaying that."

The artists received death threats, although this point isn't raised in the film.

"It's not very positive and it doesn't reflect well on society," he said. "That's where I drew the line. I just did not want to play that up."

There's one touching moment in "Deja Vu" when Young gathers his fellow band members around and thanks them for watching his back. They were all committed to the cause, although Stills was the one displaying the most obvious ambivalence.

Stills has been fundraising for Democratic candidates for years, but being put in a daily situation facing angry fans was tough on him. "Stephen is a wonderful guy," Young said. "He just doesn't like to be not liked."

Young said he believed in everything said and done during the tour, but "I've moved on to what's the solution." He believes oil fuels many of the world's conflicts and is helping to finance researchers all over the world hoping to find alternative fuel sources.

He considers the period during when the Iraq war was new and dissent was seen to be non-patriotic to be a blight on the nation's history. Even if he's moved on, he doesn't want moviegoers to forget it.

"I hope that when they leave that they talk about it for a while, and that when they wake up the next day they still have some images from it in their mind," he said. "The rest is up to them."

___

On the Net:

http://www.csny-dejavu.com

http://www.neilyoung.com/

Aud-Shot Video of Zeppelin Over London 2007

Kashmir
From about 6:30-7:12 in the video, Plant is just about directly in front of where we were in the second row.




Trampled Underfoot

Zeppelin at Earl's Court, London, 1975

Over The Hills and Far Away




Kashmir

"Just a Matter of History"

McCain gets the chronology completely wrong, attributing success in Iraq's Anbar province to the 2007 US escalation/'surge' - even though the "Sunni Awakening" began in 2006.

NYT's Bob Herbert: Madness and Shame

Madness and Shame

By BOB HERBERT

You want a scary thought? Imagine a fanatic in the mold of Dick Cheney but without the vice president’s sense of humor.

In her important new book, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” Jane Mayer of The New Yorker devotes a great deal of space to David Addington, Dick Cheney’s main man and the lead architect of the Bush administration’s legal strategy for the so-called war on terror.

She quotes a colleague as saying of Mr. Addington: “No one stood to his right.” Colin Powell, a veteran of many bruising battles with Mr. Cheney, was reported to have summed up Mr. Addington as follows: “He doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”

Very few voters are aware of Mr. Addington’s existence, much less what he stands for. But he was the legal linchpin of the administration’s Marquis de Sade approach to battling terrorism. In the view of Mr. Addington and his acolytes, anything and everything that the president authorized in the fight against terror — regardless of what the Constitution or Congress or the Geneva Conventions might say — was all right. That included torture, rendition, warrantless wiretapping, the suspension of habeas corpus, you name it.

This is the mind-set that gave us Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and the C.I.A.’s secret prisons, known as “black sites.”

Ms. Mayer wrote: “The legal doctrine that Addington espoused — that the president, as commander in chief, had the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries if national security demanded it — rested on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars shared.”

When the constraints of the law are unlocked by the men and women in suits at the pinnacle of power, terrible things happen in the real world. You end up with detainees being physically and psychologically tormented day after day, month after month, until they beg to be allowed to commit suicide. You have prisoners beaten until they are on the verge of death, or hooked to overhead manacles like something out of the Inquisition, or forced to defecate on themselves, or sexually humiliated, or driven crazy by days on end of sleep deprivation and blinding lights and blaring noises, or water-boarded.

To get a sense of the heights of madness scaled in this anything-goes atmosphere, consider a brainstorming meeting held by military officials at Guantánamo. Ms. Mayer said the meeting was called to come up with ways to crack through the resistance of detainees.

“One source of ideas,” she wrote, “was the popular television show ‘24.’ On that show as Ms. Mayer noted, “torture always worked. It saved America on a weekly basis.”

I felt as if I was in Never-Never Land as I read: “In conversation with British human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, the top military lawyer in Guantánamo, Diane Beaver, said quite earnestly that Jack Bauer ‘gave people lots of ideas’ as they sought for interrogation models.”

Donald Rumsfeld described the detainees at Guantánamo as “the worst of the worst.” A more sober assessment has since been reached by many respected observers. Ms. Mayer mentioned a study conducted by attorneys and law students at the Seton Hall University Law School.

“After reviewing 517 of the Guantánamo detainees’ cases in depth,” she said, “they concluded that only 8 percent were alleged to have associated with Al Qaeda. Fifty-five percent were not alleged to have engaged in any hostile act against the United States at all, and the remainder were charged with dubious wrongdoing, including having tried to flee U.S. bombs. The overwhelming majority — all but 5 percent — had been captured by non-U.S. players, many of whom were bounty hunters.”

The U.S. shamed itself on George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s watch, and David Addington and others like him were willing to manipulate the law like Silly Putty to give them the legal cover they desired. Ms. Mayer noted that Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the late historian, believed that “the Bush administration’s extralegal counterterrorism program presented the most dramatic, sustained and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history.”

After reflecting on major breakdowns of law that occurred in prior administrations, including the Watergate disaster, Mr. Schlesinger told Ms. Mayer: “No position taken has done more damage to the American reputation in the world — ever.”

Americans still have not come to grips with this disastrous stain on the nation’s soul. It’s important that the whole truth eventually come out, and as many of the wrongs as possible be rectified.

Ms. Mayer, as much as anyone, is doing her part to pull back the curtain on the awful reality. “The Dark Side” is essential reading for those who think they can stand the truth.

Exchange Between Veteran and McCain at Town Hall Event

Instead of initially answering the guy's question about health care funding for veterans, McCain starts talking about educational benefits and then brags about awards and endorsements from certain veterans' groups. He concludes with a smarmy "I guess they don't know something you know."

Here's some analysis from Rachel Maddow on MSNBC:

NYT's Frank Rich on John McCain and the Economy

Click on the link to read the whole piece. The following is merely an excerpt.

________________

Mr. McCain’s fiscal ineptitude has received so little scrutiny in some press quarters that his chief economic adviser, the former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, got a free pass until the moment he self-immolated on video by whining about “a nation of whiners.” The McCain-Gramm bond, dating back 15 years, is more scandalous than Mr. Obama’s connection with his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Mr. McCain has been so dependent on Mr. Gramm for economic policy that he sent him to newspaper editorial board meetings, no doubt to correct the candidate’s numbers much as Joe Lieberman cleans up after his confusions of Sunni and Shia.

Just two weeks before publicly sharing his thoughts about America’s “mental recession,” Mr. Gramm laid out equally incendiary views in a Wall Street Journal profile that portrayed him as “almost certainly” the McCain choice for Treasury secretary. Mr. Gramm said that the former chief executive of AT&T, Ed Whitacre, was “probably the most exploited worker in American history” since he received only a $158 million pay package rather than the “billions” he deserved for his success in growing Southwestern Bell.

But no one in the news media seemed to notice Mr. Gramm’s naked expression of the mind-set he’d bring to a McCain White House. And few journalists have vetted the presumptive Treasury secretary’s post-Senate history as an executive at UBS. The stock of that banking giant has lost 70 percent of its value in a year after its reckless adventures in the subprime lending market. It’s now fending off federal investigation for helping the megarich avoid taxes.

Mr. McCain made a big show of banishing Mr. Gramm after his whining “gaffe,” but it’s surely at most a temporary suspension. When the candidate said back in January that there’s nobody he knows who is stronger on economic issues than his old Senate pal, he was telling the truth. Left to his own devices — or those of his new No. 1 economic surrogate, Carly Fiorina — Mr. McCain is clueless. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger, a supporter, said that Mr. McCain’s latest panacea for high gas prices, offshore drilling, is snake oil — and then announced his availability to serve as energy czar in an Obama administration.

Winding up Turckfest Weekend

Here are a couple shots of the whole group -
Back from L-R: Jim (Black Dog), Thom, me, John, Chuck, Links
Middle row on the table: Turck, Turck, Joe
...and of course Ben and his dad in front.

Campfires and Presidents + Assholes

Some dads joined us for this trip - Joe's, Ben's, and Turck's fathers all came along for the fun.

Thom loved this picture, so I promised him I would post it here.

A little P&A action from Saturday night.

Turck's Bachelor Weekend in West Virginia

Late Thursday night, I flew from Chicago to Raleigh, where Turck is now living with Lindsay. Joe H had set up a great weekend for us at Ace Adventure Resort in West Virginia. Nate had to work on Friday, but we eventually arrived late that night with some help from his GPS, after encountering a father/son mullet combo at Wal-Mart to pick up some supplies. We did enough drinking to make waking up early on Saturday pretty difficult. These pictures were taken after we returned from rafting when we were all a little tuckered out. I don't have any images from the rafting because I didn't have a waterproof camera, but Turck did and perhaps I'll be able to post those at some point. Although we weren't exactly roughing it (there were hot showers available near the campsite and decent cell phone reception), the area and the weather was beautiful and I think we all had a fantastic time.

John McCain [TPM] "Gotta Be Me"