No More Years

The Romney Cowboy

Change it Back

A Libertarian

Big Government is the Problem…

September 4

Animal Collective – Centipede Hz (Domino)

It has been more than three years since the release of Merriweather Post Pavilion, which was among the most critically acclaimed albums of 2009. Take a listen to the track “Today’s Supernatural”.

Stars – The North (ATO)

The indie poppers from Montreal are back with their sixth full-length album. NPR Music says the album “rewards exploration with moments that alternately swoon, seethe, swing and paralyze.”

September 11

The xx – Coexist (Young Turks)

The xx’s debut album, xx, was one of the biggest indie successes of 2009. Will the band give listeners more of that unique minimalist style? Check out the track “Chained” below and see what you think.

September 18

Grizzly Bear – Shields (Secretly Canadian)

We’ve played a lot of Grizzly Bear on the show over the past two seasons. A lot. Having exhausted the track lists of Yellow House and Veckatimest, here’s hoping Shields will deliver more of the great psych-folk from their previous albums.

September 25

Mumford & Sons – Babel (Young Turks)

Admit it, you know you’re curious.

Heaven is The Walkmen’s seventh studio album (or sixth, depending on what you make of Pussy Cats), and continues a streak of critically-acclaimed releases spanning more than a decade.

In this special edition of Now That’s What I Call Boogie!, we examine their latest work but also cast a look back at some of the best songs they’ve made in their twelve years together as a band.

Heaven – Heaven (Fat Possum)

The first single off their new album, “Heaven” strikes me as a new kind of sound for the band. The anger and instability for which they were so well known seems to have been replaced by a more relaxed, nostalgic, even happy sound. They’re getting older, but they’re as great as ever.

Wake Up – Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone (StarTime International)

Vintage. The Walkmen’s first official music video, recorded in 2002.

The Rat – Bows + Arrows (Record Collection)

As much as I do love the new sounds on their latest album, the old anger and instability sure was great. “The Rat” won near universal praise and went on to be featured on many “best songs of the decade”-type lists. In an interview with the band following the release of Bows + Arrows, Rolling Stone supposedly called it “one of the greatest songs of the century” (it was released in 2004). It might not even be that outlandish of a claim.

In the New Year – You & Me (Fat Possum)

One of my favorites from their 2008 album You & Me.

Juveniles – Lisbon (Fat Possum)

Lisbon is on my list of best albums ever. Take a listen to one of the many terrific songs from the album, and if you’re interested, check out this interview with the band’s always-candid lead singer Hamilton Leithauser, conducted by Little Village Magazine at the KRUI studios in April of last year.

Spotify users can listen to all of the songs we have played by The Walkmen on the show by checking out our Master Playlist. That will do it for this edition of Now That’s What I Call Boogie!, but be sure to check back regularly with the blog this summer for more PTB content.

If you haven’t heard, the much-beloved indie rock band The Walkmen are back with a new album, and as always, everyone loves it.

In this special edition of Now That’s What I Call Boogie!, we examine their latest work but also cast a look back at some of the best songs they’ve made in their twelve years together as a band.

Photo: Fat Possum Records

It’s summertime at PTB, which means we’re off the air until August.

But do not fear! We have lots of great things to share with you in the summertime.

You can go check out Page 2 Politics, our dedicated politics blog, or listen to one of Skaaren’s Now That’s What I Call Boogie! playlists!

All our love,

Permission to Boogie

Here’s a wonderful example from Crossroads GPS:

(Pause for a moment and remember that it’s someone’s job to make those things. Somebody found the perfect sad piano music and filmed those kids playing basketball.)

Anyway, one of the charges most frequently leveled against the president is that he’s dramatically increased government spending. It’s the central theme of the basketball ad and countless GOP stump speeches.

While it’s true that federal deficits are growing, the federal spending has grown more slowly under Obama than any other president in 30 years.

Here’s the data visualized differently.

The perception of the president as a runaway spender is exaggerated, to say the least. Federal spending growth was nearly six times greater under George W. Bush than it is today, even when the first federal stimulus is re-attributed to Barack Obama.

Federal spending is higher under Obama than it was under Bush and the national debt has grown more quickly under Obama because of revenue lost to the Great Recession, but there has been no Obama boom where government spending is concerned.

The relatively sudden outrage regarding deficits and debt isn’t a reaction to any crazed presidential spending spree. As Steve Kornaki from Salon writes, deficit hawksmanship is a time-tested political tool.

Voters have a demonstrated tendency to express concerns about deficits only when the economy is bad. This is why, for instance, the Democrats during the 1981/82 recession reaped a political windfall while railing against Ronald Reagan’s massive deficits, but gained zero traction on the issue when the economy improved in 1984 – even though deficits were even higher (and still soaring) then.

The lesson is that most voters don’t actually care about the deficit itself, or really understand what it is. But it’s a scary-sounding word that conjures thoughts of government bloat and reckless spending, which makes it an irresistible weapon for a recession-era opposition party.

Smith became persona non grata online last year thanks to his sponsorship of the SOPA, the draconian anti-piracy bill that was finally slain by Internet backlash in January.

Now, a few upstanding members of the online community are pooling their resources to become political players deep in the heart of Texas’s 21st Congressional district. On Monday, Test PAC, the brainchild of some angry Redditors, made a small ad buy in Smith’s district, which includes parts of Austin and San Antonio.

Here’s the ad they ran:

But Test PAC’s founders aren’t the only crusaders taking aim at Lamar Smith; Ben Huh, the creative force behind the I Can Haz Cheezburger media conglomerate, bankrolled a pair of billboards in the San Antonio area through a group called Fight for the Future.

2012 will be Lamar Smith’s fourteenth congressional election and he tends to win big. The fledgling opposition doesn’t pose much of a threat to Smith this time around, but it does send an important message to politicians at every level.

For the first time, internet communities are mobilizing and lobbying for their pet cause (online freedom) in the real world. And though this election cycle likely won’t be influenced much by groups like Test PAC, the internet is transforming into an efficient grassroots lobbying platform that can compete with the moneyed interests that dominate the electoral process.

So, who’s ready for /b/PAC?

Lamar Smith should win easily in next week’s Republican primary, but the internet is making the Texas congressman’s reelection campaign a little more difficult.

Smith became a persona non grata online thanks to his sponsorship of the SOPA, the draconian anti-piracy bill that was killed by internet backlash in January.

Now, a few upstanding members of the online community are pooling their resources to become political players deep in the heart of Texas’s 21st Congressional district.

Here’s how people felt about voting for various minorities back then:

Only gay people and atheists were more widely distrusted than Mormons. There seems to be a solid fifth of the country who seriously dislikes Mormons for some reason. It’s been that way for a very long time.

See?

It’s pretty easy to come up with a list of people who generally dislike gay people and atheists, but who makes up the chunk of the population that consistently opposes Mormons for president?

Just about one fifth of everybody finds Mormons unfit to lead. Only education level and party affiliation have a real effect on approval rates.

So what explains the uniformity of the numbers across all of these demographics? Here are possible two explanations.

1. There is a sizable chunk of the population that is uninformed about Mormonism, and their views are determined by their limited exposure to the religion.

According to this theory of the Anti-Mormon Bloc, voters oppose a generic Mormon candidate because of their incorrect assumptions about the impact of such a candidate’s religion on his ability to perform his presidential duties. These voters may believe that the Church of Latter-day Saints would exert too much influence on a Mormon president, for example.

In 1960, 25% of American voters said they would not vote for a Catholic candidate for president. John Kennedy was opposed from the religious right by those who feared that his loyalties would lie with the Vatican and from the more secular left by those who believed that his Catholicism would unduly influence his policy-making in office.

By 1962, when neither group’s suspicions had been confirmed, the number of voters who would never vote for a Catholic had been cut in half.

The Catholic president turned out to be a lot like a Protestant president. It’s possible that those folks who currently say that they would not be comfortable with a Mormon president have some unfounded presuppositions about the loyalties and motivations of Mormons that would ultimately prove untrue.

If this is the case, Anti-Mormon sentiment would likely fall sharply during a Romney administration and Mormonism would enter the political mainstream.

2. There is a sizable chunk of the population that is very informed about Mormonism and is kind of weirded out by it.

Catholicism, for all its detractors, is much more mainstream than Mormonism. In fact, Catholicism is the mainstream when you really think about it.

An alternative explanation for the Anti-Mormon Bloc is that some people know too much about Mormonism. There’s some weird stuff in there.

Here’s a brief roundup from an article that appeared in Slate last fall:

The founder of the church, one Joseph Smith, was a fraud and conjurer well known to the authorities of upstate New York. He claimed to have been shown some gold plates on which a new revelation was inscribed in no known language. He then qualified as the sole translator of this language.

[...]

On his later forays into the chartless wilderness, there to play the role of Moses to his followers (who were permitted and even encouraged in plural marriage, so as to go forth and mass-produce little Mormons), Smith also announced that he wanted to be known as the Prophet Muhammad of North America, with the fearsome slogan: “Either al-Koran or the Sword.” He levied war against his fellow citizens, and against the federal government. One might have thought that this alone would raise some eyebrows down at the local Baptist Church.

[...]

Saddling itself with some pro-slavery views at the time of the Civil War, and also with a “bible” of its own that referred to black people as a special but inferior creation, the Mormon Church did not admit black Americans to the priesthood until 1978, which is late enough—in point of the sincerity of the “revelation” they had to undergo—to cast serious doubt on the sincerity of their change of heart.

[...]

More recently, and very weirdly, the Mormons have been caught amassing great archives of the dead, and regularly “praying them in” as adherents of the LDS, so as to retrospectively “baptize” everybody as a convert.

Some have concerns about the influence of the Church of the Latter-day Saints in a Mormon administration.

*   *   *

In truth, the Anti-Mormon Bloc is probably made up of people who fit into both categories. I don’t think Mitt Romney’s religion will have much of an impact on the outcome of the election in November, though.

John Kennedy faced similar levels of societal opposition, but it was his contacts in Chicago that swayed the outcome of the 1960 election, not his Catholicism.

Romney’s done a good job of deflecting questions of religion to this point, and I expect him to continue doing so. That is not to say his religion won’t be an issue, however.

There are troubling aspects of Mormonism, including the activism of the church and the weird post-mortem baptisms, that Mitt Romney should have to address.

A candidates’s religion shouldn’t matter, of course, but it always does.

Only gay people and atheists are more widely distrusted than Mormons.

A solid fifth of the country seriously says they would not vote for a Mormon, and it’s been that way for a very long time.

Here’s a few guesses as to why.

The New York Times reported today that the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade submitted a proposal titled “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good” to the Ending Spending Action Fund Super PAC.

The proposal is a quick, entertaining read. Here it is.

It was the first time anyone truly captured the essence of 2008 Barack Obama: he was the “metrosexual black Abe Lincoln.”

The plan goes on and on about the need to finish the job that John McCain wouldn’t do and destroy Obama by bringing to light his relationship with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Oddly, though, the five-minute campaign ad only features two clips of Wright speaking (according to the script provided in the proposal).

They’re the clips we’ve seen before. Both are easily found on YouTube, and were featured on many an evening news broadcast four years ago.

There’s the classic “God bless America? No, God damn America!” and the reverend’s unforgettable post 9/11 “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” Unfortunate for the president, sure, but it’s nothing particularly groundbreaking. (Both of the videos are worth a watch, by the way.)

It might be inadvisable for the GOP to dig up Reverend Wright and get into a Super PAC mud-slinging contest that focuses on religion, considering that their own nominee comes from a church that is highly suspect in the minds of many of its own voters (and occasionally allows polygamy and denied priesthood to black men until 1978).

Anyway, the point is that this ad sounds like a spectacular waste of money. Ricketts should use his $10 million to buy something more useful!

Like another year of service from Carlos Marmol and Kerry Wood, for example.

54% say that religion should remain apolitical; only 40% believe that the church (or other place of worship) should speak its mind and actively influence politics. These numbers represent a pretty significant shift in the attitudes of the general population over the last fifteen years.

Pew’s data suggests that this trend might be due to the public’s increasing distaste for religious displays from politicians. The public perception of politicians’ religious displays has changed dramatically in the past two years. This is likely due to the Republican primary contest that featured aggressive wooing of Christian voters.

The changes in the public’s attitude likely stem from a change in the political climate, rather than a move away from religion by the public. Over the last ten years, the number of people who believe that politicians talk too much about religion has quadrupled among Democrats and tripled among Republicans.

These trends, taken together, seem to reflect a growing displeasure with the amount of religion injected into politics. It’s unclear what effect these trends may have in the short term, but it’s likely that a continued trend away from politicized religion (and the social conservatism that typically accompanies it) would mean trouble for the current Republican party.

Water skiing? Come on Mittster! Water sports are not good for guys running for president, you should know that.

All we need is some video of Romney looking suave while water skiing so we can recreate this infamous ad.