Blue Monday, Gram Parsons edition

George Jones, RIP

1931-2013

Ritchie Havens, RIP

Blue Monday, Boston Brass edition

"I just made soup"

Wow.

I'm in Europe this week.  I was working and listening to CNN International in the backgound last night, with dispatches from South Korea, China, and Venezuela, when suddenly I heard "Boston."  After a while, though, I switched to other news programs wondering what was on the minds of other news editors.  German, French and BBC were focused exclusively on the finish line in Boston, with France 24 having the most explicit video that made clear this wasn't just some infrastructure explosion.

Blue Monday, Reverand Gary Davis edition

And put the load right on me

Hilary Clinton's test

Alex Pareene asks a very insightful question: should Hil!ary run in '16, will she pass the Mark Penn test?

Mark Penn is a pollster and political strategist and amoral P.R. creature who is generally wrong about everything. To find out how incompetent Mark Penn is at campaign strategy and how personally toxic he is in a campaign working environment go to your local library and check out literally any book about the 2008 presidential race. For the basics, check here and here. In short, he had no clue how the primaries actually worked and constantly pushed for the campaign to go as nasty and negative as possible, and everyone hated him and he was bad at his job and eventually he was fired.

Fired, but still well compensated. Since Clinton’s 2008 campaign ended, she has milked her donors — and Obama supporters — for millions of dollars to pay off her campaign’s debt. $5.4 million of the debt — all of it, that is — was owed to Mark Penn’s firm Penn, Schoen & Berland. Anyone donating money to Clinton since 2008 has essentially been paying off the man who did more than anyone outside the Obama campaign to prevent her from becoming president. The debt was only just paid off in full in January, just as Clinton left the State Department and shortly before the new pro-Clinton super PAC began operating.

 Read the whole thing for the Wayback Machine visit to some of the Clintons' most odious acquaintances.  Look, I like HC, but I won't for long if she proves to have learned no lessons from '08, when she was the prohibitive favorite.

Opening Day

Blue Monday, Stanley Brothers edition