Yeah, right.

From the San Antonio Express-News yesterday:

Closing arguments are scheduled for Tuesday, and jurors will then begin deciding whether to convict Bartholomew Granger, 42, in the death of 79-year-old Minnie Ray Sebolt….

As an accused sex offender, Granger wasn’t able to legally buy a gun, so he said he bought one from a gang member.

But hey, expanded background checks are going to fix eeeeverything. Yeah, right. Pull the other one; it’s got bells on it.

Monday music musings.

I would like to thank Eric Church for giving me yet another exhibit to submit whenever I talk about how I think artists who downplay the concept of genres do so solely to further their own ends:

I happen to feel that genres are gone in music. I just think that with the digital age, whether it’s satellite radio, terrestrial radio, Pandora, whatever, there are no more genres….

Wait, what? No more genres with satellite radio? That sound you hear is me rolling my eyes at Church’s ignorance on display here. If anything, satellite radio in general only serves better those of us who still think the concept of genres still has some utility, because it carves music up into categories even more than terrestrial radio does. And the same goes for Pandora, albeit not to the same extent. If you want to hear real country music and not ’80s-rock retreads, it’s going to be a lot easier to do that on satellite or Pandora than it is pretty much anywhere else.

And speaking of ’80s rock retreads, we have this, from reality-show hack Tate Stevens…

The Jason Aldeans, the Brantley Gilberts–they’re bringing that rock element to country music. It broadens the whole thing, which is awesome. So you’ll hear some guitar tones and sounds that are like that ’80s rock–late ’70s, ’80s, the Journeys, the Foreigners, that kind of REO Speedwagon sound. I love that stuff.

(Good grief, what it is with jackasses named Tate?)

So, here we have these people who cut their teeth on Journey and Foreigner instead of Ricky Skaggs and George Strait making “country” music, and Tate Stevens apparently thinks this is a good thing. I really don’t know what to say here that I haven’t already said before, but that it strikes me that Bob McDill’s mid-1990s lament is still just as valid as it ever was, even if the people perpetrating this fraud never tried their hand in other genres before. And I find this especially distasteful in the wake of George Jones’ death.

But Holly Gleason distilled all the arguments about old vs. new country right down to their essence here:

Do we need old school country music? Hard to say. But you listen to the processed, bulked up steroidal arena country, then put on “When the Grass Grows Over Me.” Feel the difference and decide which has the most immediacy, the most charisma, the most punch to the stomach. It won’t take but a bar or two.

Yes, indeed.

(h/t Country California)

A tale told by an idiot…

…full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Ooh, 90,000 Facebook followers! And they are flaming mad! Fear them!

But again…what are they going to propose to be done about the semiautomatic rifles and standard-capacity magazines (erroneously called “high-capacity”) that are out there now? After all, if they don’t think there’s a legitimate purpose for anyone to have them and that their continued ownership by civilians poses a danger, there’s only one logical thing to advocate, isn’t there?

And yeah…yeah, the cry for more stringent gun laws will die down. The support for them isn’t there and hasn’t been for a good long time. Of course when you put yourself in an echo chamber you’re going to think you’re the majority, but that doesn’t make you any less wrong.

I’m sure he thinks he’s being funny…

…but as he often does, Chris Ladd shows himself to be astoundingly ignorant:

In more practical terms, if you actually believe that you’re going to defend yourself from Obama with your cache of AR-15′s and a cellar full of canned goods, there’s little to discuss here.

Really? Hell, all you really need is ONE gun, along with a little gumption, and you can cause the authorities to lock down an entire city, and perhaps even bring an entire state to its knees — as one person. (See: Chris Dorner and the Tsarnev brothers.) Imagine…well, Kurt Hofmann said it better:

If one or two men can so thoroughly shake the security apparatus of the United States, the idea that the Second Amendment’s protection against tyranny is outdated, because the U.S. is now a modern superpower, and therefore “resistance is futile,” is simply not going to hold up. Imagine, after all, what even a small militia group of perhaps a dozen members could do, if the battle were not between terrorists and a country whose people can still convince themselves that they’re relatively free; but between a determined and angry citizenry who will no longer submit to enduring a long train of abuses and usurpations, and the government perpetrating those abuses. Now imagine a couple dozen of those militia groups. Now imagine hundreds of them.

Really, nothing more needs to be said.

In memory of George Jones…

…who died this morning at 81, and whose question still has yet to be answered.

Public service announcement…

For those of you who manage your music with iTunes and have AVG antivirus installed:

Back up your iTunes library before AVG eats it. I’m not kidding. Talked to someone last night who had AVG and had a good chunk of their iTunes music was just gone, vanished into thin air. Research indicated it was an AVG issue, and as you see above the issue was acknowledged by the company itself.

Yet another reason I’m glad I don’t have to deal with any kind of antivirus…

Oh, the other side has money too…

…but of course, George Weinberg conveniently forgets to mention it here:

Without the NRA money, there would be no conversation here.

Really? So I guess it’s perfectly okay for the mayor of New York City to pour all that money (some $12 million, if I remember correctly) into advertising in the run up to the vote on that Senate bill? And, again, why can’t the anti-gunners raise that kind of money on their own without a sugar daddy like Michael Bloomberg? Once again, 28,000 members of the Organization Formerly Known as Handgun Control vs. 4.5 million for the NRA. All the NRA money more or less comes from average people just like you and me. I don’t know why they all think they represent the majority of the country on this. Denial, perhaps?

And Gabrielle Giffords and her straw-purchasing husband can go pound sand. I hate that she got shot, but that doesn’t give them license to demand all our rights be restricted for the actions of a few lunatics. We know what works. It’s just a matter of doing it. Hell, even the Newtown, Connecticut Board of Education, right in the belly of the beast here, voted to put armed guards in their schools.

From reports of the school-board meeting, concerned parents cited the Sandy Hook shootings as their reason for backing an armed-guard policy. “The only thing that stopped that guy that day was when the two Newtown police burst in the building,” one parent is quoted as saying…

(What? You didn’t hear about that? Shocking!)

And yes, Giffords will indeed be remembered — as a demagogic control freak who exploited her own tragedy to take away the rights of her countrymen, trampling on the Constitution and making a mockery of the oath she took as a Congresswoman to preserve, protect and defend it.

I bet you will notice the same thing I did here.

So all these people are pissed off that the Express-News allegedly printed instructions on how to build a pressure-cooker bomb…

…yet not a single one of them is calling for common-sense regulation of the media. You know, for teh childrenses. A three-business-day waiting period. Because you know the E-N ran this in a fit of passion. Perhaps even a ban on running inflammatory material like this. After all, no one needs to know these things. They can just throw Molotov cocktails into the stands.

Hey, if that sort of thing is fine for the Second Amendment, surely it’s fine for the First, jawohl?

I have an answer to his question…

…but E.J. isn’t going to like it, not one little bit:

Since when is 90 percent of the nation not “the Real America”?

When “90 percent of the nation” is defined by the media and the victim-disarmament lobby (but I repeat myself), of course. I counted on him to throw a fit over this, and I was not disappointed.

And Mark Begich was right. It is dangerous to make policy in emotionally charged moments. E.J. Dionne can whine about it being a rational response all he wants, and as loud as he wants, but that doesn’t make him any less wrong. And Dionne might think the ball’s in the victim-disarmament lobby’s court, but then he’s thought that all along and he’s already been proven wrong.

Seriously, they ought to just start calling him Baghdad Gene. “Pay no attention to all those gun owners calling their congressmen!”

Sunday music musings.

So, how many of you from San Antonio or South Texas have heard? Heard what? Well…

A. KKYX is now broadcasting on FM as well as AM. They recently put up a signal at 104.9. Not too powerful, it mainly covers the north side of town, but hey, classic country on FM! Not only there, but also…

B. …on 92.5 and 93.3, as Clear Channel brought back the legendary K-BUC. I wasn’t here when that station was on the air, so I don’t know if it’s as good as it once was. I’m going to guess the answer is no, as they’re playing music from the ’90s and early 2000s as well. But that’s okay, because I really like what I’ve heard on there so far, which includes a good amount of stuff from the ’70s and ’80s.

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I’ve often said that people who listen to bad music seem to like to inflict it on the rest of us. We got another example of it today, on the IH-10 frontage road at DeZavala, as some dude in a Toyota Tundra with his windows rolled down subjected us to Luke Bryan. Seriously. It’s not that I think pop-country is bad by default; it’s just that it used to be a whole lot better.