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Legendary musician Jimi Hendrix was named the greatest guitar player in history Wednesday by Rolling Stone magazine in a list compiled by a panel of music experts and top guitar players. “Jimi Hendrix exploded our idea of what rock music could be: He manipulated the guitar, the whammy bar, the studio and the stage,” said Grammy-winning guitarist Tom Morello in the magazine, citing Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” as key tracks.

Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. "Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver," he demands, "or less?" The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: "MORE!" The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan. Today's Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan--which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits--is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around...

Here’s the thing about academic research: At its best, it reaffirms the obvious but at a much greater cost than casual observation entails. “A number of studies have found style of clothing and extent of nudity to be important markers of sexualization,” Erin Hatton and Mary Nell Trautner of the University of Buffalo wrote in a paper which appeared in Sexuality & Culture. A number of people outside the academy have noticed the same trend, merely by walking down the street. Nevertheless, the sociologists from Buffalo sought to break new ground. “A number of journalists and scholars have pointed to...

Last week, we asked our readers to vote for their favorite progressive rock bands. Looking over the results, it's a real pity that only two of the bands are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Here's hoping that the class of 2012 is entirely prog. (Just imagine the epic jam between Yes, King Crimson and Rush – the stage would buckle under the weight of the countless people that have played in the first two bands.) Anyway, until that magical day happens, click though to see the results of the poll.

Judging from his latest 7,000-word rant in Rolling Stone titled, "Climate of Denial: Can science and the truth withstand the merchants of poison?" Al Gore lives on another planet. One where, he complains, the media, especially television, are in cahoots with the "merchants of poison" (Big Coal, Big Oil) to deny the truth about global warming. This would be the same media that uncritically fawned over his 2006 film, An Inconvenient Truth -- which was over-hyped climate porn -- turning it into one of the most successful "documentaries" of all time and winning Gore the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize and...

The onetime Nixon operative has created the most profitable propaganda machine in history. Inside America's Unfair and Imbalanced Network.... (HIT PIECE) Chairman: Roger Ailes at Fox News. The network says his "dear friend" Rush Limbaugh, "is a reflection of him." At the Fox News holiday party the year the network overtook archrival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a Midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in the darkened tavern: the MSNBC logo. A chorus of...

There is no way to quantify if a band or artist is overrated. ItÂ’s more of a feeling than anything else. There exists in popular music a hierarchy. ItÂ’s been created, and is constantly altered, by both natural and artificial means. At the top sits The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Elvis, Michael Jackson, U2, and Madonna. At the bottom rests the 8th place American Idol contestant. Everyone else fall somewhere in between. Determining which artists are overrated and which are correctly rated is not a science. ItÂ’s not even an art. ItÂ’s just an exercise to start a conversation. ItÂ’s...

“Rolling Stone magazine is engaging in a psychological operation trying to brainwash the American public,” says an expert in military information operations. The magazine’s Feb. 23 article, “Another runaway general: Army deploys psy-ops on U.S. senators,” by Michael Hastings, is a confused attempt to create an issue where no issue exists, and a potentially libelous smear on the record of a senior military officer. This is what passes for reporting among the anti-war left.... The breathless introduction of the piece is disingenuous, asserting starkly that illegal acts took place when nothing of the kind has been charged, let alone proven....

Rolling Stone Hid More Extensive Justin Bieber Pro-Life View Teen singing sensation Justin Bieber made national waves this week by expressing his pro-life views on abortion, but Rolling Stone magazine has admitted it withheld a portion of the comment that makes Bieber’s pro-life views more firm. http://www.lifenews.com/2011/02/18/rolling-stone-hid-more-extensive-justin-bieber-pro-life-view/

It's taken three trips to Kentucky, but I'm finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you'd expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. The red-hot mama of American exceptionalism has flown in to speak at something called the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners. Palin — who earlier this morning held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate — is railing against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republican hacks in Delaware and...

Or is the irony that he's giving an interview to Rolling Stone, what he considers a "real" news organization, after he himself declared Fox News is "operating basically as a talk-radio format" rather than as a "news outlet."? From Politico via Yahoo!: Obama: Fox has a 'destructive' view “The golden age of an objective press was a pretty narrow span of time in our history. Before that, you had folks like Hearst who used their newspapers very intentionally to promote their viewpoints. I think Fox is part of that tradition. It is part of the tradition that has a very...

WASHINGTON — An Army inquiry into a Rolling Stone magazine article about Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has found that it was not the general or senior officers on his staff who made the most egregious comments that led to his abrupt dismissal as the top Afghan commander in June, according to Army and Pentagon officials. But the review, commissioned after an embarrassing and disruptive episode, does not wholly resolve who was responsible for the inflammatory quotations, most of which were anonymous. The Army review has been turned over to a higher-level inquiry by the Pentagon’s inspector general, because the matter...

With the shock still fresh over the sacking of Gen. Stanley Mc Chrystal, it fell to Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to put the case in perspective: "We are and must remain a neutral instrument of the state, accountable to and respectful of those leaders, no matter which party holds sway or which person holds a given office." Mullen's statement came as a defense of President's Obama decision to replace McChrystal, but it also served as a clear expression of the military's submission to civilian leaders. Sadly, the admiral's comment was necessary because of the dangerous...

It was 2:30 Tuesday morning in Kabul, after a busy day of travel to Kandahar and meetings with top Afghan officials, when Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal was awakened by an aide with grim news. "There's a Rolling Stone article out," the aide told McChrystal. "It's very, very bad." Forty hours later, McChrystal had been relieved of his command, his 34-year military career in tatters. Apart from a terse apology, McChrystal has not discussed publicly the disparaging remarks that he and his aides made about administration officials and that appeared in the article. On Friday, however, officials close to McChrystal began...

This week the entire journalistic pundit pack embraced the control-the-message dictates of political spin and corporate public relations as they excoriated Gen. Stanley McChrystal for allowing a Rolling Stone reporter to spend a month with him and his entourage. The derogatory towel-snapping mockery that cost McChrystal his Afghan command was often depicted as less of a mistake than his naiveté in cooperating with a magazine profile-writer.

Of all the names associated with the now-celebrated Rolling Stone article on Gen. Stanley McChrystal -- Obama, Biden, Jones, Eikenberry, Holbrooke -- the one that matters most is Hicks. He is Staff Sgt. Kennith Hicks, who, among other NCOs, confronted McChrystal over his policy to avoid, almost at all costs, inflicting causalities on the Afghan civilian population. The result was that more Americans were being killed and the war, in the view of the men fighting it, was being lost. “Sir,” Hicks said to McChrystal at a combat outpost in Afghanistan, “some of the guys here, sir, think were losing,...

Here is video of Geraldo Rivera calling the Rolling Stone reporter who wrote the article on Gen. Stanley McChrystal – Michael Hastings – a “rat in an Eagle’s Nest.” Geraldo said the reporter should not have printed some of the things he did, that he took advantage of his access over a long period of time to print statements out of context. “This is a terrible thing that this reporter has done,” Geraldo said.

If General McChrystal is guilty of anything it is being gullible enough to believe that allowing a journalist from a left leaning publication was a good idea. One of the things I learned during Desert Storm was that journalists do a good job cozying up to GI’s and making them feel important. After all, everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame. None of the quotes that everyone is up-in-arms about is directly attributable to General McChrystal but his error was thinking that this journalist was going to paint his team and the military in a positive light.

While the media are attempting to grapple with the change in leadership of the Afghanistan war and what that all means, one thing that could be learned from this, which has been ignored, are valid criticisms of President Barack Obama and his ability to command the U.S. military. Michael Hastings, author of the now-famous Rolling Stone magazine article "Runaway General" that captured several gotcha moments resulting in Obama relieving General Stanley McChrystal of his command, appeared on Al Jazeera English on June 23. He offered some startling insight into Obama's failure to grasp what he was actually getting into with...

Newsweek Baghdad correspondent Michael Hastings' book proposal sold last Tuesday for $500,000 to Scribner, a publishing source told FishbowlNY Thursday. The book, about Hastings' experiences working as a young journalist in Iraq, focuses on the author's relationship with 28-year-old Andrea "Andi" Parhamovich, a civilian consulting with NGO National Democratic Institute in Baghdad who was killed January 17, 2007 in an ambush there. In his January 29, 2007, editor's letter, Newsweek Jon Meacham billed it as a "death in the family," describing how at the time of Parhamovich's death, Hastings had plans to take her to Paris the following month to...

Well, forget today’s sound bytes. Forget the hanging apologies. Look at the medium: Rolling Stone magazine. The general chose to vent (over the course of several weeks, by the way) not to the NYT, not to the Washington Post, not to The Christian Science Monitor, etc. No. He choose Rolling Stone, for God’s sake!

Will Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan, still have his job this afternoon, after today's all-but-certain dressing-down from President Obama? "All options are on the table," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said yesterday. There's no denying that Obama would be justified in relieving McChrystal of command as a result of intemperate remarks he and his top aides made to a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine. But that would be a huge mistake. McChrystal, to put it bluntly, is a great general who is uniquely suited to the demands of an unconventional war that -- sadly but obviously...

WASHINGTON -- Gen. Stanley McChrystal's comments about President Obama and other administration officials went off like a roadside bomb at the highest levels of Washington yesterday. Defense Secretary Robert Gates blasted the general for "poor judgment" and ordered him to return immediately to Washington to discuss the matter face-to-face today. Gates said McChrystal had apologized to him and others named in the Rolling Stone article -- but Gates declined to let him off the hook. "I believe that General McChrystal made a significant mistake and exercised poor judgment in this case," he said in a statement. Wisconsin Democrat Rep. David...

After President Barack Hussein Obama meets with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the Commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama will be painted into a political corner from which he cannot escape. In an upcoming article in Rolling Stone magazine, soon to be on the newsstands, McChrystal and his aides were critical of Obama's handling of the war in Afghanistan. McChrystal was hand-picked by the Obama administration to fight the battle against the Taliban. However, I am pleased to see that a high-ranking member of the U.S. military has decided to put the defense of his nation before politics....

General McChrystal voted for Obama? Holy crap! WASHINGTON – The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan has been summoned to Washington to explain derogatory comments about President Barack Obama and his colleagues, administration officials said Tuesday. (Yahoo)Obama gets his Truman-MacArthur moment* I know his advisors think he needs it to increase his stature, but to those who know history, it diminishes him further. Harry Truman was no effete metrosexual unfamiliar with basic military terms.  He was a combat veteran of WW I, serving as an artillary Captain in France. But Obama is the president, as he so often reminds us. McChrystal Earned It He...

There isn’t very much in the Rolling Stone article requiring an apology from General McChrystal, the man in charge in Afghanistan who has been summoned to the White House. If he does resign, it should not be because of perceived slurs against the White House. They’re not there

General McChrystal gave a Rolling Stone Magazine freelancer unprecedented access to the every day life of fighting the war in Afghanistan. Apparently, the writer 'came, saw, listened and wrote' ... The writer of the Rolling Stone piece, Michael Hastings, accompanied McChrystal to an out-post in the Kandahar area of Afghanistan. A 23-year-old soldier had just died as he entered a booby-trapped home. Unit Commanders sought permission to blow-up the property, and that permission was denied...

As if the White House behavior on the war in Afghanistan wasn’t erratic enough – General McCrystal jumped into the mess with a dopey interview for the culture icon Rolling Stone. It was clear even in 2009 that the US Commander on the ground in Afghanistan is not on the same page with our ambassador in the country. Remember how Karl Eikenberry, decided to weigh into the madness opposing sending more troops to Afghanistan when President Obama was dithering on the new strategy?. Second comes the question: which one of the two generals in Afghanistan is in charge –...

Aides to the top U.S. general in Afghanistan insulted some of President Barack Obama's closest advisers, calling one a "clown" and another a "wounded animal," in an article to be published Friday in Rolling Stone magazine. The article also quotes an aide describing the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal's "disappointment" with his initial one-on-one meeting with Obama last year. Quoting all the McChrystal aides anonymously, the article portrays a split between the U.S. military and Obama's advisers at an extremely sensitive moment for the Pentagon, which is fending off criticism of its strategy to...

Tensions between the White House and the US military have been brought into the open in a blistering attack on the U.S administration by the commander of U.S and Nato forces in Afghanistan. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, General Stanley McChrystal, who clashed with the US administration over his demands for more troops to Afghanistan, mocked the vice president and denounced the US ambassador to Kabul. His aides were also less than flattering about President Barack Obama and frequently derided top civilian leaders including special envoy Richard Holbrooke. One anonymous aide calls White House national security adviser James...

There comes a moment in politics when the blinders fall off the supporters of the other guy and they discover what you have known all along: He’s a fraud. The blinders just fell off Matt Taibbi, a writer for Rolling Stone magazine. He just now noticed that while 26% of the money Barack Obama raised came from “small” donors, nearly 3 times as much came from big donors, who ponied up a half billion bucks. Where the 26% saw Hope and Change, the 74% saw Invest and Collect. Wrote Taibbi: “What’s taken place in the year since Obama won the...

Matt Taibbi gave a very good interview on CNN this afternoon, discussing his recent Rolling Stone piece on Obama's sellout. One of the more interesting points came when Taibbi was asked about some criticism from Andrew Ross Sorkin. Taibbi's response, basically: sorry maisntream jouranlists, I don't have to be evenhanded. Good answer. Video at site

Tiger Woods's Mistress Jamie Jungers Denies He Paid Her For Sex [Pic of Jamie Jungers in URL] Tiger Woods's mistress Jamie Jungers has denied being a prostitute and said: "I got nothing out of this relationship but a broken heart - not even a birthday card." By Anita Singh 11 Dec 2009 The 26-year-old Las Vegas cocktail waitress appeared on the Today show to scotch rumours that Woods paid her for sex. She claimed that they had a "boyfriend-girlfriend relationship" which lasted 18 months. Woods publicly flaunted their affair and did not appear worried about getting caught, she claimed. She...

Adam Lambert aimed for the kind of controversy Britney Spears and Madonna are known for generating, completely stunning the audience at Los Angeles’ Nokia Theatre and the millions watching the American Music Awards live on ABC. Glambert definitely delivered on his promise of a “sexy” performance as he closed the live show with simulated oral sex from a male backup dancer, a brief make-out session with his male keyboardist and a giant mirrored prop so the audience could see the looks on their own shocked faces. Rolling Stone has learned that producers weren’t informed about the guy-on-guy kiss in advance,...

Just so we’re clear about the caliber of thinking Glenn Beck brings to the table, here’s a choice passage from the book Common Sense, you know, the one Chuck Grassley was passing around to the town brawlers: Our collective experience since the Founding has taught us that all governments of every stripe are fascist in nature. They will gobble up as much money, resources, and people as possible unless adequately checked. Governments are never static; they always grow. Communism, fascism, socialism, imperialism, and statism are all different ends accomplished through the same means: totalitarian, absolute government control over the individual....

Artist Shepard Fairey, whose iconic HOPE campaign poster of Barack Obama was a global sensation, is back with a new image that both questions and deifies the President. Appearing on the cover of the Aug. 20 Rolling Stone, the portrait depicts Obama with a brow knit in determination, surrounded by a halo of stars. "Will he take bold action or compromise too easily?" asks a headline enshrining the President's head. Fairey said it wasn't meant to be a halo. Rather, the picture he worked from showed Obama standing in front of the presidential seal, he said. "It's one thing to...

Artist Shepard Fairey, whose iconic HOPE campaign poster of Barack Obama was a global sensation, is back with a new image that both questions and deifies the President. Appearing on the cover of the Aug. 20 Rolling Stone, the portrait depicts Obama with a brow knit in determination, surrounded by a halo of stars. "Will he take bold action or compromise too easily?" asks a headline enshrining the President's head. Fairey said it wasn't meant to be a halo. Rather, the picture he worked from showed Obama standing in front of the presidential seal, he said. "It's one thing to...

During a raid in mid-January on a massage parlor in Midvale, Utah, the father of last year’s American Idol runner-up, squeaky-clean Mormon David Archuleta, was arrested by police and charged with prostitute solicitation, a Class B misdemeanor. According to Us Weekly, Jeff Archuleta, 41, who was the consummate stage dad during his son’s Idol run, has pleaded no contest to the charge, paying a $582 fine following his arrest at an establishment called the Queens of Reiki on January 14th.

You might have guessed that Eddie Vedder had a Jeff Spicoli phase in high school, but now there’s solid proof: the Pearl Jam frontman’s junior year photo. As the class of 2009 graduates, check out what your favorite rockers looked like in high school in a gallery of mind-blowing yearbook photos including Madonna, Prince and James Hetfield. We’ve got Scott Wieland with a ‘do worthy of a John Hughes film, Tommy Lee rocking a teeny-bopper ’stache, an angelic Gwen Stefani, Travis Barker with hippie hair, Anthony Kiedis looking surprisingly like a young Mick Jagger, a pre-beard Jerry Garcia, a crazy-maned...

How the mighty have fallen. John Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, are back in the news because of a book written by the latter about her philandering husband. Even the New York Times which less than a year ago shunned any mention of the John Edwards scandal which was all over the Blogosphere has weighed in on his fate in the form of a Maureen Dowd column: Elizabeth Edwards would have made a wonderful candidate herself. But she poured everything into John. And then John betrayed her. And then John betrayed his staffers, going ahead with the 2008 campaign, letting...

Rolling Stone closes last S.F. office James Temple, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, April 17, 2009 SAN FRANCISCO -- Rolling Stone Magazine has severed its last tenuous link to San Francisco, the city where Jan Wenner co-founded the irreverent biweekly 42 years ago to cover the psychedelic rock scene and counterculture movement flourishing in the region. New York publisher Wenner Media will shutter its three-person office at 1700 Montgomery St., spokesman Mark Neschis said. It housed one Rolling Stone sales representative, who will relocate to Los Angeles. The other two employees, a Men's Journal representative and an assistant, are being laid...

Atlantic, Rolling Stone give their takes on the government's roleNEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Out of the mouths of ...? Two very fashionable non-financial magazines have just published powerful analyses of the current financial crisis. The implications are grim.Although radically different in tone, both articles ( "The Big Takeover," by Matt Taibbi in the April 2 Rolling Stone, and "The Quiet Coup" by Simon Johnson in the May issue of Atlantic) reach remarkably similar conclusions. As Taibbi puts it in his brilliant but unquotable-in-MarketWatch Gen X style: "People are [expletive deleted] about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're...

The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

There seems to be a new "derangement syndrome" that has infected the crew at MSNBC - Michele Bachmann Derangement Syndrome. On the MSNBC March 27 "Hardball with Chris Matthews," host Chris Matthews questioned Rep. Michele Bachman's effort to protect the United States dollar. "It's not clear why she did it since nobody on the planet, least of here in America is talking about switching to some new multinational currency here," Matthews said. ..more (w/video)..

New York, NY -- Rolling Stone magazine is coming under fire for featuring a mock interview with former President George W. Bush in its latest issue. During the interview, Rolling Stone satirizes the death of Terri Schiavo by having the former president supposedly mocking her death, even though he tried to save her life.

Wenner Media, which publishes Rolling Stone and Us Weekly, saw another round of cuts this week, just two weeks after an earlier bout of layoffs. The company laid off three employees of Rolling Stone's editorial department, following four positions cut earlier this month. Out of an original 47, that's about 15% of the editorial staff. Wenner also revealed this week that it is delaying a planned spinoff of Us Weekly called Us Style, citing adverse economic conditions. According to MIN Online, through Nov. 13, biweekly Rolling Stone's ad pages are down 23% to 986, while Us Weekly is down a...

With ad pages down across the magazine industry, Rolling Stone publisher Wenner Media has become the latest publishing company to swing the ax. Sources said the company let go at least seven employees over the past few days, including a handful of people in the corporate marketing department. The cuts represent a little less than 2 percent of the company’s 400 full-timers. Wenner follows Hearst Magazines, Time Inc.’s Southern Progress Corp. unit and Mansueto Ventures, which also have cut staff in recent weeks. The cuts at Wenner come as Rolling Stone faces a 18.3 percent decline in ad pages to...

I am curious if anyone else is aghast at the vicious campaign Rolling Stone magizine is running against McCain/Palin. In the latest issue they have yet another horribly mean illustration of McCain and Palin accompanying a hit piece on Palin. McCain appears with his eyes black making him look dead and a huge bump on the side of his neck to indicate his facial deformity resulting from cancer treatment-liberal compassion at work. And Palin is shown as a horribly ugly pit bull-like dog, a despicable reference to her acceptance speech joke-a representation which makes the historical anti-Marie Antoinette propaganda drawings...

http://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20080924/capt.77b900c2f9fa4fa298cfa43d396d4825.obama_2008_flcc110.jpg?x=253&y=345&q=85&sig=TPENIkvdduVdL8XfbRiImQ-- Strange world we live in, cult of personality on full display. On a side note check out this Youtube user's old NBC news videos of Joe Biden, strange they are not getting more play http://www.youtube.com/user/blastforth