Free Republic

Joe Cocker, "With a Little Help From My Friends." Woodstock, 1969. Closed captioned for the clear-headed.

I posted a squib on the National Review Web site about a robo call I received from John McCain. (Virginia's primary is Tuesday.) The call stressed that he would, if elected, be a down-the-line limited government conservative who would never raise taxes, would defend life, would enforce immigration laws and would win the war on terror. The candidate is trying, I said, to meet conservatives "more than halfway." The response of readers was, shall we say, emphatic. One lady wrote that she would never vote for him as "He is the most disloyal, ill-tempered man and he brings out the...

Funding for a controversial “Hippie museum,” co-sponsored by presidential front-runner Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), may still find a lifeline even though its earmark was stricken from a Senate appropriations bill earlier this year. A conference report of two combined appropriations bills — Labor, Health and Human Services and Education (Labor-HHS) and the military construction-veterans’ affairs measure — removed a provision that would have explicitly cut funds for the museum, located in Bethel, N.Y. That clause was authored by earmark foe Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.). The conference agreement states there is no “general provision proposed by the Senate that prohibits...

Republican presidential hopeful John McCain criticized Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton's proposal for a Woodstock museum as wasteful spending in a new television ad that started on Friday. In the ad — McCain's second new one in a week — the Arizona senator touts his record fighting such spending and repeats his mocking of the Clinton's failed effort to spend $1 million for a museum in Bethel, N.Y., site of the August 1969 rock festival. "John McCain says if you want to relive Woodstock, buy the record," an announcer says in the 30-second spot. The ad also hits Clinton, a...

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) - Republican John McCain contrasts images of Woodstock and his years as a Vietnam prisoner of war in a new television ad that pokes fun at Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton. The commercial, set to air on New Hampshire television Thursday, decries a proposal, since scrapped, to spend $1 million for a museum in Bethel, N.Y., site of the August 1969 rock festival. Clinton and her fellow New York senator, Chuck Schumer, had backed the plan. The ad highlights McCain's criticism of excessive Washington spending, reminds voters of the Arizona senator's decorated war record and also shows...

$1 Million Earmark Removed From Health Bill Plans for $1 million in federal funding for a museum to honor the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival struck a sour note with critics Thursday. It ended badly, with critics successfully striking down the plan for federal tax money to be spent on the museum. The plan began as an earmark in the federal health and education spending bill. Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Chuck Schumer, both of New York, supported the earmark. Critics, though, targeted the plan after it gained some national exposure. “The Woodstock museum is a shining example of what’s wrong...

<p>Abbie Hoffman interrupted The Who's performance during Woodstock 1969 to attempt a protest speech against the jailing of John Sinclair of the White Panther Party. He grabbed a microphone and yelled, "I think this is a pile of shit! While John Sinclair rots in prison..." The Who's guitarist, Pete Townshend, cut Hoffman off in mid-sentence, saying, "Back off! Back off my f-ing stage!" He then struck Hoffman with his guitar, sending the interloper tumbling offstage, to the roaring approval of the crowd. Townshend later said he actually agreed with Hoffman on Sinclair's imprisonment, though he made the point that he would have knocked him offstage regardless of his message.</p>

RUSH: Mrs. Clinton had a conference call with reporters, and we had the story yesterday, she's actually going to try to send a note out with the money going back saying, (paraphrasing) "Feel free to send it back in." Turns out, this is illegal. Federal Election Commission rules make it illegal. I got a note from a guy who worked on John Anderson's campaign in 1980, who ran that third-party independent candidacy when Reagan and Carter were battling it out, and they had a snafu. They had to give back $80,000 in donations, and they asked the FEC, "Can we...

The Wall Street Journal has tracked down the source of Norman Hsu's cash, and the good news is that the People's Republic of China didn't provide the funds -- at least, not some of them. However, the bad news is that Hsu apparently moved from Ponzi schemes to outright embezzlement as a former Woodstock backer proved as inept at background checks as the Democratic Party: New documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal may help point to an answer: A company controlled by Mr. Hsu recently received $40 million from a Madison Avenue investment fund run by Joel Rosenman, who...

Woodstock Creator Tells DA That Funds Have Gone Missing A $40 Million Shortfall Where did Norman Hsu get his money? That has been one of the big questions hanging over the prominent Democratic fund-raiser, as reports have surfaced about hundreds of thousands of dollars he made in political donations, plus lavish parties, fancy apartments and a $2 million bond he posted to get out of jail earlier this month. New documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal may help point to an answer: A company controlled by Mr. Hsu recently received $40 million from a Madison Avenue investment fund run...

The infallible Washington Times reports that up for sale is one of the most famous scenes of infantilism in the 20th century, "Woodstock." Actually, what is on the block is the late Max Yasgur's New York farm, 38 acres of which were used for the 1969 Woodstock music festival that hagiographers for the "1960s Generation" have ever since boomed as a pivotal event in American history. Such rock singers as Jimi Hendrix and Richie Havens got together before a stupefied crowd of some 500,000 eternal children to sing of peace, and freedom, and mind-numbing substances, even the most feeble of...

The famous farm near the alfalfa field that drew 400,000 people to Woodstock for three days of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll is up for sale. The asking price: $8 million. Roy Howard, the current owner, is packing it in after years of tangling with local officials over permits for reunion gatherings to mark the 1969, three-day Woodstock music festival that helped ignite a generation. Up for sale is the 2,000-square-foot house that belonged to dairy farmer Max Yasgur, along with a larger farmhouse, a barn and 103 bucolic acres about 80 miles north of New York City. Included...

Bethel, N.Y. (AP) -- The famous farm near the alfalfa field that drew 400,000 people to Woodstock for three days of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll is up for sale. The asking price: $8 million. Roy Howard, the current owner, is packing it in after years of tangling with local officials over permits for reunion gatherings to mark the 1969, three-day Woodstock music festival that helped ignite a generation. Up for sale is the 2,000-square-foot house that belonged to dairy farmer Max Yasgur, along with a larger farmhouse, a barn and 103 bucolic acres about 80 miles north of...

The grassroots free-market group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) today released a list of Senate earmarks slated to be included in the Fiscal Year 2008 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriations bill. The 1,016 earmarks total nearly $392 million, and include millions for questionable projects such as $1 million in tax dollars for a museum dedicated to recreating the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival experience and $250,000 to help fund the Polynesian Voyaging Society, which makes and sails ancient canoes from Hawaii to Japan. AFP compiled the earmarks scattered throughout the Senate Appropriations Committee Report 110-107 into a convenient, searchable...

Summer of love: 40 years later Hippie Hippie Shakedown: But where was love? BY DAWN EDEN, Guest Columnist LA Daily News WHEN it comes to inappropriate names, "Summer of Love" has to be right up there with "Joy Division," the name the Nazis reportedly gave to the sections of concentration camps that housed the guards' sex slaves. For one thing, it was not just a summer event. The countercultural happening that swept through San Francisco and beyond began with an April1967 planning announcement by concert promoter Chet Helms, aka Family Dog, creating the "Council for the Summer of Love." It...

Hippies still trying to ruin the country By Jenean Mcbrearty CONTRIBUTING COLUMNIST America won't win another war until the 1960s flower children are pushing up petunias. Radicalized, the flower children morphed into lefty loonies who now masquerade as social progressives. No matter what they rename themselves, however, their agenda hasn't changed. They still want utopia, and it wouldn't be worth mentioning except that their naivetŽ has aged into a persistent denial of reality that may have devastating consequences. For example, consider their continued belief that America's armed forces are neo-Nazi stormtroopers who delight in burning babies to further the aims...

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. - As he walks to the stage of a Hofstra University lecture hall, Robert Leonard's attire is every bit the college professor: blue blazer and shirt, charcoal slacks, yellow tie, glasses. He's a long, long way from the summer of 1969 when the uniform of the day was a gold lame jumpsuit. Leonard was a founding member and bassist for Sha Na Na, a zany doo-wop group that played one of its first gigs at Woodstock. Leonard's specialty today is forensic linguistics — employing the science of language to help identify the writers of ransom notes, threatening letters...

CNSNews has broken the story on anti-war protesters outside Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C. This is the facility where those with significant injuries are sent to from the battlefield. They are there holding up signs such as "Maimed for Lies" and "Enlist here and die for Halliburton". The organization organizing this is Code Pink, the same organization that has funded terrorists with the apparent knowledge of Rep. Waxman. For the most part the anti-war crowd doesn't see a problem with this, mostly because it garners attention which is what they are seeking. They think by kicking around...

Thunderstorms and torrential rain were today threatening to turn this year’s Glastonbury Festival into a wash-out. Thousands of music fans arriving at the Worthy Farm site in Somerset last night were greeted with heavy downpours and even lightning as the glorious sunshine came to an abrupt end. Weather forecasters have warned an expected crowd of around 150,000 to prepare for a mud bath – as rain threatens to waterlog the site and turn camp sites into bogs. Festival organiser Michael Eavis said he was keeping his fingers crossed that there would be no repeat of the infamous mudfest of 1997....

The rapidly disappearing cohort of Americans that endured the Great Depression and then fought World War II is receiving quite a send-off from the leading lights of the so-called 60s generation. Tom Brokaw has published two oral histories of “The Greatest Generation” that feature ordinary people doing their duty and suggest that such conduct was historically unique. Chris Matthews of “Hardball” is fond of writing columns praising the Navy service of his father while castigating his own baby boomer generation for its alleged softness and lack of struggle. William Bennett gave a startling condescending speech at the Naval Academy a...

Up to six days ago my post automatically carried my tagline. Abruptly that stopped. If I do not enter it manually, it does not post. Clues as to why? And I can't seem to figure out to fix it. This is apparently one of my duh days.

just read a fascinating book – "Chronicles, Volume 1" by Bob Dylan. There are some real surprises in this book. Most of us baby boomers thought of Dylan as a man with a political agenda. It turns out Dylan wasn't trying to lead anyone anywhere. He just wanted to be a singer-songwriter. It's quite a revelation, and Dylan has an interesting way of telling the story. Dylan was a private man who tried to put his family first. He didn't want to get caught up in the '60s activism. He was conspicuously absent from Woodstock, Altamont and all the other...

Woodstock performer Joe McDonald (Country Joe and The Fish) leads crowd in singing 1960s antiwar songs Thin, clean-shaven, balding and slightly stooped, the 62-year-old McDonald says he's still a socialist but confesses he's now part of the middle class. Organizers had tried to get people out. Groups involved in the protest included the Edmonton Coalition Against War and Racism, Marxist organizations, non-Muslim supporters of the Palestinian cause, members of the Unitarian Church and the occasional Vietnam war draft evader and army deserter. McDonald's sound system was handled by Mike Tulley, an American army draftee who arrived in Canada in April...

Whoa! What's happening? Why are people turning on us? We're the Baby Boomers, you know. The Mighty Boomers. We invented everything from money to music to sex, did we not? Nothing good ever happened until we came along. Now people are turning on us. We Baby Boomers are being made to feel . . . guilty. Ridiculous, isn't it? People have tried to make us feel guilty before. They said we consumed too much. Or we were too shallow. Or we only thought about ourselves. Excuuuuse me. Who should we think about? Somebody else? All that was just jealousy. Even...

Woodstock's Symbolic Irony: Peace, Love, and Cash by Michael P. Tremoglie Posted Aug 24, 2004 Who could forget the sitar-like harmonies of Crosby, Stills and Nash, the "better living through chemistry" pulsations of Sly and the Family Stone, the chanting of Country Joe and the Fish, and the wonderfully wacky, Wavy Gravy? Woodstock--a place where half a million people gathered for peace, love, and music. The event represented a generation of youth. Well not quite. The boys (and girls) of Woodstock were not such an inclusive group. One of the myths about Woodstock is that it was some altruistic event....

Who could forget the sitar-like harmonies of Crosby, Stills and Nash, the "better living through chemistry" pulsations of Sly and the Family Stone, the chanting of Country Joe and the Fish, and the wonderfully wacky, Wavy Gravy? Woodstock--a place where half a million people gathered for peace, love, and music. The event represented a generation of youth. Well not quite. The boys (and girls) of Woodstock were not such an inclusive group. One of the myths about Woodstock is that it was some altruistic event. Woodstock was all about money. John Roberts, the Ivy League heir to the Polident fortune,...

 

Who could forget the sitar-like harmonies of Crosby, Stills and Nash? The " better living through chemistry " pulsations of Sly and the Family Stone, the chanting of Country Joe and the Fish, and the wonderfully wacky Wavy Gravy? Woodstock - a place where people ("half a million people strong") gathered for peace, love, and music. An event that represented a generation of youth. Well, not quite. Contrary to the prevailing myths about Woodstock, it was not an altruistic event. Woodstock was all about money. John Roberts, the Ivy League heir to the Polident fortune, financed it. He and his...

<p>When it was hyped in the spring, the summer concert season sure looked rosy.</p> <p>The live music industry was coming off a record year for revenue in 2003 and a strong first quarter in 2004, and there was no reason to think that wouldn't continue through the summer.</p>

NEW YORK - The Lollapalooza music festival tour has been canceled because of poor ticket sales, according to its Web site. The tour, featuring Morrissey, Sonic Youth and The Flaming Lips, had been set to begin July 14 in Auburn, Wash., and continue through August, including stops in Toronto, New York, Atlanta and Dallas. Tour organizers and concert promoters "faced with several million dollars of losses, made the very tough decision to pull the tour," the Web site said Tuesday. The Web site said there had been "poor ticket sales across the board." "My heart aches along with the bands,...

THE WAY THE MUSIC DIED PBS Airdate: Thursday, May 27, at 9 P.M., 60 minutes In the recording studios of Los Angeles and the boardrooms of New York, they say the record business has been hit by a perfect storm: a convergence of industry-wide consolidation, Internet theft, and artistic drought. The effect has been the loss of billions of dollars, thousands of jobs, and that indefinable quality that once characterized American pop music. “It’s a classic example of art and commerce colliding and nobody wins,” says Nic Harcourt, music director at Los Angeles’s KCRW-FM. “It’s just a train wreck.” In...

Is the War in Iraq becoming like the War in Vietnam once was? No, if you look at the facts on the blood cost of the war. Yes, if you’re still stuck in the tie-died mind set of Woodstock. To explain: A number of apparently reputable media outlets in the United States have fostered the equation of Iraq equals Vietnam by breathlessly reporting of late that “US casualties in Iraq have reached levels not seen since Vietnam.” This demonstrates both historical ignorance and political bias. The bias is intended to promote the “quagmire” merchants. But the facts are far easier...

<p>When Ben & Jerry's ice cream announced that it was moving its annual "One World One Heart Festival" from Vermont to the original site of the 1969 Woodstock concert, progressives cheered. As one told the Poughkeepsie Journal, "When you combine music and social responsibility, it doesn't get any better." But fans balked at paying $32 for an event that had previously been free, and Ben & Jerry's succumbed to a mandate familiar to the rest of corporate America: the bottom line. Its Web site attributes the cancellation of this weekend's festivities to "[a]n economic downturn coupled with an unexpected slump in the music industry."</p>

Ben & Jerry's "One World One Heart Festival" scheduled this weekend at the original 1969 Woodstock concert site has been canceled.Tracy Chapman and LeAnn Rimes had been scheduled to headline the festival, slated for Saturday and Sunday at the former farm, now the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, 80 miles northwest of New York City. "An economic downturn coupled with an unexpected slump in the music industry" forced cancellation of this year's event, the company's Web site said. Only 1,000 of the 30,000 tickets had been sold, USA Today reported Wednesday.Ben & Jerry's said automatic refunds would be provided.

Woodstock still sets his soul free By Michael Hill ASSOCIATED PRESSAugust 15, 2003 BETHEL, N.Y. Duke Devlin was among the 400,000 people who converged on Max Yasgur's farm for three days of Woodstock in 1969. Unlike roughly 399,999 others, though, he never left. Visitors to the now-preserved hillside stand a fair chance of meeting Devlin, who resembles Santa Claus crossed with a Harley rider. Woodstock left a deep impression on Devlin, and he's taken it upon himself to tell tourists what it was like at the legendary festival, which went down 34 years ago today. "It's like hearing it from...

<p>Here's a two-word phrase you don't see or hear much anymore: young adults. It sank beneath the waves of a more recent, more powerful force: the "youth culture."</p> <p>The youth culture in America is a lifestyle, emphasizing the one thing that youth tend to be very good at: thinking about themselves. Pridefully inner-directed, it opens itself to the outer world primarily in two ways: style and "attitude." Membership in the youth culture is defined by mass marketers as a "demographic," which begins about the age of 12 and runs without interruption to the age of 35. A "young adult" is an anachronism.</p>

By the Time We Got to Woodstock: Vatican II and “The Spirit of Woodstock” Christopher Ferrara COLUMNIST, New Jersey Introduction—National Review Meets Woodstock Thirty years ago today, August 15, 1969, the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, some 500,000 young people made their way to Yasgur’s Farm in upstate New York to participate in “three days of peace, love and music.” The gathering was advertised as the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, although Yasgur’s Farm was actually located in the nearby hamlet of Bethel. Bethel means “house of God” in Hebrew, but those half-million souls were not seeking God’s...

WOODSTOCK IS FINALLY OVERTHE TIMES, THEY ARE A-CHANGIN' By: John GuthmillerPundits are wallowing in the unexpected largesse of last Tuesday's history-making midterm election. Seldom do the chattering classes get so much meat to chew on. Conservatives - the handful who get air time - are reveling like the Osbournes at a wrap party, while Democrats are alternately wailing like they should have at Paul Wellstone's funeral or putting on a game face and pretending their unprecedented losses don't matter. In the end, Republicans made political gains in the House of Representatives, and retook the Senate. These are stories to...

Police have condemned "sustained, determined and mindless" violence which marred the end of the Leeds music festival early on Monday morning. Several hundred festival-goers went on the rampage after the event at Temple Newsam finished, burning two toilet blocks to the ground and attacking police with missiles. Skips were set alight and electric cables were pulled down, and 200 officers - many in riot gear - were deployed to stop the trouble. Over 50,000 people attended the three-day event, which otherwise passed off peacefully. Inspector Nick Dyson of West Yorkshire Police said one male officer suffered a broken nose, while...

Thirty years ago today, August 15, 1969, the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, some 500,000 young people made their way to Yasgur’s Farm in upstate New York to participate in “three days of peace, love and music.” The gathering was advertised as the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, although Yasgur’s Farm was actually located in the nearby hamlet of Bethel. Bethel means “house of God” in Hebrew, but those half-million souls were not seeking God’s house that late-summer weekend. This I know, for I was one of them. Yes, I confess it here and now: I went to...