Simon & GarfunkelA Reason To Smile
Fifty years ago this week, “Saturday Night Live” debuted. It was quite an experiment: a live, 90-minute sketch comedy show featuring musical guests and starting at 11:30 p.m. The experiment proved a success beyond everyone’s imagination. I don’t think even creator Lorne Michaels believed it would last five decades while maintaining its place in the cultural zeitgeist. To celebrate SNL’s unprecedented achievement and anniversary, we thought we would highlight their second-ever musical guests, Simon & Garfunkel. Paul Simon was also the host. Simon and Art Garfunkel were already folk-rock royalty when they appeared on SNL in 1975, having been one of the best-selling musical groups of the 1960s. The two met for the first time at their Queens, New York elementary school in 1953. They quickly discovered harmonization and Simon began to write songs for the duo. But it wasn’t until 1965 that they hit it big when a remix of “The Sound of Silence” reached No. 1 on the pop charts. In spite of their spectacular success, the two had a notoriously stormy relationship and broke up in 1970, only to stage several reunions over the years. Their SNL appearance was one of them. The only video we could find of their 1975 SNL performance lives on Facebook. In order to view it you need to be a member of Facebook. For those of you who are, I encourage you to click on this link to see them sing their hit, “The Boxer,” on the show. As you can imagine, there is no shortage of Simon & Garfunkel recordings. Here is an edited version of “The Boxer” from their 1981 Central Park concert, attended by 500,000 people and their 2009 reunion at Madison Square Garden. No membership necessary. If you want to enjoy all the songs chosen for A Reason To Smile, you can listen to this Spotify playlist, which is updated weekly.
No matter how you subscribe, I thank you for reading, watching, and listening. Stay Steady, Dan |
Sunday, October 12, 2025
Simon & Garfunkel
Wednesday, December 11, 2024
Nepo Babies and Billionaires
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Good Tuesday evening, folks and welcome back to another edition of Today’s American News. We love bringing you news and analysis on the circus that is American politics and entertainment. Here are today’s big headlines:
Is Trump keeping his son’s ex-fiance silenced with a boutique post??? Greek Islands for the president-elect’s son’s ex-girlfriend at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer… oof. The nepotism of Donald Trump never ends and it’s just gross, but now it takes a new turn. Former Fox News host and and Court TV anchor Kimberly Guilfoyle, better known for her broken-off engagement to Donald Trump Jr. and her shouting during the 2020 virtual Republican National Convention, is on track to be the United States’ ambassador to Greece. Reports suggest the younger Trump has broke things off with Guilfoyle and is now involved with socialite Bettina Anderson. Maybe this is their way of keeping her quiet.
Assad’s torture dungeons speak of unspeakable cruelty… Have a strong stomach if you’re going to find out more about this story. The topping of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad over the weekend was followed by horrific new evidence of what took place under his watch for the purpose of keeping him in power (or, rather, for the purpose of just plain cruelty).
Israel conducts air raid on Syrian military targets amid power vacuum… Count Israel among the top of many around the world celebrating the ouster of Syrian president Assad over the weekend–and weary at the same time of what comes next for the war torn country. Israel took out numerous Syrian military targets. “Israeli officials have reveled in the downfall of Assad, a staunch ally of Iran who allowed his country to be used as a resupply route for Hezbollah in Lebanon. But they also fear what could come from radical Islamists governing Syria, which borders Israel in the occupied Golan Heights,” CNN wrote. Yesterday we brought you news of President Biden’s ordering of air strikes on ISIS-affiliated targets within Syria.
Arctic tundra now contributing to climate change… This news won’t get the coverage it deserves, but it was pretty eye-popping from our perspective. Arctic tundra stores carbon–scientists knew that part–but now that carbon is contributing to the warning of the planet. Yikes. The findings were released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration today based on research by Woodwell Climate Research Center scientists based out of Falmouth, Massachusetts.
Today’s Buzz
SNL did a Gladiator II and Wicked fusion trailer and it’s awesome… Gladiator II actor Paul Pescal was host of “Saturday Night Live” this weekend, and SNL had some creative fun with the popularity of both his latest movie and Wicked. We loved it.
(note: includes some spoof violence and adult topics)
We appreciate you reading! Stay tuned for tomorrow’s Today’s American News.
Monday, November 18, 2024
Trump Makes Second Attempt to Install Wall Street’s Lawyer, Jay Clayton, to Oversee Prosecutions of Wall Street SAY NO TO JAY CLAYTON!
TODD BLANCH = MATT GAETZ DEFENSE COUNSEL
IN THE NY LAWSUITS, FALSIFICATION OF BUSINESS RECORDS, TODD BLANCH
ARGUED IN OPENING ARGUMENTS & CLOSING ARGUEMENTS THAT TRUMP
HAD NEVER MET STORMY DANIELS...WHICH WAS TRUMP'S IRRELEVANT
ARGUMENT....DON'T GET LOST IN TRUMP'S LIES!
SAY NO TO JAY CLAYTON!
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Trump Makes Second Attempt to Install Wall Street’s Lawyer, Jay Clayton, to Oversee Prosecutions of Wall Street
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 18, 2024 ~
Last week President-elect Donald Trump announced the nomination of Jay Clayton to become U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York – the regional office of the U.S. Department of Justice that brings (or passes on bringing) criminal prosecutions against the Wall Street megabanks for their serial looting of the American people.
In Trump’s first term as President, Clayton was tapped by Trump to serve as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission – notwithstanding that Clayton had represented 8 of the 10 largest Wall Street banks in the prior three years as a law partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the oldest Wall Street go-to law firms. Clayton returned to Sullivan & Cromwell after his stint at the SEC and currently serves there as Senior Policy Advisor and Of Counsel.
When Clayton’s name was first announced by Trump to be SEC Chair in early January 2017, Senator Sherrod Brown, then the Democrat’s ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, issued the following statement:
“It’s hard to see how an attorney who’s spent his career helping Wall Street beat the rap will keep President-elect Trump’s promise to stop big banks and hedge funds from ‘getting away with murder.’ I look forward to hearing how Mr. Clayton will protect retirees and savers from being exploited, demand real accountability from the financial institutions the SEC oversees, and work to prevent another financial crisis.”
Our Revolution, the organization created by supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders after his failed bid for the Presidency, ramped up the heat against Clayton serving as SEC Chair with an email blast asking Sanders’ supporters to sign a petition against Clayton. The email message read in part:
“Clayton’s ties to Wall Street are deep. His law firm specializes in protecting Wall Street banks, and during the financial crisis he worked as a bailout attorney for Goldman Sachs, where his wife works today…The SEC chair is supposed to referee Wall Street banks, but Clayton has spent his entire career protecting their interests – and more than half of his family income currently comes from one of them. How can he be trusted to suddenly switch sides and put working Americans first?”
The link to the petition called this a “hostile takeover” of America. That hostile takeover now looks like a warm, cuddly blanket compared to what Trump is unleashing today. Saturday Night Live’s James Austin Johnson, playing Trump, described his cabinet picks as follows: “…I am very fastly picking the most epic cabinet of all time. They’re some of the most dynamic, free-thinking, animal killing, sexually criminal, medically crazy people in the country.” Saturday Night Live forgot to reference Fox News host Pete Hegseth, the man Trump has nominated to be Secretary of Defense and head the U.S. military and Pentagon, despite his tattoos espousing white supremacy rhetoric.
Most notable about the current Trump nomination of Clayton is that this is not the first time that Trump has attempted to put this deeply conflicted man – who has zero experience as a criminal prosecutor – in charge of the federal prosecutor’s office that handles criminal prosecutions of Wall Street. The first time was more of an attempted coup d’état rather than an appointment. Here are the hubristic details of what went down with Clayton in Trump’s last year in office as President – six months before Trump fueled the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
Shortly after 9 p.m. on June 19, 2020, the then U.S. Attorney General, William Barr, blindsided prosecutors in the Southern District of New York with the announcement that their boss, Geoffrey Berman, was stepping down as U.S. Attorney and would be replaced with the sitting SEC Chairman, Jay Clayton.
What Barr had not foreseen was that Berman had no intention of being ousted quietly. In fact, he would later write a tell-all book on the experience. Berman writes the following in Holding the Line: Inside the Nation’s Preeminent US Attorney’s Office and Its Battle with the Trump Justice Department:
“Throughout my tenure as U.S. attorney, Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining — in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired.”
Two hours after Barr’s announcement, Geoffrey Berman released his own statement indicating that the U.S. Attorney General had just told a brazen lie to the American people. Berman’s statement was this: “I learned in a press release from the Attorney General tonight that I was ‘stepping down’ as United States Attorney. I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning my position, to which I was appointed by the Judges of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.”
The next day, Barr issued another statement indicating that President Trump was removing Berman from his post but would leave Berman’s Deputy in charge of the office on an interim basis. Barr had stated the prior Friday evening that he would be putting in Craig Carpenito, the sitting U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, as acting head of the office until Clayton’s confirmation hearing. The acknowledgement by Barr that Berman’s Deputy would fill the post until a confirmation occurred appeased Berman and he agreed to step down.
The same day, then Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, released a statement indicating that he would not move forward on Clayton’s nomination without the standard policy of getting a go-ahead from the two Senators of the state where the new U.S. Attorney will serve, i.e., New York. That meant that Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand would have to give the greenlight to Clayton. Instead, Schumer released the following statement:
“Forty seven years ago, Elliott Richardson had the courage to say no to a gross abuse of presidential power. Jay Clayton has a similar choice today: He can allow himself to be used in the brazen Trump-Barr scheme to interfere in investigations by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, or he can stand up to this corruption, withdraw his name from consideration, and save his own reputation from overnight ruin.”
According to the New York Times, Senator Gillibrand had also stated that Clayton should withdraw his name from consideration.
That was the end of the Trump-Barr-Clayton attempted coup d’état on June 19, 2020. It was followed by the violent and deadly attempted coup d’état on January 6, 2021 at the Capitol building.
Now Trump’s plan to install Clayton in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York is back and, incredibly, Clayton looks like one of the more reasonable Trump cabinet picks – on the mere basis that he hasn’t been accused of sexually assaulting anyone or having his body decorated with white supremacy images.
What Trump is attempting to do for Wall Street’s serial miscreants today is precisely what he is planning to do for himself at Main Justice – the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. Trump has nominated his sycophant, Matt Gaetz, to be U.S. Attorney General and his defense counsel, Todd Blanche, to be Deputy Attorney General, a position that oversees the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Blanche represented Trump in the federal cases brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith and in the New York case where Trump was accused of attempting to illegally influence the 2016 election by paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels, who testified in court that the two had sex in a hotel room. According to Daniels’ statements to the media, Trump’s wife, Melania, was caring for their four-month old son, Barron, at the time. The hush money trial ended with Trump being convicted on all 34 criminal felony counts – making him the first convicted felon in U.S. history to be elected President of the United States.
In the 2020 effort by Trump to install Clayton, mainstream media focused on the fact that the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District was actively investigating Trump ally, Rudy Giuliani, and Deutsche Bank, a major financial lender to Trump’s companies. That might have been relevant. But also noteworthy was the ongoing criminal investigations of two Wall Street megabanks.
Goldman Sachs was under investigation in one of the biggest financial frauds in history – a case involving a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund known as 1MDB. Goldman raised over $6 billion in bond offerings for 1MDB but, according to the Justice Department, $4.5 billion of that was “misappropriated” and used “to fund the co-conspirators’ lavish lifestyles, including purchases of artwork and jewelry, the acquisition of luxury real estate and luxury yachts, the payment of gambling expenses, and the hiring of musicians and celebrities to attend parties.” Goldman made more than $600 million in fees from the bond offerings, according to the Justice Department.
On June 6, 2020 Reuters reported that Malaysia would not accept $3 billion from Goldman to settle the case. On June 11 – just eight days before Berman was abruptly dismissed from his post — the New York Times reported the following:
“Goldman Sachs is trying to get federal prosecutors to ease up on the bank for its role in a brazen scheme to loot billions of dollars from a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund.
“Lawyers for the bank have asked Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to review demands by some federal prosecutors that Goldman pay more than $2 billion in fines and plead guilty to a felony charge, according to three people briefed on the matter.
“The bank has sought to pay a lower fine and avoid a guilty plea, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are continuing.”
What most Americans have never heard about in this famous case is that Clayton’s law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, was involved in making some of those luxury purchases on behalf of the gang of alleged criminals who looted 1MDB, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Sullivan & Cromwell’s name makes seven appearances in the criminal complaint filed in court by the Justice Department.
While Sullivan & Cromwell is named 7 times in the complaint, the giant law firm Shearman & Sterling is mentioned 94 times. Shearman & Sterling has represented Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks on numerous occasions.
Something else that the public does not know is that a unit of JPMorgan Chase, a bank that has pleaded guilty to five criminal felony counts, is named 61 times in the 1MDB complaint for its role in wiring the looted funds. While the Justice Department did not bring charges against J.P. Morgan in the matter, the Swiss regulator, FINMA, found in 2017 that the bank had committed serious anti-money laundering breaches in its handling of monies belonging to 1MDB.
Just three months after the attempted Clayton coup, the U.S. Department of Justice gave JPMorgan Chase a deferred prosecution agreement for two criminal felony counts involving sprawling crimes in the trading of precious metals and U.S. Treasuries. But instead of the case being brought by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York – where JPMorgan’s trading desks are located – the case was inexplicably handled by the District of Connecticut.
Friday, July 28, 2023
RSN: FOCUS: 'No One Knew What to Do': When Sinéad O'Connor Ripped Up the Pope's Photo on TV - the Inside Story
27 July 23
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Record label executive Daniel Glass remembers the infamous 1992 SNL appearance that resulted in the artist becoming ‘totally cancelled’
Sinéad was terrific, so smart. And you could see at that young age she was very torn about stardom and recognition. The first day she landed, we decided to have dinner. We were going downtown, and I don’t know who made the decision to have a limousine but she wouldn’t get in. She wanted to go in a van. And then we got to Tower Records – the buzz was already out about Sinéad and a DJ was playing the record. She got very upset and said to me, “If there was a hole in the ground, I would crawl into it right now. Please tell him to take it off.” And I said to her very nicely, “It’s a homage. It’s respect.” She said, “Please, I don’t want to hear it. Please, please, please.” And we left. That was the contradiction of fame and recognition.
Live, she would always have hip-hop artists opening for her. That was her thing. No one was doing that. Not the commercial producers, but the really rock, hip-hop, political people in the business that had a voice – she gave them a voice and she had them opening for her. She befriended [Public Enemy’s] Hank Shocklee. She and my wife were also very close. We had babies at the same time: my second child, Maxie. Sinéad had come here and she was so lonely, not having her baby with her. She said to my wife, “Deborah, can Maxie sit on my lap?” She just wanted to hold her. She was so sweet.
I got to work with Sinéad again. In 1992, she’s getting ready to release the album Am I Not Your Girl. She got booked on SNL. Sinéad was not getting a lot of love at the time – she was controversial, she hadn’t had a hit in a while. Anyway, first song, Steve Kingston and Brian Phillips – two of the most influential people in the world of alternative rock radio – look back at me and said, “We’re adding the record Monday.” Thumbs up. Everybody’s great. We’re breathing.
And of course, the next performance was when she did War, and she ripped the picture of the pope. I will never forget it. Everybody froze at SNL. The music producer Liz Welch went from jubilation to tears. No one stopped it, no one knew what to do. We walked back to the artist’s dressing room. I don’t think she knew what she just had just done. The magnitude of it. She was in a room by herself which was kind of sad and lonely, because it was a heavy moment in history.
I remember knocking on the door. I went in and she was talking to herself. Her hands were behind her back, she had her socks on and she was doing something between poetry and chanting. I didn’t know what to do. People were upset and we got blamed, as if we were complicit. And then a few days later, she’s invited to the Dylan concert at the Garden [where she was loudly booed by the crowd]. I was there and I will never forget what Kris Kristofferson did for her. He hugged her, he put his arm around her, and he really got her through it. That was beautiful.
She was totally cancelled and then people would say, months and years later, “She was right, you know, we shouldn’t have done that.” The mob was horrible. The boycotting and blacklisting. People weren’t judging the music. The fear of not playing a record, or not adding a record to your playlist? Give me a break. It really did hurt her because she was speaking from the heart – she was an artist, and she had a very strong point of view. Her delivery was rough. She could alienate people.
She never recovered after that. No one judged the music, that’s what I was very pissed off about. Being outspoken should not be a penalty.
Two years ago, her manager Fachtna Ó Ceallaigh reached out and asked if I’d be interested [in working with her again]. I felt at that moment – not judging the music – that we had two beautiful runs together and I can’t do it again. I have a higher tolerance for artistic freedom and integrity and license and most people don’t. And I was right, because the world now is so woke, and so less open to chance, to open voices, than they were then. And I don’t regret my decision not to do that dance again.
But I only have great memories. Very often I’m asked, who are the most brilliant artists you’ve ever worked with? Nine out of 10 times, she comes in first. Not that she’s bigger, better, but that’s my gut response. She was more than a singer, more than an interpreter of songs. She was somebody who spoke the truth and wasn’t afraid of the truth. Prophets and poets, you always say after they pass away, or when it’s too late, that they were right. And what did she say that was wrong? About the abuses of the church? About mental health? About the children of the world? She was right. I knew her as a mother. She was a very compassionate, soulful person.
By the way, she drove me nuts professionally – she was the most frustrating artist of my career. But a brilliant one. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I have a very heavy heart today.
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Sunday, November 13, 2022
SNL48 Fox & Friends Cold Open - SNL
The hosts of Fox & Friends (Mikey Day, Heidi Gardner, Bowen Yang) interview Kari Lake (Cecily Strong) and Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson) about the 2022 midterm elections.
Saturday, May 8, 2021
POLITICO NIGHTLY: The mystery of the missing jobs
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WATCH: Sen. Booker questions Jack Smith on Trump investigations
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