Woody Guthrie

"If Woody Guthrie were alive today, he'd have a lot to write about: high times on Wall Street and hard times on Main Street," Springsteen told his Madison Square Garden audience in 2009 as he brought out Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello for a powerful rendition of "The Ghost of Tom Joad," a song Springsteen wrote in 1995. That's it above.Tom Joad was a John Steinbeck character from The Grapes of Wrath (1939) about whom Woody Guthrie sang (below). There is a colossal battle for the soul of the Democratic Party raging right now.

Today, the RNC has disinvited National Review from co-hosting the February 25th debate in Houston for their all-out attack on Herr Trumpf. Not that anyone of the Trumpf mass has ever heard of National Review, let alone read it. As you know by now, the old conservative mouthpiece devoted its new issue to bashing Herr.

Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) can make a case that there isn't another congressman as extreme right-wing as he is. Last year he won an open Democratic seat after reactionary Blue Dog Dan Boren retired. A 36 year old plumber and radio talk show host, Mullin is probably best known as an arch-hypocrite who railed incessantly against Obama's stimulus program while his company secretly look $370,000 for the program.