Get your head out of the gutter. It’s Kinky because today’s “Flashback Friday” segment features Ray Davies of The Kinks!
I had the honor of interviewing him a few times, but today we went back to our first meeting, at Los Angeles’ KSCA fm 101.9. I can’t find the exact date, but it was somewhere around 1995 or 96. Ray had just published his book X-Ray: The Unauthorized Biography, and was in town for a series of shows called “20th Century Man” which wound up being the blueprint for VH1’s Storyteller series!
Needless to say, that interview was one of the highlights of my career. If you listen and hear a bit of flirting going on, you’re not mistaken. A few months later when Ray was back in LA, we actually went out to dinner. Nothing more, in case you were wondering. He was a perfect gentleman.
In the first hour of today’s show, we looked back at some of this years’ Supreme Court decisions. A great rundown of the bigger decisions rendered in 2014 is published here, courtesy of the NY Times.
We’ll have to wait until Monday for the final two decisions for this term-including the Hobby Lobby case, but I’m still reeling from yesterday’s unanimous decision in McCullen v. Coakley that ruled the buffer zone around abortion clinics in MA violated the First Amendment.
If you read only one article about this flawed decision, check out Jessica Mason Pieklo of RHRealityCheck’s “Don’t Tread on Grandma: The Supreme Court Reframes the Abortion-Free Speech Debate in ‘McCullen’.” I can’t sum up that article with a short excerpt, so please read the whole thing so you have all the facts. As Pieklo warns,
I hate to say it, but it gets worse: Next term, the Roberts Court will hear the case of Elonis v. United States, a case that questions the constitutionality of laws that criminalize online threatening speech. At the heart of Elonis is a fight over what is and is not a “true threat”—the very question also at the heart of the emerging legal challenges to targeted, individual instances of clinic and provider harassment under the Federal Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act and state-level anti-harassment and anti-stalking laws. The majority in McCullen points to these kinds of laws as proof that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts did not narrowly tailor its buffer zone law enough. If states and localities are so concerned about clinic violence, Roberts writes inMcCullen, then they should look first to these laws, which in the Court’s opinion are far better suited to address instances of violence and harassment. Of course the opinion in McCullen is silent on the looming threats to even those protections.
We couldn’t let the week end without awarding one more idiot the “World’s Biggest Asshole” award. No, it wasn’t the Boehner for declaring that he’ll sue President Obama for his executive orders; it wasn’t Rush Limpballs for calling the African Americans who voted for Thad Cochran in MS’s GOP senatorial primary “Uncle Toms for Thad” or for his calls for the impeachment of President Obama for “doing things that Nixon never even imagined.” It wasn’t even Glenn Beck for dealing with his stress about Cochran’s defeat of teabagger McDaniel by shooting his gun!
