And one of the first mainstream rock acts to recognize Hendrix’s greatness was the Monkees. Unfortunately, the Monkees’ young fans weren’t quite as enthusiastic when that TV band’s Micky Dolenz came up with the seemingly bizarre idea to hire Hendrix as the opening act for the Monkees’ first U.S. tour in 1967.

Hendrix ended up playing only seven of that tour’s 29 dates, dropping out after having to contend nightly with thousands of nasty, impatient, jeering teenyboppers. “Yeah, it was kind of embarrassing,” Dolenz admits to Yahoo Entertainment. “Jimi would go, ‘Purple haze!’ and the kids would be like, ‘We want Davy!’ He’d go, ‘Foxy lady!’ and they’d yell, ‘We. Want. The. Monkees! We. Want. The. Monkees!’ He was coming up against that very typical opening-act dilemma for anyone touring with a big headliner, really.”

The odd pairing might have been doomed from the start, given the two artists’ very different audiences. But Dolenz had been a fan of Hendrix since the guitar god was still known as “Jimmy James” and performing in Greenwich Village nightclubs with the Blue Flames. “It was 1966 or so, and the Monkees were in New York on a press junket,” he recalls of the first time he saw Hendrix live. “Someone said, ‘You gotta come down to the Village and check this cat out.’ The actual act was, I think, the John Hammond Band or something. But when we went down there, I remember sitting in the front row and there was this young kid, and he was playing guitar with his teeth! I didn't even know his name at the time. I don't even know if he was introduced, but he was going under the name Jimmy James at that point. He was just great.”

snip

Hendrix apparently did care what people thought, as he decided to quit the Monkees’ tour just eight days later, after dates in Miami, North Carolina, and a three-night run at New York City’s Forest Hills Tennis Stadium. Later, a seemingly bitter Hendrix told British music paper the NME that he’d been replaced by “Mickey Mouse.” Dolenz can neither deny nor confirm the longstanding rumor that Hendrix flipped the bird at the combative crowd during that final NYC show, though he quips, “I've never seen evidence of that rumor, but if it's true, he certainly ain’t the first person to flip off an audience.”

Alaska's @lisamurkowski said today she won't confirm a new SCOTUS justice until after the inauguration day. Fair is fair, she says. My colleague @kcgrove will have a story shortly.

He and his lawyer hoped to prevent this footage from the Trump University fraud case from “getting into the hands of the media.”

During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump was burdened with lawsuits that accused him and his Trump University of defrauding students who had paid thousands of dollars to learn the supposed secrets of Trump’s financial success. Though the Trump U controversy raised questions about Trump’s fitness for office, he managed to score two legal victories in the case as it proceeded. He won a postponement in the trial until after Election Day, and he managed to seal the video of a six-hour deposition he gave in the case. That meant voters would not see news reports of Trump on the stand in a federal civil fraud case or be able to watch this footage of Trump being questioned concerning allegations of fraud. But Mother Jones has now obtained the full video of Trump’s deposition, and though the written transcript of the session was released in June 2016, the video version includes several exchanges that likely would not have played well for Trump had they become public when he was chasing votes.

Trump sat for this deposition in Trump Tower on December 10, 2015. The video shows him parrying with the lawyer for the plaintiffs, Jason Forge, over various issues, including false statements made by Trump University employees, and Trump’s own memory. Trump at one point griped, “It’s the most ridiculous lawsuit I’ve ever seen.” He claimed not to remember having boasted that he possessed one of the best memories in the world and repeatedly said he could not recall matters related to the case. He downplayed false and misleading statements presented by Trump University instructors as merely “hyperbole,” refusing to label them “false.” He even disavowed a passage from one of his own books in which he had assailed educational institutions for committing “fraud.” Had the video deposition been released during the campaign, it may have yielded ammo for anti-Trump ads. At the start of the deposition, Trump’s attorney, Daniel Petrocelli, said he and Trump did not want the transcript “getting into the hands of the media.” Regarding the video, they succeeded.

Mother Jones was provided the video by a source who asked not to be identified. Art Cohen, a lead plaintiff in one of the lawsuits against Trump University and Trump, confirmed that this was the actual video of the deposition. “On this video, Trump’s shifty memory and dishonest character are exposed when he is faced with questions that demand the truth,” Cohen says. (Last month, Mother Jones posted video of a conversation that occurred during a break in these proceedings between Trump and Petrocelli, in which Trump boasted of threatening the Better Business Bureau to change the D grade it awarded Trump University to an A.)

LONDON (Reuters) - U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden warned the United Kingdom that it must honour Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace agreement as it withdraws from the European Union or there would be no separate U.S. trade deal.


Prime Minister Boris Johnson is proposing new legislation that would break the Northern Ireland protocol of the Brexit divorce treaty that seeks to avoid a physical customs border between British-ruled Northern Ireland and EU-member Ireland.

“We can’t allow the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland to become a casualty of Brexit,” Biden said in a tweet on Wednesday.

“Any trade deal between the U.S. and U.K. must be contingent upon respect for the Agreement and preventing the return of a hard border. Period.”

The Qatari government is paying @realDonaldTrump $135,000 a year for an unused office in a San Francisco skyscraper, an apparent violation of the Constitution's emoluments clause, according to a new book by @DanAlexander21

In the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District, a few blocks from the Transamerica Pyramid Center that defines the city’s skyline, sits a 52-story tower, the kind you might find in any major city. Its name, 555 California Street, is as forgettable as its appearance, all brown and black and boring. Inside, a team of security guards watches over the elevator banks in the lobby, checking IDs.

To get past them and into the heart of the building, I signed up for a desk in a coworking space on the 49th floor. Once there, I rode down to a different floor, the 43rd, and walked off the elevator. Before me stood a pristine office with shiny concrete floors, subdued gray couches, empty chairs, and a sign that read, “Qatar Investment Authority Advisory (USA) Inc.” and, in smaller type, “A subsidiary of the Qatar Investment Authority.” Nothing inside the place looked as if it had been touched. There was a marble welcome desk but no one to welcome visitors. On top of the counter sat a plant that looked like it had been dead for months.

I rapped my knuckles on the glass doors. No one answered, even though it was the middle of the afternoon. The next day, in the morning, I returned. Again I knocked. And again no one answered.

Why would anyone, much less an entity that serves as an arm of the Qatari government, bother outfitting an empty office space in an expensive San Francisco skyscraper? Consider who owns the building. The lobby features signs for Vornado Realty Trust, the publicly traded firm, with innumerable shareholders, that has a 70% stake in the tower. The other 30% belongs to a single man: Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States. His interest here is worth an estimated $442 million after debt—making it the most valuable holding in his entire portfolio. It’s worth more than twice as much as Trump Tower, more than seven times as much as Trump’s property in Vegas, 16 times as much as his Doral golf resort in Miami.

And, just in case it wasn't clear this Puerto Rico aid was all about the election in Florida, Trump makes it clear:

"Biden's devastated the island of Puerto Rico."

The Trump administration on Friday announced $13 billion in additional aid to Puerto Rico to help with rebuilding in the aftermath of 2017's Hurricane Maria.

Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced tweeted Friday morning that Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator Pete Gaynor told her that $13 billion has been approved. She thanked the White House and President Donald Trump.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany touted the $13 billion FEMA award as two of the agency's "largest grants ever" in a statement. It will include a $11.6 billion federal share of funding for the projects.

The move is likely an attempt to appeal to Puerto Rican voters who moved to the battleground state of Florida after the hurricane struck the US territory.

Asked just before boarding Marine One if he’s looking to replace @FBI Director Wray, @POTUS replies: “We’re looking at a lot of different things...I did not like his answer the other day.”

It’s Election Day in 7 states today!

Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia and Wyoming are all open for ballots in varying ways.

Let’s get out the vote for decency, honor, and integrity. Get out and vote for
@JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris! #4Bid3n

There’s no feeling like finishing a book, and I’m proud of this one. In A Promised Land, I try to provide an honest accounting of my presidency, the forces we grapple with as a nation, and how we can heal our divisions and make democracy work for everybody.