Billy Joel and drummer Jon Small had spent the mid-Sixties playing together in a hard-working Long Island outfit called the Hassles. The band had released two LPs on United Artists showcasing their talent as purveyors of blue-eyed soul on the order of the Young Rascals and Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, but by the end of the decade both Joel and Small wanted to make something weightier. "We wanted to be a heavy band and we decided we were going to get heavy ... somehow," Joel told biographer Fred Schruers.

Splitting from their longtime band in 1969, the pair holed up in the basement of Small's parents' wallpaper store in Syosett, New York to build a Frankenstein's monster of amplification. Braving the occasional electric shock, they rigged Joel's Hammond organ into a Marshall stack. "I got a wah-wah pedal so I could wow-wow-ee-oe like Jimi [Hendrix] and added a distortion pedal, which I figured would double the mangled noise we were already making. Then we just pinned the volume to the wall." Using just drums, keyboards and Joel's vocals, they set about cooking a sickly sonic stew that culled rancid bits of Iron Butterfly, Vanilla Fudge, the Doors and Led Zeppelin at their most indulgent.

Believing themselves to be "unstoppable," they played the results to manager Irwin Mazur. Even though he privately thought the music was "the worst crap I ever heard in my life," he managed to get them a $50,000 advance from Epic Records – and an epic record it would be. "We were going to destroy the world with amplification," Joel told Dan Neer in 1985. "We had titles like 'Godzilla,' 'March of the Huns,' 'Brain Invasion.' A lot of people think I just came out of the piano bar. ..." Doubling down on the whole death and destruction motif, they named the project Attila. "If you're going to assault the rock world and crush it under ten Marshall amps, wouldn't Attila the Hun, who plundered Italy and Gaul and slaughtered quite a few innocents along the way, work as a role model?"

Released in July 1970, the album was, by Joel's estimation, "a colossal failure" that he later dismissed as "psychedelic bullshit." The souped-up amplification that they had so richly prized proved to be their undoing during their handful of gigs, driving the audience away. "People went fleeing from the place. We were so loud. You could see blood coming out of people's ears," Joel said in a 2012 interview with Alec Baldwin on NPR. "It was just horrible. Thank God it didn't happen because I would've screamed myself right out of the business."

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/30-fascinating-early-bands-of-future-music-legends-w513464/billy-joels-wild-heavy-metal-duo-attila-w513475

According to the Associated Press, Pence was visiting Israel when he was asked about the alleged affair, which recently resurfaced after reports suggested that Trump paid the actress $130,000 for her silence.

Pence told AP that he was “not going to comment on the latest baseless allegations against the president.”

It was not immediately clear how Pence came to the conclusion that the allegations are “baseless.”



Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, is said to have signed an agreement barring her from discussing her relationship with Trump.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/01/mike-pence-says-allegations-trump-affair-adult-film-star-baseless/

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/20/us/politics/trump-shutdown.html

WASHINGTON — One year to the day after taking office with vows to bring the dysfunction of Washington to heel, President Trump on Saturday found himself thrust into the most perennial of political crises, bitterly casting blame on Democrats for a government shutdown he said they had orchestrated to mar the anniversary.

Mr. Trump had planned to spend the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., celebrating his first year in office at a soiree with friends and supporters. Instead, he remained out of sight in the White House, where he stewed about an impasse he had been unable to prevent, according to people close to him, and held a feverish round of conversations with Republican leaders in search of a resolution.

“This is the One Year Anniversary of my Presidency and the Democrats wanted to give me a nice present,” he wrote on Twitter before dawn, appending the hashtag #DemocratShutdown. By afternoon, the president’s trip — which was to include a lavish $100,000-per-couple party to celebrate his first year in office — had been shelved as aides contemplated with dread the potential practical and political impacts of shuttering the government.''

On Saturday, the president was left alternately defiant and angry, self-pitying and frustrated. He argued to aides that he did not deserve the blame he was taking, but without a credible deal on the table, there was little for him to do. Irritated to have missed his big event in Florida, Mr. Trump spent much of his day watching old TV clips of him berating President Barack Obama for a lack of leadership during the 2013 government shutdown, a White House aide said, seeming content to sit back and watch the show.

Donald J. Trump? Verified account @realDonaldTrump

Great to see how hard Republicans are fighting for our Military and Safety at the Border. The Dems just want illegal immigrants to pour into our nation unchecked. If stalemate continues, Republicans should go to 51% (Nuclear Option) and vote on real, long term budget, no C.R.’s!
5:35 AM - 21 Jan 2018

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/955056249925750784

Dave Bing
🇺🇸? @davebing69
Replying to @realDonaldTrump

If you keep this shit up it’ll cost everyone $500 for a shopping cart full of groceries. It used to cost us $100 not long ago, now $200...your war on immigration will cost every single American not benefiting from ur tax cut swindle. Hope you get herpes from your unprotected sex

2:22 PM - 21 Jan 2018

https://twitter.com/davebing69/status/955188969591005184

And one thing that is still going: Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

The Justice Department confirmed this week that employees in Mueller’s office are exempt from the shutdown and can continue their work. His office is not funded through the regular congressional appropriations process.

So the probe, which Trump desperately wants shut down, is going on even as other government functions cease.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/robert-mueller-government-shutdown_us_5a63c3b6e4b00228300361db?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

‘A good thing’: Eric Trump celebrates government shutdown



"Honestly, I think it's a good thing for us," he said when asked about the government shutdown, which took place Saturday after Congress failed to agree a new federal budget.

"People see through it. I mean, people have seen a year that's incredible. It's been filled with nothing but the best for our country, 'America First' policies, and they're happy with where we are as a nation."

He claimed that Democrats want to shut the government down because they want to stop his father’s momentum.

"I mean, my father has had incredible momentum. He has gotten more done in one year than arguably any president in history. How do they divert from that message? How do they save their own party when they don't have any leadership, they don't have any good candidates out there, they don't have a message of their own? How do they do that? They obstruct, they distract, they try and place blame," he said.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/01/a-good-thing-eric-trump-celebrates-government-shutdown/

WOULD JUST LIKE TO SAY TO THE REPUBLICAN CONGRESS PEOPLE AND REPUBLICAN SENATORS. IF YOU DO NOT GET BEHIND THIS PRESIDENT AND HELP HE BUILD THE COUNTRY BACK TO BEING SOME KIND OF NORMAL, YOU WILL NOT EVER GET MY VOTE. !!!!!!

"Other than golf, he considers exercise misguided, arguing that a person, like a battery, is born with a finite amount of energy," writes Evan Osnos in a piece entitled "How Trump Could Get Fired" that appears in the May 8, edition of the New Yorker.

That's far from the first time we've heard that Trump and exercise aren't friends. This, from a February 6 piece in Axios: "The only workout Trump gets is an occasional round of golf. Even then, he mostly travels by cart. On the campaign trail he viewed his rallies as his form of exercise."

In their revelatory book "Trump Revealed," the Washington Post's Mike Kranisch and Marc Fisher wrote more extensively about Trump's "battery" theory of energy:

After college, after Trump mostly gave up his personal athletic interests, he came to view time spent playing sports as time wasted. Trump believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted. So he didn't work out. When he learned that John O'Donnell, one of his top casino executives, was training for an Ironman triathlon, he admonished him, "You are going to die young because of this."

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/15/politics/donald-trump-exercise/index.html