Some are gone, and some remain

The news is happening so fast I'm getting lost in it.

Primary schedule. Next races are Saturday the 12th (DC and Guam for Republicans, Northern Marinas for Democrats). The next states are on the 15th: Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina, Northern Mariana Island (R), and Ohio - right now showing strong for Clinton.

FULL SPEECH : Univision Democratic Primary Debate Miami Hillary Clinton vs Bernie Sanders Mar 9,16. The video of Sanders talking about Cuba and Ortega is probably something we'll be hearing about again, I'm sure the Republicans enjoyed it. It'll be tricky for him to make the sale on that stuff, for sure.
* AP fact check: Eye-popping claims about Sanders by Hillary.
* The Majority Report did a decent debate review on this. It sounds like the union people in Michigan were pretty aggravated by Clinton's claims about Bernie's vote on the auto industry bail-out, so who knows what she was thinking when she did it again? And the Koch brothers? Really? When she's the only one who's ever benefited from contributions from the Koch brothers (donors to the DLC)? Is it part of her strategy to just try to aggravate him by smearing him until he gets upset and shakes his finger so her supporters can wail about how sexist he is? (Because she is such a helpless, wilting flower that she needs to be protected from the mean old man?)
* In an interesting role-reversal, "Hillary spoke 32% longer, moderators interrupted Bernie 150% more."
* Pierce: "Bernie Sanders Said Something We Weren't Ready to Hear Last Night. It's also something that could easily be ratfcked by the Republicans: Well, at least I lived long enough to hear a presidential candidate from one of the major parties refer to 'the so-called Monroe Doctrine.'" The Republicans? Hillary started on it right there.

Video: "Burlington Mayor Bernie Sanders Address at Puerto Cabezas Sister City Program: At the invitation of the Nicaraguan government, Sanders participates in the 7th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution, visits the Atlantic coast and initiates a sister-city program with Puerto Cabezas on July 10, 1985."
* 2016: Sanders: 'Democracy is not a spectator sport'.

"The real reason Bernie and Hillary supporters can't seem to get along" - Except this sounds more like a neoliberal's story about the difference between Clinton and Sanders. I don't recall hearing Bernie say anything about "equality of outcomes" - do you? And I haven't heard Hillary Clinton suggest doing anything that will "incrementally" improve things for women and people of color in our lifetimes.

I found watching the Democratic debate in Flint excruciating. It started off well enough, with Bernie hitting hard, but there were moments that made me cringe with missed opportunities and missteps. When Clinton falsely claimed that Sanders had voted against saving the auto industry, he needed to make it clearer that he had actually voted for it, not against it. (I'm sure she knew it.) And when asked about personal experience in his past that made racism matter to him, he needed to be personal. He grew up Jewish in the shadow of the Third Reich at a time when little kids in America still got beat up for being Christ-killers, and it had to inform his thinking even if he never got beaten up himself, He shouldn't have had a problem bringing those experiences together. And though I knew from context what he meant, I cringed when he said, "You don't know what it's like to be poor." I knew it wasn't what he meant, but that line could be fatal. I do think he needs to be more prepared to call Clinton on her smears and lies and be sharper about it, too. He's still afraid to punch, despite his strong opening. Yes, he was more combative, but it was like he didn't realize yet what kind of a fight he was in. Well, the kind of fight that when Clinton lies, her supporters accuse him of sexism when he tries to correct the record.

March 8th: "Washington Post Ran 16 Negative Stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 Hours [...] All of these posts paint his candidacy in a negative light, mainly by advancing the narrative that he's a clueless white man incapable of winning over people of color or speaking to women. Even the one article about Sanders beating Trump implies this is somehow a surprise - despite the fact that Sanders consistently out-polls Hillary Clinton against the New York businessman." But it's all okay, because the WaPo investigated themselves and decided they were not guilty.
* This is interesting. If you look at the URL, you can see the original title of this story was "Sanders would be better against Trump than Clinton," but that's not what you see when you click through to The Hill.
* "Hillary really could lose to Trump: Her weakness with the working class is Trump's strength": Clinton will have a hard time winning over voters fed up with corporate-friendly trade deals."

Super Saturday saw Clinton getting a big win in Louisiana - as predicted - and Sanders having a blow-out win in Kansas (67.7-32.2) and taking Nebraska (57.1-42.9).
* The Young Turks on SUPER Biased Super Saturday Headlines From Mainstream Media when Kansas disappears from coverage.
* Sanders won Maine (64.3-35.5) in what was reported to be a huge turn-out.
* Big upset in Michigan: Nate Silver was tipping Clinton to win at 99-1, and the most recent polling showed her ahead 13 points (Monmouth) and 27 points (Fox), but Sanders took the state 49.9%-48.2%. "At a party for Clinton supporters in Detroit, many were shocked as results began to flood in - especially as just a day earlier their candidate had effectively called on Sanders to drop out and 'end the primary'."
* On the other side of the ledger, Clinton was polling at 65-11 against Sanders in Louisianabut she took 71.1% against Bernie's 23.2%.
* A lesson for supporters from a comment at the Guardian from Mark Thomason: "We did our part here in Michigan. It was a lot of work by a lot of people to upset a 20 point projection. It was door to door by young black women and Senior Center talks by elderly white women that overturned the assumptions of Hillary's strengths. It could not have happened without that. The entire margin was 18,500 votes out of 1.1 million. The same margin of black voters Hillary had in the South in just Wayne County would have been enough to change the outcome. She got just 60% in Wayne County. This outcome was not one group overpowering another. It was all of us.
* FiveThirtyEight: "What The Stunning Bernie Sanders Win In Michigan Means"

Marcy Kaptur, the "Longest-serving woman in the House makes her case for Bernie Sanders."

Although predictions leading up to Super Tuesday projected Bernie Sanders to lose all but perhaps two states, the media and the Clinton camp started talking like the primaries were all over and done despite the fact that he won four of them and outperformed projections even in several of the states he lost. Given the trends, the likelihood appears to be that he might have won Massachusetts given an additional week, but he surprised everyone by taking Colorado (58.9-40.4), Oklahoma (51.9-41.5), and Minnesota (61.7-38.3). There were no surprises in Vermont, of course, where Sanders won with 86.2% of the vote. Clinton is now way ahead of Sanders in delegate count, but some of the biggest states are still to come and Sanders still has a good chance to take them. Clinton's wins Tuesday were largely in states Democrats are expected to lose in the general.
* Trump won most of the primary states, but Rubio took Minnesota and Cruz took Texas, Oklahoma, and Alaska. Current polling still shows Sanders beating all three of them easily in the general, with Clinton only beating Trump.
* Did thousands of Massachusetts Democrats really leave the party to support Trump?
* "Latino Vote Helps Bernie Sanders Surge to Victory in Colorado in Massive Democratic Caucus Turnout" - So, maybe all that hocus pocus about how Latinos couldn't really have voted for Sanders in Nevada was just wishful thinking after all.
* "How Hillary Clinton's Super Tuesday 'Win' Relied on Dismal Voter Turnout"
* I'd like to see more about this, but my default position is that when exit polls disagree with voting results, something is probably amiss.

The Political Compass for the current bunch of candidates. Unfortunately, there's too much missing from this chart to account for both the similarities and divergences between candidates, but there was always that problem.

Some Democrats are fearful that not electing a "safe", establishment candidate could lead to a repetition of 1972. But what if the year they should really take a lesson from has been 1968? That was the year the Democratic establishment imposed the "safe" candidate - Hubert Humphrey: "When the Democrats met in Chicago late in the summer of 1968, the field had been tragically narrowed two and a half months earlier with the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Only two candidates remained, Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy. Humphrey had not won a single primary. Indeed, his primary total was a minuscule 161,143 votes. But he controlled the most delegates. By contrast, McCarthy had received 2,914,933 primary votes, almost 20 times the number that Humphrey could claim. Yet, by the time the balloons had settled onto the convention floor, a Democratic Party controlled by machine politicians and union leaders had chosen Hubert Humphrey as the Democratic nominee." That didn't work out too well, did it?

"Meet the fossil-fuel loving hedge fund billionaire behind Hillary's surge"
* This is from last October, and it's Jack Schafer, but he's right: "The Hole in Hillary's Flip-Flop Excuse: She keeps saying new information makes her change her mind on policy. But what new information?"
* Corey Robin says when Clinton tells the truth, believe her: "Amid all the accusations that Hillary Clinton is not an honest or authentic politician, that she's an endless shape-shifter who says whatever works to get her to the next primary, it's important not to lose sight of the one truth she's been telling, and will continue to tell, the voters: things will not get better. Ever. At first, I thought this was just an electoral ploy against Sanders: don't listen to the guy promising the moon. No such thing as a free lunch and all that. But it goes deeper. The American ruling class has been trying to figure out for years, if not decades, how to manage decline, how to get Americans to get used to diminished expectations, how to adapt to the notion that life for the next generation will be worse than for the previous generation, and now, how to accept (as Alex Gourevitch reminded me tonight) low to zero growth rates as the new economic normal. Clinton's campaign message isn't just for Bernie voters; it's for everyone. Expect little, deserve less, ask for nothing. When the leading candidate of the more left of the two parties is saying that - and getting the majority of its voters to embrace that message - the work of the American ruling class is done."
* Clinton's strategy promotes right-wing memes to beat Bernie, Part 12
* "Hillary's State Department Pressured Haiti Not To Raise Minimum Wage to $.61 An Hour."

"Hillary Clinton Said Outsourcing 'Benefited' America After She Criticized Bush Officials For Saying The Same Thing."
* "The Clinton-Backed Honduran Regime Is Picking Off Indigenous Leaders: The names of Berta Cáceres's murderers are yet unknown. But we know who killed her. Hillary Clinton will be good for women. Ask Berta Cáceres. But you can't. She's dead. Gunned down yesterday, March 2, at midnight, in her hometown of La Esperanza, Intibuca, in Honduras. Cáceres was a vocal and brave indigenous leader, an opponent of the 2009 Honduran coup that Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, made possible."
* After all that Obama-hugging last week, "Hillary Blames Obama: His Syrian 'Failure' Led To Rise Of ISIS."
* It's not so much that Bernie Sanders is wonderful, it's that nominating Hillary Clinton is likely to encourage the growth of fascism. Chris Hedges, "The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism: College-educated elites, on behalf of corporations, carried out the savage neoliberal assault on the working poor. Now they are being made to pay. Their duplicity - embodied in politicians such as Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama - succeeded for decades. These elites, many from East Coast Ivy League schools, spoke the language of values - civility, inclusivity, a condemnation of overt racism and bigotry, a concern for the middle class - while thrusting a knife into the back of the underclass for their corporate masters. This game has ended. There are tens of millions of Americans, especially lower-class whites, rightfully enraged at what has been done to them, their families and their communities. They have risen up to reject the neoliberal policies and political correctness imposed on them by college-educated elites from both political parties: Lower-class whites are embracing an American fascism.
* Marcy Wheeler: "Hillary Is Now Picking and Choosing Which Obama Accomplishments to Take Credit For: According to Hillary Clinton's latest campaign ploy, she deserves credit for domestic policies passed under Obama - notably, ObamaCare - but not issues - in this case, trade deals - she negotiated as Secretary of State.""
* "Even critics understate how catastrophically bad the Hillary Clinton-led NATO bombing of Libya was: The NY Times reports on Clinton's war leadership don't go far enough. Hillary's disaster in Libya should haunt her."
* The real scandal about Clinton's emails isn't that she had her own server or committed any crime by having it, it's what they reveal about her policies.
* In 2003, everyone knew there was no reason to invade Iraq, including Hillary Clinton.

"Former Massachusetts Democratic Chair: Bernie Sanders 'speaking the truth to the American people'"
* "I've Never Seen a Presidential Candidate Talk About Spirituality as Beautifully as Bernie" - This link is worth clicking just for the graphic.
* Is Bernie losing the photo-staging war? I know the Clinton campaign likes to pretend she owns all of the People of Color vote, and her campaign started off with the "He doesn't connect with minorities" meme long before there was any evidence of whether he did or didn't, and she's certainly kept pounding it, along with her media courtiers, despite the fact that this doesn't at all appear to be true in the Asian and Latino communities. She definitely locked up the black establishment very quickly, although there are certainly many younger black voters (and much of the black political left, right on down to original Black Panthers), who see Bernie as the only choice. But it's curious that Sanders' aversion to pandering is so severe that he hasn't managed to promote a few photos of those many black, Asian, and Hispanic supporters gathered around him the way Clinton always seems to manage to do. He's got more than black celebrities behind him and plenty of younger black kids on his side, so it wouldn't hurt to get them into the photos more often.

What is it like to work with Bernie Sanders? [...] In short, What was it like to work with Senator Sanders in the capacity that I had? It was great, and I can't speak highly enough of him. He and his office were never less than professional, there was never a sense that they were rushing to judgment, and I could always expect that they'd treat whatever information we provided them with fairness. It was very rare in my line of work to come across a team like the one he put together and then led by example. If everyone in Congress had an ethic like his - even if not the philosophy - I think we'd have a much better political climate."

Gaius Publius liked something I wrote elsewhere, so he made a post out of it: "The Goal of the Neo-Liberal Consensus Is to Manage the Decline."

"Export-Import Bank Debate Puts Sanders at Odds With Senate Democrats: When Democratic presidential candidate Bernard Sanders' campaign blasted fellow candidate Hillary Clinton this weekend for her support for the Export-Import Bank, it was highlighting an issue on which he stood alone among Senate Democratic caucus members. 'The Export-Import Bank provides corporate welfare to some of the largest multi-national corporations that are moving jobs to China and stashing their profits in tax havens like the Cayman Islands,' policy director Warren Gunnels said in a statement issued ahead of a Democratic debate in Flint, Mich. Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democrats, was the lone member of the caucus to vote against reauthorizing the export financing agency when it came up for votes last year, including on the tests vote in late July that proved a bipartisan group of more than 60 senators supported the underlying reauthorization."

Why Is DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz Co-Sponsoring a Bill to Help Predatory Payday Lenders?
* Pierce: "It's Time for DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz to Ride Off into the Sunset."

"Michigan mayor says he was nearly kicked out of Dem debate."

Mitt Romney endorses Hillary Clinton in Democratic Primary.

"U.S. hedge fund managers pour money into 2016 race and Trump is a factor: Major U.S. hedge fund managers are on pace this year to more than double the amount they gave in the 2012 election campaign, with independent fundraising groups backing Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton and Republican rival Ted Cruz receiving the most so far.

Peter Beinart completely loses his mind. Seriously, he supports Clinton, but he thinks Dems should switch over if they can so they can vote against Trump, and for Marco Rubio. No matter how you look at this, it makes no sense. Trump's saving grace as the GOP candidate is that most people can't stand him. But after watching Trump's circus act for months, a lot of people are too dazzled to notice how horrible Rubio is and they will imagine that he's more "reasonable" and they may find him easier to vote for. And given Beinart's support for Clinton, you'd think he'd prefer the GOP candidate to be the only one polls show Clinton likely to beat.Those polls have been too consistent for too long now to completely write them off; they show Sanders leading Cruz and Rubio comfortably while Clinton loses to them. Of course, her spread against Trump isn't so good, either, showing as low as only 1% (or less, at one point), but Sanders beating him comfortably. And before you sneeze at those polls, bear in mind that a significant number of Democrats really don't like Clinton. Of course, if Trump keeps running to the left, and Clinton keeps telling everyone she's not going to change things, Trump may just be the one to beat her after all. Maybe that's what Beinart is really afraid of.
* But Tad Devine has also lost his mind: "Sanders Campaign Strategist Suggests a Clinton-Sanders Ticket" - You don't start talking this way unless you're already giving up, but it's dumber than that, because Bernie is worth a whole lot more in the Senate than as VP, where he will have no power. Whatever happens in November, we still need Sanders in the Senate. I really do want to slap people who keep suggesting that our most valuable Senators give up their seats for a position that's worth very little.

Kevin Drum seems to have forgotten to drink his Kool-Aid: "On Second Thought, Maybe Bernie Sanders' Growth Claims Aren't As Crazy As I Thought."

As usual, the Republicans are in turmoil, waiting for the neoliberals to save them, no doubt. Right now their big worry is that they've exposed what they are and it's making conservatives introspect, which to them is a bad thing. They say scary things: "'It's scary,' South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who has endorsed Rubio, said on ABC's 'This Week.' She added: 'I think what he'll do to the Republican Party is really make us question who we are and what we're about. And that's something we don't want to see happen.'" But it's a bit late to worry about things like that when more than one Republican is waking up: "I'm a lifelong Republican but Trump surge proves that every bad thing Democrats have ever said about GOP is basically true."

"Watch a Democratic Senator Explain Donald Trump To Janet Yellen [..] 1.The Senator feels like he got the ol' bait-and-switch when he was convinced to support the Export-Import Bank - a controversial government fund that helps corporations make deals and reap profits. Its critics called it crony capitalism, but big government contractors like Boeing played hardball with members of Congress by threatening to shut down manufacturing here and, therefore, eliminate jobs if their private little (taxpayer-funded) slush fund was not refilled. Sen. Donnelly used it as a case-in-point to illustrate how the wider economic agenda is built on a bait-and-switch that promises good jobs and white picket fences if the 'business climate' is improved with tax breaks, slush funds and deregulation, but always ends up moving capital away from American labor and shifting profits into offshore tax havens." It's unfortunate that he got sidetracked on monetary policy, because all this is the result of political decisions, and Yellen's answer was just the usual voodoo about how stuff is happening as if it simply has to.
* "Trump Taps Into Economic Anxiety Resulting From 'Free Trade'"
* "Donald Trump: The Protector: He will make you safe. He will give you health care. He will give you jobs. He will build a wall. Protecting you is his prime directive."
* George Lakeoff: "Why Trump?
* "Trump Supporters Aren't Stupid: America incentivizes racism in working class white people, and if we fail to understand this, we will fail to fix it."
* Thomas Franks's latest is, "Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's why, and it isn't just a slew of insults about bigotry. It also contains this sentence: "The views of working-class people are so foreign to that universe that when New York Times columnist Nick Kristof wanted to 'engage' a Trump supporter last week, he made one up, along with this imaginary person's responses to his questions."

"Jim Webb: I could vote for Trump, but not Hillary: It's nothing personal about Hillary Clinton, but the reason Donald Trump is getting so much support right now is not because of the, you know, 'racists,' etc. and etc.,' Webb said. 'It's because a certain group of people are seeing him as the only one who has the courage to say, 'We've got to clean out the stables of the American governmental system right now.' If you're voting for Donald Trump, you might be getting something very good or very bad. If you're voting for Hillary Clinton, you're going to get the same thing. Do you want the same thing?'" Make no mistake, Jim Webb is no one's hero and his tenure as a Democrat was brief. But he he's right about one thing: Hillary Clinton is promising more of the same thing that's ailing us.

Blast from the past from the much-missed Molly Ivins: "I will not support Hillary Clinton for president: The recent death of Gene McCarthy reminded me of a lesson I spent a long, long time unlearning, so now I have to re-learn it. It's about political courage and heroes, and when a country is desperate for leadership. There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times. There are times a country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief."

I wish I could believe this headline: "The Democratic Primaries Have One Clear Loser: Third Way Centrism." I don't see how he justifies that claim. He sets up his definition of the Third Way candidate he says we don't have in this race and then say we don't have that candidate running this time - or, well, we did, but that was Webb and he got the hook early - but that sort of overlooks the elephant in the room named Hillary Clinton, who started off negotiating down on the minimum wage and whose entire campaign is based on the idea that thinking big is silly fantasy and things can't be made better than they are now. I guess we're going to see more of this from the Roosevelt Institute if they are going to keep taking Pete Peterson's money, but it would have been nice to have an actual Roosevelt Institute pointing out the dangers of the Third Way candidate who happens to be the frontrunner.

"Government may soon begin putting an end to forced arbitration clauses [...] Democratic lawmakers recently introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate called the Restoring Statutory Rights and Interests of the States Act. It would forbid companies from making customers waive their right to sue or join a class-action lawsuit." It would be nice if this were to happen, it's an outrage that companies are using this dodge to circumvent the law.

Charlie Savage and Scott Shane: "Political Talk on Guantánamo Veers From Facts: Even by the standards of an epically polarized Washington, the political talk about President Obama's effort to close the Guantánamo Bay prison is starkly divorced from facts. On both sides of the debate, many claims collapse under scrutiny."

Bobby Kennedy on "Why the Arabs Don't Want Us in Syria: They don't hate 'our freedoms.' They hate that we've betrayed our ideals in their own countries - for oil." But this is a history lesson, not just a rant.

Mark Fiore cartoon: "Voter Fraud Vigilantes"

Stephen Hawking: "If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality."

"Scalia was an intellectual phony: Can we please stop calling him a brilliant jurist? [...] For the truth is that, far more than the average judge, Scalia had no real fidelity to the legal principles he claimed were synonymous with a faithful interpretation of the law. Over and over during Scalia's three decades on the Supreme Court, if one of his cherished interpretive principles got in the way of his political preferences, that principle got thrown overboard in a New York minute."

"Legalizing Weed Has Done What 1 Trillion Dollars and a 40 Year War Couldn't: The $1 trillion War on Drugs launched by President Nixon in 1971 created the Mexican drug cartels, now legalizing weed is killing them."

Can a 3-year old represent herself in immigration court? This judge thinks so: A senior Justice Department official is arguing that 3- and 4-year-olds can learn immigration law well enough to represent themselves in court, staking out an unconventional position in a growing debate over whether immigrant children facing deportation are entitled to taxpayer-funded attorneys." Jeez, I wonder how old you have to be to be a judge...

"Federal Court Rules You Have No Constitutional Right to Engage in 100% Consensual Rough Sex: The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia released its decision in the case of Doe v. George Mason University et al. and, for some reason, they felt compelled to weigh in on whether there is a constitutional right to engage in consensual BDSM sex. Their answer is, 'no.'"

Whit Diffie and Martin Hellman win the Turing Award.

It's about time! Marvin Gaye To Be Inducted In Songwriters Hall Of Fame: "Marvin Gaye, Elvis Costello,Tom Petty, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards from CHIC, and Chip Taylor will be the latest inductees to the Songwriters Hall of Fame."

Ghostbusters: first trailer for all-female reboot arrives

"Donald Trump Gets AIDS In A New Movie, And That Has Studio Execs In A Panic: Afraid of Trump's reaction, they're 'subtly trying to make it disappear,' says an industry source. Audiences at screenings around the world, and some even in the United States, have been cheering and applauding a macabre scene in a new film by Sacha Baron Cohen in which "Donald Trump" accidentally contracts HIV."

"If You Can Get Past Karrine Steffans Calling Oprah And Maya Angelou Hoes, She Actually Has A Point About Women And Sexuality [...] "You don't have to like or even appreciate what Karrine Steffans exemplifies, but she is right when she says a woman's sexual past doesn't determine her worth and purpose. And, like Amber Rose, her voice on this subject exposes many of our hypocrisies because we like to declare a woman can have agency over her body up until that freedom becomes unabashedly sexy and maybe even promiscuous - though there's a wide variation on what many consider such behavior - and then we fall into crass slut-shaming judgement as well."

Nobody could have predicted...

3-D printed steampunk guitar

Neil Rest says this isn't the future he signed up for, but how would I have known about it without him? Worlds First Pancake Printer: PancakeBot
Okay, hungry now.

Among the many things I did not know before YouTube, Tom Jones and Janis Joplin in a duet of "Raise Your Hand".

Aryeh and Gil Gat The Amazing Rabbis, live in Jerusalem, "Wish You Were Here"

I've never regarded the Temptation's performance of this song as a cover, because I know it was written for David Ruffin's voice, and to me it's still the definitive version. But Smokey wrote it, and this is how "My Girl" sounds by the Miracles.

RIP: George Martin, Producer and Arranger for The Beatles, Dies at 90.
- Rolling Stone: "Over the decades, many people have claimed to be the 'fifth Beatle.' But the only person who can credibly hold that title was Martin. The producer not only signed the Beatles to their first record contract in 1962 but went on to work extensively with them on the vast majority of music they recorded over the next eight years, from 'Love Me Do' to the majestic suite that wrapped up Abbey Road."
* Keith Emerson, Emerson, Lake and Palmer Keyboardist, Dead at 71.

"In My Life" - with George Martin on piano.