The shows kickoff Friday, October 10 in Minneapolis and end with a run up the East Coast that will include a return stop to the New York City area.

A limited number of pre-sale tickets for most shows will be available starting Tuesday, July 15 through Music Today:

http://magneticfields.musictoday.com/

Here's the rundown:

THE MAGNETIC FIELDS - OCTOBER 2008 TOUR SCHEDULE:

Oct 10 (Fri)
Minneapolis, MN
The State Theater

Oct 11 (Sat)
Madison, WI
Capitol Theater at Overture Center for the Arts

Oct 13 (Mon)
Dallas, TX
The Majestic
** (Music Today pre-sale not available)

Oct 14 (Tue)
Austin, TX
The Paramount Theater
** (Music Today pre-sale not available)

Oct 15 (Wed)
Boulder, CO
The Boulder Theater

Oct 17 (Fri)
Atlanta, GA
Symphony Hall at the Woodruff Arts Center

Oct 18 (Sat)
Raleigh, NC
Meymandi Concert Hall at Progress Energy Center

Oct 23 (Thu)
Jersey City, NJ
Leows Jersey Theatre

Oct 24 (Fri)
Columbus, OH
The Southern Theatre

Oct 25 (Sat)
Philadelphia, PA
The Merriam Theater
** (Music Today pre-sales start August 4)

Oct 26 (Sun)
Washington, DC
Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University

Charlie Crist, the governor of Florida, and Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, have both accepted invitations to meet with Mr. McCain at his home in Arizona, according to Republican familiars with the decision.

If he chooses Jindal this election will be epic.

The Pipettes have two new members, Ani and Anna. We are demoing up 20-25 new songs, with an eye to recording a second album in the Summer. We want to tell you all about them, but we're very much head-down working on new material at the moment

This means that RiotBecki and Rosay have left to pursue other musical pursuits (which will be brilliant when they emerge), we wish them all the best, we're all still great friends and news on their pursuits will be closely supported by us.People may be confused by such a drastic change in line-up but please rest assured - if we were to be an imitation of ourselves we would stop. Plus the Pipettes has more members come and go than major labels have A&R men, it's just another day in the office for us (plus we've got to go one better than the Sugababes).

We refer you to the manifesto on our website www.thepipettes.com for a more in depth explanation on the functioning of the band; this was the natural step to take. For a more in depth series of answers, we direct you to the prepared video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU

Thanks for all the continued support over this period and we're incredibly excited to be working toward bringing you a new album that will be unlike anything we (or anyone else) have ever done. We will also have limited edition novelty tee-shirts on sale soon, keep an eye out for them and join the growing thousands who can now claim to be 'ex-Pipettes.'

Love
The Pipettes

This was a response by Monster Bobby, one of the Pipettes founding members, to the Pipettes forum:

ok, amusing though i do find it to see you lot constantly slagging nettwerk off, i feel, nonetheless like someone should leap to their defence just a little when people are getting the wrong end of the stick about things. sometimes you guys have a crazy idea about the role of management in a group like the pipettes. for starters, the "badly worded" statement was written by the band and not by nettwerk (well, we thought it was funny); second, the forum is closing, temporarily, because the whole website is closing, temporarily, in order to be completely revamped and relaunched to fit around the new thing. apart form anything else, i started a big discussion on here a few months ago about what to do with the forum and the general conclusion from most posters on that was it would be a good idea to close down the forum and possibly relaunch it in the future in a slightly different form. i'm sorry if our little statement implied that we were closing down the forum as some sort of punitive measure for bad behaviour. this was misleading and regrettable. as for a PR disaster, well, what did you want us to do? two members have left, this was not exactly part of the plan, but frankly we're dealing with it, and overcoming this little hurdle has given us the momentum to write and play better than ever before. the pipettes was never a group about the identities and personalities of its members, much more about a certain idea, an approach to doing things, involving careful study, analysis and thought. being in the pipettes is, in many ways, and i have said this before, a little like school. we have a few graduates from our school now and we are very excited to see what becomes of them. ideally we would have waited to announce anything until we had something to show for the new line-up. we wanted to say, ok, becki and rose have gone, but listen to THIS, and everyone would've gone f**k me Reg, that's amazing, instead of having to spend months speculating about whether we were still gonna be as good as we were and what have you. but, well, everyone was gossiping, perhaps inevitably, and barding was making a nuisance of himself again like some spurned lover... i personally was all up for letting people talk and getting on with the task at hand, but certain people began to take the opinion that it was getting ridiculous, and pitchfork were sniffing around and saying, 'ello, what's all this then, so we released a statement, and it got on the front page of nme.com, pitchfork and popjustice. now i wouldn't call that a pr disaster. actually, i'd call that quite a tasty bit of press. besides, announcing everything at once seemed to conform to larry david's 'double transgression theory', and as we have recently come to realise that larry david is the only ethical subject in southern california, his advice on managing bad news seemed as cogent as anyone's.

while we're at it, this polydor thing. everyone on here who's at least half-awake has known for sometime that we signed to interscope records in america last year. interscope is a part of universal music group, polydor is a part of universal music group. interscope over there, polydor over here. get it? no big change there. for the one chap on the popjustice forum who is concerned about indie rock bands signing to major labels, well, first off, what is he doing on the popjustice forum with such antiquated rockist views? and secondly, please don't besmirch the good name of the pipettes with a word as sullied as indie, which these days seems to be little more than a synonym for soft rock. actually, according to simon reynolds (in rip it up and start again) the word indie first starts cropping up (to replace the word 'independent' or 'diy' or'punk' or whatever) at precisely the point in the 80s when indie labels started making deals with majors (see Blanco y Negro) and majors started producing little boutique fake indies, so indie, from the very beginning, referred to music that appropriated some of the key signifiers of independent music but was in fact on a major label, if a somewhat concealed major label.

the pipettes, however, nailed their colours to the wall from the off, we are a pop group. a meta-pop group, if you like. we do not script everything we do in advance, although we have considered doing so. however, even if i had written the script for our whole career long in advance, neither i, nor any of the rest of us, would have come up with anything half as funny as recording a second album (second! that's all, just the second one!) with, at least as far as the public eye is concerned, none of the original members. i am grateful for destiny's extraordinary sense of humour for throwing this our way. It makes perfect sense for the pipettes to do all the things that pop groups do, but more so, in a slightly more exaggerated and preposterous fashion, in much the same way that erik satie was best able to poke fun at the french bourgeois society establishment by dressing like the very model of an average bourgeois functionary. according to slovenian lacanian philosopher, slavoj zizek, there are two kinds of rules in any given society. there are the official rules which say you must do this (but really, everybody knows that you don't really have to) and you must not do this (but really everybody knows that you can get away with it) and then there are the somewhat more hidden, unofficial rules of conduct. anyone who follows the rules precisely as written, with no regard for those unwritten rules or the tacitly accepted exceptions to the official rules, is either a psychopath or a revolutionary. such, in some ways, at least, is our approach to pop music. we must, in a sense, do everything wrong in order to know that we are doing the right thing.

IMG_8843 copy, originally uploaded by dead-ro.

Sign says, "Would we have allowed Nazi Germany to host the Olympics?"

Just got this from their mailing list:

Earl Greyhound was photographed for an NYC/multi-cultural spread in the NY Times Magazine so please be sure to look at it (us) this Sunday, March 30th. You know, for fun.

By Gary David Goldberg

It’s been almost 20 years since “Family Ties” went off the air. And Alex P. Keaton’s political idols, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, have each gone off to their deserved places in history. Yet I still get asked a lot — O.K. maybe not a lot but more than twice — whether Alex Keaton would be a Republican today. And, if so, who would be his candidate in the 2008 presidential election.

Before I go any further I should point out that I’m a registered independent. I vote Democratic most of the time but not always. I am part of the 75 percent of Americans who strongly disapprove of the job George Bush has done as president.

I should also point out that to properly represent Alex and his political point of view I, as well as the rest of the “Family Ties” writers, did a great deal of research on this subject. And during that time I developed a very healthy respect for the true conservative point of view. A powerful and proud strain of American political thought. And even today I bow to no one in my desire to see the capital gains tax eliminated.

Alex Keaton was a true conservative Republican. He was for limited government. He was strongly against government involvement in the personal lives of its citizens. He was competent and capable — the ultimate over-achiever. But, above all Alex Keaton was a firm believer in the power of ideas. He believed in the competitive marketplace of intellectual discourse, where the best ideas win — usually Alex’s. And so it’s difficult to recognize in this current incarnation of the Republican Party, a party whose legacy will include Terri Schiavo and Hurricane Katrina, a place where Alex Keaton might feel the least bit comfortable.

Alex was smart. Real smart. And, proud of it. He also believed deeply in the power of science. And, the free exchange of scientific ideas. Uncensored. Unfettered by excessive government regulation. Not stifled by religious orthodoxy. Not rewritten by political hacks with no academic or scientific credentials. So it’s hard to picture Alex in a party that seems to be waging war against science, and where their presidential candidates seem comfortable debating whether or not the earth is round.

On the other hand, I can’t see Alex easily voting for a Democrat. I think his natural inclination would have been to go for John McCain. But, that would have been John McCain in 2000, when he was still talking straight: Jerry Falwell was an agent of intolerance, and waterboarding is torture. McCain going back on those two key points would have certainly kept Alex from pulling the lever for him now.

I think Ron Paul’s message is one that would resonate with Alex. And he would appreciate Paul’s intellectual power and his willingness to state his positions unequivocally and without regard to which way the political winds were blowing. I think he’d really like Mike Huckabee’s ideas of getting rid of the IRS. (I know I do.) But ultimately Alex likes to win, and I think that would have kept him from fully committing to either of those guys.

Hillary Clinton? I have to disclose that I’ve known Hillary Clinton for more than 20 years. I think she’s a warm, funny and caring person of formidable intelligence. I admire her, and I would love to be able to say that Alex would vote for her. But I don’t think it could happen.

So what about Barack Obama? I honestly don’t know. I think Alex is an independent now, and as deeply engaged in politics as ever. He would be intrigued by Obama — impressed with his eloquence and intelligence. He would be unhappy with his plan to tax the wealthy at a higher rate, but keenly aware that eight years of neglect and corruption and no-bid contracts have to somehow be overturned. And, I think Obama’s slogan is very similar to Alex’s own personal mantra: “Of Course I Can.”

I think that Alex might just be ready to take a chance. I can picture him stepping into the voting booth, closing the curtain behind him, taking a deep breath and then for the first time in his life putting his hand up to the Democratic Party lever. He’d touch it tentatively, trying to get comfortable. Take his hand off. Put it back. He’d grasp the lever firmly. Squeeze it. And as he was about to pull, we FADE OUT.

For what its worth Michael J. Fox and I have differing opinions about just where Alex Keaton is today. I believe he does pro bono legal work for the Children’s Defense Fund.

Mike thinks he’s just now getting out of prison.

RIP William Buckley

What happened? The publication of the article capped three months of intense internal deliberations at the Times over whether to publish the negative piece and its most explosive charge about the affair. It pitted the reporters investigating the story, who believed they had nailed it, against executive editor Bill Keller, who believed they hadn't. It likely cost the paper one investigative reporter, who decided to leave in frustration. And the Times ended up publishing a piece in which the institutional tensions about just what the story should be are palpable.

Full article in extended

Behind the Bombshell in 'The New York Times.'

Gabriel Sherman, The New Republic Published: Thursday, February 21, 2008

Last night, around dinnertime, The New York Times posted on its website a 3,000-word investigation detailing Senator John McCain's connections to a telecommunications lobbyist named Vicki Iseman. The controversial piece, written by Washington bureau reporters Jim Rutenberg, Marilyn Thompson, Stephen Labaton, and David Kirkpatrick, and published in this morning's paper, explores the possibility that the Republican presidential candidate may have had an affair with the 40-year-old blond-haired lobbyist for the telecommunications industry while he chaired the Senate Commerce Committee in the late-1990s.

Beyond its revelations, however, what's most remarkable about the article is that it appeared in the paper at all: The new information it reveals focuses on the private matters of the candidate, and relies entirely on the anecdotal evidence of McCain's former staffers to justify the piece--both personal and anecdotal elements unusual in the Gray Lady. The story is filled with awkward journalistic moves--the piece contains a collection of decade-old stories about McCain and Iseman appearing at functions together and concerns voiced by McCain's aides that the Senator shouldn't be seen in public with Iseman--and departs from the Times' usual authoritative voice. At one point, the piece suggestively states: "In 1999 she began showing up so frequently in his offices and at campaign events that staff members took notice. One recalled asking, 'Why is she always around?'" In the absence of concrete, printable proof that McCain and Iseman were an item, the piece delicately steps around purported romance and instead reports on the debate within the McCain campaign about the alleged affair.

What happened? The publication of the article capped three months of intense internal deliberations at the Times over whether to publish the negative piece and its most explosive charge about the affair. It pitted the reporters investigating the story, who believed they had nailed it, against executive editor Bill Keller, who believed they hadn't. It likely cost the paper one investigative reporter, who decided to leave in frustration. And the Times ended up publishing a piece in which the institutional tensions about just what the story should be are palpable.

The McCain investigation began in November, after Rutenberg, who covers the political media and advertising beat, got a tip. Within a few days, Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet assigned Thompson and Labaton to join the project and, later, conservative beat reporter David Kirkpatrick to chip in as well. Labaton brought his expertise with regulatory issues to the team, and Thompson had done investigative work: At The Washington Post in the 1990s she had edited Michael Isikoff's reporting on the Paula Jones scandal, and in 2003 she broke the story that Strom Thurmond had secretly fathered a child with his family's black maid. Having four reporters thrown on the story showed just what a potential blockbuster the paper believed it might have.

From the outset, the Times reporters encountered stiff resistance from the McCain camp. After working on the story for several weeks, Thompson learned that McCain had personally retained Bill Clinton's former attorney Bob Bennett to defend himself against the Times' questioning. At the same time, two McCain campaign advisers, Mark Salter and Charlie Black, vigorously pressed the Times reporters to drop the matter. And in early December, McCain himself called Keller to deny the allegations on the record.

In early December, according to sources with knowledge of the events, Thompson requested a meeting with Bennett to arrange access to the senator and to discuss why the Republican presidential candidate had sought out a criminal lawyer in the first place. Bennett agreed to meet, and on the afternoon of December 18, Labaton, Rutenberg, and Thompson arrived at his Washington office. During a one-hour meeting, according to sources, Bennett admonished the Times reporters to be fair to McCain, especially in light of the whisper campaign that had sundered his 2000 presidential bid in South Carolina. He told them that he would field any questions they had, and promised to provide answers to their queries. Of the reporters in the room, Bennett knew Labaton the best. In the 1990s, Labaton had covered the Whitewater investigation, and Bennett viewed him as a straight-shooting, accurate reporter who could be reasoned with. Rutenberg he knew less well, and Bennett was miffed that Rutenberg had been calling all over Washington asking probing questions about McCain and his dealings with Iseman. The rumors were bound to get out.

Two days after that meeting, on December 20, news of the Times' unpublished investigation burst into public view when Matt Drudge posted an anonymously sourced item on the Drudge Report. "MEDIA FIREWORKS: MCCAIN PLEADS WITH NY TIMES TO SPIKE STORY," the headline proclaimed; the story hinted around the core of the allegations and focused on Keller's decision to hold the piece. "Rutenberg had hoped to break the story before the Christmas holiday," the item said, quoting unnamed sources, "but editor Keller expressed serious reservations about journalism ethics and issuing a damaging story so close to an election."

Immediately, the media pounced on the budding scandal. "If John McCain has hired Bob Bennett as his lawyer," one commentator said on Fox News, "that's a big--you don't hire Bob Bennett to knock down a press story. You hire Bob Bennett because you have serious legal issues somehow." On MSNBC, Pat Buchanan speculated that the Times newsroom was the source of the leak. "They've been rebuffed and rebuffed on this story, and they say we've had it, and they go around then and Drudge pops it just like he popped the Monica Lewinsky story first."

Initially, the McCain campaign refused to acknowledge the Drudge post. But by the afternoon of December 20, McCain denied the allegations at a press conference in Detroit, and his campaign released a statement deriding the Drudge item as "gutter politics."

Rumors of the unpublished Times piece swirled through the Romney campaign, then still locked in a tight dogfight for the Republican nomination. After the Drudge item flashed, Romney's traveling press secretary Eric Fehrnstrom went to the back of the campaign plane to ask New York Times reporter Michael Luo, who was covering Romney, if he had heard when the piece was running.

Inside the Times newsroom, the Drudge item sent the McCain piece into hiding, making it both tightly guarded and "a topic of conversation," as one staffer put it. "The fact that it ended up on Drudge pushed it into secrecy," added another staffer. "The paper gets constipated on these things," a veteran former Times staffer said, describing the editors' deliberations over whether to run the piece.

In late December, according to Times sources, Keller told the reporters and the story's editor, Rebecca Corbett, that he was holding the piece in part because they could not secure documentary proof of the alleged affair beyond anecdotal evidence. Keller felt that given the on-the-record-denials by McCain and Iseman, the reporters needed more than the circumstantial evidence they had assembled to prove the case. The reporters felt they had the goods.

The Drudge item didn't derail the investigation, however. By late December, the reporters had submitted several pages of written questions to Bennett for comment, and completed a draft of the piece before the New Year. But to their growing frustration, Keller ordered rounds of changes and additional reporting. According to Times sources, Baquet remained an advocate for his reporters and pushed the piece to be published, but sources say Keller wanted a more nuanced story looking less at personal matters and more at questions of Iseman's lobbying and McCain's legislative record. (The Washington-New York divide is an eternal rift at the Paper of Record: Baquet had successfully brought stability and investigative acumen to the Washington bureau; with the McCain piece, he was being sucked into his first major struggle with New York.)

In mid-January, Keller told the reporters to significantly recast the piece after several drafts had circulated among editors in Washington and New York. After three different versions, the piece ended up not as a stand-alone investigation but as an entry in the paper's "The Long Run" series looking at presidential candidates' career histories.

It was at about that time, amidst flurries of rumors swirling about the looming Times investigation, that the Times' McCain beat reporter, Marc Santora, abruptly left the campaign trail after covering the senator for four and a half months, frustrated by the McCain rumors. A rising star at the paper, Santora had been working grueling hours, joining the 2008 election coverage straight from a reporting assignment in Baghdad. As the campaign headed to South Carolina, the site of McCain's defeat in 2000, Santora emailed the Times' deputy Washington editor, Richard Stevenson, to vent about how the rumors were dogging him on the campaign trail, and left the McCain beat on January 10. "The last thing I wanted was to be a pawn in this thing," Santora told me. "I was exhausted, there were a lot of rumors flying around. I thought the best thing for me to do was take a break."

Santora wasn't the last casualty of the process. Two weeks ago, in early February, Marilyn Thompson, one of the four reporters working on the McCain investigation quit the Times. Thompson had been a staffer at The Washington Post for 14 years, until 2004. She had spent just six months at the Times and recorded only four bylines before accepting an offer to return to her former employer as an editor overseeing the Post's accountability coverage of money and politics. According to sources, Thompson became increasingly dispirited with the delays, and worked around the clock through the Christmas vacation on the piece, only to see the investigation sputter. Declining to comment on the investigation itself, Thompson told me her decision to return to the Post "was an opportunity to go back to the place that has been a home to me." (Thompson celebrated her byline during her last week at the Times. Her final day at the paper is tomorrow.)

Some observers say that the piece, published today, was not ready to roll. On Wednesday evening, much of the cable news commentary focused on the Times' heavy use of innuendo and circumstantial evidence. This morning, Time magazine managing editor Rick Stengel told MSNBC that he wouldn't have published such a piece. Since the story broke, the McCain campaign has been doing its best to pin the story on the Times and make the media angle the focus.

Indeed, when TNR started reporting on the whereabouts of the story on February 4th, all parties seemed intent on denying its viability. "There's absolutely no story there. And it'd be a mistake for you to write about a non-story that didn't run," McCain adviser Charlie Black told me last week. "Drudge shouldn't have put that up. He didn't know what the hell he was doing."

McCain communications director Jill Hazelbaker told me last week the campaign had no further comment beyond the December 20 statement assailing the allegations. According to McCain advisers, the Times reporters hadn't contacted the campaign about the investigation for several weeks before the piece ran, and only a few reporters from competing news organizations have put in calls on the matter. Two members of the McCain team had contacted TNR's editor to pressure him not to investigate the story.

Of course, each of these sources had reason to keep the story from breaking. But what actually pushed it into publication? The reporters working on the investigation declined to comment. In an email to me on February 19, Keller wrote: "This sounds like a pointless exercise to me--speculating about reporting that may or may not result in an article. But if that's what Special Correspondents of The New Republic do, speculate away. When we have something to say, we'll say it in the paper."

Late in the day on February 19, Baquet sent a final draft of the Times piece to Keller and Times managing editor Jill Abramson in New York. After a series of discussions, the three editors decided to publish the investigation. "We published the story when it was ready which is what we always do," Baquet told TNR this morning. He added: "Nothing forced our hand. Nothing pushed us to move faster other than our own natural desire that we wanted to get a story in the paper that met all of our standards."

When the Times did finally publish the long-gestating investigation last night, the McCain camp immediately tried to train the glare back on the Gray Lady. In fact, McCain advisers stated that TNR's inquiries pressured the Times to publish its story before it was ready so this magazine wouldn't scoop the Times' piece. "They did this because The New Republic was going to run a story that looked back at the infighting there, the Judy Miller-type power struggles -- they decided that they would rather smear McCain than suffer a story that made The New York Times newsroom look bad," Salter told reporters last night in Toledo, Ohio.

This morning, after the piece ran, and as TNR's article was about to be posted, Keller finally responded to repeated requests for interviews. In an e-mail, he defended the substance, and the timing, of the story. "Our policy is, we publish stories when they are ready. 'Ready' means the facts have been nailed down to our satisfaction, the subjects have all been given a full and fair chance to respond, and the reporting has been written up with all the proper context and caveats." Important as the story may indeed turn out to be, it may have provided the Times' critics with a few caveats too many.

Gabriel Sherman is a Special Correspondent to The New Republic.

Close

Copyright © 2007 The New Republic. All rights reserved.

APR 9 Phoenix Concert Theatre Toronto, ON - Canada
APR 10 Crofoot Ballroom Pontiac, MI
APR 11 Newport Music Hall Columbus, OH
APR 12 Carnegie Music Hall of Homestead Munhall, PA
APR 13 State Theater of Ithaca Ithaca, NY
APR 14 9:30 Club Washington, DC
APR 16 Toads Place Richmond Richmond, VA
APR 17 Georgia Theatre Athens, GA
APR 18 The Cannery Nashville, TN
APR 19 Pageant St Louis, MO
APR 20 Riviera Theatre Chicago, IL
APR 21 Orpheum - Madison Madison, WI
APR 22 Beachland Ballroom Cleveland, OH
all dates w/Okervill River

Tickets go on sale this Saturday at http://thenewpornographers.ducatking.com/

Neko and Hogan have been immortalized in an upcoming episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force!!!!!!! The Cartoon Network show premieres its new season on Sunday, January 20, and Sirens, the episode which features the ladies alongside former Phillie, John Kruk, airs January 27.

Taken from Neko's website.