Clinton, Schumer lose Woodstock museum may show up as a Jay Leno headline chuckle. Award goes to Bran Tumulty's posting on the Politics on the Hudson blog at the The Journal News/LoHud.com, out of White Plains, N.Y.

It's just an earmark. All is not lost.

Efforts by Sens. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chuck Schumer to earmark $1 million in federal money for a museum commemorating the 1969 Woodstock music festival were defeated Thursday.

The Senate voted 52 to 42 in support of a proposal by Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn to redirect the money for the care for pregnant women, mothers, and infants.

Coburn, an obstetrician, is a fiscal conservative who has waged a war on earmarks for local projects that rob money for higher priorities.

Clinton and Schumer voted to keep the local project, also known as the Museum at Bethel Woods.

Science is not a higher priority than art and music. War should not be the highest priority. What you value is not inherently more important than what others care about. We're not trying to build the no-frills society, last I checked.

In a functional society, there's support for all the arts and sciences, infants and boomers, hobbies and enjoyment, learning and easy travel and as many bronze monuments as you need. What you value is not inherently more important than what others care about.

Vaguely related: Women Lit the Fire That Burned Draft Cards at Women's E-News. Another story from 1969:

AP photo
Oct. 15, 1969, millions nationwide gathered to call for a moratorium on the Vietnam War. Above, the Washington, D.C. demonstration.

As night fell in the capital city on Moratorium Day, 15,000 people carried candles around the Washington monument, led by Coretta Scott King, identified by the press, in the custom of the times, as "Mrs. Martin Luther King."

Although young men captured the camera's eye as they burned their draft cards, much of the work of organizing draft resistance was done by women. Singer Joan Baez performed protest songs everywhere with a banner behind her that read: "Girls say yes to boys who say no." In Greenwich Village, the Peace Center, directed by writer Grace Paley, organized and counseled scores of conscientious objectors willing to go to jail rather than serve in the war.

Arrested with the Berrigan brothers for actions that included pouring blood and napalm on selective service records of men scheduled to be drafted was former nun Mary Moylan, who later went underground with them....

Alt-music retailing: From The Seminal (So, One Week Later, Is The Album Dead Yet?):

Last week, Radiohead released their latest album, In Rainbows, for free, asking fans to pay whatever they liked for the full length downloadable work.

...A week later, the “sales” numbers for In Rainbows are starting to leak. By my calculations, Radiohead made out with a ton of money.

According to a source close to the band, In Rainbows has “sold” approximately 1.2 million copies as of October 12th. In comparison, that’s more albums sold in the first week than Radioheads’ last three releases combined. According to an Internet poll of 3,000 people, the average price paid for In Rainbows was $8. If these numbers are accurate, Radiohead has made close to $10 million in one week on this album alone.

More: Radiohead's direct-marketing experiment looking successful

There's hope yet: New research concludes that the sensationalism sweeping local news is bad for ratings. The Globe reports,

Viewers, the study found, are perfectly willing to watch stories on education policy or tax debates - in many cases they'll tune in to those stories but flip away from a segment on a celebrity divorce or a deadly highway pileup. And they'll consistently reward in-depth reporting with higher ratings than more cursory stories, no matter what the topic.

The findings suggest that the shift to violence and voyeurism has left everyone worse off. Viewers, fed a diet of out-of-state car chase footage, are left knowing less about issues, like the schools, that actually affect them. And the TV stations, in clumsily catering to an audience they misunderstood, may actually be sabotaging their own ratings.

...By slim but statistically significant margins, stories on public policy beat out stories on celebrities, and stories about health issues did better than stories on crime. And giving the prize lead spot in a newscast to a story on economic issues turned out to be the best way to retain viewers from the previous program - a key ratings indicator.

Movie of the absurd: Reverend Billy Wants You To Stop Shopping. RU Sirius interviews the star of

What Would Jesus Buy?, a new film directed by Rob VanAlkemade and produced by Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock. The film follows Billy and his "Church of Stop Shopping choir" on a trek across America, between Thanksgiving and Christmas in 2005, as our protagonists try to inject a little bit of genuine holiday spirit into the frenzy of the Xmas shopping season. (You know — love thy neighbors, help the needy, give peace a chance...)

To accomplish this, Billy and the choir tweak the harried shoppers with some good-natured, mock-Biblical preaching and singing that challenges them to put away their credit cards and get with some spontaneous, joyful, and real human experiences. Reverend Billy is Bill Talen, a seasoned performance artist who moved from San Francisco to NYC in the late '90s — and if the prospect of an hour or two of typical lefty agitprop leaves you dry, don't worry. He's a funny man who could charm the pants off of Scrooge.