Glad to see all the interest in Grace Slick’s birthday this year. At the end of the buffet line I’ll repost a remarkably clear video of a performance 45 years ago that will amaze you, especially if you haven’t see it before.

Here are some more contemporary midday news/views treats; no hallucinogens have been added.

* Carson campaign having to backpeddle on candidate’s angry denials he had no relationship with controversial supplement maker; turns out there was a contract.

* Former Romney aide claims GOP fears about Marco Rubio baseless because he passed a 2012 vetting for veep. I think there’s some controversy about exactly how thorough that vetting was.

* Peggy Noonan, a former employee of Poppy’s, writes off Poppy’s son as just not very good at running for president. Oof.

* Long backgrounder by Politico‘s David Rogers over legal wrangles involving Native American efforts to reclaim lost lands.

* At the Prospect, Adele Stan looks for the people funding a deadly attack on public-sector unions at the Supreme Court and finds, to no one’s surprise, plenty of Koch-funded entities.

And in non-political news:

* Storms drive huge, inflatable pumpkin through streets of Peoria. My first though on reading this was: “Ah, Richard Pryor should have lived to see this!” But it’s Peoria, AZ, not IL.

As we break for lunch, as promised, here’s Jefferson Airplane performing “Eskimo Blue Day”–an eco-song that seems to anticipate global warming–in 1970.

YouTube video

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Ed Kilgore is a political columnist for New York and managing editor at the Democratic Strategist website. He was a contributing writer at the Washington Monthly from January 2012 until November 2015, and was the principal contributor to the Political Animal blog.