17>16.
No comments on The recall election hangover blog, part the last
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How can two songs be the number one song in the country today in 1956? Do a Google search for the words “B side”:
(Those songs, by the way, were the first Elvis recorded with his fantastic backup singers, the Jordanaires.)
Today in 1962, the Beatles made their debut with their new drummer, Ringo Starr, following a two-hour rehearsal.
Four years later, the Beatles were at number one (again with the B side):
Diana Ross reached number one today in 1973 with her first post-Supremes hit:
The number one album that same day was, believe it or not …
The number one song today in 1979:
The number one song today in 1984:
Birthdays today begin with Johnny Preston:
Nona Hendryx of Labelle:
Dennis Elliott was the original drummer of Foreigner:
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Victor Davis Hanson more often than not writes about national security, but he notices something different about the Obama presidency:
Ever since he began campaigning for the presidency, Obama has hectored the private sector — talking nonstop of higher taxes, “spreading the wealth,” “fat cat” bankers, paying your “fair share,” “millionaires and billionaires,” “corporate jet owners,” and “unneeded” income.
Such share-the-wealth tirades were matched with redistributive vendettas. Vast new financial regulations and red tape followed. A new trillion-dollar health-care entitlement was imposed on employers. The National Labor Relations Board is attempting to shut down a new Boeing aircraft plant. The federal government took over private businesses — and on occasion reversed the order of payment to private creditors. New environmental regulations have curbed energy and agricultural production. Lifelong academics and government functionaries, not businesspeople, staff the Obama Cabinet and head the administration’s agencies.
But imagine if the president had instead promoted profit-making — by cutting red tape, praising entrepreneurs, promising no new taxes or burdens on businesses, and offering incentives to open new plants inside the United States. In other words, what if small businesses and large corporations believed Obama to be a friend and partner, a leader who wanted them to make big profits, hire millions of workers, and enrich the country in the process?
The United States should be in a renaissance. In a food- and fuel-short world, we have vast agricultural and energy resources. While there are riots, strikes, and unrest from Europe to the Middle East, America remains quiet. Foreign depositors even now still believe that the United States is the least likely nation to either confiscate their capital or renege on the interest owed on it. China, Russia, and India have enormous environmental, demographic, and social challenges ahead, of the same sort the United States dealt with decades ago. Our military is far superior to the competitors.
After nearly three years of blaming, apologizing, and explaining what America cannot and should not do, it is past time for a confident President Obama to remind the country that we can do almost anything we wish.
Instead of lecturing some Americans about why they owe their existing wealth to others, why not inspire them to create even bigger new profits to enrich everyone?
Obama’s reflexive anti-business beliefs are utterly predictable, however, and not just because of his own views or the views of his party and its apparatchiks. In fact, Robert Heinlein predicted them in 1973:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
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It figures that the one subject I didn’t prepare for in my Wisconsin Public Radio appearance Friday was the riots in Great Britain. So when that was the last subject that came up, I stammered through an answer that I really did not know why riots were taking place in Britain, or in Vancouver after the Stanley Cup Finals, or on the first day of the Wisconsin State Fair.
My counterpart had an answer, although it apparently required little thought — evil Conservative governnment cutbacks, no hope for youth, the gap between the rich and the poor, etc., etc., etc.
Someone who has done more thought on both of this is Theodore Dalrymple, British physician and author:
The youth of Britain have long placed a de facto curfew on the old, who in most places would no more think of venturing forth after dark than would peasants in Bram Stoker’s Transylvania. Indeed, well before the riots last week, respectable persons would not venture into the centers of most British cities or towns on Friday and Saturday nights, for fear—and in the certainty—of encountering drunken and aggressive youngsters. In Britain nowadays, the difference between ordinary social life and riot is only a matter of degree, not of type. …
The rioters in the news last week had a thwarted sense of entitlement that has been assiduously cultivated by an alliance of intellectuals, governments and bureaucrats. “We’re fed up with being broke,” one rioter was reported as having said, as if having enough money to satisfy one’s desires were a human right rather than something to be earned.
“There are people here with nothing,” this rioter continued: nothing, that is, except an education that has cost $80,000, a roof over their head, clothes on their back and shoes on their feet, food in their stomachs, a cellphone, a flat-screen TV, a refrigerator, an electric stove, heating and lighting, hot and cold running water, a guaranteed income, free medical care, and all of the same for any of the children that they might care to propagate.
But while the rioters have been maintained in a condition of near-permanent unemployment by government subvention augmented by criminal activity, Britain was importing labor to man its service industries. You can travel up and down the country and you can be sure that all the decent hotels and restaurants will be manned overwhelmingly by young foreigners; not a young Briton in sight (thank God).
The reason for this is clear: The young unemployed Britons not only have the wrong attitude to work, for example regarding fixed hours as a form of oppression, but they are also dramatically badly educated. Within six months of arrival in the country, the average young Pole speaks better, more cultivated English than they do.
The icing on the cake, as it were, is that social charges on labor and the minimum wage are so high that no employer can possibly extract from the young unemployed Briton anything like the value of what it costs to employ him. And thus we have the paradox of high youth unemployment at the very same time that we suck in young workers from abroad.
The culture in which the young unemployed have immersed themselves is not one that is likely to promote virtues such as self-discipline, honesty and diligence. Four lines from the most famous lyric of the late and unlamentable Amy Winehouse should establish the point:
I didn’t get a lot in class
But I know it don’t come in a shot glass
They tried to make me go to rehab
But I said ‘no, no, no’
This message is not quite the same as, for example, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise.”
Canadian Mark Steyn adds:
The [debt rating] downgrade and the riots are part of the same story: Big Government debauches not only a nation’s finances but its human capital, too. …
The London rioters are the children of dependency, the progeny of Big Government: They have been marinated in “stimulus” their entire lives. …
While the British Treasury is busy writing checks to Amsterdam prostitutes, one-fifth of children are raised in homes in which no adult works — in which the weekday ritual of rising, dressing, and leaving for gainful employment is entirely unknown. One tenth of the adult population has done not a day’s work since Tony Blair took office on May 1, 1997. …
The great-grandparents of these [rioters] stood alone against a Fascist Europe in that dark year after the fall of France in 1940. Their grandparents were raised in one of the most peaceful and crime-free nations on the planet. Were those Englishmen of the mid-20th century to be magically transplanted to London today, they’d assume they were in some fantastical remote galaxy. If Charlton Heston was horrified to discover the Planet of the Apes was his own, Britons are beginning to realize that the remote desert island of Lord of the Flies is, in fact, located just off the coast of Europe in the north-east Atlantic. Within two generations of the Blitz and the Battle of Britain, a significant proportion of the once-free British people entrusted themselves to social rewiring by liberal compassionate Big Government and thereby rendered themselves paralytic and unemployable save for non-speaking parts in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. And even that would likely be too much like hard work. …
This is the logical dead end of the Nanny State. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the British welfare regime in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want” to be accomplished by “co-operation between the State and the individual.” In attempting to insulate the citizenry from life’s vicissitudes, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. As I write in my book: “Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity.” The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers, the highest abortion rate. Marriage is all but defunct, except for William and Kate, fellow toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. …
Big Government means small citizens: It corrodes the integrity of a people, catastrophically. Within living memory, the city in flames on our TV screens every night governed a fifth of the earth’s surface and a quarter of its population. When you’re imperialists on that scale, there are bound to be a few mishaps along the way. But nothing the British Empire did to its subject peoples has been as total and catastrophic as what a post-great Britain did to its own.
There are lessons for all of us there.
There is, however, one crucial difference between Great Britain and the U.S. Unlike in Britain, thanks to the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, you have the right to arm and defend yourself. Without it, the National Rifle Association’s Chris Cox says …
If you want to see what a disarmed society looks like, look no further than England.
Thousands of angry, drunk, violent thugs running wild and stealing anything they can carry. Shopkeepers and homeowners crippled with fear, unable to defend their loved ones or their property. Innocent citizens forced to watch helplessly while their life’s dreams — everything they worked so hard to build and acquire — are carried out the door, or smashed to pieces, or burned to the ground. …
The fact is, when British politicians stripped their citizens of their God-given right to self-defense, they robbed them of their freedom and their dignity.
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The Beatles were never known for having wild concerts. (Other than their fans, that is.) Today in 1960, the Beatles played their first of 48 appearances at the Indra Club in Hamburg, West Germany. The Indra Club’s owner asked the Beatles to put on a “mach shau.” The Beatles responded by reportedly screaming, shouting, leaping around the stage, and playing lying on the floor of the club. John Lennon reportedly made a stage appearance wearing only his underwear, and also wore a toilet seat around his neck on stage. As they say, Sei vorsichtig mit deinen Wünschen.
Four years later, the council of Glasgow, Scotland, required that men who had Beatles haircuts would have to wear swimming caps in city pools, because men’s hair was clogging the pool filters.
Today in 1968, the Doors had their only number one album, “Waiting for the Sun”:
Today in 1974, this 1½-hit wonder had the number one song in Britain:
(What do I mean by “1½-hit wonder?” The Three Degrees sang at the end of MFSB’s instrumental hit “The Sound of Philadelphia,” another great late Motown song.)
Birthdays today start with John Seiter of Spanky and Our Gang:
Gary Talley played guitar for the Box Tops:
Boston drummer Sib Hashian:
Kevin Rowlands sang for one-hit wonder Dexy’s Midnight Runners (hey, that rhymes):
Belinda Carlisle of the Go-Gos:
Drummer Steve Gorman of the Black Crowes:
Colin Moulding of XTC:
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A news release from the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the statewide teacher union:
WEAC’s Executive Director Dan Burkhalter confirmed today that layoff notices are being issued to 42 WEAC employees today, approximately 40 percent of the state-level organization’s workforce. The following statement can be attributed to Dan Burkhalter:
“Obviously WEAC is affected by Governor Walker’s union-busting legislation, and our organization is responding on many fronts. Layoffs and budget cuts are a reaction to the legislative action that was taken. …”
The “union-busting legislation” Burkhalter refers to is the provision that prohibits automatic payroll deduction of WEAC or local teacher union dues. As a poster on Fairly Conservative puts it:
Why would WEAC receive significantly less money under the new budget and Act 10. We know that the vast majority of school districts have not been forced to make layoffs and some have even hired more teachers. In addition to this, gross salary cuts were not part of Act 10.
This leaves the most likely source of the WEAC budget difficulties: teachers are taking advantage of Act 10 and choosing not to pay dues or are paying less in dues now that it is voluntary.
Before state law was changed, according to the Lakeland Times, state teachers working full-time paid $295.o1 in dues to WEAC, plus $19.99 to WEAC’s political action committee, plus $166 to the National Education Association, plus their local union dues. That $295.01 per full-time teacher generated $23.4 million in revenue for WEAC. Unlike their members, public employee unions, and particularly management of unions, contribute absolutely, positively nothing of value to this state.
On the other hand, perhaps WEAC wouldn’t have had to lay off 40 percent of its employees (and I wonder what their union thinks) had it made better use of those union dues instead of, say, spending $500,000 in failing to capture Democratic control of the state Senate. Or, for that matter, employing, with six-figure salaries, a president and an executive director. In fact, according to WEAC’s 2008 IRS 990 form, six WEAC management made more than $100,000, substantially more than any of WEAC’s members. (The average WEAC employee — as in $14,382,812 in compensation divided by WEAC’s 151 employees in 2009 — made $95,250, which is also more than any WEAC member.) Five management of the Wisconsin State Employees Union made more than $100,000 in 2008, and 19 management of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees made more than $100,000 in 2009.
Middle class, my … well, you finish the sentence.
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Warren Buffett has some tax advice for us:
Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent. …
I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation. …
I know well many of the mega-rich and, by and large, they are very decent people. They love America and appreciate the opportunity this country has given them. Many have joined the Giving Pledge, promising to give most of their wealth to philanthropy. Most wouldn’t mind being told to pay more in taxes as well, particularly when so many of their fellow citizens are truly suffering. …
I would leave rates for 99.7 percent of taxpayers unchanged and continue the current 2-percentage-point reduction in the employee contribution to the payroll tax. This cut helps the poor and the middle class, who need every break they can get.
But for those making more than $1 million — there were 236,883 such households in 2009 — I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more — there were 8,274 in 2009 — I would suggest an additional increase in rate.
My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.
To that, Pat Buchanan (of whom I’m not usually a fan) has a suggestion: “Why doesn’t he set an example and send a check for $5 billion to the federal government? He’s got about $40 billion. … You know, you had a plan up there … where the superrich could contribute an extra amount, and it was something like one-tenth of 1 percent did it. You get all this noise from these big rich folks; let them send checks and set an example instead of writing op-eds.”
For that matter, nothing is stopping Buffett from telling his tax professionals to stop finding ways for him to (legally) avoid taxes. Clearly, Buffett’s not doing that, either, which makes him, regardless of his fortune, another tax hypocrite. (You don’t suppose that Buffett favors estate taxes because he owns six life insurance companies and 10 percent of life insurance company revenue comes from those avoiding estate taxes, do you?)
Perhaps Buffett isn’t writing that $5 billion check because of the real reason to oppose Buffett’s tax proposal: Because government at every level wastes our tax money, every day. Buffett cannot possibly be naïve enough to believe that more tax dollars won’t get sucked into some patronage-fueled hole in Washington. (Remember the word “earmark”?)
Buffett also has a selective memory about tax legislation, as does Bloomberg BusinessWeek:
In 1982, amid a punishing 16-month recession, Reagan approved the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history. A booming economy followed in 1983 and 1984, enabling him to sail to re-election.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton forced a tax increase through Congress that Representative Dick Armey, then chairman of the House Republican Conference, condemned as a “job killer” that would push the economy into recession. That increase was succeeded by the creation of 23 million new jobs, and the Clinton Administration left a budget surplus of about $236 billion. By contrast, President George W. Bush pushed through two rounds of tax cuts and created just 3 million jobs. He also turned the surplus he inherited into a $1.2 trillion deficit.
Obviously, today’s economic crisis is vastly more severe than anything Reagan or Clinton faced, thus the timing and scope of tax increases must be carefully calibrated.
What neither Buffett nor Bloomberg told you is that one year before the 1982 tax increase (or, as Reagan called it, “revenue enhancement”), Congress passed a substantial tax cut. Congress also passed tax reform with substantially lower rates in 1986. Congress also passed tax reform in 1997. And a business magazine editorial writer should be smart enough to know that no president and no politician creates jobs; businesses create jobs, and every dollar a business spends on taxes is $1 less to spend on anything else.
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Today in 1962, the Beatles replaced drummer Pete Best with Ringo Starr. Despite those who claim Starr is the worst Beatle musically, the change worked out reasonably well for the group.
Today in 1975, Peter Gabriel announced he was leaving Genesis. Despite those who claim Genesis was better with Gabriel in the group, the post-Gabriel Genesis outsold the Gabriel Genesis by an order of magnitude:
Today on her birthday in 1986, Madonna had the number one album, “True Blue,” and the number one single:
To begin our birthday selections, one asks: Who is Edithe Gormezano? She is the wife of Sidney Liebowitz; they are better known as (in backward order) Eydie Gormé and Steve Lawrence.
Gary Loizzo, the lead of the American Breed …
… was born one year before Gordon Fleet of the Easybeats (too bad his birthday wasn’t on Monday):
Barry Hay of Golden Earring:
Tim Spooner of The Tubes:
It’s James Taylor’s birthday, but not that James Taylor — the member of Kool and the Gang:
Tim Farriss played guitar for INXS:
Robert Johnson did not perform rock music. But he influenced countless rock musicians after his death at, yes, 27:
But the most famous rock music death today came in 1977, when, while sitting on the “throne” reading The Scientific Search for Jesus, Elvis Presley got to meet, we assume, Jesus personally:
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At last, our long Wisconsin nightmare will be over with the recall elections in the 12th and 22nd Senate districts Tuesday.
Except that, of course, it won’t be over. Regardless of the results, the communofascists who have the Democratic Party of Wisconsin by the short hairs will say something like Bluto’s famous line “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor” and look forward to invalidating the Nov. 2 election results with a recall effort against Gov. Scott Walker.
It must be really fun to be a Wisconsin Democrat these days. Based on my appearance on Wisconsin Public Radio Friday, I conclude that Wisconsin Democrats need not bother with election results (see Nov. 2) or even math, because in their world 17 is not more than 16. And they certainly need not be concerned with economics, because to them money for government grows in the pockets of the evil “rich” or on marijuana plants or something. I assume they will continue with Protestarama daily until the end times because being a Wisconsin Democrat means never admitting fault or apologizing for, say, the wretched state of state finances the last time you controlled Madison.
Ever since I started writing opinions on a regular basis, I have always maintained that when voting for a candidate, the voter must consider what comes with the candidate. That has been my main objection to voting for presidential candidates Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, because, regardless of what you think personally of Clinton or Obama, when you vote for a presidential candidate you get the baggage of his or her party. At the federal level, that baggage includes the lying traitor Sen. John Kerry (D–Massachusetts), the mediocre yet shrill Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D–California), and others of your choice.
So it is with Sen. James Holperin (D–Conover), who my counterpart Friday asserts is one of the most moderate Democrats in the Senate. The problem, of course, is that when you vote for Holperin you also get Democratic Party loudmouths Mike Tate and Graeme Zielinski, plus Sen. Dave Hansen (D–Green Bay), who believes that government employees who cost $71,000 in average compensation are middle-class, and Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller (D–Monona), who claims complete justification for costing Wisconsin taxpayers $9 million in Protestarama and Recallarama.
One wonders which Holperin 12th Senate District voters will be voting for Tuesday. Will it be the Holperin who admitted to a constituent that the 2009–11 state budget had “enough little tax and fee hikes in that budget of his to sink a good sized battleship,” or the Holperin who voted for that budget? Does Holperin represent his constituents, or the Democratic Party? Where is Holperin’s moderating influence on the Madison–Milwaukee axis within his party?
Holperin and his campaigns have also slandered every business person in Wisconsin by criticizing Republican Kim Simac for running her business like a business:
Rep. Mary Williams (R–Medford), small-business owner: “Holperin’s latest campaign trick is as low as it gets: attacking Kim Simac because her business dared to suffer during the recession. The Democrats tried this dirty campaign trick on me years ago, and it just shows us all how anti-business these politicians really are.”
Rep. Tom Tiffany (R–Hazelhurst), small-business owner: “In 2008, Jim Holperin used this same line of attack against me, by going after my family’s business. That crosses the line between politics and attacking my family, and it’s just not the way you treat people. Jim Holperin will say anything to win, and we deserve better.”
From a Simac news release: Sen. Holperin’s attack, on a business in his own district, centers on losses Simac’s company suffered during the past decade. As Holperin should know, as a member of a business council in 2007-2008 and as Jim Doyle’s tourism secretary, these losses affect a taxpayer’s bottom line, and a poor economy can lead to a zero net liability.
Simac: “My husband and I work hard every single day to scratch out a living for our family. We struggle at times to make money, but Jim Holperin hasn’t made it any easier. There are many other small business owners and individuals in this district who are in similar situations. Jim Holperin has become so disconnected from this district he doesn’t even realize he is attacking many small business owners and people in his district just trying to make a living.”
Nothing moderate there, is there?
The word “moderate” has never applied to Sen. Robert Wirch (D–Kenosha), but even if it had, Wirch is a Democrat, and Democrats have not represented taxpayers for a long, long, time, and certainly not in 2011. Everything that has happened in Madison so far this year is the direct result of the fiscal disaster Wisconsin Democrats perpetuated on our state when they last controlled state government. Moreover, Wisconsin legislators cannot represent their constituents from Illinois.
As with last Tuesday, the choices are obvious — Simac in the 12th Senate District and Jonathan Steitz in the 22nd Senate District. That is, unless you approve of overcompensated government employees and overtaxed Wisconsin taxpayers.
Or, for that matter, the Fleeing Fourteen. As someone on Facebook put it early this morning:
Walking away from your job is sometimes the right thing to do. However, walking off your job just because you don’t want to do it for a month does not make you a hero. In the real world it makes you fired, and rightly so.
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We begin with an interesting non-musical anniversary: Today in 1945, Major League Baseball sold the advertising rights for the World Series to Gillette for $150,000. Gillette for years afterward got to decide who the announcers for the World Series (typically one per World Series team in the days before color commentators) would be on first radio and then TV.
This was quite a day for concerts. Today in 1965, the Beatles (along with Brenda Holloway, The King Curtis Band, The Young Rascals and Sounds Incorporated) played at Shea Stadium in New York, setting a world record for attendance at 55,000, including Mick Jagger and Keith Richards:
Today in 1969, on a farm in Bethel, N.Y, Woodstock began:
Birthdays start with Bill Pinckney of the Drifters:
Peter York played drums for the Spencer Davis Group:
Thomas Aldrich, who played drums for Black Oak Arkansas …
… was born the same day as Bill Griffin of the Miracles:
Who is Adam Yauch? Some know him as MCA of the Beastie Boys:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
