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 1970 was the second day of Woodstock:
They claim that the inability of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to gain traction in the race for the GOP presidential nomination is due to his emphasis on the culture, rather than his own shortcomings as a candidate. On the campaign trail, Mr. DeSantis is about as exciting as tapioca pudding.
Republicans’ failure to do better in the 2022 election is attributed to the Dobbs decision (overturning Roe v. Wade), which supposedly sent legions of voters to the polls shouting: “Give me abortion on demand or give me death!”
On the other hand, the disappointing results of the midterms could have something to do with the dismal quality of GOP candidates or former President Donald Trump’s insistence on turning the election into a referendum on himself.
When pro-life forces in Ohio failed to pass a ballot measure last week, which would have made it harder to amend the state’s constitution to enshrine abortion, The Wall Street Journal issued a dire warning to Republicans to stay on the supply side of the street or face doom.
With the nightmare that “Bidenomics” is inflicting on the middle class (brother, can you spare a gallon of gas?), the economy will be front and center in 2024. But it’s the social agenda that mobilizes the Republican base.
The hard-core left that now dominates the Democratic Party insists on shoving its weirdness in our faces: a dude in makeup and an evening gown trying to sell us beer, students punished for using the wrong pronouns, pornographic books hailed as great literature and drag queens who mock the Catholic Church honored by the Los Angeles Dodgers.
The Washington Times:
Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who is weighing a Democratic primary challenge against President Biden, said Sunday he wants to see a “moderate governor” enter the race to unseat Mr. Biden.
“I would like to see a moderate governor, hopefully from the heartland from one of the four states that Democrats will need,” Mr. Phillips said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
As examples, he named Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.
I’ll pause while you recover from your laughing spasm at the identification of Evers, Whitmer or Pritzker as “moderate.”
“Some people have asked me that I not use their names because of this institutional fear that it might impact you down the road. This is the time to meet the moment,” Mr. Phillips said. “I’m doing something that I know it’s unpopular as a Democrat, but I’m speaking truth. That’s my job. My duty is to the people I represent, but also to represent the mass majority.”
He went on to note that Mr. Biden‘s poll numbers in crucial states are underwater.
“I just want to say this about Democrats, it’s really important. Joe Biden right now is down seven points in the four swing states that will decide the next election,” Mr. Phillips said. “He has historically low approval numbers. There are about 55% of Democrats would like to see an alternative. I can keep going down the list.”
Phillips does have a point, whether or not he’s able to find an actual moderate Democrat governor. The prospect of Donald Trump getting reelected or a less crazy Republican elected next year has to make Democrats lose sleep at night.
Kevin Haggerty adds:
A recent poll forecasted a rough road ahead for Democratic spin doctors as evidenced by MSNBC’s “alarmed” Jen Psaki.
On Sunday, the former White House press secretary for President Joe Biden continued to do her part to coax the narrative in favor of the left up against some fairly damning numbers.
As the host of “Inside with Jen Psaki” would go on to note, a late July poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College found that around 65 percent of registered voters believe that the country is heading in the wrong direction.
“Today we’re going to change things up a little bit,” she began as she highlighted a breakdown of that number. “In part because I was pretty alarmed when I saw a recent poll that 37 percent of voters think we’re in danger of failing as a nation. Failing.”
By comparison, heading into the red wave that wasn’t for the 2022 midterm election, 62 percent considered the country to be headed in the wrong direction in Oct., slightly up from 60 percent in Sept. and down from the massive 77 percent from that July.
Meanwhile, leading into the 2020 presidential election, which ultimately could have been decided for then-President Donald Trump had a select number of counties had their vote counts tallied up by mere thousands in his favor, only 56 percent of voters viewed the country as headed in the wrong direction. Additionally, 35 percent of voters saw the nation on the right track in Sept. 2020, while only 23 percent felt that way now.
Showing that her move from press secretary to pundit was little more than a title and venue change, Psaki proceeded to gaslight the audience by pointing to the roughly 250 “bipartisan” bills that had been passed in Congress throughout Biden’s tenure.
What she ignored as she touted signature pieces like the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, infrastructure legislation and gun reform lumped in with procedural bills, was how Democrats had been in control of both the House and Senate, and a handful of RINOs were involved in crossing the aisle for those “bipartisan” measures.
Governors have to get things done like passing balanced budgets instead of merely voting “present” (see Obama, Barack) or plagiarize another country’s politicians (see Biden, Joe, U.S. Senate).
How about we do something bipartisan and Republicans get rid of Trump and Democrats get rid of Bisden and Kamala Harris?
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.
Why did police raid the offices of a small-town Kansas newspaper? The Friday raid on the offices of the Marion County Record certainly looks like a major incursion on freedom of the press—with disastrous results for not just the civil liberties but also the physical well-being of newspaper staff.
The paper attributes the Saturday death of 98-year-old co-owner Joan Meyer to stress from the raids on her home and the paper’s office. “Stressed beyond her limits and overwhelmed by hours of shock and grief after illegal police raids…Meyer, otherwise in good health for her age, collapsed Saturday afternoon and died at home,” the paper reports. It adds that she “had not been able to eat” or sleep on Friday after the raids.
The root of the raids appears to involve local entrepreneur Kari Newell, who reportedly runs a restaurant out of a hotel owned by the brother of the county attorney.
The number one song today in 1965:
Three years later, the singer of the number one song in Britain announced …
Today in 1976, Chicago released what would become its first number one single, to the regret of all true brass rock fans:
The number one song in Britain today in 1964 was brought back to popularity almost two decades later by the movie “Stripes”:
That same day, the Kinks hit the British charts for the first time with …
This was, of course, the number one song in the U.S. today in 1966:
Today in 1968, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham played together for the first time when they rehearsed at a London studio. You know them as Led Zeppelin.
We begin with a non-musical anniversary, though we can certainly add music:
On Aug. 11, 1919, Green Bay Press–Gazette sports editor George Calhoun and Indian Packing Co. employee Earl “Curly” Lambeau, a former Notre Dame football player, organized a pro football team that would be called the Green Bay Packers:
Today in 1964, the Beatles movie “A Hard Day’s Night” opened in New York:
Two years later, the Beatles opened their last American concert tour on the same day that John Lennon apologized for saying that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus. … Look, I wasn’t saying The Beatles are better than God or Jesus, I said ‘Beatles’ because it’s easy for me to talk about The Beatles. I could have said ‘TV’ or ‘Cinema’, ‘Motorcars’ or anything popular and would have got away with it…”
Hillary can’t say she didn’t warn us.
In a new 3,500-word essay on “The Weaponization of Loneliness” in the Atlantic, the former secretary of state and presidential candidate says her jejune 1996 book, It Takes a Village, forecast the country’s current crisis of loneliness and offered still-relevant solutions.
And, oh yeah, hapless lonely people exploited by authoritarian right-wingers basically kept her from the White House in 2016 (and here you thought it was Russia).
Now, social isolation is a real problem in America, as Hillary correctly recounts in her essay, and it has contributed to the Trump phenomenon. But that it has been uniquely weaponized against progressives, or that conventional progressive policies are the antidote to this deep-seated phenomenon, is as absurd and self-serving as you’d expect from a woman who managed one of the more shocking losses in U.S. presidential history and has been offering excuses ever since.
In her telling, an army of so-called incels, or involuntarily celibate men, organized by Steve Bannon is part of a growing threat to U.S. democracy. You can see the appeal of this gloss on our politics to someone who has long warned of the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” and uses the phrase, once again, in an essay otherwise devoted to warning about the threats of conspiratorial thinking.
Rather than shadowy forces, from Russian hackers to Bannon’s a-socialized acolytes, determining the course of the country, it is the middle of the electorate that remains crucially important, and it is open to persuasion on the big questions. Donald Trump fought Hillary to a draw among independents in 2016 and eked out a narrow victory, and lost them to Biden and was defeated in 2020.
To read Hillary, you might think that no one who supports the Democrats is ever lonely.
As it happens, Republicans are the party of married people. As Conn Carroll pointed out at the Washington Examiner, in the 2022 House races, Republicans won married men by 20 points and unmarried men by seven, and won married women by 14 points. The GOP, on the other hand, got wiped out with unmarried women by nearly 40 points.
This marriage gap has a connection to loneliness. According to a Gallup survey in 2020, 41 percent of single people reported being lonely the day before, whereas only 16 percent of people who were married or in a domestic partnership said the same thing. (This was in the midst of the pandemic, by the way — overall loneliness has declined since.) By region, New England has the highest rate of loneliness, and big cities are significantly more lonely than rural areas.
This means that Hillary forged a coalition of the lonely (or at least the more lonely) in 2016, and the worst thing that could happen to her party is more people getting married and living in small places with a stronger sense of community.
Of course, Hillary doesn’t offer either of those as potential solutions to the crisis of loneliness. No, but Joe Biden’s infrastructure program might help — as if people are disconnected because they can’t take high-speed rail to go see friends. She’s heartened, too, by parents protesting “book bans” and workers engaged in union organizing. Left-wing activism, apparently, is what can knit us all back together.
She invokes “the wisdom and power of the American village” and says “we have more in common than we think,” without ever giving any sense that she acknowledges the values of the other side, or even its legitimacy. If she doesn’t use her infamous word from 2016, “deplorables,” to describe her opponents, that’s clearly what she still thinks about them.
Hillary may not be lonely, but she’s a case study in the myopic self-righteousness of the Left that is unjustified, high-handed, and off-putting. It’s no wonder that if Hillary’s “village” is the community on offer, millions of rational, well-adjusted, happy Americans want nothing to do with it.
You know what people are most unhappy? Those who obsess over politics. Imagine if Hillary had won the 2016 presidential election.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 