The number one British album today in 1970 for the first of eight times on top of the British charts:
The number one British single today in 1976 was about a supposed event 12 years earlier:
The number one single today in 1981 was from a movie in which the singer was one of the leads:
The Beatles had quite a schedule today in 1963. They drove from Liverpool to London through the night to appear on the BBC’s “Parade of the Pops,” which was on live at noon.
After their two songs, they drove back north another three hours to get to their evening performance at the Swimming Baths in Doncaster.
The number one song today in 1965:
Today in 1956, Elvis Presley performed three shows at the Fort Homer Hesterly Armory in Tampa, Fla. Presley closed the final show by announcing to the crowd of 14,000, “Girls, I’ll see you backstage.”
Many of them took Presley at his word. Presley barely made it into his dressing room, losing some of his clothes and his shoes in the girl gauntlet.
The number one single today in 1966 here (on the singer’s birthday) …
… and over there:
Ten days ago, this newsletter noted that the opening days of the Genocide Games — er, the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing — had generated a “cataclysmic loss of audience” for NBC. Over the past week or so, the audience size hasn’t gotten any better — and it’s not just here in the United States:
Television ratings for the Beijing Olympics are off by 50 percent from PyeongChang levels in 2018, which themselves were well below the levels of Winter Olympics past. But to hear the International Olympic Committee tell it, there’s no problem, no problem at all. . . . In the United States, though, with the exception of the post-Super Bowl bump, ratings for the Games have bounced off the bottom of the ocean floor at historic lows.
No, it’s not only a viewer boycott of China that’s driving the low ratings, but it’s hard to believe that it’s not a factor. Viewers around the world have a lot of reasons for antipathy toward China these days — from the ongoing Uyghur genocide, to the crackdown on Hong Kong, to the aggressive moves towards Taiwan, to that virus that started in Wuhan which has killed almost 6 million people around the world officially and perhaps many, many more.
There are no live audiences or cheering crowds at the events, a television correspondent got dragged away on air, waiters and bartenders in the hotels are wearing full hazmat suits, and there’s not even the usual pretty scenery — the ski-jump platform was built next to a steel plant with structures that reminded American audiences of nuclear reactors. There’s something absurdly dystopian about this whole debacle.
For a long time, the IOC insisted to the world, and perhaps to themselves late at night, that autocratic regimes such as Russia and China were challenging but worthwhile partners who helped make the games a truly global event. It contended that the long history of blatantly unethical behavior by these regimes, inside and outside the field of play, shouldn’t be a reason for concern and certainly wasn’t a reason to exclude those countries’ athletes or bar them from hosting the games. Whatever Beijing and Moscow lacked in ethics, they made up for in money and the authority to build stadiums quickly.
These games brought another embarrassing and outrage-inducing scandal, this one involving Kamila Valieva, the 15-year-old Russian figure-skating prodigy. Valieva tested positive for the heart drug trimetazidine on December 25 at the Russian nationals; the test results were only delivered from a Swedish lab last week, after Valieva helped Russia win gold in the team figure-skating event. “The IOC ruled there would not be a medal ceremony for the team event, in which Russia won gold and the U.S. won silver. If the Russian team is eventually disqualified over the positive drug test, the Americans will move up to gold, Japan will win silver, and Canada will win bronze.” When Valieva competed in her free skate, she fell apart, falling twice and finishing in fourth place.
No one believes that a 15-year-old girl would obtain and take a performance-enhancing substance on her own; someone had to have supplied it to her.
You know a situation is bad when the usually mild-mannered Mike Tirico, NBC Sports’ anchor for the Olympics coverage, calls out the IOC on-air for utterly failing to protect Valieva or to mitigate Russian cheating and rule-breaking:
Something undeniable is the harm to the person at the center of it all: a fifteen-year-old, standing alone, looking terrified on the ice before her free skate. This image, maybe more than anything else, encapsulates the entire situation — the adults in the room left her alone. Portrayed by some this week as the villain, by others as the victim, she is in fact the victim of the villains — the coaches and national Olympic Committee surrounding Kamila Valieva, whether they orchestrated, prescribed or enabled, all of this is unclear. But what is certain is they failed to protect her.
Guilt by association is often unfair, but it’s called for here. Russia has been banned from using the name of its country the last three Olympic Games, because of the systemic state-run doping program that was uncovered after they hosted the Sochi games in 2014. The deal that was broken was supposed to ensure a level playing field while giving clean Russian athletes a chance to compete, but that scenario totally broke down here.
Now, a failed drug test from one of their athletes has tarnished one of the marquee events of the games and taken away from every skater’s moment. In the name of clean and fair competition, Olympians and gold medalists from across the globe have spoken up and IOC president Thomas Bach, at his end of the games press conference in the last hour uncharacteristically openly criticized Valieva’s entourage for their quote ‘tremendous coldness’ at the end of her skate and said that those involved should be held responsible
But now it’s time for the IOC to stand up — whether it’s about blocking Russia from hosting events for a very long time or stringent and globally transparent testing for Russian athletes going forward, if swift action from the top of the Olympic movement does not happen quickly the very future of the games could be in jeopardy.
Olympic gold medalist Tara Lipinski, an NBC figure-skating analyst, added that, “It makes me angry that the adults around her weren’t able to make better decisions and be there for her, because she is the one now dealing with the consequences and she’s just 15 and that’s not fair. . . . Again, with that being said, she should not have been allowed to skate in this Olympic event.”
Give NBC Sports a little credit for calling out the IOC on air. Maybe NBC is concluding that operating as a de facto public-relations firm for a spectacularly corrupt and increasingly incompetent Olympic committee just isn’t worth it anymore. The ratings aren’t high enough, the advertisers aren’t happy enough, and NBC Sports employees no doubt want to broadcast unforgettable human triumphs — not to try to polish a turd and implausibly assure viewers at home that the games are fair, free, and abiding under the rules.
Discussions involving Valieva keep spurring the comment that, “It’s not her fault.” Yes, that’s precisely the point, and that’s why the Russian Olympic team used her in this manner. The people who run her career know that the IOC and the world will feel hesitant to judge and rebuke a tearful, angelic-faced 15-year-old girl. That’s why they’re attempting to cheat by using a 15-year-old girl! If this were an adult man, all of us would be reacting much less sympathetically. Our inner conflict about punishing a teenage girl for the actions of others is what the Russians were counting on; they figured that gave them a better chance of getting away with it.
All of these lessons apply to the other big controversy involving Russia going on this week. Some regimes just don’t give a hoot about the rules and will do whatever it takes to win. You can’t trust them, you can’t negotiate with them without verifying that they’re keeping their promises, you can’t rely on their good faith or good will, and if you make a concession in the name of comity, they will pocket it and ask for more.
These games have been a debacle, and the IOC was warned. Adam Kilgore, the Washington Post’s correspondent in Beijing, wrote this morning that the games are concluding under “a pall of pervasive joylessness” and noted that “athletes, officials and media members [are] shuttled from hotels to venues, forbidden to see the host city except out of windows.” What was the point of selecting Beijing, then? These games could have been held anywhere.
Dan Wetzel, a Yahoo Sports national columnist, sees the Russian coaches’ heartless on-air verbal abuse of a terrified 15-year-old girl as the natural fruit of a long string of bad IOC decisions and a refusal to confront national Olympic teams that are systemically abusive: “This is the Olympics that Bach, who has been president nearly a decade, has built. This is it. He just happened to see it in all its depravity on his television Thursday. He was disgusted at what he saw. Join the club.”
The only silver lining to this mess is that Xi Jinping didn’t get much of a propaganda victory out of it all.
Super Bowl LVI on Sunday significantly changed after Rams wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. was lost for the game due to a knee injury after his leg was caught on the SoFi Stadium artificial turf. Beckham, who had two catches for 52 yards and a touchdown on three targets, was dominating the league championship game before the injury.
Not only was Beckham unable to play for the rest of Super Bowl LVI, but he has to worry about his future after suffering what is expected to be another torn ACL to the same knee he injured last season while on the Browns, according to CBS Sports NFL insider Jason Las Canfora. Beckham’s injury caused NFL players, current and former, to eliminate the use of field turf at stadiums.
Of course, the $5 billion SoFi Stadium is one of them.
There’s a lot of support for natural grass fields, but what is the “Flip The Turf” campaign? Half of the league’s teams play on artificial turf, which is why players are pushing for change. There are statistics in the campaign to back up why fields should switch from turf to grass.
In the petition, turf fields have:
- 28% more non-contact lower body injuries.
- 32% more non-contact knee injuries and 69% more non-contact foot and ankle injuries occurred on turf.
- Turf can get up to 60 degrees hotter than natural grass, increasing the rate at which toxic gases are released and ingested.
There are also environmental issues behind the campaign:
- Currently, turf can’t be recycled in the US, leading to an estimated 330 million pounds of landfill waste each year, and microplastics in our water and irrigation systems.
- On average, one turf field requires over 440,000 pounds of petroleum derivatives. The production of which emits carbon, creates fossil fuels, and contributes to global warming.
- Unlike grass, turf does not cool the environment. It does not filter air and water pollutants. It does not fix carbon dioxide or release oxygen. Turf has zero climate benefits.
Players are pushing for change. perhaps Super Bowl LVI may be the breaking point.
(For NFL players accustomed to gas-hogging sports cars and SUVs and flying in private jets to be raising environmental issues is a little hypocritical, but be that as it may ….)
Beckham’s first knee injury happened on artificial turf, at, of all places, Cincinnati. Paul Brown Stadium had grass when it opened, but converted to turf, as did the Houston Texans’ stadium. Conversely, the Baltimore Ravens’ stadium started with turf and then converted to grass.
This is, remember, the much-improved turf (supposedly) from the bad old days of carpet of 1/4-inch blades, essentially green-painted asphalt at Camp Randall Stadium and every other college stadium I marched in in five years in the UW Marching Band. But NFL players, all of whom are too young to remember the old turf, seem unimpressed with the new turf.
Lambeau Field has a hybrid surface of grass with plastic blades to keep the grass in place. (The Packers also use grow lights to keep the grass growing as late in the season as possible.) That would seem to be the ultimate grass surface, and the company that sells it, GrassMaster, also equips many soccer pitches in Europe, but at only one other NFL stadium, in Philadelphia.
The Arizona Cardinals’ stadium and the new Las Vegas Raiders stadium have grass fields that slide out fo the stadium during the week to get sun and rain, then slide back in for game day. The Raiders’ stadium has a turf surface underneath, and that was what the Badgers played on for the Las Vegas Bowl in December.
The problem with replacing turf with grass is that the team ends up losing its practice field, since most college teams with turf practice in their stadium, such as UW. (The original turf went in in the late 1960s, and I believe the old football practice fields are either parking lots or buildings.) That should make one skeptical that colleges will be replacing turf with grass anytime soon.
Whether NFL teams replace turf with grass is a more interesting question. In the NFC North Minnesota and Detroit have indoor stadiums, and so putting grass in would be complicated. (Grass was put in temporarily in the Pontiac Silverdome for the 1994 World Cup and in the Louisiana Superdome as an experiment or a Packers’ preseason game back in the Brett Favre era.)
This will be interesting to watch if expensive NFL players continue to get hurt on turf fields.
The number one single today in 1956:
Today in 1962, the Everly Brothers, on leave from the U.S. Marine Corps, appeared on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew:
The number one British single today in 1965:
The latest tax map in the United States might add to the debate over whether Wisconsin should end or reduce its personal income tax.
The Tax Foundation’s new report looks at income tax rates across the country, and Wisconsin comes in as one of the most taxed states in the Midwest.
The Tax Foundation notes that Wisconsin’s 7.65% tax rate is third highest in the Midwest, behind Minnesota and Iowa; and it’s the third highest among all Great Lakes states. Only New York and Minnesota are higher on that list.
Among our neighbors, both Illinois and Michigan have lower income tax rates than Wisconsin.
“I think a lot of Wisconsinites would be surprised to learn that Illinois of all places has a flat and much lower income tax rate. If Wisconsin wants to attract businesses and residents from high-tax Minnesota and highly regulated Illinois, policymakers should start by dramatically lessening our tax burden,” The Badger Institute’s Michael Jahr told The Center Square.
The report comes as Republicans at the Wisconsin Capitol push toward lowering and eventually eliminating Wisconsin’s personal income tax.
Jahr said the Badger Institute has worked with the Tax Foundation on a range of tax reform options that would make Wisconsin more competitive.
“A fair and pro-growth tax structure, combined with Wisconsin’s overall fiscal health, would make the Badger State an even more inviting place to do business. Whether it’s through flattening, eliminating or better balancing our various taxes, the need for reform is pressing,” Jahr said. “People factor in things like taxes when deciding where to live or locate a business. States without an income tax clearly have an advantage as evidenced by the population and business growth they’ve experienced in recent years.”
There are seven states without a state income tax, and another 11 that have flat income taxes. Wisconsin is not on either list.
The Tax Foundation’s report states that income taxes make-up a sizable chunk of state revenues across the country, accounting for about 36% of all monies that states take-in. In Wisconsin, that number is closer to 50%.
The Tax Foundation map:
Iowa is proposing a 4 percent flat tax, so it my drop even farther behind Wisconsin in tax rate.
I remain unconvinced that eliminating the state income tax is going to happen. For one thing, the most complained about tax is not ]income taxes, nor is it the sales taxes, it’s property taxes, to relieve which income and sales taxes were created and raised repeatedly.
The number one one one single today-day-day in 1962:
The number one British single today in 1966:
Today in 1969, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash recorded the album “Girl from the North Country.”
Never heard of a Dylan–Cash collaboration? That’s because the album was never released, although the title track was on Dylan’s “Nashville Skyline” album.
No one did more to mainstream libertarian ideas about peace, love, and understanding over the past half-century than P.J. O’Rourke, who has died at the age of 74. And like Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and Sid Vicious, P.J. did it his way: by taking a blowtorch to the sacred cows of both the left and right.
“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn,” he warned. “The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”
Writing in popular outlets such as National Lampoon, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic, and appearing on NPR’s Wait…Wait Don’t Tell Me!, O’Rourke distilled the insights of Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and Friedrich Hayek with far more oomph.
“Giving money and power to the government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys,” wrote O’Rourke. “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”
It takes a lot to make a libertarian look forward to the next election.
Like, say, two years of miserable government mandates ignored by some of the very people imposing them. Like watching over 70,000 maskless adults (and many celebrities) partying at a major sporting event in a city where children are required to wear medical-grade masks to school and keep them on while playing sports. Like imposing border controls on immigration and travel meant to stop the spread of COVID-19, and then keeping them in place (with no off-ramp) long after the virus is spreading here.
For once, we can be thankful that another election season is already upon us since politics is the last realm where the pandemic is dominating decision-making. The economy emerged from the omicron wave in better shape than expected. Sunday’s Super Bowl was the latest signal that lots of Americans are done with the health theatrics of the past two years. But even the political class’ commitment to COVID policy is wavering. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and President Joe Biden might be refusing to offer much hope that COVID-related mandates should be lifted soon, but they are increasingly being undone by rank-and-file Democrats who are looking at favorability ratings that are falling nearly as fast as COVID case counts.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 