The thoughts of a journalist/libertarian–conservative/Christian husband, father, Eagle Scout and aficionado of obscure rock music. Thoughts herein are only the author’s and not necessarily the opinions of his family, friends, neighbors, church members or past, present or future employers.
Britain’s number one song today in 1964:
Today in 1967, a few days after their first and last appearance on CBS-TV’s “Ed Sullivan Show,” the Doors appeared on the Murray the K show on WPIX-TV in New York:
Today in 1969, ABC-TV premiered “Music Scene” against CBS-TV’s “Gunsmoke” and NBC-TV’s “Laugh-In”:
Continue reading “Presty the DJ for Sept. 22”
Tonight is the night sung in …
It turns out there is a story to the song, reported by National Public Radio:
If you’ve ever been to a wedding reception in the U.S., you know there’s one question that can get a whole family on the dance floor: “Do you remember the 21st night of September?”
Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” even shows up at fictional weddings, as in the opening of the 1997 movie Soul Food. It’s made its way into TV shows, commercials, sporting events and video games. HBO named a movie after the song. In 2008, it played at both the Republican and Democratic national conventions.
The story of the song begins in 1978. Allee Willis was a struggling songwriter in LA — until the night she got a call from Maurice White, the leader of Earth, Wind & Fire. White offered her the chance of a lifetime: to co-write the band’s next album. Willis arrived at the studio the next day hoping it wasn’t some kind of cosmic joke.
“As I open the door, they had just written the intro to ‘September.’ And I just thought, ‘Dear God, let this be what they want me to write!’ Cause it was obviously the happiest-sounding song in the world,” Willis says.
Using a progression composed by Earth, Wind & Fire guitarist Al McKay, White and Willis wrote the song over the course of a month, conjuring images of clear skies and dancing under the stars. Willis says she likes songs that tell stories, and that at a certain point, she feared the lyrics to “September” were starting to sound simplistic. One nonsense phrase bugged her in particular.
“The, kind of, go-to phrase that Maurice used in every song he wrote was ‘ba-dee-ya,’ ” she says. “So right from the beginning he was singing, ‘Ba-dee-ya, say, do you remember / Ba-dee-ya, dancing in September.’ And I said, ‘We are going to change ‘ba-dee-ya’ to real words, right?’ ”
Wrong. Willis says that at the final vocal session she got desperate and begged White to rewrite the part.
“And finally, when it was so obvious that he was not going to do it, I just said, ‘What the f- – – does ‘ba-dee-ya’ mean?’ And he essentially said, ‘Who the f- – – cares?'” she says. “I learned my greatest lesson ever in songwriting from him, which was never let the lyric get in the way of the groove.”
I asked Jeffrey Peretz, a professor of music theory at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute, what makes that groove so powerful. He says a lot of it has to do with how the music unfolds. The song’s very structure is an endless cycle that keeps us dancing and wanting more.
“There’s four chords in the chorus that just keep moving forward and never seem to land anywhere — much like the four seasons,” he says. “It’s the end of summer, it’s the beginning of fall, it’s that Indian summertime, it’s the transition from warm to cool.”
The trigger for that yearning feeling, Peretz says, is the opening line. White asks, “Do you remember?” and we supply the memories. It’s a song that can bring all of the generations together, which makes it perfect for family gatherings. The true meaning is up to us — including, Allee Willis says, that strangely specific date.
“We went through all the dates: ‘Do you remember the first, the second, the third, the fourth … ‘ and the one that just felt the best was the 21st,” Willis explains. “I constantly have people coming up to me and they get so excited to know what the significance was. And there is no significance beyond it just sang better than any of the other dates. So … sorry!”
That’s OK, Allee. Maurice was right. It doesn’t matter what it means. When we hear it, it’s September 21st, and we are dancing again with our family, in a song that never really ends.
Well, everything ends, but not for a while …
As recently as a couple of years ago, the next paragraph, from the (soon-to-be-defunct-because-she’s-retiring-at-the-end-of-September) Joy Cardin Show Facebook page, would not have been possible:
Why did conservatives support Donald Trump in the 2016 Election? Why don’t more conservatives reject his most controversial rhetoric today? What role did conservative media have in electing Trump? We’ll ask former WTMJ talk show host and author Charlie Sykes on Thursday from 8-9am. What questions do you have for him?
I doubt that. WPR has had YOU on and lived to tell.
“Charlie ought to be going out in a wave of glory.”
So wrote fellow conservative Milwaukee radio host Mark Belling on the occasion of Charlie Sykes’ retirement from the airwaves last December. Belling noted that, as of Sykes’ final radio show, Republicans were about to take full control of both the federal and state governments for the first time since the 1950s. That fact should have made this moment the pinnacle of Sykes’ 23-year radio career.
Sykes’ final week of broadcasts on WTMJ-AM included tributes from virtually every Republican political star in Wisconsin. Ron Johnson jokingly blamed Sykes for his ascent to the U.S. Senate. And Gov. Scott Walker gushed, “You have had a tremendous impact … on the conservative movement, not just here in Milwaukee, but across the state.”
Despite the glorious send-off, the 62-year-old Sykes’ political identity was in a state of upheaval. Significant swaths of the once-cohesive Wisconsin conservative juggernaut, a group that he had both led and served for decades, were now ignoring him or, even, actively shunning him.
A bomb named Donald Trump had detonated within the GOP. And Sykes, who had believed for years that Trump would be an absolutely unacceptable leader of his party, was among its casualties.
The ideological and professional stability Sykes enjoyed through his decades on the air were a contrast to his peripatetic earlier life as a student and journalist. Before radio, he had bounced back and forth between liberalism and conservatism, and from publication to publication, working as a reporter, editor and columnist.
No one could have convinced me two years ago that, come 2017, Charlie Sykes and I would be on the same wavelength. But Donald Trump has left me politically homeless, too.
While I was not one of his listeners, Sykes loomed large within the Republican Party of Wisconsin, of which I was an active, but often malcontented, member. My fellow libertarian-leaning activists and I regarded him as an establishment shill, dedicated to the promotion and protection of an ossified party power structure. Belling’s overall assessment of Sykes’ career is positive, but he observes that Sykes “often seemed like a cheerleader rather than a commentator.”
If Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, Reince Priebus and Ron Johnson were the party capos, then Sykes was their muscle. “If you went against the grain,” recalls longtime Sykes adversary Michael Murphy of the Republican Liberty Caucus, “Charlie would call you out.”
I also assumed Sykes was, stylistically, a local version of Rush Limbaugh, his shtick exploiting the darker corners of his listeners’ psyches. Though presumptuous, my distant read of Sykes was not entirely off base. Sykes himself has spent a good deal of time lately reassessing his radio career, and acknowledging mistakes he made.
In early October, Sykes’ ninth book, How the Right Lost Its Mind, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book chronicles the bizarre transformation the conservative movement has undergone since Donald Trump declared his candidacy in June 2015. But it’s also a personal story. The conservative movement has been so central to Sykes’ life, and he so central to it, that the book could hardly not be personal.
While Sykes has come a long way toward making sense of what happened, he is still somewhat bewildered by Trump’s decisive capture of the movement. From Sykes’ perspective, it was a hostile takeover, constituting a “repudiation of the conservative mind.” As Sykes writes in the book, Trump had tapped into “something disturbing that we had ignored and perhaps nurtured — a shift from an emphasis on freedom to authoritarianism and from American ‘exceptionalism’ to nativism.”
When I met with Sykes late this summer, he recalled the strong sense of loss he felt as the conservative movement slid into derangement, and the decision it forced him to make. “If I break with the movement,” he had asked himself, “have I squandered everything that I’ve spent 20 years working on?” Sykes says he understands others’ reluctance to break. “This is who you are, this is your identity, these are your friends. And if you break with them, are you repudiating a real large chunk of your own life?”
Despite the high price, “There was not a single moment when I thought, ‘maybe I should go along.’” Today, he adds, “The infrastructure that I had is completely gone.”
From a distance, Sykes’ decision might not seem so self-sacrificial. He has, since Trump’s election, had multiple op-eds published in The New York Times. He co-hosted Indivisible, a WNYC radio series that explored the early Trump administration’s impact on American life. And, most notably, he is now an official contributor on MSNBC. Would any of these opportunities with big-time media have come his way had he not so publicly and vehemently refused to board the Trump Train?
At the time of his retirement, Sykes told The Cap Times that he had decided to end his radio show over a year earlier. So throughout 2016, as he relentlessly bashed Trump, he knew that he would be scouting for new opportunities.
“Charlie looks out for Charlie,” says the Republican Liberty Caucus’ Murphy. “This latest act is just him hoping to stay relevant, and maybe even go national.” Others, like Isthmus columnist and Urban Milwaukee editor Bruce Murphy, assert that Sykes’ political beliefs have often tracked with career opportunities. The reality, Murphy wrote earlier this year, “is that Charlie Sykes has been changing his views, over and over, throughout his life, and has always been rewarded for it.”
Sykes seems dumbfounded by accusations that his steadfast opposition to Trump is driven by expediency. While people with whom he was closely associated — like Paul Ryan and Reince Priebus — moved into positions of great influence, Sykes’ uncompromising stance against Trump kept him out in the cold. “An opportunist goes with the power, not into exile.”Sykes does appreciate the “strange new respect” he is getting from corners of the media world that used to dismiss him. But he is still quick to criticize the “liberal media,” arguing that their shabby treatment of conservatives fueled the rise of the right-wing propaganda machine. Conservative news-seekers, he writes, “were drawn to safe places, but also pushed.”
At some point, conservative talk radio hosts discovered that traditional news sources make perfect foils. So the talkers pounced, and kept pouncing, until, Sykes writes, “We had succeeded in convincing our audiences to ignore and discount any information whatsoever from the mainstream media.” He regrets that this strategy of delegitimization served to “destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information.”
Sykes devotes a substantial section of How the Right Lost Its Mind to the ascendance of “Alt-Reality” propaganda, how it nurtured “Post-Truth” politics, and its role in Trump’s electoral triumph.
It’s a chilling read. A sizable chunk of the American electorate is astonishingly susceptible to fabrications, even patently absurd ones. In Sykes telling, things got so weird during last year’s campaign that a cottage industry of fake fake news sprung up. Pranksters began fashioning reports just to test the limits of credulity. One tweeted out a contrived Clinton Foundation expense report that showed payees like ‘Sharia Law Center’ and ‘Bill Ayers,’ to see if the Twitterverse would bite. (Spoiler alert: the pranksters were unable to detect any limit to credulity.)
President Trump has, in a stroke of propaganda genius, co-opted the term “fake news,” applying it to legitimate media outlets that he considers unfriendly. In our conversation, Sykes noted that for each of his op-eds, The New York Times assigned a fact-checker. When he hears the president call the Times a “fake news joke,” he remembers the extreme rigor the paper has subjected his work to.
Toward the end of his book, Sykes urges fellow conservatives to “confront the conservative media that boosted and enabled Trumpism and created a toxic alternative reality bubble.” I asked him what non-conservatives might do to help. Because false beliefs are protected by extremely stubborn psychological barriers, Sykes thinks only “still-trusted conservative voices” have the power to stop the madness. “The right’s going to have to clean up its own house.” He laments that, as of now, “We’re not seeing a lot of that.”
I find it silly that Sykes is now being called a non-conservative for daring to criticize Trump (as did, by the way, every major conservative talk-show host in this state before the Wisconsin Republican primary, which is a major reason why Trump lost the GOP primary) and his hard-core supporters, or for appearing on public radio or TV or MSNBC. He’s been quoted frequently on this blog, and other than his non-support of Trump I challenge you to find non-conservative positions he’s taken, beyond possibly support for the taxpayer-funded Miller Park. Sykes has been one of the biggest supporters of Gov. Scott Walker from Walker’s days as Milwaukee County executive. Sykes led on-air support for Act 10. Sykes was a target at the biggest act of attempted censorship of political speech in this state, the Milwaukee County John Doe investigation. Sykes spoke at at least one county Republican Party Lincoln–Reagan Day dinner, which I know because I was there.
Regular readers know the first and foremost answer to Cardin’s question is that if the alternative choice was Hillary Clinton, virtually any Republican would have voted for Trump. (I’m not a Republican, so I didn’t.) As it turned out, a lot of independents in swing states must have voted for Trump as well, because, again, he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton demonstrates daily that if the November choice was Hillary or Trump, Trump was the better choice.
Having said that, it’s clear that Trump is a situational conservative, in that sense the Republicans’ answer to Bill Clinton. Trump, author of The Art of the Deal, deals with whoever (he thinks) is in charge. So he cozies up to Sen. Charles Schumer (D–New York) and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D–California) on “Dreamers,” which is as Republican a thing to do as donating money to Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate campaigns. If Republicans lose control of Congress in the 2018 election, the resemblance between Trump and Republicans will disappear.
The answer to Cardin’s second question is answered in part because Trump has done conservative things (Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, undoing Obama regulations and executive orders, Monday’s United Nations speech), and in part by one of her Facebook commenters …
Why do we continue to ask the same question, and not accept the only answer? The answer is that every single Trump supporter is some combination of ignorant, intellectually incapable, morally bankrupt and hateful. It’s simply not possible to be a decent human being and support Donald Trump.
That Madison jackass demonstrates that liberals love every kind of diversity except diversity of opinion. Every time Trump supporters get criticized for supporting Trump, particularly when they’re accused of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, etc. (by the definition of the accuser), they support Trump more. Liberals are either too stupid or too hate-filled to grasp that.
As for Cardin’s third question … that’s in large part what Sykes’ book is about.
First, the song of the day:
The number one song today in 1959 was a one-hit wonder …
… as was the number one song today in 1968 …
… as was the number one British song today in 1974 …
… but not over here:
The number one song today in 1985:
Today in 2001, ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC and 31 cable channels all carried “America: A Tribute to Heroes,” a 9/11 tribute and telethon:
The first of the three birthdays today is not from rock and roll, but it is familiar to high school bands across the U.S. and beyond:
Don Felder of the Eagles:
Tyler Stewart, drummer of the Barenaked Ladies:
Erick Erickson is a fan of Donald Trump’s United Nations speech Monday:
Quibble all you want with what he said or how he said it, I was only a kid when Ronald Reagan uttered the phrase “Evil Empire” and I still remember the press reaction. I was an adult when George W. Bush uttered the phrase “axis of evil” and I remember the press reaction. And I suspect that Donald Trump, like those two, will be vindicated against his critics for his tough stance at the United Nations.
What a politician says and what he really does or does not do are different things. But what President Trump said yesterday at the United Nations really restores a realistic approach to American foreign policy and a key, core sentiment that Ronald Reagan understood and the left decried: better our a**hole than their a**hole.
The fact is we cannot convert every country to our form of constitutional republic. And the fact is that there are always going to be third world hell holes from which terrorists might stage attacks or do bad things. It is far better for us to admit this and make sure those third world hell holes are controlled by allies who will help us destroy our enemies than by our enemies allies who will wage war against us.
The President’s bluntness may be off putting to some on this, but it was really telling yesterday when former Obama staffers were unable to reconcile how the President could say he will not impose our way of life on another country while also saying he would take action against Venezuela.
In the real world, the Venezuelan regime is destabilizing an entire region, sparking a humanitarian crisis, and ceding ground to nefarious groups including drug lords and terrorists. If the Venezuelan President could run his country without it collapsing into anarchy that will be taken advantage of by interests opposed to ours, President Trump would leave him alone. But because the Venezuelan President cannot do that, our President will act to keep us safe and his team is smart enough to know that acting today will prevent disaster tomorrow.
The same holds true with North Korea where this President is having to clean up the idealized vomit fest of three prior administrations and their “diplomatic” efforts that did nothing except buy North Korea time to make a nuke while learning the fine art of shake down saber rattling.
Whether this President lives up to his vision is another matter and will largely be for history to judge. But his stated foreign policy is mature, stable, and needed. It is grounded in historic American leadership around the world, not isolationism, and not multinational interventionism.
President Trump’s immediate predecessor took the world stage and often made it seem he though no nation was better or worse, but all were equal. Every nation said the same thing about how great their nation was and their nation was the best. We did it too as team sport, in Obama’s mind, but his policies were premised on us not being the best nation.
Yesterday at the United Nations, President Trump all but declared the United States actually really is the best damn nation that ever was, but is humble enough not to try to force everyone to our level.
I’ll take it!
If media reports that the Trump administration is trying to not back out of the horrible Paris economic-destruction — I mean climate change — treaty, I’ll be back to criticizing Trump again. Trump deserves credit for this speech to the relativist organization that believes that all countries are equal, including serial human rights abusers.
Jerry Bader brings up modern Democratic racism:
Here is how the Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines “xenophobe:”
one unduly fearful of what is foreign and especially of people of foreign origin.
Merriam-Webster may want to consider including the Democratic Party of Wisconsin logo with that definition. In response to Governor Scott Walker’s Monday signing of the Foxconn incentive package, a quartet of democratic legislative leadership issued a news release criticizing the deal. It appears the group didn’t want anyone to miss the fact that Foxconn is a “foreign corporation.” the phrase is used seven times in the release:
- giveaway to a foreign corporation (par. 1)
- $3 billion in cash payments to a foreign corporation (par. 2)
- special loopholes for a foreign corporation (par. 2)
- second fiddle to a foreign corporation (par. 3)
- Giving $3 billion to a foreign corporation (par.4)
- a foreign corporation ties the hands (par. 5)
- offered to a foreign corporation (par. 6)
That’s one mention for each paragraph with a bonus second mention in paragraph two. You can read the release here: Senate Dem Leadership release – Statement on Foxconn Signing 9.18.17
Meanwhile, the liberal group One Wisconsin Now joined in on the fear of foreigners fest. While OWN’s statement includes a mere three uses of the word “foreign,” they also exhibit a fear of people from a strange and mysterious land to Wisconsin’s south:
There is nothing in the proposal that guarantees that workers in the new plant come from Wisconsin, meaning taxpayers will be subsidizing jobs for workers from Illinois and other states.
Of course, it’s entirely possible and indeed likely that out of state residents would relocate to Wisconsin to take Foxconn jobs; especially if they come from a state that doesn’t border Wisconsin. While an influx of residents to Wisconsin is and of itself a good thing, there is evidence that the Foxconn development will benefit the entire state. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported that business leaders upstate, including the La Crosse and Wausau areas expect the ripple effect of Foxconn on the state economy to benefit residents in their region.
Perhaps Wisconsin Democrats will next take aim at restaurants that serve French wine and Russian caviar.
The left has used the “foreign corporation” “Taiwanese company” and “Chinese economics” narratives to argue against the state doing business with Foxconn. Democrats have argued the deal is a bad one for the state. But they also plan on running against Governor Scott Walker’s jobs record in 2018, which gives them an ulterior motive to oppose Foxconn.
Walker signed the $3 billion incentive package into law a Gateway Technical College in Racine County Monday, where the $10 billion Foxconn facility is expected to be located.
James Wigderson adds:
Since the deal with Foxconn was announced by Governor Scott Walker, Democrats have been running around complaining about a Chinese company getting a subsidy from the state of Wisconsin. (Actually, the company is Taiwanese.) They’re complaining about China more than President Donald Trump did during the 2016 campaign. …
We’ve already commented on the odd opposition to Asians by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tony Evers, the state Superintendent of Public Instruction. If the Democrats have a problem with foreigners, specifically Asians, perhaps they should just say so. Asian American voters would probably like to know if the Democrats are still the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his internment camps.
Because judging from the anti-foreigner rhetoric, Wisconsin Democrats would be thrilled to give $3 billion in incentives away to a corporation as long as it’s incorporated within the United States. It’s just the color of the skin of the executives at Foxconn that has the Democrats upset.
Oh wait, Democrats don’t like workers in Illinois, either. They’re suddenly concerned that large manufacturing facilities too close to the Illinois border might attract the wrong element. We’re not sure what that wrong element from Illinois might be, Cubs fans?
Have the Democrats been to Janesville lately, or Lake Geneva? There are Cubs fans wearing team jerseys everywhere. If we were going to build a wall on the state line, apparently something the Democrats now favor, it’s too late. Chicago-style hot dogs are now regular fare in most Wisconsin cities.
Perhaps would be happy if we created a 100-mile economic exclusion zone along the border with Illinois preventing any economic activity in the region so people from Illinois couldn’t get jobs in Wisconsin. Presumably 100 miles should be enough to deter all but the most die-hard commuters. While we’re at it, we can tear up the Amtrak tracks coming north from Chicago, too.
Of course, Democrats weren’t worried about those annoying people from Illinois invading our state when General Motors in Janesville was temporarily bailed out under President George Bush and President Barack Obama (the plant closed anyway). Nor did Democrats object to Illinois workers possibly benefitting when former Governor Jim Doyle, also a Democrat, offered General Motors $200 million in incentives to build a new factory in Janesville in 2009 (it didn’t work).
And when Amazon built in Kenosha, keeping out fans of the Chicago Bears wasn’t an issue then, either. But then, General Motors and Amazon are American companies. If Toyota or Hyundai wants to build another auto plant in Janesville or Kenosha, then the Democrats are ready to keep the foreigners out.
I also wonder how many Democrats opposed Gov. James Doyle’s incentive package for Marinette Marine, owned by an Italian company.
Wisconsin’s Assembly Democrats chose a new leader Monday, and unfortunately the choice was not a surprise. State Rep. Gordon Hintz, D-Oshkosh, is now the Assembly Minority Leader, replacing state Rep. Perter Barca, D-Kenosha. Hintz was unopposed.
Barca recently came under fire from his fellow Democrats after supporting the legislation to bring a $10 billion Foxconn manufacturing campus to the Racine-Kenosha area, but Democrats are claiming there are other factors as well. Barca presided over election loss after election loss resulting in the Republicans holding 64 seats in the 99 seat branch of the legislature.
Democrats were probably justified in kicking Barca to the curb, especially since every Democratic candidate for governor is opposed to Foxconn (until Andy Gronik changes his mind again). However, by picking Hintz by letting him run unopposed, Democrats are reminding voters that the party really does not believe good character is a prerequisite for public officials.
Hintz’s first round of trouble began when he was cited for solicitation in a prostitution sting in an Appleton massage parlor. Hintz later gained statewide notoriety after yelling, “You’re f—–g dead!” at former state Rep. Michelle Litjens, R-Oshkosh, following the completion of the Act 10 vote. Hintz did not apologize to Litjens until after the news of the threat went public.
Hintz had a chance to explain his ill behavior towards women on UpFront with Mike Gousha on Sunday. Gousha mentioned the massage parlor incident but did not ask Hintz about it, preferring instead to only ask Hintz about the incident with Litjens.
“The question is, is it about temperament?” Gousha asked. “For a leadership post, do you have the right temperament for that post?”
“Well, that’s the challenge that’s out there,” Hintz said. “It’s something that I’m self aware of. When I’m upset it’s usually because I’m upset. There’s good ways it comes out and bad ways it comes out. I’m self-aware enough to know what my strengths and weakness are. And I certainly had to make that assessment as I take something like this on.”
Hintz said there’s a positive side of his being upset because he’s upset. “I think the positive side of having energy and believing in what you do, is that I think I’m going to be able to do that,” Hintz said.
(Gousha, of course, didn’t ask if the massage parlor incident was a one-time occurrence. Nor did Gousha ask if Hintz will lack credibility as Wisconsin deals with a serious human trafficking problem. And Gousha didn’t ask Hintz what his female colleagues think of his public behavior towards women.)
Amazingly, no women candidates in the Assembly stepped up to challenge Hintz just to provide a more ethical contrast. Perhaps they would have been emboldened in their approach when Republican Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke, R-Kaukauna, asked that his Republican colleagues drop the criticisms of Hintz.
It’s doubtful Democrats will ever return the favor.
This is not the first time Assembly Democrats have been willing to overlook ethical lapses for political reasons. In 2010, Democrats refused to expel former state Rep. Jeff Woods, a former Republican who became an independent voting with the Democrats, after his third, fourth and fifth arrests for driving under the influence, the three arrests occurring within a matter of months. After the election during the lame duck session, Democrats attempted to push through contracts with the state employees, getting Woods out of rehab because they needed his vote.
Now they’re being led by someone who explains his behavior by saying he gets upset because he’s upset, so Hintz acts out. That’s not the character of a leader, but the impulse control and temperament of a child. Perhaps, then, he’s the Democrats’ best representative after all.
What do you expect from a party that thinks nothing of having an impeached, disbarred, serial sex offender give speeches at their national convention.
The number one British single today in 1969 wasn’t from Britain:
The number one U.S. single today in 1969 came from a cartoon:
The number one British album today in 1969 was from the supergroup Blind Faith, which, given its membership (Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker of Cream and Steve Winwood), was less than the sum of its parts:
Dov Fischer has a few things to say to say to Hillary Clinton:
You see, Madame First Lady-U.S. Senator-Secretary of State-Perpetual Whiner (hereinafter “MFLUSSSOSPW”), no one vote alone elected Donald J. Trump the 45th President of the United States. Let us take, for example, Republican presidential voters in the great state of California. Under our electoral college system, votes for president cast by Republicans in California do not count. They count even less than do illegal votes, produced with forged drivers’ licenses, in New Hampshire. Nonetheless, California Republicans begrudgingly accept that their votes do not count because they respect the agreed-upon rules of the game, rules dating back more than 225 years. (U.S. Const. Art. II.) Under the rules of the Electoral College, the only way that a Republican presidential candidate will garner California’s electors in this era is if the other 48 states (Massachusetts does not count) vote Republican. It will take that kind of unilateral nationwide landslide for a Republican to win a majority of California’s voters in a Presidential contest. Therefore, California circa 2016 does not matter for a contemporary Republican Presidential candidate. He or she will win with current-day California only if he or she wins without it.
Alas, this reality also means that Republican presidential candidates will not expend preciously limited resources of time and money to beef-up their California votes for a November general election. It would be pointless, almost as pointless as a California Republican driving to a voting booth on Presidential election day, even if lured by a promise of free disposable plastic grocery bags. For the California Republican voter, the rhetorical question on election day has been asked eloquently once before in the presence of a United States Senate panel investigating the Benghazi disaster: What difference does it make?
So, with California explained, [w]hat exactly [h]appened? Well, it turns out that, beyond California, it took a village to elect Donald Trump President of the United States. A village comprised of the Deep South and the American heartland and a corridor running northward from Florida through Georgia and North Carolina, all the way up to Ohio. And The Village also branched east and west up north, through the Midwestern Rust Belt from Wisconsin to Michigan to Pennsylvania. It took a village.
Many wise observers of all political stripes perceived that Trump had no chance. He entered the race as an amateur. Coarse in language, brutally vicious in personal attack, impolitic beyond words, cartoonish in ways stemming from the hairstyle to the pigmentation. This guy is going to beat Senator Rubio by calling him “Little Marco”? Or defeat Sen. Cruz by mocking his magnificent wife — every public person has had photos snapped at inopportune moments — and intimating that Cruz’s dignified father somehow was associated with the murder of our 35th President? Ouch.
But the main reason that so many thought that MFLUSSSOSPW would defeat Donald Trump is that the electoral college seemed loaded for the Democrats from the get-go, as it has been for many recent years. It is they who begin each Presidential race with California (55 votes), New York (29), Illinois (20), Massachusetts (11), Washington (12), and New Jersey (14) locked up. Add after-thoughts like Oregon (7), Rhode Island (4), Connecticut (7), Delaware (3), District of Columbia (3), Hawaii (4), and Vermont (3), and the Democrats begin the race with 172 electoral votes. The winning candidate needs 270 of the 538 total electors to win, so the race begins with the Democrat needing to secure only 98 of the remaining 366 to hit payday. Even if one concedes that Texas and smaller conservative states like Alabama, Mississippi, Idaho, and Montana are predetermined for the Republicans, the odds for a Democrat to win the electoral college from the remaining pot of states that legitimately remain “in play” remain overwhelming. Republicans mope with fellow conservatives over those odds every four years, viewing each approaching Presidential contest glumly. For those looking beyond the forthcoming bi-elections with 20/20 vision, it still seems unfair.
But those have been the rules for 228 years, and conservatives honor the rules. That is what conservatives do. The game starts with ground rules, and that defines how to proceed, fair and square. A hockey stick may not curve more than half an inch; if it does, any goal scored with it will be disallowed. A baseball bat may not have pine tar on it more than eighteen inches from its bottom. Rule 1.10(c). If it does, any home run hit with it may be disallowed. And it presently takes 270 electors to be chosen president of the United States.
So [w]hat [h]appened?
You, MFLUSSSOSPW, had been in public life post-Arkansas for 24 years. During that quarter century, we got to know your public persona. You truly may be a wonderful person to know privately. You may be someone who giggles softly, ruminates wisely, loves, shares, cares, devotes. But the public MFLUSSSOSPW that we of The Village cannot help but know — even without trying — is someone who is brazenly dishonest, cruel and hurtful, nasty, self-obsessed, manipulative and cunning (in the worst sense of that gerund), and someone narcissistic driven by a sincere tunnel belief, reinforced by decades of echo-chamber sycophancy, that she “deserves it” — whatever it is that she seeks at the moment — because, well, because she deserves it.
The Village does not trust you. If it had been only about The Server, you might have gotten a pass. But there had been cattle futures. Whitewater. The White House travel office. Filegate. That thing about having faced sniper fire when landing in Bosnia, even though the line of sweet little girls holding little flowers to greet you at that airport seemed impervious to Slobodan Milosevic’s perilous projectiles. That other thing about your Christian name having been conferred on you by your loving parents in honor of Sir Edmund Percival Hillary, the first confirmed climber of Mount Everest, whose achievement on May 29, 1953 came five years and seven months after you were born on October 26, 1947. The missing attorney-billing records from the Rose law firm. The Saul Alinsky bond. Sidney Blumenthal and the effort to character-assassinate Barack Obama. Your laughing over the acquittal of the child rapist you got freed. Benghazi: you telling the widows of the fallen martyrs that their loved heroes had died because of a dopey YouTube flick that no one could watch beyond three minutes, while secretly sharing with Chelsea that they actually had been murdered by Al Qaeda on the anniversary of Bin Laden’s 9/11 attacks. Those $250,000 speech honoraria for 15-minute closed-door shmoozes with Wall Street investors and Clinton donors. And stealing furniture from the White House. (C’mon, MFLUSSSOSPW: stealing furniture from the White House?)
The Village also remembered your role as a sexual predator’s full-time enabler. Maybe Gennifer Flowers had been consensual, but you publicly called her “trailer trash” and thereafter participated in hiring private investigators to dig up dirt on her. And the threats against Paula Corbin Jones. And Kathleen Willey. And Juanita Broaddrick. Sure, you told the media that you would not be like Tammy Wynette and “just stand by your man.” But, while Tammy ultimately walked out on George Jones, having stopped loving him that day, you instead shifted into battle mode. You mocked, insulted, and character-assassinated one female sexual-assault victim after another. You called Lewinsky a “nacissisic looney tune,” even though she was not the one wielding cigars.
The Village remembered. And that is why the email scandal buried you. Not because of Jim Comey. But because you had lost the public’s trust. The Village saw you as an irredeemable pathological liar. Then you started explaining that the emails you had wiped from your server — wiped like a waved dish rag, as you gesticulated to Fox’s Ed Henry — merely had been private communications about yoga classes and Chelsea’s wedding gown. The Village knew better, echoing in silent memory Ronald Reagan’s famous riposte to a more honest though equally incompetent Democrat: “There you go again!”
The problem is that, to the degree that the presidency is an encomium to be bequeathed rather than a position to be held in service to a nation, lots of other people also deserve it. Righteous people deserve it. Doctors and nurses who save lives deserve it. First responders who race into fires or face bullets amid confronting gang warfare to save innocent lives deserve it. As among politicians, John McCain also deserves it after the sacrifices he made as a war hero, absorbing torture and refusing freedom from Vietnamese incarceration without his men, and then devoting his life to national service. Mitt Romney deserves it after having lived a righteous life, not allowing his time as Governor of Massachusetts nor his status as a quarter-billionaire to divert him from personally delivering Thanksgiving dinners to the hungry nor from personally visiting people, outside of television cameras, in hospitals. Lots of people in The Village “deserve” it.
Beyond that, many of us Americans are concerned about our jobs, our national economy, taxes, our decaying infrastructure, and our porous Southern border through which illicit drugs that murder Americans permeate along with “coyotes” who smuggle undocumented human beings to their horrible deaths by suffocation, starvation, and worse. We are concerned about Iran developing nuclear weapons that can incinerate and obliterate parts of America, North Korea racing to attain the same level of criminally barbaric insanity, and Vladimir Putin outflanking freedom at every turn from the Crimea to the Ukraine to the Middle East. In other words, this is not a fun time when we blithely can hand over the Presidency to some empty-suit who imagines fancifully that his election will mark an end to the rising of the oceans (as in Texas, Florida, and the Caribbean) and the healing of the planet, while one prominent magazine crowns him King Messiah, a television commentator experiences thrilling leg creep from watching him bloviate, and the character himself dances the salsa in front of a Dictator Castro while Europeans are being murdered that day by terrorists. This is not a time for someone who “deserves” the honor. It is a time for someone who potentially can do the job and can earn that trust by presenting a résumé rich with proven achievements.
During the presidential campaign, you spoke of your long public record, but your long public record condemned you. As First Lady, you inadvertently had sabotaged the Democrats’ decades-long stranglehold on the House of Representatives by leading your husband on one public policy disaster after another until the American electorate invited the then-hapless Congressional Republicans back into the majority to rein him in. HillaryCare was the straw that broke the donkey’s back, assuring the GOP a new era of House dominance beginning with Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract with America.” You built that. As a United States Senator, you had carpet-bagged yourself into a seat by donning a New York Yankees baseball cap, telling the starry-eyed Empire States voters that you, a child of Illinois and the wife of an Arkansas governor, always had rooted for the Bronx Bombers. Once elected, what accomplishments did you register in the upper chamber? We all remember historic legislation, even the bad enactments, by the names of the legislative greats of both parties whose visions changed America: the Carmack Amendment, the Taft-Hartley Act, the Boggs Act, the Byrd Amendment, the Mann Act, the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, Sarbanes-Oxley. What did you do? You got assistance for Manhattan after 9/11? Gee, whiz! How did you ever manage to persuade the Congress to do that?
And then you recorded a record as Secretary of State. Under your Russian Reset, the Crimea fell to Putin. Ukraine came under threat from Putin, even as the United States reneged on missile-defense security promises to Poland and the Czech Republic. You let the Iranian “Green Revolution” go to waste. You wasted the promise of the “Arab Spring,” putting the house money on the wrong horse: Mohamed Morsi and the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood. You screamed on the phone for an interminably long time at the Prime Minister of Israel. (Pssst! — Israel is on our side.) You staked out the position that Israel could not build homes for Jews in the heart of Jerusalem. Your husband and you somehow ended up with huge speaking fees — nearly a billion dollars worth — in Putin territory, and somehow Putin people ended up reciprocally owning tons of American uranium, approved by your State Department, suitable for destroying the free world with nuclear weapons.
And Benghazi.
In great measure, that is [w]hat [h]appened, MFLUSSSOSPW. Your public persona cultivated and crafted over a quarter century. Your résumé of actual performance. Your profound sense of entitlement. Your remarkably transparent Hansel-and-Gretel trail of lies leading from Arkansas to Wall Street to Bosnia to the Middle East to Mount Everest to Russia and back to the furniture moving truck and the bathroom where that server was stashed.
But there was more. Of course Jim Comey did not help. And yet he did. He really did let you off the hook even though any objective analysis of your violations of federal law would have required that a grand jury at least be convened to explore. Instead, the FBI director acted ultra vires, outside his area of authority, dropping the criminal matter for you. And the Attorney General met with your husband privately at that infamous Phoenix tarmac to discuss grandchildren and golf with him. (With respect, as much as grandkids and mulligans pushed the contours of credibility beyond the perimeters, no one in The Village would have believed that Bill and Loretta had been discussing yoga classes or wedding dresses.) Tellingly, Loretta Lynch’s clandestine tête-à-tête with President Bill was so politically sinister that it was the only time in your husband’s long and distinguished public career that no one in America — not a single person in The Village — entertained the suspicion that he had leveraged thirty minutes intimately alone with another woman-not-his-wife for physical hanky-panky. All knew it was substantive, not about multi-generational progeny, and not about selecting irons or woods.
And one more thing. That “basket full of deplorables” gambit. You played “Identity Politics” so brazenly, so wantonly, that you — a lifelong New York Yankees fanatic dating back presumbly to their Highlanders days — forgot something that Maury Wills, their cross-country 1960s Dodgers rival, once told the press. Wills, a remarkably successful base-stealer of historic achievement, once was asked how he managed to be so successful in stealing second base (from first base) against left-handed pitchers. (As you know from your many decades of rooting for the Yankees, MFLUSSSOSPW, the left-handed pitcher faces the runner on first base, in contradistinction to the rightie who necessarily stands on the pitcher’s mound with his back to that runner. Therefore, it typically is understood that a runner on first base is disadvantaged when seeking to “get a jump” and trying to get a head start on running to second base when the pitcher is a southpaw, a leftie, who is staring right at him.) So the reporter asked Maury Wills: “How is it that you run so freely against left-handers, given that they can stare at you carefully as they are pitching?” And Wills answered: “Because with righties, I can see only their backs, but with lefties I can stare at them carefully, too, as they are pitching.”
MFLUSSSOSPW, you diverted your campaign from a pursuit to lead our entire country as our Chief Executive. Instead, you brazenly promoted the most divisive and hurtful of Identity Politics. You publicly pursued women. While you were staring at women voters, male voters in Pennsylvania and North Carolina were staring carefully at you, and they saw. You publicly pursued Latinos. Non-Latino voters in Ohio and Iowa stared carefully and saw. You pursued African-Americans. Non-African-Americans in Michigan and Wisconsin stared carefully and saw. As you shamelessly and brazenly divided the American People into narrow classes of ethnic, racial, religious, gender slices of political pie, the other slices in The Village stared carefully and saw. Like a two-year-old hiding from Mommy and staring through waffled fingers, you thought that you could see them, but they could not see you. But they stared and saw — and they flowed out to vote by the basketfuls and basketsful. You had Lady Gaga and Madonna, Lena Dunham and Katy Perry, Beyoncé and LeBron. And yet The Villagers came out in the droves that John McCain and Mitt Romney could not inspire. They came out despite Jim Comey refusing to refer charges against you. They came out because, when you lumped them all into a basketful of deplorables, they grasped that, to save the country from further tragedy and cultural rupture, it would not be enough to “leave it to the other person” to vote. That, to save the country from you, it would take the whole damn village.
And so it did.
And that’s [w]hat [h]appened.
Right Wisconsin reports:
Speaking to the Independent Business Association of Wisconsin (IBAW) Manufacturing Summit in Milwaukee on Friday, Department of Administration Secretary Scott Neitzel took the opportunity to address some of the concerns of the critics of the Foxconn legislation that recently passed the legislature.
Neitzel addressed the question of what happens if Foxconn does not follow through on its promise to create a $10 billion manufacturing facility in southeaster Wisconsin. “The state isn’t just going to issue them a check for $3 billion,” Neitzel said. “The way the $3 billion is given out, it’s over time, over a 15 year period.”
“Part of it is the capital investment, which is $1.35 billion,” Neitzel said. “$1.5 billion is based on employment, about $150 million is just a sales tax exemption for construction materials while they’re building it.”
The tax credits will only be given as Foxconn reaches the capital investment and employment targets in the agreement with Wisconsin.
“It grows as they grow,” Neitzel said.
The project is expected to create 10,000 construction jobs for the project and will create as many as 22,000 “induced jobs” from the economic activity statewide. The facility will hire 3,000 permanent employees to start, with growth of up to 13,000 permanent jobs. One estimate has the state receiving $3.90 for every $1 invested by the state. Once completed, the Foxconn development could have a $7 billion annual impact on Wisconsin’s economy.
Neitzel said from a personal perspective, the people that the Walker Administration dealt with were completely sincere in their dealings with Wisconsin. “They continue to work with the local communities,” Neitzel said. “They are talking to people about how they can integrate themselves into the community. They are making a commitment for the long term.”
In answer to the concern about how long it will take before the state “breaks even” on the investment, ” Neitzel said, “Government doesn’t usually spend money to make money.”
“Under the most, what I would call, conservative estimate, it breaks even the fiscal bureau said in 25 years,” Neitzel said. “What do we get for that from a society perspective?”
Neitzel said the Foxconn deal will create “high-paying, family-supporting jobs.”
“Another thing we want, is we want to give our best and brightest a reason to stay in Wisconsin,” Neitzel said. “We want to attract the best and brightest from around the United States and around the globe to come to Wisconsin.”
The new Foxconn manufacturing campus will also spur entrepreneurial activity and small business growth, according to Neitzel. It will also bring more venture capital to Wisconsin.
“With Foxconn here, the venture capital community now has Wisconsin at closer to the upper tier than we have ever been,” Neitzel said. “That’s a good public policy objective.”
Neitzel praised the legislature for improving the Foxconn bill before they passed it.
“It went to the Assembly. They made changes. They were all improvements,” Neitzel said. “That bill then went to the Senate. They made changes. They were all improvements. The bill that is before the governor, which he will sign soon, is a very, very good bill.”
“[The bill] allows us to accommodate Foxconn and to protect the environment and to make sure that the taxpayers of Wisconsin are protected,” Neitzel said.
Neitzel said that opponents of the Foxconn legislation are treating the development as just another manufacturing facility. “What it really is, is bringing a whole new industry to North America and planting it right here in Wisconsin,” Neitzel said. “So the whole supply chain has to come with Foxconn. They have to create a supply chain in North America and in Wisconsin.”
For example, Neitzel said, wherever the plant is built, there will have to be a glass plant right next door.
