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:
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.
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:
One week from tonight I resume my radio sportscasting side thing on this radio station for at least the next nine Friday nights, with two more Saturday afternoon football games and three Thursday night volleyball matches … before the postseason begins.
I started doing this in September 1988 based on cable TV experience consisting of one girls basketball game and two-thirds of a hockey game. As I’ve written here before, it’s always been a part-time thing — a hobby that brings in money instead of the usual — and having seen a lot of radio from the inside I have concluded that being a part-timer is preferable to being in radio full-time for many reasons.
This is the thing I enjoy the most, and enjoy enough to want to do it to professional (as in network) standards, including the not-so-fun aspect of game prep, which usually takes up at least as much time as the actual game broadcast does. I have never announced beyond NCAA Division III college football, basketball and hockey (plus one semi-pro football championship with NFL rules), and at my age I doubt I will have
I wrote back in late June that I have been uncommonly blessed in broadcasting sports to have announced five state football championship games (where my team was 2–3), three state boys basketball tournaments (no state champion yet, though I have experience at that), three state girls basketball tournaments (one year I called two state championships in two hours, and then added another the next season), one state wrestling tournament, two state girls volleyball tournaments (most recently this year despite my team losing the game before state; then came positive COVID tests for the winning team), four state baseball tournaments (no winner there yet), one state softball tournament (which ended with “And that’s a state championship!”), and one state boys soccer tournament (with the house goalkeeper).
All of this wasn’t actually the motivation for today’s blog. A friend of mine forwarded a joke meme that was previously posted by a radio station that calls itself Steve FM. A long time ago I wrote about my idea for “Steve TV,” based on my temporarily ubiquitous presence on local cable TV due to my being a school board candidate while having announced two pre-state basketball tournament games.
It turns out there are two Steve FMs. One is, to be precise, 96.7 Steve FM in Columbia, S.C., while the other is 104.9 Steve FM (call letters, of course, WSTV, which you’d think would be Steve TV’s call letters, assuming we’re east of the Mississippi River, the W vs. K call-letter dividing line) in Roanoke, Va., a station that refers to itself as “Roanoke’s Random Radio.” Both are owned by iHeart Radio.
Each plays “adult hits,” defined by the always-accurate Wikipedia as “adult contemporary, pop and mainstream rock hits from the 1970s [or late 1960s] through at least the 1990s.” Another feature is that “Due to its broad nature, the adult hits format can be easily automated. This means that the station can be run with little to no on-air personalities (a trait that, in some cases, may be openly promoted by the station), leaving only staff involved in station operations, advertising sales, and promotional presences.”
Wikipedia adds that “A large number of adult hits stations utilize male names as their branding. The practice was popularized by the franchised Jack FM and Bob FM brands, and has been widely imitated with other common male names.” That includes Ben FM, Charlie FM, Chuck FM, Ed FM, Frank FM, Mac FM, Max FM, Mike FM, Rob FM, Sam FM, Ted FM, Tom FM, Wayne FM and, to be more inclusive I suppose, Kate FM.
I am not really a fan of automated radio, though I listen on occasion (until I hear a song I don’t like). Live and local is really the best radio. (It is, for instance, hard to get local weather updates when there is no one to provide them.) On the other hand, if it’s my radio station then I should be the voice, right? (As if anyone would listen to 24/7 Steve.)
Most music radio stations have a playlist of 250 to 300 songs. I have a YouTube playlist called, of course, Presty the DJ …
… with, as of this writing, 712 songs. Since the average radio station plays 360 songs a day, I could go through the whole playlist without a repeat every two days, and, unlike both terrestrial and satellite radio, never hear a song I don’t like.
As long as we’re going through this fantasy exercise, I should point out that I like theme blocks to a point (“60s at 6,” “70s at 7,” “80s at 8,” “Two-for Tuesdays,” etc.) I also like actual news (and entertainment news is not really news unless it has some sort of strange element to it, preferably one that makes a celebrity look stupid).
I also like comedy bits to a point. I grew up listening to Larry Lujack’s “Animal Stories” and “Cheap Trashy Showbiz Report” on WLS in Chicago. Later the former Rick and Len had “Small Town Crime Wave” and other bits on WAPL in Appleton. The most hilarious was probably “PO’d in the Post,” when they would reread segments from The Post~Crescent’s “Sound Off” column, which was nothing more than voicemails of people anonymously complaining about something.
Readers might recall that Rush Limbaugh started as a top 40 DJ …
… and his original idea was to combine rock and roll and right-wing politics. I’m not sure anyone has done that, and therefore I wonder if that’s possible, though combining rock music with libertarian politics is more consistent.
I usually listen to radio for music more than talk anyway.
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:
Jacob Sullum:
This week two Texas judges issued temporary restraining orders that allow public schools in Bexar and Dallas counties to require that staff and students wear face masks as a safeguard against COVID-19. The legal issue is whether Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive order banning such mandates fits within his authority under the Texas Disaster Act of 1975. But the wisdom of requiring masks in schools depends on whether the public health benefits of that precaution outweigh the burdens it imposes on students and employees. On that point, the evidence is not nearly as clear as mandate enthusiasts imply.
Two important facts should inform decisions about face masks in schools.
First, COVID-19 infections among children and teenagers are rarely life-threatening. According to the “current best estimate” from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the infection fatality rate (IFR) for people younger than 18 is 0.002 percent. By contrast, the CDC estimates that the IFR for COVID-19 among people 65 or older is 9 percent, 4,500 times as high. The estimated IFRs for other age groups fall between those two extremes: 0.05 percent for 18-to-49-year-olds and 0.6 percent for 50- to 64-year-olds.
Second, COVID-19 vaccines are currently available to all Americans 12 or older, and the vaccination rate is especially high among older Americans, which helps explain why the recent surge in cases has not been accompanied by a commensurate increase in deaths. For teachers and other staff members who are concerned about catching COVID-19 in school, vaccination sharply reduces the risk of infection and is even more effective at preventing severe cases. The same goes for students 12 or older.
Keeping those facts in mind, what is the evidence that face masks play an important role in preventing school-related COVID-19 outbreaks? In a New York Times opinion piece published on Tuesday, Duke University pediatrician Kanecia Zimmerman and We Studied One Million Students. This Is What We Learned About Masking.”
Here is how Zimmerman and Benjamin describe the results of their study, which was based on data from March through June 2021:
During that time, more than 7,000 children and adults acquired the coronavirus and attended school while infectious. Because of close contact with those cases, more than 40,000 people required quarantine. Through contact tracing and testing, however, we found only 363 additional children and adults acquired the coronavirus. We believe this low rate of transmission occurred because of the mask-on-mask school environment: Both the infected person and the close contact wore masks.
That belief is not actually supported by Zimmerman and Benjamin’s study. Since all the North Carolina public schools they studied had universal masking, there was no control group of schools without that requirement. It is therefore impossible to say whether the low rate of secondary transmission can be attributed to the mask policy. “Because North Carolina had a mask mandate for all K-12 schools,” Zimmerman and Benjamin concede, “we could not compare masked schools to unmasked schools.”
In lieu of a control group, Zimmerman and Benjamin cite a few COVID-19 outbreaks that they attribute to a lack of universal masking. Here are the cautionary examples they mention:
• This month in North Carolina, Mooresville Graded Schools and the Union Academy Charter School decided to require masks after “both experienced outbreaks during the first days of the new school year,” the ABC affiliate in Charlotte reports. An elementary school in the Mooresville system identified “nine positive cases,” while the charter school saw “at least 14 confirmed COVID-19 cases.”
• In Illinois last month, Springfield Public Schools began requiring masks during a summer session, citing “an increase in COVID-19 positive cases among SPS students and staff.”
• In May 2020, an Israeli public school had an outbreak that involved “153 students and 25 staff members” who “were confirmed as COVID-19-positive.” The outbreak was tied to an “extreme heatwave,” during which a face mask requirement was suspended, windows were closed, and “air-conditioning functioned continuously in all classes.” The authors of the report on the Israeli outbreak also note that “distancing among students and between students and teachers was not possible,” because the classrooms were “crowded.” The CDC cites “classroom crowding” and “poor ventilation” as factors in the outbreak.
These are all examples of outbreaks (or “an increase in COVID-19 positive cases”) that occurred when masking was optional. But they do not show that a lack of masking was the main reason for virus transmission. And the Israeli outbreak, which is commonly cited by mask-mandate advocates, is striking because it was unusual, even though other Israeli schools also did not require masks during the three-day heat wave.
Meanwhile, Zimmerman and Benjamin overlook examples of school systems that did not require masks but nevertheless saw minimal COVID-19 transmission.
In Florida, where many school districts did not require masks, the CDC found that less than 1 percent of students were infected in schools during the first semester after they reopened in August 2020. The CDC did report that school districts without mask mandates had a higher school-related infection rate: 1,667 vs. 1,171 per 100,000 students. But the study notes that smaller districts were less likely to require masks, and they also “had a higher proportion of students attending in-person instruction,” which likewise was “positively correlated with the student case rate.” And even in districts without mandates, just 1.7 percent of students were infected at school.
When England reopened schools in August 2020, they did not require face masks. Public Health England identified 969 outbreaks, or about one for every 25 schools. The outbreaks affected 2 percent of primary schools and 10 percent of secondary schools. In response to a geographically representative survey, 100 primary schools and 79 secondary schools reported 2,314 cases, or an average of about 13 per school. In primary schools that experienced outbreaks, 0.84 percent of students were infected; the rate for secondary schools was 1.2 percent. Teachers were more likely to be infected and more likely to transmit the virus than students.
Both of these studies were conducted at a time when vaccines were not available to staff or students. Now that 70 percent of American adults have been at least partly vaccinated and vaccines are available to students 12 or older, we should see similar or lower rates of school-related infection, even allowing for the greater transmissibility of the delta variant.*
“Although outbreaks in schools can occur,” the CDC says, “multiple studies have shown that transmission within school settings is typically lower than—or at least similar to—levels of community transmission, when prevention strategies are in place in schools.” Regarding mask requirements specifically, it says “most studies that have shown success in limiting transmission in schools have [involved schools that] required that staff only or staff and students wear masks as one of the school’s prevention strategies.” That gloss implies that some studies found schools had “success in limiting transmission” even without mask mandates or with mandates that did not apply to students.
The CDC, which is now urging “indoor masking for all individuals age 2 years and older” in schools and child care facilities, cites six studies to support its conclusion that mask mandates are crucial: a preliminary report on Zimmerman and Benjamin’s North Carolina research; a study concluding that reopening schools in Italy, where students were required to wear masks, did not appear to drive the second COVID-19 wave in that country; a study of Chicago schools, which also required masks, finding “a lower attack rate for students and staff participating in in-person learning than for the community overall”; a CDC study that reported “limited secondary transmission” of COVID-19 in Rhode Island child care programs that required adults to wear masks; a CDC study that found 6 percent of child care facilities in Washington, D.C., with a similar requirement experienced an outbreak; and a CDC report of “minimal” COVID-19 transmission at a New Jersey school “after implementation of a comprehensive mitigation strategy” that included “universal masking.”
In their Times piece, Zimmerman and Benjamin cite CDC data from Utah, Missouri, and Wisconsin. The Utah study found that “mask adherence was high” and that “COVID-19 incidence among students and staff members was lower than in the county overall.” According to the Missouri study, COVID-19 transmission was “much lower” in schools than in the general community. The schools had adopted precautions that included “mandating use of face masks, physical distancing in classrooms, increasing ventilation with outdoor air, identification of close contacts, and following CDC isolation and quarantine guidance.” In Wisconsin, “reported student mask-wearing was high,” and “transmission risk within schools appeared low.”
These studies show that mask mandates are consistent with low rates of COVID-19 transmission. But contrary to what the CDC implies, they do not show that mask mandates are necessary to keep infection rates low, which would require comparing outcomes in otherwise similar schools with and without mandates.
In December, based on data from Georgia, the CDC reported that “COVID-19 incidence was 37% lower in schools that required teachers and staff members to use masks,” which was similar to the difference associated with “improved ventilation.” But while the incidence of infection was 21 percent lower in schools that also required students to wear masks, that difference was not statistically significant.
In a May 21 preprint study, Brown University economist Emily Oster and four other researchers analyze COVID-19 data from Florida, New York, and Massachusetts for the 2020–21 school year. “We do not find any correlations with mask mandates,” Oster et al. report. But they note that “all rates are lower in the spring, after teacher vaccination is underway.” The authors caution that their study “does not imply masks are ineffective, as these results focus only on masking in schools and do not take community behavior into consideration.” They also note that they considered “mask mandates and not actual masking behavior.”
Zimmerman and Benjamin say it is “now clear” that “universal masking is linked to lower spread” in schools; that “schools that do not require masks will have more coronavirus transmission”; that “if we send children to school without masks, we increase their risk of acquiring Covid-19”; that “masking helps prevent spread among unvaccinated people in schools”; that “universal masking is a close second” to vaccination as a way of preventing school outbreaks; and that “universal masking in schools can save lives.” But the evidence they cite to support these assertions is inconclusive at best.
Assuming that universal masking in schools does make a difference (which it might!), it is by no means clear that the benefits outweigh the costs. The data from Florida and England indicate that COVID-19 transmission in schools was a minor problem even without mask mandates and even before vaccination was possible. Given the low risks that children face from COVID-19, the low infection rates even in schools that don’t require masks, and the fact that vaccination is readily available to adults and teenagers, the benefits of forcing kids to cover their faces all day, whether or not they are vaccinated, are likely to be small.
The costs, meanwhile, are more substantial than mandate supporters typically acknowledge. The inconvenience and discomfort caused by mask requirements aggravate the unpleasantness of environments that were stressful, boring, and restrictive long before anyone had heard of COVID-19. Masks interfere with communication, learning, and social interaction. And they unfairly burden children with the responsibility of preventing infections that primarily threaten adults, who can better protect themselves by getting vaccinated. To justify those costs would require more evidence than mandate advocates have been able to muster.
The Wall Street Journal:
We thought we’d seen everything, but there it was Wednesday morning in black and white on the White House website: Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, imploring the cartel of oil exporting nations to pump more oil. Talk about a political climate change. This is the same Biden Administration that has spent six months doing everything it can to crush U.S. oil production.
“Higher gasoline costs, if left unchecked, risk harming the ongoing global recovery. The price of crude oil has been higher than it was at the end of 2019, before the onset of the pandemic,” Mr. Sullivan’s statement said. “While OPEC+ recently agreed to production increases, these increases will not fully offset previous production cuts that OPEC+ imposed during the pandemic until well into 2022. At a critical moment in the global recovery, this is simply not enough.”
Someone pass the smelling salts to Tom Steyer, the climate crusader who surely fainted when he heard that one. Oil production is beneficial? Fossil fuels are essential to economic growth? The world needs more petroleum to be burned to release more CO2 into the atmosphere?
Perhaps Mr. Sullivan missed Monday’s U.N. report that the world will soon be as hot as Hades if we keep pumping oil. In a single, brief statement, he managed to contradict President Biden’s entire energy message as a candidate and in office. But as it happens, Mr. Sullivan wasn’t talking out of his hat.
On Wednesday Brian Deese, the White House economic council chief, wrote to the Federal Trade Commission to investigate oil-price fluctuations. This is a hardy perennial whenever White House officials fret that rising gasoline prices are becoming an issue. Blame “anti-competitive” practices. Perhaps Mr. Deese found the letter in a White House file cabinet. This means inflation is showing up as a bigger political problem in the polls than Democrats let on.
Allow us to help. How about asking Congress and your own regulators to take their foot off the neck of U.S. oil and gas drillers? Before the pandemic, the U.S. had become the world’s largest oil producer. Thanks to private innovation, the end of the U.S. oil export ban passed by the GOP Congress in 2015, and President Trump’s deregulation, America has had to import far less foreign oil. The U.S. reduced the strategic leverage of foreign producers such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
But since taking office, the Biden Administration has killed the Keystone XL pipeline to transport oil from Canada and the Bakken Shale to Gulf Coast refiners; canceled oil leasing in Alaska; suspended oil leases on federal land, even after a court ruled the moratorium illegal; increased fuel-mileage standards for cars, which favors electric vehicles; and invoked the Endangered Species Act as part of a strategy to reduce drilling on private land in the West. No doubt we’re missing something.
Someone should ask Mr. Biden, on his next stop for ice cream, why the President thinks oil produced by foreign dictators in Russia, Iran or Saudi Arabia is more desirable than oil drilled by American entrepreneurs.
Anyone who voted for Biden in 2020 voted for this, along with the inevitable energy prices-driven inflation we are now seeing.
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.
The $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill is a sham. Not only that, it’s a sham that sets up a much bigger round of explicitly partisan spending later in the year.
In a climactic vote [Tuesday] afternoon, 19 Senate Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.), signed onto the bill, which calls for $550 billion in new spending as part of more than $1 trillion in funding for roads, bridges, waterways, and broadband. The bill also includes essential infrastructure provisions like, er, requiring unproven new drunk-driving-prevention technology on cars, a vaping ban on Amtrak, and new reporting requirements for cryptocurrency.
The Republicans repeatedly claimed that the spending would be fully paid for, despite plenty of reasons to suspect that it won’t be. As Reason‘s Eric Boehm reported, the Congressional Budget Office, Congress’ nonpartisan scorekeeper, estimates that the bill would add at least $256 billion to the deficit, and probably more like $400 billion. Nineteen Republicans voted for it anyway.
The same Republicans also claim that while they support the infrastructure spending, they are deeply opposed to the rest of the Democratic agenda, which is being moved separately as part of a $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package that Democrats plan to pass on a party line.
You might think of the budget resolution as the “everything else bill.” It funds the bulk of President Joe Biden’s agenda that is not physical infrastructure. It’s focused largely on climate and social spending—vastly increasing federal funding for Medicare, Obamacare, and a yet-to-be-determined new federal health program as well as welfare-style payments to parents of children and the “first ever Civilian Climate Corps.”
Democrats have insisted that this bill too will be fully paid for, but they haven’t spelled out the precise mechanisms. And reconciliation instructions released earlier this week allow for as much as $1.75 trillion in deficit spending over the next decade; like the infrastructure bill, it’s unlikely that this “fully paid for” legislation will actually be fully paid for in the end.
The $3.5 trillion budget plan, in other words, is a big government, progressive-agenda spending bill (even if the progressives would have preferred an even bigger reconciliation package). It’s the sort of legislation that Republicans claim to oppose, and have promised to fight vigorously.
The Republicans signing onto the infrastructure bill have argued, in effect, that doing so restrains Democratic ambitions. In this telling, the bipartisan bill serves as a more modest alternative to Democratic spending plans—a compromise that forces Democrats to chisel down their ambitions. It’s no such thing.
Instead, the better way to look at the two bills is as a package deal. That’s how Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) sees it. She’s been clear from the start that she will only take up the Senate’s bipartisan bill as a two-part play, along with the $3.5 budget plan. “There ain’t no infrastructure bill without the reconciliation bill,” she said in June. That’s how one key centrist Senate Democrat, Joe Manchin (W. Va.) sees it too: Late last month, he said that “if the bipartisan infrastructure bill falls apart, everything falls apart.” Sen. Tim Kaine (D–Va.) said last month that if somehow the bipartisan bill fell apart, Democrats would just…add $600 billion or so to their reconciliation bill, meaning they’d get $4.1 trillion or so either way. And while Biden has since (kinda-sorta-maybe) backtracked, he has also said that the two bills could work in “tandem.”
Meanwhile, the Congressional Progressive Caucus released a statement today saying that its members “won’t support a bipartisan bill without a bold reconciliation bill to advance our priorities.” It’s a two-bill deal.
The best way to think of these two pieces of legislation, then, is not to think of them as two entirely separate bills, but as a package deal representing $4.1 trillion in spending on the Biden agenda. And rather than restraining Democratic spending ambitions somehow, the infrastructure bill tees up the rest of the package, advancing the ball on the larger Biden agenda.
So when 19 Senate Republicans turn out to vote for the infrastructure deal, arguing that it’s a fully paid for compromise that doesn’t raise any taxes, they are effectively supporting a $4.1 trillion tandem package, and everything that may end up in it, even while pretending that they are adamantly opposed.
To understand why this happened anyway, it’s important to understand the almost mystical allure of bipartisan dealmaking in Congress, especially in the Senate. In parts of official and high-status Washington, bipartisan deals are seen as a good unto themselves, almost independent of what’s in them. And for a certain type of lawmaker, that allure has an even greater appeal now, in the post-Trump era, when one of the Senate’s own is in the White House. Biden himself is a true believer in the power of across-the-aisle dealmaking.
At the same time, Congress has been consumed by gridlock and dysfunction, and as a result there has been a growing sense, shared in part by many frustrated lawmakers, that it has lost the ability to get things done.
The bipartisan infrastructure deal is intended as a kind of a rejoinder to that narrative, an answer to the question: Who says Congress can’t get big things done? The $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal, and its $3.5 trillion partner budget bill, says yes, Congress can get big things done—big, terrible things.
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…”
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 