The number one song today in 1962:
The number one song today in 1984 announced quite a comeback:
The number one song today in 1962:
The number one song today in 1984 announced quite a comeback:
You can tell a Democrat is president, because we’re starting to see pieces blaming “us” for his mistakes. In The Atlantic a couple of weeks ago, Tom Nichols wrote that “Afghanistan Is Your Fault.” “American citizens,” Nichols suggested, “will separate into their usual camps and identify all of the obvious causes and culprits except for one: themselves.” Today, Max Boot makes the same argument in the Post. “Who’s to blame for the deaths of 13 service members in Kabul?” he asks. Answer: “We all are.”
This is of a piece with the tendency of journalists and historians to start muttering about how the presidency is “too big for one man” when the bad president in question is a Democrat. Under these terms, Republicans just aren’t up to the job, while Democrats are the victims of design or modernity or of the public being feckless. Last year, coronavirus was Trump’s fault. Now, it’s the fault of Republican governors and the unvaccinated (well, only some of the unvaccinated).
Still, this has happened pretty quickly with Joe Biden. Usually, it takes a couple of years before the press starts to sound like a bunch of hippies sitting around a fire saying, “you know, in a sense, you’re me and I’m you, and all of us are we — and so when the president makes a mistake, it’s really, like, the universe making a mistake, isn’t it? And, y’know, we’re in the universe, so we are the presidency. That’s democracy, man.”
Today in 1955, a London judge fined a man for “creating an abominable noise” — playing this song loud enough to make the neighborhood shake, rattle and roll for 2½ hours:
Today in 1968, Private Eye magazine reported that the album to be released by John Lennon and Yoko Ono would save money by providing no wardrobe for Lennon or Ono:

Honor has always had an enormous influence on human affairs and the conduct of governments — until, evidently, the advent of President Joe Biden in the year 2021.
There’s no perspective from which his exit from Afghanistan looks good. But abstracting it from any considerations of honor at least takes some of the sting out of a deeply humiliating episode that would have been considered intolerable throughout most of our nation’s history.
It is dishonorable — even if you believe we had to get out — to throw away what we had sacrificed for in Afghanistan in this grotesquely reckless manner.
It is dishonorable to criticize our erstwhile Afghan friends, especially after we pulled the rug out from under them, and kowtow to our current Afghan enemies.
It is dishonorable to do things we told people repeatedly that we wouldn’t.
It is dishonorable to abandon Afghan allies who put it all on the line for us and believed that, if the worst came, we would get them out.
It is especially dishonorable, unfathomably so, to leave Americans behind enemy lines, a potentiality that the administration has been trying to prepare the American public for in recent days (and hopefully somehow won’t come to pass).
A counterexample that reflects a more traditional American approach is President Teddy Roosevelt’s famous handling of the Perdicaris Affair in 1904, which involved the massive deployment of naval firepower over the kidnapping of one American in a faraway land of which we knew nothing.
Roosevelt’s reflexive bellicosity can seem atavistic at a time when national honor has lost a lot of its purchase.
James Bowman, who wrote a book years ago called Honor: A History, argued that the declining influence of honor in our time is a function of the enormous destructiveness of modern warfare and the feminist and psychotherapeutic reactions to it.
But it hasn’t disappeared, and never will. “Honor is the name of one category of concerns and motives that has dominated relations among peoples and states since antiquity,” the great historian and classicist Donald Kagan once noted. “Although concepts of what is honorable and dishonorable can vary over time and place, sometimes superficially and sometimes deeply, and although other people’s ideas of honor, especially those of an earlier time, can seem silly or outmoded, such surface variations often conceal a fundamental similarity or even identity.”
As for TR, his response to the Perdicaris kidnapping combined a sense of outraged honor at the mistreatment of one American with a prudent view of what military force really could achieve. It added up to a successful foray in coercive diplomacy.
Both Jerry Hendrix in his book Theodore Roosevelt’s Naval Diplomacy and Edmund Morris in his biography of TR have good accounts of the episode. Ion Perdicaris was a 64-year-old expat who lived in Tangier. He was a prominent figure in the English-speaking community in the Moroccan town.
The sultan of Morocco had limited control over the country, with bandits running loose in outlying areas, especially the charismatic Moulay Ahmed el Raisuli.
Tom Schatz of Citizens Against Government Waste (a redundant term since government wastes money as often as you breathe):
Since the beginning of the Reagan administration, the federal-budget submission to Congress has included a list of proposed budget cuts, terminations, consolidations, and savings, along with a management agenda. Every president since then thought it was important to provide this information, until President Joe Biden decided that there is not a single penny of the taxpayers’ money being misspent throughout the entire federal government.
The Biden-Harris administration’s $6 trillion budget for fiscal year (FY) 2002 is 37 percent greater than the $4.4 trillion spent in FY 2019, which was the last budget before the pandemic. Even with a $4 trillion tax increase, there is still a $1.84 trillion deficit, which is 86 percent greater than the $984 billion deficit in FY 2019. Deficits will exceed $1 trillion for each of the next ten years, pushing the national debt to more than $39 trillion from the current $28.4 trillion.
When he served with President Barack Obama, Mr. Biden was a key member of the administration’s efforts to promote its budget on Capitol Hill. He was involved in the negotiations over the Budget Control Act of 2011, which set spending caps and helped to somewhat restrain the growth of spending until it expired. President Obama tasked the then–vice president with leading his Campaign to Cut Waste, saying, “I know Joe’s the right man to lead it because nobody messes with Joe.”
Mr. Biden called himself “Sheriff Joe” for his work with the Recovery Board, which tracked expenditures under the $831 billion stimulus bill, along with the Government Accountability and Transparency Board, which was established to identify ways agencies could eliminate waste and improve performance. Mr. Biden said the transparency board would be looking at every dollar of government spending.
According to an April 19, 2019, Government Executive article about how then-candidate Joe Biden would approach managing the government as president, he had said the success of the Campaign to Cut Waste “would be measured by results, not rhetoric.” He said it would “restore trust in government” and do “more than just eliminating waste and fraud . . . by instilling a new culture of efficiency in each of our agencies, greater responsibility, responsiveness and accountability.”
In addition to the campaign and the establishment of the Accountability and Transparency Board, all eight Obama-Biden budget submissions included a volume of “terminations, reductions, and savings,” or “cuts, consolidations, and savings.” The administration said in several of these submissions that it had been going through the budget line-by-line to identify ineffective, duplicative, and overlapping programs. They would be recommended for reduction or termination so that the taxpayers’ money would be used for programs that work as intended.
According to the last Obama-Biden budget for FY 2017, that process “identified, on average, more than 140 cuts, consolidations, and savings averaging more than $22 billion each year.” The proposals were included in a separate volume with the budget submission to Congress. The Trump administration’s four budgets included an average of $50 billion in program eliminations and reductions, making it 40 consecutive years of presidential administrations providing such proposals to Congress. But the Biden-Harris budget for FY 2022 has broken that streak by providing no list of program consolidations or terminations, either separately or as part of the total budget submission.
This complete lack of interest in cutting spending began early in the administration, when President Biden sent a letter to Congress on January 31, 2021, withdrawing President Trump’s 73 proposed rescissions that would have saved taxpayers $27.4 billion, including several that were included in the Obama-Biden budgets for terminations, reductions, and savings, such as the Commission on Fine Arts, the East–West Center, the McGovern-Dole Food for Education program, and Presidio Trust. During his April 28, 2021, address to Congress, President Biden did not say a single word about wasteful spending, nor has he made any other comments or issued any executive orders requiring federal agencies to identify or reduce inefficiency. Vice President Harris likewise has said nothing about these issues.
On April 13, 2011, President Obama proposed a “Framework for Shared Prosperity and Shared Fiscal Responsibility,” which proposed $4 trillion in deficit reduction over twelve years. A little more than ten years later, on May 28, 2021, President Biden proposed a $14.5 trillion cumulative increase in deficits over ten years.
After aiming at government waste during the Obama-Biden administration, Sheriff Joe has clearly hung up his badge.
Notice that Obama suddenly got interested in government waste after the 2010 mid-term “shellacking.” Biden won’t get interested unless he’s made to be interested. In 2022?
Today in 1959, Bertolt Brecht‘s “Threepenny Opera” reached the U.S. charts in a way Brecht …
… could not have fathomed:
Today in 1968, Apple Records released its first single by — surprise! — the Beatles:
Today in 1969, this spent three weeks on top of the British charts, on top of six weeks on top of the U.S. charts, making them perhaps the ultimate one-number-one-hit-wonder:
Today in 1966, the Beatles played their last concert for which tickets were charged, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.
Today in 1970, Edwin Starr was at number one on both sides of the Atlantic:
Britain’s number one album today in 1981:
Ask a magician for the number one song today in 1982, and the magician will say …
The number one single today in 1961 was made more popular by Elvis Presley, not its creator:
Also today in 1961, the Marvelettes released what would become their first number one song:
Today in 1964, the Beatles met Bob Dylan after a concert in Forest Hills, N.Y. Dylan reportedly introduced the Beatles to marijuana:
Patrick Reusse of the Minneapolis–St. Paul Star Tribune:
Current head-counting has the Minnesota population at 5.7 million and Wisconsin at 5.9 million. The major difference is that 3.65 million of Minnesotans are concentrated in the Twin Cities metro area. The Milwaukee metro is 1.58 million and Madison, located 80 miles west, is 670,000.
Wisconsin’s larger population is fed by more mid-sized cities than in Minnesota, including Green Bay, home to an NFL franchise with a metro area population of 325,000.
Tom Oates, the now-retired, long-time columnist for the Wisconsin State Journal, said: “I was asked frequently in press boxes, ‘How can Green Bay support a football team?’ Those people don’t understand how it works in the Midwest, and for sure, in Wisconsin.
“The Packers aren’t Green Bay’s team. They are Wisconsin’s team.
“There are no divided loyalties in Wisconsin. Everyone is a Packers fan, everyone is a Brewers fan, everyone is a Bucks fan and everyone is a Badgers fan.”
Oates paused and said: “Except Marquette in basketball. Marquette fans don’t like the Badgers in basketball.”
Much of Minnesota’s rivalry with Wisconsin stems from similarities. Population (as cited). Lakes, woods, fishing and deer hunting. Starkly divided politics by urban and rural.
Twin Cities media outlets have thrived on claiming “hate” for Wisconsin teams and their fans, but they are basically us — with a few more 16-stool taverns in the small towns.
The Minnesotans embracing that hate are having a very tough 21st century. And the competition taking place around pandemic outbreaks in 2021 has been toughest of all.
Consider the period from July 20 to July 27:
On the first of those Tuesdays, Giannis Antetokounmpo led the Bucks to their first NBA title in 50 years. On the second of those Tuesdays, Aaron Rodgers showed up in Packers camp after an offseason drama in which management refused to trade him.
In between these two happenings, the Brewers were winning two out of three in a home series vs. the White Sox. The attendance for the series was 111,287, and the Brewers’ lead was seven games in the National League Central.
Here in Minnesota, the lowly Timberwolves were preparing to sit out the NBA draft after a trade that ridded them of Andrew Wiggins and brought in No-D-Lo Russell, the Vikings were about to discover that their quarterback’s plan to avoid another COVID quarantine was to shield himself with Plexiglas, and the Twins finished July last in the woeful AL Central, 17 games behind the White Sox.
What was left was for the Minnesota’s haters of Wisconsin sports entities was to gaze eastward and say, “This interstate rivalry has gone from bad to worse.”
Minnesota and Wisconsin started playing football in 1890. The only year missed was 1906, when 19 deaths in college football the previous season had caused a national campaign to ban the activity. Wisconsin’s response was to play a five-game schedule that did not include its “fiercest” rivals: Minnesota, Michigan and the University of Chicago.
The game was almost missed again last season because of the pandemic. The Gophers bowed out of two late games because of COVID issues, then agreed with the Big Ten to play at Wisconsin in mid-December.
A subpar Gophers team lost to Paul Chryst’s worst Badgers team 20-17. The Badgers are 16-1 in Paul Bunyan’s Axe games since 2004. There are other huge discrepancies, but leave it at this: 0-7 in Axe games vs. Bret Bielema.
In men’s basketball, coach Greg Gard had a group of seven seniors that primarily disliked him. And they beat the Gophers 71-59, putting Richard Pitino at 3-11 vs. Wisconsin and helping him to get fired after eight seasons.
Worst of all, there’s volleyball, where Hugh McCutcheon has the best program on the Twin Cities campus. The Badgers played for the national title in last spring’s delayed season. Now, they enter the fall season rated No. 2 in the nation, with the Gophers at No. 7.
Wisconsin has a two-time NBA MVP in Antetokounmpo, said by Oates and other observers to be an all-time great guy. It has a three-time NFL MVP (including 2020) in Rodgers, an all-time great quarterback. And it has a Brewers team that’s 25 games over .500 with the 2018 MVP, Christian Yelich, still waiting to get warm.
Plus, the Brewers now have Eduardo Escobar, “Effervescent Eddie,” who’s supposed to be our guy.
Face it, alleged haters of our Wisconsin rivals. They own us.
Minnesota is known as having 10,000 lakes (the correct number is 11,842). Former Gov. Tommy Thompson would say that Wisconsin had more lakes (15,874), “and ours have fish in them!”
YouTube provides us with a couple of highlights:
It was not until the night of John Lennon’s death, Dec. 8, 1980, that I figured out my favorite Beatles song.
Back in the good old days of live DJs in radio stations at all hours of the day and night, rock and top 40 radio stations across the U.S. immediately started playing every Beatles song they had, including …
This is like no other Beatles song in that the lead guitar is played by none other than Eric Clapton, a friend (and future, uh, whatever you call two ex-husbands of the same wife) of writer George Harrison.
What better way to honor Harrison than this band?
Or maybe this band?