The number one British single today in 1955 …
… on the day Bo Diddley made his first appearance on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Show. Diddley’s first appearance was his last because, instead of playing “Sixteen Tons” …
… Diddley played “Bo Diddley”:
The number one single today in 1965 could be said to be music to, or in, your ears:
Tom Woods:
Here’s the first thing I saw on Twitter this morning. I promise this is real and not a parody:
So she’s delighted to learn that indeed they cannot leave the house to walk the dog or to exercise.
This is for everyone’s health, of course. Because a society can be run successfully when it’s allowed to operate, then suddenly shut down, then started again, and then shut down again. No problems there!
Second, I wanted to share a few charts with you. The heroic Ian Miller (@ianmSC) has more of them.
The CDC credited masks with bringing down Arizona’s curve. Are they planning a follow-up statement now? (I’m just playing with you with that question: we already know the answer.) And here’s New Mexico as well, for good measure:
Here’s New Jersey. The governor there said masks played a significant role in bringing their curve down. And it’s true that this is one of the rare charts in which that story at least has a surface plausibility. The problem is that there’s a right-hand side to that chart now:
Then there’s Minnesota, which has had all kinds of crazy restrictions, and Florida, which was mostly open for a while before becoming completely open on September 25. Isn’t it odd that their case counts are the opposite of what the hysteria would lead you to expect?
And finally, here are three states that believe in science! That’s funny: I guess by an interesting coincidence they all just abandoned their sciency strategies at exactly the same time (because remember: rising case counts are always somebody’s fault!):
In short, the world looks nothing — as in nothing at all — like it should if the cartoon version of the virus and the government responses were correct. And yet people continue to believe it.
And not only do they believe it: but they shame and condemn you if you don’t believe it.
Why, you’re “selfish”!
I’ll never forget, earlier this year, when people protested lockdowns because their livelihoods were being destroyed, everything they’d devoted their lives to was being taken away, and their kids were suffering very badly — and the lockdowners, being the compassionate lovers of mankind they always claim to be, responded, “You just want a haircut, you selfish person.”
Wisconsin’s mask mandate has worked so well that COVID diagnoses have increased 514 percent since it took effect Aug. 1. Now Gov. Tony Evers is extending it somewhere into January. Perhaps by then everyone in the state will have it. And yet most Wisconsinites appear petrified to dare question the people who are supposed to be representing them about why failed policy is allowed to continue.
The Supremes became the first all-girl group with a British number-one single today in 1964:
The Supremes had our number one single two years later:
The number one album today in 1994 was Nirvana’s “MTV Unplugged in New York” …
… on the same day that David Crosby had a liver transplant to replace the original that was ruined by hepatitis C and considerable drug and alcohol use:
Today in 1954, ABC Radio banned Rosemary Clooney’s “Mambo Italiano” for what it termed “offensive lyrics” (decide for yourself):
The number one album today in 1978 was Billy Joel’s “52nd Street”:
More than half a century ago, in the waning weeks of the 1968 presidential contest, a young girl attended a Nixon campaign event holding a sign that read “Bring us together again.” This would be the theme of Mr. Nixon’s speech the night he beat Vice President Hubert Humphrey and former Gov. George Wallace of Alabama.
A quarter-century later, on the night of his own victory, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton declared his intention to “bring us together as never before.”
Sixteen years after that declaration, President-elect Barack Obama, who had attracted national attention with his famous vision of an America neither red nor blue but one and united, spoke of his “determination to heal the divisions that have held back our progress.” He cited the lines from Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address that inspired Joe Biden’s victory speech 10 days ago.
They and the many others who have uttered similar thoughts were certainly sincere, and I don’t cite this history to promote cynicism. But it illustrates the difficulty of translating these good intentions into results. Still, it is not impossible. Jimmy Carter began his inaugural address this way: “For myself and for our nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.”
Gerald Ford deserved this accolade. For the 895 days of his presidency, he worked to mend the national fabric torn by Vietnam, Watergate and the Central Intelligence Agency’s misdeeds. Defying conservatives in his own party, he governed from the center, and he paid the price—a challenge from Ronald Reagan that nearly cost him the Republican nomination in 1976. To rein in the imperial presidency, he minimized the use of executive privilege, which led to congressional inquiries he could not control. He made the difficult decision to give Nixon an unconditional pardon and spare the country a bitterly divisive prosecution. His press secretary resigned and some accused him of striking a corrupt bargain with his predecessor. His public approval fell precipitously and never fully recovered before Election Day. But he put the country ahead of political self-interest.
If President-elect Biden is serious about healing a divided nation, he will have to take steps that won’t be popular in his own party. For example, he won’t encourage the Justice Department to open investigations that could lead to the prosecution of Mr. Trump. If Mr. Trump’s infamous “lock her up” chant is met with calls to “lock him up,” the country will have taken another step toward the criminalization of political conflict—a hallmark of banana republics.A Biden presidency that puts healing first will govern from the center, as Ford did. Mr. Biden should lead off his legislative agenda on areas where bipartisan agreement should be possible, such as a national plan to ensure speedy vaccine distribution and adequate supplies of personal protective equipment. He should resist promoting steps, such as a national mask mandate, that are bound to provoke political controversy and constitutional challenges. He can instead work with the National Governors Association and set out constitutionally permissible conditions on states receiving federal funds.
Above all, a healing presidency will regard compromise not as a disagreeable necessity but as an opportunity to acknowledge the legitimacy of competing opinions, interests and principles in a large, pluralistic republic. Legal status for the “Dreamers” is important, and so is border security. Reforming police practices and the criminal-justice system is essential; so is the enforcement of the law against those who destroy property and commit violence, whatever their motives. Equality for all Americans without regard to race is a moral imperative, but Americans can disagree in good faith about the best means for making this equality a reality. A president who seeks compromise will do his best to respect his opponents’ red lines, even if he disagrees with them.
These arguments may strike partisans as unprincipled. But the country is both closely and deeply divided. Although Americans agree on much more than party leaders and advocacy groups will acknowledge, their divisions run deeper than they did three decades ago. Red America cannot force its will on blue America, or vice versa, and secession is both undesirable and infeasible. The only answer is to learn to live with differences.
Ambitious presidents must respect public opinion, even as they seek to change it. “Public sentiment is everything,” Abraham Lincoln famously declared. “With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed.” Lincoln confined his proposition to “this age,” but it’s every bit as relevant today.
Anyone Biden is sincere about “unity” beyond unconditional surrender of those who didn’t vote for him? I didn’t think so.
Former President Barack Obama, who presided over historic abuses of government surveillance powers, is once again attacking one of the principal targets. Four years after the Obama Justice Department misled a federal court into approving a surveillance warrant against a Trump campaign associate, Mr. Obama is comparing President Donald Trump to a murderous dictator.
Asked in a Sunday interview for the CBS News program “60 Minutes” about Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the recent election, Mr. Obama responded:
The president doesn’t like to lose and– never admits loss. I’m more troubled by the fact that other Republican officials who clearly know better are going along with this, are humoring him in this fashion. It is one more step in delegitimizing not just the incoming Biden administration, but democracy generally… I think that there has been this sense over the last several years that literally anything goes and is justified in order to get power. And that’s not unique to the United States. There are strong men and dictators around the world who think that, “I can do anything to stay in power. I can kill people. I can throw them in jail. I can run phony elections. I can suppress journalists.” But that’s not who we’re supposed to be.
Whatever one thinks of Mr. Trump’s claims—or Mr. Obama’s over-the-top comparison to dictators—Mr. Pelley has chosen one of America’s least credible advocates for presidential restraint.
Bradford Betz of Fox News reasonably notes:
…Obama’s time in office was by no means the paragon of a presidency bound by the rules of a liberal democratic republic. Court documents released in early 2013 showed that the Obama administration secretly monitored Fox News’ James Rosen – whom the FBI dubbed a “criminal co-conspirator,” despite never being charged with a crime…
Though Trump has been forceful in his denunciation of the press, the Obama administration arguably went further, evoking the Espionage Act to prosecute more people under the law for leaking sensitive information than all previous administrations combined.
As part of an investigation into the disclosure of information about a botched Al Qaeda terrorist plot, the Obama administration, without notice, obtained the records of 20 Associated Press office phone lines and reports’ home and cell phones.Early in Mr. Obama’s second term the AP reported:
The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for the Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.
Speaking of massive and unprecedented intrusions and attempts to delegitimize a presidential administration, it was four years ago this month that the Obama FBI fired Christopher Steele as a confidential source for cause, learned new reasons to doubt his reports, and also learned that he was working on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign—yet still continued to promote his bogus claims of Russian collusion.
Scott Pelley: In your book, you ask, quote, “Whether I was too tempered in speaking the truth, too cautious in word or deed.” Many Americans, Mr. President, believe you were too cautious, too tempered.
Barack Obama: Yeah… a legitimate and understandable criticism. At the end of the day, I consistently tried to treat my political opposition in the ways I’d want to be treated, To not overreact when, for example, somebody yells, “You lie,” in the middle of me giving a joint congressional address.
Barack Obama: I understand why there were times where my supporters wanted me to be more pugilistic, to, you know, pop folks in the head and duke it out a little bit more.
Scott Pelley: Was it a mistake that you didn’t?
Barack Obama: Every president brings a certain temperament to office. I think part of the reason I got elected was because I sent a message that fundamentally I believe the American people are good and decent, and that politics doesn’t have to be some cage match in– in which everybody is– is going at each other’s throats and that we can agree without being disagreeable.What a guy.
As for Mr. Pelley, readers may recall him as the author of a bizarre commentary in 2017 when he was preparing to vacate the CBS News nightly anchor chair. After a gunman shot at Republicans practicing for a congressional baseball game, Mr. Pelley said it was “time to ask” whether the attack was “to some degree, self-inflicted.”
Now Mr. Pelley is making another odd claim:
Mr. Obama is speaking after four years of virtual silence on Donald Trump. He followed a traditional commandment largely observed since Adams succeeded Washington –thou shall not criticize your successor.
Of course America would have been better off if Mr. Obama had followed the time-honored commandment to avoid surveilling your successor’s campaign. But even on its face the Pelley claim is questionable. Mr. Obama publicly criticized his successor within 10 days of Mr. Trump’s inauguration. More recently, Mr. Obama lambasted Mr. Trump at the virtual Democratic convention in August, and at various stops along the autumn campaign trail. Mr. Pelley’s own network reported last month on a speech in which “Mr. Obama delivered a sweeping condemnation of Trump”.
***
The Obama administration represented a break with tradition in terms of federal law enforcement’s relationship with politics and the press. But even Americans who don’t participate in Republican campaigns or work in media may be concerned about their free speech rights when they ponder Mr. Obama’s latest ideas for improving public discourse. The former President told Mr. Pelley:
I do think that a new president can set a new tone. That’s not going to solve all the gridlock in Washington. I think we’re going to have to work with the media and with the tech companies to find ways to inform the public better about the issues and to bolster the standards that ensure we can separate truth from fiction.
Curious how the media jumped all over Trump for his mean words and conveniently forgot about being spied on by Trump’s predecessor.
Steve Sisolak, governor of Nevada, recently scolded citizens of his state. Why, only irresponsible behavior can account for a rise in “cases” there!
So he’s teling Nevadans that they have two weeks to get things under control.
He warned, “I’m not going to come back in two weeks and say I’m going to give you another chance.”
And then, three days later, Governor Sisolak himself tested positive for COVID-19.
Should we treat him like he’s 7 and scold him for his irresponsible behavior, the way he just did to his citizens?
The governor was forced to admit: “You can take all the precautions that are possible and you can still contract the virus. I don’t know how I got it.”
As Alex Berenson says, virus gonna virus.
The current state of lockdown “science” appears to be: we have no idea what we’re doing, but if something brings people pleasure we should probably limit or prohibit it, and if something causes great inconvenience or even pain, we should probably do that.
An anonymous professor who posts on Twitter about the virus just presented this graph for our consideration. It’s a plot of COVID deaths in North Carolina and Oklahoma. Those states have adopted very different approaches to the virus. And yet, somehow, they more or less track each other anyway:
Virus gonna virus.
Yesterday former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan posted the following:
“How did we catch it? I don’t know. We wore masks. We socially distanced. We avoided crowds. We haven’t had people in our house.”
Virus gonna virus.
We can either accept this, and take steps to protect those among us who are most at risk while others resume the one life they are given, or we can destroy our social fabric.
Meanwhile, we have families and friendships being torn apart over all this. You’re a bad person if you reject the propaganda. Why, you don’t care about saving lives! You’re “selfish”!
Never mind the countless lives lost by lockdown itself, a point I’ve made again and again. Those lives don’t seem to count for some reason.
The number one single today in 1958:
The number one British single today in 1966:
Today in 1978, one of the most awful things ever foisted upon the American viewing public was shown by ABC-TV:
The number one British single today in 1979:
Joe Biden’s first speech as president elect is being hailed as a long-overdue call to overcome division. “President-elect Joe Biden seeks to unite nation with victory speech,” read the CNN headline the next day. The New York Times summed up: “Mr. Biden renewed his promise to be a president for all Americans in a polarized time.”
It is not just the left-leaning press taking at face value Biden’s calls to “put away the harsh rhetoric.” Conservative pundits are doing so as well. Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn called the speech “Lincolnesque.” Biden’s unity message was “exactly what the country needed to hear,” McGurn wrote. Daily Wire podcast host Ben Shapiro found the speech so pollyannish in its call for reconciliation as to be risible.
And yet Biden’s actual remarks were anything but unifying. Among the “great battles of our time” that Biden has now been called to fight, he said, was the still unaccomplished goal of “root[ing] out systemic racism in this country.” That “systemic racism” is presumably underwritten by millions of white Americans who continue to prevent “racial justice,” in Biden’s words. They are the ones who represent what Biden called “our darkest impulses,” locked in “constant battle” with our “better angels.” It was time—finally—for those better angels to prevail, Biden said.
This indictment of white Americans was a constant theme during the Democratic presidential primaries. In an August 2019 press briefing, Biden claimed that racism was a “white man’s problem visited on people of color.” “White folks are the reason we have institutional racism,” he said. In a January 2019 speech, Biden announced: “We have a lot to root out, but most of all the systematic racism that most of us whites don’t like to acknowledge even exists.” On Friday, November 6, the day before the press declared Biden the president elect, he was still hammering the racism theme. He had a “mandate” to eliminate “systemic racism,” he announced, prefiguring his victory speech the next day.
Throughout the election season, the Democratic contenders and mainstream media paired denunciations of white Americans’ racism with the claim that Donald Trump was the racially divisive candidate. But in those now-iconic examples of Trump’s alleged racism, the president was referring to attitudes and behaviors that he deemed anti-social or anti-American. The few times Trump used explicit racial categories were dwarfed by the constant and unapologetically anti-white statements coming from the press, the Democratic field and academic opinion writers.
And yet they got away with it. Calling whites racist is not racially divisive; referring to “law and order” apparently is. This conundrum is possible because elite whites have internalized the idea of their own racism. Decades of ever more exacting civil rights legislation and litigation, billions of dollars of transfer payments and the deployment of racial preferences throughout business and academia matter little to this conceit. It is now simply assumed that whites will be accused of racism and that they will meekly hang their heads and pack themselves off to white privilege remediations. If the tables were turned, if there were routine denunciations of black racism, there would be an uproar.
Perhaps the targets of the racism accusation don’t take it personally. If the problem is “systemic,” then any given individual seems absolved from responsibility for the fact that racial justice in America allegedly remains so unrealized. After all, the very term “systemic racism” was coined to overcome the fact that it is hard to find actual individuals in positions of even moderate power who discriminate on the basis of race. The reality is the opposite. It is hard to find an institution today that does not go out of its way to prefer minority groups, if at all possible.
But while the “systemic racism” conceit may seem to take individuals out of the equation, they are in fact essential to the idea. The character of our institutions does not arise in a vacuum; those institutions are sustained by individuals. And in any case, the connection between the system and the individuals within it is made often and explicitly enough (“White people…were the only group in which a majority voted for Trump…. Many of our fellow countrymen and women are either racists or accommodate racists or acquiesce to racists”; the fact that 71 million people voted for Donald Trump despite his “racism” should be a “cause for profound and pervasive grief“).
The Trump vote in part represented a rebellion against this double standard: accusing whites of racial sins they no longer commit is not “divisive,” but criticizing actual behavior like rioting or drive-by shootings is. That rebellion was inarticulate and inchoate, and has been sidelined for now. The operating principle of the next administration will be America’s systemic racism, a “dark impulse” that will require ever more robust government measures to counteract. And if history is any guide, there will be little pushback.
The Wall Street Journal:
Did you enjoy the days at home from mid-March to May? The 22 million lost jobs, the shuttered storefronts, the neighborhood shops out of business, the kids unable to attend school, and the near economic depression? Well, congratulations, a reprise may be coming your way if Joe Biden heeds his Covid-19 advisory team.
We’ve told you about Ezekiel Emanuel, the advisory committee member who wanted new lockdowns during the summer flare-up in the Sunbelt states. Lucky for the country that his only power then was appearing on MSNBC.
Then there’s Michael Osterholm, also a member of the Biden Covid committee, who now wants a new nationwide lockdown for as many as six weeks. Dr. Osterholm is director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. CNBC quoted him as suggesting that we are about to enter “Covid hell” and the government should lock everyone up as we await a vaccine.
“We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the wages, lost wages for individual workers for losses to small companies to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments. We could do all of that,” Dr. Osterholm said, according to Yahoo Finance. “If we did that, then we could lock down for four to six weeks.”
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 