Today in 1956, Nat King Cole became the first black man to host a TV show, on NBC:
The number one single today in 1966:
Today in 1971, Elvis Presley performed at the Met Center in Bloomington, Minn. To get the fans to leave after repeated encore requests, announcer Al Dvorin announced, “Elvis has left the building.”
My son’s school, located near a polling place, [hosted] online-only classes on Election Day and the day before. It’s doing so “out of an abundance of caution,” despite making a successful transition from a hybrid schedule to optional full-time in-person teaching, because supporters of America’s two political death cults can’t be trusted to behave themselves when encountering one another on the way to vote.
This, bluntly, is insane. Elections to government office shouldn’t matter so much that they pose threats to the safety of school kids. And the only way to make who wins government office matter less is to lower the stakes by making government itself less important.
Schools aren’t the only places worried about election fallout.
“We have seen some isolated civil unrest and as we have done on several occasions over the last few years, we have moved our firearms and ammunition off the sales floor as a precaution for the safety of our associates and customers,” a Walmart spokesman noted last week. (On Wednesday, I witnessed staff hurriedly removing guns from the sales floor of a Phoenix-area store.)
Amidst much pushback, the company reversed the decision two days later. But the fact remains that a major U.S. retailer fears its customers might riot and try to kill one another if they’re disappointed with the outcome of the vote.
Government officials are similarly worried. “Bracing for possible civil unrest on Election Day, the Justice Department is planning to station officials in a command center at FBI headquarters to coordinate the federal response to any disturbances or other problems with voting that may arise across the country,” reports The Washington Post. NPR has a similar piece on “How Police, National Guard And Military Are Preparing For Election Day Tensions.”
How did we get to the point that Americans might turn to violence if they don’t like the outcomes of elections?
“The key to peaceful transition is that politicians and their supporters must be able to lose an election,” writes Hoover Institution Senior Fellow John H. Cochrane. “Losers and their supporters understand that they may lose on policy issues, but they will have the chance to regroup and try again. They will not lose their jobs or their businesses. They will not be put in jail, dogged with investigations, prosecuted under vague laws, regulated out of business. Their assets will not be confiscated.”
“The vanishing ability to lose an election and not be crushed is the core reason for increased partisan vitriol and astounding violation of basic norms on both sides of our political divide,” Cochrane adds. He points to the growing use of regulations, legal interpretations, and criminal investigations by election winners to punish their enemies as making politics a game that nobody can afford to lose.
Chants of “lock her up!” aimed at Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump—or by any candidate at a political opponent—may rally the mob, but they raise the very real possibility that disappointment at the polls will have consequences far more dangerous than thwarted career aspirations. There are plenty of countries where coming out in the wrong end of a vote can land you behind bars.
Likewise, the weaponization of regulatory agencies by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his ilk to strong-arm banks and other firms into denying services to political opponents is a threat to “the First Amendment rights of all organizations to engage in political advocacy without fear that the state will use its regulatory authority to penalize them for doing so,” as the American Civil Liberties Union warns.
Yet these thuggish tactics have become regular features of our political life. Politicians thrill their supporters with promises to misuse the vast and dangerous power of the state to crush despised opponents. And then we’re supposed to wonder why our political seasons turn into societal pressure cookers with election outcomes treated as existential threats. Well, our political class and their rabid partisans are doing their best to make sure that losing a vote really is an existential threat.
The pandemic has certainly exacerbated the situation. People suffering from economic distress and social isolation enforced by government lockdowns are fodder for civil disorder.
“Economic growth and the unemployment rate are the two most important determinants of social unrest,” warns the International Labour Organisation (ILO).
“The domestic situation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic creates an environment that could accelerate some individuals’ mobilization to targeted violence or radicalization to terrorism,” cautions the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
But that’s fuel added to an already-smoldering fire. The political culture in the United States was sick long before anybody heard of COVID-19. All too many Americans already hated each other and plotted to destroy their political enemies. Responses to the virus just add a little more chaos to the mix.
So, how to lower the temperature so that school kids aren’t imperiled by their proximity to ballot-wielding Democrats and Republicans and retailers don’t feel compelled to strip their sporting goods departments prior to Election Day?
“If government ran less of your life, you wouldn’t have to spend so much time worrying about ‘election fraud’ this and ‘deadlines for counting ballots’ that, etc etc,” the Goldwater Institute’s Timothy Sandefur mused a few days before the latest Most Important Election Ever ™.
That’s true. Traditional philosophical arguments over the proper role of government and the balance of majority wishes with individual autonomy have been replaced by one important observation: the government we have now is so large, powerful, and dangerous that nobody can afford to lose control to their enemies. Politics is now an escalating struggle between death cults whose partisans realistically fear doom if vote totals don’t go their way.
I’ve suggested before that the most promising short-term path is for individuals and localities to follow in the footsteps of Sanctuary Cities and Second Amendment Sanctuaries in ignoring commandments from further up the governmental food chain. That’s relatively straightforward since it requires no agreements among factions. Better still would be formal decentralization that doesn’t rely on defiance.
But one way or another we have to make elections less consequential so that people can afford to lose them without fearing their treatment by the winners. Given that power is inevitably abused by those who wield it, that means reducing government’s authority over our lives so that ballot-box victors can’t so easily punish their enemies.
Today in 1963, John Lennon showed his ability to generate publicity at the Beatles’ performance at the Royal Variety Show at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London. The Queen Mother and Princess Margaret were in attendance, so perhaps they were the target of Lennon’s comment, “In the cheaper seats you clap your hands. The rest of you, just rattle your jewelry.”
Lennon would demonstrate his PR skills a couple of years later when he proclaimed the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus.”
The number one single today in 1965:
The number one single today in 1972:
Today in 1990, Melissa Ethridge and her “life partner” Julie Cypher appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine for its cover story on gay parenting.
I bring this up only to point out that Etheridge and Cypher no longer are life partners, Cypher (the ex-wife of actor Lou Diamond Phillips) is now married to another man, and Etheridge became engaged to another woman, but they split before their planned California wedding. And, by the way, Cypher had two children from the “contribution” of David Crosby, and Etheridge’s second woman had children from another man. And, by the way, Newsweek is no longer a weekly magazine.
Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris provided narration for a short animated clip that appeared on her Twitter feed Sunday. In the clip, Harris gives voice to a leftist-progressive narrative about the importance of equity—equal outcomes—rather than mere equality before the law.
“There’s a big difference between equality and equity,” says Harris. “Equality suggests, ‘Oh, everyone should get the same amount.’ The problem with that, not everybody’s starting in the same place.”
Harris contrasted equal treatment—all people getting the same thing—with equitable treatment, which means “we all end up at the same place.”
This may seem like a trivial difference, but when it comes to public policy, the difference matters. A government should be obligated to treat all citizens equally, giving them the same access to civil rights and liberties like voting, marriage, religious freedom, and gun ownership. The government cannot deny rights to certain people because they are black, female, Muslim, etc.—this would be unequal treatment.
A mandate to foster equity, though, would give the government power to violate these rights in order to achieve identical social results for all people. In accordance with this thinking, the authorities might be justified in giving some people more rights than others. Indeed, this would arguably be strictly necessary, in order to create a society where everyone ends up in the exact same situation.
Conservatives swiftly condemned Harris’s tweet in characteristically dramatic fashion: Rep. Liz Cheney (R–Wyo.) accused Harris of sounding “just like Karl Marx.” Harris probably isn’t a committed Marxist—if anything, her core ideology seems to be whatever the current political moment calls for—but it’s probably true that the people on her staff who helped make this video are well-informed about the sort of lingo that appeals to young progressive activists. This cohort is certainly interested in radical ideas like using wealth redistribution to engineer leftist social outcomes.
If the Biden-Harris ticket triumphs on Election Day, expect some of these people to find themselves staffing the vast federal bureaucracy, taking jobs in the Departments of Education, Labor, Housing, and elsewhere. There are a million different ways for these bureaucrats to make marginal, under-the-radar policy changes that support an equity-over-equality worldview. That’s a far greater danger than Harris’s earnest and clumsy attempts to woo the wokest of the woke.
The number one single today in 1956:
Britain’s number one single today in 1960:
The number one single today in 1962:
Today in 1964, a fan at a Rolling Stones concert fell out of the balcony of Public Hall in Cleveland. That prompted Cleveland Mayor Ralph Locker to ban pop music concerts in the city, saying, “Such groups do not add to the community’s culture or entertainment.” Kind of ironic that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ended up in Cleveland.
Joe Biden claims that he will not raise middle-class taxes if he’s elected president tomorrow (or whenever the election becomes official).
Biden is lying as much as he is lying about the bad effects of Biden/Harris policies on your wallet.
Example number one from Jordan Davidson:
A new study shows that Democratic Presidential Nominee Joe Biden’s proposed economic plan would significantly hurt the long-term American economy if implemented.
While many mainstream media outlets claim Biden’s plan will target the wealthy and save the middle-class money, the 50-page study released by the Hoover Institution shows different results.
“Economists have paid too little attention to the economic effects of the Biden plan,” said Casey B. Mulligan, professor of economics at the University of Chicago. “Our report, which focuses on taxation, health insurance, regulation, and energy policy, suggests that these effects are potentially very large indeed.”
The study conducted by a group of financial and economic experts including Mulligan, former Chief Economist of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and Kevin Hassett, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers since 2017, demonstrates how Biden’s plan will hurt everyone.
“We conclude that, in the long run, Vice President Biden’s full agenda reduces full-time equivalent employment per person by about 3 percent, the capital stock per person by about 15 percent, real GDP per capita by more than 8 percent, and real consumption per household by about 7 percent,” the report stated.
If Biden’s proposed changes are implemented, the economists warn that, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s projections, 2030 may yield “4.9 million fewer employed individuals, $2.6 trillion less GDP, and $1.5 trillion less consumption in that year alone.” The economists also note that the median household income in 2030 would fall by $6,500 despite Biden’s promises to prioritize the middle class.
In the study, the economists’ main findings center on three conclusions. First, that for Biden to achieve the “ambitious plans to further cut the nation’s carbon emissions,” 1.3 million net additional energy workers will need to be added into the transportation and electrical industries.
“Biden’s plans are ambitious,” says Mulligan. “Unless people drive a lot less, the electrification of all or even most passenger vehicles would increase the per capita demand for electric power by about 25 percent. Simultaneously, more than 70 percent of the baseline supply (i.e., electricity generated from fossil fuels) would be taken offline and another 11 percent (nuclear) would not expand.”
The study also concludes that “labor wedges are increased by proposed changes to regulation as well as to the ACA.” Because of the subsidations, the study found the average marginal tax rate on labor would rise by 2.4 percentage points.
“Labor falls primarily due to new and high implicit taxes associated with more generous health insurance assistance delivered in the framework of the Affordable Care Act (ACA),” the study reads.
“Our quantitative findings for the ACA should be no surprise given what had been found for previous efforts in the U.S. and other countries to expand health insurance coverage,” the study adds.
Lastly, the study concludes that Biden’s plan “reduces capital intensity by increasing average marginal tax rates on capital income.”
“Biden’s plan to raise personal income and payroll tax rates would push their federal rates from below 40 percent to, often, above 50 percent, and these are on top of state income taxes,” the study states, which would hurt small businesses, their employees, and consumers substantially.
While Biden and his VP Nominee Kamala Harris previously promised that they will not “raise taxes on anyone who makes less than $400,000,” they have also promised to repeal the tax cuts made by President Trump, which gave 80.4 percent of all taxpayers a cut and 91 percent of the middle quintile a cut.
“On Day One, Joe Biden will repeal that tax bill. He will get rid of it,” Harris said during the vice presidential debate in early October.
Repealing a tax cut is a tax increase, as those who enjoyed Barack Obama’s allowing the Great Recession payroll tax cuts to expire should know.
Example number two is from John Joyce: posts something determined accurate by Politifact:
Did you know Biden wants to get rid of something called “stepped up basis”? How does this affect you! When your parents pass and leave you the family house, normally you would inherit that property at what it is worth today. If you were to sell that house you would only pay taxes on the gain from what it is worth today and what it sells for. If Biden does away with “stepped up basis,” you will inherit the property for what your parents paid for the property. If you decide to sell you will pay taxes on the difference between the original purchase price and what it sells for today. Here is what this looks like!
Inherited House at Current Value – $200,000
Sells for $205,000Taxable income = $5000
Taxes Due – 20% of $5000 = $1000
Profit to you = $204,000
Biden Policy
Inherited House at original purchase price – $40,000
Sells for $205,000
Taxable income = $165,000
Taxes Due – 20% of $165,000 = $33,000
Profit to you = $172,000
If your parents were to have sold this property prior to passing, they would have paid no taxes because it was their primary residence.
So much for helping the middle class get ahead.
My educated guess would be that at least 95% of Americans don’t even know Biden has proposed this. We are talking tens of thousands of more tax dollars for the average sold after inheritance! Wow, google “Biden stepped up basis” and educate yourself because this is a biggie!
Example three and more come from the Wall Street Journal:
‘I don’t see red states and blue states,” said Joe Biden in the final presidential debate, borrowing a line from Barack Obama. He must not have examined the policies that he and Democrats in Congress are pushing that would do disproportional harm to Republican states, especially in the South, while favoring Democratic states. Let’s examine four policies in particular:
Far left operatives created the Donald Trump Watch website recently to reveal local Trump donors in your community.
Users are able to punch in the address of any location in the country and a map will show you the name and address of any Trump donor in the area.
The website is using FEC data to target Trump voters and donors.
According to the website they provide the names and addresses of “Americans who Give Money to Support a Racist.”
The website claims it is a privately owned website that is not affiliated with any government agencies.
Here is what we found.
We looked up the registering company Dynadot LLC.
It was a small company in San Mateo California and now has two Chinese offices and a Toronto Canada office.
The only reason for calling Trump a racist and doxing his supporters on-line is to let BLM and ANTIFA know where we live.
It has our names, amount of donations, and our addresses according to zipcode.
They could easily target donors in a single geographic area.
And we all know how the left operates today!
Journalists claim they can’t cover the New York Post’s Hunter Biden email scoop because the underlying evidence has yet to been verified. Also, they won’t look for any verifying evidence because there isn’t enough evidence.
It’s quite the conundrum.
Because other than the now-corroborated emails, the laptop, the on-the-record source who was a CEO of a Biden corporation, a trove of text messages and documents, and a lack of denials, the Hunter Biden email story reminds me of the “Russian collusion” story. Surely it deserves a modicum of scrutiny and follow-up.
Anyone who watched Tony Bobulinski’s interview on Tucker Carlson’s show this week — apparently it pulled over 5 million viewers — was confronted with a seemingly credible character. Bobulinski says he met with Joe Biden in 2017, and that the former vice president was intimately involved in the family business. Maybe someone will ask the candidate about this. Because Biden, widely seen as the frontrunner, has on numerous occasions emphatically denied any knowledge of what Hunter was doing. So even if he didn’t benefit from his son’s leveraging of the family name to strike deals with Chinese Communist energy interests, it is still newsworthy.
Bobulinski alleges that during a meeting with Joe Biden’s brother, he asked how the former vice president gets away with this sort of thing: “I remember looking at Jim Biden and saying how are you guys getting away with this? Aren’t you concerned? He looked at me, and he laughed a little bit, and said ‘plausible deniability.’”
Hunter’s ex-business partner, in fact, confronted Rob Walker, a Biden “family representative” about it.“If [Schiff] doesn’t come out, on record, I am providing the facts,” Bobulinski said in a recording.
“Ah, Tony, you’re just going to bury all of us, man,” responded Walker, which sounds odd coming from someone charged with representing a supposedly completely innocent venture.
To put all of this context as a journalistic matter, the week before the Post broke the Hunter Biden story, every major news network was reporting on surreptitiously taped conversation in which the First Lady was grousing about Christmas decorations.
Indeed, these are just allegations. Some of them more compelling than others. We still know very little, for example, about potentially damaging emails that purport to show Biden helping his son while he was vice president — namely, by meeting with a Burisma energy executive on behalf of Hunter at the White House.
In a strange way, the lack of coverage has perpetuated the story, not only through the Streisand effect, but because suppressing it — the New York Post’s Twitter account is still frozen — allows the imagination to run wild. While no conservative pundit has penned 8,000 words of Chait-style crackpottery pondering whether Joe has been Chinese asset since the 1980s, some have certainly jumped the gun.
Perhaps my favorite part of [the] interview, though, was learning that Adam Schiff’s ugly and mendacious habit of smearing anyone he disagrees with as a Russian asset is what allegedly helped spur Bobulinski, a former U.S. Navy lieutenant, to come forward.
Does it matter? Yesterday, a number of journalists were retweeting an Axios interview in which Senator Ted Cruz, asked about the “Hunter Biden stuff,” said the story won’t move a single vote. Perhaps that’s true. It’s also irrelevant. The journalist’s job is to provide transparency, not to worry about elections or be society’s hall monitor.
It is certain — and, boy, am I sick of framing coverage in this way, but what can you do? — that if a credible witness and former business partner of one of Donald Trump Jr.’s companies came forward to offer specific accusations and evidence that the president was profiting off of business dealings his shady son was striking with authoritarians, teams of investigative journalists would be descending on every tangential character as if they were a defunct Chinese bank account.
And the assertion made by many reporters that journalistic ethics prohibit them from even mentioning these allegations is a new and concocted standard. There are thousands of allegations against Republicans reported without verification. Not one outlet had a problem referring to the recent Atlantic piece citing unnamed sources who claimed Trump belittled soldiers, even though the story came from one writer at a partisan outlet. Allegations by whistleblowers are covered all the time, whether they have been fully vetted or not. Major outlets were eager to amplify not only the uncorroborated accusations of Christine Blasey Ford, but a host of other very obviously dubious claims about Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing.
But much of the reticence about investigating the Hunter Biden story is in reaction to the fallout from the Hillary Clinton email scandal. No matter what evidence emerged, political media were never going to repeat 2016. One assumes even good reporters don’t want to be perceived as tipping the election (which speaks to the poor health of journalism).
Lest we forget, as with this Biden story, the Clinton email scandal was newsworthy. There was, after all, an open FBI investigation into the frontrunning presidential candidate of the United States because of her reckless and potentially criminal behavior. It was Hillary who initially set up a secret server to circumvent transparency, likely to hide favor-trading related to her foundation, and sent unsecured classified documents through that illegal server, although she almost surely knew it threatened national security. As the New York Times reported at the time, the chance that her correspondences were being captured by foreign powers was extremely high. It was Hillary’s staff that destroyed evidence related to that server — or as James Comey noted in his testimony, they “cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.” Any government employees conducting themselves in a similar manner would have been sent to jail.
I’m not in the habit of defending Comey, but he saved Clinton by letting her and her staff slide on richly deserved charges. The letter Comey sent to Congress informing them that the bureau had found a cache of new evidence relating to a criminal investigation was Clinton’s fault, not his. It was her top aide and confidant Huma Abedin who failed to inform the FBI about her laptop. And it was Abedin’s then-husband who used that computer to court teenage girls. Comey had an ethical obligation to inform Congress when he was apprised that new evidence had been found — as he had promised to do under oath during his testimony. If he didn’t, and the story leaked, as it surely would have, the perception would have been that he was attempting to cover up the potential wrongdoing of one of the candidates.Or, in other words, he would have been doing exactly what most of the political media are engaged in right now.
At a minimum, what we know is that the national media will spend the next four or eight years covering for Biden and his eventual successor, Kamala Harris, just as they provided cover for Barack Obama for eight years.
Wisconsinites know that the first radio station was what now is WHA in Madison. Today in 1920, the nation’s first commercial radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, went on the air.
The number one British single today in 1956 is the only number one song cowritten by a vice president, Charles Dawes:
The number one song today in 1974:
The number one British album today in 1985 was Simple Minds’ “Once Upon a Time” …
Today begins with a non-music anniversary: Today in 1870, the U.S. Weather Bureau was created, later to become the National Weather Service.
Tomorrow in 1870, the first complaints were made about the Weather Bureau’s being wrong about its forecast.
Today in 1946, two New York radio stations changed call letters. WABC, owned by CBS, became (natch) WCBS, paving the way for WJZ, owned by ABC, to become (natch) WABC seven years later. WEAF changed its call letters to WNBC.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 