Today in 1966, Neil Young, Stephen Stills and Richie Furay formed the Buffalo Springfield.
The number one British single today in 1967:
Today in 1971, the South African Broadcasting Corp. lifted its ban on broadcasting the Beatles.
Perhaps SABC felt safe given that the Beatles had broken up one year earlier. (SABC was South Africa’s radio broadcaster, by the way. TV didn’t get to South Africa until 1976.)
The Green New Deal is going to put a lot of Americans in the red.
According to a new analysis, the liberal plan backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will cost households an average of $75,000 in the first year and $40,000 extra every year after.
The study of 11 states found that the initial year of the program will be especially high because businesses and households will have to get new equipment. The price tag includes increased costs for electricity, upgrading vehicles and housing, and shipping.
Source: CEI
Alaska would be hit the hardest, with an initial first-year price tag per household at over $84,000.
“The Green New Deal is a politically motivated policy that will saddle households with exorbitant costs and wreck our economy. Our analysis shows that, if implemented, the Green New Deal would cost for American households at least tens of thousands of dollars annually on a permanent basis,” said Competitive Enterprise Institute President Kent Lassman.
“The Green New Deal would effectively destroy America’s energy industry, and with it, our entire economy,” added Daniel Turner, executive director of Power the Future.
And Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty research director Will Flanders said, “The Green New Deal would eliminate that, driving middle class families into poverty by imposing staggering annual costs of more than $40,000 per household.”
Liberals and progressives have galvanized around the plan to end the use of fossil fuels. But many centrists have avoided it because of the costs.
Several groups have studied the potential high costs, and the new report is the latest.
According to DataUSA the median annual household income in Wisconsin is $60,773. The first-year costs of the Green New Deal would thus suck up all of the income of most families in Wisconsin in its first year, three-fourths for the next four years, and two-thirds every year thereafter.
As politicians react to the coronavirus outbreak, more than a few seem to be following the old adage that you should never let a good crisis go to waste.
Since it is only a matter of time before Democrats and Republicans start accusing the other side of using a public health crisis for political gain, let’s be blunt about something: Both sides are going to use the crisis for political gain. Indeed, both already are.
Much of President Donald Trump’s briefing about the coronavirus on Wednesday night was incoherent, but he nevertheless managed to brag about how the stock market had risen after his election. More to the point, he repeatedly claimed that his administration had slowed the spread of the disease into America by cutting off air travel from China, and he suggested that further restrictions could be coming. That’s a natural response from an administration whose signature non-coronavirus policies have included travel bans, immigration restrictions, and a general hostility to the free movement of goods and people across national borders.
But building walls doesn’t stop the spread of disease. In fact, “travel restrictions can cause more harm than good by hindering info-sharing, medical supply chains and harming economies,” advised Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, secretary-general of the World Health Organization, earlier this month. Slowing the spread of disease allows more time for hospitals to prepare, but historical evidence shows that travel bans don’t actually reduce the number of people who get sick during disease outbreaks.
China hawks are seizing on the outbreak too. Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) plans to introduce a bill requiring American medical device manufacturers to provide detailed information about their supply chains to the Food and Drug Administration. The agency would use that info to “assess the security of the U.S. medical product supply chain.”
While it is presented as a way for the government to ensure America is prepared for a public health crisis, Hawley’s bill is also a step toward greater central planning. It’s not difficult to see how Hawley or Trump could, sometime in the future, claim that America’s medical supply chain is too dependent on China—in the same way that Trump used a fictional “national security” risk to justify tariffs on steel and aluminum. Those tariffs haven’t worked, but Hawley—who believes Trump’s trade war is a long-term proposition—is barely disguising his attempt to lay the groundwork for more protectionism.
Democrats, too, are using the coronavirus as a new argument for old political objectives. Like defeating Trump, for example. While they offered little in the way of alternatives during Tuesday’s primary debate, each of the candidates onstage were happy to blast the president for bungling the response to the coronavirus—even though it’s still far too soon to conclude whether Trump’s responses, or lack thereof, have made the outbreak worse in America.
Specifically, former Vice President Joe Biden has ripped the current administration for making “draconian cuts” to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The Obama administration “increased the budget of the CDC. We increased the NIH budget,” Biden said Tuesday night. “He’s wiped all that out. He cut the funding for the entire effort.”
Except he didn’t. Trump has proposed budget cuts for the CDC and NIH in each of his budgets since taking office, but Congress never approved those proposals. That’s a pretty important distinction.
If the NIH and the CDC aren’t adequately prepared to handle a disease outbreak, it’s probably their own fault. There is always going to be a finite amount of money for any government agency to use, so it’s best not to waste your shares. Yet the CDC spent $15 billion during the Obama administration to nudge Americans towards healthier eating habits, and millions more on the creation of a “Hollywood liaison office” with funds that were supposed to be used to counter the threat of bioterrorism. Sure, it’s possible that more funding would result in greater preparedness to face new and deadly diseases. So would making better choices about the money you already have.
But that’s not going to stop Democrats from using the coronavirus outbreak to argue for spending more money that we don’t have—and heaven forbid we actually pay for emergency coronavirus funding with budget cuts elsewhere. Just like it won’t stop Republicans from using the disease to push their anti-trade agenda. No matter how bad the outbreak might turn out to be, you can bet that politicians will find a way to make it worse.
Clive Cussler, the author and maritime adventurer who captivated millions with his best-selling tales of suspense and who, between books, led scores of expeditions to find historic shipwrecks and lost treasures in the ocean depths, died on Monday at his home in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 88.
His death was confirmed by a spokeswoman for his publisher, Penguin Random House. No specific cause was given.
Mayan jungles, undersea kingdoms, ghost ships, evil forces out to destroy the world, beautiful women, heroes modeled on himself — Mr. Cussler’s vivid literary fantasies and his larger-than-life exploits swirled together for four decades, spinning off more than 85 books and locating almost as many shipwrecks.
A college dropout who once pumped gas and wrote advertising copy, Mr. Cussler resorted to a hoax to get his first book published. But his work — mostly action thrillers of the James Bond-Indiana Jones kind, plus nonfiction accounts of his marine quests and a few children’s books — made him a global celebrity.
His book sales have been staggering — more than 100 million copies, with vast numbers sold in paperback at airports. Translated into 40 or so languages, his books reached The New York Times’s best-seller lists more than 20 times, as he amassed a fortune estimated at $80 million.
Mr. Cussler looked like the hero of Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” You had to imagine the battered straw hat and the tired shoulders hunched over a gunwale, but after years of roaming oceans and diving for wrecks, he had that seafarer’s husky build and sunburned cheeks, and his face, more sea dog than bibliophile, was flecked with gray: the grizzled beard, the mustache, the eyes, the gray-white hair.
Often compared to the thrillers churned out by Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum and Ian Fleming, the Cussler novels featured formulaic plots, one- or two-word titles (“Cyclops,” “Dragon,” “Inca Gold,” “Poseidon’s Arrow”) and frequently a recurring hero, Dirk Pitt, an undersea explorer who cheats death and saves the world as he foils the diabolical plots of megalomaniac villains, while satisfying his taste for exotic cars and lusty women.
For the aforementioned reasons, I inhaled Cussler novels for years in high school and college, as with Clancy’s and Ludlum’s works. I also read Fleming’s works until I figured out that his novels didn’t match the movies that much.
Mr. Cussler was hardly a stylist. Critics called his characters wooden, his dialogue leaden and his prose clichéd (“the cold touch of fear,” “a narrow brush with death”), while praising his descriptions of marine hardware, underwater struggles and salvage operations. But readers were swept along on the page-turning tides, and after his commercial breakthrough, “Raise the Titanic!” (1976), his books were frequently on the best-seller lists for months.
Mr. Cussler also connected with readers by turning his love for scuba diving into an oceanic lifestyle that paralleled and validated his superhero.
He first created the National Underwater and Marine Agency as a fictional government organization that employed his hero in the Dirk Pitt books. Then, in 1979, he founded an actual National Underwater and Marine Agency as a private nonprofit group committed to “preserving maritime heritage through the discovery, archaeological survey and conservation of shipwreck artifacts.” It underwrote his maritime ventures.
With Mr. Cussler leading expeditions and joining dives, the organization eventually located some 60 wrecks. Among them were the Cunard steamship Carpathia, first to reach survivors of the lost Titanic on April 15, 1912, then itself sunk by German torpedoes off Ireland in 1918; Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt’s coastal steamer Lexington, which caught fire and went down in Long Island Sound in 1840; and Manassas, the Confederacy’s first Civil War ironclad, sunk in battle in the Lower Mississippi in 1862.
His first nonfiction book, “The Sea Hunters” (1996, with Craig Dirgo), was an account of his NUMA exploits, some of which were portrayed in television documentaries featuring Mr. Cussler as narrator. Valuable artifacts raised by his expeditions were given to museums or governments.
Mr. Cussler, who named his franchise hero after his son Dirk, acknowledged that Dirk Pitt’s character was his own alter ego. His later novels, many co-written by his son or others, often included himself as a character who saves the day. His son, a daughter and friends were also used as characters in his books.
“I’ve been doing Dirk Pitt for 30 years,” Mr. Cussler told The Times in 2000. “Maybe I can find another writer down the line to take him over. It’s not the money; it’s the fans.
“I’d like to retire,” he continued. “I’m toying with the idea of Pitt having a son who shows up. He’s getting a little long in the tooth. When we started out, we were both 36 years old. Now he’s a little over 40, and I’m pushing 70.”
But 20 years later, he was still churning out books, sometimes two a year. His 85th, “Journey of the Pharaohs: A Novel From the NUMA Files,” written with Graham Brown, is scheduled to be published in March. The Penguin Random House spokeswoman said there are others to be published after that.
Cussler came up with an interesting way to change the Dirk Pitt novels. Though The Mediterranean Caper was his first published novel (which I think I read in middle school), the first novel he wrote was Pacific Vortex! (Exclamation point not mine.) As the publisher’s website puts it, “In a furious race against time, Pitt’s mission swirls him into a battle with underwater assassins-and traps him in the arms of Summer Moran, the most stunningly exotic and dangerous toward disaster, onto an ancient sunken island—the astonishing setting for the explosive climax of Pacific Vortex!”
Spoiler alerts: Summer dies … or so the reader thinks. Several novels later, at the end of Valhalla Rising, “though many lives will be lost, and many saved, it is Pitt’s own life that will be changed forever …” (which itself is a tipoff that Pitt isn’t really in danger of dying in this book) by the appearance of Dirk and Summer Pitt, the old Dirk’s twin children who were conceived during Pacific Vortex! with mother Summer. They then are part of the following novels with old Dirk having learned the unintended consequences of associating with “lusty women” and settling down with one of those lusty women, who appeared first in Vixen 03. (Again, you can see why “exotic cars and lusty women” would appeal to a high school reader.)
Clive Eric Cussler was born in Aurora, Ill., on July 15, 1931, the only child of Eric and Amy Hunnewell Cussler. His father was an accountant. Clive grew up in Alhambra, Calif., a poor student but an avid reader of adventure stories.
“I detested school,” he told Publishers Weekly in 1994. “I was always the kid who was staring out the window. While the teacher was lecturing on algebra, I was on the deck of a pirate ship or in an airplane shooting down the Red Baron.”
He attended Pasadena City College briefly, but left to join the Air Force when the Korean War began in 1950. He became a mechanic, flew supply missions in the Pacific but never saw combat. While stationed in Hawaii, he learned scuba diving and explored underwater wrecks. He mustered out as a sergeant.
In 1955, he married Barbara Knight. They had three children, Teri, Dirk and Dayna. His wife died in 2003. He later married Janet Horvath, who survives him, along with his children, four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
In California, Mr. Cussler pumped gas, wrote advertising copy and, from 1961 to 1965, co-owned Bestgen & Cussler Advertising in Newport Beach. Later, at the D’Arcy agency in Hollywood, he won several awards.
From 1967 to 1969 he was advertising director of Aquatic Marine Corporation in Newport Beach. In 1970, he joined Mefford, Wolff and Weir Advertising in Denver, where he became a vice president and creative director.
He began writing fiction at home in the late 60s, but his first two books, “Pacific Vortex” and “The Mediterranean Caper,” were repeatedly rejected. Unable even to get an agent, he staged a hoax. Using the letterhead of a fictitious writers’ agency, he wrote to the agent Peter Lampack, posing as an old colleague about to retire and overloaded with work. He enclosed copies of his manuscripts, citing their potential.
It worked. “Where can I sign Clive Cussler?” Mr. Lampack wrote back. In 1973, “The Mediterranean Caper” was published, followed by “Iceberg” (1975) and “Raise the Titanic!” (1976).
Despite an improbable plot and negative reviews, “Raise the Titanic!” sold 150,000 copies, was a Times best seller for six months and became a 1980 film starring Richard Jordan and Jason Robards Jr.
While Dirk Pitt books appeared throughout his career, Mr. Cussler also wrote other series: “The NUMA Files,” featuring the hero Kurt Austin and written with Graham Brown or Paul Kemprecos; “The Fargo Adventures,” about husband-and-wife treasure hunters, written with Grant Blackwood or Thomas Perry; “The Oregon Files,” set on a high-tech spy ship disguised as a freighter, written with Jack DuBrul or Mr. Dirgo; and “The Isaac Bell Adventures,” about an early-20th-century detective, written with Justin Scott.
His nonfiction included “Clive Cussler and Dirk Pitt Revealed” (1998, with Mr. Dirgo) and “Built for Adventure: The Classic Automobiles of Clive Cussler and Dirk Pitt” (2011). Mr. Cussler, who had homes in Arvada, Colo., and Paradise Valley, Ariz., restored vintage cars and had about 100 in his museum in Arvada, including a 1906 Stanley Steamer, a 1913 Marmon and a 1921 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost.
It’s interesting how superheroes are now big in fiction (particularly on the screen), when Pitt represents, if not a superhero, then someone who can do far more than most people, not merely due to intelligence and strength, but because of a lack of such weaknesses as fear, pain and fatigue, while being immune to legal consequences. Lee Child’s Jack Reacher is possibly similar, though in the novels Reacher appears to be somewhereon the autism spectrum in human-interaction skills.
Cussler, Ludlum and Clancy represent a subset of novelist who blends action and well-researched detail. The trend today in such writers as Mark Dawson seems to be toward action at the expense of anything else, including very much character development. Cussler also was part of the trend of being a brand-name author, something that has been taken to considerable lengths by James Patterson. (Then again, Tom Clancy still gets author credit on new books even though he is dead.)
Cussler’s novels were you-can’t-put-this-down-once-you-start-reading books, first, in a sort-of near-future setting. Anyone who can successfully write fiction has to have a great imagination. Perhaps that’s why I remain unable to write fiction, though I have written probably tens of millions of words since I started writing for a living. (That and, as I’ve bemoaned before, my inability to create a plot for said fiction. If the plot points for a novel are lined up like the alphabet, I always get stuck around F.)
Authors are always told to write what they know. I know journalism, but journalists are not superheroes (nor are bloggers or part-time sports announcers), and they are certainly not Men of Action!
One of the great early-generation players in UW hockey history was Bobby Suter, a small yet fierce defenseman who played on the Badgers’ 1977 national championship team and the 1978 Frozen Four team.
That’s how Badger fans know Suter, the second most penalized player in UW history, and the most penalized defenseman in UW history. (He also set a record by getting five points in a period in one game.)
Everyone else in the hockey world knows Suter as a member of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, which is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Miracle on Ice.
Ryan Suter (who is second place in UW freshman-season penalties) knew Bobby Suter as Dad:
When I was in the second grade, I did a pretty ridiculous thing. At the time, I didn’t know what I was doing. All my teachers kept asking me about this medal that my dad had at home. I had never seen it. I didn’t even understand what they were talking about.
So I went home and I asked my dad, “Do you have a medal?”He said, “Yeah, it’s somewhere.”
I said, “Can I bring it to school? Some teachers want to see it.”
And he probably said something like, “Huh? The medal? Uhh … Yeah, let me find it.”
A couple of days passed. Maybe even weeks. Eventually, my dad gave me this gold medal. It said LAKE PLACID 1980. So I popped it in my backpack and took it to school. I knew he had won it playing hockey, and I had heard some people in my family talking about “the Miracle,” but you know how it is when you hear those kind of family stories when you’re a kid. All that stuff is kind of like a myth. I mean, he was just my dad. Blue jeans and work boots, every day.
I got to school with the medal, and I just shoved it inside my desk with all my papers and stuff. Then, at some point, we were doing show-and-tell, and all the kids were probably like, “Here’s a picture of our new puppy. Here’s a Lego thing I made …”
And then I pulled the medal out, totally oblivious, like, Is this what you wanted me to bring in?
All the teachers were freaking out. They thought it was the coolest thing. They were trying to explain what the medal meant to all us kids, and they kept saying, “The Miracle on Ice, the Miracle on Ice.”
And I’m like, Wow, this is a pretty cool show-and-tell. But I really had no idea about the true magnitude of what my dad and his teammates had done. He never talked about it. He never watched the tapes of the game. It just wasn’t his nature.
So after show-and-tell was over, we had these little lockers in the back of the room — they weren’t even locked. I think they call them cubby holes? I put the 1980 Olympic gold medal in my cubby, and I left in there for, like, two weeks.
Finally, I came home one day and my dad said, “Hey, do you still have my medal? Somebody else wants to borrow it.”
And I was like, “Yeah, it’s in my cubby. All the teachers really thought it was cool!”
If I had known then what I know now, I definitely wouldn’t have kept the Miracle on Ice gold medal next to a box of Crayola Crayons for two weeks.
But that was my dad in a nutshell. He was a part of one of the greatest hockey teams of all time, but you would never know it in a million years by the way he carried himself. He was the definition of blue-collar. When he came home to Wisconsin after the Olympics, the first thing he did was open up a sporting goods store on the east side of Madison. But it wasn’t just a sporting goods store. The other half was a bait shop. I was too young to remember, but he’d tell me stories about opening up in the morning and walking in and seeing dead minnows all over all the goalie pads. I guess they’d pop off the top of the bait buckets in the middle of the night and try to escape.
It was the most Wisconsin thing ever.
My first memories in life are of waking up in the morning and going to the shop and having one of my brothers put on the brand-new goalie gear. We’d play right in the back of the store until my dad was done with work, and then we’d drive over to hockey practice in my dad’s beat-up old pickup truck. And when I say beat-up, I mean beat-up. Holes in the floor boards. One little bench seat. We’d pile in there and sit four-across, probably smelling terrible. My dad couldn’t even reach the stick shift with all our legs in the way, so he taught us how to shift gears for him. It was a team effort.
All we did, every day, every minute, was hockey.
My dad was my coach from the time I started skating, and he ran some hockey camps, too, but his dream was always to open up his own rink. When I was about 12 years old, he and a few other guys got some money together and built Capitol Ice Rink in Middleton. Once again, my dad being my dad, he was like a one-man construction crew. I don’t even know if it was legal, but he had me and my brothers driving the Bobcats, dumping dirt all over the parking lot and everything. It was unreal.
Whenever there was a problem, he’d never call anybody. He’d just shrug and be like, “We’ll figure it out.”
Cap Ice was his baby. When the place opened, he was so proud. He was there from sunup to sundown. He had so much going on it was comical. He’d clean the toilets, run the Zamboni, stock the vending machines, do the practice scheduling, run the register at the hockey shop, fix the broken light fixtures, then he’d go out and coach his youth team. Sometimes he’d be driving the Zamboni with his hockey skates on, just because he didn’t want anyone else to do it.
He was always running — no, seriously, sprinting — around the rink. He never expected anything from anybody. This one time, he was so busy that he jumped on the Zamboni and pulled out to clean the ice for a tournament game, and he forgot to detach the water hose. He got about halfway to the red line before the hose snapped.
He was nuts, in the best way possible. A lot of guys who accomplished what he did in Lake Placid would’ve had their Team USA jerseys hanging up all over the rink. They would’ve wanted to be a local legend. But my dad was the complete opposite. You never would’ve known.
It was like a running joke around the rink, when people would come from out of town for a tournament and want to get a picture with my dad, the regulars would say, “Take a step back and make sure you get his boots in the picture.”
I think he still had the same work boots from the ’70s.
If a kid came up and asked him about the Miracle on Ice, he’d always deflect the question and ask them something about themselves like, “How’s your team doing? What tournaments are you playing in?”
Sometimes, when he was going all-out to put on these unbelievable youth tournaments and camps, people would ask him, “Why are you doing all this? Why don’t you just take it easy?”
And he would say the same thing every time. “It’s all about the kids. That’s why we do it.”
It really wasn’t a cliché. He genuinely loved hockey and he genuinely loved helping kids. For 16 years, he poured everything he had into that rink.
Three years ago, right around this time, I was just getting back on the ice in Minnesota before training camp with the Wild. I remember seeing my wife Becky in the stands, and she was crying. I didn’t know what was going on. I thought maybe something had happened with our kids. Then she came down to the glass, and she said, “Something happened with your dad.”
He was working at the rink when he had a fatal heart attack.
I had just seen him two days before. He came by our house to drop off something we’d left behind at a wedding. I saw him pull up, so I went out to the garage to say hi. But, with my dad being my dad, he was already on the run. By the time I got there, he was pulling out of the driveway.
I waved to him.
He waved back.
He had to get to the rink.
It’s been three years now since his passing, and it still sucks. It still hurts. Every day, I wish he was here. He was a great person who cared so much about his family and hockey and helping people get better. I would give anything to be hosting a tournament at Cap Ice, sweeping the floor with my dad at 11 o’clock at night, and walking out of there knowing that the locker rooms were clean for the kids coming in at 6 a.m. the next morning. To us, that was happiness. I would give anything to have that moment again.
But you know what? I take comfort in knowing that my father died in the place that he built with his bare hands, doing the thing that he loved the most. He truly loved every minute of it. He really did. He loved hockey. He loved the rink. He loved the kids.
I actually had no idea how many lives he touched until his funeral service. At the wake, more than 4,000 people showed up. You had generations of Wisconsin hockey parents and kids and coaches, and you know what was so amazing about it? They almost never mentioned the Miracle on Ice.
They said, “Man, your dad was the best. He fitted me for my first pair of skates, and he took an hour to make sure that they were perfect.”
They said, “I used to get all my kids’ hockey equipment at your dad’s shop, and he used to sell me stuff at cost, because he knew we could barely afford it.”
The best lesson I think people can take from my dad is his humility. He was a part of the single greatest moment in American sports history. But he never talked about it. He never wanted any glory. He was happy to go sweep the floors at the end of the night.
He never wanted to be a local legend. But he became one anyway. He did it his way.
I know that he was proud of what I accomplished in hockey, but honestly I think he was the most proud whenever he saw me around my wife and kids. He just loved being a grandpa, and he couldn’t sit still. That was perfect for the kids. We’d all go out to dinner and whenever my kids would be getting restless, he’d say, “Hey kids, what do you say we go outside?”
And they’d go on their little adventure together.
I don’t know why, maybe it was because he had been to the top of the mountain, but to him, hockey was just … it was just fun. It wasn’t about glory.
I remember before I left with Team USA for the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, he said, “Ahh, you guys gotta win this so they can finally stop talking about us.”
And he was really serious.
I’ve still never watched the Miracle game against Russia. We have the DVDs somewhere, but I don’t know if I’ll ever watch it. It’s not what my dad would’ve wanted. I honestly don’t think he ever watched it, either.
I can just see him saying, “Watch it? I played in it. Let’s go to the rink.”
There’s a song that comes on the radio a lot, and whenever it does, I get a little bit emotional. It’s a Tim McGraw song, and the last line sums up my father in five words.
“Always stay humble and kind.”
I can’t think of better advice for anybody.
My dad is my hero. But I’m not proud of him because he was the guy who won the gold medal in 1980. I’m proud of him because he was the guy sweeping the floors in the locker room, and the guy who taught hundreds of kids how to play the great game of hockey, and the guy who was a hell of a dad to me and my brothers.
The number one single today in 1976 is the first record I ever purchased, for $1.03 at a Madison drugstore just before it left the WISM radio top 40 list:
Today in 1977, a member of the audience at a Ray Charles concert tried to strangle him with a rope.
The number one single today in 1981:
Birthdays today start with Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones:
Joe South:
Donnie Iris of the Jaggerz:
Ronnie Rosman of Tommy James and the Shondells:
Cindy Wilson of the B-52s:
Ian Stanley played keyboards for Tears for Fears:
Phil Gould of Level 42:
Four deaths of note today: Frankie Lymon in 1968 …
… one-hit-wonder Bobby Bloom in 1974 …
… David Byron of Uriah Heep in 1985 …
… and drummer George Allen “Buddy” Miles, who had the good taste to record with two of the greatest rock guitarists of all time on the same song, in 2008:
Bernie Sanders, the socialist from Vermont from Brooklyn, has stepped in it and stepped in deep with his praise of Fidel Castro’s brutal dictatorship in Cuba and its fictitious advances in, among other things, literacy. Republicans must be looking forward to watching him defend that in Florida in front of audiences composed of the friends, family, and survivors of those whom the Castro regime murdered, imprisoned, tortured, disfigured, repressed, and terrorized — which, it bears remembering, it continues to do, to this day, under Raúl Castro. The Cuban people desperately need our help, not Senator Sanders making excuses for the men who murder and oppress them.
The analogous cases are, as a rhetorical matter, obvious enough: Mussolini had a really strong public-works program. Hitler was a patron of the arts. Franco was . . . pretty fashion-forward, even for a generalissimo. Etc.
Conservatives are as vulnerable to flights of ideological fancy and political passion as anybody. Even the great F. A. Hayek (who rejected the label “conservative” even though he plainly was a conservative as Americans use the word) found himself hostage to excessive enthusiasm, in his case for the repressive rightist government of Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet’s government did make critical reforms to economic policy in Chile. It also committed horrendous atrocities. “Yes, but what about his entitlement-reform program?” is at the very least morally and intellectually insufficient. And the attraction to the strongman form of government always must be resisted, because there is, finally, no such thing as a benevolent dictator. Hayek was gently chided by Margaret Thatcher for his excessive affection for the Chilean regime. Her advice to him is wise counsel for conservatives today: “Our reform must be in line with our traditions and our Constitution. At times the process may seem painfully slow. But I am certain we shall achieve our reforms in our own way and in our own time. Then they will endure.”
It is not true that the American Left has no interest in “our traditions and our Constitution.” The Left is very interested in our traditions and our Constitution — it hates these and wishes to see them destroyed. The Left’s war on the Constitution goes back to the foundation of American progressivism under Woodrow Wilson, who considered the Constitution outmoded and a hindrance to intelligent administration. The line of thinking extends straight into modern progressivism: Harry Reid’s attempt to gut the First Amendment in order to put political speech under government control, a proposal endorsed by every Democrat in the Senate; other related progressive attempts to destroy the Bill of Rights, beginning with the First and Second Amendments but by no means limited to these; the contention by progressives, typified by Ryan Cooper, that “the American Constitution is an outdated, malfunctioning piece of junk”; Senator Sanders’s call for “revolution”; etc.
The Democrats may shed a few crocodile tears over President Donald Trump’s supposed assault on the Constitution (Trump’s assault mainly has been on American manners, the importance of which is generally overlooked and misunderstood), but assaulting the Constitution is the foundation of their politics and their jurisprudence: Assaulting the Constitution — reshaping it to better fit progressive political preferences — is what Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan were put on the Supreme Court to do. The intellectual and constitutional position that this is impermissible — that the Constitution must be treated as though it says what it actually says rather than as though it said what people invested with transient political power wish it said, which is all the “textualism” of Clarence Thomas et al. actually amounts to — is denounced as dangerous “extremism.” Whatever it is the American Left is on about, it is not the Constitution — not the actual one that has been written down, in any case.
Rather, the Left advocates a new constitutional covenant, one in which the law is written on our hearts — or at least on the hearts of a cabal of left-wing law professors. Senator Sanders is not an intellectual. He is not a scholar of law or economics or intersectionality studies, and he is not a member of the new administrative class that the American Left has been building since Woodrow Wilson. He is only their John the Baptist, a voice crying in the wilderness and announcing the coming of the new kingdom.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 