The number one British single today in 1954:
Today in 1955, RCA Records purchased the recording contract of Elvis Presley from Sam Phillips for an unheard-of $35,000.
The number one single today in 1960 holds the record for the shortest number one of all time:
The number one British single today in 1970 hit number one after the singer’s death earlier in the year:
After the music …
What defines a Republican, these days? How about a Democrat? That’s a difficult question to answer. After years of shifting priorities and ideologies, the beliefs of Republicans of today bear little resemblance to those of somebody of that affiliation from a decade ago, and the modern Democrat is just as far removed from recent predecessors. But one thing is clear: Republicans aren’t Democrats and hate anybody who is, and Democrats feel the same about Republicans.
Identity established by mutual loathing is pretty much all there is to go on when partisans of the two factions so rapidly change positions, sometimes despising one another for holding fast to beliefs they themselves once supported. In their struggle for control of the government, it’s all about loyalty and power, without any deeper meaning.
“Six in 10 Republicans say they would rather have a president who agrees with their political views but does not set a good moral example for the country, as opposed to one who sets a good moral example but does not agree with them politically. In contrast, 75% of Democrats prefer a president who sets a good moral example over one who agrees with their issue positions,” Gallup reported last week. “In 1999, Republicans’ and Democrats’ opinions were reversed, with Republicans favoring a president who sets a good moral example and Democrats preferring one who agrees with them politically.”
Of course, Republicans downplay moral issues at a time when the president from their party shows every sign of being morally crippled, just as Democrats deemphasized morals when their own occupant of the White House had his sleaziness on display. Then as now, tribal affiliation overcame any supposed principles.
The primacy of tribal affiliation has also been obvious in the course of semi-regular media pranks when partisans have been deliberately presented with misattributed quotes about public policy issues. Interviewees inevitably become befuddled when they learn that the “bad” opinion they dutifully denounced belonged, not so long ago, to the “good” side.
More broadly, the recent changes in party positions have involved “the transformation of the GOP into the party of Patrick J. Buchanan and Donald J. Trump—defined by cultural resentments, crude populism, and ethnic nationalism,” as Peter Wehner puts it in The Atlantic. At the same time, “the Democratic Party is embracing a form of identity politics in which gender, race, and ethnicity become definitional” along with progressive/socialist economics that are “fiscally ruinous, invest massive and unwarranted trust in central planners, and weaken America’s security.”
Such rapid shifts on issues and ideology have left little time for developing a strong basis of enthusiasm for what political partisans are supposedly for, but that’s left people plenty of energy left to expend on what they’re against.
“We find that while partisan animus began to rise in the 1980s, it has grown dramatically over the past two decades,” Shanto Iyengar and Masha Krupenkin, political scientists at Stanford, reported in a paper published last year. “As animosity toward the opposing party has intensified, it has taken on a new role as the prime motivator in partisans’ political lives. … today it is outgroup animus rather than ingroup favoritism that drives political behavior.”
That means politically partisan Americans are defining themselves not by what they have in common with allies, but by how much they hate their enemies. They may not have a good handle on what they’re fighting about but, damnit, they’re gonna fight.
Fifty-five percent of Republicans said Democrats are “more immoral” than other Americans, and 47 percent of Democrats said likewise about Republicans, as Pew Research noted last month. “The level of division and animosity—including negative sentiments among partisans toward the members of the opposing party—has only deepened” since the last survey three years ago.
Fifty-five percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats say the party opposing their own is “not just worse for politics—they are downright evil,” according to a YouGov survey. Thirty-four percent of Republicans and 27 percent of Democrats say the other party “lack the traits to be considered fully human—they behave like animals.”
Factions that aren’t really firm about what they believe, shift positions, but are dead-set in their hatred for one another to the point of dehumanization? In a weird way, such partisan animus for its own sake sounds an awful lot like the ancient rivalry between the Blues and the Greens—the chariot teams turned political parties that played such a prominent role in sixth-century Byzantine political life. As with modern Republicans and Democrats it was never entirely clear what they stood for beyond opposition to one another, but rioting between the two factions ultimately burned half of Constantinople to the ground.
When the Blues and Greens set about burning down their city, they were encouraged by senators who hoped to seize the imperial throne for themselves. They sought to take advantage of the chaos.
Nothing much has changed over the centuries.
“Partisan negativity is self-reinforcing, that is, political elites are motivated to stoke negativity to boost their chances of reelection,” Iyengar and Krupenkin wrote in their 2018 paper.
Fundamentally, then, what defines Republicans and Democrats isn’t programs or beliefs or ideology—it’s achieving power and destroying the enemy in the process. What’s done once power is achieved—beyond grinding “evil” and “immoral” enemies into dust—is secondary at best.
Since platforms and ideas don’t really matter, there’s no room for finding common ground or cutting deals. Opposing political factions can compromise, for good or ill, on health care bills and defense schemes. But how do you split the difference when what separates you isn’t a matter of firm values or principles, but a mutual desire to seize total control and to smash all who don’t wear your gang colors?
Ultimately, the only way to keep the peace is to make sure there’s no prize to be won. So long as there’s a powerful government over which hateful partisans fight for dominance, we’re all in danger from the battling factions.
When the first priority of a politician is to get more power, you have this, reported by Nick Gillespie:
For a self-styled digital native who stresses “21st century solutions” to today’s problems, presidential hopeful Andrew Yang has a decidedly 20th century way of addressing what he considers to be problems: spend more, regulate more.
As Reason‘s Billy Binion noted, the tech entrepreneur’s proposals about “Regulating Technology Firms in the 21st Century” involve a lot of unwise monkeying around with “Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act; the landmark legislation protects social media companies from facing certain liabilities for third-party content posted by users online.” Like many other critics of online platforms (including progressives such as Elizabeth Warren and conservatives such as Josh Hawley), Yang buys into the nonexistent distinction between “publishers” and “platforms” as a means of regulating the speech and economic freedom of social media companies and website operators.
In the same document, Yang also proposes to
- Create a Department of the Attention Economy that focuses specifically on how to responsibly design and use smartphones, social media, gaming, and chat apps. It will include overall guidelines, as well as age-based ones.
- Provide guidance (and regulation, if needed) on design features that maximize screen time for young people, like removing autoplay video for children under 16, removing the queues that allow infinite scrolling, capping the number of recommendations per day, reducing notification signs and “like” counts, and using artificial intelligence and machine learning to determine when children are using devices to cap screen hours per day.
- Establish rules and standards around kid-targeted content to protect them from inappropriate content.
- Incentivize content production of high-quality and positive programming for kids similar to broadcast TV.
- Require platforms to provide guidance on kid-healthy content for parents, and provide incentives for companies that work to make user data of minors available to their parents.
- Include classes on the responsible use of technology in public school curricula and teach children how to distinguish reliable from unreliable news sources online.
It’s this sort of “new” thinking that loses libertarians. In what way does a new, presumably cabinet-level, agency do anything other than expand the size, scope, and spending of government in a way that will inevitably limit speech and expression? That it’s being done in the name of “the children” makes it seem like a punchline from a mid-1990s episode of The Simpsons. Yang asserts that “we are beginning to understand exactly how much of an adverse effect” social media is having on kids and that Facebook, Twitter, and the rest face no “real accountability” even as he rhapsodizes about his 20th century childhood: “I look back at my childhood and I remember riding a bike around the neighborhood, but now tablets, computers, and mobile devices have shifted the attention of youth.”
Spare me the nostalgia and moral panic, which is highly reminiscent of the ’90s panic over the supposed effects on kids of sex and violence on cable TV (lest we forget, Attorney General Janet Reno and other leaders threatened censorship if the menace of Beavis and Butt-head and other basic cable fare wasn’t cleaned up). The social science is far from settled on any of this stuff and the first reaction to perceived problems should never be creating a series of government controls. Social media companies face all sorts of pushback in the marketplace, too, including lack of interest from users (Facebook has posted two years of declining use in the U.S.).
What would any of Yang’s plans cost in terms of dollars and cents? It doesn’t really matter because the visionary will pay for everything with a value-added tax on digital advertising.
Lord knows Republicans, including Donald Trump, are hardly avatars of a new way of governing, but the Democratic presidential candidates have yet to meet a problem that can’t be solved by creating a whole new program or bureaucracy. South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg wants to shell out $1 trillion to make housing, child care, and college more affordable. Elizabeth Warren wants to raise taxes by $26 trillion and Bernie Sanders wants national rent-control laws while washout Beto O’Rourke yammered on about the right to live close to work before bidding adieu to the 2020 race. Joe Biden wants to spend $750 billion over the next decade to deliver what Obamacare was supposed to do.
Over the last 40 years, federal spending averaged 20.4 percent of GDP while federal revenue averaged just 17.4 percent. That gap, says the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is only going to get wider, saddling future Americans with more and more debt, which dampens long-term economic growth, among other bad outcomes.
The federal government spent about $4.4 trillion in fiscal year 2019 (while posting a $1 trillion deficit). Surely there is more than enough savings to be found in that massive sum before proposing big new programs that will be layered on top of a seemingly infinite number of existing efforts to fix all the big and small problems of the world. It shouldn’t be too much to insist that all candidates for president (and every other federal office) explain how they are going to bring revenues and outlays into some sort of balance. But at the very least, we shouldn’t stand for yet more spending and regulation that simply gets layered on top of what is already there.
Regardless of whether the spending comes from a D or an R.
Jonathan V. Last writes on …
So . . .
That’s not a joke I’m Ron Burgundy?
[Monday] the government of South Dakota announced their anti-meth campaign, the slogan of which is, “Meth. We’re on it.”
This is a real thing that people spent money on. $450,000.
The internet is, as you might imagine, highly amused.
I mean, it’s not “Just Say No.”
Or, “This is your brain on drugs.”
Or, “From you, dad. I learned it from watching you.”
And on first glance this seems destined to be one of those advertising case studies where future scholars ask, “So, they wanted an anti-drug slogan and they settled on Look at me I’m on drugs!?!”
And the designers were so committed that they even trademarked the thing. (That “TM” is like a splinter in my eye. Make it stop.)
But here’s the thing: Isn’t this campaign also kind of genius?
Let’s stipulate that you can’t hang a value on “awareness.” Maybe it’s worthless. Maybe it’s really important. I don’t know.
For the sake of argument, though, let’s assume that “awareness” is a valid goal and evaluate this logo purely on how it achieves that goal.
Mission: Accomplished.
I could think of a dozen ways to stand up an anti-meth campaign that you would forget in an hour.
But “Meth. We’re on it.” is never going away. People will goof on it for a generation. There will be parodies. T-shirts. Stickers. Every middle schooler in South Dakota will, some day when they’re old, laugh with their buddies about that crazy “Meth. We’re on it.” thing.
I mean, if they don’t die from meth.
The goal of a piece of design like this is to hit people so hard that they have to take notice, that they talk about the concept, that they remember it and it resonates in the culture over time.
I would say that the South Dakota meth campaign achieves all of that.
Good for them.
A local example would be in the late 20th century, when what Wisconsin Energy, which formerly was Wisconsin Natural (Gas) and Wisconsin Electric (I know, because I wrote monthly checks), decided to call itself WE Energies, which Milwaukee talk radio host Charlie Sykes dubbed “WEnergies.” (Pronounced “wiener-jeez.”)
This is sort of a corollary to an incredibly annoying commercial that isn’t annoying merely from overbroadcast, but because of a feature that sets your teeth on edge. Some would say that’s good because you remember the ad. It’s not good, however, if you refuse to patronize the business because of their bad ads. (That would be me.)
Bad business decisions happen when there is no skeptic in the room, someone to point out how the brilliant idea could go horribly wrong.
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:
There are those who believe the two-party system of this country insufficiently represents the diversity of political views of this country.
So, my high school political science teacher posted this on Facebook:
It’s an interesting exercise. Of course, political parties aren’t part of the Constitution. But imagine the governing chaos of a country where no party has anything close to a majority. But you don’t have to imagine that. Look at Italy and Greece.
CNN:
In a historic move, President Donald Trump announced Friday that hospitals will be required to disclose the rates they privately negotiate with insurers.
Part of a larger transparency push aimed at reducing health care costs, the controversial requirement has already raised the ire of the powerful industry. Four hospital groups quickly promised to file a legal challenge, arguing the rule exceeds the administration’s authority.
The rule is the latest in a series of steps the administration has taken to show what Trump is doing to lower health care costs — a key concern among Americans and one of his main promises as he heads into the 2020 campaign.Under the final rule, which stems from an executive order Trump issued this summer, hospitals will have to make public by 2021 the rates they negotiate with insurers and the amounts they are willing to accept in cash for an item or service. In addition, they must provide this information in an online, searchable way for 300 common services, such as X-rays, outpatient visits, Cesarean deliveries and lab tests.
Hospitals that don’t comply will face a civil penalty of up to $300 a day.
Also, the administration released a proposed rule that would require insurers to provide consumers with estimates of their out-of-pocket costs for all health care services through an online tool. Carriers would have to disclose their negotiated rates for in-network providers as well as the allowed amounts paid for out-of-network providers. This proposal was prompted by feedback that consumers are more interested in what they are on the hook for based on their insurance plans’ deductibles and copays or coinsurance.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said this announcement may be “a more significant improvement to American health care markets than any other single thing the Trump administration has done.”“American patients have been at the mercy of a shadowy system with little access to the information they need to make decisions about their own care,” Azar said. “This shadowy system has to change.”
The secretary added that he believes the changes will survive any legal challenges from hospitals.
Negotiated rates are closely guarded secrets, though they are eventually revealed to patients when they receive explanations of benefits from their insurers. That information should be available before the person receives care, administration officials say.
The administration argues that increasing price transparency will lead to a more competitive marketplace.
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:
I am a great believer in Senator Marco Rubio, in his excellent intentions, and in the undoubtable ability of Senator Marco Rubio and his excellent intentions together to screw up anything they touch.
Senator Rubio, writing in National Review, joins the ranks of those who propose to reinvent capitalism — “common-good capitalism,” he calls it. Senator Elizabeth Warren also proposes to reinvent capitalism and calls her version “accountable capitalism.” Dear old Bernie Sanders still proposes to overthrow capitalism and be done with it, bless his heart.
Senator Rubio, working from remarks originally delivered in a speech at Catholic University, references a series of popes — Leo XIII, mostly, but also Benedict and Francis — to describe (whether the senator understands this or not) the familiar moral basis of fascist economic thinking, beginning from the premise that “workers and businesses are not competitors for their share of limited resources, but partners in an effort that strengthens the entire nation.” Under the careful tutelage of the state, of course. I write this as a fellow Catholic: God defend us from these backward, primitive-minded Catholic social reformers. Pope Francis would do mortal harm to the poor of this world if he had any real political power; blessedly, Providence has relieved him and us of that burden.
It is the case that resources are limited — scarcity is an inescapable fact — and that firms and workers compete with one another (as do consumers; politicians never talk about that, for some reason). What to make of that? Nothing. Senator Rubio simply proceeds with his shallow moralizing as though these facts were not facts. Some people like Chevy trucks, some like Fords, and some of us prefer Toyotas built in Texas. Does the marginal sale of one of these vs. one of the others “strengthen the entire nation”? Of course not. Apple, Disney, Amazon, and Netflix are fighting one another tooth and talon for market share in the entertainment industry, and “the nation” has no especial vested interest in any particular outcome. Nobody really even takes seriously the kind of rhetoric that Senator Rubio here is relying upon. These are just words that come out of the mouths of men who want power.
And power is what is at issue.
Men such as Senator Rubio desire for themselves the power to overrule markets — to limit trade and property rights, enterprise and exchange — in the service of what Senator Rubio describes as the “common good.” The problems with that are several. For one thing, Senator Rubio does not know what the common good is and has no way of knowing. For another thing, we know quite well, from long experience, how such vague and plastic notions of the “common good” interact with the discrete good.
Take, for example, Senator Rubio’s own servility on behalf of subsidies for the billionaire sugar barons of his home state, arguing that such handouts to business interests are a matter of “national security,” a position that the senator has defended by twisting himself into absurd positions that Bikram Choudhury himself would blanch to contemplate. I write this not because Senator Rubio represents the worst of what Washington has to offer but because he represents the best of what Washington has to offer. His heart is in the right place. His head is .. elsewhere. Like most of the men and women who find success in politics, Senator Rubio has the wrong kind of intelligence for the task he imagines he is undertaking. He is clever, like most politicians, and like most politicians believes that a clever tweak here or there will make moot certain inconvenient realities such as economic scarcity. He is wrong about this.
He is wrong about a great deal. He worries about the “financialization” of the U.S. economy, which is largely a myth. (The share of assets controlled by financial firms has held steady around 2 percent for a long time.) He worries that the lack of satisfying employment in certain communities has led to substance abuse and a decline in marriage without considering the possibility that the unemployment is a symptom of the same noneconomic pathology as the addiction and family dysfunction. “Diagnosing the problem is something we should be able to achieve across the political spectrum, though even that seems challenging at times,” he writes. But Dr. Rubio has got it wrong. “Ultimately, deciding what the government should do about it must be the core question of our politics,” he continues. Misunderstanding the problem and then reorienting government toward the execution of a program of therapy dreamt up by quacks with no special expertise or genuine knowledge of the disease in question is exactly the catastrophe you get when you encounter the word “diagnosis” in a sentence written by a lawyer.
Capitalism is what happens when government respects property rights, which include the rights to trade and to work. What we need from men in government is not the quasi-metaphysical project of reinventing capitalism in the name of the “common good.” What we need from government is — government. The government in which Senator Rubio serves cannot manage to appropriate money through regular order, to cease its own ruinous accumulation of debt, or to secure a clear and lasting military victory over a rabble of half-organized fanatics festering in the wilderness of Afghanistan. So, no, I do not think they know how to run Apple or Facebook or Ford. If Senator Rubio cares about the common good, then he can butt right out while the people who produce the goods and innovations that bring with them such ancillary benefits as jobs and tax payments do what they do.
Which is not to say that there is no role for government in this. This is not a brief for anarchism. Government can — or could, or should — play an irreplaceable role in this by providing a predictable and stable policy environment (including in the matter of business taxes and regulation) that will allow firms to make long-term investments under reasonably stable conditions. Do you know what is not a synonym for “policy stability?” Reinventing capitalism. The federal government exists to provide public goods that are necessarily national in scope; in reality, most of the money it spends is simple redistribution of income, either directly through Social Security and other payments or indirectly through the provision and subsidy of medical benefits. And, if Senator Rubio would care to have a gander at the books over there at the Social Security Administration, it would be obvious that Washington cannot even do that right.
The nation does not need your philosophy, Senator Rubio. (Although, given how weakly articulated it is, may I recommend that you revise the part of your stump speech in which you make fun of philosophy majors?) We do not need your half-assed moralizing. We need stability and predictability from a government that secures our liberty and our property in the least obtrusive way that can be managed. And if you could manage that without bankrupting the nation, we would be grateful.
I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t get a chance to vote for Rubio in 2016.
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”:
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:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 