The number one single today in 1964 was performed by the oldest number one artist to date:
The number one single today in 1970:
The number one British single today in 1981:
No comments on Presty the DJ for May 9
-
-
Over the last decade, journalists have held up Germany’s renewables energy transition, the Energiewende, as an environmental model for the world.
“Many poor countries, once intent on building coal-fired power plants to bring electricity to their people, are discussing whether they might leapfrog the fossil age and build clean grids from the outset,” thanks to the Energiewende, wrote a New York Times reporter in 2014.
With Germany as inspiration, the United Nations and World Bank poured billions into renewables like wind, solar, and hydro in developing nations like Kenya.
But then, last year, Germany was forced to acknowledge that it had to delay its phase-out of coal, and would not meet its 2020 greenhouse gas reduction commitments. It announced plans to bulldoze an ancient church and forest in order to get at the coal underneath it.
After renewables investors and advocates, including Al Gore and Greenpeace, criticized Germany, journalists came to the country’s defense. “Germany has fallen short of its emission targets in part because its targets were so ambitious,” one of them argued last summer.
“If the rest of the world made just half Germany’s effort, the future for our planet would look less bleak,” she wrote. “So Germany, don’t give up. And also: Thank you.”
But Germany didn’t just fall short of its climate targets. Its emissions have flat-lined since 2009.
Now comes a major article in the country’s largest newsweekly magazine, Der Spiegel, titled, “A Botched Job in Germany” (“Murks in Germany“). The magazine’s cover shows broken wind turbines and incomplete electrical transmission towers against a dark silhouette of Berlin.
“The Energiewende — the biggest political project since reunification — threatens to fail,” write Der Spiegel’s Frank Dohmen, Alexander Jung, Stefan Schultz, Gerald Traufetter in their a 5,700-word investigative story (the article can be read in English here).
Over the past five years alone, the Energiewende has cost Germany €32 billion ($36 billion) annually, and opposition to renewables is growing in the German countryside.
“The politicians fear citizen resistance” Der Spiegel reports. “There is hardly a wind energy project that is not fought.”
In response, politicians sometimes order “electrical lines be buried underground but that is many times more expensive and takes years longer.”
As a result, the deployment of renewables and related transmission lines is slowing rapidly. Less than half as many wind turbines (743) were installed in 2018 as were installed in 2017, and just 30 kilometers of new transmission were added in 2017.
Solar and wind advocates say cheaper solar panels and wind turbines will make the future growth in renewables cheaper than past growth but there are reasons to believe the opposite will be the case.
Der Spiegel cites a recent estimate that it would cost Germany “€3.4 trillion ($3.8 trillion),” or seven times more than it spent from 2000 to 2025, to increase solar and wind three to five-fold by 2050.
Between 2000 and 2019, Germany grew renewables from 7% to 35% of its electricity. And as much of Germany’s renewable electricity comes from biomass, which scientists view as polluting and environmentally degrading, as from solar.
Of the 7,700 new kilometers of transmission lines needed, only 8% have been built, while large-scale electricity storage remains inefficient and expensive. “A large part of the energy used is lost,” the reporters note of a much-hyped hydrogen gas project, “and the efficiency is below 40%… No viable business model can be developed from this.”
Meanwhile, the 20-year subsidies granted to wind, solar, and biogas since 2000 will start coming to an end next year. “The wind power boom is over,” Der Spiegel concludes.
All of which raises a question: if renewables can’t cheaply power Germany, one of the richest and most technologically advanced countries in the world, how could a developing nation like Kenya ever expect them to allow it to “leapfrog” fossil fuels?
The Question of Technology
The earliest and most sophisticated 20th Century case for renewables came from a German who is widely considered the most influential philosopher of the 20th Century, Martin Heidegger.
In his 1954 essay, “The Question Concerning of Technology,” Heidegger condemned the view of nature as a mere resource for human consumption.
The use of “modern technology,” he wrote, “puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such… Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium…to yield atomic energy.”
The solution, Heidegger argued, was to yoke human society and its economy to unreliable energy flows. He even condemned hydro-electric dams, for dominating the natural environment, and praised windmills because they “do not unlock energy in order to store it.”
These weren’t just aesthetic preferences. Windmills have traditionally been useful to farmers whereas large dams have allowed poor agrarian societies to industrialize.
In the US, Heidegger’s views were picked up by renewable energy advocates. Barry Commoner in 1969 argued that a transition to renewables was needed to bring modern civilization “into harmony with the ecosphere.”
The goal of renewables was to turn modern industrial societies back into agrarian ones, argued Murray Bookchin in his 1962 book, Our Synthetic Environment.
Bookchin admitted his proposal “conjures up an image of cultural isolation and social stagnation, of a journey backward in history to the agrarian societies of the medieval and ancient worlds.”
But then, starting around the year 2000, renewables started to gain a high-tech luster. Governments and private investors poured $2 trillion into solar and wind and related infrastructure, creating the impression that renewables were profitable aside from subsidies.
Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk proclaimed that a rich, high-energy civilization could be powered by cheap solar panels and electric cars.
Journalists reported breathlessly on the cost declines in batteries, imagining a tipping point at which conventional electricity utilities would be “disrupted.”
But no amount of marketing could change the poor physics of resource-intensive and land-intensive renewables. Solar farms take 450 times more land than nuclear plants, and wind farms take 700 times more land than natural gas wells, to produce the same amount of energy.
Efforts to export the Energiewende to developing nations may prove even more devastating.
The new wind farm in Kenya, inspired and financed by Germany and other well-meaning Western nations, is located on a major flight path of migratory birds. Scientists say it will kill hundreds of endangered eagles.
“It’s one of the three worst sites for a wind farm that I’ve seen in Africa in terms of its potential to kill threatened birds,” a biologist explained.
In response, the wind farm’s developers have done what Europeans have long done in Africa, which is to hire the organizations, which ostensibly represent the doomed eagles and communities, to collaborate rather than fight the project.
Kenya won’t be able to “leapfrog” fossil fuels with its wind farm. On the contrary, all of that unreliable wind energy is likely to increase the price of electricity and make Kenya’s slow climb out of poverty even slower.
Heidegger, like much of the conservation movement, would have hated what the Energiewende has become: an excuse for the destruction of natural landscapes and local communities.
Opposition to renewables comes from the country peoples that Heidegger idolized as more authentic and “grounded” than urbane cosmopolitan elites who fetishize their solar roofs and Teslas as signs of virtue.
Germans, who will have spent $580 billion on renewables and related infrastructure by 2025, express great pride in the Energiewende. “It’s our gift to the world,” a renewables advocate told The Times.
Tragically, many Germans appear to have believed that the billions they spent on renewables would redeem them. “Germans would then at last feel that they have gone from being world-destroyers in the 20th century to world-saviors in the 21st,” noted a reporter.
Many Germans will, like Der Spiegel, claim the renewables transition was merely “botched,” but it wasn’t. The transition to renewables was doomed because modern industrial people, no matter how Romantic they are, do not want to return to pre-modern life.
The reason renewables can’t power modern civilization is because they were never meant to. One interesting question is why anybody ever thought they could.
Go back to farm windmills. For those of us in the developed world, the future of renewable energy may not be in large windmills (which use a large amount of petroleum products) or solar farms, but in house- or factory-sized windmills and building-size solar. In the developing world, fossil fuels are better than wood fires. -
Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper wrote in The Wall Street Journal Sunday that he is “running to save capitalism,” lobbing criticism at politicians at either end of the political spectrum who he said pose dire threats to the nation’s economic success.
The 2020 presidential hopeful dinged his fellow Democratic primary contenders, some of whom have embraced policies labeled by some as socialism. But the former small business owner-turned-governor whacked conservatives as well for pushing deregulatory policies, headlining his Journal op-ed piece with a declaration that “I’m running to save capitalism.”
Hickenlooper blamed growing income inequality for voters’ willingness to back politicians threatening to uproot traditional capitalism, but argued that both Democrats and Republicans were approaching the issue incorrectly. He offered a firm defense of an economic system that has mostly been hammered on the 2020 Democratic campaign trail.
“Capitalism is the only economic system that can support a strong middle class, a growing economy, and innovative entrepreneurs leading global technological advancements,” he wrote. “Yet for too many Americans, capitalism simply isn’t working.”
-
Today in 1954, the BBC banned Johnny Ray’s “Such a Night” after complaints about its “suggestiveness.”
The Brits had yet to see Elvis Presley or Jerry Lee Lewis.
The number one British single today in 1955:
Today in 1965, what would now be called a “video” was shot in London:
-
The Washington Times:
Cory Booker says an appeal to “patriotism” should be enough to convince Americans that higher taxes and his leadership are needed in 2020.
The New Jersey Democrat told CNN’s Jake Tapper over the weekend that Americans who want “the best for the country” can be convinced that ousting President Trump and raising taxes are economically good ideas as election season heats up.
“What do you say to somebody who says, ‘yeah, I’m not crazy about Trump, but the economy has done so much better and Republicans keep telling me, the Democratic nominee is going the raise my taxes and he is talking about raising taxes, so that might hurt the economy, hurt my bottom line,’” Mr. Tapper asked the presidential hopeful over the weekend. “What’s the counterargument?”
“We live in a nation with far more patriotism than people are expressing,” the Democrat replied Saturday from his home in Newark. “What I mean is folks want the best for the country. We know if your family doesn’t have a great public school, great health care, we’re all suffering and creating greater costs. … We’re all hurting because we have not envisioned an economy that invests in each other.”
Mr. Booker’s comments come against a political backdrop in which the unemployment rate — the lowest since December 1969 — sits at 3.6%.
In Booker’s case “patriotism” is a synonym for “sacrifice.” Sometimes this approach works for Democrats. Bill Clinton got elected president by convincing a plurality of American voters that the economy was going poorly when it wasn’t, and that sacrifice in the form of tax increases was necessary. That got him elected; it also turned his party from the majority in Congress to the minority in Congress.
Americans are perfectly willing to sacrifice when warranted, as shown in world wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam and various conflicts since Vietnam. Surrendering to the authority of government is not necessarily a warranted sacrifice, however, and it’s really not patriotic at all. (Clinton claimed you could not love your country and hate your government. As with many other things, notably his personal conduct, he was wrong.)
Booker also feels that national gun registration is patriotic, as CBS News reports:
Democratic presidential candidate and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker introduced a sweeping gun violence prevention plan. If elected, the campaign announced Monday that on day one of his presidency, Booker will use executive action to close gun sales loopholes and to make investments in communities affected by gun violence.
The plan, which is the most extensive gun violence prevention proposal put forth by a presidential candidate to date, prioritizes a gun licensing program whereby gun owners would be required to obtain a gun permit and pass an FBI background check. Under the proposal, the gun permit would be valid for up to five years. …
The Democratic presidential hopeful’s proposal also includes banning assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and bump stocks and closing multiple gun loopholes, including one known as the “Boyfriend Loophole.” According to the Giffords Law Center, federal law currently offers some protection to spouses of domestic abusers, banning those who have been convicted of domestic abuse or who are subject to domestic violence court orders from owning guns. But those protections don’t extend to partners who are not spouses.
Booker proposes extending the ban to any dating partner or former dating partner who is convicted of a misdemeanor abuse crime.
Booker’s definition of “patriotism” flies in the face of history. This country began in large part because of a revolt against taxes. Remember no taxation without representation? And as the legend goes …
Sacrificing your constitutional rights is also not patriotic in any sense, but a politician who seeks to take away your constitutional rights is committing treason. Booker, like most politicians, fails to grasp the purpose of the Bill of Rights — to protect citizens’ constitutional rights from being usurped by government. This country would not be particularly distinguishable from other countries were it not for our Constitution and our rights. Those are what Americans have fought and died for for more than 200 years, not so that a politician could espouse taking away what we have so he can have more power.
-
The latest from the reality-optional caucus is that Vladimir Putin is sure to interfere in the 2020 election on behalf of Donald Trump.
I don’t think these people realize how delusional they sound to the rest of mankind.
Just one of the many reasons this idea is ridiculous: Trump’s Russia policy has been bellicose by any standard.
The blogger Moon of Alabama assembled some news items that appear to support this view.
Thus:
“Trump deploys TANKS to Estonia as NATO builds up HUGE army on Russian border” – Express, Feb 7 2017
“Trump launches attack on Syria with 59 Tomahawk missiles” – CNBC, Apr 6 2017
“U.S. Rejects Exxon Mobil Bid for Waiver on Russia Sanctions” – NYT, Apr 21 2017
“Trump to promote U.S. natgas exports in Russia’s backyard” – Reuters, Jul 3 2017
“Trump Urges East Europe to Loosen Russia’s Grip With U.S. Gas” – Bloomberg, Jul 6 2017
“Trump signs bill approving new sanctions against Russia” – CNN, Aug 3, 2017
“Justice Dept Asks Russia’s RT to Register as Foreign Agent” – Newsmax, Sep 13 2017
“US ‘to restrict Russian military flights over America’” – Independent, Sep 26 2017
“Trump signs into law U.S. government ban on Kaspersky Lab software” – Reuters, Dec 12 2017
“Trump gives green light to selling lethal arms to Ukraine” – The Hill, Dec 20 2017
“U.S. Punishes Chechen Leader in New Sanctions Against Russians” – NYT, Dec 20 2017
“Sputnik Partner ‘Required To Register’ Under U.S. Foreign-Agent Law” – RFERL, Jan 10 2018
“Trump says Russia is helping North Korea avoid sanctions” – CBSNews, Jan 17 2018
“Trump’s ‘energy dominance’ strategy is undercutting Russia’s influence and business in Europe” – Reuters, Feb 9 2018
“Trump looks to deter Russia, China with $686B ask for Pentagon” – The Hill, Feb 12 2018
“American General In Syria Confirms US Forces Killed Hundreds Of Russians In Massive Battle” – The Drive, Mar 16 2018
“Trump orders expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats, closure of Seattle consulate” – CBS, Mar 26 2018
“Trump vows periodical dispatch of US troops to Baltic states, step up air defense” – Lithuania Tribune, Apr 3 2018
“Trump opposes Nord Stream II, questions Germany” – AA, Apr 4 2018
“Trump just hit Russian oligarchs with the most aggressive sanctions yet” – Vice, Apr 6 2018
“Trump orders missile strike on Syria military targets” – CBSNews, Apr 9 2018
“Aluminum Stocks Jump As Trump Sanctions Target Putin Pal” – Investors, Apr 9 2018
“Russia ‘deeply disappointed’ at Trump’s withdrawal from Iran deal” – Times of Israel, May 9 2018
“Trump to NATO allies: Raise military spending to 4 percent of GDP” – AlJazeerah, Jul 12 2018
“Trump says U.S. ties to NATO ‘very strong’” – Politico, Jul 12 2018
“U.S. to sanction Turkey for receiving S-400 missiles” – Ahval, Jul 27 2018
“Trump administration to hit Russia with new sanctions for Skripal poisoning” – NBC News Aug 8 2018
“Space Force Is Trump’s Answer to New Russian and Chinese Weapons” – FP, Aug 10 2018
“US Sanctions Chinese Entity Over Purchase of Russian Fighters, S-400s” – Treasury – Sputnik, Sep 20 2018
“Trump hints at punitive action against India for buying S-400 from Russia” – India Today, Oct 11 2018
“Trump Agrees to Boost Pentagon’s Budget to $750 Bln in 2019 – Reports” – Sputnik, Oct 12 2018
“Trump says US will withdraw from nuclear arms treaty with Russia” – Guardian, Oct 21 2018
“Haley Condemns ‘Outrageous’ Russian Firing on Ukrainian Ships” – Bloomberg, Nov 26 2018
“2 Trump Moves Cost This Russian-American CEO $2.3B” – Forbes, Jan 14 2019
But “Trump is Putin’s puppet,” says every clueless idiot in the world. Well, not the world: the U.S. seems exclusively beset by this particular derangement.
The heroic Caitlin Johnstone further observes that none of this actual evidence will make any difference, because “Russia conspiracy theories have nothing to do with facts. We can expect to see fact-free allegations that Russia is planning to help Trump win in 2020 getting louder and louder as the election grows nearer. We can expect to see these fact-free allegations bolstered and amplified by western government agencies who need to manufacture support for further escalations against Russia, by the mass media who need ratings, and by the Democratic Party who need to keep their base fixated on insubstantial nonsense while they force an establishment loyalist through their fake primary.”
The bad news: the reality-optional caucus seems to be growing.
Trump follows …
-
The number one single today in 1966 was presumably played on the radio on days other than Mondays:
Today is the anniversary of the last Beatles U.S. single release, “Long and Winding Road” (the theme music of the Schenk Middle School eighth-grade Dessert Dance about this time in 1979):
The number one album today in 1977 was the Eagles’ “Hotel California”:
-
John Solomon of The Hill:
The boomerang from the Democratic Party’s failed attempt to connect Donald Trump to Russia’s 2016 election meddling is picking up speed, and its flight path crosses right through Moscow’s pesky neighbor, Ukraine. That is where there is growing evidence a foreign power was asked, and in some cases tried, to help Hillary Clinton.
In its most detailed account yet, Ukraine’s embassy in Washington says a Democratic National Committee insider during the 2016 election solicited dirt on Donald Trump’s campaign chairman and even tried to enlist the country’s president to help.
In written answers to questions, Ambassador Valeriy Chaly’s office says DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought information from the Ukrainian government on Paul Manafort’s dealings inside the country, in hopes of forcing the issue before Congress.
Chalupa later tried to arrange for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to comment on Manafort’s Russian ties on a U.S. visit during the 2016 campaign, the ambassador said.
Chaly says that, at the time of the contacts in 2016, the embassy knew Chalupa primarily as a Ukrainian-American activist, and learned only later of her ties to the DNC. He says the embassy considered her requests an inappropriate solicitation of interference in the U.S. election.
“The Embassy got to know Ms. Chalupa because of her engagement with Ukrainian and other diasporas in Washington D.C., and not in her DNC capacity. We’ve learned about her DNC involvement later,” Chaly said in a statement issued by his embassy. “We were surprised to see Alexandra’s interest in Mr. Paul Manafort’s case. It was her own cause. The Embassy representatives unambiguously refused to get involved in any way, as we were convinced that this is a strictly U.S. domestic matter.
“All ideas floated by Alexandra were related to approaching a Member of Congress with a purpose to initiate hearings on Paul Manafort or letting an investigative journalist ask President Poroshenko a question about Mr. Manafort during his public talk in Washington, D.C.,” the ambassador explained.
Reached by phone last week, Chalupa said she was too busy to talk. She did not respond to email and phone messages seeking subsequent comment.
Chaly’s written answers mark the most direct acknowledgement by Ukraine’s government that an American tied to the Democratic Party sought the country’s help in the 2016 election, and they confirm the main points of a January 2017 story by Politico on Chalupa’s efforts.
In that story, the embassy was broadly quoted as denying interference in the election and suggested Chalupa’s main reason for contacting the ambassador’s office was to organize an event celebrating women leaders.
The fresh statement comes several months after a Ukrainian court ruled that the country’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), closely aligned with the U.S. embassy in Kiev, and a parliamentarian named Serhiy Leshchenko wrongly interfered in the 2016 American election by releasing documents related to Manafort.
The acknowledgement by Kiev’s embassy, plus newly released testimony, suggests the Ukrainian efforts to influence the U.S. election had some intersections in Washington as well.
Nellie Ohr, wife of senior U.S. Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, acknowledged in congressional testimony that, while working for the Clinton-hired research firm Fusion GPS, she researched Trump and Manafort’s ties to Russia and learned Leshchenko, the Ukrainian lawmaker, was providing dirt to Fusion.
Fusion also paid British intelligence operative Christopher Steele, whose anti-Trump dossier the FBI used as primary evidence to support its request to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
In addition, I wrote last month that the Obama White House invited Ukrainian law enforcement officials to a meeting in January 2016 as Trump rose in the polls on his improbable path to the presidency. The meeting led to U.S. requests to the Ukrainians to help investigate Manafort, setting in motion a series of events that led to the Ukrainians leaking the documents about Manafort in May 2016.
The DNC’s embassy contacts add a new dimension, though. Chalupa discussed in the 2017 Politico article about her efforts to dig up dirt on Trump and Manafort, including at the Ukrainian embassy.
FEC records show Chalupa’s firm, Chalupa & Associates, was paid $71,918 by the DNC during the 2016 election cycle.
Exactly how the Ukrainian embassy responded to Chalupa’s inquiries remains in dispute.
Chaly’s statement says the embassy rebuffed her requests for information: “No documents related to Trump campaign or any individuals involved in the campaign have been passed to Ms. Chalupa or the DNC neither from the Embassy nor via the Embassy. No documents exchange was even discussed.”
But Andrii Telizhenko, a former political officer who worked under Chaly from December 2015 through June 2016, told me he was instructed by the ambassador and his top deputy to meet with Chalupa in March 2016 and to gather whatever dirt Ukraine had in its government files about Trump and Manafort.
Telizhenko said that, when he was told by the embassy to arrange the meeting, both Chaly and the ambassador’s top deputy identified Chalupa “as someone working for the DNC and trying to get Clinton elected.”
Over lunch at a Washington restaurant, Chalupa told Telizhenko in stark terms what she hoped the Ukrainians could provide the DNC and the Clinton campaign, according to his account.
“She said the DNC wanted to collect evidence that Trump, his organization and Manafort were Russian assets, working to hurt the U.S. and working with Putin against the U.S. interests. She indicated if we could find the evidence they would introduce it in Congress in September and try to build a case that Trump should be removed from the ballot, from the election,” he recalled.
After the meeting, Telizhenko said he became concerned about the legality of using his country’s assets to help an American political party win an U.S. election. But he proceeded with his assignment.
Telizhenko said that, as he began his research, he discovered that Fusion GPS was nosing around Ukraine, seeking similar information, and he believed they, too, worked for the Democrats.
As a former aide inside the general prosecutor’s office in Kiev, Telizhenko used contacts with intelligence, police and prosecutors across the country to secure information connecting Russian figures to assistance on some of the Trump organization’s real estate deals overseas, including a tower in Toronto.
Telizhenko said he did not want to provide the intelligence he collected directly to Chalupa, and instead handed the materials to Chaly: “I told him what we were doing was illegal, that it was unethical doing this as diplomats.” He said the ambassador told him he would handle the matter and had opened a second channel back in Ukraine to continue finding dirt on Trump.
Telizhenko said he also was instructed by his bosses to meet with an American journalist researching Manafort’s ties to Ukraine.
About a month later, he said his relationship with the ambassador soured and, by June 2016, he was ordered to return to Ukraine. There, he reported his concerns about the embassy’s contacts with the Democrats to the former prosecutor general’s office and officials in the Poroshenko administration: “Everybody already knew what was going on and told me it had been approved at the highest levels.”
Telizhenko said he never was able to confirm whether the information he collected for Chalupa was delivered to her, the DNC or the Clinton campaign.
Chalupa, meanwhile, continued to build a case that Manafort and Trump were tied to Russia.
In April 2016, she attended an international symposium where she reported back to the DNC that she had met with 68 Ukrainian investigative journalists to talk about Manafort. She also wrote that she invited American reporter Michael Isikoff to speak with her. Isikoff wrote some of the seminal stories tying Manafort to Ukraine and Trump to Russia; he later wrote a book making a case for Russian collusion.
“A lot more coming down the pipe,” Chalupa wrote a top DNC official on May 3, 2016, recounting her effort to educate Ukrainian journalists and Isikoff about Manafort.
Then she added: “More offline tomorrow since there is a big Trump component you and Lauren need to be aware of that will hit in next few weeks and something I’m working on you should be aware of.”
Less than a month later, the “black ledger” identifying payments to Manafort was announced in Ukraine, forcing Manafort to resign as Trump’s campaign chairman and eventually face criminal prosecution for improper foreign lobbying.
DNC officials have suggested in the past that Chalupa’s efforts were personal, not officially on behalf of the DNC. But Chalupa’s May 2016 email clearly informed a senior DNC official that she was “digging into Manafort” and she suspected someone was trying to hack into her email account.
Chaly over the years has tried to portray his role as Ukraine’s ambassador in Washington as one of neutrality during the 2016 election. But in August 2016 he raised eyebrows in some diplomatic circles when he wrote an OpEd in The Hill skewering Trump for some of his comments on Russia. “Trump’s comments send wrong message to world,” Chaly’s article blared in the headline.
In his statement to me, Chaly said he wrote the article because he had been solicited for his views by The Hill’s opinion team.
Chaly’s office also acknowledged that a month after the OpEd, President Poroshenko met with then-candidate Clinton during a stop in New York. The office said the ambassador requested a similar meeting with Trump but it didn’t get organized.
Though Chaly and Telizhenko disagree on what Ukraine did after it got Chalupa’s request, they confirm that a paid contractor of the DNC solicited their government’s help to find dirt on Trump that could sway the 2016 election.
For a Democratic Party that spent more than two years building the now-disproven theory that Trump colluded with Russia to hijack the 2016 election, the tale of the Ukrainian embassy in Washington feels just like a speeding political boomerang.
This, of course, is nothing new with Democrats.
-
The number one British album today in 1972 was a Tyrannosaurus Rex double album, the complete title of which is “My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair … But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows”/”Prophets, Seers & Sages: The Angels of the Ages.” Really.
-
Today is Cinco de Mayo, so some Mexican rock would be appropriate:
The number one single today in 1962:
I’m unaware of whether the soundtrack of “West Side Story” got any radio airplay, but since I played it in both the La Follette and UW marching bands, I note that today in 1962 the soundtrack hit number one and stayed there for 54 weeks:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 