It figures after War and Peace-size Presty the DJ entries the past few days, today’s is relatively short.
The number one album today in 1974, a few months after the death of its singer, was “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim”:
The number one single today in 1974 introduced the world to the word “pompatus”:
Today in 1982, Bob Geldof was arrested after a disturbance aboard a 727 that had been grounded for five hours:
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports reaction to new Packers coach Matt LaFleur:
National writers and talking heads had plenty to say when it came to the Packers’ hiring of Titans offensive coordinator Matt LaFleur to be the franchise’s next head coach, and while many felt the match with Aaron Rodgers was a good one, many well-known talking heads questioned LaFleur’s experience and recent track record.
Danny Heifitz at The Ringer makes note of the success LaFleur has had with quarterbacks Robert Griffin III, Jared Goff and Matt Ryan and notes the obvious: LaFleur’s success in Green Bay will hinge on his work with Rodgers.
“The Green Bay Packers have hired Aaron Rodgers a new head coach. I mean, the Packers have hired a new head coach. According to reports, Titans offensive coordinator Matt LaFleur will lead Green Bay next season, and while he’ll be leading a staff and a 53-man roster, he’ll be graded primarily on how well he does as Rodgers’s boss. Rodgers, the highest-paid player in NFL history and perhaps the most gifted quarterback of all time, needs a Super Bowl win to justify his contract and burnish his legacy, and LaFleur’s job will be facilitating that.” …
Some high-profile sports-opinion personalities question the hire, including Colin Cowherd of Fox Sports.
“Congratulations on hiring somebody who people question whether he has the stature and gravitas to lead a coordinators meeting. Maybe you’ve heard Aaron Rodgers is aging, he ran a Super Bowl-winning coach out of town. Good luck to Matt LaFleur.” — @ColinCowherd
The number one album today in 1964 was “Ring of Fire: The Best of Johnny Cash,” the first country album to reach the top of the album chart:
The number one single today in 1964, whatever the words were:
Dan O’Donnell:
Wisconsin got a bold new leader on Monday; a young, dynamic, charismatic figure who is as innovative as he is likeable and who promises fundamental change through sheer force of will.
To say that the Packers hiring Matt LaFleur to be their new head coach overshadowed Tony Evers’ inauguration would be the understatement of the new year. After news broke late Monday afternoon that the former Tennessee Titans’ offensive coordinator would be Green Bay’s coach, Evers’ inauguration became an afterthought.
That’s not a dig at a state or a media far too obsessed with football, mind you; it’s an acknowledgement of the reality that LaFleur is likelier to make a more lasting impact than is Evers.
LaFleur, after all, has a mandate to make dramatic change that Evers simply doesn’t and LaFleur, unlike Evers, won’t be rendered politically impotent by a State Legislature and Judiciary unlikely to approve of his more radical instincts.
As different as Wisconsin’s two new leaders may appear—LaFleur is a good-looking 39 year-old with a reputation as a forward thinker while the 67 year-old Evers is a self-described bore—their fates may well be inextricably linked to the same basic theory of management.
The Peter Principle, as defined in Laurence J. Peter’s 1969 book of the same name, is the idea that “every employee tends to rise to the level of his incompetence.” In other words, in a given organization (be it a football team or a state government), an individual who succeeds in—or is merely adequate in—his job, he will be promoted. If he succeeds again, he will be promoted again, and this cycle will continue…until it doesn’t. The Peter Principle dictates that everyone has a level of core competency and, once it is exceeded, failure will result.
Rise one level above your competence, the Peter Principle holds, and the results would be disastrous.
This is why many Packer fans breathed a sigh of relief that Green Bay hired LaFleur instead of Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels. A very highly regarded young coordinator in 2009, he was hired as head coach of the Denver Broncos and failed miserably. Almost immediately, he so alienated starting quarterback Jay Cutler that Cutler said he could no longer trust the organization and demanded a trade.
Josh McDaniels thus stands as a grave warning for NFL teams like the Packers who hire first-time head coaches. So too should the people of Wisconsin be leery of a new Governor who seems to have just been sworn in to exactly one level above his abilities.
After a lackluster 8-8 season in 2009, the Broncos cratered in 2010, and McDaniels was fired after they dropped to 3-9 and were fined for illegally taping an opponent’s practice.The next season, McDaniels returned to his core competency—serving as an offensive coordinator—and he has remained one of the best in football ever since, winning five Super Bowls as the leader of the Patriots’ offense.
According to the Peter Principle, this is where McDaniels should remain since a promotion to head coach exceeded his level of aptitude.
Josh McDaniels thus stands as a grave warning for NFL teams like the Packers who hire first-time head coaches.
So too should the people of Wisconsin be leery of a new Governor who seems to have just been sworn in to exactly one level above his abilities.
If one is a believer in omens, Evers flubbing his Oath of Office—literally the very first thing he did in office—is an ominous one, especially since it seems as though State Superintendent was above Evers’ core competency.
After all, he was wholly unable to perform what is perhaps the primary function of that role—making requests for funding—without resorting to plagiarism. Will he similarly resort to stealing others’ ideas when he presents his State Budget next month? Will he have a staffer swipe an old Obama speech when he delivers his first State of the State Address?
Even before he took office, Evers showed signs that he was not up to the job of Governor. In an embarrassing backtrack last week, he was forced to meekly promise to follow Wisconsin’s laws just a day after defiantly proclaiming that he would have to be sued in order to abide by legislation Republicans passed in extraordinary session last month.
This dithering, combined with Evers’ apparent inability to provide any sort of policy specifics or even articulate a coherent vision for Wisconsin, reveals him to be just as much of a disaster-in-waiting for the state as Josh McDaniels might have been.
There is, after all, a reason Wisconsin rejected him as State Superintendent twice—even relegating him to a third-place finish in the 2001 primary—and there is a reason he has been wholly unremarkable since finally winning the position that the Peter Principle had long denied him.
Even Evers’ most diehard supporters would be hard-pressed to name Evers’ most significant (or, for that matter, any) accomplishments as Superintendent, forcing a serious examination of whether that role, too, eluded his highest level of job skills.
His primary qualification for election, though, was that he is not Scott Walker and thus, despite his rather obvious shortcomings, the people of Wisconsin promoted Evers to Governor.
No wonder the state tuned out his inauguration as soon as the Packers hired a new coach: At least Matt LaFleur offers a glimmer of hope.
The number one British single today in 1957 was the same single as the previous week …
… though performed by a different act:
The number one British single today in 1958:
The number one album for the fifth consecutive week today in 1976 was “Chicago IX,” which was actually “Chicago’s Greatest Hits”:
Last week, Gov.-Elect Tony Evers reversed course on a handful of issues that were cornerstones of his campaign.
The incoming governor already has a well-documented record of changing his story on whether he plans to increase taxes on Wisconsinites. But as he made the rounds in the media, Evers went on the record discussing a slate of hot button campaign issues – and, in several cases, directly contradicting his own previous statements.
When it comes to taxes, Evers has gone from “everything’s on the table” to an 11th-hour campaign promise to “raise no taxes” and, remarkably, back again.
Evers has changed his tune on key policy issues like school choice, Foxconn, abolishing the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. (WEDC), the minimum wage, and Act 10. While his rapid 180 on whether, as a constitutional office holder, he will follow the laws passed in last month’s extraordinary session received some notice in the mainstream media, we have assembled a comprehensive list of every issue on which Gov. Evers’ has changed his position.
TAXES
When it comes to taxes, Evers has gone from “everything’s on the table” to an 11th-hour campaign promise to “raise no taxes” and, remarkably, back again.
During the campaign, Evers talked about cutting middle class taxes and paying for it by scrapping or scaling back the state’s manufacturing and agriculture tax credit. But in the final days of the campaign, on Nov. 1, Evers reversed course, telling The Washington Post that,”I’m planning to raise no taxes.” Some speculated that the Governor’s change was a last-minute attempt to keep the support of voting taxpayers.
Now, he has reverted to his earlier position. In a round of interviews last week, Gov. Evers said he wants to cap the state’s manufacturing and agriculture tax credit at $300,000 a year in income.
That would amount to a significant tax hike on Wisconsin businesses and farmers, many of whom file business income on their personal income tax forms.
Evers also said last week that his first budget will roll back protections for local property taxpayers, breaking his campaign pledge “to raise no taxes.” It would also overturn one of Gov. Walker’s hallmark accomplishments – the statewide property tax freeze.
The governor-elect also told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel he’s open to the idea of allowing local governments to raise their sales tax.
EXTRAORDINARY SESSION LAWS
Evers quickly changed his mind about whether he’d follow, or ignore, a slate of laws passed in the Legislature’s extraordinary session last month.
He told reporters during a series of interviews on Wednesday that he would refuse to follow some of the laws, signed by Walker in December, that restrict certain powers of the governor’s office. By ignoring some of the laws, he was hoping to draw lawsuits from his foes.
“Tony Evers says it will take a lawsuit to get him to go along with lame-duck legislation,” read a headline in the Journal Sentinel published Wednesday.
He slept on it, and changed his mind by the next day. At a Thursday news conference, he again reversed course.
“I have no intent of breaking the law,” he told reporters.
SCHOOL CHOICE
While Evers’ change of tune on the extraordinary session laws was his fastest, maybe his most significant is his new position on abolishing school choice.
The state’s school choice programs offer state support for families who want to opt out of the public education system and send their children to private schools. On the campaign trail, Evers made his stance clear: he wants to abolish the program.
“As governor, I would work with the legislature to phase out vouchers,” he said in a School Administrators Alliance survey. “I’ve spent the last 20 years fighting back against vouchers and privatizers. On my watch, we’ve removed more than 30 schools from the voucher program and prevented dozens from joining,” Evers said.
But he reversed course in an interview with WisconsinEye. Ending the state’s school choice program “can’t happen,” he said. “We have 30,000 plus kids in there … that can’t happen, and I’ve never said that can happen.”
Faced with a Republican Legislature unlikely to go along with any effort to abolish school choice, Evers now offers vague promises of “transparency.” Among them, he will push to include the cost of school choice on property tax bills in hopes it sparks a “conversation” about the program.
Evers’ choice of advisers suggests a conflict in his incoming administration’s stance on school choice. Heather Dubois Bourenane, director of the Wisconsin Public Education Network, was named to Evers’ “What’s Best for Kids” Advisory Council. Bourenane is a top-flight foe of Wisconsin’s school choice program and a persistent advocate for the public education industry.
Bourenane has described the popular school voucher program as a “laundering scheme.”
Evers’ new, unequivocal statement rejecting the dismantling of the choice programs isn’t likely to sit well with Bourenane and those in her corner. Something to watch as Gov. Evers puts together his first budget.
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
“I’m not going to be proposing anything in the budget about WEDC,” Evers said in Wednesday’s WisconsinEye interview.
That stands in stark contrast to his campaign pledge to abolish the quasi-public economic development agency championed by Walker as a replacement for the state’s old Commerce Department.
He’s also backing off his criticism of WEDC’s top achievement over the past eight years, Foxconn. While he never went as far as his primary opponents who called for the wholesale cancellation of the milestone economic development deal with the Taiwan-based electronics giant, he was highly critical of the project.
During the campaign, Evers said he would hold Foxconn’s feet to the fire, saying just enough to placate the far left that hates the deal and the tens of thousands of private sector jobs it promises to bring. But Evers recently backed off much of that rhetoric.
“We have to have good working relationships with them (Foxconn),” Evers told WisconsinEye’s Steve Walters. While he repeated the vague assertion that he would “hold their feet to the fire,” Evers also admitted that the company is “making some proactive steps” in how the company is handling wetlands as construction proceeds.
Construction is currently underway on Foxconn’s massive, $10 billion manufacturing campus in Mount Pleasant that promises to create 13,000 high-tech jobs – the largest economic development deal of its kind in U.S. history.
MINIMUM WAGE
During the campaign, Evers’ vision for a minimum wage increase was pretty clear: “We’re going to $15 an hour minimum. Minimum,” he said at a rally at UW-Milwaukee to roaring applause from the crowd of Bernie Sanders supporters.
But in an interview with the Wisconsin State Journal, Evers seemingly backed off the $15-at-a-minimum promise, declining to give a specific figure. While his first budget will offer a “clear pathway” to raising the wage, “Evers declined to say how, or how much, his budget would propose to increase the state’s minimum wage,” the newspaper reported.
A stalled drive toward a higher minimum wage would be good news for the Badger State. Such a drastic increase might sound good to the Bernie Sanders crowd, but it would likely backfire on those it’s ostensibly supposed to help.
As a growing body of research shows, the forced $15 is coming with some ugly consequences. A new study from the University of Washington found Seattle’s path to a $15 minimum wage to date appears to have caused employers in the Emerald City to trim low-wage worker hours by 9 percent on average. They earned $125 less each month following the most recent increase, according to the study, funded in part by the city of Seattle.
A 2014 MacIver Institute study found 91,000 Wisconsinites would lose their jobs if the minimum wage was raised to $15. Considering that many of those are entry level jobs, a “living wage” mandate would eliminate countless opportunities for young workers just getting started in their careers.
ACT 10 AND RIGHT-TO-WORK
During the primary, Evers backed repealing Act 10, Walker’s signature collective bargaining reform law that’s saved taxpayers more than $5 billion.
“Tony is supportive of returning collective bargaining rights to public employees,” said campaign manager Maggie Gau in a statement.
If Republicans were to maintain control of the Legislature, Evers said at the time, he’d still work toward a compromise giving government employees more bargaining power and tipping the scales of government away from taxpayers and back in favor of state workers.
Now that he’s the incoming governor with a Republican-controlled Legislature, Evers is telling the media he hasn’t made decisions about Act 10 yet.
“[T]hat’s part of the budget we haven’t made any determinations on,” he told the Wisconsin State Journal. Indeed, any significant changes to either Act 10 or the state’s right-to-work law would need to go through the Republican-controlled Legislature.
Instead, he’s looking for ways to circumvent the Legislature.
“[I]n a nod to the improbability of passing such a change through the GOP Legislature, Evers said he has considered non-legislative moves such as hiring Cabinet secretaries ‘that value input of employees,’” the paper reported.
The number one single today in 1955 was banned by ABC Radio stations because it was allegedly in bad taste:
The number one album today in 1961 wasn’t a music album — Bob Newhart’s “The Button Down Mind Strikes Back!”
The number one album today in 1965 was “Beatles ’65”:
In a search that lasted for more than a month, the Green Bay Packers have found their next head coach.
Matt LaFleur, 39, is set to become the 15th head coach for the franchise, according to multiple reports and confirmed by PackersNews.
The Tennessee Titans offensive coordinator interviewed initially on Sunday. By Monday morning, the source said, the Packers began preparations to make LaFleur their 15th head coach in franchise history.
ESPN first reported LaFleur was the Packers’ top target.
LaFleur just concluded his first year as the Titans’ offensive coordinator after spending 2017 as Sean McVay’s offensive coordinator for the Los Angeles Rams. Tennessee finished 9-7 and missed the playoffs, ending the year No. 25 in total offense and No. 27 in scoring. The Titans were 29th in passing with quarterback Marcus Mariota but seventh in the league in rushing.,
In 2017 in L.A., the Rams finished eighth in the league in rushing to go with the No. 10 passing attack in football.
Interim head coach Joe Philbin directed the team over the final four games of the regular season and interviewed for the full-time position after going 2-2. The Packers finished third in the NFC North with a 6-9-1 record, missing the playoffs for the second straight year.
The last time the Packers looked for a head coach, Ted Thompson was the general manager and he moved relatively quickly. Thompson settled on McCarthy, then the San Francisco 49ers offensive coordinator, just 10 days after the firing of Mike Sherman on Jan. 2, 2006.
Murphy and general manager Brian Gutekunst met Friday with New England Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels and Patriots defensive play caller Brian Flores about their coaching vacancy. On Saturday they huddled with New Orleans Saints offensive coordinator Pete Carmichael Jr. and tight ends coach Dan Campbell, as well as former Tampa Bay Buccaneers offensive coordinator Todd Monken.
On Sunday, they interviewed LaFleur and former Dolphins coach Adam Gase. It’s unclear whether they spoke with Pittsburgh Steelers offensive line coach Mike Munchak, who was reported to be high on the Denver Broncos’ list.
Winnipeg Free Press publisher Bob Cox has an insight American media either doesn’t grasp or isn’t willing to admit:
Donald Trump loves CNN. He most certainly does not want the New York Times to fail. And the Washington Post is doing fine by him.
You might think differently if you watched the news conference that Trump gave the day after the U.S. mid-term elections in November. Trump tangled with CNN reporter Jim Acosta. Later that day, Acosta’s press pass to the White House was revoked, making it impossible for him to gain access to the place he works.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders released a video clip that appeared to show Acosta delivering a karate chop with his left hand to the arm of a female aide as she tried to take a microphone from him. The clip had been altered. Run at proper speed, the video shows the arm of the aide brushed up against Acosta’s left arm as she reached across to try to take away the microphone. Acosta immediately said: “Pardon me, ma’am.”
It was yet another skirmish in what Trump has turned into an ongoing war against traditional news media. His words are as nasty and harsh as ever heard from a U.S. President—the press is the true enemy of the people, journalists are liars, awful people who spread fake news.
But most of the news media are playing exactly the game Trump wants to play.
Trump’s formula is simple:
Step 1: Say the media cannot be trusted. He undermines the work of journalists who gather facts and present them to the public. He tells supporters the media is not telling the truth about him. He is the only source of “truth” about what is going on.
Step 2: Lie. Trump continuously makes exaggerated claims about his accomplishments and utters falsehoods. He tells supporters they will not see this in the media because the media does not report what is really going on. He knows the media will report what he says, and point out what is not true.
Step 3: Loudly proclaim “I told you so.” Trump uses his unflattering portrayal in the news to prove that the media is out to get him, that it makes things up, that it spreads falsehoods, etc. This provides new justification to go back to step 1, turn up the volume and use even more inflammatory language.
The end result is that Trump has an opposition—the media—at all times. Trump’s strategy depends on having that opposition.
In politics, the media is the perfect opposition. For starters, it is not a single entity, but a broad group of independent organizations that compete against each other and never speak with a single voice. They have viewers and readers, but not a huge base of supporters to mobilize when attacked.
Individual reporters are like cats, going their own way, not overly interested in working together. Some voices were raised in support of Acosta, but there was no concerted industry effort on his behalf. He eventually got back the press pass, but that was due to the legal pressure CNN brought on the White House.
Journalists are an opposition that does not fight back. Most do not consider fighting back because this is not their role. The media’s role is to report on the president, not find ways of undermining him.
Trump is far from the first politician to make the media the opposition. But Trump is the best and highest profile practitioner of the craft.
It appears to be encouraging others. In the Canadian context, think of Ontario Premier Doug Ford. Even in Manitoba, Premier Brian Pallister has threatened to sue the Winnipeg Free Press for its reporting and the Conservative Party has sent fundraising letters to members urging them to give to help counter the lies the newspaper supposedly spreads.
It is unfortunate because news media are watchdogs, not opponents. Politicians like Donald Trump confuse the two roles—interpreting legitimate questions as criticism and factual reporting as attacks.
Serious news media that are doing their job will continue to ask questions and report facts.
They won’t fight back. And Donald Trump will keep bashing them because that is exactly how he wants things to work.
To quote a late friend of mine: Ya think?
The Beatles had the number one album, “Rubber Soul” …
… and the number one single today in 1966:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 