The Beatles had the number one album, “Rubber Soul” …
… and the number one single today in 1966:
No comments on Presty the DJ for Jan. 8
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Facebook Friend Michael Smith:
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there – good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… ”
Senator Elizabeth Warren, 2020 Democrat Presidential Candidate (2011)
“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”
President Barack Obama, Democrat (2012)
“The President states a simple truth here. Business owners across America do not build their own roads and bridges, sewers and water systems; they do not single-handedly maintain the health of their employees; they do not finance their own court system; and they did not build their own Internet to market and sell their products. The public provides these things, together. The government manages our shared financial resources to make these things happen. That’s the government’s job.”
George P. Lakoff, cognitive linguist and progressive philosopher (2012)
The common fallacy in these quotes is that business owners across America did build that – they pay taxes specifically to support the creation and maintenance of roads and bridges, sewers and water systems, they pay for insurance to provide health care for their employees and they do pay for court systems from those very same taxes. The fact that other individual citizens in American are compelled to contribute through coercive taxation is immaterial. These arguments are like the crowing of the Obama administration about the number of “successful signups” for Obamacare and the subsequent fawning coverage by the media – shocker of all shockers – people who were commanded to sign up under penalty of law signed up! Excelsior! The program is so popular it had to be made mandatory.
Want to see evidence of what happens to coercive participation when it is no longer coercive?
Just have a look at that right to work laws and the removal of confiscatory union dues has done to union membership.
It is also notable that government seldom does such work itself, it hires businesses from the private sector to do it. For example, the Hoover Dam, cast as a great accomplishment of progressive government, was actually built by capitalist private contractors – the very independent businesses that progressives love to hate.
The idea that the individual owes his success to the collective and therefore should pay the collective with his productivity is nothing new. Here’s he very same idea that preceded the above statements by over 50 years:
“The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence, that individual effort is futile, that an individual conscience is a useless luxury, that there is no individual mind or character or achievement, that everything is achieved collectively, and that it’s masses that count, not men.”
~ Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged” (1957)
We now have a House controlled once again by Randian looters – but this time, there is a batch of newbies who eschew the custom of hiding their true motives and desires. The Democrats are going to have a train car load of radical leftists running for president. The next two years is going to be as interesting on the Democrat side as 2015 and 2016 were on the GOP side.
One wonders if 2020 will be the year Atlas actually shrugs.</blockquote
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The group Milwaukee rapper WebsterX was to have performed with has been pulled from Governor-elect Tony Evers’ inaugural gala after the Evers organization was informed by Media Trackers of offensive tweets by the artist, whose real name is Sam Ahmed. In tweets from 2011 and 2012, Ahmed jokes about killing police, Republicans, and committing rape.
Media Trackers sent the tweets to Evers organization spokesman Brandon Weathersby, who told us late Friday afternoon that the group New Age Narcissism had been pulled from the lineup: “Upon the discovery of offensive statements made by a member of New Age Narcissism the group will no longer be performing at the Inaugural Gala. These statements are not reflective of our values.”
Here are some of the tweets:
You can view more tweets here: WebsterX Tweets
The Cap Times reported on Ahmed’s inclusion in the line up Wednesday:
Also on the lineup is New Age Narcissism, a musical collective that includes some of the city’s biggest ambassadors of hip-hop and R&B. Among them is Lex Allen, an R&B singer who was recently featured this year as a performer at Summerfest, and WebsterX, a rapper who has had his music featured on NPR and whose single “Feels” was highlighted by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as one of the year’s best.
Because, you see, in Milwaukee and Madison joking about killing cops and Republicans is not merely OK, but applauded and expected. This is what a majority of this state’s voters voted to have for the next four years.
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The number one single in Britain …
… and over here on my parents’ wedding day in 1961:
The number one single today in 1977:
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First: The song of the day:
The number one album today in 1968 was the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour”:
The number one single today in 1973 included a person rumored to be the subject of the song on backing vocals:
The number one British single today in 1979 was this group’s only number one:
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Today’s first song is posted in honor of the first FM signal heard by the Federal Communications Commission today in 1940:
Today in 1968, Jimi Hendrix was jailed for one day in Stockholm, Sweden, for destroying the contents of his hotel room.
The culprit? Not marijuana or some other controlled substance. Alcohol.
Today in 1973, Bruce Springsteen released his first album, “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.” It sold all of 25,000 copies in its first year.
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I have written here about the Far East Side of Madison, where I grew up. (Including what could have been, but wasn’t, the neighborhood high school.)
The Facebook Historic Madison group discovered two newspaper ads. First, chronolotgically speaking, from 1961:
Quoting from myself (actually another blog):
The first subdivision in the area south of Cottage Grove Road east of U. S. 51 was Harry Vogts’ Acewood from 1959. By 1962 many small, medium, and large builders and developers were active in the area; two of the larger were Towne Realty of Milwaukee that used Findorff, a Madison company, to build its houses, and the Lucey Realty Service owned by Patrick J. Lucey who was governor of Wisconsin from 1971 to 1977.
Many streets are named for local residents: Steinhauer Trail, Starker Avenue, Vinje Court, and Droster Road. Several are for builders; Montgomery Drive is for William C. Montgomery. First names are common as in Bonnie Lane, Ellen Avenue, Wendy Lane,and Melinda Drive. Female names greatly outnumber male names. Painted Post Road is from Lucey’s Painted Post Subdivision. Bird streets are Meadowlark Drive, Sandpiper Lane, Pelican Circle, and Tern Court. …
One major street, Acewood Boulevard, began about 1959 in Harry Vogts’ Acewood subdivision. Vogts (1908-1994) owned Ace Builders, Inc., and had already named one subdivision in Glendale Aceview.
New Acewood (which one assumes was phase 2 of Acewood) was the neighborhood to which we moved in 1966, five years after this ad. All the houses I rememberhad one-car garages, which worked fine for my parents at the time since they had only one car.
But while my parents were situating in their new-to-them house, to the east was …
By 1958 when large scale suburban development began in the area east of U. S. 51, south of Milwaukee Street, and north of Cottage Grove Road, developers such as Aaron Elkind, Donald Sanford, and Albert McGinnis knew a lot about selling houses to middle income clients.
They made certain that subdivisions named Kingston-Onyx, Rolling Meadows, and Heritage Heights promised pleasant surroundings. Streets with names such as Diamond, Turquoise, and Crystal sparkled with the promise of a high-quality product in a landscape filled with singing birds on streets named Chickadee Court, Bob-o-link Lane, and Meadowlark Drive.
Heritage Heights suggested merry England with Kingsbridge Road, Queensbridge Road, and Knightsbridge Road.
As I’ve written before, this was the neighborhood that was probably as suburban as you could get while still beingwithin the Madison city .limits. Thanks to the lakes and surface streets not really designed for the traffic they ended up getting, getting downtown or to the UW campus took more time than the crow needed to fly. Other than three hellish years at Schenk Middle School (which may have been the fault of the students more than anything else), life seemed pretty safe to the point of dullness in Heritage Heights, which makes you think of …
… the unofficial theme song of our ’80s neighborhood.
As long as we’re running the wayback machine, we should bring up this Facebook gem:
Before McDonald’s became ubiquitous, and well before anyone in the Culver family thought of dumping A&W and going off on their own, there was Kelly’s, which as you’ll note from the menu was kind of McDonald’s without golden arches but with the dancing Pickle Pete.
The slightly odd thing here is that the listed menu does not include hot dogs. I know that Kelly’s had hot dogs, because for some reason I wouldn’t eat hamburgers until sometime in grade school.
WISC-TV remembered Kelly’s and another burger place:
P-P-Pickle P-P-Pete!!!
Once upon a time, Kelly’s Hamburgers was a national chain that competed with the likes of McDonald’s. Madison had several Kelly’s locations around town, but locally, the restaurants are best remembered for their iconic mascot—a smiling dill pickle slice with a stutter, called Pickle Pete. He appeared in newspaper ads and radio jingles in the ’60s and ’70s and, as best as we know, Pickle Pete was unique to the Madison market. …
A Night at the Drive-In
For east-siders, few places from the mid-20th century are more fondly remembered than the Monona Root Beer Drive-In across from Olbrich Park. Famed for its curly fries made by hand, the drive-in was best known by the nickname the “Hungry Hungry” because of the large neon sign that flashed the word “hungry.” Some Madisonians even recall seeing the sign across Lake Monona from downtown. This photo belongs to former drive-in owner Tim Femrite, who worked there in the ’50s as a teenager. “I started there humping cars—that means waiting on them,” Femrite says. “I cut buns, peeled onions, pattied hamburgers. It was hot in the summertime, but it was fun.”
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The number one single today in 1959:
Today in 1970, the Who’s Keith Moon was trying to escape from a gang of skinheads when he accidentally hit and killed chauffeur Neil Boland.
The problem was Moon’s attempt at escape. He had never passed his driver’s license test.
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I wanted to write this column about dogs. If you follow me on Twitter or have read my work elsewhere, you probably know that about me: I like my dogs. Though truth be told, I probably like your dogs, too. Because I just like dogs.
It’s a common sentiment. Dog ownership has been going up markedly for a while now. There are some who worry that dogs — and even cats — are replacing human children as the objects of our devotion.
There’s evidence to support the claim. Many young couples are more eager to have pets than kids. Expenditures on pet insurance have soared. One often sees dogs referred to as “furbabies” on social media. Two decades ago, my wife and I struggled to find hotels on our cross-country drives that would accommodate dogs (at least at a reasonable price). Now, many hotels compete for the attention of dog owners. Some businesses eager to hire skilled young workers have generous bring-your-dog-to-work policies, and some even provide “pawternity” care for new dog owners.
A survey by SunTrust Bank found that 33 percent of first-time home-buying Millennials said the desire for a better space for their dog was a factor in their decision. Only 25 percent said marriage was an issue, and just 19 percent said children were.
Psychologist Clay Routledge makes a persuasive case that dog ownership is a symptom of America’s very real loneliness crisis. As our society becomes more individualistic, Routledge observed in National Review, “pets may be appealing to some because they lack the agency of humans and thus require less compromise and sacrifice.”
And the problem will like get worse because, as Routledge notes, young people report much more anxiety and isolation in the era of the smartphone, which is why anxious college students increasingly request the support of “companion animals.”
In his book Them, Senator Ben Sasse catalogs America’s loneliness crisis. We have fewer and fewer “non-virtual” friends. Americans entertain others in their homes half as much as they did 25 years ago. People don’t know — never mind socialize with — their neighbors the way they once did.
There’s much to ponder and debate here. But it seems obvious that Routledge is on to something.
Which brings me back to what I wanted to write about. I post a lot of videos and pictures of my dogs, Zoë and Pippa, on Twitter, that distorted and distorting window on the national conversation. I also follow many of the hugely popular dog-focused Twitter accounts (WeRateDogs, The Dogist, Thoughts of Dog, etc.).
Dogs — and animals generally — are among the few things that bridge the partisan divide. Tragedies are a partisan affair. If someone dies in a hurricane or shooting, there’s a mad rush to score political points. Last week, a lovely young woman, Bre Payton, died from a sudden illness, and a bunch of ghouls mocked or celebrated her demise because she was a conservative.
Even babies can be controversial, since babies can touch various nerves, from abortion politics to the apparent scourge of “misgendering” newborns.
But dogs are largely immune to political ugliness. The angriest complaints I get about my dog tweets — from people on both the left and the right — are that I’m wasting apparently scarce resources on dogs when I could be expressing my anger about whatever outrage the complainers demand I be outraged about.
This is one of the reasons I love dogs. Because it is an occupational hazard in my line of work to be constantly drenched in the muck of politics, dogs are a safe harbor. They don’t care about political correctness. They don’t want to Make America Great Again or join the “Resistance.” They just want to pursue doggie goodness as they see it.
It strikes me that all of these things are connected. The increasing nastiness of our politics is a byproduct of our social isolation. We look to politics to provide the sense of meaning and belonging once found in community and religion, which is why everything is becoming politicized. The problem is that politics, particularly at the national level, is necessarily about disagreement, which is why it cannot provide the sense of unity people crave from it.
And that’s one reason why dogs are so appealing. In an era when everything is a source of discord and politicization, it’s good to have something that stands — and sits and fetches — apart. Because they’re all good dogs.
Last point first. Recall that the author of Marley and Me lovingly chronicled all the bad things Marley the yellow lab did. After the column he wrote upon Marley’s death, his voice mail reached capacity with tales, plus additional emails, about the bad things those owners’ dogs did. (Like eat items of clothing and throw them back up whole.) So what is a “good dog” depends on your opinion of what your dog just did.
My general opinion of parenting is that people who don’t want to be parents shouldn’t be parents, so the “furbabies” thing is something that can easily be ignored.
Related to that is this comment:
Dogs are sentient (they think, learn and express emotions), loving, and they really only know how to live in the moment. It’s a great combination of traits for people who are sick of people but don’t want to live in total isolation.
There were also a few buzzkill comments:
- Maybe it depends on where you live, but when I was in Seattle I saw politics start to creep in about dogs. Seattle is a place where many claim to need an emotional support pet. If you own a purebred dog people also feel it is their duty to lecture you on the value of adopting a pound dog. Speaking of pound dogs, have you noticed that no one just adopts a dog from the pound anymore? Even that has achieved virtue-signaling status. Now everyone “rescues” their pet. It’s subtle, but it elevates the actions of the owner to something more noble.
Well …
… here is Max, our “rescue” dog. This is the puppy we were introduced to one Sunday at church, who then kept inviting himself across the street, probably because his owner was new and didn’t know how to take care of a dog. The owner also didn’t notice the part of her lease that said “no pets,” which made her look for a new home for the former Peanut. We found this out one Sunday and left a note on her door. The following Saturday I was going to announce a college basketball game, but as I was leaving she appeared at the door and wanted to know if we were still interested. I said I was leaving, but talk to the people inside, and sure enough, when I left we had one dog and one cat, but when I got home we had two dogs and one cat. The one thing I did rescue him from was being outlawed by the city, which had one sense-challenged alderman who thought “pit bulls” (however they are defined, something the proposed ordinance did not do) should be banned. Happily, I caught him in a public lie, and that ended not only the ordinance, but eventually his political career.
- A neighbor told me that they (the couple) had pulled their new puppy from her playgroup because there were Trump owned dogs in the group. They had been doxxed out into the open.
Really. - Dogs are awesome, yes, but don’t kid yourself…politics are alive and well in the dog world. The left is absolutely coming for your pets. I have a competitive dog (shows and herding trials) and have seen first hand PETA and HSUS activists trying to disrupt events. Also, beware of feel good laws that are being passed all over the country that will ultimately hurt all dogs and dog owners.
(Re PETA and HSUS, I bet that misbehavior stops the next time a dog owner pulls a gun on them defending their dog.)
The previous quotes prove the point of those who prefer dogs to humans — there may be no bad dogs, but there certainly are bad dog owners because there are bad people.
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Joe Setyon describes what the federal government “shutdown” is not:
“In shutdown, national parks transform into Wild West—heavily populated and barely supervised,” blares a headline from The Washington Post. “It’s a free-for-all: shutdown brings turmoil to beloved US national parks,” says The Guardian. “National parks getting trashed during government shutdown,” writes HuffPost. The Associated Press says: “Garbage, feces take toll on national parks amid shutdown.” And lest we forget about our beloved museums, the Post sighs, “The Smithsonian and the National Gallery held on as long as they could. They’re closing.”
Sounds like a crisis! But at most it’s an unfortunate nuisance.
Some background: Parts of the federal government have been shut down since December 21 over President Donald Trump’s demands for border wall money. While Trump has already approved about $931 billion of the proposed $1.2 trillion in spending for the fiscal year, funding has lapsed for agencies that rely on the rest. This didn’t automatically mean closures. Thanks to a contingency plan adopted by the National Park Service earlier this year, many national parks remained open for a time, just without the park rangers, maintenance workers, and other staff who’ve been furloughed by the shutdown.
But without those workers, trash has piled up and restrooms have gradually gotten dirtier. As a result, officials have opted to close down Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Joshua Tree National Parks in California, as well as parts of Yosemite.
In D.C., meanwhile, the Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art remained open using leftover funds that had been previously allocated. That money has since run out, and the Smithsonian announced today that its museums and the National Zoo would be closing. The National Gallery notes at the top of its website that its status after today “is yet to be determined.”
It’s not hard to understand why some people are making a fuss over these closings. This is, after all, one of the more visible effects of the shutdown. That’s because the federal services and employees deemed “essential”—the parts of the government authorized to shoot you, for instance—are still functioning. National parks and the various historical and artistic institutions run by the federal government are classified as “non-essential,” and rightfully so. Without getting into whether these institutions should be privatized (though there’s a good case for that), their current closures largely affect people’s leisure activities and nothing more.
The closures are definitely unfortunate for tourists who planned trips around these parks and/or museums. But even then, there are plenty of privately run institutions that aren’t affected by the government shutdown at all. In D.C. alone, there’s the Phillips Collection, the National Building Museum, and the Newseum. If you’re sad the National Zoo’s Panda Cam is turned off, you can head to YouTube for your fix. Plus, while California may have more national parks than any other state, it also has a sprawling state park system.
Even the supposed “trashing” of the parks isn’t cause for too much concern. The worry largely stems from issues involving litter, dirty bathrooms, and people relieving themselves in the wrong places. Disgusting problems, for sure, but ones that are not hard to remedy once furloughed employees are back on the clock. In the meantime, shutting the parks and not letting the trash pile up any further is the right thing to do.
American Consequences describes what a real shutdown would look like:
The Wall Street Journal reports that some 380,000 federal employees are at home without any idea when they’ll receive another paycheck… and another 420,000 employees deemed “essential” are working without pay.
Of course, these folks will get paid when the government comes back online. They always have before… under President Clinton in 1995 and 1996, under Obama in 2013, and during the three “mini shutdowns” we had last year.
These so-called shutdowns are anything but.
Despite the headlines, they have no significant effect on the market… on the economy… or on the political process.
No matter your hopes and dreams, the government will never truly shut down.
It will remain – bigger than ever – with trillion-dollar annual borrowing, more than $20 trillion in total debt, and massive open-ended entitlement programs.
Back in 2017 P.J. O’Rourke wrote:
In the interest of adding a little cogitation to the process of governance, let’s conduct a “thought experiment.” Let’s think about just one of the purposes that the federal government has been put to – providing entitlement handouts.
Let’s think about not doing that anymore. …
What if the U.S. federal government got out of the entitlement business? Why is it even in this business? Entitlement spending makes up 60% of the federal budget. The United States was not founded as a charity.
Where in the U.S. Constitution does it say that the purpose of the federal government is to take money from one group of people and give it to another group of people in order to make a third group of people feel good? (That third group being the kind-hearted folks who are always eager to help right society’s wrongs – with somebody else’s money.)
The economic upside to ending federal handouts is so obvious that even a bleeding-heart economist with a column in the New York Times would notice it. (I’m talking to you, Paul Krugman.)
We take that 60% of the budget, set 10% aside to lower the debt and deficit, and give ourselves a 50% tax cut. A 19.8% top tax bracket! This is almost as good as living in Hong Kong (top rate 15%) except without having a communist dictator with the world’s largest military force on our doorstep.
But what happens to people when the federal government stops giving them handouts?
First, let’s talk about what doesn’t happen. Some federal government entitlements are not handouts. Namely veterans’ benefits. Here is a useful purpose for government. When our fellow citizens put themselves at risk to protect us (and are paid rather poorly for doing so), we taxpayers should pick up the tab for their medical care, retirement, and whatever else we’ve promised them.
Also, Social Security and the part of Medicare that’s paid for by the Medicare trust fund aren’t really handouts. People spend their whole working lives paying into these schemes that the government has the nerve to call “insurance plans.” People rightly expect to get a return on their “involuntary investments.”
We should get rid of Social Security and Medicare anyway.
But what will happen to the old folks? They’ll get rich.
Social Security and Medicare should have been privatized long ago. The libertarian think tank, Cato Institute, has been studying Social Security and retirement healthcare privatization for years. Google “Cato Institute” on the subjects to see a variety of well thought-out and practical ways that private wealth funds could replace the pitfalls of public funding (like this one).
In the meantime, let’s look at some figures from a liberal think tank, the Urban Institute. Its analysis of government retirement programs claims that a dual-income couple earning average wages and retiring in 2020 will typically receive $1,059,000 in lifetime Social Security and Medicare benefits.
Sounds pretty good – until you do the rest of the math. According to the Urban Institute that couple – each of them working from age 22 to age 67 – will have paid a total of $853,000 in Social Security and Medicare taxes.
A million-plus return on an $853,000 investment is swell – if it happened in yesterday’s day trade. But over 45 years?!
Averaging it out, the couple put almost $19,000 a year into their “involuntary investments.” Let’s say the two of them have no financial savvy at all. Let’s say they put their annual $19,000 into an ordinary savings account that since 1975 has paid on average 3.5% a year in interest. (The Urban Institute couple are a very average pair.)
The couple would be more than twice as rich!
As it is, they only get their million dollars if they live long enough and get sick enough to qualify for all their entitlements. What happens if they get struck by a meteor the day after they retire? Nothing. It’s the government’s money. Their $1,059,000 goes to some other old, sick couple.
If our Urban Institute couple had $2 million of their own, they could make a will and leave it to…
NOT to the federal government. They could leave it to an organization that was founded as a charity.
And charity will be needed if we stop federal government entitlement handouts.
We can privatize our way out of Social Security and Medicare and eliminate approximately $1.5 trillion a year in federal entitlement spending. But that still leaves us with the nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid and other welfare entitlements.
Which brings us to the most important part of this thought experiment.
What kind of a nation are we? If the federal government got out of the entitlement business, would we make it our business to feed the hungry, treat the sick, comfort the distressed, and help the helpless?
I hope to hell we would!
We might do it through state, city, town, and county programs that replace some of the federal entitlements. Surely local people know what the needy in their communities need better than Washington does.
But mostly we would perform real acts of charitableness with real charity. (Memo to those kind-hearted folks who are always eager to help right society’s wrongs: Giving somebody else’s money to somebody else is not charity.)
Americans already make more charitable donations than anyone else on earth. And the Gallup Poll “World Giving Index” says we are outranked in the percentage of what we give only by humble Myanmar. Good for you, people of what used to be called Burma!
The National Philanthropic Trust, a nonprofit that keeps track of these things, says that in 2015 individual Americans donated $373.3 billion to charity. Corporations gave $18.5 billion. And private charitable foundations contributed $57.2 billion.
That’s a total of $449 billion. In our thought experiment, we’re already halfway to meeting the needs that the remaining federal government entitlement programs were supposed to address.
And this is assuming that there’s no waste, fraud, and abuse in the $1 trillion federal poverty entitlement programs. (In which case, we’d have to work with a hypothesis that clearly isn’t true.)
But we can do better than $449 billion in charitable giving. We’ve just gotten a 50% tax cut. We have some extra cash. The average household contribution to charity is currently $2,974.
Let’s double it. Let’s triple it. However, not until we’ve spent some time pondering the fundamental purposes of the federal government.
As I said, it’s just a thought experiment. But I like what I see in the test tube.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 