The number one single today in 1963 was recorded by a 15-year-old, the youngest number one singer to date:
The number one British single today in 1967 was that year’s Eurovision song contest winner:
The number one single today in 1985:
Thirty years ago as a soon-to-be UW–Madison graduate, I thought I was embarking on a career that would take me into the national media, either with a byline in a big newspaper or on TV most nights.
Variety covers what I apparently missed:
On a chilly and gray Monday in D.C. a few weeks ago, President Trump was sitting on the South Lawn among a group of children during the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, when CNN’s chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, shouted a question at him.
“Mr. President, what about the DACA kids? Should they worry about what is going to happen to them, sir?”
Trump answered, blaming the situation on the Democrats, but Acosta persisted in a follow-up: “Didn’t you kill DACA, sir? Didn’t you kill DACA?”
Trump didn’t respond, but plenty of others did. Conservative sites were indignant, accusing Acosta of behaving “rudely.” Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary, called him a “carnival barker,” and Brad Parscale, who is managing Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, tweeted, “Pull his credentials for each incident.”
A few days later, in an interview with Variety, Acosta says, “Yeah, I had the audacity to ask the president a question about policy at the Easter Egg Roll. As a matter of fact, I’d done that last year and nobody took issue with that. It’s part of the environment we’re in right now where every action is going to be put through the conservative meat grinder.”
Just about any correspondent covering the White House today will tell you that the kind of tension and animus that exists between the press corps and the Trump administration is something new and different. Most reporters share a sense that covering Trump is a challenge like no other, at a time when political journalists and the First Amendment are under siege. If it isn’t the president’s frequent outbursts on Twitter, railing against one particular story, news outlet or reporter, it is the unrelenting pace of the breaking-news cycle, much of it due to Trump’s erratic, unconventional behavior and the public interest in his every move.
“There is that natural tension that exists between the press and the people we were covering, but it was never like this,” Acosta says. “We were never called ‘fake news.’ We were never called ‘the enemy of the people,’ and that just created a totally different climate and environment that we are all trying to make sense of and trying to figure out: How do we cover the news in that kind of toxic environment?”
The natural answer is, just the way they have always done it — which is to say, report the news. But that isn’t quite enough with this White House, as reporters are subjected to much greater scrutiny and demands. The stakes are higher and the criticisms more extreme, the attacks often personal.
With the easy accessibility of social media, some political reporters find themselves getting death threats. Acosta says he got “a threat of violence” following the Easter Egg Roll incident. “I probably receive more death threats than I can count. I get them basically once a week.”
April Ryan, a longtime reporter for American Urban Radio Networks and, as a CNN contributor, a recognizable figure in the daily White House briefings, says her experience has been similar. “I actively get death threats just for asking a question,” she says. “I have law enforcement on speed dial.” She recently received a threat after asking White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders whether the president had considered resigning. Sanders dismissed Ryan’s query as “an absolutely ridiculous question.” Ryan has found her contentious exchanges with the administration at times going viral.
“For the last four presidents that I have covered, there’s a thread. There’s always retaliation, but never on this scale,” says Ryan, who is writing a book — April Ryan Under Fire: On the Frontlines — on reporting in the Trump era. “If you write on something or report on something they don’t like, of course they are going to give you a call or call your bosses or come to you literally and talk to you and say, ‘It wasn’t that way. You have gotten it wrong.’ This administration, you will get a [Fake News Award], or they will call you out. They will try to disparage your name. It has gone into personal attacks.”
Among those Trump has recently targeted is Chuck Todd, the host of “Meet the Press” and a former White House correspondent.
Todd thinks the president’s insults have had an effect, because “the last time I checked, the press corps is made up of human beings. You are going to defend your work and defend your integrity.”
“There is a danger of getting caught up in it,” Todd says, warning of over-covering a story that strikes a chord within the news business. “I am as concerned about press norms being violated as anyone in the industry, but we have to be careful that we are not ignoring the impact in the rest of the country [of what’s going on in Washington] .”
» Lately, Trump has been tweeting about the “Amazon Washington Post,” flippantly saying that the paper ought to register as a lobbyist for the online retail giant. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, also owns the Post.
“I joined the Post last year, and I didn’t even get an Amazon Prime subscription,” quips Ashley Parker, White House correspondent for the Post. “There is no connection.”
“You want to be fair. You want to be accurate. You want to add context,” Parker says. “The one thing about this ‘fake news’ environment: I think one of the ways you protect yourself is by doing your job and being extra bulletproof. So if under Obama or under George W. Bush you would triple-check your work, now maybe you quadruple-check it because you don’t want to give them any excuse to call you ‘fake news.’”
Thanks to the intrepid reporting of Parker and the staff of The Washington Post, the paper won two Pulitzer Prizes on April 16 — for their investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and for coverage of the 2017 Senate race in Alabama.
Jonathan Karl, chief White House correspondent for ABC News, suggests that there’s nothing new about a president targeting the press. John Adams championed the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, under which reporters were jailed for coverage he didn’t like.
Trump, though, is like no other recent predecessor in his willingness to put his obsessive media consumption and criticism on full display. Last summer, as he was holding a joint press conference with the Romanian president, Trump called on Karl and ribbed him, saying, “Remember how nice you used to be before I ran?”
“My approach was to say, ‘Always fair, Mr. President,’ and to dive right into my question, because you cannot be distracted,” Karl says. The result was Trump responding to Karl that he would be “100%” willing to testify under oath to Special Counsel Robert Mueller to refute fired FBI director James Comey’s claims, a remark that is all the more relevant today given the latest news developments.
White House press officials did not respond to requests for comment. But Sanders, in a recent forum hosted by the White House Correspondents’ Assn., pushed back on the idea that the administration had “declared war on the press.” She said it was “a little bit far-fetched” to “lay the blame” on the president for lack of respect for the media.
“We could not be … bigger advocates of the First Amendment, but I think there is a level of responsibility that comes with being a journalist,” Sanders said. “The majority of the people that show up every day come for the purpose of good reporting, to do their job, but there are a handful of people that I don’t feel are as responsible with that information and can be very inaccurate at times and put out misleading information. I do think that is problematic.”
Trump’s relationship with the media is a bit confounding — different in public than in private. He bashes “fake news” and individual outlets and reporters but has at times called journalists from The New York Times, out of the blue, to clarify a point. He has held only one formal press conference, in February 2017, but takes questions during pool sprays, on Air Force One and on the White House lawn more than previous presidents did.
Parker says that in a “weird way,” there’s a little more transparency in that Trump’s tweets are “direct windows into what the president of the United States is thinking in that moment.” And while she call the press conference “the gold standard” of press access, she adds that Trump is more likely than his predecessors to interact with reporters.
Major Garrett, CBS News’ chief White House correspondent, says Trump cares deeply about the coverage he gets: “As was said by one of his top advisers, ‘Trump hates negative publicity unless he generates it.’”
About six weeks ago, on a Saturday, Trump railed against the mainstream media on Twitter, writing that it had gone “CRAZY.” But that evening, he appeared at the annual Gridiron Club dinner, a white-tie media tradition that dates to the 19th century, where he said to the journalists gathered, “I want to thank the press for all that you do to support and sustain democracy. I mean that.”
The event was not televised, giving it much less of a profile than the April 28 White House Correspondents’ Assn. dinner, with its mix of celebrity, biting comedy and First Amendment focus. Trump once again is breaking tradition by not attending, though Sanders will sit at the head table.
Jonathan Swan, national political reporter for Axios, says that he takes Trump’s uses of the term “fake news,” often to dismiss stories he doesn’t like, “with a large grain of salt.”
“I know that he loves the media, in the sense that he needs it. He feeds it. He understands the game,” Swan says, adding, “I’m not going to give him a huge amount of credit for accessibility. He hasn’t committed to a press conference,” with its extended period of questioning, “for a long time. He should.”
Karl says that there’s a “fundamental contradiction when it comes to President Trump and his relationship with the news media. He has had relentless attacks on the one hand, and on the other hand has had very positive relationships with reporters covering him.” During the presidential campaign, he says, Trump was “one of the most accessible, media-friendly candidates we had seen,” often holding press availabilities and one-on-one interviews.
That has stopped: The president does “far fewer interviews, and by and large, they are with friendly news outlets,” Karl says.
Trump has made little secret of his affinity for the coverage of Fox News. The administration has hired a handful of the channel’s personalities, including John Bolton, the former United Nations ambassador who is now national security adviser. Another intertwined relationship was recently revealed: Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, advised Fox News host Sean Hannity as a client.
There also are differences in the dynamics of the White House daily briefing. Perhaps no other moment routinely displays the tension between the White House press corps and ⇧he administration than the Q&As with the press secretary, held in a startlingly small space in the West Wing, built atop an indoor pool.
“The press briefings serve a useful purpose,” says Acosta. “We have to ask the leader of the free world, or the representatives of the free world, what the hell is going on. … I want all of that on TV … their evasions, their lies, their falsehoods.”
The briefings are a long-standing tradition, but televising them dates only to the Clinton administration. Then-White House press secretary Mike McCurry allowed the sessions to be televised in the name of opening them up to a wider audience. “It was not an act. It was not entertainment at that time,” Ryan says. “It was about transparency and allowing the American public to see what is going on.”
The briefings took on a life of their own in the early months of the Trump administration, and with Spicer’s confrontations with reporters already the stuff of “Saturday Night Live” skits, they seemed to become part of the infotainment mix of daytime television. Things have settled down somewhat since then and are slightly less dramatic.
Sanders, Parker notes, gets less flustered than her predecessor. Still, she has complained that many cable and broadcast outlets ignore the administration’s policy messaging, such as when a cabinet secretary is brought in to take questions, while focusing on “palace intrigue.”
That isn’t so different from the complaints of previous administrations, but Sanders has suggested that it is a matter of degree. “Ninety percent of the coverage is negative — when you have that much positive news to talk about and only 10% of the time it is being covered, it is hard to argue that there shouldn’t be a level of frustration,” she said at the recent WHCA event.
Among journalists, the complaints center on what they see as evasion of questions. Sanders, who sometimes tinges her answers with sarcasm and her own attacks on the press, has been better at keeping briefings to a daily schedule, but reporters have noted the briefings have become briefer. What used to be an hour of Q&A is often on the order of 20 minutes.
“The info the White House wants [to circulate] gets dismissed in favor of whatever headline of the day there might be,” McCurry says. “However, there is something indispensable about having a senior White House official standing there every day to take questions and be held accountable for producing real answers. The only thing I would change is to take it off live TV and make it more of a working session, with less posturing on both sides of the podium.”
What most concerns many newsrooms, academics and First Amendment advocates isn’t the mechanics of the briefings or the daily accessibility of the president, but the larger picture.
Lynn Sweet, bureau chief and White House correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times, says that “one of the most frustrating things I have ever faced as a journalist is people question things that are facts. … The unrelenting attacks on the media that happen in almost every speech do have a potentially dangerous and corrosive impact,” she says. “It is something that is a worry. The mission of journalists has not changed, and that is to just do their jobs. We have to be more mindful than ever.”
John Roberts, chief White House correspondent for Fox News, says he doesn’t think the president’s attacks have had an impact on coverage, and may have helped garner additional public attention for those who cover him. “I think to some degree his campaign to discredit the media has backfired, and he has actually sparked more interest in news,” Roberts says.
But Swan points out that “when [Trump] calls everything ‘fake news,’ it is corrosive, but it is corrosive to [the administration] too.” The reporter says it’s particularly a problem when the White House needs to identify something that’s actually wrong and needs to show that the term is not just a catchphrase.
Others note the potential negative impact in other countries, where the United States is looked on as a guidepost for free expression. Some journalists fear that Trump’s attacks at rallies or other events, while perhaps part of his shtick, will be taken much more seriously than intended by someone in the whipped-up crowd. “Fake news, by the president saying this, is not just a cute little statement for some,” says Ryan. “This has tentacles; it is reaching overseas. I am hearing from European leaders who are saying it can really destabilize democracies. They are very concerned.”
The WHCA over the past year created a committee focused on reporter security; it’s designed to be used as a means for members to connect to law enforcement resources. Margaret Talev, president of the association and senior White House correspondent for Bloomberg, says that she doesn’t want to overstate the problem — reporting at the White House is not like covering Mexican drug cartels or the government of the Philippines.
“For the most part it has been just an exacerbation of really inappropriate and occasionally violent wishes on social media,” she says. “But for a few members, there actually have been interactions that I would say are unquestionably threats, where they need to get authorities involved. That is very worrisome and troubling.
“I don’t think it is the administration’s intention to harm reporters physically,” she adds. “Particularly in a crowd setting, the risk of inciting a crowd and things getting out of control is very real. And the United States has really never been a dangerous place to be an American political reporter, and I think that is a threshold I really don’t want us to cross.”
She says that for most reporters, the job is the same — “to cover the policies, the people, the personalities; to cover the moment, the arc of the moment. All of that stuff is the same.”
The intensity is not. Earlier in the Trump administration, Karl recalls taking a day off with his daughter to visit the University of Virginia when news broke that the Obamacare repeal bill was dead in Congress. ABC News sent a live truck to the campus so Karl could do “reports while walking around the campus on a college tour.” He’s learned, no matter where he is going, to bring a jacket for the camera.
Lately, it’s gotten more intense — a recent Friday was indicative: Comey book excerpts in the morning, Michael Cohen revelations in the afternoon, Syrian air strikes in the evening.
“It is intensive, it is exhausting, it is all-consuming, it is certainly stressful,” Karl says. “But this is a great time to be a reporter. We will be looking back at this time years from now and trading stories.”
Pardon my lack of sympathy for these reporters who are paid big, big, big bucks for their work. Threats? I’ve gotten them for covering school boards for school districts with barely 1,000 students in them. At the time, I was making as much in a year as these babies make for a couple weeks’ work. I’ve been threatened by criminals. I’ve been verbally ripped apart by politicians and government types who make a multiple of my salary. I even got a Catholic bishop mad at me in a room full of people wanting to hear him speak. I’ve never whined about all of that, in print or anywhere else.
I didn’t go into this line of work to be liked, popular with power or cool. (Variety covers Hollywood. What does that say about Variety’s choice to cover this “story”?) If they did, they should find another line of work. Maybe the big national media should find reporters whose feelings don’t bruise so easily to cover the White House and other big political beats. As Harry S. Truman once said about Washington, if you want a friend, get a dog.
In his recent biography of Ronald Reagan, historian H.W. Brands notes how Reagan the orator differed from the “flexible pragmatism” he demonstrated as president.
“There are really two Reagans,” Brands told me in an interview in 2016. “One is the rhetorical Reagan, you could call it the ‘candidate Reagan,” who says exactly the things that conservatives today love to hear.”
“But then there was the Reagan who was actually president, and who believed that the purpose of getting elected was to govern — to make progress toward the things you’ve been talking about. And who understood that progress comes incrementally,” Brands told me. “Reagan used to say that he’d rather get 80% of what he wanted than go over the cliff with his flags flying.”
In the wake of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s recent announcement that he wouldn’t be seeking re-election in 2018, much of the shoddy commentary declaring him a “failure” and a “hypocrite” managed to miss this point entirely.
For nearly two decades, Ryan had been a voice of fiscal rectitude, warning of the dangers of high taxes, large deficits and suffocating government debt. But as a leader, Ryan was forced to sublimate his enthusiasm for scaling back Social Security and other entitlements in favor of more mainstream crowd-pleasers. And some of them, most notably the recent $1.5 trillion tax cut, made the deficit worse. Like Reagan, who signed a large tax cut followed by several smaller tax increases, Ryan was forced to settle for incremental progress towards lessening the burden of government in our lives.
With all due respect to Oscar-winner Frances McDormand, the greatest acting job of the past year has been performed by Democrats suddenly outraged over the excessive level of government debt America currently carries. During Barack Obama’s presidency, federal debt nearly doubled, from $10.63 trillion to $19.4 trillion. Yet only when Republicans upped the debt by $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years did progressives begin buying smelling salts in bulk.
Ryan’s pet issues remain even as he exits. Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute has noted that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, publicly-held federal debt is expected to balloon to $82 trillion over the next three decades, due entirely to cash shortages in Medicare and Social Security and the need to pay interest on those deficits. In 2009, even Obama emphasized the need to reform these entitlement programs, saying we had “kicked this can down the road,” further noting that “we are now at the end of the road” and “not in a position to kick it any further.” (Spoiler alert: If a tomato can football hall of fame existed, Obama would hold the record for longest field goal.)
Surely, entitlement reforms are a tough sell, especially in an election year. There’s a better chance of Stormy Daniels being invited to a summer cookout at Mar-a-Lago than there is of congressional candidates tackling Social Security and Medicare spending just before voters start casting ballots.
But if Republicans recognize that 2018 is going to be a brutal year for their party, it would make sense to pass some common-sense reforms while they still control the House and Senate. There is a limited window to make modest changes to entitlement programs that will help guarantee their solvency — changes that could even be sold to the public in a palatable way.
For instance, as Bloomberg’s Ramesh Ponnuru has suggested, simply tying Social Security benefit increases to prices rather than wages would reduce the deficit in the program by 94% over the next 75 years. Even reducing benefits for the top 40% of wealthy Americans and increasing payouts for the lowest 30% of recipients could both make the program more solvent and pass political muster. (Similarly, in Ryan’s previous plans to save Medicare, he means-tested benefits: Those with higher incomes would be asked to pay more for coverage, while the poor would receive more aid.)
Even if a GOP-led Congress can’t stomach these reforms before the election, Republicans should be able to move forward in a lame-duck session after the November results are known. Such entitlement changes, which could slow America’s march toward $2 trillion annual deficits, could be added to the budget, which is unlikely to be passed before then.
If Congress acts soon — which it must do to stave off significant future tax increases — there’s even an off-chance voters reward them for taking bold, necessary action. In places like Wisconsin, voters re-elected Gov. Scott Walker twice after he made controversial decisions to weaken public employee unions; virtually everyone in Ryan’s Wisconsin district has heard him talk about his plans to scale back entitlements, and yet he has never won his district by less than double digits.
If Republicans see big losses coming in November, they should go down fighting while they can. Reforms to entitlements are coming at some point — it only makes sense to craft them now when they require modest controls instead of large tax increases.
And in doing so, Ryan can silence his liberal critics attacking him for saying one thing and doing another. America anxiously awaits their gushing columns when he proves to be a man of his word.
Imagine having tickets to today’s 1964 NME winner’s poll concert at Wembley Empire Pool in London:
State Rep. Todd Novak (R–Dodgeville) has a few things to say to The C(r)apital Times:
The editorial that the Capital Times recently wrote about my bid for re-election for the 51st Assembly District has been characterized as “ridiculous,” a “sophomoric piece” and containing “no statistics or facts, just vague statements.” I couldn’t agree more. The constituent of mine who spoke up in my defense in a letter to the editor is an independent voter and represents a voice that this paper and other Madison liberals refuse to acknowledge exists. The Cap Times is dead set on promoting its own liberal agenda. Fortunately for the readers of this paper, I get to set the record straight and show all that I’ve done to prove that I’m an independent voice for a beautiful, rural area southwest of Madison.
Prior to my election to the Assembly in 2014, I was a newspaper editor for 25 years. I wrote many critical editorials, but always made sure I could back everything up with facts, something that obviously the Cap Times does not do. The Cap Times editors wrote that they could give me high marks if I could figure out how to get something done in the Legislature. But then, when I recently announced my re-election, they stated I was disingenuous in touting my accomplishments.
Do the editors of this paper consider it disingenuous that every bill I authored this session passed the Assembly unanimously or with bipartisan votes? I had several of my requests put in the state budget, including funding for 24 Alzheimer’s and dementia specialists, two new buildings at UW-Platteville and a grant for the Monroe Arts Center so it could expand and continue to be a great asset to the city of Monroe. I also was the lead author on the $100 million safety grant for school districts to upgrade their buildings. I was appointed to the speaker’s bipartisan Task Force on Foster Care, which produced several laws. This is just a partial list, but it’s hardly disingenuous to tout this record of bipartisan accomplishments, despite the opinion of this paper.
The editors also claim that I vote lockstep with Gov. Scott Walker. This is laughable considering I voted against Foxconn because I listened to so many who had concerns. I fought against the proposed changes to the open records law and public notices, and also several environmental proposals. The list could go on. Thankfully, unlike this paper, my constituents know my record.
I’m proud to be Republican but I’m also proud to stand up and fight for what I believe in. I fight for what my constituents want, even if it goes against my party. When the Wisconsin State Journal endorsed me in the last election, they wrote, “He’s one of the most independent members of either political party.” However, the Cap Times’ editorial implies the only reason I was elected is because of the money spent on my race, but at least they admit money was also spent on my opponent’s behalf.
Another fact this paper chooses to ignore: In 2016, I was the only Republican to win in the 51st Assembly District at the state and federal level. I think this is because I make it a priority to always be engaged and accessible to my constituents, regardless if they voted for me or not. In fact, several laws I authored this session came directly from constituents.
The people of southwest Wisconsin deserve a representative who is not hyper partisan and looks out for them, regardless of party. Unfortunately, the Cap Times and Madison elitists can’t accept that, believing that what the 51st Assembly District really needs is Democratic representation. But I don’t fit the stereotype that the editors want so desperately to portray. The Cap Times has an obvious agenda and this paper should at least be honest about it.
This frankly is something Republicans should do more of. It is also a reason Donald Trump’s attacks on the media increase his popularity with his supporters, even though his attacks tend to lack specificity and therefore substance.
Republicans too often duck from taking on the media, either because they’re afraid to look bad in print or on the air or because with Fox News, conservative talk radio and conservative media they can ignore the mainstream media. The First Amendment does not immunize the news media from criticism.
Too many people in my line of work act as though the First Amendment applies only to themselves. Too many people, including apparently everyone who gets a C(r)apital Times paycheck, refuse to get the non-liberal side of any political or cultural story beyond attacking, because that might legitimize conservatives as actual people with points of view that deserve respect.
The irony here is that Novak is about as diverse a Republican as can be found. Read this story, and note the source. Of course, liberals support every kind of diversity except intellectual diversity. Novak is not my state representative (I’d have to move a few miles east), but I would certainly vote for him were he in my Assembly district. (And, by the way, Dane County is not in the 51st Assembly District. That makes The C(r)apital Times’ opinion just an opinion, and you know what opinions are like.
Jeff Jacoby observes that Sunday …
… was the 48th annual Earth Day, and to mark the occasion, USA Today ran a column by John Heritage exhorting readers to “defend their planet like it’s 1970.” Heritage was a legislative aide to the late Senator Gaylord Nelson, the Wisconsin Democrat credited with founding Earth Day.
The column began by celebrating the environmental awareness that the first Earth Day helped promote, and credited it with helping prod Congress into enacting legislation to reduce air pollution and water pollution, which were urgent environmental problems of the time. The cleanup of America’s air and waterways was a remarkable accomplishment; no one who remembers what the nation’s cities and many of its rivers were like in the 1960s and 1970s would dispute that the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act effected a wonderful and salutary change in our natural surroundings.
But after a few paragraphs of good news, Heritage pivots to the usual message of gloom, doom, and impending disaster that so often characterizes environmental writing.
“Look at what is happening now,” he writes.
Trump and his minions are rolling back hard-fought environmental regulations as fast as they can. And while Arctic and Antarctic ice melts and seas rise, Trump walks out of the most significant world conference yet to get a handle on global warming.
Meanwhile, the Trump rollback targets federally-protected lands. . . . The lands are being opened even though safer energy sources are coming online.
And lobbyists have invaded the Environmental Protection Agency, shoving dedicated environmental experts aside . . . .
To be truthful and blunt about it, environmental policy is being devastated by the Trump administration.
To be truthful and blunt about it, the environment is cleaner and healthier than it has been in generations, and the Earth supports more human beings with less hunger, less disease, less infant mortality, and less poverty than ever before. But for too many environmentalists, good news is a distraction from their ongoing need to maintain an aura of crisis. That is as true today as it was when Earth Day began.
A timely reminder of that reality comes from Mark J. Perry, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. On his invaluable blog, Carpe Diem, he reminded readers over the weekend of some of the “spectacularly wrong predictions made around the time of first Earth Day in 1970.” Here are a few of the 18 predictions Perry quotes:
- Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
- “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
- “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
- Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions. . . . By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
- In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support . . . the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution . . . by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.”
- Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
- Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look: “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
Fears about climate change were also prevalent in the alarmist predictions made at the time of the first Earth Day. Watt, speaking at Swarthmore College in 1970, described the calamity he was sure was on its way:
“The world has been chilling sharply for about 20 years,” he said. If present trends continued, that meant “the world will be about four degrees colder . . . in 1990, but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
You remember the Ice Age of 2000, don’t you?
Apocalyptic rhetoric has accompanied environmental activism for many decades, yet the failure of the apocalypse to materialize never seems to reduce the “green” believers’ conviction that catastrophe is just around the corner. To be sure, many environmentalists — Paul Ehrlich, Al Gore, James Hansen — have amassed great fame and fortune by foretelling ecological disaster, and as Upton Sinclair observed, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
But the rest of us ought to be able to resist the hysteria and the hype. The spectacularly misguided predictions from the first Earth Day in 1970 should supply some perspective on today’s alarmist environmental rhetoric. Life on Earth wasn’t coming to an end 48 years ago. It’s not coming to an end today.
There’s an old joke that economists have predicted nine of the last five recessions. What is not a joke is that environmentalists’ zeal to save Gaia is really their zeal to control our lives. When celebrity environmentalists such as Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio sell their gas-guzzling private jets and huge houses, they may have more credibility than me. Until then, I will remind you of Instapundit Glenn Harlan Reynolds’ dictum that he will believe that global warming — oops, “climate change” — is a crisis when people in charge start acting like it’s a crisis.
The number one single today in 1960:
The number one single today in 1970:
The number one album today in 1987 was U2’s “The Joshua Tree”:
The number one British single today in 1959:
The number one single today in 1961:
The number one single today in 1965:
In early March, I met up with Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic, at an event sponsored by the magazine at the South by Southwest conference in Austin. He had just hired me away from National Review, the venerable conservative magazine where I’d been a writer and editor for 10 years.
“You know, the campaign to have me fired will begin 11 seconds after you announce that you’ve hired me,” I told him. He scoffed. “It won’t be that bad,” he said. “The Atlantic isn’t the New York Times. It isn’t high church for liberals.”
My first piece appeared in the Atlantic on April 2. I was fired on April 5.
The purported reason for our “parting ways,” as Mr. Goldberg put it in his announcement, had nothing to do with what I’d written in my inaugural piece. The problem was a six-word, four-year-old tweet on abortion and capital punishment and a discussion of that tweet in a subsequent podcast. I had responded to a familiar pro-abortion argument: that pro-lifers should not be taken seriously in our claim that abortion is the willful taking of an innocent human life unless we are ready to punish women who get abortions with long prison sentences. It’s a silly argument, so I responded with these words: “I have hanging more in mind.”
Trollish and hostile? I’ll cop to that, though as the subsequent conversation online and on the podcast indicated—to say nothing of the few million words of my published writing available to the reading public—I am generally opposed to capital punishment. I was making a point about the sloppy rhetoric of the abortion debate, not a public-policy recommendation. Such provocations can sometimes clarify the terms of a debate, but in this case, I obscured the more meaningful questions about abortion and sparked the sort of hysteria I’d meant to point out and mock.
Let’s not equivocate: Abortion isn’t littering or securities fraud or driving 57 in a 55-mph zone. If it isn’t homicide, then it’s no more morally significant than getting a tooth pulled. If it isn’t homicide, then there’s no real argument for prohibiting it. If it is homicide, then we need to discuss more seriously what should be done to put an end to it. For all the chatter today about diversity of viewpoint and the need for open discourse, there aren’t very many people on the pro-choice side, in my experience, who are ready to talk candidly about the reality of abortion.
Which brings us back to that event at South by Southwest, where the Atlantic was sponsoring a panel about marginalized points of view and diversity in journalism. The panelists, all Atlantic writers and editors, argued that the cultural and economic decks are stacked against feminists and advocates of minority interests. They made this argument under the prestigious, high-profile auspices of South by Southwest and their own magazine, hosted by a feminist group called the Female Quotient, which enjoys the patronage of Google, PepsiCo, AT&T, NBCUniversal, Facebook, UBS, JPMorgan Chase and Deloitte. We should all be so marginalized. If you want to know who actually has the power in our society and who is actually marginalized, ask which ideas get you sponsorships from Google and Pepsi and which get you fired.
The event itself was revealing, not for the predictable banalities uttered on stage but for the offstage observations coming from the master of ceremonies: my new boss. Mr. Goldberg in private sometimes takes an amusingly ironic view of the pieties of P.C. culture. After giving the opening remarks, he joked about inflicting upon me the “wokiest” thing I’d ever suffered through and said that he himself was “insufficiently intersectional” for the event. He had a good laugh.
I couldn’t share so easily in his humor. Mr. Goldberg knows something about the power of the Twitter mob. A Jewish liberal with some hawkish foreign-policy views and a clear-eyed understanding of the problems associated with the poorly assimilated Muslim minority communities in Europe, he has been labeled everything from a perpetrator of crimes against humanity (he served in the Israeli military as a young man) to an “Islamophobe” to the intellectual author of George W. Bush’s ill-conceived war in Iraq.
But he underestimated the energy with which that mob would pursue someone like me. Mr. Goldberg sits atop one of the most celebrated magazines in our country’s history, and before that he was a star at the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker. He can survive the occasional heresy.
I’m an unassimilated conservative from Lubbock, Texas. Much of my career for the past 20-odd years has consisted of writing pieces that tell people things they don’t want to hear. My angry critics on the left think I’m a right-wing monster; my angry critics on the right don’t like the fact that I’ve reported extensively from Trump country and haven’t thought very highly of what I’ve seen. If I’d been hired for a new job at some conservative outlet, you can be sure there would have been talk about how I pray each night for the death of the white working class.
But this time, the tsunami came from the left, as I’d predicted.
On March 22, the Atlantic announced that it had hired me and three others as contributors to its new section “for ideas, opinions and commentary.” In no time, the abortion-rights group Naral was organizing protests against me, demanding that I not be permitted to publish in the Atlantic. Activists claimed, dishonestly, that I wanted to see every fourth woman in the country lynched (it is estimated that 1 in 4 American women will have an abortion by the age of 45). Opinion pieces denouncing me appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, Slate, the Huffington Post, Mother Jones, the Guardian and other publications.
The remarkable fact about all this commentary on my supposedly horrifying views on abortion is that not a single writer from any of those famous publications took the time to ask me about the controversy. (The sole exception was a reporter from Vox.) Did I think I was being portrayed accurately? Why did I make that outrageous statement? Did I really want to set up gallows, despite my long-stated reservations about capital punishment? Those are questions that might have occurred to people in the business of asking questions. (In preparing this account, I have confirmed my recollection of what Mr. Goldberg said with Mr. Goldberg himself.)
The Washington Post reports:
The Democratic National Committee filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit Friday against the Russian government, the Trump campaign and the WikiLeaks organization alleging a far-reaching conspiracy to disrupt the 2016 campaign and tilt the election to Donald Trump.
The complaint, filed in federal district court in Manhattan, alleges that top Trump campaign officials conspired with the Russian government and its military spy agency to hurt Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and help Trump by hacking the computer networks of the Democratic Party and disseminating stolen material found there.
“During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trump’s campaign,” DNC Chairman Tom Perez said in a statement.
“This constituted an act of unprecedented treachery: the campaign of a nominee for President of the United States in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency,” he said.
The case asserts that the Russian hacking campaign — combined with Trump associates’ contacts with Russia and the campaign’s public cheerleading of the hacks — amounted to an illegal conspiracy to interfere in the election that caused serious damage to the Democratic Party.
Senate investigators and prosecutors for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III are still investigating whether Trump associates coordinated with the Russian efforts. Last month, House Intelligence Committee Republicans said they found no evidence that President Trump and his affiliates colluded with Russian officials to sway the election or that the Kremlin sought to help him — a conclusion rejected by the panel’s Democrats.
The president has repeatedly rejected any collusion or improper activity by his campaign. This week, he referred again in a tweet to the “phony Russia investigation where, by the way, there was NO COLLUSION (except by the Dems).”
Suing a foreign country may present legal challenges for the Democrats, in part because other nations have immunity from most U.S. lawsuits. The DNC’s complaint argues Russia is not entitled to the protection because the hack constituted a trespass on the party’s private property.
The lawsuit argues that Russia is not entitled to sovereign immunity in this case because “the DNC claims arise out of Russia’s trespass on to the DNC’s private servers . . . in order to steal trade secrets and commit economic espionage.”
The lawsuit echoes a similar legal tactic that the Democratic Party used during the Watergate scandal. In 1972, the DNC filed suit against then-President Richard Nixon’s reelection committee seeking $1 million in damages for the break-in at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building.
The suit was denounced at the time by Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, who called it a case of “sheer demagoguery” by the DNC. But the civil action brought by the DNC’s then-chairman, Lawrence F. O’Brien, was ultimately successful, yielding a $750,000 settlement from the Nixon campaign that was reached on the day in 1974 that Nixon left office.
The suit filed Friday seeks millions of dollars in compensation to offset damage it claims the party suffered from the hacks. The DNC argues that the cyberattack undermined its ability to communicate with voters, collect donations and operate effectively as its employees faced personal harassment and, in some cases, death threats.
The suit also seeks an acknowledgment from the defendants that they conspired to infiltrate the Democrats’ computers, steal information and disseminate it to influence the election.
To support its case, the lawsuit offers a detailed narrative of the DNC hacks, as well as episodes in which key Trump aides are alleged to have been told Russia held damaging information about Clinton.
Russia engaged in a “brazen attack on U.S. soil” the party alleges, a campaign that began with the cyberhack of its computer networks in 2015 and 2016. Trump campaign officials received repeated outreach from Russia, the suit says.
“Rather than report these repeated messages and communications that Russia intended to interfere in the U.S. election, the Trump campaign and its agents gleefully welcomed Russia’s help,” the party argues
Ultimately, Trump’s associates entered into an agreement with Russian agents “to promote Donald Trump’s candidacy through illegal means,” the suit concludes.
The suit does not name Trump as a defendant. Instead, it targets various Trump aides who met with people believed to be affiliated with Russia during the campaign, including the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner, his campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates.
Manafort and Gates were charged with money-laundering, fraud and tax evasion in a case brought by special prosecutors last year. In February, Gates pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI and is cooperating with investigators. Manafort has pleaded not guilty.
The DNC lawsuit also names as a defendant the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, which has been accused by the U.S. government of orchestrating the hacks, as well as WikiLeaks, which published the DNC’s stolen emails, and the group’s founder Julian Assange.
The White House, the Russian Embassy, WikiLeaks and Assange had no immediate comment on Friday. A Manafort spokesman declined comment.
The lawsuit was also filed against Roger Stone, the longtime Trump confidante who claimed during the campaign that he was in contact with Assange.
The Trump advisers and associates have denied assisting Russia in its hacking campaign. Stone has denied any communication with Assange or advance knowledge of the document dumps by WikiLeaks, saying his comments about Assange were jokes or exaggerations.
The DNC lawsuit argues that the Russian government and the GRU violated a series of laws by orchestrating the secret intrusion into the Democrats’ computer systems, including statutes to protect trade secrets, prohibit wire tapping and prevent trespassing.
The party said the Trump defendants committed conspiracy through their interaction with Russian agents and their public encouragement of the hacking, with the campaign itself acting as a racketeering enterprise promoting illegal activity.
The complaint was filed on behalf of the party by the law firm of Cohen Milstein.
The suit contains previously undisclosed details, including that the specific date when it is believed theRussians breached the DNC computer system: July 27, 2015, according to forensic evidence cited in the filing.
The analysis shows the system was breached again on April 18, 2016. The first signs that hackers were siphoning documents and information from DNC systems on April 22. The suit notes that four days later, Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos was informed by Josef Mifsud, a London-based professor, that the Russians were in possession of thousands of emails that could be damaging to Clinton.
The list of defendants in the suit includes Papadopoulos and Mifsud, as well as Aras and Emin Agalarov, the wealthy Russian father and son who hosted the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow in 2013. Trump, who owned the pageant, attended the event.
The Agalarovs also played a role in arranging a meeting for a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in New York in 2016, at which Donald Trump Jr. had expected to be given damaging information about Clinton.
Scott Balber, an attorney for the Agalarovs, said the allegations about his clients were “frivolous” and “a publicity stunt.”
“They had absolutely nothing to do with any alleged hacking of any Democratic computer system or any interference in the US election.”
The suit alleges that Trump’s personal and professional ties to Russia helped foster the conspiracy.
The DNC’s lawyers wrote that “long standing personal professional and financial ties to Russia and numerous individuals linked to the Russian government provided fertile ground for a conspiracy between the defendants to interfere in the 2016 elections.”
The lawsuit describes how the then-Soviet Union paid for Trump to travel Moscow in the 1980s.
It also details the history of Manafort and Gates, who worked for Russian-friendly factions in the Ukraine before joining the Trump campaign. Prosecutors have said they were in contact in 2016 with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former linguist in the Russian army who the FBI has alleged had ties to Russian intelligence.
The interesting historical side note is that Democrats Jimmy Carter and Ted “Do Oldsmobiles Float?” Kennedy each tried to get the late U.S.S.R. to intervene in consecutive presidential elections on their behalf.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 