The number one single today in 1966:
The Beatles had an interesting day today in 1969. Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman …
… while George Harrison and wife Patti Boyd were arrested on charges of possessing 120 marijuana joints.
The number one British single today in 1965:
The number one single today in 1967:
Today in 1968, this song went gold after its singer died in a plane crash in Lake Monona in Madison:
Today in 1956, RCA records purchased a half-page ad in that week’s Billboard magazine claiming that Elvis Presley was …
Ordinarily, if you have to tell someone something like that, the ad probably doesn’t measure up to the standards of accuracy. This one time, the hype was accurate.
Today in 1960, Britain’s Record Retailer printed the country’s first Extended Play and LP chart. Number one on the EP chart:
With Daylight Saving Time beginning Sunday, this is news from the Tallahassee Democrat:
Florida is a step closer to living up to its nickname as “The Sunshine State.”
A bill to let Florida remain on Daylight Saving Time year round is headed to Gov. Rick Scott’s desk after the state Senate approved it 33-2 on Tuesday.
If Scott signs the “Sunshine Protection Act,” Congress would need to amend existing federal law to allow the change.
While the rest of the Eastern United States would set their clocks back in the fall, Florida wouldn’t, leaving it with more sunshine in the evening during the winter. Northwest Florida is currently in the Central time zone.
Hawaii, most of Arizona, and a handful of U.S. territories – including American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands – do not observe Daylight Saving Time.
Of course, the term Daylight Saving Time is incorrect; it’s really Daylight Shifting Time, and evidently Florida’s lawmakers have decided to shift their daylight from morning to evening during the less searing-hot months. Of course, Florida being farther south than the Great White (only at noon) North, there is less variation between the longest day and the longest night than up here.
Today in 1963, the Beatles appeared in a concert at the East Ham Granada in London … as third billing after Tommy Roe and Chris Montez.
Today in 1964, Capitol Records released the Four Preps’ “Letter to the Beatles.”
The song started at number 85. And then Capitol withdrew the song to avoid a lawsuit because the song included a bit of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
Compare and contrast — first, from the Daily Caller:
NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson called for a national gun confiscation program in a syndicated column through Black Press USA on Monday.
Comparing recent school shootings to the violence and discrimination black students faced after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, Johnson wrote that “fear and terror still exist in our children’s classrooms” because of the “National Rifle Association and the politicians [sic] that support them.”
“Given the disproportionate damage gun violence is having on our communities, the NAACP has advocated for sane, sensible laws, to help eliminate or at least to decrease the damage and death caused by gun violence. Requiring universal background checks on all gun sales and transfers, banning military-style, semi-automatic assault guns, enacting tough, new criminal penalties for straw purchasers and gun traffickers, and allowing the Center for Disease Control to research gun violence as a major public health issue are just a few of the reasonable steps lawmakers could take to stem the tide of gun related deaths in neighborhoods across the nation,” Johnson wrote.
The leader of America’s oldest civil rights organization noted that gun violence is the leading killer of young black Americans, but declined to note that a significant portion of these deaths are caused by illegal weapons.
“Over 80 percent of gun deaths of African Americans are homicides. Roughly speaking, 1 out of every 3 African American males who die between the ages of 15 and 19 is killed by gun violence. African American children and teens were less than 15 percent of the total child population in 2008 and 2009, but accounted for 45 percent of all child- and teen-related gun deaths. These numbers are tragic and intolerable, but most of all they are preventable,” Johnson wrote.
The column went on to celebrate Australia’s gun confiscation policy that largely banned all semi-automatic weapons, which was strictly enforced with strong sentencing.
“Australia’s success story is an example for us all. America will remain a deadly nation for our children, its schools caught in the crossfire, unless we insist politicians and the NRA curb their lobbyist efforts and allow the creation of policy that acts in the best interests of public safety.”
Johnson is, of course, free to move to Australia any time he likes.
The opposing, and correct, view is reported by The Blaze:
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice shook the ladies on “The View” (except Meghan McCain, of course) when she shared a story from her childhood experience growing up in 1950s Alabama.
She said she’s an unapologetic supporter of the Second Amendment because it protected her and her family from the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Birmingham, Alabama.
“Let me tell you why I’m a defender of the Second Amendment,” she said.
“I was a little girl growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the late fifties, early sixties,” she explained. “There was no way that Bull Connor and the Birmingham Police were going to protect you.”
“And so when White Knight Riders would come through our neighborhood,” she said, “my father and his friends would take their guns and they’d go to the head of the neighborhood, it’s a little cul-de-sac and they would fire in the air if anybody came through.”
Given that the overwhelming majority of victims of gun violence committed by blacks are other blacks, Johnson seems to believe that blacks are not capable of responsible gun ownership, and that blacks should not be allowed the right of self-defense. That is certainly racist, as is the rest of the history of gun control efforts. The NAACP should know from their own history, as Rice does but Johnson apparently doesn’t, that blacks’ trusting their own safety to white-run government didn’t work out very well.
Today in 1965, Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was released. Other than the run-on nature of the lyrics, the song was one of the first to have an accompanying “promo film,” now known as a “music video”:
Today in 1971, Radio Hanoi played the Star Spangled Banner, presumably not as a compliment:
Today in 1973, Paul McCartney was fined £100 for growing marijuana at his farm in Campbelltown, Scotland.
McCartney’s excuse was that he didn’t know the seeds he claimed to have been given would actually grow.
The latest Marquette University Law School Poll results show that the long-predicted “blue wave” in November might not crash into Wisconsin after all. While 2018 may indeed be a big Democrat year, voters in Wisconsin are telling pollsters that they don’t much care for Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin.
After nearly a full six-year term, Senator Baldwin has the support of just 37% of the poll’s respondents, while 39% have an unfavorable view of her. A full 20% say they don’t know enough about her to form an opinion. In an election year, those numbers are nothing short of catastrophic for an incumbent. Not only is she underwater, she has clearly accomplished so little in her time in Washington that a fifth of Wisconsinites can’t say one way or another what they think about anything she’s done (or, more accurately, failed to do).
This means that her challengers, State Senator Leah Vukmir and businessman Kevin Nicholson, are still able to define for voters who exactly Baldwin is–a scary proposition for any vulnerable incumbent. Though Nicholson and Vukmir are still virtual unknowns–a whopping 80% of Marquette Poll respondents don’t yet know enough about either to form an opinion–they have a tremendous opening to build their candidacies on the back of Baldwin’s shameful negligence on opioid over-prescription at the Veterans Affairs facility in Tomah.
Because of Baldwin’s remarkably low profile in Washington, her refusal to listen to a whistleblower’s information about the problems at the VA is what overwhelmingly defines her term in office. This is a transgression that cuts through the static of nonstop election-year political advertising and either changes voters’ minds or steels their resolve to vote out their do-nothing Senator.
Let’s face it: “Senator Baldwin did nothing while our veterans died of overdoses” is a far more powerful message than “Senator Baldwin is wrong on trade policy.”
This is the uphill battle that Baldwin has to fight, and the fact that she is brazenly (and dishonestly) running advertisements touting her record on veterans affairs speaks volumes about how scared she is that this issue will cost her re-election.
Conversely, the poll shows that Governor Walker should be feeling confident in his bid for re-election. He stands at 47% approval with 47% disapproval–the exact same split he saw in the March, 2014 Marquette Poll. He went on to defeat Mary Burke rather handily that November even though Burke was the Democratic Party’s hand-picked candidate and faced no serious competition in the primary.
This year, a crowded Democratic primary field is ensuring that none of the candidates has eight free months to attack Walker. They must instead spend every moment and every dollar differentiating themselves from the rest of the pack. In all likelihood, this means moving to the left of the competition in a bid to secure the Democratic Party’s increasingly radical base.
Ask Hillary Clinton how well that worked two years ago.
Wisconsin’s Democrats made it clear during that primary that they wanted an avowed socialist, Bernie Sanders, and chose him overwhelmingly over the more moderate Clinton. Similarly, to escape the 2018 primary, a more moderate Democrat like Tony Evers (who is currently leading the field at 18%) will have to move left to fend off a challenge from the likes of Madison Mayor Paul Soglin or Firefighters Union President Mahlon Mitchell.
Making matters even worse for the Democratic field, 53% of Marquette poll respondents say Wisconsin is on the right track. With record-low unemployment and major business investments in the state during Walker’s tenure in office, it will be very difficult to change voters’ minds that the past seven years have been very good for the state.
The one bit of good news that Democrats received from this poll is the enthusiasm gap: While 54% of Republicans say they are very motivated to vote this year, 64% of Democrats say the same. It will therefore take far less convincing to get Democrats out to the polls and, as has been proven time and again in Wisconsin, winning requires that a candidate first and foremost turn out the base.
If Democrats can do this in far greater numbers than Republicans, then they can theoretically recapture the Governor’s mansion and hold onto the Senate seat, but there is simply no indication that the voter base that elected Walker three times in three years will suddenly abandon him in 2018. If that happens, and if enough of the 20% of voters who still don’t know about Senator Baldwin learn about and are repulsed by her handling of the Tomah V.A. scandal, then November might be far better for Wisconsin Republicans than they fear.
London’s Daily Mail:
The NRA has seen a huge surge in membership interest in recent weeks, after drawing noisy backlash over the shooting in Parkland, Florida.
Google searches for ‘NRA membership’ have risen roughly 4,900 per cent since the week before the February 14 shooting, with new members flocking to support the gun owners’ rights group.
NRA President Wayne LaPierre announced last May that national membership had reached five million, but the group has not commented on the recent surge and didn’t immediately reply to calls from DailyMail.com on Sunday.
Though high-profile mass shootings often spur an increase in gun sales over fear of a crackdown, the Parkland shooting was different in the focus of vitriol that was directed at the NRA.
Some otherwise casual gun rights supporters said that the loud attacks on the NRA in the media by young Parkland survivors such as David Hogg drove them to sign up.
‘Thank you David Hogg for inspiring me,’ one Twitter user wrote. ‘I gifted my husband with an NRA membership. I felt now was an important time to support them,’ she continued, adding a screenshot of the membership confirmation email.
Other new NRA members said they were pushed to join because of perceived media bias and the rush to condemn gun rights in the wake of the shooting, in which 17 died.‘After ten minutes of CNN’s town hall “debate” I had already searched for gun safes, the closest firearms dealer near me, classes on gun safety, and an NRA membership,’ wrote Robert Norman in a column for the Federalist.
NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch appeared at the CNN town hall just a week after the shooting, receiving boos and curses from the packed arena.
Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel piled on, drawing cheers from the crowd when he berated Loesch – days before information about critical law enforcement failures in Israel’s own department came to light.
‘The town hall was a display of tyranny,’ wrote Norman, on why it prompted him to join the NRA.
‘For tyranny has never come from a single person, but rather from a mob cheering for the destruction of liberty and rights from those with whom they disagree.’
Google searches for ‘NRA membership’ have risen roughly 4900 per cent since the week before the February 14 shooting, according to this Google Trends report
After the CNN town hall, several national brands withdrew from partnerships to offer discounts to NRA members – companies including MetLife, Enterprise car rental, and Norton AntiVirus.A new Morning Consult survey conducted last week found that net favorability ratings for those brands plunged when consumers learned of their moves to cut ties with the NRA – though the results were sharply split along partisan lines.
‘There is no one. NO ONE. Who joins the NRA for a discount on a rental car,’ Cleta Mitchell, an NRA member and former Oklahoma state lawmaker who sat on the NRA’s board from 2002 to 2013, said in an email to Time.
‘You can rest assured that the NRA will not lose a single member as a result of this,’ Mitchell said.
‘If anything, it should spur people to join the NRA as a means of demonstrating that we who believe in the Second Amendment will not be bullied by these left wing multi-billion dollar corporations
Today in 1962, the Beatles recorded their first radio appearance, on the BBC’s “Teenagers’ Turn — Here We Go”:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 