Today in 1959, the four members of the Platters, who had been arrested in Cincinnati Aug. 10 on drug and prostitution charges, were acquitted.
Still, unlike perhaps today, the acquittal didn’t undo the damage the charges caused to the group’s career.
Imagine having the opportunity to see Johnny Cash, with Elvis Presley his opening act, in concert at a high school. The concert was at Arkansas High School in Swifton, Ark., today in 1955.
Today in 1961, the Beatles played a concert at the Palais Ballroom in Aldershot, Great Britain. Because the local newspaper wouldn’t accept the promoter’s check for advertising, the concert wasn’t publicized, and attendance totaled 18.
After the concert, the Beatles reportedly were ordered out of town by local police due to their rowdiness.
That, however, doesn’t compare to what happened in New Haven, Conn., today in 1967. Before the Doors concert in the New Haven Arena, a policeman discovered singer Jim Morrison making out in a backstage shower with an 18-year-old girl.
The officer, unaware that he had discovered the lead singer of the concert, told Morrison and the woman to leave. After an argument, in which Morrison told the officer to “eat it,” the officer sprayed Morrison and his new friend with Mace. The concert was delayed one hour while Morrison recovered.
Halfway through the first set, Morrison decided to express his opinion about the New Haven police, daring them to arrest him. They did, on charges of inciting a riot, public obscenity and decency. The charges were later dropped for lack of evidence.
The number one album today in 1972 was the Moody Blues’ “Seventh Sojourn”:
The number one single today in 1978:
Today in 1988, a poll was released on the subject of the best background music for sex. Number three was Luther Vandross …
… number two was Beethoven …
… and number one was Neil Diamond.
Neil Diamond?
The number one single today in 1989:
Today in 2003, Ozzy Osbourne crashed his ATV at his home, breaking his collarbone, eight ribs and a vertebra in his neck.
Birthdays begin with Sam Strain of the Imperials and the O’Jays:
Joan Armatrading:
Jack Sonni of Dire Straits:
Nick Seymour played bass for Crowded House:
Jakob Dylan of the Wallflowers:
Zak Foley of EMF:
What, you may ask, is this?
These are, according to the Hot Wheels Wiki:
The Overbored 454 is a Hot Wheels Original Model by Phil Riehlman. This model resembles a 70’s Chevelle SS that has been tuned. With its 5.0 V8 Psycho Maxter engine with 845 horsepower and a top speed of 275 mph, this muscle car will rule the American street races.
With what engine? According to the YouTube video (and you might want to turn down the volume before you view it) …
This model resembles a 70’s Chevelle SS that has been tuned. With its I-6 (Inline Six) Psycho Maxter engine with 845 horsepower and a top speed of 245 mph (394 km/h), this muscle car will rule the American street races.
Yes, we are discussing a Hot Wheels car here. But fiction requires verisimilitude, defined as “the appearance of being true or real.” (So ignore that 275 mph claim.) It is true that the Chevelle SS was a trim package, but according to this only 7,000 of the Chevelle SS were made with a Chevy six-cylinder engine, and likely none after the mid-1960s.
The Overbored 454 is supposed to be based on a 1970s SS, of course, such as …
… although to me it looks like a non-SS, though a related car — a mid-1970s Laguna S3, due to the sloped nose:
Back to the engine. The six a Chevelle SS might have had was introduced in 1962 for the new Chevy II compact (which means it probably powered my parents’ Nova sedan and wagon), in 194-, 230- or 250-cubic-inch sizes, with gas and air measured through a one- or two-barrel carburetor, producing at most 155 gross horsepower. (There also was a 292 six available, but sold only in trucks and vans.) It replaced the old “Stovebolt” six that powered the first two years of Corvettes. Maybe it could be bored out to 5 liters (about 305 cubic inches, but even with a supercharger and being “tuned” the idea that you could get 845 horsepower out of that engine is laughable, even in toys.
Besides that, what does “454” refer to if not to Chevy’s 454 V-8? That engine was the biggest of Chevy’s commercially available big-block V-8s. The second of the two big-blocks started at 396 cubic inches in the 1965 Corvette, grew to 427 cubic inches, then reached its zenith at 454 cubic inches in 1970. (My former neighbor’s 1970 Corvette owner’s manual listed an optional LS-7 465-cubic-inch 454, though it was never sold by Chevy. The Chevelle SS 454 had to do with just 450 stated horsepower.) That engine wasn’t available in cars after 1976, but it was available in trucks up to the SS 454 half-ton pickup to 1993.
The 454 got sixth place in one online poll of the greatest engines of all time. (Number one was, of course, the Chevy small-block, a version of which still powers Corvettes, Camaros, pickups, SUVs and vans.)
It shouldn’t be news that you can get a lot of horsepower from a 454.
My late friend and broadcast partner Frank, who once sold Chevrolets, could tell you more about 454s, I imagine, than I can without research. Even though Chevy sold 454-powered Chevelles, I imagine they must have been very nose-heavy, since aluminum blocks and heads weren’t perfected yet. Of course, the point of muscle cars was shoving the most horsepower possible into a mid-size (and sometimes compact) car. Such things as handling and braking weren’t priorities. (Imagine driving one of those in the era of drum brakes.) We won’t even discuss gas mileage.
Even though you haven’t been able to buy a big-block in a car in 40 years and a truck in almost 25, it turns out you can still buy a big-block engine from Chevy, with horsepower ranging from 406 from a 502 (for $7,566) to the ZZ572 720R Deluxe, which for $18,531 (minus a $250 rebate from Chevy through Dec. 31) will deliver 727 horsepower to your Chevelle or anything else you can fit it in. According to Chevy, though, the engine requires 110 octane gas and is “suitable for limited forays on the street.” Worse, the 720-horsepower ZZ572 is available with only, in GM’s Connect & Cruise package (with another $500 or $750 rebate through Dec. 31), an automatic transmission.
If you can sacrifice 100 horsepower and can spend another $100 (really), the 620-horsepower ZZ572 can be equipped with a six-speed manual transmission. Or, for $2,000 less, you could make do with just 502 horsepower in the fuel-injected Ram Jet 502. As you know, God intended us to drive V-8s and sticks.
The funny thing about this blog about an imaginary car is that it is based on a car whose resurrection keeps getting rumored, including last year:
If you believe these online sources, GM is also about to bring out a new Pontiac GTO …
… and Oldsmobile 442 too …
… to compete against the upcoming Ford Torino …
… and Mercury Cougar:
The Harvey Weinstein sexual-harassment fire burns on, consuming famous men. Corporations and institutions are on automated rapid response: proclaim zero tolerance and throw offenders into the street, while directing human-resources departments to design fine-grained standards of acceptable behavior.
It would be a comfort to think that HR specialists could solve this problem, but what has gone wrong runs deeper than calling in the lawyers. A question persists: How did this happen?
How have so many intelligent, accomplished adult men crashed across the boundaries of sex? Psychiatric explanations—reducing cause to a uniquely individual neurosis—are insufficient. This isn’t just “really weird stuff.”
Some may have a distant memory of the culture wars of the 1990s. This looks like a moment to revisit some of its battlefields.
Incidents of sexual abuse on this scale don’t randomly erupt. They grow from the complex climate of a nation’s culture. These guys aren’t blips or outliers. These men are a product of their times.
Their acts reveal a collapse of self-restraint. That in turn suggests a broader evaporation of conscience, the sense that doing something is wrong. We are seeing now how wrongs can hurt others when conscience is demoted as a civilizing instrument of personal behavior.
Intellectuals have played a big role in shaping arguments for loosening the traditions of self-restraint in the realm, as they would say, of eros. In Oscar Wilde’s quip, “There is no sin except stupidity.”
There are in fact intellectuals who have watched these sexual passages with alarm and described how they were putting us on dangerous ground.
The definitive critical history of this moral transition is Rochelle Gurstein’s 1996 book, The Repeal of Reticence. Ms. Gurstein describes how “the sense of the sacred and the shameful” gradually declined across the 20th century as writers and artists rejected former ways of thinking about personal propriety or reticent behavior.
“They demanded,” she writes, “that the traditional union of moral and aesthetic judgment be dissolved; the functions of the body needed to be considered apart from the values of love, fidelity, chastity, modesty or shame.” The result, she says, was a culture’s slow but steady estrangement “from any coherent moral tradition.”
In his compelling history of pre-World War I Europe, “Rites of Spring,” the Canadian cultural historian Modris Eksteins similarly describes the emerging ethos: “Social and moral absolutes were thrown overboard, and art, or the aesthetic sense, became the issue of supreme importance because it would lead to freedom.”
After all these years, this debate seems old hat. Just now, though, it looks rather new hat.
One thing that happened gradually is sophisticated people simply refused to be shocked.
Just two years ago, the Metropolitan Opera staged Jacques Offenbach’s “The Tales of Hoffmann,” whose final act was described accurately to this audience member by the Huffington Post: “The Venetian palazzo in Act 3 is a model of debauchery with those same girls wearing next to nothing and who could double as pole dancers. An orgy of simulated sex is in progress.”
There was a time, not that long ago, when something like this would have caused a minor public stir. Not anymore. Today, no one reacts or even much cares.
So when one asks how these men could behave so boorishly and monstrously, one answer is that they . . . have . . . no . . . shame. They lived in a culture that had eliminated shame and behavioral boundaries.
Is there a road back from Weinsteinism? Once a society has crossed a Rubicon like this, can you ever cross back over? The possibility of return is not at all clear.
One of the intriguing stories of this season is how the Washington Metro system is banning ads on buses from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington that show shepherds on a hill beside the message, “Find the perfect gift.” The Metro says this violates its ban on promoting religion or religious belief.
During the culture wars of the ’80s and ’90s, one question raised was whether religious belief deserved standing in public debates about the shape and direction of contemporary American culture. Because the case for belief was carried then by the “religious right,” secularists resisted, and still do.
In a recent homily I heard, a priest suggested that one of the purposes of confession wasn’t just to admit sin but to learn conscience. Maybe it’s time to ask if the long period of freedom from organized conscience formation simply isn’t working.
The reason to reopen this debate isn’t merely so that dissenters from the current culture can say they were right. It looks like we’re pretty far beyond either side winning this argument. The reason to reconsider is that otherwise, the evident shock at these stories of abuse, or any progress toward a better sexual modus vivendi, will wash out to sea.
Unless the critics of the current culture get a good-faith hearing, the forces that led to Harvey Weinstein and the others are going to win.
Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels:
A recent whim prompted me to reread Stephen Ambrose’s “To America,” a collection of reflections on the historian’s craft and many of the topics and individuals Ambrose wrote about during his prolific career. The book might have been titled “Second Thoughts,” because virtually every chapter describes some significant issue on which the author changed his mind over the years: his estimation of presidents such as U.S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon; Harry Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb; the “robber barons” who built the transcontinental railroad; the reality of Soviet tyranny; and several more.
In many cases Ambrose relates how he came to dispute conclusions that his university professors and advisers peddled to him in his younger years. Elsewhere, he takes issue with his own previous views. But in each instance, he explains the evolution of his thinking, and the grounds for it, without defensiveness or embarrassment.
When the book appeared, early in this century, one would not have found such admissions especially noteworthy. In 2017, they take on a more striking cast, because ours is an era when it seems no one ever confesses to being wrong. Moreover, everyone is so emphatically right that those who disagree are not merely in error but irredeemably so, candidates not for persuasion but for castigation and ostracism.
Social historians will need some time and perspective to determine exactly what led to the new closed-mindedness, but some of the causes seem plain. One is the effect of narrowcasting, in which people find the sources of information (or the sources’ algorithms find them) that fortify their existing viewpoints and prejudices. “Confirmation bias” has mutated from a hazard of academic research to a menacing political and social phenomenon.
Meanwhile, those institutions of higher learning — the adjective now almost needs quotation marks — that should cultivate and model openness to debate and refutation too often have become bastions of conformity and thought control.
John Maynard Keynes is frequently credited with the aphorism “When I find I’m wrong, I change my mind. What do you do?” Today, the problem may less be an attitude of stubbornness than that fewer people than ever recognize their mistakes in the first place.
In a well-documented fashion, steady doses of viewpoint reinforcement lead not only to a resistance to alternative positions but also to a more entrenched and passionate way in which thoughts are held and expressed. When those expressions are launched in the impersonal or even anonymous channels of today’s social — or is it antisocial? — media, vitriol often becomes the currency of discourse and second thoughts a form of tribal desertion or defeat. Things people would not say face to face are all too easy to post in bouts of blogger or tweeter one-upmanship.
So honest admissions of error are more eye-catching these days. In recent years, The Post’s Bob Woodward has recounted how, a quarter-century later, he had come to a very different interpretation of Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. And how he wasn’t the only one; Sen. Ted Kennedy, who excoriated Ford at the time of his decision, joined Woodward in that assessment, and conferred an award for political courage for the act they had once deemed a corrupt bargain.
A few months back, the world lost Jay Keyworth, nuclear scientist and presidential science adviser to Ronald Reagan. Keyworth had assembled the evidence to advocate an anti-ballistic- missile (ABM) system, which establishment opinion of the time relentlessly derided as “Star Wars” — a fanciful and impractical notion, and one in conflict with the then-sacred doctrine of mutual assured destruction.
Now, with one rogue nation perfecting both weapons and rocketry capable of annihilating U.S. targets, and another perhaps only years from joining it, the conversation is all about the effectiveness of our ABM system and why the heck the government hasn’t made our national safety more certain. We’re still waiting for that conversation to include “Thanks, Jay. You were right, and we weren’t.”
Ambrose wrote his book near the end of his life. In fact, it is dedicated to his cancer doctor and nurses. Maybe such honest introspection comes more readily under the imminence of the great event. But our everyday exchanges, and indeed the life of our republic, would be greatly improved by the more common utterance of those three magical little words: “I was wrong.”
Today in 1940, the first NFL championship game was broadcast nationally on Mutual radio. Before long, Mutual announcer Red Barber probably wondered why they’d bothered.
Today in 1963, Frank Sinatra Jr. was kidnapped from a Lake Tahoe hotel. He was released two days later after his father paid $240,000 ransom. The kidnappers were arrested and sentenced to prison.
The top selling 8-track today in 1971:
Wisconsin’s infamous John Doe investigation was more sinister and politically driven than originally reported.
A Wisconsin Attorney General report on the year-long investigation into leaks of sealed John Doe court documents to a liberal British publication in September 2016 finds a rogue agency of partisan bureaucrats bent on a mission “to bring down the (Gov. Scott) Walker campaign and the Governor himself.”
The AG report, released Wednesday, details an expanded John Doe probe into a “broad range of Wisconsin Republicans,” a “John Doe III,” according to Attorney General Brad Schimel, that widened the scope of the so-called John Doe II investigation into dozens of right-of-center groups and scores of conservatives. Republican lawmakers, conservative talk show hosts, a former employee from the MacIver Institute, average citizens, even churches, were secretly monitored by the dark John Doe.
State Department of Justice investigators found hundreds of thousands of John Doe documents in the possession of the GAB long after they were ordered to be turned over to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
The Government Accountability Board, the state’s former “nonpartisan” speech cop, proved to be more partisan than originally suspected, the state Department of Justice report found. For reasons that “perhaps may never be fully explained,” GAB held onto thousands of private emails from Wisconsin conservatives in several folders on their servers marked “Opposition Research.” The report’s findings validate what conservatives have long contended was nothing more than a witch-hunt into limited government groups and the governor who was turning conservative ideas into public policy.
“Moreover, DOJ is deeply concerned by what appears to have been the weaponization of GAB by partisans in furtherance of political goals, which permitted the vast collection of highly personal information from dozens of Wisconsin Republicans without even taking modest steps to secure this information,” the report states.
And in an all-too familiar occurrence involving allegations of government abuse, a key hard drive believed to contain the court-sealed John Doe documents leaked to The Guardian in October 2016 has suspiciously disappeared – GAB officials with knowledge of the hard drive can’t seem to explain what happened to it.
Still, despite a damning report laying out myriad examples of criminal misconduct by government bureaucrats, Schimel, a Republican, says his Department of Justice cannot file criminal charges – chiefly because of disappearing evidence, less-than-cooperative John Doe agents and the “systemic and pervasive mishandling of John Doe evidence (that) likely resulted in circumstances allowing the Guardian leak in the first place.”
Such failures prevent prosecutors from proving criminal liability beyond a reasonable doubt, the attorney general wrote, although the report points to a small universe of GAB employees that had access to the leaked documents.
They also seemed to have a political ax to grind.
The Department of Justice, however, recommends the John Doe judge initiate contempt proceedings against former GAB officials and the John Doe probe’s special prosecutor for “grossly” mishandling secret evidence. Schimel also recommends that Shane Falk, who served as lead staff attorney in the John Doe probes, be referred for discipline to the Wisconsin Court System’s Office of Lawyer Regulation. Falk took a job with a private law firm in August 2014, just as allegations of investigative abuse began to surround the political investigation.
Back Doe
The John Doe has a long and winding history. It all began in 2010, when the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office, led by Democrat John Chisholm, signed off on a secret investigation into the Milwaukee County Executive’s office, at the time directed by then-Republican candidate for governor, Scott Walker.
It was Walker who, the year before, brought questions about a discrepancy in a county veterans fund to the DA’s attention. His chief of staff at the time asked the agency to investigate. Eventually, the district attorney’s office opened a John Doe, as Walker, a fiscal conservative in a liberal county, was rolling into his run for governor.
That investigation brought six convictions, only two of which were related to the original scope of the veterans fund investigation. Prosecutors, with the help of a very accommodating John Doe judge, went after Walker’s staff and conservative allies in what was commonly known in the DA’s office as the “Walker Doe,” according to an inside source. They threatened two County Executive staffers with lengthy prison sentences if they didn’t talk, if they didn’t turn on their boss. They didn’t because they couldn’t. There was nothing to tell, according to the targeted staffers.
Chisholm used the hundreds of thousands of electronic communications – including reams of private email – to seek a second John Doe. This time, the district attorney, with the help of the very willing Government Accountability Board, set their sights on just about every right-of-center group in Wisconsin. The probe investigated the prosecutors’ theory that conservative organizations illegally coordinated with Walker’s campaign during the bitterly partisan recall elections of 2011 and 2012.
John Doe agents effectively conducted a spy operation, secretly grabbing up millions of digital records from Republicans who had no idea they were being targeted in the Democrat-led dragnet. The agents capped it off in October 2013 with coordinated, predawn, armed raids on the homes of several conservative Wisconsinites. Many were forced to sit by while law enforcement officials rooted through their possessions in the name of a campaign finance paper investigation.
Only one problem: There was no illegal coordination, no campaign finance wrongdoing, no collusion. Sound familiar? (See Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign). The John Doe judge at the time in early 2014 quashed the subpoenas used in the investigation. He found that the prosecutors lacked probable cause that crimes alleged had been committed.
The ruling followed a string of court decisions that not only raised questions about the prosecutors’ theory, but the tactics involved in the political probe.
In July 2016, the Wisconsin Supreme Court declared the John Doe investigation unconstitutional and ordered it shut down. The majority opinion concluded that Special Prosecutor Francis Schmitz was “the instigator of a ‘perfect storm’ of wrongs” perpetrated against citizens who were legally exercising their First Amendment rights. At least they were until the John Doe investigators silenced them.
Wisconsin’s John Doe law is similar to a grand jury investigation, without the benefit of a jury of peers. The procedures are overseen by a single judge with extraordinary power to compel witnesses to testify – all in the pursuit of determining whether a crime has been committed. Unlike a grand jury investigation where the accused can publicly defend themselves, John Doe targets and witnesses must remain silent. Failing to do so could land them in jail or subject them to steep fines.
After the Supreme Court decision, the Republican-led Legislature reformed the John Doe law and its secrecy order that one federal appeals court judge described as “screamingly unconstitutional.” It also jettisoned the “nonpartisan” Government Accountability Board following growing evidence of investigative abuses.
‘Pretty Please’
Despite court orders in January 2014 barring the John Doe prosecutors and their bureaucratic pals from further reviewing any of the “evidence” they had illegally obtained, GAB staff pushed on.
Days after the court order, Shane Falk, GAB’s lead attorney on the John Doe, directed staffer Molly Naggappala to log into the investigation’s account with an offsite data storage site where the millions of documents were stored (at taxpayer expense). He told Naggappala to print off emails seized from search warrants.
“Can you print out everything that you pulled out of Relativity (the data storage operator) and previously sent us? Then give a copy to Nate (Judnic) and one to me. Pretty please?”
Naggappala complied, according to the Attorney General’s investigative report. It was a “direct violation” of the judge’s cease and desist order.
Schmitz, the special prosecutor, didn’t order Falk to “stand down,” and Falk and other GAB staff continued to access the documents in defiance of the court order.
The documents Falk sought were the “very emails … that were leaked to the Guardian newspaper,” the DOJ report states.
It was previously reported that John Doe investigators used Gmail accounts disconnected from the state electronic communications system when sharing investigation information and ideas. The Department of Justice probe into the leaks found Falk used an external hard drive for the storage of separate John Doe files. Falk told DOJ investigators that he turned the hard drive over to colleague Nathan Judnic when he left the GAB.
Falk and former GAB staff and current administrators at the GAB’s successor, the state Ethics Commission, could not provide the hard drive to investigators. After some conflicting answers, none of the attorneys and bureaucrats could offer an explanation for what happened to it.
Falk came to the GAB with a left-leaning pedigree. He previously had served as a Democrat appointee on a state campaign ethics board, the predecessor to the GAB. In 2008, he testified before the relatively new GAB, urging the agency to find ways of “getting around the constitution” to go after issue ads from organizations such as Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce.
“When it comes to the point of it affecting an election, the compelling interest rises to the level where the state can get around the constitutional right to free speech,” he testified.
During the John Doe probe, Falk encouraged Schmitz, the special prosecutor, to stay strong in their pursuit of Walker and his conservative allies.
“Remember, in brief, this was a bastardization of politics and our state is being run by corporations and billionaires,” Falk wrote in an email on conservative issue advocacy. “That isn’t democracy to say the least, but due to how they do this dark money, the populace never knows.”
The populace also didn’t know just how political the John Doe probe had gotten.
‘Falk Boxes’
The Department of Justice report refers to “Falk boxes,” in which three hard drives in particular contained nearly 500,000 unique emails from Yahoo and Gmail accounts, totaling millions of pages.
“The hard drives included transcripts of Google Chat logs between several individuals, most of which were purely personal (and sometimes very private) conversations,” the report states.
GAB placed a “large portion” of the emails into several folders titled, “Opposition Research” or “Senate Opposition Research.”
John Doe investigators dug deep in their expansive “John Doe III” probe, obtaining through warrants electronic communications of the governor, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Oshkosh), former RNC chair Reince Priebus, U.S. Rep. Sean Duffy, and state Sens. Van Wanggard and Howard Marklein. They also monitored the emails of conservative talk show hosts Vicki McKenna, Mark Belling, and Charlie Sykes, as well as former MacIver Institute employee Brian Fraley.
“The breadth of information and communications contained in the ‘Falk boxes,’ apparently as the result of the John Doe III investigation into Wisconsin Republicans, was breathtaking,” the attorney general’s report asserts. “Just to illustrate this point, the investigators obtained, categorized, and maintained over 150 personal emails between Senator Leah Vukmir and her daughter, including emails containing private medical information and other highly personal information.”
Why?
“DOJ was unable to determine why investigators ever obtained, let alone saved and labeled, over 150 very private and very personal emails between a Senator and her child, or why investigators placed those emails in a folder named ‘Opposition Research,’” the report states.
Vukmir, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, was astounded in learning that she was spied on, but she vowed to fight against such “intrusive behavior.”
“Attempting to bully her into silence will not work,” said Vukmir campaign spokeswoman Jessica Ward. “Sen. Vukmir intends on exploring additional legislative or legal options to ensure this never occurs again, and that any individuals involved are held fully accountable.”
But the Vukmir emails were just the tip of the iceberg. The Department of Justice investigation found the John Doe probe swept up all kinds of private emails, including:
- Over 1,000 emails between a private bible study group called a “Life Group” at Blackhawk Church in Middleton, Wisconsin. The emails covered such subjects as “LG- He is risen,” “LG- helping out Mom,” “LG- Game Night,” “LG- Spiritual Formation,” “LG-The Spirit and Scripture,” “LG-New Sermon Series=Rainbows and Sugarplums,” and “[Redacted] Requests Prayer.”
- Pictures of a woman who was purchasing a new dress, asking the email recipient how the dress looked on her.
- A string of 20 emails referencing a “Kenmore Mini Fridge” negotiation over Craigslist.
- An email thanking the recipient for advice concerning the purchase of a Benelli over/under shotgun at Dick’s.
- An email between parents discussing a daughter’s need for an OB-GYN.
- An email regarding prescription medications needed.
- A series of Google Chat logs between friends covering a variety of private topics, including whether the writer needs “to lose 20 lbs asap.”
- Several emails between family members circulating drafts and
corrections to a Christmas letter.The Department of Justice’s review of these emails did not find any unethical or illegal behavior by “any state official, employee, or other Wisconsin Republican apparently targeted in John Doe III.”
DOJ investigators believe the leak to the Guardian was calculated to attempt to influence a U.S. Supreme Court decision on whether to take up John Doe prosecutors request for review of the state court’s decision shutting down the investigation – and whether they could hold onto the possessions they illegally took. The Guardian hit piece, with hundreds of pages of cherry-picked court documents, was published just days before the court unanimously rejected the case.
Sloppy disregard for the security of the court-sealed John Doe documents – at the GAB and at the state Supreme Court office – left the DOJ unable to identify beyond a reasonable doubt who had access to the records, when the records where accessed or “who stole them,” according to the report.
Here’s the scary footnote to a frightening report on government abuse: The Department of Justice cannot assure any John Doe II or III target that information illegally seized from them “will not be published on the Internet or by The Guardian at some future date.”
“Nor can DOJ assure any person whose information was gathered that they will not suffer from identity theft or face other adverse consequences as a result of the irresponsible way that GAB handled personal information,” the report states.
Everyone who was involved in this miscarriage of justice who is still employed by state government should be fired. Everyone who was involved in this miscarriage of justice should be sued by their victims. Everyone who was involved in this miscarriage of justice who has a law degree should be disbarred. Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm needs to be removed from office.
Most of the media that allegedly covers state government decided to ignore this story, as David Blaska points out:
Thank the Good Lord for Brad Schimel, the first conservative state attorney general in long memory. Thank you the heavens above for the too few brave souls — Eric O’Keefe, the Wall Street Journal, Vicki McKenna (her interview with Schimel), and Matt Kittle (his report) among them — for speaking out against the government gag orders. …
What was the crime being investigated by the Government Accountability Board and its agents in the Milwaukee and Dane County district attorneys offices?
The crime was this: one group of citizens “colluding” with another group of citizens on matters of their governance before an election. Just as the Act 10 opposition had done before the Walker/State Senate Recalls.
The John Doe was not an investigation, it was a persecution. The government — acting in secrecy with full police powers — intimidated, prosecuted, and selectively targeted political speech with which they disagreed. …
Had the victims of this oppressed speech been Black Lives Matter or the Socialist Workers Party, the Wisconsin State Journal and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel would have been in full howl. The ACLU would file lawsuits. Garrulous old Neil Heinen would steam like a teapot. The Madison Common Council would issue a pronunciamento. John Nichols would blow into his bullhorn in front of the Monument to Communism in James Madison Park. Ambulances would be halted on John Nolen Drive. Tammy Baldwin would write a campaign fund-raising letter.
But it was just a bunch of conservatives — white, at that. Anyone who complained was guilty of “whining,” according to former State Journal columnist Chris Rickert.
Wisconsin Democrats need to ask themselves how they would feel if Schimel or Republican district attorneys were secretly investigating their own political activities.
Facebook Friend Michael Smith wrote this, which is pertinent after Facebook reaction to yesterday’s post:
You have to love discussing tax cuts with a progressive. I can’t seem to get any of my Democrat friends to tell me how a cut in tax rates across the board amounts to “redistributing wealth upward” or how the GOP is stealing from the poor to give to the rich when the poor don’t pay income taxes to start with.
It’s about statolatry – the literal worship of government. Democrats literally love government the way Christians love Christ.
They ascribe all that is good and holy to the government.
Without government, how will we know what to do? Who will tell us what is right and what is wrong if there is nobody to make laws? WIthout government, who will protect us from each other?
Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
Fear of smaller government is irrational and an indication of a lack of self-confidence. It is the ultimate form of low self esteem, that one cannot live without someone telling them how. One wonders if such a position is a result of actually wanting to be a member of the collective or just a fear of being alone.
Minnesota Public Radio reports:
A Democratic official who has spoken to Al Franken and key aides says Franken will resign his Minnesota Senate seat on Thursday, the official tells MPR News.
The official spoke to Franken and separately to Franken’s staff. A staff member told the official that Franken had gone to his Washington home to discuss his plans with family.
MPR News agreed to withhold the official’s name because the official wanted to give Franken the chance to talk about his decision in his own words.
Franken faced a cascade of calls Wednesday from fellow Democrats and other political allies to leave office in response to multiple allegations of sexual harassment.
After MPR News reported the planned resignation, a tweet from Franken’s official account said it was “not accurate.”
“No final decision has been made and the senator is still talking with his family,” the tweet read.
In terms of the balance of power in the Senate, this will have no effect. Dayton, a member of Minnesota’s Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party, isn’t going to name a Republican (that is, member of the Independent–Republican Party) to fill Franken’s seat. My guess would be U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison (D–Minnesota). Whoever is picked, should that person choose to run for the rest of Franken’s unfinished term, will be on the ballot with whoever decides to run against U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D … oops, DFL–Minnesota), whose term expires after the 2018 election.
For what it’s worth, I loathe Franken. He wasn’t the least bit funny on “Saturday Night Live,” he got elected to the Senate via vote fraud, and apparently he’s as much of a pig in private life as he is a jerk in public life. Good riddance.
The number one British album today in 1963 will be at number one for 21 weeks — “Meet the Beatles”:
The number one single here today in 1963 certainly was not a traditional pop song:
Today in 1967, Otis Redding recorded a song before heading on a concert tour that included Madison:
The number one British album today in 1968 was the Beatles’ “White Album”:
The number one British single today in 1974 was originally a country song:
See the comment from 1963 about the number one single today in 1974:
The number one song today in 1985:
The number one British song today in 1991:
The number one album today in 1991 was U2’s “Achtung Baby”:
The number one single today in 2003:
Only one birthday of note today: Tom Waits, whose voice was described as “like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car” makes him better known as writing for others:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 