If you wanna be happy, listen to the number one single today in 1963:
Another one-hit wonder had the number one single today in 1968:
The number one single today in 1974 might be the very definition of the term “novelty song”:
The number one British single today in 1975:
(Which more appropriately should have been called “Stand by Your Men,” since Tammy Wynette had had three husbands up to then, and two more thereafter.)
I have been in my present (more-than) full-time job for five years. I wrote about that here.
That comprises one-sixth of my career. This story is the biggest of my career, and I am speaking about it today.
Michael Gerson on thrice-married Donald Trump and some of his biggest supporters, who you’d think wouldn’t approve of three marriages, two of which ended in divorce:
In the compulsively transgressive, foul-mouthed, loser-disdaining, mammon-worshiping billionaire, conservative Christians “have found their dream president,” according to Jerry Falwell Jr.
It is a miracle, of sorts.
In a recent analysis, the Pew Research Center found that more than three-fourths of white evangelical Christians approve of Trump’s job performance, most of them “strongly.” With these evangelicals comprising about a quarter of the electorate, their support is the life jacket preventing Trump from slipping into unrecoverable political depths.
The essence of Trump’s appeal to conservative Christians can be found in his otherwise anodyne commencement speech at Liberty University. “Being an outsider is fine,” Trump said. “Embrace the label.” And then he promised: “As long as I am your president, no one is ever going to stop you from practicing your faith.” Trump presented evangelicals as a group of besieged outsiders, in need of a defender.
This sense of grievance and cultural dispossession — the common ground between The Donald and the faithful — runs deep in evangelical Christian history. Evangelicalism emerged from the periodic mass revivals that have burned across America for 300 years. While defining this version of Christianity is notoriously difficult, it involves (at least) a personal decision to accept God’s grace through faith in Christ and a commitment to live — haltingly, imperfectly — according to his example.
In the 19th century, evangelicals (particularly of the Northern variety) took leadership in abolitionism and other movements of social reform. But as a modernism based on secular scientific and cultural assumptions took control of institution after institution, evangelicals often found themselves dismissed as anti-intellectual rubes.
The trend culminated at the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, in which evolution and H.L. Mencken were pitted against creation and William Jennings Bryan (whom Mencken called “a tin pot pope in the Coca-Cola belt and a brother to the forlorn pastors who belabor half-wits in galvanized iron tabernacles behind the railroad yards”). Never mind that Mencken was racist, anti-Semitic and an advocate of eugenics and that Bryan was the compassionate progenitor of the New Deal. Fundamentalists (a designation adopted by many evangelicals) lost the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, even in their own minds.
After a period of political dormancy — which included discrediting slumber during the civil rights movement — evangelicals returned to defend Christian schools against regulation during the Carter administration. To defend against Supreme Court decisions that put tight limits on school prayer and removed state limits on abortion. To defend against regulatory assaults on religious institutions. Nathan Glazer once termed this a “defensive offensive” — a kind of aggrieved reaction to the perceived aggressions of modernity.
Those who might be understandably confused by the current state of evangelicalism should understand a few things:
First, evangelicals don’t have a body of social teaching equivalent, say, to Catholic social doctrine. Catholics are taught, in essence, that if you want to call yourself pro-life on abortion, you also have to support greater access to health care and oppose the dehumanization of migrants. And vice versa. There is a doctrinal whole that requires a broad and consistent view of social justice. Evangelicals have nothing of the sort. Their agenda often seems indistinguishable from the political movement that currently defends and deploys them, be it Reaganism or Trumpism.
Second, evangelicalism is racially and ethnically homogeneous, which leaves certain views and assumptions unchallenged. The American Catholic Church, in contrast, is one-third Hispanic, which changes the church’s perception of immigrants and their struggles. (Successful evangelical churches in urban areas are now experiencing the same diversity and broadening their social concern.)
Third, without really knowing it, Trump has presented a secular version of evangelical eschatology. When the candidate talked of an America on the brink of destruction, which could be saved only by returning to the certainties of the past, it perfectly fit the evangelical narrative of moral and national decline. Trump speaks the language of decadence and renewal (while exemplifying just one of them).
In the Trump era, evangelicals have gotten a conservative Supreme Court justice for their pains — which is significant. And they have gotten a leader who shows contempt for those who hold them in contempt — which is emotionally satisfying.
The cost? Evangelicals have become loyal to a leader of shockingly low character. They have associated their faith with exclusion and bias. They have become another Washington interest group, striving for advantage rather than seeking the common good. And a movement that should be known for grace is now known for its seething resentments.
Whether you approve or not, the cause of this is obvious — Trump’s predecessor in the White House. Barack Obama was as big a fan of abortion as Bill Clinton, and opposed religious liberty for conservative Christians. (See “wedding cakes.”) In these divisive days, you’re either for something or against something, and apparently doing what you say is preferable to doing what you do in your private life.
First, for those who believe the British are the height of sophistication and are so much more couth than us Americans: This was the number one song in the U.K. today in 1986:
The chicken is not having a birthday. Pervis Jackson of the Spinners is:
So is drummer Bill Bruford, who played for Yes, King Crimson and Genesis:
George Mitchell on the state’s budget (cash) surplus and (GAAP) deficit:
“State controller sees red, while state officials see black”
So reads the headline on a newsletter issued last week from the apolitical (and indispensable) Wisconsin Taxpayer Alliance (WISTAX). The document offers important and under-reported information on the condition of the state treasury.
As debate on the state budget heats up, Governor Scott Walker and many legislative Republicans tout a record of “eliminated” deficits and a resulting “Reform Dividend.” Some suggest the state’s general fund is so flush it can be tapped to help address the transportation finance impasse.
How do the positive claims stand up when measured against information from the two most authoritative sources, namely, WISTAX and the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB)?
You be the judge.
The WISTAX newsletter analyzes the state controller’s recently released Comprehensive Annual Fiscal Report for 2016. Using the most meaningful assessment — one based on Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) — the report shows the general fund had a $1.7 billion deficit.
A 50-state ranking at the WISTAX website shows that Wisconsin was one of only seven states to report a GAAP deficit. Of particular note: on a per capita basis only Illinois had a larger GAAP deficit than Wisconsin.
But wait…doesn’t Wisconsin have a budget “surplus”? Only if you use the essentially meaningless cash balance on the last day of a fiscal year. For example, say your checking account shows a balance of $1,000 on June 30 but you just booked a $3,000 vacation and have some unpaid medical bills. Do you have a “surplus”? Not if you count the invoices that will arrive in July’s mail.
But…hasn’t Wisconsin “eliminated” a multi-billion deficit inherited from Governor Jim Doyle? It is true that the 2011-13 state budget wiped out what the Legislative Fiscal Bureau reports as the “structural deficit.” Now, according to the LFB, that projected shortfall is back and will exceed a billion dollars heading into 2019-21. Governor Walker’s spokesperson and some conservatives pooh-pooh that number. Apparently, in their view, the structural deficits that they portrayed in apocalyptic terms under Jim Doyle only matter if they occur on a Democrat’s watch.
As for the “Reform Dividend” budget of Governor Walker, if adopted the GAAP deficit of $1.7 billion in 2016 will grow to more than $2 billion by 2019. Why is that? One key reason, as WISTAX recently wrote, “Proposed general fund spending [in the Governor’s budget] exceeds revenue by $155m in 2018 and by $215m in 2019.”
In summary, despite strong fiscal steps taken in the 2011-13 budget, the state’s fiscal condition arguably has declined. The per capita GAAP deficit is second only to that of Illinois. The projected structural deficit — portrayed as an ominous dark cloud under Jim Doyle — stands at a billion dollars.
Those facts notwithstanding, the Wisconsin State Journal reported last week that some legislators “are leaning toward using borrowing backed by general fund taxes to help pay for roads…”
This would continue a practice started by Doyle and accelerated under Walker. In 2006, highway debt service supported by the general fund totaled $40 million, an amount that will more than triple in 2017-18 under the budget proposed by Governor Walker. That growing cost, along with the mushrooming bill for debt paid by the separate transportation fund, is central to the transportation finance challenge now confronting the state.
Tapping the general fund for more highway debt would continue the practice, as described by the State Journal’s Matt Defour, of kicking the transportation finance down the road for another two years. This is the unavoidable result of Governor Walker’s opposition to raising the gas tax. Given projections of a structural deficit and growing GAAP deficit, all that’s certain is that the legislature will face more daunting issues when it convenes in January 2019.
For one thing, would be helpful if someone (perhaps state Sen. Howard Marklein (R–Spring Green), a CPA) who can understand the difference between cash and GAAP accounting as it applies to government can explain how to eliminate the state’s GAAP deficit. Since each counts revenues and spending differently, though I’m not an accountant, I don’t think cutting $1.7 billion from the (cash-measured) budget will necessarily eliminate the GAAP deficit, though if it did I’d be all in favor of it.
This proves yet again that fiscal irresponsibility is not necessarily tied to one political party, and that fiscal responsibility must not be tied to election results, and must be mandated instead by constitutional limits on spending and taxation, so that the rights of the taxpayer shall not be infringed by wasteful government spending. (For instance, requiring GAAP, not cash, balanced budgets at the state level.)
Today in 1980, Brian May of Queen collapsed while onstage. This was due to hepatitis, not, one assumes, the fact that Paul McCartney released his “McCartney II” album the same day.
Today’s rock music birthdays start with someone who will never be associated with rock music: Liberace, born in West Allis today in 1919.
Actual rock birthdays start with Isaac “Redd” Holt of Young–Holt Unlimited:
Nicky Chinn wrote this 1970s classic: It’s it’s …
Roger Earl of Foghat …
… was born one year before Barbara Lee of the Chiffons …
… and drummer Darrell Sweet of Nazareth:
William “Sputnik” Spooner played guitar for both the Grateful Dead …
… and The Tubes:
Richard Page of Mr. Mister:
Krist Novoselic of Nirvana was born one year before …
… Miss Jackson if you’re nasty:
Finally, Patrick Waite, bassist and singer for Musical Youth, which did this ’80s classic, dude:
It turns out that predictions about how bad the Brewers would be this season may have been exaggerated, largely because there are worse teams on the Brewers schedule.
One of them is the Mets, swept by the Brewers this weekend 7–4, 11–4 and 11–9. Friday starting pitcher Matt Harvey gave up three home runs, two of them pinch-hit, one of those described by a Facebook Friend as appearing to have been hit by a guy in the accounting department. Meanwhile starting pitcher Matt Garza, one of the worst acquisitions in Brewers history in terms of performance for pay, resembled a major league starting pitcher.
The Mets pitching staff gave up eight home runs on the weekend. According to the New York Daily News Mets starters have the worst earned run average in baseball and have pitched the third fewest innings in the National League.
It turns out that Harvey has more problems than giving up gopherballs, Page Six reports:
Supermodel Adriana Lima was still slinging arrows at The Dark Knight Saturday, as diehard Mets fans trolled her for breaking the hurler’s heart.
“U ruined Matt Harvey” fumed nicholaspetro43.
“You ruined the Mets season go away!” taunted dadinoooo.
But the bodacious Brazilian did not shrink from her critics. “There is always two sides of the coin,” she responded. “Only 1 has been heard.”
Harvey was suspended for three games last week after he failed to show up for the May 6 game against the Marlins.
The Post exclusively reported Harvey spent the night before drinking — drowning his sorrows after Lima posted an Instagram photo showing her stepping out with a former beau, New England Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman.
On Saturday, throw out the Brewers’ fifth inning, and it would have been a close ballgame. Unfortunately for the Mets, the Brewers scored eight runs in their fifth inning.
Then on Sunday the Mets had a 7–1 lead that disappeared like watching the Titanic sink.
The New York Post, never one for a measured response for a local team failure when gasoline can be poured on the fire, wrote:
So this is life for the Mets without Jeurys Familia.
There is no guarantee the Mets would have won Sunday’s game even if their All-Star closer was active, not with the manner the ball was jumping at Miller Park, but calling Addison Reed’s number for five-out saves sure doesn’t seem like a recipe for success.
But that’s where the Mets were after Jerry Blevins, Fernando Salas and Josh Edgin all pitched to some level of disappointment. Reed surrendered a three-run homer to Manny Pina, sending the Mets to the bottom of Lake Michigan in a painful fourth straight loss, 11-9 to the Brewers.
“Slider down,” Reed said, when asked what he was trying to throw Pina. “I think it was down the middle of the plate.”
That assessment summarized the final three innings for the Mets, a torturous stretch in which the Brewers scored 10 runs against Jacob deGrom and an overwhelmed bullpen. The Mets led 7-1 heading to bottom of the sixth before the Brewers scored two, three and five runs in their final three at-bats.
The save situation was the Mets’ first since Familia underwent surgery Friday for a blood clot in his right shoulder that will keep him sidelined for three to four months.
“We had a big lead and we blew it,” said deGrom, who slogged through six innings in which he allowed four earned runs on eight hits with seven strikeouts and one walk. …
“We have a clubhouse full of veterans and they have all been through a game like this,” [manager Terry] Collins said. “They have all been through a series like this before and you have got to rise out of the ashes and get back on the horse.”
As a result of the weekend and their opponent as described by the Mets manager’s mixed metaphor, the Brewers are one game out of first place in the National League Central Division. I highly doubt the Brewers will be anywhere near first place by the end of the season, but if teams are going to give games to you, you might as well take them.
For those who still fail to grasp why Donald Trump won the presidential election, read Kyle Smith:
”We’re voting with our middle finger,” a Trump supporter in South Carolina told a reporter last fall. No doubt.
Many a liberal observer saw the Trump vote as a rageful taunt aimed at racial and sexual minorities. But there is much more to Trump’s support than that, argues law professor Joan C. Williams in her new book White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.
Making an admirable and research-driven effort to see things from the point of view of her subject, author Williams unpacks exactly how the white working class (WWC) viewed the election, and how their history-making choice made a lot of sense given their concerns.
The WWC is plagued by crisis within and without — household income in this group has been all but stagnant for 40 years. The mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high-school education has increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014. Opioids arrived and factories left. Democrats at best didn’t seem to notice; at worst they seemed to be causing misery by supporting NAFTA and mass immigration that drives down wages while imposing environmental policies meant to crush carbon-intensive industries. Then they mocked their victims as rednecks on the wrong side of history.
Williams isn’t interested in mocking her subjects. She is a liberal who is genuinely worried about the plight of the WWC. An admitted silver-spoon baby, she married someone she calls a “class migrant” — a guy from the working class (he’s an Italian-American from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn) who earned a spot at Harvard Law School, where the couple met. Right away, she was unable to hide her fascination with his people. At a family dinner, his father took a dislike to her because Williams seemed to be studying everyone like an anthropologist. …
If your answer to the question “Who am I?” is “I’m a professor,” then your identity doesn’t change whether you’re in London, Miami or San Francisco. Elites have a tendency to leave home for college, then flit from one global capital to another. Not so the WWC, which Williams defines as white middle-class people (those in the $41,000 to $132,000 income range) who don’t have a college education. They’re strongly attached to their hometowns, to the people they feel comfortable with, to what they perceive to be the shared values of their communities.
Tradition and stability matter. “The dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money,” Williams notes.
Donald Trump epitomizes this idea, having made his fortune “in garish casinos that sold a working-class brand of luxury.” Gold-covered everything is exactly how you’d decorate if you were from Appalachia and struck it rich with no intervening period of finishing school at Stanford or Yale.
To the rootless global elites, though, tradition is subordinated to transgression. What society considers edgy, elites deem worthy of their praise. It isn’t acceptable merely to accept gay life, for example — it must be celebrated. Recalling moving to San Francisco and observing a fully naked man walking down the street, Williams recalls feeling proud of herself for being tolerant of such norm-shattering. Among the elites, she says, “It’s a point of pride not to be one of those petty bourgeois who’s shocked by sexual transgression.”
This attitude not only stuns the WWC but strikes them as a kind of attack on everything they hold dear. To them, bicoastal urban America is a joke to which they don’t get the punchline. They feel excluded, marginalized, left out. Worse than any of this, they feel condescended to, and it infuriates them, Williams writes.
Hillary Clinton did a marvelous job of confirming their suspicions when she said — in New York City, at an LGBT event — that “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
Being called names such as these is exactly what gets the white working class fired up. She might as well have told everyone from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, “Don’t vote for me.” Outside of Chicagoland, they didn’t. …Dismissing the WWC as racist doesn’t make a lot more sense than calling them misogynist, Williams argues, citing evidence that upper-class white people are simply better than the working class at camouflaging race-based judgments. You’ll rarely catch managerial types uttering racial slurs, but consider the “Greg/Jamal” study in which corporate recruiters were sent identical resumes, one from “Greg” and one from “Jamal.” The Jamals of the world proved to have a much more difficult time landing interviews.
As for why a $60,000 a year mechanic could feel affinity for a New York billionaire, it’s because WWC consider moguls to be fantasy figures. Trump represents something aspirational; they picture themselves in that boardroom firing people.
Managers, on the other hand, remind them of the bosses they resent. “Most working-class people have little contact with the truly rich outside of ‘The Apprentice’ or ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,’ ” Williams writes, “but they suffer class affronts from professionals every day: the doctor who unthinkingly patronizes the medical technician, the harried office worker who treats the security guard as invisible, the overbooked business traveler who snaps at the TSA agent.”
Hillary Clinton reminds them of the prissy know-it-alls who have been bossing them around their whole lives — she’s the lady who tells you there’s no eating in the library, as columnist Jonah Goldberg once put it. They don’t resent Trump, though: They imagine being him and firing her.
Clinton’s rhetoric about helping the poor also turned off the WWC: The have-a-littles disdain the have-nots. Working people in the middle are proud of their discipline and resent the spongers they perceive as being rewarded for having none. They don’t romanticize welfare recipients as being hapless victims of circumstance because they see them at the grocery store every week. …Bill Clinton understood this kind of thinking, which is why he signed welfare reform in 1996, when he carried such states as West Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri and Louisiana. No Democratic presidential candidate since has won any of those states, and they’re no longer even trying.
Bill famously advised his wife’s campaign to do more to reach out to the WWC, but in what will surely be recalled as one of the defining moments of hubris on Team Hillary, campaign manager Robby Mook replied, “the data run counter to your anecdotes.”
There is certainly no sense that Democrats grasp this.
The number one British single today in 1959:
The number one album today in 1971 was Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s “4 Way Street”:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 