Today in 1961, this was the first country song to sell more than $1 million:
The number one single today in 1962:
The number one single today in 1970 (which sounded like it had been recorded using 1770 technology):
The number one album today in 1975 was “Chicago IX,” which was actually “Chicago’s Greatest Hits”:
The UW–Madison Daily Communist — I mean, Daily Cardinal — reports:
Republican congressman Sean Duffy is facing criticism for describing Madison as a “communist community” when he attacked the ongoing presidential recount in Wisconsin Wednesday.
In a Fox News interview, Duffy, who represents northwestern Wisconsin, criticized Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s request for a recount of the state’s general election race.
“It’s a sad state of affairs for these Democrats who don’t believe in democracy and freedom and free elections,” Duffy said.
Duffy alleged that election officials in Dane County were stalling in order to miss the Dec. 13 deadline for certifying the vote, even though the county is on track to complete the recount on time.
Duffy’s comments drew a rebuke from numerous Wisconsin politicians.
On Wednesday, U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., called for an apology from Duffy. Pocan represents Wisconsin’s second congressional district, including Dane County.
“His insinuation that my constituents are somehow un-American for exercising their political views is extremely alarming,” Pocan said in a release.
Madison Mayor Paul Soglin also voiced his disapproval over Duffy’s comments, initially calling him a “moron.”
“I apologize to Congressman Duffy for referring to him as a moron. I should have said he is a liar and a charlatan,” Soglin said Thursday.
Duffy defended himself on Twitter, tweeting “The PC crowd is humorless. For those offended by my ‘communist’ comment, I’ll send a therapy dog to your ‘safe place’ of choice in Madison,” and questioned whether Pocan would “accept the results of the election and denounce the frivolous recount.”
In response, Pocan tweeted “Humorless is better than being senseless about Dane County providing 73% of new jobs in WI. Perhaps a $175K salary distorts your views.”
Interesting comment from Pocan, given that his salary is the same as Duffy’s.
I also fail to understand why Comrade Pocan believes economic growth is a good thing, given that Pocan and his ilk believe the only purpose of making money is to give it to Pocan and his ilk.
I’m not sure why a UW–Stevens Point professor felt the need to chime in, but, Wisconsin Public Radio reports …
U.S. Rep. Sean Duffy’s comments that involved calling the Madison “communist” during a Fox News interview earlier this week are “simply irresponsible,” a UW-Stevens Point political science professor said.
“I mean, Duffy, besides being a member of Congress, is also part of the transition team and so, you just don’t say that,” professor Ed Miller said.
Duffy, who represents Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District, made the comment during an interview about the state’s presidential recount on Tucker Carlson Tonight. …
Duffy went on to say that people working for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton are taking as much time as possible to contest ballots and “slow-walking” so that votes can’t get certified.
“If that doesn’t happen, to think of the state of Wisconsin who voted for Trump, the first time for a Republican since 1984, that our 10 electors would be disenfranchised for our state, is a sad state of affairs for these Democrats who don’t believe in Democracy and freedom and free elections,” Duffy also said. “They want to use politics to undermine the will of the voter.”
Miller said Duffy is essentially separating people by calling the Madison-area Communist. Miller added that Duffy’s comment is factually inaccurate, Dane County is not the only county hand counting the ballots.
“There’s a number of counties that are hand counting their ballots in Wisconsin,” Miller said. …
“His insinuation that my constituents are somehow un-American for exercising their political views is extremely alarming,” Pocan said in a statement. “At a time when our country stands divided, Congressman Duffy’s ‘Trumpizing’ of Wisconsin is the wrong direction for our state.”
Pocan also said he hopes the Wisconsin delegation will condemn Duffy’s comments.
Other responses to Duffy’s characterization of Wisconsin’s capitol included its mayor, Paul Soglin, who said, “For years I’ve been listening to morons like Representative Duffy, who are resentful of the fact that Madison is Wisconsin’s economic engine,” according to WSAU-TV.
The mayor released a statement Thursday addressing his earlier comments on Duffy.
“I apologize to Congressman Duffy for referring to him as a moron. I should have said he is a liar and a charlatan,” Soglin said.
And that’s a rich comment from Soglin given his being a buddy of the now-room-temperature Fidel Castro.
The Wisconsin State Journal unsurprisingly felt the need to chime in:
Have you no sense of decency, U.S. Rep. Sean Duffy?
Madison is not a “progressive, liberal, communist community,” as you claimed on Fox Newsthe other night.
We’re a progressive, liberal, capitalist community. And our strong free-market economy is creating more private-sector jobs than any other part of the state.
That’s why Madison Mayor Paul Soglin took such offense this week to your commie dig, though most people understood it to be hyperbole (as was the first sentence in this editorial). …
Wisconsin has long struggled with an urban-rural divide. And that unfortunate rift has grown worse in the wake of last month’s election. Rural voters in Wisconsin and elsewhere played a big role in handing the presidency to a bombastic Donald Trump, which shocked many city dwellers.
But the election is now over, and even the big-talking Republican president-elect has toned down his rhetoric.
Sort of.
We all should be on the same side in Wisconsin when it comes to helping each other succeed across regions of the state. When southern Wisconsin does well, that’s good for northern Wisconsin, and vice versa. The insults don’t help.
I don’t know that the State Journal’s last claim is really the case. Certain parts of this state are emptying out as people move east, to, among other places, Madison. What does Southwest Wisconsin, for instance, get when someone from there moves to Madison?
There’s also this bit of historical revisionism:
Soglin gave Cuban dictator Fidel Castro a symbolic key to Madison four decades ago. But the mayor also has worked in the financial industry and at Epic Systems, one of the state’s fastest growing private companies.
Epic Systems is in Verona, not Madison. Soglin and Madison’s intransigence is why Epic is in Verona, not Madison. And Soglin’s private sector experience comes as an attorney who was hired by people to try to navigate the regulatory morass he created in his previous term as mayor.
Is Madison Communist like Cuba or China? Not economically, though perhaps in its lockstep ideology where non-liberal thoughts are not allowed to be expressed, let alone become law. Clearly Duffy was using a pejorative to describe my hometown and the left-wing jerks who live in it, two of which took Duffy’s bait. (Apparently Soglin doesn’t have enough things to do.) And the over-the-top reaction is certainly revealing, isn’t it? It’s like communism is a bad thing or something.
George Mason University Prof. David Bernstein:
The presidential election was so close that many factors were “but-for” causes of Donald Trump’s victory. One that’s been mostly overlooked is Trump’s surprising success with religious voters. According to exit polls, Trump received 81 percent of the white evangelical Christian vote, and Hillary Clinton only 16 percent. Trump did significantly better than the overtly religious Mitt Romney and the overtly evangelical George W. Bush. He likely over-performed among other theologically conservative voters, such as traditionalist Catholics, as well. Not bad for a thrice-married adulterer of no discernible faith.
To what can we attribute Trump’s success? The most logical answer is that religious traditionalists felt that their religious liberty was under assault from liberals, and they therefore had to hold their noses and vote for Trump. As Sean Trende of RealClear Politics noted, since 2012:
Democrats and liberals have: booed the inclusion of God in their platform at the 2012 convention (this is disputed, but it is the perception); endorsed a regulation that would allow transgendered students to use the bathroom and locker room corresponding to their identity; attempted to force small businesses to cover drugs they believe induce abortions; attempted to force nuns to provide contraceptive coverage; forced Brendan Eich to step down as chief executive officer of Mozilla due to his opposition to marriage equality; fined a small Christian bakery over $140,000 for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding; vigorously opposed a law in Indiana that would provide protections against similar regulations – despite having overwhelmingly supported similar laws when they protected Native American religious rights – and then scoured the Indiana countryside trying to find a business that would be affected by the law before settling upon a small pizza place in the middle of nowhere and harassing the owners. In 2015, the United States solicitor general suggested that churches might lose their tax exempt status if they refused to perform same-sex marriages. In 2016, the Democratic nominee endorsed repealing the Hyde Amendment, thereby endorsing federal funding for elective abortions.
Megan McArdle of Bloomberg similarly pointed out, “Over the last few years, as controversies have erupted over the rights of cake bakers and pizza places to refuse to cater gay weddings, the rights of nuns to refuse to provide insurance that covers birth control, the rights of Catholic hospitals to refuse to perform abortions, and the rights of Christian schools to teach (and require students and teachers to practice) traditional Christian morality, some Christians have begun to feel that their communities are under existential threat.”
Let’s focus on one of these incidents, the time the solicitor general of the United States acknowledged that religious institutions that oppose as a matter of internal policy same-sex marriage may lose their tax exemptions. At oral argument in the Obergefell same-sex marriage case, there was the following colloquy:
Justice Samuel Alito: Well, in the Bob Jones case, the Court held that a college was not entitled to taxexempt status if it opposed interracial marriage or interracial dating. So would the same apply to a university or a college if it opposed same sex marriage?
Soliticitor General Verrilli: You know, I , I don’t think I can answer that question without knowing more specifics, but it’s certainly going to be an issue. I don’t deny that. I don’t deny that, Justice Alito. It is it is going to be an issue.
With the mainstream media busy celebrating the Supreme Court’s ultimate recognition of a right to same-sex marriage, this didn’t get that much attention in mainstream news outlets. But in the course of researching my book, “Lawless,” I noticed that Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr.’s answer was big news in both the conservative blogosphere and in publications catering to religiously traditionalist audiences. The idea that Regent University or Brigham Young University or the local Catholic university or the many hundreds of other religious schools — and potentially other religious organizations — could be put at a severe competitive disadvantage if they refused on theological grounds to extend the same recognition to same-sex couples as to opposite-sex couples struck many as a direct and serious assault on religious liberty.
In short, many religious Christians of a traditionalist bent believed that liberals not only reduce their deeply held beliefs to bigotry, but want to run them out of their jobs, close down their stores and undermine their institutions. When I first posted about this on Facebook, I wrote that I hope liberals really enjoyed running Brendan Eich out of his job and closing down the Sweet Cakes bakery, because it cost them the Supreme Court. I’ll add now that I hope Verrilli enjoyed putting the fear of government into the God-fearing because it cost his party the election.
UPDATE: As co-blogger Todd Zywicki wrote to me on Facebook, “When you find yourself in the Supreme Court adverse to the Little Sisters of the Poor you might consider whether maybe you have pushed a little too far.”
Imagine having tickets to this concert at the National Guard Armory in Amory, Miss., today in 1955: Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley:
Today in 1957, while Jerry Lee Lewis secretly married his 13-year-old second cousin (while he was still married — three taboos in one!), Al Priddy, a DJ on KEX in Portland, was fired for playing Presley’s version of “White Christmas,” on the ground that “it’s not in the spirit we associate with Christmas.”
The number one album today in 1961 was Elvis Presley’s “Blue Hawaii” …
… while the number one single was a request:
Today in 1968, filming began for the Rolling Stones movie “Rock and Roll Circus,” featuring, in addition to the group, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, The Who, Eric Clapton and Jethro Tull, plus clowns and acrobats.
The film was released in 1996. (That is not a typo.)
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.
Monday Morning Quarterback goes back to 1993, when …
In the first version of NFL free agency, a player only moved on to a new locale when the team that drafted him wanted nothing more to do with him; in that climate the Packers were getting the dregs of the dregs. In 1992 a man nicknamed “the Minister of Defense” led an antitrust lawsuit against the league that resulted in true free agency. That was great for players—after their rookie contract ended, they could now offer their services to any team in the league, choosing the town in which they wanted to play—but it sent a chill through the scouts and personnel men employed by the most successful NFL franchise of the league’s first seven decades. Thanks to free agency, the task of assembling a competitive roster in small-town Wisconsin was about to get significantly tougher.
“Among players, Green Bay was depicted as some Russian place where you go and no one ever hears from you,” says former NFL tight end Keith Jackson, a first-round draft pick of the Eagles in 1988 who would go on to play for the Dolphins and the Packers.
Then something unprecedented happened. Upon becoming an unrestricted free agent in 1993, a player who had been named to six consecutive All-Pro teams in Philadelphia made a shock decision that would change the course of a franchise and the tenor of a town.
“Before that decision guys would say, ‘If Green Bay drafts me, I don’t want to go.’ It was Siberia,” says Jackson. “But Reggie White saw something different about it.” …
Packers legend holds that it was coach Mike Holmgren who whispered the divine words into White’s ear to get him to choose the Packers, a team that had six winning seasons in the 25 years before 1993. After White had expressed that he would go with God in his decision, Holmgren called White and got an answering machine. “Reggie,” Holmgren said. “This is God. Come to Green Bay.”
In reality, the bulk of the recruiting legwork was done by Ray Rhodes, the 42-year-old African-American defensive coordinator who joined the team in 1992. “Everybody suspected he’d go to a big city for outside endorsements,” says [former defensive line coach Greg] Blache, who went on to serve as defensive coordinator in Chicago and Washington before retiring in 2009. “But Ray Rhodes did a phenomenal job of talking to and recruiting Reggie. I think it blew everybody’s mind that he would come to Green Bay. It set the tone. He was the premier guy, and it turned the tables to where guys didn’t just run to the big market.”
White’s decision to come to Green Bay, a city that was 95% white, with a TV market the size of Wichita’s, raised eyebrows across the league. Not long after he signed a record four-year, $17 million deal, White began calling on the network of pros to which he’d essentially provided free agency, looking for them to return the favor and give Green Bay a chance. The Packers had a young, promising quarterback in Brett Favre, and having made the playoffs that ’93 season for the first time in 10 years (they fell to the dynastic Cowboys in the divisional round) they seemed on the cusp of something big.
Players who joined the team in the ensuing seasons recall White’s gruff baritone voice and folksy manner of speaking during recruitment. “When I talked to Reggie,” says former NFL center Jamie Dukes, “he said in that Reggie voice, ‘Quit playing games and come win some football games.’ ”
After eight years in Atlanta, Dukes took a shot with the Packers in 1994. “There is no question, had Reggie not gone to Green Bay to make Green Bay cool, that wouldn’t have happened,” says Dukes, who retired in 1995 and went on to work as an analyst for NFL Network. “Prior to that, Green Bay wasn’t on the menu of places you wanted to go.”
Jackson, a former teammate of White’s in Philly, signed with the Packers in 1995 and was a Pro Bowl selection and Super Bowl champion the next season. He compared the perception of Green Bay to the Allegory of the Cave, Plato’s commentary on human ignorance. Jackson says the typical NFL player’s view of Green Bay pre-Reggie White was a shadow image that couldn’t have been further from the truth.
“Reggie saw all these positives about Green Bay that nobody really knew about,” Jackson says. “He saw it as an opportunity to go somewhere where the people are super fans. And when you lose a game, there’s nobody screaming at you saying you’re a bum. The media is reporting the facts and not trying to create a controversy. It was actually an oasis to play football, and you really concentrated on being a football player.”
Getting players to follow Reggie was easy enough, but the day-to-day of living in Green Bay for African-Americans who had grown accustomed to life in the league’s coastal and urban destinations was a new challenge. Defensive end Sean Jones had spent four seasons in Los Angeles after the Raiders drafted him in the second round in 1984, then played in Houston for six more seasons, before White helped bring him to Green Bay in 1994. Jones had been a part of a group of players around the league, organized by White, who regularly discussed ways to use their voices to promote racial equality in their communities. Jones arrived in Green Bay to discover that equality was not exactly an issue.
“The thing that people have to know is that just because there’s a lot of white people, that doesn’t make them racist,” Jones says. “It’s probably the least racist place I’ve ever been in my life.
“That said, they don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know how to cut a fade with a No. 2, and they don’t know how to make fried chicken and cornbread. Where’s the black history museum? Where’s Chinatown? They didn’t have any of that, but they embraced you and they wanted to win.”
To provide a taste of home and some semblance of normalcy for White’s wave of recruits, general manager Ron Wolf arranged for more regular visits from a Milwaukee barber. He also contracted a Milwaukee soul food eatery to cater a meal on Wednesdays at the team facility. The players pigged out on fried catfish and barbecue from Bungalow Restaurant and had enough time to work off the calories in advance of Friday weigh-ins.
Says Jackson: “I think management said, ‘We’ve got to figure out how to make sure that when they come here, they feel at home,’ because Green Bay didn’t present that by itself.”
Management could do the little things to make its black players more comfortable, but it couldn’t do much to replicate the metropolitan environment of an Atlanta or a Miami. Honestly, they didn’t want to. White fostered an increased sense of fellowship among religious teammates, serving as bible study leader and mentor to young players. He even served as a sort of marriage counselor for young couples.
By 1996 the roster had coalesced to the point where 50 out of 53 players could be found staging a takeover of a local bowling alley on Thursday nights. (The teetotalling White reluctantly approved a local hangout where beer was served. He drank only Diet Cokes.). But the true test of Green Bay’s transformation would come with the arrival of a player who seemed ready to challenge that sense of community.
Andre Rison had been a veteran of four clubs by the fall of 1996, most recently in Jacksonville, where he had requested his own release during the ’96 season after reportedly being late to meetings and confrontational with coaches. He also had a checkered relationship with Favre dating back to their time as teammates in Atlanta. (After Favre expressed relief that the Pack hadn’t signed Rison before the ’96 season, saying he was a “problem internally,” Rison responded, “Maybe a couple of years ago, I would have said he’s a hillbilly jealous of a black man making money. But now I’m at this age. No comment.”) Despite this, and despite a tempestuous off-field history that included a 1993 domestic violence and shooting incident, the Packers signed Rison, a four-time Pro Bowl receiver, after his Jacksonville release in November 1996, to plug holes left by Robert Brooks’ season-ending knee injury and Antonio Freeman’s broken arm.
“Dre was about winning,” Jones says, “but he was also about the swag, the pomp and circumstance. It took him a minute to embrace the culture and really believe. You have to buy into the pattern and the routine, and he did that. The guy ended up being one of the best teammates.”
A quick convert in Green Bay’s new oasis, Rison lasted just a half-season, but in Super Bowl XXXI he caught two passes for 77 yards, including a 54-yard touchdown from Favre to open the scoring. White’s influence had sent one fish out of water swimming upstream and would usher an era of prosperity that saved one NFL franchise from the potential crush of a changing economic landscape.
“You ask anybody that played there long enough and they will tell you Green Bay was the best thing that happened to their careers,” Jackson says. “But nobody really wanted to see until Reggie said ‘God sent me to Green Bay.’ ”
Remember the last Packer game at Milwaukee County Stadium, and how it ended?
The game was announced by Fox Sports’ Joe Buck, who had an interesting moment at the start:
That is why I always make sure I visit the men’s room before the broadcast. Of course, if you drink too much coffee (as I did before the first state basketball game I announced), you have to run to the first-floor bathroom in the ancient UW Fieldhouse from your broadcast position at the front of the upper deck, leaving the halftime to your broadcast partner.
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:
Marc A. Thiessen expounds on a subject we discussed on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin (Mid)Week in (Mid)Review yesterday:
Donald Trump’s phone call with the president of Taiwan wasn’t a blunder by an inexperienced president-elect unschooled in the niceties of cross-straits diplomacy.
It was a deliberate move — and a brilliant one at that.
The phone call with President Tsai Ing-wen was reportedly carefully planned, and Trump was fully briefed before the call, according to The Post. It’s not that Trump was unfamiliar with the “Three Communiques” or unaware of the fiction that there is “One China.” Trump knew precisely what he was doing in taking the call. He was serving notice on Beijing that it is dealing with a different kind of president — an outsider who will not be encumbered by the same Lilliputian diplomatic threads that tied down previous administrations. The message, as John Bolton correctly put it, was that “the president of the United States [will] talk to whomever he wants if he thinks it’s in the interest of the United States, and nobody in Beijing gets to dictate who we talk to.”
Amen to that.
And if that message was lost on Beijing, Trump underscored it on Sunday, tweeting: “Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the U.S. doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don’t think so!” He does not need Beijing’s permission to speak to anyone. No more kowtowing in a Trump administration.
Trump promised during the campaign that he would take a tougher stand with China, and supporting Taiwan has always been part of his get-tough approach to Beijing. As far back as 2011, Trump tweeted: “Why is @BarackObama delaying the sale of F-16 aircraft to Taiwan? Wrong message to send to China. #TimeToGetTough.” Indeed, the very idea that Trump could not speak to Taiwan’s president because it would anger Beijing is precisely the kind of weak-kneed subservience that Trump promised to eliminate as president.
Trump’s call with the Taiwanese president sent a message not only to Beijing, but also to the striped-pants foreign-policy establishment in Washington. It is telling how so many in that establishment immediately assumed Trump had committed an unintended gaffe. “Bottomless pig-ignorance” is how one liberal foreign-policy commentator described Trump’s decision to speak with Tsai. Trump just shocked the world by winning the presidential election, yet they still underestimate him. The irony is that the hyperventilation in Washington has far outpaced the measured response from Beijing. When American foreign-policy elites are more upset than China, perhaps it’s time for some introspection.
The hypocrisy is rank. When President Obama broke with decades of U.S. policy and extended diplomatic recognition to a murderous dictatorship in Cuba, the foreign-policy establishment swooned. Democrats on Capitol Hill praised Obama for taking action that was “long overdue.” Former President Jimmy Carter raved about how Obama had “shown such wisdom,” while the New York Times gushed that Obama was acting “courageously” and “ushering in a transformational era for millions of Cubans who have suffered as a result of more than 50 years of hostility between the two nations.”
But when Trump broke with decades of U.S. diplomatic practice and had a phone call with the democratically elected leader of Taiwan, he was declared a buffoon. Well, if they didn’t like that phone call, his critics may hate what could come next even more. Trump now has an opportunity to do with Taiwan what Obama did with Cuba — normalize relations.
There are a number of steps the Trump administration can take to strengthen our military, economic and diplomatic ties with Taiwan. My American Enterprise Institute colleague Derek Scissors has suggested that Trump could negotiate a new free-trade agreement with Taiwan. “Taiwan’s tiny population means there is no jobs threat,” Scissors says, but Taiwan is also the United States’ ninth-largest trading partner. A free-trade agreement would be economically beneficial to both sides and would send a message to friend and foe alike in Asia that, despite Trump’s planned withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the United States is not withdrawing from the region.
On the military front, Trump could begin sending general officers to Taipei once again to coordinate with their Taiwanese counterparts and hold joint military exercises. On the diplomatic front, Bolton says the new administration could start “receiving Taiwanese diplomats officially at the State Department; upgrading the status of U.S. representation in Taipei from a private ‘institute’ to an official diplomatic mission; inviting Taiwan’s president to travel officially to America; allowing the most senior U.S. officials to visit Taiwan to transact government business; and ultimately restoring full diplomatic recognition.”
Beijing would be wise not to overreact to any overtures Trump makes to Taiwan. When China tested President George W. Bush in his first months in office by scrambling fighters and forcing a U.S. EP-3 aircraft to land on the Chinese island of Hainan, its actions backfired. After the incident, Bush approved a $30 billion arms package for Taiwan, announced that Taiwan would be treated as a major non-NATO ally and declared that the United States would do “whatever it took” to defend Taiwan. His actions not only strengthened U.S. ties with Taiwan but also set the stage for good relations with Beijing throughout his presidency.
China does not want to make the same mistake and overplay its hand with Trump. Trump’s call with Taiwan’s president was a smart, calculated move designed to send a clear message: The days of pushing the United States around are over.
That may horrify official Washington, but it’s the right message to send.
What a novel concept it is to reward countries that respect Western values (democracy and freedom, to name two) and not those that don’t (Iran and Cuba, to name two examples from the current administration).
I didn’t get to mention one new Chinese innovation that should horrify Americans, reported by the Wall Street Journal:
Hangzhou’s local government is piloting a “social credit” system the Communist Party has said it wants to roll out nationwide by 2020, a digital reboot of the methods of social control the regime uses to avert threats to its legitimacy.
More than three dozen local governments across China are beginning to compile digital records of social and financial behavior to rate creditworthiness. A person can incur black marks for infractions such as fare cheating, jaywalking and violating family-planning rules. The effort echoes the dang’an, a system of dossiers the Communist party keeps on urban workers’ behavior.
In time, Beijing expects to draw on bigger, combined data pools, including a person’s internet activity, according to interviews with some architects of the system and a review of government documents. Algorithms would use a range of data to calculate a citizen’s rating, which would then be used to determine all manner of activities, such as who gets loans, or faster treatment at government offices or access to luxury hotels.
The endeavor reinforces President Xi Jinping’s campaign to tighten his grip on the country and dictate morality at a time of economic uncertainty that threatens to undermine the party. Mr. Xi in October called for innovation in “social governance” that would “heighten the capacity to forecast and prevent all manner of risks.”
The national social-credit system’s aim, according to a slogan repeated in planning documents, is to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 