Today in 1925, RCA took over the 25-station AT&T network plus WEAF radio in New York, making today the birthday of the original NBC radio network:
Today in 1965, the Rolling Stones made their U.S. TV debut on ABC’s “Hullabaloo”:
Today in 1966, the Doors agreed to release “Break on Through” as their first single, removing the word “high” to get radio airplay:
The number one single today in 1980:
US News reports:
On Thursday, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, held a conference call with devastated staffers that put the rosiest possible frame on a calamitous picture.
The message to the dozens of mostly young, sleep-deprived and shell-shocked aides: We did everything we could have. We wouldn’t have changed a thing. You should still be proud.Inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters, which sits half a mile south of the U.S. Capitol, eyes rolled and heads shook in frustration and disbelief.
Clinton’s loss at the hands of Donald Trump amounted to the most surprising outcome in the history of modern electoral politics. Of course things could’ve been done differently. And ignoring that fact wasn’t going to make the searing defeat any easier.
“We are pissed at them and state parties are pissed at them because they lost due to arrogance,” a top DNC staffer tells U.S. News, sharing the candid sentiment suffusing the high levels of the committee in exchange for anonymity.
It’s no surprise that the hierarchy of the Clinton campaign leadership was insular and self-assured. But DNC staffers say the team’s presumptuous, know-it-all attitude caused it to ignore early warning signs of electoral trouble inside the states, and demoralized DNC staff who felt largely marginalized or altogether neglected for most of the campaign.
There is always some level of tension between the sprawling bureaucracy of the party committee and the nominee’s campaign apparatus. But in the wake of Clinton’s loss, when intraparty finger-pointing is inevitable, some DNC staffers describe the relationship between the two entities as uniquely ineffectual, even after the displacement of unpopular chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. And they attribute it to one fundamental reason: Clinton’s campaign leaders always thought they knew best. The DNC was to do what it was told: Essentially, be seen and not heard.
On election night, DNC number crunchers’ first saw signs of trouble when tallies from Virginia began to roll in. Here was a state the Clinton camp expected to carry by nearly 10 points, and the early returns showed that wasn’t going to happen. She won it by 5, but the slimmer-than-expected margin made DNC staffers nervous, especially because they had warned the Clinton camp not to pull staff and resources from there. The campaign did anyway, slashing its advertising investment in August. Sure, they survived inside the commonwealth, but inside the DNC, the late call of Virginia for Clinton was a distressing warning of things to come.
If their projected margin in Virginia was cut in half, where else was their forecast wrong?
Florida was always expected to be a slog. But a shiver went down the DNC’s collective spine when a call came in from Scott Arceneaux, executive director of the Florida Democratic Party, saying, “We’ve got a problem.”
The Clinton campaign was exceeding President Barack Obama’s margins in Democratic counties near Miami. But everything north and west of that showed signs of trouble. Trump’s margins outside South Florida shocked Democrats, in that he outperformed 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney.
“It turns out this was not a turnout problem for Clinton,” one Democratic strategist says. “This was a turnout dream for Trump.”
Taking deep breaths at the DNC, staffers attempted to calm themselves by noting Clinton didn’t have to have Florida, while Trump did. Still, the night was moving in the wrong direction.
The staggering moment top DNC staff knew it was over for Clinton was not due to a presidential call, but a down-ballot contest. It was 11:22 p.m. Eastern time when The Associated Press projected the Wisconsin Senate race, a seat deemed a safe pickup for Democrats for most of the year.
Instead, first-term incumbent Ron Johnson had not only survived, he won with a more than 3-point margin over Democratic challenger Russ Feingold.
“That’s the moment we knew it was over,” the DNC source says.
Kory Kozloski, executive director of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, had phoned DNC Chief Operating Officer Lindsey Reynolds to assure her, “Don’t worry, we’ll be your firewall.”
But when Feingold fell, Reynolds became exasperated, blurting out an expletive, according to a source.
“Really, f—–? Where’s our firewall now?” she said.
Clinton’s high command – led by Podesta, campaign manager Robby Mook and director of state campaigns Marlon Marshall – knew it was over before midnight Tuesday, even though Wisconsin wasn’t called for Trump by The Associated Press until 2:30 a.m. Eastern time and Clinton wouldn’t concede until shortly thereafter.
They released astounded staff from their positions at campaign headquarters in Brooklyn to head over to the Javits Convention Center at 11:55 p.m. In a sense, they were sending them to the mourning site with the rest of Clinton’s hard-core supporters.
Back at DNC headquarters, staffers were equally as depressed, but they also became angry, reeling through times they were not valued or downright insulted.
There was the time a state party executive director asked to speak directly to Marshall, and a reply came back from a junior staffer that the state party member wasn’t senior enough to merit that level of interaction.
There were the numerous pleas from state party leaders to get Clinton to specific states – like Michigan – earlier, and to devote more resources to state party operations, which provide the oil and expertise to get out the vote.
“But it was all about analytics with them,” the DNC source says. “They were too reliant on analytics and not enough on instinct and human intel from the ground.”
And there were the multiple factions of power swirling around Clinton: from Huma Abedin, her longtime aide, to Mook and Marshall, whom sources say lost some of Clinton’s trust through the grueling primary with Sen. Bernie Sanders, to older Clinton hands like Minyon Moore and Charlie Baker.
Adam Parkhomenko, the DNC’s national field director and a co-founder of the Ready for Hillary super PAC, served as a helpful intermediary between these different groups of aides and the DNC. But on many days, even near the end of the campaign, it was difficult to get a read on who held the real power with the candidate.
By early next year, there will be an entirely new set of Democratic National Committee leaders with many new staff. Former DNC chairman Howard Dean, Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm have emerged as early prospects for the job to succeed Donna Brazile, who is set to step down from her interim role in early 2017.
It’s a chance at a fresh start, and ironically, the loss of the presidency will give the entity new life and relevance.
First, the DNC is tasked with mining the reams of data from the states they lost and drawing some difficult conclusions about the best path forward.
In the meantime, Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn is seeking those answers as well, and will want to see the DNC’s data.
But the DNC staffer says his boss has told him, “With the way they treated us, don’t feel like you need to respond to anything Brooklyn wants quickly.”
Will Rahn of CBS News:
The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.
This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’s be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.
So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the people who cover it. Trump knew what he was doingwhen he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate us, and have for some time.
And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.
It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from “heroin country” that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it’s our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. What can we do to get these people to stop worshiping their false god and accept our gospel?
We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists, at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste. We believe we not only have access to the indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs divined from an advanced understanding of justice.
You’d think that Trump’s victory – the one we all discounted too far in advance – would lead to a certain newfound humility in the political press. But of course that’s not how it works. To us, speaking broadly, our diagnosis was still basically correct. The demons were just stronger than we realized.
This is all a “whitelash,” you see. Trump voters are racist and sexist, so there must be more racists and sexists than we realized. Tuesday night’s outcome was not a logic-driven rejection of a deeply flawed candidate named Clinton; no, it was a primal scream against fairness, equality, and progress. Let the new tantrums commence!
That’s the fantasy, the idea that if we mock them enough, call them racist enough, they’ll eventually shut up and get in line. It’s similar to how media Twitter works, a system where people who dissent from the proper framing of a story are attacked by mobs of smugly incredulous pundits. Journalists exist primarily in a world where people can get shouted down and disappear, which informs our attitudes toward all disagreement.
Journalists increasingly don’t even believe in the possibility of reasoned disagreement, and as such ascribe cynical motives to those who think about things a different way. We see this in the ongoing veneration of “facts,” the ones peddled by explainer websites and data journalists who believe themselves to be curiously post-ideological.
That the explainers and data journalists so frequently get things hilariously wrong never invites the soul-searching you’d think it would. Instead, it all just somehow leads us to more smugness, more meanness, more certainty from the reporters and pundits. Faced with defeat, we retreat further into our bubble, assumptions left unchecked. No, it’s the voters who are wrong.
As a direct result, we get it wrong with greater frequency. Out on the road, we forget to ask the right questions. We can’t even imagine the right question. We go into assignments too certain that what we find will serve to justify our biases. The public’s estimation of the press declines even further — fewer than one-in-three Americans trust the press, per Gallup — which starts the cycle anew.
There’s a place for opinionated journalism; in fact, it’s vital. But our causal, profession-wide smugness and protestations of superiority are making us unable to do it well.
Our theme now should be humility. We must become more impartial, not less so. We have to abandon our easy culture of tantrums and recrimination. We have to stop writing these know-it-all, 140-character sermons on social media and admit that, as a class, journalists have a shamefully limited understanding of the country we cover.
What’s worse, we don’t make much of an effort to really understand, and with too few exceptions, treat the economic grievances of Middle America like they’re some sort of punchline. Sometimes quite literally so, such as when reporters tweet out a photo of racist-looking Trump supporters and jokingly suggest that they must be upset about free trade or low wages.
We have to fix this, and the broken reasoning behind it. There’s a fleeting fun to gang-ups and groupthink. But it’s not worth what we are losing in the process.
Such as: Their jobs.
Fordham University Prof. Charles Camosy:
The most important divide in this election was not between whites and non-whites. It was between those who are often referred to as “educated” voters and those who are described as “working class” voters.
The reality is that six in 10 Americans do not have a college degree, and they elected Donald Trump. College-educated people didn’t just fail to see this coming — they have struggled to display even a rudimentary understanding of the worldviews of those who voted for Trump. This is an indictment of the monolithic, insulated political culture in the vast majority our colleges and universities.
As a college professor, I know that there are many ways in which college graduates simply know more about the world than those who do not have such degrees. This is especially true — with some exceptions, of course — when it comes to “hard facts” learned in science, history and sociology courses.But I also know that that those with college degrees — again, with some significant exceptions — don’t necessarily know philosophy or theology. And they have especially paltry knowledge about the foundational role that different philosophical or theological claims play in public thought compared with what is common to college campuses. In my experience, many professors and college students don’t even realize that their views on political issues rely on a particular philosophical or theological stance.
Higher education in the United States, after all, is woefully monolithic in its range of worldviews. In 2014, some 60 percent of college professors identified as either “liberal” or “far-left,” an increase from 42 percent identifying as such in 1990. And while liberal college professors outnumber conservatives 5-to-1, conservatives are considerably more common within the general public. The world of academia is, therefore, different in terms of political temperature than the rest of society, and what is common knowledge and conventional wisdom among America’s campus dwellers can’t be taken for granted outside the campus gates.
While some of the political differences between educated and working-class voters is based on a dispute over hard facts, the much broader and more foundational disagreements are about norms and values. They turn on first principles grounded in the very different intuitions and stories which animate very different political cultures. Such disagreements cannot be explained by the fact that college-educated voters know some facts which non-college educated voters do not. They are about something far more fundamental.Think about the sets of issues that are often at the core of the identity of the working-class folks who elected Trump: religion, personal liberty’s relationship with government, gender, marriage, sexuality, prenatal life and gun rights. Intuition and stories guide most working-class communities on these issues. With some exceptions, those professorial sorts who form the cultures of our colleges and universities have very different intuition and stories. And the result of this divide has been to produce an educated class with an isolated, insular political culture.
Religion in most secular institutions, for instance, is at best thought of as an important sociological phenomenon to understand — but is very often criticized as an inherently violent, backward force in our culture, akin to belief in fairies and dragons. Professors are less religious than the population as a whole. Most campus cultures have strictly (if not formally) enforced dogmatic views about the nature of gender, sexual orientation, a woman’s right to choose abortion, guns and the role of the state as primary agent of social change. If anyone disagrees with these dogmatic positions they risk being marginalized as ignorant, bigoted, fanatical or some other dismissive label.Sometimes the college-educated find themselves so unable to understand a particular working-class point of view that they will respond to those perspectives with shocking condescension. Recall that President Obama, in the midst of the 2012 election cycle, suggested that job losses were the reason working-class voters were bitterly clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” The religious themselves, meanwhile, likely do not chalk their faith up to unhappy economic prospects, and they probably find it hard to connect with politicians who seem to assume such.
Thus today’s college graduates are formed by a campus culture that leaves them unable to understand people with unfamiliar or heterodox views on guns, abortion, religion, marriage, gender and privilege. And that same culture leads such educated people to either label those with whom they disagree as bad people or reduce their stated views on these issues as actually being about something else, as in Obama’s case. Most college grads in this culture are simply never forced to engage with or seriously consider professors or texts which could provide a genuine, compelling alternative view.
For decades now, U.S. colleges and universities have quite rightly been trying to become more diverse when it comes to race and gender. But this election highlights the fact that our institutions of higher education should use similar methods to cultivate philosophical, theological and political diversity.These institutions should consider using quotas in hiring that help faculties and administrations more accurately reflect the wide range of norms and values present in the American people. There should be systemwide attempts to have texts assigned in classes written by people from intellectually underrepresented groups. There should be concerted efforts to protect political minorities from discrimination and marginalization, even if their views are unpopular or uncomfortable to consider.
The goal of such changes would not be to convince students that their political approaches are either correct or incorrect. The goal would instead be educational: to identify and understand the norms, values, first principles, intuitions and stories which have been traditionally underrepresented in higher education. This would better equip college graduates to engage with the world as it is, including with their fellow citizens.
The alternative, a reduction of all disagreement to racism, bigotry and ignorance — in addition to being wrong about its primary source — will simply make the disagreement far more personal, entrenched and vitriolic. And it won’t make liberal values more persuasive to the less educated, as Trump victory demonstrates.
It is time to do the hard work of forging the kind of understanding that moves beyond mere dismissal to actual argument. Today’s election results indicate that our colleges and universities are places where this hard work is particularly necessary.
Camosy explains not merely last week’s post-election protests, but why there has been less voter complaint than you might think about UW System cuts this decade. I can tell you from experience that UW System people really do not grasp that voters might not like their values getting not only short shrift, but derided in the UW System classrooms those voters’ tax dollars built by UW System faculty paid for by those tax dollars.
Meanwhile, Mathew Ingram looks at a different group:
If you’re looking for a word to describe the feeling in the nation’s newsrooms after a Donald Trump win, “shell-shocked” would probably be a good one. How is this possible when every poll and prediction site said that Hillary Clinton would win? How could everyone have gotten it so wrong?
The inescapable fact is that most of the mainstream media got it wrong because they simply couldn’t believe that Americans would elect someone like Donald Trump. Denial can be a powerful drug.
In part, that’s because much of the East Coast-based media establishment is arguably out of touch with the largely rural population that voted for Trump, the disenfranchised voters who looked past his cheesy exterior and his penchant for half-truths and heard a message of hope, however twisted.
As the editor of Cracked put it in a very perceptive essay: “If you don’t live in one of these small towns, you can’t understand the hopelessness. The vast majority of possible careers involve moving to the city, and around every city is now a hundred-foot wall called ‘Cost of Living.’”
But there’s more to it than just that. As I tried to explain in a previous post about Trump’s rise, he took advantage of a media landscape that has never been more broken, more fragmented and more open to misinformation, disinformation, and even outright hoaxes and lies.
In the end, all of the fact-checking, all the digging done by people like David Farenthold of the Washington Post, and all of the editorials and endorsements were like spitting into the wind.
One of the downsides of the fractured media landscape is that it’s easier than ever to sit in an echo chamber or filter bubble and preach to the converted. Newspaper readers believe what they want to believe, and so do those on Facebook—and never the twain shall meet.
The number one single today in 1960:
The number one British single today in 1981:
The number one British album today in 1981 was “Queen Greatest Hits”:
The number one album today in 1965 received no known radio airplay:
The number one British single today in 1968 was based on, but didn’t directly come from, a movie:
Today in 1968, Britain’s W.T. Smiths refused to carry the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Electric Ladyland” …
… with its original album cover …
… although a different cover was OK:
The number one single today in 1983:
Stephen Colbert said this Tuesday night:
Army veteran Perfecto Sanchez:
I am fortunate to have been born in America and I am proud to have had the opportunity to serve my country in a time of war. In my opinion, there was no greater privilege than to lead some of our nations bravest and brightest Soldiers in combat. I am grateful to have served during a time in our nations history where men and women of the Armed Services were revered and respected. I am grateful for my loving family that supported me unconditionally. I am grateful for the experience. I am grateful for my friends. I am grateful for the random handshakes; the occasional free beer. I am grateful to be alive and I am forever grateful for my brothers that gave the ultimate sacrifice. I am grateful for a sound mind and body.
Besides the cliché question: ‘Have you ever killed anyone?’ (which from my experience has come from the most random of acquaintances) the one question I I’ve had the hardest time answering, which fittingly usually comes from the dearest of friends, is “how is it that you are normal?”
The first question I want to ask back is “What the hell is normal in this world and why would anyone want to be it?” But beyond that, back to the essence of the question: I am expected to assimilate to this perceived “normality” during my transition back into society, or, as the military would say, my ‘reintegration’ into the civilian world. Of the many theories I may have to answer the question at hand (and I must acknowledge the infinite combination of fortunate circumstances that have contributed to my version of “normal”) there is one theory that rises to the top.
As routine as brushing my teeth and as necessary as drinking water, for me, so was the act of maintaining a journal while I was in combat. I had always kept some version of a journal but never before as an act of survival. Regardless of how tired I was after a patrol or mission, regardless of my state of mind, I wrote in that thing. Doing so was just as important as maintaining equipment for reliability, exercising to maintain performance, or showering to maintain hygiene. I wrote to maintain mental sanity and sharpness, the most important and often over-looked form of personal maintenance in my opinion.
That book held every truth, feeling, fear, and reservation. My 1st patrol. The first time I met an Iraqi kid. The first time I was shot at. My 1st IED. The 1st time I pulled the trigger. The smell of fresh Iraqi bread. My ninth IED. I will never forget the first time one of my brothers died in my arms. The journal captured everything. It held the ugliness and beauty of war. Stories of a city, the beginning of the 2006 surge, the coming of age of young 2nd Lieutenant. As a 22 year-old Platoon Leader in charge of 34 men in high intensity combat in the most dangerous city in the world, it’s safe to say there was a lot that I needed to get out of my head.
Fast forward to two years ago. I was a few years removed from my active duty and well into my civilian reintegration. Everything was going along about as well as it could be. But then one night, I picked up that journal and did something unexpected.
I remember holding it in my hands. I remember reminiscing on the contents inside. And most importantly I remember not knowing what to do with all of the memories, emotions, and overwhelming content it held. After a moment of consideration, I decided to burn it. Why is a question that I never really tried to articulate until now. The truth is that it wasn’t an act of shame or regret, but one of freedom. My journal symbolized the functional acts of a combat Platoon leader and the emotional vomit of a confused kid. I would peruse it at times and it would bring me back to the long, hot, dusty patrols in Ramadi, Iraq. The transactional details of firefights, the emotions of losing friends, and beautiful excerpts of awe and respect of the men I served with. It was a finite story of specific time and space. And the truth I felt constrained by the contents because what the journal didn’t tell was the story of the lessons learned and memories made during the eight years following. For example, one of the lessons I learned in Iraq is that sometimes you get blown up. I learned you can sit there and cry about it, you can cower behind a rock, you can ask yourself the question, “what the fuck am I doing here?” What I learned is that sometimes bombs go off, but what matters most is what you do after. My journal was a symbol of bombs that went off and the years elapsed was the symbol of what you do after.
The act of burning my journal wasn’t an escape from the past, but a decision to enjoy and pursue the freedom to be found in the present. The pages may be gone but the memories never will be. I’m ok with that because it’s the memories that matter. It’s the actions that I take now, and not just those of the past, that define me. I am grateful for my memories. War didn’t teach me to hate, it taught me how to love and how to be. The pages were a symbol of a war and a man I once was and now the memories that I’ve kept have been turned into fuel for the man that I am.
I can now sum it all up in a simple sentence: It’s easy to die for something you believe in but it’s hard to live everyday of your life for that same belief.
I learned that I didn’t want to have just to have ‘survived’ the war but to be better because of it. For the Soldiers that I served with and the Soldiers that I lost, I live every single day for them and most importantly for myself. I live to be the best person I can be. When people ask me ‘”how are you normal?” I think back to that journal and how it helped me capture for a moment in time all the memories experienced, lessons learned, and people I’d met. I relish how fortunate and grateful I am for the role it played.
So now, with a little bit of distance between the end of one journal and the beginning of another, I smile. Both then and now, one of the things I am most grateful for is not being normal. And there is a very good chance if you’re reading this, you aren’t normal either, and to that I say “cheers.”
Besides the end of the War to End All Wars (which didn’t end all wars but led directly to the next war) and the day Americans remember and honor those whose service and sacrifice allow me to freely write this and you to freely read this, what else happened Nov. 11?
Today in 1954, Bill Haley got his first top 10 single, “Shake Rattle and Roll,” originally a Joe Turner song. Haley had changed the name of his band, the cowboy-motif Saddlemen, to His Comets.
Imagine what the Transportation Security Administration would have done with this: Today in 1969, the FBI arrested Jim Morrison for drunk and disorderly conduct on an airplane. Morrison and actor Tom Baker had been drinking and harassing stewardesses on a flight to Phoenix. Morrison and Baker spent a night in jail and were released on $2,500 bail.
Today in 1972, an era when pretty much everything would go in rock music, listeners got to hear the first example of what might be called “yodel rock”:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 