And apparently we hate it. How else does one explain why so many millennials seem to long to live in government-run economies, or worse?
A Gallup poll in June 2015 found that almost 70% of U.S. millennials would be willing to vote for a socialist presidential candidate. Even more shocking, a poll conducted before this year’s presidential election by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that barely half of millennials believe “Communism was or is a problem.”
The same poll found that a quarter of millennials hold favorable opinions of Vladimir Lenin, while 18% think favorably of Mao Zedong. More than 10% even have positive feelings about Joseph Stalin. Never mind that these men were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions and the impoverishment of hundreds of millions.
These polling numbers are frightening—especially when the Communist-ruled and socialist nations in the world today, from North Korea and Cuba to Venezuela, show so clearly how such systems invariably lead to repression and declining standards of living for their populations.
Part of the problem is that many millennials see these ideologies as represented by Scandinavian countries, an ignorant view fed them by candidate Bernie Sanders, among others. As Harvard and Stanford visiting professor Daniel Schatz (a Swede) wrote in Forbes in February, “Sweden began to reverse its economic model during the 1990s” through privatization and deregulation. Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen was even more unequivocal in a speech earlier this year: “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”
Scandinavian economies are in some ways freer than those in the U.S. The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom gives these countries high marks for limited regulatory burdens and for corporate tax rates lower than in the U.S. In many ways it’s easier to start a successful business and take part in economic life in a Scandinavian country than it is in America.
Millennials who wish to see a socialist or Communist Party-ruled nation in action should look to Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. Venezuela’s current troubles make daily headlines. The country is crippled by inflation and shortages of basic goods, and the government takes more control over the economy each day. No wonder even millennials want to get out. A poll conducted by the Venezuelan market analysis firm DatinCorp in September found that 69% of youths there wanted to emigrate.
As Venezuelan blogger Maria Antonia Marturet recently observed, the country’s millennials are fleeing because, “They wanted to live in a place where they could go out at night without being kidnapped, where they could eat whatever they wanted without queuing, and where they could eventually have babies without the stress of not finding a hospital where to give birth.”
At least Venezuelan millennials still feel somewhat able to speak up. Communist Cuba arrests political dissidents. In North Korea, speaking against a regime that imposes starvation on its population can mean joining what the United Nations estimates are as many as 120,000 political prisoners kept in prison camps.
Young people living in Communist and socialist countries today don’t deserve U.S. millennials’ envy, but their concern and pity. There was nothing to admire about the Soviet Union, and there is even less to admire in countries that seek to perpetuate its failed philosophy at the expense of liberty and prosperity.
Today in 1963, the London Times’ music critics named John Lennon and Paul McCartney Outstanding Composers of 1963. Two days later, Sunday Times music critic Richard Buckle named Lennon and McCartney “the greatest composers since Beethoven.”
The number one album today in 1969 was “Led Zeppelin II” …
… the same day that the number one single was this group’s last:
The first harbinger that the Vikings’ trip to Green Bay might not go well came Friday afternoon, when their plane slid off the runway at Appleton International Airport.
And then things went downhill from there. After a 5–0 start, the Vikings’ 38–25 Christmas Eve loss to the Packers ended the Vikings’ chance of making the playoffs in a season where the Vikings traded a first-round draft choice to get quarterback Sam Bradford.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Jim Souhan reports on a surprising story that came out after the game:
After getting stuck on the team plane for hours on the runway in Appleton on Friday, the Vikings played on Saturday as if they had already pulled the emergency exit on the season and leaped into the void.
For the second time in six days, Mike Zimmer’s defense was filleted by a top quarterback in a meaningful game. The Packers and Aaron Rodgers beat the Vikings, 38-25 shortly after the Colts and Andrew Luck beat them 34-6.
For the first time, Rodgers dismantled a Vikings defense coached by Zimmer, and for the first time Zimmer found himself publicly at odds with players he values.
In previous games against the Packers, Vikings cornerbacks have played a side of the field rather than following Packers receiver Jordy Nelson. Zimmer said Saturday that he wanted cornerback Xavier Rhodes to follow Nelson.
That’s not what happened in the first half. On the Packers’ first possession, Rhodes, Terence Newman and Captain Munnerlyn all covered Nelson, who finished the first half with seven catches on seven targets for 145 yards and two touchdowns.
In the second half, Rhodes covered Nelson on both sides of the field. Nelson caught two more passes for nine more yards.
“Well, that’s what he was supposed to do all game,” Zimmer said. “Someone decided that they wouldn’t do that.”
When did Zimmer notice that the players weren’t following the plan? “In the first half when Terence Newman came over and said something to me like ‘I can cover this guy, let me have him,’ ” Zimmer said. “I said, ‘Do what you’re supposed to do.’ ”
Asked about Zimmer’s quotes, Rhodes said: “To be honest, I really don’t want to answer that. That’s something. … That’s … nah, never mind. I will not answer that question.”
Rhodes reconsidered, saying: “Matter of fact, forget it. We felt as a team and as players we came together, we felt like we never done that when we played against the Packers and, I mean, as a DB I felt like we can handle it. So we felt as DBs that we could stay on our side and cover him because in the beginning, we always played against him, we always played sides, we never followed …”
When did the players decide to create their own plan? “The decision was all through practice,” Rhodes said.
Did Zimmer say anything to him during the game? “Not to my memory,” Rhodes said.
Did the defensive backs broach the subject with Zimmer? “We just felt like we should play sides,” Rhodes said. “As the game went on our coaches demanded and told me I needed to follow him.”
Zimmer’s perceived strengths are taking a beating. In a crucial six-day stretch, his team gave up 72 points, lost two must-win games and displayed a lack of respect for his leadership.
The Vikings’ postseason mission, redemption for that bitter arctic loss to Seattle, officially died at 3:13 p.m. Central Standard Time Saturday at Lambeau Field, their epitaph a sad but inevitable 38-25 loss to the surging Packers.
The Vikings face one more must-win Week 17 at home against woeful Chicago to avoid a losing record after opening the season with five consecutive wins.
Bah, humbug.
Aaron Rodgers and Jordy Nelson delivered last rites with a pitch-and-catch tutorial. But the Vikings came bearing ample gifts of turnovers, penalties and porous defensive backs who hatched their own coverage scheme against coach Mike Zimmer’s edict to Xavier Rhodes that the Pro Bowl cornerback shadow Nelson, one of the NFL’s most dynamic receivers
Exploiting gaping holes in Minnesota’s secondary, Nelson accumulated seven receptions for 145 yards and two touchdowns. At halftime. He caught only two more passes for 9 yards in the second half after Rhodes retreated his original assignment.
“That’s what they were supposed to do the whole game,” Zimmer fumed. “Someone decided that they weren’t going to do that.”
Rhodes stammered when asked about his freestyling.
“Um, to be honest, I really don’t want to answer that,” he said.
Rhodes explained the Vikings never shadowed Nelson in the past, so the defensive backs decided during the week they would revert to their customary positions on either side of the field.
“We felt as a team, as players, we came together,” he said. “We felt like we could handle him on that side of the field. That’s what felt right.”
Sure, why not. Toss a supersized helping of insubordination onto the Vikings’ funeral pyre.
Fifty-one weeks ago, on this very field, the Vikings celebrated a division title by downing Green Bay 20-13, the crowning achievement thus far in Zimmer’s ragged three-year reign.
They were one butchered 27-yard field goal last January from advancing to the divisional playoffs. After starting 5-0, the confident Vikings seemed more than capable of overcoming the loss of franchise quarterback Teddy Bridgewater and superstar running back Adrian Peterson to injury.
But that imperfect perfection covered up structural deficiencies on offense and defense, not to mention razor-thin depth that was unable to underpin an injury-ravaged offensive line that was the root cause of so much misery.
At this point, pounding on T.J. Clemmings another week is akin to abuse that warrants a restraining order. Left to block six-time Pro Bowl linebacker Clay Matthews with a minute remaining in the first half, the resulting strip sack of Sam Bradford at midfield was predictable if not negligent.
Zimmer and offensive line coach Tony Sparano own this calcified breach for insisting they could boost an overmatched pass protector who has no business playing left tackle. And general manager Rick Spielman for buying what Clemmings was selling in college and spending a fourth-round pick on a player whose confidence has been shredded.
The bedrock of the Minnesota Vikings‘ defense — indeed, the identity of their program under Mike Zimmer — has been a scheme which is often ironclad when players trust it.
Zimmer has preached for three seasons to his players about the interconnectedness of a defense, building a theater-style meeting room so he could address position groups together and issuing impromptu quizzes to defensive backs about the three-technique tackle’s job on a particular play. Sayings such as, “Do your job so someone else can do theirs” have bordered on dogma, and Vikings players professed almost total devotion to a set of ideas that had built one of the league’s top units.
That is what made what happened at Lambeau Field on Sunday so striking.
Zimmer said after the Vikings’ 38-25 loss to the Green Bay Packers that the Vikings had planned for Xavier Rhodes to shadow Jordy Nelson — as he had done with top receivers for much of the season — but that “someone decided they wouldn’t do that.” The coach added that veteran cornerback Terence Newman told him in the first half, “I can cover [Nelson]; let me have him,” to which Zimmer replied, “Do what you’re supposed to do.”
Nelson caught seven passes for 145 yards and two touchdowns in the first half, hauling in a 15-yard pass from Rodgers while matched up on Newman during the Packers’ first series. On the second series, when Nelson caught three passes for 45 yards, the Packers had him in the slot, where Rhodes never shadows receivers. Nelson was also in the slot on a 48-yard catch, before Rhodes moved to the left side of the Vikings’ defense to shadow him for the first time with 2:42 left in the first quarter.
Think again about what happened here. Zimmer — who coached Deion Sanders and Darren Woodson in Dallas — volunteered the fact that Rhodes was supposed to cover Nelson, until players decided on their own plan. Newman — who was a rookie when Zimmer became the Cowboys’ defensive coordinator, who followed the coach to Cincinnati and Minnesota, who lobbied for Zimmer as a head coach and once said the coach could be enshrined in Canton based on what he had done to make teams better — apparently was part of a group that decided not to listen to him in this instance.
Evidently, so was Rhodes, whose development into a Pro Bowl corner has largely been on Zimmer’s watch, and who said after the game the Vikings’ defensive backs settled on the plan not during the game, but in practice last week. …
Players whom Zimmer has developed, who would be seen as some of the coach’s star pupils, suddenly decided not to follow a game plan — and apparently not to tell Zimmer, defensive coordinator George Edwards nor defensive backs coach Jerry Gray about it. Did they lose faith in the scheme after a 34-6 loss to the Colts last Sunday? Did they think their ideas wouldn’t be heard if they approached coaches with them?
Those questions remain open, and Zimmer’s ability to discipline players next Sunday against the Chicago Bears would be hampered somewhat by the lack of other options in his secondary. But Saturday’s developments, at the end of a season that began with Super Bowl aspirations and will end with a meaningless Week 17 game, suggest there’s more at play in the Vikings’ demise than just injuries and some bad luck.
A team that started 5-0 now needs a victory just to avoid a losing record. A defense that bullied MVP quarterbacks at the beginning of the season has now been picked apart for 72 points in the last two games. And a group that has long seemed to thrive on its harmony, seemed, on Saturday at least, to be in discord.
It looks like it’ll be an interesting offseason in the Twin Cities. The Vikings’ first season in their billion-dollar indoor football palace started off well, but has collapsed like a Viking ship with a hole under the waterline. Zimmer, a highly respected defensive coach, may be coaching his last game as head coach against Da Bears under the truism that it’s easier to fire the coach than the players. Players have varying relationships with coaches (see Favre, Brett, and Holmgren, Mike), but to see open revolt is not normal.
The Packers, meanwhile, now look like the football reincarnation of Team Streak, the 1987 Milwaukee Brewers and their epic winning streaks followed by losing streaks and vice versa. The Packers reversed their four-game losing streak by winning five in a row, and winning in Detroit Sunday, where the last time the Packers played this happened …
… will clinch the NFC North title. They could also earn a wild card spot or even miss the playoffs if they lose depending on what other teams do. (At least I think that’s the case based on what I read.)
Swisher discussed writing about the consumer internet at its inception, making the jump from newspapers to blogs, and why she and Recode co-founder Walt Mossberg sold the company to Vox Media. But she also critiqued how journalists at Vox and everywhere need to change in the era of Trump and “post-truth” politics.
“I think we should really call people out on things,” Swisher said. “We have to stop being quite as cooperative. We sort of suspend disbelief when these companies get money — this is just in tech, but it’s everything,” she said, referring to credulous articles about tech companies raising huge funding rounds.
“We allow them to lie, we allow them to say things that are false, we don’t question things as much as we should — for lots of reasons,” she added. “In our case, when we do that, we’re trying to be fair.”
Kafka noted that, according to Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei, Trump’s America eyes the media with suspicion and resents being told that their opinions about same-sex marriage and transgender bathroom rights are wrong. Too bad, Swisher replied.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “People said the exact same things about interracial marriages. They’re wrong. I don’t want to reach across the aisle on that issue. They’re 100 percent wrong, and history will bear this out.”
“We always tend to try to ‘get along’ when we should be asking questions, at the very least,” Swisher added. “We don’t ask enough questions.”
My guess is most readers don’t know what Recode Media is, who Swisher is, or Swisher’s opinion on social issues. (I wonder how she’d feel if she was asked why millions of years of biology should be ignored on that marriage issue, for instance, and why she’s arrogant enough to believe she’s right and those who have different opinions are wrong.) But Swisher is correct, though probably not where she thinks she is, about the media’s need to ask more questions, ask more pointed questions, and especially not caring about currying favor with whoever is in power.
A more interesting perspective (about which Swisher probably would be dismissive) comes from John Bicknell:
I hire reporters to cover state and local government. They are tasked with finding waste, fraud, and malfeasance, along with shining a light into corners where most news outlets don’t look and from a perspective — that of the free market — from which all too many reporters and editors are not familiar.
During my more than three decades as a journalist, I have sat through my share of diversity training sessions. I have been handed memo after memo and read study after study about how we needed to make our newsrooms look more like the communities we serve.
The key word there is “look.”
These sessions and memos and studies typically focused on the need to hire and promote more women and people of color. And they worked. While there is always more that can be done, newsrooms much more closely reflect the gender and ethnic demographics of America than they once did. But never did I get a memo or sit through a training session in which we were urged to recruit, hire, and promote newsroom staff who think more like the communities we serve.
And so newsrooms are now populated by much more diverse-looking staffs than in the past — staffs that largely share a common set of progressive values, a monochrome worldview centered on left-wing notions of how America should behave in the world, and an elitist culture unalterably convinced of its own moral superiority.
I have been that person who pipes up in meetings, “There’s another way to look at that,” only to be hooted down as if I had just endorsed puppy maiming. I have heard otherwise intelligent and urbane colleagues denigrate ideas different from the ones they hold in the most demeaning of language, and I have heard them apply the same type of language to people with whom they disagree.
Evenhanded treatment of the news cannot emerge from such a newsroom. And it hasn’t, for years.
Sure, every once in a while, a conservative makes the leap to a mainstream newsroom. We notice when it happens because it’s so rare.
And then we sit back and wait for the journalistic equivalent of O’Sullivan’s First Law: Any institution that is not explicitly right-wing will become left-wing over time.
Not because there aren’t good conservative reporters out there with the strength of their own convictions, but because it’s difficult to stand upright in a hurricane.
Many news outlets have lost their credibility with the reading and viewing public because they pretend a neutrality they don’t have, and because they don’t take the reading and viewing public seriously. They should dispense with the pretense, and start hiring people who take their audiences seriously.
Need an example of what I mean? Salena Zito did stellar work because she didn’t assume the people she talked to were racist troglodytes, but voters with real concerns about real issues in search of real solutions.
She’s just one case. There are others, but not that many.
So, I urge my colleagues to look harder. Scoop up some of the brilliant young journalists writing for The College Fix or those working on alternative college papers. If you have a need for more experienced hands, I happen to know some. Give me a call or drop me a note.
Sure, if you hire the best and the brightest liberty-minded journalists, it will be harder for me to find reporters to hire. But not as hard as you might think. Because there are a lot more young conservative journalists ready to go to work than you think there are.
Journalistic debacles like the election of 2016 are invariably followed by a period of hand-wringing, accompanied by media promises to examine what went wrong and to do better. First the hand-wringing ends, usually by Christmas, then the promises to change are forgotten.
Unfortunately, we’re ahead of schedule this year.
The same journalists who assure us they plan to spend more time in “flyover country” — so they can do a better job of reporting on the concerns of working-class Americans — seem startlingly unaware that use of that phrase and the mindset from which it derives are part of their problem.
What we need are more journalists who don’t think of anything west of Fairfax County, Va., as flyover country, but as part of the country in which they live.
Today in 1963, Capitol Records, which had previously rejected the U.S. rights to every Beatles single until then, finally released a double single, the first of which had already reached number one in the United Kingdom:
One year later, guess which group had their sixth number one of the year.
Today in 1967, BBC TV broadcasted the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour” movie:
Today in 1954, R&B singer Johnny Ace had a concert at the City Auditorium in Houston. Between sets, Ace was playing with a revolver. When someone in the room said, “Be careful with that thing,” Ace replied, “It’s OK, the gun’s not loaded. See?” And pointed the gun at his head, and pulled the trigger. And found out he was wrong.
The number one album today in 1965 was the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul”:
Starting shortly after my birth, my parents purchased Christmas albums for $1 from an unlikely place, tire stores.
(That’s as seemingly outmoded as getting, for instance, glasses every time you filled up at your favorite gas station, back in the days when gas stations were usually part of a car repair place, not a convenience store. Of course, go to a convenience store now, and you can probably find CDs, if not records, and at least plastic glasses such as Red Solo Cups and silverware. Progress, or something.)
The albums featured contemporary artists from the ’60s, plus opera singers and other artists.
These albums were played on my parents’ wall-length Magnavox hi-fi player.
Playing these albums was as annual a ritual as watching “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas,” “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” or other holiday-season appointment TV.
Those albums began my, and then our, collection of Christmas music.
You may think some of these singers are unusual choices to sing Christmas music. (This list includes at least six Jewish singers.)
Of course, Christians know that Jesus Christ was Jewish.
And I defy any reader to find anyone who can sing “Silent Night” like Barbra Streisand did in the ’60s.
These albums are available for purchase online, but record players are now as outmoded as, well, getting glasses with your fill-up at the gas station. (Though note what I previously wrote.)
But thanks to YouTube and other digital technology, other aficionados of this era of Christmas music now can have their music preserved for their current and future enjoyment.
The tire-store-Christmas-album list has been augmented by both earlier and later works.
In the same way I think no one can sing “Silent Night” like Barbra Streisand, I think no one can sing “Do You Hear What I Hear” (a song written during the Cuban Missile Crisis, believe it or not) like Whitney Houston:
This list contains another irony — an entry from “A Christmas Gift for You,” Phil Spector’s Christmas album. (Spector’s birthday is Christmas.)
The album should have been a bazillion-seller, and perhaps would have been had it not been for the date of its initial release: Nov. 22, 1963.
Finally, here’s the last iteration of one of the coolest TV traditions — “The Late Show with David Letterman” and its annual appearance of Darlene Love (from the aforementioned Phil Spector album), which started in 1986 on NBC …
Today in 1964, a group of would-be DJs launched the pirate radio station Radio London from a former U.S. minesweeper anchored 3½ miles off Frinton-on-the-Sea, England.
It’s probably unrelated, but on the same day Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys had a nervous breakdown on a flight from Los Angeles to Houston. Wilson left the band to focus on writing and producing, with Glen Campbell replacing him for concerts.
The pernicious influence of unions reared its ugly head today in 1966, when Britain’s ITV broadcast its final “Ready, Steady, Go!” because of a British musicians’ union’s ban on miming. The final show featured Mick Jagger, The Who, Eric Burdon, the Spencer Davis Group, Donovan and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.
America owes President Barack Obama an enormous debt of gratitude for showing how truly dangerous the federal government can be when our Constitution’s checks and balances start failing. With the active collusion of congressional Democrats, President Obama’s presidency has been one long series of body blows to the separation of powers that has protected our democracy since the founding.
The results have been stark. Never has a president trampled so much on the prerogatives of Congress. Obama’s executive orders, suspending parts of our immigration laws and even his own prized Obamacare, have been sheer usurpations, going far beyond even the breathtaking delegations of legislative authority granted by the brief Democratic supermajority in Congress in 2009–10.
Sad to say, Obama’s trampling on the prerogatives of state governments has been even more unprecedented, and potentially far more damaging. His agencies’ “Dear Colleague” letters, addressing such sensitive issues as local school districts’ bathroom policies and the standards by which institutions of higher education review claims of sexual assault, have wrested away the core functions of state leaders, local boards, and even administrators.
The separation of state and federal authority is one of the most essential principles of our Constitution. It explains the Constitution’s structural allocation of powers as much as the division between legislative, executive, and judicial functions. If we lose the separate and independent existence of state governments, we will lose our Constitution.
Hence the potentially historic importance of the initiative just announced by Governor Scott Walker, under the heading “Wisconsin, Not Washington.” This morning Governor Walker sent a letter to President-elect Trump, asking for Trump’s help in restoring the federal structure of the Constitution.
Governor Walker’s letter opens (after congratulating Trump) with a paragraph framing the issue in a way similar to how the Founders might have done it:
The question is not what functions the federal government should give back to the states, but what functions should the federal government have in the first place. The federal government was originally created to be a small, central government of limited powers, with everything else left to the states. Through years of federal overreach, this model has been turned on its head, and now is the time to right the ship. Power flows from the people to the government, not the other way around.
With an eye toward “aggressively expand[ing] opportunities for those seeking family supporting jobs,” the letter calls on the incoming Trump administration to provide various block grants and waivers to state governments. Among other suggestions, the letter calls for an executive order “directing all federal agencies to consult and coordinate federal activities with their state counterparts and to truly delegate oversight of functions and activities without mandates or strings.” It suggests that federal agencies should be required to make permitting decisions in a timely manner, just as most state agencies are required to do. The letter specifically calls for flexibility in the administration of nutritional-assistance programs, Medicaid, and the management of the state’s gray-wolf population. It highlights the need for revisions to the Clean Air Act’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards. And it calls for giving Wisconsin more ability to manage federal timberland for the benefit of the resources, wildlife, and economy of Wisconsin, not the federal government.
The Supreme Court has many times insisted that states must remain “free and independent within their proper sphere of authority.” But the Court has given the federal government almost free rein to put coercive conditions on the funds it sends the states, and to require federal-agency “permission” for states to implement federal law.
These twin levers of “coercive federalism” have resulted in a situation where federal and state governments are more integrated with each other than many independent federal agencies are with the rest of the executive branch. Today the president has more control over how states run their Medicaid programs than he has over the Federal Communications Commission. There’s definitely something wrong with that.
Democrats who fear the exercise of unbridled power by a Republican president have as much reason to want state governments kept free from federal control as Republicans do for not wanting a repeat of Obama’s constitutional abuses. We can disagree about policy issues, but we should agree on the basic meaning of our Constitution.
It is urgent to return the states’ reserved powers and responsibilities to them, as the Tenth Amendment requires. But as we do so, it’s equally important to resist the temptation of letting states take over federal functions. One of the most invidious forms of federal control is “cooperative federalism,” whereby states assume responsibility for implementing federal programs.
Instead, the federal government should be forced to implement all federal regulations itself. Constituents who fear the EPA may prefer State Implementation Plans to Federal Implementation Plans under the Clean Air Act, but either way, it’s a shakedown.
If federal bureaucrats want to regulate everything, let’s make them do it all by themselves. If they want us to do it at the state level, then they should let us do it all by ourselves.
Governor Walker’s letter closes by noting that the suggested recalibration between the federal and state governments “should only be the beginning of our efforts to return authority closer to the people.” He is absolutely right that this conversion will not happen overnight, but it is a challenge that must be tackled immediately. The separation of powers between the federal government and state governments is as important as the separation of powers between the branches of the federal government. Restoring those checks and balances is a task for all the states, and all generations of Americans.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 