Today in 1938, CBS (radio, obviously, because there was no TV yet) broadcasted The Mercury Theater on the Air production of “The War of the Worlds,” from H.G. Wells’ novel.
Some number of listeners who missed the opening (such as those listening to the NBC Red Network’s “Chase and Sanborn” show with ventriloquist Edgar Bergen who changed the channel when Nelson Eddy started signing) thought the simulated news bulletins were actual news bulletins about the Martian invasion, or an invasion by Nazi Germany. Half an hour into the broadcast, the CBS switchboard lit up, and police arrived at the studios. As he had planned, Welles concluded the broadcast by calling it the equivalent “of dressing up in a sheet, jumping out of a bush and saying, ‘Boo!’”
Then, the actors and producer John Houseman (before he became a law school professor and pitchman for Smith Barney) were locked into a storeroom while CBS executives grabbed every copy of the script. And then the reporters showed up.
The New York Times/Wikipedia
At WGAR radio in Cleveland, host Jack Paar (yes, that Jack Paar) reassured callers that Martians were not actually invading. Paar was immediately accused of covering up the news.
The number one album and single today in 1971:
A low, low moment in rock history: Today in 1978, NBC-TV broadcast “Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park”:
(The entire movie, believe it or don’t, can be viewed on YouTube.)
Today in 1983, Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” spent its 491st week on the charts, surpassing the previous record set by Johnny Mathis’ “Johnny’s Greatest Hits.” “Dark Side of the Moon” finally departed the charts in October 1988, after 741 weeks on the charts.
Now that Chicago is finally in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, we can be objective and read Tim Sommer:
Last week, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced 19 nominees for its class of 2017. Five of these nominees will be inducted into the Hall.
I am certain many of the Hall’s members and voters mean well, and I have heard nice things about their museum (which I have not visited). But the Hall, as it exists now, is so deeply flawed that it risks not only having a lack of credibility, but also a lack of validity. In other words, it doesn’t just make mistakes; the mistakes seem to be endemic, built into the fabric of the organization.
And you know what? Rock ’n roll deserves better.
Rock ’n roll (by which I mean any and all manifestations of music-based expression and art, from King Oliver to Tony Conrad) saves lives. It is a friend to the lonely. It finds the words for you when your tongue, childish or ancient, is tied in confusion. It makes you excited to wake up in the morning, and it pumps life into your Chuck Taylors on your way home from school. It paints rainbow swirls of dreams on the gray wall of your cubicle. It makes you shout, “That is me. I wish I saidthat. There’s my swagger, my swish, my wag, my wish, my future, my youth!”
Rock ’n roll brings back the sensation of an autumn day 39 years ago, and the smile cracked secretly at a traffic light this morning. It is the sound of your favorite city and the sound of a lovely farm-spotted road; it is the soundtrack to a pair of brown eyes you will never, ever forget.
Remember that moment in the flat yellow hallway of your suburban high school when it seemed like the future would never come, when it seemed that your lips would never find a kiss, when you would stare at your reflection in the giant window panes by the gym and you would see exactly the moon-shaped, un-kissable face you assumed everyone else saw?
Then you heard the Kinks, or you heard the Mumps, or you heard Mott the Hoople, or you heard the tube-heated tones of a late-night DJ playing “Dark Star”, and you knew that behind the gamelan clangs of the blue green lockers, outside of the tall red brick walls, past that row of shrieking buses, beyond the anonymous whirr of the Long Island Expressway, somewhere beyond Bayside and Little Neck and even Jamaica, there might be a place where misfits like you would find love.
Rock ’n roll loved me before anyone else did, didn’t it love you before anyone else did, too?
That’s why it’s important to tell its story in the right way.
The powers that be at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame simply don’t know nearly as much about their subject as someone running an organization with that mighty a title should. Most of the poobahs at the Hall know about as much about rock and pop as I know about, oh, baseball. See, I know a little bit about baseball, probably enough to fake my way through a conversation, and I know a lot about certain aspects of baseball, like the New York Mets or the career of catcher/spy Moe Berg; but I would never, ever claim to know enough about baseball to run a freaking Hall of Fame, or even act as a voter for one.
I suspect the Hall of Fame and their voters know a bit about rock ’n roll, and perhaps a lot about certain areas, but they simply don’t know enough to reasonably accomplish the rather significant task they have assumed control of. Otherwise, they would have inducted The Smiths, The Cure, Thin Lizzy, Kate Bush, Big Star,Judas Priest, Slayer, Husker Du, and many etceteras, a long time ago.
So, here are the new nominees, along with my handicapping of the likelihood of these artists getting voted into the Hall this time around. Please note: This is notbased on who I think belongs in “a” Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; it’s based on who I think this Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the deeply flawed and biased organization that presently exists, will vote in. (For those not familiar with gambling odds, it works out this way: 1/5 means a 5/6 shot that X will get into the Hall of Fame, meaning they’ve got a good chance.)
In order, and remember, there are only five slots:
ELO 1/5
Tupac Shakur 2/5
Chic 2/5
The Cars 2/5
Pearl Jam 3/5
Joan Baez 3/5
Chaka Khan 6/5
MC5 3/2
Janet Jackson 3/2
Kraftwerk 8/5
Yes 2/1
Journey 5/2
Bad Brains 5/2
The Zombies 6/1
Depeche Mode 6/1
Jane’s Addiction 7/1
The J. Geils Band 8/1
Steppenwolf 12/1
Joe Tex 14/1
I want to say a few words about the nominees, but first, let’s take a moment to talk about who isn’t nominated.
I’m no Bon Jovi fan—at their best, they remind me of a cell phone photo of a screenshot of Thin Lizzy—but clearly they sneezed on Jann’s brie at some point, because I cannot for the life of me understand why they are not in the Hall of Fame (and even Green Day is in the Hall of Fame). They fit two of the HOF’s primary requirements: they’re American and they sold a lot of records.
Once again, there’s no heavy metal on the list. Zero.
This is profoundly insulting to the millions of people who have been excited, energized, entertained and inspired by Judas Priest, Iron Maiden (only one of the biggest bands in the world for the last 30 years!), not to mention hugely popular innovators like Slayer or Motörhead.
I want to repeat this slowly to let it sink in: there’s something out there calling itself the Rock and roll Hall of Fame, and Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, and Motörheadaren’t in it. Jeezus, you’d think they would have at least thrown a bone to Def Leppard. (But, hey, British accents…)
With the exception of nominee Depeche Mode, the Hall of Fame carries on pretending that virtually no British music made in the 1980s is worthy, despite the profound influence many of these groups had on both sides of the Atlantic (and regardless of the fact that all of the artists I am about to cite were major chart acts in the U.K.).
So, once again, no Smiths, Kate Bush, New Order, Madness, the Jam, the Cure, Joy Division, the Specials, etcetera; and the anti-British bias of the Hall extends backwards from the “New Wave” era, too, and therefore we don’t see Thin Lizzy, T. Rex, or Roxy Music nominated, either, to name just three. I find the Hall’s rabid Anglophobia another major element that obstructs any occasional desire we might have to take the Hall seriously.
Kraftwerk are, inarguably, the second most influential pop/rock group of the last 55 years. They were the first pop act to entirely replace their rhythm section with distinctly synthetic instrumentation, and the first act to use the pulsing synth throb as their unvaried signature. The entire age of electronic dance music and synth-based pop derives from their inventions. Put on any mainstream pop radio station today, and it is more likely you will hear a sound rooted in Kraftwerk’s innovations than you will hear a combo-based Beatle-centric sound.
In addition, for over 40 years Kraftwerk have consistently released high-quality music. No Hall of Fame omission is more glaring (with the exception of archivist/ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, who should have been inducted in the first or second class). But it’s a tough crowd this year, and Kraftwerk may get passed over once again.
I have no particular affection for Joan Baez, who’s over-sincere, over-reaching vocalizing is the musical equivalent of Eric Roberts’ yowling “Charlie, they took my thumb!” in The Pope of Greenwich Village. However, she is the second biggest name in the history of post-1960 folk music, and folk music is an essential part of our pop/rock story: it is the crucial bridge between the 1950s ideation of American rock and the more sincere, more artistic, more rebellious form it took in the 1960s (this is a really important point that I’ll write about at another time).
It’s utterly ridiculous that the second biggest name in folk music isn’t in the Hall. That underlines one of the abominable things about the Hall: They simply ignore entire categories of rock and pop. Folk, heavy metal and low-charting but culturally important alternative music suffer the most. All of these things get pushed out of the way because the Hall can’t see beyond the fine, fine mane of Timothy B. Schmidt. Joan Baez most definitely belongs in (and so does Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, the Kingston Trio, Fred Neil, and Peter, Paul and Mary, to name just five others who will never, ever get nominated).
The MC5’s stock has gone up in the last year or two, and I think this may be their year. I need not tell any of you why this snarling, fiery band, one of the few activist acts in American rock history who honestly put their money where their mouth is, belong in the Hall.
Let’s move on to the rest of the nominees! Oh, now might be a good time to take a swig of that 20-year-old Tawny Port you have sitting around.
If the Hall had even the slightest history of inducting low-selling bands of innovation, genius and influence, the nomination of the phenomenal Bad Brainswould make an enormous amount of sense, and would be something to celebrate. But the Hall have not only shied away from acknowledging those sorts of acts; they’ve actually spurned the idea at every conceivable chance.
The Hall have 100 percent ignored American independent music and non-mainstream/non-major label punk rock. Because of that, as phenomenal as the Bad Brains were (and circa ’79 – ’83, they were the greatest live act in America), I cannot endorse this act of pure tokenism (and I do not mean “tokenism” due to race, but in terms of the Bad Brains’ role as underground/punk heroes).
If their nomination had been accompanied by nominations for, say, Black Flag or Minor Threat, this would make some sense; it would indicate that the Hall was acknowledging the enormous importance hardcore punk had on the creation of an alternative touring and independent label distribution circuit in the 1980s.
Likewise, if the Bad Brains were nominated alongside, say, Suicide, Big Star, Van Dyke Parks, or Wire, it would indicate that the Hall was acknowledging artistically pioneering artists who didn’t rack up big American chart numbers. But that didn’t happen either. This is your dad trying to make you feel better that your grandmother died by giving you a Beatles record. This nomination doesn’t make the Hall cool. It underlines how uncool it really is.
There’s nothing wrong with Chaka Khan, except for the fact that there’s are a pile of legacy R&B singers who deserve to be honored by the Hall more than she does—just off the top of my head, Shirley Ellis and Irma Thomas spring to mind, and I am sure you can think of others. But her name is very familiar, so I think she stands a strong chance of getting in.
Chic, who made music of quality and originality and sold records and were significant generational touchstones, are prime Hall of Fame material.
Depeche Mode are a giant act of style and distinction. There may be other post-1980 British acts more worthy of a nomination, but Depeche Mode should still definitely be in the Hall. Do I think they’ll get voted in? Probably not. There are too many Hall voters who were called “fag” in high school; rather than embracing this, they then tried to buddy up to the jocks that were calling them names. This kind of confusion is still in their hearts, so they’ll probably take it out on Depeche Mode.
Electric Light Orchestra are pretty much the stone-cold lock in this year’s nominating class. Although I find Jeff Lynne’s I-wish-I-wish-I-wish I could have been in the Fabs act tiresome and offensive, he can write a helluva tune, he understands drama in production and arrangement, and best of all, the amazing Roy Wood, co-founder of ELO, gets to slip into the Hall, too.
If there was a Hall of Fame for well-meaning bands who seemed O.K. in the 1970s because they offered a refreshing alternative to ELP, Kansas, and England Dan and John Ford Coley, The J. Geils Band would belong right in there, alongside Southside Johnny, Steve Forbert and Willie Nile. These acts were like the middle relievers of rock ’n roll; they saw us through some tough innings, but then the Ramones and the Sex Pistols came in to close, striking out the side in the 9th. But there aren’t very many middle relievers in the baseball Hall of Fame.[i] Still, because there are no E-Street Band-related nominations this year, I would not entirely rule out The J. Geils Band sneaking in. If I was going to bet on a long shot, this might be the one.
I believe Jane’s Addiction were an important factor in bridging hair metal and grunge, but I’ve always found their “We’re (giggle giggle) ever-so kinky, but we’re kinda (giggle giggle) mainstream, too, doesn’t that make us (giggle giggle) cool?” act vaguely stinking of Danny Elfman-esque snarkiness. They’re the kind of band you tolerate until you really start thinking about them; once you do, it all falls apart, though the individual parts are very solid. I think they’ll get into the Hall one day, and for all the asinine things I just said, they probably deserve to be in, but I don’t think this is the year.
Janet Jackson doesn’t belong in the Hall, but she’s a super familiar name who had big hits over a fairly wide period of time, and that’s usually enough for the Hall voters. If it were a weaker class I’d say she was a lock, but it might not happen this year. I mean, if you’re going to admit mainstream state-of-the-art pop (and I think you should), why the freak isn’t the amazing Carpenters in the Hall?
Joe Tex would be an ideal Hall of Fame act if they Hall could find their ass with a Google Maps app and a big sign that said “To Find Ass: Look Down and Behind.” But, see, the Hall can’t find their ass with a Google Maps app and a big sign that says “To Find Ass: Look Down and Behind.”
I’m glad to see Tex nominated, but like the Bad Brains, I am afraid this nod might be a concession to shut up naysayers like me. Personally, if the Hall functioned with intelligence, wisdom and discretion, artists like Joe Tex and, say, Lee Dorsey would have been in a long time ago. And although it’s a different kind of music, where the heck is Doug Sahm? (See, the “Tex” thing made me think of that.)
Normally, I would say Journey are a lock, but this might be the year the Hall try to show how credible and earnest and sincere they are (because, see, the Hall actually think that the Cars pass for a cool alternative rock band), and Journey may end up paying for that.
Someone has to be the first non-Nirvana grunge band in the Hall, and it might as well be Pearl Jam. Likable, hard working, sincere and popular, they belong in the Hall.
Having two classic rock hits should not be the sole criteria for getting into the Hall, so I find it offensive that Steppenwolfare even nominated, since the band has virtually no generational profile outside of those hits. However, the Hall is notoriously stupid—the voters will see a name, hum a song in their head, and think, “Ohhh, I like them, I just heard their song on the radio today!”—so you never know.
Personally, I despise the Cars: They are “clever,” which is the second worst thing a pop/rock act can be (the first is “ironic”), and when I was a teenage fan, Ric Ocasek was inexcusably rude to me (not Paul Simon-level rude, but still pretty bad). Nevertheless, the Cars have everything that makes them an archetypal Hall of Fame act: They wrote some of the more memorable melodies of their era, they are a distinctly “generational” act (i.e., everyone who was young during their ’79 – ‘83 heyday will have all sorts of goofy nostalgia attached to them), and they sold plenty of records. I think they’re pretty close to a lock.
The Zombies are a tough one, because I want to say they absolutely belong in, but there’s no freaking way they belong in before T. Rex. I’ll leave it at that.
Tupac Shakur is generational touchstone, an artist who often displayed genius, a big seller, and a martyr, so Tupac (along with ELO) is as close as you get to a lock in this year’s nominating class.
And that’s the nominating class of 2017.
Finally, I would like to end this piece by quoting the great Mark Twain: “Everybody talks about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but no one shoots it as it steps out of its limousine on to the sidewalk outside of Sparks Steakhouse on E. 46th Street.”
Today in 1956, Elvis Presley made his second appearance on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Show, with Sullivan presenting Presley a gold record for …
One year later, Presley’s appearance at the Pan Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles prompted police to tell Presley he was not allowed to wiggle his hips onstage. The next night’s performance was filmed by the LAPD vice squad.
One year later, Buddy Holly filmed ABC-TV’s “American Bandstand”:
I can, as readers know, relate to what Warren Bluhm writes:
When the news broke late last week that layoffs were imminent at the corporation that owns the venerable small-town paper where I worked for most of 14 years, I started to think about how logical it would be to lay me off. I suppose all of my co-workers had similar thoughts about themselves, but I just had a feeling.
I don’t take horoscopes seriously, but I do read mine because they often contain good advice. On Monday morning, I read it out loud to Red and we both laughed nervously:
“Changes at work are coming: This could be the luckiest turn of events that’s happened in months. To prepare yourself, bone up on your skills and make sure your client base is ample.”
If ever there was a moment when I went over to the dark side and embraced the idea that my fate is sealed by the position of stars light years away, that might have been that moment. Whether or not I “believed,” in any case, by golly, it was good advice.
And: A little after noon on Tuesday, I was given the word that I was part of the company’s latest round of cuts to contain costs.
It was a cordial conversation, and I was assured this was not a performance decision but an economic one yada yada yada, and they explained some nice going-away benefits, and off I went to let the folks who work with me know they were safe, and only I was leaving (at least in the newsroom; a trio of other, tremendous support people were also let go).
Now, my dear friends and colleagues have railed about how could the company do this, and I love them, but let’s note that the goal is to keep the doors open, and under this ownership the newspaper has endured for 12 long years since the previous owner decided he couldn’t make a go of it any longer. My fondest desire was always to grow the paper despite the odds, but in the absence of such growth, the alternative is to cut costs, and frankly I was the costliest cost in the room.
The paper survives to fight another day. My loyalty has always been to the 154 years of folks who toiled under the banner before me and with me, and not to the corporation that bought the brand, and perhaps that helped put me on the list. You know what? It doesn’t matter. The brand survives, and if anyone can save it from oblivion, it’s the incredible journalists and other people who still work in that building.
I am so proud to have been a part of that tradition and grateful for the high bar set by the people who walked those hallways before me. Anytime I started feeling my oats, all I had to do was remind myself, “Bluhm, you’re no Chan Harris,” or someone would come along to say it for me. I wouldn’t have tried as hard as I did without those noble ghosts chasing me.
Today is the first day of the next phase of my life, and oh, what an adventure it shall be.
It seems that the worst thing a media person can do these days is work for a publicly traded media company. I guess I was not specifically laid off, but when the company that owns your magazine decides to close the magazine, you are definitely surplus.
The Door County Advocate has for decades been the state’s largest weekly newspaper, with thousands of its subscribers living in Door County only during the summer. But at least, like me and my former Journal Communications colleagues, Warren has a lot of company with former Gannett Co. employees. (That sentence has a double meaning in that no one works for Journal Communications anymore, with the broadcast/print split and subsequent print sale to Gannett.)
Gannett’s next purchase, by the way, reportedly will be the thing called “Tronc,” the print arm of the former Tribune Co., which like Journal split off its broadcast (Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times) and broadcast (the WGNs) properties. Again, change is not necessarily progress.
On Monday evening, Opportunity Lives hosted a “Comeback” screening event at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) headlined the event, and he requested that Pastor Jerome Smith of the Joseph Project also participate.
Following a screening of a few of the episodes of the film, Sen. Johnson and Pastor Smith, joined by Dallas-based Urban Specialists Pastor Omar Jahwar and Antong Lucky, held an on-stage discussion and question-and-answer session with nearly 100 students and guests on community-based solutions to poverty. The conversation covered topics ranging from criminality to social entrepreneurship to economic empowerment.
Johnson’s heart for the poor beats outside the halls of the U.S. Senate. For the past several years, he and Smith have run The Joseph Project, a Wisconsin-based non-profit that teaches vital job skills to unemployed adults in search of long-term work.
After successfully completing training with The Joseph Project, qualified applicants are matched with local employers, typically in the state’s manufacturing sector, who are seeking reliable employees. These positions often pay upwards of $25 an hour with full benefits. Since many of the program’s participants have criminal records, such opportunities would be impossible without The Joseph Project vouching for their trustworthiness to prospective employers.
Once an applicant receives an offer, Johnson’s group ensures he or she can go to work. If no dependable transportation is available, The Joseph Project will transport workers to their jobs and back home for free. The organization runs several shuttle routes daily, ensuring that those who complete the program can earn a steady paycheck once they enter the workforce.
For Johnson, The Joseph Project is a deeply personal passion. It combines a faith-inspired calling to serve others and honoring the manufacturing heritage of the Midwest. And for the Wisconsin Republican, it harkens to his own business success story, where he rose from machine operator at his wife’s family business to eventually its owner and CEO.
And unlike many public figures, Johnson is actually involved in the organization he promotes. He’s led 13 training sessions, and he’s personally connected job seekers to Wisconsin manufacturers with positions to fill. Without Johnson’s leadership, many families couldn’t put food on their tables.
At Monday’s event, Johnson recalled the families whose lives have been transformed by The Joseph Project. While he credited Pastor Smith’s ministry for the program’s success, his business acumen and personal network have been utterly indispensible in helping people achieve their dreams.
Following our event, National Public Radio (NPR) ran a brief write-up about Johnson’s faith-focused efforts to eliminate poverty. The story, apparently meant to convince secular Madisonians that Republicans want religious litmus tests for those needing aid, insinuates that Johnson believes only his religious-affiliated approach is the right one.
Johnson’s political opponent, former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), responded by claiming non-profits like The Joseph Project were insufficient substitutes for robust government spending. But he didn’t stop there, denigrating the organization, explaining:
“It’s not enough to pick people up in a van and send them away a couple hours and have them come back exhausted at the end of the day. That doesn’t make a community.”
When the NPR reporter relayed Feingold’s full statement (there was more that wasn’t included in the published piece) to Johnson after our event, he was visibly disgusted and seemingly a little shocked that his Democratic rival would insult the program’s leaders, volunteers and participants so brazenly.
Perhaps Feingold’s bizarre strategy of attacking a faith-inspired inner city charity is a reaction to the incredibly effective slate of television advertisements from the Johnson campaign telling the stories of the beneficiaries of The Joseph Project. Or maybe it’s because the Democrats thought Johnson’s seat would be an easy pick-up for them in the 2016 cycle. The race is currently a statistical tie with Johnson trending upward and Feingold collapsing in the polls.
Either way, Johnson is right to be repulsed. Feingold’s comments demonstrate the Left’s earnest sentiments about the poor: they are too stupid to want better for themselves and too lazy to do the work necessary to achieve it.
While Democrats like Feingold never stop congratulating themselves for their altruism, it is this same self-aggrandizement and condescension that has exacerbated the problems in America’s disadvantaged communities. Their policies have done nothing to improve the quality of life for those who struggle, and in fact, have made it worse by discouraging the dignity of work and diminishing each individual’s worth.
Fifty years after President Lyndon B. Johnson’s so-called “War on Poverty” began, U.S. taxpayers have spent more than $22 trillion on programs intended to help the poor. Much of this spending has expanded government under control of Democrats who promised that their benevolence would eliminate poverty. It didn’t.
Today, 14 percent of Americans are still poor – the same percentage as those impoverished half a century ago. After allocating three times what the U.S. government has spent on all wars from the American Revolution to present day on eliminating poverty, there is still an inequality of opportunity in the form of educational injustice and economic immobility in disadvantaged communities.
To make matters worse, the Democrats’ favorite spending programs have undeniably eroded the family unit, diminished localized civic involvement, and handicapped faith-based institutions. For centuries, these have been keys to thriving, stable communities. Without them, they have crumbled.
Despite the abundant evidence that clearly proves just how wrong they’ve been, Democrats are so wedded to the cause of growing government that they continue to put politics over people and ideology over better ideas. And when faced with the human costs of the repeated failures of their policies, Democrats soothe their guilt by celebrating how much money they’ve spent and promising to spend more. For too many Democrats, outputs are irrelevant, particularly if the inputs – government spending – make them feel good about themselves and help them get reelected.
And too many Democrats see charities, especially those rooted in a faith tradition, as a threat to the poverty industrial complex that perpetuates their power. They insist that groups like the Joseph Project – an organization that has actually been successful moving people from welfare to work – are inferior alternatives to a government system that, in many cases, is the hurting the very people it is designed to help.
Feingold won’t tell Wisconsinites the truth: organizations like the Joseph Project, if replicated and tailored to neighborhoods nationwide, would practically end the poverty industrial complex that has destroyed communities, and with it, the spirit of far too many of our fellow Americans.
Or perhaps he simply doesn’t understand some important truths. The government can’t give a felon a hug. A federal law can’t instill in a hopeless person a sense of purpose. And no Congressional action is as effective as someone giving themselves in service to another.
It is human beings caring for each other person to person – human beings like those who work and volunteer for the Joseph Project, including Sen. Ron Johnson – who make a difference in our country.
Imagine that: Improving the lives of the poor without a government program. Obviously Feingold opposes that. And he’s a jerk, but you knew that.
Desperate to salvage the credibility of the increasingly discredited Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as ObamaCare, Citizen Action of Wisconsin and Robert Kraig, the state’s leading ObamaCare apologist, are trying to put a new spin on a wave of negative news stories about ObamaCare driving shocking premium increases. Instead of admitting that premium hikes are increasingly making the Affordable Care Act less affordable, Kraig calls the cost increases “moderate.”
On Monday, Bloomberg reported that the Obama Administration’s own Department of Health and Human Services released data showing premiums for mid-grade health insurance plans will rise by an average of 25% in the 38 states that use the federal health insurance exchange. Wisconsin is one of those states.
Previously, Media Trackers pointed out that according to data provided by the Wisconsin Office of the Commissioner of Insurance, health insurance premiums in the Badger state are set to rise an average of 15.88% next year, and some health plans will see a 30.37% increase in monthly premiums.
Neighboring Minnesota, where Democrats led by Gov. Mark Dayton (D) implemented a state health insurance exchange at the cost of state taxpayers, suffered a near-catastrophic departure of health insurance providers from the exchange this year. Dayton admitted in public remarks that, “The reality is the Affordable Care Act is no longer affordable for increasing numbers of people.”
Citizen Action and Robert Kraig wanted Wisconsin to follow the path of Minnesota in the way the Gopher state set up a state-based exchange and regulated insurance plans that were offered through the exchange. While Wisconsin has suffered from premium hikes and the departure of several big insurance companies from the market, the crisis has not been as acute as it is in Minnesota.
“A preliminary analysis by Citizen Action of Wisconsin of Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace rates released earlier today by the federal government shows moderate increases when premiums and deductibles are taken together,” Kraig blogged on Sunday on the ironically named “No Sacred Cows Blog” run by Citizen Action.
Wisconsin consumers won’t be hit hard by the premium hikes, Kraig argued, if they look at premium hikes and lower deductibles together. “The result is that rates (premiums and deductibles together) decreased by 1.2% for the most common plans,” he claims. But that requires consumers to be unhealthy enough to make use of their health insurance up to and beyond the cost of the deductible. For a healthy person, there is no silver lining to the premium hikes.
Arguing that, “a Wisconsin consumer who uses enough health care to pay the full deductible will actually see a reduction in consumer costs (not including tax subsidies)” is not a terribly persuasive argument because it requires the assumption that consumers spend at least some part of the upcoming year sick.
After making the argument that sick people will be the winners under the monthly premium hikes, Kraig then asserts that, “Premium increases are actually easier for health consumers to handle because they are covered by affordability tax credits.”
Who pays for those tax credits – also known as a subsidy for health insurance premiums? The federal government. Who funds the federal government? Taxpayers. Who is required to have federally-mandated health insurance coverage? Everyone.
Additionally, because of how the Affordable Care Act was written, a taxpayer may fund the subsidies on one hand – because they pay taxes – while not qualifying for them when they buy government-mandated health insurance. The subsidies are only available to individuals and families who make less than 400% of the federal poverty level. One group hit by that rule is small business owners who run their business expenses and profits through their personal tax rate.
Not once in his praise of premium hikes did Kraig address the biggest broken promise of ObamaCare: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” That’s not true in Wisconsin or anywhere else, where new plans have replaced pre-ObamaCare plans and entire insurance companies have quit the marketplace.
Russ Feingold voted to ruin your health care by voting for ObamaCare. Keep that in mind when you vote.
In Boise, Idaho, this weekend, I watched people packed into a high school auditorium warm to a ticket most Americans haven’t even heard of: Evan McMullin and Mindy Finn. McMullin, a 40-year-old former Central Intelligence Agency operative, Goldman Sachs banker and congressional aide, has only been running for president for 11 weeks. He hasn’t even raised $1 million. Yet, according to polls, he was even with Trump and Clinton in Utah, the state where he was born. One poll even showed him ahead. He wasn’t just the first third-party presidential candidate with a chance of winning a state since George Wallace in 1968 — he’d be the first candidate in U.S. history to do so without a party affiliation. If he manages this, he’d have a platform to try to revamp the right flank of American politics — his project after what he sees as an inevitable Clinton victory. …
People laughed and clapped when Finn, a 35-year-old former Twitter executive and consultant to the presidential campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney, admitted she hadn’t had plans to run for vice president this year “or ever.” But the mood got more serious when she and McMullin explained why they decided to run: They’d waited and waited for a big-name conservative to come forward and stand against Trump and Clinton. When none appeared, they despaired and decided to make a go of it themselves, just to show, as McMullin said, that there were “millions of Americans more qualified to be president than Trump or Clinton.” That was a sentiment the audience shared. Lines formed at the end of McMullin’s short speech — one to have pictures taken with him, a regular occurrence at his campaign stops in the Mountain West, and another one to donate to his campaign, which subsists on these contributions — less than $40 on average. Capacity crowds at every venue where he has appeared since making a dent in the Utah polls ensure that he can go on.
McMullin says he voted for Senator Marco Rubio in the Republican primary. “He was the best on national security issues and I thought he would be successful at bringing in people of different races and religions into the conservative movement.” But he would have backed any Republican candidate except Trump, whom he called a racist, an enemy of religious freedom and of everything a true conservative holds dear, from the Second Amendment to the right to life. “I don’t trust the Donald Trump who’s running for president,” he said. “I trust the Donald Trump before he was running and his entire life.”
McMullin says Trump harnessed the feelings of people left behind by trade, automation and ultimately the Republican Party itself. “He took these people’s frustration and turned it into anger and hate and that drove his momentum even further,” McMullin said. “And as he did that, you saw leaders of the Republican Party join him because they saw political opportunity in it and that gave him even more opportunity, and here we are with Donald Trump as our nominee.”
When Trump won the nomination, McMullin was working as policy director for the House Republican Conference, the party’s congressional caucus. He had access to leading lawmakers, and he watched with mounting frustration as they either fell in behind Trump or refused to oppose him. “They told me Trump’s supporters would send them angry tweets if they did,” McMullin told the crowd in Boise, to laughter and jeers.
The former CIA agent, who ran intelligence and counter-terrorism operations in the Middle East, approached a group called Better for America, which had been casting around for an anti-Trump conservative candidate and trying to secure ballot spots for a knight in shining armor. He said he would have served whoever was picked. But the group couldn’t find anyone with even minor name recognition. So McMullin took the plunge, setting up his election headquarters in Utah and trying to get on the ballot everywhere he could — mostly as a write-in. He raised about $300,000 in the first month, then almost nothing in the month that followed because few believed he stood a chance. He says the trickle of funding increased to a more respectable stream after the Utah polls.
Not a Spoiler
McMullin’s plan was to win a state or two in the Mountain West. Idaho and Wyoming, as well as Utah, have large Mormon populations, and McMullin, himself a Mormon, knows his coreligionists have a hard time accepting Trump even as an alternative to Clinton. Mormons, with their memory of persecution, haven’t taken kindly to Trump’s early promises to keep Muslims out of the U.S.
Trump was expected to carry Utah, Idaho and Wyoming, all deeply conservative states, and McMullin may deny him victory at least in Utah (polls in Idaho and Wyoming don’t track him yet).
If the race between Trump and Clinton were close, a victory even in one state would allow McMullin and Finn a theoretical chance at the White House because if neither candidate gets a majority of electoral votes, the 12th Amendment of the Constitution calls for Congress to pick the president. That was their original long-shot strategy — such a scenario hasn’t played out since 1825. McMullin is the first to admit that this “does appear less likely now”: He is certain Clinton will win by a landslide. So is Finn.
“Clinton is within three points of Trump in Texas, my home state,” Finn told me. “It shows the damage he has done to the Republican Party.”
If the race ends as they predict, the votes cast for McMullin won’t change anything, but he he and Finn hope to “send a strong message to Washington, to the Republican Party and to conservatives that something new is happening and that there’s a new conservative movement that we’re building.”
I’ve heard the word “movement” from a number of candidates in this campaign — Bernie Sanders, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, and, of course, Trump. Sanders and Trump did succeed in forming genuine movements. On a small scale, McMullin has done so, too, at least in the Mountain West. Hundreds of people, far more than expected, show up at his volunteer recruitment events. He talks of plans to keep the organization alive after Election Day, perhaps even turn it into a party. He says:
Both of us are skeptical that the Republican Party will change in a good way after this election. It will learn that it needs to be able to appeal to women, to minorities and to millennials, and they’re doing terribly with that in this election. They’re not getting better. They’re getting worse. I have been involved with the Republican Party at high levels and tried to change the party, and we see that it really struggles. Every week it seems like there’s another Republican member of Congress saying something terrible about women. I mean, they can’t help themselves. Now that Donald Trump supporters are more empowered than they’ve ever been, that doesn’t suggest a positive future for the Republican Party to me. Most likely over time they will shrink in size and become a white nationalist party.
That’s not a direction McMullin wants to go. He and his running mate may have given up on modernizing the party, but not on conservative politics.
Conservatism for Millennials
After months of listening to U.S. Republican politicians thunder about gay marriage and abortion, I was surprised at the seeming mildness of McMullin’s message on these issues. He talked about working with liberal groups to minimize the number of elective abortions, and said that the Supreme Court had ruled on gay marriage so it’s time to move on. (One reason for the latter stand may be that McMullin’s mother is now married to a woman.) But when I asked him if his was a somewhat watered down version of conservatism, he pushed back hard.
“If I became president I’d appoint Supreme Court justices who would, I hope, overturn Roe v. Wade,” he said. “So that would be a litmus test for me.”
His stands don’t differ much from Republican orthodoxy: He calls for entitlements reform to cut the deficit and government debt, and wants to replace Obamacare with a cheaper system that would do more to foster competition among insurance companies and downsize government in general. His biggest objection to Clinton, apart from the litany of accusations stemming from the e-mail scandal, is that she’s a government expansionist. In the traditional Republican vein, he’s more of a national security hawk than the Democratic nominee, and rejects what he sees as Trump’s affection for President Vladimir Putin.
Unlike either of the candidates, McMullin, who worked in the Middle East for most of his 11 years at the CIA, has a coherent plan for Syria. It involves full radar coverage of the country to monitor and report Russian and Syrian regime airstrikes along with the creation of no-fly zones in the north and south of the country to protect moderate Syrian rebels. The U.S., he says, is perfectly capable of building a local force that could hold its ground against President Bashar al-Assad on the battlefield and force him to negotiate his departure. “As far as the moderate Syrians are concerned, I am really frustrated when policy makers say, ‘They are weak, we can’t really work with them,’” McMullin says. “Oh yeah, they are weak because we don’t support them. How are they supposed to fight this battle on their own?”
Both McMullin and Finn sound capable of discussion and compromise, of accepting others’ views rather than imposing their own. They are not harsh ideologues or politicians intent on hitting their talking points. When I remarked on that, McMullin said:
I think generally there’s a hunger for authenticity. We’re honest about our goals, we’re honest about the chances, we’re honest about what we stand for. That is not the usual thing, and we know that because we come from that world: We’ve been top advisers to politicians.
As I listened to this pair of political novices talk about broadcasting their events on the social networks or using Facebook to build awareness, I imagined one of the next elections — perhaps not the one in four years, but surely by 2024 — in which they and their peers on the left would argue out the issues instead of slinging mud. I could easily imagine them working toward political compromises, too. By being genuine and understated, they would perhaps restore the credibility the U.S.’s democracy has lost this year.
On both sides of the line dividing the American right and left, there is a yearning for something different, an earnest belief in working to make the country better. Perhaps there’s a chance that it won’t be corrupted by the realities of politics: The negative example of the Trump v. Clinton race is there for all to see and avoid.
Britishers with taste bought this single when it hit the charts today in 1961:
Today in 1965, the four Beatles were named Members of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth. The Beatles’ visit reportedly began when they smoked marijuana in a Buckingham Palace bathroom to calm their nerves.
The Beatles’ receiving their MBEs prompted a number of MBE recipients to return theirs. “Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war — for killing people,” said John Lennon, previewing the public relations skills he’d show a year later when he would compare the Beatles to Jesus Christ. “We received ours for entertaining other people. I’d say we deserve ours more.”
Lennon returned his MBE in 1969 as part of his peace protests.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 