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Today in 1962, the Beatles recorded their first radio appearance, on the BBC’s “Teenagers’ Turn — Here We Go”:
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The number one British album today in 1965 was “The Rolling Stones No. 2”:
The number one single today in 1965:
Today in 1970, an album was released to pay for the defense in a California murder trial.
You didn’t know Charles Manson was a recording “artist,” did you?
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Today in 1955, Elvis Presley made his TV debut, on “Louisiana Hayride” on KWKH-TV in Shreveport, La.
The number one album today in 1966 was Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’ “Going Places”:
The number one single today in 1966:
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Car & Driver contributing editor John Pearley Huffman writes on something possibly inspired by a Nissan truck commercial of old:
Alabama, the author’s Husky, will jump into a truck bed before the tailgate is even down. Another staffer’s Newfie dances around as if her paws were in a frying pan and runs in circles when she hears the word “ride.” Only dogs seem to love cars as much as humans. There’s little (or no) science investigating why, so we invited the experts to speculate.
Dogs experience the world more through scent than sight. Where a human’s nose has up to 5 million olfactory receptors, a dog’s can have up to 300 million. No wonder they like to stick their snoots out the window and into the wind. “I’m not sure they’re getting a high, per se,” says Dr. Melissa Bain, a veterinarian at the University of California, Davis, who researches animal behavior and welfare. “But they are getting a lot of input in higher speed.”
Dr. Brian Hare, associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University and the founder of the Duke Canine Cognition Center, says the wind blast may be a sort of sensory overload. “It’s the equivalent of watching an incredible movie or reading the latest issue of Car & Driver,” he says (with a little coaching). “There’s so much information they’re taking in, it’s just ‘Whoa.’ Then again, the simpler explanation could e that it just feels good. And it could also be both.”
The breeze is just part of it, he says. “In most places where you find wolves today, they have to range pretty far. They’ve evolved to go places. They likely enjoy going places. It’s not going to do much good if you’re selected to not enjoy that thing you need to do to survive.” He says it’s possible dogs know the car is going somewhere, “a new place to explore, and there might be other dogs there.” At the very least, he says, “dogs associate the car with a good outcome: ‘When I get in this thing, good things happen.’ At the most they understand that they’re going somewhere.” …
Most of all, he says, dogs are pack animals, social animals. But domestication as tweaked the formula. “If you give that dog a choice between being with a person or with other dogs, dogs prefer to be with people,” Hare says. “They’re the most successful mammals besides humans in the history of the planet,” he continues. “The trust bond with humans has been a huge boost to the domesticated wolves who live with us. Dogs have evolved to be geniuses at taking advantage of the human tool.” It’s dogs’ desire to be with us that makes them eager driving companions. … In other words dogs love cars because they love us.
This (photo taken with my cellphone and blown up) is Max, our PitBasenHerd (also known as the World’s Largest Basenji, given that Basenji are beagle-size, and Max certainly is not), who one day managed to con Mrs. Presteblog into letting him stick his head out the passenger-side window of the van. Now, of course, he wants to stick his head out the window whenever he’s in the van, regardless of weather. (The driver must make sure the power windows are off, lest Max step on the switch and lower the window all the way.)
Our other dog, Leo el Chihuahua obesidad mórbida, sits on the driver’s lap and thinks he’s steering the vehicle. He formerly scratched on the window on the passenger side until the driver let down the window.
Leo and Max are keeping up a tradition started by our two Welsh springer spaniels, Puzzle and Nick, who clamored to go with us wherever we went. Unfortunately for them, kids take up more space and attention, so Leo and Max have less vehicular travel than Puzzle and Nick did.
We once had a car small enough that I could put my arm over the passenger-side front seat. Nick, who often sat in the middle of the back seat, would hang his head over my arm, fall asleep and start snoring while sitting. That worked until my arm fell asleep and I had to move it.
This time of year I am reminded of a Saturday in which the number of high school teams our newspaper had to cover exceeded my ability to cover them. On Saturday morning, I took one of our dogs with me and covered a girls gymnastics sectional meet, then a boys basketball regional final game, while Mrs. Presteblog took the other dog and covered a different boys game. We met in location number four for that night’s girls sectional final game. Puzzle and Nick had no idea where they were going, but didn’t care.
That was back in our pre-child days, when our dogs went most places we went in vehicles, including on overnight trips and to our cut-your-own Christmas tree source. Earlier that year, because there was one game that had to be covered in order to have a sports page that week, we drove to Beloit for a boys basketball holiday tournament game. Since the team we were covering won, the four of us went back to Beloit the next night.
When Mrs. Presteblog flew to Guatemala via Mitchell Field in Milwaukee, we stayed the previous night at a hotel near the airport, since her flight left at 6 a.m. (I don’t remember if the hotel allowed pets or not.) I parked our car in an underground garage. When I returned, I found a note on the car criticizing me for keeping our “poor babbies” in a locked car, despite the fact that (1) they had been there for all of an hour (2) in a covered garage (3) before sunrise (4) with the windows cracked. (Irrelevant aside: That was the same day that John F. Kennedy Jr. made his last flight.)
It wasn’t an overnight trip, but we once went to Door County on a summer day. We stopped at a beach on the Green Bay side, and watched the dogs jump off a seaweed-covered boat ramp. Puzzle had bad back hips due to dysplasia, but powerful front legs and chest. That, however, failed to prevent her from not being able to stop and, though I don’t think she intended to, skid off the ramp into the water. Later, they discovered the joys of rolling in dead fish, and their owners discovered the non-joys of driving 90 minutes back home in a car full of dogs smelling of dead fish.
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… the midst of three straight days of postseason basketball, as you can read about here.
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The Grammy Awards premiered today in 1959. The Record of the Year came from a TV series:
Today in 1966, John Lennon demonstrated the ability to get publicity, if not positive publicity, when the London Evening Standard printed a story in which Lennon said:
Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first — rock and roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.
Lennon’s comment prompted Bible Belt protests, including burning Beatles records. Of course, as the band pointed out, to burn Beatles records requires purchasing them first.
The number one single today in 1967:
Today in 1973, Pink Floyd began its 19-date North American tour at the Dane County Coliseum in Madison.
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Since I am doing three or four postseason high school basketball games between now and Saturday night, of course I will be also on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin Week in Review Friday at 8 a.m. to make my usual appearance relatively close to a holiday of some sort. (If Pets Had Thumbs Day? Holy Experiment Day? Multiple Personality Day? National Frozen Food Day? National Crown Roast of Pork Day? Be Nasty Day? Panic Day? Worship of Tools Day?)
That means, in addition to the radio stations I’ll be on tonight through Saturday night, you can hear me Friday on WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at http://www.wpr.org.
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The Old Dominion Libertarian posits a fantastical story of the 2016 election that begins with the 12th Amendment:
The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. – U.S. Constitution, Amendment XII
There has been an increasing amount of discussion about a possible strong third-party or independent showing in 2016, whether from an independent Republican ticket put up in opposition to Trump, or from a Libertarian or independent campaign capitalizing on popular disgust with the frontrunners for the major-party nominations: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, both of whom are unlikely to muster approval ratings higher than the low-mid 40s.
This seems like a good opportunity to review one of the lesser-known provisions of that already too-obscure institution: the Electoral College. Under the 12th Amendment, in order to be elected President a candidate must secure an absolute majority (currently 270 votes) in the Electoral College. Thanks to a strange technicality in the way the amendment is written, as little as one Electoral Vote cast for a third-party candidate, could legally result in the House of Representatives electing that candidate President of the United States.
The way it works, is if no candidate receives a 270 vote majority. Then, the newly elected House will have to choose a President, in the brief window in January between when they take office (Jan 3) and Inauguration Day (Jan 20). In this election, they are limited to choosing from among the top three candidates in the Electoral College. Adding an additional wrinkle to the process: each state gets one vote, the only time the House of Representatives votes that way. The delegations from the 43 states having more than one Representative, must vote among themselves, to decide how to cast each state’s one vote. This effectively guarantees that the Republicans would control the outcome of any election thrown to the House, even if they are no longer the majority, because of their dominance in more, smaller states.
The Vice President is elected separately by the Senate (voting as usual), however they are limited to the top two, not three, candidates in the Electoral College.
So, with that basic scheme in mind (see here for CGP Grey’s excellent video explanation): consider the following scenario plays out on Election Night 2016:
The Democratic nominee is Hillary Clinton. The Republican nominee is Donald Trump. The third candidate can be any number of possibilities: Jim Webb, Mike Bloomberg, Mark Cuban, Angus King, or an independent Republican ticket put up in opposition to Trump, such as Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan or Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. However, since it’s my personal preference, in this scenario we’ll posit that it is Gary Johnson, former Governor of New Mexico, as the Libertarian nominee. The same basic premise can be played out with any of them.
Clinton has 43% of the popular vote. Trump has 39% of the popular vote. Johnson, after being included in the debates on the calculation from both major-party candidates that he would hurt the other more, gets 16% of the popular vote. The remaining 2% scatters to other minor party candidates. (This is roughly similar to the popular vote breakdown from Clinton vs. Bush vs. Perot in 1992.)
However, the Electoral College tells a different story than 1992. Unlike Ross Perot, Johnson has won a narrow first-place plurality with approx. 34% in three smaller states: New Hampshire, Nevada, and New Mexico, totaling 15 Electoral Votes. The remaining states are near evenly divided: the Democrat ticket has 260 Electoral Votes and, despite being four points behind in the popular vote, the Republican ticket has 263 Electoral Votes.
Instantly, all eyes turn to the House of Representatives, and in particular its Republican members.
The House Republicans are now in a real dilemma. Most have refused to support or endorse Donald Trump’s disastrous campaign, which has continued in much the same manner as his primary campaign, and a small number had even openly endorsed Johnson in the final weeks. Most of those who nominally endorsed Trump, only did so halfheartedly and insincerely.
The Clinton campaign demands that the House confirm her, not along party lines, but because she received, by far, the most popular votes. The same percentage, they note, as Bill Clinton had received to be elected in 1992, though still well short of 50%.
The Trump campaign counters that the voters had returned a GOP-majority House (at least by state), and so the specified process in the Constitution implies that the Republican members of the House should elect their own party’s nominee. Additionally, they count that Trump was the first-place candidate in the Electoral College.
House Republicans are in a catch-22. The vast majority consider Trump ideologically and more importantly, temperamentally, unfit to be President. Many of them have said so publicly. Furthermore, almost two-thirds of voters rejected him, and he lost the popular vote by a wide margin. The idea of a Trump presidency, particularly under these circumstances, with every Republican in Congress to blame, is seen as a nightmare scenario among GOP establishment circles.
On the other hand, few Republican Congressmen can go home to their districts and face a primary, having voted to install Hillary Clinton as President. The massacre in the 2018 mid-term primary elections would be historic, and they know it. They are caught between losing their seats in primaries, or losing their majority in the general election, to voter backlash in favor of the spurned Democrats.
In this scenario, Johnson presents a strongly appealing and compelling dark-horse option. A former Republican Governor with experience in office, and a smaller-government free-market platform, he is much more acceptable to many in Washington than dangerous lunatic Donald Trump. But he also has an appeal and acceptability to the left and center that Trump utterly lacks. The same is likely true of Jim Webb, and possibly Michael Bloomberg.
Facing deadlock and no good options in picking either Clinton or Trump, the House Republicans make an offer: the House will elect the third-party candidate President, and the Senate (still in GOP hands), will elect the Republican nominee for Vice-President. (This is made easier, since the third-place candidate for Vice President is not eligible to be elected by the Senate). This could be Ted Cruz, for example, or another relatively acceptable GOP Governor or Senator placed on the ticket in a failed bid to keep the GOP unified behind Trump. (Alternately, if the Democrats have retaken the Senate, they could independently elect their party’s nominee for Vice President.)
So on December 30, 2016, a press conference is called in the Capitol Rotunda. Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, announce that both of their incoming caucuses had just voted in a special closed-door session, to elect a Libertarian President and a Republican Vice-President. A unity ticket among candidates who, between them, received a majority of both the popular vote and the electoral college. After being sworn in on January 3, the new Congress does exactly that.
And that’s how, if the stars align just right, this obscure provision of the Constitution could allow members of Congress to, in effect, veto both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and elevate a third-place runner-up to the Oval Office instead.
Far fetched? Absolutely. Impossible? I don’t think so. Unprecedented? Not quite. In 1824, a very similar scenario played out among John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, and Henry Clay. Jackson, seen as unfit despite being the clear popular vote winner, was passed over in favor of popular runner-up Adams, thanks in part to a deal with 4th place candidate and Speaker of the House Henry Clay to appoint him as Secretary of State.
This is not an entirely new idea, either. Throwing an election to the House has long been the goal of third-party Presidential campaigns, most famously those in 1948 and 1968 that swept the Deep South. It is a consideration that should figure heavily into any campaign strategy for a strong third-party presidential campaign.
My first thought is that you’d think three constitutional crises in my lifetime would be enough. (To wit: Richard Nixon’s threatened impeachment in 1974, Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998, and the month-long 2000 presidential election.)
I would, however, be fine with this arrangement myself.
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The Daily Caller reports:
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump doubled down on his promise to open up the country’s libel laws and warned that reporters they will “regret … all of the bad stories they write.”
During a campaign speech in Huntsville, Alabama Sunday, Trump talked about the “heat” he received from the media since saying on Friday he would push to make it easier to sue journalists over “purposely negative and horrible and false articles” about him.
Trump told the crowd in Huntsville, “I said to the press they have to report accurately and if they don’t report accurately, we — all of us — should have the right to sue them, OK? You know what? This has nothing to do with freedom of the press, which I believe in totally,” he said.
“But when they don’t report accurately, we should have the right to sue them to get them to report accurately and also damages, because right now, we have libel laws that don’t mean a thing. I will tell you it’s going to be tougher because they will be tougher on me now. They are so dishonest,” he explained. …
He added, “But here’s the story, when they write inaccurately, we have to have the right to hold them to what they write and if it’s inaccurate we have the right to get damages. Right now we get nothing. They are going to regret, all of them, all of the bad stories they write.”
Trump defended his stance to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday earlier in the day.
“In England, I can tell you it’s very much different and very much easier,” the New York businessman said.
“I think it’s very unfair that The New York Times can write a story that it’s very much false, and they basically told me is false,” he said. “All I want is fairness.”
Trump has threatened and slapped libel and defamation lawsuits on the press and private civilians in the past. He lost a libel suit in 2011 against Timothy O’Brien, author of the 2009 book TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald. Trump accused O’Brien of committing “actual malice” by referencing three anonymous sources who said Trump’s net worth is estimated between $150 million and $250 million.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Trump’s lawyer said it was “proven conclusively” that Trump’s net worth to exceeds $7 billion.
Trump hit Sheena Monin, a Miss USA pageant contestant from Pennsylvania, with a $5 million defamation lawsuit in 2012 after she questioned the integrity of the pageant’s results in a Facebook post.
That makes Trump the right-wing (assuming that’s what he really is) equivalent to the left-wingers screaming to ban “hate speech” — that is, speech they disapprove of for identity-group reasons.
That makes Newspaper Association of America president David Chavern observe:
The first thing to understand is that under the landmark Supreme Court case of New York Times vs. Sullivan, it was determined that news organizations could be found liable when they deliberately publish false information. The specific standard is “actual malice.” So if Mr. Trump wants to address media organizations that “write purposely negative and horrible, false articles” then the law is already established as to his rights to do that.
But we all know that Mr. Trump isn’t interested in legalities in this case. He is clearly just trying to intimidate news organizations and bully them in providing more positive coverage of him and his candidacy for President. He should pick a different target. Newspapers have dealt with more intimidating figures than Mr. Trump.
Newspapers, actually, have a long, long history of responsibly speaking truth in the face of great power. One could think of Watergate or the Oscar-nominated movie “Spotlight” for some better-known examples. Throughout history, those in power have complained about newspaper reporting when it didn’t meet their agenda and the number of instances where the reporting has been found to be on target has vastly out-weighed any circumstances where it wasn’t. The fact is that our society relies upon the newspaper industry to be a consistent, challenging voice to the wealthy and powerful — and newspapers have a long history of carrying out that mandate with care and a deep sense of responsibility.
Newspapers have successfully stood-up to sitting Presidents, vast religious organizations, governors, mayors and immensely powerful corporations, among many others. If Mr. Trump wants to try to bully news organizations into providing reporting that he likes, then he will have to do a whole lot better than making weak, misguided promises about changes to a law that aren’t needed in the first place.
The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple adds:
An attack on media law is a logical extension of Trump’s rhetoric, not to mention a threat to American democracy. After all, he has displayed a highly undemocratic annoyance with the idea that the media is independent. For months he has been attempting to get the cameras at his rallies to properly pan around the thronged arenas, the better to capture his out-of-control popularity, even when the camera operators’ job is to stay on him. He has ridiculed reporter after reporter for reporting the facts of Trump’s march through the GOP primaries. Whenever he has been busted out by investigative journalism, he has attacked the institutions that have compiled it.
Though Trump in his remarks issued no specifics — he never does — about the shortcomings of existing policy or the exact changes he’d make, he appears to be upset with the degree to which media outlets are protected by longstanding First Amendment law. And protected they are, especially when reporting on people like Donald Trump, the sort of person that libel law sees as “public figures.” Media types can go after public figures with a great deal of aggressiveness because the law of the land sees those in the public eye as inviting scrutiny and thrusting themselves into the glare of accountability.
Wind the clock back to March 1964, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided the landmark case New York Times v. Sullivan. At issue was not an article but rather an advertisement in a 1960 edition of the New York Times that an Alabama elected official, L.B. Sullivan, found particularly injurious. The record concluded that some of the criticisms in the advertisement were inaccurate.
No matter, wrote William J. Brennan for the majority, in an opinion that appeared to foresee Trump himself:
Those who won our independence believed … that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies, and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones. Believing in the power of reason as applied through public discussion, they eschewed silence coerced by law — the argument of force in its worst form. Recognizing the occasional tyrannies of governing majorities, they amended the Constitution so that free speech and assembly should be guaranteed.
Thus, we consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.
From this decision has arisen something of a two-tiered libel arrangement throughout the land. There’s one standard for Joe Schmo, who has to prove only that a media outlet acted with negligence in order to secure a favorable judgment. For public figures — they have to prove a standard known as “actual malice,” that the offending statement “was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or false.”
What’s so comical and pathetic about Trump is how, as per usual, he speaks so loudly without knowing anything about the topic. Roll back the tape on one part of his riff: “I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”
Trump wouldn’t need to “open up our libel laws” in order to accomplish this end. As currently laid out, our libel laws enable him to do just that. In fact, the “actual malice” standard discussed above applies almost precisely to those instances when news outlets write “purposely negative and horrible and false articles.”
Read carefully, in other words, Trump’s words delivered a thundering endorsement of the status quo in libel jurisprudence. Surely he didn’t mean as much — if elected he would doubtless move ahead with this plan to make it harder for news outlets to call him out. Though for a guy who spends much of his day writing over-the-top slams of other public officials, maybe Trump should give thanks for the First Amendment.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 