Today in 1959, the four members of the Platters, who had been arrested in Cincinnati Aug. 10 on drug and prostitution charges, were acquitted.
Still, unlike perhaps today, the acquittal didn’t undo the damage the charges caused to the group’s career.
U2’s Bono is an interesting guy in the music world.
He’s not a conservative, but he admits that capitalism helps poor people improve their lives better than government (or what serves for government in the Third World).
So his comments reported by the Independent Journal about ISIS are worth considering:
In recent weeks, many different strategies for defeating ISIS have been proposed. Russia and France (among others) have engaged in airstrikes. President Obama has suggested more “gun control.”
U2’s Bono and the Edge? “Music.”
In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Bono and the Edge sat down to discuss their dedication to returning to Paris as a venue, despite the fact that a rock concert was so recently the target of a horrific attack.
Zakaria mentioned the Paris resident who, following the attack at the Bataclan, dragged a piano out into the streets and began to play John Lennon’s “Imagine.” He asked if Bono felt that music was a proper response to terrorism. Bono explained:
“That’s poetry in music, and humor…
All fascists are afraid of humor. That’s why Hitler outlawed the dadaists, the surrealists. Violence is their language.”
He then addressed the philosophical side of the issue:
“Think about the idea of outlawing music. A child sings before it can speak. It’s the very essence of our humanity.”
And he added a few words of caution for Americans:
“If you only take Christian refugees… this is not the American idea. I’m always reminding people that America is not just a country – it’s an idea.
If they change the nature of the United States and the way people think and the pluralism and inclusiveness, then they win.”
The Edge added his perspective as well:
“Everything that we hold dear seemed to be the target.
And France, the birthplace of the enlightenment movement, which gave birth to America. It’s like the place where the modern Western world was born.”
And he added the historical significance:
“There have only been a few movements that have targeted music specifically. The Taliban banned music, and during Mao’s cultural revolution some music was banned.
We think of music as the sound of freedom. We think that rock and roll has a part to play.
Defiance. Resistance, as it were.”
U2, after canceling a performance immediately following the attacks on the Bataclan and surrounding areas, returns to Paris for back to back concerts December 6th and 7th. They are determined to be a part of that “spirit of defiance,” said Bono:
“[ISIS] is not trying to take lives. They’re trying to take away our way of life.
They’re a death cult. We are a life cult.”
And ticket sales indicate that Paris is ready to embrace U2 and the music Bono referred to as “defiant joy” – all but 300 seats were sold to the rescheduled shows in a city still reeling from the effects of a terror attack.
Even if you don’t agree with all of their analysis, most of it is correct. Certainly if humor includes ridicule, humor is a useful weapon against ISIS. Whether or not they are legitimate, every video that shows a terrorist blowing up himself by accident deserves to go viral. (As observed by someone decades ago, comedy is tragedy that happens to someone else.)
No war is ever won merely by bombs and soldiers. World War II, for instance, required not just the military defeat of Germany and Japan, but, in Japan’s case, the elimination of the militaristic facets of their culture, and in Germany’s case the elimination of the Nazi culture. That takes decades in some cases. The last thing that pushed the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries into the dustbin of history was the fall of the Berlin Wall, pushed there by young East Germans wanting to live in the more prosperous and more free West.
Donald Trump has been wrongly advocating for the elimination of Muslim immigration. (The fact that Jimmy Carter stopped Iranian immigration during the Iran hostage crisis proves only that two wrongs don’t make successful strategy.) Were Trump serious about the cultural war between radical Islam and our culture, he would have gone to Paris (unlike the other presidential candidates, he certainly can afford the trip) for the U2 concerts and demonstrated to the world that he’s not afraid of radical Islam.
Wars are not won by hiding in your bunker and fencing yourself off.
Until recently, Princeton University’s devotion to Woodrow Wilson was so pervasive and worshipful that visitors to campus might easily have mistaken the modernist parthenon housing the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs for a literal temple.
If nothing else, the black students demanding that my alma mater strip the segregationist president’s name from its public-policy school and Wilson College residential complex have accomplished one amazing thing. They’ve forced Princeton to acknowledge that its 13th president, and the nation’s 28th, was not the most nearly perfect human ever to inhabit New Jersey.
As the university continues to debate the protesters’ demands, a new work of intellectual history coincidentally published by Princeton University Press and written by a Princeton faculty member offers a compelling — though implicit — case that Wilson’s name is ideally suited for the public-policy school but deeply ironic for the residential college.
Along the way, “Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era,” by Thomas C. Leonard, reveals the largely forgotten intellectual origins of many current controversies, including disputes over tightening voter identification laws, raising the minimum wage and restricting immigration.
The book isn’t about Wilson per se. It’s about the progressive intellectual movement in which he played a major role as scholar, university administrator, and politician. Early 20th-century progressives transformed American institutions, and the movement’s premises continue to inform thinking and policy across the political spectrum. “It was the progressives who fashioned the new sciences of society, founded the modern American university, invented the think tank, and created the American administrative state, institutions still defined by the progressive values that formed and instructed them,” writes Leonard, a research scholar at Princeton’s Council of the Humanities.
The progressives believed, first and foremost, in the importance of science and scientific experts in guiding the economy, government, and society. Against the selfishness, disorder, corruption, ignorance, conflict and wastefulness of free markets or mass democracy, they advanced the ideal of disinterested, public-spirited social control by well-educated elites. The progressives were technocrats who, Leonard observes, “agreed that expert public administrators do not merely serve the common good, they also identify the common good.” Schools of public administration, including the one that since 1948 has borne Woodrow Wilson’s name, still enshrine that conviction.
Leonard also brings to light an embarrassing truth: In the early 20th century, the progressive definition of the common good was thoroughly infused with scientific racism. Harvard economist William Z. Ripley, for example, was a recognized expert on both railroadregulation and the classification of European races by coloring, stature and “cephalic index,” or head shape. At the University of Wisconsin, the red-hot center of progressive thought, leading social scientists turned out economic-reform proposals along with works parsing the racial characteristics — and supposed natural inferiority — of blacks, Chinese, and non-Teutonic European immigrants. (Present-day progressives somehow didn’t highlight this heritage when they were defending “the Wisconsin Idea” against the depredations of Republican Governor Scott Walker.)
“The ‘race suicide’ of the American or colonial stock should be regarded as the most fundamental of our social problems,” the Wisconsin economist John R. Commons wrote in 1920. His colleague Edward A. Ross, who popularized the terms “social control” and “race suicide,” called interest in eugenics “a perfect index of one’s breadth of outlook and unselfish concern for the future of our race.”
In the early 20th century, most progressives viewed as cutting-edge science what today looks like simple bigotry. “Eugenics and race science were not pseudosciences in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” Leonard emphasizes. “They were sciences,” supported by research laboratories and scholarly journals and promoted by professors at the country’s most prestigious universities.
While some socialists and conservatives also embraced them, Leonard argues, eugenics and scientific racism fit particularly well with progressive thought: “Eugenics was anti-individualistic; it promised efficiency; it required expertise, and it was founded on the authority of science.” Equally important, “biological ideas,” Leonard writes, gave progressive reformers “a conceptual scheme capable of accommodating the great contradiction at the heart of Progressive Era reform — its view of the poor as victims deserving state uplift and as threats requiring state restraint.” They could feel sorry for impoverished Americans while trying to restrict their influence and limit their numbers.
Take political participation. Nowadays, people argue about whether stricter voter identification laws are good-government protections against fraud or discriminatory attempts to deter minority and low-income voters. A century ago, leading progressives happily embraced both goals. “Fewer voters among the lower classes was not a cost, it was a benefit of reform,” Leonard writes. After progressive reforms, including Jim Crow restrictions sold in part as anti-corruption measures, voter participation plummeted. In New York State, turnout dropped from 88 percent in 1900 to 55 percent in 1920, while national turnout fell from 80 percent in 1896 to 50 percent in 1924.
Advocates similarly didn’t deny that imposing a minimum wage might throw some people out of work. That wasn’t a bug; it was a feature — a way to deter undesirable workers and keep them out of the marketplace and ideally out of the country. Progressives feared that, faced with competition from blacks, Jews, Chinese, or other immigrants, native-stock workingmen would try to keep up living standards by having fewer kids and sending their wives to work. Voilà: “race suicide.” Better to let a minimum wage identify inferior workers, who might be shunted into institutions and sterilized, thereby improving the breed in future generations. …
Although they generally assumed black inferiority, progressives outside the South didn’t worry much about the “Negro question.” They were instead obsessed with the racial, economic, and social threats posed by immigrants. MIT president Francis Amasa Walkercalled for “protecting the American rate of wages, the American standard of living, and the quality of American citizenship from degradation through the tumultuous access of vast throngs of ignorant and brutalized peasantry from the countries of eastern and southern Europe,” whom he described in Darwinian language as “representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence.”
So restricting immigration was as central to the progressive agenda as regulating railroads. Indeed, in his five-volume History of the American People, Wilson lumped together in one long paragraph the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act as “the first fruits of radical economic changes and the rapid developments of trade, industry, and transportation” — equal harbingers of the modern administrative state. With a literacy test and ban on most other Asian immigrants enacted in 1917 and national quotas established in 1924, the progressives bequeathed to America the concept of illegal immigration
The irony is that Wisconsin — specifically Ripon — is where the first U.S. political party that advocated equal treatment for blacks and whites was born. The Republican Party included progressives such as Fighting Bob La Follette, but most progressives ran off to form the Progressive Party (as opposed to Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party), then after the Progressive Party (or Parties) collapsed became Democrats.
That historical whitewashing, so to speak, continues in this state. The Fighting Bob site claims …
Most of La Follette’s contemporaries remained convinced that people of color were inherently unequal to whites, and defended their stance with arguments based in both biology and social, religious, and political tradition.
La Follette rejected discrimination for any reason. Despite the nation’s embrace of Jim Crow, La Follette told Howard University Law School’s African American graduating class of 1886, “We are one people…our lives run side by side, our ashes rest in the same soil.” He railed against separatism: “It is snobbish stupidity, it is supreme folly, to talk of non-contact, or exclusion.”
La Follette attributed the source of the trouble to the discrimination by the majority rather than in the alleged inferiority of their targets. In 1889, he lectured white racists from the floor of the U.S. Congress: “There is nothing threatening or portentous in the Negro problem today, excepting as you make it so. The difficulty does not lie with him, but with you instead, in the blind prejudice and stubborn antagonism, ever opposed to his development politically and socially as a citizen.”
… while not mentioning what Christian Schneider does:
You are also supposed to forget the black marks of Progressivism: the virulently racist eugenics of La Follette’s handpicked president of the University of Wisconsin, Charles Van Hise, who once said, “He who thinks not of himself primarily, but of his race and of its future, is the new patriot.” You have to forget that Progressives played a part in foisting Prohibition on the nation, an unforeseen effect of which was people either blinding or killing themselves by drinking substitute alcohol made of chemicals such as paint thinner.
And you will never, ever get fans of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, to admit Sanger’s racist beliefs and support, to quote her, “how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”
Imagine having the opportunity to see Johnny Cash, with Elvis Presley his opening act, in concert at a high school. The concert was at Arkansas High School in Swifton, Ark., today in 1955:
Today in 1961, the Beatles played a concert at the Palais Ballroom in Aldershot, Great Britain. Because the local newspaper wouldn’t accept the promoter’s check for advertising, the concert wasn’t publicized, and attendance totaled 18.
After the concert, the Beatles reportedly were ordered out of town by local police due to their rowdiness.
That, however, doesn’t compare to what happened in New Haven, Conn., today in 1967. Before the Doors concert in the New Haven Arena, a policeman discovered singer Jim Morrison making out in a backstage shower with an 18-year-old girl.
The officer, unaware that he had discovered the lead singer of the concert, told Morrison and the woman to leave. After an argument, in which Morrison told the officer to “eat it,” the officer sprayed Morrison and his new friend with Mace. The concert was delayed one hour while Morrison recovered.
Halfway through the first set, Morrison decided to express his opinion about the New Haven police, daring them to arrest him. They did, on charges of inciting a riot, public obscenity and decency. The charges were later dropped for lack of evidence.
The number one album today in 1972 was the Moody Blues’ “Seventh Sojourn”:
The number one single today in 1978:
Today in 1988, a poll was released on the subject of the best background music for sex. Number three was Luther Vandross …
… number two was Beethoven …
… and number one was Neil Diamond.
Neil Diamond?
The number one single today in 1989:
Today in 2003, Ozzy Osbourne crashed his ATV at his home, breaking his collarbone, eight ribs and a vertebra in his neck.
Birthdays begin with Sam Strain of the Imperials and the O’Jays:
Joan Armatrading:
Jack Sonni of Dire Straits:
Nick Seymour played bass for Crowded House:
Jakob Dylan of the Wallflowers:
Zak Foley of EMF:
On Saturday the New York Times published the newspaper’s opinion on the front page. Here are some excerpts:
With striking unanimity . . . the rising tide of bellicosity gripped the Republican presidential field. . . . Senator Ted Cruz of Texas seethed with disgust for Democrats. . . . Their language was almost apocalyptic. . . . Republicans showed little patience for such nuance. . . . For all the heated expressions from Republicans, there emerged no real detailed consensus among them about how to destroy the Islamic State or stop it from inspiring future adherents in the United States. . . . They favored symbolism over specific policy prescriptions. . . . Republican voters are flocking not to the candidate with the most experience managing national security, but to an outsider with no government résumé. . . . [David Gergen] added: “It’s almost animalistic. The human instinct is to seek safety.”
The last time the paper published an opinion on the front page was on Friday.
Also on Saturday, the Times admitted to publishing opinion on the front page: a signed editorial titled “The Gun Epidemic” (online “End the Gun Epidemic in America”). That was unusual; the last time the Times ran a formal editorial on the front page was in 1920. It disparaged the presidential nomination of Warren Harding as “the fine and perfect flower of the cowardice and imbecility of the Senatorial cabal that charged itself with the management of the Republican Convention.”
Saturday’s editorial—pegged to Wednesday’s terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif.—began as follows:
All decent people feel sorrow and righteous fury about the latest slaughter of innocents, in California. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are searching for motivations, including the vital question of how the murderers might have been connected to international terrorism. That is right and proper.
But . . .
You may ask: Why spend the first paragraph stating the obvious when the point of the editorial—signaled by that “But . . .”—is its antithesis? Because the Times is walking back this embarrassingly wrong assertion, from an editorial two days earlier: “There will be post-mortems and an official search for a ‘motive’ for this latest gun atrocity, as if something explicable had happened.”
The Times, of course, rushed to fit last week’s terrorist attacks into its “gun violence” template, and the Saturday editorial was a desperate attempt to keep it there against all evidence. In the print edition, the editorial ran in the left column, just below a banner headline reading “F.B.I. IS TREATING RAMPAGE AS AN ACT OF TERRORISM” (online: “F.B.I. Treating San Bernardino Attack as Terrorism Case”). It seems the Times execs admire our “Two Papers in One!” trope.
The editorial dealt with the contradiction by equivocating on the definition of terrorism: Politicians who favor gun rights “distract us with arguments about the word terrorism. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism.” And the editorial went beyond earlier calls for “modest,” “common-sense” “gun-safety” laws to urge confiscation of legally owned firearms:
Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.
This was not the second but the third post-San Bernardino editorial calling for more restrictions on law-abiding gun owners. The other one, on Friday, endorsed a Democratic effort, which the U.S. Senate rejected on Thursday, that would “prevent people on the F.B.I.’s consolidated terrorist watchlist from purchasing guns.”
That the Times’s gun-control crusade is motivated by hoplophobia rather than a sincere concern about crime and terrorism can be demonstrated by a comparison with other Times editorials that do not focus on guns. Just a week earlier, on Nov. 27, the paper pooh-poohed “False Alarms About a National Crime Wave”:
It is true that in many cities, murders in 2015 are on pace to surpass 2014 totals. . . .
While that is troubling, it is not evidence that America has fallen back into a lawless pit of chaos and death. A more meaningful way of looking at data is comparing it with unmistakable longer-term trends: The rate of violent crime, including murder, has been going down for a quarter-century, and is at its lowest in decades. On average, it is half of what it was in 1990, and in some places even lower.
We would speculate that the quarter-century-long trend toward more-permissive gun laws is a causal factor in the crime reduction. It will not surprise you to learn the Times does not consider that possibility.
And in an April 2014 editorial the Times told the story of Rahinah Ibrahim, a Malaysian architecture professor whom the FBI had wrongly added to its no-fly list (a subset of the consolidated terror watch list):
This week, government lawyers informed her that one reason for the denial is engagement in “terrorist activity,” even though they have conceded that she has never posed a threat to the United States.
How can Dr. Ibrahim be a terrorist and not be a threat at the same time? Welcome to the shadowy, self-contradictory world of American terror watch lists, which operate under a veil of secrecy so thick that it is virtually impossible to pierce it when mistakes are made. A 2007 audit found that more than half of the 71,000 names then on the no-fly list were wrongly included.
In a recently unredacted portion of his January ruling, Judge [William] Alsup noted that in 2009 the government added Dr. Ibrahim back to its central terrorist-screening database under a “secret exception” to its own standard of proof. A democratic society premised on due process and open courts cannot tolerate such behavior.
Among those who’ve ended up on the terrorist watch list over the years: peace activists Rebecca Gordon and Jan Adams, journalists Timothy Noah and Stephen Hayes, and 72 employees of the Department of Homeland Security.
President Obama, in an Oval Office address last night, also endorsed the failed legislation to deny gun rights to persons on the watch list. He did not order DHS to dismiss those 72 employees. One assumes that if he had, the Times would have rightly regarded it as an outrage. But when there’s an opportunity to deprive Americans of their rights under the Second Amendment, all notions of fairness and due process are out the window.
The Times’s front-page editorializing may be an attempt to keep up with the Daily News, a New York tabloid that could be described as the Times for infants. The News’s reaction to the San Bernardino attack has been utterly unhinged.
The News’s first reaction was to denounce prayer. “GOD ISN’T FIXING THIS,” screamed the front-page headline: “As latest batch of innocent Americans are left lying in pools of blood, cowards who could truly end gun scourge continue to hide behind meaninglessplatitudes.” The cover featured tweets from Republican Sens. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Lindsey Graham and Speaker Paul Ryan saying they were praying for the San Bernardino victims, survivors and emergency personnel.
And it wasn’t just the News. It appeared as if the left had collectively decided that they could finally get gun control through the simple expedient of enacting prayer control. Connecticut’s Sen. Chris Murphy tweeted: “Your ‘thoughts’ should be about steps to take to stop this carnage. Your ‘prayers’ should be for forgiveness if you do nothing—again.”
The Hill reported that Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, said: “We’ve had far too many moments of silence on the floor of the House. And while it is right to respectfully acknowledge the losses, we can no longer remain silent. What gives us the right to hold moments of silence when we do nothing to act upon the cause of the grief?” The Los Angeles Times reports that Rep. Jackie Speier, a Bay Area Democrat, plans to boycott any moment of silence for mass-shooting victims.
The Times’s Saturday editorial also scoffed at “elected leaders” who “offer prayers for gun victims.” And the paper’s columnist Timothy Egan demanded “No More Thoughts and Prayers.” Gun control, prayer control, thought control.
In the war on thought, no one is more militant than the editorial staff at the Daily News.Friday’s News featured another blaring headline: “HE’S A TERRORIST,” referring to Syed Farook, who along with his Pakistani wife carried out the San Bernardino attack. (Both were later killed in a shootout with police.) “But so are these guys . . .,” the paper added over photos of four proven or alleged mass-shooting perpetrators, two of whom had no known political motive. Then the kicker: “AND this guy”—Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association.
Your humble columnist had an interesting debate on Twitter with a fellow journalist who argued that the smear against LaPierre constituted actionable libel. Our view was that the News’s defense in any libel case would be close to airtight. In order for a statement to be libelous, it must be both false and defamatory. The News could argue that no reasonable person would understand it to be literally accusing LaPierre of terrorism, and thus the smear was constructively not a factual claim at all. It could also argue that it was unlikely to harm LaPierre’s reputation—most people’s minds are made up one way or the other about LaPierre and the NRA—and thus was not defamatory.
In other words, the best thing you can say about the attack on LaPierre is that it is impossible either to believe or to find persuasive. Such is the standard of journalism practiced by the Daily News.
The front page of today’s News, believe it or not, is even more infantile: “To all those who have been offended by hearing the truth about our nation’s gun scourge & the NRA & cowardly pols who think nothing’s wrong: Everything is AWESOME!” the paper declares. That odd assertion is illustrated with photos of cute animals.
Inside the paper one finds a column by Linda Stasi, denouncing one of the San Bernardino victims. “They were two hate-filled, bigoted municipal employees interacting in one department,” she begins. “Now 13 innocent people are dead in unspeakable carnage.”
The actual death toll was 14; she means to exclude one of them, Nicholas Thalasinos, “a radical Born Again Christian/Messianic Jew”:
Make no mistake, as disgusting and deservedly dead as the hate-filled fanatical Muslim killers were, Thalasinos was also a hate-filled bigot. Death can’t change that. . . .
Thalasinos was an anti-government, anti-Islam, pro-NRA, rabidly anti-Planned Parenthood kinda guy, who posted that it would be “Freaking Awesome” if hateful Ann Coulter was named head of Homeland Security. He asked, “IS 1. EVERY POLITICIAN IS BOUGHT AND PAID FOR? 2. EVERY POLITICIAN IS A MORON? 3. EVERY POLITICIAN IS RACIST AGAINST JEWS?” He also posted screeds like, “You can stick your Muslim Million Man march up your asses,” and how “Hashem” should blow up Iran.
Stasi suggests that Thalasinos deserved to lose his job for expressing views she finds uncongenial, though she allows that he didn’t deserve to be murdered. (Pro tip: If you feel it necessary to spell that out, consider the possibility that the argument you’re making isn’t a well-considered one.) And she unmistakably means to draw a moral equivalence between Thalasinos and Farook: “Except for their different religions they were in many ways similar men.” The difference between a mass murderer and his victim—a man who, as far as we know, never committed an act of violence—escapes her.
What accounts for all this madness from the antigun left? It is an impotent rage born of the inability to persuade Americans of the (to the left) obvious benefits of more gun control. The Times editorial makes that explicit, denouncing “politicians [who] abet would-be killers by creating gun markets for them, and voters [who] allow those politicians to keep their jobs.” As Democrat Dick Tuck said upon losing a 1966 nomination primary for the California Senate, “The people have spoken, the bastards.”
The rage of the powerless can be unsettling. Peggy Noonan, who is not an opponent of gun control, found Sen. Murphy’s tweet menacing:
Here’s an odd thing. If you really are for some new gun-control measure, if you are serious about it, you just might wait a while, until the blood has cooled, for instance, and then try to win people over to see it your way. You might offer information, argument, points of persuasion. Successful politics involves pulling people together. You don’t use a tragedy to shame and silence those who don’t see it your way; that only hardens sides. Which has left me wondering if gun-control proponents are even serious about it. Maybe they’re just using their wedge issue at a moment of high stress to hammer people on the other side of the ideological and philosophical divide.
Whether they are serious depends on your point of view. When a child throws a tantrum, it certainly seems serious to the child. We find it difficult to ascribe cynicism to behavior that is so obviously self-defeating.
One reason it is self-defeating is that many people do take it seriously. We spent a few days last week at Miami Art Week, where we observed a lot of firearm-themed work. “The memo went out,” our friend Bobby Zeitler remarked. He believes there is an orchestrated effort to destroy the Second Amendment.
We’re quite certain that’s a misperception. There is of course such an effort, and it is growing in intensity—but it looks to us less like orchestration than contagion, a sort of elite mass hysteria. Yet we understand how someone might see it otherwise. When a chorus of powerful voices in the media and politics sing the same ominous tune, it’s natural for people to feel threatened. They respond by voting for politicians who take an uncompromising stand against the threat.
They also respond by buying guns while they still can. As the Times noted in its Thursday editorial, a Fox Butterfieldian classic:
Even as grief fills communities randomly victimized by mass shootings, the sales of weapons grow ever higher. Holiday shoppers set a record for Black Friday gun sales last week. They left the Federal Bureau of Investigation processing 185,345 firearm background checks, the most ever in a single day, topping the Black Friday gun buying binge after the shooting massacre of 26 people at a school in Newtown, Conn., three years ago.
The Times, the News, Murphy, Stasi and others have certainly succeeded in drawing attention to themselves, in part by paying attention to one another. “Nice of @nytimes to credit @NYDailyNews cover for showing impact a front page can have,” log-rolled the News’s Harry Siegel Saturday on Twitter.
Of course a child’s tantrum has that kind of “impact” too. In terms of adult impact, however—changing minds and policies—we suspect this will end up being as effective as the Times’s 1920 denunciation of Warren Harding. He went on to win the general election, 404-127, with what remains the largest popular-vote margin (60% to 34%) in modern electoral history.
Erick Erickson did not care for the New York Times’ front-page editorial last week, so …
This is what I think of the New York Times editorial today. The United States suffered its worst terrorist attacks since September 11 and the New York Times’ response is that all law-abiding citizens need their guns taken away. Screw them. The New York Times wants you to be sitting ducks for a bunch of arms jihadists who the New York Times thinks no doubt got that way because of the United States.
It should be striking to every American citizen that the New York Times believes the nation should have unfettered abortion rights, a right not made explicit in the Constitution, but can have the Second Amendment right curtailed at will though it is explicitly in the Constitution.
Again, we have suffered the worst terrorist attack in more than a decade and the New York Times believes now we must have our rights taken away as a response to terrorism.
I hope everyone will join me in posting pictures of bullet holes in the New York Times editorial. Send them your response. …
By the way, it is worth noting that all my shooting friends are upset that I did not keep a small cluster. But I wanted to shoot it from top to bottom. I only had seven bullets and made the most of it.
As you can imagine, Erickson got responses, to which he wrote …
Well the last eighteen hours or so has been interesting. Hollywood actors to “journalists” have been outraged that I dared put bullet holes in the front page editorial of the New York Times. I’ve been denounced as a psycho, called angry, and told that this action is further proof we need gun control.
All I did was put seven bullet holes in a New York Times editorial from top to bottom. I guess I should again point out that I wasn’t going for a grouping, but top to bottom coverage.
In any event, the left seems more outraged by me putting bullet holes in a newspaper than they are terrorists shooting up a place in California. They are positively enraged by it. Had I put a statue of Jesus in a jar of urine or burned an American flag, they’d call it free speech and art. But this — this was an atrocity. It is as if I shot a person.
The hilariousness of this has been on display for the last few days.
When I pointed out the other day that we haven’t had these sorts of shootings before the Age of Obama, the left flew into outrage mode.
According to the left, we actually have had fewer shootings in the Age of Obama.
Well then, I pondered, why do we need more gun control if these shootings are already on the decline?
That just flew them into further rage and name calling.
It really is a cult like experience to see a group of people see a terrorist attack and their solution after it is the same as before it — gun control. The left has closed itself off to any ideas, but those in their own echo chamber now. Gun control and carbon taxes will solve all the world’s problems.
… following up with:
The ensuing reaction over these past twenty-four hours have convinced me I must apologize. My conscience convicts me that I made a major error.
In all honesty, had I known that these last twenty-four hours would be as hysterically funny as they have been, I would have shot the front page of the New York Times well before today.
These people are insane, filled with rage, and flat out funny. Suggesting that shooting the front page of the New York Times is the equivalent of ISIS destroying Palmyra and killing its citizens has to be the icing on the cake. That the Catholic Democrats twitter account is the one that suggested it makes it even better.
Then there are the truthers. When not holding on to the idea that George W. Bush brought down the World Trade Center, they’re certain I stabbed the New York Times with a pencil because they see what looks like lead on it.
I have not gotten this good a laugh out of the left since they all melted down after I called Wendy Davis “Abortion Barbie.”
I am so sorry. Had I known this would have happened, I would have done it a whole lot sooner.
Today in 1940, the first NFL championship game was broadcast nationally on Mutual radio. Before long, Mutual announcer Red Barber probably wondered why they’d bothered.
Today in 1963, Frank Sinatra Jr. was kidnapped from a Lake Tahoe hotel. He was released two days later after his father paid $240,000 ransom. The kidnappers were arrested and sentenced to prison.
The top selling 8-track today in 1971:
It is unclear to me why Barack Obama bothered giving his speech last night on the latest radical Muslim terrorist attack Wednesday. There was nothing new and, considering how our immigration system let in a terrorist from Pakistan to kill 14 Americans, nothing reassuring for those who have figured out that Obama is an empty suit.
The best thing about the speech was what wasn’t in it — namely, from dire online predictions gun control via executive order. Of course, California already has banned “assault weapons,” and open-carry, requires background checks and waiting period for all firearms purposes, and limits magazine sizes. All that did was give the terrorists more gun laws to violate. (Beyond, that is, the fact that killing 14 people, whether by gun, pipe bomb or any other method has been illegal since laws were created.)
What also wasn’t in Obama’s speech, however, was the acknowledgement of radical Islam as a worldwide security threat. The Wall Street Journal posted this Sunday before the speech, and nothing Obama said contradicted it:
President Obama entered the White House believing that the “war on terror” was a misguided overreaction driven by political fear, and his government even stopped using the term. Seven years later Mr. Obama is presiding over a global jihadist revival that now threatens the American homeland more than at any time since the attacks of September 11, 2001.
That’s the distressing lesson of the recent spate of terror attacks that this week arrived at a center for the disabled in San Bernardino, California. FBI Director James Comey said Friday that his agency is now investigating Wednesday’s massacre of 14 people as an act of terrorism and that the two Muslim killers showed “indications of radicalization.”
Mr. Comey added that while there is no evidence so far that the killers were part of a larger terror cell or plot, there are some indications of potential foreign terror “inspiration.” The latter would have to mean Islamic State or al Qaeda, perhaps through the Internet.
The FBI director said more than once that the investigation is in the early stages, but he deserves support for speaking frankly about the evidence and dangers. Every instinct of this Administration, starting with the President, has been to minimize the terror risk on U.S. soil—perhaps because it contradicts Mr. Obama’s political belief that all we have to fear is fear of terrorism itself.
The President made this explicit in his May 23, 2013 speech at National Defense University in which he said Americans should move past the country’s post-9/11 war footing and compared the Islamist terror threat to “many forms of violent extremism in our history.” Few speeches in presidential history have been repudiated so quickly by events.
San Bernardino is an example of the domestic terror nightmare that Mr. Comey has been warning against as he’s told Congress about the thousands of Americans who are now Islamic State sympathizers. That neither Pakistani-American Syed Farook, born in Illinois, nor Tashfeen Malik, his wife by way of Saudi Arabia, was on the FBI’s watch list is all the more worrisome. Their quiet stockpiling of guns, ammo and bomb-making material even as they led seemingly average lives shows that the U.S. may have a larger problem of homegrown terrorism than the government has wanted to admit.
Americans have tended to think they are safer than Europeans and their Muslim immigrant enclaves of Saint-Denis, Molenbeek and Birmingham. But by the account of his friends and even his family, Farook gave no hint of radical conversion until he mowed down the same colleagues who had thrown his wife a baby shower. He shows that jihad is possible even among native-born Americans who give every sign of abiding by U.S. norms.
CNN interviewed Michael Weiss, co-author of ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, and, Hot Air reports:
Barack Obama’s speech on ISIS and gun control from the Oval Office didn’t get a very good reception on CNN, especially not from The Daily Beast’s Michael Weiss. When asked about his prediction of ISIS’ reaction to the speech, Weiss started off by saying that they would “laugh, frankly.” That started a nearly three-minute analysis that excoriated Obama for self-indulgence and fantastical thinking:
Among the many salient points made by Weiss was that Obama still seems convinced by earlier cooked intel analyses that his strategy against ISIS has been effective. Even with a new report on his desk commissioned by the White House itself that strips away that fantasy, Obama tried to sell the idea that his 15-month-long strategy has succeeded in some measure. As Weiss briefly references in the clip above, The Daily Beast’s Kimberly Dozier reports that the new analysis makes it clear that it hasn’t succeeded at all in even slowing down ISIS’ expansion:
A new U.S. intelligence report on ISIS, commissioned by the White House, predicts that the self-proclaimed Islamic State will spread worldwide and grow in numbers, unless it suffers a significant loss of territory on the battlefield in Iraq and Syria, U.S. officials told The Daily Beast.
The report stands in stark contrast to earlier White House assurances that ISIS had been “contained” in Iraq and Syria. And it is already spurring changes in how the U.S. grapples with ISIS, these officials said.
It’s also a tacit admission that coalition efforts so far—dropping thousands of bombs and deploying 3,500 U.S. troops as well as other coalition trainers—have been outpaced by ISIS’s ability to expand and attract new followers, even as the yearlong coalition air campaign has helped local forces drive ISIS out of parts of Iraq and Syria.
One can understand why Weiss predicts hearty peals of laughter from Raqqa after this speech. Even with this report on Obama’s desk, the President broadcast a rare Oval Office speech outlining his strategy to “destroy ISIL,” which was nothing more than a regurgitation of his original strategy to “degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL” …
In other words, we’ll conduct some bombing raids along with a handful of allies, send in commandos to train native forces that never seem to materialize — like the 60 or so fighters we spent $500 million to train — and we’ll demand that Bashar Assad will step down. That’s exactly the same strategy we’ve been using since Obama’s offhand admission in August 2014 that we had no strategy against ISIS forced him to articulate one a month later.
This is what Weiss means when he rebukes Obama for “self-congratulating and cheerleading.” Obama isn’t serious about “destroy[ing] ISIL”; he’s serious about making us think he’s serious about it. What Obama does take seriously, however, is gun control, and his belief that the biggest threat here in the US is the risk of offending Muslims, the latter of which Obama spent almost as much time discussing as his military strategy against ISIS.
Obama talked about preventing those on the no-fly list from being able to own guns. Independent of the fact that Wednesday’s murderers were not on the no-fly list, consider not merely the basic incompetence of the federal government (the Defense Department classifies Roman Catholics and evangelicals as extremists, while 72 Department of Homeland Security employees are on the federal terrorist watch list), but also the lack of due process involved in getting on, or off, the no-fly list. It took U.S. Rep. Justin Amash (R–Michigan) to point that out:
Putting someone on a no-fly list without due process and infringing on someone’s right to keep and bear arms without due process are both wrong. The latter is a Second Amendment violation, and both are Fifth Amendment violations.
Remember when Democrats believed in civil liberties? That apparently was so 20th century. And does any reader believe the feds under Obama wouldn’t have a selective definition of “terrorist” (for instance, gun owners and known conservatives)?
Former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown (R–Massachusetts):
Ben Franklin said that death and taxes were the two certainties of life. A third certainty in our country used to be strong leadership from the individual in the Oval Office. Abraham Lincoln, F.D.R, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and many others have used their position as our commander in chief to exude America’s strength on the world stage and promote our nation’s unique exceptionalism.
However, on several recent big issues, President Obama has not taken the challenging, but necessary step up to the plate to demonstrate why America needs to lead in the world. His actions instead seem to suggest that we can lead from behind, which goes against everything that our country has stood for in the past.
The best example of this is President Obama’s utter failure to address the danger that ISIS presents to the United States. Their sickening attacks in Paris are still fresh in our mind, but it is important to note that just hours before the terrorists attacked the city, President Obama said that ISIS was “contained” and “on the run.”
Following the attacks, instead of stepping forward and adopting an aggressive strategy to take the fight to ISIS, the president deferred and continued to give off the impression that our current strategy to combat radical Islamic terrorism is working. His response showed that he is either delusional to the real threat ISIS presents our nation or he is simply incapable of providing authentic leadership for the sake of the country and the globe.
Then last week, following the devastating tragedy in San Bernardino, President Obama immediately leapt to blame gun laws and Republicans, when in fact the attacks appear to have been perpetrated by ISIS sympathizers. The fact that the President would try to score political points instead of committing to once-and-for-all going after America’s greatest threat is emblematic of his entire presidency, putting politics and party before country and leadership.
While it seems President Obama has already checked out on his White House responsibilities and is looking forward to writing his memoirs and building his library, the absence of American leadership has now become a defining issue of the 2016 presidential election. …
For the past seven years, we have seen what it looks like when America doesn’t take charge, but instead sits in the backseat as a global observer. As a result, our country is less safe, less secure, and people have a rational fear of another heinous act of terrorism coming to our shores.
During my appearance on Wisconsin Public Radio Friday morning, I quoted the director of the former mosque of one of Wednesday’s mass murderers, who said that he should have known that Islam teaches that if you kill one person, you kill everyone. I said that that was the kind of thing Muslims need to say more often and more publicly. (Which is something I said after the Paris attacks.)
I then got a Facebook message asking why this did not get news coverage:
The world’s most prestigious newspapers, belonging to a diverse spectrum of ideological inclinations, have at least one thing in common. They agree to be completely oblivious towards one of the most extraordinary events to have taken place in contemporary times. A gathering composed of a staggering 20 million people from across the globe, traveling on foot (and sometimes barefoot) from Najaf to Karbala. Men, women, children, as well as the elderly and the disabled form a continuous column of human bodies stretching the long and winding road that links these two Iraqi cities. Compare this with the statistics available for other huge gathering in human history. You won’t find many that are even comparable. The IBT website (http://www.ibtimes.co.in/arbaeen-2014-20-million-pilgrims-flock-karbala-photos-617054) reported, “The Iraqi government confirmed that the number of pilgrims in the city of Karbala for the annual Arbaeen (Arbain) pilgrim has reached a record 17.5 million this year. Some local sources report the number might cross 20 million by the day of Arbaeen on 13 December. If the number is officially confirmed, the Arbaeen 2014’s number of pilgrims will only be one step behind the largest historic peaceful gathering of people in one place for a single event. The first place is occupied by the 10 February, 2013, Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, India, which saw a monstrous crowd of 30 million people on that day gathered to bathe on Mauni Amavasya.”
What is even more amazing is that no government or organization has invested billions of dollars in order to setup this event. There is no flashy entertainment to draw the crowds. No five star hotels and restaurants. It’s just rugged roads, the harshest of weather and, above all else, the ever looming threat of Takfiri terrorism http://rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iraq/121220141. In fact, the presence of the ISIL (or ISIS) has prompted even more people to join in, making this grand event the world’s largest expression of popular resistance against extremism and terror. Here we see a road side sign proudly declaring, “Even if the Daaesh (ISIL/ISIS) terrorists rain drop from the sky, we’ll still continue our pilgrimage of Husayn”.
In short, this immense congregation represents almost everything that human civilization has come to hold sacred. It is spontaneous and populist, a true grass-roots affair, unadulterated by any government agenda or shady politics. It challenges the capitalist world-view as millions of people are fed, clothed and housed for free, not by some mega-charity organization, but by ordinary people dedicating their often meager salaries to this very purpose. Furthermore, being a commemoration of Husayn ibn Ali’s heroic martyrdom after his rejection of the tyrant Caliph Yazeed ibn Muawiyah, this event also epitomizes a clear and resonating statement against all forms of tyranny, despotism and absolutism. At the same time, it is an unprecedented exercise in non-violent resistance, as 20 million people shame the hate and bigotry of ISIS and its other petro-dollar funded affiliates, challenging them in broad daylight without a speck of fear. Moreover, it displays a meeting of man’s physical and spiritual dimensions, thus rebutting, in the most vocal of manners, the prejudiced and erroneous conception that modern man has some how grown beyond his relationship with the metaphysical. Last, but not least, this mega-event has turned into a melting pot of cultures and creeds, as people from all denominations flood into Karbala to show their devotion and support.But even with all these astonishing characteristics, the bitter truth of modern-corporate journalism is this: “It may be 20 million strong, but it’s not quite news worthy”. Why? Well, for starters it simply does not corroborate the narrow, agenda driven and militantly materialist ideology of the people who control mainstream media. Secondly, it does not reinforce the bleak and God-less image of modern man that international media has worked so hard to create in the minds of its readers, listeners and viewers. Thirdly, it may actually have dared to present an entirely new paradigm for what human civilization should look like after a million years of evolution: “tolerance, indeed love, towards others” without undermining a “deep devotion towards one’s own convictions”, “embracing one’s physical potentials and strengths” while simultaneously “achieving the highest degree of spiritual elevation”, “money at the service of human ideals” instead of “humanity at the service of wealth and the wealthy”, “uncompromising political and popular resistance against terror and tyranny” spawned from the very heart of “spiritual and religious beliefs” …
If you haven’t read about this before, you have now.
You can also read from the Gatestone Institute about the Muslim Reform Movement:
We are Muslims who live in the 21st century. We stand for a respectful, merciful and inclusive interpretation of Islam. We are in a battle for the soul of Islam, and an Islamic renewal must defeat the ideology of Islamism, or politicized Islam, which seeks to create Islamic states, as well as an Islamic caliphate. We seek to reclaim the progressive spirit with which Islam was born in the 7th century to fast forward it into the 21st century. We support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by United Nations member states in 1948.
We reject interpretations of Islam that call for any violence, social injustice and politicized Islam. Facing the threat of terrorism, intolerance, and social injustice in the name of Islam, we have reflected on how we can transform our communities based on three principles: peace, human rights and secular governance. We are announcing today the formation of an international initiative: the Muslim Reform Movement.
We have courageous reformers from around the world who will outline our Declaration for Muslim Reform, a living document that we will continue to enhance as our journey continues. We invite our fellow Muslims and neighbors to join us.
So what does the Muslim Reform Movement stand for?
A. Peace: National Security, Counterterrorism and Foreign Policy
1. We stand for universal peace, love and compassion. We reject violent jihad. We believe we must target the ideology of violent Islamist extremism in order to liberate individuals from the scourge of oppression and terrorism both in Muslim-majority societies and the West.
2. We stand for the protection of all people of all faiths and non-faith who seek freedom from dictatorships, theocracies and Islamist extremists.
3. We reject bigotry, oppression and violence against all people based on any prejudice, including ethnicity, gender, language, belief, religion, sexual orientation and gender expression.
B. Human Rights: Women’s Rights and Minority Rights
1. We stand for human rights and justice. We support equal rights and dignity for all people, including minorities. We support the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.
2. We reject tribalism, castes, monarchies and patriarchies and consider all people equal with no birth rights other than human rights. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. Muslims don’t have an exclusive right to “heaven.”
3. We support equal rights for women, including equal rights to inheritance, witness, work, mobility, personal law, education, and employment. Men and women have equal rights in mosques, boards, leadership and all spheres of society. We reject sexism and misogyny.
C. Secular Governance: Freedom of Speech and Religion
1. We are for secular governance, democracy and liberty. We are against political movements in the name of religion. We separate mosque and state. We are loyal to the nations in which we live. We reject the idea of the Islamic state. There is no need for an Islamic caliphate. We oppose institutionalized sharia. Sharia is manmade.
2. We believe in life, joy, free speech and the beauty all around us. Every individual has the right to publicly express criticism of Islam. Ideas do not have rights. Human beings have rights. We reject blasphemy laws. They are a cover for the restriction of freedom of speech and religion. We affirm every individual’s right to participate equally in ijtihad, or critical thinking, and we seek a revival of ijtihad.
3. We believe in freedom of religion and the right of all people to express and practice their faith, or non-faith, without threat of intimidation, persecution, discrimination or violence. Apostasy is not a crime. Our ummah–our community–is not just Muslims, but all of humanity.
The number one British album today in 1963 will be at number one for 21 weeks — “Meet the Beatles”:
The number one single here today in 1963 certainly was not a traditional pop song:
Today in 1967, Otis Redding recorded a song before heading on a concert tour that included Madison:
The number one British album today in 1968 was the Beatles’ “White Album”:
The number one British single today in 1974 was originally a country song:
See the comment from 1963 about the number one single today in 1974:
The number one song today in 1985:
The number one British song today in 1991:
The number one album today in 1991 was U2’s “Achtung Baby”:
The number one single today in 2003:
Only one birthday of note today: Tom Waits, whose voice was described as “like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car” makes him better known as writing for others:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 