More has happened in rock music on Christmas than one might think.
The number one single today in 1971:
The number three British single today in 1982 at least has a Christmas theme:
No comments on Presty the DJ for Dec. 25
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Starting shortly after my birth, my parents purchased Christmas albums for $1 from an unlikely place, tire stores.
(That’s as seemingly outmoded as getting, for instance, glasses every time you filled up at your favorite gas station, back in the days when gas stations were usually part of a car repair place, not a convenience store. Of course, go to a convenience store now, and you can probably find CDs, if not records, and at least plastic glasses such as Red Solo Cups and silverware. Progress, or something.)
The albums featured contemporary artists from the ’60s, plus opera singers and other artists.
These albums were played on my parents’ wall-length Magnavox hi-fi player.
Playing these albums was as annual a ritual as watching “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas,” “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” or other holiday-season appointment TV.
Those albums began my, and then our, collection of Christmas music.
You may think some of these singers are unusual choices to sing Christmas music. (This list includes at least six Jewish singers.)
Of course, Christians know that Jesus Christ was Jewish.
And I defy any reader to find anyone who can sing “Silent Night” like Barbra Streisand did in the ’60s.
These albums are available for purchase online, but record players are now as outmoded as, well, getting glasses with your fill-up at the gas station. (Though note what I previously wrote.)
But thanks to YouTube and other digital technology, other aficionados of this era of Christmas music now can have their music preserved for their current and future enjoyment.
The tire-store-Christmas-album list has been augmented by both earlier and later works.
In the same way I think no one can sing “Silent Night” like Barbra Streisand, I think no one can sing “Do You Hear What I Hear” like Whitney Houston:
This list contains another irony — an entry from “A Christmas Gift for You,” Phil Spector’s Christmas album. (Spector’s birthday is Christmas.)
The album should have been a bazillion-seller, and perhaps would have been had it not been for the date of its initial release: Nov. 22, 1963.
Finally, here’s the last iteration of one of the coolest TV traditions — “The Late Show with David Letterman” and its annual appearance of Darlene Love (from the aforementioned Phil Spector album), which started in 1986 on NBC …
… and ended on CBS:
Merry Christmas.
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Today in 1954, R&B singer Johnny Ace had a concert at the City Auditorium in Houston. Between sets, Ace was playing with a revolver. When someone in the room said, “Be careful with that thing,” Ace replied, “It’s OK, the gun’s not loaded. See?” And pointed the gun at his head, and pulled the trigger. And found out he was wrong.
The number one album today in 1965 was the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul”:
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Recently, The Wall Street Journal‘s Kimberley Strassel used the phrase “no political guardrails” to point out how many of today’s politicians seem to lack any constraints, any safeguards against their use of power. She’s onto something.
“Mr. Obama wants what he wants. If ObamaCare is problematic, he unilaterally alters the law,” Strassel writes. “If the nation won’t support laws to fight climate change, he creates one with regulation. If the Senate won’t confirm his nominees, he declares it in recess and installs them anyway.”
Hillary Clinton does it too. In fact, she promises that once she becomes president, that is how she will govern. If Congress won’t give her gun control laws she wants, she says she’ll unilaterally impose them. Likewise, if Congress rejects her proposed new tax on corporations , “then I will ask the Treasury Department, when I’m there, to use its regulatory authority, if that’s what it takes.”
Whatever it takes. So far, the public doesn’t seem to mind.
Donald Trump’s poll numbers go up after he promises “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” says that “there’s nobody bigger or better at the military than I am,” says that he’ll make Mexico “pay for that wall” and so on.
Apparently lots of people like the idea of a big, strong mommy or daddy who will take control of life and make everything better. Constitutional restraints? They’re for sissies. We want “leadership”—someone “strong” to run America.
I don’t. I’m an adult. I don’t want to be “led.” I will run my own life. Also, a president doesn’t “run America.” The president presides over just one of three branches of government, and there are strict limits on what he can and should do.
The Constitution was written to limit political authority. Those limits left individual Americans mostly to our own devices, which helped create the freest and most prosperous country in the history of the world.
Now, advocates for both parties are off the rails. Some Republicans demand that the IRS audit the Clinton Foundation. Part of me wishes that it would. I suspect their foundation is largely a scam, a pretend charity that props up the Clintons’ egos and pays Hillary’s political flunkies. Heck, in 2013, it raised $144 million but spent only $8.8 million on charity!
Shut it down! But where are the guardrails here? As Strassel put it, “When did conservatives go from wanting to abolish the IRS to wanting to use it against rivals?”
Today, politicians act as if guardrails are just an annoyance. And they get rewarded for that.
Strassel writes, “The more outrageous Mr. Trump is, the more his numbers soar. The more Mrs. Clinton promises to cram an agenda down the throats of her ‘enemies,’ the more enthusiastic her base. The more unrestrained the idea, the more press coverage; the more ratings soar, the more unrestrained the idea.”
By contrast, humble candidates, quieter ones with modest plans—constitutional ones—get lost in the noise.
So does important government reform. While people argued whether Trump dislikes immigrants, Congress quietly reauthorized the Export-Import Bank, a huge and immoral subsidy for corporations.
A coalition of free-market and anti-corporate-welfare activists fought to get Ex-Im Bank funding eliminated and finally won—but then their work was quietly undone in a massive spending bill.
I once had lunch with Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.). He talked about reading Ayn Rand, and he emphasized the need to cut government spending. Now he’s the speaker of the House who just oversaw a record-sized spending bill that doles out money to both parties’ pet projects.
Little of that is authorized in the Constitution, which was intended to leave to the people or the states everything not explicitly mentioned in the document.
Today, we get a depressing combination of big, showy violations of constitutional rules—which distract us from the tiny, routine violations of constitutional rules.
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One sign that this nation is full of idiots is that this legitimate criticism of Barack Obama by Kevin D. Williamson will inevitably be seen as racist:
Race makes people crazy, but often not in the way you’d expect. A nation watched wide-eyed as Melissa Harris-Perry of MSNBC complained that the Star Wars franchise was racist because the major villain is “black.” Darth Vader is black in the sense that Johnny Cash or Ben Roethlisberger or certain figures from Arthurian legend are “black” — white guys in black outfits — so people kept waiting for Harris-Perry, “America’s foremost public intellectual,” to crack and let us know that she was joking. But she wasn’t joking.
One cannot imagine what she’d make of that Adolf Hitler/Darth Vader episode of “Epic Rap Battles of History,” in which the Nazi dismisses the Sith and his off-brand Stormtroopers: “You leading an army of white men? Disgraceful.” And, of course, in the latest installment, The Force Awakens, one of those white men turns out to have the black face of English actor John Boyega.
This isn’t the sort of thing that drives people nuts: If you’re breaking down the hidden racial significance of Darth Vader’s black armor, you’re already there.
The American people, who are generally more tolerant, more sensible, and more wry than is appreciated, have learned to laugh at that sort of thing. A popular image among AR-15 enthusiasts shows the fearsome-looking rifle over the caption: “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?” The same joke has been made about coal, certain cats that provoke a superstitious response, Anas rubripes, dark T-shirts, and one very mean-looking 1987 Buick Grand National. Barack Obama doesn’t get the joke. In a pre-vacation interview with NPR, the president argued that (as the New York Times decodes the message) “some of the scorn directed at him personally stems from the fact that he is the first African American to hold the White House.” I.e, “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?”
Barack Obama doesn’t get the joke. In a pre-vacation interview with NPR, the president argued that (as the New York Times decodes the message) “some of the scorn directed at him personally stems from the fact that he is the first African American to hold the White House.” I.e, “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?”
In a pre-vacation interview with NPR, the president argued that (as the New York Times decodes the message) “some of the scorn directed at him personally stems from the fact that he is the first African American to hold the White House.” I.e, “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?”
This is kind of clever, in a way. The president says that much of the unhappiness with his administration is “pretty specific to me, and who I am and my background,” which is slippery in that by saying it’s about him, he’s really saying it’s about his critics, and their bigotry and prejudice. “It’s not me, it’s you.”
This is, needless to say, intellectual dishonesty, which is Barack Obama’s specialty. Yes, there are racists in the world, and they are engaged in politics, mainly in the form of basement-dwelling losers with Dungeons & Dragons avatars oinking about on Twitter. They are a significant consideration if you are Donald Trump’s psephological engineers. They are not much of a real factor if you are Barack Obama wondering why you haven’t been celebrated like one of the men on Mount Rushmore.
(Not counting Teddy Roosevelt, of course: Who on Earth thinks: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and, uh . . . that guy who might be the guy who came up with the Maxwell House Coffee motto?)
The reason President Obama has not been hailed as the equal of President Washington, President Jefferson, or President Lincoln is . . . kind of obvious.
The sage marketing wisdom is: “Under-promise and over-deliver.” That was hardly an option for Obama, who promised, quite literally (literally, Mr. Vice President!), a sea change. When you are billing yourself as the fulfillment of Hegelian capital-H history, as not only a redeemer of nations but a healer of planets, it gets a little awkward when you have to spend most of your administration explaining why the economy still kind of sucks and the secretary of state feels the need to lie about everything from the murder of diplomatic personnel to the fact that she’s storing state secrets in the crapper. If you had bought shares in Obama As Advertised and then had to sell them at the price of Obama In Fact, you’d know what it felt like to be running a mortgage-derivative fund back in 2008.
If you’re the Right, then you can enjoy the pessimist’s pleasure: Sure, things have gone terribly, terribly wrong – exactly as we expected! If you’re the Left, Obama’s not looking too great, either: The guy fought an illegal and counterproductive war in the Middle East (“to the shores of Tripoli!”), didn’t close Gitmo, didn’t end “Too Big to Fail,” and just reinvaded Iraq. Ask the victims of Boko Haram if this is the moment the planet started to heal.
“It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?”
No, Mr. President. It’s a couple of other things. The first of which is that here it is on the very verge of 2016, President Obama’s last full year in office, and he has not figured out that there is more to the job than giving speeches. The other thing is: To the extent that he does try to do the rest of the job, he isn’t very good at it. Building a better future? Team Obama can’t build a website. President Squarespace probably would have been an improvement in some respects.
The really maddening thing, though, is that President Obama thinks the reason he isn’t perceived as being especially good at his job is that we yokels aren’t smart enough to understand how spectacularly spectacular he is. Barack Obama is a man almost entirely incapable of self-criticism, and in the NPR interview, he repeated one of his favorite claims: He has had trouble with public opinion because he didn’t explain his awesome ideas well enough. That’s a very politic way of saying: “These rubes don’t get it.”
Politicians find themselves crippled by sex scandals rather than by financial scandals because almost everybody understands sex but almost nobody understands futures trading. (Bill’s loss is Hillary’s capital gain.) Everybody understands racism, too, and all people of good will reject it, which is what makes “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?” so powerful as rhetoric. But it isn’t all-powerful.
It’s too late to break up with Barack Obama. But if we did, we’d have to tell the truth: “It’s not us. It’s you.”
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Former U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm (R–Texas) and Michael Solon argue in the Wall Street Journal that the odious features of Barack Obama’s presidency can be undone by a Republican president:
President Obama seems to aspire to join Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan as one of the three most transformative presidents of the past hundred years, and by all outward signs he has achieved that goal. But while Roosevelt and Reagan sold their programs to the American people and enacted them with bipartisan support, Mr. Obama jammed his partisan agenda down the public’s throat. The Obama legacy is built on executive orders, regulations and agency actions that can be overturned using the same authority Mr. Obama employed to put them in place.
An array of President Obama’s policies—changing immigration law, blocking the Keystone XL pipeline, the Iranian nuclear agreement and the normalization of relations with Cuba, among others—were implemented exclusively through executive action. Because any president is free “to revoke, modify or supersede his own orders or those issued by a predecessor,” as the Congressional Research Service puts it, a Republican president could overturn every Obama executive action the moment after taking the oath of office.
At the beginning of the inaugural address, the new president could sign an executive order rescinding all of Mr. Obama’s executive orders deemed harmful to economic growth or constitutionally suspect. The new president could then establish a blue-ribbon commission to review all other Obama executive orders. Any order not reissued or amended in 60 days could be automatically rescinded.
Then there’s the trove of regulations used largely to push through policies that could have never passed Congress. For example, when President Obama in 2010 couldn’t ram through his climate-change legislation in a Democratic Senate, he used decades-old regulatory authority to inflict the green agenda on power plants and the auto industry.
This is far from the only example: Labor Department rules on fiduciary standards; the National Labor Relations Board’s ruling that franchisees are joint employers; the Environmental Protection Agency’s power grab over water ways; the Federal Communications Commission’s attempt to regulate the Internet as a 1930s telephone monopoly. All are illustrations of how President Obama has used rule-making not to carry out congressional intent but to circumvent it.
If the new president proves as committed to overturning these regulations as Mr. Obama was to implementing them, these rules could be amended or overturned. And because Senate Democrats “nuked” the right of the minority to filibuster administration nominees, the new president’s appointees could not be blocked by Democrats if Republicans retain control of the Senate.
To accelerate this process, the new president should name cabinet and agency appointees before the 115th Congress begins. He could declare an economic emergency and ask the agencies to initiate the rule-making process promptly. On the first day in the Oval Office the president could order federal agencies to halt consideration of all pending regulations—precisely as President Obama did.
Even when the Obama transformation is rooted in law, by demanding legislation that even the most liberal Congress in 75 years could not vote for in detail, he was forced to avoid program details, granting vast power to agencies to determine actual policy during implementation. Dodd-Frank granted extraordinary powers to financial regulators by leaving objectives vaguely defined: What the Volcker rule on bank trading means, what constitutes an acceptable “living will” for a financial institution, how international regulatory decisions work within U.S. law, and much more. If the new president nominated able, committed cabinet and agency leaders, many of Dodd-Frank’s worst provisions could be revised or reversed without legislative action.
As Congress debates repealing Dodd-Frank, the new president’s appointees could ensure that no financial institution is too big to fail, that Federal Reserve bureaucrats are removed from corporate boardrooms and that penalties for misconduct fall on individual offenders, not on innocent pensioners and other stockholders. The new president’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director will have the unilateral power to overturn each and every barrier erected against mortgage, auto and personal lending.
The Affordable Care Act also grants substantial flexibility in its implementation, a feature Mr. Obama has repeatedly exploited. The new president could suspend penalties for individuals and employers, enforce income-verification requirements, ease the premium shock on young enrollees by adjusting the community rating system, allow different pricing structures inside the exchanges and alter provider compensation. These actions could begin dismantling the most pernicious parts of ObamaCare and prevent its roots from deepening as Congress debates its repeal and replacement.
By relentlessly pursuing an agenda that was outside the political mainstream, Mr. Obama became the most polarizing president of the past century. Had he compromised with his own party and a handful of Republicans, much of his vision might have been firmly cemented into law on a bipartisan basis. But by doing it his way, Mr. Obama built an imposing sand castle that is now imperiled by the changing tides of voter sentiment. All the American electorate must do now is choose a president totally committed to overturning the Obama program—and Obama’s sand castle will be washed away.
This assumes, of course, that Hillary Clinton or faux conservative Donald Trump doesn’t become the next president. The additional problem with this premise is that whatever a Republican president does by executive order can be undone by the next Democratic president. That’s why change — for instance, a balanced-budget amendment or controls on spending and tax increases — need to be by constitutional amendment, to prevent politicians from doing more fiscal damage to this country.
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Today in 1964, a group of would-be DJs launched the pirate radio station Radio London from a former U.S. minesweeper anchored 3½ miles off Frinton-on-the-Sea, England.
It’s probably unrelated, but on the same day Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys had a nervous breakdown on a flight from Los Angeles to Houston. Wilson left the band to focus on writing and producing, with Glen Campbell replacing him for concerts.
The pernicious influence of unions reared its ugly head today in 1966, when Britain’s ITV broadcast its final “Ready, Steady, Go!” because of a British musicians’ union’s ban on miming. The final show featured Mick Jagger, The Who, Eric Burdon, the Spencer Davis Group, Donovan and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.
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What would happen if the New York Times got its editorial writers’ wish and Congress passed sweeping restrictions on our Second Amendment rights?
Brian Doherty explains the massive assault on civil liberties for virtually no effect that would happen:
The Times could take some national pride in the fact that we as a nation have made amazing progress in curbing the scourge of gun violence, cutting it nearly in half in the past couple of decades.
But they do not take that tack. Rather, when they get to concrete (sort of) proposals after expressing their dismay with murders and tools that can be used to murder, they declare that “Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, 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.”
If the Times got its way, their confiscation program would almost certainly require a buyback, as in much-lauded Australia. Enormous law enforcement effort and time would have to go into trying to enforce the prohibition as well, if it were to have any meaning.
While the Times is not specific about exactly what weapons it wants to ban and confiscate beyond the specific models used in San Bernardino, Slate did some rough calculations back in 2013 that likely over 3.5 million such rifles or substantially similar ones are in circulation in the U.S.
Such rifles cannot reasonably be expected to be hidden on one’s person and thus ought not give law enforcement any extra reason to search persons moving forward with this new, massively distributed, contraband contaminating America. Still, there would surely be some unpredictable but bad effect in using the power of law enforcement to search people and their property to uncover their now-banned weapons. Our society being what it is, such efforts would likely impact the less-well-off and less well-connected the most, and the most violently.
What the Times is calling for is, beyond its countable costs in money and effort and the likely further erosion of civil liberties, also (as they surely know) calling for a massive political civil war the likes of which we haven’t seen in a long time. The “assault weapon” ban of 1994-2004, though pointless, just barred the future making and selling of such weapons, and didn’t try to confiscate existing ones.
A huge proportion of the American people will be very upset if the government attempts a mass national confiscation of a widely and almost entirely peacefully used weapon. (Despite what the Times said, in nearly every case, no “good of their fellow citizens” would be furthered by an American giving up a weapon, since in nearly every case that weapon would never harm anyone else.)
So, what is the size of this problem, worth such cost in treasure, liberty, and domestic tranquility to the Times?
According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report for 2014, rifles—the entire category of rifles, of which the ones the Timeswants to ban at such great cost are but a subset—were used to commit 248 murders. That’s in a country of around 319 million people. That’s around 2 percent of the total number of homicides that year.
While the official figure, it is doubtless a bit too low. The numbers for Alabama and Illinois are known to be too low, because of reporting gaps. That said, the FBI figures there do not break down the category “rifle” to the specific ones that the Times targets, likely akin to the “assault weapons” that were banned moving forward in America for a decade, with no appreciable effect on public safety.
So the total number of those 248 (or slightly more) rifle murders actually caused using the ones the Times wants to expend all that effort into banning is much smaller than 248. Since the effort could not actually succeed in removing all such rifles from the hands of people with propensities to murder, and even if it did those murderous types would have other means to murder if they chose, the effort would not actually save all of that subset-of-248 lives.
The move the Times proposes with such ceremony and passion is so purely symbolic, so driven by a superstitious desire to placate fate by acting as if it is doing something to stop grotesque acts of terror like in San Bernardino, and so motivated by a desire to sock it to a huge proportion of their fellow citizens over a contentious and heated political and constitutional issue, and is being offered with such emphasis (first front page editorial in nearly a century) that one could imagine the Times is only proposing such a move as a stalking horse for seeing if the government can get away with successfully banning and confiscating a class of weapon, by starting with one with such a tenuous connection with public safety on a national level.
It is likely that there is literally no other political crusade on which the Times could call for so much expense and turmoil for such a small benefit—again, except for the benefit of showing Americans who believe that they have an inherent right to own weapons of self-defense if used in a peaceful fashion, as the staggeringly overwhelmingly vast majority of them are, that the Times and those in government they speak for have the power and will to give it to them, good and hard.
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Proving that there is no accounting for taste, I present the number one song today in 1958:
The number one single today in 1962 was by a group whose name was sort of a non sequitur given that the group came from a country that lacks the meteorological phenomenon of the group’s title:
The number one single today in 1963:
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Ben Branstetter compares the original Star Trek, the three reimagined movies, and the future TV series:
While one might think the re-energized intro could bring “fun” to the Star Trek universe, many geeks expressed dismay at the new, hip turn for a franchise entering its fifth decade. …
Unlike most Hollywood fare, Star Trek, for most of its existence on screens big and small, has kept and renewed one of the most rabid fan bases on Earth with smart, cerebral plots dense with backstory, character development, and moralistic musings. The TV series, especially, have been notably free of the kinds of action scenes that have filled their competitors and would today stand in stark contrast to the CGI-heavy worlds of The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones.
That contrast will hopefully come to light sooner rather than later as CBS prepares to reintroduce Star Trek to the airwaves with a brand new TV series, the first sinceStar Trek: Enterprise ended its mediocre run in 2005. As The Guardian’s Luke Holland noted upon the announcement of the reboot, the series tradition in tackling the human condition through analogy and debate may pale in our action-packed present. “Viewed from the post–Breaking Bad TV landscape of 2015,”writes Holland, “at their worst–and apologies to any Trekkies out there–they were sometimes ponderous, pious and slightly dull.”
A rush to keep young people on broadcast television has encouraged a newfound wave of TV shows based on geek culture standbys saturated in special effects, violence, and action sequences–network shows like Arrow, Gotham, The Flash, and Agents of SHIELD are creating an entire generation of comic book fans who have never opened a comic book, and the reboot of the Star Wars universe will soon come to your TV or streaming device, as well.
If you line up any of the Star Trek TV series on your Netflix queue in parallel with any one of these shows, the difference becomes clear. Star Trek has always been episodic and philosophical, even breaking political ground as it opened audiences to new and challenging ideas. The top-rated shows of this “Golden Age” are serial, building tension and relationships with audiences over entire seasons The first series became famous for tackling issues about race and inequality, featuring one of the most diverse casts on TV.
Which is not to say a show can’t do these things while including a few stunt sequences, but the two qualities often find themselves at odd with one another.
A warning for the writers of this latest Star Trek series should lie within the last season of Game of Thrones. Based on the immersive and literary A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin, the HBO show retains a massive following despite being a story primarily about politics. As showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have been forced to go off-script from the books (fans await the sixth installment of the book series with intensely baited breath), however, the fifth season became more filled with gratuitous rape and violence as well as lengthy, choreographed battle scenes. In short, what was once an intelligent, complex show about the ethics of leadership and the cost of war has refocused on sensationalized tactics verging on smut.
Such a road is a nightmare for most Trek fans, but the newly-released trailer seems to indicate no disdain among CBS and Paramount for rollicking sci-fi blockbusters. While one could imagine a situation in which CBS and Paramount (the studio licensed to produce the two previous entries into the Star Trek film canon) would keep one tone on film and another on television, it doesn’t seem likely. CBS announced the new series will be headed by Alex Kurtzman co-writer and producer for 2009’s similarly tense Star Trek (directed by new Star Warsdirector J.J. Abrams) and Heather Kadin, producer on shows like Matador, Sleepy Hollow, and Limitless.
Those are not comparisons that might be welcome to fans of one of the oldest franchises in American television. But relying on dense arguments, sprawling backstory, and space operatics while still remaining entertaining is risky–any writer could easily come across as preachy rather than academic, heavy-handed rather than scholarly. By taking the film series and, potentially, its new TV series in a more modern direction, CBS could be saving the franchise from obscurity.
There remains something to be said, however, for what will be lost. Science fiction has long been a genre for toying with big ideas about philosophy, ethics, politics, or society. While writers like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and Arthur C. Clarke used the genre to such ends on the page, Gene Roddenberry and the original Star Trek series brought big concepts out of the pages of pulp magazines and into the average American living room. As we encounter science fiction concepts in real life–mass surveillance, virtual reality, gene editing, transhumanism, artificial intelligence–it’s easy to see how the world could benefit from a thoughtful version of the show instead of yet another computerized festival of explosions and stunts.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 