No comments on Presty the DJ for June 19
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The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Daniel Bice paused from his usual attacks on Republicans and conservatives to focus on former and, he thinks, future U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold:
Former U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold — long a champion of campaign finance reform — founded a political action committee that has given a mere 5% of its income to federal candidates and political parties.
Instead, nearly half of the $7.1 million that Progressives United PAChas spent since 2011 has gone to raising more money for itself, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets.org. The data also show the group has paid another sizable chunk of money on salaries or consulting fees for Feingold, his top aide and eight former staffers. …
Feingold officials countered by saying that his PAC was responsible for raising much more money for the candidates it endorsed through a fundraising portal. While that bolsters the bottom line, it means Feingold’s PAC still spent more than $3.50 for every $1 that a candidate received in direct or indirect funding over the past four years.
In 2011, shortly after losing his Senate seat, Feingold announced that he was setting up his PAC and a political nonprofit called Progressives United Inc. The two groups have raised and spent $10 million over the past four years.
The PAC was created with the aim of “directly and indirectly supporting candidates who stand up for our progressive ideals.”
But campaign records show that Feingold’s PAC did little to help candidates directly, donating a mere $352,008 to federal candidates and political parties since 2011.
Most of the rest of its budget went to overhead.
Fundraising was the top expense, with one direct mail firm, Nexus Direct of Virginia Beach, Va., being paid $2.3 million by the Feingold PAC in the past four years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Feingold and nine of his former campaign and U.S. Senate staffers drew salaries or consulting fees from the PAC, federal election records show. Five of them also spent time on the payroll of Progressives United Inc., the nonprofit.
For instance, Mary Irvine — Feingold’s longtime chief of staff — was paid a total of $317,823 by the PAC and nonprofit from February 2011 until July 2013, when she left to take a job joining Feingold at the U.S. State Department. Irvine was listed on federal tax reports as vice president of Progressives United Inc.
Feingold received $77,000 from the two groups, one of which spent $42,609 to buy hundreds of copies of the ex-senator’s latest book, “While America Sleeps.” …
Federal tax records show Progressives United Inc. raised and spent $2.8 million during its four years in operation. Of that, more than $1.2 million was spent on salaries and $1.3 million on fundraising for the nonprofit.
Those two items made up nearly 90% of the group’s overall budget.
Apparently being a Progressives United employee was a good gig, not just because of the six-figure salaries, but because of ritzy hotels and fine dining for employees too.
It would be one thing if Feingold hadn’t wrapped the maverick mantra around himself all these years, despite the reality of his voting record, which is indistingushable from any Democrat, except when Feingold went left of the donkey party. Apparently I was mistaken when I assumed the purpose of a political action committee was primarily to raise money for candidates, not create cushy jobs for your former Senate and campaign staff.
Then again, phoniness seems to run in the Democratic Party these days, with the supposed hero of the middle class, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the similar lack-of-spending-on-anybody-but-ourselves Clinton Foundation.
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My conservative undergraduate institution — Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tenn. — was far more open to dissent, including from angry atheist classmates (yes, I had a few) than was Harvard Law School. No one was jeered, shouted down, or threatened at Lipscomb. No one called future employers of atheist or liberal students to try to get job offers canceled. Professors didn’t scream at dissenting students, and activists didn’t plaster photo-shopped, pornographic pictures of liberals all over campus walls. At Harvard, all those things happened — to conservative students.
My relatively conservative Kentucky law firm employed people of every ideological stripe, and we engaged in robust (and almost always friendly) discussions of virtually every kind of cultural and political topic. The firm’s pro bono work veered both liberal and conservative, depending on the views of the individual lawyer. When an LGBT activist complained to the managing partner of the firm about my conservative advocacy, she was shut down by a simple statement: “I’m running a law firm here, not the speech police.”
My Manhattan law firm, by contrast, performed only one kind of pro bono service: liberal. Political debates were virtually nonexistent in the workplace, but political conversations happened all the time. The overwhelming liberal majority expressed themselves freely, while the very few conservatives remained silent. Dissent was decidedly not welcome. Even the conservative churches I’ve attended have been more ideologically diverse than the two major liberal campuses where I either attended (Harvard Law School) or taught (Cornell Law School). Indeed, the numbers demonstrate the truth of my anecdotal experience, with self-professed Evangelicals more politically diverse than not only Ivy League faculties but entire, allegedly “diverse” Northeastern cities. In other words, you’re more likely to hear a meaningful debate between people of fundamentally different political opinions in a church pew than in New York City.
Even the conservative churches I’ve attended have been more ideologically diverse than the two major liberal campuses where I either attended (Harvard Law School) or taught (Cornell Law School). Indeed, the numbers demonstrate the truth of my anecdotal experience, with self-professed Evangelicals more politically diverse than not only Ivy League faculties but entire, allegedly “diverse” Northeastern cities. In other words, you’re more likely to hear a meaningful debate between people of fundamentally different political opinions in a church pew than in New York City.
This reality exerts a powerful influence on the residents of the two regions. While enjoying the undeniable organizational (and psychic) benefits of near-unanimity, urban liberals consistently think debates are “over” when they’ve scarcely begun, fail to understand (much less consider) opposing points of view, and consistently overestimate their cultural strength. An urban liberal can go his entire life without exposure to serious conservative ideas. This leads to an atmosphere rife with bullying but also prone to the occasional embarrassing overreach — such that brave conservatives can, for example, defeat even the largest universities in court as the universities’ ideological zeal outpaces their respect for the Constitution. I’ve been privileged to be a part of many such cases, in courtrooms across the nation. In the South, I’ve found that rank-and-file conservatives are often amused rather than alarmed by most cultural debates. And while they have a much more difficult time escaping the Left (after all, everyone still has a TV and goes to the movies), they have a hard time taking, say, the Bruce Jenner story seriously. He’s more of a sad curiosity than a harbinger of cultural disaster. Unless they work for politically correct corporations (often those headquartered in Blue America), conservatives in the South usually find that radical social trends don’t affect their jobs, rarely affect their schools (which tend to retain a robust Christian and conservative presence at every level), and are barely a topic of conversation at church. RELATED: America’s Progressive Autoimmune Crisis Continues Apace These two cultures create a reality that is exactly the opposite of that portrayed in Hollywood, according to which people always escape smaller towns and cities for the “broader horizons” of New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Yet it’s not small-town America that’s narrow-minded. Our great cities embrace a curious and constricted kind of diversity, in which people of all races, sexual orientations, and personal proclivities are celebrated and embraced — so long as their minds belong to the collective.
In the South, I’ve found that rank-and-file conservatives are often amused rather than alarmed by most cultural debates. And while they have a much more difficult time escaping the Left (after all, everyone still has a TV and goes to the movies), they have a hard time taking, say, the Bruce Jenner story seriously. He’s more of a sad curiosity than a harbinger of cultural disaster. Unless they work for politically correct corporations (often those headquartered in Blue America), conservatives in the South usually find that radical social trends don’t affect their jobs, rarely affect their schools (which tend to retain a robust Christian and conservative presence at every level), and are barely a topic of conversation at church.
These two cultures create a reality that is exactly the opposite of that portrayed in Hollywood, according to which people always escape smaller towns and cities for the “broader horizons” of New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Yet it’s not small-town America that’s narrow-minded. Our great cities embrace a curious and constricted kind of diversity, in which people of all races, sexual orientations, and personal proclivities are celebrated and embraced — so long as their minds belong to the collective.
We have yet to see whether these cultural approaches can coexist indefinitely. While your average Tennessean doesn’t much care what someone in New York City thinks or does, the urban Left isn’t willing to embrace legal or cultural federalism and allow states to go their own way. Instead, it demands that all social trends conform to its agenda, demands that public schools teach social leftism exclusively, and, most recently, refuses to allow even Indiana to chart its own course on religious freedom and tolerance.
We have yet to see whether these cultural approaches can coexist indefinitely. While your average Tennessean doesn’t much care what someone in New York City thinks or does, the urban Left isn’t willing to embrace legal or cultural federalism and allow states to go their own way. Instead, it demands that all social trends conform to its agenda, demands that public schools teach social leftism exclusively, and, most recently, refuses to allow even Indiana to chart its own course on religious freedom and tolerance.
Americans tend — over the long run — to reject censorship and intolerance, but past performance is no guarantee of future results. For those of us who live in Free America, our mission is clear: Resist legal and ideological aggression, and model the respect for free speech and individual liberty that we demand from our ideological foes. May the best culture win.
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Today in 1967 was the Monterey International Pop Festival:
Happy birthday first to Paul McCartney:
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For reasons known only to himself, Donald Trump is running for president.
It may be amusing to watch Trump, a former donor to Hillary Clinton, now explain why he opposes her. Then again, they do share one thing in common — generating huge fortunes largely on other people’s money. At least Trump has buildings to show for his OPM.
There is no better commentator to analyze The Donald for president than P.J. O’Rourke:
Who are these jacklegs, highbinders, wirepullers, mountebanks, swellheads, buncombe spigots, boodle artists, four-flushers, and animated cuspidors offering themselves as worthy of the nation’s highest office?
Do they take us voters for fools? Of course. But are they also deluded? Are they also insane? Are they under an illusion that they have the qualities to make a good or even adequate president? Do they imagine they possess even one such quality?
Clinton, Bush, Walker, Sanders, Rubio, Paul, O’Malley, Christie, Perry, Biden, Santorum, Cruz, Chaffee, Graham, Jindal, Webb, Pataki, Kasich, Gore, Fiorina, Huckabee, Warren, Carson, and Trump.
That’s not a list of presidential candidates. That’s a list of congressionally appointed members of a bipartisan blue-ribbon commission named to look into a question of pressing national importance such as “paper or plastic?” …
Let us therefore begin at the bottom of the campaign barrel with the lees, the dross, and the dregs, by which I mean Donald Trump.
Or is Trump just using the garbage of his personality to chum for publicity again? If he isn’t really a candidate, I see no reason to take him at his word, any more than I’d take him at his word about anything else.
Besides, I, personally, support his candidacy. “Democracy,” said H. L. Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
The American government is of the people, by the people, for the people. And, these days, America is peopled by 320 million Donald Trumps. Donald Trump is representative of all that we hold dear: money. Or, rather, he is representative of greed for money. We common people may not be able to match Trump’s piggy bank, but we can match his piggishness.
And in this era of inflated self-esteem, which has become so fundamental to Americanism that it’s taught in our schools, we can all match Trump’s opinion of his own worth. Trump claims to be worth billions—seven of them as of 2012.
In 2004 Forbes magazine estimated Trump’s net worth to be $2.6 billion. New York Times reporter Timothy O’Brien looked into the numbers and came up with a net worth figure between $150 and $250 million. Trump sued O’Brien and lost.
Many a candidate for president has fibbed on the subject of his or her economic circumstances—William Henry “born in a log cabin” Harrison and Hillary “dead broke” Clinton. But Trump will be the first candidate to—like the American legend that he is—tell tall tales about all the money he’s got. Trump is a financial Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, and Davey Crockett rolled into one, according to Trump.
If Trump’s critics don’t think this is typical of modern Americans, they haven’t looked at our online dating profiles.
Also typical of modern Americans is Trump’s bad taste. True, he doesn’t dress the way the rest of us do—like a nine-year-old in twee T-shirt, bulbous shorts, boob shoes, and league-skunked sports team cap. And Trump doesn’t weigh 300 pounds or have multiple piercings or visible ink. He puts his own individual stamp on gaucherie. And we like it. We’re a country that cherishes being individuals as much as we cherish being gauche.
Trump’s suits have a cut and sheen as if they came from the trunk sale of a visiting Bombay tailor staying in a cheap hotel in Trump’s native Queens and taking a nip between fittings. Trump wears neckties in Outer Borough colors. And, Donald, the end of your necktie belongs up around your belt buckle, not between your knees and your nuts. Trump’s haircut makes Kim Jong Un laugh.
Americans appreciate bad taste or America wouldn’t look the way America does. And the way America looks is due, in no small part, to buildings Trump built.
In the 1970s he ruined Grand Central Station’s Commodore Hotel, turning it into a Grand Hyatt. Built in 1919, the handsome neo-French Renaissance tower was covered by Trump with cheap glazing—the epitome of seventies smoked glass coffee tables to snort cocaine from, except all its surfaces are vertical.
Then there is the brassy-déclassé Trump Tower with its horrible huge pleated façade threatening 5th Avenue with a cacophony of accordion music.
And Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, bearing the same relation to the noble white mausoleum in Uttar Pradesh as a turd bears to a prize in a Cracker Jack box.
Trump’s grandfather, a German immigrant, changed the family name from Drumpf to Trump. This was wrong. We could have had Drumpf Tower, Drumpf Taj Mahal, Drumpf Plaza Hotel, and President of the United States Donald Drumpf, heading up the Drumpf administration.
But is that a reason not to vote for Donald? No. We have to consider what kind of president he would make. What would his foreign policy be? What domestic priorities would he favor? How would he handle the economy?
On all three counts he’ll be—just like he says he is already—a big success.
Imagine the strides Trump will make in American foreign policy. He’s crazier than all the other candidates put together. He’s under the illusion that he’s 20 times richer than he is. He thinks childhood vaccination caused the movie Rain Man. He believes Obama was born to the Queen of Sheba in an H. Rider Haggard novel. Putin, Xi Jinping, Ayatollah Khamenei, ISIS, the Taliban, and Hamas will be paralyzed with fear. Who knows what this lunatic will do?
What he’ll do is build thousands of Trump casinos, Trump hotels, and Trump resorts in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Raqqa, Kandahar, and Gaza. Then all of them will go bankrupt the way Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Plaza Hotel, and Trump Entertainment Resorts did. He’ll destroy the power of our foes leaving Russia trying to palm off Eastern Ukraine on angry bond-holders and China auctioning distressed property in the Spratly Islands.
Trump’s chief domestic policy will be to be on TV. That’s one more reason he’ll get elected. We can relate to Trump. The first and foremost goal of all Americans is to be on TV.
As President Trump will be able to be on TV all the time, 24/7. Just doing his hair in the makeup room during commercial breaks should keep him too busy to push other birdbrain domestic policies the way some presidents have. And he can yell “You’re fired!” as much as he wants. It will make for a healthy turnover in cabinet appointees such as Ivanka, Dennis Rodman, Larry King, and Vince McMahon.
And Trump understands the economy. He’ll push America’s economic growth forward the same way he pushed his own—with debt and more debt. Average American household debt is more than $225,000. The average American family’s credit card debt is almost $16,000. Trump restructured $3.5 billion in business debt and $900 million in personal debt between 1991 and 1994. We Americans know a leader when we see one. And we love debt. Otherwise America’s national debt wouldn’t have gone from $15 billion in 1930 to $18 trillion today. Tomorrow, with Trump in the Oval Office, the sky’s the limit.
Meanwhile, this news from the Los Angeles Times can’t be a surprise:
Billionaire Donald Trump, a Republican, announced his bid for the presidency with Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” blasting in the background, and once again a political candidate has associated himself with a rock star without the endorsement of said star.
Young, a two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, has long been associated with political causes championed by liberals, but in the 1980s, he left some followers perplexed when he spoke supportively of Republican President Reagan. He also sang at that time about the legacy of the Woodstock generation being little more than “a hippie dream.”
In recent years, however, Young has been actively involved in the development of green alternatives to gasoline-powered automobiles, devoting considerable time, energy and resources to the LincVolt, a converted 1959 Lincoln Continental that runs on electricity and biodiesel fuel.
“Rockin’ in the Free World” was released in 1989 on Young’s “Freedom” album, a song that addressed the meaning of patriotism in a world in which drug-addicted mothers could abandon their babies and in which the environment continued to be threatened by pollution.
This demonstrates sloppy research. There are better choices out there.
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The number five song today in 1967 …
… was 27 spots higher than this song reached in 1978:
Birthdays start with Jerry Fielding, who composed the theme music to …
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Mike Rowe was accused by someone named “Craig” of demonizing the unemployed. To that accusation, Rowe wrote:
Everyday on the news, liberal pundits and politicians portray the wealthy as greedy, while conservative pundits and politicians portray the poor as lazy. Democrats have become so good at denouncing greed, Republicans now defend it. And Republicans are so good at condemning laziness, Democrats are now denying it even exists. It’s a never ending dance that gets more contorted by the day.
A few weeks ago in Georgetown, President Obama accused Fox News of “perpetuating a false narrative” by consistently calling poor people “lazy.” Fox News denied the President’s accusation, claiming to have only criticized policies, not people. Unfortunately for Fox, The Daily Show has apparently gained access to the Internet, and after a ten-second google-search and a few minutes in the edit bay, John Stewart was on the air with a devastating montage of Fox personnel referring to the unemployed as “sponges,” “leeches,” “freeloaders,” and “mooches.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/…/daily-shows-jon-stewart-bu…/
Over the next few days, the echo chamber got very noisy. The Left howled about the bias at Fox and condemned the one-percent, while the Right shrieked about the bias at MSNBC and bemoaned the growing entitlement state. But through all the howling and shrieking, no one said a word about the millions of jobs that American companies are struggling to fill right now. No one talked the fact that most of those jobs don’t require an expensive four-year degree. And no one mentioned the 1.2 trillion dollars of outstanding student loans, or the madness of lending money we don’t have to kids who can’t pay it back, educating them for jobs that no longer exist.
I started mikeroweWORKS to talk about these issues, and shine a light on a few million good jobs that no one seems excited about. But mostly, I wanted to remind people that real opportunity still exists for those individuals who are willing to work hard, learn a skill, and make a persuasive case for themselves. Sadly, you see my efforts as “right wing propaganda.” But why? Are our differences really political? Or is it something deeper? Something philosophical?
You wrote that, “people want to work.” In my travels, I’ve met a lot of hard-working individuals, and I’ve been singing their praises for the last 12 years. But I’ve seen nothing that would lead me to agree with your generalization. From what I’ve seen of the species, and what I know of myself, most people – given the choice – would prefer NOT to work. In fact, on Dirty Jobs, I saw Help Wanted signs in every state, even at the height of the recession. Is it possible you see the existence of so many unfilled jobs as a challenge to your basic understanding of what makes people tick?
Last week at a policy conference in Mackinac, I talked to several hiring managers from a few of the largest companies in Michigan. They all told me the same thing – the biggest under reported challenge in finding good help, (aside from the inability to “piss clean,”) is an overwhelming lack of “soft skills.” That’s a polite way of saying that many applicants don’t tuck their shirts in, or pull their pants up, or look you in the eye, or say things like “please” and “thank you.” This is not a Michigan problem – this is a national crisis. We’re churning out a generation of poorly educated people with no skill, no ambition, no guidance, and no realistic expectations of what it means to go to work.
These are the people you’re talking about Craig, and their number grows everyday. I understand you would like me to help them, but how? I’m not a mentor, and my foundation doesn’t do interventions. Do you really want me to stop rewarding individual work ethic, just because I don’t have the resources to assist those who don’t have any? If I’m unable to help everyone, do you really want me to help no one?
My goals are modest, and they’ll remain that way. I don’t focus on groups. I focus on individuals who are eager to do whatever it takes to get started. People willing to retool, retrain, and relocate. That doesn’t mean I have no empathy for those less motivated. It just means I’m more inclined to subsidize the cost of training for those who are. That shouldn’t be a partisan position, but if it is, I guess I’ll just have to live with it.
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Dueling ex-Beatles today: In 1978, one year after the play “Beatlemania” opened on Broadway, Ringo Starr released his “Bad Boy” album, while Paul McCartney and Wings released “I’ve Had Enough”:
The number six song one year later (with no known connection to Mr. Spock):
The number eight single today in 1990 …
… bears an interesting resemblance to an earlier song:
Put the two together, and you get …
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The Power Line blog reports:
Hillary Clinton says that as president, she would have a litmus test for Supreme Court nominees: they must promise to vote to overturn the Citizens United case.
It is easy to understand why Hillary isn’t fond of Citizens United. The case involved a film called Hillary: The Movie that was critical of her. In Citizens United, the Supreme Court held that it was unconstitutional to criminalize showings of Hillary within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of a general election, simply because the movie (like all movies) was produced by a corporation. This is how the court’s majority described what was at stake in the case:
The law before us is an outright ban, backed by criminal sanctions. Section 441b makes it a felony for all corporations—including nonprofit advocacy corporations—either to expressly advocate the election or defeat of candidates or to broadcast electioneering communications within 30 days of a primary election and 60 days of a general election. Thus, the following acts would all be felonies under §441b: The Sierra Club runs an ad, within the crucial phase of 60 days before the general election, that exhorts the public to disapprove of a Congressman who favors logging in national forests; the National Rifle Association publishes a book urging the public to vote for the challenger because the incumbent U. S. Senator supports a handgun ban; and the American Civil Liberties Union creates a Web site telling the public to vote for a Presidential candidate in light of that candidate’s defense of free speech. These prohibitions are classic examples of censorship.
If Hillary gets her way and Citizens United is overturned, the path will be cleared for Congress to enact legislation that makes it a crime to criticize President Clinton in a book or movie. So far, the political class has only tried to ban books and movies that endorse or criticize candidates 60 days out from an election, but there is nothing magic about that number. Next time, they could punish anyone who publishes a book or produces a movie critical of Hillary 180 days, or 360 days before the next election. Is there any reason why Hillary’s Supreme Court justices, committed to reversing Citizens United, would balk at such legislation? None that I can see. We are living, after all, in the era of the permanent campaign.
Has there ever been a time when free speech is popular? Perhaps not; certainly not today. Not on the left. But those who might consider supporting Hillary Clinton for president should think carefully about the powers she wants the federal government to wield.
Rusty the Prickly Phony Maverick also supports repealing Citizens United. Of course, as McCain-Feingold proved, Feingold has never been a fan of constitutional rights.
Liberals used to be fans of constitutional rights back when they were out of power. And then power corrupted them, as power corrupts all politicians.
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Today in 1956, 15-year-old John Lennon met 13-year-old Paul McCartney when Lennon’s band, the Quarrymen, played at a church dinner.
Birthdays today start with David Rose, the composer of a song many high school bands have played (really):
Nigel Pickering, guitarist of Spanky and Our Gang:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 