The number one single today in 1960:
Today in 1969, the Who released their rock opera “Tommy” …
… two years before Iron Butterfly disbanded over arguments over what “In a Gadda Da Vita” (which is one-third the length of all of “Tommy”) actually meant:
The number one British album today in 1970 was “McCartney,” named for you know who:
Something called The Cauldron says:
NBC, CBS and FOX have all tried — and failed — to loosen ESPN’s chokehold on cable sports because they have all been unable to grasp one very simple rule:
You can’t out-ESPN ESPN. …
The fact that CBS Sports Network isn’t even recorded by Nielsen speaks for itself, but meanwhile, ESPN averaged over 7 times the viewers as its nearest competitor during both day time and prime time broadcasts.
How is this possible, you ask? The answer is actually quite simple: None of the new sports networks have learned from the mistakes of its predecessors.
CBS Sports Network has toiled in obscurity for a decade since CBS acquired College Sports TV for $325 million in 2005 — where I was working at the time. First, it failed to compete with ESPN’s college sports’ coverage as CBS College Sports Network. And then it failed again after pivoting in 2011 to become a general sports network rebranded as CBS Sports Network.
A microcosm of the channel’s failure, CBS Sports Net’s one major splash to improve ratings, hiring Jim Rome in 2012, went down in flames with his daily show lasting less than two years.
NBC was next up to bat by morphing Versus into the NBC Sports Network in 2012, and hiring Michelle Beadle away from ESPN to be the face of the network with their version of “SportsNation” called “The Crossover.”
Beadle later described her former co-host Dave Briggs as a “talentless hack” and the entire NBC Sports Network experience as “a hot mess,” which gives you a pretty good idea of how that experiment went.
Then came along FOX Sports 1, which was launched two summers ago, billed as a real challenger to ESPN’s throne with Rupert Murdoch’s money and power behind the project.
The network made big-time hires in Gus Johnson and Erin Andrews, launched its own versions of “SportsNation” (“Crowd Goes Wild”) and “SportsCenter” (“FOX Sports Live”), was part of a $3 billion rights deal with the Pac-12 that it shares with ESPN, and gobbled up the rights to Big East basketball.
Yet almost every move FS1 has made has failed miserably.
Andrews was moved from college football to the NFL after one year of FOX’s disastrous college football pre-game show. Crowd Goes Wild was quickly cancelled, FOX Sports Live is dwarfed by SportsCenter, and FOX’s college sports coverage gets crushed by ESPN. …
CBS Sports Network is currently on a ventilator somewhere, while NBC Sports Network seems content having the rights to the NHL and English Premier League soccer. FS1 continues to double down on its investment, as evidenced by the recent hiring of former “First Take” producer and “Embrace Debate” artist Jamie Horowitz.
But moves like that suggest FS1 remains blind to repeating its mistakes all over again, trying to replicate ESPN’s success by bringing in former Bristol employees, and copying The Worldwide Leader’s shows.
That’s a fool’s errand.
If FOX were to hire Skip Bayless (his contract is up soon, by the way), ESPN would just replace him with another stooge to stir shit up while FOX’s knockoff goes and draws a fraction of the Mothership’s audience.
The lesson, at this point, should be clear: Instead of trying to out-ESPN ESPN, sports networks need to be the anti-ESPN.
The irony of FOX Sports 1 not understanding this rule is that it’s the same credo Murdoch used to make FOX News so successful.
Nobody thought there was space for another news channel when FOX News launched in 1996 with CNN already firmly established and MSNBC having recently launched. But FOX News’ Roger Ailes had the ingenious idea of cornering an untapped market: Conservatives who hate the “liberal media.” While FOX News is universally panned by industry insiders, it’s the 800-pound cable news gorilla that routinely trounces its primary competition.
Likewise, there are A LOT of sports fans out there that really hate ESPN and would love an antidote to the “Embrace Debate” culture that has spread to SEVEN daily debate shows on the network. Those fans just haven’t found an alternative yet.
If I were in charge of FOX Sports 1, my motto would be: FS1 is going to be the sports blog of cable sports networks — funny as hell and totally unfiltered. I’d start by canceling “FOX Sports Live” and replacing it with a sports version of “The Man Show” that mixed in sports with on-air drinking, comedic skits and girls jumping on trampolines.
Would it be shameless? Yes. But so is all of FOX News, and it’d also be ten times better than watching a poor man’s “SportsCenter.” Just imagine a sports version of “The Man Show” that, say, paired original co-host Adam Carolla with Bill Simmons and a daily segment narrated by Simmons called, “Why ESPN Sucks.”
The second thing I’d do is get former “Crowd Goes Wild” host Katie Nolan on the air as much as possible instead of just YouTube clips and a weekly show that airs on Sunday nights (the name, “Garbage Time,” is certainly fitting if nothing else). She’s the only creative and original thing FS1 thing has done to date.
Nolan isn’t alone when it comes to potentially available talent, either. For example, Spencer Hall of SB Nation and Drew Magary of Deadspin are Internet stars with huge, loyal followings that would tune in to watch them whenever they are on TV. They’re also widely respected within the blogosphere, making them polar opposites of Skip Bayless.
I’d also build out FS1’s daytime programming with stark alternatives to ESPN’s debate shows. How about a parody of First Take called Last Take? Instead of debating mindless things like, “Could a 52-year old Michael Jordan beat LeBron James?”, Hall and Magary could mockingly argue over the question, “Could the cadaver of Babe Ruth hit a home run off Clayton Kershaw?” with Nolan as the moderator.
These suggestions may fly in the face of conventional television programming wisdom, but pretty much every single executive instinct of the suits at CBS, NBC, and FOX has been wrong.
So perhaps Jerry Seinfeld had it right. “If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.”
You can agree with his point about trying to out-ESPN ESPN without agreeing to his approach on how to do that, or whether his solution even matches his definition of the problem. What would be the purpose of an ESPN parody show? Bayless and Stephen A. Smith are self-parodies as it is. (Bayless and Smith have their own talk show on every TV in Hell, broadcast 24/7.)
I am probably no one’s target demographic anymore, but I am interested in watching sports to watch sports. And only watch sports. You know, the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat; the human drama of athletic competition? That is what’s worth watching. Not the pregame show, not the postgame show, and certainly not hours of uninformed “takes” for the sole purpose of participant self-promotion.
Former Cubs manager Lee Elia’s spectacular rant about Cubs fans (back in the days of only day baseball at Wrigley Field) comes to mind when you wonder who watches ESPN’s aforementioned seven sports yak shows. I would rather watch golf (which I don’t watch) than Bayless or Smith. The first word in ESPN’s name is, yes, “Entertainment,” but ESPN’s sports talk qualifies only in the same way car crash scenes qualify as entertainment.
It’s probably not a surprise that I was more of a fan and viewer of ESPN in its early days when it had more air time to fill than programming and would therefore fill air time with repeats of games (which would actually be convenient for those who don’t work the usual 8-to-5 schedule) or weird sports like Australian Rules Football. I also enjoyed watching ESPN Classic, even though (or perhaps because) what it showed was usually before the era of 16:9 HD and stereo broadcasts with constant score-and-time on the screen.
But as I said, I’m probably in no one’s target demographic anymore. Certainly not ESPN’s.
Three-day weekends like this one traditionally include a lot of baseball-watching among baseball fans.
One wonders who future baseball fans will watch, based on this Wall Street Journal story:
As nationwide participation numbers continue to decline, some local youth leagues are reaching a breaking point.
Unable to field enough teams to form a self-contained league, they face a choice between playing teams from surrounding areas, merging with nearby leagues or disbanding altogether. Either way, the game becomes less easily accessible to the casual player, a dying breed in an era of specialization in youth sports.
This shift threatens to cost Major League Baseball millions of potential fans, raising concerns about the league’s future at a time when revenues are soaring and attendance is strong.
“The biggest predictor of fan avidity as an adult is whether you played the game,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said. An MLB spokesman cited fan polling conducted by the league last year as proof. When asked to assess the factors that drove their interest in sports, fans between the ages of 12 and 17 cited participation as a major factor more often than watching or attending the sport. That was particularly true among male fans in that age group, 70% of which cited “playing the sport” as a big factor in building their interest.
Since replacing Bud Selig in January, Manfred has been especially focused on increasing youth interest in baseball. The league recently began working with ESPN to prominently feature local Little League teams during Sunday Night Baseball telecasts. MLB brings the teams to the games, and ESPN shows them during the broadcast. An MLB spokesman said the league also plans to announce a major youth initiative in the coming weeks.
But MLB faces headwinds that have been years in the making and forces that are outside its direct control. In 2002, nine million people between the ages of 7 and 17 played baseball in the U.S., according to the National Sporting Goods Association, an industry trade group. By 2013, the most recent year for which data is available, that figure had dropped by more than 41%, to 5.3 million. Likewise, youth softball participation declined from 5.4 million to 3.2 million over the same span.
Other popular sports, including soccer and basketball, have suffered as youth sports participation in general has declined and become more specialized. A pervasive emphasis on performance over mere fun and exercise has driven many children to focus exclusively on one sport from an early age, making it harder for all sports to attract casual participants. But the decline of baseball as a community sport has been especially precipitous. …
In more affluent areas, the best alternatives are merely inconvenient. Nearby towns pool teams together for an interleague schedule or merge their leagues outright. At its entry level, the sport requires players to leave their communities for games more often than before. …
While neighborhood games become increasingly scarce, year-round travel teams have never been more prevalent. The U.S. Specialty Sports Association, the dominant organizing body for travel baseball, said it has around 1.3 million players spread across 80,000 teams, more than double what it had 10 years ago. The company’s website includes national rankings for teams in age groups that begin at “4 and under.”
Ismael Gonzalez, who manages the Miami-based 9-and-under team MVP Juniors Elite, said his team travels throughout the Southeast, playing more than 100 games a year and practicing two or three days a week. “These kids work like machines,” he said. “This is not just for fun. This is their lifestyle.”
But the cost of that lifestyle—thousands of dollars a year in many cases—puts it out of reach for many parents. It skews heavily white: A 15-year study of travel teams by Nebraska researcher David Ogden found that only 3% of players are black. And its popularity has made baseball more of a niche sport, precisely what MLB wants to avoid at the spectator level.
“The kids who have been playing baseball since they were 18 months old, they’re going to be baseball fans,” said Mark Hyman, a George Washington University sports management professor and author of three books on youth sports. “But MLB can’t rely on them exclusively. There needs to be opportunities for kids who are not going to be Willie Mays and don’t even want to be Willie Mays.”
There are other reasons mentioned in the comments, including some parents emphasizing individual sports such as running, baseball being more fun to play than to watch, baseball being boring to play if you’re not a pitcher or catcher, Major League Baseball being boring to watch, the usual assortment of other physical (other sports) and nonphysical (involving some sort of computer) activities, and this indictment of today’s culture: “… parents keep their kids in a bubble of activities coupled with the irrational fear, in most cases, of prohibiting their kids to bike over to a local park alone to play.”
The counterpoint is to look at baseball’s overall attendance, the highest of any professional sport in the world. Of course, if your favorite major professional sport played 2,430 regular-season games every year, it too would lead the world in attendance, since no other sport gets remotely close to that number of games played each year. Average attendance, however, drops baseball to second, at, according to Statistica, 30,437 per game in 2014–15. behind the National Football League and ahead of Major League Soccer, the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association.
The more interesting number (which doesn’t seem to be available) is percentage of seats sold. The NFL percentage is well over 90 percent, and the NHL and NBA numbers are more than 90 percent. The MLB number is around 70 percent. Part of the reason is that MLB teams have difficulty selling seats for an entire 81-game home schedule when the team falls out of contention for the postseason. (In the case of the Brewers, that was approximately April 15.) The owners of baseball are loath to turn away money (though one wonders how much profit a team makes when, say, 20,000 people show up for a game as opposed to 40,000), but one thing MLB might consider is shortening its season by, say, a month, not only in order to play postseason games in decent weather, but to tighten up the schedule and make each game mean more.
But part of the reason also must have to do with baseball’s very nature as the hardest sport to play, as anyone who has swung and missed at a pitch can demonstrate. (Golf is hard enough, and the ball doesn’t move off the tee.) Hitting a baseball is so difficult that .300 — seven out of 10 failures — is the mark of a good player. And anyone who has tried to get a baseball across home plate in the knees-to-armpits strike zone knows that successful pitching isn’t any easier. (I speak from experience in both cases.) A lot of kids who don’t succeed at something right away don’t stick with it.
I thoroughly disagree with the number one song today in 1961:
Today in 1965, the Beatles found that “Ticket to Ride” was a ticket to the top of the charts:
The number one album today in 1971 was the Rolling Stones’ “Sticky Fingers”:
Colleges and high schools are in the midst of their commencements, with a ton of them this weekend.
On the subject of commencement speeches, Carlos Lozada writes:
Before you picket, protest, sit-in or safe-space your way out of listening to a conservative commencement speaker this college graduation season, I need to let you in on a secret:
Conservatives give better commencement addresses than liberals.
I know, I know, how is that possible? It’s liberal arts after all, right? When you — or more likely, your parents — have just spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for that B.A. in anthropology or political science, who needs Ayaan Hirsi Ali telling you that universities have become temples of dogmatic orthodoxy or P.J. O’Rourke killing the moment with a speech about how ideals are pointless?
Actually, you do.
Two new anthologies of commencement speeches offer a revealing comparison of how liberals and conservative perform in this springtime ritual. The World is Waiting For You, edited by Tara Grove and Isabel Ostrer, bills itself as “the perfect gift for all who feel ready to move their tassels to the left.” Its roster includes Noam Chomsky, Gloria Steinem, Howard Zinn, and other high-profile liberals. Remembering Who We Are, edited by Zev Chafets, features prominent conservatives, including Roger Ailes, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina and more. Drawing from this sample of 48 speeches — 30 by conservatives, 18 by liberals — the right-leaning speakers stand out for five reasons:
Conservatives speak to you as an individual. Liberal commencement speakers tend to address graduates as members of a group, usually a generation. “If you are part of the first generation of Americans who genuinely see race and ethnicity as attributes, not stereotypes, will you have done better than we did?” journalist Anna Quindlen asked in her 2011 speech to Grinnell College. “The genius of your generation has yet to be told,” law professor Theodore M. Shaw told graduates of Wesleyan University in 2014. “You are the first Internet Generation.” And they call on you to act as a group as well, as part of an activist community or movement: “The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups,” Barbara Kingsolver declared to Duke University’s 2008 graduates. “And they are known to change the world.”
Though conservatives can also lapse into generation-speak, they are more likely to address you one-on-one, focusing on people more than movements. And when you’re about to leave behind a phase of your life in which you’ve always moved forward as part of a class or group, and enter a working world when you’ll rise and fall on your own, that’s not a bad approach. Both Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, for example, stressed the importance of finding your own personal talents — and how that will lead to fulfilling work as well as happiness and (of course) income. “The money will come if you do the right thing, and you use your talent well,” Ailes told 2013’s University of North Carolina journalism school graduates. That may take time, O’Reilly cautioned: “Don’t panic if you haven’t figured out the talent thing,” he said to Marist College grads in 2001. “Take opportunities as they present themselves and work hard. Eventually it will come to you.”
Conservative speeches are shorter. Most of the shorter speeches tend to appear in the conservative anthology. Speakers such as Ryan Crocker, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, among other hotspots; Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly; and economist Thomas Sargent offered especially concise addresses. In the liberal anthology, only Noam Chomsky’s address to the American University in Beirut in 2013 stood out for its relative brevity. (Of course, not all of the conservative addresses were merciful in length: Bobby Jindal and David Mamet’s speeches gave you enough time to pick up a few extra credit hours.)
Conservatives give more actionable advice. Liberal speeches are sweeping, epic, certainly inspiring — but often short on specifics. “Godpseed, as you go out and change the world” is how Marian Wright Edelman concluded her remarks to Muhlenberg College in 2008, and that’s not atypical on the left. But conservatives, whether or not you like their advice, seem more willing to get granular. “Promise yourself that over the next year, you’re going to spend half an hour a day learning something new,” Ben Carson urged at Regent University in 2014. “One half hour a day, that’s not a big investment. Get an algebra book, a chemistry book, a physics book. . . . Civics, geography, world history, American history, Greek history. Half an hour a day for one year. I guarantee you in a year’s time, people who haven’t seen you in a while will say, ‘Who are you?’ They will not recognize you.” In 2013, Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, drew on survey data to advise Thomas Edison State College graduates how to lead happier lives. “Immerse yourself in faith, family, community, and work,” he said. “And never waste your time chasing anything unearned.” And speaking to the University of Georgia’s 2005 law school class, former solicitor general Theodore Olsen outlined the pitfalls leading to professional failure, focusing on workplace ambition and attitude. “Watch what happens when you spend a lot of time marveling at your last accomplishment,” he warned.
Conservatives tell better stories. By far, the more memorable personal tales in these collections come from conservative speakers. In her 2005 speech at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Carly Fiorina recalled how she was nearly shut out of an important work meeting early in her career because the client wanted to go to a strip club and her male co-workers didn’t want her to feel “uncomfortable” — so she decided to join them there. Brit Hume on the time Charlton Heston asked Hume to call him “Chuck,” and Hume responded: “I could no more call you Chuck, sir, than I could call Moses ‘Mo.’” Jindal deadpanning on how he and the only other Republican undergraduate at Brown University easily became president and vice president of the school’s College Republicans. If you have to sit through a final lecture before graduating, it may as well be entertaining.
Conservatives are less likely to suck up to you. “Your generation should be the model for my generation because you totally rock,” Anna Quindlen gushed to Grinnell College graduates in 2011. And Wynton Marsalis looked at the 2001 Connecticut College graduating class and said, “Check yourselves out, because it’s a beautiful thing.” There are some conservative suck-ups, too, but Antonin Scalia captured the room-for-improvement strain running through lots of right-leaning speeches: “To thine own self be true,” he told graduates in 2010, “depending upon who you think you are.” And Rush Limbaugh, when asked on his radio show in May 2008 what he would say to a graduating class, was even tougher: “The first thing that I would say is the world does not revolve around you, yet, and you are not the future leaders of the country, yet, just because you’ve graduated.”
One strange anniversary in rock music: Today in 1968, Paul McCartney and Jane Asher attended a concert of … Andy Williams:
Eleven years later, not McCartney, but Elton John became the first Western artist to perform in the Soviet Union.
Four years later, David Bowie’s suggestion reached number one:
Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post says it offends her that Carly Fiorina is running for president with a career in business behind her, instead of being a former president’s wife. If only she had the gravitas of a Mrs. Bill Clinton, skilled in the arts of bimbo suppression, who went on to stellar careers in her post-Bill incarnation, as … well, as what?
Marcus ticks off the public posts held by Hillary: first lady, senator from New York, secretary of state for Barack Obama. But she fails to say what Clinton did with and in these posts. Were she to try, the seemingly impressive picture would become something considerably less bright.
In 1993, then known as “Bill’s better half” and a new kind of first lady,” was given the task of designing a government takeover of health care. This had been planned as the jewel in the crown of the liberal edifice, but it proved a tough nut to crack. In September, 1994 the bill was withdrawn, but not before it had become the great cause célèbre of the upcoming midterms, in which Democrats lost control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in forty years. Elected to the Senate in 2000, thanks in part to her husband’s fling with an intern, she voted in 2002 to launch the war in Iraq, turned against it the minute it ran into trouble and then tried to atone by opposing the Surge, which in 2007-2008 made Iraq stable.
Named secretary of state by Obama in 2009 after having failed in her first attempt to be president, she began her term trying for a ‘reset’ with Russia, in which even finding the right Russian word became an embarrassment. She supported regime change in Libya that proved catastrophic, and failed to foresee, prepare for or deal with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2012 in Egypt and Libya that killed our ambassador and three other Americans. She insisted for over a week later that the riots were caused by a video made in America, which she surely had known was a lie.
To her credit, Hillary was one of the legion of people who begged Obama not to withdraw hastily from Iraq, (which beats the decision to go in as the one of worst ever made by an American president), but the fact remains that she was part of one of the worst foreign policy administrations in American history, and did little to check the decline.
Correctly, Marcus calls out Fiorina for her defeats — the fact that she was fired “in a boardroom brawl” from Hewlett-Packard, and lost a Senate race in 2010 to Barbara Boxer by a ten-point spread. But she had to have done something right to have risen to the top. Since 2010, she has turned into a very good candidate — funny, articulate, adept at expressing the conservative message in accessible terms to an audience, and deflating Hillary’s claims that she alone speaks for women, at all times, on all things, everywhere.
What can’t be denied is that while everyone can name Hillary’s failures — health care, the Surge, Benghazi and Libya — no one can name a specific success over 23 years that bears her mark, shows her good judgment, her capacity to bring people together or get much of anything done.
The difference between business and politics is that someone who screws up repeatedly, or maybe not even repeatedly, in business gets fired. Someone who screws up repeatedly in politics … is running for president as a Democrat. (And she’s a pathological liar too, demonstrated by every time she covered up for Slick Willie.)
The National Motorists Association is happy, because …
Thanks to the efforts of many citizens and public officials, Wisconsin’s maximum speed limit will soon be raised to 70 mph. The new limit will apply to select stretches of interstate highways and freeways throughout the state.
The NMA has supported the increase ever since Manitowoc Assemblyman Paul Tittl took up the fight for higher speed limits two years ago. Rep. Tittl’s initial bill failed to clear the Senate Transportation Committee in 2013. But Rep. Tittl did not give up and proposed a simplified bill this year while redoubling his efforts to garner support. NMA representatives also testified in favor of higher speed limits at four public hearings over the last two legislative terms.
The speed limit increase in Wisconsin is long overdue. All of our neighboring states went to 70 mph years ago, and Wisconsin and Oregon are the only states west of New York with 65 mph maximum speed limits.
But that will change tomorrow when Gov. Walker signs the new speed limit into law.
This was emailed yesterday, which means “tomorrow” is today, although it’s more like as soon as the 70 mph signs go up along Interstates and elsewhere. I guarantee you that Gov. James Doyle or wannabee governors Tom Barrett or Mary Burke would have never signed a speed-limit increase into law.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t apply to all four-lane highways. U.S. 151 from the Wisconsin-Iowa state line to Fond du Lac won’t go to 70 because of the at-grade intersections, the result of farm machinery traveling the same highways as those trying to get, or deliver, from one place to another.
I also think 70 mph is too slow, though 70 is better than 65, and 65 is better than the stupid 55-mph speed limit on non-four-lane highways. (The 55-mph national speed limit should have gotten Richard Nixon impeached before Watergate.)
I support higher speed limits because speed limits usually are set too low under traffic engineers’ 85th-percentile rule, the speed at which 85 percent of traffic on a highway travels. They are also set too low as the result of certain politicians’ desire for more money, whether by hook (taxes) or crook (fees, fines, etc.). Speed limits are analogous to ticketing a driver for blood alcohol concentration higher than legal levels instead of ticketing a driver for drunk driving based on his wandering all over the road and being a danger to other drivers.
There is, you see, only one truly, provably nonrenewable resource: time.
Today in 1966, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend of The Who decided to replace for the evening the tardy drummer Keith Moon and bass player John Entwistle with the bass player and drummer of the band that played before them at the Ricky Tick Club in Windsor, England.
When Moon and Entwistle arrived and found they had been substituted for, a fight broke out. Moon and Entwistle quit … for a week.
The number one single today in 1967:
Mona Charen on what some Democrats have discovered about their president:
Like cult members awaking to find their leader swigging gin and squirreling money into a Swiss bank account, liberals are rubbing their eyes in disbelief at President Obama’s behavior. The figure they worshipped so fervently and for so long is now revealed to be a “sexist” – at least according to National Organization for Women President Terry O’Neill.
Her view is seconded by Senator Sherrod Brown (D., OH). They are upset about the president’s derisive treatment of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., MA), who committed a sin the president does not take kindly – she disagreed with him. For differing about the merits of the TPP trade deal, she got what everyone should already recognize as the Obama treatment – her views were caricatured and her motives were questioned. “The truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else.” Senator Brown thought the president’s use of Warren’s first name betokened sexism.
No, Senator Brown, that’s not sexism, that’s all-purpose disrespect. The president has been displaying the same condescension to world leaders, senate majority leaders, house speakers, and everyone else since first taking office. It was always “John” and “Harry” and “Hillary” – never Speaker Boehner, Leader Reid, or Secretary Clinton. It was “Angela” and “David,” not Chancellor Merkel and Prime Minister Cameron. Can’t wait to see whether, when the Pope visits in September, the president refers to him as “Jorge.” There was one exception to this rule – Obama was at pains to refer to Iran’s Ali Khameini, who has never been elected to anything, as “Supreme Leader.”
It’s hard to think of another figure whose self-esteem is so inversely proportional to his merit.
So welcome to our world, liberals. Now that your eyes are opened, take a look at the completely unjust, snide, and dishonest way Obama talked about Republicans at the Georgetown University panel on poverty a few days ago.
The most fairmindness Obama could muster was to say he believed that Republicans care about the poor. But this acknowledgment was quickly vitiated by his insistence that if Republicans don’t agree with him about increasing the tax on hedge fund managers, they are insincere. If the tax rate on “carried interest” were raised, the president declared, “I” could fund universal preschool.”
Um, no. The left-leaning Center for American Progress estimates that raising taxes on hedge fund managers could bring in $21 billion over 10 years, or a little over $2 billion per year. According to the National Institute for Early Education Research, universal preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds would clock in at $70 billion per year (not counting what we spend on existing pre-k programs). Now, I don’t give a fig about hedge fund managers, but here’s a thought: How much would increasing their taxes really raise? Probably nothing. As John Carney of CNBC showed, they could take their income a different way and avoid the tax.
And really, considering what a great job the government is doing in education, why would anyone believe that universal pre-k would be successful? National Review’s Jim Geraghty notes that Baltimore’s schools spend more per pupil than suburban Fairfax County, Virginia’s, with much worse results.
It’s possible that some of those hedge fund millionaires and billionaires might contribute money to school choice scholarship funds and other reforms as Ted Forstmann, Jim Barksdale, Eli Broad, Michael Dell, David Packard, the Walton family, Donald Fisher, and many others have done.
Mr. Obama flays the rich the way a compass points north, often bizarrely unaware of how he’s embarrassing himself. Regarding the bifurcation of society, he lamented that “those who are doing better and better — more skilled, more educated, luckier, having greater advantages — are withdrawing from sort of the commons — kids start going to private schools; kids start working out at private clubs instead of the public parks.” This from a graduate of the Ponahou School who sends his daughters to Sidwell Friends.
During the discussion, Mr. Obama disparaged John Boehner’s and Mitch McConnell’s interest in helping the poor. So it’s worth recalling that one of Obama’s first acts as president was to seek to defund the District of Columbia’s Opportunity Scholarship fund. When the Democrats controlled Congress, he succeeded. But someone who cared waited for a chance, and when Republicans gained control of the House and the Congress was in a tense budget showdown with the White House, John Boehner personally saw to it that the program was revived.
So who is judging whom when it comes to the poor?
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 