The number one single today in 1964 was performed by the oldest number one artist to date:
The number one British single today in 1967:
The number one single today in 1970:
No comments on Presty the DJ for May 9
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As expected, the Brewers fired manager Ron Roenicke this week, despite a two-game winning streak.
Roenicke was fired, of course, because of the epic 2014 collapse, which has carried over into this season. That shouldn’t be that surprising, because all the 2014 collapse did was prove that, over a 162-game season, the Brewers were at best an average, mediocre team.
CBSSports.com’s Jon Heyman explains what happened and what’s next:
Brewers GM Doug Melvin acted decisively to fire manager Ron Roenicke and hire well-respected neophyte Craig Counsell. Melvin was so sure about the switch he sent club owner Mark Attanasio an 18-point email detailing why Counsell had to be the choice to lead the suddenly underachieving team – they’d been 16-40 over their last two months of regular-season baseball.
Now Melvin is being proactive about his next possible step. He’s already sent out feelers to other teams about a possible sell-off, in case Counsell can’t play quick miracle worker with the 9-19 team (2-1 since he took over).
And while Melvin painstakingly laid out his 18-point argument for Counsell – just a few of the reasons were about what a long and successful career he had (a plus was sitting on the bench half the time in 16 years, giving him extra time to study the game), how hard he’s worked in the Brewers front office, how smart he is, how respected he is and what a great teammate he was considered to be – at the moment it is hard to imagine a quick enough turnaround to avoid at least some retooling.
Milwaukee, a team that’s used to being in the middle and in the mix, somehow has managed to fall 11 1/2 games behind to the first-place Cardinals in exactly a month. Melvin and Co. have kept Milwaukee competitive – they’ve won in the 80s seven of the last 10 seasons – but he acknowledges there’s always a time to reboot.
The Brewers have gone for it in recent times, trading Lorenzo Cain, Alcides Escibar,Michael Brantley, Jake Odorizzi and many others to take their shots, and while there can’t be regrets now, Melvin says they could have had a young $47-million team had they played for the future earlier. If the Cubs can take a pause, no reason that their far-less-rich neighbor to the north can’t, too, he figures.
Word is, Melvin, after playing counsel on behalf of Counsell, is planning to consider just about anything in terms of trades, though the two players he is most reluctant to deal are star catcher Jonathan Lucroy and young shortstop Jean Segura. Lucroy is the closest to untouchable, it seems, followed fairly closely by Segura.
“Those are two tough positions to fill,” Melvin said. “I guess you have to be open to everything. But you’d have to be overwhelmed. We have some pretty good shortstops in the system. But they are doing well in the minors (and Segura) is doing well in the majors. Those are positions that can take years to fill. We’ve got two young ones who are making (little) money.”
Rival GMs suggest they’d be shocked to see Milwaukee part with Lucroy, one of the best two-way catchers in the game, and maybe just a little less so with Segura. The Pirates,Mets, Mariners and Padres look like teams that may need shortstop help, where Segura might fit. But as Melvin suggested, it would have to take a haul.
Assuming Lucroy and Segura stay, the most coveted Brewer in trade would thus become multi-talented center fielder Carlos Gomez, who’s a free agent after the 2016 season.
“That’s the guy,” who’d be of interest, one rival GM said.
“That’s a quality player,” another rival said.
Kyle Lohse, who’s even closer to free agency (after this year he’s free), could be of interest, as well, despite a slow start (7.01 ERA). Rival GMs could see the Cardinals, where he used to play, the Astros, where he knows GM Jeff Luhnow from St. Louis days, and the Dodgers, who’ve lost Brandon McCarthy for the year and will be without Hyun-Jin Ryu for a while (more on that later) as players for Lohse.
Matt Garza is another veteran righthander who could help someone, but with $35-million-plus to go through 2017, one rival exec says, “I’m not sure anyone would want him.”Aramis Ramirez is only solid these days, but third base is a tough spot to fill, so he too could draw interest.
Gerardo Parra, who seemed slightly miscast there as a fourth outfielder, is a useful player and excellent defender. Closer Franicisco Rodriguez looks as good as ever in his fourth go-round in Milwaukee, and big Jonathan Broxton could help someone in the pen.
Of course, Ryan Braun would be interesting as a trade target. While the Brewers expected some dropoff post suspension, it’s been pretty stark, despite some moments (.667 OPS compared to .913 for his career). There’s still hope for a rebound, but as one rival pointed out, “You don’t know what player you’d be getting.” That makes things dicey.
Young second baseman Scooter Gennett is reasonably priced, and Milwaukee turned back at least the Angels‘ winter overture, but there are still some teams with second-base needs, so you never know.
Melvin, though, feels certain about Counsell after seeing him operate the past couple years in the front office. Though he understands there will be critics, who reasonably point out that Counsell has never managed or coached at any level.
“What kind of message does this send to all the coaches and managers in their system?” one rival executive wondered.
Melvin countered, “I think game management is a small part of what a manager needs to do. I think it is all about preparation and passion for the game. He’s always been well respected. He’s an intelligent guy who had a good understanding of analytics, and an understanding about younger players.”
Attanasio bought the 18-point reasoning, but just in case, he interviewed Counsell for three hours himself. There’s no denying at this point that they needed something different.
The Brewers began 7-18 after finishing last year in a 9-22 nose dive after spending 150 days in first place, so something was amiss. Roenicke wondered why he was fired right after the team had won two of three games. But Melvin said he talked to the team about that.
“I apologized for making a change when we had played well the last three games. But I had to look at the last 100 games. And we were 28 games under,” said Melvin, who has been in discussions with Attanasio about his own future and is expected to stay on in some key capacity beyond this year.
If anything was wrong with the timing, perhaps it should have been done after last year’s collapse – it’s tough to change the story following such an implosion. Plus, Brewers higherups compounded that choice by picking up Roenicke’s 2016 option for $1.4 million in advance, a generous but unnecessary March move. Melvin said they all agreed to give Roenicke – who had a winning record overall with the Brewers – another chance. And one of those votes of support came from Counsell.
But soon into this season, it became apparent a change needed to be made, as whispers started to go around that Roenicke had “lost the clubhouse.” Although, Melvin puts little stock in that, saying, “I am not always in the clubhouse, and I am not one to have a spy.”
Roenicke is the fall guy for Melvin’s failures as GM. That’s not surprising, because most Brewers fans overrate the talent level on this team. Chris Davis and Logan Schaefer are major league players only because they’re on a major league roster (or at least Schaefer was until he was sent down when Carlos Gomez returned). Braun will never be the player he was before his, well, substance (ab)use. Gomez has the outfielder equivalent of the old baseball saying “a million-dollar-arm and a 10-cent head.” He is the type of player you put on a good team so you can live with his screwups.
There are three specific players from the 2011 Brewers that were never replaced. One was Prince Fielder, though the Brewers made the right decision to let him go, unless you think a 300-pound player is likely to have a largely injury-free career. But only this year with Adam Lind do the Brewers have an actual left-handed-hitting power threat. The other two are maybe more surprising — Jerry Hairston Jr., who was a great utility player and good in the clubhouse, and, of all people, Nyjer Morgan, who may have driven team management (and perhaps his teammates) crazy, but he was a very valuable addition to the 2011 team.
Assuming Melvin is replaced, either by his choice (retirement) or not, the next GM needs to have one priority: Pitching. As you know, the Brewers have largely failed to develop their own pitching largely during their entire history. The 1982 World Series team had one home-grown starting pitcher, Moose Haas. The 2011 National League Central champion team had one home-grown starting pitcher, Yovani Gallardo. Both teams imported most of their other starters (in 1982’s case, Pete Vuckovich, Mike Caldwell and, late in the season, Don Sutton; in 2011’s case, Zack Greinke, Randy Wolf and Shaun Marcum) and their closers (Rollie Fingers in most of 1982, John Axford in 2011).
The Brewers have a depressing history of having one good starting pitcher who then burns out. Teddy Higuera becomes Cal Eldred, who becomes Ben Sheets, who becomes Yovani Gallardo, who becomes either Wily Peralta or Jimmy Nelson. The Braves had an embarrassment of wealth in starting pitching in the 1990s, all except for Greg Maddux developed within their own system. (The Braves traded for John Smoltz, but he was a minor-leaguer at the time.) The Dodgers have had plenty of starting pitching for decades. Bench coaches are hired for in-game strategy, so a manager doesn’t necessarily need to do that himself.
Accordingly, I’m not sure Counsell was the right choice to replace Roenicke. (Given that Counsell worked with Melvin, maybe he should have, or should, replace Melvin.) Position players are relatively easy to find. (Where was Lind last year?) The Brewers need a manager who can develop his pitching, such as it is — whoever might be 2015’s answer to George Bamberger, who turned a bad pitching staff into a pretty good staff in the late 1970s, whether or not the Staten Island sinker was a legal pitch.
Related to that, it might be worthwhile for the Brewers to replace all of their minor league managers, coaches and instructors, and find managers, coaches and instructors who can actually teach their players fundamental baseball. Brewers losses are a traveshamockery of bad baserunning (this means you, Carlos) and bad defense (Braun will never remind anyone of Garry Maddox, wherever you put him), in addition to poor pitching and insufficient hitting.
The Brewers face a bad choice of either hanging on to overrated players (everyone except Lucroy, Nelson and Segura should be available), or having players who are not ready for the major leagues playing in the major leagues. It’s a good thing Miller Park is a great place to watch a baseball game. There won’t be good baseball played at Miller Park for years.
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Today in 1954, the BBC banned Johnny Ray’s “Such a Night” after complaints about its “suggestiveness.”
The Brits had yet to see Elvis Presley or Jerry Lee Lewis.
The number one British single today in 1955:
The number one single today in 1964 was from a group that had had number one with three different songs for 14 consecutive weeks:
Today in 1965, what would now be called a “video” was shot in London:
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I wear blue jeans most days. They seem appropriate for a small-town journalist, particularly since I’m no longer in the business journalism world.
That does not mean the new Blue Jean Nation is for me, though. Bill Lueders reports:
For 15 years, Mike McCabe headed Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, the state’s foremost — and feistiest — sentinel of the role of money in politics. He brought equal amounts of anger and optimism to the group’s nonpartisan mission, skewering Democrats and Republicans alike and sounding a clarion call for reform.
“I loved that job,” McCabe says wistfully. “I could have very easily done it for another 15 years.”
But McCabe decided he needed to try a new approach. His 2014 book, Blue Jeans in High Places, calls for the creation of a new political movement for people like himself who feel “politically homeless,” alienated from both major parties.
“I wrote that book as a blueprint,” McCabe says. “Blueprints are worthless unless you use them to build something.”
What McCabe wants to build is not a third party, which he jokes is a lock to come in third. His concept, similar to progressive movements in the past and the tea party movement of recent years, is to create a “first party” — one that demands change from within the existing political structure.
“We are neither elephant nor ass,” McCabe has said, “but we recognize that America has a two-party system and we plan to work within that system to get the parties truly working for all of us and not just a favored few.”
I was trying to remember a time where McCabe criticized Democrats. I can’t, unless it was for criticizing Democrats for taking corporate campaign contributions. McCabe is not a moderate.
But: What is Blue Jean Nation about? Take a look at its “creed” (which strikes me as actually McCabe’s creed, but never mind that):
We are commoners. We realize government is not of the people, by the people and for the people at the present time and we are committed to getting citizens back in the driver’s seat of our government.
We believe both major political parties are failing America. We don’t need three parties. We need at least one that truly works for the people.
We believe the biggest problem facing Wisconsin and all of America today is a political system that caters to a few at the expense of the many. At the root of this problem is political corruption that plagues us with “leaders” who are not free to lead and leaves our country paralyzed when it comes to dealing with the most challenging issues of our time.
So far, so good, except for that part about “the most challenging issues of our time.” Given the number of roadblocks the Founding Fathers put in our political system, what McCabe calls leaving our country “paralyzed” could be said to be a feature, not a bug. The right decisions are supposed to be made by our leaders. The Department of Homeland Security, created in the wake of 9/11, demonstrates that haste often makes waste.
We believe the way politicians seek public office — with fundraising that amounts to legal bribery and with advertising that is routinely misleading and often downright untruthful — is immoral and destructive to civic life. Power sought dishonorably cannot possibly lead to just and honest policymaking or clean and open government.
Many people think Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy were among our best presidents. Truman was a product of the corrupt Boss Tweed political machine. Kennedy was elected president thanks to political chicanery in Illinois and Texas. What does that say when two of our supposed best presidents got their power “dishonorably”?
Independent of McCabe’s non-acknowledgement of the First Amendment, this fails to acknowledge why we have “advertising that is routinely misleading and often downright untruthful.” It’s because it obviously works. Joseph de Maistre said “Every country has the government it deserves,” and that extends probably to every level of government.
To which McCabe replies:
We believe government is necessary to a civil and just society and prosperous economy. But we insist on a limited government — one that is as small as possible and only as big as required to do what society needs done collectively. Government programs that work should be supported and ones that do not should be reformed or ended. Most importantly, what government does must serve the broad public interest and promote the common good, not just benefit those who lavishly fund election campaigns or have high-priced lobbyists advocating on their behalf.
Independent of the contradictory second sentence (about which more momentarily), the United States of America exists because of fundamental mistrust of government. McCabe doesn’t seem to support term limits (the only term limit that would work would be limit of one term), cutting legislator pay (the fact a state legislator makes almost twice as much money as the average Wisconsin family should outrage people), placing strict constitutional limits on spending at every level (which, had that been enacted in the late 1970s, would have given us government half the size we’re stuck with in Wisconsin today), and generally taking power away from politicians. Every political fault we have in this state stems from the fact that legislators make too much money and have too much power. Blue Jean Nation does absolutely nothing about that.
Economic issues are where things start to unravel further:
We believe in hard work and self sufficiency. We also believe in looking out for each other. We agree that it is wise to live within our means and pay for what we get today instead of mortgaging the future and saddling generations to come with our debts. We believe in a free market, not a market manipulated to favor the most politically privileged participants in our economy.
Free market? Not really:
We believe in one-for-all economics – policies ensuring that the fruits of a vibrant economy benefit the whole of society. We are equally committed to rural revitalization and urban renewal. Instead of subsidizing global conglomerates, efforts to stimulate the economy should emphasize community-based small enterprise development, empower local entrepreneurs and cooperatives, and enable us to once again grow together rather than growing apart. We believe supply-side or “trickle down” economic theory has it wrong. Demand, not supply, is the primary driver of economic growth. Feed-the-rich policies have been a miserable failure, never producing more than a trickle for the masses and causing grotesque economic inequality and the slow but steady extermination of the middle class.
That previous paragraph doesn’t match “limited government” at all. Nor does …
We believe we are all in the same boat and will sink or sail together. We believe in waging war on poverty, not poor people. We believe it is everyone’s right to pursue material gain and accumulate wealth, but vigorously object to its use to buy government favors or special treatment.
That last paragraph is a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with Blue Jean Nation. There is an incorrect assumption that everything applies, and should apply, equally to everybody — not merely in rights (and we can’t even agree on, for instance, whether abortion rights or rights to same-sex marriage are really rights), but in equality of outcome. The U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights was created to restrict government; it was not created to inspire Karl Marx. There is also a built-in assumption that there is one correct answer for everything that ills us, and it’s only those evil Republicans keeping us away from that Utopia. That is flat out wrong.
You would think someone who has been around politics as long as McCabe has would grasp the simple fact that since the first Congress met politics has been, and remains, a zero-sum game. One side wins; the other loses. The reason things don’t get done today is because we cannot decide the best way to fix what’s wrong. If there were obvious answers, those obvious answers would have become law decades ago.
We believe in aspiring to intelligence, not belittling it. Becoming well educated and learning to think critically should be valued and expected, not feared or obstructed. Education is our best hope for building a better and more prosperous future, and our best weapon against economic and social decline. For our nation’s youth to have a reasonable chance of experiencing the American Dream in the 21st Century, higher education needs to be made as accessible and affordable in the future as primary and secondary education have been in the past.
Hmmm. Two of the most intelligent people I knew were my late father-in-law and my grandmother. Both were graduates of eighth grade. McCabe seems to confuse intelligence with wisdom, and either with education. It was presumably a Ph.D.-holding professor who suggested recently that parents who read to children at bedtime are being unfair to children whose parents don’t.
According to McCabe, “belittling” “intelligence” means daring to question whether the public schools and higher education as currently constructed are really the best way to prepare our children for the 21st century. Elsewhere McCabe touts free college, which also flies in the face of “limited government.” (And free college is a prescription for politicians to get as involved in higher education as politicians now are involved in “free” public education.) McCabe has similar insults directed at those who don’t think spending tens of millions of dollars every year to buy land for no use at all is a wise use of taxpayer money.
It took less than a decade after the founding of our nation for the national political landscape to organize itself into two parties. Other parties have come and gone, and other parties morphed into what we have today, like it or not, the Democrats and Republicans. Even the Wisconsin Progressives ended up mostly in the Democratic Party. That suggests that politics is a binary thing, and it probably is, since every vote that takes place is a yes or no vote. (Unless you’re U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois), and you’re allowed to vote “present” with no political repercussions.)
A worthy goal of a non-two-party movement would be to get government out of our lives, and deescalate the political battles that take place in Madison and Washington. Government was never supposed to be, and should not be, as pervasive and invasive as it is today.
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UW–Madison Prof. Noah Williams:
Press reports recently have provided a misleading picture of the Wisconsin economy: These stories base their analysis on the state rankings of job and wage growth from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in which Wisconsin has slipped into 40th place or lower.
But a look at broader data shows that the economy in Wisconsin is much healthier than these indicators suggest, and has outperformed the overall national economy.
Job growth rankings, in particular, do not provide an accurate depiction of the labor market. States hardest hit by recession would need to have higher job growth simply to return to the same place. For comparison, the rankings place Wisconsin between 31st and 41st over the past three years, while Michigan has regularly been in the top 10. But total employment in Michigan fell roughly 11% from 2007 to 2010. Although it has grown relatively rapidly since 2011, it remains at 4% below its 2007 level.
By contrast, Wisconsin tracks the national average rather closely. The recession was somewhat milder in Wisconsin than in the nation as a whole, so job growth after the recession was somewhat slower. But over the past three years, total employment growth in Wisconsin has been at least as strong as the national average.
On other dimensions, Wisconsin has outperformed the national average.
Unemployment in the state did not spike as dramatically, peaking at 9.2% compared with 10% nationally. But even from the lower peak, statewide unemployment has fallen rapidly, especially over the last two years. Since the beginning of 2014, the unemployment rate has fallen by 1.5 percentage points, and now stands at 4.6%, compared with 5.5% nationwide. A significant component of the reduction in the unemployment rate nationwide has been a decline in the labor force participation rate, which now stands at 62.8%. Some of this is due to demographic factors, driven by the aging of the population, but a large part is cyclical, with unemployed workers stopping looking for work. Labor force participation in Wisconsin historically has been above the national average, but importantly has been roughly stable since the beginning of 2012 at about 68.5%.
If the labor force participation rate in the U.S. as a whole had remained constant since 2012 (rather than falling by one percentage point), the national unemployment rate would now be 7% rather than 5.5%. Thus, the national unemployment rate hides additional weakness in the labor market not present in Wisconsin.
Earnings and incomes also are important gauges of whether households are improving economically. Along those lines, the state rankings on wage growth have been featured in recent reports. This data has been more mixed, with Wisconsin ranking in the 20s or better for most of 2011-2013, before slipping to 42nd recently. By comparison, South Dakota typically has been ranked in the top 10 and frequently in the top five. Again, these rankings provide a misleading picture. Data from the BLS shows that, since early 2011, average earnings have grown by more than 10% in Wisconsin and South Dakota, both more than one percentage point faster than the national average. Rather than stagnating, average earnings growth in Wisconsin has matched higher ranked states, and has been faster than the national average.
In addition, Wisconsin has done even better when looking at broader measures of household income. Available on an annual basis through 2013, real median household income from the Census Bureau goes beyond labor market earnings, and so provides a better indicator of household income and welfare. Median incomes in Wisconsin historically have been above the national average, and both have declined from their pre-recession peaks in 2007. But from 2011 to 2013, real median income rose by 2.7% in Wisconsin to $55,258, while it fell by 1.3% nationwide, to $51,939.
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The number one single today in 1966:
Today is the anniversary of the last Beatles U.S. single release, “Long and Winding Road” (the theme music of the Schenk Middle School eighth-grade Dessert Dance about this time in 1979):
The number one album today in 1977 was the Eagles’ “Hotel California”:
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On Sunday a group of Americans opposed to radical Islam held an art contest for depictions of the Muslim prophet Muhammad in Garland, Texas.
Two Muslims took exception to the contest — apparently Islam prohibits depictions of Muhammad — and decided to kill everyone who went to the exhibition. They got as far as two Garland police officers outside the facility.
The New York Daily News reports:
ISIS appeared to declare war on right-wing blogger Pamela Geller Tuesday in an ominous online message claiming it has fighters across America ready to attack “any target we desire.”
The threat, posted on JustPasteIt, singles out Geller, who helped plan a Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest that was attacked by two gunmen in Garland, Tex. over the weekend. ISIS claimed responsibility for the shooting early Tuesday, marking the first time the terror group called an American attack one of its own.
The chilling Tuesday post also boasts of ISIS having “71 trained soldiers in 15 different states ready at our word to attack,” specifically naming only Virginia, Maryland, Illinois, Michigan and California.
“The attack by the Islamic State in America is only the beginning of our efforts to establish a wiliyah in the heart of our enemy,” the message reads, apparently misspelling the Arabic word “wilayah,” meaning authority or governance. …
The authenticity of the post, as well as the group’s claim to the Texas shooting, have not been independently confirmed, and it is possible the threat is a hoax or a message from an ISIS sympathizer. ISIS has frequently used the anonymous message board JustPasteIt to publish propaganda, including the names and addresses of 100 U.S. service members in a call for an American jihad.
RELATED: WHO IS PAMELA GELLER, THE MUHAMMAD DRAWING CONTEST HOST?
The armed attackers who stormed the Sunday cartoon contest, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi, were both shot dead by an off-duty officer outside. They were the only fatalities in an attack that also gave another guard a minor injury.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
The front page of the New York Daily News on Aug. 31, 2014.
The JustPasteIt post claims both men knew they would be killed, and were only testing the waters for future terror.
“We knew that the target was protected. Our intention was to show how easy we give our lives for the Sake of Allah,” the post says.
Geller‘s reaction:
This threat illustrates the savagery and barbarism of the Islamic State. They want me dead for violating Sharia blasphemy laws. What remains to be seen is whether the free world will finally wake up and stand for the freedom of speech, or instead kowtow to this evil and continue to denounce me. What’s really frightening and astonishing about this threat is that the media in denouncing me is essentially allying with and even cheering on the Islamic State. I expected this from jihadists. I never expected it from my fellow Americans in the mainstream media.
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Activist Pamela Geller is no stranger to saying things that horrify the politically correct. She protested the World Trade Center mosque and bought bus-sign ads describing what’s really written in the Quran. Last weekend, she and writer Robert Spencer’s American Freedom Defense Initiative organized a contest for the best Muhammad cartoon drawing with a $10,000 prize in Texas in response to the Islamofascist newsroom massacre of cartoonists in Paris at the French paper Charlie Hebdo earlier this year.
And to no one’s surprise in a nation whose leaders consider rising Islamofascist terror groups “junior varsity” and where extremist depravities are viewed as “workplace violence” or dismissed as reactions to bad filmmaking rather than organized terror, a couple of Islamofacists from North Phoenix, Ariz., shot up the Garland, Texas, cartoon conference, wounding a security guard before an off-duty traffic cop took the pair down and saved the country from another massacre.
Since then, it’s been Charlie Hebdo all over again, given the media’s failure to understand that this is about the threat that radical Islam poses to free speech.
Incredibly, the left wasted no time blasting Geller and Spender, blaming them for the murderous behavior of the gunmen.
CNN’s Alisyn Camerota attacked Geller as anti-Islamic, cherry-picking various news clips to make her case, despite Geller asserting that she wasn’t.
“Civilized men can disagree,” Geller told CNN. “Savages will kill you when they disagree.”
Why she should be on the hot seat instead of the would-be attackers and their enablers is beyond us.
But the finger-pointing at Geller kept coming.
“Free speech aside, why would anyone do something as provocative as hosting a ‘Muhammad drawing contest’?” tweeted New York Times’ Rukmini Callimachi.
Free speech aside? From the newspaper of record?
Callimachi didn’t seem to understand that the entire event — as Geller’s participants repeatedly said in the pre-shooting film clips of the event posted on her blog — was explicitly about free speech, which is now under attack by Islamofascists and which can be demonstrated only by extreme means, such as cartoons.
And that’s the heart of the matter. Agree with Geller or not, there can be no compromise on free speech. The attack on her event underscored the fragility of America’s free speech, the basis for all of America’s freedoms.
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The number one British album today in 1972 was a Tyrannosaurus Rex double album, the complete title of which is “My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair … But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows”/”Prophets, Seers & Sages: The Angels of the Ages.” Really.
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“Free speech aside, why would anyone do something as provocative as hosting a ‘Muhammad drawing contest’?” asked Rukmini Callimachi, a New York Times reporter who specializes in Islamic extremism, on Twitter last night. That prompted a fair amount of criticism and mockery, but we’d like to attempt a serious answer to the question.
Callimachi was responding to last night’s events in Garland, a Dallas suburb, summed up by The Wall Street Journal:
Two men were killed Sunday in a Dallas suburb after they opened fire outside a building where an exhibit that featured cartoon drawings of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad was being held, city officials said.
The men drove up to the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas, where the American Freedom Defense Initiative was hosting an event with an award of $10,000 for the top Muhammad cartoon, and began shooting at an unarmed security officer, according to a Garland city spokeswoman.
Garland police who were helping with event security returned fire, shooting and killing the two gunmen, who weren’t immediately identified.
The victim, Bruce Joiner, is out of the hospital after treatment for an ankle wound. The New York Times reports that police identified one of the dead suspects as Elton Simpson of Phoenix, where the FBI searched “an apartment believed to be connected to him.” In 2010 federal prosecutors charged a man by that name with “plotting to travel to Somalia ‘for the purpose of engaging in violent jihad,’ and then lying to a federal agent.” A judge convicted him of the latter charge “but said the government had not proved that his plan involved terrorism.”
The Times adds that “officials did not give a motive for the attack,” which is no doubt wise of them: The job of police investigators is to gather facts first and explain theories later. In this case, however, one hypothesis seems far likelier than any others. As the Times notes, “drawings of Muhammad, considered offensive by many Muslims, have drawn violent responses in the past.” The most shocking was January’s Charlie Hebdo massacre, but also in February, as CNN reported, a gunman who “swore fidelity to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi” opened fire on a free-speech forum in Copenhagen, and then outside a synagogue, claiming two lives before Danish police killed him.
Even without official word on Simpson and his yet-unnamed accomplice’s motive, one can say that the attack was functionally an act of jihad. Anjem Choudary — the London-based extremist imam who defended the Charlie Hebdo assassinations in a next-day USA Today op-ed — tweeted this morning: “#garlandshooting we must learn the lessons from [Salman] Rushdie, [Ayaan] Hirsi Ali, Theo Van Gogh & Chalie [sic] Hebdo not to insult the Messenger Muhammad (saw)!” He elaborated in another tweet: “#garlandshooting there are two camps in the world: those that believe sovereignty belongs to mankind & those who believe it belongs to Allah.” (“Saw” is an abbreviation for the Arabic phrase meaning “peace be upon him.”)
So what about Rukmini Callimachi’s question? Let’s first dispense with the “Free speech aside …” preface, which some on Twitter found especially neuralgic: “The #NYT should change its slogan to ‘Free Speech Aside,’” snarked Gavin McInnes. It was certainly an unfortunate choice of words, but sometimes Twitter encourages brevity at the expense of clarity. We’d suggest a charitable interpretation. Perhaps Callimachi didn’t mean to disparage free speech but to concede it. That is, perhaps by “Free speech aside …,” she meant something like “Stipulating that the event was an exercise in constitutionally protected free speech …”
Proceeding on that assumption, the answer seems obvious. The purpose of the event was to make a point, in part a point about free speech. The event’s message was something like this: This is America, where the right of free speech is nearly absolute and includes the right to say things others find offensive or otherwise provocative.
Of course the event provoked not just indignation or anger but violence, a consequence whose possibility the authorities evidently anticipated — hence the strong police presence — and that was reasonable to anticipate given the European events described above. If we assume the organizers were cognizant of the possibility as well, then the event is best understood as an exercise in nonviolent resistance.
In a Salon apologia for the Baltimore riots, political philosopher Musa al-Gharbi observes that Martin Luther King “often staged episodes of civil disobedience in the most hostile or dangerous areas, with the implicit intent of generating a heavy-handed response from the authorities or local community in a highly public and well-publicized setting — thereby advancing sympathy for, and awareness of, the cause. Pacifists gain moral high ground precisely by refusing to return violence in kind — a feat that is impossible unless and until they are confronted with unreasonable force.”
It would be inaccurate to describe the Garland event as civil disobedience, since the organizers’ adversaries were not the civil authorities. (Indeed, the Garland police appear to have acted exemplarily in employing deadly force to protect citizens from violence.) But if Choudary’s understanding of the attack is correct, Simpson and his accomplice were acting on behalf of what they saw as a higher authority — the laws of Shariah, ordained by God. That such authority has no formal standing in the U.S. does not make it either benign or unworthy of resistance.
Five years ago this column criticized “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day,” a similar effort that grew out of a whimsical cartoon, because it struck us as a gratuitous effort to offend. A few months later the cartoonist, Molly Norris, was reported to have gone into hiding in the face of death threats. In 2008, we interviewed Dutch politician Geert Wilders and argued that some of his anti-Islam rhetoric was overwrought and wrongheaded:
He insists that his antagonism toward Islam reflects no antipathy toward Muslims: “I make a distinction between the ideology . . . and the people. . . . There are people who call themselves Muslims and don’t subscribe to the full part of the Quran. And those people, of course, we should invest [in], we should talk to.” He says he would end Muslim immigration to the Netherlands but work to assimilate those already there.
His idea of how to do so, however, seems unlikely to win many converts: “You have to give up this stupid, fascist book”—the Quran. “This is what you have to do. You have to give up that book.”
Mr. Wilders is right to call for a vigilant defense of liberal principles. A society has a right, indeed a duty, to require that religious minorities comply with secular rules of civilized behavior. But to demand that they renounce their religious identity and holy books is itself an affront to liberal principles.
Wilders was among the organizers of last night’s event in Garland. As far as we know, he has not softened his problematic views. But he’s still right to call for a vigilant defense of liberal principles. Sometimes that justifies being provocative. Sometimes it even requires it.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 