The number one R&B single today in 1961 was Motown Records’ first million-selling single:
The number one single today in 1972:
Birthdays begin with that well known recording star Lorne Greene:
No comments on Presty the DJ for Feb. 12
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That rarest of things, Madison conservative David Blaska, won a victory in, of all places, Dane County Circuit Court, Madison.com reports:
A Dane County judge will allow a lawsuit over Madison teacher contracts to go forward in its entirety, saying that a former Dane County supervisor does have standing to make all of the claims alleged in his lawsuit.
The lawsuit, brought by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty with conservative blogger David Blaska as plaintiff, seeks a declaration that teacher contracts for the 2014-15 and 2015-16 school years violate Act 10, the legislation that virtually eliminated collective bargaining rights for most public workers.
The Madison School District and Madison Teachers Inc. maintain that the contracts were signed during a time in which Act 10 was not in effect because of a court order.
The district and union had asked that portions of the lawsuit be stricken as immaterial because Blaska has no standing to raise issues related to union dues and fair share payments. Dane County Circuit Judge Richard Niess said they are not immaterial.
Under Wisconsin law, Niess wrote, “a taxpayer need only show that he has sustained, or will sustain, some pecuniary loss, however infinitesimal.”
You already know how I feel about teacher unions. Blaska is, of course, hated by Madison’s left, but I bet he could not care less about that.
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Today in 1964 — one year to the day after recording their first album — the Beatles made their first U.S. concert appearance at the Washington Coliseum in D.C.:
The number one album today in 1969, “More of the Monkees,” jumped 121 positions in one week:
Today in 1972, Pink Floyd appeared at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, during their Dark Side of the Moon tour.
The concert lasted 25 minutes until the power went out, leaving the hall as bright as the dark side of the moon.
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Two phrases that Daniel Patrick Moynihan put into America’s political lexicon two decades ago are increasingly pertinent. They explain the insufficient dismay about recent economic numbers.
Moynihan said that when deviant behaviors — e.g., violent crime, or births to unmarried women — reach a certain level, society soothes itself by “defining deviancy down.” It de-stigmatizes the behaviors by declaring them normal. And sometimes, Moynihan said, social problems are the result of “iatrogenic government.” In medicine, an iatrogenic ailment is inadvertently induced by a physician or medicine; in social policy, iatrogenic problems are caused by government.
When the economy grew by just 2.6 percent in 2014’s fourth quarter, the New York Times headline cheerfully said “Economy Pulls Ahead.” The story said the U.S. economy is “an island of relative strength” in a world facing “renewed torpor and turmoil.” This was defining failure down.
The Wall Street Journal said “U.S. Economy Hits Speed Bumps,” as though speedy growth had been normal for a while. The speeding had consisted of one quarter (2014’s third) of 5 percent growth. But the economy had gone 43 consecutive quarters without 5 percent growth, the longest such period since the government began keeping the pertinent records in 1947. And even with this third quarter, growth for 2014 was just 2.4 percent, making this the ninth consecutive year under 3 percent. During the recovery from the recession of 1981–82, there were five quarters of 7 percent–or-higher growth, and five years averaged 4.6 percent growth.
There also was unmerited triumphalism about November’s job growth of 353,000. This was just the fifth month of 300,000-plus growth in the 68 months since the sluggish recovery began in June 2009. In the 1960s, there were nine months of 300,000-plus job creation — and at its highest, in 1969, the nation’s population was nearly 118 million smaller than today’s. In the 1980s, there were 23 months of 300,000-plus jobs, and the nation’s population in 1989 was 73 million smaller than today’s 320 million.
By the time — April 2014 — the economy returned to the number of jobs it had before the recession began in December 2007 there were 15 million more Americans. Nicole Gelinas writes in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal: “A healthy economy should add 200,000 new jobs every month, even when it’s not recovering from a recession. By that standard, America should have 133 million people working in the private sector right now, not 118.4 million.”
Economic weakness — new business formations are at a 35-year low — is both a cause and a consequence of alarming cultural changes. In 1960, 12 percent of 25- to-34-year-olds were never married; today, 49 percent never have been. Although the population was 27 million larger in 2010 than in 2000, there were fewer births in 2010.
The lingering economic anemia is astonishing, given plummeting energy prices. To a considerable extent, the anemia is an iatrogenic social ailment, induced by government behavior. The business burdens and uncertainties created by the Affordable Care Act are just part of the Obama administration’s regulatory mania (3,659 new regulations finalized in 2013 and another 2,594 proposed, according to Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute). …
Barack Obama’s plan to tax the earnings from parents’ “529” college-savings plans lived just long enough to indicate why some progressives perhaps prefer slow rather than rapid economic growth. Rapid growth reduces the appeal of redistributive policies and the need for the bitter, jostling, divisive politics that advance such policies. The 529s help enable families to achieve self-sufficiency. This excites progressives’ dislike of any private provision that impedes implementation of their dependency agenda.
The progressive project of maximizing the number of people dependent on government is also aided by the acid of insecurity that grows rapidly when the economy does not. Anxious and disappointed people are susceptible to progressives’ blandishments about the political allocation of wealth and opportunity — “free” this and that. By making slow growth normal, iatrogenic government serves the progressive program of defining economic failure down.
Jim Clifton adds:
Right now, we’re hearing much celebrating from the media, the White House and Wall Street about how unemployment is “down” to 5.6%. The cheerleading for this number is deafening. The media loves a comeback story, the White House wants to score political points and Wall Street would like you to stay in the market.
None of them will tell you this: If you, a family member or anyone is unemployed and has subsequently given up on finding a job — if you are so hopelessly out of work that you’ve stopped looking over the past four weeks — the Department of Labor doesn’t count you as unemployed. That’s right. While you are as unemployed as one can possibly be, and tragically may never find work again, you are not counted in the figure we see relentlessly in the news — currently 5.6%. Right now, as many as 30 million Americans are either out of work or severely underemployed. Trust me, the vast majority of them aren’t throwing parties to toast “falling” unemployment.
There’s another reason why the official rate is misleading. Say you’re an out-of-work engineer or healthcare worker or construction worker or retail manager: If you perform a minimum of one hour of work in a week and are paid at least $20 — maybe someone pays you to mow their lawn — you’re not officially counted as unemployed in the much-reported 5.6%. Few Americans know this.
Yet another figure of importance that doesn’t get much press: those working part time but wanting full-time work. If you have a degree in chemistry or math and are working 10 hours part time because it is all you can find — in other words, you are severely underemployed — the government doesn’t count you in the 5.6%. Few Americans know this.
There’s no other way to say this. The official unemployment rate, which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a Big Lie.
And it’s a lie that has consequences, because the great American dream is to have a good job, and in recent years, America has failed to deliver that dream more than it has at any time in recent memory. A good job is an individual’s primary identity, their very self-worth, their dignity — it establishes the relationship they have with their friends, community and country. When we fail to deliver a good job that fits a citizen’s talents, training and experience, we are failing the great American dream.
Gallup defines a good job as 30+ hours per week for an organization that provides a regular paycheck. Right now, the U.S. is delivering at a staggeringly low rate of 44%, which is the number of full-time jobs as a percent of the adult population, 18 years and older. We need that to be 50% and a bare minimum of 10 million new, good jobs to replenish America’s middle class.
I hear all the time that “unemployment is greatly reduced, but the people aren’t feeling it.” When the media, talking heads, the White House and Wall Street start reporting the truth — the percent of Americans in good jobs; jobs that are full time and real — then we will quit wondering why Americans aren’t “feeling” something that doesn’t remotely reflect the reality in their lives. And we will also quit wondering what hollowed out the middle class.
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The first gold record — which was only a record spray-painted gold because the criteria for a gold record hadn’t been devised yet — was “awarded” today in 1942:
The number one British album today in 1968 was the Four Tops’ “Greatest Hits”:
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UW-Madison journalism doctoral student Michael Mirer complains in the Washington Post:
You might think that one of the nation’s leading academic communication programs would be a good place to make a long-distance phone call.
Yet there I was on a cold January morning, the interview I needed to get less than 15 minutes away, panic mounting as each attempt to dial out on my department-issued speakerphone produced an electronic wail rather than a ring tone. I’m writing my dissertation on how Web sites owned by sports teams and leagues challenge our society’s most deeply held values about journalism. I collect my data by talking to the people who work for these sites. I need a working phone. My cell was acting as my voice recorder, so I couldn’t use it to make calls — not that the reception in my office is good enough to be trusted.
During one of the many rounds of budget cuts the University of Wisconsin has endured over the past few years, the department ended all nonessential long-distance service. This was essential to me, I explained to the front-office staff. I am hoping to log about 25 hours of interviews with people who are outside the university’s 608 area code. Long-distance phone calls cost less than 4 cents per minute; the entire project would cost about $60, surely something could be worked out? Could I pay for it myself? Write a grant? They didn’t think so.
There’s no using the telephone in, of all places, the communication department. The budget is too tight. The phone jack in my office is a vestige of a time when the state invested in higher education. …
I found a workaround for my phone problem. That day it involved using a phone line that turned out to belong to another unit in our building, so I shouldn’t have used it. The department staff found me a line in one of the research labs that should work, although it didn’t the first time. A professor on my PhD committee had just reactivated her own long-distance calling for research purposes and offered me the use of her phone, when she’s not using it. Or I can use Skype, which is glitchy and takes lousy recordings on the computer I’m holding together with masking tape. I’ll be able to get the job done, but barely. Sort of like what the university has done in the past few years.
Facebook Friend and author Virginia Postrel describes this as “self-parody,” and that Mirer’s screed is “beyond stupid. I can only conclude that the guy is somehow in Scott Walker’s employ. It’s like an extended argument for shutting down the UWM school of journalism and communications, or at least its Ph.D. program. They’re letting in idiots.”
If Wisconsin taxpayers wonder how a doctoral dissertation on “how Web sites owned by sports teams and leagues challenge our society’s most deeply held values about journalism” advances mankind, well, you’re not alone.
One person who tried to defend this, and got hammered, had to admit:
Look: this guy’s kind of a schmuck. Let’s not paint all student journalists with the schmuck brush.Yeah, well, you’d hope someone who spent at least six years in college to get bachelor’s and master’s degrees, both of which considerably subsidized by your tax dollars, would not be a schmuck.
Another comment pointed out:
He is writing about websites owned by sports teams… I am pretty sure that the closet that comes to journalism is that they both involve words. Give me a guy writing his PhD on exposing public or private corruption or generally making the world a better place. But sports websites? Seriously? Why do I get the feeling his best friend is a PhD candidate over in Engineering that is upset he can’t get enough AA batteries to finish his dissertation on the evolution of Pokemon on Gameboy.
Another person in academia, though apparently with common sense, adds:
I’ve been in this profession for a quarter century, and there has never been a time where we’ve not said “we are barely scraping by.” Your use of resources always expand to what the resources are and then it seems like you are “barely scraping by.” There is lots of fat to cut in academica, folks.
Another comment makes you wonder how much Mirer has learned in his six-plus years at our state’s world-class university:
The danger of using personal anecdotes to introduce a policy oriented article is that readers will conclude from the anecdote that you are an idiot before they get to your argumentation. When I was last interviewed for an NPR story the reporter taught me how to record the interview on my smartphone, took about 20 seconds.
My own smartphone, which is really not very state-of-the-current-art (the purchase price was right), records and plays back all of my pregame coach interviews, whether on the phone or in person. It also includes pregame music. I have even announced games on it. I also chronicled damage from tornadoes onto Facebook, apparently making me the only media person live on the scene (or whatever “live” means online) immediately following the tornadoes.
I note that not to brag about my professional abilities or my technological expertise, because, as Postrel points out …
… as a professional journalist since 1982 I have utter contempt for someone in 2015 who cannot figure out how to record off a cell phone (even without involving Skype or similar services). I do it all the time. It is a basic professional skill, requiring minimal equipment
At some point, journalists have to learn resourcefulness. Media outlets are notorious, and have always been, for not entirely adequately equipping their reporters and other in-field people. (Total cost of my sound and recording and camera apps: Zero.)
But the contempt in Postrel’s previous paragraph pales in comparison to what follows:
Although I do believe that communications (aka rhetoric) is a legitimate and important field of study, it is also the unfortunate case that it exists primarily to provide easy majors for people who want to spend their college years partying or playing sports or both. I’m skeptical about whether journalism schools should exist at all.Arguments against the proposed $300 million in UW System funding cuts should be made by someone who can use facts and logic. That apparently does not include Mirer. On the other hand, if the saying “Those who can’t do, teach” is accurate, he’s perfect for academia … unless the UW System takes up Postrel’s proposal.
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Jonah Goldberg on Gov. Scott Walker, apparently now the favorite to win the Iowa Republican Caucus:
A new Des Moines Register poll has Walker in first place — narrowly — among likely Republican caucus-goers. With Mitt Romney included in the poll, Walker was the respondents’ first choice with 15 percentage points. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was second with 14 percentage points and Romney third with 13. With Romney out, Walker rose to 16 percentage points and Paul to 15. First place in a tightly packed field is better than any of the alternatives, but it’s not that big a deal this far out.
The big deal is the vanilla factor (which sounds like a terribly boring spy novel). According to the Register story that accompanied the poll, 51 percent of caucus-goers want an “anti-establishment candidate without a lot of ties to Washington or Wall Street who would change the way things are done and challenge conventional thinking.” Meanwhile, 43 percent prefer a more establishment figure “with executive experience who understands business and how to execute ideas.”
Walker is in the golden spot. He can, like Bill Murray in the movie “Groundhog Day” listening to Andie MacDowell explain the perfect man, reply “that’s me” to almost everything Republicans say they want. Executive experience? Challenge conventional thinking? Anti-establishment fighter? “Me, me, me.”
Respondents looking for an establishment candidate said Romney was their first choice. Those preferring an outsider said Paul was their first choice. But both groups said their second choice was a big scoop of Walker.
Of course, this can all change. No matter how palatable it is, people can still grow weary of vanilla, and Walker may melt under the pressure. Though having won three statewide elections in four years — in liberal Wisconsin! — that’s unlikely.
If you’re Jeb Bush, Paul, Ted Cruz or one of the other candidates — official and unofficial — Walker should have you worried. With the arguable exceptions of Sen. Marco Rubio and Gov. Bobby Jindal, right now right now most of field is made up of boutique flavors, intensely popular among some, intensely unpopular among others.
Pundits talk of the “establishment versus tea party” rift in the GOP as a recent development. The truth is this schism is more like a permanent feature of Republican politics.
Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich fought the forces of Thomas Dewey, Nelson Rockefeller, Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush with hammers and tongs for decades, losing many early battles and winning later ones. Richard Nixon brilliantly played both sides against the other, alternating between establishmentarian noblesse oblige and populist hostility to the “Georgetown set” whenever it served his purposes.
These squabbles often took an ideological color, but they were sometimes simply bare-knuckle fights over who got control of the levers of power within the party. For example, even today, the ideological differences between the anti-establishment Cruz and that supposedly wan vassal of entrenched power, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, are quite small.
Bush is doing a phenomenal job of securing support from big GOP donors. As a result, the Beltway news corps has dubbed him the front-runner. “Republicans have a tradition of picking an anointed one early,” Karen Tumulty and Matea Gold of the Washington Post write. “That establishment candidate almost always ends up with the nomination, although not without a fight and some speed bumps along the way.”
Yes and no. The anointed one and the establishment candidate are not necessarily the same person. And what counts as “the establishment” is often a moving target.
Just consider the Bushes. George H.W. Bush ran as the establishment candidate and lost to the anointed candidate in 1980. George W. Bush thought he was anointed in 2000 but ended up having to run as an anti-establishment candidate (recasting himself as a “reformer with results”). Ultimately, both got elected, but only after finding peak vanilla. Jeb Bush is a long way from that.
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The number one single today in 1963:
Today in 1964, three years to the day from their first appearance as the Beatles, the Beatles made their first appearance on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew:
The number one single today in 1974:
The number one single today in 1991:
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The number one album today in 1969 was the soundtrack to NBC-TV’s “TCB,” a special with Diana Ross and the Supremes and the Temptations:
The number one album today in 1975 was Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks”:
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Today in 1969, Jim Morrison of the Doors was arrested for drunk driving and driving without a license in Los Angeles:
The number one British album today in 1970 was “Led Zeppelin II”:
The number one single today in 1970:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 