The number one British album today in 1973 was the Rolling Stones’ “Goats Head Soup,” despite (or perhaps because of) the BBC’s ban of one of its songs, “Star Star”:
Who shares a birthday with my brother (who celebrated his sixth birthday, on a Friday the 13th, by getting chicken pox from me)? Start with Paul Simon:
Robert Lamm plays keyboards — or more accurately, the keytar — for Chicago:
Sammy Hagar:
Craig McGregor of Foghat:
John Ford Coley, formerly a duet with England Dan Seals:
Rob Marche played guitar for the Jo Boxers, who …
One death of note: Ed Sullivan, whose Sunday night CBS-TV show showed off rock and roll (plus Topo Gigio and Senor Wences) to millions, died today in 1974:
We begin with an entry from the It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time Dept.: Today in 1956, Chrysler Corp. launched its 1957 car lineup with a new option: a record player. The record player didn’t play albums or 45s, however; it played only seven-inch discs at 16⅔ rpm. Chrysler sold them until 1961.
Today in 1957, Little Richard was on an Australian tour when he publicly renounced rock and roll and embraced religion and announced he was going to record Gospel music from now on. The conversion was the result of his praying during a flight when one of the plane’s engines caught fire.
Little Richard returned to rock and roll five years later.
As part of the yearly rotation of non-division opponents, the Packers will host the Rams next season.
The Los Angeles Rams, that is, if this passed-on report from the Epoch Times is correct:
The St. Louis Rams have already made the decision to relocate to Los Angeles, and will make the official announcement after the Super Bowl, according to a new report.
“There’s a strong belief, people that are in–that I believe are in the know–multiple people, have told me that the decision has already been made and that the team is moving,” one of the hosts of 101 ESPN said in a recent show.
“Somebody told you that, really?” sharply questioned another.
“Yes.”
Jason La Confora of CBS Sports said recently that Rams owner Stan Kroenke is expected to make the announcement on February 15, 2015.
Kroenke stoked speculation in January by buying a 60-acre tract of land in Inglewood, California.
“The land is located between the recently renovated Forum and the Hollywood Park racetrack, which was shut down in December, and could potentially serve as the home of a future NFL stadium,” ESPN said.
“Since the Raiders and Rams left Southern California after the 1994 season, Los Angeles has been subjected to enough meaningless artist renderings to fill a museum and more empty promises to encompass two decades worth of failed campaign speeches. There is, however, a big difference if Kroenke truly does have an interest in moving the Rams out of St. Louis and back to Los Angeles. He owns the Rams and now owns enough land in Los Angeles to build a stadium.”
“Every indication that you get, or everything that is not said by Stan Kroenke would lead you to believe that he wants to build a stadium and have a team there,” one of the ESPN Radio hosts said this week.
“This is a guy that lives in L.A., and tried to buy the Dodgers.”
As the 20th anniversary of the NFL’s departure from Los Angeles, the NFL seems closer than ever to returning. Per a league source, the current plan is that the NFL will send one or two teams back to Los Angeles within the next 12 to 24 months.
The timeline would include a team announcing its intention to move in the 2015 or 2016 offseason, with arrangements to play at the Rose Bowl or the L.A. Coliseum pending the construction of a new stadium. Possible sites for a venue in L.A. include the AEG project at L.A. Live in downtown, the land purchased recently by Rams owner Stan Kroenke at Hollywood Park, Chavez Ravine, and a couple of locations that have not yet been publicly disclosed. Ed Roski’s shovel-ready site at City of Industry is not regarded as a viable destination.
Currently, the universe of teams that may relocate consists of three: the Rams, Raiders, and Chargers. The Raiders’ current lease expires after the 2014 season. The Rams can exit without penalty after each season. The Chargers can leave by paying a relocation fee that shrinks every year.
The Rams, who most people don’t know actually started in Cleveland …
… moved from Cleveland to Los Angeles in 1946, playing at the cavernous Los Angeles Coliseum …
… before moving to Anaheim Stadium in 1980 …
… and then St. Louis in 1995:
The Raiders started in Oakland …
… moved to Los Angeles (the Coliseum) in 1982 …
… then moved back to Oakland in 1995:
The Chargers played their first season in Los Angeles before moving down Interstate 5 to San Diego.
Ever since the Rams and Raiders departed L.A. after the 1994 season, NFL-back-to-L.A. rumors have been as prevalent as car magazines’ stories about the next new Chevy Corvette. It is rather ironic that the rumors about the Rams’ and/or Raiders’ and/or Chargers’ moving (back) to L.A. involves two franchises that both moved to and from L.A. It’s also a bit ironic that two of the most recent teams to have moved (the last was the Houston Oilers, which became the Tennessee Titans in 1997, preceded one year earlier by the first Cleveland Browns, which became the Baltimore Ravens) are looking to move back.
Usually, teams that move move because of a combination of on-the-field lack of success and bad stadium situations, with one often affecting the other. (Which is kind of like being excited about buying a car that is a lemon.) The Rams play in the Edward Jones Dome, which opened in 1995. By 2012, the stadium was ranked the seventh worst U.S. sports stadium by Time magazine.
The Raiders are 0–4 and just fired their coach, and the Rams are 1–3 and in last place in the NFC West. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, the Chargers are 4–1. Another team often mentioned in moving discussions, the Jacksonville Jaguars, are 0–4, but their stadium, the former Gator Bowl, just had $63 million in renovation work. The Buffalo Bills were recently sold to the owners of the National Hockey League’s Buffalo Sabres, so they’re probably not going anywhere. (And the Bills are also 3–2 and tied for first in the AFC East.)
Both the Raiders and Chargers are supposedly working on stadium deals where they are now. That makes the Rams’ moving back to L.A. more logical, given the additional fact that since the Rams are in the NFC West, they could move back to L.A. without reconfiguring divisions. The Raiders’ situation is also intertwined with the Oakland Athletics, who share the former Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum with the Raiders in the only remaining baseball/football stadium. (The A’s want out too.)
For much of the 12 years the Chargers have been posturing and pestering for a new stadium in San Diego, they were the only team in the NFL with the ability to get out of their current lease with minimal or no penalty. Not so any more.
The St. Louis Rams recently won their freedom and can leave any time, and the Raiders are free to abandon Oakland after this season. Both teams, as do the Chargers, maintain their current stadium situations are unsustainable.
This is not the good news you might think it is. It doesn’t push the Chargers out of the L.A. scene.
What it might actually do is force the Chargers to make a decision — because they can’t let another team (or teams) beat them to Los Angeles.
The Chargers can’t have another NFL team in Southern California – not without getting a new stadium in San Diego.
The team says that 30 percent of its revenue is generated from Los Angeles and Orange County. To have a team in that region siphon that business would, Chargers officials have said several times, have a momentously adverse affect on their bottom line.
(A little refresher: The Chargers are one of a handful of NFL teams whose primary local revenue source is ticket sales. A new stadium would provide a lucrative naming rights deal, which the Chargers do not have now, as well as enhanced signage, among other revenue-generating features.)
If progress toward a new stadium remains stalled – the mayor’s dinner with Chargers President Dean Spanos and lunch with U-T columnist Nick Canepa and a few perfunctory meetings between advisers aside – the Chargers will be cornered if the Rams and Raiders appear headed back to Southern California.
Their two choices will be staking their claim to the region in the form of litigation trying to block any teams from moving to L.A. or moving to L.A. themselves.
So whatever anyone thinks about how L.A. will embrace an NFL team after 20 years or its decades-long inability to get a stadium built, those in the league know there will one day, sooner than later, be at least one team in the nation’s second-largest market.
After reading this, you are bound to ask: Well, if L.A. is such a great market, why isn’t a team there now? The Rams and the Raiders left the same season for similar reasons — the Rams got a sweetheart stadium deal in St. Louis, and the Raiders got a deal to move out of the L.A. Coliseum, which was old, in a bad neighborhood, and lacking in 1990s stadium amenities. Twenty years later, the L.A. Coliseum remains old, in a bad neighborhood, and lacking in 2010s stadium amenities, but the O.co Coliseum is similarly old and lacking in amenities. (Unless you consider sewer backups to be a stadium amenity.)
You can also gue$$ what el$e i$ motivating the new $tadium pu$h, both from the NFL’s perspective and the perspective of owners of teams that might move to L.A. The NFL would love to have Super Bowls back in the SouthLAnd, but that is unlikely without a team and without a better stadium than the Coliseum (which hosted Super Bowls I and VII) or the Rose Bowl.
This is also potentially tied to the NFL’s TV blackout policy. Because of (the importance varies) the cavernous size of the Coliseum, the lack of quality of the Raiders and Rams, and the fact there are so many other things to do, L.A. team games have often been blacked out in L.A. because the stadiums haven’t been sold out. (The situation didn’t change back in Oakland either; the Raiders last season reduced their stadium capacity to avoid blackouts. That might have to do with the fact that through 2011, the Raiders had had more blackouts than locally broadcast games.)
No one is likely to announce a move during the season, because that would result in ugly situations in their soon-to-be-vacated home stadiums, at least until after the teams’ last home games. Watch what happens, though, after Dec. 21, because, interestingly, the Rams’, Raiders’ and Chargers’ last games of this season are on the road. The Chargers’ last two games are on the road, in fact, which could give them a one-week jump start, though whether they would use it might depend on whether or not they remain in playoff contention.
“I have no idea what’s going on. I heard it’s coming from the mayor?” asked Neenah High School senior Lexie Zehner.
Indeed it is.
“We know the evils and the hazards of young people and dancing!” said Neenah Mayor Dean Kaufert.
Kaufert told FOX 11 he plans to issue a proclamation Wednesday banning all dancing in Neenah. …
“I don’t think it’s fair to make us not be able to express ourselves in this art form,” said Zehner.
Wait! There’s more!
“One of the parents came up with the idea to try and create a buzz,” said Kaufert, revealing the signs and the proclamation are a cheeky way of marketing Footloose for the high school.
“If this creates a buzz and creates interest in it and puts more people in the seats, it’s gonna be well worth it,” Kaufert explained.
And not to fear, Kaufert told us if enough people attend the play, “we will consider lifting the ban and allowing dancing back in Neenah,” he said, laughing.
Uproxx reports:
Enough dumb stuff happens on a daily basis, especially in politics, that it’s not unreasonable to believe that a small town’s mayor could be a big enough A-hole to propose a ban on dancing. After all, the uptight adults of the movie Footloose had things going pretty well in Bomont until that no-good Ren McCormack showed up and got all of the girls pregnant with his big city dance moves. So when Dean Kaufert, the new mayor of Neenah, Wisconsin, started making news yesterday over his proposal to ban dancing in that town that I’ve never heard of, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that he could have been yet another seriously insane old doofus trying to ruin the fun for everyone.
Instead, it turns out that he’s a pretty cool dude just trying to rile up some viral support for the teens of Neenah High School. …
Sure, it’s all fun and laughs right now, but wait until the school’s successful performance turns the whole town into one big episode of Glee. Be careful with what you wish for, Mayor Kaufert.
The gubernatorial election is four weeks from yesterday.
It’s obvious what voters are voting for if they vote for Scott Walker. It’s also obvious what voters are voting for if they vote for Mary Burke — the not-Scott Walker.
And that’s about all you can say about Burke, the Club for Growth claims:
Among the more effective weapons available to any shifty office-seeker is the widespread perception that the political arts are steeped in arcane knowledge incomprehensible to voters. Conversely, a shifty office-seeker’s nightmare is widespread realization that he (or she) is really playing a fairly simple game. We resist believing the latter: If we’re going to be fleeced, we naturally hope it will be by someone who knows more than we do.
But sometimes the only choice is to face facts and admit the office-seeker is plying a dreary and pedestrian trade, and perhaps not even proficiently. There’s no other explanation for the incredible lifespan—now nearing three weeks—of the Mary Burke plagiarism scandal.
We like our initial interpretation better all the time. The serial plagiarism is revealing far beyond Burke’s willingness to lift economic development ideas; it suggests we are at risk of being governed by a nonentity.
Appearing Sunday on Madison television, she struggled to identify a single component of her jobs plan that was a certifiable Burke original, then picked one that promptly tuned out to have been plagiarized.
And recall, she immediately fired the consultant responsible for the plan when the plagiarism story broke, but retains the plan and produced a defiant television ad saying so. If she received a contribution from someone who later turned out to be a bank robber, would she keep the money?
We argued a week ago that Burke seems strangely indifferent to the realities of her campaign, begging the question whether she’s really interested in governing. Come the debates, someone should ask whether she actually wants to be governor.
It would be interesting to hear if they ever reach the follow-up question: “Why?”
“Why” is obvious — she’s not Scott Walker.
But what would happen in Wisconsin if Burke were elected?
There is no way Republicans will not retain the state Assembly after the Nov. 4 election. It looks decreasingly likely that Democrats will even be able to take the state Senate, in which Republicans have a 17-15 majority, with one vacancy.
The word that comes to mind, of course, is “gridlock.” Mike Nichols examines the potential Gov. Burke:
The elephant in the room is the elephants in the room — the big room with the white columns, stuffed eagle and oak desks that is known as the Assembly Chamber.
There are 60 Republicans in the Assembly and only 39 Democrats. Robin Vos, the Republican Assembly speaker, thinks Republicans, if anything, might actually pick up a few seats this November. And even if they don’t, they will retain an enormous majority.
The GOP also currently controls the Senate, though by a much slimmer 17-15 margin with one vacancy — the southeastern Wisconsin seat Neal Kedzie resigned in June to take over the Motor Carrier’s Association. Democrats will not pick up Kedzie’s solidly Republican seat, and they on are track to lose the redistricted seat currently held by Democratic State Sen. John Lehman, the one-time Racine teacher who could end up as Burke’s lieutenant governor. That means Democrats will need to pick up a total of three other seats to take over the 33-seat chamber.
It’s not altogether impossible. Democrats hope to capture seats held by outgoing Sens. Mike Ellis, Dale Schultz and Joe Leibham. But it’s extremely unlikely, and even if Burke does win and Democrats prevail in the senate, the fact is she will still have to deal with a very conservative Assembly.Mary Burke’s hopes won’t rest with allies in the Legislature. They will, at least initially, rest with her veto pen. …
“I think we are unique in the scope of the governor’s authority,” says Fred Wade, a Madison attorney who has long criticized the way Wisconsin governors can use the partial-veto to “create legislation that the Legislature did not approve.”
Like other governors, Wisconsin’s chief executive has the ability to veto legislation in toto. But he — or she — also has the ability to partially veto appropriations.
Governors dating to Pat Lucey in the 1970s have used and abused this so-called “partial veto.” Jim Doyle, for instance, transferred more than $400 million from the transportation fund to schools by almost comically crossing out words and stitching together parts of different sentences.
That’s no longer possible. Voters altered the state constitution and eliminated the so-called “Vanna White” and “Frankenstein” vetoes that once allowed governors to delete letters in words or crudely stitch together parts of different sentences. But, Wade says, governors can still cross words, digits, whole sentences and commas out of appropriations bills in ways that can entirely defy legislators’ intent.
“For Mary Burke the temptation will be to do what Jim Doyle did,” says Wade. “Because he was stymied in the legislature, he used the power extensively to write legislation the Legislature did not approve but that reflected his priorities.”
Republican legislators could limit Burke’s ability to do the same by excluding purely policy matters from the budget bill. And, Vos points out, governors are not able to “veto an appropriation higher.” But, he concedes, Burke, if so inclined, would be able to stop Republicans “from cutting taxes or cutting waste.”
In the end, it would be virtually impossible to fireproof the budget bill to prevent the new governor from creatively tweaking it to suit her agenda. But chances are that any conflicts with Republicans in the budget would be over the power of the purse. …
Burke has made it clear that she would try to repeal provisions of Act 10 that “crippled the political power of public-sector unions.” She has called Act 10’s implementation of annual union elections and ban on automatic dues collections “nothing more than heavy-handed attempts to punish labor unions” and has said she would work to repeal those provisions.
Vos says he can’t see how she would accomplish that without control of the Legislature.
“I believe that she does not have the ability to do very much on Act 10,” he says.
Retiring Democratic Sen. Tim Cullen essentially agrees, telling Wisconsin Interest it is “highly unlikely” she could roll back Act 10.
Joe Zepecki, communications director for the Burke campaign, says, “There is no silver-bullet strategy” on the issue.
“It’s bringing people together and getting that done.” She would, he says, “turn down the volume a little in terms of the political back-and-forth.”
Overall, Cullen thinks Burke would “govern somewhere near the middle.” Vos, for his part, says that if she wins, “she gets to reshape state government in a way that is much more liberal.” …
What’s clear is that while Burke would have virtually no ability to push major policy initiatives without the acquiescence of Republican legislators, she could also stand in the way of Vos and fellow Republicans pursuing their own conservative agenda.
Zepecki says Burke has no doubt that she can work with people like Vos and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald. Should she win, there will certainly be much talk of bipartisanship.
In the end, though, there wouldn’t just be a struggle for power between two political parties. There would be a broader struggle between branches of government. There are conservatives who feel too much power has already migrated from the legislative to the executive branch — and there will be an attempt to reclaim some ground.
“We will end up having a Republican legislature that will pass all kinds of bills that Mary Burke will veto,” predicts Vos. He suggests it will become much harder to reform entitlements, for instance, or keep a lid on taxes and spending and regulation.
Cullen lacks credibility on being “somewhere near the middle” given his role in the Fleeing Fourteen. Nothing Zepecki says should be believed, period.
Gridlock is the most optimistic view of Burke as governor. At no point has Burke ever during this campaign uttered one word about her own party’s faults — that they totally screwed up state finances in the late 2000s, for instance. Burke has demonstrated zero ability to translate her supposed business experience to legislation and policy. When you advocate the loss of 120,000 jobs, your credibility on the economy will rightly be in question.
You can certainly kiss tax cuts goodbye. Burke is apparently claiming that the Walker tax cuts were only $11 per month. How arrogant to claim that state government can spend your $132 better than you can, or, for a family of four, your $528. But hey, when you take two years off work and your daddy gets you a job in the family business, maybe money’s not a big deal for you.
New polling data suggest that anger at President Barack Obama and a growing distrust of big government could spell trouble for Democratic lawmakers heading into the 2014 midterm elections.
A new Gallup poll reports that 32 percent of likely voters will head to the polls this fall to send a message of opposition to the president and his Democratic colleagues. Just 20 percent say that they will go to the polls to signal support.
Opposition to the president is at a 16-year high. For comparison, opposition to the commander in chief is 13 points higher than during Bill Clinton’s sex scandal and 2 points higher than George Bush’s final year.
Gallup reports:
A majority of Republican registered voters, 58 percent, say they will be sending a message of opposition to Obama with their vote this fall. In contrast, 38 percent of Democratic voters say they will support the president. Rather than supporting Obama, most Democrats, 53 percent, say they will not be sending a message with their vote.
Democrats are a bit less likely now (38 percent) than in 2010 (45 percent) to say they will be sending a message of support to Obama, while Republican opposition to the president is the same.
Meanwhile, numbers from The Associated Press show that more than half of Americans feel that the government is too incompetent to handle economic and other problems facing the nation.
Just 2 percent of respondents reported that they are “extremely confident” that Washington can fix the economy.
When it comes to protecting Americans from terror threats, people on both sides of the political divide said they are losing faith.
“Democrats tend to express more faith in the government’s ability to protect them than do Republicans,” the AP reported. “Yet even among Democrats, just 27 percent are confident the government can keep them safe from terrorist attacks. Fewer than 1 in 5 say so on each of the other issues, including climate change.”
I saw this on Facebook with this added comment:
Anger is something of an understatement. And it’s not reserved for 0bama; if you voted for him, I hope you end up unemployed, homeless, and on a 12 month 0bamunistCare waiting list with 6 months to live. No, I’m not wishing you ill, I’m wishing you what you voted for. The fact that the two are indistinguishable is far more a testament to your stupidity, ignorance, and irresponsibility at the polls than any malice on my part.
My favorite Ray Charles song was number one today in 1961:
Today in 1969, the BBC’s “Top of the Pops” refused for the first time to play that week’s number one song because of what singers Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin were supposedly doing while recording “Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus”:
According to a classmate of mine, Madison radio stations play Britain’s number one single today in 1971 too often:
Dana Milbank is the winner of this week’s Media-Can’t-See-the-Forest-for-the-Trees award:
Aspiring Republican presidential candidate Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana, scheduled a big Washington speech for Monday to condemn President Obama’s defense policy. But an unexpected competitor beat him to the punch.
Leon Panetta, in an interview with USA Today’s Susan Page published just before Jindal’s speech, criticized Obama in harsh terms that would have been dismissed as partisan sniping — if Panetta weren’t a Democrat who had served as Obama’s CIA director and secretary of defense.
Panetta criticized his former boss for having “lost his way” — allowing the power vacuum in Iraq that created the Islamic State, rejecting Panetta’s and Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s advice to arm the Syrian rebels and failing to enforce his own “red line” barring Syria’s use of chemical weapons.
The interview was timed with this week’s launch of Panetta’s book, in which he wrote that Obama “avoids the battle, complains, and misses opportunities.” Panetta also wrote of Obama’s “frustrating reticence to engage his opponents and rally support for his cause” and his tendency to rely “on the logic of a law professor rather than the passion of a leader.”
So when Jindal arrived at the conservative American Enterprise Institute on Monday morning, all he really had to do to blame Obama for the world’s woes was to quote Panetta.
“How did we get to this point?” Jindal asked. “Just ask the people who can be honest about what happened. Ask former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.”
In a news conference following the speech, I asked Jindal to elaborate. Panetta “is now the latest in a series of officials who have served in this administration coming out and saying from the inside they saw some of the dangerous mistakes this president has made,” the governor said.
George W. Bush got criticism from former advisers (Paul O’Neill, John DiIulio), as did Bill Clinton (George Stephanopoulos, Dick Morris), but this level of disloyalty is stunning, even though it is softened with praise for Obama’s intellect.
At the start of the year, Robert Gates, Obama’s first defense secretary, wrote a memoir full of criticism of Obama’s handling of Afghanistan, saying Obama made military decisions based on political considerations. Clinton, who also published a book this year, criticized Obama for rejecting her advice on Syria and mocked the “Don’t do stupid stuff” phrase used by administration officials to describe Obama’s doctrine.
The lack of message discipline is puzzling, because Obama rewards and promotes loyalists. But he’s a cerebral leader, and he may lack the personal attachments that make aides want to charge the hill for him.
Also, as MSNBC reporter Alex Seitz-Wald tweeted in response to a question I posed, Panetta, Gates and Clinton didn’t owe their careers to Obama. Clinton was a rival, Gates was a Bush holdover, and Panetta is a Democratic eminence grise. Loyalty didn’t trump book sales — or Clinton’s need to distance herself from Obama before a presidential run.
But there’s also David Axelrod, long Obama’s loyal strategist, saying on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Obama made “a mistake” in saying his economic policies will be on the ballot next month.
Obama’s most loyal mouthpiece at the moment may be Vice President Joe Biden, who in a speech at Harvard last week condemned as “inappropriate” the books by former administration officials. But having Biden speak for you is of dubious value: The vice president’s criticism of Panetta was overshadowed by loose remarks in that same speech that led Biden to apologize to the governments of Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.
Here’s an alternative explanation: Maybe Panetta thinks Obama’s weak-on-defense anti-American American foreign policy is bad for the country. Maybe Panetta is a patriot before he’s a Democrat or one of Obama’s apparatchiks.
Notice the trope that Obama (like Clinton before him) is really smart, and of course its countertrope that Republicans are dumb. Anyone with sense knows the success, or lack thereof, of your life isn’t about how smart you are, it’s about the smart decisions you make, or don’t. Slick Willie exercised horrid personal judgment. Obama exercises horrid judgment on issues that affect the lives of the American people.
This is also the sort of inside-baseball story that shows why Americans increasingly hate the news media. What is more important here — the future of our country, or who’s not being nice to whom in the White House? Milbank appears to believe that all Obama administration officials, past and present, should demonstrate slavish loyalty to their leader as Milbank does. Independent of personal ambition, that’s not how the American system is supposed to work.
Remember when liberals used to think that dissent is patriotic?
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 