Today in 1931, RCA Victor began selling record players that would play not just 78s, but 33⅓-rpm albums too.
Today in 1956, the BBC banned Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rockin’ Through the Rye” on the grounds that the Comets’ recording of an 18th-century Scottish folk song went against “traditional British standards”:
(It’s worth noting on Constitution Day that we Americans have a Constitution that includes a Bill of Rights, and we don’t have a national broadcaster to ban music on spurious standards. Britain lacks all of those.)
Today in 1964, the Beatles were paid an unbelievable $150,000 for a concert in Kansas City, the tickets for which were $4.50.
In 2003, Lutz was involved in an incident that left Timothy Nabors paralyzed in a high profile shooting. Nabors claimed he was unarmed, but soon admitted he was indeed armed. …
On October 3, 2005, as he had done for the past 16-years, Mike Lutz arrived for duty with the Milwaukee Police Department. Little did he know that this would be—for all practical purposes—his last official day as a street cop.
Lt. Mike Dubis, Sgt. Mike Hartert, Sandoval, Lutz, and Officer John Osowski rolled-up to execute a no-knock search warrant for weapons at 905 W. Harrison Street—an apartment building wedged between the street and the Kinnickinnic River to the south. Sgt. Hartert was in full uniform, while the other officers present were dressed in civilian attire with their badges plainly visible. A man, who was outside when the officers arrived in their unmarked squad cars and shouting “police” and “search warrant” in both English and Spanish, ran inside Apartment Four—the search warrant’s targeted location. When the officers attempted for force the door, the man tried to hold the door shut.
“I proceeded to the door. I announce ‘Milwaukee police. Milwaukee police,’ Lutz testified. “I have my gun in my right hand extended before me, and I have my left hand out to push open the door, and I start pushing open the door as I’m yelling, ‘Milwaukee Police.’
“The door gets open approximately 12 inches. And I’m able to see a refrigerator to my left, and I see Mr. Payano leaning over the refrigerator pointing a gun at me. It happened very quickly.
“Just as the door was opened and I glanced, I didn’t have the time to bring my gun over. I heard one shot fired.”
As a defense, Payano claimed he did not know that the men forcing the door were police officers.
Common sense should have kicked-in here, as the location is a rough part of the city of Milwaukee—an area where street gangs have operated for years. The officers were driving unmarked Ford Crown Victorias and Sgt. Hartert was wearing a police uniform.
But common sense is not always so common.
A Circuit Court judge shot down Payano’s claim of self-defense, although the court of appeals then overturned the lower court’s ruling.
The case then reached the Wisconsin State Supreme Court.
“We conclude,” wrote Justice Prosser for the majority, “that, because the circuit court made its ruling using the appropriate legal standards under Sullivan, sufficiently explained its rationale on the record, and came to a reasonable conclusion, we must affirm its decision to admit the other acts evidence against Payano.”
Because of this ruling, prosecutors were able to obtain a conviction of Officer Lutz’s assailant.
The shooting, however, seriously damaged Mike Lutz’s arm. He later received a duty disability. …
Micheal Lutz’s credibility and integrity have been on the line before and he has proven himself time and again. He served heroically on the Milwaukee Police Department and took a bullet in service of the community.
Chisholm could claim that Lutz was a disgruntled former employee … oh wait, he can’t:
According to a new letter obtained by RightWisconsin, Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm commended former MPD officer and special prosecutor Michael Lutz for “exemplary” service to the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office upon completion of Lutz’s short tenure with the DA.
This letter from DA Chisholm contradicts some of the narrative that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel provided when it outed Lutz in a Friday story. Columnist Daniel Bice wrote:
Reached Thursday, Chisholm said he was surprised that Lutz would make the allegations about the Milwaukee County district attorney’s office.
That’s because, Chisholm said, Lutz was simply an unpaid intern for five months in the county office who spent his time filling out grant applications for the community prosecution program.
At some point, the word “intern” was edited out of Bice’s column as a descriptor of Lutz, whose title was Pro Bono Public Service Special Prosecutor.
But the paper’s watchdog columnist Dan Bice believes he knows who Taylor’s source is. As for the source’s credibility, Bice sent a terse and stunning email yesterday:
According to Taylor, the source in Chisholm’s office asked for anonymity because he feared retaliation. Those fears are now being realized. Reporters visited his family home and JS staffers threatened to publish disparaging information provided by Chisholm. …
When asked to comment on the implication of his email, Bice said, “I believe if you read my email, you will see that I am explicitly agnostic about [the source’s] credibility.”
Agnostic? We’ll see.
But Stuart Taylor isn’t buying it.
“I can’t comment on my source but if some journalist is sliming the credibility of a person he thinks is my source because the man is on disability, that is stunningly dishonest and disgusting,” said Taylor. “If I were the employer of such a journalist, I would fire him.”
Meanwhile, the attorney general’s race has had its own nastiness, which Charlie Sykes summarizes:
(2) One of those surrogates is former Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager, who was ousted from that job after being busted for drunk driving. (What, Anthony Weiner wasn’t available?)
So: To preserve the chances of Mary Burke becoming governor and Happ becoming attorney general, Democrats slime a police officer who was shot in the line of duty (I wonder how the police unions feel about that) and a sexual assault victim.
Not that they care, but the persecutors in the Milwaukee County district attorney’s office are giving Milwaukee a bad national name, as demonstrated by the Daily Signal:
The fact that such a secret persecution of citizen advocacy organizations even occurred ought to be an embarrassment to a state that prides itself on being a progressive bastion of individual freedom. It is more reminiscent of a banana republic than the world’s foremost democracy.
We interrupt this blog to point out: Wisconsin is not now, nor has it ever been, a “bastion of individual freedom.” The Progressive Era brought us the income tax. Nothing free there. And banana republics have tropical weather, which this state does not.
To allow an investigation of issue advocacy based simply on allegations of collaboration between elected officials and the public would chill core political speech. The right of citizens and their membership associations to directly engage elected leaders is all the more important on politically charged questions of public policy. Such collaboration is the norm in the political arena, where there is extensive interaction between citizens groups and elected officials about proposed legislation. In fact, such coordination is vital to a functioning democracy.
Under the warped view of the democratic process exhibited by the local prosecutors involved in this investigation, public officials would be strictly prohibited from speaking to the public about important public policy issues. Advocacy groups — no matter what their political persuasion — also would have to avoid any contact or discussion of issues with government officials and each other for fear of their conduct being considered criminal.
The public’s right to engage in issue advocacy, including coordinated activity, cannot be limited in this way and is as protected at the state level as it is at the federal level. Wisconsin is failing to draw the sharp line that the FEC and the courts have drawn between regulating express advocacy that is intended to support or oppose particular candidates running for office and grass-roots advocacy on important public policy issues. As Bob Bauer, President Barack Obama’s former White House counsel, recently said, we should “value, not distrust, collective political action and the strategies through which it is effected.” …
In fact, not a single decision by the U.S. Supreme Court or the 7th Circuit upholds the type of punishment of coordinated issue advocacy that Wisconsin prosecutors were pursuing. Why? Because the prosecutors were trying to punish political speech.
I hope that the civil rights lawsuit filed against these prosecutors is successful and results in a large judgment that deters this type of investigation from ever happening again. But this also should spur the Wisconsin Legislature to repeal the laws allowing such secret — and, frankly, un-American — political investigations and to get rid of campaign finance regulations that are unconstitutional and an insult to the First Amendment rights of Wisconsin citizens.
Today in 1956, Elvis Presley had his first number one song:
Today in 1965, Ford Motor Co. began offering eight-track tape players in their cars. Since eight-track tape players for home audio weren’t available yet, car owners had to buy eight-track tapes at auto parts stores.
Today in 1970, Vice President Spiro Agnew said in a speech that the youth of America were being “brainwashed into a drug culture” by rock music, movies, books and underground newspapers.
Today in Great Britain in the first half of the 1960s was a day for oddities.
Today in 1960, a campaign began to ban the Ray Peterson song “Tell Laura I Love Her” (previously mentioned here) on the grounds that it was likely to inspire a “glorious death cult” among teens. (The song was about a love-smitten boy who decides to enter a car race to earn money to buy a wedding ring for her girlfriend. To sum up, that was his first and last race.)
The anti-“Tell Laura” campaign apparently was not based on improving traffic safety. We conclude this from the fact that three years later, Graham Nash of the Hollies leaned against a van door at 40 mph after a performance in Scotland to determine if the door was locked. Nash determined it wasn’t locked on the way to the pavement.
I got my new Car & Driver magazine in the mail earlier this week. And it reported on something I managed to miss from one month ago, passed on by Jalopnik:
Car & Driver’s depiction (actually done by a 15-year-old) of the supposed next Corvette.
GM’s head of global product development, Mark Reuss, confirms that the company is working on the next Corvette. Our sources elaborate on this salient piece of information, telling us that, after 61 years of evolution, the C8 will be revolutionary.
The new Corvette will be the mid-engined American Dream Machine that Chevy couldn’t, until now, muster the courage to build. In truth, the factory is still not prepared to detail what’s coming, which is why you’re looking at the 2017 model year through our freshly waxed crystal ball.
THE PLAN: The C8 flagship, the Zora ZR1, will debut the new mid-engine architecture. Launching as a 2017 model, it will define the top of the Corvette hierarchy just as its precursors did in 1990-1995 C4 generation and 2009-2013 C6 model years. As before, the ZR1 will be low volume, roughly 1500 units per annum, and high priced. We figure around $150,000.
Before I go on: Regular readers know I have a thing about the Corvette, though I have driven few and owned none. (I work in journalism, have kids, and to date have received exactly $0 from my supposed Vast Right Wing Conspiracy benefactors. And no one has gotten me one for my birthday or Father’s Day. And I have yet to see in the flesh the yellow convertible recently purchased by a member of my family, with the correct transmission, that really needs to come up here.)
So if you’ve read this blog, you know of my skepticism of mid-engine Corvettes (or more accurately Corvettes with engines behind the driver) such as …
XP-819Astro IIXP-882XP-895The Pininfarina-designed prototype powered by a two-rotor rotary engine.The four-rotor prototype, which with a 400 V-8 became the AeroVette prototype,CERV III
Technically the Corvette has been a mid-engine — that is, the engine is mounted between the front and rear axles — since the C4 debuted in 1983. This obviously refers to a future Corvette with an engine in front of the back wheels, instead of behind the front wheels.
I truly believe that every car magazine publisher has a note in his desk that reads something like: “In case single-copy sales are lagging, do a NEW MID-ENGINE CORVETTE! story.” Car & Driver, Road & Track, Motor Trend, Automobile and the others have resorted to what could be called “Corvette porn” — predictions that are fun to read and heighten anticipation, though they don’t actually happen — for decades. (This was particularly the case during the 15-year run of the C3 Corvette, which was due to be replaced by a new mid-engine Corvette any day now, or then.) Jalopnik calls the rear/mid-engine Corvette as “the automobile magazine’s white whale; an elusive beast that always seems so close and yet, always, just of reach.”
One of the two reasons I remain skeptical about a mid-engine Corvette is that GM already sells every front-engine Corvette it makes today. The side view of every mid-engine Corvette design except possibly the XP-882 and AeroVette shows a car with more back than front, which goes against every previous Corvette design. And there are enough people not enamored with the C7’s design; for some reason every alternative-looking version looks better than the actual animal.
The other is that I am extremely skeptical that GM could pull it off successfully. Fans of the idea of a mid-engine Corvette exaggerate, I think, GM’s ability to design a mid-engine car that works in today’s world. For instance, C&D reports that this C8 is likely to have all of 5 cubic feet of space in the front end and the rear end. C&D writes that “This will surely disappoint golfers who drive their C7s to the links with more than one set of clubs in their 10- to 15-cubic-foot cargo holds. The new Zora ZR1 will be for those who enjoy long drives without using clubs.”
Yeah, well, GM already has too many stories to tell of ignoring customers’ demands at GM’s own peril. Why not eliminate the sound system while you’re at it, and make drivers listen to nothing but the engine or their passenger? That’s the purist driving experience, after all.
You would think at some point car owners would get tired of being GM’s guinea pigs for technology not quite sorted out (the Vega’s melting aluminum engine, the Citation, Computer Command Control, Cross Fire Injection) when the car leaves the dealership. I can see maybe one-tenth of Chevy dealers being able to service a car with the engine in the wrong end. I can see service costs skyrocket, which would be good for GM and its Chevy dealers, but not so much for the owner.
C&D also reports that the C8 will not have a manual transmission, and won’t have a transmission designed by GM either, instead from the outside:
Our snooping suggests that the Corvette engineering group will develop just one transaxle for the initial phase of the C8 program, and that a dual-clutch automatic will be its choice. … After the inevitable weeping over the demise of the manual, life in Bloomington will continue. Mourners will probably be in the minority anyway — 65 percent of new Stingrays are delivered with automatics.
That’s a rather arrogant statement, whether it comes from C&D or its unnamed inside source(s). (The story was written by their veteran technical director, Don Sherman.) If two-thirds of C7 buyers are ordering automatics, then one-third are specifying manuals not because they’re faster than automatics, but because the driving experience is superior. Essentially GM is saying that manual drivers need not plunk down their money, which is a strange attitude for a corporation saved by taxpayer dollars, and a company that really needs to be more, not less, responsive to the public.
Then there’s this:
Alternative power sources are planned to keep the Corvette viable when regulations clamp down more aggressively on fuel consumption. Potent V-6s with and without boost are inevitable. Moving the engine behind the cockpit clears space for an electric motor to drive the front wheels; by 2020, a four-wheel-drive Corvette hybrid is a distinct possibility.
This is where I get off the train. GM, remember, has had more of its vehicles recalled in the past year than its entire 2013 production total, and for a rather simple (though potentially fatal) problem, bad ignition switches. GM’s hybrid, remember, is the money-losing Volt. GM has one, and only one, mid-engine car in its entire existence, the 1980s Pontiac Fiero.
Up until now, the Corvette’s success has been in large part not because of state-of-the-art technology, but because of high refinement of proven technology — for instance, pushrod V-8s instead of double overhead cams and four valves per cylinder, except for the King of the Hill ZR1. (And even at that, C&D’s long-term test Stingray blew its engine at 6,000 miles, apparently because of a bad oil filter. Their engine was replaced under warranty; had the engine blown five years from now, you would have paid upwards of $100,000 for an expensive lump of fiberglass, carbon fiber and various other materials.) There used to be 6,000 Chevrolet dealers in the U.S., which meant you were pretty close to a dealer if something went wrong. And of course an entire aftermarket industry serving only Corvettes grew, but there is less you can buy to upgrade your Corvette because there is less the aftermarket can do.
The V-8, in small (up to 6.2 liters) or large (once up to 454 cubic inches) block size, carbureted (up to three) or fuel injected, has been part of the Corvette experience for all but its first two years of existence. If I wanted a V-6 and an automatic (and call it whatever you like, if it doesn’t involve a clutch pedal and the driver’s making every shift, it’s an automatic), I would buy a minivan. No automaker has proven that a turbocharged or supercharged gasoline engine lasts as long as a non-charged gas engine.
I am not one of these people who hates every advance in car tech. Fuel injection (now that it actually works) is superior to carburetors. I like air conditioning. I need tilt steering because of my size. But I have owned cars long enough to know that the older a car is, the more things stop working — sometimes things that prevent you from driving the car, but more often things that prevent you, absent a huge repair bill, from using the car as it was designed. (By the time our first Subaru Outback left the premises at 228,000 miles, one side marker light, the rear wipers, and various interior lights had stopped working. The cruise control on Outback number two has never worked in my six-year ownership experience.)
The irony is that the C4 and onward have each made great strides in turning the Corvette into a car you could conceivably drive every day. (If you have no more than one passenger, of course.) Purists don’t like the hatchback, but the aforementioned golf clubs, along with luggage for a weekend trip, groceries, or whatever else can now fit. Advances in traction control mean you could drive a Vette in a snowfall (assuming you have the right all-season tires). I don’t like the elimination of the hidden headlights in the C6 and C7, but at least owners don’t have to worry about them not working. The 2015 Corvette is EPA-rated at 29 highway mpg, and Corvettes have been at least in the mid-20s in highway mpg for years. And the price, as I’ve chronicled in this space, makes the Corvette the best high-performance bargain on the planet compared with its Porsche, Ferrari and other competition.
C&D reports that this Corvette will be sold with the existing C7 until it’s phased out around 2020. When that happens, all Corvettes will be mid-engined, all apparently will have automatics, and some may not even have V-8s. I’d question whether this is progress, but I’m betting I won’t be able to afford a C8 of any kind anyway due to the obvious steep price increase for all the new, yet unproven, GM technology.
Yesterday, as you know, was the 13th anniversary of 9/11.
An event as cataclysmic as 9/11 was understandably could lead to some inappropriate reaction, the result of a trauma with no frame of reference to guide your thoughts or actions.
That bit of psychobabble is as charitable as I can be to describe this bit of ignominious history, from the Examiner:
Not only were the events of that day a change of course for history, but they were also a psychological attack on the hearts and minds of every American; and the effects still resonate to this day. It was scary. People didn’t know to react or wrap their head around what had just happened. The government reacted with immediate military action. Normal citizens reacted by donating any money they could to aid the relief effort. Some even joined the military. Some corporate entities responded with censorship.
In the days following 9/11, Clear Channel Communications, the owner of more than 1,200 radio stations covering every market demographic in the United States at the time issued a ban of around 165 songs from being played on any of their radio stations. I truly think that the Clear Channel memorandum had good intentions by trying to suppress any song about death, fire, tall buildings, or bombs because music moves people emotionally and Clear Channel must have been of the opinion that American minds had been put through enough horror. Clear Channel felt the need to spread only positivity through the power of the airwaves, therefore attempting to keep the public’s heads up by pure psychology. (You see this in bars and restaurants all time. When’s the last time you bought a cheap drink at a bar that was playing classical music? You haven’t)
The reasoning behind the decision was one thing. The list itself is crazy. Songs that personally make me feel inspired and empowered such as “New York, New York” by Frank Sinatra, “What a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong, and “Imagine” by John Lennon were on this list. Any time I hear any of those three songs, I receive a feeling inside that not many songs can dish out. I feel hope in the face of adversity. I see a light at the end of the tunnel. I feel an ability to overcome. And most importantly, I feel inspired to try to make the world a better place with my own two hands.
So the very thought of a song about New York City or a song inspired by a war 30 years prior we as Americans were considered too fragile to hear. If history has taught us anything, it has taught us Americans are resilient and hold a rock-solid resolve. History has also taught us that simply you can’t stop New York City.
Before 9/11 was the 1989 World Series earthquake in San Francisco, which WOLX radio in Madison announced, followed by, I kid you not, Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move Under My Feet.” This is what happens when a radio station creates a playlist who knows how long in advance, and doesn’t have DJs in the building who can make the decision to pull an temporarily inappropriate song. (Or doesn’t give the DJ the ability to do so.)
Clear Channel’s list is indeed crazy, including:
It seems that nearly every grunge rock band from the ’90s was blacked out.
The list includes at least one ironic choice: Paul Simon sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water” at a 9/11 benefit concert. And not playing “New York, New York” defies explanation. Yes, 9/11 took place on a Tuesday, but what reason other than that is there to not play Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Tuesday’s Gone”?
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 