Today in 1969, Leslie West and Felix Pappalardi created Mountain:
Birthdays today start with Paul Williams of the Temptations:
Roy Bittan of the E Street Band, which played mostly, but not exclusively, with Bruce Springsteen:
Joey Puerta of Ambrosia:
The Milwaukee Bucks’ new owners scored public relations points early by saying all the right things upon their introduction and by drafting Duke’s Jabari Parker.
Then came the trainwreck of the firing of coach Larry Drew and hiring of Brooklyn Nets coach Jason Kidd as their new coach/majordomo of basketball.
It’s kind of a given that professional athletes will be buttheads, particularly in the National Basketball Association, where the main off-court hobby seems to be fathering multiple children without bothering to marry their mother. It is generally expected, however, that the adults in the locker room will act like adults. This apparently has not been the case with Kidd, who had domestic abuse and alcohol issues during his playing days. There is not much evidence that, unlike former coach Scott Skiles, Kidd has actually grown up and stopped acting as if his age was his uniform number.
As bad, on a different level, is how Kidd engineered his exit from Brooklyn. Following one season as coach, when the Nets did well during half of the season, Kidd apparently decided he deserved more authority and campaigned with management to be moved above the Nets’ general manager in the hierarchy. Management declined, and so Kidd started talking with his friends the Bucks owners.
The Sporting News contributes this:
There is a certain decorum with which a coach in the NBA — and, indeed, a coach in most any major pro sport in the country — is expected to carry himself. Safe to say that, in the last few days, recently departed Nets coach Jason Kidd has violated several of them. Or, at least, the one that matters most.
“I think the one thing you know not to do as a coach is to talk about another job while it is still occupied,” one veteran NBA coach told Sporting News. “You just don’t do that. This is a tough business, there are only 30 jobs and no matter what you think of a guy, every one of us puts his heart and soul into what we do every day. And so you learn to respect your colleagues. But nothing is more disrespectful than gunning for someone’s job while he is still in it.”
What’s worse is that Kidd appears to have done this three times in a matter of days. First, Kidd attempted to usurp the general manager’s role with the Nets from Billy King, having seen Stan Van Gundy get the same broad powers in Detroit and Doc Rivers granted that title with the Clippers. But Brooklyn team ownership, led by Mikhail Prokhorov, had no interest in giving Kidd that level of power.
New Bucks owners Marc Lasry and Wes Edens then came into play for Kidd, receiving permission from the team to speak to him last week — Lasry was a former minority owner with the Nets, and knows Kidd personally.
That’s when Kidd attempted to sell the Bucks on an arrangement by which he would both run and coach the team. Problem is, the Bucks have two people doing those jobs already — coach Larry Drew and general manager John Hammond.
King. Drew. Hammond. That’s three employees Kidd attempted to oust. Kidd eventually came away with the job as Bucks coach, with Milwaukee sending 2015 and 2019 second-round picks to the Nets, Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports first reported. Drew was never informed of the negotiations with Kidd.
What’s worse, it appears that one of Kidd’s motivations was resentment over the bigger financial packages awarded to Steve Kerr in Golden State and Derek Fisher in New York, each of whom reportedly got five-year, $25 million deals. Both of those coaches, like Kidd, are former players who have never been on a coaching staff before — not only as a head coach, but not even as an assistant. …
The coach also pointed out that this is one of the perils of hiring a coach with no experience — he has no sense of paying dues, no sense of how hard some coaches, like Drew, have worked to get where they are. Kidd is acting like a spoiled brat, perhaps because he never had to earn anything in the coaching business.
I’ve argued here before that the positions of general manager and coach need to be separate, at least in pro football. That more likely than not is the case in other pro sports as well. General managers acquire players by draft, trade or free agent signing; coaches coach them. Those are two full-time jobs, and given that Kidd apparently isn’t necessarily a candidate for Mensa, to think he can do both jobs seems optimistic at best.
Kidd supposedly wants to become the Bucks’ answer to Phil Jackson, possessor of several NBA championship rings and now president of the team he played for, the New York Knicks. Jackson was a role player on two NBA championship teams, but apparently while he wasn’t playing he was paying attention to what coach Red Holtzman was doing. Additionally, unlike Kidd, Jackson learned how to coach by coaching in the Continental Basketball Association (as did former Bucks coach George Karl). One season is really not a large enough sample size to determine if someone can coach.
The supposed upside here is Kidd’s supposed ability to get free agents to play in Milwaukee because he was able to get a couple to come to Brooklyn. (Which might be an indictment of Kidd’s coaching ability since the Nets didn’t start playing well until the second half of the season.) Milwaukee is not Brooklyn, and whether Kidd can duplicate that feat remains to be seen. Moreover, Kidd eventually will run out of player contemporaries who he supposedly can attract to Milwaukee to play.
None of this should be viewed as a defense of former coach Larry Drew (who is being paid handsomely to have read that he was about to be replaced) or general manager John Hammond. The Bucks deserved their record as last season’s second worst team in the NBA, and I saw little evidence of improvement. (Teams should never tank to improve their next-season draft position.) But I’m not sure at all that Kidd represents actual improvement.
The Wisconsin State Journal’s Tom Oates reinforces my point:
Kidd, who has alienated people throughout the NBA over the last 20 years, was available only because his own power play had been rebuffed by Nets ownership. He tried to oust general manager Billy King — the man who hired him despite his complete lack of coaching experience — and gain control of all basketball decisions in Brooklyn, but the Nets instead seemed eager to let him move on. That should have told the Bucks owners something right there, but apparently they weren’t listening.
The way [Marc] Lasry and [Wesley] Edens handled this entire matter — especially interviewing a prospective coach when they already had one under contract — shows either a lack of character or an amazing amount of naivete. It was cutthroat or clumsy or both, all of which bodes poorly for a franchise that is coming to the plate for its final at-bat in Milwaukee and can’t afford to make mistakes.
The immediate response to the Kidd news was that these are the same old dysfunctional Bucks. They still have owners who think they know more about basketball than they actually do and like to meddle in decisions they’re not qualified to make.
And speaking of unqualified, there is nothing in Kidd’s resume that would qualify him to run the basketball operations in an NBA franchise. He was a point guard for 19 seasons and a coach for one, but he’s never spent a day in an NBA front office.
Still, the Bucks’ starstruck new owners seemed willing to hand their franchise over to him. Perhaps they should have asked why the Nets’ owners, who are more familiar with the NBA and know Kidd better than anyone, weren’t willing to give him that control. …
But just because Kidd was hired only to coach the team doesn’t mean this story is over. His desire to make personnel decisions likely hasn’t changed and, given the clout he carries with the new owners, it’s only a matter of time before he has both jobs. …
Of course, if Kidd has success as a coach, much of this will be forgotten. But it seems like only a matter of time before Kidd is in control of the team’s basketball decisions, and that ought to scare everyone.
The Associated Press’ Raf Casert explains why the U.S. will lose to Belgium in the World Cup later today:
TOUGH DEFENSE: Belgium didn’t concede a single goal in open play during the group stage. Talk about a hermetic seal. It has Thibaut Courtois, at 22, already one of the top goalkeepers around. He anchored Atletico Madrid to the Spanish league title and also the Champions League final. Playing ahead of him is Vincent Kompany, who led Manchester City to two of the last three Premier League titles. And amazingly at 36, Daniel Van Buyten is still one of the standout defenders at the World Cup.
“KAMPFSCHWEIN” COACH: If you are looking for fighting spirit, coach Marc Wilmots fits the bill. Such was the toughness of his attitude and the challenges he made as a player with Schalke in the Bundesliga, the working class fan base immediately took a liking to him and called him Kampfschwein — which translates as fighting boar. Now aged 45, that determination survives. As a coach, he goes looking for victories at the World Cup whether they involve beautiful football or not. His team’s three one-goal victories have so far proven it to be the right strategy.
EDEN HAZARD: The playmaker has huge expectations to live up to. At 23, he is already among a handful of European players with global appeal. He is now the creative genius at Chelsea and is seeking to emulate that for Belgium at the World Cup. So far, the results have been mixed. He has been decisive in both matches he played in, providing the winning assist late in the game each time, in a 1–0 win over Russia and a 2–1 victory against Algeria. But he has yet to take the mantle of leadership in the team and this is what Wilmots will be looking for against the United States.
SPOILT FOR STRIKERS?: Don’t be fooled by the measly four goals from three games, Belgium does have its share of good strikers. Christian Benteke was supposed to be the first choice for Wilmots, but the Aston Villa striker ruptured his Achilles tendon in April. No worries. There’s also Romelu Lukaku, the Everton forward. Despite a sterling preparation campaign and key goals in qualifying, he has been a bitter disappointment so far in Brazil. Wilmots went looking for an alternative, and found one. Divock Origi, at 19, has been crucial. He scored the winner against Russia and provided the shot which allowed Jan Vertonghen to tap in the winner against South Korea. Now, Origi is a fan favorite to start against the United States.
Soccer fans: Do you really think the U.S. can compete against that?
Today in 1963, the Beatles recorded “She Loves You,” yeah, yeah, yeah:
Four years later, the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” reached number one, and stayed there for 15 weeks:
Jack Hunter asserts:
Republican presidential frontrunner Mike Huckabee warns “libertarianism is not Republicanism.” Senator Lindsey Graham has declared, “We are not going to build this party around libertarian ideas.” Former Senator Rick Santorum says, “I fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican Party and the conservative movement.”
Conservatives who see rising libertarian influence in the GOP as a problem are not only wrong.
They forget recent history.
Bush-Cheney was one of the least conservative eras in the last half century. Government and the debt exploded at a rate surpassed only by Obama. Medicare Part D was the largest entitlement expansion since LBJ. Bush’s tenure began with doubling the size of the Department of Education and ended with bailing out Wall Street. The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes praised Bush as representing a new “Big Government Conservatism” while Dick Cheney insisted “deficits don’t matter.”
There wasn’t even the pretense during Bush-Cheney that government should be smaller. In 2003, The Manchester Union-Leader reported of National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie, “the party’s new chairman, energetic and full of vigor, said in no uncertain terms that the days of Reaganesque Republican railings against the expansion of federal government are over.”
One could argue that Reagan talked a good small government game, but like Bush, he ultimately expanded the state. Conservatives could also argue, in Reagan’s defense, that Congress never delivered on promised spending cuts.
Regardless, despite any failings, Reagan always fought for and promoted limited government. Bush never did. He never even tried. As columnist James Antle compared them, “Bush’s record on spending was much worse than Reagan’s, and so was his rhetoric. Reagan’s speeches kept conservatives focused on the evils of government growth even when his actions did not.”
Fred Barnes got it right in 2003: “Reagan was a small government conservative who declared in his inauguration address that government was the problem, not the solution. There, Bush begs to differ.”
In addition to rejecting small government philosophy, the issues that unified conservatives most during Bush-Cheney were definitively anti-libertarian: support for the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping and “enhanced interrogation tactics.”
Some of Bush’s foreign policy decisions and national security measures must be viewed through a post 9-11 lens, but still do not justify his ultimate legacy from a conservative perspective: A Republican president explicitly rejected the core tenets of small government and constitutional liberty that had defined American conservatism for essentially its entire history.
Barry Goldwater famously said that “extremism in the defense of liberty” was no vice. Reagan believed conservatism proper was like a three-legged stool consisting of national security, religious and economic-libertarian conservatives.
Bush certainly represented national security conservatives. He was popular with religious conservatives.
But during his watch, the libertarian leg of Reagan’s stool was virtually non-existent.
So why, ultimately, did the last Republican administration fail so terribly in advancing conservatism? Because Bush-Cheney represented a Republican Party completely void of libertarian influence.
Those eight years reminded us that where the conservative movement has been the least conservative is also where it has been the least libertarian.
Being libertarian means, first and foremost, holding the ideological position that government is undesirable. Liberals generally hold the ideological position that government is a democratic force for social change and justice, and thus, a positive good. Libertarians—and most conservatives, in most eras—have considered government positively bad: A leveling force that squelches creativity, natural diversity, inhibits the free market and hampers human innovation.
When President Obama or Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid accuse libertarian leaning Republicans of being “the party of no government” or “anarchists,” their accusations are factually ridiculous. But however perverse, they do denote an anti-government libertarian component that had theretofor been lacking in the GOP.
Goldwater and Reagan also emphasized this. Unfortunately, Goldwater’s brand of liberty was too extreme for America in 1964. Even so, as a product of Goldwater and that history, Reagan famously declared in 1975 that libertarianism was the “heart and soul of conservatism.”
One could argue that Goldwater-Reagan conservatism is outdated and in some ways it might be. Different eras call for different policies and ideas. But it is quite another thing to argue that limited government philosophy—the core of historic American conservatism—is outdated. I know very few conservatives who would say this.
If surveying the right’s ideological history, Goldwater’s vision, Reagan’s revolution and Bush’s failure all point to one hard-to-ignore fact for any conscious conservative: It is no doubt possible to be a libertarian without being a conservative. But it is, by definition, impossible to be a conservative without also, to some degree, being a libertarian.
In fact, Reagan’s axiom—that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem”—is the eternal libertarian mantra.
Is it a “failure” if someone doesn’t do something he never promised to do? Both Bushes marketed themselves as compassionate conservatives — the older talking about “a kinder, gentler America,” his son promising to reform education, which doesn’t necessarily mean smaller government. And after 9/11 there wasn’t much interest in the topic of smaller government anyway.
At the risk of offending readers who may be their fans: The Huckabee/Santorum version of the Republican Party does not deserve your vote. That part of the GOP doesn’t believe in freedom of any sort.
The person who coined (as far as I know) the term “conservatarian,” Tim Nerenz, posted on Facebook:
Many of us “right-libertarians” (as opposed to left-libertarians) were Goldwater Republicans back when we were still welcome within the GOP. If conservatives and libertarians would compromise and focus on the 75% of things we both support, it would be an unbeatable coalition. Free trade, limited government, individual liberty, private property – FLIP. Flat or Fair Tax, 2nd amendment, right to work, deregulation, border security, reform of LEGAL immigration, energy independence, school choice, FED reform, elimination of corporate welfare – why can’t we get all that stuff done and then rip each other’s guts out over the things we disagree about? …
Reagan did not win landslides because he had the best and slickest “gotcha” operatives; he won because he both explained and embodied principles that a majority of Americans support. As the article states, it all begins when liberty, not government, is the first principle.
James Taranto compares how while Richard Nixon may or may not have had more integrity than Barack Obama has, the people who worked for Nixon certainly had more credibility than the people who work for Obama:
In the scandal involving the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS commissioner refused to play along with a corrupt administration, the New York Times reports. A White House aide handed him a list of 200 political “enemies” the president wanted investigated. In response, the aide asked: “Do you realize what you’re doing?” Then, he answered his own rhetorical question: “If I did what you asked, it’d make Watergate look like a Sunday school picnic.”
The White House aide’s reply was “emphatic,” according to the Times: “”The man I work for doesn’t like somebody to say ‘no.’ ”
The commissioner went to his boss, the Treasury secretary, “showed him the list and recommended that the I.R.S. do nothing.” The secretary “told him to lock the list in his safe.” Later, he retrieved the list and turned it over to congressional investigators.
It’s enough to restore your trust in the government–except that it happened more than 40 years ago. The corrupt order was delivered by John Dean in September 1972. The commissioner, Johnnie Walters, eventually “testified to various committees investigating alleged Nixon misdeeds,” the Times reports. “He left office in April 1973.” He died Tuesday; the Times article we’ve been quoting is his obituary.
Walters wasn’t the first IRS commissioner to resist President Nixon’s political pressure. His predecessor, Randolph Thrower, was fired “for resisting White House pressure to punish political opponents,” as the Times notes. Thrower died this March at 100. When Walters took office in 1971, “his stated goals were simplifying the tax process and catching tax cheats,” but his job “had grown more complex” when Nixon imposed wage-and-price controls in an economically ignorant effort to curb inflation.
But the obituarist dryly notes that “Mr. Walters had not been told of Nixon’s other job requirements,” which surfaced in a recorded Oval Office conversation: “I want to be sure he is a ruthless son of a bitch, that he will do what he’s told, that every income-tax return I want to see I see, that he will go after our enemies and not go after our friends.” When Nixon learned that Walters had refused to follow the wrongful order, he asked: “Why the hell did we promote him?”
Later, he told the aforementioned White House aide, John Dean: “You’ve got to kick Walters’s ass out first and get a man in there.” He added that the Treasury secretary, George Shultz, “needed to make sure that Mr. Walters left if he wanted to keep his own job,” in the Times’s paraphrase. Shultz remained in office until May 1974, three months before Nixon’s resignation, and later served as President Reagan’s secretary of state. He’s still alive at 93.
This Wednesday, as Mediaite.com notes, Barack Obama’s Treasury secretary, Jack Lew, testified before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, pressed him about the purported harmonic convergence of crashed computers that caused seven IRS employees’ emails to go missing. “Sometimes a broken hard drive is just a broken hard drive,” Lew said.
As far as we know, even Bill Clinton never said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
One group of experts, the International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers, apparently disagrees with Lew and the current IRS commissioner, John Koskinen, as The Weekly Standard’s Jim Swift reports:
IAITAM administers internationally accepted certifications for information technology professionals. According to the group’s standards, if Lerner’s supposedly malfunctioning hardware was properly destroyed, there would be records of it.
Dr. Barbara Rembiesa, president of IAITAM, questions whether there is documentation of the destruction of the files. Who performed the work, says Rembiesa, is important because not all IT professionals are IAITAM certified.
“The notion that these emails just magically vanished makes no sense whatsoever. That is not how IT asset management at major businesses and government institutions works in this country. When the hard drive in question was destroyed, the IRS should have called in an accredited IT Asset Destruction (ITAD) professional or firm to complete that process, which requires extensive documentation, official signoffs, approvals, and signatures of completion. If this was done, there would be records. If this was not done, this is the smoking gun that proves the drive or drives were destroyed improperly – or not at all.”
Also on Wednesday, the House Ways and Means Committee released an eyebrow-raising email exchange from December 2012 (that is, postdating the alleged computer crashes). It seems that Lois Lerner, the IRS’s since-ousted head of tax-exempt organizations, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican member of the Senate Finance Committee, were invited to appear together at a conference.
Lerner turned down the invitation, emailing Matthew Giuliano, a lawyer then employed as a manager at the IRS: “Don’t think I want to be on stage with Grassley on this issue.” (The “issue” and the identity of the conference sponsor are redacted from the email exchange.) But she observed: “Looked like they were inappropriately offering to pay for [Grassley’s] wife. Perhaps we should refer to Exam?”
“We have seen a lot of unbelievable things in this investigation, but the fact that Lois Lerner attempted to initiate an apparently baseless IRS examination against a sitting Republican United States Senator is shocking,” Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp said in a press release. “At every turn, Lerner was using the IRS as a tool for political purposes in defiance of taxpayer rights.”
Giuliano gingerly replied to Lerner that he was “not sure we should send to exam. I think the offer to pay for Grassley’s wife is income to Grassley, and not prohibited on its face.”
There’s no indication that Lerner pressed the matter further, and the email exchange alone is consistent with the hypothesis that she was an overzealous enforcer but not a partisan one. That is the claim administration apologists have been making, though when you stop and think about it, that means their defense is that the IRS is indiscriminate in opportunistically snooping on private correspondence.
Anyway, everything else we know about Lerner and Obama-era IRS practices argues against that defense. “If this were a Republican administration,” former Clinton aide Lanny Davis tells radio host Larry O’Connor, who quotes him in the Washington Free Beacon, “I’d be saying when hard drives have been obliterated and this recent Lois Lerner–I think very inappropriate, maybe innocent but completely inappropriate–‘maybe we should look at Mr. Grassley’ … there’s no Democrat that I know of that wouldn’t be asking a Republican administration to conduct an independent investigation.”
Four decades ago, during a Republican administration that was brought down by corruption, the IRS turned out to be a bulwark of government integrity. Today the possibility remains that the IRS itself is the source of the corruption. As we’ve repeatedly argued, that would be even worse than an IRS that follows corrupt orders from the president. A corrupt administration can be replaced, as Nixon’s was. It’s harder to see what can be done if a vital and permanent institution of the administrative state has been corrupted.
Here’s an odd anniversary: Four days after Cher divorced Sonny Bono, she married Gregg Allman. Come back to this blog in nine days to find out what happened next.
Birthdays start with Florence Ballard of the Supremes …
This is Fr. Christian Maxfield of Trinity Episcopal Church in Platteville, Wis. (Our oldest son is ushering today.)
Today’s readings are Genesis 22:1–14, Psalm 13, Romans 6:12–23, and Matthew 10:40–42 for those keeping track at home.
Fr. Christian gives the children’s sermon with our three and the granddaughter of one of our members. Gracey the Maxfield dog is not pictured.
Today in 1957, Iran banned rock music, proclaiming that rock dancing was “harmful to health.” The ban stayed until the 1990s, which is surprising … that it was ever lifted. (I’m guessing it remains a de facto ban.)
Proving that there is no accounting for taste, here is the number 17 song today in 1968:
Today in 1967, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were sentenced on drug charges. Jagger was sentenced to one year in jail and Richards to three months after marijuana residue was found in Richards’ apartment. After a public outcry that included a London Times column, Richards’ charges were dropped and Jagger’s sentence was reduced to probation.
Of course, you could replace “1967” with any year and Jagger’ and Richards’ names with practically any rock musician’s name of those days.
Or other people: Today in 2000, Eminem’s mother sued her son for defamation from the line “My mother smokes more dope than I do” from his “My Name Is.”
Birthdays start with LeRoy Anderson, whose first work was the theme music for many afternoon movies, but who is best known for his second work (with which I point out that Christmas is less than six months away):
Today in 1957, Jerry Lee Lewis made his U.S. television debut:
Today in 1965 may have been why videocassette recorders (the precursor to TiVos, for younger readers) were invented. On ABC, Dick Clark premiered “Where the Action Is …”
… while on CBS New York DJ Murray the K hosted “It’s What’s Happening Baby!”
Today in 1968, this song was certified gold:
The number one single today in 1969:
Today in 1975, David Bowie found “Fame”:
Today in 1978, the UN named Kansas ambassadors of goodwill:
Two birthdays today are from the same group: Drummer Bobby Harrison was born two years before bassist Dave Knights of Procol Harum:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 