The number one single, believe it or don’t, today in 1961:
In an unrelated development that day, Frank Sinatra began Reprise Records, which included artists beside Sinatra:
No comments on Presty the DJ for Feb. 13
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Roger L. Simon makes an interesting conclusion about the Republican Party’s two ideological halves:
Reading David Harsanyi’s well-reasoned article “Sorry, America Isn’t Destined To Be More Liberal” in The Federalist, I was struck once again how we are at a point where only social conservatives can save liberalism. Harsanyi was responding to what he calls “wishful thinking” in a Washington Post op-ed by Steve Rosenthal, a former political director of the AFL-CIO, ”America is becoming more liberal.”
Harsanyi correctly points out that most of what Rosenthal cites as evidence for this tilt are social issues — most prominently same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization. And certainly it’s true that gay marriage and legalized pot are more popular than ever. Rosenthal also makes the claim that anti-big business feeling is on the rise, as if that were an indication of a preference for liberalism — or am I mistaken and George Soros is a “small businessman”?
In reality what is really going on is not a liberal revolution but a libertarian one. More Americans than ever, or at least during my lifetime, distrust the federal government and think it’s too big. Indeed, in the latest Gallup poll of America’s problems, government itself leads the way among our citizens with 21% followed by the economy with 18%. The president’s bugaboo, “the gap between rich and poor,” registers a paltry 4%. …
This analysis of the (admittedly macro) political trends in our country tracks well with my personal observation. Being an older guy with a teenage daughter, I have been blessed in many ways — not the least of which is considerable contact with the younger generation. Much of that contact is circumscribed, but not all of it. Recently I have had the opportunity to interview high school students from many different social classes and ethnicities.
Although I didn’t ask them directly about their politics — that was off the table for the interviews I was conducting — I got a fair glimpse of their views as time went on just through the flow of the conversation. Worry about their economic future is, not surprisingly, pervasive, but there was practically universal skepticism of government’s ability to solve it. They saw themselves as individual actors, libertarian, in most cases, without even realizing it. They were also highly aware of Obamacare and its innate unfairness to the younger generation, as well as its overweening bureaucratic disorganization.
In fact, when you come down to it, virtually nothing associated with the liberal platform met with their approval — even legalization of marijuana was dealt with in most instances with a shrug — except, you guessed it, same-sex marriage.
That appears to be the one issue militating against a coming Republican majority, but it is an exceptionally potent one because it is used, fairly or not, to paint the right as bigots. And young people, again not surprisingly, don’t want to hang with bigots — so the whole house of cards goes down.
On the other hand, I sensed no hostility toward religious people. Several of these kids were religious — a few devoutly. They were quite thoughtful on the subject of abortion with a variety of views. But to them gay marriage was a done deal. Remember, they come from a generation in which nearly all of their gay contemporaries are out. These are their friends and classmates that are being discriminated against. …
No one is going to be happy here. SoCons who continue to press this issue on the political (not the personal or religious) stage have to realize that they are damaging many of us who have other concerns domestic and foreign, many of which we would probably agree on more easily.
This is a great moment. A seriously smaller government is a real possibility with electoral victories in 2014 and 2016. Let’s not jeopardize them by emphasizing an issue more properly, and unquestionably more successfully, dealt with in the private realm.
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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:
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If there is one celebrity who extols the value of hard work regardless of the line of work, it is Mike Rowe.
Rowe apparently narrated a Walmart commercial during the Winter Olympics Saturday …
… and the response wasn’t unanimous, as Rowe writes on his Facebook page.
Let’s start with Kevin Groce.
“Mike – Walmart was the last thing I would ever think you would do anything for! Why?
Hi Kevin,
That’s easy. Walmart has committed to purchase 250 billion dollars of American made products over the next decade. In essence, that’s a purchase order made out to the USA for a quarter of a trillion dollars. That means dozens of American factories are going to reopen all over the country. Millions of dollars will pour straight into local economies, and hundreds of thousands of new manufacturing positions will need to be filled. That’s a massive undertaking packed with enormous challenges, and I want to help. I want to see them succeed. Don’t you? Honestly Kevin, who gives a crap about your feelings toward Walmart? Who gives a crap about mine? Isn’t this the kind of initiative we can all get behind?? …
Hopefully, I’ll redeem myself in the future. But I’ve never supported the “underdog” simply because they’re not the favorite. Size might matter in some pursuits, (I’ve been assured it does,) but in business, there’s nothing inherently good about being small, and nothing inherently bad about being big. My foundation supports skilled labor, American manufacturing, entrepreneurial risk, a solid work ethic, and personal responsibility. We reward these qualities wherever we find them, whether they’re in David or Goliath. …
I think anything on television, especially a commercial with a big claim delivered by a professional spokesman should always be questioned. But if the country can’t get behind a program like this, I’m afraid we are all well and truly screwed. …
There’s a lot of merchandise currently in Walmart that’s manufactured right here in the USA – (including Dirty Jobs Cleaning Products.) But let’s assume – for the purpose of conversation – that Walmart did get every single item from China. Wouldn’t you like to see that change? Watch the ad again. Walmart is promising to buy 250 billion dollars of American made stuff and put it on their shelves. Whatever else you might think of the company, can you really root against an initiative like that? Let me ask it another way. Do you really think America has any hope of reinvigorating our manufacturing base without support from the biggest retailer in the world? …
Remember, this is Walmart making the claim. They have to make good on it, because if they’re blowing smoke, their detractors will eat them alive. I believe this thing is going to happen because they are completely out of the closet with it. Walmart is going to buy a quarter trillion dollars of American made goods in the next ten years and put those goods on their shelves. The only question is whether or not Americans will support that effort. If they do, we just might be looking at a stimulus that actually stimulates something.
Rose Marie Bayless writes –
“Dear Mike – There’s only one little problem with your new commercial for Walmart….and that is that they do NOT provide manufacturing jobs.”
Hi Rose. You’re correct – Walmart doesn’t “provide” manufacturing jobs. Mostly because they’re not a manufacturing company. They’re a retailer. They buy all sorts of things from all sorts of suppliers all over the world, which they then sell to millions of Americans. In fact, 60% of all Americans shop there. That’s why Walmart is so successful. And that’s why they can do a great deal to encourage their suppliers to manufacture goods domestically. That’s what this initiative is all about – a financial commitment to buy from American suppliers.
“Hey, I am on your side here, I want “made in America” too but make you’re sure on the side of the WORKER not the corporate greed side ok Mike? Love ya.”
Love ya back, Rose, but no thanks. You offer up a false and dangerous choice. The world is bigger than “Workers vs. Bosses,” and so is this campaign. Remember, Walmart thrives because a majority of Americans like to shop there. Like Apple, Discovery, Ford, and Facebook, Walmart does not exist for the purpose of employing people. No successful company does. Walmart’s first order of business is to serve their customer. Ultimately, the customer calls the shots. Not management. Not labor. Jobs are just a happy consequence of that success. …
Most portrayals of work gravitate to one extreme or the other. Dream Jobs and Dangerous Jobs make better TV that Normal Jobs. With Dirty Jobs, I got lucky. We featured regular, hardworking people, covered with crap, but happy in their work. There was no talk about jobs being “good or bad.” The people on Dirty Jobs saw work as an opportunity, and they took pride in what they did. I loved that. This spot reminded me of the people I met on my show. I was struck by how familiar they looked. I guess that’s what happens when you cast real people…
omingUnglued
Feb. 8, 2014 at 4:41pm
“Walmart can be a hero here. Just do it! I’ll shop there when they do! We want everything clean and nice. No dirty manufacturing for us, no stinky farms. Wake up America, where are your dirty manufacturing jobs now, overseas that’s where. Where are all the farms? Where is your food coming from? Overseas, check the labels in the grocery stores.”You’re right, Unglued. Walmart can change the game. But the business of filling a few hundred thousand new factory jobs is not a slam dunk. Because in spite of high unemployment, hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs currently exist that no one seems to want. That little piece of the narrative doesn’t get a lot of press, but it should. Because the skills gap is real, and it’s a mistake to assume that people will line up to take jobs that so many people love to disparage.
One of the real disconnects around this issue for me has been the steady drumbeat of unemployment in the headlines. I know that the labor participation rate is at historic lows. I know that millions are out of work. But I also know that I’ve seen Help Wanted signs in all 50 states. Even at the height of the recession, the employers I met on Dirty Jobs were all hiring. They still are. And they all told me the same thing – the biggest challenge of running a business was finding people who were willing to learn a new skill and work hard.
I like this campaign because at it’s heart, it portrays hard work as something dignified and decent. Lot’s of people will criticize these spots as nothing but PR. But PR matters. A lot. Because right now, people are disconnected from the part of our workforce that still makes things. We can’t reinvigorate the trades until we agree and understand the importance of buying American. Again – who can be against that? …
Sean Murray’s not done with me. He writes again,
“Misguided. Mike Rowe should have never done this ad due to the fact it came from WalMart. I like the message, but Walmart is one of the reasons a lot of manufacturing was lost in the United States. The vast majority of merchandise Walmart sells in the U.S. is manufactured abroad. The company searches the world for the cheapest goods possible, and this means buying from low-wage factories overseas. Walmart boasts of direct relationships with nearly 20,000 Chinese suppliers, and purchased $27 billion worth of Chinese-made goods in 2006. According to the Economic Policy Institute, Walmart’s trade with China alone eliminated 133,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs between 2001 and 2006 and accounted for 11.2 percent of the nation’s total job loss due to trade. With $419 billion in annual net sales, Walmart’s market power is so immense that blah, blah, blah…”
Forgive me Sean, but I’ve replaced the rest of your rant with “blah blah blah” because it appears to have been cut and pasted word for word from a political site dedicated to destroying Walmart. And also because reactions like yours are the reason our country is paralyzed. You’re like the diehard conservatives who freaked out because I sat too close to Bill Maher, and the diehard liberals that got all bent when I got too close to Glenn Beck. You’re stuck in your own narrative.
Step back for a minute. Look at what’s happening here. Walmart has just promised to do something you claim to want them to do. How do you react? Do you encourage them? Do you support them? No. You hold fast to the the party line. You lash out. Our country is falling apart around us, and you criticize me. For what? For doing a voiceover on a commercial that celebrates the dignity of hard work? I realize you’d prefer it if Costco was pushing this campaign forward, but guess what – they’re not.
But, maybe they will? Maybe they’ll all get on board? Target, Best Buy, Kohl’s, Macy’s, Dollar General, Home Depot, Lowe’s…maybe they’ll all make similar commitments to American manufacturing? And maybe Americans will finally make it easy by demanding and buying more American made products. So far – that hasn’t happened. Maybe Walmart will break the logjam. Someone has to at least try, don’t you think?
Seriously Sean, do you and all the other detractors really want to see this campaign fail because it’s coming from a retailer whose policies you don’t approve of? Do us all a favor – try to get over it. Try to get over your disappointment with me. Try to get over your disappointment with Walmart. Try to get past your issues with the messenger, and take another look at the message…
A quarter trillion dollar commitment to American made products. 250,000 new jobs.
Really – what’s not to like?
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James Pethokoukis has a movie idea that sounds like …
In a recent letter to the Wall Street Journal, multimillionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins expressed great concern about the protests in the San Francisco Bay Area against company buses for tech workers. The episodes have mostly been peaceful, but in December some protesters smashed a window on a Google bus in Oakland. Still, it’s a quite a leap — an impossibly long one, actually — from that bit of vandalism to the Kristallnacht rerun, this time against the rich, described in Perkins’s letter, which carried the headline “Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?” Perkins quickly apologized for his “terrible misjudgment” in making the Nazi Germany analogy.
What’s more, the Bay Area — with its long left-wing tradition and influx of youthful and monied techies — isn’t a representative slice of America. Formerly lovable geeks are now despised by progressive activists for their display of transportation privilege and their presumed inflationary impact on housing prices. Oh, and there is a small minority of Occupy Silicon Valley types/Terminator fans concerned that Google’s purchases of artificial intelligence and robotics companies are creating, as one protester told the New York Times, “an unconscionable world of surveillance, control and automation.”
So, you know, San Francisco. Those parochial and paranoid concerns aside, however, the rest of America does seem to share an unease about income distribution — even if it hardly justifies Perkins’s hyperbolic concerns about demonizing the wealthy. That President Obama incessantly talks about income inequality is evidence: The White House political team surely has taken notice of polls on inequality such as a recent one from Pew Research/USA Todayshowing that 60 percent of Americans think the U.S. economic system “unfairly favors the wealthy.” In the same poll, 82 percent favor the notion that Washington should try and close the income gap. …
While reasonable minds can differ on the morality of large income gaps, the evidence shows no correlation between extreme inequality and mobility. Mobility has changed little in the past 40 years, according to new research from the Equality of Opportunity Project. The 60 percent of the people in the Pew/USA Today survey who still believe that most people “who want to get ahead can make it if they’re willing to work hard” are correct. You wouldn’t know that from the president’s speeches, though. Nor would you know that the wealth gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent has actually narrowed a bit over the past generation.
So it would be helpful to the quality of public debate if Obama presented a fuller and more accurate picture of income inequality. When we depict high-end income inequality as a critical problem, argues Brooking scholar Ron Haskins, “discussion quickly turns to criticizing the rich.”
And to what end? Even higher income taxes? As Haskins points out in a recent report, the top 1 percent of earners pay nearly 40 percent of income taxes, while the bottom 40 percent receive in refundable income-tax credits the equivalent of 5 percent of their salary. America already has an extraordinarily progressive federal tax code by international standards.
Moreover, Obama consistently fails to find any moral or economic distinction between getting rich by creating a new products or services versus taking advantage, for instance, of the federal government’s continued “too big to fail” banking backstop. Nuance matters. So do words. …
So here’s the plausible plot for nightmarish future scenario: The rich aren’t rounded up, but disrespect for earned success from innovation and wealth creation leads to less of both — and to a much poorer America.
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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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Here’s a nice catty New York Post item:
Forgive and forget? Not Bill and Hillary.
A system of political rewards and punishments devised by the political power couple set aside “a special circle of Clinton hell . . . for people who had endorsed [President] Obama,” according to “HRC,” a new book by Politico former White House bureau chief Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes of The Hill.
The most helpful Clintonistas were rated “1” under the Clintons’ rating system, while turncoat former allies, such as John Kerry, received “7’s.”
The Clinton camp would later “joke about the fates of the folks they felt had betrayed them,” the book said.
“Bill Richardson: investigated; John Edwards: disgraced by scandal; Chris Dodd: stepped down; . . . Ted Kennedy: dead,” an aide quipped, according to the book.
Kennedy “had slashed Hillary worst of all, delivering a pivotal endorsement speech for Obama just before the Super Tuesday primaries [in 2008] that cast her as yesterday’s news and Obama as the rightful heir to Camelot,” the authors wrote. “Bill Clinton had pleaded with Kennedy to hold off, but to no avail.”
The couple’s political hardball — and groundwork for a potential Hillary presidential run in 2016 — began behind the scenes in 2008 after she lost the Democratic presidential primary to Obama, and it ramped up in 2012 as the president struggled to defeat Republican nominee Mitt Romney.
Bill Clinton applied his own version of the “friend in need” adage, offering letters of recommendation, endorsements and advice to potential and established allies — with the expectation the chits will be cashed in for the 2016 race. …
Punishment came in the form of Bill backing the opponents of Obama backers — even four years after his wife’s bitter 2008 campaign. …Even when Bill Clinton famously campaigned for Obama in 2012, he would draw the line at anything that could hurt his wife’s 2016 chances.Bubba refused Obama’s request to appear with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a first-term Democrat from Massachusetts, because she was viewed as a potential primary rival in 2016.
Bill Clinton has always been about Bill Clinton, even ideologically. Hillary Clinton is also about herself, but not ideologically. If, God forbid, Hillary becomes president, that will mean all of the negatives of the Bubba presidency with none of the positives of the Bubba presidency.
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The Daily Caller passes on this survey:
Despite more optimism about the U.S. economy and their own companies, the quarterly survey, conducted by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and CFO Magazine found that “48% of US CFOs say their firms are considering reducing employment in response to the Affordable Care Act.”
Twenty percent of CFOs said that they may hire fewer workers in response to Obamacare. Ten percent said that layoffs were a possibility while 40 percent of CFOs said they might decrease employees’ hours to below the 30-hour-a-week threshold.
Under Obamacare, companies with more the 50 employees must offer health insurance coverage to employees who work an average of 30 or more hours per week.
Besides altering the makeup of their workforces, companies said they also plan to change the health benefit packages offered to employees.
“Two-thirds of companies will change health benefits in response to ACA,” reads the Fuqua/CFO Magazine report summary.
Forty-four percent of CFOs said they are considering reducing health benefits for employees. Thirty-eight percent said that employees and retirees may be forced to contribute more to their health plans.
“The inadequacies of the ACA website have grabbed a lot of attention, even though many of those issues have been or can be fixed,” said John Graham, Duke Fuqua School of Business finance professor and director of the survey, in a press release.
“Our survey points to a more detrimental and potentially long-lasting problem. An unintended consequence of the Affordable Care Act will be a reduction in full-time employment growth in the United States,” the study says.
Graham said that companies plan to increase full-time employment by 1.4 percent over the next year, a decrease in expectations from the previous quarter.
“CFOs indicate that full-time employment growth would be stronger in the absence of the ACA,” said Graham.
“I doubt the advocates of this legislation would have foretold the negative impact on employment,” said Campbell R. Harvey, a Fuqua finance professor and survey director, also in a press release.
“The impact on the real economy is startling. Nearly one-third of firms may either terminate employees or hire fewer people in the future as a direct result of ACA.”
Did the Obama administration really intend to increase unemployment? It makes you wonder, particularly when Fox News adds:
The Congressional Budget Office released its annual economic projection Tuesday, sending tweeters into a tizzy.
At issue: the impact of ObamaCare and the number of full-time jobs that might go away as a result of the federally mandated insurance program.
The CBO predicts nearly 2.5 million workers could opt out of the work force to stay eligible for Medicaid and other federal subsidies — resulting in the loss of 2.3 million jobs.
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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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Right now, 50 years ago at 8 Eastern, 7 Central, on a CBS-TV station your rabbit ears could pick up …
There have been a number of top-whatever lists of Beatles songs, so I might as well contribute mine:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 