Use as many of these words as possible in a written composition.
No comments on Your challenge for today
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The number five song today in 1967 …
… was 27 spots higher than this song reached in 1978:
Birthdays start with Jerry Fielding, who composed the theme music to …
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Dueling ex-Beatles today: In 1978, one year after the play “Beatlemania” opened on Broadway, Ringo Starr released his “Bad Boy” album, while Paul McCartney and Wings released “I’ve Had Enough”:
The number six song one year later (with no known connection to Mr. Spock):
The number eight single today in 1990 …
… bears an interesting resemblance to an earlier song:
Put the two together, and you get …
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Today in 1956, 15-year-old John Lennon met 13-year-old Paul McCartney when Lennon’s band, the Quarrymen, played at a church dinner.
Birthdays today start with David Rose, the composer of a song many high school bands have played (really):
Nigel Pickering, guitarist of Spanky and Our Gang:
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I’m always amused when non-sportswriters try to explain sports.
It’s not that sportswriting is a mysterious art that requires decades of study. (Although writing does require a lot of not study, but, well, writing to get better at it.)
Before Thursday’s Miami win over San Antonio that tied the best-of-seven NBA Finals at two games each, the Washington Post discovered this novel theory of how the Spurs won the third game over the Heat:
To understand why the Spurs won — and why they have been one of the best teams in the league over the last decade-plus — it helps to read a certain 1990 paper in an economics journal. “Arbitrage in a Basketball Economy,” by Kevin Grier and Robert D. Tollison, explained a principle that remains useful: Successful basketball strategy resembles the financial concept of arbitrage.
Arbitrage is the principle that when there is a mispricing in a market, someone will trade to exploit the difference, making a profit for themselves and ending the mispricing. For example, the exchange rate between the dollar and the yen should be consistent with the dollar-to-euro and euro-to-yen exchanges rates. If those prices don’t line up — if there is free money to be made by trading dollars for yen, then exchanging the yen for euros, then euros back to dollars — somebody will do it almost instantly, and the mispricing will evaporate.
So, what does that have to do with the NBA?
In their paper in the journal Kykos, Grier and Tollison asked whether the question of who takes shots on a basketball team could or should obey the same principle.
Think of it this way: A basketball team has five players on the floor at any given time, and any of them can shoot from any point on the floor. Each shot has an “expected value” in terms of points. For a point guard shooting from just behind the three-point line, there might be a 45 percent chance of scoring three points if he sinks the shot, a 10 percent chance of being fouled and getting foul shots, a 25 percent chance of missing the shot but a teammate getting the rebound and allowing another scoring opportunity, and a 20 percent chance of missing and the opposing team getting the rebound. Multiply those out as a weighted average, and you would expect something like 1.4 points, on average, for every time the point guard takes that shot.What you want as a coach (or a fan, for that matter) is for every shot your player takes to have the same expected value. Your star forward driving to the lane? A big-but-slow center hogging the space under the basket and putting up an easy shot? A mid-range jumper by your journeyman point guard? They should all have the same expected value when all the possible outcomes and their relative probabilities are factored in.
If that’s not the case — say, your journeyman guard’s jumper has a higher expected value than your star forward’s inside shot — there’s an arbitrage opportunity. The coach should demand more shooting by the guard and less by the forward.
The best players will still end up taking more shots and scoring more points than the weaker players. But if defenses are guarding the stars more tightly and leaving easier opportunities for weaker players, a well-coached team will exploit the opportunity. Yes, to be a successful team you need to have good players. But to be a great coach, you need to deploy those players smartly so that there is no low-hanging fruit of higher-than-average expected value shots not being taken.
In their 1990 study, Grier and Tollison found that coaches’ success on this frontier — not just of winning more games or fewer, but on properly arbitraging what shots are taken — matters. “We show that managers who allocate shots better increase team victories and improve their own job security,” they wrote.
Which brings us back to Gary Neal and Danny Green, the stars of last night’s NBA finals game. The Heat defense was focused on stopping the Spurs’ biggest stars, Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili. Those three combined for only 25 points, less than half that of the Neal-Green combo. In the first half, even as the Spurs were leading, Duncan looked physically dejected at times.
But because he is a great coach, Gregg Popovich, ensured that his team was able to exploit whatever opportunities the opposing defense left open. And in this case, the fact that Neal and Green are journeymen who will probably never star in a sneaker commercial wasn’t a reason why they shouldn’t lead the Spurs offense. As the Bleacher Report puts it, “Spurs coach Gregg Popovich is the kind of guy who discovers $20 bills in his laundry, finding money seemingly everywhere he looks.”
Exploiting “whatever opportunities the opposing defense left open” is hardly a novel concept in basketball. It’s usually called “finding the open man.” The principle behind help defense is that defenders slide from the player they’re assigned to defend to whoever has the ball. That should leave someone uncovered by anybody; if the guy with the ball gets the ball to the uncovered man, and he doesn’t have hands of stone, the offense scores.
That’s not even a concept limited to basketball. Iowa football coach Hayden Fry described his offense as “scratch where it itches,” which for you non-Texans meant an offensive strategy contrary to the defense’s emphasis. If the defense was geared up to stop the run, throw; if the defense had one receiver double-teamed, throw it to the open guy. Indianapolis won a Super Bowl by successfully running the ball despite having future Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning. Baseball pitchers “pitch around” a hot hitter to try to get out a less-hot hitter. Wayne Gretzky won Stanley Cups not just because of his world-beating skill, but because other Edmonton Oilers stepped up. When Gretzky left the Oilers, he stopped winning Stanley Cups because the teams he was on had lesser supporting casts.
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The Capitalism Is Freedom website reports that Republican Mike Huckabee has a radical idea:
Mike Huckabee has gained prominence as both a faith leader and a politician. And on Monday, he straddled these two worlds as he spoke at a pastors’ conference in Houston, Texas. His comments, which were delivered before the start of the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting, invoked themes of religious freedom and churches’ interaction with the federal government. Of particular note, Huckabee said that it may be time for faith leaders to separate from the government in order to maintain their freedoms.
The former Arkansas governor and pastor decried the most recent revelation that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) targeted conservative groups and he offered up some contentious cautions for people of faith.
“The recent revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has been targeting people of faith — people who are conservative, people who are pro-Israel — and have been picking out the parts of belief and speech and faith that government seems to approve and that which it doesn’t approve has brought up a very important reality that I think, sooner or later, as believers, we need to confront,” he said, according to quotes published by the Associated Baptist Press.
Admitting that the audience might not agree with or appreciate his subsequent comments, Huckabee encouraged Christian leaders to at least hear him out and to prayerfully consider his words.
“I think we need to recognize that it may be time to quit worrying so much about the tax code and start thinking more about the truth of the living God, and if it means that we give up tax-exempt status and tax deductions for charitable contributions, I choose freedom more than I choose a deduction that the government gives me permission to say what God wants me to say,” he continued.
Huckabee seemed to be telling the crowd that it may be time for churches to simply leave behind the coveted 501(c)(3) status to give themselves more freedom (IRS rules restrict political endorsements and other partisan speech from the pulpit). In the former presidential candidate’s view, freedom is more important than “financial benefit.”
“I must be very honest and tell you; I have never given a dime to God that I gave solely because it was a tax decision,” Huckabee continued. “And if you’ve got people in your church who are giving because it’s a tax decision, then they ought to keep their money. They need it more than God does.”
I’m not a Southern Baptist. I know of no one who gives to a church mainly, let alone solely, for the tax deduction. Churches are like any organization (including a business) in that what comes in needs to exceed what’s going out over the long term, or else that organization will cease to exist. Note, of course, that while Jesus Christ told Christians to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and give to God what is God’s (Matthew 22:21, Mark 12:17, Luke 20:25), the God of the Old Testament asked only 10 percent, not the 30 percent the federal, Wisconsin and local Caesars require of us.
(That’s assuming that those Bible verses haven’t been misinterpreted by those who favor government’s sucking up our tax dollars. Read the counterargument here.)
The problem with Huckabee’s assertion about the non-taxed status of churches specifically or nonprofits generally is that whatever the nonprofit is taxed is money that cannot go to the nonprofit’s mission. If, for instance, United Way donations were taxable, the United Way would have less money for the charities it funds. Churches that have to pay taxes would have fewer resources available to help their areas’ less fortunate.
Of course, the same applies to business. Any dollar of tax a business pays is one less dollar it can use on the business, or pay its employees, or pay its owners. The only people who should pay taxes are actual, living, breathing people. That would solve the next issue, which is that the IRS has no businesses telling ministers what they can or cannot do. For Christians, God’s authority always trumps man’s.
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Today in 1965, the Beatles released “Beatles VI,” their seventh U.S. album:
Twenty-five years later, Frank Sinatra reached number 32, but probably number one in New York:
Nine years and a different coast later, Carole King got her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame:
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First: National Review reports:
Over the past several decades, American teachers’ salaries and benefits have increased steadily, while the academic performance of the nation’s students has stagnated. In a new paper released on Wednesday, Sally Lovejoy and Chad Miller of the American Action Forum argue that teachers unions’ and their collective-bargaining policies are at least partly to blame for both issues.
The authors cite an array of studies examining the impact of teachers’ unions and their negotiating strategies. The majority of these studies have found that collective-bargaining agreements typically focus on higher teacher pay and benefits and greater job security, with little consideration given to student performance. In fact, teachers’ unions have historically resisted most efforts to hold teachers accountable for the academic performance of their students, and have succeeded consistently. Tenure policies, for instance, make it virtually impossible to fire unqualified or ineffective teachers. Most states award tenure automatically after about three years, and do not test a new teacher’s mastery of even the most basic reading and math skills. Perhaps not surprisingly, this has had a largely negative impact on the students themselves, especially those in large urban school districts with a high percentage of black and Hispanic students.
The paper compares student-performance data from two such districts, New York City and Chicago (both of which require collective bargaining), with data from Charlotte, N.C., and Austin, Texas, urban districts in states where collective bargaining is banned for public employees. The two different situations reveal how collective bargaining is inflating salaries, compensation, and job security while it’s strangling policies that could help student achievement. …
Research indicates that high-quality teachers have a significant impact on student achievement both in school and beyond, making the teachers’ unions’ resistance to performance-based evaluation all the more frustrating. One study by professors at Harvard and Columbia found that students assigned to teachers classified as “high-value added” instructors attend better colleges, earn higher salaries, and are less likely to have children as teenagers. Furthermore, simply replacing a “low-value added” teacher with an average one can increase students’ lifetime earning by as much as $1.4 million.
According to teacher unions, every teacher is a great teacher. According to reality, that is not the case. In addition to inflating the cost of schools, teacher unions protect bad teachers and inhibit the ability of good teachers to do better. Too bad Gov. Scott Walker tried merely to make government employees pay more for their (taxpayer-funded) benefits, instead of destroying teacher unions.
Speaking of the cost of schools, George Mitchell points out something you haven’t heard in the ongoing complaints that every single taxpayer dollar is not going to schools:
Of the many fallacies perpetuated by lazy journalists, one of the most consequential involves public school finance. = Coverage of current budget deliberations in Madison illustrates this.
Consider a recent Green Bay Press-Gazette story on the possible expansion of the Milwaukee and Racine school choice program.
Oconto Falls district Superintendent Dave Polashek was reported as one of many local school officials “frustrated” by the prospect. He said, “At a time when we’re cutting things like drivers education and home ec, they want to divert funding from public schools to create a dual school system.” Polashek said legislators are “somewhat oblivious to the needs of schools. Does it make sense to support private education with public dollars at a time when we’re hurting?”
In a similar vein, the Journal Sentinel editorial board accused legislators of “[c]ontinuing their attack on the public school system” by approving a tax deduction for parents of private school students. The paper opined,”The losers [will] be public schools, which are already under significant financial pressure. Wisconsin has great public schools; why not give them more support instead of undermining them?” …
In fact, however, only by ignoring recent history can one believe that Wisconsin public schools are financially shortchanged. That history flatly refutes the claim that legislators are “oblivious to the needs of schools.”
In 1987, per pupil public school revenues were $4,302. If schools had been held harmless from inflation in the next twenty-four years, revenues would need to have grown 88 per cent, to $8,108.
What actually happened during that period? Financial support for public schools ballooned 198 per cent, more than twice as fast as inflation. By 2010 this meant that public school revenue equaled $12,822/pupil, a whopping 58 per cent increase over the level that would have held schools harmless from inflation. The accompanying chart compares how spending actually has grown with what would have occurred to insulate schools from inflation.
The new money added to the K-12 system by 2010 equaled $4,714/pupil. Given public school enrollment of 872,000 students that year, Wisconsin taxpayers had provided public schools with a spending windfall of more than $4.1 billion a year by the time Governor Walker took office. So much for being “oblivious.”
Wisconsin journalists have failed to report this history. Further, they have failed to explain adequately that much of the new spending has not reached the classroom. Instead, it has gone to pension, health care, and other fringe benefits. Where such costs once equaled about a quarter of teacher salaries, in many school districts that share now exceeds fifty per cent. In the Milwaukee Public Schools, the meteoric rise in fringe benefits is the principal reason for reductions in education programming that have been part of recent budgets. …
The overall journalistic failure has predictable consequences when it comes to public opinion. In scientific polling, scholars at Harvard University have found that the public is clueless when it comes to public school spending and levels of teacher compensation.
These scholars have reported their findings in the respected journal Education Next. They find that the average citizen has a “wildly inaccurate” understanding of school finance. For example, “…[w]e asked respondents to estimate average per-pupil expenditures within their local school district and the average teacher salaries in their states…[W]e discovered that those surveyed, on average, underestimated per-pupil expenditures by more than half and teacher salaries by roughly 30 percent…”
How do citizens react when they “learn the truth”?
- “For the nation as a whole, overall support for higher spending levels dropped by 8 percentage points (from 46 to 38 percent) when respondents were informed of actual per-pupil expenditures in their own district.”
- The impacts of this information varied widely across subgroups. Told the truth about per-pupil expenditures, the share of African Americans willing to support additional spending plummeted from 82 to 48 percent.”
- “When informed about actual average teacher salaries in their state, respondents’ support for higher salaries dropped by 16 percentage points (from 56 to 40 percent).”
You won’t learn this from the Department of Propaganda and Inaccuracies — I mean, the Department of Public Instruction, which appears to spend at least half of its employee time sending out news releases that scream for more money for schools, as Collin Roth reports:
State Superintendent Tony Evers makes no secret about his opposition to the school choice program and its expansion. “Our children are caught in the crossfire of an ideologically driven expansion of school vouchers that is financially reckless and academically unproven,” said Evers in a recent statement.
But RightWisconsin has uncovered that beyond just vocally opposing the expansion of school choice, Tony Evers and the Department of Public Instruction staff used taxpayer resources to actively encourage superintendents around the state to enlist their faculty and parents to lobby against the expansion of school choice.
On May 30, Deputy State Superintendent Michael Thompson sent out the following message from Tony Evers to school administrators around the state …
With these marching orders in hand (received on their taxpayer-financed computers via their taxpayer-maintained email accounts) superintendents around the state then used their publicly funded email networks to enlist the support of publicly-funded faculty and parents to oppose the expansion of school choice.
In Plymouth, Superintendent Clark Reinke sent out a “Legislative Alert” that said, ” I want to urge you to contact our legislators and other legislators on the Joint Finance Comm to voice concern about voucher expansion and the process being used to advance this policy.”
Oshkosh Superintendent Stan F. Mack II did the same thing, forwarding on Evers message with his own personal appeal. “It is critical that you consider following up on the advice of State Superintendent Tony Evers and contact State legislators,” wrote Mack.
A quick look at the Department of Public Instruction finds the government agency acting as the political organizing hub for opponents of school choice. Superintendent Evers has posted statement after statement opposing and deriding the choice program and there is a 17-page white paper detailing DPI’s opposition to Governor Walker’s proposal to expand the school choice program. And now we know that Evers’ deputy was running an operation to mobilize opposition to the expansion of choice.
This is the logical result, first, of voters having given little thought to who should run the state’s schools over the decades. The next superintendent of public instruction (Evers’ releases refer to himself as only “state superintendent,” by the way) who actually gives a damn about how taxpayer dollars are spent will be the first. The next superintendent who is not a puppet of the Wisconsin Education Association Council will be the first. The next superintendent who admits that this state’s public schools are (1) overrated and (2) failing some children will be the first. (Truth be told, in the same way that a civilian heads the U.S. Defense Department, a non-educator should head DPI.)
Part of this is conservatives’ fault for not fielding credible, well financed opponents for the incumbent superintendents. (I voted for Don Pridemore in April, but I had no illusions of him actually winning, and I never thought he was the best possible non-education-establishment candidate.) Republicans have been less than successful in explaining to and persuading voters, particularly parents, that children deserve the best possible education — not measured by how much money is spent, but on results — and if that best possible education isn’t in the child’s home school district, then somewhere else, public or private. (The federal GI Bill allows veterans to attend any college they wish, public or private. The GI Bill does not violate separation of church and state. The GI Bill might be a useful model for state education spending.) The GOP also failed to persuade parents who like their kids’ schools of how vouchers wouldn’t hurt successful public schools. (Indeed, the proposed $150-per-student increase in allowable spending should have been based in part on the school report cards, with more money going to the school districts with A- and B-graded schools.)
I’ve been around long enough to remember when Gov. Tommy Thompson hamhandedly tried to go around DPI by creating a Department of Education run by his own nominee. No one in the Thompson administration apparently bothered to check on whether that was constitutional (it most likely wasn’t — their apparent model of taking duties away from the secretary of state to the governor’s cabinet appointees didn’t really apply), and no one felt like taking on the educational establishment, including DPI, by promoting change to the state’s Constitution to get rid of DPI. Which is not to say the Democrats are the party of political courage in education either, proven not just throughout Recallarama but particularly by the failure of Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett to demand control of Milwaukee Public Schools, as his predecessor, John Norquist, wanted.
The flip side of the Republicans’ miscommunicating their stance on education is what happened to school vouchers in this state as of, apparently, when the 2013–15 budget takes effect. Wisconsin started with vouchers only for MPS. Republicans wanted to add nine other school districts that have big-city school district problems. (Several of those additional school districts opposed the voucher program. The correct response to that is the Golden Rule of Politics: He who has the gold makes the rules.) At no point have I ever heard a Democrat explain why parents of children who attend private schools — who want, for instance, their children to get the morals and values the public schools do not teach — why they should pay for public school property taxes and private-school tuition tax-break-free.
Democrats and, apparently, the Republican Gang of Three — Sens. Mike Ellis (R–Neenah), Luther Olsen (R–Ripon) and Dale Schultz (R–Richland Center), who relish their contrariness when they’re in the majority — opposed adding the nine school districts. So what are we getting instead? School choice for every school district. Yes, it’s only 500 students statewide this coming school year and 1,000 the following school year, which averages out to one to two students per school district. But study of government demonstrates that once a government program begins, it’s nearly impossible to stop. Future Republican gubernatorial and legislative candidates will campaign on expanding the program beyond 1,000 students. Their future opponents will be hard pressed to explain to parents happy with their children’s school choices why they should be pulled out of those schools and thrown back into the inferior (in the minds of those parents) public schools.
Educational politics is a real education, isn’t it? -
“Could people like Bob Dole, even Ronald Reagan — could you make it in today’s Republican Party?” Chris Wallace of “Fox News Sunday” asked former Senate Majority Leader and 1996 GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole.
“I doubt it,” Dole replied. “Reagan wouldn’t have made it. Certainly, Nixon couldn’t have made it, because he had ideas and — We might have made it, but I doubt it.” …
I don’t blame Wallace for asking it, I guess, because every time a major Republican says Reagan couldn’t get nominated today, it gets enormous play. When Jeb Bush said something to that effect last summer, it ignited a minor firestorm.
This time around, the sirens went off at The New York Times the moment Dole uttered his remarks. Members of the Times’ editorial board sprang from their beds like firefighters, putting on their boots midstride as they raced for the newsroom to bang out an op-ed titled “The Wisdom of Bob Dole.”
It was arguably their most predictable editorial ever — or at least since the Times’ endorsement(s) of Barack Obama, or their endorsements of John Kerry, Al Gore, Bill Clinton (twice), Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter (twice), George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy. Clearly, when the Times frets that the Republican Party is dangerously “abandoning its past,” you know it has the best interests of the GOP at heart.
Never mind that the Times didn’t have much use for Dole and viewed Reagan’s takeover of the White House as tantamount to a barbarian invasion.
So why is it a ridiculous question? Well, first of all, it’s not a literal question but a figurative one. After all, if Reagan were alive today, he would be 102 years old.
Obviously, what Wallace meant is: “Would a politician with his positions make it in today’s GOP?”
But this, too, has more poetic license than people realize. After all, a candidate who kept insisting that we should roll back the Soviet Union wouldn’t be greeted as a man of unbending principle, but as a loon. The Soviet Union is gone. The world has moved on. The issues have changed.
Even being generous on this point, the simple fact is that no former president of the United States would have an easy time getting elected today. Nixon wouldn’t fare well today not because he had “ideas,” as Dole ludicrously said, but because Nixon was a screaming liberal by today’s standards. And I don’t simply mean today’s Republican standards. Nixon started the Environmental Protection Agency. He implemented wage and price controls. He didn’t just push affirmative action programs, but racial quotas too.
As for the Democrats, which one, exactly, would have an easy time getting elected today? Forget about the repugnant sexual antics; John F. Kennedy was a foreign-policy hawk and tax cutter. Jimmy Carter? A haughty, born-again Christian Southerner? Sure, he’d sail through the Democratic primaries. Even Bill Clinton, despite his enormous popularity among Democrats today, probably couldn’t get nominated if he ran as the Democrat he was in 1992.
No one knows how Nixon, Carter, Clinton or Reagan — never mind FDR, Lincoln or Washington — would change their views with the benefit of hindsight. It’s a fun parlor game to guess. But that’s all it is: a game.
Meanwhile, Republicans are subjected to a double standard. On one hand, they are vilified for being too inflexible, too hidebound. On the other hand, they’re condemned for not holding the exact same positions other Republicans held 30 or even 60 years ago. (Obama loves to invoke Eisenhower’s positions as if they prove GOP hypocrisy.) Which is it? Are they rigid, or changing too much?
Obama doesn’t even hold the same positions he held five years ago. But his ever-changing views are proof of “pragmatism” and “evolution.”
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This was a good day for the Beatles in 1970 … even though they were breaking up.
Their “Let It Be” album was at number one, as was this single off the album:
Don’t criticize the number one album today in 1980, lest you be criticized for living in “Glass Houses”:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 