I thoroughly disagree with the number one song today in 1961:
Today in 1965, the Beatles found that “Ticket to Ride” was a ticket to the top of the charts:
The number one album today in 1971 was the Rolling Stones’ “Sticky Fingers”:
Leaving aside the seriousness of lawlessness, and the corruption of our civic culture by the professionally pious, this past week has been amusing. There was the spectacle of advocates of an ever-larger regulatory government expressing shock about such government’s large capacity for misbehavior. And, entertainingly, the answer to the question “Will Barack Obama’s scandals derail his second-term agenda?” was a question: What agenda?
The scandals are interlocking and overlapping in ways that drain his authority. Everything he advocates requires Americans to lavish on government something that his administration, and big government generally, undermines: trust.
Liberalism’s agenda has been constant since long before liberals, having given their name a bad name, stopped calling themselves liberals and resumed calling themselves progressives, which they will call themselves until they finish giving that name a bad name. The agenda always is: Concentrate more power in Washington, more Washington power in the executive branch and more executive power in agencies run by experts. Then trust the experts to be disinterested and prudent with their myriad intrusions into, and minute regulations of, Americans’ lives. Obama’s presidency may yet be, on balance, a net plus for the public good if it shatters Americans’ trust in the regulatory state’s motives.
(By the way: Replace “Washington” in the previous paragraph with “Madison,” and you have perfectly described Wisconsin.)
One tactic was to misrepresent the Benghazi attack, lest it undermine his narrative about taming terrorism. Does anyone think the administration’s purpose in manufacturing12 iterations of the talking points was to make them more accurate?
Another tactic was using the “federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” The words are from a 1971 memo by the then-White House counsel, John Dean, whose spirit still resides where he worked before going to prison. Congress may contain some Democrats who owed their 2012 election to the IRS’s suppression of conservative political advocacy.
Obama’s supposed “trifecta” of scandals — Benghazi, the IRS and the seizure of Associated Press phone records — neglects some. A fourth scandal is power being wielded by executive branch officials (at the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) illegally installed in office by presidential recess appointments made when the Senate was not in recess.
A fifth might be from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, whosolicited funds from corporations in industries that HHS regulates to replace some that Congress refused to appropriate. The money is to be spent by nonprofit — which does not mean nonpolitical — entities. The funds are to educate Americans about, which might mean (consider the administration’s Benghazi and IRS behaviors) propagandize in favor of, Obamacare and to enroll people in its provisions. The experienced (former governor, former education secretary, 10 years in the Senate) and temperate Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.)compares this to the Iran-contra scandal, wherein the Reagan administration raised private funds to do what Congress had refused to do — finance the insurgency against Nicaragua’s government. …
Because Obama’s entire agenda involves enlarging government’s role in allocating wealth and opportunity, the agenda now depends on persuading Americans to trust him, not their lying eyes. In the fourth month of his second term, it is already too late for that.
The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan proves my Clinton-era observation that if you’re not cynical about politics, you’re not paying attention:
It actually is shocking that the IRS appears to have become political and ideological in a way that is systemic. It is shocking that the president claimed he read about the targeting of conservatives just last Friday, in the newspapers, and today the New York Times reports the leadership of the Treasury Department was told the charges were being investigated a year ago.
And it has to be remembered that this is not your ordinary scandal. Your ordinary scandal is an embarrassment. Somebody did something bad and there’s an investigation or hearings. People are made to suffer for their missteps, if only in terms of notoriety and legal expense. Sometimes the innocent or mostly innocent are dragged in, too. But in the end it passes. Some new laws are passed or rules instituted. And we move on to the next scandal. In a government populated by humans there will never be a lack of them.
But the IRS scandal is different because it speaks of the political corruption of a major and crucial governmental agency to whose rules and regulations every American—everyone who has a job or a bank account, or who engages in a financial transaction—is subject. Most people will never have an interaction with the State Department or the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but the IRS deals with an intimate and sensitive part of your life, your personal finances. It is the revenue-collecting arm of the government. It is needed. It does necessary work. When that work is done well it is rarely noted and almost never celebrated. When it’s done badly it’s a terrible thing, because it means a citizen was treated badly or abused. But as an agency it couldn’t be more important to the national mood, the national atmosphere.
If we allow it to become politically corrupt that scandal will not pass, it will be with us every day….
The targeting of conservative groups and individuals by the IRS was a political operation that had political effects. We know this because only people with certain assumed political views were targeted and abused. No liberal groups were. According to today’s Washington Post, the Barack H. Obama Foundation, run by the president’s half-brother and named after their father, sailed through to tax-exempt status in a matter of weeks.
When a problem is political it’s best to have politically independent people investigate it.
Again, if what happened at the IRS is not stopped now, it will never stop. The next White House will come in and they’ll know they can do it too. And if they’re unlucky enough to be caught, they’ll have a have a few uncomfortable moments in Congress, and a few people who were going to retire in the summer will retire in the spring. And it will all go on.
We are at a point now where you can make a list of things that, all combined and allowed to continue, can kill America. This is one of them. Widespread belief that the revenue-collecting arm of the US government is hopelessly corrupt is one of them.
One strange anniversary in rock music: Today in 1968, Paul McCartney and Jane Asher attended a concert of … Andy Williams:
Eleven years later, not McCartney, but Elton John became the first Western artist to perform in the Soviet Union.
Four years later, David Bowie’s suggestion reached number one:
Is IRS-Gate actually worse than Watergate?
Remember that one reason Richard Nixon was impeached was his siccing the Internal Revenue Service on his political enemies. Which is what the IRS has done to Barack Obama’s political opponents.
Matt Kibbe argues that IRS-Gate is worse than Watergate:
The IRS has admitted that since May 2010 it targeted grassroots-conservative organizations that had applied for tax-exempt status, unfairly subjecting them to rigorous scrutiny due to their political leanings.
Such groups were told they were required to comply with IRS requests, no matter how absurd, in order to obtain non-profit status. Some were ask to provide book reports, names of family members, family members’ political affiliations, lists of donors and more. A report issued by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration this week begins to highlight the extent of misbehavior.
Following the admission, many have accused the IRS of misusing and misrepresenting its power for political advantage, and it’s true that silencing – or at least handcuffing – conservatives in the run-up to the 2012 election could very well have made an impact.
But this abuse extends far beyond the last or next election and strikes at the very core of the people’s relationship with their government.
The Washington Post’s editorial board wrote that, “A bedrock principle of U.S. democracy is that the coercive powers of government are never used for partisan purposes.”
In her apology, Lois G. Lerner, IRS director of exempt organization, insisted that the extra scrutiny was not politically motivated. The narrow focus on partisanship as the primary point of controversy is dangerous. This is not first and foremost a partisan issue.
It doesn’t matter whom the IRS was targeting or what specific beliefs they held: the fact remains that for years the agency used its power to discourage and intimidate Americans from speaking out against what they viewed as bad policies, stifling the First Amendment right of every citizen to hold government accountable.
The president says he was not aware of the problem. If so, then the state of our freedom is far worse than any of us has imagined – the gray suits are in place and already taking over.
Pundits have compared the current scandal to Watergate, but this one, frankly, is worse.
When the abuses of Watergate – which included misuse of the IRS to launch audits against Nixon’s enemies – were discovered, they stopped and the perpetrators were brought to justice.
We don’t yet know just how high the knowledge of the IRS practice reached, but it’s already clear that a broad element of the agency – including those with the power to stop it – knew about this blatant violation of basic constitutional rights for years and did nothing to stop it.
Despite Ms. Lerner’s statements to the contrary, it’s clear the IRS has been using its power for years to discourage and intimidate Americans from participating in their right to hold government accountable.
This abuse of power and “unequal treatment under the law” is truly chilling, and must not be brushed away with apologies or toothless inspector-generals’ reports.
It demands a rigorous congressional investigation and severe punishment of the power-drunk bureaucrats who carried it out.
No government agency must be allowed to abuse its powers so blatantly and get away with it. The freedom Americans hold so dearly is at stake. …
We must stop this abuse of government over the governed and ensure this never happens again to any segment of the American population, regardless of their political leanings.
Think of what Kibbe is saying here. If the Obama administration ordered the IRS to harass conservative organizations, that’s on Barack Obama, and he can be impeached. If someone within the IRS decided to harass conservative organizations on his or her (or their) own, that means the IRS is uncontrollable, answerable only if caught.
The test for this among non-conservatives is for them to ask themselves if this would be equally outrageous had a Republican presidential administration unleashed the IRS on left-wing organizations. Of course it would be. It is outrageous for the IRS to be targeting organizations based on their political beliefs, period. Without evidence of criminal wrongdoing, that is a blatant violation of those organizations’ First Amendment rights.
I’ve never been a supporter of a national sales tax to replace the federal income tax. This might change my mind. (Particularly a national sales tax that was collected by the states and sent to Washington, instead of the other way around, once the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is repealed.) At a minimum, this proves why changing tax law so that only individuals are assessed income taxes, and not corporations or organizations, is worth doing.
That is the headline with which Automotive News’ Mark Rechtin begins:
You know that study that just came out declaring “the end of the driving boom,” because Gen Y supposedly doesn’t care about cars?
Ignore it.
The 69-page study by the Frontier Group and the Public Interest Research Group is just another case of inside-the-beltway thinking attempting to drive public policy decisions. Or using statistics to ignore the real causal evidence for why something is happening.
According to the study, “Young people aged 16 to 34 drove 23 percent fewer miles on average in 2009 than they did in 2001 — a greater decline in driving than any other age group. The severe economic recession was likely responsible for some of the decline, but not all.”
The study posits that millenials would rather Tweet than drive, and would rather live in an urban setting with mass transit than commute in from the suburbs.
When you read between the lines, the Frontier/PIRG study is a clear call for investing less in freeways and main arteries, and a call for more subways and light rail. …
But the biggest problem with the survey is its basic psychographic misunderstanding: Young people do care about cars. They just haven’t had to.
Either unemployed or underemployed, many Gen Y college grads have moved back home with their helicopter parents who have resumed their role as their childrens’ personal taxi services. Gen Ys can’t afford cars, but they can afford iPhones.
At some point, however, the economy will improve. Recent grads will get real jobs, have boyfriends and girlfriends, and realize that having mom chauffeur a date to see Vampire Weekend isn’t cool when you’re 25.
Then there’s the marriage factor. Even if millenials can afford that cool 600-square-foot artist’s loft close to the subway station, it won’t fit a family, and it’s in a cruddy, crowded neighborhood with a lousy school district.
Gen Y will enter suburban life — it’s a demographic certainty. Kicking and screaming, the last bohemians of Gen Y will realize the car has changed from being an unneeded luxury to an absolute necessity. …
The same day that the Frontier/PIRG study came out, Edmunds.com released its own findings about Gen Y buyers.
“With higher unemployment, lower income and a greater propensity to live at home than previous generations at this age, it hardly comes as a surprise that these younger adults have failed to buy new cars at the same rate as their predecessors,” Edmunds chief economist Lacey Plache wrote.
Rechtin points out that since 1956, vehicle miles driven have tracked growth, or lack thereof, in the gross domestic product. If driving is or has decreased, it’s because of the (still) crappy economy, with a major assist to gas prices nearing $4 per gallon once again.
On Right Wisconsin, I wrote about Gov. Scott Walker’s decision to reject federal funds to expand Medicaid:
Others have raised additional pertinent objections to expanding Medicaid. Harvard University Prof. Malcolm Sparrow estimates health care abuse and fraud as “hundreds of billions of dollars a year,” with up to $60 billion per year in Medicaid fraud alone. The Wisconsin Reporter extrapolates Wisconsin’s share at $210 million in yearly Medicaid fraud. If you provide more Medicaid, you will get more Medicaid fraud. …
The only two valid reasons for expanding Medicaid would seem to be a reduction in overall health care spending and a corresponding improvement in the health of Medicaid recipients. The former will not happen. As it turns out, the latter rationale doesn’t quite pan out either.
The New England Journal of Medicine studied the state of Oregon’s 2008 Medicaid expansion, which, quoting from the study, “generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first two years.” …
The NEJM study came a year after the Cato Institute looked at the first year of Oregon’s Medicaid expansion. Expanding Medicaid unsurprisingly led to “higher medical consumption,” such as a 63 percent increase in mammograms, a nearly 60 percent increase in average outpatient visits, a nearly 30 percent increase in hospital admissions, a 15 percent increase in diabetes screening, and a 25 percent increase in Medicaid spending. The only benefit Cato found was reduced out-of-pocket patient costs; it predicted the NEJM study a year in advance by showing no significant health improvements. …
Ever wonder why small businesses are so concerned about the effects of Obamacare? It’s because small business owners pay 100 percent of the costs of their own health insurance. They see the bills and they write the checks. They know how much health insurance costs. Their employees generally do not, unless their employers tell them how much they’re contributing.
Today in 1966, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend of The Who decided to replace for the evening the tardy drummer Keith Moon and bass player John Entwistle with the bass player and drummer of the band that played before them at the Ricky Tick Club in Windsor, England.
When Moon and Entwistle arrived and found they had been substituted for, a fight broke out. Moon and Entwistle quit … for a week.
The number one single today in 1967:
The number one album today in 1958, and for the next 31 weeks, was the soundtrack to the musical “South Pacific” went to number one and stayed there for 31 weeks. The film version starred Mitzi Gaynor, who looked very much like my mother a few years later.
Today in 1979, Eric Clapton married Patti Boyd, the former wife of George Harrison and the muse for the song “Layla.” The song lasted much longer than the marriage.
One wonders if anyone played selections from that day’s number one British album:
The number one single today in 1963:
Another one-hit wonder had the number one single today in 1968:
The number one single today in 1974 might be the very definition of the term “novelty song”:
The number one British single today in 1975:
(Which more appropriately should have been called “Stand by Your Men,” since Tammy Wynette had had three husbands up to then, and two more thereafter.)
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 