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:
No comments on Presty the DJ for Feb. 12
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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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Super Bowl 58, this country’s largest unofficial holiday, is Sunday.
Based only on football Packers fans might be torn about this game. On the one hand, Kansas City, whom the Packers beat during the regular season, is coached by former Packers assistant Andy Reid, one of the most likable NFL coaches. On the other hand, San Francisco, who ended the Packers season in the playoffs, has as its quarterback Brock Purdy, who has gone from the final NFL draft pick his rookie year to a Super Bowl quarterback.
Unlike most Super Bowls, this one has unfortunate political portents because of the presence of Taylor Swift, girlfriend of one of the Kansas City Chiefs players who besides being an entertainment bazillionaire endorsed Joe Biden for president and before that a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate who lost. That is anathema to those who believe celebrities should stay out of politics and, for that matter, accept no other political views besides their own:
About Swift, Ben Domenech:
I was standing in the beer line with a group of Pittsburgh Steelers fans midway through their home game against the Green Bay Packers when a cadre of women with Glamsquad hair walked by. They wore decidedly bespoke yellow and black outfits, emblazoned with player names you typically won’t see worn on fan jerseys. “There go the WAGs, they’re like the Real Housewives of Pittsburgh,” a female fan dressed in more temperature-appropriate attire informed me. “I get my hair done at the same place as her,” pointing to a blonde wearing the last name of Pittsburgh’s placekicker. In a crowd of camo jackets, wool beanies and winter coats, the shiny-heeled boots and excess of tanned skin stood out — but no one said fashion was easy, especially in the National Football League.
A new piece by the Ringer’s Nora Princiotti has managed to do something perhaps thought impossible at this stage — write something interesting about the NFL’s Taylor Swift year, and what it means for both the culture and the business of sports.
Her comparison to the Victoria Beckham era of the mid-2000s is apt, yet there’s just one part of Princiotti’s theses to which I take exception: her suggestion that the NFL has poorly served female fans in the past and that the descent of the WAGs on the sport is an opportunity-filled break from that. She writes:
In a commercial sense, Swift and her fellow WAGs’ prominence this season has been a coup for football, more evidence of the power of female audiences, who remain underserved as fans of basically anything, including sports. The NFL is the ratings juggernaut in entertainment, but its biggest long-term concern is that the average fan is a fifty-year-old man. The league knows this and desperately wants to appeal to a younger and more diverse audience, but it doesn’t know how. Overtures to female fans via pink jerseys and plunging V-neck logo tees have been condescending, not to mention downright ugly. But in 2023, a group of influential female tastemakers who demonstrated in real time how they want to present themselves as fans fell organically into the league’s lap, modeling game days as an aesthetic — not mob wife, but football girlfriend. Swift’s outfits are well documented and have led to plenty of sold-out merchandise, and after she, Mahomes, Biles and Culpo all wore Kristin Juszczyk’s custom team gear, the NFL gave Juszczyk a licensing deal.
I have heard this hypothesis expressed occasionally by media types who don’t typically pay attention to sports — and it’s important to keep some perspective on all this. While women are underrepresented as a portion of pro football viewership during the regular season, the total number of NFL viewers is so huge and dwarfs all competition to the point that women still watch the NFL way more than any other sport, by far.
To understand the level of difference we’re talking about: the lowest-watched Super Bowl of the past decade was in 2021, when about 92 million people watched (a far cry from the famed New England-Atlanta comeback, watched by more than 170 million). But roughly half of those were women. By comparison, the 2023 Stanley Cup finals averaged 2.6 million viewers, the 2023 World Series averaged 9.1 million viewers, and the 2023 NBA Finals averaged 11.6 million viewers. The 2022 World Cup final had 25.8 million viewers. Even if literally every viewer for all those professional championship games was female, it still wouldn’t total the number watching even a down-year’s Super Bowl.
The point is, more women are fans of the NFL than literally any other sport and more of them watch it than any other sport — which is why advertising has already shifted in their direction. What Taylor Swift has done is dramatically increase the attention paid to the sport by women who aren’t already sports fans — something that you see in the expanded coverage from media outlets who don’t have any idea what a Shanahan offense looks like.
And this has obviously created a spike in WAG efforts, lived out in competitive “gameday couture” and intentional attempts to go viral to boost makeup artists or designers. The fact that one of the most viral non-Swift moments from the box level was Cincinnati Bengals backup Jake Browning’s girlfriend in her all-white jumpsuit just indicates that we’re only going to see things escalate from here.
The NFL still provides the most drama on television, and now it’s reaching a new demo. Just wait until they start having opinions about Tony Romo’s announcing — that’s when it’s going to get real.
This is less a new trend than Domenech may realize given the numbr of female Packers fans, including the biggest Packers fan I know, my aunt.
Now for some actual football, from John Hirschauer:
Football is a cyclical game. Teams are always trying new things—plays, formations, coverages—to get an edge. Some innovations work for a few weeks, some for a season. Others, like creative pre-snap motion, become part of every team’s playbook. In time, every innovation is either foiled or copied.
The NFL is in the midst of another schematic revolution. In the past two decades, innovations percolated from the college level up to the pros. This time, though, teams around the league are embracing an old brand of football with a modern face.
At the fore of this revolution are the San Francisco 49ers, representing the NFC in this weekend’s Super Bowl. San Francisco led the league in every major offensive category this season, including rushing and passing efficiency. Their coach, Kyle Shanahan, is a wunderkind who has befuddled opposing defensive coordinators and elevated his quarterback, Brock Purdy, from the final man selected in the 2022 NFL draft to the heights of the football world. Shanahan’s assistants have filled coaching vacancies around the league as teams strive to imitate San Francisco’s success.
Shanahan succeeds by zigging as the football world zags. Where high school and college teams across the country have traded neck-roll-wearing fullbacks and plodding tight ends for speedier wide receivers, Shanahan’s 49ers use a fullback more than any other team. Colleges have all but ditched traditional under-center formations for the shotgun, while Shanahan’s pro-style, under-center formations call to mind your father’s 49ers. And as the football world seeks to stretch defenses with wide, spread sets, Shanahan uses condensed formations—with the wide receivers aligned close to the tight ends and offensive linemen.
Shanahan’s offense is predicated on the “outside zone,” which his father, Mike, used to win consecutive Super Bowls with the Denver Broncos in 1998 and 1999. The premise is simple. At the snap, all five offensive linemen take steps in concert to the “play side” of the formation. Their goal: to “outflank,” or beat to the sideline, the defender in their “zone.” If they succeed in sealing off their assigned defender, the running back is left with a huge gap to the play side.
If they don’t—or if the defense anticipates the play and “outflanks” the offense—the running back is often left with a giant “cut back” lane on the opposite side of the play …
As The Ringer’s Ben Solak notes, because this play requires the defense to move laterally, Shanahan can set up passing plays that mirror his running plays, leading to easy throws for the quarterback:
Each of these plays, you’ll notice, uses a fullback—the bulky blocker who lines up in front of the running back. At the start of the 2024 season, only 14 NFL teams listed a fullback on their roster; at the college level, the fullback position is all but extinct. Not in San Francisco. Shanahan signed fullback Kyle Juszczyk to a $21 million contract in 2017, the largest for a fullback in league history. “When you have a fullback out there, that’s the only time an offense can fully dictate what’s going on,” Shanahan said. “If you don’t have a fullback in there, there are certain things a defense can do where you have to throw the ball.”
Making this choice in an era that puts a premium on speed, Shanahan has cracked the code. By using “heavier” personnel, he forces defensive coordinators to make a decision: play a beefier linebacker to match the offense’s power in the running game, at the risk of having a slower defender on the field for a pass, or stick with a quicker, scrawnier defensive back who is better able to cover the pass but could get exposed by San Francisco’s brawling fullback and tight end on a running play. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
This is characteristic of how Shanahan’s offense succeeds: he gets defenses to anticipate one thing, only to deliver something else. He breaks the huddle with an All-Pro running back and fullback, only to line up with an empty backfield. He plays the running back, Christian McCaffrey, as a wide receiver, and the wide receiver, Deebo Samuel, as a running back. He motions a tight end and pulls an offensive lineman right, then throws a screen pass left. For Shanahan, what started as a spin-off of his father’s wide-zone scheme has become an exercise in deception. As Solak put it, “The keystone of the 49ers offense is that you think it’s one thing, and it turns out it’s something else.”
The Shanahan system is not without critics, and it bucks the prevailing philosophy at the high school and college levels. The antithesis to his approach is that popularized by the late Mike Leach, the eccentric Texas Tech and Mississippi State head coach who midwifed the “Air Raid” offense into the football mainstream. The Air Raid is an up-tempo, no-huddle offense predicated on passing and snapping the ball as many times as possible. It is a relatively simple system, with short, often five-to-seven-word play calls, which communicate to the quarterback, receivers, and linemen one of a handful of staple route combinations (where the receivers run after the snap) and protection schemes (how the line blocks defensive pass rushers).
Where Shanahan uses long huddles and short running plays to keep opposing offenses on the sideline, Leach believed that “the greatest time of possession in the world is a touchdown.” Leach disdained the strategic precision of Shanahan-style offenses, with their 17-word play calls and elaborate pre-snap motions, for the chaos of a pass-first, on-the-move offense that never gave defenses a chance to adjust.
Whether Shanahan’s or Leach’s vision wins out in the long run remains to be seen. Coincidentally, though, one crucial player in this Sunday’s Super Bowl—Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes—played in an Air Raid offense at Texas Tech. Consider this year’s Super Bowl a referendum, perhaps, on the future of America’s game.
A referendum for now, perhaps. The line that NFL stands for “Not For Long” applies to all sorts of things.
The “Air Raid” is the offense Wisconsin played this fall under new coach Luke Fickell, to mixed results. Shanahan is part of the same coaching tree as Packers coach Matt LaFleur (both worked for Mike Shanahan at Washington), and there are similarities between the 49ers’ and Packers’ offenses.
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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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Hey, what was the number one single today in 1963?
Today in 1964, three years to the day from their first appearance as the Beatles, the Beatles made their first appearance on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew:
The number one single today in 1974 could be found for years on ABC-TV golf tournaments:
The number one single today in 1991:
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Is a journalist’s trip to a hostile country “treason?” Should that journalist be barred from the U.S. on the chance that he’s performing an act of journalism, such as interviewing a foreign leader? The answer to both of these questions, for anybody who isn’t a jackass, is “no.” And yet Tucker Carlson’s presence in Russia has excited a frenzy of speculation and protest because of the controversial talking head’s populist politics.
“Perhaps we need a total and complete shutdown of Tucker Carlson re-entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” The Bulwark editor-at-large Bill Kristol snarked on reports that Carlson was in Moscow.
Former GOP congressman Adam Kinzinger went further, calling Carlson a “traitor” for visiting Russia’s capital amidst rumors that the journalist traveled to interview Russia’s thuggish President Vladimir Putin. Carlson later confirmed the rumors on X (formerly Twitter.)
“If so, Mr. Carlson would be the first American media figure to land a formal interview with the Russian leader since he invaded Ukraine nearly two years ago,” observed Jim Rutenberg and Milana Mazaeva for The New York Times. Rutenberg and Mazaeva noted that Russia’s own journalists face tight strictures, and that “Mr. Putin’s government has been holding Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter, in jail for nearly a year.”
This is entirely true. But it’s not at all uncommon for journalists to interview foreign political leaders, including complete scumbags. Gathering information is core to the job and powerful figures on the world stage are and should be of interest to the public—especially if they pose potential or real danger.
Vladimir Putin was the subject of an interview with Barbara Walters back in 2001. In 2015, Reuters interviewed China’s President (probably for life) Xi Jinping about his intentions on the world stage. Orla Guerin of the BBC spoke with Venezuela’s dictatorial Nicolás Maduro in 2019. Last October, in the wake of Hamas’s bloody attack on Israel, The Economist‘s Zanny Minton Beddoes sat down with Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior official with the terrorist group, to try to understand his thinking.
For that matter, CBS-TV’s Mike Wallace interviewed Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini for “60 Minutes” while Iran had American hostages. ABC-TV’s Ted Koppel once interviewed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein for “Nightline” during the Iran–Iraq War.
That interview with Marzouk may come the closest to a present-day interview with Putin because of the context of Hamas’s attack and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For most Americans, both figures are wildly unsympathetic. But it’s not the job of journalists to speak only with popular figures who give their audiences warm and fuzzy feelings. They’re supposed to gather news about everybody, including terrible people who are responsible for war, tyranny, and murder. And there’s a real value in understanding the motives and goals of people who play an important role on the world stage.
“How does Hamas justify the atrocities committed in Israel?” The Economist wrote of the Marzouk interview. “Why has it done this? What does it plan to do with the hostages?”
Putin plays a comparatively bigger role on the world stage, controlling an entire major country and its nuclear arsenal. Some insights into where he’s coming from could be helpful.
“I can’t believe the idea that @TuckerCarlson is a traitor for doing an interview with anyone is taken seriously. Are people two years old? I remember when it was destination television if U.S. anchors scored interviews with the Ayatollah or a Soviet premier,” journalist Matt Taibbi, who has built an independent presence on Substack, pointed out in an effort to bring a measure of sanity to the discussion.
Of course, Tucker Carlson raises eyebrows because he’s a nationalist and populist and seen as, among other unpleasant things, overly sympathetic to Putin’s government. Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple called Carlson a “Putin apologist” while MSNBC’s Alex Wagner referred to him as “one of the biggest cheerleaders for Russia.”
Honestly, Russian officials seem to agree; they’ve highlighted his coverage for years as representing a relatively friendly voice in the United States media.
But that doesn’t matter. In free societies, people have the right to embrace whatever political views they like, whether in their personal lives or their professional careers. Those views are certainly fair game for criticism and, the more public the figure, the more legitimate a target they are for high-profile takedowns. But a person’s ideology is neither a ticket to ride nor a bar to entry for trying to make a living as a journalist—or at least it shouldn’t be if we’re going to have anything resembling free media.
Having been fired from Fox News, Carlson built a following on X. Whatever anybody may think of the man and his views—I’m not a fan—it’s to all of our benefit that there’s space for diverse viewpoints espoused by people who don’t need permission from gatekeepers to gather and report news, comment on events, and build followings. The more people engaging in journalism with whom we disagree, especially if we disagree with them in different ways, the more likely that media is uncensored, healthy, and making a fair attempt at getting the job done. If we agree with a few voices, too, so much the better.
Besides, if Tucker Carlson is sympathetic to a foreign dictator, or authoritarian in his beliefs, or just plain politically repulsive, he wouldn’t exactly be breaking new ground among journalists. The excellent 2019 film Mr. Jones documented Gareth Jones’s uphill struggle to reveal the truth of the Holodomor, the deliberate famine inflicted on the Ukrainian people by Joseph Stalin’s communist regime. Among the obstacles to reporting the story were pro-Soviet journalists such as Walter Duranty of The New York Times, who won a Pulitzer Prize for propagandizing on behalf of Stalin.
No doubt, Carlson sees himself in the Jones truth-teller role here, though he may well be more of a Duranty stand-in. But that’s a verdict to be rendered by public debate and the passage of time, not by a mob screaming “traitor” at somebody who wanders from the ideological reservation.
And there’s certainly nothing to be gained by speculating about barring a journalist from the country because you disagree with his views or his work. Even if we allow that Kristol is just joking, he’s written some terrible things himself—cheerleading for the Iraq War comes to mind—that invite harsh judgment.
But Kristol, like Carlson, shouldn’t be barred from the country or from journalism for wrongthink. A free society and a free press demand that all voices be welcome to speak. Then, once they’ve spoken, they’re fair game for whatever heat is directed their way.
Tuccille’s appears to be a minority view, as Tom Jones (not the singer) chronicles):
I wrote in Wednesday’s newsletter that Tucker Carlson is in Russia and now it has been confirmed: He has, indeed, interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin. That interview is expected to air today, most likely on Carlson’s streaming site and on X.
In teasing the interview, Carlson took a shot at other journalists by saying, “… not a single Western journalist has bothered to interview” Putin since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour snapped back on X, saying that it’s “absurd” to think Western journalists haven’t tried to interview Putin.
Even the Russians called out Carlson’s ridiculous claim.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, “Mr. Carlson is wrong. We receive many requests for interviews with the president.”
Peskov said the Kremlin has denied interview requests from large Western outlets, but it granted Carlson’s request because “his position is different” from what the Kremlin calls “Anglo-Saxon media.” Peskov said of Carlson, “It’s not pro-Russian, not pro-Ukrainian, it’s pro-American.”
Oh, so now the Kremlin wants to cooperate with someone because they are “pro-American?”
The Washington Post’s Robyn Dixon and Natalia Abbakumova wrote, “The Kremlin’s decision to allow the interview demonstrated Putin’s interest in building bridges to the disruptive MAGA element of the Republican Party, and it seemed to reflect the Kremlin’s hope that Donald Trump would return to the presidency and that Republicans would continue to block U.S. military aid to Ukraine.”
Meanwhile, back here in the United States, Carlson has very little, if any, credibility among real journalists or media observers.
Political commentator Steve Schmidt — a strategist who worked on campaigns for John McCain, George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger and helped found The Lincoln Project — wrote on Substack, “Why is Tucker Carlson in Russia? The answer is simple. Carlson despises America as much as Putin does, though for different reasons. Tucker Carlson is what the Russians call a ‘useful idiot.’”
Schmidt added, “He is a vessel for foreign poison to reach our free society, in which he seems to delight, undermining with lies, omissions and utter nonsense. It is important to remember that Tucker Carlson is not engaged in an act of dissent or speech. He is a propagandist carrying water for a Russian war criminal who hates the United States, and is committed to conflict with the west. He is a purveyor of racial malice, election denialism and dozens of conspiracy theories. He is being covered in Russia by state TV like the NFL covers Taylor Swift at a Chiefs game. It is a sickening display. Tucker Carlson has become a dangerous demagogue in recent years. His actions and conduct are reprehensible. He is no journalist. He is a very bad American. Tucker Carlson is a stooge, and specifically he is Putin’s stooge. What a disgrace.”
During his show on NewsNation, anchor Chris Cuomo said, “Tucker Carlson is getting exactly what he wants: attention. Now, frankly, I don’t care. His explanation of why he’s doing it — that he’s a journalist and he needs to inform people; he can call himself whatever he wants. I think his work is demonstrable as not being just about giving people information. He has a point of view and often it’s not aligned with the facts.”
Anne Applebaum, the staff writer for The Atlantic and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, tweeted, “Many journalists have interviewed Putin, who also makes frequent, widely covered speeches. Carlson’s interview is different because he is not a journalist, he’s a propagandist, with a history of helping autocrats conceal corruption.”
Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign affairs correspondent of The Wall Street Journal, took a jab at Carlson for claiming no Western media bothered to interview Putin, tweeting, “Poor, poor Vladimir Putin. Until now, nobody in the West has had the chance to hear him explain all the excellent reasons for why he had to invade Ukraine. Not in the speech that was broadcast live on every global network the morning of the invasion, and not in countless others.”
It should be noted that Trofimov is a colleague of the Journal’s Evan Gershkovich, who has been imprisoned in Russia on trumped-up charges of espionage since March 2023.
I wonder if Carlson grilled Putin about that?
Finally, there is this tweet from Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats about Carlson’s bragging that he is the only one with a journalist’s determination to interview Putin: “Unbelievable! I am like hundreds of Russian journalists who have had to go into exile to keep reporting about the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine. The alternative was to go to jail. And now this SoB is teaching us about good journalism, shooting from the $1000 Ritz suite in Moscow.”
Censorship is not part of a free society.
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The number one album today in 1969 was the soundtrack to NBC-TV’s “TCB,” a special with Diana Ross and the Supremes and the Temptations:
The number one album today in 1975 was Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks”:
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President Biden doesn’t need a bill to fix the border. He just needs to enforce the law. The law is section 212(f) of the immigration and nationality act, which gives the President authority to suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens.
It’s similar to Title 42, but even bigger. It also includes travel restrictions implemented by President Trump. In 2018, the Supreme Court supported section 212(f). The trouble is, Mr. Biden won’t enforce it.
And that’s one of many reasons why we don’t need a new piece of legislation. Especially when that legislation would virtually codify somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 illegals per day entering America.
Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social earlier that “only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill, which only gives Shutdown Authority after 5000 Encounters a day, when we already have the right to CLOSE THE BORDER NOW, which must be done.”
The liberal Connecticut senator, Chris Murphy, who was the Democratic negotiator, keeps gloating “the border never closes.” What does that tell you? Tells me the Bidens don’t want to close the border.
And so-called reforms for asylum and processing, will just encourage more illegal entries. Ditto for so-called parole migration. And green cards. And work permits.
Years ago, the Trump administration proposed a checklist of criteria for legal immigration including rudimentary things like speaking English, a civics lesson on the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, some American history, proof of a job.
Heaven forbid migrants should speak the language and know a little bit about the country. Of course, none of that is in the Biden bill. And if Mr. Trump wins the election, why should he be stuck with numerical targets that are way too high?
Much higher than his own crackdown on illegals before he left office four years ago. I’m also interested in the discussion of Governor Abbott that putting up barbed wire around Eagle Pass, Texas, has dramatically reduced the number of illegals.
Of course, the Bidens oppose any barriers, but barbed wire reminds me of building the wall. Which is another good Trump idea. And all this reminds me of Remain in Mexico, which has been ignored in this new bill.
So has any updating of Title 42. Like so many institutions in Mr. Biden’s America, the border is completely broken. In a real sense, America is broken. The border is just a symptom. The problem is much larger.
The Justice System, the economy, the Middle East and foreign policy, schools, universities, government censorship, law and order. All broken.
In another sense, the Biden administration is broken. And Mr. Trump is working very hard to get a chance to fix it.
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Today in 1969, Jim Morrison of the Doors was arrested for drunk driving and driving without a license in Los Angeles:
The number one British album today in 1970 was “Led Zeppelin II”:
The number one single today in 1970:
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The number one British album today in 1965 was “The Rolling Stones No. 2”:
The number one single on both sides of the Atlantic today in 1965:
The number one single today in 1982 …
… from the number one album, the J. Geils Band’s “Freeze Frame”:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 