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In today’s Wall Street Journal, Marc Myers explains Beatlemania, writing:
From a cultural standpoint, Beatlemania in 1965 far exceeded teenage rages for Frank Sinatra in the 1940s and Elvis Presley in the ’50s—thanks largely to the proliferation of television sets and portable phonographs. In the months before their appearance at Shea Stadium, the Beatles unleashed three No. 1 singles, two No. 1 albums and a wave of branded merchandise, from toys and pens to lunchboxes and pin-on buttons. Their new color movie “Help!” opened in New York four days before the concert.
But the Beatles were part of a much broader incursion. In the first seven months of 1965, Billboard’s pop chart was flooded with hits by U.K. artists such as Petula Clark, the Rolling Stones, Herman’s Hermits and Tom Jones. On TV, Patty Duke played not only an American teenager but also her identical British cousin, one of the two stars of “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” was British and jukebox shows like “Shindig,” “Hullabaloo” and “Where the Action Is” often showcased British acts.
Anglomania so permeated the youth culture in 1965 that many grade-schoolers and teens imagined London as an Oz-like gateway to adulthood and high-life sophistication. Millions of boys begged parents for Beatle haircuts, ankle boots and guitar lessons. Girls who saw future husbands in John, Paul, George and Ringo insisted on miniskirts and white boots. The sexual revolution had begun.
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Right Sector is an independent, ultra-nationalist, and conservative militia organization. As The National Interest points out, the group is “the last militia force to operate in the east independent of the government-controlled army. … Over the past year, Right Sector battalions have earned the respect and support of Ukrainian soldiers in the Donbas. Their assistance is important for government troops who often find themselves ill prepared for battle, due to the inefficiencies and economic burdens of the central government.”
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The Indiana Pacers will bring out the Hickory jerseys in select games this year to honor the 30th anniversary of the Hoosiers. Here’s a great interview with Pacers President Larry Bird taking a walk down memory lane with Dan Patrick:
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Former CIA bin-Laden unit Chief Michael Scheuer, writes at non-intervention.com, “return to General Washington’s foreign-policy legacy by immediately proclaiming the end of U.S. interventionism, the termination of support for all states and groups in the Middle East, the U.S. withdrawal from NATO, and the resumption of America’s most effective national security policy — strict neutrality.”
Scheuer writes:
Three of the U.S. national government’s self-imposed and surely lethal handicaps in dealing with the Islamist threat are (a) a fixation on looking at the problem in a state-by-state manner; that is, what do we do in Iraq? what do we do in Afghanistan? what do we do in Libya? etc.; (b) an enduring but long-disproved assumption that in its war with Islam the West has time its side; and (c) an addiction to an unwise, unnecessary, and bankrupting interventionism that is the main motivator of the international Islamist movement, a phenomenon which was fathered and is still nurtured by the West’s so-called “allies and friends,” Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, etc.
By forming and implementing interventionist policies for each nation-state where an Islamist threat is identified as needing to be addressed, Washington and its NATO allies miss the point that their main Islamist enemies — the Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda, and especially the former – think in a regional manner and then design and execute policies meant to establish bases from which they can further expand in a way that advances their ultimate goal of driving the West from the Muslim world and creating an unitary and worldwide Islamic state or caliphate. Whether or not such a state can be created is an open question, but for the time being the subject can be left for academics to endlessly, theoretically, and inconclusively debate, thereby leaving the sane to try to defend the United States.
Related video:
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Last week, the EPA’s hazmat team, inspecting an abandoned Gold Rush-era mine near Durango, Colorado, breached a retaining wall that dumped three million gallons of toxic sludge into a creek that is a tributary of the Animas River, writes the WSJ.
The plume of lead, arsenic, mercury, copper, cadmium and other heavy metals turned the water a memorable shade of yellow-orange chrome. The sludge is so acidic that it stings upon touch. Colorado, New Mexico and the Navajo Indian reservation have declared states of emergency as the contamination empties into Lake Powell in Utah and the San Juan River in New Mexico.
State and local officials learned about the ecological fiasco when they saw their river becoming the color of Indian curry. The EPA took 24 hours to notify officials and has yet to explain the cause of the accident.
Apparently the EPA was excavating the mine in search of a notional make-work problem to solve. But where are the demands for reparation and the media outrage, asks the WSJ? President Obama, still on the golf course, has voiced no indignation, and the green lobby seems to be reacting with a yawn. Read more here.
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Take a look at this page I found by the Tax Foundation. You can read it here:
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 In an interesting theme in Carly Fiorina’s campaign—opining on the crony capitalism that is so much a part of our economy and politics—she notes, “What we have now is less and less free market and more and more crony capitalism.”
The Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner explains:
Crony capitalism is an insidious system in which businesses’ success is based on a close relationship with government, and specifically with the people in power who dispense favors, subsidies, bailouts, and other forms of special treatment.
Crony capitalism costs taxpayers roughly $100 billion per year, according to Cato Institute estimates, and consumers hundreds of billions more in higher prices. It slows economic growth and leads to greater inequality.
As Mr. Tanner sees it, with President Obama and Hillary Clinton, there is a “virtually seamless integration of business and government. TARP, green-energy subsidies, the auto-industry bailout, the Export-Import Bank — nearly all the monstrosities of recent cronyism bear a Democratic stamp.” Then, of course, we have Obamacare, jammed packed with special favors for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, as well as for the administration’s favored unions.
But it’s not just Democrats. Trump basically backed TARP, and he would have extended the bank bailout to Lehman. He also would have the government pick winners and losers with his current call for protectionism and tariffs.
Jeb Bush and Scott Walker both supported taxpayer-financed sports stadiums. Like Trump, Jeb also supported TARP and the bank bailout. Marco Rubio is the sugar daddy to Florida’s sugar industry, voting against reforming the sugar program.
Ted Cruz and Rand Paul are the only Republican candidates who did not back money for agricultural welfare.
Unfortunately it is too easy for politicians to succumb to the temptation of special interests groups at the expense of taxpayers. Carly Fiorina is bringing up a telling point about the link between government and business cronyism that no candidate in either party wants to discuss. Read more from Mr. Tanner here.
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 Pat Buchanan writes, “there is a plot afoot in The Washington Post Conservative Club to purge Trump from the Republican Party before the primaries begin.” Pat continues that George Will wants Trump “excommunicated” and locked out of all GOP debates until he kneels and takes a loyalty oath to the nominee
According to the Washington Posts’ Michael Gerson, Trump followers have a resentment of outsiders, of Mexico, of China and immigrants that is more like a European right wing party, a UKIP, or a National Front in France.
Perhaps Mr. Will, Mr.Gerson and other out-of-touch neocon-centric Republicans would do well to take better note of the surging nationalistic popularity of European parties, including UKIP and Marine Le Pen’s “Front National.” I have been in France nearly a dozen times over the past five years and have watched with astonishment the gains of so many right wing nationalistic parties. And certainly “Front National” is the poster child. Europeans are fed up with immigrants who do not assimilate into European culture and overburden schools; hospitals and European economies in general, due to lack of jobs. Especially troublesome are immigrants from the radical Muslim world.
The French have awoken, as have the English, Swiss, Germans, and Dutch, to name a handful of the most obvious. In the French national elections of 2017, “Front National” could even pull off a shocking upset.
The only candidate to date, Republican or Democrat beyond Rand Paul, who seems to have any idea that western countries, including the U.S., are fed up with business as usual on the immigration front is Donald Trump.
Mr. Trump will sink or swim moving forward keyed to the solutions he offers Americans and the tone with which he chooses to present his case to the voters. Republican insiders would be making a mistake by attempting to railroad Trump. Do they really think that the most independent thinking Donald Trump is going to just roll over and play dead?
The big three policy issues for me, as I have written often, are taxes, immigration and foreign policy. To date I have heard nothing meaningful from any candidate. Mrs. Clinton is hopelessly delusional and most of the Republicans are a failure on all three counts. Clearly there is room for some candidate to come forward with a plan that Americans can actually get behind, Trump or no Trump.
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