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Looking out from Hell Town tonight... |
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| Like most cities, Milton decorates for the holidays with Christmas lights all through the town. Unlike most cities its displays aren't just strung above the city's streets, or on lamposts, or in municipal parks and greenways for strolling pedestrians and passing motorists to oggle. Its most impressive display is visible only from the city's riverbank and are best viewed from the water. From its beginnings, Milton was a river town. Settled in 1800s, it sat on the north edge of the Blackwater River near a timber mill, and was called "Mill Town." In its heyday, Milton thrived as a processor and distributor of timber, lumber, brick, naval stores and ship building materials. Schooners that left its docks delivered their cargo to ports all over the world. Today the lumber business is a memory, and the river's main role is recreational. In 1987, the city built a promenade along the river's north bank stretching some four city blocks or about an eighth of a mile. Leisure boats can berth overnight along it for free. Smack in the middle is an extensive war memorial. For Christmas the length of the riverwalk is festooned in a riot of christmas lights and lighted figurines stretching from the gazebo at its northwest end to the covered picnic pavilion that sits to the southeast. | |
Jan. 18, 2023
144,535 ◒
(-12,815 since 1/11)
7-day avg: 49,597◒
NY Times
- Vaccinations
Completed Primary Series: 69.1%
Updated (Bivalent) Booster: 15.4%.
CDC COVID Data Tracker
Jan. 5.
“We will get the over-regulating, micromanaging, bureaucratic tyrants off
of your backs, out of your wallets and out of your lives.”
(source: Rockefeller Institution of Government.)
With a nod to Paul Krugman, "Can Anything Be Done to Assuage Rural Rage?"
NYT, Jan. 26, 2023
1/21/23 -- Plus Ca Change ...
What follows is a repost from something that originally appeared on this website back in 2018. Nothing seems to have changed much with respect to the subject, so why not?
The earlier piece was occasioned by an assertion made by then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that federal overspending was our collective penance for failure to address excessive entitlement benefits sooner.
Sound familiar? It should. House Republicans are currently demanding cuts in entitlements as their price for supporting a debt ceiling increase. They are specifically targeting Social Security and Medicare programs.
In essence, they threaten to make it impossible for the government to pay any of its bills unless they get their way. The ensuing default would have a deleterious effect on the country’s credit rating, to say the least, and thus create significant financial damage, which presumably they hope would fall principally around the White House's shoulders.
No need to pen something new about this gambit, as old as it is unseemly; this earlier piece still suffices nicely. It’s about all the same nonsense, and all the things that were wrong with his reasoning still pertain.
In 2018, Mitch McConnell was criticizing the same "out-of- control" spending problem that current House Republicans bemoan, although with the unusal tacit implication that his own party had some part in passing the laws that authorized the spending in the first place.
Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear.
[Extracted from 11/6/2018 -- Mitchy the Kidder]
(www.websitesammy.com/2018.html)
Mitch McConnell is not like Donald Trump.
Our President is a bold-faced pathological liar, and he doesn’t care who knows it. He figures if people aren't smart enough to realize that everything he says is mostly untethered from reality, that's their problem.
The Senate Majority Leader, on the other hand, is cautious about saying things that are laughably untrue. His comments are generally constructed from carefully selected strings of facts calculated to lead the listener to a plausible truth. Just not necessarily the whole truth. He figures if people aren't smart enough to figure that out, that's their problem too.
But these men do have two things in common. And one is that both are more interested in buttressing a position than setting the record straight. Case in point: Senator McConnell's recent interview with Bloomberg News, in which he said of the annual federal deficit … “It’s disappointing but it’s not a Republican problem. It’s a bipartisan problem: unwillingness to address the real drivers of the debt.”
McConnell was trying to make the point by implication that the then-surging federal deficit did not come from declining revenues resulting from the giant tax cuts Republicans pushed through last year. To his mind the blame belonged with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
The misdirection in this Bloomberg interview also extended to what he had to say about entitlements themselves.
First off, one of the main unresponsive legislators the Senator was wagging his finger at is McConnell himself. He's been Senate Majority Leader since 2015. No one was in a better position to do something about entitlements or deficits or both. And yet the deficit grew by 77% under his aegis.
Second, the casual listener would hear in McConnell's remarks that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid accounted for 70% of federal spending. Only they don't, as anyone looking at the numbers could confirm after some simple arithmetic.
It's true that discretionary spending accounts for 30% of outlays. But Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid comprise only part of the 70% total entitlements component. Combined those three programs account for only 47% of total spending. [Ed. note: only 40% in 2022.]
That's still a lot but it's not 70%. Entitlements also include most Veterans' Administration programs, federal employee and military retirement plans, unemployment compensation, food stamps and agricultural price support programs. As Majority Leader of the Senate, McConnell would know that. It was no slip of the tongue.
Anyway, who says spending money on the welfare of our citizenry is money less well spent than on overseas military adventures, profligate border control schemes, corporate subsidies and interest on the debt, much less Congressional health care?
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid have done a lot of Americans a lot of good. They're hardly giveaways. And the third program, in concept, is supposed to save the country money. If Republicans don't care for that, maybe they should try to see if they could get their heart to grow two sizes.
Third, this might be a good time to point out that whatever Mitch might do to cut back Social Security (and at least half of Medicare), it would have near zero effect on federal indebtedness.
The CBO presents budget results on what is called a consolidated basis as a manner of convenience. Big picture perspective. But Social Security, you will remember, is not funded through general revenues. It's got its own money, which Mitch can't so easily touch. It doesn't, and never will, run a deficit, per statute. It's a lender to the federal government, not a borrower.
In a similar way, only 41% of Medicare funding comes from general revenues. The bulk of the rest is from payroll taxes and beneficiary premiums. And Medicaid is paid for in a sizable way by the states. (By the way, Medicare outlays actually declined by $10 billion (1.7%) last year.)
This not to suggest that our three major entitlement programs aren't facing long-term financing issues that Congress can and should address or that Congress hasn't been dilatory in not doing so already. (This is Congress we're talking about, after all.) Although cuts are not the best, and certainly not the only, solution available to them.
But this is to suggest that the Senate Majority Leader was, with Bloomberg as is his too-frequent wont, using entitlements as a convenient political football and doing so in a pretty dishonest way.
It's much easier to tell when the President is lying. Mitch is counting on that.
The difference between Mitch McConnell then and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, along with his present band of merry pranksters from the laughably termed “Freedom Caucus” is that they don’t even know what McConnell wasn’t talking about.
The most successful social support programs in our nation’s history, which they and their party have despised from their inception. Which their predecessors actually fought tooth and nail against creating.
It’s not deficit reduction they’re after at all. It’s something else entirely. Damn your eyes, FDR and LBJ!! They’ve never gotten over them. And they’re still losing elections to them.
Still looking for a little more Christmas season pick-me-up before launching yourself headlong into the new year? Visit the Skelly Family Christmas Site's New Year's Page, and reflect a bit on why it is we make such a big deal over the first day of the new year anyway. Plus, there's extra time this year to add your own seasonal mood into the Christmas Spirit Index app. Have at it. It's going to be a long year.
11/21/22 -- Voters Trust Republicans More than Democrats on the Economy
| 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Receipts | 3,250 | 3,268 | 3,316 | 3,330 | 3,463 | 3,421 | 4,046 | 4,896 |
| Outlays | 3,692 | 3,853 | 3,982 | 4,109 | 4,447 | 6,554 | 6,822 | 6,272 |
| Deficit (–) Amount | –442 | –585 | −665 | −779 | −984 | −3,132 | −2,776 | −1,375 |
| Percentage of GDP | –2.4 | –3.1 | −3.5 | −3.8 | −4.6 | −14.9 | −12.3 | −5.5 |
Our parents used to tell us when you elect a Democrat you get a war. When you get a Republican you get higher tariffs. That was a long time ago. Now Republicans seem to mean higher deficits. And, as often as not, a recession. Then Democrats come in and try to repair the damage. Then Republicans come back in and try to take credit for any improvement.
A more thoughtful assessment might be that our economy is too complicated, subject to far too many, often contradictory and even competing, forces to support odious comparisons.
That having been said, it is evidently factually accurate to say that, historically speaking, our economy has performed better when the president was a Democrat than a Republican. And this holds regardless of how one measures performance. This lonely reality was elucidated in painful detail a while back in a (2013) research paper by two professors of economics, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson at Princeton University: "Presidents and the Economy: A Forensic Investigation." Nothing has happened since to challenge their conclusions.
And if you don't believe it's true, there could be any number of reasons why not. It's that you're stubborn. It's that you're not paying attention. It's because you don't know how to analyze events or read financial reports. Because you're listening only to Fox News. Because you're listening only to Donald Trump. But one way or another it's because you don't know what you're talking about. And you think your faith will save you. That works in religion, perhaps; in husbanding the public's financial weal, not so much.
From Reagan to Trump, Republican presidencies had five recessions during their terms in office: one each under Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Trump, and two under George W. Bush. By contrast, Democrats Clinton, Obama and Biden had none.
But it's not just GDP. Democratic presidents create more jobs, manage the deficit better, enjoy better stock market performance, even encourage significantly more business investment.
The six presidents who have presided over the fastest job growth since the Great Depression have all been Democrats. The four who have presided over the slowest growth have all been Republicans.
What's going on here?
Does this mean all the Republican administrations were bad and all the Democratic ones were good? No, it doesn't. Maybe the Democrats were just lucky.
What it does mean is there's no way on earth to demonstrate that Republicans are better at handling the economy than Democrats. And it does mean that people who think so are kidding themselves. Maybe it's time to reintroduce voters to literacy tests. Maybe some people really are just too ignorant to vote. (Case in point? Georgia's Senatorial runoff election.)
Some clever Republican financial analyst, if such a thing exists, should do a study showing that the economy does better when the House of Representatives is in the hands of Republicans. The numbers do suggest there might be a case there. Forget presidents. It's the House that controls the budget after all.
But only slightly better. The simple fact is—a fact nobody seems to want to believe—is that neither the federal government, nor any part of it, is really able to control the economy. Our elected officials can only react to things to try to make them a little better. Or at least to limit the damage until those things go away.
The luck of the draw plays a big part in any Administration's successes and failures.
Maybe Republicans are just unlucky. Maybe it's they who do the spadework and the heavy lifting during their terms in office and then it's the Democrats who just come in and reap the benefits of their predecessors' hard work. An excellent case could be made for that scenario with respect to George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton. Bush was thrown out of office over a tax increase, and Clinton then rode the surge in revenues to the first budget surplus since World War II. Obama inherited a financial meltdown that almost put the whole world into another Great Depression. And when the country was finally climbing out of it, Trump came along and tried to claim the credit.
In any event, very often the tools available are limited and crude. Trump had to deal with COVID for a year with no vaccine. Jay Powell's only rejoinder to inflation is to punish us with higher interest rates and hope he doesn't cause a recession in the process.
It's not just bad luck or bad timing holding our leaders back either. The engines of commerce, in America and elsewhere, are subject to cycles that are notoriously contemptuous of the hopes and dreams of presidents of any political persuasion. Our economy’s performance stems primarily from millions of decisions made every day by businesses and consumers, many of which have little relation to and consideration of government policies or hopes or dreams.
Inflation ebbs and flows in erratic patterns. When the moon is right, expansion rules, when the wind changes, business slows to a crawl. Sometimes for obvious but unanticipated reasons—wars, pestilence, ruinous weather, floods, monsoons, earthquakes, crop failures, or even the unintended consequences of bad decisions by a previous administration. Some disruptions are more easily weathered, others are more lasting and intractable.
Last year, The New York Times offered a theory of a possible behavioral difference between the two parties in an opinion piece by staff writer David Leonhardt. ("Why Are Republican Presidents So Bad for the Economy?")
It suggests Democrats have been more willing to heed economic and historical lessons while Republicans have often clung to cherished ideological theories—like the power of tax cuts and deregulation. Democrats, it opines, have been more pragmatic. And, it adds, bolder. More agressive in responding to crises, more willing to try new straegies and methods.
Not buying that? Okay but, for whatever reason, it seems incontrovertible that the American economy has performed better under Democratic administrations than Republican ones, over both the last few decades and the last century. And the enduring belief to the contrary on the part of such a large segment of our voting public? Attributable most likely to a failure of our schools? But that's a whole nuther subject.
Though my story's seldom told
I have squandered my resistance
For a pocketful of mumbles
Such are promises
All lies and jest
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest
The Boxer, Simon and Garfunkel
Now "The Killer" has left the building, too. Jerry Lee Lewis, one of the foundational rocks of Rock & Roll finally passed on, unusually quietly, October 28 at his Mississippi home, south of Memphis. He was 87. Wild and unpredictable as a hurricane in both his music and his life, Lewis was a member of the inaugural class of inductees to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, along with Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, James Brown, Little Richard, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke and the Everly Brothers. And he outlasted most of them too.
Lewis married seven times and was rarely far from trouble or death. He made millions, but he managed his finances the way he managed his life, on a pay-as-you-go, cash basis. He ended up owing hundreds of thousands of dollars to the IRS.
He actually had only a handful of pop hits, but two of them were "Great Balls of Fire" and "Whole Lotta Shakin,’” which were, as his Yahoo obituary said, all by themselves more than enough to insure rock n roll immortality.
"No group, be it (the) Beatles, Dylan or Stones, have ever improved on 'Whole Lotta Shakin' for my money," John Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970. (For a taste of Lewis's "burn down the house" approach to live performing, treat yourself to this old film chestnut recorded in the UK: Whole Lotta Shakin Going On, Live 1964.)
Briefly, in 1958 when Elvis was drafted into the Army, Lewis was touted as a contender to replace Presley as rock’s prime hit maker. But while Lewis toured in England, author Hillel Italie recounts in the AP piece on the singer's death, the press learned three damaging things: He was married to a 13-year-old (possibly even a 12-year-old), Myra Gale Brown. What's more, she was his cousin. And last, he was still married to his previous wife. His tour was canceled. He was blacklisted from the radio. "His earnings dropped overnight to virtually nothing," she concludes.
Reflecting on his life once, Lewis offered this defense: "I probably would have rearranged my life a little bit different, but I never did hide anything from people."
Lewis reinvented himself as a country performer in the 1960s, and the music industry eventually forgave him. Long after he stopped having hits, he still won three Grammys and continued to record with some of the industry's greatest stars.
10/31/22 -- Trick or Treat
Happy Halloween! Click here for Sammy's annual Halloween message to his grown children. Why, oh why, oh why, don'tcha love me?7/2/2022 -- Inflation Game
Larry Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury, one-time Chief Economist at the World Bank, a highly trained academic mind out of MIT and Harvard (PhD), thinks we got it from Joe Biden giving everybody a $1,200 COVID stimulus check back in March 2021. With a total cost of about $400 billion, that would seem like an unlikely catalytic causation, both mistimed and undersized. If even Larry Summers can't get his arms around this, what chance do you have?
So next family gathering, after you've had a one or two chardonnays too many, instead of expounding on your unique insights into the economic aspects of life, maybe pick a simpler, less contentious subject, like politics or religion or your mate's comfort level with random aberrant bedroom practices?
But meantime, there's no reason you shouldn't entertain yourself playing with this dandy little interactive Consumer Price Index graphic, created by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Hours of diverting and satisfying pleasure and easier to work than that cellphone game the kids have been trying to teach you to play.
And who knows, if this thing gets enough hits maybe they'll come out with a Global Economy version. Then you can explain to Larry Summers why the Biden checks probably weren't responsible for spiking prices in the U.K. or the European Union countries either. (Two separate things now, remember. Or someday will be. Maybe. You better check.)
Have a little fun with inflation; after all, it's having a little fun with you. Click on the link. Here! The picture on the page is just a picture. It doesn't do anything.
6/11/22 -- The tide rises, the tide falls: DeSantis tops Trump
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Western Conservative Summit, ( Denver, CO, Jun. 3-4)
Presidential Straw Poll
Voters could approve any number of candidates who were then ranked by the total number of approvals each received. Some 1,114 people responded, according to poll results shared by Michael McGonigle, a journalist with local Colorado publication The Daily Citizen, and Fox News.
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5/15/22 -- Unprecedented
Gloria Steinam.
The first time around was exciting enough. But now, fifty years later, in a leaked draft of an impending Court ruling, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, appears ready to cast the historic decision that established a woman's right to abortion on the ash heap of history. With some fairly harsh words as an epitaph.
Basically, Alito dismisses the 1973 Roe ruling as just as historically wrong-headed as such jurisprudential clunkers as Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) or Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), castigating it as "egregiously wrong from the start." He calls its reasoning exceptionally weak, its constitutional references vague and, what's more, he contends that the decision has spawned damaging consequences. "Far from bringing about a national settlement on the abortion issue, Roe and Casey (a follow-on case in 1993 that replaced Roe's three-trimester standard) have enflamed debate and deepened division," he charges.
Alito declares instead that abortion should be settled in the court of popular sentiment. "The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting. That is what the Constitution and the rule of law demand."
Professing to be neutral on the subject of abortion itself, which his rhetoric sometimes betrays, Alito contends that as far as the Constitution is concerned, the subject never comes up. (Neither do handguns, contraceptives, shuffle dancing or space flight. Or women. Slavery does, at least tacitly, but in all fairness we did change our minds on that, and on the record. Same with alcohol, twice.)
Alito's draft would uphold a Republican-backed Mississippi law—struck down by lower courts as a violation of the Roe precedent—banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Roe v Wade was decided in 1973 (7-2) by the Burger court, generally considered by historians to be the last liberal court to date. It is often described as a "transitional" court, standing between the liberal rulings of the Warren Court and the conservative rulings of the Rehnquist Court. The composition of the Burger court at the time of the Roe decision was as follows:
| Justice | Nominated by |
|---|---|
| Chief Justice Warren Burger | Eisenhower, Chief by Nixon |
| Harry Blackmun | Nixon |
| William O. Douglas | Roosevelt |
| William Brennan | Eisenhower |
| Potter Stewart | Eisenhower |
| Thurgood Marshall | Johnson |
| Lewis Powell | Nixon |
| Byron White, dissenting | Kennedy |
| William Rehnquist, dissenting | Nixon |
Essentially, the longstanding argument over abortion since Roe can be boiled down to whether and how courts should recognize liberty rights that are not explicitly spelled out in the Constitution’s text. The ruling that the Constitution protects the right of a pregnant woman to have an abortion struck down several federal laws as well as abortion laws in 46 states. It asserted that these many statutes abridged a woman's right of personal privacy in violation of provisions in the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments.
(This from The Bill of Rights Institute: "The Constitution does not list a right to privacy. The Court has held, however, that Bill of Rights protections of free speech, assembly and religious exercise (First Amendment), along with freedom from forced quartering of troops (Third), unreasonable searches and seizures (Fourth), and forced self-incrimination (Fifth) create 'zones of privacy.' These 'zones,' the Court has held, are places into which the government cannot unreasonably intrude. Roe claimed that the law robbed her of her right to privacy as protected by the combination of Bill of Rights amendments, and of her liberty as protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.")
Since as early as 1923 the Court has broadly read the "liberty" guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment to guarantee a fairly broad right of privacy that has come to encompass decisions about child-rearing, procreation, marriage and termination of medical treatment.
Both the Fourth and the Fourteenth Amendments guarantee that you can't be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process. This rather generalized and abstract phrase is the only prohibition to be found it the Constitution twice. People have been arguing about what it means ever since it was written.
According to the website "Maryland Criminal Lawyer," Constitutional due process provides a great many protections for both criminal defendants and the public at large. Procedural due process defines the process for trying criminal defendants, and substantive due process is the mechanism that prevents government interference with fundamental rights.
It is the latter that has been interpreted to create a right to privacy, even though the Constitution does not expressly define that right. In 1905, the Supreme Court declared a New York law regulating baker’s working hours was a violation of substantive due process because the bakers were deprived of their right to set their own terms for their work.
In addition, the Ninth Amendment states that the "enumeration of certain rights" in the Bill of Rights "shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people." Many scholars have interpreted it as justifying a broad reading of the Bill of Rights that protects privacy in ways not specifically provided in the first eight amendments.
Opponents have never fully bought into this argument.
Justice Alito's Dobbs draft asserts that the Due Process clause can guarantee only non-enumerated rights that are "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition and implicit in the concept of ordered liberty." To Alito, abortion does not fit the bill. He notes that when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, three quarters of the States had already made abortion a crime at all stages of pregnancy.
The "deeply rooted" phrasing is adopted from a 1997 opinion by William Rehnquist (Washington v. Glucksberg) in a case challenging the state of Washington's ban on assisted-suicide. Some Conservatives seem to be coalescing around Renquist's opinion as a general rule for assessing non-enumerated Due Process rights. Associate Justice Brent Kavenaugh touted "the Glucksberg Test" with respect to abortion as early as 2017, a year before his confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court.
Renquist's use of the wording was itself derivative, echoing two different opinions written by Justice Benjamin Cardozo, one involving a right to a trial-by-jury technicality (Snyder v Massachusetts, 1934). (He ruled against but, again, it was over a technicality.) And another dealing with a double-jeopardy case, which was eventually overturned (Palko v. Connecticut, 1937).
"Glucksberg Test?" As Bill Murray says in the original Ghostbusters, "Actually, it's more of a guideline." "Rooted in the past" has not actually achieved litmus-test status in legal jurisprudence. It is one of several lines of reasoning judges apply in grappling with substantive Due Process that they might need to address in a case. And why not? When sizing things up in the present, it makes sense to look to the past, to where we've been and how it brought us to where we are, in an effort to come to terms with the way we're going.
Justice John M. Harlan II wrote a frequently cited dissent of his(Poe v. Ullman, 1961) that made the point that the process of discerning non-enumerated rights had not yet been reduced to any formula, "but must be left to case-by-case adjudication."
There were times in our past when contraceptives, the private sexual activities of consenting married couples, abortions and interracial marriage were all illegal in this country. And witches were burned. And Thomas Jefferson, sensitive to the fact that a small number of Washington's staff were homosexuals, once tried (and failed) to have the punishment for that "offense" reduced from death to castration.
Lawrence O'Brian, the MSNBC commentator, observed that "deeply rooted in this Nation's history" is not very deeply rooted in the Constitution. How often when Constitutional cases are argued, do arguments center around not the document itself but, rather, interpretations of it made by former judges in former cases? The words in the Constitution don't move, it's the precedents and their interpretations that do.
You won't find the words, "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition and implicit in the concept of ordered liberty" anywhere in the Constitution. Justice Alito is interpreting precedents. His way. Others will surely interpret in their own. What makes his interpretation the official one? The fact that he went last?
David A. Strauss of the University of Chicago Law School has observed that, taken as a collective, the nation seems to want a Constitution that is both living, adapting, and changing and, simultaneously, invincibly stable and impervious to human manipulation.
But all that notwithstanding, Alito's abortion marginalization seems like a fairly narrow take on a procedure the practitioners of which have been commonly characterized as the "world's second-oldest profession." It would seem abortion is rooted in everyone's culture.
Abortion has existed in America since colonization days. By the early 1800s, methods were published favoring abortion early in pregnancy. By common law, abortion after quickening (the start of fetal movements, usually 15–20 weeks) was not allowed, but it was without written statutes, and the rules were hazy. When America became independent, most states continued to apply English common law to abortion.
Connecticut was the first state to outlaw medicinal abortion after quickening, in 1821, and 10 of the 26 states created similar restrictions within 20 years.
According to James Mohr, a number of factors played a role in the rise of anti-abortion laws. Physicians, who were the leading advocates of abortion criminalization laws, appear to have been motivated at least in part by advances in medical knowledge. Doctors were also influenced by practical reasons. For one, abortion providers tended to be untrained and not members of medical societies. Doctors considered them a nuisance to public health. They also disliked them because they were competition, often at a cheaper cost.
Mohr's 1978 book Abortion in America documented multiple recorded abortion estimates by 19th century physicians which suggested that between around 15% and 35% of all pregnancies ended in abortion. Before the start of the 19th century, most abortions were sought by unmarried women who had become pregnant out of wedlock. But of 54 abortion cases published in American medical journals between 1839 and 1880, over half were sought by married women, and well over 60% of the married women already had at least one child. The sense that married women were now frequently obtaining abortions worried many conservative physicians, who were almost exclusively men. Supposedly much of the blame was placed on the burgeoning women's rights movement.
Physicians remained the loudest voice in the anti-abortion debate, and they carried their agenda to state legislatures around the country, advocating not only anti-abortion laws, but also laws against birth control, thus presaging the modern debate over women's body rights.
Criminalization of abortion accelerated into the late 1860s, through the efforts of concerned legislators, doctors and the American Medical Association. In 1873, Anthony Comstock, an anti-vice activist and United States Postal Inspector, created the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an institution dedicated to supervising the morality of the public. Later that year, Comstock successfully influenced the United States Congress to pass the Comstock Law, which made it illegal to deliver through the U.S. mail any "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" material. It also prohibited producing or publishing information pertaining to the procurement of abortion or the prevention of conception or venereal disease, even to medical students. Similar prohibitions were passed by 24 of the 37 states.
By 1900, abortion was a felony in every state. Some states included provisions allowing for abortion in limited circumstances, generally to protect the woman's life or to terminate pregnancies arising from rape or incest. Abortions continued to occur, however, and became increasingly available. The American Birth Control League was founded by Margaret Sanger in 1921; it would become Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942. By the 1930s, licensed physicians performed an estimated 800,000 abortions a year.
Alito's take on history, then, would seem ill-informed at best and self-serving at worst. If the procedure was not thoroughly rooted in the culture, whence such a strong desire to move against it?
David Garrow, a legal historian who writes frequently on the histories of both the Supreme Court and the Civil Rights Movement, points out that lawyers on both sides of the abortion debate too often ignore the practical reality that abortions were commonplace when the 14th Amendment was added, even in states where it was banned. And criminal prosecutions rare.
Alito's draft also sets forth a point of differentiation between abortion and other non-enumerated rights that he obviously considers determinative. None of the other cases cited by Roe and Casey involved the moral question posed by abortion: namely, that it "destroys what the law at issue in this case regards as the life of an"unborn human being.”
Fair phrasing, but perhaps a little emotionally-overcharged given the nature of the teatise. No one, least of all pregnant women, confuses an abortion with a joyous occasion. Even Roe and Casey describe the fetus as "potential life." Which is indubitably why most women who have faced the dilemma have called it the weightiest decision of their lives. And virtually anyone will acknowledge there comes a time when the option is medically foreclosed by fetal viability.
But that doesn't make it a decision that should never be made or that, while it's an option, should be made by anyone but the expectant mother herself and her doctor. The Court has made clear that the Constitution protects live beings, not potential ones.
Clearly, abortion is a polarizing subject, one that raises the fire and the ire in partisans on both sides. This may well not be the last pilfered draft you'll have to peruse on this matter. It's not the way this is going.
Alito's notion of settling this in the court of popular sentiment is risible. For one thing, majority rule seems an idiotic suggestion given the legal, medical and ethical complexities of the subject. This is something most people anchor their position on by way of emotion, political affiliation, prejudice and religion. Congress isn't much better. Most days they couldn't compromise their way around a take-out lunch order. Especially in these times when 43% of the public vote equals majority rule in the United States Senate today.
John Marshall, fourth Chief Justice of the United States, from 1801 until his death in 1835. The longest tenured chief in Supreme Court history, he is considered one of the most influential justices to ever sit on the Court. Due in no small measure to his most far-reaching and enduring achievement: the invention (out of whole cloth) of Judicial Review, the power to invalidate laws as unconstitutional (Marbury v. Madison, 1803). It profoundly increased the influence of the Judiciary in America and dramatically reshaped the form and function of virtually every level of the country's government. Nowhere in the Constitution is allowance made for such a power.
A modest proposal? Possibly what is needed is a council of seasoned elders secure in their positions, with vision tempered by age and experience, whose outlook on life has been shaped and contoured by what Wordsworth described as ...
the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
We used to have Supreme Courts like that. That does not describe our current Court. Today the Court is highly politicized, very young and, ironically, rather ideologically hidebound so soon in life.
America recently put three jurists on the Supreme Court who were specifically hand-picked for their relative youth and for the certainty, guaranteed by the Federalist Society, they would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. The President of the moment bragged about this publicly and frequently. Proud that he was rigging a jury that would deliver the desired verdict before hearing the case.
One of those justices got his seat because the then Senate Majority Leader refused a hearing for the nominee (a purposely selected ideological moderate) of the sitting President, claiming the nomination came too close to a presidential election (ten months before).
Another was nominated only four months before the end of the following president's term with presidential voting already underway in many states. Reversing his previous objection, the same Senate Majority Leader willingly accommodated that confirmation hearing. Without those two highly irregular maneuvers, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization would have gone, in all likelihood, 4-4.
The U.S. Supreme Court was established by Article 3 of the U.S. Constitution to have ultimate jurisdiction over all laws, especially those in which constitutionality is at issue, not to punt them back to federal and state legislatures. Not to put itself in peril of degenerating into the third house of Congress. If nothing changes, we should surely resign ourselves to entertaining a third chapter of Roe, just as soon as the other team gets up at bat. After that, we'll just have to see what happens.
5/9/22 -- Long Shot
The Golden Boys ... Robert Louis Ridarelli, one of early rock and roll's early legends, died on April 5 from complications of pneumonia at age 79. At a hospital in suburban Philadelphia. You knew him as Bobby Rydell. He was part of the wave of heart-throb male teen idols that gained ascendency just after the arrival of Elvis and enjoyed a pretty good run right up until the British invasion. We're talkin' the '50s here, halcyon days of our modern musical culture. Three of those idols grew up together in the same South Phili neighborhood, childhood friends who each managed to slip the surly bonds of Earth and touch the face of the Rock and Roll gods. This was early American Bandstand time, top-40 hits, teenage lovers shuffling each other around the floor, and Dick Clark, a transplanted New Yorker who found TV fame himself in Philadelphia with an afternoon dance program. He and the show captivated the hearts and minds of American teens nationwide from 1954 to 1984. Even the regular school-kid dancers, girls in dresses, boys in jackets and ties, had their own fan clubs. (Clark is pictured right, with Rydell, Fabian and Frankie Avalon in 1959.) Bobby Rydell had 34 Top-100 hits, making him one of the top five artists of his time (Billboard). His biggest successes were "Wild One," "Swingin' School," Kissin' Time" and "Wildwood Days." His last major chart score, "Forget Him," reached number 4 on the Hot 100 in 1964, his fifth gold disc winner. One of his hits, released in 1960, wasn't even rock and roll. It was "Volare" an English-language cover of Domenico Modugno's 1958 top pop single "Nel blu dipinto di blu" (the only foreign-language song to win Grammys for both Record of the Year and Song of the Year). Rydell said that for him Rock and Roll was just what people were buying at the time, and so he sang it. In 1963, Rydell gained cinema fame as Ann-Margaret's partly jilted and jealous boyfriend Hugo Peabody in the film version of "Bye Bye Birdie." In it he had to keep up with Ann-Margret in a memorably intense dance routine set to the musical number "A Lot of Livin’ To Do." The scene took them two weeks to rehearse and two weeks more to shoot. Snippets pop up regularly on YouTube dance compilation videos. "Birdie" would be Rydell's only significant movie role. He had no interest in moving to Hollywood. He never strayed far from his Philadelphia roots, living in the area for most of his life. But In 1978, "Grease," the cinematic blockbuster—also born of a stage play—that paid homage to the '50s also paid a little to one of the period's biggest stars. The school that Danny Zucco, Rizzo, Sandy and the other "T-Birds" and "Pink Ladies" attended was "Rydell High." (All except "Cha-Cha" DiGregorio.) Bobby Rydell continued performing in nightclubs and casinos throughout the 1980s. He teamed up with Frankie Avalon and Fabian, and performing as "The Golden Boys," they toured extensively as a highly popular act on the oldies circuits. At the time of his death the official Bobby Rydell website was still listing upcoming summer concert dates.
4/6/22 -- "Haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate"
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 431,000 in March, and the unemployment rate declined to 3.6%.
Plus, the January increase was revised up by 23,000, from 481,000 to 504,000, and February was revised up by 72,000, from 678,000 to 750,000.
The unemployment rate and the number of unemployed are now little different from where they were in January 2020. In case you've forgotten that halcyon time, it's pretty much just before the COVID-19 pandemic began.
| Sector | Jobs Lost | Recovered to Date |
|---|---|---|
| Services-Providing | -14.59% | 116.1% |
| Prof./Business Svs. | -10.67% | 115.8% |
| Goods-Producing | 11.84% | 112.6% |
| Leisure/Hospitality | -47.99% | 176.6% |
| Manufacturing | -10.65% | 110.8% |
| Financial Activities | -2.80% | 103.7% |
| Retail Trade | -14.37% | 118.9% |
So, one less thing for the loyal opposition to cry alas and alack about, but they're never at a loss.
Now is probably the time to reprise, as often is done in this thin space, the cautionary admonition that the president does not, by and large, have huge impact on the jobs situation. Not none, but not that much. Not in Trump's case and not now in Biden's. The same could be said of economic growth (gasp). Jobs and GDP respond, in their own ways and times, more to market forces than politicians.
But presidents are quick to take credit, and critics (using the term broadly) are quick to cast blame when opportunities present themselves.
That having been said, there's not much aspersion to be cast on Biden so far in either of these two areas. The economy which was in recession when he took office grew 5.7% last year and is projected to gain by 2.8% to 3% in 2022. After that, we'll see.
You won't hear too much caterwauling from the disgruntled minority about the deficit either. After rising 5.2% in the Trump years, it shrank 12.8% in FY 2021. Trump's deficit surge (fueled partly by COVID and its costs) was the third worst in our nation's history, behind only George W. Bush (11.7%: tax cuts, two wars) and Abraham Lincoln (9.4%: the Civil War).
Ah, but at least there is inflation. And books in school. And Trans kids. (Never at a loss.)
Inflation is truly a threat. (Books in school are not. Nor are Trans kids, except for the kids who have to deal with that dilemma—and don't need any more stigma attached to their situation.)
Inflation was up 7.9% last year. And even folks who can't spell deficit and don't know the difference between GDP and a hashtag challenge gain a visceral understanding of inflation every time they go grocery shopping or stop for gas.
And telling them it's going to go away (just like COVID) is not the same as making it go away. And it's another thing presidents can't easily or quickly do much about. Ask Jerry "WIN"(whip inflation now) Ford. (NIM: "No Immediate Miracles." What passed for heckling in 1974.)
But inflation is going away. As could be expected with many things the causes of which are themselves transient.
Deloitte, the multinational professional services network that we used to call an "accounting firm," says in its first-quarter "United States Economic Forecast" that it expects inflation to fall back into the low-2% range in the second half of 2022. Their report is a fairly extensive treatise (they estimate a 20-minute read) examining the impact of the Ukraine crisis, persisting inflation, and the lingering effects of COVID-19 on the multifarious aspects of the US economy. Worth spending the time if you're one of those people who really like to sound like they know what they're talking about.
Also, it may be worth noting that average hourly earnings over the past 12 months have increased 5.6%. Another thing that causes inflation is putting more money in people's pockets, along with too few goods and services in the pipeline or in the showrooms or on the shelves.
| Year | Inflation Rate (yr. on yr.) | Business Cycle (GDP Growth) | Events Affecting Inflation |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 3.4% | Expansion (4.1%) | Tech bubble burst |
| 2001 | 1.6% | March peak, Nov. trough (1.0%) | Bush tax cut, 9/11 attacks |
| 2002 | 2.4% | Expansion (1.7%) | War on Terror |
| 2003 | 1.9% | Expansion (2.9%) | JGTRRA1 |
| 2004 | 3.3% | Expansion (3.8%) | |
| 2005 | 3.4% | Expansion (3.5%) | Katrina, Bankruptcy Act |
| 2006 | 2.5% | Expansion (2.9%) | |
| 2007 | 4.1% | Dec peak (1.9%) | Bank crisis |
| 2008 | 0.1% | Contraction (-0.1%) | Financial crisis |
| 2009 | 2.7% | June trough (-2.5%) | ARRA2 |
| 2010 | 1.5% | Expansion (2.6%) | ACA, Dodd-Frank Act |
| 2011 | 3.0% | Expansion (1.6%) | Debt ceiling crisis |
| 2012 | 1.7% | Expansion (2.2%) | |
| 2013 | 1.5% | Expansion (1.8%) | Gov. shutdown, sequestration |
| 2014 | 0.8% | Expansion (2.5%) | QE ends |
| 2015 | 0.7% | Expansion (3.1%) | Deflation in oil and gas prices |
| 2016 | 2.1% | Expansion (1.7%) | |
| 2017 | 2.1% | Expansion (2.3%) | |
| 2018 | 1.9% | Expansion (3.0%) | |
| 2019 | 2.3% | Expansion (2.2%) | |
| 2020 | 1.4% | Contraction (-3.4%) | COVID-19 |
| 2021 | 7.0% | Expansion (5.9%) | COVID-19 |
| 2022 | 4.3% (est.) | Expansion (2.8%) | March 2022 projection |
| 2023 | 2.7% (est.) | Expansion (2.2%) | " |
| 2024 | 2.3% (est.) | Expansion (2.0%) | " |
2 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
Oddly enough it seems also fashionable to fault the current administration over its international relations record, but pundits not on Fox News seem to be expressing approval of Biden's response to Russia's invasion of the Ukraine, which has included getting NATO focused, energized and engaged so soon after its having endured four years of trash talk, neglect and deprecation from America. (Thanks, Russia.)
A recent Quinnipiac University national poll reported 49% of Americans hold a negative view of Biden's handling of the conflict, with only 42% approving. At the same time, more than 50% of Americans express confidence in Macron in France and Scholz in Germany in their handling of Putin's assault.
Similarly, An NPR/Ipsos poll finds that only 36% of Americans think Biden is doing a good job in Ukraine, while 52% say he's not. NPR points out, however, that this disapproval is driven largely by the GOP: 81% of Republicans rated Biden's response as fair or poor, while 62% of Democrats rated his response as good or excellent.
Putin's support among Russians is much broader: more than 80% of Russian respondents support his Ukraine offensive, according to private Russian pollster, Levada. Kremlin-backed state-funded pollsters also show Putin's popularity among Russians rising markedly, with approval figures above 80%.
Joseph Marie, comte de Maistre (1753 –1821) was a Savoyard (the Duchy of Savoy was a country in Western Europe which in 1720 became the Kingdom of Sardinia) and also a philosopher, writer, lawyer, diplomat, moralist and influential thinker during the period immediately following the French Revolution. An interesting guy, notwithstanding his inexplicable fondness for monarchies and Jesuits.
Together with philosopher Edmund Burke, Maistre is commonly regarded as a founder of European conservatism. He had close personal and intellectual ties with France but was strongly opposed to the French Revolution. In self-imposed exile in Switzerland he enjoyed a brief career as a counter-revolutionary writer. His observations on Russian life, contained in diplomatic memoirs and personal correspondence, were supposedly among Leo Tolstoy's sources for his novel War and Peace.
Among the many memorable quotes he left behind him is this one:
And regardless of who you may think it was, it was really he who first said, "In a democracy people get the leaders they deserve." It will be interesting to see how many Americans vote in November with that cautionary thought fixed firmly in the forefront of their mind. And how many will heed the enemy force because it feels so good.
3/15/22 -- Outhouse Reading
Roll their shit in little balls.
Those who read these words of wit
Eat those little balls of shit."
Of course, any proctologist could have told you that, but consider the following.
Wastewater analysis is beginning to be recognized as possibly a very useful tool for tracking the community spread of COVID-19 over time. When people get infected, pieces of the virus can be found in their feces. By examining multiple sewage samples over time, the amount of COVID virus in those samples can be observed to be going up or down.
"Between 40% and 80% of people who have COVID-19 shed viral RNA in their feces," reports Amy Kirby, program lead for the CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System. "When the number of COVID-19-positive samples in sewage go up, 3 to 7 days later the number of reported cases go up."
"Wait a minute," you say; "aren't COVID-19 numbers going down, at long last?"
Oh you poor fool. So far along and still you don't get it? Yes, things are looking up. Just like last summer. For this, as for that, shining moment.
Yet, many people have concluded, this thing doesn't go away just because we're exhausted from dealing with it.
Bloomberg is reporting that a 10-day detection of COVID-19 at sampling sites from March 1 to March 10 was much higher than the period running from Feb. 1 to Feb. 10 (although during that latter period fewer sites were available for testing).
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about a third of wastewater sampling sites across the U.S. are showing an uptick in COVID-19 cases. In the 15-day period running from Feb. 24 to March 10, 145 wastewater sampling sites out of 401 active sites revealed an increase of 10% or more in coronavirus wastewater levels. Sixty-two of those sites showed an increase of 1,000% or more, while 48 increased anywhere from 100% to 999%.
The hysterically inclined take heed; it's probably still a little early to conclude we're all doomed, yet again. This line of investigation is in the very early stages of development. The U.S. is hardly awash, pardon the word-play, in fecal matter test sites. Coverage is still a little, shall we say, spotty.
Wastewater sampling sites: 698 - Sites with current data: 419
But if COVID-19 tracking with wastewater surveillance is still experimental, the actual science is not. It has been used in countries where polio is still a threat to look for evidence of the disease in a community. In the United States, it’s also being used to estimate opioid drug use, by testing sewage for chemicals left behind after the body digests such drugs.
With access to regular coronavirus testing strained and with more people using home tests (the results of which may never be reported to public health agencies), case counts are becoming a less reliable way to track COVID-19. Wastewater analysis offers a new alternative for examining where it is spreading.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has started a web portal where state, tribal, local and territorial health departments can submit wastewater data into a national database. Cities like Boston were among the first to assess through wastewater, last January, that their omicron surge had peaked.
Scientists who are working with wastewater sampling say the tool has enormous utility for public health agencies and individuals alike. "I think there’s a good chance that it will outlive this pandemic, tracking viruses like the flu," said Sasha Harris-Lovett, part of a UC Berkeley research team researching the concentration of coronavirus RNA in sewage.
It is a real-time snapshot of how much of a given virus is in an entire community, without the time lag and variability introduced by testing and reporting. Compared to clinical case data, it has a much faster turnaround, as little as 24 hours. Moreover, it doesn’t rely on the availability of test sites and test kits, nor on how on many people choose to use them.
There are factors that can interfere with wastewater readings. The process requires multiple samples over a period of time to establish a clear trend, and rainwater or industrial waste in the sewers can skew the numbers. So can a highly-localized pocket of cases that might give a falsely elevated reading for the community at large.
Ultimately, the utility of the emerging technique will depend on whether public health agencies invest in using it. Not all wastewater plants even have enough staffing to track sewage frequently.
But you can feel free to poke your nose in (more unnecessary word play) and get your own sense of how things are progressing. The CDC Database is open to public consumption. You can reach it at COVID Wastewater Surveillance Data Tracker. You can get an overview of the virus's ebb and flow, on both a local and a national level, see what spots are hot—and what are not—and observe how the tracking project in general is progressing. You can even set up your own customized search requests to see how much better (or worse) you're doing than your friends in neighboring states or counties.
Take a ride. Have some fun. But, please, keep the database clean. And no graffiti.
2/2/22 -- The Things We Do for Love
The fact is, Valentine's Day started as a religious feast day long ago, honoring a Roman priest whom one of the Roman Empire's nastier emperors had martyred. This happened in the third century, which was way before Hallmark.
The short version of the tale is this.
In 270 A.D., on February 14, a holy priest of Rome named Valentine was executed by Emperor Claudius II. At the time, the empire was involved in numerous unpopular and bloody military campaigns, and Claudius was beginning to have trouble getting soldiers to fill his ranks. He concluded that men were unwilling to commit owing to an excessive attachment to their wives and families. So he banned all marriages and engagements in Rome. How like a despot.
Valentine, evidently a fool for love, defied Claudius by continuing to perform marriages for young lovers in secret.
When his actions came to light he was dragged before the Prefect of Rome, who sentenced him to be beaten to death with clubs and have his head cut off. There is the additional story that while in jail, just before his execution, the condemned vicar left a farewell note for his jailer’s daughter, who had become his close friend and whom he had cured of blindness. The note was signed, "From your Valentine."
In the course of time, Valentine became a saint, pre-congregation, meaning his sainthood was conferred by general proclamation, a common practice prior to the Congregation for the Cause of Sainthood, established by the church in 1588. (He is still recognized as a saint by the Church today but was removed from the General Roman Calendar in 1969 owing to a lack of reliable information about him.) Saint Valentine is the patron saint of lovers, epileptics and beekeepers.
The longer story is that the exact origins and identity of St. Valentine are unclear. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, at least three different Saint Valentines, all of them martyrs, are mentioned in the early martyrologies under the date of February 14. One was our priest in Rome, the second was a bishop of Interamna (now Terni, Italy) and the third was a martyr in the Roman province of Africa.
Legends vary on just how the martyr’s name, whichever martyr it was, became connected with romance. The date of his (their) execution(s) may have become co-mingled with the Feast of Lupercalia, a Roman pagan festival of love, during which the names of young women would be placed in a box, from which they were drawn by willing men as chance directed. Kind of like the cocktail party game of tossing car keys in the center of a rug and going home with whatever woman whose keys you picked up. Ah, romance.
In 496, Pope Gelasius put an end to the Feast of Lupercalia and declared that February 14 should be celebrated henceforth as St. Valentine’s Day. Which St. Valentine he was dedicating the day to, or whether he meant all three, was never made fully clear.
But gradually, through the centuries, February 14 became a date for exchanging love messages, poems and simple gifts such as flowers or candy (and briefly, in the twentieth century, in LA and on the Upper East Side of New York, car keys).
In the US, with its inclination towards capitalism, the observation truly flourished. Over 130 million Valentine’s Day cards are exchanged each Feb, 14, making it the second biggest yearly holiday for greeting card transmissions. Hallmark first started selling Valentine’s Day cards in 1913.
And Hallmark was never alone. The average person celebrating Valentine’s Day spends close to $150, according to the National Retail Federation. CNN once estimated that 224 million roses get murdered each year in the name of love. A whopping $1.5 million is spent on candy and supposedly another $4.4 billion for jewelry. All told, we blow about $18.6 billion on Valentine’s Day every year.
February 14 is also universally considered to be the worst night of the year for taking your sweetie for a romantic dinner out at a fancy restaurant: long waits, bad service, second-string kitchen staffs and pre-fixe pricing.
A wiser course would be to opt for an intimate dinner for two at home, especially if you're someone who knows how to cook a simple but elegant meal and buy a bottle or two of decent wine. Consider a small t-bone with pan-seared mushrooms, sautéed salmon with lemon and brown butter or if you're up to it, shrimp etouffee with Andouille sausage and a side of cold asparagus with red-wine vinaigrette garnished with a small dice of red pepper. But nothing that ties you up too long in the kitchen.
And at meal's end (consider finishing with an alcohol-laced dessert), you're already that much closer to the bedroom.
Wishing you a Happy Velentine's Day. May it be for you a worthy offering to the memory of that eponymous other who so long ago lost his own head over love.
A big advantage of dining in: you have control of the audio environment. A critical element for ensuring success in an amorous evening. Streaming services like Spotify make background music a snap. There are playlists aplenty, but with very little effort you can probably do much better on your own.
Here is a playlist plucked at random of 37 supposedly great valentine favorites for setting the proper romantic mood. Put together evidently by a millennial who thinks man crawled out of the waves around 1956 and most of the good music started to flow shortly after 2001.
| "Something" by The Beatles (1969) | "Thinking Out Loud" by Ed Sheeran (2014) |
| "My Funny Valentine" by Frank Sinatra (1937) | "Valentine" by The Replacements (1987) |
| "Valentine's Day" by Steve Earle (1996) | "Won't You Be My Valentine" by Dore Alpert (2020) |
| "Be Mine" by R.E.M. (1996) | "Valentine's Day" by Bruce Springsteen (1987) |
| "Valentine" by Willie Nelson (1993) | "Valentine" by 5 Seconds of Summern (2018) |
| "My Valentine" by Paul McCartney (2012) | "Valentine" by Pentatonix (2013) |
| "Valentine" by Martina McBride & Jim Brickman (1997) | "Toxic Valentine" by All Time Low (2009) |
| "Valentine" by Train (2017) | "Valentine Love" by Norman Connors (1975) |
| "Valentine" by Fiona Apple (2012) | "Valentine's Day is Over" by Billy Bragg (1988) |
| "Happy Valentine's Day" by OutKast (2003) | "Cupid's Chokehold" by Gym Class Heroes ft. Patrick Stump (2005) |
| "Silly Love Songs" by Paul McCartney & Wings (1976) | "L-O-V-E" by Nat King Colen (1965) |
| "At Last" by Etta James (1960) | "All You Need Is Love" by The Beatles (1967) |
| "Your Song" by Elton John (1970) | "For Once in My Life" by Stevie Wonder (1968) |
| "I Will Always Love You" by Dolly Parton (1974) | "Love of My Life" by Queen (1975) |
| "Love Me Tender" by Elvis Presley (1956) | "First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" by Roberta Flack (1969) |
| "All of Me" by John Legend (2013) | "If I Ain't Got You" by Alicia Keys (2003) |
| "Make You Feel My Love" by Adele (2008) | "Endless Love" by Diana Ross & Lionel Richie (1981) |
| "Can't Help Falling In Love" by Elvis Presley (1961) | "A Thousand Years" by Christina Perrin (2011) |
| "My Heart Will Go On" by Celine Dion (2009) |
One of the signs of advancing age is exhibiting persistent suspicion of the musical tastes of the generation that follows yours. But, geez, what are these songs and where did some of them come from? Unless your date is 18 or under, she'll be hearing most of these Valentine's classics for the first time.
Several other prefab playlists came up likewise short. Here's a personal list that took all of about 20 minutes to put together, including typing.
"Here There and Everywhere" by the Beatles (1966)
"The Rose" by Bette Midler (1979)
"Just the Way You Are" by Billy Joel (1979)
"Until the Night" By Billy Joel (1978)
"Can't Help Falling In Love" by Elvis Presley (1956)
"Don't Worry Baby" by The Beach Boys and Lorrie Morgan (1996)
"Surfer Girl" by the Beach Boys (1963)
"Theme from a Summer Place" by Percey Faith and his Orchestra (1959)
"Summer of '42" by Michel Legrand (1971)
"Coney Island Baby" by the The Excellents (1962)
"A Rose in Spanish Harlem" by Benny King (1964)
"The Girls in Their Summer Dresses by Harry Belafonte (1966)
"That Sunday, That Summer" by Nat King Cole (1963)
"Boys of Summer" by Don Henley (1984)
"Love at the Five & Dime" by Nanci Griffith (1986)
"Turn the Radio Up (Make Me Lose Control) by Eric Carmen (1988)
"Put It Together" by Langhorne Slim (2015)
"Can't Help Falling In Love" by UB40 (1993)
"Be My Girl" by the Lettermen (1963)
"When I Fall in Love" by The Lettermen (1962)
If even that's too much for you, just find a playlist of Billy Joel's greatest love songs (like this), but it's really much better if the music says something touchingly wonderful about the wonder of you.
Dining in front of a crackling fireplace is a very nice touch if you can swing it. Own a bridge table? A bear skin rug in front of the fire, so much the better.
Oh, and send the kids to a sleepover at the house of some friend or neighbor who's not nearly as romantic.
George Hamilton IV - A Rose and a Baby Ruth (1956). Love conquers looks.