Good morning, and welcome to Thursday, April 30, 2026. It’s International Jazz Day — designated by UNESCO to recognize jazz as a universal language that promotes peace, dialogue, and intercultural understanding. The rest of these are not from the UN, far as I can find: Honesty Day, National Adopt a Shelter Pet Day, National Therapy Animal Day, National Bubble Tea Day, National Oatmeal Cookie Day, National Mr. Potato Head Day, and Healthy Kids Day
311: Roman Emperor Galerius issues the Edict of Toleration, ending the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire.
1492: Christopher Columbus is given a royal commission by Spanish monarchs Isabella I and Ferdinand II to equip his expedition to the New World.
1789: George Washington is inaugurated as the first President of the United States of America at Federal Hall in NYC.
1803: Chancellor Robert Livingston and James Monroe sign the Louisiana Purchase Treaty in Paris; at 15 million dollars, it doubles the size of the USA.
1808: The first practical typewriter is finished by Italian Pellegrino Turri.
1859: Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities is first published.
1861: President Abraham Lincoln orders Federal Troops to evacuate Indian Territory (Civil War).
1864: New York becomes the first state to charge a hunting license fee.
1885: Henry Lee Higginson starts the Popular Music series with the Boston Symphony, which evolves into the Boston Pops Orchestra in 1900.
1904: The ice cream cone, invented by Ernest A. Hamwi, makes its debut at the St. Louis World’s Fair (independently of other claimant Italo Marchiony in New York).
1925: Automaker Dodge Brothers, Inc., is sold to Dillon, Read & Company for $146 million plus $50 million for charity.
1939: Lou Gehrig sets a MLB record playing his 2,130th consecutive and final game for the New York Yankees.
1945: Arthur Godfrey Time begins a 27-year run on CBS radio.
1945: Adolf Hitler commits suicide along with his new wife Eva Braun in the Führerbunker in Berlin as the Red Army captures the city.
1955: Cuban bandleader Pérez Prado’s mambo version of “Cherry Pink & Apple Blossom White” goes #1 for 10 weeks.
1961: “Tossin’ and Turnin'” single released by Bobby Lewis (Billboard Song of the Year, 1961).
1973: Paul McCartney releases the Red Rose Speedway album, which includes the hit single “My Love.”
1976: The Betsy Ross Bridge, spanning the Delaware River from Philadelphia, Pa., to Pennsauken, N.J., opens.
1989: Chicago newspaper movie critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert film their 500th movie review television show.
1993: CERN releases the source code of the World Wide Web, making it freely available to all.
Birthdays today include: Carl Friedrich Gauss, German mathematician; Alice B. Toklas, American-Parisian avant-garde and companion of Gertrude Stein; Joachim von Ribbentrop, Nazi foreign minister and war criminal; Eve Arden [Eunice Quedens], American stage and screen actress; Robert Shaw, American chorale conductor (Robert Shaw Chorale); Roger L. Easton, American scientist and inventor (GPS); Johnny Horton, singer (“The Battle of New Orleans”); Cloris Leachman, Oscar and Emmy Award-winning actress (Young Frankenstein, Frau Blucher); Burt Young, actor (Rocky; Convoy); Bobby Vee, pop singer (“Devil Or Angel,” “Take Good Care Of My Baby”); Jill Clayburgh, American actress (Unmarried Woman, Semi-Tough); Stephen Harper, 22nd Prime Minister of Canada; Michael Waltrip, NASCAR driver; and Johnny Galecki, actor (Roseanne, The Big Bang Theory).
If today is your day, Happy Birthday!
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I don’t mention Robert Stacy McCain (The Other McCain) in my daily musings nearly as much as I should. He deserves far more of my attention than he gets.
My correspondence with Stacy stretches back to the heyday of blogging, and we both came up through that tradition. He ran with his writing far further than I did — life happens. These days, he carries the credentials of former assistant national editor and reporter for The Washington Times and co-author of the 2006 book Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party.
The man has done well. For a time, he showed up in my pages at BitsBlog at least once a week. I hold him in high esteem — no question about that. When I made the transition to new digs (a new home physically, and a new byline here at PJ Media — both at once), I let his name drop off the radar entirely. Not by intent, mind.
That changes today. A piece he wrote at Born Lucky caught my eye — and it grabbed me because I’d just touched the same subject in last Tuesday’s daily, where I quoted Paul Harvey, saying:
…by our own emphasis on all of the bad things, crime and inflation and pollution and floods and fires and discords and disaster and discontent, by our persistent preoccupation with negatives, we tend to unsell ourselves and our impressionable offspring on a way of life, which is the envy of the rest of the world.
Says Stacy in his piece:
Until he was 60 years old, David Mamet had never talked to a conservative. When his discontent with events in the early years of the Obama Era finally led him to question his lifelong liberalism, the first conservative he spoke to recommended that he read Shelby Steele’s 2006 book, White Guilt — an excellent choice. From that start, Mamet continued his autodidactic course of remedial study, reading various works of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell and Paul Johnson, among others.
What Mamet gathered from his study, and from his own observations, was that liberalism is essentially destructive. In order to lead us to their Utopia of Equality (the “Promised Land”) liberals must first discredit and destroy the hated status quo, i.e., the American system of limited government and free enterprise. This was what Obama meant when he spoke of “fundamentally changing” the United States — destruction.
Well, yes. I made that point several times during the Obama years — the rather obvious observation that before you raise a new building, you need to tear down the old one first. What I argued at the time was, essentially, stop and consider what we sacrifice in that transition from America to their vision of Utopia.
Stacy continues:
Mamet is offended by this project, which aims to cheat Americans of their patrimony:
“Our forebears struggled and fought and died to establish and to preserve and broaden those freedoms they bequeathed us, and which have made us the most prosperous country in history. To denigrate our culture and traditions, to turn our back on our place and duty in the world … is an act of folly like that of any thoughtless and weak (not to say ungrateful) inheritor of wealth.”
The fact that we are indeed “the most prosperous country in history” is little appreciated by most Americans. This has been the subject of much humor lately, when it was reported that the per capita gross domestic product of the United Kingdom is less than that of Mississippi. It is notorious that, in every measure of socioeconomic well-being that can be ranked, Mississippi is always dead last among the United States, so that if England is poorer than that … Well, it must be bad.
An interesting point to raise with King Charles being in DC the last couple days. Anyway:
America has been the greatest success story in world history, and yet liberals want to wreck it all in the name of Progress and Equality — or Hope and Change, as the slogans of the Obama campaign promised. This is folly, as Mamet finally realized after decades of membership in the liberal tribe, and he’s spent the past 15 years trying to wake up others to the menace he belatedly has discerned. He sees now what I began to see more than 30 years ago when the first couple of years of Bill Clinton’s presidency cured me of my inherited loyalty to the Democratic Party.
The thing about being a loyal Democrat is that, if you ever start having doubts about the party’s agenda — and decide to investigate whatever it is that caused your doubt — the whole scheme can suddenly unravel.
And there it is — that explains the desperate scramble to reclaim the narrative. When other voices break into the conversation, logic takes over, and the “logic” Democrats have peddled for the last few decades can’t survive a fair fight. We’ve watched this epiphany unfold for an increasing number of Democrats lately, as it grows harder to deny the extent to which the party has left them behind. The Democrats are panicking. They’re losing their grip on the American voter, they know it, and they can’t bring themselves to admit why.
Higher taxes, rising crime, a crushing cost of living, and a relentless guilt trip aimed at mainstream America — all of it is bleeding support away from Democrats. That hemorrhage produces the kind of nonsensical desperation we see in Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) talking out of both sides of his mouth: proclaiming in one breath that “violence is never the answer, whether it’s targeted at the right, the left or the center,” then turning around and declaring that “We are in an era of maximum warfare. Everywhere, all the time.”
It also explains why Democrat leadership threw its weight behind the open borders policy we lived through under Biden. At this point, Democrats are losing these battles in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible twenty years ago. The war, however, goes on. And, as Stacy puts it, this is urgent:
Times change, and the issues shift, but the War to Stop Liberals From Ruining Everything is incessant. Whether or not we can “Make America Great Again,” if we give up now, there won’t be anything of American greatness left to fight for.
Thought of the day: “Keep smiling, because life is a beautiful thing and there’s so much to smile about.” —Marilyn Monroe
Take care. I’ll see you here tomorrow.
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