When it comes to lasting love, Harry Connick Jr. and his wife, Jill Goodacre Connick, have one rule—there are no rules. “We trust each other, we love each other, we communicate,” Harry told People. “But when you say it’s a rule, it’s almost like we got to adhere to this. We don’t really roll like that.” “We just wake up every day, and we’re thankful for each other and try to be good parents and good spouses to one another,” he continued. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Harry Connick Jr (@harryconnickjr) The two-time Emmy winner and his wife celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary this year. And their relationship is stronger than ever because they prioritize each other and their three daughters, Georgia, 28, Kate, 26, and Charlotte, 22. They also strive to maintain their “way of life” instead of paying attention to what works for others. “It’s different for everybody,” he said of love and marriage. “Certain things that work for us may not work for other people, but we’re not too big on rules.” Harry Connick Jr. Doesn’t Like Handing Out Advice Because of that mindset, Harry Connick Jr. is careful not to hand his daughters too much advice as they look for their life partners.  “I think that we’ve tried to lead by example … I’m not an advice giver,” he noted. “‘Hey, what do you think about this?’ I might tell them, but I’ve always found that giving advice, especially unsolicited advice, tends to make people shy away.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Harry Connick Jr (@harryconnickjr) The Independence Day star said he and Jill raised their girls “to have self-worth” and to “make good decisions,” so he hopes they’re confident enough to live their lives without much input from others. “I think they will [make good decisions],” he shared. “So, if they need us, they’ll come [to us]. But, it’s not like, ‘Make sure you communicate,’ or, ‘Find someone you can always laugh with.’ That’s just not my thing.” This story’s featured image is by Noam Galai/Getty Images for New York Magazine. The post Harry Connick Jr. & Wife Jill’s Secret To Happy Marriage Works For Them But “May Not Work For Other People” appeared first on InspireMore.

'What a bunch of rubes'

Our 11 Best Heart Songs Sung By Nancy Wilson article presents a wonderful showcase of songs in which Nancy Wilson sings lead vocals. It must not be easy standing right next to one of the greatest rock and roll singers of all time in her sister Ann. Still, Nancy has held her own quite wonderfully over the years whenever she has taken the lead on a tune. We wonder how many people even recognize, just from hearing the songs on the radio or CD, that at times it is Nancy singing lead vocals. Of course, I think most Heart fans The post 11 Best Heart Songs Sung By Nancy Wilson appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

The Shepherd Calls His Flocks: Sunday Reflection

Four years ago this week (July 20, 2020), MSNBC elevated their nasty, ultra-partisan weekend host Joy Reid from weekend mornings to primetime, with The ReidOut taking over the 7pm ET time slot from Chris Matthews’s Hardball. Matthews had abruptly quit four months earlier, after allegations he’d made creepy sexual comments to female colleagues and guests. With Reid, MSNBC knew exactly what they were getting. A veteran of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, she had already used MSNBC’s airwaves to falsely denounce Republicans as the “fascist” and “cruel” enemies of “brown people;” to falsely claim the “far right” yearned to “send women back to the Dark Ages;” and to shamefully trash GOP Congressman Steve Scalise mere days after he was critically wounded by a wannabe assassin steeped in MSNBC’s anti-Republican rhetoric. Promoted in the midst of the hard-fought 2020 election, Reid has delivered the same vituperative partisanship to an even larger audience. Then-candidate Joe Biden even headlined her first program, lamely flattering Reid that she had been on his list of potential vice presidential nominees. Culling through Reid’s quotes from the past four years, there’s no shortage of extremist and hateful rhetoric, much of which is complete nonsense. In 2020, she claimed federal law enforcement “abuse” and even “kidnap” people off the streets (they don’t), and spun sinister theories that Donald Trump was going to use the United States Post Office to steal that year’s election (he didn’t). Routinely employing poisonous demagoguery, Reid has claimed Republicans would trade “all the tax cuts” for the right to use openly racist language, and she’s accused the GOP of “bringing back the lynching vibe.” She’s even stated that, because regulating abortion is again constitutional, the “Christianist majority” on the Supreme Court has made women “state property.” And rather than display a basic level of humanity, just on Monday she grumbled that last weekend’s assassination attempt would “allow Donald Trump as he is, you know, bathed in the glory and grandeur of his party, to rewrite himself as both a hero and a victim.” For four years, Joy Reid has been the most insanely inflammatory hosts on a network chock full of inflammatory hosts; you can find hundreds of examples of her lunacy right here on NewsBusters. Here are 20 quotes showing how she’s degraded political discourse since her primetime debut in July 2020: ■ “A generation ago, when federal forces were deployed into American cities, it was a relief to people of color because it meant that a little girl may get walked into school….The cavalry was coming. Now, when federal forces are being deployed into America’s cities, it’s to teargas and abuse people and in some cases just snatch people off the streets without identifying themselves, and essentially to kidnap them. It’s a secret police sort of, you know, vibe instead of a cavalry.”— Host Joy Reid on TheReidOut, July 21, 2020. ■ “In 2016, Donald Trump relied on foreign help and voter suppression to help him squeak by Hillary Clinton. This year, he’s literally going postal to do the same thing against Joe Biden. Donald Trump is actively working to ensure that your vote, the vote that you plan to cast in the presidential ballot, may not count in November.”— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, August 13, 2020. ■ “Does Donald Trump actually care?...Do you think that he cares that some of his own people could get sick and maybe die by being at this event in the White House?...This is a cult of personality....I have literally seen interviews where people would say, ‘I don’t care if I get sick. I have to see him.’”— Co-host Joy Reid during MSNBC’s Decision 2020: Republican National Convention, August 27, 2020. ■ “Donald Trump continues to behave like an itinerant dictator….bulldozing over our democracy and hunkering down in the White House, refusing to relinquish the reins of government or even to admit he’s been fired by the American people….Trump is no longer an autocrat in the making, he’s already there.”— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, November 18, 2020. ■ “I’ll say it again: people on the right would trade all the tax cuts for the ability to openly say the n-word like in ‘the good old days.’ To them, not being able to be openly racist and discriminatory without consequence is oppression.”— March 3, 2021 tweet by MSNBC’s The ReidOut host Joy Reid. ■ “What Republicans are saying is they’re going to make it torture for you to vote in line by having fewer machines, beat-up machines at places….places where black folks live...make it impossible or torture for you to vote in line. And they’re going to make it impossible for you to vote by mail. They’re going to lock off every way that you can vote….This is the end of democracy in America. This is the beginning of the South Africa strategy…..It’s Jim Crow America.”— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, March 25, 2021. ■ “Your drunk, mostly absentee, Nazi-curious, authoritarian Republican Party is doing this circus, waiting around for you to put their ridiculous, embarrassing, democracy-hating, Trump-cult authoritarianism, open-racism-embracing, dangerous behinds back in power.”— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, November 18, 2021. ■ “Please stop thinking that there is some body count, some level of brutality and carnage that will move them — these Republicans and their two pet Democrats....Because their tolerance for blood and the NRA’s tolerance for slaughter are bottomless, as is the grief and the torture that the parents of slaughtered children and slaughtered grandmas and shoppers and Bible study parishioners, all the slaughtered Americans will feel every day for the rest of their lives. So honestly, to hell with anybody who says ‘don’t politicize this.’...”— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, May 25, 2022. ■ “Welp. The Christianist majority on the SCOTUS has made it clear that they intend to return this county to its 18th century state and they are accomplishing their goal....We have raced backwards, against the tide of history. The Republican Party did this. Gilead states are doing this. It’s time to wake up, y’all.”— June 24, 2022 tweet by MSNBC’s The ReidOut host Joy Reid, following the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. ■ “More than 100 million women and queer folks with uteruses too, woke up to another day in America, basically as state property in the more than 20 fully or partially Republican-controlled states that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority unleashed to literally take physical control of half the population.”— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s TheReidOut, July 5, 2022. ■ “How long before an American woman is prosecuted for an abortion?...What’s even worse than a woman prosecuted for a miscarriage or stillbirth? Death. In states with strict abortion laws, doctors may hesitate before offering essential lifesaving measures when a woman is bleeding out during a miscarriage. Because remember, the doctors face fears of prosecution, too.”— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, July 6, 2022. ■ “It’s also important to unpack the myth of Thanksgiving. It is a holiday riddled with historical inaccuracies. Built on this myth that the indigenous welcomed their colonizers with open arms and ears of corn. A simplistic fairytale interpretation of a 1621 encounter between indigenous tribes and English settlers that erases the genocide that followed. It’s the truth that Republicans want banned from our textbooks because here is the secret they want so desperately to keep. We are a country founded on violence.”— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, November 23, 2022. ■ “They seemed to have gotten back into lynching, hanging, all sorts of other draconian 19th century fare. What is going on with Republicans that they seem to be bringing back the lynching vibe?”— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, April 10, 2023. ■ “You can’t even say slavery was bad now in the Republican Party. That’s how far it’s gone.”— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, July 27, 2023. ■ “The conservative majority on the court led by Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have already waged a full frontal assault on modern society, including repealing the Civil Rights era, abortion access and affirmative action, and they are currently gunning for contraceptive access, and maybe even gay marriage. And that is because justices like Alito and Thomas share the religious far-right’s grievances about society’s evolution.”— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, February 20, 2024. ■ “This mad man [Donald Trump], whose brain is clearly addled and little more than a ball of smooth clay at this stage of its deterioration, makes these promises to feed chum to a base that has been drilled by right-wing media to now care more about stopping migrants — even if they themselves live thousands of miles from the southern border — than about the economy or inflation or literally anything else.”— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, March 18, 2024. ■ “As dangerous and clearly deranged as Trump is, we have to start asking not just what’s wrong with a society that produces so much support for this chaos theater, but also who is it that so badly wants Trump to be President?”— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, March 19, 2024. ■ “The first person to actually criminally prosecute Donald Trump is a black Harvard grad....And a black woman is doing the same exact thing in Georgia. And a black woman forced you to pay a $175 million fine….Trump is being held to account by the very multicultural, multiracial democracy that he’s trying to dismantle. And for me, there’s something poetic and actually wonderful about that. It says something good about our country that we’re still capable of having that happen. Go, DEI! My DEIs are bringing it home.”— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, April 15, 2024. ■ “So, now he’s flying a Christian nationalist, pro-Trump flag as well….He [Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito] is a lawless individual, a clear Christian nationalist, and now a dual insurrection flag flier.”— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, May 22, 2024. ■ “His [The Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo] preferred list of wannabe justices in a second Trump presidency is already out there. Let me be blunt. You all should be very worried. These judges would lock us into a multi-generational nightmare. Fox spoke with a number of sources and the latest list is a veritable who’s who of young, forced-birth, anti-LGBTQ activists who have made a living stripping away rights from minorities in America in the name of Christian nationalism.”— Host Joy Reid on MSNBC’s The ReidOut, June 17, 2024. For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.

Saturday evening, June 13, instantaneously became one of those “where were you when?” moments. I was sitting on the couch watching a movie when I heard my phone buzz. When I looked at the screen, there was a notification from a group chat that includes several friends who work in full-time Christian ministry. It was a simple question. “Are you guys watching this?” There was a flurry of affirmative responses of disbelief, and I quickly typed out, “What are we watching and where?” 'We have a responsibility to pray. We need to pray regularly for all our leaders — national, state, and local.' The next message was jarring: “Someone just shot at Donald Trump on live TV." At that moment, I joined the rest of the country watching and reading reports of what would soon be confirmed as an unsuccessful assassination attempt. The last attempted assassination of a sitting or former president took place in 1981, the year I was born. This kind of political violence is not unprecedented in the history of our country, but it is not something that has ever happened in my lifetime. I wrestled through a gamut of thoughts and emotions. I was shocked and angered. I quickly told my wife what was happening. I gathered my kids, one of whom had heard the news from his friends while playing video games online, and tried my best as a parent to help them understand this historic moment. I called my dad to see if he had heard the news. The aforementioned group chat was in overdrive. It wasn’t until an hour or so later that I thought, “I should pray.” That’s an embarrassing sentence to write because I’m a pastor. I’ve been a Christian for 28 years. I’ve been a pastor for 18 years. I’ve preached countless sermons in which I’ve proclaimed that prayer shouldn’t be our last resort — it should be our first resort. In that moment of national crisis, it wasn’t a first resort for me, but it should have been. Before I scrolled, before I called, before I read — I should have prayed. Eventually, I did pray that evening. First, I prayed a prayer of repentance that I hadn’t practiced what I preached, and then I prayed for all those involved in the tragedy and for our nation as a whole. I prayed the next morning as I prepared to address my congregation, and I prayed in both of our worship services that morning. Before I prayed in church Sunday morning, I shared a specific exhortation with our people. I told them that there is no place for political violence in our nation. I told them, as Christians, we have a twofold responsibility in moments like these. We must always condemn evil in every form, and we must pray. Regarding prayer, I said this, “We have a responsibility to pray. We need to pray regularly for all our leaders — national, state, and local. We need to appeal to our King, the King of kings, for protection, for wisdom, and for the salvation of their souls." I believe this because it’s what the Bible teaches. God’s word is replete with commands, calls, and exhortations to pray. The Bible teaches us that we should pray, how to pray, and what we should be praying for. The principle of praying for leaders is found in 1 Timothy 2. The apostle Paul wrote a letter to a young pastor named Timothy, who was pastoring the church in Ephesus that Paul had planted 10 years earlier. Paul’s letter addressed a series of concerns within the life of the church and gave Timothy specific instructions on how to address those concerns so that he could lead his church faithfully. 1 Timothy 2:1 says, “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people.” Paul was urging Timothy to treat prayer as a matter of importance, a first resort. God wants all men and women to be saved by placing their faith and trust in Christ alone — and that includes our leaders. And while it is clear that we are called to pray for all men everywhere, in 1 Timothy 2:1 Paul calls the church to specifically pray “for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.” He says they need to pray that their leaders govern in such a way that there is peace and quiet in society, holistic peace that allows all men and women to flourish, and for Christians, the opportunity to live faithfully without fear of persecution. Christians love to pray for Christian leaders. But Ephesus was under the rule of the Roman empire and had never had a Christian king. So when Paul calls us to pray for our leaders, he’s not simply referring to the leaders we like or the leaders from our political party of choice. He means all leaders. We should pray for our leaders at every level of service — local, state, and national. We should pray for their safety. I do not believe any Christian should have to practice his faith under the fear of persecution from his leaders. I also believe no elected official should ever have to do his job in fear of his life. We should also pray that God grants them wisdom. I believe as Christians we should pray that wisdom is rooted in the principles of God’s word. Most importantly, I believe we should pray for their salvation. Paul continues in 1 Timothy 2:3-5, saying, “This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all.” God wants all men and women to be saved by placing their faith and trust in Christ alone — and that includes our leaders. Tragedy is inevitable. Prayerlessness is not. In moments of crisis, may our collective call be, “Let us pray.”

There's one simple reason automakers like Ford and GM are stepping back from their ambitious EV plans: their customers. Contrary to the exuberant predictions of Elon Musk, environmental groups, and other industry and government “experts," the love affair between EVs and the American consumer seems to have fizzled after a honeymoon period of robust sales volumes. Meanwhile, China is happy to serve the consumers its competitors have neglected. In late 2022, it took over nearly 100% of the Russian car market in a matter of monthsTurns out these relatively pricey novelties just aren't as appealing anymore, especially when hybrids offer most of the efficiency without the range anxiety. A look at the change in market share makes it clear that the process of going all in — or even mostly in — on EVs is going to take decades rather than years.My strong sense of this was validated by last year's iSeeCars.com study, which showed sales in cities and states with more than 7% new EV market share growing much more slowly than in markets below that threshold. It seems that the media- and government-fueled hype around the latest must-have technology can only take you so far. Getting from 3 to 7% EV share is much easier than getting from 7 to 10%. As for 20, 30% or more? That's clearly a long way off.This retreat from EVs clearly makes sense for American automakers. But could it risk ceding ground to China?Not necessarily. The Chinese already have every advantage when it comes to EVs, from their chokehold on the global lithium supply to their ability to reduce costs by aligning their manufacturing sectors with the government. Before going toe-to-toe with them, we might want to strengthen our position. The best move for U.S. automakers is to sell Americans the gasoline and hybrid models they want right now, while developing their own domestic EV supply chains. This will allow carmakers like Ford and GM to maintain healthy sales and profit while funding a more measured, and realistic, approach to electric vehicles. They've already tried the shock-and-awe, flood-the-market approach, and it taught us an expensive lesson. Now, the challenge is how quickly they can adjust production to reflect true consumer demand.Even China isn't betting it all on EVs. It's been snatching up internal combustion-engine technology that left-leaning European brands have foolishly discarded.While Biden and the Green New Deal zealots have been trying to force a one-size-fits-all solution on American citizens, Chinese carmaker Geely has been building some 15 internal combustion engine plants in Europe, which will supply ultra-efficient 4-cylinder turbo engines to Mercedes, Nissan, Renault, Volvo, and other brands caught up short by the cooling EV demand. Some brands — BMW, Hyundai, KIA, Genesis, and Toyota — did see the writing on the wall in time and had the foresight to keep offering consumers a choice. Their bottom lines are better off because of it. Meanwhile, China is happy to serve the consumers its competitors have neglected. In late 2022, it took over nearly 100% of the Russian car market in a matter of months. All it had to do was supply the good old-fashioned gas-powered vehicles nobody else seemed interested in making. The result has been China's biggest export boom ever.Imagine that — innovating in new, EV technology while still catering to consumers who aren't ready to make the change. It's called hedging your bets, and all smart players do it. The current administration might want to look into it.