Because I’m the only non-sports editorial person in the office and thus have better local things to do, I didn’t attend the Dubuque appearance of U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood in Dubuque Friday.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has a task for those in the tri-states — contact your congressional representatives in Washington, D.C., and urge them to pass the transportation bill.
“America is one big pothole, folks,” said LaHood, adding that if the bill is not passed, the U.S. will be changing course from a long history of supporting the nation’s transportation infrastructure. …
The transportation secretary suggested that policy-makers in Washington, D.C., where “nobody gets along or has a common agenda,” follow Dubuque’s lead and ignore the political views of individual leaders in the name of progress. …
Asked by Mayor Ray Buol what it would cost to bring U.S. transportation up to current standards, LaHood acknowledged it would take “billions of dollars,” but he said the cost already has been budgeted for.
Last thing first: Given that there is no prospect in the foreseeable future of anything approximating a balanced federal budget, to say that the cost has already been budgeted for is like your planning to win PowerBall or Mega Millions this week.
LaHood, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, demonstrates that those who claim there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans have a point. LaHood has been the point man in the Obama administration’s continuing war on drivers, as demonstrated by the proposal to make GPS devices essentially useless and to ban cellphone use in vehicles. LaHood is also a professor of the Washington-knows-best school as demonstrated by the federal mandate for all states to set the same definition of legal intoxication instead of letting states decide. (Which came after the federal mandate for all states to require seat belt use and set the same drinking age, the latter of which dates back to the Reagan administration.)
The texting ban and LaHood’s wish to ban cellphone use is despite the lack of proof that texting and cellphones are any worse a driver distraction than all the other legal (that is, not specifically proscribed by law) forms of driver distraction, such as eating and drinking, reading a map, reading road signs, watching other traffic, adjusting your sound system or ventilation controls, the Check Engine light, or, worst of all, passengers.
LaHood’s employment as transportation secretary is supposed to impress us with President Obama’s bipartisanism, in the same way we were supposed to be impressed by George W. Bush’s appointment of U.S. Rep. Norman Mineta (D–California) as transportation secretary. My preference for transportation secretary would be a member of the National Motorists Association, an organization that seeks to inject that rarest of things, common sense, into speed limits and enforcement thereof, the drunk driving debate, seat belt laws, and the other things government tries to do to infringe upon our transportation freedom.
Beyond LaHood’s search for his “billions of dollars,” transportation funding is a state issue too. One of my first local events was a Platteville Area Chamber of Commerce luncheon that featured state Secretary of Transportation Mark Gottlieb. He mentioned a $15 billion gap in what the Department of Transportation and/or the Legislature wants to do in road projects and actual funding therefor over the next decade.
In both the federal and state cases, perhaps there wouldn’t be such a funding gap if we drivers weren’t paying through our gas taxes and vehicle registration fees (those two areas comprise half of state transportation revenue) for things that do not benefit us drivers. I like to walk, and my children ride bikes; that doesn’t mean I think we should pay for pedestrian-specific paths or bike trails beyond what we already have. Mass transit in rural areas does not cost nearly as much as the Milwaukee transit system nor Madison Metro buses, and it seems to me residents of Milwaukee and Dane counties should pay for their buses, not me. Trains have a purpose, to move freight, not to move limousine liberals between Madison and Milwaukee.
Now that I’ve written this, I sort of wish I had gone to see LaHood. Except that LaHood is like nearly every other politician I’ve ever met, afflicted with something one of our late dogs had — selective hearing.
Jessica McBride is also looking for reasons to choose Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett instead of Gov. Scott Walker:
Mayor Tom Barrett increasingly seems to be running a “throw everything you can and see what sticks” campaign. …
And so we’re told we should oust Gov. Scott Walker midterm because, well, Walker’s supposedly the really, really angry guy (OK, whatever). Or he’s making us all really angry at each other (whatever).
We’re told we should go through the disruption of doing something we’ve never done before, oust a governor midterm, because he’s mean to women (or something).
We’re told we should oust him because some monthly jobs figures weren’t great, even though Milwaukee’s jobs figures aren’t great. And then, when Walker, under fire over jobs before he’s had a chance to really implement a job reform agenda, produces a report that shows the state has gained jobs under his tenure, we’re told we shouldn’t vote for him because he released it early. …
There are also murky asides about that looming John Doe investigation in Milwaukee County. Although the specter of that is obviously concerning, right now it hasn’t snaked its way up to Walker. So right now it’s just shadowy allegations or aides who allegedly did bad things. …
If you believe the polls, Walker is actually increasing his lead. I think this is partly because the Democrats haven’t settled on a coherent, clear message for why we need to be going through all this. They need one. Walker is not just an incumbent. He’s an incumbent they are trying to toss out of office in the middle of his term. That’s a really big deal. People get this. It means they are looking for Democrats to clearly make the case — the case for why we should.
Instead, Democrats are tossing up such a flurry of charges that no one has a clue what they are talking about anymore.
The upshot is in McBride’s last sentence: “… the fact his opponents haven’t been able to clearly explain why his central reform (remember that?) was so bad.”
Today in 1966, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend of The Who decided to replace for the evening the tardy drummer Keith Moon and bass player John Entwistle with the bass player and drummer of the band that played before them at the Ricky Tick Club in Windsor, England.
When Moon and Entwistle arrived and found they had been substituted for, a fight broke out. Moon and Entwistle quit … for a week.
The number one single today in 1967:
Today in 1967, the BBC’s “Where It’s At” featured a preview of the Beatles’ new album, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
The show didn’t include the song the Beeb banned due to its alleged drug references:
The numberone album today in 1958, and for the next 31 weeks, was the soundtrack to the musical “South Pacific” went to number one and stayed there for 31 weeks. The film version starred Mitzi Gaynor, who looked very much like my mother a few years later.
Today in 1979, Eric Clapton married Patti Boyd, the former wife of George Harrison and the muse for the song “Layla.” The song lasted much longer than the marriage.
One wonders if anyone played selections from that day’s number one British album:
I am not a person who reflexively believes the way things used to be is better than the way things are today. For one thing, history, good or bad, does not go backwards.
I am, for better or worse, a child of the TV generation. When our oldest son, Michael, started watching TV, it amused us greatly that he was watching the same PBS shows, “Sesame Street” and “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” that we watched growing up. (It wouldn’t surprise me, though I don’t remember it, if I watched episode number one of “Sesame Street,” portions of which, of course, can be viewed on YouTube.) I’m sure pediatricians or psychologists would be horrified to learn that, when I was seven years old, I was a religious watcher of “Hawaii Five-O,” on CBS Tuesdays at 7:30 p.m. and then, once the “Family Hour” was instituted, 8 p.m. (More on Five-O later.)
Cable TV has been a bonanza (not to be confused with “Bonanza”) of old TV over the years, having taken on what broadcast stations used to do during off-network hours. (Old reruns on broadcast TV have largely been replaced by original-run syndicated programming.) One highlight of going to my in-laws was the ability to watch weekend reruns of “Emergency!” and “The Green Hornet,” which at the time were on channels we didn’t get where we lived.
On a different weekend in southwest Wisconsin, another channel was showing a marathon of the old cartoon show “The Banana Splits,” with four people costumed as lifesize stuffed animals. (I apologize in advance for inserting the theme music, “Tra-la-la La-la-la-laaa tra-la-la la-la-la-laaaaaa,” into your brain for the next several days.)
One of the voice talents on the show was the great ventriloquist Paul Winchell, who gained anonymous notice later as the voice of Tigger and Dow Bathroom Cleaner’s “scrubbing bubbles.” TNT used to have a morning segment called “Lunchbox TV,” featuring reruns of “Starsky and Hutch,” “CHiPs” and “Kung Fu.”
While my early watching was usually cartoon-related, most of my TV watching has been in some variation of the action/adventure genre. Early on, I developed a two-pronged formula as to whether the series was worth my watching: (1) cool wheels, well before I could drive (including, in the case of “Star Trek,” space vehicles), and (2) cool theme music, before I’d developed appreciation for music. That might be the only explanation for why I watched “The A-Team,” although George Peppard did appear to be having the time of his life as the head of said A-Team.
For us old TV buffs, WBAY-TV RTN was a godsend, until it went away. Then came WGBA-TV’s Me TV, which on Sundays includes one of the great dramas, “The Fugitive” (the finale of which was the highest rated TV show in history until someone shot J.R. Ewing), “The Rockford Files” (a series I thought as a nine-year-old was edgy because the title character said “damn” and “hell” a lot), “Get Smart” (two words: Mel Brooks) and “Hawaii Five-O,” and “Mission: Impossible” weekdays, and “The Wild Wild West” (a science fiction Western, if that makes any sense) on weekends.
If I were programming “Steve TV,” using the aforementioned formula, the program schedule would include:
“Hawaii Five-O” (9 p.m. weeknights), which has the best opening sequence, bar none, in the history of TV. It was “Miami Vice” 15 years before “Miami Vice,” crime in lush locales. The irony is that, if you ask any Hawaii tourism official of the 1970s, “Hawaii Five-O” did more than almost anything to attract tourism to Hawaii, even though the show depicted the state as riven with crime and even espionage. (One of the stars once pointed out that if the show had been realistic, Five-O would have solved every crime the state has ever had about halfway through the series.)
“Magnum P.I.” (10 p.m. weeknights), which replaced “Hawaii Five-O” on the CBS schedule using the same Hawaii studios “Five-O” used. Star Tom Selleck was a star worth emulating in the 1980s, although no one at my part-time newspaper job was impressed when, one day, I drove to work in my mother’s red Chevy Camaro (the closest thing I could find to a Ferrari 308GTSi) wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Like “Hawaii Five-O,” the depiction of Hawaii, where everything grows all year and frost is the name of an old poet, makes those in the less-than-great white north pine for tropical climates.
“Emergency!”, one of the many Jack Webb productions. This one was different from Webb’s “Dragnet” and “Adam-12” (which I religiously watched before “Hawaii Five-O”) in that it lasted an hour and wasn’t about Los Angeles police. It was about Los Angeles County firefighters and paramedics, complete with a cool rescue squad truck, and the paramedics got to do all kinds of dangerous things in the wonderful (though noticeably smoggy) southern California climate, supported by doctors at an L.A.-area hospital. (Why this series has not been remade in the post-9/11 era, where there is much more interest in emergency services as TV show themes, is beyond me.)
“Starsky and Hutch,” a series about two hip plainclothes detectives who drove around in a vehicle guaranteed not to attract bad-guy attention, a red Ford Gran Torino with a huge white Nike-like swoosh on the side. (Similar to the “Magnum P.I.” Ferrari.) The first season, where the title characters were cops instead of social workers with badges as they became later in the series, featured theme music by Lalo Schifrin, who, though he didn’t compose many TV themes or movie scores, composed some great ones, including “Mission: Impossible,” “Mannix,” “Bullitt” and “Dirty Harry.”
I’m a fan of the more obscure series too. “It Takes a Thief” starred Robert Wagner as a rich jewel thief who steals things for the government. (And you thought stealing stuff for the government was limited to the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Revenue.) The classicthememusic was from jazz composer Dave Grusin. I doubt anyone remembers another Jack Webb offering, “Chase,” which featured not just cool theme music but, in the same series, a fast car, a helicopter, a motorcycle and a police dog. (Nirvana for pre-teen boys.) A couple years later, NBC-TV replayed a one-season series, “Hawk,” about a half-American Indian New York City police detective, because of its star, who, 10 years after the series first aired on ABC, was the top-grossing box office star in the U.S. — Burt Reynolds. Even more obscure was a series I remember watching, though I remember almost nothing about it — “Bearcats,” about two guys “looking for adventure” around the turn-of-the-century West, traveling from place to place in an old Stutz Bearcat.
How do we know these and other TV series were superior to much of what’s on TV today? Because Hollywood keeps remaking TV of the ‘60s and ‘70s as movies, even series that were not perhaps crying out to be redone as movies, such as “The Incredible Hulk.” Since the 1980s, we have seen the movie returns of “The Untouchables,” “Mission: Impossible,” “The Saint” (think of the original British TV series as Roger Moore’s audition to replace Sean Connery as James Bond), “The Avengers” (perhaps the worst remake, because while Uma Thurman was a fine replacement for Diana Rigg, Ralph Fiennes is no Patrick Macnee), “The Wild Wild West” (again victimized by bad casting, because Will Smith reminds no one of original star Robert Conrad), “I Spy,” “The Mod Squad,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “S.W.A.T.,” “Starsky and Hutch,” and “Get Smart,” an unappreciated classic in its time. Dick Wolf, the creator of the “Law & Order” franchise, brought back “Dragnet” for two seasons as a one-hour drama, but although I enjoyed it (hearing the announcement “sentenced to death by lethal injection” at the end was a particular thrill), few other viewers apparently did.
Most of those remakes are not popular among the series’ original fans. In the case of “Starsky and Hutch,” the producers made fun of the original series, and if you do that, you’re making fun of the original series’ fans, whether or not the original premise strained credulity. The movie casting of Ben Stiller as Starsky and Owen Wilson as Hutch was just ridiculous. (Having Hutch sing “Don’t Give Up on Us,” the only successful single of original costar David Soul, was a nice touch, though.) If you watch any remake directed by Brian De Palma (who redid “The Untouchables” and the first “Mission: Impossible”), you know that any similarity between the original and De Palma’s remake is limited to the title.
Most of the remakes miss the spirit of the originals, which were created in the old Television Code days, when writers and directors couldn’t go nearly as far as TV goes today and thus had to be more inventive. The quality of most series usually drops the longer the series goes on (particularly “Star Trek,” most of the third season of which could qualify as the worst program in the history of entertainment) when, as a Star Trek chronicler once put it, format becomes formula. At some point, the powers that be in TV entertainment decided that what viewers wanted was more reality — flawed heroes, storylines unresolved after just one episode, social commentary, and more downer episode endings — when, not to be Pollyanniaish about it, most viewers want escapism out of their entertainment. (This is probably not an original theory, but the more grim the daily news is, I’d suggest, the more escapism people want.) Call me a philistine, but the longer the classic series “M*A*S*H” went, the less interested I was in it as the series became more socially profound and less funny. (The fact the series lasted approximately four times as long as the actual Korean War didn’t help either.) A series that was supposed to emulate “Emergency!”, “Third Watch,” was unwatchable because the creators (who formerly worked on “ER”) decided instead to foist enough angst on each character to make them, or the viewer, look for their stash of cyanide tablets.
A lot of fans of old series (many of whom expand on the original through writing fan fiction) want to bring back their favorite series, only to be disappointed by the failure of the comeback (proposals to bring back “Hawaii Five-O” have languished for more than a decade) or to be disappointed in the comeback, since obviously different people (namely actors, writers and producers) are involved. History, good or bad, does not go backwards, even on TV.
Another one-hit wonder had the number one single today in 1968:
The number one single today in 1974 might be the very definition of the term “novelty song”:
The number one British single today in 1975:
(Which more appropriately should have been called “Stand by Your Men,” since Tammy Wynette had had three husbands up to then, and two more thereafter.)
With this redux of the 2010 gubernatorial election, Barrett tees up the ball that Walker slammed a year ago last February.
But how to improve the state?
That’s the key question for the next four weeks.
For better or worse — and it seems everyone has made up their minds on the matter — Walker has answered the question during the first one-third of his term.
And his opponent?
Barrett has yet to say how much he would spend to restore cuts to education, local governments or health care, or how he would get the money. Neither he nor his chief rival, former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk, gave details during the primary campaign on how they would roll back Walker’s cuts. (Secretary of State Doug La Follette and especially state Sen. Kathleen Vinehout were more forthcoming. That they garnered few votes relative to their opponents says more about us than it does about them.)
Now it’s time for Barrett to offer a specific plan for what he would do, and undo, to keep Wisconsin’s fiscal house in order while assuring that the truly needy receive care, public schools and universities are adequately financed, aid to local units of government is sufficient and state agencies exercise the fiscal austerity shown by a private sector that has balanced budgets through efficiencies, benefit cuts, wage freezes and layoffs.
The Commonwealth Press adds this about the state’s fiscal condition, blame for which goes both directions since the state’s books are legally, not correctly, balanced:
Politics by definition … is a zero-sum game.
“Fairness” and “equity” are abstractions anchored only in the gains or losses of the observer. That will remain the case long after Barrett and Walker exit the political stage.
But what won’t, what shouldn’t, change is this: Be they Democrats or Republicans, Wisconsin’s governors and legislators should never again put this state in a position where year after year they have to scramble to offset red ink because they didn’t have the fiscal discipline — the statesmanship — to spend within their means.
First, for those who believe the British are the height of sophistication and are so much more couth than us Americans: This was the number one song in the U.K. today in 1986:
The chicken is not having a birthday. Pervis Jackson of the Spinners is:
So is drummer Bill Bruford, who played for Yes, King Crimson and Genesis:
Maybe it’s the cynic in me, but part of me believes one political side’s favorite members of the other political side are those who can’t explain their opposing views well, or succeed in convincing others of their contrary views.
Perhaps that explains the spittle-generating hatred most Democrats seem to have of Gov. Scott Walker. As Tim Nerenz points out:
Opponents of the reforms enacted in Wisconsin by Governor Scott Walker and his Republican legislature are understandably beside themselves; he was able to do in a single legislative session what they could not accomplish in a decade.
Last winter, an information campaign entitled “It’s Working Wisconsin” was launched to publicize the benefits of Act 10, the GOP budget repair bill that restricted collective bargaining privileges for public sector employees and gave municipalities new tools to address their budget shortfalls.
Opponents say it’s not working, and I agree with them. It’s not work-ing; it worked.
The Walker budget reforms are no longer a theory, an experiment, or a work in progress – they worked. Cause and effect; action and reaction; input and output; stimulus and response; modification and result.
You can hold any opinion you wish about Governor Walker his Republicans; you can oppose their agenda, you can abhor their ideology, you can object to their tactics, you can fear what they will do next. But you can’t say that their fiscal reforms have not worked – not if you have a clue what the word “fiscal” means.
And you can have any opinion of public sector unions that you wish, but you can’t say they weren’t the problem – not if you truly believe that Walker busted them and you truly believe that his predecessor did everything possible to fix the state’s fiscal mess without busting them. Walker did bust them; and it worked.
A structural budget deficit of $3.6 billion has been turned to a $425 million surplus without raising taxes, gutting programs, or laying off large numbers of public employees. Townships, cities, counties, and school boards have saved well over $1 billion – and counting – of taxpayer money in less than a year since Act 10 went into effect; property taxes actually declined state-wide for the first time this century.
I know those are Walker’s campaign talking points, but they wouldn’t be if Act 10 didn’t work. And they could have been former Governor Jim Doyle’s third-term talking points if he would have done what Walker did during any one of the eight years he sat in Madison with legislative majorities and swore up and down that nothing could be done about our deficits but raise taxes, beg for federal bailouts, raid trust funds, and spray some accounting voodoo around to cover the stink….
Corporate tax revenues are up, personal tax revenues are up, sales tax revenues are up, the number of people working is up, the number of unfilled jobs is up, companies are hiring, exports are increasing, and Wisconsin is attracting business from surrounding states. Unemployment is down, new claims for unemployment are down, and the average length of time on unemployment is down.
Municipalities which took advantage of the budget tools the legislature gave to them found ways to save money and improve services. Many school districts reduced class sizes and enacted merit pay to reward great teachers. Liberated from state choke-holds, local units of government began to govern much better. He busted the Madison bureaucracy, too; and it worked….
With over a year to think about it, the Democrats haven’t offered up anything that appeals to libertarians, the Republicans can defend their own candidates, and there is nothing further that needs to be said.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 