I was one day old when the Rolling Stones released “Satisfaction”:
Four years later, the Beatles released “The Ballad of John and Yoko”:
The short list of birthdays today includes Roger Brown, who played saxophone for the Average White Band …
Luke Hilgemann of Americans for Prosperity–Wisconsin wonders what is so progressive about Wisconsin.
Many on the Wisconsin Left like to beam with pride about the state’s “Progressive past.” Such a stance would imply the state has been an unenviable pillar of progress for over one hundred years.
Hardly.
Would you call it “Progress” that Wisconsin has one of the highest tax burdens in the country?
Where is the “Progress” when even after Illinois raises its income taxes by 66% as it did in 2011, it still has a lower tax rate than most Wisconsinites pay?
How is “progress” five tax brackets designed to punish success?
Is it “Progress” when earning $30,000 annually makes you eligible for a tax rate of over 6 percent?
How is it “Progress” when for over the past one hundred years, state politicians in both parties have felt the best way to achieve competitiveness for Wisconsin was to carve out tax credits for favored industries or connected lobbyists?
In reality, there is little about Wisconsin’s progressive tax code which helps aide it in being competitive for the 21st Century economy. It has stiffened growth. It has let opportunity be wasted. It has sent jobs packing, kept jobs away from the Badger State and only added to “Brain Drain.”
Remind me once again, where all the promised “progress” in that progressive agenda went exactly? …
It always amazes me how quickly – and solely for political gain – many Wisconsin liberals and progressive jump on the policies of Gov. Scott Walker and the Legislature for everything economically wrong with the state, but never seem willing to turn the examination table on themselves. We’re still living under tax rates passed by Jim Doyle in a system that dates back to the days of “Fighting Bob” La Follette.
That can’t have an effect on things, could it?
A hundred years later, it blows the mind how this kind of thinking and these kinds of policy are somehow still labeled as “Progressive.” Frankly, it’s time to be honest and call it for what it truly is: Antiquated.
I would have used the word “wrongheaded” instead of “antiquated.” The fact something is old doesn’t necessarily make it wrong. (See Constitution, U.S.) But for a state with an economy between 20th and 25th among the states to have the fifth highest state and local taxes makes it obvious that the way the state has been doing things since possibly the beginning of the Progressive Era isn’t working.
There is a specific event of note today. See if you can find it in this list of today in …
350 A.D.: Nepotianus proclaims himself emperor of Rome, backed up by the parade of gladiators who accompany him into Rome.
1083: Henry IV of Germany storms Rome, capturing St. Peter’s Cathedral.
1326: The Treaty of Novgorod determines the borders between Russia and the portion of Finnmark known as Norway.
1509: Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon, his first (but not last) wife.
1539: Hernando de Soto lands at Ucita, Fla., and claims Florida for Spain.
1540: Having taken a year to get there, de Soto is the first European to cross the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina — a trip that now takes about 11½ hours by car.
1621: The Dutch West India Company receives a charter for New Netherlands, known today as New York City.
1781: Jack Jouett, not Paul Revere, begins his midnight ride to warn Virginia Gov. Thomas Jefferson and legislature, not Boston, and Thomas Jefferson of an impending raid by British Gen. Banastre “Bloody Ban” Tarleton.
1800: President John Adams moves to Washington, D.C., and lives in a tavern, because the White House isn’t finished yet. Adams moved in later in 1800, only to move out after he lost the 1800 presidential election to Thomas Jefferson.
1804: Richard Cobden, British economist and statesman known as the Apostle of Free Trade, is born.
1808: Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederacy, is born.
1851: The New York Knickerbockers baseball team wears a straw hat, white shirt and long blue trousers — the first recognized baseball uniform. (Presumably previous teams wore clothes, but not uniform clothes.)
1861: Stephen A. Douglas, who defeated Abraham Lincoln for the U.S. Senate in 1858 after the Lincoln–Douglas debates, but was defeated for president by Lincoln in 1860, dies. (Here’s a historical what-if for you: Douglas, the Northern Democratic candidate for president, received just 12 electoral votes, finishing fourth. But what if Douglas had won, and then died three months after taking office, in the midst of tensions that led to the Civil War? The Civil War began before Douglas’ death, but one wonders if an insurrection wasn’t inevitable regardless of who was elected president, given that Southern Democrats bolted both Democratic conventions — the first one was adjourned after 57 ballots for the presidential nomination — and nominated their own candidate, Vice President John Breckinridge. The 1860 northern Democrats’ vice presidential candidate was Georgia Gov. Herschel Vespasian Johnson, chosen to balance the ticket.)
1864: On Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ 56th birthday, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee wins his last victory of the Civil War at the Battle of Cold Harbor, Va., where more than 6,000 Union soldiers were killed or wounded in one hour. (Perhaps that’s why June 3 is Confederate Memorial Day in Kentucky, Louisiana and Tennessee.) That same day, Ransom Eli Olds, who created the Oldsmobile car and REO truck (for which the rock group REO Speedwagon) was born.
1876: Harper’s Weekly publishes a front-page cartoon by Thomas Nast about Congress’ attempt to impeach President Ulysses Grant. Congress had just impeached Grant’s war secretary, William Belknap, despite the fact that Belknap resigned before the impeachment vote. Other Congressional attempts to impeach Grant focused around an accusation that Grant had used public funds for his 1872 reelection campaign, an accusation that foundered when the accuser was discovered to be an escapee from an insane asylum, and a complaint that Grant had been out of Washington an excessive number of times. (You cannot make these things up.) A century later, Richard Nixon was impeached in committee, an impeachment attempt was made against Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton was impeached, and impeachment attempts were made against George W. Bush.
1880: Alexander Graham Bell transmitted the first wireless phone message from the top of the Franklin School in Washington, D.C., on his new “photophone,” which transmits sound via light beams.
1881: A 55-year-old Japanese giant salamander, believed to have been the oldest amphibian, dies in a Dutch zoo.
1886: Charles Lwanga, a Catholic catechist, 11 other Catholic men and boys and nine Anglicans are burned alive by the orders of King Mwanga II of Uganda. Pope Paul VI canonized Lwanga and the other Catholics in 1964 and named June 3 the Feast Day of Charles Lwanga and Companions.
1888: Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” is published in the San Francisco Examiner.
1904: Charles Richard Drew, who pioneered blood plasma research, is born.
1906: Singer Josephine Baker is born.
1911: Actress Ellen Corby, Grandma of The Waltons, is born in Racine.
1925: Actor Tony Curtis is born, presumably not wearing women’s clothes.
1929: Producer Chuck Barris, creator of The Gong Show, is born. (If you’ve never heard of The Gong Show, or you think TV is bizarre now, watch this and this.)
1937: Edward VIII marries American Wallis Warfield Simpson. That same day, Negro Leagues baseball player Josh Gibson hits a 580-foot home run at Yankee Stadium.
1939: Steve Dalkowski, on whom the Nuke LaLoosh character in “Bull Durham” and the Steve Nebraska character in “The Scout,” is born. In an era before radar guns, the left-handed Dalkowski could regularly throw over 100 mph, but not necessarily over the plate, which is why Dalkowski never pitched in the majors. He did have the reported distinction of having the highest number of strikeouts and walks per nine innings of any pitcher in pro baseball history.
1940: While the German Luftwaffe bombs Paris, Allied forces exit Dunkirk, France, saving their troops but losing all their equipment.
1943: In Los Angeles, Navy sailors and Marines fight Latino youths in the Zoot Suit riots.
1944: Italians say “Arrivederci” as German forces exit Rome.
1946: Members of three iconic classic rock groups are born today — Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople, bassist John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin, and drummer Michael Clarke of The Byrds.
1949: “Dragnet” premieres on radio in Los Angeles, the start of a franchise that included four TV series and two movies, and those are just the facts.
1954: Dan Hill, who foisted the horrifyingly bad “Sometimes When We Touch” on radio listeners, is born.
1957: Howard Cosell’s first TV show premieres. Complaints about Cosell begin approximately 12 seconds after the show begins.
1963: Pope John XXIII dies, taking one pope off St. Malachy’s list. (Four more have been taken off the list since then. Pope Francis is the last pope on Malachy’s list.)
1964: The Rolling Stones begin their first U.S. tour with Johnny Rivers and Bobby Goldsboro. (Putting the Stones and Goldsboro in the same concert would be like putting Korn and Michael Bolton in the same concert today.)
1965: Body-builder Suzan Kaminga, actor and singer Jeff Blumenkranz, actor Daniel Selby and Phish bass player Mike Gordon are born. American astronaut Edward White, having flown into space on Gemini 4 earlier in the day, makes the first U.S. spacewalk.
In a hospital room in Madison, a nun shoos the people watching the spacewalk out of the only room on the nursery floor with a TV, so that the new mother inside can get some rest before her constantly hungry newborn son wants to eat again.
1967: Anderson Cooper of CNN is born.
1969: The last, and arguably worst, episode of “Star Trek” airs on NBC.
1973: The Soviet supersonic jet era ends shortly after it begins when the Tupolev TU-144 crashes at an air show in Paris:
1980: Seven tornadoes hit the Grand Island, Neb., area, killing five, injuring 357 and causing $300 million in damages. A movie, “Night of the Twisters,” is made based on the tornado outbreak.
1989: Chinese troops kill hundreds of pro-democracy students in Beijing. The same day, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran dies.
1992: A newspaper geek celebrates his 27th birthday by buying half of the Tri-County Press in Cuba City.
1997: Dennis James, the host of TV’s first game show and TV’s first telethon, dies.
2001: Mel Brooks’ “The Producers” wins a record 12 Tony Awards. CBS-TV, which carries the Tony Awards, anticipates the big day for “Springtime for Hitler” by having Bialystock & Bloom (actually, Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick) emcee the awards. That same day, actor Anthony Quinn dies.
2009: “Kung Fu” actor David Carradine dies.
2011: Actor James Arness, brother of actor Peter Graves, dies on the same day that singer Andrew Gold, formerly Linda Ronstadt’s guitar player, dies.
And let me be the first to wish you a Happy Opium Suppression Movement Day.
What, you ask, was the number one song on this day in 1972? Your Lincoln dealer is glad you asked:
Birthdays today include Monty Python’s favorite saxophonist, Boots Randolph:
Curtis Mayfield:
Today in 1958, Alan Freed joined WABC radio in New York, one of the great 50,000-watt rock stations of the AM era.
Birthdays include Captain Beefheart, known to his parents as Del Simmons:
Charles Miller, flutist and saxophonist for War:
One of Gladys Knight’s Pips, William Guest:
An eclectic group of music anniversaries today:
1963: The number one song is Ray Baretto’s “El Watusi”:
1967: The Beatles release “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”:
1968: The number one song is Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson”:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 