… because the world has one day left, reports FrontPageMag:
Forget the Mayans, they were a bunch of chumps who wore their headgear inside out. It takes a scientist to nail down the real date when the world ends.
January 17, 2013.
James Hansen, the man who looked at Venus and decided that it was once just like Earth before the Venusians built too many smokestacks and ruined it all, gave a very timely warning back on January 17, 2009. …
And sadly, while the EPA did courageously attempt to regulate water as a pollutant and killed a bunch of coal plants, shale oil took off and all the good work was undone. …
Pack your bags. Bundle up your cats, dogs, penguins and cleaning robots into the SUV and drive north into the ice gloriously blasting pollution in your wake while tossing soda cans out the window because it no longer matters… the world is doomed.
And isn’t that liberating?
So the end of the world was not in May 2011, and it wasn’t in December. it’s tomorrow? I guess I won’t make the kids do their homework or, in our second son’s case, finish his Pinewood Derby car for tomorrow night’s race.
Breaking news: No, it’s not tomorrow, it’s …
But like every false prophet, James Hansen, who reads the future of earth in Venus, has found a new date for doomsday. It’s the date when Canada unleashes the terrible fury of its tar sands.
In the spring of 2012, Hansen warned, “If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.”
Game over indeed and we’re not just talking hockey season here. “If we were to fully exploit this new oil source,” James Hansen proclaimed, while waving a megaphone in the middle of an abandoned shopping mall. “Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction.”
Not to be outdone, Hansen has apparently figured out that if you use the word “market,” you get a few more people’s attention:
“We should impose a gradually rising carbon fee, collected from fossil fuel companies, then distribute 100 percent of the collections to all Americans on a per-capita basis every month. The government would not get a penny. This market-based approach would stimulate innovation, jobs and economic growth, avoid enlarging government or having it pick winners or losers. Most Americans, except the heaviest energy users, would get more back than they paid in increased prices.”
“The heaviest energy users” would include, by the way, those who have to commute to work, farmers who have to take their crops and livestock to market (which means higher food prices), businesses that have to get their products from factory to store (which means higher prices), business’ suppliers who have to get their raw materials from their factory to their customers’ facilities … get the picture yet?
What news media treats Hansen seriously?
See the lower right corner of the screen: Current TV, sold by hypocrite Al Gore to Al Jazeera, funded by fossil fuels.
It’s not hard to come up with the most surprising news of the day from Monday. David Blaska did:
John Sylvester, better known to Madison radio listeners as “Sly,” will be back on the air, but not in Madison. The controversial radio talk show personality starts Monday, Feb. 4, at WEKZ 93.7 FM, based in Monroe.
His show will air weekdays from 3 to 6:30 p.m., confirmed station operations manager Kent McConnell.
After 15 years, Sylvester lost gig at WTDY 1670 AM in Madison just before Thanksgiving Day due to a format change. The station also released its news staff and earlier this month went to syndicated sports radio.
McConnell said of Sylvester, “He reached out to us. We’re always looking for ways to connect with our listeners. It is a bit of a change for us.”
Sly is pleased to announce that he has joined 93.7 WEKZ-FM, and starting February 4th, his distinctive talk radio program will air across south central Wisconsin and northern Illinois. WEKZ’s listening area includes Monroe, Beloit, Freeport, Rockford, Platteville, Janesville, Dubuque, and Madison. …
Sly will take to the air from 3:00-6:30 p.m. weekdays on 93.7 WEKZ. His show will also be streamed live on the the internet and on a smartphone app. The success of slysoffice.com will continue with a redesigned website that will feature Sly’s on-air interviews, and choice segments from his show on 93.7 WEKZ.
It should be pointed out that Blaska is not a fan of Sylvester, to whose nom de air Blaska usually adds the letters M and E. (And this Bob Dole-like referring to himself in the third person seems strange to Steve Prestegard. YouknowitIknowitandtheAmericanpeopleknowit.) But Blaska isn’t the only n0n-fan; in fact, Sly’s detractors aren’t limited to the right side of the political aisle:
Sylvester took a stridently pro-union, anti-Republican stance at WTDY. Although he could engage in intelligent political commentary, albeit from a progressive perspective, he also engaged in attempts at low-brow humor that some, including former Madison mayor Dave Cieslewicz and this author, said amounted to misogyny.
Most notably, he called then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice an Aunt Jemima. He suggested that Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor performed sexual favors to win election, rejoiced at her diagnosis of cancer, and made fun of her children. And he seemed to stalk rival talk show host Vicki McKenna.
I got an email disputing Blaska’s characterization of Sly’s commentary about Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch’s cancer. I didn’t hear the original, so I can’t say whether Blaska is correct or not, but you can listen and decide for yourself …
… while realizing that making fun of someone’s cancer diagnosis really isn’t funny.
As someone connected to southwest Wisconsin in one way or another (in chronological order, family, job and in-laws) for most of my life, I can attest that satire doesn’t always go over well in this part of the state. (If that’s what you want to call what Sly said, or what Blaska said Sly said.) The term “progressive” really doesn’t apply either, as a political or nonpolitical word (i.e. as opposed to “traditional”). For that matter, people in this part of the state are not as lacking in manners as Sly’s WTDY on-air persona was in Blaska’s description. (Try that in person in this area, and you had better have a good plastic surgeon and dentist and health insurance.)
For that matter, while there certainly are Democrats in this part of the state (this area is represented in Congress by either U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D–Madison) or Rep. Ron Kind (D–La Crosse), and Democrats do better in legislative races than they did 25 years ago), Democrats here aren’t as completely lacking in common sense as Democrats in the People’s Republic of Madison. Monroe’s state senator is mine too, Sen. Dale Schultz (R–Richland Center), though the Senate districts of Sen. Tim Cullen (D–Janesville) and Jon Erpenbach (D–Middleton) are within view of WEKZ’s stick. The list of Assembly representatives whose constituents will be able to hear Sly ranges from Rep. Sondy Pope (D–Middleton) on the left to Rep. Travis Tranel (R–Cuba City) on the right. (Politically, not geographically.) That means a significant percentage of Sly’s listeners will be people who believe every pejorative statement about the People’s Republic of Madison, as well as Milwaukee.
My opinion may be different from others since I occasionally popped up on Sly’s former show on the late WTDY. I listened to him more often (due to reasons of geography) when Sly was the morning man on WIBA-FM, where he interspersed classic rock with a daily segment called “Social Dilemma,” in which he debated an issue with listeners. He disagreed with listeners more conservative than himself, but not necessarily disrespectfully. The listeners he argued most with where those who (1) were more conservative with himself and (2) couldn’t communicate their views very well. (That was before sports talk host Jim Rome communicated his two rules of calling into his show: “Have a take, and don’t suck.”)
The amusing comment to Blaska’s story is:
I lived in Green County–among the most well-armed counties in the state, if not the nation. On this stand alone, Sly in Green County will go over like a fart in church.
The thing you must realize is that radio is a business, and it is more of a bottom-line business than many. WEKZ is not owned by one of the radio giants like Clear Channel (owner of Sly’s former employer, WIBA-FM in Madison) or Cumulus (which owns several radio stations within Wisconsin ears). WEKZ’s owner also owns four other radio stations in the area. That’s all. So first, obviously Sly came for the right price in WEKZ’s opinion. Secondly, Sly didn’t last as long in radio as he has without knowing his audience and what he’s doing. The egregious violations of taste Blaska chronicled could have been stopped by Sly’s most recent employer, the former WTDY, by telling him to knock it off or firing him. Sly was fired as the result of a decision to switch from news–talk to sports talk, not because of anything he said on the air.
This seems like a departure for WEKZ. While some of its stations have some talk programming, which is typical for a market that size (as is local news and sports), the company’s stations play oldies (WEKZ-FM), rock, country and easy listening. So I’ll be curious about whether Sly’s new show is all talk, or talk and music, or less political over the air with the website for more overtly political bonus content. One wonders how many of the advertisers on Sly’s WTDY show will migrate south-southwestward given that few of their current or potential future customers seem likely to be that far away from Madison.
The other issue Sly will have to deal with is that outside of the Madison–Milwaukee axis, politics is not the be-all and end-all of life as it is in the People’s Republic of Madison. Unions aren’t very popular here, even among their supposed beneficiaries, blue-collar workers. It may well be that, as someone I know in radio predicted, his WEKZ job is something to do on his way to a bigger market.
Which doesn’t mean it won’t be interesting listening:
“He knows his audience may be a little different,” McConnell told me. “He may have to tone it down a smidge. But as he says, he’s still got to be Sly.”
Al Gore and his co-investors just sold liberal cable channel Current TV to Al Jazeera, the network bankrolled by the emir of Qatar. How much in carbon offsets does Mr. Gore need to balance his estimated $100 million from the sale to an oil sheik?
But there’s a more serious issue here than hypocrisy. Current’s owners could have simply said they sold to the highest bidder, with the emir paying an estimated $500 million for a network with viewership of only 22,000. Instead they glorified Al Jazeera.
Writing for himself and Mr. Gore, co-founder Joel Hyatt, a lawyer and Democratic fundraiser, explained: “When considering the several suitors who were interested in acquiring Current, it became clear to us that Al Jazeera was founded with the same goals we had.” Among them: “to give voice to those whose voices are not typically heard; to speak truth to power; to provide independent and diverse points of view; and to tell the important stories that no one else is telling.”
Mr. Hyatt also asserted that “Al and I did significant due diligence.” He wrote that he spent a week at Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar and was impressed by the “journalistic integrity” he saw there.
More due diligence might have included a review of the close journalistic coverage over the years of Al Jazeera’s Arabic and English broadcasts, which discloses the unsurprising fact that the network reflects the interests of the government that runs it—making it akin to Vladimir Putin’s Russia Today and Beijing’s Xinhua. The emir of Qatar, Hamid bin Khalifa Al Thani, appointed his cousin as chairman of Al Jazeera. The emir was last in the news for donating $400 million to Hamas, a terrorist organization. …
Founded in 1996, Al Jazeera became well known after 9/11. In a November 2001New York Times Magazine article, Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami wrote that the network’s staffers are “either pan-Arabists—nationalists of a leftist bent committed to the idea of a single nation across the many frontiers of the Arab world—or Islamists.”
In 2007, the liberal Nation magazine said that “field reports are overwhelmingly negative with violent footage played over and over. . . . There’s a clear underlying message: that the way out of this spiral is political Islam.” Dave Marash, formerly of ABC’s “Nightline,” quit Al Jazeera’s English-language station in 2008 when producers in Qatar ordered up anti-American programming.
In 2008, Al Jazeera threw an on-air party for Samir Kuntar when he was released from an Israeli prison. Kuntar led a Palestine Liberation Front terrorist team that kidnapped an Israeli family in 1979. He shot the father and killed the 4-year-old daughter by smashing her head against rocks along the beach. In footage available on YouTube, Al Jazeera’s Beirut bureau chief hands Kuntar a scimitar to cut the celebratory cake and says: “This is the sword of the Arabs, Samir.”
In 2009, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, host of the network’s most popular Arabic-language show, “Shariah and Life,” said on air (also available on YouTube): “Oh, Allah, take this oppressive Jewish, Zionist band of people. Oh Allah, do not spare a single one of them. Oh Allah, count their numbers and kill them, down to the very last one.” Perhaps Mr. Gore doesn’t have access to YouTube. …
News consumers understand that a former vice president justifying a big payday is not the best judge of “journalistic integrity.” Arabs deserve and will some day have a network independent of any of their governments. When this happens, Americans may even watch.
The best reader comment from Crovitz’s piece:
There’s a reason no one else is telling some of these stories. That’s because they are not worthy of being broadcast. It’s really stupid to say that all views are equal. Truth is not subjective and we have enough propaganda on network TV without turning over cable space to more extreme views.
Let’s face it, it’s all about money. Mr. Gore has been becoming exceedingly rich over his endeavors to promote the global warming myth and we shouldn’t be surprised that he sold to Al Jazeera. After all people without a moral compass tend to find common ground with each other.
The best exchange (other than the one in which Gore is accused of a snake oil salesman, the response to which was “You insult snake oil”):
Hard to believe that a former Vice-President would turn into such a gutter snipe. He makes Spiro Agnew look like the epitome of probity.
Please don’t compare Gore to Spiro Agnew. At lease Spiro was a patriot.
How many people are afraid of one or more of the events in the left-side column, when the corresponding event on the right-side column is much more statistically likely? (Passed on by Investors.com)
Of course, to quote economists John Maynard Keynes, in the long run we are all dead.
Friedman is the author of The World Is Flat, which is the theme of approximately half his columns. Such as “The World Is Flatter“:
Yesterday’s news from Palestine is unbelievable, and it raises questions about whether there might just be light at the end of the tunnel. It is impossible not to be tantalized by the potential of these events to change the course of Palestine’s history. What’s important, however, is that we focus on what this means to the citizens themselves. The current administration seems too caught up in spinning the facts to pay attention to the important effects on daily life. Just call it missing the fields for the wheat.
When thinking about the recent turmoil, it’s important to remember three things: One, people don’t behave like car salesmen, so attempts to treat them as such are a waste of time. Car salesmen never suddenly blow themselves up. Two, Palestine has spent decades torn by civil war and ethnic hatred, so a mindset of peace and stability will seem foreign and strange. And three, capitalism is an extraordinarily powerful idea: If authoritarianism is Palestine’s ironing board, then capitalism is certainly its flowerpot.
When I was in Palestine last month, I was amazed by the people’s basic desire for a stable life, and that tells me two things. It tells me that the citizens of Palestine have no shortage of human capital, and that is a good beginning to grow from. Second, it tells me that people in Palestine are just like people anywhere else on this flat earth of ours.
So what should we do about the chaos in Palestine? Well, it’s easier to start with what we should not do. We should not ignore the problem and pretend it will go away. Beyond that, we need to be careful to nurture the fragile foundations of peace.
What has been going on in Malaysia is truly historic, and it has been on my mind ever since it began. It is impossible not to be tantalized by the potential of these events to change the course of Malaysia’s history. What’s important, however, is that we focus on what this means on the street. The current administration seems too caught up in dissecting the macro-level situation to pay attention to the important effects on daily life. Just call it missing the myths for the lie.
When thinking about the ongoing turmoil, it’s important to remember three things: One, people don’t behave like lemmings, so attempts to treat them as such inevitably look foolish. Lemmings never suddenly shift their course in order to fit with a predetermined set of beliefs. Two, Malaysia has spent decades being batted back and forth between colonial powers, so a mindset of peace and stability will seem foreign and strange. And three, capitalism is an extraordinarily powerful idea: If corruption is Malaysia’s ironing board, then capitalism is certainly its tabletop.
When I was in Malaysia last week, I was amazed by the level of Westernization for such a closed society, and that tells me two things. It tells me that the citizens of Malaysia have no shortage of potential entrepreneurs, and that is a good beginning to grow from. Second, it tells me that people in Malaysia are just like people anywhere else on this flat earth of ours.
Imagine if grassroots activists sat down with ordinary people like you and me and ironed out some real solutions to our capital gains crisis.
With the election season over, maybe you’ve forgotten about capital gains, but I certainly haven’t. It would be easy to forget that the problem even exists, when our headlines are constantly splashed with the violence in Cambodia, the authoritarian crackdown in Burundi and the still-unstable democratic transition in Venezuela. But the capital gains problem is growing, and politicians are more divided than ever. Democrats seem to think that capital gains can just be ignored. Republican politicians like Marco Rubio, on the other hand, seem to think that nonsensical rhetoric will substitute for a argument.
But the Republican party of Marco Rubio is not the Republican party of Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt wouldn’t refuse to budge, he’d compromise because he’d understand that the fate of the country, and his own political career, depended on a lasting solution to the problem of capital gains.
Let’s make America for the world what Cape Canaveral was to America: the world’s greatest launching pad. If I had fifteen minutes to pitch my idea to politicians, I’d tell them two things about capital gains. First, there’s no way around the issue unless we’re prepared to spend more: and not just spend more, but spend smarter by investing in the kind of green energy that makes countries succeed. That’s going to require some tax increases as well, but as they say, “Ain’t nothing to it but to do it.”
An interesting thought occurred to me today—what if grassroots activists sat down with ordinary people like you and me and ironed out some real solutions to our health insurance crisis?
With the election season over, maybe you’ve forgotten about health insurance, but I certainly haven’t. It would be easy to forget that the problem even exists, when our headlines are constantly splashed with the violence in Cape Verde, the authoritarian crackdown in Italy and the still-unstable democratic transition in Russia. But the health insurance problem is growing, and politicians are more divided than ever. Republicans seem to think that health insurance can just be ignored. Democratic politicians like Harry Reid, on the other hand, seem to think that nonsensical rhetoric will substitute for a argument.
But the Democratic party of Harry Reid is not the Democratic party of Franklin Roosevelt. FDR wouldn’t just filibuster, he’d break ranks with members of his own party because he’d understand that the fate of the country, and his own political career, depended on a lasting solution to the problem of health insurance.
Let’s make America for the world what Cape Canaveral was to America: the world’s greatest launching pad. If I had fifteen minutes to pitch my idea to politicians, I’d tell them two things about health insurance. First, there’s no way around the issue unless we’re prepared to spend less: and not just spend less, but spend smarter by investing in the kind of national infrastructure that makes countries succeed. That’s going to require some tax cuts as well, but as they say, “When in Rome.”
But Friedman does not limit himself to international commentary. Not when he sees “Obama’s Moment“:
Imagine if academics sat down with ordinary people like you and me and ironed out some real solutions to our same-sex marriage crisis.
With the election season over, maybe you’ve forgotten about same-sex marriage, but I certainly haven’t. It would be easy to forget that the problem even exists, when our headlines are constantly splashed with the violence in Suriname, the authoritarian crackdown in Kosovo and the still-unstable democratic transition in Afghanistan. But the same-sex marriage problem is growing, and politicians are more divided than ever. Democrats seem to think that same-sex marriage can just be ignored. Republican politicians like Mitch McConnell, on the other hand, seem to think that unscientific rhetoric will substitute for a compromise.
But the Republican party of Mitch McConnell is not the Republican party of Lincoln. Lincoln wouldn’t refuse to budge, he’d break ranks with members of his own party because he’d understand that the fate of the country, and his own political career, depended on a lasting solution to the problem of same-sex marriage.
The first rule of holes is that when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels. If I had fifteen minutes to pitch my idea to politicians, I’d tell them two things about same-sex marriage. First, there’s no way around the issue unless we’re prepared to spend less: and not just spend less, but spend smarter by investing in the kind of human capital that makes countries succeed. That’s going to require some tax cuts as well, but as they say, “Mo’ money mo’ problems.”
Second, I’d tell them to look at China, which all but solved its same-sex marriage crisis over the past decade. When I visited China in 2000, Mbantu, the cabbie who drove me from the airport, couldn’t stop telling me about how he had to take a second job because of the high cost of same-sex marriage. I caught up with Mbantu in Shanghai last year. Thanks to China’s reformed approach toward same-sex marriage, Mbantu has enough money in his pocket to finally be able to afford an apartment for his kids.
It should be appalling that a columnist is so predictable that someone could actually create that kind of website. Maybe it’s time for Friedman to go on another sabbatical to develop some original ideas and insights.
The day has arrived for the annual Presteblog tradition, That Was the Year That Was 2012, the title borrowed from David Frost‘s satirical 1960s TV series “That Was the Week That Was.”
Business has gotten to the point where I am now writing two TWTYTW 2012s. The first, covering southwest Wisconsin, can be read here, along with here Wednesday night. (Yes, 2012 in southwest Wisconsin was so event-filled that two 1,000-word columns were required to cover it all. So I guess that makes three TWTYTWs.)
Now for a frankly bizarre proposition: Was 2012 the best year ever? The Spectator says yes:
Take global poverty. In 1990, the UN announced Millennium Development Goals, the first of which was to halve the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015. It emerged this year that the target was met in 2008. Yet the achievement did not merit an official announcement, presumably because it was not achieved by any government scheme but by the pace of global capitalism. Buying cheap plastic toys made in China really is helping to make poverty history. And global inequality? This, too, is lower now than any point in modern times. Globalisation means the world’s not just getting richer, but fairer too. …
Advances in medicine and technology mean that people across the world are living longer. The average life expectancy in Africa reached 55 this year. Ten years ago, it was 50. The number of people dying from Aids has been in decline for the last eight years. Deaths from malaria have fallen by a fifth in half a decade. …
War has historically been humanity’s biggest killer. But in most of the world today, a generation is growing up that knows little of it. The Peace Research Institute in Oslo says there have been fewer war deaths in the last decade than any time in the last century.
Independent Journal Review adds an important modifier that basically blows up the Spectator’s dubious premise:
Simply because two behemoth states are running as fast as they can from communism and socialism — China and India — embracing industrial technology and exporting goods to the EU and the US, the global standard of living has been bettered.
While life in the U.S. economy is devolving under the colossal weight of big government, former hardcore socialist countries are introducing just enough of the successful American institutions of market capitalism to ease their national misery.
The United States will only return to prosperity when it stops approaching economy as a matter of haves-and-have-nots, instead unleashing its potential for innovation and productivity. This effectively means getting the micro-managing, parasitical government of Washington D.C. out of the nation’s way.
That last paragraph isn’t going to happen in the next four years, of course, because the same administration that generated the weakest economic recovery since World War II got reelected by a majority of voters. (Insert Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity.) If the world’s most important country isn’t better off, the world isn’t better off.
The national Republican Party had a rotten year. The state Republican Party had quite a different year. Gov. Scott Walker survived his (illegitimate) recall. Republicans lost control of the state Senate in June, only to gain it back Nov. 6. Consider that since Nov. 2, 2010, Republicans now control all but one statewide elective office and flipped control of both houses of the Legislature.
Recallarama Part Deux was the most nasty campaign in Wisconsin history, at least until the 2014 gubernatorial campaign. Christian Schneider notes:
A college friend of mine once had a contrarian theory on how to find the best women to date. He believed you should always target women already in relationships. “If a girl has a boyfriend, you only have to be better than that one guy,” he would say. “With single women, you have to be better than every other dude in the world.”
In 2012, Gov. Scott Walker took this advice to heart as he staved off a bitter recall effort initiated by swarms of angry public-sector union members, whose ability to collectively bargain he had all but eliminated in 2011. One observer cleverly deemed the public unions’ efforts in Wisconsin “frozen custard’s last stand.”
But Walker didn’t have to defeat the concepts of “collective bargaining,” or “unions.” He simply had to beat the political corpse of Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who had lost two previous bids for governor, the last in 2010 to Walker himself.
The June 5 recall election fractured Wisconsin both at the state and individual level. On election day, a Chippewa Falls woman tried to drive to the polls to vote against Walker but was blocked by her estranged husband – so she ran him over. The recall inspired a Madison-area rapper with the unfortunate sobriquet “Dudu Stinks” to pen the “Walker Recall Anthem,” which included the Beatle-esque lyric, “Get this power hungry man out of office and away we go. … this is larger than the current student-teacher ratio.” Inexplicably, the voting public failed to heed Mr. Stinks’ plea and re-elected Walker by a larger margin than he had garnered against the somnambulistic Barrett merely two years earlier.
Certain members of the state media learned that the Open Records Law also includes signatures on petitions to recall governors. Then again, much of the mainstream media had a bad year as demonstrated by their completely being in the tank for Obama (apparently being skeptical of authority figures is no longer taught in journalism school) and their getting such details as the name of the suspect wrong in the Newtown, Conn., mass murder.
The Packers proved for the second consecutive season that the regular season and the postseason are separate. The Badgers shocked even themselves by earning their third consecutive Big Ten … er, T1e2n … uh, B1G … football title after a season that could be rewritten as a soap opera. The Brewers were sort of competitive after losing Prince Fielder, but still lack left-handed power hitting, but more importantly still lack pitching, particularly after letting Zach Greinke go.
The Great Recession, which began exactly five years ago, is fast receding into the history books. But its effects don’t merely linger; they haunt almost every region, industry and household. With each turn of the calendar, the world wonders and hopes: Will this be the year?
Will this be the year that the economy breaks out of its pattern of sluggish growth that has held since the recession ended in 2009?
Will this be the year that jobs are created on a large scale, that people who haven’t seen a raise in half a decade might finally see bigger paychecks?
There’s your last laugh of 2012. Our recovery in name only includes unemployment correctly measured beyond 14 percent. There is no sign that families will recover the 10 percent of their income that the Obama administration-led economy siphoned from their pockets in the first Obama term. Businesses are neither hiring nor investing in capital. (The only retail that’s doing well is gun sales.) And that will lead to an economic expansion? In what meth-head’s dream?
The economy is going to tank in 2013, whether or not a “fiscal cliff” solution occurs. Either taxes are going to increase automatically tomorrow (which won’t be noticeable until the first 2013 paychecks arrive), or taxes are going to increase as part of the fiscal cliff deal. (In addition to 2013’s ObamaCare tax increases.) Tax increases always depress the economy, even a strong economy, and no one thinks this is a strong economy.
1. Justice Patience “Pat” Roggensack will win re-election.
2. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett will not receive an appointment from President Barack Obama.
3. The John Doe investigation into the county administration under Scott Walker when he was Milwaukee County Executive will produce no further prosecutions.
4. Tony Evers will win re-election at State Superintendent for the Department of Public Instruction. The legislature will then take away more of his responsibilities. …
7. There will be unsuccessful attempts made to recall Justices David Prosser, Annette Ziegler and Michael Gableman. …
14. Wisconsin will cut the state income tax. …
19. The state legislature will pass a mining bill acceptable to Gogebic Taconite.
20. Global warming will cause snow and rain, after causing last year’s drought. Tornadoes will be Governor Scott Walker’s fault. …
24. No gun control measures will pass the state legislature.
Schneider (predicted by Wigderson to start wearing sunglasses on “Sunday Insight with Charlie Sykes”) concludes:
And, thus, with the nation headed to the precipice of a fiscal cliff, with 2012’s slate of gun violence from coast to coast, and with Wisconsin’s summer of discontent behind it, 2013 has a very low bar for success. It doesn’t have to be better than most years; it only has to be better than 2012 to be a considered a winner.
Well, may your 2013 be better than your 2012. I think the United States’ 2013 will not be better.
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 59,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
The blueprint for a new stadium for the Atlanta Falcons was approved early Monday in a special called meeting of the Georgia World Congress Center Authority.
The state agency, in a unanimous decision, gave its thumbs up to a “term sheet,” which lays out the business terms with team for a new field, including who will pay for it, how the revenue will be divided and who will own the building.
The stadium the World Congress Center Authority is apparently going to build (there are few details except it apparently will have a retractable roof) is a replacement for the Georgia Dome, the home of the Atlanta Falcons, and the site of both basketball and gymnastics during the 1996 Olympics. (Each had half of the building.) That was an example of thought-out design, as was Olympic Stadium, which after the Olympics was partially dismantled and became Turner Field, the Braves’ home.
Because in sports as in life, new and shiny trumps tried and true. The Dome opened in 1992, and it’s a nice place two decades on, but by 2017 it’ll be gone, having been rendered superfluous by its billion dollar baby brother. …
The Falcons’ lease with the Dome is due to expire around 2017, and that was their pressure point. They didn’t threaten to leave town – “There was not a 1995-type lever,” McKay said, speaking of the days when teams told cities to build a new stadium or else – but they did make it known they had no interest in re-upping this lease. That left the GWCCA, which runs the Dome, with a choice it didn’t know it would have to make: Do we ditch a perfectly sound building to placate our biggest tenant?
To their credit, [GWCCA executive director Frank] Poe and associates forged a not-terrible solution. The Falcons stand to foot 70 percent of the $1 billion it will take to erect a new stadium, with public money – roughly $300 million from a hotel-motel tax that affects mostly non-Georgians – making up the difference. There are those who wonder if that $300 million wouldn’t be better used to upgrade infrastructure or further education, but this leads us to the unanswerable question: Why should ballplayers earn millions while schoolteachers make do with thousands?
In pro sports, a new stadium is almost always a shared venture, and far less public money will be earmarked toward the Falcons’ new home than was the case, say, in Indianapolis with the Colts and Lucas Oil Stadium. That’s as it should be: The Falcons are the ones who wanted this, and they should pay the most.
When this new-stadium balloon was first floated, the thought was that the GWCCA might be so cowed by Arthur Blank that it handed the famous owner everything he wanted. Instead the Falcons will settle for one stadium — they first wanted the Dome to remain in place just down the street, a notion laughable on its face – with a retractable roof (as opposed to an open-air facility). …
In these uncertain times, handing $300 million in tax money to fund a stadium that will be run by a team owned by a billionaire isn’t an easy sell, especially when the building that team occupies is presentable enough that it will, come April, stage the big-ticket Final Four. But the Falcons had leverage – they could move to Doraville and leave the Dome vacant on NFL Sundays – and they applied it. The GWCAA fought its corner and will get what amounts to a newer Dome. Maybe everybody won’t win in this, but there shouldn’t be many losers.
And if not … well, nothing is forever. The Falcons will be obliged to stay in their new home for 30 years. Sometime around Year 20, they’ll start angling for something bigger and brighter. That’s the way of our world. Everybody wants the latest iPhone, even if the old one works fine. Every professional team wants a new stadium, even if the existing place still looks pretty darn good.
Bradley’s last sentence is one-third correct in Wisconsin. Yes, the Bucks want a replacement for the Bradley Center. However, the Brewers are fine with Miller Park, and the Packers are improving Lambeau Field.
There is a Wisconsin connection to this story. The Georgia Dome replaced, for football purposes, Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium, the original home of the Milwaukee-to-Atlanta Braves. The original Braves’ and Falcons’ home opened in 1966. I was 1 year old.
(Oh wait, there’s a second connection: Before moving to Lambeau Field, more about which in a moment, Brett Favre started his NFL career playing in Fulton County Stadium’s last year, if you want to call going 0-for-5 with three interceptions “playing.”)
Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig paints a glowing picture of publicly funded sports complexes.
“There’s been a debate everywhere you’ve had it, and every community has wound up doing it and they’re happy they did it,” Selig told Wisconsin Reporter on Tuesday after a speaking appearance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“They bring in business. They make the community a better place to live. And overall it’s been a very positive experience, and I happen to believe in it,” he added.
Selig, former owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, was at his alma mater to give a speech at the university’s business school on ethical leadership. In the big leagues, ethics of operation often involve wealthy franchise owners strong-arming cities for hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to pay for state-of-the-art stadiums on threat of losing the team to a city that will.
“We never really talked about that,” Selig said about the idea of moving the Milwaukee Brewers to North Carolina in the 1990s while politicians debated the merits of bilking $150 million from taxpayers.
They finally agreed. After the approval of a contentious multi-county sales tax that cost a Racinesenator his job through recall and tens of millions of dollars in cost overruns, Miller Park was built.
“But the Brewers put in a lot of money and there’s just not a debate. In fact … with (the Brewers) now drawing 3 million-plus people a year, that’s why I said all the critics are gone now, because they know they’re wrong. And they were wrong.”
The critics, as it turns out, are alive and well. Whenever a new stadium is pushed by an owner, however, their voices tend to be drowned out by vote-seeking politicians and the team’s loyal fan base.
Marc Levine, director of the Center for Economic Development University of Milwaukee, recently wrote in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel op-ed:
“The same fallacious economic development arguments that were used to sell Miller Park are being trotted out to justify public spending for a new (Milwaukee) Bucks‘ arena: the building of a new facility, and the presence of a sports team, is an engine of economic growth for the city and region, a critical source of jobs, income and enhanced revenues for public services.
“Yet, with a unanimity that is rare in social science research, academic studies have found that professional sports franchises and facilities generate little or no job creation or income growth.” …
Selig and others suggest there’s an arguably bigger benefit to stadiums, particularly in communities like Milwaukee.
Minnesota state Sen. Geoff Michel, R-Edina, said during a discussion last spring on financing a $975 million Minnesota Vikings stadium that professional football is “one of the things that puts us on the map.”
Selig appears to have selective memory on that subject. I recall considerable speculation about the Brewers’ moving out of Milwaukee if Miller Park wasn’t built. One of the Carolinas was mentioned; so was, of all places, Mexico City. (Note that neither has a Major League Baseball team today.) Even had the 1996 package that got Miller Park not been approved, it seems likely the Brewers would have gotten a new stadium at some point, though not necessarily in Milwaukee.
Let’s be honest — how many Americans would know where Green Bay is were it not for the Packers, whose Lambeau Field was built with public funds (a 1956 bond issue approved by voters by a 2-to-1 margin) and renovated with more public funds (the 1/2-percent sales tax approved by 53 percent of Brown County voters in 2000)? Of course, the Packers’ stewardship of Lambeau Field since moving in in 1957 has been far superior to just the other NFC North teams. Since 1957, the Chicago Bears played in Wrigley Field, Soldier Field and whatever that is the Bears play in now; Detroit moved from Tiger Stadium to the Pontiac Silverdome to Ford Field; and Minnesota moved from Metropolitan Stadium to the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome (with an unscheduled stop at the University of Minnesota’s TCF Bank Stadium), with their new stadium at the Metrodome site in the works.
Regardless of the perceived benefits or lack thereof, there’s a big difference between a project such as Lambeau Field that taxpayers twice agreed to fund, and projects where there is no democratic buy-in. That would include Miller Park, depending on your perspective. The Legislature signed off on the funding, but Racine County voters who didn’t think they should be included in the 0.1-percent sales tax ended the political career of Sen. George Petak (R–Racine) via recall.
Had no replacement for Milwaukee County Stadium been built, at best the Brewers would have continued as an undercapitalized, underfunded, underperforming, underattended franchise. (Note the Brewers’ lack of winning seasons from 1993 until the Seligs sold the Brewers, which shows some combination of the slim margin for error of sports franchises in small markets, or years of poor management decisions in nearly every part of the franchise.) Maybe someone like Mark Attanasio would have purchased the Brewers and generated public support for a new stadium. And maybe someone else would have purchased the Brewers from the Selig family and moved them out of Wisconsin. And therein lies the rub: how important is professional sports — whether viewed in person in a stadium impervious to Wisconsin’s capricious weather, or viewable on TV — to you?
Whenever the Georgia Dome is deflated, man will do what nature was unable to do, in perhaps the strangest moment involving a stadium in at least U.S. history:
Fans weren’t expecting a tornado to visit the Georgia Dome during the 2008 Southeastern Conference men’s basketball tournament, but that’s what they got. Though the game interrupted by the tornado did finish, there was enough damage to the stadium that the remainder of the tournament had to be moved to Georgia Tech.
YouTube has other intersections of severe weather and sports, including tornado warnings at Wrigley Field in Chicago:
These are instances where a sports announcer becomes something between a newscaster and an amateur meteorologist. The second girls basketball game I ever announced, in November 1988, took place during a tornado watch, with tornado warnings across the Mississippi River in Iowa. Before the game I asked the athletic director what would happen in the event of a tornado warning. That forced him to pause, because he apparently had never had to consider a tornado warning-caused evacuation during a basketball game. (No tornado warning was issued where we were, although we could hear lightning over our FM signal, which isn’t typical.)
Two years later, a Lancaster High School football game got all of nine minutes in before a storm forced its postponement to the next night. Ordinarily football fields have the press box on the west sideline, which means, since weather generally moves west to east in this country, whatever weather there is is coming from behind you. The old LHS field, however, had the press box on the east side, which means we could see it coming. (So could my future father-in-law, a Grant County part-time sheriff’s deputy handling traffic in the parking lot. He got quite wet.)
Once I moved to TV, I announced two games with weather delays — the first during the first quarter, the second before the game. Both were, of course, on the road, meaning we returned home quite late. Both delays were longer than an hour, because of the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association’s policy of stopping play until 30 minutes has elapsed since the last lightning. Tape-delay TV means you merely turn off the camera. Live TV and radio that is not thrown to the studio requires a special art to fill images of rain and lightning.
The Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce hired former state Secretary of Commerce Zach Brandon as its new president.
Brandon appears to be a man of more than one personality, depending on who interviews him. Start with the Wisconsin State Journal‘s Q&A:
A former business owner, three-term Madison City Council member, state Commerce Department executive and most recently, director of the Wisconsin Angel Network, Brandon, 39, succeeds Jennifer Alexander, who led the Chamber for nearly nine years.
Describing himself as a Democrat, Brandon says he was a fiscal conservative and social liberal on the City Council. He takes the helm of an organization traditionally known, he acknowledges, for its conservative stances. …
A: I want the Chamber to be intrepid, focusing on being innovative, entrepreneurial and identifiable. My goal is to make Madison an innovative and entrepreneurial hub that’s an envy of the world. …
We have lots of collisions in the city when it comes to policy ideas. The Chamber and the business community should be involved; there shouldn’t be an area where we’re afraid to be part of the dialogue. …
Madison is an under-performing city, based on its potential. It’s about the right leaders, the right vision. There’s a significant overhaul in our leadership system now, with a new school superintendent, UW-Madison chancellor, U.S. senator and U.S. representative coming in and a new leader of Thrive (the eight-county regional economic development organization). People are not entrenched; they will be willing to think differently.
But to The Capital Times, Brandon says different things, as shown in its Q&A, or “CT” and “ZB”:
Watching Scott Walker’s gubernatorial campaign in 2010, it’s no secret what one of its key over-arching strategies was.
Run against Madison.
Zach Brandon says that has got to stop.
As the new president of the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce, Brandon plans to do all he can to end that wedge issue and work toward growing the entire state economy. …
Zach Brandon: I think everyone realizes that for many years Madison rested on its laurels. We are the seat of government, we’ve got this world-class research university and we were complacent. But with Act 10, people have come to the realization that government jobs are no longer going to be a growth industry. I was saying that back in 2005 and now other people are coming to that realization.
So what Madison needs to do now is think about the assets it has. We have natural beauty, a wonderful quality of life, tremendous civic engagement and a research institution that brings in $1 billion in federal grants each year. We have all the key elements to be a world-class innovation city. …
We need the right kind of research. It can’t be research for research’s sake. It’s a focus on things that can be commercialized. You need the right kind of talent to commercialize the research, you need the kind of investment capital that is interested in drawing on good ideas and finally you need the kind of environment that is conducive to making those things happen. I think we’ve got failings in all of those areas.
One place we really underperform is in exports — both inbound investment and outbound materials. If you look at Madison’s exports as a percentage of GDP (gross domestic product), we underperform just about every other metropolitan area in the country. We are on par with Wausau and that is just inexcusable.
CT: Can the state do anything to help Madison perform better, given that Walker ran on a platform of basically trashing state employees and Madison liberals, saying the first thing he would do as governor is “Stop that boondoggle train to Madison?”
ZB: We have to remind our state leaders of two things: One, Madison is a tremendous economic engine on its own and two, you can’t grow the state economy without Madison. Whatever your job creation goals might be, you need Madison to perform at the top levels. Regardless of your politics, we all have shared goals because Wisconsin doesn’t succeed unless Madison succeeds.
If there is a message I want to give state business leaders or elected officials it’s this: when you are upset with what you think is an activist judge, don’t say an “activist judge from Madison” or a “liberal judge from Madison.” Just say “a liberal judge.” If you are upset about a labor union don’t say “a labor union from Madison.” By using Madison as a descriptor, it really hurts the private sector where in fact the private sector had nothing to do with it.
Ex-Capital Times writer and, shockingly, Madison conservative David Blaska observes:
That really is the problem, isn’t it? The private sector had nothing to do with it. Maybe the private sector should have something to do with it. Instead, business has been AWOL.
Now think of what Zach IS saying: The statewide perception of Madison is a business buzz-kill.
Well, “the private sector had nothing to do with it” because Madison and Dane County government generally doesn’t listen to business. Official Madison believes business profits are greedy, evil, racist, classist, sexist, homophobic, etc. How a small start-up can ever succeed in the People’s Republic of Madison is beyond my comprehension. So if Brandon can change that, well, maybe he should be the next Democratic candidate for governor.
Then again, state government didn’t listen to business in the previous gubernatorial administration either. That would the administration Brandon served as secretary of commerce. That administration helped business so much that, among other things, the Legislature got rid of the Department of Commerce. (Seems that raising taxes by more than $2 billion doesn’t help the economy, but then again it didn’t help state finances either.)
I suspect Brandon is right, though, about official Madison’s complacency. If you have people, you have a business base, and with state government, Dane County government and UW–Madison in the same 77 square miles, that’s a lot of consumers. (Too many, from the perspective of those paying those salaries, but that’s a subject for another day.) High taxes? Micromanaging regulators? Who cares?
I hope Brandon succeeds. (See, Sly? Would someone who hates Madison write that?) There is nothing in the Wisconsin Democratic Party that remotely resembles being “pro-business” today. It’s beyond time for the Democrats to stop their knee-jerk opposition to anyone who has more money than they do and doesn’t get a paycheck from a governmental body.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 