Anyone who has seen my face on this blog or elsewhere knows that my face is partially covered by facial hair. (Since the winter of 1992–93, for those who didn’t know.)
Seeking to improve its public profile, the American Mustache Institute introduced a proposal it called the Stimulus To Allow Critical Hair Expenses — yes, STACHE — Act, a tax deduction of up to $250 for, yes, facial hair expenses:
The STACHE Act is based on the celebrated white paper “Mustached Americans And The Triple Bottom Line.” … Written by noted tax policy professor Dr.John Yeutter, Ph.D., CFP, Associate Professor of Accounting and Tax Policy at Northeastern State University, it argues that the social and environmental benefits to mustache growth and maintenance provide a service to the U.S. economy.
“Given the clear link between the growing and maintenance of mustaches and incremental income … mustache maintenance costs qualify for and should be considered as a deductible expense …,” Dr. Yeutter wrote.
Said $250 tax deduction would cover such expenses as:
Mustache and beard trimming instruments;
Mustache wax and weightless conditioning agents;
Facial hair coloring products (for men and women over 43 years of age);
Bacon;
Mustache combs and mirrors;
DVD collections of “Magnum P.I.” and “Smokey and the Bandit”;
Mustache insurance (now required by state law in Alabama, Oregon, Maine, New Mexico, and Puerto Rico);
Billy clubs or bodyguards to keep women away as a mustache increases good looks by an estimated 38 percent;
Little black books and jumbo packages of kielbasa sausage;
Burt Reynolds wallet-sized photos.
I don’t know how many people AMI expected to read Yeutter’s white paper. I did. The Environmental Impact part claims:
Mustache grooming aids are largely natural and environmentally friendly, and do not contribute to either ozone depletion or global warming as is the case with other hair care products.
In addition, the cookie duster can act as a natural warming device, allowing the Mustached American to reduce dependencies on artificial heating devices and save vast quantities of energy during cooler months. Further, proper mustache maintenance reduces solid waste, as not only are the vibrissae themselves not deposited into landfills, but also a significant amount of disposable razors are saved from dangerous misuse.
Other environmental benefits of the appropriate growth and grooming of mustaches include inarguable proof that owning and operating a proper mustache reduces shaving, thus reducing the use of water, shaving cream, and environmentally harmful chemicals found in after-shave lotions and tonics. Additionally, reduced nasal drainage caused by breathing harmful pathogens are effectively filtered through mustache fur, thus limiting the amount of dangerous carbon dioxide reaching the ozone layer.
If you’re not convinced by now of the seriousness of AMI’s proposal, consider that AMI further proposed to publicize the STACHE Act by holding a Million Mustache March on Washington on April 1.
The STACHE Act is of little use to me, since I use neither mustache wax nor “weightless conditioning agents” nor “facial hair coloring products,” and I’m really not interested in the DVDs or the Burt Reynolds photos. (However, I would take the bacon and kielbasa deductions.)
But to demonstrate that truth is stranger than fiction:
After barnstorming the Nation’s Capitol in support of the proposed Stache Act (details and white paper here), the office of of [sic] Maryland 6th district U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett informed the American Mustache Institute that the congressman has begun the process of ensuring the ‘Stache Act becomes law by passing the proposal to the House Ways and Means Committee for study — an essential first step for tax legislation.
The surprising thing is not that a congressman—Rep. Bartlett, a Republican—would support the creation of another tax loophole. …
Instead, it was odd that Bartlett would even participate in what clearly seems to be an elaborate parody of Washington, D.C., think tanks and advocacy groups—and Congress. (The group is, after all, holding a rally on Capitol Hill on April 1.)
So I called Bartlett’s office to see if something so silly could possibly be real. Sure enough, it is—but there’s a wrinkle: Congressman Bartlett was never aware that the bill had been referred to the committee in his name. …
“Congressman Bartlett has referred their proposal to the Ways and Means Committee, without commenting on the merit of the bill,” Lisa Wright, Bartlett’s press secretary, told me. The House Ways and Means Committee, Wright explained, has jurisdiction since the Stache Act is a tax bill.
Wright was then asked that since Bartlett referred the bill with comment, would she be able to comment on her boss’s opinion of the proposed legislation. “Congressman Bartlett merely referred it without recommendation,” Wright told me after a big pause.
Indeed, Wright conceded, when asked whether it’s a waste of the congressman’s time to be toying with legislative stunts like this one, that Bartlett actually knew nothing about the bill he supposedly had referred to the House Ways and Means Committee.
“I did not raise it with him,” Wright admitted. “Actually it’s a staff referral . . . I did it, I referred it.” When asked whether Congressman Bartlett knew about the referral, Wright sheepishly said, “I don’t think I told him yet.”
That was posted Tuesday. One day later:
UPDATE: Lisa Wright called Wednesday morning to clarify that she only referred the mustache proposal to the Ways and Means Committee, and did not actually send a bill to the committee. In a follow-up message left on my voicemail, Wright says, “Please check Thomas to look for the Stache Act. You will not find it. It does not exist. There is no bill. There is no legislation. And an advocacy group that characterizes it as legislation—and you used that term with me—does not make it legislation.”
I think Wright’s next job evaluation with Bartlett might not go so well.
Commonwealth judged best weekly paper in Wisconsin
After a 10-year hiatus, the Ripon Commonwealth Press once again has been named the best weekly newspaper in Wisconsin.
After being judged against the 190 other weekly publications across the state, the Wisconsin Newspaper Association named it the Weekly Newspaper of the Year Friday night.
The Commonwealth Press won 13 first-place awards, 11 second-place awards and nine third-place awards in competition against other weekly newspapers in the state.
Publisher Tim Lyke told his fellow newspaper publishers that “We are fortunate in Ripon to have readers and advertisers who expect and deserve a newspaper that strives every week to live up to the excellence of the community we serve.”
As one of his readers (and an occasional advertiser through our church) who doubles as an ink-stained wretch who used to do the sort of things the Commonwealth Press editorial staff does and still sends them newsreleases, I have to publicly congratulate the Commonwealth Press for its superior journalism in an increasingly difficult journalistic and business environment for superior journalism.
Editor Ian Stepleton credits the Commonwealth Press’ readers:
I have a different perspective on this “victory,” largely because I know why we won.
You.
As I’ve discovered over the almost 18 years I’ve lived here, Ripon is one special, unique place.
… And that is why we won Newspaper of the Year.
… Where else, all in one spot, can you find:
* People so engaged — for the past 150-plus years — that they not only have changed their community, but the nation (and arguably the world as well)
* A top-notch college that is so closely tied to its community
* Such technological innovation from which local names have become household brands
* Residents so motivated that nothing can hold them back, such as the late Jeanne Bice (the ultimate Quacker herself), Trent Baalke (49ers general manager), Harrison Ford (actor), Al Jarreau (jazz musician), etc.
As has sometimes been said, all roads lead to Ripon — even in a metaphorical sense, it seems.
It just goes to show this community has many, many reasons to be proud.
We at the Commonwealth are just lucky enough to be here to chronicle them.
Having exited the weekly newspaper world nearly two decades ago (while still getting occasional urges to go back — the first sign of recovery from addiction is admitting your addiction, right?), I’m a bit envious of the Commonwealth Press. I won two WNA first-place awards for sports writing, and the newspaper we co-owned, the Tri-County Press in Cuba City, won a Most Improved Newspaper award. We did really good work at the Grant County Herald Independent in Lancaster (including for the murder trial I covered), but we won neither a General Excellence award nor a Newspaper of the Year award in my three years in Lancaster.
Of course, the purpose of journalism is not to win awards for yourself or your media outlet. The purpose of journalism is to report what’s going on so that your readers, listeners and viewers are better informed. If you want to know what’s happening in Ripon, you have to read the Commonwealth Press. (Not everything, of course, because one obligation of journalists is to report the provable truth.)
Perhaps the most impressive thing is the number of first- and second-place awards for the Commonwealth Press’ coverage of the Ripon area’s interesting (as in the Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times”) news year. That includes the recall election of state Sen. Luther Olsen (R–Ripon), the problems with the Boca Grande downtown redevelopment project, the controversy over the Rosendale Dairy megafarm and its effect on area groundwater, and the often-dysfunctional relationships in Green Lake city government.
This is despite the fact that the Commonwealth Press doesn’t really have news media competition. That is not a comment about the staff at the local radio station, which at least does some local news coverage. That is a comment about the owner of said local radio station, who needs to devote his own resources (some of which come from our church, which is why I get to write this paragraph) to local news coverage, such as having his staff attend city council and school board meetings to report thereupon. One of the Commonwealth Press’ supposed daily newspaper competition is well known (to which I can personally attest) for being unable to be bothered to cover events that occur weekdays after 5 p.m. or on weekends.
As an opinionmonger (who also blogs on the Commonwealth Press’ website), I particularly applaud the first-place award for the Commonwealth Press’ opinion pages. A lot of newspapers think printing letters to the editor suffices as an opinion section. It doesn’t. A lot of newspapers think printing controversial opinions will make advertisers angry enough to stop advertising, and readers angry enough to cancel their subscriptions. They might. Neither is an insignificant concern, given that readers’ eyeballs are what compel advertisers to advertise, and given the diminishing small-town newspaper advertising base.
Economic pressures are making weekly journalism difficult. Print journalism is still trying to figure out how to use the Internet to get people to pay for their product instead of putting it online for free. The traditional advertiser base for small-town newspapers, local retail businesses, is being eroded by the growth of big-box and online retailers. If your two biggest revenue sources are readers’ subscriptions and advertising, and both are eroding for demographic and economic reasons, well, you can see the challenge.
One solution is for a company to purchase and operate several newspapers. (When I started in Grant County in 1988, my employer owned two newspapers and one shopper. By the time I left in 1994, he was up to five newspapers and two shoppers. He was then bought out by a company that now owns nine southwest Wisconsin newspapers, including most of our former print competitors. Another former employer owns not just the state’s largest newspaper, but many weekly newspapers as well. The nation’s largest newspaper owner, Gannett, owns 10 Wisconsin daily newspapers.
Whether chain ownership is a good thing or not depends on who the owner is. Chain ownership allows such production functions as printing, accounting and circulation to be done centrally, which, in the case of good owners, allows more resources to be devoted to the editorial product. On the other hand, Gannett owns the aforementioned 9-to-5 newspaper.
The Commonwealth Press is a throwback in that the Commonwealth Press is Ripon Community Printers’ only newspaper. (I’ve suggested to the publisher more than once, in fact, that their brand of journalism could serve other communities too.) Ripon Community Printers is one of the state’s largest printing companies and one of Ripon’s largest employers, with a worldwide customer base. (Including, of all things, Polish-language Chicago phone books.)
The Commonwealth Press is not perfect. (I used to repeat the old saw that if I ever published a mistake-free issue, that would be my last day in print journalism.) My four years on the Ripon Plan Commission included two run-ins with the Commonwealth Press where the newspaper mischaracterized things I said during Plan Commission meetings. (Part of that was my forgetting or ignoring the indisputable fact that anything you say at a public meeting can and may be used by the news media present.) In one instance the Commonwealth Press commented negatively on something I said at a meeting that no one from the Commonwealth Press attended. The following week’s Commonwealth Press included a pointed letter from the wrongly criticized Plan Commission member, which they printed.
Some claim the Commonwealth Press is excessively deferential to the powers-that-be in Ripon. (That’s a common complaint of weekly newspapers, and sometimes valid, sometimes not.) The Commonwealth Press’ sports coverage well covers the local teams, but has a strange habit of not mentioning their opponents by player names. (It’s the print equivalent of the late Ripon sports announcer Jack Arnold, who sounded as if he was calling a game featuring an Asian team, given that every opponent’s name was “He.”) And one of the newspapers’ readers is known in the office for sending emails when he sees prominent typographical errors. (The Commonwealth Press has a habit of dropping the second E from the word “eyeing.”)
These past two paragraphs are an example of the life of a weekly newspaper. Every Wednesday afternoon the newspaper gets delivered to the front door. Every Wednesday evening my wife and I read it. Fifty-two issues a year are 52 opportunities to mess up something, inaccurately or incompletely report something, or make someone angry at you. In my year and a half as an editor and co-publisher, I often felt as though the power structure of our home community was against me, until I learned after we left that I had become a comparative paragon of weekly journalism. My former boss and business partner used to say that our subscribers liked to hate the newspaper, and if “hated” meant nitpicking beyond reason and attributing motives and agendas where none existed, he was right.
If you do anything for public consumption 52 times a year, you’re going to be criticized for something. Whether they get it right in every instance (and no journalist ever does), the Commonwealth Press is a must-read for those who care about what’s happening in Ripon. That’s more important than getting a Newspaper of the Year award, as I suspect the Commonwealth Press staff would tell you. Nevertheless, the Commonwealth Press deserves congratulations for publishing a newspaper worthy of Ripon.
Assuming that Thursday’s forecasted storm doesn’t topple power lines or knock down cellphone or radio towers, I will be on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin program Friday doing the 8 a.m. Week in Review segment.
Wisconsin Public Radio’s Ideas Network can be heard on WHA (970 AM) in Madison, WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at www.wpr.org.
If the headline and lead sentence seem apocalyptic for what now is a forecast of 1 to 3 inches, let me double-down: Ripon is going to close schools Friday. (It is a scheduled day off.)
Posts in this blog can now also be found at IBWisconsin.com, the Wisconsin blog of Madison’s In Business magazine.
Since posts to run or not will be the province of IBWisconsin, I assume IBWisconsin will choose to post entries about Wisconsin business and/or Wisconsin politics. So if you’re looking for my thoughts about, for instance, the Boy Scouts, facial hair, large cars, station wagons, rock music or food, the original Presteblog probably remains your best place.
There is great irony in my appearing in a Madison-based blog, even though it covers the entire state and not merely the People’s Republic of Madison. Though I am a native of the 77 square miles surrounded by reality, I have absolutely zero interest in returning as a Mad City resident, in part because the Madison of my childhood has been replaced by something bigger but not better, and in part because of official and unofficial Madison’s absolute intolerance for non-liberal points of view. Madison’s always been liberal in my lifetime, but not anti-conservative, which it certainly is now.
For those who haven’t read me yet, my views veer between conservative and libertarian depending on the subject. That’s because I’ve observed over the years that Republicans can foul things up while in power as well as Democrats can, and because I find inconsistent the view that government should stay out of your wallet but should be in your bedroom, or vice versa. Despite what you may conclude from reading, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a card-carrying, dues-paying member of the Republican Party. When Gov. Scott Walker and Republicans deserve criticism, they get it here.
My fellow IBWisconsin bloggers include various business experts and David Blaska, recently (wrongly) punted from Isthmus; Tom Still of the Wisconsin Technology Council, who I started reading at an age far younger than either of us wants to admit back in his Wisconsin State Journal days; former U.S. Senate candidate Terrance Wall; Tom Breuer, former columnist for The Scene, who once interviewed a certain business magazine editor to get an opinion utterly opposite his tabloid’s views; and In Business editor Joe Vanden Plas, who approached me after I corrected a misapprehension of his last year.
One thing new readers will find is that I am the king of state business climate comparisons. The second term paper I did as a political science major at the University of Wisconsin focused on the state’s business climate, back in the days after Kimberly–Clark’s well publicized departure of its corporate headquarters for Dallas because of the state’s bad business climate, as characterized by then-K–C chairman Darwin Smith.
The various business climate comparisons use and weight different criteria (although taxes weigh heavily). Most of them (most recently Forbes) have come to the same conclusion: Wisconsin’s business climate isn’t very good. And Walker and the GOP haven’t done nearly enough to change it in the right direction. (Of course, the Democrats’ goal is to have Wisconsin rank dead last in every business climate comparison.)
Let’s see — the stupid Walker recall election, Recallarama part deux, a socialist running for U.S. Senate, and four more years of the hopey-changey thing? I certainly do not lack for things to write about.
Wisconsinites know that “the flag for the local union” is actually the Wisconsin state flag. The only union it represents is Wisconsinites. (For non-Wisconsinites, the “1848” is the year of our statehood, on May 29. This little kerfuffle shows that the decision several years ago to add “Wisconsin” and “1848” to the flag because it looked too much like other state flags had unintended consequences.)
Since the premise of the entire story is based on that flag, erase the first three sentences, and what do you have? Obama saying something about something that has to do with his reelection.
Besides being sloppy, Donovan Slack’s reporting describes the nature of today’s media. You have technology, you use it to get the latest story out online, apparently whether correct or not. (Then again, read a Gannett Wisconsin newspaper, and you’ll see Gannett’s commitment to proper English. Or not.) This basic error is the sort of thing that is supposed to be the province of inexperienced, untrained bloggers, not supposedly professional reporters.
The worst part of this is that one of Politico’s founders, Jim VandeHei, is from Oshkosh.
On the other hand, Stuff Journalists Like blows the lid off the actual work of journalists following the latest Internet trend:
This past weekend, the University of North Dakota hosted the University of Wisconsin in men’s hockey.
This is the next to last season of their league, the Western Collegiate Hockey Association, with members of the Big Ten — Wisconsin and Minnesota — in the league. The Big Ten is sponsoring hockey beginning in 2013–14, with the WCHA’s Minnesota and Wisconsin, the Central Collegiate Hockey Association’s Michigan, Michigan State and Ohio State, and the new Penn State hockey program.
Today is the 30th anniversary of one of the more infamous yet amusing moments in college hockey — the North Dakota–Wisconsin Water Bottle Fight. On a Saturday night in January 1982 at the Dane County Coliseum in Madison, the Badgers were leading the Fighting Sioux 3–0 in the third period.
The Grand Forks Herald picks up what happened next from the perspective of Sioux co-captain Cary Eades:
Eades skated past the Wisconsin bench on his way to make a line change. Wisconsin’s John Newberry squirted Eades in the face with a water bottle — for the second time during the game.
“Their door was open, so I went in to have a talk with him,” Eades said.
Eades proceeded to put his stick up near Newberry’s throat and ask the Badger forward what he was going to do now. Wisconsin defenseman Pat Ethier saw this exchange, ran down the bench and landed a punch on Eades that set off everything.
Watch the Wisconsin and North Dakota versions of “everything” that followed:
This was neither the first nor the last time the Badgers and Fighting Sioux (the nickname was natural) had squared off on the ice. One year earlier in Grand Forks, the two teams got into a fight during pregame warmups. This was, however, the event that prompted the largest number of suspensions from the WCHA.
A member of the UW Band was in the beer garden (behind the two teams’ benches, which were divided by the tunnel into the beer garden) when a Badger and a Fighting Sioux (based on the Herald story, I’m guessing it was Jim Archibald, UND’s — surprise! — all-time penalty leader) rolled into the beer garden. The band member took one look at the Fighting Sioux and one look at his beer, and deposited the beer into the Boy Named Sioux’s facemask.
The 30-years-later comments from Eades, now an assistant coach for the (literally) Fighting Sioux, fit into the maybe-you-should-have-thought-of-that-at-the-time category:
While everyone remembers the brawl, Eades prefers to think about and talk about the other aspects of the rivalry that season. …
“From my personal standpoint, (the brawl) kind of overshadows a lot of good things I accomplished in my college career,” Eades said. “I was very fortunate to have a lot of good teammates and good seasons, but that’s the only thing anyone wants to talk about. I’d rather talk about the four goals in one period, but there’s no video of that. The fights and controversy and uproar are what people talk about at the hockey games and the beverage places afterward.
“Hopefully, with the 30 years, we can put it in a casket and bury it.”
The other aspects of the rivalry were epic in a different way. Wisconsin finished second to North Dakota in the WCHA regular season, but swept North Dakota in the WCHA finals in Grand Forks. The Fighting Sioux had 1982’s last laugh, though, beating Wisconsin 5–2 to win the NCAA title in Badger coach Bob Johnson’s final game before he headed to the NHL.
One year later, the WCHA semifinals (in the pre-Final Four/Five days) pitted, once again, Wisconsin against North Dakota in another two-game total-goal series. After a first-night tie, the Badgers tied the second game in the last minute of the third period, sending the game into overtime. And then another overtime. And then a third overtime. And then it got weird.
The Badgers’ Ted Pearson scored to win the game in the third overtime. Or so it seemed, until North Dakota challenged the curvature of Pearson’s stick. (Stick curvature is limited by hockey rule.) The stick was found to be illegal, so the goal was taken off the scoreboard and Pearson was sent to the penalty box. Not to be denied, however, the Badgers’ Paul Houck scored a short-handed goal about 30 seconds later, this time with a legal stick, ending the Fighting Sioux’s season.
The NCAA Frozen Four was held that year in … Grand Forks. Two WCHA teams were there — Wisconsin and Minnesota, a bigger rival for North Dakota than Wisconsin. So UND fans wore buttons with Wisconsin Ws that said “This Sioux’s for You.” Wisconsin never got to play Minnesota (unlike in 1981, when the Badgers beat the Gophers to win the NCAA title), but defeated Providence 2–0 and Harvard 6–2 to win the third of Wisconsin’s five NCAA titles.
That occurred the year before I went to UW. My last year at UW coincided with the first year of the WCHA Final Four, in St. Paul in 1988. Wisconsin beat North Dakota 2–1 in the Sunday afternoon semifinal, advancing the Badgers to the Monday night championship game against the Sunday night semifinal winner, Minnesota.
Monday afternoon was the third-place game between North Dakota and Minnesota–Duluth. Having nothing better to do, a group of us in the UW Band went to the third-place game and sat in with the North Dakota band during the second intermission. We borrowed their trumpets and, instead of their playing whatever they’d play to start the third period, we played “On Wisconsin.” The boos reverberated through the half-empty St. Paul Civic Center. It was great.
The Herald reports that North Dakota and Wisconsin have agreed to continue playing nonconference series after the Badgers head for the Big Ten in 2013–14. Which is good news. It would be a shame to lose a rivalry in which the two teams occasionally hate each other.
Christian Schneider on with whom Sens. Jessica King (D–Oshkosh) and Tim Cullen (D–Janesville), supposed gubernatorial recall candidate, are hanging around these days:
If the recent controversy over collective bargaining in Wisconsin has done anything, it has lifted up a rock to expose how many cretins manage to slither below the surface of legitimate political dialogue. …
Then there’s liberal hero Ian Murphy, who impersonated billionaire David Koch while making a now-famous prank phone call to Gov. Scott Walker. Murphy, a blogger, was immediately lionized by union loyalists for supposedly “exposing” Walker’s ties to the Koch Brothers (whom Walker claims he has never met). …
On Tuesday, the 540,000 signatures needed to force a recall election of Governor Walker are due; and in advance of this momentous occasion, Democrats have sent Murphy on a barnstorming tour to drum up support for the recall. Local newspapers have photographed Murphy chumming it up with incumbent state senators, many of whom fled the state last February in order to block a vote on the collective-bargaining bill. Flyers offer attendees the chance to “meet special guest Ian Murphy of the Daily Beast, famous for his ‘Fake David Koch’ phone call.”
But that isn’t the only thing that has brought fame to Ian Murphy. In May 2008, he wrote a vile column titled “F*** the Troops,” in which he ridiculed the notion that we should honor those fighting for our country. Among Murphy’s “greatest” hits (warning: profane language):
● “So, 4000 rubes are dead. Cry me the Tigris. Another 30,000 have been seriously wounded. Boo f***ing hoo. They got what they asked for — and cool robotic limbs, too.”
● “The benevolence of America’s ‘troops’ is sacrosanct. Questioning their rectitude simply isn’t done. It’s the forbidden zone. We may rail against this tragic war, but our soldiers are lauded by all as saints. Why? They volunteered to partake in this savage idiocy, and for this they deserve our utmost respect? I think not.”
● “The nearly two-thirds of us who know this war is bullshit need to stop s***ing off the troops. They get enough action raping female soldiers and sodomizing Iraqi detainees.”
● “As a society, we need to discard our blind deference to military service. There’s nothing admirable about volunteering to murder people. There’s nothing admirable about being rooked by obvious propaganda. There’s nothing admirable about doing what you’re told if what you’re told to do is terrible.”
● On John McCain: “Again, what is heroic about involving one’s self in a foolish war, being a sh***y pilot or getting tortured? Yeah, it must have sucked, but getting your ass kicked every day for five years doesn’t make you a hero—it makes you a Bad News Bear.”
● “But what kind of world would we rather live in: one where fools are admired for being fooled and murderers are extolled for murdering, or one where we have the capacity to step back and say, ‘I don’t care who told you to do what and why; you’re still an asshole!’ Personally, I’d rather live in a world where people who act like retards are treated like retards: executed in Texas.”
And on and on it goes.
Of course, anyone who is familiar with politics sees these reptiles trolling around on message boards and on Twitter. But Ian Murphy is now headlining legitimate events thrown by legitimate Democrats, none of whom will even acknowledge his puerile radicalism. (Very little, if any, of Murphy’s past has been reported in the state media, save for Milwaukee-area conservative talk radio.)
Miss Wisconsin won the Miss America pageant on Saturday night. She clearly represents the pretty side of the state. But Ian Murphy has given everyone a glimpse of how ugly it can be, too.
Warning: If you’re online this weekend, it will be hard to avoid me.
On Friday, I will be on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin program doing the 8 a.m. Week in Review segment.
Wisconsin Public Radio’s Ideas Network can be heard on WHA (970 AM) in Madison, WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at www.wpr.org.
That, I suppose, will serve as warmup for the four college basketball games I’m announcing this weekend — Lake Forest at Ripon Friday, women at 5:30 and men at 7:30 p.m., and Illinois College at Ripon Saturday, women at 1 and men at 3 p.m. (Similar to other broadcast sports, if you want to watch the Red Hawks, Foresters or Lady Blues/Blueboys, you have to watch us; you have no choice of announcers.)
The U.S. Supreme Court will get to decide whether the following (minus the poster’s editorial additions) is worth a $1.43 million fine:
The Federal Communications Commission fined 52 ABC stations in the Central and Mountain time zones after the aforementioned opening to ABC’s “NYPD Blue” Feb. 25, 2003. A federal appeals court overturned the fines, leaving it in the hands of the Supremes, who heard oral arguments Tuesday, reports the Los Angeles Times:
The Supreme Court seemed reluctant Tuesday to end the government’s historic policing of the broadcast airwaves and to strike down the “indecency” rules that guide prime-time TV shows.
Broadcasters use the public airwaves, and the “government can insist on a certain modicum of decency,” said Justice Antonin Scalia during oral arguments on the constitutionality of a ban on four-letter words and nudity.
“All we are asking for is for a few channels” where parents can be confident their children will not hear profanity or see sex scenes, said Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who is a parent of two young children. …
Lawyers for the networks urged the Supreme Court to throw out the fines and strike down the FCC’s indecency rules. They said federal policing of broadcast content was outdated and no longer warranted. They said most Americans receive entertainment and news though cable TV or the Internet, and these media have full 1st Amendment rights. Broadcasters deserve the same rights, they said.
They also argued that current FCC policy against indecency is vague and arbitrary and should be voided on those grounds. They noted, for example, that the broadcast of “Saving Private Ryan,” the World War II movie by Steven Spielberg that portrayed the Normandy landings, was permitted, even though it included plenty of four-letter words. At the same time, other broadcasters were fined for allowing a single four-letter word.
The ABC fine is the latest in a period of fine-happiness on the part of the FCC. Before 2000, according to the Washington Post, the FCC levied fines against a TV station once, for a Kansas City station’s 1987 discussion of the movie “Private Lessons.”
After the George W. Bush administration took office, the FCC issued fines for Telemundo’s 2000 showing a couple in a bubble bath during a sexually-themed show (merely because the scene was “suggestive”), a San Francisco station’s 2002 showing of the objects of the puppet show “Puppetry of the Penis” (I kid you not), Fox’s 2003 showing of “Married by America” that included “digitally obscured nudity,” and, of course, the infamous display of one of Janet Jackson’s breasts (which I managed to miss seeing) during the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show in 2004.
CBS was fined $3.6 million for a 2003 episode of “Without a Trace” that featured a disappearance of a high school student tied to “very wild parties that the students have been having.” (Oddly enough, the effort to get the FCC to fine CBS didn’t take place until after the episode was repeated 13 months later.)
The millennium has brought more than the FCC has fined. Cher got away with using a certain word that rhymes with “luck” in a 2002 awards show, one year before Bono of U2 described his group’s Golden Globe Award as “f—ing brilliant.” After Jackson’s flashing the CBS audience, the FCC decided that “fleeting expletives” such as Cher’s and Bono’s could indeed be fined, though they didn’t retroactively issue fines.
The aforementioned “fleeting expletives” fine threat has resulted in TV and radio stations’ broadcasting live sports events on seven-second delays (because, you know, players might call each other rude names or object to officials’ calls), which is utterly stupid. (I would have selected another word besides “utterly” in keeping with the theme of this piece, but I have standards.)
It is interesting to note that that “NYPD Blue” scene got the fine, but other “NYPD Blue” scenes did not, including …
… or the infamous Dennis Franz shower scene, which arguably should have gotten a fine solely for aesthetic reasons. (Similar to the Madison naked bicyclist protests, you cannot un-see something.) Anyone who has lived in a house with children knows that children sometimes walk in on their parents when their parents would have preferred the door had stayed shut. If, as Roberts claimed during oral arguments Tuesday, “context counts,” the context of the scene that got the fine is completely different from my other two examples.
It probably is foreshadowing to point out that I was a big fan of “NYPD Blue” (along with other cop TV) and I am not a fan of the FCC. The fines are incompatible with what the FCC tells anyone who goes to its website:
The First Amendment, as well as Section 326 of the Communications Act, prohibits the Commission from censoring broadcast material and from interfering with freedom of expression in broadcasting. The Constitution’s protection of free speech includes that of programming that maybe objectionable to many viewer or listeners.
What is a fine if it is not an attempt at “censoring broadcast material” and “interfering with freedom of expression in broadcasting”? TV station owners whose tolerance for FCC fines reaches its limit will ultimately tell their network to stop airing FCC-objectionable material, or not carry potentially FCC-objectionable material. (There is a long history of the latter, including the boycott by Southern NBC stations of the original “Star Trek” because NBC dared to carry a series with a black actress. That boycott was about racism, however, not the FCC. The NBC station in Salt Lake City refused to carry NBC’s “The Playboy Club” when it was briefly on this past fall.)
The distinguishing factor is supposed to be that ABC, along with CBS, Fox, NBC, PBS, CW, My Network TV and other networks are available over the air, whereas HBO, Showtime, TBS, TNT, A&E and others are available only for cable or satellite viewers. That is a distinction with a decreasing difference given that only 15 percent of U.S. households get only broadcast TV.
Had I written this column a decade ago, I would have written that it’s really not the FCC’s business to decide whether my sensibilities have been offended. The fact that we now have three TV-watching children, one of whom is now up through what the networks call “prime time,” actually doesn’t change that opinion, although it makes TV-watching more of a chore.
The old “family hour,” which was supposed to feature family-appropriate TV before 8 p.m. Central time, went away a long time ago. It’s up to the producers of Fox’s “Glee,” which is on Tuesdays at 7 p.m., whether they want to have gay characters, but I’m sure parents who don’t approve of homosexuality don’t appreciate having to explain it to their kids during a TV show. (So far, I have not had to explain the purpose of Cialis, Levitra or Viagra or other “male enhancement” aids when a commercial comes up.)
Well, there’s an answer for all that: Don’t watch. In fact, you are free to not watch the following 7 p.m. shows, all of which are rated TV-14: ABC’s “The Bachelor,” CBS’ “How I Met Your Mother,” the CW’s “Gossip Girl,” Fox’s “House” and My Network TV’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” on Mondays; CBS’ “NCIS” and Fox’s “Glee” on Tuesdays; CBS’ “Criminal Minds” on Wednesdays; Fox’s “Bones” and the CW’s “The Vampire Diaries” on Thursdays; and Fox’s “Kitchen Nightmares” on Fridays; plus Telemundo’s “Una Maid en Manhattan,” on every weeknight.
(It is perhaps a little more disturbing that such TV-14-rated shows as “The Simpsons,” “Two and a Half Men” and “Family Guy” are shown between 6 and 7 p.m. by stations that don’t carry 6 p.m. news, but the answer to that is in the previous paragraph too. Then again, I watched such family-friendly shows as “The Mod Squad” and “Hawaii Five-O” when I was our children’s age; I remember being bummed because the “family hour” shifted Steve McGarrett to 8 p.m.)
More disturbing than what’s on between 6 and 8 p.m. is the cultural and parental laziness inherent in the idea that TV needs to cater to the lowest-common-sensibility denominator at some times of the day because parents don’t want to have to act as parents. Parents who want to censor what their children see and hear need to be independently wealthy because they’ll have to follow them around to such opportunities for exposure to disagreeable ideas as the school lunchroom and recess.
This is a good place to bring up the difference between government and society, a distinction not enough people seem to understand. In a diverse, pluralistic society, government is not the best arbiter between contrasting standards of personal morality. (For example, see the positions on abortion rights of 1996 presidential candidate Steve Forbes vs. 2000 presidential candidate Steve Forbes.) Should the moral standards of those opposed to alcohol force beer, wine and liquor commercials off TV? No. It should not be up to the government to tell the networks that they cannot broadcast ads for legal products, whether or not you like the presence of Cialis, Levitra and Viagra ads. (Does that apply to cigarette advertising, not seen on the airwaves since 1970? Yes.) Those with problems with such advertising of legal products need to contact the offending TV station, or the companies advertising said products, and get like-minded people to do the same.
I’m not sure where one begins trying to de-coarsen the culture, but TV reflects culture at least as much as the other way around. Actually, now I do know where one begins trying to de-coarsen the culture: with yourself and those around you. The networks respond to ratings, and if people don’t watch, TV series don’t survive.
Roberts’ request that “All we are asking for is for a few channels” without foul language or bare skin should fall on deaf ears because it’s not the government’s place to tell any broadcaster — over the air, cable, satellite or online — what content the broadcaster can or cannot show. There is that troublesome First Amendment, for starters. And as brought up here last May, the idea that the airwaves are public was correctly described by former FCC commissioner Erwin Krasnow as “a mischievous notion that has been misused as a rationalization for government regulation,” which contradicts the First Amendment.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
