Assuming everyone involved can be roused out of our tryptophan comas, I will be on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin program Friday at 8 a.m.
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. (that is, the state whose finances are worse than Wisconsin’s), 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.
Forty-eight years ago at 12:30 p.m., John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy were riding in a motorcade in downtown Dallas.
At the same time, those watching a CBS-affiliate TV station (including probably my mother and grandmother) were watching this:
About seven minutes later, listeners to ABC radio stations heard this:
About three minutes after that, the aforementioned CBS viewers saw this:
Those listening to the biggest Top 40 station in Dallas had their listening to the Chiffons interrupted:
Those watching whatever their NBC-TV station was carrying around 12:45 heard this …
… while those watching WFAA-TV in Dallas at the same time saw this:
Those watching ABC-TV’s rerun of “Father Knows Best” saw this:
From then on, for the first time in history, all three TV networks presented wall-to-wall (or as close as possible; most TV stations went off the air after midnight) coverage of breaking news:
I have great interest in JFK’s assassination and coverage thereof for a couple of reasons. I went to John F. Kennedy School in Madison, so that may be part of it, in addition to my being a media geek.
There were mistakes, because there are always mistakes in such coverage. Lyndon Johnson was reported to also have been shot and to have had a heart attack. (Imagine the panic that briefly created.) A Secret Service agent was reported to have died.
What is interesting from viewing the coverage is the quality of most of the TV coverage for an unprecedented (for TV) event. It was far from perfect (the ABC-TV coverage is particularly difficult to watch early on), but live remote reports were rare even when they could be set up in advance, let alone when they needed to be set up on the spur of the moment. NBC had its own problems getting a telephone report from Robert MacNeil (later of PBS’ MacNeil–Lehrer Report).
In comparison, the local radio coverage left something to be desired. Perhaps it’s because coverage standards have changed, but it blows my mind (pun not intended) that radio stations would report that the president had been shot in their own city, and then go back to their usual programming (music and, in one case, a Bible program). One reason is that radio news reporters were strewn all over the area to cover Kennedy’s several appearances in Fort Worth and Dallas. One station went between its own coverage and CBS radio coverage, while another went between its own coverage and NBC radio coverage, which also incorporated NBC TV coverage.
Since there was no such thing as a minicam and satellites weren’t in much use yet, there is no tape of the actual announcement from White House assistant press secretary Malcolm Kilduff:
One is struck on watching the coverage how Kennedy’s assassination emotionally affected those covering it in a way I doubt would be repeated in today’s cynical age:
From nearly 50 years later, some reporters and commentators sound as if they were in the tank for Kennedy — or, more accurate, Kennedy the image:
A rather clear-eyed, even cold commentary came from NBC’s Edwin Newman, a UW grad:
Had I been a columnist or commentator in late November 1963, I might have peered through my glasses or newfangled contact lenses, puffed on my pipe, and typed out something like this:
On Monday, Americans will get to witness on television something most have never seen before, except possibly in a theater newsreel — a state funeral. This country’s last state funeral took place in 1945 upon the death of Franklin Roosevelt.
It was noted at the time of President Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961 that this country had an unprecedented number of living former presidents — Dwight Eisenhower, Kennedy’s predecessor; Harry Truman, Eisenhower’s predecessor; and Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt’s predecessor. It is one of many cruel ironies of this weekend that all three have outlived our youngest elected president.
Kennedy was not our youngest president; that was Theodore Roosevelt, who became president upon the assassination of William McKinley, the last president to have been assassinated before Friday. However, our youngest elected president is also the youngest to have died in office.
Those men who fought in and survived World War II will note the irony of one of their own, who had his PT boat cut in two and sunk by a Japanese destroyer 20 years ago, surviving that only to die of violence back in this country.
When you reach the age of President Kennedy, you start to notice when people of your own age show up in the obituary columns. Usually, their deaths are because of heart attacks or car accidents or cancer. President Kennedy projected youth, energy and vitality, thanks in large part to his family. Whether or not you voted for him, most men of President Kennedy’s age or with a young family identified with him much more than with any other president of our memory. And now, Mrs. Kennedy will have to raise their two young children by herself, a widow thanks to, according to the wire reports, a former Marine who left this country for the Soviet Union.
President Kennedy knew much tragedy in his short life. Two of his men on PT 109 were killed in the collision with the Japanese destroyer. His older brother, Joe, died during World War II. One sister, Kathleen, died in a plane crash. Another sister, Rosemary, is retarded and in a nursing home. Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy had a stillborn daughter and another son, Patrick, die shortly after birth earlier this year. This latest Kennedy family tragedy is now the nation’s tragedy as well.
Those readers who were around in the 1940s remember where they were when news was reported about the Pearl Harbor attack and the death of Franklin Roosevelt. Now, this generation has its own where-were-you-when moment. This moment, though, reflects poorly on the United States of America.
I tried to write that what-if column from the viewpoint of 1963. (Hence the term “retarded” to describe Rosemary Kennedy, who had a low IQ and was the victim of a lobotomy ordered by her father.) Americans then and now like to think of ourselves as idealists. A lot of Americans got into government because of Kennedy and what he seemed to represent. Even though Kennedy defeated a presidential candidate just four years older, Kennedy represented to most Americans youth and vigor. (We know now from his medical record that that was an inaccurate representation, as was a great deal of his life story.) He also represented nearly unlimited possibility, such as his embracing a flight to the Moon.
Those of my generation have never experienced an assassination of a president, though an attempt was made on Ronald Reagan’s life. So it’s hard to say how we’d react today to a similar event. Much of the reaction would be based on our political worldview, which is the wrong motivation. We are much more cynical today for good reason, and we see politics as a zero-sum game — one side wins, which means the other loses.
Regardless of your political views, one should always strive to correct inaccuracies whenever you see them.
Readers will recall that I called outJoe Vanden Plas of Madison’s In Business over his claim that Gov. Scott Walker never mentioned his plans for public employee collective bargaining “rights” before he was elected. That claim is, as you know, not only false, but provably false:
Vanden Plas has now stepped up and revised his view in a blog titled “Touché, Mr. Prestegard”:
Conservative blogger Steve Prestegard has convinced me that I’m spreading a myth, a yarn that contends Gov. Scott Walker did not campaign on changes to collective bargaining for unionized state employees. …
My old view, flawed that it was, actually is shared by many, perhaps because Walker didn’t exactly blare his intentions from loudspeakers. The press accounts I allude to noted that he thought the state could save $176 million a year by requiring state employees to contribute to their pensions, something I did not object to.
Another passage notes that Walker supported a bill to take away the rights (privileges, actually) of workers to negotiate health care benefits.
So there it is. You could argue that it was in the fine print, but it was there.
Vanden Plas also channeled his inner John Cleese, which is preferable to channeling his inner Brenda Lee:
I would quibble with one thing Vanden Plas wrote:
Mr. Prestegard and I exchanged several emails, the first of which wondered how the editor of a business magazine could take the side of government employees instead of those whose excessive taxes pay their salaries, or why I was taking the side of government employee unions over my readers.
I responded that our business readers depend on public employee unions to deliver services, including preparing the next generation workforce, so I try to refrain from making it an “us-versus-them thing.” I noted that I’ve also criticized certain union supporters for their harassment of businesses, in Madison and beyond, that wanted to remain neutral.
In so doing, I’ve tried to point out how much Madison businesses support the livelihoods of public employees with the tax base they create in a town chock-full of tax-exempt property.
It’s not his summary of our email exchange, which was accurate. It’s that public employee unions do not deliver government services. Government delivers government services, and those services are delivered by public employees, who are (unfortunately) members of public employee unions. If public employee unions didn’t exist, government would still provide government services and still employ people. Public employee unions contribute absolutely, positively nothing to this state, other than their contribution to this state’s reputation and reality as a tax and regulatory hell.
I don’t expect this to change anyone’s opinion about Walker or Recallarama. I read on Facebook Tuesday morning assertions that it’s not about public employee collective bargaining, it’s about “the sale of Wisconsin to the highest corporate bidder, across the board,” “the coming abuses to our natural resources,” how Walker “ran on a platform of Jobs, not on the things he began doing the moment he took office, namely the will of the Koch Bros and making sure all of his cronies and funders were taken care of,” blah, blah, blah.
The important thing here is that Vanden Plas helped dispel a misconception that the media doesn’t care about whether what it writes or broadcasts is accurate. Every time I speak to groups about the media (for instance, Thursday at the Marian University Appleton Center), I point out that of course the media makes mistakes, but those mistakes become perpetuated if alert readers don’t seek to have them corrected.
George Mason University Prof. Tyler Cowen in the New York Times:
The United States has always had a culture with a high regard for those able to rise from poverty to riches. It has had a strong work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit and has attracted ambitious immigrants, many of whom were drawn here by the possibility of acquiring wealth. Furthermore, the best approach for fighting poverty is often precisely not to make fighting poverty the highest priority. Instead, it’s better to stress achievement and the pursuit of excellence, like a hero from an Ayn Rand novel. These are still at least the ideals of many conservatives and libertarians.
The egalitarian ideals of the left, which were manifest in a wide variety of 20th-century movements, have been wonderful for driving social and civil rights advances, and in these areas liberals have often made much greater contributions than conservatives have. Still, the left-wing vision does not sufficiently appreciate the power — both as reality and useful mythology — of the meritocratic, virtuous production of wealth through business. Rather, academics on the left, like the Columbia University economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Jeffrey D. Sachs among many others, seem more comfortable focusing on the very real offenses of plutocrats and selfish elites. …
The counterintuitive tragedy is this: modern conservative thought is relying increasingly on social engineering through economic policy, by hoping that a weaker social welfare state will somehow promote individual responsibility. Maybe it won’t.
For one thing, today’s elites are so wedded to permissive values — in part for their own pleasure and convenience — that a new conservative cultural revolution may have little chance of succeeding. Lax child-rearing and relatively easy divorce may be preferred by some high earners, but would conservatives wish them on society at large, including the poor and new immigrants? Probably not, but that’s often what we are getting.
In the future, complaints about income inequality are likely to grow and conservatives and libertarians won’t have all the answers. Nonetheless, higher income inequality will increase the appeal of traditional mores — of discipline and hard work — because they bolster one’s chances of advancing economically. That means more people and especially more parents will yearn for a tough, pro-discipline and pro-wealth cultural revolution. And so they should.
It remains to be seen how many of us are up to its demands.
Last month, I wrote about my 20-plus-year avocation, sports announcing, which has provided me with volumes of stories even though I’ve never worked in broadcasting full-time.
I wrote that I haven’t really patterned myself after any announcer that I’m aware of. But if you listened to, for instance, Jim Irwin call Packer and Badger games and Bob Uecker call Brewer games for decades, you are likely to unconsciously emulate them unless you make a conscious effort not to.
Packer fans today get to hear the outstanding work of Packer announcer Wayne Larrivee, known for …
The contrast to Larrivee is the other announcer at Lambeau Field Monday night, the Vikings’ unprofessional Paul Allen:
The example of working to not sound like someone applies to the announcing Carays, Harry …
… and Skip, who did not want to sound like his father, and almost never did …
… except for this October 1992 moment:
Jack and Joe Buck don’t sound alike, but Joe gave a great tribute to Jack in crazy game 6 of the World Series:
Harry Caray and Jack Buck called Cardinals games from the late 1960s until the Cardinals fired Caray in 1970. Note the differences between their styles:
Buck then took over and announced the Cardinals and NFL football until his death:
The younger Buck now announces baseball …
… and football (where he almost became the Packers’ personal announcer, calling their last six games of the 2010 season):
Team announcers have two priorities: (1) Get people to watch or listen to the broadcast, and (2) get people to come to the team’s home games. Some team announcers claim to call games down the middle, but that’s not necessarily what their listeners want to hear. And when your team does well, that tends to help the announcer’s career too:
The number one task of an announcer is to call the game — score, down and distance, balls and strikes, etc., and of course in-game commercials and sponsor mentions. The announcers I like best are those who besides that make you watch, whether you have a rooting interest in the game, and regardless of the score.
Skip Caray was worth watching to see what he’d say next, including:
Until Braves owner Ted Turner made him stop, upon reaching the bottom of the fifth inning: “We’ve come to the bottom of another fifth.”
During a late at-bat of a Braves hitter during a game in Los Angeles: “He has twice grounded to short. [After the swing] He has thrice grounded to short.”
During a period where Turner prohibited CNN announcers from using the word “foreign,” mandating “international” instead, a batter called time out and stepped out of the batter’s box because, Caray explained, “he had an international object in his eye.”
Caray described one poorly attended Braves home game as “a partial sellout.” Another home game, with entire sections of empty seats, was called “Blue Seat Night, folks — you dress up like a blue seat, you get in free.” In another game, he announced, “The stadium is filled tonight, but many fans have come disguised as empty seats.”
Caray once mispronounced the name of Philadelphia Phillies third baseman Mike Schmidt, omitting the M and adding a Z sound at the end. After coming back from commercial, his partner, former Milwaukee Braves pitcher Ernie Johnson, asked, “What was the name of the Phillies third baseman again?”
When you’ve been announcing games since 1974, as Reds announcer Marty Brennaman has, you can get away with being critical during games:
Whether or not he can call games as well as he used to, CBS’ Verne Lundquist (who had a couple of problem calls in the LSU–Alabama game Saturday) is enjoyable to watch, particularly on basketball with Bill Raftery, which is kind of like watching your two great-uncles argue with each other:
The best hockey announcer right now is probably NBC’s Mike Emrick:
One announcer whose very voice is college football is ABC’s Keith Jackson …
… although he could do other sports too:
My favorite sports announcer was Dick Enberg of NBC and CBS:
The announcer that makes every other sound like a rank amateur is, of course, the transcendent Vin Scully …
… who, though best known for baseball, could announce football too:
Scully’s opposite in career is NBC’s Al Michaels, best known for football …
… and one hockey game …
… but who also did baseball well:
One more thing: The exciting aspect of calling sports is that the announcer is never 100 percent sure what’s going to happen. Watch the bizarre finish of the 2010 Stanley Cup Finals, for which no announcer could properly prepare:
It must be difficult to be a business publication editor in the People’s Republic of Madison.
Either that, or Joe Vanden Plas, senior editor of In Business, has fallen victim to the Stockholm Syndrome. Vanden Plas claims “I don’t really mind a gubernatorial recall” against Gov. Scott Walker, who is only the most pro-business Wisconsin governor of the 21st century:
Before I get into my reasoning, let me state the following: I voted for Walker because I thought the policies he spelled out during the 2010 campaign would improve the business climate in Wisconsin. While there is always room for improvement — we still need to enact a Wisconsin-centric approach to boosting venture capital deployment — I believe the governor has delivered on that promise.
Walker also promised to get the state’s fiscal house in order, and even though we have more challenges with future budgets, we now have a balanced budget. Here’s the rub: he never told us, while campaigning in 2010, that he would limit collective bargaining in order to get there. That little bomb was dropped a couple of days after the election, after victory had been secured.
This is where Vanden Plas’ entire argument falls apart before it really gets going. Readers of this blog know that Walker has done exactly what he said he was going to do, as reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in June and August 2010, and as repeated by a teacher union publication last fall.
That fact makes Vanden Plas’ next assertions dubious:
Republicans calling for recall reform want malfeasance in office to be the main criterion under which recall elections can be considered. That should certainly be one of them, but what about politicians who promise one thing during a campaign and do just the opposite while in office? Or those who camouflage their real intentions during a campaign and then spring a surprise once the votes are counted?
As much as I appreciate the Governor’s attempts to help job creators, he was guilty of the latter and it was immensely unfair to voters.
Let me amend that: Vanden Plas’ assertions are not dubious if the governor he’s referring to is Walker’s predecessor, James Doyle, who said, “We should not, we must not and I will not raise taxes,” and then raised taxes by $2.1 billion. Voters never got a chance to vote on that since the tax increase was passed right after the 2008 election … except that that tax increase added on to Democrats’ gross incompetence helps explain the 2010 election results. Perhaps Vanden Plas was thinking of the 2009–10 Legislature in his last sentence, “A defeat would send a message to people in both parties — no post-campaign surprises or you could also be recalled.” And as for camouflaging “real intentions,” as far as I know not a single Democratic candidate in Recallarama uttered the words “collective bargaining,” which was disingenuous at best.
I have to wonder why a business magazine would take the side of (1) government employees over those whose (excessive) taxes pay their salaries and (2) government employee unions over the magazine’s own readers, but that’s what Vanden Plas does:
We will have an opportunity to weigh the benefits of a balanced budget and more taxpayer-friendly property tax bills this December (another Walker promise) versus what I hope will be Walker’s opponent outlining an alternative fiscal path.
I have no problem negotiating with public employees, during a budget crunch, to have them contribute more to their health care and pension benefits, so long as they have the opportunity to recoup what has been lost through collective bargaining when economic conditions improve. Diminishing collective bargaining power removes that possibility.
Voters had an “alternative fiscal path” to choose from in November 2010. That path included multi-billion-dollar tax increases, and multi-billion-dollar state budget deficits. Voters emphatically chose the path Walker and Republicans represented. Since January, opponents of Walker have responded by (1) denying that grotesquely large deficits (as in the second largest per capita deficits in the nation) are a problem and (2) proposing to raise taxes.
Vanden Plas’ praise of public employee collective bargaining belies the fact that unions are seen as a negative in nearly every state business climate comparison — comparisons in which Wisconsin has advanced from bad under Doyle to mediocre under Walker and will undoubtedly slide back toward the basement should Walker lose a recall election.
The correct time to object to an elected official’s or party’s political direction is at the next regularly scheduled election, which is less than a year from now. Voters can throw out the entire Assembly and switch control of the Senate back to Democrats if they like. The current path guarantees that the next Democratic governor and members of a Democratic-controlled Legislature will be recalled at the first politically expedient opportunity, which will make this state ungovernable for anybody. (Unless something far worse happens.)
The Dane County economy is more influenced by government — state government, the University of Wisconsin, and the state’s second largest county and city government — then any other metropolitan area in this state. (Imagine if Walker, instead of requiring state employees to pay more for their benefits, had laid off a couple thousand state employees.) But businesses in the People’s Republic of Madison are not immune from the economic laws and forces that affect every other business in Wisconsin. Anything that makes businesses less profitable (as in excessive taxes to fund excessive government employee pay and benefits) is bad for the entire state.
These screenshots were what Charter Cable subscribers in Ripon saw, on WTMJ-TV (channel 4) at 1 p.m. …
… on WISN-TV (channel 12) at 1:03 p.m. …
… and on WCGV-TV (channel 24) at 1:04 p.m.:
I may be wrong about this, but I thought the EAS test was supposed to be simultaneous on every EAS-participating over-the-air and cable channel. I only got WISN and WCGV’s tests because I just happened to be flipping channels after the WTMJ test was over. Then, Telemundo (cable channel 17) had audio of a National Weather Service Required Weekly Test, which usually occurs Wednesdays at noon. Right day, but one hour and a few minutes late.
That wasn’t as strange as what apparently happened in Milwaukee, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
In our newsroom, we monitor four cable news networks. At 1 p.m., all of the stations interrupted their broadcasts. But instead of showing a test alert, our Time Warner Cable service switched all of the televisions to QVC.
We wondered whether it might be a local issue, but after turning to the social media network Twitter, we saw people complaining about the same problem on different cable systems across the country.
In the Washington, D.C., area, Twitter user @dmataconis wrote: “Did not see it on Comcast in northern Virginia. Instead, saw about 30 seconds of QVC (was watching MSNBC at test time)”
In Los Angeles, @123arnie wrote: “For the Emergency Alert test, Time Warner Cable changed my channel to QVC, so when the test was over I could buy things.”
In Milwaukee, Twitter user @marnerae01 wrote: “National Emergency Test turned TV to QVC. feel safer knowing if theres a disaster, I can purchase seasonal items for 3 EZ payments of $19.50.”
Beginning at 2:01 p.m., viewers and listeners in many states said they saw and heard the alerts at the scheduled time, but others said they did not. There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancies, but that was one of the purposes of the test — to find out how well the system would work in an actual emergency. …
Many of the reported failures affected cable and satellite television subscribers, and some were quite puzzling. Some DirecTV subscribers said their TV sets played the Lady Gaga song “Paparazzi” when the test was under way. Some Time Warner Cable subscribers in New York said the test never appeared on screen. Some Comcast subscribers in northern Virginia said their TV sets were switched over to QVC before the alert was shown.
In some cases the test messages were delayed, perhaps because they were designed to trickle down from one place to many. A viewer in Minneapolis said he saw the message about three minutes late. A viewer in Chattanooga, Tenn., said she saw it about 10 minutes late.
“We always knew that there would probably be some things that didn’t work and some things that did,” a FEMA official said an hour after the test. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because the agencies had not publicly acknowledged the glitches yet.
This appears to have gone about as well as the ESPN Y2K test:
It also makes one think that technological change is not always positive. Now that we’re in the digital TV era, we’ve all seen instances in which, instead of a snowy or fuzzy analog signal, there is no signal at all, or, worse, the picture is frozen in place for minutes or even longer.
For the conspiracy theorists, here’s a comment from CBS in New York:
It was supposed to fail. This is part of the mission.
When it fails on TV and radio stations, the government gets the opportunity to argue it should also target cellphones, and the power grid, and Internet service providers so that every means of communication is interrupted and may be controlled.
I maintain what I wrote Tuesday, that I have a hard time imagining, when the EAS wasn’t used for 9/11, what national — as in nationwide — emergency would require the White House to have the ability to override every TV channel. (Except, apparently, QVC.)
The spin being put on this failure is, “well we had to test to learn were the weak spots in the system were.” Perhaps.
But, think of it this way: In a genuine emergency isn’t better that all of our notification eggs are not in one basket?!
Let’s retire the Emergency Alert System along with the TSA and put the money toward something useful like hardening our electrical system infrastructure. …
Of course, this being government, scrapping this deeply flawed and unnecessary system never occurs to them.
And some people still believe the government should take over health care and take a more active role in the economy.
Today at 1 p.m., for 30 seconds every TV station and cable channel will broadcast a test of the Emergency Alert System.
The test will not sound like this:
The test is a first because there has never been a nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System or its predecessor Emergency Broadcast System.
For that matter, the EAS has never been activated for a nationwide emergency. That includes 9/11, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Wall crisis, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or any other national event, including this event 46 years ago today:
It may seem like an obvious thing to have issued a nationwide EAS alert on 9/11. But what good would it have really done? It would not have been issued before the second plane hit the World Trade Center at the earliest, and by then the plot involving the two other planes was well under way. The federal government grounded every flight in the country. Issuing a nationwide EAS alert would have only generated more panic then the conclusions TV viewers were already drawing.
So what is the point of a nationwide test? According to an FCC news release, “The purpose of the test is to assess the reliability and effectiveness of the EAS as a public alert mechanism. EAS Participants currently participate in state-level monthly tests and local-level weekly tests, but no top-down review of the entire system has ever been undertaken. The Commission, along with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, will use the results of this nationwide test to assess the reliability and effectiveness of the EAS as a public alert mechanism, and will work together with EAS stakeholders to make improvements to the system as appropriate.”
The chief of the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau adds:
Early warnings save lives. This was demonstrated recently and dramatically during the major earthquake and tsunami that devastated Eastern Japan. Except for Japan’s early warning systems, loss of life would have been much higher. …
Although FCC rules require local and state components of the EAS to be tested on a weekly and monthly basis, the system has never been tested nationally end-to-end. If public safety officials need to send an alert or warning to a large region of the United States, in the case of a major earth quake and tsunami on the West Coast, for example, or even to the entire country, we need to know that the system will work as intended. Only a top-down, simultaneous test of all components of the EAS can tell us this.
Early warnings do save lives, but only if they’re heeded. The National Weather Service issued this apocalyptic (as described by the narrator) warning before Hurricane Katrina, which was not heeded by tens of thousands of New Orleans residents:
Part of the reason, as I’ve discussed beforein this space, is that the National Weather Service issues more tornado warnings than they used to,which means more ignored tornado warnings. In the past, tornado warnings would be issued upon visual (by weather spotters, usually law enforcement) or radar evidence (the “hook echo”). For several years, the NWS has been issuing what I call STCOPAT warnings, for a “severe thunderstorm capable of producing a tornado.” (We had a personal record three visits to the basement this year, one toward the end of our German/French/Italian foreign exchange student’s visit, and another during a Story Time visit to the Ripon library.)
There have been a handful of false emergency alarms of a non-meteorological nature. Imagine yourself listening to the radio in Fort Wayne, Ind., on a Saturday morning in February 1971, when you hear this:
In June 2007, something similar happened in Illinois:
Today’s test originally was going to take 2½ minutes, but was shortened to 30 seconds. As TV Technology puts it, the Federal Emergency Management Agency “confirmed the shortening of the Nov. 9 test, but did not say specifically if the agency did so to reduce the chance of an unintended reenactment of ‘War of the Worlds.’ The change was said to be made at the direction of Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano.”
I’m guessing the test was shortened to 30 seconds because of, shall we say, negative reactions. First, from The Blaze:
Only the President has the authority to activate EAS at the national level, and he has delegated that authority to the Director of FEMA. The test will be conducted jointly by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through FEMA, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Weather Service (NWS).
In essence, the authority to seize control of all television and civilian communication has been asserted by the executive branch and handed to a government agency. …
So this begs the question: is the first ever national EAS test really a big deal?
Probably not. At least, not yet.
But there are some troubling factors all coming together right now that could conceivably trigger a real usage of the EAS system in the not too distant future. A European financial collapse could bring down U.S. markets. What is now the “Occupy” movement could lead to widespread civil unrest. And there are ominous signs that radical groups such as Anonymous will attempt something major on November 5th- Guy Fawke’s day.
Now we know in the event of a major crisis, the American people will be told with one voice, at the same time, about an emergency.
All thats left to determine is who will have control of the EAS when that day comes, and what their message will be.
I can’t see a legitimate need to cut off radio and TV in an emergency.
Quite the opposite in fact.
Of all the Presidents this one is least trusted to have such control at his fingertips. This is not good news. what will we do when all radio and television communications cease, in the event of some type of emergency? I understand there possibly could be a time it is useful. Now the programs make announcements and run bulletins and banners across the screen. This is a great deal of power for one person to hold. How would we know what is going on if it happens that all communications were to cease for a time? … we would not know the cause or purpose. Not a good situation. This happened in Germany prior/during WW11
… Like I’ve said before, there hasn’t ever been a nation-wide test of the system. Now, you could say we sort-of had one in 1971 when the idiot operator at NORAD sent the wrong message during a weekly test. If you look at the results of what happened, then the system failed miserably. Over half the country would not have known if we were under attack. This is a way for the FCC to gauge how (and if) the system will work and to take steps to fix what doesn’t.
Now, something I didn’t know…the EAS is basically a last-ditch effort to get a Presidential message out to the people, just in case the President couldn’t use the networks to talk to us.
There are some who will view this as a way for Barry the Boob to prepare to put us under martial law, but I don’t look at it as something so sinister. It really is a good idea to do this…just to make sure it works. And if in some future time he does use it to do just that, then you can say “I told you so”.
It says something about the level of distrust in the federal government and the president that a seemingly worthwhile test has sinister overtones. Then again, the term “homeland security” is rather 1984-esque. And one should be skeptical about a government agency (and I could stop the sentence right there) for its color-coded contribution to national security.
The better question to me is what nationwide value the EAS actually has. In case of natural disaster, there’s no question. But natural disasters are local in scope. Should the U.S. be subject to, say, an electromagnetic pulse attack, no one will hear a presidential EAS message. We have news media that did as good a job as possible reporting the day of 9/11, and they would do the same in the event of an event of similar scope. Knocking every TV channel off the air for a presidential message, regardless of who the president is, seems to me to be counterproductive. In an actual emergency, less communication is not better.
[Marion] Kuster quickly pulled up to the scene of a violent crash, a 10-50 in police-speak. Two vehicles had collided more or less head-on. The scene was a mess.
From one car, Kuster could hear the wails of an injured woman. At the car in front of her, she saw a young man, a teenager judging by the letter jacket in the back seat, slipping in and out of consciousness.
She did what we’ve all been trained to do.
Kuster punched in 9-1-1 on her cell.
What ensued frustrated her.
But, as she found out later, the situation that followed may have been unavoidable. …
“I said [to the Fond du Lac County dispatcher], ‘I’m between Ripon and Green Lake and I need an ambulance,’” Kuster said. “She said, ‘What county are you in?’ I said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘I have to know what county you’re in.”
The story reports on the delay of nearly two minutes in dispatching emergency personnel because the dispatcher Kuster called was unable to pinpoint whether the crash was in Fond du Lac County or Green Lake County. A crash on the east side of the Fond du Lac–Green Lake county line means either the Town of Ripon Police Department or the Fond du Lac County Sheriff’s Department should respond; a crash on the west side of the county line means the Green Lake County Sheriff’s Department should respond.
That almost-two-minute delay was basically dismissed by Fond du Lac County officials. That is the wrong response. For one thing, Ripon Guardian Ambulance, whose service area runs approximately from Green Lake to Rosendale to Brandon, is not a full-time ambulance service. EMTs take several minutes to get to the ambulance garage at City Hall in Ripon. The same applies to the Ripon and Green Lake fire departments, whose firefighters are volunteers.
I can see how something like this might happen. In the year when I was commuting daily from Ripon to New London, there was a car crash on U.S. 45 south of New London. That stretch of U.S. 45 is basically the Outagamie–Waupaca county line. When I called 911, I wondered which county would answer the call. Perhaps because I was driving south, Waupaca County answered. (Ironic in a sense since Waupaca County has the stupid ordinance prohibiting cell phone use while driving.)
An even better example is any crash or incident in the Fox Cities, which comprises parts of three counties, four cities, three villages and six (depending on how you count) towns. Which adds up to three sheriff’s departments, seven police departments and nine fire departments. (But only one ambulance service, which was not set up by government, but by the Fox Cities’ hospitals.) Before moving to Ripon, we lived in a house in the Winnebago County part of Appleton, next to a house in the Town of Menasha. The City of Menasha was at the end of our street. A drive on Wisconsin 441 to U.S. 41 would take me back into the Town of Menasha, then into Outagamie County and the Town of Grand Chute, then to either of my offices in the Outagamie County part of the City of Appleton. If you are unfortunate enough to get into a crash at the intersection of South Oneida Street and Calumet Street in Appleton, you will simultaneously be in three different counties.
The fact that you can understand how this could happen doesn’t mean it should happen. It frankly adds fuel to those who suggest, sometimes in jest and sometimes not, that Ripon should be in Green Lake County instead of Fond du Lac County. And as Kuster pointed out, “It could be life or death for somebody. … I could have been from Minnesota, and I would not have known what county we were in.” In fact, the existing procedure is to send units from both Fond du Lac County and Green Lake County, according to Fond du Lac County’s emergency government director, something Fond du Lac County has been “re-emphasizing” after this crash.
Another issue was brought up by Ripon Police Chief Dave Lukoski — emergency service agencies can’t send units to any call and decide jurisdictional questions later, because “It’s a jurisdictional concern. When we got out to an agency’s [call], we have to have a mutual aid agreement to cover us in case something happens. We lose liability protection [if] we are out of our jurisdiction. … If I get rammed by a semi and I [don’t have insurance coverage], insurance companies will run away from me.”
I’m sure Lukoski’s correct about that. That brings to mind, however, two incidents, one I covered in my weekly newspaper days, the other I personally witnessed. In March 1990, when a Grant County sheriff’s deputy was shot to death, police and sheriff’s departments from all over southwest Wisconsin responded. Technically, every officer who wasn’t employed by Grant County, including the Dane County K-9 dog who captured the killer, was out of his jurisdiction.
That also was the case in the Camp Randall Stampede in November 1993, when 70 Badger fans were caught against a fence and injured celebrating a UW win over Michigan. Every ambulance from Dane County was called, and again, every ambulance except Madison Fire Department ambulances or private ambulances was out of its agency’s jurisdiction. If emergency responses are being delayed or not happening at all because of insurance concerns, something needs to be done about that, whether legislatively or otherwise.
The last point, a point not brought up at all in the story, is that this is great evidence that Wisconsin’s 3,120 units of government are far, far, far, far, far too many. The Fox Cities has one police department serving the three villages and one fire department serving two of the four cities, but those are just baby steps toward what should have happened years ago — a Fox Cities police department and a Fox Cities fire department (similar to what is being proposed in Green Bay). Here in Ripon, our property tax dollars pay for the Ripon Police Department, but our state income tax dollars, through the dubious miracle of state shared revenue, help pay for the Town of Ripon Police Department, whose contribution to public safety is writing speeding tickets outside the city. (While still, I’ve been told, being a net money-loser for the Town of Ripon.)
We live in a state that ran state budget deficits, when correctly measured by Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, every year in the first decade of the 21st century. Only one other state also ran GAAP deficits every year in the past decade — Illinois, which has 6,994 units of government, the most of any state in the country. Having, in Wisconsin’s case, one unit of government for every 1,823 Wisconsinites (a lower ratio than Illinois, believe it or not) leads to neither responsible government finance nor quality government service.
Widespread disenchantment with both the governor and Obama makes the highly polarized state the perfect stage for a debate over the role of government
Wisconsin is the republic of political unhappiness. Six of 10 voters disapprove of Republican Governor Scott Walker, who picked a fight with public-sector unions by curbing their collective-bargaining rights. Labor mobilized, and voters bounced two state senators in recall elections in August. A campaign to oust Walker gets under way in November. …
Voter grumpiness knows no party lines: Obama, who carried Wisconsin with 56 percent of the vote, now faces widespread disenchantment. A statewide poll by SurveyUSA in late August found 50 percent disapproved of his performance in office, though his approval rating, at 45 percent, was higher than in most national soundings. …
Although Wisconsin is often caricatured as a hotbed of left-wing activism, thanks to university town Madison, the state in fact is complex and polarized. “The extreme right wing and extreme left wing have become more and more entrenched,” says J.B. Van Hollen, Wisconsin’s Republican attorney general. “I think people in the middle of the road are more disgusted than anything with politics, but not necessarily with government.”
The Midwestern state is the perfect stage for a debate over the role of government. On one side is its heritage of progressivism embodied by Robert La Follette, the fiery U.S. senator who opposed World War I, railroad interests, and child labor. On the other is the modern-day vision of smaller government and reduced entitlements articulated by U.S. Representative Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican and chairman of the House Budget Committee.
If Walker enraged organized labor, Obama’s health-care reforms and economic stimulus programs “helped mobilize the conservative base and contribute to their resurgence in ’09 and ’10,” says Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “You’ve got an unhappy middle class, unhappy with their situation. They were looking for someone to improve it, and then they were disappointed when that didn’t happen.”
The state is up for grabs, says Franklin, adding that Obama’s 2008 margin of victory was an aberration. “It is Democrat with a small d,” he says.
I’m not sure how you can describe as “Democrat-with-a-small-d” a state whose electoral votes haven’t gone for a Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan. Yes, one year ago voters swept out Democrats left and, well, left, and declined to elect Gov. James Doyle’s would-be successor, but I assume that to be disgust over the grotesque failure that was the 2009–10 Legislature controlled by Doyle’s party.
Speaking of Doyle, Bloomberg asked him (as it asked politicians from each of those six states) “How to win my state.” I wonder if there’s a veiled message in Doyle’s response:
“Get your base out and do everything you can to get the independents to break your way. People are stressed and the election will be a very contentious election, but I think people will recognize it’s not an easy thing to do to govern in difficult times, and that it takes someone who is looking for good, reasonable, middle-of-the-road solutions to problems.”
Independent of the laughable first sentence given the continuous slander machine that was the 2006 Doyle campaign against former U.S. Rep. Mark Green — who has more character in one finger than Doyle will see in his entire life — Doyle’s reference to “good, reasonable, middle-of-the-road solutions to problems” cannot possibly refer to his party. That does not describe Democrats’ three-part response to the $2.9 billion in red ink Doyle and Democrats left the state, which was (1) to deny that the problem existed and (2) to propose substantially raising taxes even beyond the $2.1 billion tax increase Doyle and Democrats shoved down taxpayer throats while (3) doing absolutely nothing about cutting government spending.
Assuming we will have to endure a recall election against Walker this coming year, it will be interesting to hear what those who couldn’t be bothered (except for Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett) to run for governor answer how they would be a better governor than Walker. It will also be amusing to not hear the two words that propelled Recallarama, but were never uttered by Democrats: “Collective bargaining.”
Wisconsin’s inclusion on Bloomberg’s list is another depressing sign that we will be cursed any second now with an unending parade of presidential campaign advertising, to go with the unending parade of U.S. Senate campaign advertising, to go with the unending parade of House of Representatives campaign advertising in at least three House districts (the Second, where U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D–Madison) is running for the Senate, and the Seventh and Eighth, with their new Republican reps), to go with the unending parade of recall campaign advertising. I should buy a TiVo.
The lead story in the Bloomberg Government Insider (what a depressing title) includes this subhead: “The 2012 election will hinge on whether voters will blame Barack Obama for the weak economy.” I’ll answer Bloomberg’s rhetorical question: Of course voters will blame Obama for the weak economy if the economy is still weak one year from now. Voters have credited or blamed the incumbent party in the White House for the economy every presidential election since 1976. One would think it would require substantial economic improvement, noticeable by everyone, for Obama to win reelection in 2012. But voters have made poor choices before — for instance, the last presidential election.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 