Jon Gabriel explains why, instead of turning off your lights to commemorate Earth Hour at 8:30 p.m. local time, you should heed the advice of this headline:
Since 2007, environmental activists have promoted this Gaia-appeasing sacrifice to conserve energy and raise awareness about apocalyptic climate change.
But like many gimmicks, Earth Hour is designed to make people feel like they’re accomplishing something instead of actually accomplishing something.
The whole “awareness-raising” trend is annoying on general principle. Why raise awareness about fatal diseases when you can work to cure them? But what is hazy messaging for a public health campaign is decidedly counterproductive for the professed goals of this envirostunt. Earth Hour actually increases CO2 emissions.
Consider the activists’ recommendation of replacing electric lights with candles for an hour. Candles are made from paraffin, i.e., refined crude oil, and are far less efficient than electric bulbs — even those dastardly incandescent light bulbs our government is so helpfully seizing from us. You would need about 40 candles to match the light produced by a 40-watt bulb, but just one candle cancels out any theoretical CO2 reduction.
Then there’s the effect of a mass off-switch/on-switch across an electrical grid. Power companies still pump the same amount of energy despite a brief dip in consumption. But when a large number of people simultaneously increase consumption at the end of Earth Hour, a surge often requires engineers to fire up additional coal or oil-fueled resources. …
What really chafes is the flamboyant hypocrisy of Earth Hour advocates. “Let’s turn off our lights, then upload millions of tweets, photos and videos using our smartphones and computers!” Because where’s the fun in saving the planet if you can’t use electricity to brag about it every three minutes?
The facts show that Earth Hour is just another exercise in progressive posturing and self-congratulation. If conspicuous non-consumption saved the planet, we’d be able to run our cars on self-righteousness and moral preening. …
The counterproductive stunt of Earth Hour might make the anti-science Left feel better about themselves, but it only harms the planet and humanity at large. If activists want to improve the lives of the downtrodden, perhaps they can support the fracking boom that delivers clean, inexpensive natural gas to an energy-starved world.
Earth needs more light and progress, not more darkness and hypocrisy.
Electricity has given humanity huge benefits. Almost 3 billion people still burn dung, twigs, and other traditional fuels indoors to cook and keep warm, generating noxious fumes that kill an estimated 2 million people each year, mostly women and children. Likewise, just 100 years ago, the average American family spent six hours each week during cold months shoveling six tons of coal into the furnace (not to mention cleaning the coal dust from carpets, furniture, curtains, and bedclothes). In the developed world today, electric stoves and heaters have banished indoor air pollution.
“Similarly, electricity has allowed us to mechanize much of our world, ending most backbreaking work. The washing machine liberated women from spending endless hours carrying water and beating clothing on scrub boards. The refrigerator made it possible for almost everyone to eat more fruits and vegetables, and to stop eating rotten food, which is the main reason why the most prevalent cancer for men in the United States in 1930, stomach cancer, is the least prevalent now.
I’m grateful for my big screen television and the electricity that powers it so I can watch the Shockers versus Gonzaga. At this moment with 11:39 in the first half, it is tied 10-10.
I’m grateful for natural gas that is keeping my home nice and warm while it snows outside (it started again about 30 minutes ago). Natural gas is an excellent source of energy.
In both cases, I picked the national champion correctly, Kentucky.
This year, I’m considerably more busy. I also didn’t have time to find a system, as I did last year. On the other hand, this year’s tournament is a considerably more wide open tournament, so maybe a system won’t help this year anyway.
This bracket is from a pool I’ve been in for several years:
The other bracket has a few differences, but the same Final Four — Duke, Gonzaga, Miami and Kansas — and the same national championship, Duke over Kansas.
I can’t say I’m particularly enthused about this. It is a difficult tournament to figure out this year. (For instance, last year’s national champion, Kentucky, didn’t get into the tournament. The Wildcats did get into the National Invitation Tournament, only to lose their first-round game Tuesday. Adolph Rupp is rolling over in his grave.) Maybe that’s why I picked three familiars, and why I don’t have Miami winning it all. I think that the team that wins it all is usually a team that’s been around the Final Four before, which certainly describes both Duke and Kansas.
I have Wisconsin and Marquette winning one game each. This Badger team is capable of anything from making the Final Four, which a few people I know have predicted, to losing Friday. They are that inconsistent, and I don’t think you become magically consistent in March. To coin a phrase used at numerous levels of numerous sports, you are what you are.
I am unimpressed with any Big Ten team, including Wisconsin, which is why I have none of them going to the Final Four. There are two ways of looking at that, I suppose — it’s a really even conference, or it’s not a very good conference. And there is certainly no team that stands head and shoulders over everyone, including regular-season champion Indiana and tournament champion Ohio State, both of whom lost to the woefully inconsistent Badgers earlier this season.
And, as of 11 a.m., away we go,. And if we’re lucky, we’ll see some of these:
I will be on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin program Friday doing the 8 a.m. Week in Review segment. (Less-than-live Steve will also be on at 9 p.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., 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.
My high school political science teacher, now a blogger too, passes on this from The Daily Beast:
God is dead in literature. According to conventional wisdom and prevailing perceptions, Christian themes, along with faith outside the detached analytical realm of sociology, no longer have a role in the narrative of contemporary novelists. …
Let us consider an entire “genre.” Crime fiction weaves its tale in the threshold between right and wrong, just and unjust, good and evil. It is because of its naked confrontation with philosophy and ethics, and its depiction of drifters, confidence men, femme fatales, petty criminals, serial killers, and agents of the law beset by iniquity and caught in the web of moral turpitude, that it is so effectively and naturally able to deal with doubt, faith, and the inner combat of spiritual warfare. The case for faith in fiction is to be made by those who deal with cracking cases for a living—the fictional detectives, private investigators, and troubled protagonists who inhabit the scandalous, seductive, and serpentine setting of noir.
Crime and noir have always told the story of people who decide to cross an invisible but palpable moral line. It then measures the wreckage—physical, emotional, and spiritual—that results from the voluntary crossing over into another ethical universe—a colder, tougher, and uglier universe. These same questions haunt the tales of the Bible and the lives of the saints. …
[Lawrence Block’s] Hit Me hits shelves on the heels of the release of Walter Mosley’s new e-book,TheParishioner. Mosley is most famous for his Easy Rawlins mystery series—Devil in a Blue Dress was adapted into a film starring Denzel Washington. In Mosley’s new book, Xavier Rule is a reformed gangster attempting to transform his life from criminality to responsibility under the guiding hand of Father Frank, a mysterious and often autocratic preacher at a secluded church in California. …
Michael Connelly, author of the Harry Bosch series and The Lincoln Lawyer, which served as the basis for the movie starring Matthew McConaughey, navigates noir with a spiritual compass, and, like Mosley, uses crime not only to tell a suspenseful story but also to provoke the reader into evaluating evidence demonstrating the veracity of concepts far larger than any criminal case. The search for redemption and the opportunity for moral transformation provide the pulse to Connelly’s fiction. Mickey Haller, the protagonist of The Lincoln Lawyer, believes that there is “nothing scarier than an innocent client,” and is content to represent obvious criminals, steadily amassing wealth as a defense attorney. When he discovers that he was partially responsible for the conviction of an innocent man, and when he is forced to confront the pure evil of a guilty man, he surrenders to a moral calling. He determines that his life must have meaning.
Connelly’s most famous character, Harry Bosch, is named after the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, whose religious paintings depict the hellish consequences of earthly sins and, with a frightening blend of realism and surrealism, took on apocalyptic dimensions in their representation of spiritual torment, the battle for justice, and the judgment of God. The homicide detective, like the painter, is motivated by a sense of fairness formed by faith and a nonnegotiable moral code. His stone-cold consistency is the source of his virtue and his vice—he is comfortable with bending the law in an “ends justifies means” philosophy of law enforcement.
Connelly and Mosley prove that hands of sufficient delicacy and muscularity can transform the genre of crime fiction into the art of literature. No man is more adept at accomplishing such a feat, however, than James Lee Burke. Burke is the winner of two Edgar Awards and is most famous for chronicling the life of David Robicheaux, a New Orleans homicide detective turned New Iberia sheriff’s deputy. Robicheaux is a recovering alcoholic and practicing Catholic who is married to a former nun and is guided by a system of philosophy that combines hardboiled realism and incorruptible mysticism. Burke’s stories might begin with a simple homicide or rape but ultimately feel as if they are anecdotes from the Book of Revelation.
The Tin Roof Blowdown, released in 2007, is set in the Armageddon atmosphere of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Robicheaux must apprehend a pair of rapists, prevent a vigilante from creating more death and destruction, and save the life of a priest friend with a morphine addiction. Robicheaux believes that the rapist and the priest are equal in the eyes of God. The rapist hand-delivers a letter of apology to try to make amends for a crime that can likely never be forgiven, and he prays for forgiveness and redemption before dying. In one of the most moving conclusions to any book, Robicheaux believes that the rapist and the priest, who died in the days after the hurricane, are “safe inside a pewter vessel that is as big as the hand of God.” …
“Learn to love sinners.” That’s Catholic priest and author Robert Barron’s advice to his seminary students if they ever hope to become effective priests. God is not dead in literature. He is hiding in the stories of sinners.
The Platteville Journal received seven Wisconsin Newspaper Association Better Newspaper Contest awards, including two first-place awards, at the annual WNA convention in Middleton Friday. …
The Journal won first place in the Most Improved Newspaper category. The category compared three editions in August 2012 from the same three editions one year earlier.
“Changes very noticeable,” judges wrote, mentioning The Journal’s logo “and front page in general. … Very newsy and well designed newspaper.”
Editor Steve Prestegard also received a first-place award in the editorial category for his June 27 Etc. column, “Parking problems.” Judges called it “good, punchy writing on topics of local interest.”
As a former fellow ink-stained wretch put it, newspaper people use words like “punchy” and “newsy.”
When winning awards, a journalist is supposed to say that he or she isn’t in the profession to win awards, and that quality work is its own reward.
Who in the name of Joseph Pulitzer am I kidding? Of course I’m happy that The Platteville Journal received seven awards in the Wisconsin Newspaper Association Better Newspaper Contest last weekend. Professional recognition of your work is always nice.
And professional recognition is always nice, until the inevitable future lesson that you’re not as good as you think you are. Journalism is one of the few professions in which you make your mistakes in pubic. I mean public. (See?)
I had a great time at the WNA convention, even before award time. I saw former coworkers and colleagues in this line of work, along with my counterpart on the most contentious hour in the history of the Wisconsin Public Radio Week in Review. (When we were on the air two years ago during the height of Act 10, I truly thought that had we been in the same room, fisticuffs might have broken out, though when you’re looking at out-of-shape journalists the result probably would have been similar to your typical hockey fight.) I also got to see most of the staff of the Ripon Commonwealth Press, once again judged the state’s best weekly newspaper, and for good reason.
The timing of the WNA convention was ironic given the reporting of attempts at intimidation by the Obama administration of journalists covering the administration. (Including, most stupidly, Bob Woodward of All the President’s Men. Woodward seems unlikely to be able to be intimidated.) The reverse irony was the fact that Gov. Scott Walker spoke during the convention’s first night. (I couldn’t go, but I’ve heard him before.)
After a quarter-century in journalism I’ve concluded I’m better at improving than creating. I’m probably best at, shall we say, adapting (sounds better than “stealing,” right?) others’ more original ideas. If you put together the 1985–88 Monona Community Herald, the 1988–91 Grant County Herald Independent, the 1991–92 Beaver Dam Daily Citizen (where I learned that “under way” is two words, not one, and I learned the Fay Test — if the typesetter who doesn’t pay much attention to local events doesn’t know a name in a headline, don’t put it in the headline), and the 1992–94 Tri-County Press, with a few ideas thrown in from the 1994–2001 and 2008–11 Marketplace Magazine (R.I.P.), you get the 2012–13 Platteville Journal.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown to appreciate the work of the old-timers more than I did 20 or so years ago. We purchased the Tri-County Press in Cuba City from a man who had owned it for 27 years, after his father owned it for 64 years. I redesigned it because (1) it needed to be redesigned, and (2) I couldn’t figure out how it had been designed. One of the nicest compliments I’ve ever gotten was from the son of a reader who said he previously could read the paper between his mailbox and the front door of his house, but now had to sit down and read it.
One of the more enjoyable hours I’ve had here was talking to the long-time owner of The Platteville Journal before he sold it in 2004. We were competitors when I was in Lancaster and in Cuba City. I confess I didn’t think much of how his newspaper looked. I further confess (because it’s Lent after all) that I didn’t react well to competition.
In both cases, it’s taken many years for me to realize that someone does the best he or she can with what he or she has, particularly when, as in the Journal’s and the Tri-County Press’ cases, the editor is also the publisher, job printer and business owner. I work long and irregular hours, but it’s hard to imagine working every night, every weekend and every holiday, and being ultimately responsible for literally everything. That’s what business owners do, whether or not they’re in journalism.
We old (or middle-aged in my case) warhorses can swap war stories. The Journal’s previous publisher told me of a city council meeting he covered in which two aldermen, with the same first name, got into such a heated argument though sitting on opposite ends of the council meeting room that one got up and crossed the room to take a swing at the other. I have my own stories, including taking on an entire school board (or so it seemed at the time) over its creative (yet incorrect) interpretation of the state Open Meetings Law.
The previous owner of The Journal (who purchased an ad thanking us and applauding the “past and present editors” after the sale for their work) didn’t get nearly as much credit as he should have for the things he did for Platteville. That was one reason to write about him. The other is that he has terminal cancer. I will make certain he gets an appropriate sendoff in the pages of his former newspaper.
The convention honors those journalists who have passed on to the Great Newsroom in the Sky in the past year. This year, that included Don and Laurel Huibregtse, owners of the Monona Community Herald and the source of my first journalism paycheck. Between that and meeting all those people I’ve interacted with in my journalism career, the convention was a one (very long) day trip into the wayback machine.
Remember the phrase “One is a fluke, two is a coincidence, three is a trend”?
Let us observe the Obama administration’s antipathy toward the First Amendment and the media, beginning with Bob Woodward of All the President’s Men, as reported by James Taranto:
The tiff began last Friday, when an op-ed piece Woodward wrote for last Sunday’s paper appeared on the Post’s website. Drawing on reporting from his most recent book, “The Price of Politics,” Woodward argued that President Obama’s efforts to blame the sequester on congressional Republicans constituted, as Woodward delicately put it, “partisan message management.” …
That did not go over well at a White House that is used to deferential, even admiring coverage from mainstream-media reporters, many of whom these days, in contrast with old-timers like Woodward, are brazen advocates of left-wing causes. (See ourMonday column for a detailed treatment of this problem at the Post.)
Press secretary Jay Carney tweeted that Woodward’s op-ed was “willfully wrong,”Politico reports. Obama aide David Plouffe, as Twitchy.com notes, got nastier, likening Woodward, who turns 70 later this month, to an athlete who is too old to perform well: “Watching Woodward last 2 days is like imagining my idol Mike Schmidt facing live pitching again. Perfection gained once is rarely repeated.”
The most hotly contested White House response came to Woodward in private. Its public revelation came in stages and occasioned a good deal of confusion and hostility. …
Woodward’s detractors now accuse him of having “lied” or “fabricated” the White House threat. That’s ridiculous. As Woodward tells the New York Times, “I never said it was a threat.” What he did say, as the video shows, is: “It’s Mickey Mouse.” He quoted the [Gene] Sperling email accurately. The lack of any factual dispute is sufficient to disprove the charge of lying or fabrication.
Woodward has reported on every presidential administration since Nixon. When he does his job, the administration in question doesn’t like it. That is as it should be.
But it’s not just Woodward. It’s also Lanny Davis, formerly of the Clinton administration …
Lanny Davis, who served under President Bill Clinton as special counsel to the White House, told Washington, D.C.’s WMAL this morning that the Obama White House had threatened theWashington Times over his column, warning that theTimes would suffer limited access to White House officials and might have its White House credentials revoked. Davis, a centrist Democrat, is sometimes critical of the Obama administration’s policies. …
Davis told WMAL that his editor, John Solomon, “received a phone call from a senior Obama White House official who didn’t like some of my columns, even though I’m a supporter of Obama. I couldn’t imagine why this call was made.” Davis says the Obama aide told Solomon, “that if he continued to run my columns, he would lose, or his reporters would lose their White House credentials.”
There is a kind of a threatening tone that from time to time, not all the time, but comes out of these guys http://problems this White House, but that doesn’t excuse it. And, you know, they should not play that way, but they, they feel like they’re holding the cards in the relationship. They’ve got people’s access, you know, to hold over them. I remember one time I reported something during the http://problems and we were on the road, and we were actually in Berlin. It was on Obama’s http://break in 2008, and they didn’t like something that I had reported, and I was disinvited to a dinner that night that reporters were having with the candidate. I was told “Don’t come” you know, you know fairly abusive email.
As editor-in-chief of National Journal, I received several e-mails and telephone calls from this White House official filled with vulgarity, abusive language, and virtually the same phrase that Woodward called a veiled threat. “You will regret staking out that claim,” The Washington Post reporter was told.
Once I moved back to daily reporting this year, the badgering intensified. I wrote Saturday night, asking the official to stop e-mailing me. The official wrote, challenging Woodward and my tweet. “Get off your high horse and assess the facts, Ron,” the official wrote.
I wrote back:
“I asked you to stop e-mailing me. All future e-mails from you will be on the record — publishable at my discretion and directly attributed to you. My cell-phone number is … . If you should decide you have anything constructive to share, you can try to reach me by phone. All of our conversations will also be on the record, publishable at my discretion and directly attributed to you.” I haven’t heard back from the official. It was a step not taken lightly because the note essentially ended our working relationship.
In April of 2011 SF Chronicle staffer Carla Marinucci captured on videophone a group of protestors at an Obama event and posted it with her story.The next day Phil Bronstein, the Chronicle’s editor at large, exposed Marinucci was told by the White House that she would be barred from future Bay Area coverage of the president’s visits. The White House denied threatening the reporter which prompted this amazingly frank statement by Chronicle editor Ward Bushee.
“Sadly, we expected the White House to respond in this manner based on our experiences yesterday. It is not a truthful response. It follows a day of off-the-record exchanges with key people in the White House communications office who told us they would remove our reporter, then threatened retaliation to Chronicle and Hearst reporters if we reported on the ban, and then recanted to say our reporter might not be removed after all.”
“The whole Woodward thing doesn’t surprise me at all,” says David Brody, chief political correspondent for CBN News. “I can tell you categorically that there’s always been, right from the get-go of this administration, an overzealous sensitivity to any push-back from any media outlet.” …
“I had a young reporter asking tough, important questions of an Obama Cabinet secretary,” says one DC veteran. “She was doing her job, and they were trying to bully her. In an e-mail, they called her the vilest names — bitch, c–t, a–hole.” He complained and was told the matter would be investigated: “They were hemming and hawing, saying, ‘We’ll look into it.’ Nothing happened.” …
He wound up confronting the author of the e-mail directly. “I said, ‘From now on, every e-mail you send this reporter will be on the record, and you will be speaking on behalf of the president of the United States.’ That shut it down.”
Neil Munro, White House correspondent for the conservative Daily Caller, says that after he interrupted Obama during a June 2012 press conference on immigration — inadvertently, Munro insists — he felt the wrath of the administration. “The White House called and bitched us out vigorously,” he says. “I haven’t been called on since shortly after Osama bin Laden was killed.”
“I’ve seen reporters get abused — but it’s the job of the press to push back hard,” says Ron Fournier, a White House correspondent under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “The people you’re covering don’t feel like they should be challenged, and they have immense resources at their disposal to beat back.”
Apparently to work for the Obama administration (or, for that matter, the Wisconsin Democratic Party, it seems) you must be an amoral scumbag. (I wonder what Obama would think if his daughters were referred to as “bitch, c–t, a–hole.”) Such behavior on the part of a Republican administration would get universal (and deserved) condemnation from every newspaper of any size. A Democratic administration gets a pass, apparently.
Taranto gets the last word:
What Woodward, Fournier and more than a few other Washington journalists ought to regret is the degree to which they have allowed themselves to become personally attached to the presidency of Barack Obama.
I was at the Wisconsin Newspaper Association convention Friday. (More about that later this week.)
My guess is this Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story about the Act 10 fight and Recallarama will get an award at next year’s WNA convention:
Behind the scenes, there was more to the Republican governor’s fight with public employee unions than just Walker’s speeches and the massive protests of union supporters. An in-depth review reveals a rich backstory, including the undisclosed visit to Wisconsin by President Barack Obama’s campaign manager just before the effort to recall Walker; the role played by a conservative Milwaukee foundation in pushing labor legislation in Wisconsin and elsewhere; and the tension between Walker’s office and law enforcement over handling the demonstrations that greeted the governor’s proposal.
Walker emerged from the legislative fight and the subsequent recall election with a majority of support among Wisconsin voters, deep opposition from Democrats, and a hero’s status among conservatives nationally. Public worker unions lost fundamental powers and in some cases their official status altogether.
But both sides managed to surprise the other with their dogged opposition, from Feb. 11, 2011 – the day the governor announced his legislation – to June 5, 2012, the date Walker became the first governor in U.S. history to survive a recall election. …
The least surprising news is that this was not just a Wisconsin fight:
During the three weeks Democrats stayed in Illinois, then-Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller (D-Monona) spent thousands of dollars in personal funds on meeting spaces, food and hotel rooms for himself and others. Then and later, Miller was adamant that Democrats made their own decisions to go to Illinois and stay there, but he welcomed the free use of meeting space from the sympathetic Illinois teachers union.
Labor leaders made their own use of the space. Seeking to persuade the Democratic senators to stay out of Wisconsin, three union officials traveled to Libertyville to meet with them: Rich Abelson, executive director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees local that represents county and municipal workers in Milwaukee County; an unidentified person; and John Stocks, the incoming executive director of the National Education Association, which with 3 million members was the largest union in the country.
Stocks wasn’t an outsider – he knew most of the Democrats from his 14 years as a former top official and lobbyist with the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the in-state affiliate of the national teachers union. A New Orleans native and former Idaho state senator, Stocks still had a home in the Madison area and was among the union officials who had been consulting with Miller.
Stocks registered with Wisconsin ethics officials as a lobbyist for the NEA on Feb. 22, 2011 – five days after the Democratic senators left the state and four days before the meeting in Libertyville. He turned in his lobbyist’s license several months later. Stocks, who didn’t respond to interview requests, was the NEA’s only registered lobbyist in Wisconsin and the only one for any national union office turning up in state records during that time.
The NEA reported that Stocks and other NEA staff spent more than 200 hours on lobbying and related activities on the bill for a cost of $67,600 in total – small change compared to the millions of dollars spent by labor and business groups on the labor legislation but significant because of the national profile of both Stocks and the union.
Not all of those hours would have been with Democrats. Stocks also reached out to some Republicans he knew from his time with WEAC.
Sen. Bob Jauch (D-Poplar) had been among those talking to Stocks individually, but he skipped the Libertyville meeting with union officials because he considered it inappropriate for the caucus to meet privately with any interest group and thought it would eventually come out and reflect badly on the Democrats.
Other Democrats said they saw no problem in meeting with the unions because it is common for lawmakers to talk to people directly affected by legislation. Sen. Julie Lassa (D-Stevens Point), who as caucus chairwoman led the meeting, said listening to the unions did not mean Democrats did whatever they asked.
Unlike Jauch, Sen. Tim Cullen (D-Janesville) decided to stay in the meeting despite his own concerns about it. “I was interested in one question and my question was, ‘How long are you expecting us to stay and what’s your strategy for us coming home?’ ” Cullen said of the union leaders. “I wanted to hear their answers. And I got no answers from them.”
If you ever needed evidence that the Madison Police Department is every bit as political as the rest of the People’s Republic of Madison, here it is:
There were also tensions behind the scenes as police and Walker’s aides sought to deal with the massive protests back in Madison against the governor’s bill. For instance, on Feb. 17, 2011 – the day that Senate Democrats left the state – the Walker administration said in a statement that the Capitol police had estimated the number of demonstrators at 5,000 inside the statehouse and 20,000 outside it.
But Susan Riseling, the chief of the University of Wisconsin-Madison police and the officer responsible for the Capitol’s interior during the protests, estimated the crowd inside the building that midafternoon at nearly 25,000, or five times the Walker administration’s count. Riseling, who developed her expertise in estimating crowds over years of overseeing UW football games, made her estimate based on the crowd’s density and the amount of floor space it covered.
“Whoever the officer was who reported the information (the 5,000 figure) – well – I can’t imagine how they got their numbers. Way, way low. Now, crowds did ebb and flow. My kindest interpretation would be these numbers come from a real ebb,” she said.
Tension rose even higher on March 9, 2011, when Republicans on a conference committee of the Legislature’s two houses abruptly convened and amended Walker’s legislation so it could be passed without Senate Democrats present. In part because Republican lawmakers hadn’t told Capitol police of their plan, not enough officers were on hand to handle the thousands of demonstrators who rushed to the Capitol.
When Deputy Chief Dan Blackdeer of the Capitol police telephoned the Madison Police Department urgently requesting help, the city police refused, according to several sources directly familiar with the events of that night.
More unsurprising news: The Obama administration was paying close attention:
In October 2011 at a three-hour private meeting at the Madison headquarters of the state teachers union, Jim Messina and Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Obama’s campaign manager and deputy campaign manager, met with a half-dozen Wisconsin Democrats and union leaders and discussed the looming recall attempt against Walker.
Messina was skeptical of the recall. Correctly predicting Walker’s coming fundraising success, Messina warned the group that a Republican had told him Walker’s side could raise $60 million to $80 million. That would hurt Democrats in the recall and could hurt Obama’s re-election effort in a battleground state.
According to participants, the Wisconsin group told Messina and his deputy that the recall would happen no matter what.
“The basic message to (Messina) was ‘We have no way to stop this,’ ” one participant said. “He came to appreciate this train was leaving whether we liked it or not.”
In June 2012, Walker became the first governor in the nation’s history to win a recall election. But Obama, who steered clear of the recalls, ultimately won the state and his own re-election later that year, proving in the process that Wisconsin was the nation’s consummate political battleground.
Interesting additional observations come from reporters Jason Stein and Patrick Marley:
Q.Biggest winner of the whole chapter in Wisconsin history? Marley. I think you’d have to say Scott Walker. He did become the first governor to win a recall election. Won by a bigger margin than he had in 2010 and launched him on to a national stage where he was welcomed as a hero at the Republican National Convention and is now named as a potential candidate for 2016.
Q.Who were the biggest losers?
Marley. Public sector unions in Wisconsin. Act 10 did not completely eliminate them, but it reduced their power dramatically. Their role in lives of people of Wisconsin is already dramatically diminished.
Stein. And though they have won a few small victories in the legal battles over Act 10 that continue to this day, largely the courts at state and federal level have left that law in place.
Q.What’s the main take-away people locally and nationally should have of Gov. Scott Walker through this entire episode?
Stein. There was an incredible amount of pressure on everyone who was involved in that struggle from lowly reporters up to lawmakers and on no one was that pressure more intense than on the governor. One thing you could see from him is that he was able to remain extremely cool, to keep his rhetoric very focused and disciplined even in the midst of incredible pressure. So, as you think about somebody who could deal with the rigors of a presidential campaign, that’s something that people ought to take into account.
Well, this is embarrassing: One of my readers (who I got to meet after many years at said WNA convention) points out that my premise is wrong because the Journal Sentinel no longer enters the Better Newspaper Contest because the Journal Sentinel feels itself above the Wisconsin newspaper fray. (That’s my paraphrase of his description. I can do that as an unwillingly former Journal Communications employee.)
Anyone who watched the original (and superior) iteration of “Star Trek” knows that if someone is going to die on a mission to a planet, he or she is likely to be wearing a red uniform shirt.
Three redshirts meet their end at the hand of the cloud vampire in “Obsession.”
The idea of red-shirted characters being frequently killed in Star Trek: The Original Series has become a pop culture cliché. But is wearing a redshirt in Star Trek as hazardous as it is thought to be? To find out, casualty figures for the Starship Enterprise were compiled using the casualty list provided by Memory Alpha.
Using what is known about Enterprise crew and casualty figures, suppose an Enterprise crew member has been killed. Discarding the 15 unknown casualties, redshirts consist of 60.0% of all fatalities where the uniform color is known; blue and gold uniforms are the remaining 40.0% of casualties. Redshirts are only 52.0% of the entire crew, but 60.0% of casualties, so what is the probability that the latest casualty was wearing a redshirt? The Enterprise often visits Starbases and takes on new crew members, so we assume sampling with replacement. Otherwise, the population size would change every time a crew member is killed.
Significance Magazine uses something called Bayes’ Theorem (of which I am unfamiliar because journalism is the opposite of math) to conclude:
There is a 61.9% chance that any given casualty is wearing a redshirt. This really does not help the insurance premiums of operations, engineering and security personnel. Three departments wear redshirts so it may be worthwhile to take a deeper look at the data to determine if a wearing a redshirt is as hazardous as it appears to be. …
There is a 64.5% chance that any given casualty in a redshirt is a member of security. We can also conclude there is only a 35.5% chance that any casualty in a redshirt is not a member of security. This is in spite of security being only 37.7% of the entire population of redshirts. So what does this mean for red-shirted crew members not in security? Remember, security, operations and engineering wear redshirts. The 15 unknown crew members are not included in this calculation. …
Although Enterprise crew members in redshirts suffer many more casualties than crew members in other uniforms, they suffer fewer casualties than crew members in gold uniforms when the entire population size is considered. Only 10% of the entire redshirt population was lost during the three year run of Star Trek. This is less than the 13.4% of goldshirts, but more than the 5.1% of blueshirts. What is truly hazardous is not wearing a redshirt, but being a member of the security department. The red-shirted members of security were only 20.9% of the entire crew, but there is a 61.9% chance that the next casualty is in a redshirt and 64.5% chance this red-shirted victim is a member of the security department. The remaining redshirts, operations and engineering make up the largest single population, but only have an 8.6% chance of being a casualty.
If I were being an ingrate here I would point out that two Star Trek redshirts, Chief Engineer Scott and communications Lt. Uhura, survived the entire three years, because they were regular cast members. A security guard was not a regular cast member (see? They were expendable!) until “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Of course, the whole thing falls apart there because red shirts and gold shirts (or “chartreuse” as described by Significance Magazine) were switched in ST:TNG, presumably for aesthetic reasons. The second series certainly didn’t kill red-shirted Captain Picard and Commander Riker. Worf and Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge were switched from red shirts to gold shirts in the second season.
The more pedestrian explanation might be an observation by David Gerrold, who wrote the funniest episode of the first series, “The Trouble with Tribbles.” Gerrold’s The World of Star Trek noted the difference between format and formula, and had a list of the number of episodes, particularly in the third season, that were rewarmed (or “repurposed” in today’s lingo) earlier episodes, or reused plot points thereof. Format: Explore an unexplored planet, where unexpected dangers arise: Formula: Beam down to a strange planet, have the scary being on the planet kill one of the redshirts. Or as one of the comments puts it:
To echo others, but maybe be a little more specific: the set of shirts we should be examining are the ones on landing parties. The general rule/joke is: “Four people beam down in a landing party: Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and some redshirt. Guess who’s not coming back?”
By the third season, creator Gene Roddenberry’s attention was wandering since it was obvious that “Star Trek,” which nearly didn’t survive to season three, wasn’t going to survive season four. (And in many instances, a cancellation of the third season might have been considered a mercy killing.) The series had lost some of its creative and producing talent, and it had run out of original story ideas, at least in Gerrold’s view.
And as proof some people have, or did have, too much time on their hands, another comment:
Here’s the thing … Because they were experimenting with things in [“Where No Man Has Gone Before,” TOS’ second pilot that became its third episode], both Mitchell and Kelso [who both died] are wearing beige operations shirts as Helm and Navigation, positions which were previously and subsequently “gold” command positions (at least in TOS). As a result, both were technically “red-shirts”, not gold (since these were not the old style chartreuse-colored uniforms). They also wear assignment patches used for operations in this episode. So the final count of gold and red shirts would be modified depending on whether you assign these deaths by color of shirt only, or whether you take into account their actual duties.
So the redshirt body count undercounts, according to this comment. If you find that illogical, you have company.
That exploding sound you heard Tuesday was the heads of liberals exploding when they read David Blaska:
Last week, Gov. Scott Walker proposed expanding school choice vouchers to nine large school districts that have failing or under-performing schools. Good Madison libs, who have been running Madison’s high-priced public school system for decades into an ever-widening achievement gap for minority students, are coughing up a collective hairball. …
Q. So, why do you say Scott Walker blazing a trail as a reform governor in the historic mold of Fighting Bob La Follette (or, for that matter, Tommy Thompson)?
A. First, he hobbled the teachers unions, which has siphoned off increased education spending and held veto power over performance measures and accountability. Secondly, by proposing school choice, it doesn’t matter how much the Madison school district whores after the teachers union, or its remnants. Parents can choose alternatives in the existing or new privately operated schools in Madison that will blossom with the increased demand. Scott Walker has placed his trust not in institutions, not in the education establishment elite or in government coercion, but in leaving the people free to decide for themselves.
That is as Revolutionary as the Founding Fathers. Class dismissed.
As a graduate of La Follette High School in Madison (which makes me a political science and history expert, right?), I am skeptical of Blaska’s comparison, although I can appreciate hyperbole to attract reader attention. (However, exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.) Railroad passes for politicians haven’t been an issue in this state for a while, thanks, I guess, to Fighting Bob.
On the other hand, I oppose sainthood for politicians, whether it’s Walker, Thompson, Russ Feingold, Barack Obama, La Follette or anyone else. One of the worst aspects of today’s Democratic Party in Wisconsin is its unthinking, hypnotic worship of Obama, Feingold, Tammy Baldwin, Bill Clinton, etc., etc., ad nauseam. It disgusts me. Regular readers know that I spend more time beating on politicians, even Republicans, than praising them.
(The correct pay for politicians, regardless of level, is the same pay the New York Times advocated in 1987 as the correct minimum wage: Zero.)
The way you tell a reformer’s impact is from the long view, and Walker hasn’t been in office long enough to have a long-term impact. For that matter, Walker’s accomplishment of undoing the fiscal disaster that was the Doyle administration’s last two years is just one accomplishment. Not enough of the Doyle disaster, particularly Doyle’s tax increases, has been reversed.
What did Fighting Bob accomplish? La Follette and Progressives proposed direct election of U.S. senators, instead of having them chosen by state legislatures. (Some conservatives want to go back to the original, though I’m not sure what that would now accomplish.) La Follette enacted the first state income tax, soon followed by the first federal income tax. (The state income tax was enacted to provide — surprise! — property tax relief. It failed in that regard, as has the state sales tax. Wisconsin has the fourth highest state and local taxes in the country, something about which Walker has done far too little.)
La Follette also stoked the fires of envy of the “rich” (defined as someone with more money than you). And so we have high personal income tax rates (see Doyle, James) and high corporate income tax rates. And as a result, Wisconsin trails the nation in business starts, incorporations, major corporations and per capita personal income. We have had a bad business climate as long as business climates have been measured (at least three decades), and where does the attitude that business is an evil that must be controlled and taxed to the eyeballs come from? The people who put the annual Fighting Bob Fest on their calendars as soon as the date is set, including some elected officials, and obviously labor leaders.
Populists love the concept of “Fighting ______,” taking on the big meanies on behalf of the little guy. Today, of course, the “big meanies” might be considered public employee unions (whose heads are considerably better compensated than their members, and particularly the average Wisconsin family, whose income is short of $50,000), the education establishment (for whom the status quo is just fine; never mind what’s best for the children), and those who stand in the way of the little guy having a better financial year this year than last year. “Fighting Scott”? Well, maybe.
Here’s one place where the moniker definitely doesn’t fit, and shouldn’t fit. The most pernicious aspect of the Progressive Era was the idea that mankind could be perfected by government, institutions and society. The more electorally successful progressive was Woodrow Wilson, whose idea of human improvement was Prohibition, raids by his attorney general on suspected subversives, and jailing those who didn’t adhere to the government line. Wilson begat a different kind of “progressive,” Franklin Roosevelt, who interned Japanese–Americans during World War II, after he made the Great Depression far worse by ineffective economic policy in the spirit of doing something, anything, about the Depression, whether or not it worked.
A potential comparison of Walker may be to not La Follette the Progressive, but Theodore Roosevelt the progressive. Roosevelt famously busted the trusts. (Some of which, however, got put back together; much of the Standard Oil behemoth is now BP Amoco and ExxonMobil.) Walker is in the process of, if not busting public employee unions (teacher and police unions still exist, as do the more radical government employee unions), then putting them in a more appropriate place than they have been.
(While a UW student, I wrote a term paper, which I now wish I could find, comparing the progressive Roosevelt with the progressive La Follette. Despite being on the same sides of many issues, Roosevelt and La Follette started separate Progressive Parties, and based on my research, including their autobiographies, neither could really stand the other.)
A comparison Walker might better appreciate would be with Ronald Reagan. The political right is not the group who believes the Constitution needs to be fumigated of such odious concepts as the right to own firearms, or the right of businesses to participate in the political process because the political process affects business. Reagan’s eight years in office undid not just the disastrous four previous years, but much of the worst features of the Nixon Administration.
I’d be much happier with Walker getting his inspiration from the Founding Fathers instead of from La Follette. Voters don’t want change; voters want improvement. “Reform” sounds great as a political concept, until “reform” turns out to be worse than what it replaced. (Have the public schools as a whole really improved in the past, say, half-century?) Walker may not even get reelected next year, so it’s a little early to assign a legacy just yet.
The high school boys basketball playoffs start this week. (Weather permitting in some places.) That means the NCAA college basketball tournaments are imminent.
It has become fashionable, of course, to assert that Division I college basketball is “in trouble,” that it has become so slow and staid and overcontrolled it might ultimately wither into irrelevance. Some of this is hyperbole, since there’s an obvious upside to the parity that low scoring engenders, and since the NCAA tournament is still a financial windfall, and since a team like Wisconsin, under Bo Ryan, can drag games into the 30s and still win games and fill seats. But it is impossible not to notice that something is happening, that the balance has been thrown off, and it is silly not to acknowledge that the overarching trend is impacting how people view college basketball. “I’m not a guy who’s too concerned about whether the game is popular or not,” says Ken Pomeroy, who pioneered the notion of advanced college basketball statistics at his website, “but it certainly hurts the perception of it.”
Here is what the numbers confirm: Overall scoring, at slightly less than 68 points per game, is at its lowest level in three decades, and possessions are growing longer and longer. The game, as a whole, is slower and less free-flowing than it used to be. There are distinct lulls, and transition baskets are more and more difficult to come by. Ask why this is happening, and it becomes a Rorschach test: You will hear a dozen hypotheses from a dozen different sources, ranging from the length of the shot clock to the increased physicality on the perimeter to poor shot selection to the lack of competent post players to the profusion of timeouts to the NBA’s one-and-done rule to the spike in coaches’ salaries, all of which are entirely speculative, and any of which might be at least somewhat viable.
The last of Michael Weinreb’s hypotheses leads to another that may or may not be tied to coach salaries, because it applies to high school coaches too, most of whom are paid in no more than four figures. Weinreb interviewed former Oklahoma coach Billy Tubbs, whose Sooner teams were among the nation’s scoring leaders:
Toward the end of his Oklahoma tenure, Tubbs says, he could feel the culture changing, veering toward the conservatism he both embraces outside of the game and despises within it. (In 1991, a few years before Tubbs left Oklahoma for TCU, overall scoring peaked at 77 points per game, and it’s been trailing downward ever since.) Tubbs brought up the shadow of “political correctness” with me several times, which seems like a bit of an oblique connection, but I think what he was trying to say is that the coaches who should be willing to gamble — coaches, like Tubbs, who are blessed with superior talent — simply don’t think it’s worth the risk anymore. And so they take command of everything that’s happening on the floor. They slow the game down to call offensive sets, and they play it safe on defense rather than risk giving up easy layups in transition. And the very notion of running wild like Tubbs’s teams did, or of throwing caution to the wind like Paul Westhead’s Loyola Marymount teams did, or of raising hell like Nolan Richardson’s Arkansas teams did, becomes a concept too fraught with potential danger to even consider implementing. The favorites now play at the underdog’s pace. And this, one coach told me, is how a team like Kansas loses to an obvious inferior like TCU.
“To take command of everything that’s happening on the floor” happens to blunt one of the supposed benefits of athletics. Players of team sports learn to work as a team, to realize the greater good is more important than the individual, and how to deal with success and failure. They also should learn decision-making on the fly, because in life sometimes you have to make important decisions quickly. Student–athletes do not learn when their coach does all the thinking and makes all the decisions. Employers do not want automatons working for them.
Of course, any story about slow-tempo basketball has obligatory shots at Wisconsin. Tubbs was not known for caring about others’ opinions when he coached, and that apparently hasn’t changed:
“The thing you’ve got to look at is if the stands are empty in the arena. I’m seeing a lot of empty seats. You can play really conservative if you fill the gym. At Wisconsin, they don’t know any better, do they?”
Tubbs’ rude comment about Wisconsin aside, he’s right about the financial issues, which, as I’ve argued before, apply to football as well. Division I college coaches of revenue sports (primarily football and men’s basketball, plus men’s hockey at Wisconsin) are judged not merely on wins and losses, but on whether they fill their stadiums. The revenue sports at D-I schools fund all the other sports. When Bret Bielema left Wisconsin for Arkansas, I argued then (and believe now) that it was a stupid move because he was in no danger of losing his UW job because the Badgers filled Camp Randall Stadium, whether or not fans were always pleased with what they were seeing, or paying.
Whether UW fans like games in the 40s or not, Bo Ryan is similarly in no danger of losing his Wisconsin job. The aforementioned Pomeroy ranks Wisconsin fifth best in Division I and second best in the Big Ten, despite its 19–8 record. Ryan’s accomplishments at UW — Big Ten regular-season and tournament titles, something UW never did under Dick Bennett, and an Elite Eight team, the only area in which Bennett did better — make Ryan arguably the best coach UW has ever had. (It is interesting to note, though, that the UW Athletic Department was pushing season tickets into the regular season.)
Ryan is an example of the value of old sportswriters. Sports commentators working today assume that Wisconsin has always played a glacially slow style of basketball, dating back before Ryan to Bennett. Few probably realize that when Ryan was the coach at UW–Platteville, his teams tried to run and press their opponents out of the gym; in fact, UWP once led Division III in scoring under Ryan. Today’s sportswriters are too dense to realize that maybe Ryan’s offensive style is based on Ryan’s conclusions based on available talent within the state of Wisconsin.
Adding more hate, if you want to call it that, is Awful Announcing:
Tuesday night CBS Sports Network Debbie Antonelli went the extra mile to try and help viewers at home watching Rutgers-Syracuse. The score at the half was 19-15 Rutgers as both teams combined to shoot 22.2% from the field. Antonelli left the booth and went to the scorers table to try and select a new game ball and change the offensive luck of both teams. …
If only we could get whoever’s calling the next Wisconsin game to try this …
I’ve watched, covered and announced games of every conceivable tempo. I admit to preferring a faster pace, having covered the fastest-paced team of all, Grinnell College. It’s not that every game needs to be played at Grinnell’s insane pace, though. There are high-quality deliberate-paced games. There are also deliberate-paced games that are boring to watch, and there seem to be an increasing number of those kinds of games.
We know how the most successful sport, pro football, would handle this. The National Football League will tinker with its rules whenever the league feels it’s necessary to stoke fan interest, usually toward more offense. Today’s NFL game ties back to 1978, when the league liberalized what offensive linemen could do and restricted what defensive backs could do. The NFL realizes that sports is entertainment, and non-entertained fans don’t buy tickets and don’t spend money at the stadium.
College sports is entertainment too, whether or not the NCAA wants to admit that. Sportswriter complaints shouldn’t be the impetus for NCAA rule changes. Dropping TV ratings and diminishing attendance should be the impetus for NCAA rule changes. Fewer eyeballs watching games, in person or on TV, will ultimately mean less financial windfall for the NCAA.
Perhaps the most effective way (as the excellent sports editor of The Platteville Journal pointed out) to improve scoring has nothing to do with, as has been suggested elsewhere, the distance of the three-point line or the length of the shot clock. (Scoring now is below where it was in the days before the three-point shot and the shot clock, which demonstrates that coaches and players adjust to rules changes.) It doesn’t have to do with the lane, either, even though I’ve previously proposed the international lane, which trapezoid shape might make camping in the lane more difficult for offensive players.
It has to do with the officials’ calling the game as it is meant to be played, as opposed to how it’s played now.
What does watching old NCAA basketball demonstrate? It demonstrates how the game is supposed to be officiated. Playing inside shouldn’t reach contact levels consistent with charges for battery. Touching the player with the ball should be a foul. Contact should mean fouls. Not only would calling fouls mean more points directly (assuming players started practicing free throws again), it would mean changes in defensive approaches away from today’s no-autopsy no-foul strategy.
Coaches are not dumb. If officials called the correct fouls, coaches who played excessively physical styles would lose games. (This means you, Tom Izzo!) They would either adjust or get fired (because their teams lost and fans stopped showing up) and would have to find jobs as football defensive assistant coaches.
