Birthday-wise, today is more about quality than quality.
One-hit wonder Brenton Wood …
… was born one year before two-hit wonder Dobie Gray …
… who was born one year before someone you may have heard of — Mick Jagger:
Queen drummer Roger Taylor (the last song dedicated to the Ripon High School baseball team and the Ripon–Green Lake American Legion baseball team):
Terri Nunn of Berlin:
One death of note today: Mary Wells:
The latest “Sunday Insight with Charlie Sykes,” which includes me sitting on the far stage right, can be viewed here.
Marketplace Magazine: Gone but apparently not forgotten. (At least they spelled my name right.)
I have written, because it is undeniably correct, that this summer’s Recallarama is occurring because Democrats, public employee unions and their apparatchiks want to undo the Nov. 2 elections because, well, they lost.
It is not, as I wrote last week, because the aforementioned triumvirate of transgressions believes Gov. Scott Walker and Republicans pulled a fast one on the voters in enacting changes to public employee collective bargaining. The unions knew in plenty of time that that was what Walker intended on doing, because Walker said so, more than once, and to the state’s biggest newspaper more than once.
The unions want you to believe it is out of their concern over state budget cuts, even though the state budget itself increased 7.6 percent. But as I wrote last week, the discerning voter should believe nothing the aforementioned axis of error says in their campaign ads.
Since Recallarama is all about Nov. 2 and what’s happened since then — because of the horror of creating more jobs in May than the rest of the country combined — it is instructive to ponder what would have happened if Tom Barrett had defeated Scott Walker and had Democrats retained control of the Legislature. (I’ll pause until your shudders stop.)
The MacIver Institute has fought through the shuddering and pondered exactly that scenario:
Our analysts consulted with the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau as they went through the amendment packages line by line. Their findings: If the Assembly Democrats’ twelve major packaged amendments to the budget bill had passed, Wisconsin would be looking at a $1,779,098,700 spending increase. …
The first overt increase in spending was proposed in Amendment 4, titled the Education Package. The package would have increased spending by a total of $1,271,709,900. The largest proposed spending increase would have restored $1.2 billion in general education equalization aid. Interestingly, the Democrats attempted to use a familiar accounting gimmick, common in previous Wisconsin budgets, to make this look like only a $349.6 million spending increase. Assembly Democrats attempted to shift $897.4 million of this increase onto the 2013-2015 budget. The amendment as proposed did not reflect this but the Legislative Fiscal Bureau provided this detail. Regardless of the timing, Assembly Democrats attempted to increase spending by $1,271,709,900. …
Amendment 7, the so-called Tax Fairness Package, would have increased taxes on capital gains and manufacturers by $356.3 million. It also attempted to restore $56.2 million for the earned income tax credit and $13.6 million for the homestead tax credit. Critics classify these programs as welfare spending even though they contain the word “tax” in their title. These credits would give “tax refunds” to people who don’t pay taxes to begin with. …
In their package on Healthcare, Amendment 9, the Democrats attempted to remove the enrollment cap on family care, a move that would have cost the state an estimated $290 million over the biennium. The Democrats also attempted to stipulate that $466 million in unspecified cuts made by the governor’s bill could only be made through efficiencies. This was an attempt to maintain current services, remove eligibility restrictions, and not increase cost sharing by enrollees. …
Their Environment Package, Amendment 12, proposed an increase in the bonding allowance of the land stewardship fund by $234 million as well as to the Purchase of Agricultural Conservation Easements (PACE) by $12 million. The total proposed bonding increase was $246,000,000. These increases would have cost the state $2,980,000 in principal and interest payments over the biennium. The Joint Finance Committee’s budget bill did not zero out these bonding allowances. The bill only decreased them from $86 [million] to $60 million per year from fiscal year 2011-12 through 2019-20 for the stewardship program. The amendment also increased aid for recycling by $26 million over the two-year period. This brings the total spending increase to $28,980,000. …
As it was passed by the legislature, the new state budget erased the structural deficit and is scheduled to leave the budget $300 million in the black.
However, had the Assembly Democrats been successful in their attempts to amend the budget, the plan would have left the state with a $1.4 billion deficit going into the 2013-2015 budget deliberations.
Increasing spending by $1.7 billion to create a structural deficit of $1.4 billion while raising taxes by $356.3 million two years after increasing taxes by $2.1 billion — that is what voters avoided by voting correctly Nov. 2.
It should be pointed out that the MacIver Institute did not double-count — that is, “If a specific spending proposal was included in more than one amendment, we only counted the spending once.” On the other hand, it could be argued that Democrats introduced some of the amendments as political theater instead of policy proposal — introducing amendments they know would lose to be able to charge that those evil Republicans cut recycling aid and money for assistant district attorneys.
It should also be pointed out that these amendments were in reaction to the governor’s proposed 2011–13 budget as modified in the budget process by the Legislature. My guess is that, given the Democrats’ horrid record in fiscal management, had the Democrats been required to create their own budget, it would have been, in fact, worse than what MacIver identifies. That’s what happened in the 2009–11 budget, proposed by Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle, passed by Democrats and then made about 0.017 percent less fiscally irresponsible through Doyle’s vetoes.
The actual 2011–13 budget and the budget repair bill that cut back public employee collective bargaining, Democrats claim, gut education and various other of their favorite government services. That’s their version; the Weekly Standard has the actual truth:
But as the abstract debate over collective bargaining collides with reality, it is becoming clear just how big a lie the Big Labor line was. Now that the law is in effect, where are the horror stories of massive layoffs and schools shutting down? They don’t exist—except in a couple of districts where collective bargaining agreements, inked before the budget repair bill was introduced, remain in effect.
In Milwaukee, nine schools are shutting and 354 teachers have been fired due to a drop in state funding and the end of federal stimulus funding. But if teachers there agreed to the 5.8 percent pension contribution, the school district says it would rehire 200 of those teachers. (Other changes could offset the rest of the layoffs.) …
The only other district seeing such massive layoffs is Kenosha, where 212 teachers will be fired this year. “Kenosha is in the same boat as [Milwaukee], with a collective bargaining agreement signed before Walker took office that lasts until June 30, 2013,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on July 16. “But most other Wisconsin districts have avoided layoffs and massive cuts to programs.”
That includes, voters in the 14th Senate District, the Berlin school district, which closed its elementary school in Poy Sippi. Contrary to what voters are being led to believe by the latest inaccurate left-wing political ad, the closing of Poy Sippi was decided before the 2011–13 state budget was finished. And, reports WLUK-TV:
“We explored a number of different options,” said Bob Eidahl, the Berlin Area School District Administrator.
Eidahl says the district wanted to balance its budget with minimal impact on students.
“This was a decision that we really wish that we didn’t have to make, but financially it was the best alternative for us at the particular time,” said Eidahl.
The 70 or so students who previously would have went to Poy Sippi will now be bused about 20 minutes to Berlin’s elementary school.
“No one had layoffs,” said [teacher Hargrave. “Everyone will have a position there, or throughout the district, so that’s a huge positive.”
Neither the state’s finances nor the state’s taxes are where they need to be yet. But the state would have been worse off had not voters fired Democrats left and, well, left Nov. 2. And the state will be worse off if voters vote for Democrats in the Aug. 9 and 16 recall elections.
Today in 1964, the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” hit number one and stayed there for 14 weeks:
Today in 1973, George Harrison got a visit from the taxman, who told him he owed £1 million in taxes on his 1973 Bangladesh album and concert:
Birthdays start with Mark Clarke of Uriah Heep …
… born one year before Verdine White, who played bass for Earth Wind & Fire:
Ken Greer played guitar for Red Rider:
One death occurred today in 1995: Charlie Rich:
A variation on covers today: They’re not the same song, but people think they have the same title, and one singer put the two songs together:
Today in 1965, Bob Dylan released “Like a Rolling Stone,” which is not like the Rolling Stones:
Birthdays start with Heinz Burt, bassist for the one-hit-wonder Tornados …
… born one year before Jim McCarty of the Yardbirds …
… who was born one year before Jim Armstrong, guitarist for Them:
William “Junior” Campbell was the lead signer for two-hit wonder Marmalade:
Time for a visit to coverland:
Today in 1965, the Beatles asked for …
Birthdays start with Cleveland Dunkin of the Penguins:
Dino Danelli played the drums for the Young Rascals:
Blair Thornton played guitar for Bachman–Turner Overdrive:
Ian Thomas was a one-hit wonder in this country and a bigger act in the Great White North:
Janis Siegel (who we once saw in a Lawrence University concert) sang for the Manhattan Transfer:
Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore:
Who is Saul Hudson? Slash of Guns N Roses:
Sam Waters of Color Me Badd:
Our subject today is the depiction of journalists — or, as we like to call ourselves, “ink-stained wretches” — in the entertainment media.
This isn’t exactly a Golden Age of journalists in entertainment, but it’s interesting to note how many of them have been depicted on TV in the past few years, including in “Ugly Betty,” “Dirt,” “My Boys” and “Just Shoot Me.” For a while, magazines particularly attracted the attention of TV scriptwriters, as shown in “Ugly Betty” (and the movie it seems to have been based on, “The Devil Wears Prada”), “Dirt” and “Just Shoot Me.”
Many other movies and TV shows have featured journalists as characters, but neither “The Odd Couple” movie nor TV series was about newspapers. In most cases, journalists are plot devices to move the story along — for instance, “Then Came Bronson,” a 1969 series about a newspaper reporter who decides to travel around America after a friend of his commits suicide and leaves him his motorcycle. (Travel the country on a reporter’s salary — that’s how you know it’s fiction.)
Charles Foster Kane, the lead character in “Citizen Kane,” was based on newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, but “Citizen Kane” is not a newspaper movie. “All the President’s Men” chronicled the Watergate investigation by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who are to Watergate what any number of TV reporters were to the John F. Kennedy assassination. “All the President’s Men,” based on Woodstein’s book (that’s what Post editor Ben Bradlee called the pair) All the President’s Men, helped create the brief genre of reporters as rock stars, due no doubt to casting Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein, but it’s arguable whether it’s a newspaper movie or political thriller. Jack Webb, creator of “Dragnet,” did one newspaper movie, “-30-” (which reporters typed at the end of their stories to indicate to the typesetter that that was the end of the story), which imdb.com describes as depicting an “implausibly active day in the life of a metropolitan newspaper.”
My favorite in the newspaper movie genre is “Deadline USA,” with Humphrey Bogart as the editor of a daily newspaper about to be sold. “Deadline USA” ends what might be one of the best endings of any movie: The bad guy, a mobster, is about to be exposed in the pages of the newspaper, and as he’s threatening editor Bogart on the phone, the newspaper’s press begins to run. When the mobster says he can’t hear Bogart’s character due to the noise, Bogart’s response is: “That’s the press, baby. The press! And there’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing!”
(The movie also includes another line: “A journalist makes himself the hero of the story. A reporter is only a witness.” That contrasts to the definition I heard in college of “journalist”: “an out-of-work reporter.” So am I a journalist or not?)
“Citizen Kane” and “All the President’s Men” are on Best Colleges Online‘s list of 14 movies every journalism major is supposed to see. The rest of their list, though, looks more like movies for entertainment’s sake than movies for insights about journalism: “Network” (and I suppose its inclusion on this list will make you mad as hell and you’re not going to take it anymore), “Almost Famous” (a teenage boy’s fantasy about journalism), “Good Night and Good Luck” (Edward R. Murrow vs. Wisconsin’s own Joe McCarthy), “Ace in the Hole,” “Ringu” (“a reporter investigating some mysterious deaths and a popular urban legend encounters a cursed video tape that spreads like a virus and eventually kills off (almost!) everyone who pops it into the VCR”), “Zodiac” (about the real-life serial killings in San Francisco on which “Dirty Harry” was based), “The Paper,” “Broadcast News” and older flicks.
The best known TV series about newspapers is probably “Lou Grant,” which also is notable for taking a character from a sitcom (the title character’s boss, a Minneapolis TV station news director, on “Mary Tyler Moore”) into a drama. Ed Asner played the TV news director-turned-Los Angeles newspaper city editor, the lead character in one of TV’s first ensemble drama casts. “Lou Grant” was loved by critics and those who give out awards; the series won 13 Emmy Awards, three Golden Globe awards, a Peabody award and nine other awards in its five-year run. (The first season can be seen at hulu.com.) The series was canceled, despite its being in the top 10 of the Nielsen ratings in its last month, largely because Asner used both his role in the series and his office as president of the Screen Actors Guild as a soapbox for his views on the U.S. presence in central America, to the discomfort of CBS and advertisers.
The cult classic “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” is an example of the genre of journalist as investigator, a detective armed with a notebook and a camera instead of a gun. (Of course, police detectives carry notebooks and guns, and sometimes cameras too.) In fact, just as there are more serial killers on TV or in movies than in real life, there may be more investigative reporters depicted on TV than actually exist in real life — for instance, Raymond Burr got out of his wheelchair on “Ironside” to play the title role in “Kingston: Confidential,” described thusly: “An investigative reporter, backed by the head of a newspaper and TV chain, uncovers a plot to utilize nuclear power plants in a scheme to take over the world.” (I wonder if the staff of the Green Bay Press–Gazette or the Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter is aware of this fiendish plot involving those nuclear power plants along Lake Michigan.)
Other TV shows that have featured journalists as major characters include:
There have been a couple of journalist-as-superhero depictions. Clark Kent, of course, was a “mild-mannered reporter at the Daily Planet” when he wasn’t being Superman, either in one of the Superman movies or, on TV, “The Adventures of Superman,” “Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman,” or the current “Smallville.” Some readers may remember “Electra Woman and Dyna Girl,” two reporters for something called “Newsmaker Magazine” when they weren’t battling “a bevy of costumed villains.”
My personal favorite of that genre is “The Green Hornet,” a comic book turned into a radio series, a film serial, and then a TV series featuring the publisher of a newspaper who fought crime on his off hours, dogged by one of his own reporters who was trying to find out the secret identity of the Green Hornet, thought to be a “ruthless criminal.” (Hint to reporter Mike Axford: He signs your paychecks.) Besides having a great theme written by trumpeter Al Hirt based on Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee,” “The Green Hornet” TV series was the U.S. TV debut of martial artist Bruce Lee, who played the Green Hornet’s sidekick, Kato. (It should be noted that their favorite vehicle was not a green Hornet, but “Black Beauty,” comparable probably to a black Chrysler 300 of today, but with such special features as rocket launchers, smoke guns, etc.)
At this point you may be asking: What about the “Green Hornet” movie? I haven’t seen it, and based on these reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes I don’t plan to see it:
A facetious industrial product, and the first out-and-out bore of the year.
Despite its obvious angling to become a franchise, this Green Hornet offers little that’s worth committing to even the “cult flick” chamber of your brain.
A big, sloppy, loud, grating mess of a movie.
[Seth] Rogen takes what should have and could have been one of the most unique antithesis’ to Batman and transforms it in to a vanity project for his one note comedy and flat one-liners…
…an uneven, disastrously overlong piece of work.
I’m sure you’re shocked — shocked! — to discover that Hollywood, well, Hollywoodizes its depictions of journalists. (For one thing, any media outlet depicted on TV appears to have far more staff than an actual media outlet of that size would have.) The reason there haven’t been very many good depictions of journalists is that most of what journalists do, though important, frankly isn’t very interesting to watch. (After the fact, that’s another story.) Interviews, particularly hostile interviews, can be entertaining to watch, as demonstrated by CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes.” But the process of putting words on paper (or into word processing program now) isn’t very interesting to watch if you’re not in the profession, any more than the process of watching photographers take photos, radio reporters edit sound or TV reporters put a story together in an editing bay is interesting to watch. Nor is, say, sitting in a courtroom at a trial or at a city council meeting. And if you think those wouldn’t be interesting to watch, watching an editor come up with a story list for an edition of his or her publication, or editing reporters’ stories is as exciting as watching trees grow.
I haven’t seen very many non-TV reporters you’d want to see on the screen from an appearance standpoint either. (Guess where the phrase “you have a face for radio” came from.) Few are tall, baby-faced in a rugged sort of way, with graying curly hair, piercing blue eyes, facial hair that varies with the season … sorry, got lost in the moment there. The reporters and editors I’ve known over the years aren’t fashionably thin or, for that matter, thin at all or, for that matter, fashionable at all, and don’t have hot significant others, cool cars and funky living quarters. (Media types, however, are quite adept at violating traffic and parking laws, thanks to those pesky deadlines.) There are more married people than in your typical TV series setting (although journalism is known for its unpleasantly high divorce rate).
One of the most bizarre incidents mixing (fictional) TV and real life occurred in 1992 over “Murphy Brown,” a sitcom set at a TV newsmagazine that looked a lot like “60 Minutes.” The title character gave birth to a child with no father in the picture. That prompted Vice President Dan Quayle to blast the show during the 1992 presidential campaign for a depicting “a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman — mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’” That was misread as an attack on single mothers who were not single by “just another lifestyle choice,” criticized by others who praised the show for not having the title character get an abortion, prompted the series’ creator to have her (fictional) show give a response to Quayle’s comments, and then, from one to many years later, resulted in a series of admissions from places you’d never figure, including from Candace Bergen, who played Brown, that Quayle was, uh, right. (If this paragraph didn’t make sense to you, nothing about that made sense at the time either.)
Most of the time, the personality of reporters doesn’t come across in their on-screen depictions. I find that to be too bad, because one reason I’ve liked working in the media is because of my fellow aberrant personalities in this profession. There is more drinking and smoking in journalism than in society as a whole (although media companies tend to frown on bottles in desks nowadays, and media owners have the same no-smoking-at-work policies as everyone else), and there is more, shall we say, use of colorful vocabulary than in your typical workplace. Black humor and situationally inappropriate humor is a trademark of this profession, as is automatic skepticism. Some media types seem to be engaging in a contest to see who can be more cynical than the next media type, particularly those who specialize in political reporting, for ample reason. That is portrayed better in “Dilbert,” which isn’t set in a media workplace, than in most TV and movie depictions I’ve seen.
I will be a guest on WTMJ-TV’s “Sunday Insight with Charlie Sykes” Sunday at 10 a.m.
Birthdays start with the indescribable George Clinton of Parliament Funkadelic:
Rick Davies played keyboards for Supertramp:
Estelle Bennett was the older sister of Ronnie Spector, and both were part of the Ronettes:
Don Henley of the Eagles:
Aeschylus’ observation, “in war, truth is the first casualty,” would be as accurate if “war” were replaced by “politics.”
Particularly during Recallarama. As noted Wednesday, the public employee unions and their Democratic toadies (or vice versa) aren’t telling voters the real reasons they’re trying a coup d’état against the Walker administration and Republicans is because (1) they didn’t and don’t like the Nov. 2 election results and (2) they’re annoyed at having to pay more for their health insurance and pensions (even though they’re still paying less and getting more than the 85 percent of taxpayers who are paying for those benefits without collecting government paychecks).
And as noted Tuesday, the public employee unions and their Democratic toadies are, to put it as charitably as possible, mistaken when they claim that the Walker administration and the GOP deliberately withheld their intention to restrict public employee collective bargaining. (Either that, or there is a major literacy problem among Wisconsin’s teachers.)
As Christian Schneider pointed out Wednesday, the unions “knew the collective-bargaining issue was provocative enough to get between 15,000 and 20,000 people per senate district to sign recall petitions (about 10 percent of each district’s population), but not enough to get any of their candidates elected. Unions know the people who signed recall petitions are already in their pocket — they had to quickly change gears and return to the more traditional Democrat talking points, in order to garner independent votes.”
That is why you are being barraged by ads paid for Democrats’ various apparatchiks making claims that range between “mischaracterization” and “falsehood.” Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce — which represents private-sector employers, who employ the vast majority of Wisconsin workers — has assembled a list of claims that don’t stand up to scrutiny, including:
FICTION. The new state budget increases taxes on families, while giving tax breaks “to corporations and the super rich.”
FACT. Recent budget legislation does not increase income, sales, or excise taxes, and it effectively freezes local property taxes.
Indeed, because the income tax is “indexed” for inflation, typical low- and middle-income taxpayers—those with incomes up to $70,000—will get small tax cuts, as they do every year. During the 2009 tax-filing season, those cuts averaged over 2%.
The “tax breaks” referred to cut taxes this year by $80 million. That is just 0.6% of general state tax collections expected for the year. Next year that percentage is still under 1%. These figures are trivial compared to the $3 billion in tax and fee increases enacted to cover the four years ending this past June.
The largest tax cut is an income tax deduction for hiring new employees (jobs!); the second largest merely follows federal law and allows those with health savings accounts to make tax-free deposits to those accounts—hardly the “super rich.” The third largest does not cut taxes at all but merely delays payment of capital gains taxes.
The response to the additional claim that tax breaks are going to out-of-state corporations is that said out-of-state corporations are some of the biggest employers in this state. Raise business taxes, and to summarize, nothing good happens.
This next two illustrate major flaws in the 2011–13 state budget:
FICTION. The 2011-13 budget drastically cuts state spending, which can only harm public services.
FACT. The new general fund budget spends $29.0 billion over the next two years. Comparable state spending during 2009-10 was $12.8 billion and is estimated at $14.2b for the year just ended for a two-year total of $27.0 billion. Thus, due largely to Medicaid, state general fund expenditures are rising by $2 billion, or 7.6%. Yes, many programs had to be reduced, but, overall, the budget did not see a “drastic cut.”
FICTION. The new state budget puts dedicated state employees on the street.
FACT. With selected program reductions and state government reorganization, some job positions were eliminated. But, overall, state positions paid for with state tax dollars increased over last year’s base by 13.
These are flaws because the state budget should have been actually cut instead of increased. This is, remember, a state that ran deficits every fiscal year during the previous decade, and by other measures has some of the worst finances of any state. Wisconsin businesses and families had to actually cut spending thanks to the rotten economy and business climate. Only the severely math-challenged would consider a 7.6 percent spending increase to be a cut.
The state, remember, spends $4.9 billion on its employees every year. A lot of businesses put “dedicated” “employees on the street” because they didn’t have the business to justify their employment. Why were state and local government not required to do the same? This is also a political flaw in hindsight because, given the amount of screaming from public employee unions over a budget that increases state employment, the Walker administration and the GOP might as well have chopped state employment, given that the political result would have been similar.
The only school districts that are being harmed by the 2011–13 budget are those school districts that didn’t take advantage of the new law to hold down employee benefit spending. Those school districts that passed new teacher contracts that included the employee-benefit provisions, or waited until after the new budget took effect, won’t be paying as much in employee benefits.
The unstated fiction here is that if voters only vote for Democrats, everything will be better. There is no way that the public employee collective bargaining restrictions will be undone by a Democratic-controlled Senate. Even when, at some future point, Democrats once again control the executive and legislative branches of state government, I wouldn’t predict that the provisions in the budget repair bill will be undone by future legislative initiative. When schools do not fall apart, even Democrats will have to admit that in order to spend more government money on something, you have to be financially responsible in other areas funded by taxpayers.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
