Today is the anniversary of the Rolling Stones’ first public performance, at the Marquee Club in London in 1962. They were known then as the “Rollin’ Stones,” and they had not recorded a song yet.
If you’re going to record just one song that gets on the charts, ending at number one would be preferable, whether in 1969, or in the year 2525:
Birthdays start with Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac:
John Wetton played bass for Asia and King Crimson:
The most complicated opinion piece I’ve ever written was before a 1993 five-part statewide referendum on gaming.
One of the five referendum questions was a constitutional amendment; the other four were advisory referenda. In a stunning example of small-R-republican cowardice, the Legislature of the time couldn’t decide how much gaming should be legal or not, and so they threw the whole mess at the voters. I wrote for three weekly newspapers that voters should vote Yes on three questions and No on two to essentially maintain but not expand the amount of legal gaming in Wisconsin at the time. (And that is how voters voted.)
The second most complicated opinion piece I’ve ever written was a Marketplace of Ideas column for an issue that fell in between the November 2000 presidential election and the U.S. Supreme Court’s finally deciding the 2000 presidential election. The nightmare of every opinion-writer, of course, is that he or she writes a piece that, between when it’s published (or, now, is posted but hasn’t gone live yet) and when it gets read, something happens to invalidate the premise of the opinion piece. (Such as writing about why the Packers lost Super Bowl XLV.)
Since when Marketplace went to press no one had any idea when or how Bush vs. Gore would finally be decided, I wrote a do-it-yourself column. The left column was headlined “If Gore wins, read this,” the right column was headlined “If Bush wins, read this,” and the center column was headlined “… and then read this.”
That long preamble is my introduction for a series of columns I’ll be writing about the marathon of state Senate recall elections that will start with six primaries Tuesday and end with two Senate elections Aug. 16. When I was the editor and publisher of Marketplace, I would preface election columns by saying that my opinion thusly expressed was only my own opinion, and not the opinion of Marketplace, Add Inc/Journal Community Publishing Group, Marketplace’s advertisers, etc., etc., etc. It was not, in other words, an endorsement in the traditional newspaper sense that “the newspaper” as an institution endorsed candidate A or a Yes vote on referendum B.
Now, of course, I am 100 percent responsible for this blog, so let me make myself perfectly clear: you absolutely must vote exactly the way I tell you to vote over the next few weeks. Your life, your fortune and your sacred honor depend on it.
There will be six Democratic primaries Tuesday: Nancy Nusbaum of De Pere vs. Otto Junkermann of Allouez in the 2nd District, Rep. Sandy Pasch (D–Whitefish Bay) vs. Gladys Huber of Mequon in the 8th District, Shelly Moore of River Falls vs. Isaac Weix of Menomonie in the 10th District, Rep. Fred Clark (D–Baraboo) vs. Rol Church of Wautoma in the 14th District, Jessica King of Oshkosh vs. John Buckstaff of Oshkosh in the 18th District, and Rep. Jennifer Shilling (D–La Crosse) vs. James D. Smith of La Crosse in the 32nd District.
You may conclude that my voting recommendations make a mockery of the primaries. The reason is that, as I’ve argued before and will argue again, the recalls of the Republicans make a mockery of the democratic process. Recalls are intended for those who engage in actual misconduct in office — leaving the state to prevent a quorum, for instance, or, say, drunk driving (see Wood, Jeff) — not because of votes you don’t like. The recall effort is because those who didn’t like the Nov. 2 election results, as well as the April 5 Supreme Court results, are trying to undo those elections in a red-faced, screaming, crying, shaking-their-fists, punching-holes-in-the-wall, obscenity-filled tantrum of Democrats, public employee unions and their apparatchiks. Any other explanation is disingenuous. It takes naïveté of sky-high levels to suggest that voters didn’t know that Gov. Scott Walker and Republican challengers were going to do things differently if elected Nov. 2.
Misuse of recalls practically begs a tit-for-tat response when the tables are turned and Democrats return to power. And hanging this sword over the heads of legislators may make them even less likely than they are now to confront controversial issues. We need more courage in governance, not less.
The easy part first: The three people for whom you should not vote — whether this month, next month or in November 2012 — are Pasch, Clark and Shilling. Those three were all in the majority party of the Assembly when the then-majority party in the Legislature worked hard to permanently ruin state finances and the state’s economy, as in $2.1 billion in tax increases, a GAAP deficit of $2.9 billion, and a structural deficit that maxed out at $3.6 billion. Under the Democrats’ watch, in fact, Wisconsin had some of the worst finances of any state in the country, but Wisconsin also had a business climate that, at best, ranked in the bottom fourth among the states. If fiscal incompetence were a crime, Pasch, Clark and Shilling would be in prison, along with Gov. James Doyle and other Democrats in the 2009–10 Legislature. (The added bonus is that we 14th Senate District voters have seen revealing glimpses of Clark’s character since he started running.)
And WEAC respected taxpayers exactly when, Shelly? It shouldn’t surprise you that Moore the Mouth is now part of the new 9.2 percent unemployment rate, having been fired in January for using school district computers to organize Protestarama in Madison.
King has a compelling personal story but offers no evidence that she would do anything other than what Democratic leaders tell her to do. (And we’ve seen where that got Wisconsin.) In fact, based on her website, her sole reason to vote for appears to be that she’s not Sen. Randy Hopper (R–Fond du Lac), who’s not even named. As Walter Mondale said of Gary Hart in 1984, where’s the beef?
The one race that presents a bit more of a dilemma is the 2nd Senate District primary. Nusbaum has had an interesting career, having run as a Republican against U.S. Rep. Toby Roth (R–Appleton) in 1994 and then running in the Eighth Congressional District Democratic primary against Steve Kagen in 2006. In between, she did a good job as Brown County executive and before that as De Pere mayor. Eighth District Democratic voters made the profoundly wrong choice in 2006; whatever Kagen’s qualities as an allergist were, his poor intellect but outsize ego made watching him repeatedly insert his foot into his mouth made him an entertaining embarrassment to Northeast Wisconsin.
(I should point out that Nusbaum favored in 2000 extending the 0.5-percent Lambeau Field sales tax to provide more revenue for Brown County. I favored the sales tax for Lambeau Field but not anything else. I think Nusbaum dropped out of my fan club after the referendum, in which Brown County voters approved the sales tax only for Lambeau Field.)
I’m running to be the next State Senator for the 2nd Senate District because I believe we can do better in Wisconsin. We need to bring change to Madison now before they do anymore damage to the values we know are so important. And we need a state senator who will always put the people first.
Independent of the typo (“any more” should be two words in this sentence), I’m curious as to what “the values we know are so important” are. Clearly fiscal responsibility is not one of them, as demonstrated by Nusbaum’s current party’s reprehensible state fiscal record. If “we can do better” means creating budgets that are not awash in red ink and increasing government debt to one of the highest per-capita levels in the country, well, I’m all for that. To me, putting “the people” first means not overtaxing the 85 percent of Wisconsin workers who aren’t government employees but whose taxes pay the salaries and (much better than private-sector) benefits of government employees. To me, putting “the people” first also means more consideration for the employers of those 85 percent of Wisconsin workers beyond puerile “Tax the rich!” slogans.
Note that two losing Democrats, Kagen and former Assembly Majority Leader Tom Nelson (who now is Outagamie County executive apparently because Outagamie County voters didn’t pay attention to his work in Madison), are endorsing Nusbaum. I would be more comfortable with Nusbaum’s candidacy if 2nd District voters had actual evidence that Nusbaum would represent a different approach from Democrats’ bending over to public employee unions at non-public-employee taxpayer expense. I would be interested in what Nusbaum, who had to deal with union employees both as De Pere mayor and as Brown County executive, would suggest to deal with spiralling public employee compensation costs other than what the Legislature did. But we’re apparently not going to get the answer to that, which brings up another point …
King’s issues-free website and Nusbaum’s issues-free website demonstrate a reality of all the Republican Senate recalls. They are only about getting Sens. Robert Cowles (R–Green Bay), Alberta Darling (R–River Hills), Sheila Harsdorf (R–River Falls), Luther Olsen (R–Ripon), Hopper and Dan Kapanke (R–La Crosse) out of office, as if that’s going to undo the current Legislature’s first steps toward fiscal responsibility. Among other things, the current Legislature balanced the budget (though only on a cash basis) without raising taxes and without large-scale state employee layoffs. (At $71,000 on average per state employee, the state spends nearly $4.9 billion on state employee compensation every year.) Would Democratic recall candidates have favored further dumping on Wisconsin’s economy by raising taxes, or tens of thousands of public employee layoffs?
Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly but expecting different results. That is what a vote for Pasch, Clark or Shilling represents. “Insane” is also a good word to describe anyone who votes for Moore. As for King and Nusbaum, neither has proven so far that voting for them would represent a third-way approach that isn’t as extreme as Republicans are accused of being (as if a 1.1-percent state budget increase is “extreme”) and doesn’t represent the unconditional surrender to public employee unions that is the official policy of the state Democratic Party.
Business people know the term “pass-through” refers to the finances of subchapter-S corporations — for tax purposes, profits and losses are assessed directly on an S corporation’s shareholders, not on the corporation itself.
This is my elongated and probably tortured way to suggest you go to the MacIver Institute website and read my Special Guest Perspective about how the state budget isn’t really balanced, despite the claims of Gov. Scott Walker and Republicans. (Hint: It has to do with how you measure finances.)
Regular readers know that I am a media history buff. (Which makes sense for someone who majored in journalism and political science and minored in history.)
One of the more useful functions of YouTube is as a collection point for old media that can be converted from film, 33- or 45-rpm record (remember those?), reel-to-reel or cassette tape, kinescope or videotape, or, for all we know, Victrolas and wire recordings to electronic form. (Until some obscure copyright-holder who thinks they deserve money demands that YouTube takes down the offending old media, that is.)
While I was looking for something else (and I don’t even recall what I sought), I came upon this treasure trove of old Madison media that dates back before I was born.
First is a series of ads that apparently ran in Madison theaters in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Contained within this video is (1) my mother’s former employer, (2) our favorite pizza place, and (3) the theater where my brother and I watched our first movie.
(The answers are (1) the Bank of Madison, (2) Paisan’s Restaurant, and (3) the Cinema Theater, two blocks east of my father’s bank, where we watched “Lady and the Tramp.”)
The popular radio station among those of us in the grade-school set was the top 40 station, WISM (1480 AM):
Both of these blow my mind. I met Clyde Coffee (he would occasionally drop by the restaurant I first worked, and I watched him broadcast on a Saturday morning at what the station called “Club Syene,” their Syene Road studios south of Madison) and Bill Short (who was also a sports official and as recently as last year was still doing radio traffic reports in Mad City), and once interviewed Jonathan Little, who went from WISM to WZEE (104.1 FM) to turn an automated station into WISM’s replacement and the number one station in the Madison market, Z104. And the last piece has a recording of Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, from the first time he was mayor.
(More Madison radio can be found here. For that matter, the menu on the left has more radio from elsewhere in Wisconsin.)
WKOW-TV (channel 27) was Madison’s first TV station, switching on its transmitter as a CBS affiliate in 1953. (When WISC-TV went on the air in 1956, CBS switched to WISC, and WKOW went to ABC, since WMTV had already started as an NBC affiliate, although WMTV also carried ABC and DuMont.) WKOW commemorated its 50th anniversary with this video. I recall none of this, but I would point out that I met (1) Blake Kellogg when he became a UW professor and (2) interviewed Marsh Shapiro after WKOW fired him in 1986. Shapiro already owned the Nitty Gritty restaurant/bar by then, and I have eaten his Gritty Burgers and drunk his beer. I also remember John Schermerhorn and “Dairyland Jubilee,” a show that ended when he died of a heart attack at 44. Tom Hooper went on to be the consumer reporter for WITI-TV in Milwaukee.
In the days before multiple late-night shows and infomercials, nearly every TV market had at least one station that did Friday- or Saturday-night horror movies, usually with a host. In Madison, it was …
… The Inferno, brought to you by American TV & Appliance, on WMTV (channel 15). It was originally called “Ferdie’s Inferno,” after Ferdinand Mattioli, the first owner of American TV. After Mattioli died of cancer, his younger brother, Leonard, took over the company, and the show became known as “Lenny’s Inferno.” The host was Mr. Mephisto, and the box talked back to the host. The younger Mattioli was a legend in Madison TV, with the most, shall we say, energetic commercials on the tube.
This is a photo of the old WISC-TV studios on the West Beltline. The “Radio AM-FM” refers to what later became WISM and what now is WMGN (98.1 FM, “Magic 98”). WISC was the host of the first appointment TV I recall, “Circus 3,” Madison’s answer to Chicago’s “Bozo’s Circus,” featuring ventriloquist Howie Olson and Cowboy Eddie, apparently a relative of Howdy Doody, along with, as you see from the back wall, the classics:
WISC also had the market’s first noon news, the “Farm Hour,” the theme music to which was Aaron Copland’s “Hoedown.” (The same music as the old “Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner” TV ads. If I ever own a radio station that does farm news, that will be the farm news sounder.)
WISC was actually Madison’s third commercial TV station, but because it had the only VHF channel (2 to 13 in the pre-digital days), it became the Madison TV market’s number one station almost as soon as the transmitter was turned on. And yet it had perhaps the most interesting history. (Other than, that is, WKOW’s owner selling the station to a company that went bankrupt, which gave the owner the chance to buy back his stations. The fact I was an intern at WKOW at the time had nothing to do with WKOW’s owner’s bankruptcy … I think.)
According to a Madison Magazine article on WISC’s first 50 years, in 1970, WISC received a challenge to renewing its Federal Communications Commission license. (According to a former WISC employee who spoke to my high school journalism class, there was some question as to how WISC got channel 3, and there were some accusations of WISC’s covering news events with cameras that lacked film in them.)
WISC’s response was to create Madison’s first and last hour-long news, “Eyewitness News,” at a time when perhaps Madison didn’t really have enough news to fill an hour at 6 p.m. That lasted until the mid-1970s, when WISC returned the 6 p.m. news to half an hour and started the market’s first 5 p.m. news under the banner of “Action News.”
WISC’s 50th anniversary website has a lot of video and photos, including a reunion with Cowboy Eddie, but sadly it does not have photos of the first Action News set. Picture in your mind a checkerboard of blue wooden squares and yellowish glass, with the visuals for the stories projected onto the glass. The anchors sat not at a desk, but on low-backed chairs holding their scripts in their laps.
Tedd O’Connell, who later went on to become the first news director of WGBA-TV in Green Bay, anchored for 15 years. The weather guy was John Digman, a short redhead who used the antenna from a 1949 Cadillac as his pointer. After a couple of years, WISC decided Action News needed a desk after all, so they made one, in the shape of a giant number 3. (Perhaps emulating WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee, the state’s first commercial TV station, whose news anchors read the news from behind a giant 4 around the same time.) Later in the 1970s, WISC ditched the checkerboard for a more conventional-looking set, other than its yellow, orange and green colors.
(WISC’s 50th anniversary website also doesn’t have this blast from my personal past. The night before my girlfriend, who was a year ahead of me at Madison La Follette, was to graduate, we were at her house, when WISC’s just-before-9 p.m. news update came up, with, I believe, O’Connell teasing a Madison high school senior skip day bust. She and I spent the next hour speculating on which high school got busted; we dismissed La Follette immediately. So 10 p.m. arrived, and O’Connell announced that several arrests were made at a senior skip day … for La Follette. Specifically, some of her classmates.)
Finally, something you almost never see anymore: A TV station signoff:
WisBusiness.com interviewed a few Wisconsin business executives, and found them complimentary of the Walker administration and its approach to Wisconsin’s employers so far:
“We did very well,” said Kurt Bauer, CEO of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state’s largest business lobby.
“We’ve seen some historic reforms both within the budget and within the first six months of the session that have really changed the business climate and how business leaders around the nation see Wisconsin.” …
Brandon Scholz, CEO of the Wisconsin Grocers Association, said he, too, was pleased with the budget bill because it didn’t include new regulations, tax hikes or fees and “does not make it tougher for companies that drive our economy and hire people.”
“This is a good budget because it doesn’t impose any additional burdens on the business community,” he said.
Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council, also lauded Walker and the Legislature.
“This budget will protect and enhance some of the key investments in small business formation in Wisconsin, which is an area where Wisconsin has great potential to improve,” he said.
“Creating 10,000 new businesses over four years will be a tall order, but it’s achievable if the state and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. foster the right conditions and provide appropriate incentives. Technology-based businesses create jobs that pay well above the statewide average, and Wisconsin is poised to compete on a global basis.”
Not everyone is pleased, of course. One displeased person has good reason; the other does not, and he is …
“Gov. Walker’s budget includes tax breaks for manufacturers even if they cut jobs,” said Assembly Democratic Leader Peter Barca, D-Kenosha, a former Midwest regional administrator to the U.S. Small Business Administration. “Unfortunately, this budget also slashes funding by nearly a third for job retraining programs that companies support and that help match workers with new jobs.”
Barca said Walker and Republican legislative leaders should be using targeted tax cuts that focus on economic development initiatives directly targeted at producing jobs.
In other words, Barca wants to go back to the approach of the Doyle administration, which resulted in the crappy economy and business climate the Walker administration is trying to undo, plus a multi-billion-dollar budget deficit to boot. Voters had their say about that approach Nov. 2, which is why Barca is now in the minority party in the Legislature. (And how did Barca get to the SBA? Because his Congressional career ended at the hands of former U.S. Rep. Mark Neumann, that’s how — fortunately for Barca before Bill Clinton’s term as president ended.)
The valid objection:
Jeff Hamilton, president of the Wisconsin Brewers Guild and Milwaukee’s Sprecher Brewing Co., said he was disappointed Walker didn’t veto a provision in the budget that small brewers believe will harm their ability to expand.
“Generally, the majority of this budget is a good thing,” he said. “But business models that were available to us before this budget no longer exist, so our company has been devalued and opportunities for entrepreneurs to develop their businesses have been taken away and we’re not too happy about that.”
He said his association is working with several legislators do away with the changes.
Hamilton also bristled at comments by Walker that craft brewers didn’t understand changes to the state’s beer distribution rules in the budget.
“For him to say that was insulting to small brewers because it implies that we don’t know anything about our business or the government affairs that affect it,” he said.
Hamilton echoes a point made in this blog and by others — that government has no business picking winners and losers, whether that means a kind of business (green energy, for instance) or a specific business (MillerCoors over Anheuser–Busch in this case).
Bauer made another point about which I will quibble:
… passage of a balanced budget without raising taxes … “sends a message to business leaders in our state and nationwide that Wisconsin is no longer in denial about the seriousness of our chronic budget deficits. It has created a positive buzz for our state.“
He said the balanced budget contrasts Wisconsin “very nicely” with the neighboring states of Illinois, which has raised taxes, and proposed tax hikes in Minnesota.
“It also removes uncertainly about the future direction of the state for business leaders, which positions Wisconsin better than many other states which lack the courage to make the tough but necessary choices to get their fiscal houses in order.”
Removing uncertainty is good. (The substantial uncertainty about what Barack Obama wants to infest upon business has much to do with why the U.S. economy is how it now is.) The budget, however, is only legally balanced, not factually balanced, because state law requires only that the budget be balanced on a cash basis, and not on Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, as most states require. Given that Wisconsin was one of only two states to have a GAAP deficit every year during the first decade of the 21st century, I’m guessing the state still has a substantial GAAP deficit.
Even though, as Hamilton puts it, “the majority of this budget is a good thing,” it’s far too early to claim that the state’s economy will improve. For one thing, if the recall elections go the wrong way, further initiatives to improve the state’s business climate would be stopped by a Democrat-controlled Senate, or even a one-vote-majority GOP Senate if that one vote is Sen. Dale Schultz (RINO–Richland Center). (Of course, Democrats are deluding themselves in thinking a Democrat-controlled Senate will be able to roll back, for instance, public employee collective bargaining restrictions given Walker’s strongest veto pen in the nation.)
The bad business climate this state has had throughout the 2000s will require much more repair, in reducing taxes, defanging overaggressive regulators, reducing taxes, reducing the size and scope of state and local government, and reducing taxes. Progress depends on what happens in the August recall elections and the November 2012 elections, and what the Legislature and governor do in between elections.
U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Florida) wasn’t talking about Wisconsin, but what he said about the country as a whole particularly applies to Wisconsin: “We don’t need new taxes. We need new taxpayers.” As in those filling new jobs created by entrepreneurs.
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.
On the opposite side of me will be former state attorney general Peg Lautenschlager. As a part-Norwegian, part-German, part-Polish pundit, in all the years I’ve been doing media punditry, I believe this is the first time someone on a panel has had a longer last name than me.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 