The number one British album today in 1965 was “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”:
Today in 1970, Johnny Cash performed at the White House, getting a request from its resident:
No comments on Presty the DJ for April 17
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Hundreds of demonstrators lined the streets around the Michigan Capitol Wednesday for a rally to protest Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order, which aims to protect public health during the coronavirus pandemic.
Several of the vehicles participating in “Operation Gridlock” sported American flags and MAGA (Make America Great Again) banners. A banner across the Capitol lawn read “Security without liberty is called prison.”
Drivers laid on their horns repeatedly for hours ahead of the event, and others had megaphones. About 400 vehicles filled Allegan Street, which runs along the Capitol, for at least four blocks. Hundreds of other vehicles crowded other Lansing streets.
Michigan State Police troopers will only take enforcement action, traffic or otherwise, in the case of vandalism or if there is a threat to human life, said Lt. Brian Oleksyk, public information officer for the State Police’s First District.
“Our goal is to provide a safe and secure environment for visitors to the Capitol while also protecting the Capitol complex as well as the governor’s residence,” Oleksyk said. “We’re trying to do that while protecting the First Amendment rights of people attending the event.”
Shortly after 3 p.m., Michigan State Police responded to an altercation among protesters at Michigan and Capitol avenues but it was quickly dispersed, said State Police Lt. Darren Green. An individual was led away from the scene, and there was one arrest, Green said.
Around that same time, police began to create makeshift barricades with their bicycles at crosswalks in front of the Capitol to discourage individuals from blocking traffic.
Mike Vennix, 58, of Kalamazoo was among dozens of protesters who got out of their vehicles and gathered in front of the Capitol.
Asked if he had ever seen anything like the demonstration, he said no.
“Not like this,” he said. “This is great stuff.”
Like others, Vennix argued that Whitmer should let more people return to work and lift restrictions on public outings. But many health officials have backed Whitmer’s policies, arguing they will prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed.
“People can make up their own minds and play it smart as far as what we’re faced with,” Vennix said.
House Speaker Lee Chatfield, R-Levering, joined protesters by waving American flags from the first floor windows of his Capitol office. He argued the governor should be allowing reasonable changes to the stay-home order to allow people to start returning safely to work.
“My only goal is hopefully to ensure that government does hear them,” Chatfield said. “I know I’ve heard them. I have their back and I want to do all I can to ensure their constitutional rights are protected and they can get their livelihoods back and take care of their families.”
Todd Harden of Flushing was one of a few counter protesters at the rally, carrying a neon sign that said “We back ‘that woman,’” a reference to a remark by President Donald Trump in which he referred to Whitmer as “the woman in Michigan.”
Whitmer is a “smart lady,” Harden said, but he predicted she would likely “come down a notch” on some restrictions associated with the stay-home order.
“I always thought she was top notch and I believe in her decisions,” he said. “I just want a little more quiet quarantine time.”
It would be interesting to know if Harden is presently employed or not.
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Times were tough down on the farm before the COVID-19 outbreak. Now, each new day is filled with dread, filled with collapsing markets, looming bankruptcies and ruined lives.
“At this point, we’re all looking at a train barreling over a cliff, not really sure if anyone is going to survive when we hit the bottom,” Brodhead-area farmer Rob Riemer told Vicki McKenna this week on NewsTalk 1310 WIBA.
The pasture-raised cattle and egg Riemer Family Farm dates back nearly a century. The third generation now wonders if their southcentral Wisconsin farm will survive the coming months.
The pandemic and Gov. Tony Evers’ sweeping Safer at Home order locking down much of Wisconsin has hit America’s Dairyland particularly hard.
Dan Smith, president and CEO of Cooperative Network, said the agriculture industry in general was just beginning a slow recovery from a painful downturn over the last four or five years. The severity of the coronavirus shutdown of the economy at large was like “pouring gasoline on a fire,” Smith said.
Overnight, the dairy industry lost about 40 percent of its marketplace — the food service industry. A big chunk of that market includes schools, which began closing en masse a month ago. Markets instantly changed, as Evers ordered most consumers to stay home. Food processors couldn’t turn on a dime to meet the changes, and everything seemed to slow to a crawl.
Riemer said last year was bad enough. His farm suffered a “six-figure loss.” The reserves are gone. Now, if the economic shutdown continues, his family farm, like so many family farms, won’t make it.
“We’re just talking a matter of months basically. Most of us will probably survive a month or two, some will not. But if this goes on extended, by the end of the summer, fall, or later, I don’t think you’re going to have more than a handful of farms survive this,” the farmer said.
A report earlier this month, Institute for Reforming Government lays out the rising challenges confronting Wisconsin farmers and calls on the Legislature to finish the business of passing reform legislation that will help bring back prosperity to the Dairyland’s farms.
Smith said farmers do need help, but just throwing money at the problem isn’t going to cut it. He said it’s time for systemic changes to sustain agriculture and promote a safe and reliable food system.
But things are going to have to change quickly if Wisconsin wants to save its family farms, the ag expert said.
“Agriculture was already the at-risk patient, to put it in the language of the pandemic,” Smith said. “This really hits at the worst possible time.”
Listen to the Vicki McKenna’s interview with Rob Riemer here.
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The number one British single today in 1969:
In a week, the Beatles would tell the Aces to …
Today in 1969, MC5 demonstrated how not to protest a department store’s failure to sell your albums: Take out an Ann Arbor newspaper ad that says “F— Hudsons” (without the dashes).
Not only did Hudsons not change its mind, Elektra Records dropped MC5.
Detective Kenneth Hutchinson of a California police department had the number one single today in 1977:
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It has been said often that adversity doesn’t build character; adversity reveals character.
William J. Bennett and Seth Leibsohn explore that point:
Given the most recent mortality rates and modeling, it appears that the death toll in America from coronavirus will end up looking a lot like the annual fatality numbers from the flu. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Washington state is now projecting 68,841 potential deaths in America. It is also estimating lower ranges than that. The flu season of 2017-2018 took 61,099 American lives. For this we have scared the hell out of the American people, shut down the economy, ended over 17 million jobs, taken trillions of dollars out of the economy, closed places of worship, and massively disrupted civic life as we know it. Some of our major public officials tell us, still, that there will be no returning to a status quo, that we will have to get used to a new normal. We strongly disagree with that mindset.
A panic and hysteria over a pandemic that does not look to be what so many frightened us into thinking has radically degraded this country. What should be the major lessons learned here? How did we go from an ethos of “Let’s Roll!” when America was hit by a major attack from outside forces two decades ago to “Let’s roll up in a ball”?
First, New York City is where the epidemic has struck the hardest. The media is centered in New York City. Although sensationalism is not new, something in the 21st century media landscape is: Reporting the news has been replaced with raising alarms, heightening political tensions, and funneling information through a strictly partisan lens. Lost is the notion that if something is too bad to be true — or too good to be true — it probably is not true. Conspiracy theories and extreme rhetoric have replaced fact and reason, as well as reasonableness. These dark impulses have been aided and abetted by a series of left-wing notions that have come to dominate our politics, giving us a new “paranoid style in American politics.”
In the 1970s, professor Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, gained a huge following for predicting, incorrectly, that “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” In the 1980s, we were scared into believing a nuclear winter would create a human and climatic catastrophe, killing over one billion people because of “a precipitous drop in the Earth’s temperatures and widespread failure of crops, leading to deadly famine.” In the 1990s up through Greta Thunberg’s “Person of the Year” designation, climate change (no longer a warming or a cooling, just “change”) presaged “no tomorrow,” while “entire ecosystems are collapsing.” We have seen much the same fright-inducing extreme rhetoric with our domestic politics.
Aided and abetted by its mainstream media enablers and ideological soulmates, the left has warped our political rhetoric to a point beyond reason, impeding our ability to make calm and rational assessments. President Trump, for example, is not wrong or too conservative — he’s an “existential threat to America” and “worse than Hitler,” and, of course, responsible for all the deaths from COVID-19. From the left’s social to political rhetoric of extremism and worst-case scenarios, we’ve been conditioned to hyperbolic exaggeration; we’ve been numbed into implausible raving.
Thus, when the virus came to our shores, Americans were primed enough to accept and cower in front of models of death telling us that two million of us would be killed. Now, after the damage was ignited by shutdowns and panic, the social destruction of this irresponsible fearmongering will take a long time to undo. Whipping the population into a frenzy and panic, is, as Abraham Lincoln warned us long ago, not healthy for the perpetuation of our political institutions.
Or any other institution. As part of our national affright, we engaged in a shuttering of our best forces of composition — such as churches, synagogues, schools — and our venues for physical exercise. Just at the time of their greatest needs, these services were ordered to be shut down. Thus, no surprise: over the course of the past six weeks, suicide hotline calls, alcohol abuse, and other instances of substance abuse and domestic violence have increased. More social destruction will ensue.
Lesson Two: Although houses of worship were closed this past weekend, the message of strength, courage, and “be not afraid” should be our first instincts as Americans.
Ronald Reagan popularized the notion of “Trust, but verify.” Americans need to use that approach with our own leaders, and with the “experts” who issue dire warnings. Even those who are well-meaning and highly credentialed are not omniscient. We should listen, but verify. Medical patients given a grim prognosis usually want a second opinion. We should want that as a polity, too.
Lesson Three: Disaggregate the data. If there is a vulnerable population — and there is here — encourage appropriate and reasonable measures. Resist zealous generalizations that lead to vast distributions of misery and hardship. The chances of a younger person and an older person acquiring this disease, much less dying from it, are not the same. And both are small. No doctor would treat a 40-year-old from Boise the same way he or she would treat an 80-year-old from Queens. Neither should our nation treat the body politic the same way.
Lesson Four: Understand there is public health, and there is public health. Does a virus that may take as many Americans as the seasonal flu require an upending of literally everything in our life, work, and recreational activity, affecting so much more of our other health, including mental health? Does it require a response that will lead to other deaths and diseases of despair from substance abuse and suicide ideation to domestic violence, all while curbing of our civic health and constitutional rights as well?
Lesson Five: Do not be impervious to good or hopeful news. Compare this virus’ numbers and prognoses to other numbers and prognoses we have taken for granted without even knowing it. When data reveals that there is a .007% chance of dying from this disease in America, report that. When evidence shows there may be extant medicines that can treat the virus, encourage rather than anathematize that.
If there is one over-arching lesson uniting all others, it is to remember our Lincoln. Early on, he asked, “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?” He answered that if danger ever reaches our shores, “it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
Ignoring these lessons will augur poorly for us in the near term and perhaps severely in our next crisis, setting precedents we may never be able to overcome.
Americans generally and Wisconsinites specifically have been great big steaming piles of … well, failure during the coronavirus pan(dem)ic. Most Wisconsinites and all of the state-level news media have accepted the Evers Edicts without protest or even questioning, and have questioned nothing coming out of the Department of Health Services, which, contrary to public belief, is as political a state agency as any. The supposedly Republican-controlled Legislature has failed to even debate one of Evers’ executive orders when at least some of them are blatantly unconstitutional at both the federal and state levels. Church leaders have also knuckled under to the Evers Edicts, as if going to church really isn’t as important as church leadership has been claiming all these decades.
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Thursday’s unemployment update confirms that over the last three weeks, nearly 17 million Americans have been laid off because of the shutdown. That’s one-tenth of the nation’s workforce. It’s not just an economic fact. It’s a public health disaster. If the shutdown is dragged on, as many public health experts recommend, it is almost certain to kill more Americans than coronavirus.
The academics and public health officials who have concocted models of the virus’s spread are telling us that we have to continue the shutdown to save thousands of lives. But none of their models considers the deaths that will be caused by unemployment.
Before the virus hit, America’s unemployment rate was 3.5%, the lowest in 50 years. Now Goldman Sachs predicts unemployment could spike to 15% by midyear. A St. Louis Federal Reserve economist grimly predicts 32% unemployment — worse than during the Great Depression.
No model or guesswork is required to foresee the deadly impact. Job losses cause extreme suffering. Every 1% hike in the unemployment rate will likely produce a 3.3% increase in drug overdose deaths and a 0.99% increase in suicides according to data provided by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the medical journal Lancet. These are facts based on experience, not models. If unemployment hits 32%, some 77,000 Americans are likely to die from suicide and drug overdoses as a result of layoffs. Scientists call these fatalities deaths of despair.
Then add the predictable deaths from alcohol abuse caused by unemployment. Health economist Michael French from the University of Miami and a co-author found a “significant association between job loss” and binge drinking and alcoholism.
The impact of layoffs goes beyond suicide, drug overdosing and drinking. Overall, the death rate for an unemployed person is 63% higher than for someone with a job, according to findings in Social Science & Medicine.
Layoff-related deaths are likely to far outnumber the 60,400 coronavirus deaths predicted through August.
This comparison is not meant to understate the horror of coronavirus for those who get it and their families.
But heavy-handed state edicts to close all “nonessential businesses” need to be reassessed in light of the predictable harm to the lives and health of the uninfected.
The shutdown was originally explained as a way to “flatten the curve,” allowing time to expand health care capacity, so lives would not be needlessly lost in overwhelmed hospitals.
When the shutdown is lifted, cases will increase. And some epidemiologists predict the virus could return in a second wave this fall. But as President Donald Trump reported Friday, hospitals are ready now, supplied with ventilators, caregivers and beds. Some cities are now oversupplied. Even New York state, with half the cases in the nation, reports enough beds. Temporary bed capacity there provided by the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is largely empty and unneeded.
Trump’s social distancing guidelines expire April 30, suggesting the possibility of restarting parts of the economy shortly thereafter.
To make any reopening possible, schools should resume in most places, so working parents can return to jobs. Even in New York state, the coronavirus epicenter with almost half the deaths, only one child under 10 has died. Some 84% of fatalities in New York are people over 60.
When America faced a polio epidemic in the 1950s, schools were shutdown because polio disproportionately impacted children. It makes little sense with coronavirus, which usually spares the young.
On Tuesday, Trump [announced] a committee focused on how to reopen America for business. That’s a reassuring sign. It won’t be done by a flick of the switch. It will depend on testing, on accommodations employers make to help workers feel safe and on the confidence level of consumers who ultimately decide when it’s again safe to patronize restaurants and theaters.
The president’s public health advisers are saying the virus will “determine the timetable.” Mr. President, listen also to the silent majority, who will suffer most from an indefinite shutdown. It’s not just their jobs that are on the line. Their lives are, too.
That’s not the only unintended consequence of shutting down the country. Amanda Prestigiacomo:
Veteran scholar of epidemiology Dr. Knut Wittkowski, formerly the head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at Rockefeller University in New York City, argued in a interview published earlier this month that shelter-in-place policies could actually result in more deaths in the long term.
The general argument made by Dr. Wittkowski is that lockdown orders prolong any efforts in developing so-called herd immunity, which is our only weapon in “exterminating” the novel coronavirus outside of a vaccine, and that could optimistically take longer than 18 months. Focusing on shielding the most vulnerable to the virus (our elderly and folks with comorbidities) while allowing the young and healthy to build up immunity would, in the end, save more lives, Wittkowski argued.
“With all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity,” the epidemiologist said. “About 80% of the people need to have had contact with the virus, and the majority of them won’t even have recognized that they were infected, or they had very, very mild symptoms, especially if they are children.”
“So, it’s very important to keep the schools open and kids mingling to spread the virus to get herd immunity as fast as possible, and then the elderly people, who should be separated, and the nursing homes should be closed during that time, can come back and meet their children and grandchildren after about 4 weeks when the virus has been exterminated,” he continued.
Herd immunity, Wittkowski argued, would stop a “second wave” headed for the United States in the fall.
“If we had herd immunity now, there couldn’t be a second wave in autumn,” he said. “Herd immunity lasts for a couple of years, typically, and that’s why the last SARS epidemic we had in 2003, it lasted 15 years for enough people to become susceptible again so that a new epidemic could spread of a related virus. Because typically, there is something that requires cross-immunity, so if you were exposed to one of the SARS viruses, you are less likely to fall ill with another SARS virus. So, if we had herd immunity, we wouldn’t have a second wave.”
“However, if we are preventing herd immunity from developing, it is almost guaranteed that we have a second wave as soon as either we stop the social distancing or the climate changes with winter coming or something like that,” added Wittkowski. …
Dr. David L. Katz, president of True Health Initiative and the founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, writing at The New York Times on March 20, suggested our “fight” against COVID-19 could be worse than the virus itself.
“The ‘unique’ nature of COVID-19 — that it results in only ‘mild’ symptoms in 99% of cases and that it appears to only pose a high risk to the elderly — Katz contends, makes it particularly suited for a more strategic containment effort, rather than our current unsustainable, society-wide approach that threatens to upend the economy,” The Daily Wire reported at the time.
“The clustering of complications and death from Covid-19 among the elderly and chronically ill, but not children (there have been only very rare deaths in children), suggests that we could achieve the crucial goals of social distancing — saving lives and not overwhelming our medical system — by preferentially protecting the medically frail and those over age 60, and in particular those over 70 and 80, from exposure,” Dr. Katz explained.
“I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life — schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned — will be long lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself,” he added.
Moreover, John P.A. Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine with focuses on medicine, epidemiology, population health and biomedical data science, warned last month that we are working off incomplete data and potentially causing more harm in our response.
What happens as well when the next bacteria- or virus-caused illness outbreak proves to be resistant to all our germ warfare of the past couple of months? (Note the numerous studies that report that children who grow up with pets are less likely to get serious illnesses than those who live in homes without dogs and/or cats. We have two of each, by the way.) It is safe to assume that nature is cooking up something that could make the coronavirus look like the sniffles, and how we are treating the coronavirus might make us suspectible to the next bad thing.
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John Daniel Davidson demonstrates Lord Acton’s observation that “power corrupts”:
There’s nothing like a crisis to bring clarity. The response of some mayors and governors to the coronavirus pandemic in recent days has made it clear they think they have unlimited and arbitrary power over their fellow citizens, that they can order them to do or not do just about anything under the guise of protecting public health.
We’ve now witnessed local and state governments issue decrees about what people can and cannot buy in stores, arrest parents playing with their children in public parks, yank people off public buses at random, remove basketball rims along with private property, ticket churchgoers, and in one case try—and fail—to chase down a lone runner on an empty beach. All of this, we’re told, is for our own good.
The most egregious example of this outpouring of authoritarianism was an attempt by Louisville, Kentucky, Mayor Greg Fischer to ban drive-in church services on Easter. On Holy Thursday, one day before Christians were to begin their most important religious celebrations of the year, Fischer declared that drive-in Easter services would be illegal.
To remove all doubt about his seriousness, he also threatened arrest and criminal penalties for anyone who dared violate his order, and in an Orwellian twist, invited people to snitch on their fellow citizens. Fischer justified this by saying it was “to save lives.”
Thankfully, a federal judge made short work of the mayor’s idiotic power-grab, issuing a temporary restraining order against the city of Louisville on Saturday, writing so as to remove all doubt, “The Mayor’s decision is stunning. And it is, ‘beyond all reason,’ unconstitutional.”
The mayor shouldn’t have needed a federal judge to tell him that. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the U.S. Constitution should know the government can’t single out religious worship for special regulations and prohibitions, which is precisely what the clueless Fischer did here. His order would have barred Christians from driving to their church parking lots and sitting in their vehicles for Easter services—all while maintaining proper social distancing—while imposing no such restrictions on drive-up and drive-through restaurants, liquor stores, grocery stores, or parking lots generally.
Mayors or governors—or even presidents—can no more single out Christians on Easter than they can single out Muslims during Ramadan or Jews on Yom Kippur. If you’re going to ban parking in parking lots, it has to apply to everyone everywhere.
But this didn’t just happen in Louisville. Two churches in Greenville, Mississippi, that were holding drive-in services for Holy Week said police showed up and ordered churchgoers to leave or face a $500 fine.
In a video posted on Twitter from Pastor Hamilton of King James Bible Baptist Church in Greenville, a police officer tells Hamilton that because of the governor’s order, “your rights are suspended.” To the good pastor’s credit, he correctly notes that the governor cannot suspend his rights because his rights come from God, not the government.
Video from Pastor Hamilton of King James Bible Baptist Church in Greenville, MS. Church tried the “drive-in” method of holding services & were targeted due to the Mayor issuing an order prohibiting such services. Watch as an officer tells the Pastor that his rights are suspended. pic.twitter.com/zLdT6Qd8ew
— Nick Short 🇺🇸 (@PoliticalShort) April 11, 2020
Pandemic or not, this stuff has no place in American society. Petty tyranny of the kind these mayors and local officials are scheming is wholly alien to our customs and way of life, and destructive to the social contract on which our nation is built.
Thankfully, the Department of Justice has taken notice of this fledgling authoritarian streak among the country’s mayors and governors. A DOJ spokesman said Saturday Attorney General William Barr is “monitoring” government regulation of religious services and may take action against local governments as early as this week.
That’s a good start, but the targeting of churches, while undoubtedly the most offensive overreach by state and local governments, is hardly the only instance of government gone wild. In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has taken it upon herself to declare what items are and are not “essential,” dictating to grocery stores what they can and cannot sell as part of a sweeping order issued Friday.
Among the nonessential, and therefore banned, items are fruit and vegetable plants and seeds. Never mind that growing fruits and vegetables at home right now would help maintain social distancing during the pandemic, the governor has spoken and her word is law. (Lottery tickets, on the other hand, are still permitted.)
Beyond the fruit and vegetable ban, the governor’s order is an object lesson in the absurdity and inconsistency of arbitrary power and rule by fiat. Michiganders are banned from traveling “between residences” if they own a cottage or a summer home, but the ban only applies to Michigan residents, so an out-of-stater with a cottage in the Upper Peninsula could presumably still visit. The ban also still allows travel between states, so if a Michigander has a cottage in Wisconsin or Ohio, he can travel without fear of being arrested or fined by state police.
Why did Whitmer tailor her order this way? Probably because she knows she has no authority to ban travel between states, or issue orders to Americans generally—no more than a mayor has the authority to shut down drive-in Easter services in his city.
That these officials need to be reminded of that, and in some cases restrained by federal judges, bodes very ill for America. Now more than ever, we need leaders who don’t just care about protecting us from the pandemic, but also care about preserving liberty in a time of crisis.
The flaw in this piece is that it doesn’t include Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, who has issued a record number of executive orders, several of which are illegal and/or unconstitutional, though the state Legislature apparently lacks the guts to challenge him.
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The New York Times tut-tus about Wisconsin’s political climate:
The Wisconsin State Legislature couldn’t agree on who to honor for Black History Month. It couldn’t hold a special session on gun violence that lasted more than a few seconds. It had stalled for weeks on releasing money to help farmers struggling with mental health issues.
So Brad Pfaff wasn’t all that shocked that, because of a partisan standoff over postponing the election, thousands of mask-wearing citizens made their way outside during the global coronavirus pandemic to vote last Tuesday.
The rest of the country was seeing Wisconsin’s political dysfunction on display, but Mr. Pfaff has already lived it.
“I was surprised how personal it got,” he said, recalling a different fight: The divisions that kept him from being confirmed as the state’s agriculture secretary. “I never wanted it to be like that.”
A brutal type of scorched-earth political warfare is flaring in America’s Dairyland.
It shows how partisanship pushed to its most strategic outer limits can ensnare not only primary election voters but also cow manure, a Christmas tree, a tourism agency and, in particular, farmers who need help.
“The Wisconsin coal mine is knee deep in dead canaries,” said Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic Party chairman. “Every possible alarm bell about a partisan divide so extreme to be potentially lethal in a literal sense has been rung.”
Mr. Pfaff inadvertently became one of those warning bells.
No blame accepted by Winkler, we see.
Low milk prices and a long global trade war have put farmers in Wisconsin and elsewhere in crisis mode for months — even before a pandemic that produced demand so low that some farmers have dumped their milk. Farms have been going bankrupt at alarming rates, and farmers facing financial ruin have killed themselves.
Late last year, 11 months after he was first named as agriculture secretary, the Republican-led State Senate voted down Mr. Pfaff’s nomination, effectively firing the Democratic nominee who nearly everyone agreed was amply qualified for the task of helping farmers navigate one of the worst farming crises in decades.
“Somebody fired in the middle of a dairy crisis, an agriculture crisis, when he publicly advocated for farmers’ mental health,” said Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat who was elected by fewer than 30,000 votes, still in disbelief five months later. “God forbid.”
Says the governor of Milwaukee and Dane counties.
Mr. Pfaff did carry out some of his duties last year, while waiting for confirmation. He hosted an Uzbek delegation studying best practices in potato cultivation and crowned Tequila Naomi, a seven-year-old Jersey, as Cow of the Year.
He wrote a dozen entries in a blog, saying in one post, “In a time of greater and greater polarization, dairy brings us together.”
But even in Wisconsin, America’s Dairyland, where thousands of farmers own more than one million cows, the cows couldn’t overcome partisanship.
The political battle in Wisconsin became particularly heated during the tenure of Gov. Scott Walker, who outraged Democrats by taking on a key liberal tenet: organized labor. After he lost the Statehouse in 2018, Wisconsin Republicans, who now control both chambers of the Statehouse, pushed through measures to strip the powers of newly elected Democrats. In November, Republicans opened a special session the governor had called to take up gun control measures — and then pounded the gavel to close the session after only a few seconds.
Wisconsin’s capital is surrounded by perfect squares of farmland dotted with red barns and grain silos. Out there, roads are named after farmers because the land has been in the family for so long.
“We’re not as Wisconsin nice as we used to be,” said Sachin Chheda, a Democratic consultant based in Milwaukee. “Farms are the badminton shuttlecock being pushed back and forth over the net.”
Brian Fraley, a local Republican strategist, said the divisiveness on display in the decision on the agriculture secretary was nearly universal, whatever the topic. Everyone wants to help farmers, but the political climate complicated things.
“Society in general is becoming more cynical and abrasive,” he said. “The filters are off and people just express themselves more crudely and quickly. They hit send too easily. The rejection of Brad Pfaff was as much about sending a signal to the governor as it was about his qualifications.”
On both sides of the aisle in Wisconsin, the current crisis can seem even more cynical and abrasive. Democrats have argued that pushing forward with the election last Tuesday — after the Republican-dominated Legislature refused to entertain the governor’s request to mail absentee ballots to all voters or reschedule the primary — put voters’ lives at risk.
Brian Reisinger, a Republican strategist, said that line of thinking “fires up our base and turns people off.” He argued that Democrats were “focusing on the flash points.”
When he was first nominated to be agriculture secretary, it didn’t seem inevitable that Mr. Pfaff, the son of dairy farmers who still pitches in on his parents’ farm on the weekends, would become one of those flash points.
“Oh, I loved the job,” he gushed one afternoon. “I knew the seriousness of the situation taking place in the countryside, and I took it very seriously when I traveled and listened and heard what was going on out there.”
There is a large part of the problem right there. Government employees — who still are paid better and have far better benefits than the people they are supposed to serve, by the way — are supposed to serve the public, not love their jobs./
Even events that were supposed to be fun played against an inescapable backdrop of economic trouble in the industry. In September, Mr. Pfaff traveled to Milk-n-More Farms in Cecil, Wis., to name Tequila Naomi the state’s Cow of the Year.
“Her udder is extremely well attached,” said Nicolle Wussow, who raises Tequila Naomi as she did the cow’s mother, grandmother and great-grandmother on the farm she took over from her parents, Even before the coronavirus crisis, she said, keeping the farm of 100 dairy cows afloat was difficult.
“The expenses just don’t go down,” Ms. Wussow said.
Across the state all last year, Mr. Pfaff was hearing similar stories. Wisconsin lost 10 percent of its dairy farms in 2019, the largest decline in the state’s history. An agriculture-centric motivational speaker started a lecture circuit. Government statistics reported that the suicide rate was higher than ever; farmer deaths were part of the reason. One farmer carved the number for a suicide hotline in his popular 11-acre corn maze.
Phones were ringing at Mr. Pfaff’s agency’s Farm Center, an advice hotline where five workers field calls. Frank Friar, a retired farm loan executive, started answering calls 12 years ago when farmers were mostly seeking help navigating leasing and fencing disputes. Now, they wanted help saving their farms from financial ruin.
Mr. Friar remembered picking up the phone in the fall to hear one caller say: “I have a gun. I have it hidden, and I have shells.”
The help center was offering farmers who seemed stressed or talked of suicide $100 vouchers they could use in the offices of mental health professionals across the state, a program that had been in place for several years and was paid for through a grant.
The vouchers soon became a touchstone in the partisan battle in the Capitol.
Several years ago, the center issued few vouchers — only 26 were distributed in 2014. But as the farm economy worsened, the need increased; seven times as many vouchers were issued just last year.
One farmer who received vouchers was David Owen, who had been struggling to keep afloat the same farm in Pulaski, Wis., where he grew up. He knew of farmers nearby facing similar hardships who had committed suicide.
“I’m not going to say I wasn’t that far-off,” he said. “I can say it didn’t bother me anymore to die.”
Mr. Owen said he and his wife had yet to cash in the vouchers when they decided to auction off their entire herd of 125 Holsteins. The help center says last year it had a 42 percent redemption rate.
“Once we made the decision to sell, it got a little easier,” Mr. Owen said.
A few days later, just before the auction, he had a heart attack. He earned money this winter doing small carpentry jobs, and on Tuesday he ventured out to vote, casting an all-Republican ballot at the town hall.
At the help center, officials had been granted $200,000 for the vouchers and other programs through the state’s budget process. But members of the Republican-controlled Joint Finance Committee had yet to officially release the money to the center and cash was running low. A fight over information on the program’s effectiveness ensued.
“What we were trying to do is be helpful to the agency and helpful to farmers who needed help,” said Representative Joan Ballweg, a Republican who is co-chairwoman of a task force on suicide prevention.
My former state representative, by the way.
As lawmakers fought, Mr. Pfaff said he thought back to the frosty morning a year ago when he stood outside a giant dairy barn and marveled at the wreckage from an ice storm. Heaps of snow had crumpled the roof. Animals were wounded, or worse.
“I saw dead cows stacked up like cordwood,” Mr. Pfaff said.
Helplessness was all he felt that day, especially when he saw a teenager hop down from his tractor to join his father surveying the tattered farm that had been in the same family for generations.
That boy might never inherit the family farm, Mr. Pfaff thought. Only $500 was left in the mental health fund, enough for five vouchers. He couldn’t stay quiet.
“If the Joint Finance Committee doesn’t want to move this funding forward immediately, then they have a choice to make: Which five farmers will it be?” Mr. Pfaff complained publicly.
Republicans were outraged at the suggestion their inaction was hurting farmers. The Republican Senate majority leader, Scott Fitzgerald, fired off a letter to Mr. Pfaff, calling his comments “offensive and unproductive.”
Republicans began rallying against Mr. Pfaff. A legislative committee at the start of the year had unanimously voted to support his nomination for agriculture secretary, but Mr. Pfaff had yet to be confirmed by the entire Senate. Rumors buzzed that Republicans might vote to reject him.
The governor quickly scrambled to save his nominee. He held private meetings with Republican senators. They were not swayed. He hosted a euchre party at the governor’s mansion. One Republican showed up.The day of the vote on his position, Mr. Pfaff knew what was coming. He holed up in his office and ignored the action on the Senate floor. Mr. Evers doubled down, causing a stir by taking a seat in the public gallery of the Senate, an extraordinary move for a sitting governor.
One after another, Democratic senators stood to defend Mr. Pfaff. They noted his record helping farmers as the Wisconsin executive director of the Farm Service Agency under President Barack Obama. He was in 4-H as a youth, they said. Farming was in his DNA. He bleeds manure, one senator said.
From behind the lectern, Mr. Fitzgerald, the majority leader, said he had warned the governor that he didn’t have enough votes for Mr. Pfaff’s nomination to succeed. The governor could have withdrawn the nomination and spared an embarrassing vote.
Frustrated with the situation, Jennifer Shilling, the Senate minority leader, said, “We need statesmen and women to figure out a way that we de-escalate this legislative nuclear war that we are in.”
If you read Shilling’s emails, which are sent to news media not from her Senate district, you would find that statement hypocritical.
The votes were counted, and Mr. Pfaff’s nomination was defeated. It was the first time since at least 1987 that the Senate had turned down a cabinet nominee. The governor swore in anger. He appointed a new agriculture secretary. Mr. Pfaff got a job at the State Department of Administration, as director of business and rural development.
The next thing the Senate should do is end the employment of Health Services secretary Andrea Palm, whose sociology degree makes her unqualified for a pandemic or anything else health-related, anbd tourism secretary-designate Sara Meaney.
Mr. Pfaff cast his ballot early a few weeks ago, before Republicans had asked for an exception to the governor’s stay-at-home orders so citizens could golf and hold Easter services. He didn’t have to venture out Tuesday into what was the culmination of recent partisan bickering — voters lining up during a pandemic.
But Mr. Pfaff recently learned a seat in his district came open in the State Senate. He is considering a candidacy.
It is unclear to me why Wisconsinites seem to think Wisconsin should be different from other states. Wisconsin has, in fact, one of the largest blobs of government in the nation — 3,120, second only to Illinois. And our political culture dating back to statehood ensures that there is never a discussion about cutting government. In such an atmosphere, in politics, winning is everything, regardless of the collateral damage.(P.S. I met Pfaff. I wasn’t impressed. I wasn’t necessarily unimpressed either, but he struck me as just another Tony Evers bureaucrat who will never stand up to his boss.)
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A former boss of mine was a huge fan of the Rolling Stones. His wife was a huge fan of the Beatles. The two bands crossed paths today in 1963 at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, England.
The number one British single today in 1966:
Today in 1971, the Illinois Crime Commission released its list of “drug-oriented records” …
You’d think given the culture of corruption in Illinois that the commission would have better and more local priorities. On the other hand, the commission probably was made up of third and fourth cousins twice removed of Richard Daley and other Flatland politicians, so, whatever, man.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 