Today in 1957, the sixth annual New Music Express poll named Elvis Presley the second most popular singer in Great Britain behind … Pat Boone. That seems as unlikely as, say, Boone’s recording a heavy metal album.
The number one British song today in 1962, coming to you via satellite:
Britain’s number one album today in 1969 was the Beatles’ “Abbey Road”:
The latest thing the Evers administration has screwed up is explained by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty:
Congressman Sean Duffy resigned from the House of Representatives effective September 23, 2019. Upon his resignation, Governor Tony Evers called a special election to fill the now vacant 7th Congressional District seat with a special general election date of January 27, 2020.
If more than one candidate from any political party runs and obtains the necessary nomination signatures, then pursuant to Evers’ schedule there will be a special primary election on December 30, 2019. Nomination signatures from potential candidates are due four weeks before the potential special primary election, on December 2, 2019.
A primary election is all but a certainty in the special election as two GOP candidates have already entered the race.
Issue: Federal law (called the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (“UOCAVA”), 52 U.S.C. §§ 20301 et seq.) gives overseas voters like deployed servicemen and women the right to vote via absentee ballot. In 2009, UOCAVA was amended by the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (“MOVE”) Act, to add the mandate that such voters receive a ballot 45 days before an election. Evers’s scheduled dates violate this federal law for both the proposed primary date and the proposed general election date.
Evers has now admitted that his Executive Order setting these dates violates federal law and he is in the process of setting new dates.
Analysis: Evers appears to have followed the same timelines used by himself and former Governor Scott Walker to call special elections for state legislative seats, but why he did so for a federal election is unclear. UOCAVA imposes requirements for federal elections which make these timelines unlawful. As a result, and as Evers has now recognized, the originally proposed election dates are unlawful.
Courts have found violations of UOCAVA and issued declaratory and injunctive relief when States have established election schedules that did not allow military voters the federally mandated 45 days to vote. In United States v. Alabama, 778 F.3d 926, 929 (11th Cir. 2015) and United States v. Georgia, 952 F. Supp. 2d 1318, 1333 (N.D. Ga. 2013), for example, state laws required runoff elections to be held less than 45 days after the corresponding election. The courts held that these state laws violated the UOCAVA.
The governor has said he will change the dates to comply with the law, which is good because it is all but certain a court would have required that anyway. This is especially true given that Wisconsin had clear notice that our election laws violated UOCAVA: in June of 2018, the state entered a consent decree with the federal government requiring the state to “take such actions as are necessary to assure that temporary overseas voters will receive all of the protections of UOCAVA in all future elections for Federal office…” The current Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator actually signed that consent decree, and yet the Commission proceeded forward as if it was fully intending to have the election that plainly violated federal law. Why no one at the Election Commission blew the whistle on the unlawful dates set by Evers is a question worth asking.
Insofar as Wisconsin law conflicts with federal law with respect to election deadlines, Wisconsin law is preempted. Any special election for the Seventh Congressional District must comply with UOCAVA. It must also comply with any state law not in conflict with federal law.
Which prompts Dan O’Donnell to comment:
In his desperation to avoid holding a special election to replace the now-retired Sean Duffy in the 7th Congressional District on the date of the Spring Election, Evers spun a web of deceit in which he now finds himself tangled.
Either he can admit that he lied about when state law required him to hold that special election or he can admit that his Administration was too incompetent to read applicable federal law before issuing his executive order.
One might imagine that neither is especially appealing.
When Duffy officially resigned his seat on September 23rd, Evers issued the head-scratching order to hold a special election for the seat on Monday, January 21st instead of the more logical Tuesday, January 22nd.
State law, his office told WisPolitics.com, dictated that the earliest the primary election could be was Tuesday, December 24th. Since Evers didn’t want to hold a primary on Christmas Eve (or New Year’s Eve the following Tuesday), he had no choice but to move the election to Monday, December 30th.
Naturally, he didn’t realize that this date marks the final night of Hanukkah (and the fifth day of Kwanzaa), and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos “respectfully demanded” that the primary be moved.
“It is unnecessary to require Wisconsinites to exercise their civic duty to vote on a day they have set aside for a religious purpose,” Vos wrote in a letter to Evers on Friday. “Our Constitution allows us to freely practice a religion if we so choose and as public servants, we must treat people of all faiths with the same dignity and respect.”
Evers did not publicly respond to this, but on Monday was forced to confront an even more pressing challenge to his planned special election—a federal law requiring 45 days before a federal election for military and overseas voters to receive and return their ballots.
Since the congressional race is a federal election, the primary would need to be 45 days before the general. Moreover, state law provides that no special election can occur after February 1st unless it coincides with the Spring Election (held next year on April 7th).
Evers wanted to avoid a special election in the heavily Republican 7th Congressional District on the date of the Spring Election because it would provide a draw to the polls for conservative voters who might otherwise stay home.
After all, the Spring Election will feature Wisconsin’s presidential primary and since the Democratic Party has a wide open primary while President Trump doesn’t have a serious Republican challenger, conventional wisdom assumes that there will be significantly higher Democrat turnout.
This would tend to buoy the chances of liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates Jill Karofsky and Ed Fallone as they try to unseat incumbent conservative justice Dan Kelly.
Assuming Kelly advances out of the primary on February 18th, either Karofsky or Fallone would have a significant inherent advantage against him in the general election because they will presumably have hundreds of thousands more Democrats than Republicans at the polls for the presidential primary.
That advantage would be somewhat muted, however, if 26 of the most conservative of Wisconsin’s 72 counties had a special congressional election in which to vote as well. Their votes might just be enough to counterbalance the expected overwhelming turnout in the heavily Democratic Milwaukee and Dane Counties and put Kelly over the top.
Evers couldn’t allow that, but he also couldn’t be seen as so Machiavellian in his political scheming, so he came up with a nonsensical reason that he just couldn’t hold the special election on April 7th: The constituents of the 7th Congressional District would be unrepresented in the House of Representatives for far too long—six months instead of four.
Those two extra months meant so much to Evers that he is now considering holding the special election on May 5th just so that he won’t have to hold it on April 7th. The Evers Administration has already demonstrated that it doesn’t examine the calendar closely enough to notice Jewish holidays, and now it’s apparently conveying that it doesn’t know that seven months is a longer time for residents of the 7th Congressional District to be unrepresented than is six months.
Of course, Evers actually does know this, but his lack of knowledge of federal law has revealed his dishonesty. Now that he is required to hold the special election on April 7th at the earliest, he is looking for a later date just so that his preferred candidate in the Supreme Court race can maintain a massive voter turnout advantage.
He never cared about residents going unrepresented at all; that was just the web he spun. Now, though, karma has tangled it and Evers is caught. Does he admit that all of his sanctimony was disingenuous and order the special election on May 5th, or does he stick to his supposed convictions and schedule the election for April 7th even though it might hurt him politically in the Supreme Court race?
The Evers (mis)administration is nine months old, and already is working hard to be the political equivalent of the Gang That Can’t Shoot Straight. Anyone who had any dealings with the Department of Public Instruction when Evers ran it should have known this was going to happen, but apparently none of Evers’ Madison and Milwaukee voters knew or cared.
Understand that we are not talking about such policy issues as Evers’ demands to raise taxes or his jonesing to ban guns. Evers and his minions can’t get the nonpartisan, nonideological political and nonpolitical things right either.
For instance, Evers decided to sneak into Platteville to visit UW–Platteville and a Platteville school without telling anyone in the news media, for reasons no one has even attempted to explain. When Scott Walker was governor, media were told at least 24 hours in advance via email, and then Walker’s media people followed up with a phone call to the media.
The corollary is Evers’ refusal to speak to unfavored news media, specifically the MacIver Institute, when he is perfectly fine with speaking to One Wisconsin Now, which meets no one’s definition of “news media.” MacIver is now suing the Evers administration for doing something Walker never did either.
It’s not as if Evers’ administration is trying hard in media relations outside of conservative media. Newspapers that used to get more detail than they could possibly use about the daily whereabouts of Walker, his wife Tonnette, or former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch now get nothing from this governor or lieutenant governor. That is Media Relations 101, and given the number of ex-journalists working in state government as public information officers you’d think one of them might say something to the party hack who is supposedly handling Evers’ media relations.
Speaking of relations, or lack thereof, Evers’ office and appointees are apparently not on speaking terms with legislators (as in non-returned emails and phone messages) whose last names are not followed by the letter D. I got that piece of information from two of them, who interestingly represent an area of the state considered to be a swing political area.
This state used to have a fantastic tourism secretary, Stephanie Klett. Since tourism is one of the three biggest pieces of this state’s economy, one would think Evers would find someone competent. One would be wrong to think that. From what I’ve been told by people in the tourism industry, the new tourism secretary, a self-proclaimed world traveler, has not been to most of this state, and her department is uninterested in promoting most of this state, perhaps because of all of those unwashed Republicans who live outstate.
Remember, following Evers’ pledge to not raise taxes, Evers’ budget proposal to raise income taxes and gas taxes? Neither happened. In fact, the 2019–21 state budget, other than Evers’ budget vetoes, bears little resemblance to what Evers proposed. It’s as if Evers didn’t even attempt to negotiate with legislative Republicans, hoping that Democrats can take over both houses of the Legislature in 2020, when the tea leaves are not favorable for that happening, at least 13 months away from the election.
As far as the election date, this state has an attorney general whose office, one would think, should be cognizant of, or at least be able to research, federal election law. Or not, it seems.
This is what voters in Milwaukee and Dane County voted into office last November — not merely liberals, but liberals incompetent at the basic functions of state government, such as media and constituent relations. The administrations of Gov. Tommy Thompson — whose years in office had more Democrats than Republicans in charge in the Legislature — and James Doyle — who governed with a Republican Legislature six out of his eight years in Office — were nowhere near this incompetent.
More U.S. voters (including 69% of independents) are angry at the media than are angry at either President Donald Trump or his political opponents, survey results released by Rasmussen Reports on Wednesday show.
“How angry are you at the media?”:
- Angry: 61% (of which, 40% are Very Angry)
- Not Angry: 38% (of which, 19% are Not at All Angry)
The 61% expressing anger at the media is up from 53% in June of last year, but off from its high of 66% in June of 2010.
Voters’ anger at the media is also greater than their anger at either President Donald Trump (53%) or his political opponents (49%) and far more Republicans (83%) than Democrats (33%) say they’re angry at the media.
More than two-thirds (69%) of unaffiliated voters say they’re angry at the media.
The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on September 29-30, 2019 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.
Why might that be? Maybe Lara Logan has an answer:
There is nothing more human than opinions and bias. To say we have none is dishonest. But what we do have as professional journalists is a simple standard to get us past that: two first-hand sources — question everything and independently verify. I didn’t invent this — I inherited it from people like Edward R. Murrow and I will keep passing it on.
Journalists are not activists. We may share the passion for a particular cause, but our job is to follow the facts wherever they may lead. We can’t ignore something that reflects badly on a noble cause, as an activist might. We have to care about the means as much as the end because our duty is to search for the whole truth.
Nor are we lawyers in a court of law, cherry-picking facts to prove our case. Fortunately, there is only one truth. How we feel about it, how we perceive it, those things are subjective but the truth itself is not.
Above all, we are not propagandists or political operatives. That is not our job.
I have profound respect for my colleagues and for what we as journalists are at our best. Today, as a whole, we are not at our best. Just ask people in towns and cities across this country, as I do. Everywhere I go, people tell me they have lost faith in journalism. It comes from all people, all walks of life and all political stripes.
Frankly, I don’t blame them. Responsibility for this begins with us.
We begin with this unusual event: Today in 1978, the members of Aerosmith bailed out 30 of their fans who were arrested at their concert in Fort Wayne, Ind., for smoking marijuana:
Britain’s number one single today in 1987:
Today in 1992 on NBC-TV’s “Saturday Night Live,” Sinead O’Connor torpedoed her own career:
When a teenage girl has an angry, tearful strop, most parents just send them to their rooms until they’ve calmed down.
However, when 16-year-old Greta Thunberg got on to the stage at the UN this week and had a full-on adolescent meltdown, she was deafened by the applause.
Not from me she wasn’t.
Because I was in the bog, being sick.
“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood,” she sobbed.
“We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?”
Right, well in the immortal words of Samuel L Jackson: “Allow me to retort.”
How dare we? No. How dare you sail to America on a carbon fibre yacht that you didn’t build which cost £15million, that you didn’t earn, and which has a back-up diesel engine that you didn’t mention.
I’m sorry Ms Thunberg, but if you’re going to lay into my generation, you must accept it when I lay into you and yours.
What about the pills you take when you have a headache?
What about the clean water that comes out of your tap? What about the food you can buy at any time of the day and night?
No 16-year-old was responsible for any of that.
What about the aid missions currently being run in some of the poorest countries of the world, or the drugs that help keep Aids at bay?
Think about all the movies you’ve enjoyed. Movies made by grown-ups. And all those comedians who’ve made you laugh.
And then pause for a moment to consider how soundly you sleep at night, knowing that adults are building and servicing and flying Sweden’s fighter planes. To keep you safe.
We gave you mobile phones and laptops and the internet. We created the social media you use every day and we run the banks that pay for it all.
So how dare you stand there and lecture us, you spoilt brat.
And yes, you are spoilt because when you told your mum and dad to stop using planes and give up meat, they didn’t behave like sane parents and ignore you. They actually said, “Yes, dear.” And did.
What they should have done is point out that life is tragic.
Some people are born bright and some are born stupid.
Some are beautiful and some are not.
Some have rich parents who give them everything but love.
Some have poor parents who have nothing to give except love.
Now shut up and let them get on with it.
This is how the world works. It’s how the world has always worked.
And banging your fists on the table won’t change a thing. You’ll learn that when you’ve got a few more years under your belt.
I agree with you that the world is heating up. You may even be right that man has something to do with it.
And there is no doubt that as deserts eat into currently habitable places in Africa and the Middle East, Europe will face an unimaginable refugee crisis.
Something needs to be done about that. So how’s this for an idea. Get back to school as quickly as possible and work hard in your science lectures.
Because science is what will solve the problem eventually. Not scowling and having screaming ab-dabs every five minutes.
Many thousands of people who you had the temerity to blame this week are trying to do exactly what you want.
So be a good girl, shut up and let them get on with it.
Anyone who has watched Clarkson on the original version of the BBC’s “TopGear” would expect something this acerbic from Clarkson. Shikma Dalmia writes less acerbically:
Every global climate summit to date has featured lots of tough talk but little action. The United Nations confab in New York that just wrapped up is no different. Nor will anything change in the future unless climate change warriors stop insisting that the world go on an energy diet—and start offering cheaper and cleaner energy options that don’t require a lifestyle where transcontinental travel means a boat like the one that the 16-year-old Greta Thunberg took from Sweden to rebuke the world’s leaders.
Human-caused global warming is real, but activists have to get real too. They think that they can spur action by simply exaggerating the urgency of climate change. Thunberg insisted that if drastic action to cut emissions isn’t taken now, basically the planet as we know it will cease to exist. Likewise, Green New Dealers like Rep. Alexander Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) have been saying that the planet has an “expiration date.”
But anyone who has watched Game of Thrones knows that dialing up apocalypse talk alone can’t overcome the collective action problem preventing action on climate change. In that drama, Queen Cersei chooses to free-ride rather than join other kingdoms in fighting the forces of Armageddon.
Climate change activists are confronting the same problem—and the more they exaggerate the sacrifices required, the more they’ll exacerbate it.
The Sixth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that preserving the planet as we know it will require keeping the global mean surface temperature at no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the average temperature in the 19th century before the industrial revolution. This is a more stringent target than that set during the 2015 Paris Accords whose goal was to hold the temperature increase to 2 degrees Centigrade.
Allowing emissions to rise more than that would mean planetary change and disruptions, to be sure. For example, coral reefs would be damaged, storms may be worse, and Arctic ice may melt in summers. But it is not clear that this will lead to planetary catastrophe by making cyclones more fierce or droughts more severe, causing mass death. Climate warriors, however, refuse to make such distinctions.
In order to hold the temperature to the 1.5 degrees threshold, the IPCC calculated that the world would have to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 40 to 50 percent by 2030 and completely by 2050. This will mean a total transition from fossil fuels to renewables like wind and solar by 2050, a goal that Ocasio-Cortez has wholeheartedly embraced for the United States.
What would the price tag for this be?
As per the IPCC’s own calculations, around $2.4 trillion annually between 2016 and 2035 in 2010 dollars—or about 2.5 percent of the global GDP. To understand just how daunting that is, consider that the total energy investments in the world amount to only around $1.7 trillion right now—which means that the world is being asked to make an additional $45 trillion in investments over 19 years to generate the same amount of energy and improve energy efficiency. The higher costs will mean scaling back First World lifestyles, of course. But they will also mean forcing Third World countries, where many people don’t even have electricity, to stay stuck in poverty for many more decades to help out generations a hundred years from now.
This may be a good long-term investment but the upfront costs—both monetary and human—are formidable which makes the politics of climate change intractable. That’s why the New York conference didn’t go anywhere. The U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres asked countries to up the commitments they’d made four years ago in Paris. Only 65 countries obliged. The biggest polluters just shrugged.
America didn’t even request a speaking slot at the event because that would have meant laying out concrete plans for actual cuts. The Australian prime minister was in town but didn’t bother showing up. China failed to announce new targets and renewed its calls that developed countries go first—no doubt because it doesn’t want to put an anchor around its already limping economy. Likewise, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Trump’s new best friend, outlined more investments in renewables but remains committed to coal projects for the foreseeable future. And the European Union, historically a leader in pushing for emission cuts, didn’t signal any intention to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.
Climate activists are blaming much of this on Trump’s Paris pullout. But that’s head-in-the-sand evasion because even if Trump were the Joan of Arc of climate change, he couldn’t ensure results. America enthusiastically led the way for the 1997 Kyoto Treaty that convinced many countries to pledge cuts, but almost none delivered before President George Bush bailed. And the reason is those that dutifully made the cuts would end up harming their economy for no gain if others didn’t follow through. So it was more expedient to promise and leave.
Climate activists are now counting on woke capital to bring these countries to heel by withholding investments from polluting nations. And several asset fund managers did indeed commit to a net-zero emissions portfolio by 2050. But the investor community as a whole is going to face the same collective action problem that the international community is confronting; namely, that if one of them foregoes lucrative investments, there will be just that much more temptation for others.
The better way might be offering clean fuel options that are so attractive that consumers simply can’t turn them down. Phone users did not switch from landlines to cell phones because they were forced to do so. They did so automatically and voluntarily because the new technology offered massive advantages relative to the costs that the old one didn’t.
Something equivalent needs to happen on the energy front to make fossil fuels obsolete. The most promising alternative on the horizon so far isn’t renewables, but nuclear. Yet environmentalists are mostly opposed to it. This was reasonable when nuclear’s upfront capital costs—namely to build layers of safety in reactors—were astronomical and options to safely dispose of spent radioactive fuel weren’t great. But the new generation of nuclear reactors is overcoming at least some of these problems. For example, Bill Gate’s Terrapower, a traveling wave reactor, is experimenting with using depleted uranium, a waste product leftover from conventional reactors.
The most revolutionary fuels are ones that no one can even imagine yet. But they will only materialize if today’s young environmental activists don’t skip school to spend two weeks boating across the ocean to attend a summit. Rather than lecturing world leaders, they’d help more if they stayed in class, listened, and learned in order to become future innovators.
Tom Still writes about my hometown:
As if the Pentagon didn’t have enough to worry about with Iran, North Korea and hostile governments elsewhere, it must now contend with the Madison School Board.
The School Board decided Monday to ask the U.S. Air Force to reconsider stationing F-35 fighter jets at Truax Field unless the negative effects identified in a draft environmental report — noise being chief among them — are found to be overblown.
“The issues identified in the draft will negatively impact learning in our schools, reduce the property tax base, decrease school enrollment in the affected area, and disproportionately affect children and families of color and people with low incomes,” read the board’s resolution.
That’s an ominous prediction. Never mind that new workers attached to the 20-plane squadron of F-35s might choose to live on the east side near Truax, send their children to city schools and generally contribute to the community as well as the national defense by upgrading the current squadron of F-16 fighters.
Along with misgivings that have surfaced within city government and from people who have testified at public hearings, the pattern is a familiar one. Madison is a very conservative city when it comes to embracing any kind of physical change. Examples abound.
• Motorists would still be navigating the asphalt cow path that was the original 1947 Beltline Highway if some public officials had their way over time.
• The Monona Terrace Convention Center would still lie fallow on the late Frank Lloyd Wright’s drawing board if civic leaders had not pulled together in the 1990s to overcome 60 years of opposition.
• The Overture Center wouldn’t be home to countless concerts and cultural events if Jerry Frautschi and Pleasant Rowland hadn’t stepped forward with $205 million and broken a logjam that included debate over whether to preserve outmoded buildings.
• University Research Park on the city’s west side might still be an experimental farm had not civic leaders, a crusading editor and the late Chancellor Irving Shain agreed that bright ideas born on campus or tied to its graduates needed a place to plant roots and grow into successful companies. Today, 125 companies, 4,000 employees and millions of dollars of value stand as proof the 1984 research park decision worked.
Madison has been described as “the city that can’t put two bricks together” by those who are frustrated by the penchant of elected officials and others to debate everything to death. The counter-argument from supporters of endless process is that Madison is merely looking out for the under-represented, the historic and the environment. Besides, they say, those projects eventually came to fruition. They just took longer.
They don’t always happen. In the mid-2000s, UW-Madison was very much in the running to become the anchor for a new National Bio and Agro-Defense facility to replace the aging federal laboratory in Plum Island, New York. Opposition from residents near the proposed site and the Dane County Board of Supervisors eventually took the Madison area off the list for the Department of Homeland Security, even though UW-Madison’s range of scientific disciplines — veterinary, agricultural and biosecurity — was an ideal fit.
Today, the National Bio and Agro-Defense facility is under construction in Manhattan, Kansas, home to Kansas State University. The $1.25 billion center will feature a biosafety level-4 laboratory, employ hundreds of scientists and technicians, and open by 2022-23. The economic impact on that region will be significant for decades to come.
While it is doubtful the Pentagon will buckle under to the Madison School Board and suddenly abandon plans to base F-35s at Truax Field, first activated as a military base in 1942, a similar episode took place a little more than a decade ago with the bio-defense facility. It could happen again.
Nearly 10 months into is his first year in office, Gov. Tony Evers has compiled a woeful record on open government.
Now the Democrat’s administration is doubling down on a “deeply troubling” policy that is closing the door to even more members of the media.
Attorney General Josh Kaul, defending Evers in a First Amendment federal lawsuit brought by the MacIver Institute, argues that only what the administration deems to be “bona fide” journalists and news organizations are entitled to attend certain press events with the governor. The MacIver Institute, according to Kaul’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, is not a “bona fide” news outlet. Never mind the fact that the conservative MacIver News Service’s reporters have been covering policy as credentialed members of the Capitol press corps for years.
“(T)he government is free to exclude individuals or groups so long as the limitations are reasonable and viewpoint neutral,” Kaul’s motion states.
Except they are not, according to MacIver’s lawsuit.
The complaint, filed in federal court, asserts the administration violated MacIver’s First Amendment rights by banning its news organization from a February briefing with the media on Evers’ budget proposal. I know that MacIver reporters were banned, because I was one of those reporters. MacIver asked to be included on the list of journalists covering the budget briefing. When the administration failed to respond, we showed up at the governor’s office, where we were denied access.
The lawsuit also alleges the governor’s press team refused to add MacIver News Service and its journalists to a “press list” that at one time included more than 1,000 email addresses.
Among those invited to Tony Evers’ exclusive club, left-wing political operative One Wisconsin Now, the Progressive, a Madison-based liberal publication, and the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.
Yet MacIver News Service, part of a free-market think tank, doesn’t make the cut because the parent organization engages in advocacy.
Evers’ arbiters of who is a bona fide journalist are themselves former officials with the Democratic Party and liberal activist organizations. The “gatekeepers” seem hardly nonpartisan judges of journalism.
Exhibit A, Melissa Baldauff, Evers’ communication director. Before taking the gig with the governor, Baldauff was a spokeswoman for the state Democratic Party.
This party hack sits in judgment of journalists. In a sworn statement, Baldauff declares that, “based on my experience with media and politics, the MacIver Institute engages in policy and lobbying.” MacIver does not lobby. It does advocate for free-market policies, as newspaper editorial boards across this country advocate for liberal government policies.
As proof that MacIver doesn’t fit into the Evers’ administration’s journalistic standards, Baldauff notes that the organization joined “44 other free market groups and individuals in urging the United States Senate to repeal all Obamacare taxes.” The horror! Certainly the First Amendment right to a free press can’t sustain such viewpoints, Baldauff suggests.
“In this case, the decision is being made by someone who herself is incredibly involved in politics and you end up in a problematic place where MacIver is denied access but someone like John Nichols (of the Progressive), who engages in much more explicit activity than MacIver, gets on the list because, from their perspective, he’s one of the good guys,” said Daniel Suhr, associate senior attorney for the Liberty Justice Center, the law firm representing MacIver.
What the latest court filing from Kaul, a Democrat, uncovered is that days after MacIver received the governor’s office’s list of acceptable media outlets through an open records request, the administration changed the rules and whittled down some of the members. The new policy actually doesn’t include rules at all, but factors or standards the governor’s office deems necessary to meet to be a real, bona fide journalist.
“The new criteria are just putting lipstick on a pig,” Suhr said. “You have the same problem at the end of the day.”
“And the factors … create way too much potential of a judgment call in favor of a liberal news outlet or commentator to get a break and for a conservative outlet, an outlet that challenges the administration or asks too many tough questions, to be denied access,” Suhr added.
But now Evers’ keepers of “the list” have kicked out other news organizations, like the Jewish Chronicle, Suhr said. Even the new Wisconsin Examiner, a liberal apologist website, is excluded, but only because the policy says the publication hasn’t been around long enough.
Evers has been knocked several times for his transparency troubles. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty in a review of the administration’s compliance with the state’s open records law found its processes “disorganized and dysfunctional” — failing to live up to the recognized standards of Evers’ predecessor, Republican Gov. Scott Walker.
Suhr, who served as legal counsel for Walker, said the former governor opened up his press and public events to all media organizations, even the ones that wanted to see him run out of office.
The attorney said the MacIver lawsuit is about breaking down the gates Evers and his team have erected around the First Amendment.
“Ultimately, this is a fight for the First Amendment. Freedom of the press is only a robust right when people step up to defend it,” Suhr said. “Every journalist and, really, every citizen has a stake in assuring the First Amendment is robust and protected for each and every one of us.”
Today in 1953, Victor Borge’s “Comedy in Music” opened on Broadway, closing 849 performances later. (Pop.)
Today in 1960, Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs released “Stay,” which would become the shortest number one single of all time:
The number one single today in 1965:
[Last] Monday, celebrity climate activist Greta Thunberg delivered a speech to the UN Climate Action summit in New York. Thunberg demanded drastic cuts in carbon emissions of more than 50 percent over the next ten years.
It is unclear to whom exactly she was directing her comments, although she also filed a legal complaint with the UN on Monday, demanding five countries (namely Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany and Turkey) more swiftly adopt larger cuts in carbon emissions. The complaint is legally based on a 1989 agreement, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, under which Thunberg claims the human rights of children are being violated by too-high carbon emissions in the named countries.
Thunberg seems unaware, however, that in poor and developing countries, carbon emissions are more a lifeline to children than they are a threat.
It’s one thing to criticize France and Germany for their carbon emissions. Those are relatively wealthy countries where few families are reduced to third-world-style grinding poverty when their governments make energy production — and thus most consumer goods and services — more expensive through carbon-reduction mandates and regulations. But even in the rich world, a drastic cut like that demanded by Thunberg would relegate many households now living on the margins to a life of greatly increased hardship.
That’s a price Thunberg is willing to have first-world poor people pay.
But her inclusion of countries like Brazil and Turkey on this list is bizarre and borders on the sadistic — assuming she actually knows about the situation in those places.
While some areas of Brazil and Turkey contain neighborhoods that approach first-world conditions, both countries are still characterized by large populations living in the sorts of poverty that European children could scarcely comprehend.
But thanks to industrialization and economic globalization — countries can, and do, climb out of poverty.
In recent decades, countries like Turkey, Malaysia, Brazil, Thailand, and Mexico — once poverty-stricken third-world countries — are now middle-income countries. Moreover, in these countries most of the population will in coming decades likely achieve what we considered to be first-world standards of living in the twentieth century.
At least, that’s what will happen if people with Thunberg’s position don’t get their way.
The challenge here arises from the fact that for a middle-income or poor country, cheap energy consumption — made possible overwhelmingly by fossil fuels — is often a proxy for economic growth.
After all, if a country wants to get richer, it has to create things of value. At the lower- and middle- income level, that usually means making things such as vehicles, computers, or other types of machinery. This has certainly been the case in Mexico, Malaysia, and Turkey.
But for countries like these, the only economical way to produce these things is by using fossil fuels.
Thus it is not a coincidence that carbon-emissions growth and economic growth track together. …
We no longer see this close a relationship between the two factors in wealthy countries. This is due to the fact many first-world (and post-Soviet) countries make broader use of nuclear power, and because high income countries have more heavily abandoned coal in favor of less-carbon intensive fuels like natural gas.2
It is thanks to this fossil-fuel powered industrialization over the past thirty years that extreme poverty and other symptoms of economic under-development have been so reduced.
For example, according to the World Bank, worldwide extreme poverty was reduced from 35 percent to 11 percent, from 1990 to 2013. We also find that access to clean water has increased, literacy has increased, and life expectancy has increased — especially in lower-income areas that have been most rapidly industrializing in recent decades. In spite of constant claims of impending doom, global health continues to improve.
Just as carbon emissions track with economic growth in middle income countries, child mortality tends to fall as carbon emissions increase. …
Industrialization isn’t the only factor behind reducing child mortality, of course. But it is certainly a major factor. Industrialization sustains modern health care amenities such as climate controlled hospitals, and it increases access to clean water and sanitation systems.
Thunberg, unfortunately, ignores all of this, mocking the idea of economic growth as a “fairytale.” But for people in the developing world, money and economic growth — two things Thunberg apparently` thinks are contemptible — translates into a longer and better life. In other words, economic development means happiness for regular people, since, as Ludwig von Mises pointed out, “Most mothers feel happier if their children survive, and most people feel happier without tuberculosis than with it.”
Thunberg’s blithe disregard for the benefits of economic growth is not uncommon for people from wealthy countries who are already living in an industrialized world built by the fossil fuels of yesteryear. For them, they associate additional economic growth with access to high fashion and luxury cars. But for the billions of human beings living outside these places, fossil-fuel-driven industrialization can be the difference between life and death.
And yet, Greta Thunberg has seen fit to attack countries like Brazil and Turkey for not more enthusiastically cutting off their primary means to quickly deliver a more sanitary, more well-fed, and less deadly way of life for ordinary people.
The Chinese know the benefits of economic growth especially well. A country that was literally starving to death during the 1970s, China rapidly industrialized after abandoning Mao’s communism for a system of limited and regulated market capitalism. But even this small market-based lifeline — sustained by fossil fuels — quickly and substantially pulled a billion people out of a tenuous existence previously threatened regularly by famine and economic deprivation.
Today, China is the world’s largest carbon emitter — by far — with total carbon emissions double that of the United States. And while the US and the EU have been cutting emissions, China won’t even pledge to cap its emissions any time before 2030. (And a pledge doesn’t mean it will actually happen.) India meanwhile, more than doubled its carbon emissions between 2000 and 2014, and its prime minister refuses to pledge to cut its coal-fired power generation.
And who can blame these countries? First-world school children may think it’s fine to lecture Chinese factory workers about the need to cut back their standard of living, but such comments are likely to fall on deaf ears if climate policy means destroying the so-called “fairytale” of economic growth.5
As one Chinese resident said in response to Thunberg on China’s social media platform Weibo: “If the economy doesn’t grow, what do us people living in developing countries eat?”
Advocates for drastic cuts in emissions might retort: “even if our policies do make people poorer, they’d be a lot worse off with global warming!”
Would they though?
At the UN, Thunberg thundered, “People are suffering. People are dying [because of climate change.]” But that isolated assertion doesn’t tell us what we need to know when it comes to climate-change policy.
The question that does matter is his: if the world implements drastic Thunbergian climate change policies will the policies themselves do more harm than good?
The answer may very well not be in the climate activists’ favor. After all, the costs of climate change must be measured compared to the costs of climate change policy. If economic growth is stifled by climate policy — and a hundred million people lose out on clean water and safe housing as a result — that’s a pretty big cost.
After all, the benefits of cheap energy — most of provided by fossil fuels — are already apparent. Life expectancy continues to go up — and is expected to keep making the biggest gains in the developing world. Child mortality continues to go down. For the first time in history, the average Chinese peasant isn’t forced to scratch out a subsistence-level existence on a rice paddy. Thanks to cheap electricity, women in middle income countries don’t have to spend their days cleaning clothes by hand without washing machines. Children don’t have to drink cholera-tainted water.
It’s easy to sit before a group of wealthy politicians and say “how dare you” for not implementing one’s desired climate policy. It might be slightly harder to tell a Bangladeshi tee-shirt factory worker that she’s had it too good, and we need to put the brakes on economic growth. For her own good, of course.
And this has been the problem with climate-change policy all along. Although the burden of proof is on them for wanting to coerce billions into their global economic-management scheme, the climate-change activists have never convincingly made the case that the downside of climate change is worse than the downside of crippling industrializing economies.
This is why the activists so commonly rely on over-the-top claims of total global destruction. One need not waste any time on weighing the options if the only choices presented are “do what we want” or “face total global extinction.”
But even climate change activists can’t agree the Armageddon approach is accurate. Last year, for example, Scientific American published “Should We Chill Out About Global Warming?” by John Horgan which explores the idea “that continued progress in science and other realms will help us overcome environmental problems.”
Specifically, Horgan looks at two recent writers on the topic, Steven Pinker and Will Boisvert. Neither Pinker nor Boisvert could be said to have libertarian credentials, and neither take the position that there is no climate change. Both assume that climate change will lead to difficulties.
Both, however, also conclude that the challenges posed by climate change do not require the presence of a global climate dictatorship. Moreover, human societies are already motivated to do the sorts of things that will be essential in overcoming climate-change challenges that may arise.
That is, pursuing higher standards of living through technological innovation is the key to dealing with climate change.
But that innovation isn’t fostered by shaking a finger at Brazilian laborers and telling them to forget about a family car or household appliances or travel at vacation time.
That isn’t likely to be a winning strategy outside the world of self-hating first-world suburbanites. It appears many Indians and Brazilians and Chinese are willing to risk the global warming for a chance at experiencing even a small piece of what wealthy first-world climate activists have been enjoying all their lives.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 