Today’s first song is posted in honor of the first FM signal heard by the Federal Communications Commission today in 1940:
Today in 1968, Jimi Hendrix was jailed for one day in Stockholm, Sweden, for destroying the contents of his hotel room.
The culprit? Not marijuana or some other controlled substance. Alcohol.
Today in 1973, Bruce Springsteen released his first album, “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.” It sold all of 25,000 copies in its first year.
I have written here about the Far East Side of Madison, where I grew up. (Including what could have been, but wasn’t, the neighborhood high school.)
The Facebook Historic Madison group discovered two newspaper ads. First, chronolotgically speaking, from 1961:
Quoting from myself (actually another blog):
The first subdivision in the area south of Cottage Grove Road east of U. S. 51 was Harry Vogts’ Acewood from 1959. By 1962 many small, medium, and large builders and developers were active in the area; two of the larger were Towne Realty of Milwaukee that used Findorff, a Madison company, to build its houses, and the Lucey Realty Service owned by Patrick J. Lucey who was governor of Wisconsin from 1971 to 1977.
Many streets are named for local residents: Steinhauer Trail, Starker Avenue, Vinje Court, and Droster Road. Several are for builders; Montgomery Drive is for William C. Montgomery. First names are common as in Bonnie Lane, Ellen Avenue, Wendy Lane,and Melinda Drive. Female names greatly outnumber male names. Painted Post Road is from Lucey’s Painted Post Subdivision. Bird streets are Meadowlark Drive, Sandpiper Lane, Pelican Circle, and Tern Court. …
One major street, Acewood Boulevard, began about 1959 in Harry Vogts’ Acewood subdivision. Vogts (1908-1994) owned Ace Builders, Inc., and had already named one subdivision in Glendale Aceview.
New Acewood (which one assumes was phase 2 of Acewood) was the neighborhood to which we moved in 1966, five years after this ad. All the houses I rememberhad one-car garages, which worked fine for my parents at the time since they had only one car.
But while my parents were situating in their new-to-them house, to the east was …
By 1958 when large scale suburban development began in the area east of U. S. 51, south of Milwaukee Street, and north of Cottage Grove Road, developers such as Aaron Elkind, Donald Sanford, and Albert McGinnis knew a lot about selling houses to middle income clients.
They made certain that subdivisions named Kingston-Onyx, Rolling Meadows, and Heritage Heights promised pleasant surroundings. Streets with names such as Diamond, Turquoise, and Crystal sparkled with the promise of a high-quality product in a landscape filled with singing birds on streets named Chickadee Court, Bob-o-link Lane, and Meadowlark Drive.
Heritage Heights suggested merry England with Kingsbridge Road, Queensbridge Road, and Knightsbridge Road.
As I’ve written before, this was the neighborhood that was probably as suburban as you could get while still beingwithin the Madison city .limits. Thanks to the lakes and surface streets not really designed for the traffic they ended up getting, getting downtown or to the UW campus took more time than the crow needed to fly. Other than three hellish years at Schenk Middle School (which may have been the fault of the students more than anything else), life seemed pretty safe to the point of dullness in Heritage Heights, which makes you think of …
… the unofficial theme song of our ’80s neighborhood.
As long as we’re running the wayback machine, we should bring up this Facebook gem:
Before McDonald’s became ubiquitous, and well before anyone in the Culver family thought of dumping A&W and going off on their own, there was Kelly’s, which as you’ll note from the menu was kind of McDonald’s without golden arches but with the dancing Pickle Pete.
The slightly odd thing here is that the listed menu does not include hot dogs. I know that Kelly’s had hot dogs, because for some reason I wouldn’t eat hamburgers until sometime in grade school.
WISC-TV remembered Kelly’s and another burger place:
P-P-Pickle P-P-Pete!!!
Once upon a time, Kelly’s Hamburgers was a national chain that competed with the likes of McDonald’s. Madison had several Kelly’s locations around town, but locally, the restaurants are best remembered for their iconic mascot—a smiling dill pickle slice with a stutter, called Pickle Pete. He appeared in newspaper ads and radio jingles in the ’60s and ’70s and, as best as we know, Pickle Pete was unique to the Madison market. …
A Night at the Drive-In
For east-siders, few places from the mid-20th century are more fondly remembered than the Monona Root Beer Drive-In across from Olbrich Park. Famed for its curly fries made by hand, the drive-in was best known by the nickname the “Hungry Hungry” because of the large neon sign that flashed the word “hungry.” Some Madisonians even recall seeing the sign across Lake Monona from downtown. This photo belongs to former drive-in owner Tim Femrite, who worked there in the ’50s as a teenager. “I started there humping cars—that means waiting on them,” Femrite says. “I cut buns, peeled onions, pattied hamburgers. It was hot in the summertime, but it was fun.”
The number one single today in 1959:
Today in 1970, the Who’s Keith Moon was trying to escape from a gang of skinheads when he accidentally hit and killed chauffeur Neil Boland.
The problem was Moon’s attempt at escape. He had never passed his driver’s license test.
I wanted to write this column about dogs. If you follow me on Twitter or have read my work elsewhere, you probably know that about me: I like my dogs. Though truth be told, I probably like your dogs, too. Because I just like dogs.
It’s a common sentiment. Dog ownership has been going up markedly for a while now. There are some who worry that dogs — and even cats — are replacing human children as the objects of our devotion.
There’s evidence to support the claim. Many young couples are more eager to have pets than kids. Expenditures on pet insurance have soared. One often sees dogs referred to as “furbabies” on social media. Two decades ago, my wife and I struggled to find hotels on our cross-country drives that would accommodate dogs (at least at a reasonable price). Now, many hotels compete for the attention of dog owners. Some businesses eager to hire skilled young workers have generous bring-your-dog-to-work policies, and some even provide “pawternity” care for new dog owners.
A survey by SunTrust Bank found that 33 percent of first-time home-buying Millennials said the desire for a better space for their dog was a factor in their decision. Only 25 percent said marriage was an issue, and just 19 percent said children were.
Psychologist Clay Routledge makes a persuasive case that dog ownership is a symptom of America’s very real loneliness crisis. As our society becomes more individualistic, Routledge observed in National Review, “pets may be appealing to some because they lack the agency of humans and thus require less compromise and sacrifice.”
And the problem will like get worse because, as Routledge notes, young people report much more anxiety and isolation in the era of the smartphone, which is why anxious college students increasingly request the support of “companion animals.”
In his book Them, Senator Ben Sasse catalogs America’s loneliness crisis. We have fewer and fewer “non-virtual” friends. Americans entertain others in their homes half as much as they did 25 years ago. People don’t know — never mind socialize with — their neighbors the way they once did.
There’s much to ponder and debate here. But it seems obvious that Routledge is on to something.
Which brings me back to what I wanted to write about. I post a lot of videos and pictures of my dogs, Zoë and Pippa, on Twitter, that distorted and distorting window on the national conversation. I also follow many of the hugely popular dog-focused Twitter accounts (WeRateDogs, The Dogist, Thoughts of Dog, etc.).
Dogs — and animals generally — are among the few things that bridge the partisan divide. Tragedies are a partisan affair. If someone dies in a hurricane or shooting, there’s a mad rush to score political points. Last week, a lovely young woman, Bre Payton, died from a sudden illness, and a bunch of ghouls mocked or celebrated her demise because she was a conservative.
Even babies can be controversial, since babies can touch various nerves, from abortion politics to the apparent scourge of “misgendering” newborns.
But dogs are largely immune to political ugliness. The angriest complaints I get about my dog tweets — from people on both the left and the right — are that I’m wasting apparently scarce resources on dogs when I could be expressing my anger about whatever outrage the complainers demand I be outraged about.
This is one of the reasons I love dogs. Because it is an occupational hazard in my line of work to be constantly drenched in the muck of politics, dogs are a safe harbor. They don’t care about political correctness. They don’t want to Make America Great Again or join the “Resistance.” They just want to pursue doggie goodness as they see it.
It strikes me that all of these things are connected. The increasing nastiness of our politics is a byproduct of our social isolation. We look to politics to provide the sense of meaning and belonging once found in community and religion, which is why everything is becoming politicized. The problem is that politics, particularly at the national level, is necessarily about disagreement, which is why it cannot provide the sense of unity people crave from it.
And that’s one reason why dogs are so appealing. In an era when everything is a source of discord and politicization, it’s good to have something that stands — and sits and fetches — apart. Because they’re all good dogs.
Last point first. Recall that the author of Marley and Me lovingly chronicled all the bad things Marley the yellow lab did. After the column he wrote upon Marley’s death, his voice mail reached capacity with tales, plus additional emails, about the bad things those owners’ dogs did. (Like eat items of clothing and throw them back up whole.) So what is a “good dog” depends on your opinion of what your dog just did.
My general opinion of parenting is that people who don’t want to be parents shouldn’t be parents, so the “furbabies” thing is something that can easily be ignored.
Related to that is this comment:
Dogs are sentient (they think, learn and express emotions), loving, and they really only know how to live in the moment. It’s a great combination of traits for people who are sick of people but don’t want to live in total isolation.
There were also a few buzzkill comments:
Well …
… here is Max, our “rescue” dog. This is the puppy we were introduced to one Sunday at church, who then kept inviting himself across the street, probably because his owner was new and didn’t know how to take care of a dog. The owner also didn’t notice the part of her lease that said “no pets,” which made her look for a new home for the former Peanut. We found this out one Sunday and left a note on her door. The following Saturday I was going to announce a college basketball game, but as I was leaving she appeared at the door and wanted to know if we were still interested. I said I was leaving, but talk to the people inside, and sure enough, when I left we had one dog and one cat, but when I got home we had two dogs and one cat. The one thing I did rescue him from was being outlawed by the city, which had one sense-challenged alderman who thought “pit bulls” (however they are defined, something the proposed ordinance did not do) should be banned. Happily, I caught him in a public lie, and that ended not only the ordinance, but eventually his political career.
(Re PETA and HSUS, I bet that misbehavior stops the next time a dog owner pulls a gun on them defending their dog.)
The previous quotes prove the point of those who prefer dogs to humans — there may be no bad dogs, but there certainly are bad dog owners because there are bad people.
Joe Setyon describes what the federal government “shutdown” is not:
“In shutdown, national parks transform into Wild West—heavily populated and barely supervised,” blares a headline from The Washington Post. “It’s a free-for-all: shutdown brings turmoil to beloved US national parks,” says The Guardian. “National parks getting trashed during government shutdown,” writes HuffPost. The Associated Press says: “Garbage, feces take toll on national parks amid shutdown.” And lest we forget about our beloved museums, the Post sighs, “The Smithsonian and the National Gallery held on as long as they could. They’re closing.”
Sounds like a crisis! But at most it’s an unfortunate nuisance.
Some background: Parts of the federal government have been shut down since December 21 over President Donald Trump’s demands for border wall money. While Trump has already approved about $931 billion of the proposed $1.2 trillion in spending for the fiscal year, funding has lapsed for agencies that rely on the rest. This didn’t automatically mean closures. Thanks to a contingency plan adopted by the National Park Service earlier this year, many national parks remained open for a time, just without the park rangers, maintenance workers, and other staff who’ve been furloughed by the shutdown.
But without those workers, trash has piled up and restrooms have gradually gotten dirtier. As a result, officials have opted to close down Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Joshua Tree National Parks in California, as well as parts of Yosemite.
In D.C., meanwhile, the Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art remained open using leftover funds that had been previously allocated. That money has since run out, and the Smithsonian announced today that its museums and the National Zoo would be closing. The National Gallery notes at the top of its website that its status after today “is yet to be determined.”
It’s not hard to understand why some people are making a fuss over these closings. This is, after all, one of the more visible effects of the shutdown. That’s because the federal services and employees deemed “essential”—the parts of the government authorized to shoot you, for instance—are still functioning. National parks and the various historical and artistic institutions run by the federal government are classified as “non-essential,” and rightfully so. Without getting into whether these institutions should be privatized (though there’s a good case for that), their current closures largely affect people’s leisure activities and nothing more.
The closures are definitely unfortunate for tourists who planned trips around these parks and/or museums. But even then, there are plenty of privately run institutions that aren’t affected by the government shutdown at all. In D.C. alone, there’s the Phillips Collection, the National Building Museum, and the Newseum. If you’re sad the National Zoo’s Panda Cam is turned off, you can head to YouTube for your fix. Plus, while California may have more national parks than any other state, it also has a sprawling state park system.
Even the supposed “trashing” of the parks isn’t cause for too much concern. The worry largely stems from issues involving litter, dirty bathrooms, and people relieving themselves in the wrong places. Disgusting problems, for sure, but ones that are not hard to remedy once furloughed employees are back on the clock. In the meantime, shutting the parks and not letting the trash pile up any further is the right thing to do.
American Consequences describes what a real shutdown would look like:
The Wall Street Journal reports that some 380,000 federal employees are at home without any idea when they’ll receive another paycheck… and another 420,000 employees deemed “essential” are working without pay.
Of course, these folks will get paid when the government comes back online. They always have before… under President Clinton in 1995 and 1996, under Obama in 2013, and during the three “mini shutdowns” we had last year.
These so-called shutdowns are anything but.
Despite the headlines, they have no significant effect on the market… on the economy… or on the political process.
No matter your hopes and dreams, the government will never truly shut down.
It will remain – bigger than ever – with trillion-dollar annual borrowing, more than $20 trillion in total debt, and massive open-ended entitlement programs.
Back in 2017 P.J. O’Rourke wrote:
In the interest of adding a little cogitation to the process of governance, let’s conduct a “thought experiment.” Let’s think about just one of the purposes that the federal government has been put to – providing entitlement handouts.
Let’s think about not doing that anymore. …
What if the U.S. federal government got out of the entitlement business? Why is it even in this business? Entitlement spending makes up 60% of the federal budget. The United States was not founded as a charity.
Where in the U.S. Constitution does it say that the purpose of the federal government is to take money from one group of people and give it to another group of people in order to make a third group of people feel good? (That third group being the kind-hearted folks who are always eager to help right society’s wrongs – with somebody else’s money.)
The economic upside to ending federal handouts is so obvious that even a bleeding-heart economist with a column in the New York Times would notice it. (I’m talking to you, Paul Krugman.)
We take that 60% of the budget, set 10% aside to lower the debt and deficit, and give ourselves a 50% tax cut. A 19.8% top tax bracket! This is almost as good as living in Hong Kong (top rate 15%) except without having a communist dictator with the world’s largest military force on our doorstep.
But what happens to people when the federal government stops giving them handouts?
First, let’s talk about what doesn’t happen. Some federal government entitlements are not handouts. Namely veterans’ benefits. Here is a useful purpose for government. When our fellow citizens put themselves at risk to protect us (and are paid rather poorly for doing so), we taxpayers should pick up the tab for their medical care, retirement, and whatever else we’ve promised them.
Also, Social Security and the part of Medicare that’s paid for by the Medicare trust fund aren’t really handouts. People spend their whole working lives paying into these schemes that the government has the nerve to call “insurance plans.” People rightly expect to get a return on their “involuntary investments.”
We should get rid of Social Security and Medicare anyway.
But what will happen to the old folks? They’ll get rich.
Social Security and Medicare should have been privatized long ago. The libertarian think tank, Cato Institute, has been studying Social Security and retirement healthcare privatization for years. Google “Cato Institute” on the subjects to see a variety of well thought-out and practical ways that private wealth funds could replace the pitfalls of public funding (like this one).
In the meantime, let’s look at some figures from a liberal think tank, the Urban Institute. Its analysis of government retirement programs claims that a dual-income couple earning average wages and retiring in 2020 will typically receive $1,059,000 in lifetime Social Security and Medicare benefits.
Sounds pretty good – until you do the rest of the math. According to the Urban Institute that couple – each of them working from age 22 to age 67 – will have paid a total of $853,000 in Social Security and Medicare taxes.
A million-plus return on an $853,000 investment is swell – if it happened in yesterday’s day trade. But over 45 years?!
Averaging it out, the couple put almost $19,000 a year into their “involuntary investments.” Let’s say the two of them have no financial savvy at all. Let’s say they put their annual $19,000 into an ordinary savings account that since 1975 has paid on average 3.5% a year in interest. (The Urban Institute couple are a very average pair.)
The couple would be more than twice as rich!
As it is, they only get their million dollars if they live long enough and get sick enough to qualify for all their entitlements. What happens if they get struck by a meteor the day after they retire? Nothing. It’s the government’s money. Their $1,059,000 goes to some other old, sick couple.
If our Urban Institute couple had $2 million of their own, they could make a will and leave it to…
NOT to the federal government. They could leave it to an organization that was founded as a charity.
And charity will be needed if we stop federal government entitlement handouts.
We can privatize our way out of Social Security and Medicare and eliminate approximately $1.5 trillion a year in federal entitlement spending. But that still leaves us with the nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid and other welfare entitlements.
Which brings us to the most important part of this thought experiment.
What kind of a nation are we? If the federal government got out of the entitlement business, would we make it our business to feed the hungry, treat the sick, comfort the distressed, and help the helpless?
I hope to hell we would!
We might do it through state, city, town, and county programs that replace some of the federal entitlements. Surely local people know what the needy in their communities need better than Washington does.
But mostly we would perform real acts of charitableness with real charity. (Memo to those kind-hearted folks who are always eager to help right society’s wrongs: Giving somebody else’s money to somebody else is not charity.)
Americans already make more charitable donations than anyone else on earth. And the Gallup Poll “World Giving Index” says we are outranked in the percentage of what we give only by humble Myanmar. Good for you, people of what used to be called Burma!
The National Philanthropic Trust, a nonprofit that keeps track of these things, says that in 2015 individual Americans donated $373.3 billion to charity. Corporations gave $18.5 billion. And private charitable foundations contributed $57.2 billion.
That’s a total of $449 billion. In our thought experiment, we’re already halfway to meeting the needs that the remaining federal government entitlement programs were supposed to address.
And this is assuming that there’s no waste, fraud, and abuse in the $1 trillion federal poverty entitlement programs. (In which case, we’d have to work with a hypothesis that clearly isn’t true.)
But we can do better than $449 billion in charitable giving. We’ve just gotten a 50% tax cut. We have some extra cash. The average household contribution to charity is currently $2,974.
Let’s double it. Let’s triple it. However, not until we’ve spent some time pondering the fundamental purposes of the federal government.
As I said, it’s just a thought experiment. But I like what I see in the test tube.
The number one single on both sides of the Atlantic today in 1957:
Today in 1964, NBC-TV’s Tonight show showed the first U.S. video of the Beatles:
Today in 1967, Beach Boy Carl Wilson got his draft notice, and declared he was a conscientious objector.
Today in 1969, Jimi Hendrix appeared on BBC’s Lulu show, and demonstrated the perils of live TV:
I didn’t get around to writing my usual That Was the Year That Was 2018 because I was too busy at the end of 2018 to do it.
It would be hard to improve, however, on the opinion of James Wigderson:
It was the worst of times, it was the dumbest of times. Wisconsin politics can get pretty stupid, and politicians and voters in Wisconsin just seemed determined to prove how stupid they could be in 2018. Unfortunately, in the stupidity contest between voters and politicians, everyone lost.
There was so much stupidity in 2018, the decision by the Shorewood School District to cancel a play production of To Kill a Mockingbird only rates an honorable mention. Putting false signatures on nomination petitions doesn’t even come close. School administrators allowing students to just walk out of class to make a political point is just another forgotten note of folly. GOP Senate candidates going full-tilt Trump when his popularity tanked in Wisconsin? Hah! Even “The Hop” hops on by without making our list. We would hope that 2019 will be better but, so far, we haven’t been given too many reasons for confidence in the future.
Here is the list of the dozen dumbest events in Wisconsin politics in 2018:
12. Stormy Daniels’ Strip Bar Tour Through Wisconsin.
A porn star was treated like a hero by Wisconsin’s political left as she made appearances at strip clubs in Milwaukee and Madison because she once (allegedly) had sex with President Donald Trump.
“Look what she’s doing for women in this country,” 70-year-old Linda Nelson told the Capital Times. Nelson had never been to a strip club before Daniels’ appearance. “She’s suing our president. What could be stronger than that?”
Daniels would later lose her defamation law suit and has been ordered to pay the president’s legal fees.
After a Stormy stop in Madison, Dylan Brogan wrote in Isthmus, “Stormy sign{ed} my Constitution on a stack of topless portraits of herself.” At least she didn’t give the Constitution a lap dance.
11. Leah Vukmir’s pop up ad has funny looking union thugs.
We could create an entire list of the stupidity that occurred during the Republican primary for U.S. Senate last year, but the decision by state Sen. Leah Vukmir’s campaign to find some very blue collar-looking actors and call them union thugs was one of the dumbest ideas of 2018. It even knocked the Vukmir campaign’s press release calling Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) a “member of team terrorist” off our list.
Additional note of stupidity: everyone on the left that accused Vukmir of racism because they thought the actors looked Hispanic. Really? Just by looking at someone you can tell they’re Hispanic? And that’s not racist?
10. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers compares abortion to a tonsillectomy.
There was a lot of stupidity in the Evers campaign for governor. Evers promised to reduce the prison population by half, and then backed away from it. Evers said he won’t raise taxes when he’s planning on raising taxes. When asked about raising the gas tax $1 a gallon, Evers said everything is on the table. Evers even defended plagiarism found in the Department of Public Instruction budget.
But it takes a special kind of stupid to compare an abortion to a tonsillectomy and then say taxpayers should pay for abortions. So much for “the party of science.” We should be grateful that Evers spent most of his “education career” as a bureaucrat rather than in a science classroom.
9. The tuba that shook the walls of the GOP.
Judge Michael Screnock’s one and only television ad for his campaign for Wisconsin Supreme Court showed him playing a tuba. His campaign probably could have gotten away with it if he wasn’t being crushed on the airwaves by Judge Rebecca Dallet, who was busy falsely portraying herself as a moderate. Screnock deserved a better commercial, a better campaign plan, and more financial support from conservatives.
8. Kevin Nicholson decides to attack his fellow Republicans.
When the national Club for Growth attacked Governor Scott Walker’s record to attack state Sen. Leah Vukmir in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate, that was pretty stupid. Nicholson’s campaign compounded the error by refusing to repudiate the attack.
Nicholson then attacked Republican Party activists, inventing the term “Madison swamp” to describe the GOP just prior to the Republican Party of Wisconsin state convention. Apparently Nicholson missed the fact that Republicans controlled nearly everything in Madison prior to the last election and that a lot of grass roots Republicans worked hard to make that happen.
Nicholson even decided to accuse Vukmir of not respecting his military service, a false attack that resulted in Nicholson then saying in an interview that everyone who served in the military should be a conservative. If they weren’t conservatives, Nicholson said he had to question their “cognitive thought process.” That disaster prompted criticism from everybody.
Finally, there was Nicholson’s odd decision to have someone like Brandon Moody as his spokesman so he could alienate even more conservatives by picking a stupid fight with RightWisconsin. We’re still waiting on the explanation behind that stupid decision.
7. Rep. Rob Swearingen’s war on wedding barns.
Republicans are supposed to support free enterprise and the free market. Apparently that support stops when a committee chairman is a former president of the Tavern League of Wisconsin. Swearingen is determined to squash potential banquet competition from “wedding barns” even though they bring more tourists to Wisconsin and more business to Tavern League members.
Swearingen and the Tavern League even pushed a bill that would have eliminated tailgating at most major sporting events in their zeal to kill the wedding barn industry. While the bill passed the Assembly, it (thankfully) died in the Senate after the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty did an analysis.
Swearingen’s response to opposition to his economic protectionism was to label his critics “the far right.” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) should put an end to Swearingen’s stupid little war lest Republicans completely alienate an entire class of entrepreneurs.
6. The Democrats nominated Randy Bryce in the 1st Congressional District, wasting millions of dollars on a losing candidate for an open seat.
This is how stupid Wisconsin politics got. How is nominating Bryce to run for Congress not number one on our list?
Let us list the reasons this was a stupid decision by the Democratic voters of the 1st Congressional District:
Bryce had a record of being arrested nine times. He couldn’t explain his back child support getting paid after declaring his candidacy. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s political gossip columnist helped another person owed money by Bryce get in touch with the candidate so that debt could be mysteriously settled by an unknown Democratic Party lawyer. Bryce had to buy a rifle with campaign funds just so he could be seen shooting it in a commercial. His brother campaigned against him after Bryce called the police “terrorists.” Bryce claimed he wasn’t a politician (after losing three other political races) but was getting paid to be a political consultant by former Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chairman Mike Tate. (Proof that anything Tate touches – dies.) His campaign spokesman left to go work for Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon’s quixotic campaign for governor. Bryce compared his drunk driving arrest and conviction to the arrests of civil rights icon John Lewis for civil disobedience during the civil rights struggle.
In addition to all of that, Bryce was a pretty typical leftist with no understanding of economics who looked pretty stupid on CNN when he was asked how he was going to pay for Medicare-for-all. (Okay, so did every other Democrat who didn’t lie through their teeth.) Bryce’s understanding of the issues was so bad, Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI02) had to be a babysitter for Bryce at interviews.
Despite the Hollywood millions spent on Bryce’s candidacy, despite campaign appearances by Sen. Bernie Sanders to fire up the Democratic base, despite all of the national attention, Bryce got a lower percentage of the vote than Rob Zerban received in 2012.
5. Jeremy “Segway Boy” Ryan was arrested for allegedly trying to buy radioactive material.
Guess what? That person who is offering to sell radioactive material on the Internet so you can allegedly commit murder with it might be an FBI agent. Who would’ve thunk it?
By the way, for those media outlets that called Ryan a Republican without mentioning that he was just running for Congress as a prank and that he was actually a die-hard leftist protester? You’re pretty stupid, too.
4. Hey Leah, where are you going with that gun in your ad?
Vukmir’s campaign might have had the worst political ad this century in Wisconsin politics. The worst. When the Republican National Committee runs its seminars on political campaign management, this ad will be used as an example of what campaigns should never, ever do. From putting their own candidate in scary lighting, to the unfired gun just sitting on the table, to the manufactured threatening call, this ad was a disaster. That somebody looked at it before it was aired and said, “We gotta run this,” is a sad commentary on the IQ level of some political consultants.
If there was one, just one, fence-sitting suburban mom who saw this ad and said, “I’m going to vote Republican in November,” we can guarantee it had the opposite effect on many more.
3. Kevin Nicholson, the $11 Million Dollar Man.
Richard Uihlein invested $11 million, according to Politico, in Nicholson’s campaign to become the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, only to watch him lose to state Sen. Leah Vukmir (R-Brookfield) in the August primary. Uihlein spent that money through various Political Action Committees, including: Club for Growth, an alleged scam PAC called the Tea Party Patriots, Solutions for Wisconsin, Restoration PAC, the Great America PAC (no roller coasters), and the John Bolton Super PAC (buying his endorsement).
According to OpenSecrets.org, only $1,468,523 was spent by outside groups on Vukmir’s behalf during the Republican primary.
The next time Uihlein wants to spend $11 million on one race in Wisconsin, he should give us a call. Not because we will help him spend his money more wisely, but we will happily help him spend it.
2. Wisconsin voters decided to keep the state treasurer.
It’s literally a job with almost no duties except answer the phone and attend a committee meeting occasionally. That’s it. Yet Wisconsin voters were dumb enough to believe that the job is some sort of “watchdog” on the state’s finances. Worse, some Republicans even bought into the idea and even contributed financially to the effort to keep the position on state treasurer.
Instead of shrinking state government with a constitutional amendment to eliminate the state treasurer, we still have a no-work, full-pay job on the state payroll. Worse, the voters put a Democrat in the position in November. This means Secretary of State Doug La Follette will get to go on more taxpayer-funded trips thanks to the additional Democratic vote on the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands.
That’s democracy for you. Sometimes the voters are stupid. And this time they were really, really stupid.
And the number one stupid thing that happened in Wisconsin politics in 2018 is…
WISCONSIN VOTERS CHOSE TONY EVERS OVER SCOTT WALKER.
Record low unemployment. Budget surpluses every year. Lower taxes. A complete structural change in state government to keep state and local governments financially stable (if they choose to use the tools offered by Act 10). A friendly business climate. More economic freedom. A modest expansion of school choice. Even more money invested than ever before in public schools, if that’s what you wanted. All thanks to Governor Scott Walker.
The voters threw it all away in favor of a governor who wants to raise taxes through the roof, release prisoners from jail, and return us to the days of Governor Jim Doyle.
Evers can’t even admit that voucher schools and independent charter schools are outperforming their legacy public school counterparts when his own Department of Public Instruction is supplying the evidence. Meanwhile, Evers did almost nothing to fix the failing schools in our state.
How stupid can Wisconsin get?
No, really, Wisconsin chose this guy?
The number one album today in 1965 was the soundtrack to “Roustabout”:
Today in 1968, the complete shipment of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s new album, “Two Virgins,” was confiscated by New Jersey authorities due to the album cover. A revised cover was used in record stores:
Click here to see why the album cover was revised.
The number one album today in 1971 was fellow ex-Beatle George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass”:
I’m going to guess that not many readers will read this immediately upon posting, either because when posted you were out, or you were already in bed.
Perhaps that was the problem for the Beatles in 1962, when they went to Decca Records for an audition, and Decca declined to sign them.
Before that, the number one single (for the second time) today in 1956:
Today in 1964, BBC-TV premiered “Top of the Pops”:
The Washington Post:
President Trump’s headstrong refusal to reopen the federal government without new border wall funding has set him on a risky and defiant path for 2019, relying on brazen brinkmanship to shore up his base support and protect him ahead of a challenging year for his administration.
The latest overtures in the wake of the midterm elections, which brought about sweeping Democratic gains and the end of GOP control of Congress, stand in stark contrast to the historical behavior of modern presidents, who have moved at least briefly toward the political center after being humbled at the ballot box.
But Trump — counseled by a cadre of hard-line lawmakers and sensitive to criticism from his allies in the conservative media — has instead focused on reassuring his most ardent supporters of his commitment to the signature border pledge that electrified his followers during his 2016 presidential run even though it is opposed by a majority of voters.
The president has rejected the advice of Republican pollsters and strategists to declare that he holds a winning hand, predicting in a series of tweets that even losing the clash over border construction will lead him to reelection, all while threatening to “close” the border if Democrats do not blink on his $5 billion request for a new wall.
“This is only about the Dems not letting Donald Trump & the Republicans have a win,” Trump tweeted on Thursday. “They may have the 10 Senate votes, but we have the issue, Border Security. 2020!”
Trump’s fervent appeals to his supporters — not just on the wall but in his sharpening criticism of Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome H. Powell, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and Democrats — leave him both emboldened and hamstrung heading into the new year, according to top Republicans and Democrats. While he is galvanizing his base amid political and economic uncertainty, he is also making it difficult to work with Democrats or recast his own presidency.
His current stance on the government shutdown reinforces a central tenet of Trump’s career: Choosing base politics over a broader pitch and applying a one-dimensional pugnacity to whatever obstacle looms, often replete with bursts of misleading or inaccurate statements. …
As the shutdown drags on, Trump’s dogged base politics have left him little leverage to force Democrats to comply with his wishes, an ominous reality as Pelosi is expected to win the House speakership in the coming days and then mostly ignore Trump’s calls for wall funds as she asserts herself within the confines of divided government. …
Some Republican pollsters have also been watching the president’s tactics with concern, noting that there is little evidence he has grown his electoral coalition after the 2016 election, when he won the White House despite losing the popular vote.
“The problem is that the base is nowhere close to a majority of the nation,” GOP pollster Whit Ayres said. “In a government of the people, for the people and by the people, it sure helps to have a majority of the people behind what you are trying to do.”
White House officials and Trump friends say the president is unbound from convention and party, arguing that he is going with his gut instincts and shrugging off calls for a more traditional approach, including his decision to end the U.S. operation in Syria, where roughly 2,000 troops are deployed. That policy shift prompted Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to resign in protest, rattling senior Republicans who have long viewed Mattis as a stabilizing force who guarded against the president’s impulses.
“It’s a preview of things to come,” former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum (R) said of Trump’s recent moves. “He feels like he listened to too many people who told him he’d get the wall next year and he didn’t get it. So now he’ll fight for something he believes in.”
In the days before Christmas, when several options to end the shutdown were floated, Trump dismissed them and told several advisers that the political benefit with his base for “fighting and fighting” for the wall outweighed any political cost and was a necessity for keeping “my people” engaged, according to two Trump advisers familiar with the discussions.
Trump’s blizzard of tweets on the shutdown, before and after his trip to Iraq this past week to visit U.S. troops, repeatedly played to his core voters, many of whom see illegal immigration as an urgent national emergency that necessitates a massive wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Friday that Trump would stay in Washington through the new year — and Trump readily amped up his rhetoric on Twitter.
“We will be forced to close the Southern Border entirely if the Obstructionist Democrats do not give us the money to finish the Wall & also change the ridiculous immigration laws that our Country is saddled with,” Trump tweeted.
Earlier in the week, while at al-Asad Air Base in Iraq, Trump’s base politics were on display as he blamed Pelosi for the impasse, telling reporters that “Nancy is calling the shots” and that “the American public is demanding a wall” — sparking criticism for injecting politics into an apolitical setting. …
Trump’s tactics stand apart from those of recent presidents who have endured midterm losses. Barack Obama in 2010, George W. Bush in 2006 and Bill Clinton in 1994 all expressed some self-awareness of voters’ dissatisfaction after watching their party lose control of the House. They subsequently spent time reaching out to the other side about bipartisan efforts, with varying records of success. Bush called his party’s stumble a “thumping” and Obama called the 2010 election “humbling” and a “shellacking.”
Former Obama advisers said part of the reason for that response in 2010 was the necessity of adapting and improving the president’s standing for his reelection campaign.
“I don’t think there was ever a time during any of the Obama presidential campaigns where the strategy was predicated on doubling down on our base,” said Joel Benenson, who served as lead pollster for both of Obama’s national campaigns. “You don’t win presidential elections with your base, typically.”
In his first news conference after the midterms, in which Democrats flipped 40 House seats, Trump declared that “we did very well last night,” highlighting Republican pickups in the Senate and some successful gubernatorial races. He blamed several losing members in the House for their own defeats, saying they had erred by failing to embrace him, a claim that is undercut by polls in their districts showing his unpopularity.
Trump has also reacted to the midterms by closely eyeing conservative media organs and huddling with deeply conservative members of the House GOP, such as Rep. Mark Meadows (N.C.) and Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), who have encouraged a hard line.
“I can tell you, if they believe this president is going to yield on this particular issue, they’re misreading him, misreading the American people,” Meadows said Thursday on CNN.
One longtime Trump adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly, said Trump has been “spooked” not by the midterms but by a brewing rebellion on the right earlier this month when he was considering accepting a deal from Democrats to fund the government through early February. Rush Limbaugh dismissed the potential compromise program as “Trump gets nothing and the Democrats get everything.” Another firebrand, Ann Coulter, published a column titled “Gutless President in Wall-less Country.”
“He’s spooked by what the world would be like for him if the base wasn’t there” for whatever comes from the Mueller probe or House investigations, the Trump adviser said, adding that the volatility of Wall Street has increased Trump’s private frustrations to include not just Democrats and the media but the Federal Reserve.
Trump’s current border stance has polled poorly. A Quinnipiac University poll in mid-December found that 62 percent of the country, including 65 percent of self-identified independents and one in three Republicans, oppose shutting down the government over wall funding. The same poll found that Americans oppose building a wall on the Mexican border by 54 to 43 percent.
Some Trump allies, however, said Trump is savvier than his stubborn tweets let on, suggesting that the president must play to his base and show solidarity on the wall if he wants to move on at some point in 2019 and turn his attention to other issues such as infrastructure or health care.
“It’s de facto playing to the base so he can get it done and move on,” said longtime GOP consultant John Brabender, who has advised Vice President Pence. “He can’t get reelected with only his base, but he needs the symbolism of what he’s doing so they don’t go away. It’s about his credibility with them and talking about it now so eventually he can talk about other issues.”
This does not reflect well on the Post if it took them this long to figure out Trumpolitics. I had it figured out a few months into 2017. Trump does what his voters want.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 