Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog

Presty the DJ for Jan. 7

January 7, 2019

Music
The number one single in Britain …

… and over here on my parents’ wedding day in 1961:

The number one single today in 1977:

(more…)
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Presty the DJ for Jan. 6

January 6, 2019

Music
First: The song of the day:

The number one album today in 1968 was the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour”:

The number one single today in 1973 included a person rumored to be the subject of the song on backing vocals:

The number one British single today in 1979 was this group’s only number one:

(more…)
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Presty the DJ for Jan. 5

January 5, 2019

Music
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.

(more…)
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The old neighborhoods

January 4, 2019

History, Madison, Uncategorized
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. …

Tom Femrite

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.”
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Presty the DJ for Jan. 4

January 4, 2019

Music
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.

(more…)
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A dog of an opinion

January 3, 2019

Culture, US politics
Jonah Goldberg:

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:
- Maybe it depends on where you live, but when I was in Seattle I saw politics start to creep in about dogs. Seattle is a place where many claim to need an emotional support pet. If you own a purebred dog people also feel it is their duty to lecture you on the value of adopting a pound dog. Speaking of pound dogs, have you noticed that no one just adopts a dog from the pound anymore? Even that has achieved virtue-signaling status. Now everyone “rescues” their pet. It’s subtle, but it elevates the actions of the owner to something more noble.
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.
- A neighbor told me that they (the couple) had pulled their new puppy from her playgroup because there were Trump owned dogs in the group. They had been doxxed out into the open.
  Really.
- Dogs are awesome, yes, but don’t kid yourself…politics are alive and well in the dog world. The left is absolutely coming for your pets. I have a competitive dog (shows and herding trials) and have seen first hand PETA and HSUS activists trying to disrupt events. Also, beware of feel good laws that are being passed all over the country that will ultimately hurt all dogs and dog owners.
(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.
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What a real shutdown would look like

January 3, 2019

US politics
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.
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Presty the DJ for Jan. 3

January 3, 2019

Music
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:

(more…)
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The year in stupid

January 2, 2019

Wisconsin politics
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?

If you don’t like prosperity, I guarantee there won’t be any in Wisconsin by the end of this year, thanks to Evers and his left-wing toadies.

The MacIver Institute contributes another 10:

There were many sins of omission committed by the Fourth Estate’s usual suspects. Sometimes they left important pieces out of the story. Sometimes they bypassed the story altogether.

There are more, many more, but MacIver News Service has narrowed down the Top 10 most underreported stories by the mainstream media in 2018. And here they are.

#10 – John Doe raids forgotten

An important anniversary came and went in October without so much as a back-page note from most members of the mainstream media. That’s probably because they don’t want to be reminded that the John Doe investigation, one of the darkest chapters in Wisconsin history, was replete with prosecutorial and bureaucratic abuses.

They forgot that five years ago, on Oct. 3, 2013, armed officers stormed the homes of conservative citizens before the break of day to conduct unconstitutional raids. Among the victims, Republican strategist Deb Jordahl. Her children awoke to armed deputies standing over their beds. For hours, officers searched their home. The family was forced to watch investigators root through their possessions — all in the name of a bogus, secret investigation into alleged campaign finance violations. What it was, according to stacks of court documents, was a sinister probe into the left’s enemies. Sound familiar?

#9 – Extraordinary narrative

This month’s extraordinary legislative session possessed no shortage of coverage. In fact, it may have been over-covered. It’s how the mainstream players told the story, helping the left paint a picture of a Republican “power grab,” that poisoned the well, so to speak. They’re stifling poor Tony before he even takes the oath of office, went the Democratic Party talking points regurgitated by the legacy press.

There’s no doubt that the Republican majority, seeing the writing on the wall, pushed some legislation that will restrain Evers’ executive power, the power that the GOP had no problem allowing Gov. Scott Walker to wield. What was often missing from the overheated narrative, though, was that Democrats attempted to tie the hands of then-Gov.-elect Walker in late 2010 when they hastily tried to cram through expensive union contracts.

Also missing in the din of discontent is the fact that many of the measures Republicans eventually passed had previously been taken up in one house or the other but failed to make it off the floor. That’s important, because the narrative throughout the session was that Republicans were trying to swiftly push through legislation with little debate.

But who needs context when you’ve got a good, half-reported narrative.

#8 – Act 10 savings

It seems whenever the mainstream media report on Act 10 it’s always about how rough Walker’s cornerstone reform has been on public employees. When it comes to the savings the law has wrought, well, crickets.

Such was the case in August, when MacIver News Service reported that Act 10 has saved Wisconsin school districts more than $3.2 billion in benefits costs.

The 2011 law that launched massive union-led protests and a recall campaign against Walker holds public employee pay increases to the rate of inflation and requires them to contribute more — or something — to their taxpayer-funded health insurance and pension plans.

Districts found savings by opening up bidding to new insurers for the first time in years, while others increased required employee contributions toward insurance plans. Overall, since 2011, districts have largely moved to more taxpayer-friendly health plans – freeing up more money for the classroom.

That’s big news, important news, for the people paying for schools and education in this state. So, of course, the mainstream media mostly ignored it.

#7 – Direct primary care dies in silence

What if health care were much more transparent, much more affordable, and much more direct? That would be a pretty big deal, right?

Direct primary care is delivering on that promise in half the country. Not in Wisconsin, though. While debate over legislation codifying direct primary care in the Badger State did receive some love from the mainstream press early on, the love was scant and fleeting.

Direct primary care, a method of delivering health care in which patients pay their primary care doctors directly via a monthly fee, bypasses health insurance and the morass of red tape, inflated costs, and financial uncertainty that plague the traditional system of financing health care. A bill in the last session of the Legislature looked like it was moving until special interests choked it dead. It pretty much died in silence.

#6 – $907,000 question

While most news outlets didn’t seem to care that some government retirees are banking hundreds of thousands of dollars in unused sick pay, MacIver News did — and so did some lawmakers.

Thanks to Wisconsin’s generous sick leave conversion system, some retirees will have mountains of cash they can use to pay for post-retirement health insurance premiums in the Wisconsin Group Health Insurance Program.

As MacIver News Service first reported in its series, “Bureaucrat Benefits,” the highest sick leave balance in 2017 topped $907,000 for a 69-year-old public employee with 27 years creditable service at a top annual salary of $290,000. That’s equal to more than three years of the retiree’s peak salary.

Following the investigative report, lawmakers said reforms to a state employee benefits system that includes “golden health care parachutes” for some retirees are long overdue.

“These stories are certainly getting my attention,” said Sen. David Craig (R-Big Bend). “It’s another situation where state government is on another planet than the private sector. You have spiraling health care costs and you have these government workers immune to a certain extent.”

#5 – Buffering

When the city of Madison rolled out it’s big-government, broadband-for-all proposal, the legacy media was there. When the city launched an ill-fated pilot broadband project in some of Madison’s poorest neighborhoods, the mainstream media were back again. When the whole thing fell apart on cue, they were nowhere to be found.

The costly plan to build a government-owned fiber optic broadband network in Madison finally died in late summer. It went out “with a whimper and not with a bang,” according to a city official overseeing the process.

The city’s Digital Technology Committee in September approved a motion to not pursue a Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) network that had been in the works — mostly behind the scenes — for years. MacIver was there all along exposing the astronomical cost of the proposal, while nary a member of the mainstream media was to be found at most of the consequential committee meetings.

#4 – Broad brush

In the fever-pitch election year, the mainstream media and the Democratic Party political machine hammered Attorney General Brad Schimel, accusing him of being slow to respond to a pileup of untested sexual assault kits. They painted the Republican AG as a skinflint who put taxpayer savings ahead of swiftly clearing the backlog of some 4,100 untested rape kits.

They painted with a very broad brush.

A MacIver News Service review of the record found Schimel’s state Department of Justice had worked assiduously for three years solving a problem 30 years in the making. As of September, all of the untested kits had been tested. More so, the Wisconsin Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (WiSAKI), is changing attitudes, ideas, an entire culture of how law enforcement officials deal with survivors. In fact, the Republican-led DOJ was lauded by the Obama administration for its victim-centered approach to what is a national decades-old problem – a problem, experts say, that is much more complicated than the media investigative reports and partisan press releases like to admit.

That kind of context meant nothing to liberal Attorney-General-elect Josh Kaul, who defeated Schimel in November, arguably in part on the rape kit narrative the mainstream press created.

#3 – Double standard

For the past eight years, mainstream outlets have feverishly reported on Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s conservative and pro-business allies. It’s funny how silent they have been so far on the far left, big-government types Democrat Gov.-elect Tony Evers has surrounded himself with.

As MacIver News Service first reported earlier this month, Evers liked to talk about compromise and bipartisanship following his election win, but his picks for policy advisers suggest he’s playing politics to the far left. The incoming governor has quietly assembled advisory committees packed with some of the most left-leaning people from some of the more left-wing organizations in the state. Nary a conservative to be found, of course, and even truly moderate Republicans are missing from the far left-heavy advisory committees.

The lineup includes big labor bosses, extreme environmentalists, social justice warriors, and espousers of socialism.

None of that seems to matter to the mainstreamers that have fed the Evers-as-moderating-force narrative.

#2 -Radical plans exposed

Liberals typically aren’t furtive creatures. They generally tell you they want more tax increases, more government programs, more government. But the mainstream news outlets opted to turn a blind eye to the Legislature’s left wing socialism-lite manifesto last spring.

Assembly Democrats, led by Rep. Chris Taylor (D-Madison) released a roadmap that includes 18 policy changes ranging from gutting the Second Amendment to guaranteeing a “right to a living wage.”

MacIver News Service exposed the Democrats’ radical plans. Much of the rest of the media yawned or looked away, perhaps because they share the same vision of big government as the liberals do.

#1 – Good times get no respect, or coverage

With apologies to Frank Sinatra, 2018 was a very good year for Wisconsin’s economy. But the Badger State boom — in an election year — didn’t seem all that compelling to many of the traditional news outlets in the state.

Wisconsin’s jobless rate fell to as low as 2.8 percent, and has stood at 3 percent or lower for nine straight months. More people are working in the Badger State than anytime in the state’s history. Initial unemployment claims are at 30-year lows. Pretty much crickets from the mainstream media.
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Presty the DJ for Jan. 2

January 2, 2019

Music
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”:

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