How much money would you have paid for tickets for this concert at the Cow Palace in San Francisco today in 1964:
No comments on Presty the DJ for Aug. 19
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How can two songs be the number one song in the country today in 1956? Do a Google search for the words “B side”:
(Those songs, by the way, were the first Elvis recorded with his fantastic backup singers, the Jordanaires.)
Today in 1962, the Beatles made their debut with their new drummer, Ringo Starr, following a two-hour rehearsal.
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Back when WLS radio in Chicago was a rock station that could be heard over most of the nation, during the summer WLS would run a top-of-the-hour jingle that started with the headline and then the singing of “Music Radio, WLS, Chicago!’
Then would be played what Inside Radio writes about now, referring to Portable People Meters, a measure of radio or TV audience:
All indications point to another battle between classic hits and classic rock to be crowned the Format of The Summer of 2018. June and July PPMs show what has become an annual trend: As the temperature rises, so do ratings for the two formats. In June the classic hits format saw its highest 6+ share (5.9) in PPM markets since Nielsen began tracking national format ratings. Classic rock has also begun its share ascent, moving from a 4.9 share in the first five months of the year to a to a 5.2 in June. The Format of the Summer is based on the format with the most uplift in audience between June and August, compared to the first five months of the year. Classic rock has been named the summer’s fastest-growing format for the past two years, while classic hits took the title in the two years prior, 2014 and 2015. …
Inside Radio caught up with a number of programmers specializing in these gold-based formats to see why the heat brings the ears to classic hits and classic rock stations over the summer months. “Classic rock has always been a ‘windows in the car down, hair blowing in the wind, singing every word loudly, taking you back nostalgically to a great point in your life’ kind of format,” explains WCSX Detroit PD Jerry Tarrants. The longer summer days, he says, increase TSL from the station’s P1’s. That, along with an influx of tune-in from P2 and P3 listeners, “certainly works to our advantage.” he said.
Summertime activities also lead to more tune-in opportunities. Cumulus Media VP/Programming classic hits Brian Thomas notes, “People are outside, at the beach, on the boat or having a BBQ and love to hear the classic hits they know. All the songs are familiar.”
Adds Scott Jameson, VP/classic rock for Cumulus, “Many markets have limited warm weather seasons, so it’s a great time to activate the audience on many levels. When you add it up, the energy and activity of the summer many times translates to higher ratings.”
Jim Ryan, classic hits formatcaptain at Entercom, doesn’t believe listeners flock to classic hits or classic rock stations simply because of the summer months, but he does think that “they are more inclined to stay with the format in the warmer months.” Expanding upon Jameson’s thoughts about parts of the country that get all four seasons, Ryan added, “Between November elections and winter snowstorms, there is more of a need to sample news radio stations and those are our people.”
Without a doubt, the summer months change people’s perspective. Long summer days turn into warm summer nights and radio serves as an ideal companion.
“I try to drive tempo more in the warmer months because people want the music on the radio to reflect their mood,” Ryan says. “When someone is up and happy they are more inclined to turn up and sing along with songs like ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’ rather than ‘Who’s Crying Now.’” Thomas agrees: “The audience wants to have fun. Bring on the party.”
Jameson sees a difference in the mindset of the audience during summer, “particularly in Midwest and northern markets where warm weather doesn’t last long,” he explains. “With kids out of school and parents looking for things to do, rock formats provide a great soundtrack for a variety of activities.”
The summer months, with their built-in long holiday weekends – Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day – lend themselves to specialty programming that fits in nicely with the classic hits/rock formats. “I advise the classic rock stations I work with to develop creative ways to re-package the format using these holidays as a backdrop,” Jameson tells Inside Radio. “Gold-based stations don’t have the luxury of exposing new music, so we need to find clever ways to allow old music to sound fresh again. Whether it’s a ‘Rock n’ Roll 500’ over Memorial Day or ‘Four on the Fourth,’ it lets the format breathe a bit and listeners love the various themes.”
Thomas says “specialty weekends bring in big audience for classic hits. We see this in every market where the station that does a Memorial Day Top 500 scores big.”
Tarrants likes to keep the specialty weekend themes going throughout the year, not just when the temperature gets above 80 degrees. “In Michigan we experience such significant changes in seasonal climate it allows us some good opportunities to emotionally charge our listeners with some creative imaging all year,” he explained. “We do as much fall/winter seasonal pieces as we do summer.”
Besides theme weekends, Ryan brings back the tempo of the music and how it shifts from season to season. “In every category in my music scheduling program, you will find ballads on top,” Ryan said. During the warm weather months, he finds himself “skipping over those big time… Save those ballads for a rainy Monday night.”
Thomas, who previously programmed WCBS-FM before joining Cumulus, says, “We have joked that once it hits 70 degrees in Chicago or 75 when I was in New York we don’t play anymore slow songs, especially on the weekends.” This is something he has seen AC stations do as well, with “no slow songs weekends.”
Tarrants adds, “Musically when the weather breaks in the spring, I will groom the library… throttling back the darker songs and accelerating the brighter fun-filled themed titles.”
The Milwaukee radio market proves this point. In the July Nielsen ratings classic hits WRIT (95.7 FM) was rated first by a sizeable margin above news/talk WTMJ (620 AM), with classic rock WKLH (96.5) third.
That’s somewhat the case in Madison too. The spring ratings showed classic-hits WOLX (94.9 FM) first, contemporary hits Z104 second, news/talk WIBA (1310) third, alternative Triple M fourth, and classic rock WIBA-FM fifth.
What is the difference between classic hits and classic rock? The always accurate Wikipedia defines “classic hits” as “rock and pop music from the early/mid 1960s through the mid/late 1980s (occasionally early/mid 1990s in some markets),” and “a contemporary version of the oldies format.” “Classic rock,” meanwhile, is “developed from the album-oriented rock (AOR) format in the early 1980s. In the United States, the classic rock format features music ranging generally from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s, primarily focusing on commercially successful hard rock popularized in the 1970s.”
WIBA-FM in Madison was an AOR station in the 1980s, and has basically not changed the music it plays since the 1990s. WOLX converted from elevator music to be one of Wisconsin’s first oldies stations in the late 1980s, when much of the music it plays now was on such pop stations as Z-104.
Here are a few YouTube opinions:
Why might songs of the ’70s or ’80s be more popular than songs of today? Maybe because, despite the unquestionable technological improvements of today, the music then was better … perhaps because the artists and producers had to work harder at it. This New York Times slideshow shows how summer music was quite diverse — as measured by average volume of the song, creative sound, energy, danceability and use of acoustic instruments instead of e-instruments — in the 1980s and 1990s …
… specifically 1988 …
… and quite non-diverse in terms of sound this decade:
There are some songs that, regardless of when they were recorded, say summer, beginning with the official start of summer when …
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Non-conservative Jack Shafer wrote before yesterday’s coordinated media attack on Donald Trump — I mean defense of the free press:
Nothing flatters an independent journalist less than the sight of him forming a line to drink from the same fountain as his colleagues. Such a spectacle will unfold on Thursday, August 16, as 200 or more editorial pages will heed the call sounded by Boston Globe op-ed page editor Marjorie Pritchard to run editorials opposing President Donald Trump’s unrelieved press-bashing. Participating dailies include the Houston Chronicle, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Miami Herald and the Denver Post, as well as the Globe. Joining the movement are the American Society of News Editors and the New England Newspaper and Press Association. Dan Rather is on board, as is the Radio Television Digital News Association.
“Our words will differ. But at least we can agree that such attacks are alarming,” Pritchard’s appeal declared.
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The Beatles were never known for having wild concerts. (Other than their fans, that is.)
Today in 1960, the Beatles played their first of 48 appearances at the Indra Club in Hamburg, West Germany. The Indra Club’s owner asked the Beatles to put on a “mach shau.” The Beatles responded by reportedly screaming, shouting, leaping around the stage, and playing lying on the floor of the club. John Lennon reportedly made a stage appearance wearing only his underwear, and also wore a toilet seat around his neck on stage. As they say, Sei vorsichtig mit deinen Wünschen.
Four years later, the council of Glasgow, Scotland, required that men who had Beatles haircuts would have to wear swimming caps in city pools, because men’s hair was clogging the pool filters.
Today in 1968, the Doors had their only number one album, “Waiting for the Sun”:
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The Boston Globe reports:
Around 200 news publications across the United States have committed to a Boston Globe-coordinated effort to run editorials Thursday promoting the freedom of the press, in light of President Trump’s frequent attacks on the media.
Some of the most respected and widely circulated newspapers in the country have committed to taking a stand in their editorial pages, including The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, The Denver Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Chicago Sun-Times. The list ranges from large metropolitan dailies to small weekly papers with circulations as low as 4,000.
The Globe initiative comes amid the president’s repeated verbal attacks on journalists, calling mainstream press organizations “fake news” and “the enemy of the American people.” Tensions came to a boil in early August when CNN reporter Jim Acosta walked out of a press briefing after White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders refused to refute Trump’s “enemy of the people” comments.
‘‘We are not the enemy of the people,’’ Marjorie Pritchard, deputy managing editor of the Globe’s opinion page, told the AP last week.
The Globe’s request to denounce the “dirty war against the free press” has been promoted by industry groups such as the American Society of News Editors, as well as regional groups like the New England Newspaper and Press Association. The request also suggested editorial boards take a stand against Trump’s words regardless of their politics, or whether they generally editorialized in support of or in opposition to the president’s policies.
‘‘Our words will differ. But at least we can agree that such attacks are alarming,’’ the Globe appeal said. …
Pritchard previously said the decision to reach out to newspapers was reached after Trump appeared to step up his rhetoric in recent weeks. He called the media “fake, fake disgusting news” at an Aug. 2 rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
‘‘Whatever happened to the free press? Whatever happened to honest reporting?’’ he asked at the rally, pointing to journalists covering the event. ‘‘They don’t report it. They only make up stories.’’
Pritchard said she hoped the editorials would make an impression on Americans.
‘‘I hope it would educate readers to realize that an attack on the First Amendment is unacceptable,’’ she said. ‘‘We are a free and independent press; it is one of the most sacred principles enshrined in the Constitution.’’
If you are a supporter of the free press specifically and the First Amendment generally, then you should accept the existence of, if not agree with, opposing points of view — in this case, Patricia McCarthy:
[Pritchard’s] big idea is her response to President Trump’s relentless attack on those among the media who relentlessly publish fake news. Trump has never said all of the media are disingenuous, or that all of the media publish and promote fake news. He clearly goes after the news outlets who do: CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NPR, CBS, NBC, NYT, WaPo, L.A. Times, and too many others.
The president is targeting what has become known as the mainstream media, the MSM, or the “drive-bys,” as Rush Limbaugh rightfully calls them. They are clones of one another. There is not an original thought or idea among their “reporters.” Their reporters are not journalists in any sense of the word. They all take their marching orders from the leftists who head up each of these organizations. Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, not one of them deviated from the Clinton campaign party line.
Ms. Pritchard, then, is working hard to prove Trump’s point. He rages against the leftist machine that is the MSM, and she is bound and determined to prove him right for all to see. She, and all those editors who are jumping onto her bandwagon, is playing right into his hands. How clueless can these anti-Trumpers be? They are mind-numbed idiots, so easily trolled by the master. They see themselves as defenders of the free press!
The only free press today is vast, available to all of us, and thoroughly outside their realm of conformity. They think they matter; they have yet to grasp the fact that they are largely irrelevant. Jim Acosta thinks he is a reporter; he is a rude clown, subservient to tyrants, disrespectful to Trump and Sarah Sanders. He actually thinks people care what he says, does, or thinks. They do not. He is a joke.
Since interest has dimmed in Stormy Daniels and her “creepy porn lawyer,” as Tucker Carlson has dubbed him, the new star the MSM are celebrating is the pathetic Omarosa Manigault Newman, with her book of lies and accusations that everyone knows are fabricated. The anchors on all the MSM outlets know exactly who and what she is but are wooing her in the hope that she will be the one to take Trump down. They never give up. They never learn. From the Access Hollywood tape to Omarosa, they are confident that each new lowlife with a story to tell will be the one to overturn the election. They are like Energizer bunnies; they have motors but no brains. They never give up, no matter how ridiculous the attacks on Trump become. In short, they are utter fools.
Ms. Pritchard says newspapers use “differing words.” Uh, no, they don’t. They use the same words. Just as that JournoList functioned under Obama, talking points went out, and they all repeated them verbatim. These people do not think for themselves. Throw a differing, conservative opinion at them, and they cry racism. That is their only defense, no matter how specious.
Conservatives are looking forward to Thursday’s coordinated anti-Trump editorials. We will have a definitive list of news outlets to never trust again because they will have revealed themselves to be unthinking soldiers in a nasty war against a man for whom over sixty million Americans voted to be their president. So far, he has been a truly terrific president. He has accomplished more good for the nation than either Bush or Obama did in sixteen years.
- Economy great thanks to tax cuts and de-regulation.
- Unemployment at lowest point ever, for blacks and Hispanics, too.
- Food stamp use down by a few million.
The man who has accomplished all this in nineteen months is whom they want to destroy. What does that tell us about who the left is today? Leftists do not have the country’s best interest at heart. Their hatred of this man motivates them in a most destructive way. Let those hundred or so newspapers follow Pritchard’s orders and publish their anti-Trump op-eds on Thursday. They will be demonstrating for all to see just how right Trump is when he calls out the perpetrators of fake news.
McCarthy’s piece is an opinion. So is whatever those 200 newspapers write today and this week.
One of Wisconsin’s best weekly newspapers wrote this piece this week on its opinion page, patriotically called The First Amendment, that its veteran award-winning editor doubts fits into what the Globe has in mind.
As someone who has been doing this crap — I mean, has been a journalist — for three decades, I have trouble fitting in on this subject, which I will attempt to explain here.
Is the free press vital to this democratic republic? There is absolutely no question that it is. Trump specifically and whichever party and politicians in power conveniently forget that, or don’t want that to be the case, far too often. But Trump isn’t the first president to try to prevent the press from doing its job, though he probably has been the most verbal about it. (Other than Harry S. Truman, who once threatened to punch out Washington Post music critic Paul Hume for the latter’s uncomplimentary review of Truman’s daughter’s performance. Trump hasn’t gone that far. Yet.)
Should Trump not say bad things about the news media? Well … I don’t care what Trump or any other politician says about the media generally or myself specifically. I really don’t. Once upon a time when journalists had more backbone than today, nasty comments from politicians were something a journalist should put on his or her résumé.
Our job as journalists is to hold the powerful accountable, regardless of party or lack of party. Politicians, law enforcement, the criminal justice system, the educational system and every other level and function of government everywhere do their work with our tax dollars, and for that reason alone the free press is necessary to make sure they’re doing what they should be doing, and not doing what they should not be doing.
Freedom of the press is part of the First Amendment. The First Amendment does not belong just to the press. It belongs to all Americans, and if it doesn’t, then it’s just almost-illegible words on old paper. The Wisconsin Constitution’s free-expression protections also belong to all Wisconsinites, as do the state Open Meetings Law and Open Records Law.
There seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding today about the media and its history on the subject of reporter bias. The period where the media was seen as impartial is not that old in American history.
To too many people “unbiased” actually means “biased in favor of my point of view.” Does this strike you as unbiased?
How about this?
In the middle of ABC-TV’s coverage of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, Howard K. Smith and Frank Reynolds practically demanded Congress pass gun control. So did Cronkite on CBS even though, of all people, Dan Rather correctly pointed out that the gun control measures then in Congress wouldn’t have prevented either Kennedy assassination.
All you need see for evidence of previous institutional press bias is see the number of newspapers with the words “Democrat,” “Republican,” “Progressive” or similar words. And even when those words weren’t in the names of the newspapers, there have usually been conservative newspapers (the Chicago Tribune, Milwaukee Sentinel, Wisconsin State Journal, and once upon a time the Los Angeles Times) and liberal newspapers (the New York Times, Milwaukee Journal and The Capital Times) in multiple-newspaper markets. The State Journal is unquestionably more liberal than it was now that it’s the only daily newspaper in Madison, while The C(r)apital Times is still as lefty as always, including in its news coverage. (One associate editor wrote in a news story “the so-called Moral Majority,” which is an error because that was the group’s name, and the writer’s opinion of it didn’t belong in a news story.)
Remember these good old days?
My suspicion is that what’s written today and this week is going to be read as nothing more than ripping on Trump (particularly in the opinion of those sympathetic to views like McCarthy’s), and will give an unrealistically gauzy view of the news media, with related offended whining that people fail to worship the media’s work (this, for instance), accompanied by hand-wringing that Trump and his supporters are destroying democracy. (They aren’t and won’t.)
Truth be told, the media has a lot of flaws today, and this campaign might be one of them. For one thing, it’s practically impossible for me, someone who has worked for low pay but long and irregular hours in the First Amendment Wars, to think I have very much in common with Acosta, Pritchard or people who get their paychecks from big media, even though I used to work for one of this country’s biggest (at the time) media companies. They get paid an order of magnitude more than I do in much better conditions with much better benefits, including being wrongly famous.
Is Trump trying to control the media? Of course he is. So did his predecessor, and every president in this media age, and probably every president before that. So do most politicians. They have media relations people to feed quotes and pass on good things about their guy and bad things about the other side. They all answer questions posed by the media with answers to the questions they want to be asked, instead of what they were asked.
That, however, is part of the job, and always has been. A reporter who expects to be fed information and not have to do actual asking of questions is either lazy or a toady for whoever is in power. (Too many journalists worship at the altar of government because they cover government.)
A few things have certainly gotten worse in my professional lifetime. There have been far too many stories labeled “Analysis” that are in fact the writer’s opinion not on the opinion pages. There are far too many expressions of reporter opinion on social media, particularly on Twitter reporter accounts, when the correct number of opinions that are not labeled opinions is zero. (News-media social media should report and only report, not give the reporter’s opinion.)
Too much of this “analysis” since approximately the Clinton administration has been inside baseball — some political staffer feeds their view about the brilliant politics of (insert politician’s name here). That violates the sentence I have had printed on top of every computer I’ve had for more than 25 years — “What does this story mean to the reader?” And unless you’re a political junkie, the political fortunes of a politician are and should be about 367th in your list of important things.
There are also far too many journalists who seek to curry favor among the politically powerful. In fact, I have to wonder how much news media bitching is taking place due to failures to curry favor among the Trump administration. The Washington phrase, “If you want a friend, get a dog,” applies to journalists in state capitals, county seats and basically anywhere else.
There is a large and growing disconnect between the news media and the people we are supposed to be serving. Yes, news media people are considerably more politically liberal on average, and because of that many seem to not grasp conservative views. (Conservatives working in the mainstream media often keep their political views secret because they think those views will hurt their career among their liberal colleagues and bosses.) The media utterly failed in not seeing the possibility of Trump’s election, and they compound that error by refusing to see why people might have voted for Trump, and that a huge number of Americans believe that government failed them under the previous administration.
But the political divide isn’t the only divide. Those readers who live in communities with newspapers or radio stations with news departments might get an education by finding out how many reporters (1) live in the community they work in, (2) have or had children, and (3) go to church regularly. That was me once upon a time, when the only thing I did among those three was live where the job was. Your view of life and what’s important, and therefore what is important news and what isn’t, changes when you have ties to a community, particularly children. And as has been pointed out on this blog, the media gets more things wrong about guns and gun control than can be listed here.
Here is a dirty little secret about Trump and the media: Trump is president today not just because he was running against Hillary Clinton and as an anti-Barack Obama vote; he is president today in large part due to the news media. Trump has been providing quotable copy and video for the media since he was a New York City developer who showed up on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” The media focused on Trump in 2015 because Trump was so much more interesting than any of the other presidential candidates. Trump and the media have a symbiotic–parasitic relationship regardless of what Trump or the media say about eachother.
I sort of feel like an orphan in today’s argument, not on Trump’s side but not on the media’s side.(I can generally pick apart most publications and see their flaws.) I have, I think, more respect for the First Amendment than most journalists do anymore. I believe in giving the opposing side a voice. It’s hard to see that from the national media today.
Individual thinking is not in very much evidence today on any side of the political divide. I have always wanted to be judged on my own work, not lumped in with everyone else in the news media.
But as I wrote before, I really do not care what politicians think of the media or of me, and I have to wonder why media people care what Trump or any other politician thinks of them. I would have thought that journalists would have thick skins and not be snowflakes, but apparently I was mistaken.
In my professional life, I’ve gotten threats of various kinds, including threats to my health. I got invited by a school board president to stand in front of their table and listen to what they were saying while they were trying to skirt the Open Meetings Law. (I did.) I got publicly asked to leave a speech given by Madison Catholic Bishop Robert Morlino. (I didn’t. He did.) They didn’t, don’t and won’t faze me from doing my work. Nor will anything any politician says about the news media. We always get the last word when we want it.
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Back in my public TV pundit days, the late Wisconsin Public Television “WeekEnd” show had a post-election “hangover” show in which WPT would invite all of its pundits to an on-air party in Madison.
The last such show was the most strange, because the Friday after the 2000 presidential election was a show that, unlike every previous such show, included one very prominent race that was not yet decided, with no prospect of a decided result.
That is certainly not the case with this “fall” primary election, which if anything featured surprisingly wide margins in some races, including the U.S. Senate Republican primary, with U.S. Sen. Leah Vukmir (R–Brookfield) having no problem defeating Kevin Nicholson despite Nicholson (and his out-of-state money) vastly outspending Vukmir.
Nicholson is evidence of how out-of-state money doesn’t necessarily translate into votes, especially if the candidate has a clueless campaign. Anyone who has paid any attention to politics should have known the fights Vukmir was involved in the Legislature during her career, including Act 10, school choice and various tax cuts. Obviously GOP voters found most of what Nicholson claimed to lack credibility. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the demise of the GOP establishment in Wisconsin was exaggerated.
That doesn’t necessarily end Nicholson’s career, of course. In fact, the next 12 weeks will prove how much Nicholson is interested in Wisconsin politics, or not. If he doesn’t campaign hard for Vukmir and other Republicans, we’ll know the answer. If he’s really interested in haviing a future in state politics, he should also be looking for an office — state Legislature, or maybe the Fifth Congressional District if U.S. Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R–Menomonee Falls) retires — to run for in 2020.
Dan O’Donnell has more on the Vukmir race and other Tuesday stuff:
“Crucial Waukesha County” has been a running joke among pundits on election nights, but last night it proved just how crucial it is. As of this writing, Vukmir’s 22,005-vote margin of victory in Waukesha County made up approximately 73 percent of her statewide margin of victory. That, combined with her 9,679-vote victory margin in Ozaukee and Washington Counties, means that nearly all of her statewide margin of victory came from just three counties.
All told, she won just 16 counties (nearly all of them in southeast Wisconsin) while Nicholson won 56. Yet Vukmir’s margin of victory in the counties she won was simply too much for Nicholson to overcome outstate.
In presenting himself during the campaign as an outsider running against the weak, timid, do-nothing Republican Establishment, Nicholson made what would have been in any other state a wise gambit in the Age of Trump.
In southeast Wisconsin, however, it proved to be disastrous.
From the moment Governor Walker first proposed Act 10 in his first major act after his inauguration in 2011, Wisconsin Republicans—especially those who represent the very conservative WOW counties—found themselves in an all-out war with the most thuggish elements of liberalism. But they didn’t waver; they held together and won. And then they kept on winning, passing voter ID and right-to-work laws, repealing prevailing wage for local construction projects, and cutting tax and regulatory hurdles that reopened the state for business.
Along the way, they became the model for conservative governance for the rest of the country and a shining example of what Republicans could accomplish if they would only hold together and hold to their promises. Nicholson’s campaign, though, divisively suggested—first obliquely and then openly after he lost the GOP nomination and internal polling likely showed him struggling in the race’s final months—that the Wisconsin Republican Party was just like the dreaded “Republican Establishment” everywhere else; that it was somehow standing in the way of conservative reform instead of enacting it.
In attempting to cast Vukmir as a “typical politician” and an “Establishment type,” Nicholson also cast the rest of the Wisconsin GOP and those who have supported it as the Establishment. The gross miscalculation of voters in the counties he needed most is enough to make even the most casual observer of politics say “WOW.”
Not surprisingly, those voters resented it, and they punished Nicholson for it.
That, however, was [Tuesday]. Today, the divisiveness of the primary must give way to a united conservative movement or every one of Wisconsin’s conservative reforms is in jeopardy.
In a far less bitter primary, State Superintendent Tony Evers won the Democratic Party’s gubernatorial nomination. As of this writing, more than 525,000 people voted in that primary, compared with about 430,000 who voted in the Republican Senate race and 442,000 who voted in Governor Walker’s largely uncontested primary. Neither of those are perfect comparisons, of course, but they are still gaps of roughly 95,000 and 83,000 more Democrat votes across the state.
In Wisconsin’s First Congressional District, which leans Republican, roughly 1,200 more votes were cast in the contested Democratic primary (which was won by Randy Bryce) than in the Republican primary (won by Bryan Steil).
This would seem to confirm that the enthusiasm gap between Republican and Democrat voters in Wisconsin is both very real and very concerning. To put it in perspective, in the Republican wave election of 2010, Ron Johnson beat incumbent Democratic Senator Russ Feingold by 105,091 votes out of 2.14 million cast for the two men combined—a margin of victory of 4.9 percent. Walker defeated Tom Barrett by 124,638 votes out of 2.13 million cast for the two of them—a margin of 5.8 percent.
[Tuesday] night, the “margin of victory” for statewide Democrat votes cast in the gubernatorial primary over Republican votes cast in the Senate primary was 9.9 percent (and nearly 100,000 total votes out of fewer than half of the total cast in the general election eight years ago).
This, again, is far from a perfect comparison, but it does illustrate the challenges that both Vukmir and Walker will face this November. This is also why it is absolutely imperative that the divisiveness of yesterday’s primary be forgotten (or at least forgiven) today.
If it isn’t, if conservative voters decide that they don’t want any part of Wisconsin’s “establishment” Republican Party, then Democrats will win—not just the Senate race, but the Governor’s race, too—and every conservative reform of the past seven years will be in jeopardy.
Once again, southeast Wisconsin (especially the WOW counties) will take the lead, but every other county must join them and be every bit as active and engaged if conservatives are to win again this year.
One might say it’s crucial.
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Today in 1962, the Beatles replaced drummer Pete Best with Ringo Starr. Despite those who claim Starr is the worst Beatle musically, the change worked out reasonably well for the group.
Today in 1970 was the second day of Woodstock:
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A few years ago, I spoke at my son’s fifth-grade class about all the wonderful things that we have today in our great country that weren’t around 100 years ago, including cars. A ponytailed girl in the front of the room raised her hand and, with a solemn look on her face, scolded me: “Cars are bad. They cause pollution.”
Wow. These were 11-year-olds! It was one of my first encounters with the green indoctrination that goes on in public schools starting in the first grade.
There wasn’t time to explain to her that when Henry Ford started rolling his black Model T’s off the assembly lines in Michigan, the mass production of automobiles was heralded as one of the greatest environmental and health advances in history. It replaced one of the prodigious polluters: the horse. The average 1,000-pound horse dumps 30 pounds of feces and 2 gallons of urine a day. Can anyone imagine what Washington, D.C., or Pittsburgh or New Orleans smelled like on a hot, sweltering summer day or what all that feces did to our water supply? Oh, and watch your step!
Yet, many liberals still seem to agree with Al Gore, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, who says that the combustible engine is one of the worst inventions of all time.
This explains why the ascendant green movement in America has for decades been trying to force Americans out of their cars. They think like that fifth-grader despite being supposedly rational adults.
The war on driving includes calls for carbon and gas taxes, tens of billions of gas tax money diverted to inefficient and little-used mass transit projects, and opposition to building new roads and highways. One of the most nefarious initiatives has been the Obama administration’s draconian increases to the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards — a giant and hidden tax on American drivers.
Donald Trump announced last week he wants to ease those regulations. Under the Obama mandates, CAFE requirements would rise from about 35 mpg today to 54 mpg by 2025. This would raise the cost of many new cars by almost $3,000, and the hit to the economy from these rules is expected to reach a cool $500 billion over the next 50 years.
Under Trump’s proposed changes, mileage requirements would still rise every year to 42 mpg by 2025 (way too high for my liking). And yet the left is seething in protest, complaining this means the end of our planet. The difference between the Trump and the Obama standards will mean a 31-hundredth degree higher global temperature in 80 years.
The Department of Transportation has found that the best way to get cleaner air is to incentivize families to buy new cars and get the older and higher polluting gas-guzzlers off the road. But CAFE standards raise car prices. So families delay the purchase of new cars, which increases pollution levels.
Perhaps the biggest benefit of the new Trump standards is that they are expected to save about 1,000 lives a year due to lower highway deaths. The Competitive Enterprise Institute has found that CAFE standards kill people for two reasons: first, they induce the car companies to build lighter cars in order to meet the fuel standards. Second, because the regulations keep old cars on the road longer, Americans are more likely to be driving in less safe vehicles. The Trump administration has science firmly on its side here.
Not so long ago liberals opposed military intervention in the Middle East by chanting “no blood for oil.” But with higher CAFE standards, they willingly tolerate more blood on the highways to save on oil.
Hearty congratulations to Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler for a new rule that can save lives, reduce pollution, grow the economy, and let people buy the cars they want — including SUVs, minivans and sports cars. This is a great victory for common sense and a windshield against the left’s war on cars. As for those misguided fifth-graders, they will figure out the virtues of cars once they are old enough to get their driver’s licenses. But when will liberals grow up?
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Steve Levy (not of ESPN):
President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform required recipients to work as a prerequisite to a government check. It led to more Americans participating in the workforce and a remarkable reduction of the welfare rolls.
Taxpayers and the recipients themselves benefited.
But those tight work requirements were loosened considerably in the Obama years, as were the eligibility rules for disability claims. Both were at least partially responsible for the huge increase of people no longer in the workforce (up to 40 million in the 25 to 64 age bracket).
Fortunately, that trend is suddenly being reversed thanks to President Trump’s vibrant economy. The number of Social Security Disability (SSDI) applications this year is at the lowest rate in 16 years. Another positive trend is the new administration’s formulating of rules requiring work for Medicaid.
It’s about time.
With all the debate over the healthcare bills, little attention focused on how the explosion of Medicaid can fundamentally change the basic underpinnings of American society.
The media gushes over how millions of Americans now get health insurance thanks to the expansion of Medicaid. They fail to mention that once you become dependent on that program, rather than through an employer, you can be forever trapped by being on the dole. That means you become more concerned about keeping your eligibility for Medicaid, and the healthcare it bestows, than upon advancing on a career path with promotions, higher wages — or even getting a job in the first place.
Medicaid ballooned by $100 billion between 2013 and 2015, while food stamp rolls grew 36 percent in the decade prior to the Trump administration.
Simultaneously, workfare requirements were being gutted.
Even further overlooked is the fact that Supplemental Security Disability Income had grown from 4.3 million in 1990, to 6.7 million in 2000, to 8.6 million today. This left us with one in 19 Americans collecting a disability check while not being fully employed.
Did the American workplace suddenly get infinitely more dangerous over the last 20 years? Hardly. Our work conditions have never been safer.
In 2013, former Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., through a Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee report, exposed the fact that many residents in West Virginia waited for their 99 weeks of unemployment to expire in the midst of the Great Recession, only to turn around thereafter and apply for disability benefits.
Remarkably, 15 percent of the state’s population was on disability. It’s emblematic of an explosion of an underclass that could forever be dependent on a government check and lose all incentives to rejoin the workforce.
While no one was looking, lawmakers quietly liberalized provisions that opened the floodgates for mere stress or back pain to be a qualifier for disability benefits. These categories are among the fastest growing in the system.
How many of us over 40 don’t have stress or back pain?
1.3 million additional recipients were added during the Obama years through 2015, due to an expediting of the administrative process that overwhelmingly sided with the applicant.
The nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) noted that rules were changed to allow for more weight on self-reporting, relaxed screenings of mental illness, and the accepting of medical evidence from the applicant’s own doctor — while no taxpayer advocates were involved in the process.
Those on disability also qualify for Medicare. And because the Feds foot the whole disability bill, while only providing 50 percent of many Social Services costs such as food stamps, at least one state,Missouri, was actually paying a consultant (Public Consulting Group) to move people from their welfare rolls and onto disability.
As Chana Joffe-Walt wrote in her staggering article for NPR’s “Planet Money,” ” . . . disability has also become a de facto welfare program for people without a lot of education or job skills.” Her report further indicated that, “Once people go onto disability, they almost never go back to work.”
Perhaps, until now.
The tax cut plan and its resulting kick-start to the economy has boosted job opportunities and consumer confidence. Greater hope equates to greater motivation. Add to that an increase individual dignity by tying benefits to a requirment to work.
The administration should go further to require that anyone on disability, who has not lost his limbs or eyesight, or isn’t undergoing treatment for a terminal disease, report to an employment site established by local government and be given a job — even if it is filing papers.
Pay these individuals the same they get right now. While there won’t be direct savings there, a massive amount will be saved by weeding out fraudulent applicants.
Since those applicants have to report to a designated location 40 hours a week anyway, we’ll see how fast they say their stress isn’t all that bad and perhaps they can do their old job, and get paid by their employer, rather than the taxpayer.
One reason I’m skeptical about this is, as employers can tell you, merely having a body in the office doesn’t exactly help the business. It’s hard to imagine a less motivated employee than someone who has already been a malingerer due to his or her stated disability that prevents them, or so they claim, from doing any work at all.
Those of us who work 40 or more hours a week to support those who work zero hours per week deserve this much.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 