Today in 1955, the Louisiana Hayride TV show broadcast this concert live from Shreveport, La.:
No comments on Presty the DJ for April 2
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Today is April Fool’s Day. Which John Lennon and Yoko Ono celebrated in 1970 by announcing they were having sex-change operations.
Today in 1972, the Mar y Sol festival began in Puerto Rico. The concert’s location simplified security — it was on an island accessible only by those with tickets.
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Today in 1949, RCA introduced the 45-rpm single to compete with the 33-rpm album introduced by CBS one year earlier. The first RCA 45 was …
Today in 1964, the Beatles filmed a scene of a “live” TV performance before a studio audience for their movie “A Hard Day’s Night.”
In the audience: Phil Collins.
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My efforts to avoid political advertising around elections meant I missed this …
… specifically this shot:
That is future Sauk County Circuit Judge and state Supreme Court candidate Michael Screnock, a tuba player in the UW Marching Band (whose annual concerts in the Kohl Center are April 19–21, by the way) while I was a trumpet player in the world’s best college marching band. (Mike — I mean, Judge Screnock — graduated in 1990, two years after I did, which means we are both of the era when the band didn’t get to perform at bowl games and NCAA tournament games because UW didn’t play in those games.)
A sign of my advanced age, or something else, is that I have personal connections with at least four present members of this state’s judiciary. One of my coworkers (with whom I shared political ideology) at my only daily newspaper job is now a Columbia County judge. One of my high school classmates (with whom I did not share political ideology, to put it mildly) is now a state administrative law judge. One of the two local circuit judges (with whom I have never discussed politics) was a teammate of mine on the softball team of my first full-time employer, a team utterly lacking in athletic talent with few exceptions (one of them being a guy nicknamed “Baseball”), yet somehow not the worst team in the league.
Even though I haven’t paid attention to the commercial, this mailer from the Republican Party of Wisconsin appeared in the mail yesterday:
From JudgeScrenock.com: “After graduating from Baraboo High School, Judge Screnock chose to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he was an active member of the UW Marching Band tuba section. He met his wife, Karen from Brookfield, Wisconsin, on the UW campus and they were married the summer before he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics in 1990.” It should be obvious (but requires saying in our hyperpolitical times) that the UW Marching Band does not endorse political candidates, then or now. (Including in 1978, when UW Marching Band members played on the school bus procured by or for Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Dreyfus.) At least in my (or our) day, I think it’s safe to say that band members skewed rightward, perhaps in part because there were more of them from small towns than from Madison (including, yes, me) and Milwaukee, or because we had some military reservists in our ranks, or because we were in the band during the Age of Reagan. (One of the aforementioned reservists finished a concert at the State Capitol by exhorting a vote for Reagan, “the official presidential candidate of the UW Band!”, which wasn’t met with unanimous agreement in the band. However, Reagan did win Wisconsin.)
Then again, politics in the 1980s, certain victims of Reagan Derangement Syndrome notwithstanding, was not as stupid as it is today. Every part of Madison skewed Democrat, but no adult I knew — that is, the parents of my classmates and friends — took the extreme leftist viewpoints that appear commonplace today in the People’s Republic of Madison. Politics obviously got discussed at UW–Madison, and even at my high school, but not to the extent it is today, certainly not with the nasty tone of today (with the exception of those were seen as a few bubbles off plumb), and people rarely made personal decisions (as far as I was aware of) based on political considerations. (An exception: My high school journalism teacher refused to take us to Madison Newspapers Inc., a place budding journalists might like to have seen, because the Wisconsin State Journal and The Capital Times broke the newspaper strike. On the other hand, we didn’t go to field trips anywhere, which may have been for nonpolitical reasons, and we got to talk to reporters in our classroom. I was in fifth grade during the state’s last teachers’ strike, but I don’t recall the subject coming up at all after the strike ended.)
The band certainly was and is patriotic, and that came from the top. In those days, and I assume today, the National Anthem was preceded by a patriotic drill that started with “Songs to Thee Wisconsin,” and then included some combination of “Bound for the Promised Land,” the spiritual “Simple Gifts” (from which came part of Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring”), versions of “God Bless America” and “America the Beautiful,” and like songs. That was probably a bigger challenge when UW Band director Mike Leckrone arrived on campus during the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
There were a few political moments, but not many in my band days. One inadvertent controversy came when, during a debate over whether the band should play “You’ve Said It All” …
… selected because fans at the 1973 NCAA hockey tournament wanted a polka …
… which became a country song …
… that when Budweiser used it in its commercials was criticized for allegedly promoting drinking …
… Leckrone pointed out, correctly, that the melody of “The Star Spangled Banner” came from a British drinking song, “To Anacreon in Heaven.”
(For those who think political issues have metastasized into ridiculousness in the 21st century, I present this as evidence that this has been the case longer than you might think.)
I somehow managed to miss band members’ playing at an appearance of Gov. Anthony Earl shortly before he lost the 1986 election. I did, however, play at an event for state Sen. Carl Otte (D–Sheboygan), because I was told he was a “friend of the Band,” and more importantly for the free food and beer. (Afterward we ended up at a tavern — I’ll pause to allow readers to recover from the shock of that statement — to see Earl and a couple of his aides playing cribbage at a nearby table.) The band has also played for governors since Earl. If the governor calls, what are you going to do?
Which brings to mind this amusing paraphrased story from Rick Telander’s book From Red Ink to Roses: The band generated some more controversy by greeting the Chicago Bears as all Wisconsinites should during a Packers game at which the band played. That apparently prompted a phone call from Gov. Tommy Thompson (a Republican) to UW–Madison chancellor Donna Shalala (not a Republican), during which (perhaps not with complete seriousness) Thompson asked Shalala what she was going to do about the band. To that, Shalala replied that she couldn’t very well reprimand the band for telling the truth.
The biggest political incident in my band days came before the 1984 UW–Ohio State football game, which (in those days when not every game was on TV) was nationally televised by CBS. That meant an 11:05 a.m. kickoff, which pushed everything else back from the usual 1 or 1:30 p.m. starts. We played the National Anthem around 10:45 a.m. When we got to the line “And the rocket’s red glare” there came a sight so bizarre that it didn’t register at first — people running on the field past us. They were members of the anti-nuclear dance group (really) Nu Parable, previously known for getting kicked out of Madison shopping malls for their mime-like “die-in” in which they simulated becoming victims of a nuclear attack. This was during the 1984 presidential campaign, when left-leaning UW students (but I repeat myself) were absolutely convinced that, having inexplicably failed to destroy the world in a giant mushroom cloud during his first term, Ronald Reagan would certainly accomplish that feat during a second term in office.
The crowd’s reaction was probably not what Nu Parable had in mind — booing once fans figured out what was going on, accompanied by the student section’s chanting “Nuke ’em!” A few of them made the mistake of “dying” in front of band members (unfortunately, not me), who literally marched over them, with one of the Nu Parables getting literally punted by a Marine reservist.
After we were done playing, a few of us went over to watch them get arrested by UW police. One of them was our drum major, who always reminded me of the Grim Reaper. If looks could have killed, there would have been no second Nu Parable die-in, because they all would have dropped dead on the spot. As it was, when they had another “die-in” before the next pre-election home game, they stayed away from the band.
The obligatory inside joke here is my having to contemplate voting for a tuba player. (The obligatory inside joke follow-up is that, I suppose, that beats having to vote for a reed-sucker.)
Readers could correctly conclude that I planned on voting for Screnock before this anyway. Our common experience in the band taught us the value of hard work whether or not anyone notices, doing more than you physically (and otherwise) think you can do, the esprit de corps of being in the world’s best college marching band, and a term you hear a lot of today — accountability without excuses or blaming someone else for your own faults and problems. That doesn’t make the UW Band a right-wing organization, and if anyone thinks it does, they are wrong. If hard work, exceeding your self-imposed limits and personal accountability are values out of favor with liberals, that is their fault.
As for Screnock’s opponent, who announced earlier this week that she has “San Francisco values,” greater San Francisco includes Palo Alto, home of Stanford University and the abomination known as the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band …
… known for this list of things, and of course acting as tackling dummies.
Compare and contrast:
The other thing Judge Screnock and I have in common is that we grew up in an era where not everything, even on the UW–Madison campus, was political. As you know, the words “change” and “progress” are not synonyms. (Though I suspect Screnock and I would both agree that change in UW football and basketball since we were in the band is both change and progress.)
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Long-time readers know my fondness for big, big cars of old, including my former 1975 Chevrolet Caprice, all 18 feet, 4,300 pounds and 11 mpg of it.
Well, I’m not the only one. Riverside Green writes:
A good friend of mine is the “Brougham Whisperer,” Jason Bagge, also known as Mr. Caprice, ha ha! He buys real cars about as often as I buy model cars. Which is to say, a lot. Most of those cars are 1970s land yachts, though not exclusively so. But one of his favorites are the Nimitz-class 1971-1976 Chevrolet Caprice. He’s owned several over the years, but perhaps the coolest one he had is the subject of today’s Klockau Classic. The 1976 Caprice Classic Landau. In triple black, no less!
Living in the Pacific Northwest, he is in a great position to find clean old cars that just need a little love to be really nice. In fact, it’s uncanny. Every time he finds a new car I think, “Holy crap! I haven’t seen one of those since about 1993!” And then he sells it. And then, three months later, he finds ANOTHER one, often times nicer than the last one. The man has a knack for this stuff!
Late last year, he sold this mint pistachio-hued 1974 Chevrolet Impala. It was nice when he got it. But he gave it that extra polish he is well known for in the old car hobby, including an NOS grille, new whitewalls, and myriad other things. At the time I told him this one should be the “keeper.” It was that nice. So of course he sold it. Ha ha!
And almost exactly a year ago, I told him to keep this one, an ice blue metallic 1976 Caprice Classic Sport Sedan. I wrote it up right here at RG, and at the time he still had it. But not long after it was heading to the Midwest, to its new owner in Chicagoland!
But that’s how it goes. He sees a car, performs his magic, enjoys the car a while, someone makes him an offer he can’t refuse, and the car is away and the search for a new classic is on!
Which brings us to the elusive, Broughamtastic 1976 Chevrolet Caprice Classic Landau.
A couple of years ago Jason was scouring the online classifieds when he spotted this. It had been turned into a half-assed lowrider (little wheels but no hydraulics, heh!) but it was a genuine factory triple black Landau (meaning black paint, interior and top, for those of you born before the Brougham Age).
He had to have it. And he got it! And immediately began working on it. The interior was a little rough, but the doofy little wheels were almost immediately ditched, sold, and factory wheels and Caprice wheel covers were sourced. Along with brand new whitewall tires. Naturally.
But those standard Caprice Classic wheelcovers were just placeholders. You see, the Landau package, available on two-door Caprice Classics and Impalas, came with their very own wheel cover style. And were color-keyed to the car’s paint for Maximum Broughaminess.
So of course the “regular” Caprice Classic wheel covers just wouldn’t do long-term. Jason was able to acquire the correct ones, and painstakingly masked them off and painted them to match. Fun fact: The 1976 Landau wheel covers were the standard 1975 Caprice Classic wheel discs, but with painted centers. Ebay is your friend!
In no time the Landau was looking damn fine! As it should be.
The biggest talking point on all 1976 Caprice Classics were quad rectangular headlamps, giving the Caprices a decidedly Cadillac-like look up front. Of course there was a new grille too.
The top of the heap was the Classic Landau, which added an Elk-grained Landau vinyl roof, accent stripes, dual color-keyed sport mirrors, and deluxe bumpers with rubber impact strips front and rear.
Said dual sport mirrors included a remote control for the driver’s side. Rounding out the special features were “Landau” script etched into the quarter window glass and the aforementioned special wheel covers with color-keyed centers and “Landau” center caps.
The Caprice Classic Landau retailed for $5,284 new, and that was before any options were added. But even that base price was a healthy bump over the standard Classic two-door coupe, whose MSRP was $5,043.
At the end of the model year the regular Caprice Classic was the winner sales-wise, but Landau sales were not too shabby either. 28,161 regular Caprice Classic coupes were sold, while Caprice Classic Landau production was 21,926.
Today any stock Caprice Classic from The Year Of Our Lord 1976 is rare, as these automobiles have fallen prey to myriad custom-car aficionados. And said demand has bumped the price of these “Whopper” Caprices in the market. They are certainly no longer the old, worn-out $900 beaters they were circa 1991. Jason will tell you!
When he got done with the car, it looked terrific! He was hoping to source upholstery for the somewhat worn interior when someone offered him a ton of money for it. So with some regret, the car moved on. Too bad. I loved this one. I messaged Jason at least a couple of times, saying ‘keep this car!’ But money talks and…well, you know.
But wait! There’s even more. As we speak a new car has been acquired and is on the way to Jason’s driveway, so stay tuned. You will hear all about it, later this year! Until then, keep calm and Brougham on!
What’s interesting to me is that, other than the “pistachio-hued” Impala, every Caprice here is a ’76. These represent a few of what’s left of the 152,806 Caprices built (many in the late Janesville plant) and sold in the 1976 model year. There were 21,929 Landau coupes, as opposed to 28,161 non-Landau coupes. (We had a non-Landau coupe; I can find no breakdowns of 1975 production by body style.) The four-door Caprice pictured here is a Sport Sedan (as if the term “sport” applies to an 18-foot-long car), notable by the window in the C-pillar and the nonexistent B-pillar, of which 55,308 were built, as opposed to the 47,411 non-Sport Sedan sedans.
Interestingly, perhaps, those 152,806 Caprices represented a huge sales jump from 1975, when 103,944 (including the last 8,349 convertibles) were sold. I don’t know how widely it was known (except perhaps among car buffs) that GM was downsizing its full-size cars for 1977. Perhaps that had something to do with the 47-percent jump in sales. The sales jump is unlikely to have been because of the few changes from ’75 to ’76, including the rectangular headlights and replacement of the instrument-panel-knob pictograms with woodgrain. (Really.)
Bagge has two videos of the black ’76, which includes what is known derisively as the “Mark of Excellence” — a cracked dashboard. This has a 400 V-8, the biggest small-block V-8 Chevy ever made. It doesn’t have the ironic option of the temperature gauge (only because some car buffs looked askance at the 400 for its cylinder head design that was claimed to be prone to overheating) and Econominder, a fuel economy (actually engine vacuum) gauge.
Bagge’s Caprices represent cars no one will ever make anymore. Technologically cars today are much more capable, but most of them are destined to be remembered as much as your previous refrigerator. My Caprice represented my first taste of transportation freedom. Perhaps any car I was able to drive with my new driver’s license might have, but that car did.
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The History of Rock Facebook page tells the story of one of the more amusing moments in rock and non-rock-music history tied to this song:
On March 27th of 1971, the very popular song … was pulled from rotation by an influential radio station. It was the ‘flagship’ radio station of the NBC network. Other stations across their vast radio network soon followed suit … due to pressure from censors and higher-ups at the network and that’s what brings all of the things and/or people in the pics below to my post here. They include…
- Jerry Garcia
- WNBC, a now defunct radio station in New York City
- Lawrence Welk
- 2 singers from the Lawrence Welk show by the names of Gail Farrell & Dick Dale
- Myron Floren, the accordionist from that show
- And of course, last but certainly not least, Brewer & Shipley, in a concert promo flyer within the pics … with a song that can be described as a ONE HIT WONDER in more than one way. A song that was controversial for more than one reason as well
Like for instance, Jerry Garcia had been hired to play steel guitar on the “Tarkio” album from 1970 that this song comes from. There was no need for steel guitar on this song…but when it was released as a single … Jerry played on the song on the B side … by the name of “Oh Mommy (I Aint No Commie)” … which is a song about being ‘allowed’ under federal law to start up a revolution.
… Brewer says, “We wrote that one night in the dressing room of a coffee house. We were literally just entertaining ourselves. The next day we got together to do some picking and said, ‘What was that we were messing with last night?’ We remembered it, and in about an hour, we’d written ‘One Toke Over the Line.’ Just making ourselves laugh, really. We had no idea that it would ever even be considered as a single, because it was just another song to us. Actually Tom and I always thought that our ballads were our forte.
The incident that sparked this song happened at the Vanguard in Kansas City, Missouri. The band was playing the show because, in seeking to escape the LA music scene, they started a tour of their Midwest homelands. Shipley reports that he was given a block of hash and told to take two hits. He ignored the advice and instead took three. Shipley says, “I go out of the dressing room – I’m also a banjo player, but I didn’t have one, so I was playing my guitar — and Michael (Brewer) came in and I said, ‘Jesus, Michael, I’m one toke over the line.’ And to be perfect honest, I don’t remember if Michael was with me when I took that hit or not. I remember it as ‘not’; I think Michael remembers it as ‘yes.’ And he started to sing to what I was playing, and I chimed in and boom, we had the line.”
Brewer also remembers the occasion. “I just cracked up,” he said. “I thought it was hysterical. And right on the spot, we just started singing, ‘One toke over the line, sweet Jesus,’ and that was about it; then we went onstage.”
Now, jump to the very conservative, family oriented, WHOLESOME tv show from back in the day…by the name of The Lawrence Welk Show. The host and his compatriots were famous for playing music of all kinds…but also for playing it with big band and/or polka instruments. Welk had heard the song by Brewer & Shipley and put it on his show (also in 1971), to be performed by 2 of his many regular performers. When the song’s slot came up in the show…accordionist Myron Floren who would often introduce acts, called it, “one of the newer songs”. At which point, singers Gail Farrell & Dick Dale launched into their wholesome rendition of “One Toke Over The Line”. At the end of the song…Lawrence bookended their performance by saying, “there you’ve heard A MODERN SPIRITUAL by Gail and Dale”…..
I am absolutely convinced that of everyone in this Lawrence Welk clip, Floren (of whom my grandparents were big fans, and saw him in concert at least twice) is the only person here who knew what the song was about, which explains his, uh, throat-clearing moment.
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The number one single today in 1957 was the first number one rock and roll single to be written by its singer:
The number one single today in 1963 …
… which sounds suspiciously similar to a song released seven years later:
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David Hogg began his speech at the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C., on Saturday by accusing Marco Rubio, Florida’s Republican senator, of exchanging students’ lives for donations from the National Rifle Association. Dividing the $3 million or so that Rubio has received from the NRA over the years by the number of primary and secondary students in Florida, Hogg figured that the senator had charged $1.05 for each of the 14 teenagers killed in the February 14 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, where Hogg is a senior.
Hogg and the other young activists who attended demonstrations across the country on Saturday to demand legislation aimed at preventing school shootings may have energized the debate about gun control, but they certainly have not elevated it. Taking their cues from the grownups they say have failed them, Hogg and his compatriots assume their opponents are motivated by greed, cowardice, and crass political considerations—anything but honest disagreement.
“School safety is not a political issue,” the March for Our Lives website insists. “There cannot be two sides to doing everything in our power to ensure the lives and futures of children who are at risk of dying when they should be learning, playing, and growing.”
There cannot be two sides. That sort of logic practically demands contempt for anyone who does not share your policy preferences, as illustrated by Hogg’s comments about legislators who do not vote the way he thinks they should.
“They’re pathetic fuckers that want to keep killing our children,” Hogg said in an interview with The Outline. “They could have blood from children spattered all over their faces, and they wouldn’t take action, because they all still see those dollar signs.”
Hogg is only 17, but comments from older, supposedly wiser advocates of gun control reflect a similar attitude. “If you’re a political leader doing nothing about this slaughter,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) tweeted after the Parkland attack, “you’re an accomplice.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who is five times as old as David Hogg, shares his assumptions about people who disagree with her, although she expresses them in more temperate terms. “The students protesting inaction on gun safety,” she tweeted on March 14, “have the courage to stand up to the NRA and lawmakers would do well to follow their example.”
If fear of the NRA is the only conceivable reason why people would fail to support the legislation favored by Hogg, Murphy, and Feinstein, there is no point in debating whether, say, an “assault weapon” ban, a limit on the capacity of magazines, or background checks for every gun transfer can reasonably be expected to have a meaningful impact on the frequency or lethality of mass shootings. The only sensible course is to shame or scare people into doing what everyone knows is the right thing—whatever that happens to be at any given moment.
“Our lives are more important than your guns,” said a sign held by a teenager at the D.C. rally. Similar slogans, presumably written by adults, could be seen on signs held by preschoolers. The implicit message—that Americans must surrender their firearms and their Second Amendment rights in the name of protecting children—was not exactly designed to provoke a fruitful dialogue. But that approach makes sense if you think all the relevant issues have already been settled.
Lara Vance, a middle-aged Kentucky woman who was interviewed at the D.C. rally, said she was “rather shocked that this is even an issue.” After all, “This is something that can be solved. It doesn’t take a lot of thought. We know what the problems are, and we need Congress to get their act together and get this problem solved.”
I disagree with pretty much every part of that, but I have no doubt that Vance sincerely believes it. I wish she would extend me the same courtesy.
University of Maryland Prof. Dana Fisher adds:
In the days before and after more than two million Americans participated in the March for Our Lives, the gun-violence conversation has focused on the Marjory Stoneman Douglas survivors and their “student movement.”
The school shooting in Parkland, Fla., and the passion of the teenage survivors have become a catalyst for the current movement. With the help of some well-resourced benefactors, including Oprah Winfrey and George Clooney, the survivors organized an extraordinary rally in D.C. and sister marches around the country in a mere six weeks.
However, the young faces of the advocates have created an assumption that “youth” and “students” are the core of the movement. My research tells a different story about who participated in the March for Our Lives — and it is more complicated and less well-packaged for prime time.
As part of my research on the American Resistance, I have been working with a research team to survey protesters at all the large-scale protest events in Washington since President Trump’s inauguration. By snaking through the crowd and sampling every fifth person at designated increments within the staging area, we are able to gather a field approximation of a random sample. So far, the data set includes surveys collected from 1,745 protest participants.
During the March for Our Lives, my team sampled 256 people who were randomly selected. This gives us the chance to provide evidence about who attended the March for Our Lives and why.
Like other resistance protests, and like previous gun-control marches, the March for Our Lives was mostly women. Whereas the 2017 Women’s March was 85 percent women, the March for Our Lives was 70 percent women. Further, participants were highly educated; 72 percent had a BA or higher.
Contrary to what’s been reported in many media accounts, the D.C. March for Our Lives crowd was not primarily made up of teenagers. Only about 10 percent of the participants were under 18. The average age of the adults in the crowd was just under 49 years old, which is older than participants at the other marches I’ve surveyed but similar to the age of the average participant at the Million Moms March in 2000, which was also about gun control.
Participants were also more likely than those at recent marches to be first-time protesters. About 27 percent of participants at the March for Our Lives had never protested before. This group was less politically engaged in general: Only about a third of them had contacted an elected official in the past year, while about three-quarters of the more seasoned protesters had.
Even more interesting, the new protesters were less motivated by the issue of gun control. In fact, only 12 percent of the people who were new to protesting reported that they were motivated to join the march because of the gun-control issue, compared with 60 percent of the participants with experience protesting. …
The March for Our Lives had the allure of a free concert — in fact, the event’s website maintained a list of performers but never listed the speakers. But it is one thing to turn out to watch Lin-Manuel Miranda and Ariana Grande perform, and quite another to vote in the midterm election in November.
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State Treasurer Matt Adamczyk four years ago campaigned for the office with a novel pledge: He would do all he could in one – and only one – term to get rid of the state treasurer’s post.
On Tuesday, a state referendum question will ask voters whether the office of the treasurer should be eliminated from the constitution. And, if so, should the lieutenant governor replace the treasurer as a member of the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands, administrator of the state’s Common School Fund.
It’s a yes or no question. Adamczyk is a definite yes.
“The office of the treasurer is basically symbolic in nature. It’s a relic of the past, and I say we get rid of it,” he told MacIver News Service recently on the Vicki McKenna Show, on NewsTalk 1310 WIBA.
The referendum to amend the constitution, on the April 3 ballot, has been mostly overshadowed by the hotly contested state Supreme Court election.
But Adamczyk, a limited-government Republican, said the treasurer’s question is bigger than the ballot issue. It’s an opportunity, at least in a small way, to reduce the size and scope of state government.
“We need to show we can try to limit government somehow,” he said. “Government just can’t keep getting bigger. We have to stop the growth in government and, at a minimum limit it, and, hopefully, reduce it.”
Adamczyk has limited some of the government footprint in the office he successfully campaigned for. One of his first acts as treasurer was to cut two bureaucratic positions. He could have filled a deputy treasurer position, which paid about $85,000 per year. He declined. The treasurer said he couldn’t hire someone for a job that didn’t have any real duties.
Adamczyk said eliminating the positions and turning the mostly symbolic treasurer’s office into a one-man show will save taxpayers about $1 million in salaries and benefits over the course of his four-year term.
Taxpayers would save another $70,000 a year in treasurer’s salary, if voters move to eliminate the office.
While an essential part of state government when Wisconsin became a state in 1848, the treasurer’s office has seen most of its duties and responsibilities shifted to other agencies. The treasurer’s remaining constitutional responsibility is to serve on the three-member Board of Commissioners of Public Lands, alongside the attorney general and the secretary of state. The referendum question would turn that obligation over to the lieutenant governor.
The Republican-controlled Legislature passed in two consecutive sessions (as the constitution requires) a resolution to take the treasurer’s question to voters. The measure earned some bipartisan support in the Assembly.
Critics of the campaign to put the treasurer’s office out of its misery insist the move is “another power grab” by Republican Gov. Scott Walker. Big government defenders such as Madison Alderman Mark Clear have urged residents of the liberal city to vote “no” on the resolution.
“The next State Treasurer should focus on providing independent information to the public about the state’s budget and fiscal health, as well as encouraging the Legislature to restore the position’s financial oversight authority,” Clear said in a press release.
But referendum question supporters, like state Rep. Rob Brooks (R-Brookfield), say the effort is about streamlining government, making it more efficient and accountable by eliminating an unnecessary office.
Adamczyk, who earlier announced he is running for the Assembly seat being vacated by state Rep. Dale Kooyenga (R-Brookfield), said he’s optimistic voters will take the “opportunity to make government smaller.”
“Most people do vote that way when given a direct chance to make government a little bit smaller,” the outgoing treasurer said.
Former state Treasurer Jack Voight wants voters to reject a referendum on April 3 that would eliminate his old job. However, his “Save Our Fiscal Watchdog” group could use a fiscal watchdog themselves.
Save Our Fiscal Watchdog submitted a campaign finance statement to the Wisconsin Ethics Commission that they raised only $209.11 for their effort and spent only $18.89 on bank charges. However, the campaign finance statement, written by Voight as the organization’s treasurer, does not include the creation of the organization’s website.
“Well, I guess somebody else created that and there was no bill for that,” Voight explained in a phone interview Tuesday. “I guess it’d be like an in-kind contribution. I suppose I could amend it to an in-kind contribution. I should do that.”
When asked who designed the website, Voight said he didn’t know. “I didn’t ask the committee who did it,” Voight said. “I probably should have asked that.”
Voight, a Republican who served three terms as state treasurer from 1995 to 2007, has been a vocal proponent of saving the endangered state constitutional office. Likewise, the website asks voters not to eliminate the treasurer’s position.
“On April 3, Wisconsin voters will be asked if they want to eliminate the office of the Wisconsin State Treasurer from our Constitution,” the website says. “This would make us the only state in the U.S. without a Treasurer or an equivalent watchdog office.”
However, the last two state treasurers were elected on a platform of eliminating the position which has grown almost completely powerless over the years. The only remaining duty of the state treasurer is to sit on the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands (BCPL), a constitutionally mandated duty that would go to the lieutenant governor’s office if a majority of voters vote yes to eliminate the treasurer’s office. …
Democrats and Voight have argued against eliminating the constitutional office, saying that it puts too much control of the BCPL in the hands of the Executive Branch by putting the lieutenant governor on the board instead. However, the lieutenant governor would be the only executive branch officer on the board, with the state attorney general and the secretary of state also continuing to serve on the board.
In addition to statements on the campaign website defending keeping the state treasurer’s position, the website also features a “vote no” campaign YouTube video, the production costs of which were also not included in the “Save Our Fiscal Watchdog” campaign finance statement.
The opponents of eliminating $70,000 in state payroll do not accurately portray what the office does. The position is not a watchdog of public funds, and hasn’t been for a long time, well before this effort to eliminate the office. Opponents also claim the duties of the office have been taken by unelected bureaucrats, which is rich for Democrats (which Voight is not) to assert given that those “unelected bureaucrats” are overwhelmingly Democrats.
James Wigderson adds:
Getting rid of the state treasurer is not a new idea. When my grandfather ran for Secretary of State in the 1950s, the Waukesha Freeman wondered in an editorial why that position and the state treasurer were still elected offices. Since then, both positions have lost considerable amounts of responsibility.
The fiscal estimates are now done by the non-partisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau. Unclaimed property is now handled by the Department of Revenue. (Full disclosure, they sent me a $20 check without me applying to reclaim the money. The system works.)
Meanwhile, the continued presence of Doug La Follette as Secretary of State proves the worthlessness of that constitutional office.
It’s spring cleaning time, and the Capitol basement would be better off used for storage.
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The number one British single today in 1963 may make you tap your foot:
Today in 1966, Mick Jagger got in the way of a chair thrown onto the stage during a Rolling Stones concert in Marseilles, France.
The title and artist are the same for the number one album today in 1969:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 