For 15 years, Mike McCabe headed Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, the state’s foremost — and feistiest — sentinel of the role of money in politics. He brought equal amounts of anger and optimism to the group’s nonpartisan mission, skewering Democrats and Republicans alike and sounding a clarion call for reform.
“I loved that job,” McCabe says wistfully. “I could have very easily done it for another 15 years.”
But McCabe decided he needed to try a new approach. His 2014 book, Blue Jeans in High Places, calls for the creation of a new political movement for people like himself who feel “politically homeless,” alienated from both major parties.
“I wrote that book as a blueprint,” McCabe says. “Blueprints are worthless unless you use them to build something.”
What McCabe wants to build is not a third party, which he jokes is a lock to come in third. His concept, similar to progressive movements in the past and the tea party movement of recent years, is to create a “first party” — one that demands change from within the existing political structure.
“We are neither elephant nor ass,” McCabe has said, “but we recognize that America has a two-party system and we plan to work within that system to get the parties truly working for all of us and not just a favored few.”
I was trying to remember a time where McCabe criticized Democrats. I can’t, unless it was for criticizing Democrats for taking corporate campaign contributions. McCabe is not a moderate.
But: What is Blue Jean Nation about? Take a look at its “creed” (which strikes me as actually McCabe’s creed, but never mind that):
We are commoners. We realize government is not of the people, by the people and for the people at the present time and we are committed to getting citizens back in the driver’s seat of our government.
We believe both major political parties are failing America. We don’t need three parties. We need at least one that truly works for the people.
We believe the biggest problem facing Wisconsin and all of America today is a political system that caters to a few at the expense of the many. At the root of this problem is political corruption that plagues us with “leaders” who are not free to lead and leaves our country paralyzed when it comes to dealing with the most challenging issues of our time.
So far, so good, except for that part about “the most challenging issues of our time.” Given the number of roadblocks the Founding Fathers put in our political system, what McCabe calls leaving our country “paralyzed” could be said to be a feature, not a bug. The right decisions are supposed to be made by our leaders. The Department of Homeland Security, created in the wake of 9/11, demonstrates that haste often makes waste.
We believe the way politicians seek public office — with fundraising that amounts to legal bribery and with advertising that is routinely misleading and often downright untruthful — is immoral and destructive to civic life. Power sought dishonorably cannot possibly lead to just and honest policymaking or clean and open government.
Many people think Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy were among our best presidents. Truman was a product of the corrupt Boss Tweed political machine. Kennedy was elected president thanks to political chicanery in Illinois and Texas. What does that say when two of our supposed best presidents got their power “dishonorably”?
Independent of McCabe’s non-acknowledgement of the First Amendment, this fails to acknowledge why we have “advertising that is routinely misleading and often downright untruthful.” It’s because it obviously works. Joseph de Maistre said “Every country has the government it deserves,” and that extends probably to every level of government.
To which McCabe replies:
We believe government is necessary to a civil and just society and prosperous economy. But we insist on a limited government — one that is as small as possible and only as big as required to do what society needs done collectively. Government programs that work should be supported and ones that do not should be reformed or ended. Most importantly, what government does must serve the broad public interest and promote the common good, not just benefit those who lavishly fund election campaigns or have high-priced lobbyists advocating on their behalf.
Independent of the contradictory second sentence (about which more momentarily), the United States of America exists because of fundamental mistrust of government. McCabe doesn’t seem to support term limits (the only term limit that would work would be limit of one term), cutting legislator pay (the fact a state legislator makes almost twice as much money as the average Wisconsin family should outrage people), placing strict constitutional limits on spending at every level (which, had that been enacted in the late 1970s, would have given us government half the size we’re stuck with in Wisconsin today), and generally taking power away from politicians. Every political fault we have in this state stems from the fact that legislators make too much money and have too much power. Blue Jean Nation does absolutely nothing about that.
Economic issues are where things start to unravel further:
We believe in hard work and self sufficiency. We also believe in looking out for each other. We agree that it is wise to live within our means and pay for what we get today instead of mortgaging the future and saddling generations to come with our debts. We believe in a free market, not a market manipulated to favor the most politically privileged participants in our economy.
Free market? Not really:
We believe in one-for-all economics – policies ensuring that the fruits of a vibrant economy benefit the whole of society. We are equally committed to rural revitalization and urban renewal. Instead of subsidizing global conglomerates, efforts to stimulate the economy should emphasize community-based small enterprise development, empower local entrepreneurs and cooperatives, and enable us to once again grow together rather than growing apart. We believe supply-side or “trickle down” economic theory has it wrong. Demand, not supply, is the primary driver of economic growth. Feed-the-rich policies have been a miserable failure, never producing more than a trickle for the masses and causing grotesque economic inequality and the slow but steady extermination of the middle class.
That previous paragraph doesn’t match “limited government” at all. Nor does …
We believe we are all in the same boat and will sink or sail together. We believe in waging war on poverty, not poor people. We believe it is everyone’s right to pursue material gain and accumulate wealth, but vigorously object to its use to buy government favors or special treatment.
That last paragraph is a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with Blue Jean Nation. There is an incorrect assumption that everything applies, and should apply, equally to everybody — not merely in rights (and we can’t even agree on, for instance, whether abortion rights or rights to same-sex marriage are really rights), but in equality of outcome. The U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights was created to restrict government; it was not created to inspire Karl Marx. There is also a built-in assumption that there is one correct answer for everything that ills us, and it’s only those evil Republicans keeping us away from that Utopia. That is flat out wrong.
You would think someone who has been around politics as long as McCabe has would grasp the simple fact that since the first Congress met politics has been, and remains, a zero-sum game. One side wins; the other loses. The reason things don’t get done today is because we cannot decide the best way to fix what’s wrong. If there were obvious answers, those obvious answers would have become law decades ago.
We believe in aspiring to intelligence, not belittling it. Becoming well educated and learning to think critically should be valued and expected, not feared or obstructed. Education is our best hope for building a better and more prosperous future, and our best weapon against economic and social decline. For our nation’s youth to have a reasonable chance of experiencing the American Dream in the 21st Century, higher education needs to be made as accessible and affordable in the future as primary and secondary education have been in the past.
Hmmm. Two of the most intelligent people I knew were my late father-in-law and my grandmother. Both were graduates of eighth grade. McCabe seems to confuse intelligence with wisdom, and either with education. It was presumably a Ph.D.-holding professor who suggested recently that parents who read to children at bedtime are being unfair to children whose parents don’t.
According to McCabe, “belittling” “intelligence” means daring to question whether the public schools and higher education as currently constructed are really the best way to prepare our children for the 21st century. Elsewhere McCabe touts free college, which also flies in the face of “limited government.” (And free college is a prescription for politicians to get as involved in higher education as politicians now are involved in “free” public education.) McCabe has similar insults directed at those who don’t think spending tens of millions of dollars every year to buy land for no use at all is a wise use of taxpayer money.
It took less than a decade after the founding of our nation for the national political landscape to organize itself into two parties. Other parties have come and gone, and other parties morphed into what we have today, like it or not, the Democrats and Republicans. Even the Wisconsin Progressives ended up mostly in the Democratic Party. That suggests that politics is a binary thing, and it probably is, since every vote that takes place is a yes or no vote. (Unless you’re U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois), and you’re allowed to vote “present” with no political repercussions.)
A worthy goal of a non-two-party movement would be to get government out of our lives, and deescalate the political battles that take place in Madison and Washington. Government was never supposed to be, and should not be, as pervasive and invasive as it is today.
Press reports recently have provided a misleading picture of the Wisconsin economy: These stories base their analysis on the state rankings of job and wage growth from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in which Wisconsin has slipped into 40th place or lower.
But a look at broader data shows that the economy in Wisconsin is much healthier than these indicators suggest, and has outperformed the overall national economy.
Job growth rankings, in particular, do not provide an accurate depiction of the labor market. States hardest hit by recession would need to have higher job growth simply to return to the same place. For comparison, the rankings place Wisconsin between 31st and 41st over the past three years, while Michigan has regularly been in the top 10. But total employment in Michigan fell roughly 11% from 2007 to 2010. Although it has grown relatively rapidly since 2011, it remains at 4% below its 2007 level.
By contrast, Wisconsin tracks the national average rather closely. The recession was somewhat milder in Wisconsin than in the nation as a whole, so job growth after the recession was somewhat slower. But over the past three years, total employment growth in Wisconsin has been at least as strong as the national average.
On other dimensions, Wisconsin has outperformed the national average.
Unemployment in the state did not spike as dramatically, peaking at 9.2% compared with 10% nationally. But even from the lower peak, statewide unemployment has fallen rapidly, especially over the last two years. Since the beginning of 2014, the unemployment rate has fallen by 1.5 percentage points, and now stands at 4.6%, compared with 5.5% nationwide. A significant component of the reduction in the unemployment rate nationwide has been a decline in the labor force participation rate, which now stands at 62.8%. Some of this is due to demographic factors, driven by the aging of the population, but a large part is cyclical, with unemployed workers stopping looking for work. Labor force participation in Wisconsin historically has been above the national average, but importantly has been roughly stable since the beginning of 2012 at about 68.5%.
If the labor force participation rate in the U.S. as a whole had remained constant since 2012 (rather than falling by one percentage point), the national unemployment rate would now be 7% rather than 5.5%. Thus, the national unemployment rate hides additional weakness in the labor market not present in Wisconsin.
Earnings and incomes also are important gauges of whether households are improving economically. Along those lines, the state rankings on wage growth have been featured in recent reports. This data has been more mixed, with Wisconsin ranking in the 20s or better for most of 2011-2013, before slipping to 42nd recently. By comparison, South Dakota typically has been ranked in the top 10 and frequently in the top five. Again, these rankings provide a misleading picture. Data from the BLS shows that, since early 2011, average earnings have grown by more than 10% in Wisconsin and South Dakota, both more than one percentage point faster than the national average. Rather than stagnating, average earnings growth in Wisconsin has matched higher ranked states, and has been faster than the national average.
In addition, Wisconsin has done even better when looking at broader measures of household income. Available on an annual basis through 2013, real median household income from the Census Bureau goes beyond labor market earnings, and so provides a better indicator of household income and welfare. Median incomes in Wisconsin historically have been above the national average, and both have declined from their pre-recession peaks in 2007. But from 2011 to 2013, real median income rose by 2.7% in Wisconsin to $55,258, while it fell by 1.3% nationwide, to $51,939.
Today is the anniversary of the last Beatles U.S. single release, “Long and Winding Road” (the theme music of the Schenk Middle School eighth-grade Dessert Dance about this time in 1979):
The number one album today in 1977 was the Eagles’ “Hotel California”:
On Sunday a group of Americans opposed to radical Islam held an art contest for depictions of the Muslim prophet Muhammad in Garland, Texas.
Two Muslims took exception to the contest — apparently Islam prohibits depictions of Muhammad — and decided to kill everyone who went to the exhibition. They got as far as two Garland police officers outside the facility.
ISIS appeared to declare war on right-wing blogger Pamela Geller Tuesday in an ominous online message claiming it has fighters across America ready to attack “any target we desire.”
The threat, posted on JustPasteIt, singles out Geller, who helped plan a Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest that was attacked by two gunmen in Garland, Tex. over the weekend. ISIS claimed responsibility for the shooting early Tuesday, marking the first time the terror group called an American attack one of its own.
The chilling Tuesday post also boasts of ISIS having “71 trained soldiers in 15 different states ready at our word to attack,” specifically naming only Virginia, Maryland, Illinois, Michigan and California.
“The attack by the Islamic State in America is only the beginning of our efforts to establish a wiliyah in the heart of our enemy,” the message reads, apparently misspelling the Arabic word “wilayah,” meaning authority or governance. …
The authenticity of the post, as well as the group’s claim to the Texas shooting, have not been independently confirmed, and it is possible the threat is a hoax or a message from an ISIS sympathizer. ISIS has frequently used the anonymous message board JustPasteIt to publish propaganda, including the names and addresses of 100 U.S. service members in a call for an American jihad.
The armed attackers who stormed the Sunday cartoon contest, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi, were both shot dead by an off-duty officer outside. They were the only fatalities in an attack that also gave another guard a minor injury.
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The front page of the New York Daily News on Aug. 31, 2014.
The JustPasteIt post claims both men knew they would be killed, and were only testing the waters for future terror.
“We knew that the target was protected. Our intention was to show how easy we give our lives for the Sake of Allah,” the post says.
This threat illustrates the savagery and barbarism of the Islamic State. They want me dead for violating Sharia blasphemy laws. What remains to be seen is whether the free world will finally wake up and stand for the freedom of speech, or instead kowtow to this evil and continue to denounce me. What’s really frightening and astonishing about this threat is that the media in denouncing me is essentially allying with and even cheering on the Islamic State. I expected this from jihadists. I never expected it from my fellow Americans in the mainstream media.
Activist Pamela Geller is no stranger to saying things that horrify the politically correct. She protested the World Trade Center mosque and bought bus-sign ads describing what’s really written in the Quran. Last weekend, she and writer Robert Spencer’s American Freedom Defense Initiative organized a contest for the best Muhammad cartoon drawing with a $10,000 prize in Texas in response to the Islamofascist newsroom massacre of cartoonists in Paris at the French paper Charlie Hebdo earlier this year.
And to no one’s surprise in a nation whose leaders consider rising Islamofascist terror groups “junior varsity” and where extremist depravities are viewed as “workplace violence” or dismissed as reactions to bad filmmaking rather than organized terror, a couple of Islamofacists from North Phoenix, Ariz., shot up the Garland, Texas, cartoon conference, wounding a security guard before an off-duty traffic cop took the pair down and saved the country from another massacre.
Since then, it’s been Charlie Hebdo all over again, given the media’s failure to understand that this is about the threat that radical Islam poses to free speech.
Incredibly, the left wasted no time blasting Geller and Spender, blaming them for the murderous behavior of the gunmen.
CNN’s Alisyn Camerota attacked Geller as anti-Islamic, cherry-picking various news clips to make her case, despite Geller asserting that she wasn’t.
“Civilized men can disagree,” Geller told CNN. “Savages will kill you when they disagree.”
Why she should be on the hot seat instead of the would-be attackers and their enablers is beyond us.
But the finger-pointing at Geller kept coming.
“Free speech aside, why would anyone do something as provocative as hosting a ‘Muhammad drawing contest’?” tweeted New York Times’ Rukmini Callimachi.
Free speech aside? From the newspaper of record?
Callimachi didn’t seem to understand that the entire event — as Geller’s participants repeatedly said in the pre-shooting film clips of the event posted on her blog — was explicitly about free speech, which is now under attack by Islamofascists and which can be demonstrated only by extreme means, such as cartoons.
And that’s the heart of the matter. Agree with Geller or not, there can be no compromise on free speech. The attack on her event underscored the fragility of America’s free speech, the basis for all of America’s freedoms.
The number one British album today in 1972 was a Tyrannosaurus Rex double album, the complete title of which is “My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair … But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows”/”Prophets, Seers & Sages: The Angels of the Ages.” Really.
“Free speech aside, why would anyone do something as provocative as hosting a ‘Muhammad drawing contest’?” asked Rukmini Callimachi, a New York Times reporter who specializes in Islamic extremism, on Twitter last night. That prompted a fair amount of criticism and mockery, but we’d like to attempt a serious answer to the question.
Callimachi was responding to last night’s events in Garland, a Dallas suburb, summed up by The Wall Street Journal:
Two men were killed Sunday in a Dallas suburb after they opened fire outside a building where an exhibit that featured cartoon drawings of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad was being held, city officials said.
The men drove up to the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas, where the American Freedom Defense Initiative was hosting an event with an award of $10,000 for the top Muhammad cartoon, and began shooting at an unarmed security officer, according to a Garland city spokeswoman.
Garland police who were helping with event security returned fire, shooting and killing the two gunmen, who weren’t immediately identified.
The victim, Bruce Joiner, is out of the hospital after treatment for an ankle wound. The New York Times reports that police identified one of the dead suspects as Elton Simpson of Phoenix, where the FBI searched “an apartment believed to be connected to him.” In 2010 federal prosecutors charged a man by that name with “plotting to travel to Somalia ‘for the purpose of engaging in violent jihad,’ and then lying to a federal agent.” A judge convicted him of the latter charge “but said the government had not proved that his plan involved terrorism.”
The Times adds that “officials did not give a motive for the attack,” which is no doubt wise of them: The job of police investigators is to gather facts first and explain theories later. In this case, however, one hypothesis seems far likelier than any others. As the Times notes, “drawings of Muhammad, considered offensive by many Muslims, have drawn violent responses in the past.” The most shocking was January’s Charlie Hebdo massacre, but also in February, as CNN reported, a gunman who “swore fidelity to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi” opened fire on a free-speech forum in Copenhagen, and then outside a synagogue, claiming two lives before Danish police killed him.
Even without official word on Simpson and his yet-unnamed accomplice’s motive, one can say that the attack was functionally an act of jihad. Anjem Choudary — the London-based extremist imam who defended the Charlie Hebdo assassinations in a next-day USA Today op-ed — tweeted this morning: “#garlandshooting we must learn the lessons from [Salman] Rushdie, [Ayaan] Hirsi Ali, Theo Van Gogh & Chalie [sic] Hebdo not to insult the Messenger Muhammad (saw)!” He elaborated in another tweet: “#garlandshooting there are two camps in the world: those that believe sovereignty belongs to mankind & those who believe it belongs to Allah.” (“Saw” is an abbreviation for the Arabic phrase meaning “peace be upon him.”)
So what about Rukmini Callimachi’s question? Let’s first dispense with the “Free speech aside …” preface, which some on Twitter found especially neuralgic: “The #NYT should change its slogan to ‘Free Speech Aside,’” snarked Gavin McInnes. It was certainly an unfortunate choice of words, but sometimes Twitter encourages brevity at the expense of clarity. We’d suggest a charitable interpretation. Perhaps Callimachi didn’t mean to disparage free speech but to concede it. That is, perhaps by “Free speech aside …,” she meant something like “Stipulating that the event was an exercise in constitutionally protected free speech …”
Proceeding on that assumption, the answer seems obvious. The purpose of the event was to make a point, in part a point about free speech. The event’s message was something like this: This is America, where the right of free speech is nearly absolute and includes the right to say things others find offensive or otherwise provocative.
Of course the event provoked not just indignation or anger but violence, a consequence whose possibility the authorities evidently anticipated — hence the strong police presence — and that was reasonable to anticipate given the European events described above. If we assume the organizers were cognizant of the possibility as well, then the event is best understood as an exercise in nonviolent resistance.
In a Salon apologia for the Baltimore riots, political philosopher Musa al-Gharbi observes that Martin Luther King “often staged episodes of civil disobedience in the most hostile or dangerous areas, with the implicit intent of generating a heavy-handed response from the authorities or local community in a highly public and well-publicized setting — thereby advancing sympathy for, and awareness of, the cause. Pacifists gain moral high ground precisely by refusing to return violence in kind — a feat that is impossible unless and until they are confronted with unreasonable force.”
It would be inaccurate to describe the Garland event as civil disobedience, since the organizers’ adversaries were not the civil authorities. (Indeed, the Garland police appear to have acted exemplarily in employing deadly force to protect citizens from violence.) But if Choudary’s understanding of the attack is correct, Simpson and his accomplice were acting on behalf of what they saw as a higher authority — the laws of Shariah, ordained by God. That such authority has no formal standing in the U.S. does not make it either benign or unworthy of resistance.
Five years ago this column criticized “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day,” a similar effort that grew out of a whimsical cartoon, because it struck us as a gratuitous effort to offend. A few months later the cartoonist, Molly Norris, was reported to have gone into hiding in the face of death threats. In 2008, we interviewed Dutch politician Geert Wilders and argued that some of his anti-Islam rhetoric was overwrought and wrongheaded:
He insists that his antagonism toward Islam reflects no antipathy toward Muslims: “I make a distinction between the ideology . . . and the people. . . . There are people who call themselves Muslims and don’t subscribe to the full part of the Quran. And those people, of course, we should invest [in], we should talk to.” He says he would end Muslim immigration to the Netherlands but work to assimilate those already there.
His idea of how to do so, however, seems unlikely to win many converts: “You have to give up this stupid, fascist book”—the Quran. “This is what you have to do. You have to give up that book.”
Mr. Wilders is right to call for a vigilant defense of liberal principles. A society has a right, indeed a duty, to require that religious minorities comply with secular rules of civilized behavior. But to demand that they renounce their religious identity and holy books is itself an affront to liberal principles.
Wilders was among the organizers of last night’s event in Garland. As far as we know, he has not softened his problematic views. But he’s still right to call for a vigilant defense of liberal principles. Sometimes that justifies being provocative. Sometimes it even requires it.
1) First is the value of parenting. Mother of the year goes to the woman who slapped her teenage son silly for throwing rocks at the police. If Barack Obama wants to send a clear message of social responsibility, he should invite the lady to the White House and give her a medal of some sort. Bring the boy along. The young man has a real chance to grow up and be something. Or, at least, to grow up.
“He’s my only son. At the end of the day, I won’t want him to be another Freddie Gray,” she said, in reference to the 25-year-old killed in police custody. (CNN’s video here.) Think about that. Obey the law as a survival strategy.
2) The second lesson stems from the first. The raw fuel for disorders in Baltimore, as in Madison, comes down to teenage boys. The troubles started in Baltimore after the high schools let out Monday. Most of the victims –– whether in Baltimore, Madison, or Ferguson –– have been troubled young males. Boys looking to be men challenge authority –– the father figure. That is part of the initiation rite, no matter the species. The purpose of the adult is to keep order. Didn’t we read about a world ruled by teenaged boys in Lord of the Flies?
A while back, gamekeepers noted young bull elephants were wantonly killing rhinos. They captured and introduced into the rogue band a couple mature elephants from another herd. The rhino killing ceased. In this most violent year of race relations since LBJ, police substitute for the father figures –– the upholders of order –– for so many fatherless young men.
In Madison, the April 13 daylong shutdown of East Washington Avenue was in large part the work of truant high schoolers.
3) The third lesson is to not abdicate that authority just because it is challenged in the name of some bogus altruism. You protest the death of Freddie Gray by burning down a drug store and senior citizen housing? Stealing the Stoly?
The president is correct to call the riots the work of “criminals and thugs.” Baltimore’s mayor said the same, but some of her words were (perhaps understandably) misinterpreted. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said she worked with the police, “to make sure that the protesters were able to exercise their right to free speech. It’s a very delicate balancing act, because, while we tried to make sure that they were protected from the cars and the other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.”
At first blush, it sounded that the mayor was giving free rein to the rioters. What she meant was that ordering police to stand back for the purpose of allowing peaceful demonstration gave an unintended opening to lawless instigators.
The indispensible James Taranto, of The Wall Street Journal, writes that Baltimore “failed in the delicate balancing act of safeguarding both free expression and public order. As the latter deteriorated, the former inevitably suffered as well: It’s hard to protest when bricks are flying and buildings are burning.”
Allowing Madison kids to close down a major thoroughfare during rush-hour traffic is that kind of opening.
4) The culture of victimhood teaches people that they are not responsible for their own failings, and that the real problem is they’re not getting enough free stuff from the government. That, if too many black men are being arrested for crime, it is the fault of those who enforce the law and, indeed, of the statute itself.
Madison –– its city hall overrun with tramps and vagrants, its streets shut down by bullhorn-tooting children –– has managed to turn upside-down the expectations of a functional community.
Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal observes, “the first and most important responsibility of any city government is to uphold law and order. When the streets are unsafe and crime is high, everything else –– getting businesses to invest and create jobs ––becomes next to impossible. People start voting with their feet.”
Say hello to Middleton, Fitchburg, and Sun Prairie!
5) Call in the troops sooner rather than later. At some point (this is week five) District Attorney Ismael Ozanne is bound to announce his decision whether to prosecute in the Tony T. Robinson death. (Baltimore cannot give him much solace.) Governor Walker should even now have a contingent of National Guard members assembled and ready to deploy within minutes. Boots on the ground. Do not wait for the mayor to request anything. Yes, the ACLU and The Capital Times will bitch. Send them the bill.
Instead, Baltimore is smoldering. Schools are closed. The Orioles will play baseball before an empty house in beautiful Camden Yards –– no fans permitted. This is how cities die. It’s how Detroit hollowed out in 1968.
Don’t say it can’t happen in Madison. We may lack the minority population but not the young crazies.
How much of a nerve? This comes from Isthmus, which used to run Blaska until it got rid of Blaska’s column (and, for that matter, used to run mine as well):
If you have a job in Madison, your office probably has one. Call them today at 608-204-9655 and tell them to stop delivery immediately. Cite an article by DavidBlaska titled “Madison can smell Baltimore’s smoke.”I won’t link to it because I don’t have the window open anymore and I’m sure you can find it yourself. I recommend reading it to see just how strident and wrong that mag is for running that tripe. They need to hear about it from their readers.
Racism can’t be good for business and reading the comments on that blog, it’s apparent that both IB and Blaska believe that it is.
So how much money can Madison liberals who can’t stand opinions different from theirs, who already subscribe to In Business, save by canceling in a huff? This much:
To qualify for a free subscription to In Business, including the annual Book of Lists (total value of $75) …
Madison is a big believer in diversity, except for intellectual diversity.
The number one single today in 1956 was this artist’s first, but certainly not last:
The number one single today in 1962:
I’m unaware of whether the soundtrack of “West Side Story” got any radio airplay, but since I played it in both the La Follette and UW marching bands, I note that today in 1962 the soundtrack hit number one and stayed there for 54 weeks:
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 