My favorite Ray Charles song was number one today in 1961:
Today in 1969, the BBC’s “Top of the Pops” refused for the first time to play that week’s number one song because of what singers Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin were supposedly doing while recording “Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus”:
According to a classmate of mine, Madison radio stations play Britain’s number one single today in 1971 too often:
Dana Milbank is the winner of this week’s Media-Can’t-See-the-Forest-for-the-Trees award:
Aspiring Republican presidential candidate Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana, scheduled a big Washington speech for Monday to condemn President Obama’s defense policy. But an unexpected competitor beat him to the punch.
Leon Panetta, in an interview with USA Today’s Susan Page published just before Jindal’s speech, criticized Obama in harsh terms that would have been dismissed as partisan sniping — if Panetta weren’t a Democrat who had served as Obama’s CIA director and secretary of defense.
Panetta criticized his former boss for having “lost his way” — allowing the power vacuum in Iraq that created the Islamic State, rejecting Panetta’s and Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s advice to arm the Syrian rebels and failing to enforce his own “red line” barring Syria’s use of chemical weapons.
The interview was timed with this week’s launch of Panetta’s book, in which he wrote that Obama “avoids the battle, complains, and misses opportunities.” Panetta also wrote of Obama’s “frustrating reticence to engage his opponents and rally support for his cause” and his tendency to rely “on the logic of a law professor rather than the passion of a leader.”
So when Jindal arrived at the conservative American Enterprise Institute on Monday morning, all he really had to do to blame Obama for the world’s woes was to quote Panetta.
“How did we get to this point?” Jindal asked. “Just ask the people who can be honest about what happened. Ask former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.”
In a news conference following the speech, I asked Jindal to elaborate. Panetta “is now the latest in a series of officials who have served in this administration coming out and saying from the inside they saw some of the dangerous mistakes this president has made,” the governor said.
George W. Bush got criticism from former advisers (Paul O’Neill, John DiIulio), as did Bill Clinton (George Stephanopoulos, Dick Morris), but this level of disloyalty is stunning, even though it is softened with praise for Obama’s intellect.
At the start of the year, Robert Gates, Obama’s first defense secretary, wrote a memoir full of criticism of Obama’s handling of Afghanistan, saying Obama made military decisions based on political considerations. Clinton, who also published a book this year, criticized Obama for rejecting her advice on Syria and mocked the “Don’t do stupid stuff” phrase used by administration officials to describe Obama’s doctrine.
The lack of message discipline is puzzling, because Obama rewards and promotes loyalists. But he’s a cerebral leader, and he may lack the personal attachments that make aides want to charge the hill for him.
Also, as MSNBC reporter Alex Seitz-Wald tweeted in response to a question I posed, Panetta, Gates and Clinton didn’t owe their careers to Obama. Clinton was a rival, Gates was a Bush holdover, and Panetta is a Democratic eminence grise. Loyalty didn’t trump book sales — or Clinton’s need to distance herself from Obama before a presidential run.
But there’s also David Axelrod, long Obama’s loyal strategist, saying on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Obama made “a mistake” in saying his economic policies will be on the ballot next month.
Obama’s most loyal mouthpiece at the moment may be Vice President Joe Biden, who in a speech at Harvard last week condemned as “inappropriate” the books by former administration officials. But having Biden speak for you is of dubious value: The vice president’s criticism of Panetta was overshadowed by loose remarks in that same speech that led Biden to apologize to the governments of Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.
Here’s an alternative explanation: Maybe Panetta thinks Obama’s weak-on-defense anti-American American foreign policy is bad for the country. Maybe Panetta is a patriot before he’s a Democrat or one of Obama’s apparatchiks.
Notice the trope that Obama (like Clinton before him) is really smart, and of course its countertrope that Republicans are dumb. Anyone with sense knows the success, or lack thereof, of your life isn’t about how smart you are, it’s about the smart decisions you make, or don’t. Slick Willie exercised horrid personal judgment. Obama exercises horrid judgment on issues that affect the lives of the American people.
This is also the sort of inside-baseball story that shows why Americans increasingly hate the news media. What is more important here — the future of our country, or who’s not being nice to whom in the White House? Milbank appears to believe that all Obama administration officials, past and present, should demonstrate slavish loyalty to their leader as Milbank does. Independent of personal ambition, that’s not how the American system is supposed to work.
Remember when liberals used to think that dissent is patriotic?
The new issue of Wisconsin Interest magazine includes a story about a lesser known, but more immediate, funding crisis in federal entitlements — Social Security Disability Insurance.
(Spoiler alert: The crisis is not just financial.)
The number one song today in 1955:
The number one British song (which is not from Britain) today in 1964:
Today in 1971, John Lennon released his “Imagine” album:
A lot can happen in four weeks, but as of today this doesn’t look to be a good election for Wisconsin Democrats.
The top of the ticket, gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke, has had a floundering campaign since the revelations that her campaign is based on a grab bag of other people’s ideas. Their attorney general candidate, Susan Happ, has a major ethics problem. The Sixth Congressional District appears to be the only place where they might have a chance of flipping the seat, but even if that happens Mark Harris will be in the wrong party in the dictatorship of the majority that is the U.S. House of Representatives.
Democrats have high hopes of flipping the state Senate to Democratic control. But state Democratic leadership has managed to alienate a lot of Democrats in one of those most flippable districts, the 17th, by recruiting a candidate to run instead of the original Democrat who ran.
Perhaps Senate Democratic leadership wasn’t counting on the frowned-upon candidate’s wife, Rita Wittwer, to start writing letters to newspapers in the Senate district:
This guy certainly had all the experience that a Senate candidate for a very rural district should possess. He had a P.O. box and rented a room in the district for a little over three years. He was mentored by and worked a bit over a year for a U.S. senator who barely remembers him. He was a law clerk of questionable merit for a Republican judge. He has a law degree but has never practiced law. Aside from his university years, he lived his life in urban Waukesha, graduating from a private high school. …
This was the beginning of the disenfranchisement of the voters in the 17th Senate District. In and of itself, a primary is not necessarily a bad thing. However, the Senate Democratic leader didn’t like leaving anything to chance — or, should I say, to the voters. He decided that he should endorse his chosen one and at the Democratic convention purposely failed to mention Ernie as the other candidate. That didn’t exactly go over well with our supporters and they made their feelings known to “his leadership.” Not that their views mattered. They were completely ignored. …
Losing an election is unbelievably painful. Losing an election because of political manipulation is even worse. To add insult to injury, we found out a few days ago that the list of supporters that we fought so hard to get was given to the chosen one without our permission. How special is that? Because our website was created under the Senate Demmocratic umbrella and because we loaded the names of anyone with an email address into our website for ease in communicating, the Senate Democratic hierarchy believes that they own our names and have the right to use them as they see fit.
Meanwhile, Burke probably needs to replace her campaign’s press people after this embarrassment, reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
Telling reporters they can’t interview people at a political rally is like trying to take away Ted Nugent’s guns. You might get your wango tangoed.
At least three journalists ran into this restriction while covering Michelle Obama’s appearance in Milwaukee on [Sept. 29] on behalf of Mary Burke, Democratic candidate for governor.
But the White House, if I may refer to the first lady’s communications director that way, says it was a mistake that won’t be repeated.
“It is not our policy. This was an open press event. If anyone either from the Burke campaign or from our team obstructed a reporter from speaking with folks who were there, that was an error,” I was told Thursday by Maria Cristina “MC” Gonzalez Noguera.
There was no security reason for it, and really no reason at all.
“This is a case of an overzealous staff person,” she said.
That excessive zeal infected other Burke and White House staffers at the rally, held at the Wisconsin Center. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Meg Kissinger, who was in the corral of media workers at the back of the hall, was stopped twice as she talked to people over the dividing ropes while waiting for the speeches to begin.
“I thought it was a joke. I started laughing,” she said. Then she spread the word on Twitter and said this on Facebook: “To say that I was creeped out is an understatement. This is what reporters do in America: we speak to people. At least that’s how I’ve been doing things — at all kinds of political events — since 1979.”
I immediately clicked the like button. Her post went crazy on the Internet and was trending all over the place. The Madison chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists jumped in to condemn the curbed press access and cited other times at both Democratic and Republican events when the media were limited on where and whom they could interview.
Fans of press freedom, and, yes, there are some left, praised Kissinger for exposing such a ridiculous rule and then interviewing anyone she darn well pleased. Opponents of Burke seized the opportunity to say, see, she would make a lousy governor who will keep all the people’s quotes for herself.
The partisan attacks worry Burke campaign spokesman Joe Zepecki. He called the Journal Sentinel newsroom and tried to have the mention of press restrictions deleted from the online news article. Editors refused. Zepecki then complained bitterly in emails to Kissinger and said it wasn’t news, nor was her inclusion in the article that people at the rally who needed to sit down were having trouble finding chairs.
Zepecki later told me no other reporters mentioned any of this in their news accounts. That just proves Kissinger is the only one who got it right. We can’t have politicians or their staffs dictating how news is covered, because you know they’d love to.
Afternoon First Amendment violation update: Speaking of “We can’t have politicians or their staffs dictating how news is covered,” Wisconsin Reporter reports on itself:
Wisconsin Reporter was barred from covering a campaign rally Tuesday in Madison for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke and featuring first lady Michelle Obama.
Melissa Baldauff, communications director for the state Democratic Party, informed Wisconsin Reporter on Monday it wasn’t allowed to attend the event at the Overture Center because the online publication isn’t a legitimate news source.
This marks the second time in about a week the Burke camp has dictated press coverage of a campaign fundraiser in Wisconsin headlined by the first lady. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Meg Kissinger reported White House and Burke staff tried to block reporters from talking to crowd members Sept. 29 in Milwaukee.
Free press advocates denounced the decision.
Carol O’Leary, president of the Wisconsin Newspaper Association board of directors, called the handling of Wisconsin Reporter’s request an assault on free press and criticized Obama and the Burke campaign for trying to control information released to the public.
“They are picking who they want to cover their stories … It’s not transparency,” O’Leary said.
The Madison chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, which expressed disappointment with Burke and Obama for trying to prevent reporters from speaking to the audience in Milwaukee, supports wide media access to campaign functions.
“It seems to me that Wisconsin Reporter ought to be able to attend the event and report on it,” said Mark Pitsch, president of the local Society of Professional Journalists, a national journalism group.
Baldauff, who agreed to speak to Wisconsin Reporter on Monday outside the offices of the Democratic Party and Burke for Wisconsin, initially attributed the denial to a lack of space — even though a request for media credentials was submitted Saturday, shortly after the Burke campaign sent a news release outlining the logistics.
But that answer changed when Baldauff, who repeatedly declined to explain the process for selecting which media outlets can participate, was told Wisconsin Reporter would be doing a story on press being turned away from the political fundraiser.
“Well, you’re not the press though, so, thanks,” Baldauff said as she left the hallway and closed an office door.
Someone should tell Burke that should she get elected, she’s not going to be able to pick and choose which media talks to her.
Today in 1975, one of the stranger episodes in rock music history ended when John Lennon got permanent resident status, his “green card.” The federal government, at the direction of Richard Nixon, tried to deport Lennon because of his 1968 British arrest for possession of marijuana. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that trying to deport Lennon on the basis of an arrest was “contrary to U.S. ideas of due process and was invalid as a means of banishing the former Beatle from America.”
The number one British single today in 1978 came from that day’s number one album:
The number one album today in 1989 was Tears for Fears’ “Seeds of Love”:
If you’re a parent, you know that weekends are not time off any more than weekdays are.
This weekend was ridiculously full. I announced two volleyball matches Saturday, one day after doing a football game, and four days after doing another volleyball match. (In between, I got to be a parent at a Parents Night for the first time. I have sat through more than 100 Parents Nights for games I’ve covered or announced, but this is the first time I’ve gotten to participate, since we have a freshman soccer player in the house.) We also had our church’s annual St. Francis Day pet blessing, after which I went to a silo fire fought by seven fire departments.
Sunday, our daughter made her world debut as an acolyte, before her practice for a role in “The Nutcracker.” In between, an historic moment in the Prestegard family, or extended family:
This may be the first touchdown a Prestegard has ever scored in organized football. Had this been on the radio, my call would have been something like “Handoff to Prestegard on the end-around … and Prestegard to the 30, around the corner to the 20, down the sidelines to the 10 … tooooo the end zone! Touchdown for Dylan Prestegard — 34 yards on the end-around! And the Herd [team name, hence the green jerseys for Marshall] start the second half with a bang, and take the lead, 12 to 6!”
I feel like I should re-edit the video in slow motion with some NFL Films music, like …
Or, knowing popular music today, he’d probably prefer something like this:
A football game I announced earlier this season did involve a Prestegard child … in the marching band. That too is a family first. So yes, the marching band got airtime. I have yet to announce a game where one of our kids is a player … yet.
This week, I have games to announce every night from Wednesday to Friday, plus Saturday afternoon. A Neil Young song says it’s better to burn out than it is to rust.
Waukesha’s city administrator and an urban planner say that public employee collective bargaining reforms — the controversial Act 10 of 2011 — need to go further:
In its Sept. 17 editorial about Gov. Scott Walker’s second term agenda, the Journal Sentinel Editorial Board said, “Act 10 was a mistake” (“Gov. Scott Walker’s second term? Same as the first,” Our View). Act 10 virtually ended collective bargaining for many, but not all, state and local public employees.
It was not a mistake and should be followed up with Act 10.2 and Act 10.3. One would address the expensive early retirement feature included in the Wisconsin pension plan for all state and local public employees, and the other would bring in police and fire personnel, left out in Act 10. Police and fire together amount to about 60% of most local budgets, leaving only 40% covered by Act 10.
Wisconsin was the first state in the Union to allow public employees to bargain collectively, and, by the 1970s, unionization was showing its worst feature. That feature was, and will always remain, that unions cannot resist the temptation to try to control both sides of the bargaining table. They do this by being politically active in electing union-sympathetic public officials and in de-electing taxpayer sympathizers. The state teachers union was the first to consistently apply this power both in local and state elections and was very effective at both levels.
Wisconsin, having first created public collective bargaining, rightfully should be the first state to remove it. Indiana was slightly earlier, but the Indiana public at referendum put it back in place. That action, and the current race for Wisconsin governor, shows just how much unions are fighting to regain this power.
Early public employee unions recognized that public employee strikes did not sit well with the public. In exchange for removing the right to strike, unions were given arbitration, a power that likely gained more for unions than striking. The problem with arbitration is it becomes an averaging of the surrounding lowest and highest wages.
As the wealthier tax bases raise their wages and benefits, over time the lower tax base communities rise to the previous average of the higher base. If they both can rise faster than inflation, which they have done by a ratio of 2.5-3 to 1, in only a few successive contract periods the lower tax base pay equals the former high base levels.
Where bargaining has been especially deleterious for taxpayers is unions began focusing on fringe benefits, which are hidden from public view and often hidden from employees themselves and under-appreciated by them. It is now common for public employees to receive benefits that cost 50% of their total pay, whereas the private-sector ratio is around 25%. This “fringes strategy” has paid excess dividends to public workers in two costly areas: health insurance and pensions.
In health insurance, public employees were shielded from the huge run-up in health premiums because they were able to bargain 100% employer pickup of the cost. Such premiums between 1978 and the 2008 economic slump rose 600%, or double the 300% rise in general inflation.
For teachers, they achieved an extra bonus from their employer-paid health insurance. The local unions bargained, and won in 60% of Wisconsin school districts, that the no-bid contract for health insurance go to the insurance company owned by the state teachers union.
That insurance can be called “cadillac coverage.” Not only did it have five-way coverage — doctor, hospital, drugs, vision and dental — each was top of the line. For example, in private-sector dental insurance, when it existed, $1,000 per year was the typical limit per patient in the family. A few companies offered $1,200, and a very few $1,500. Some teachers’ coverage: $2,000 per patient per year.
Similarly in patient-paid deductibles, zero was a common ratio for teachers. When private-sector family premiums were reaching $18,000 per family a year, the teachers’ company was $22,000 to $25,000. School districts are learning they can retain this high coverage, but by bidding can lower the cost greatly, in some cases so far by over 50%.
In pensions, most private-sector employers contribute up to 3% of wages into the company 401(k) plan, and under 401(k) rules, employees may add another 3%, a total of 6% between them. But because the early retirement feature of the Wisconsin plan is so costly, the plan specifies total contributions as high as 16% a year.
In bargaining, there have been efforts to have the school district pay the entire 16%. Under the “Rule of 85,” a Wisconsin public employee may retire as early as age 55, provided he or she has worked 30 years under the plan. Until age 65, when federal Medicare begins, collective bargaining has won employer-paid health insurance covering that gap for early retirees. Often, it even continues after age 65 for a lifetime, thereby exempting retirees from paying their share of Medicare. Wisconsin’s early retirement is out of step with the times, considering longer lives and Social Security raising its age to 66, then to 67. …
The final, and some public administrators say, the worst aspect of collective bargaining, was how the labor agreement came to supersede some civil service rules and other rightful employer prerogatives. An example is how bargaining contracts typically dictate layoffs be only by least seniority, so the last in is the first out. School districts before Act 10 sometimes were laying off their most promising young teachers because of their recent hiring. Under Act 10, for the first time in four decades, public bodies again are creating their own handbook of work rules and benefits, which are correcting these past union-imposed arbitrary situations.
That last paragraph is all the evidence you need of why Act 10 had to become law, controversial and divisive though it was. The employees do not get to decide who works and who gets laid off. That is properly the role of management, whether or not the employees like the managers.
Gov. Gaylord Nelson’s signing of the law allowing government employees to unionize might be the single worst piece of legislation signed into law in Wisconsin in the 20th century. You’ll notice that neither Walker nor any other Republican has mentioned overturning that law, though it should be overturned.
You may remember claims by Da Union during Recallarama that the teacher unions were willing to bargain bigger employee contributions for their benefits. That was a statement that lacked any credibility for two reasons. First, given that there are 427 school districts in this state, no state union official can speak for every school district union head, let alone a majority of the members of all 427 teacher unions. Contract negotiations also take place behind closed doors, meaning Da Union could say one thing in public and do the opposite in private.
Act 10 is one step, and only one step, to giving taxpayers the power over the government we’re paying for instead of politicians and government employees, whose salaries and benefits are paid for by us taxpayers.
The number one song today in 1970:
The number one song today in 1973:
Britain’s number one album tonight in 1984 was David Bowie’s “Tonight”:
The number one song today in 1959 came from a German opera:
The number one British song today in 1961:
The number one British song today in 1974 came from the movie “The Exorcist”:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 