The number one single today in 1966:
Today in 1971, Rick Nelson was booed at Madison Square Garden in New York when he dared to sing new material at a concert. That prompted him to write …
If I told you the number one British album today in 1983 was “Genesis,” I would have given you the artist and the title:
Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce has a few questions for supposed business person Mary Burke:
1.) You have repeatedly said that you will take good job creation ideas from any source, whether they are from a Democrat, Republican or someone else. Can you name a single Republican economic initiative you support and one Democratic economic initiative you oppose?
2.) Act 10 has already saved Wisconsin taxpayers at least $3 billion. If you restore collective bargaining privileges to government employees, how will you replace the lost savings in a manner that holds taxpayers harmless from tax hikes going forward?
3.) What is the role of state government in creating jobs?
4.) Why do you oppose the Manufacturers and Agricultural Production Tax credit, which makes Wisconsin’s two largest business sectors more competitive by encouraging investment in Wisconsin instead of other states?
5.) You are on record of saying that you don’t believe Wisconsin’s tax burden is too high. What taxes would you raise?
6.) You are on record opposing an iron ore mine in the Penokee Hills. If a permit is issued, the mine would create as many as 2,000 high-paying, middle-class jobs in an economically challenged part of the state. What is your specific plan to replace the 2,000 mining and construction jobs in northern Wisconsin with jobs that would also pay an average of $60,000 per year?
I didn’t watch the debate between Burke and Scott Walker Friday night. (Seriously, Wisconsin broadcasters, if you want people to watch debates, think about not scheduling them on high school football Friday nights.) I gather that Burke answered none of those questions, or at least none of them satisfactorily.
Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity wonders if Burke is correctly representing her own positions:
First, she tried to downplay the Wisconsin recovery by comparing us to other Midwestern States she claims are doing better economically. Two of the states she refers to are Indiana and Michigan. Both states recently passed Right-to-Work legislation and attribute much of their economic recovery to those important changes in law.
Second, she minimizes the benefit of the Walker tax cuts by claiming that it’s “only” $11 per month. I don’t know about you, but any time the government lets me keep more of my money, there is no such thing as “only.”
And what about so many Wisconsinites struggling to make ends meet as a result of mismanagement of the economy by a Doyle-Burke administration and Washington, DC? Seems to me that extra $11 per month would go a long way toward diapers, groceries and clothes for Badger state families.
Is she just claiming that the tax cuts should have been bigger? If so, she’s trying to marginalize Governor Walker’s effort to let hard working families keep more of their money. And if so, she should immediately come out in support of massive, across the board cuts in spending and taxes.
In scrambling to gain traction and legitimacy, Mary Burke is making the conservative case for moving Wisconsin forward.
Burke has another problem, identified by James Wigderson:
In her closing statement in Friday night’s debate with Governor Scott Walker, Mary Burke stole a page from the Barack Obama campaign plan in 2008 and promised “a new tone” in politics. “I am also going to set a different tone.”
After taking another swipe at Walker, she added, “I am not only going to change the tone; I’m going to change the system. There is no way that big money and special interests should have a greater voice than you do.”
The atmosphere is unlikely to get better if Burke is elected. It’s not as if Burke is going to walk into the Capitol and the “Capitol singers” will suddenly dissipate instead of continuing their harassment of Republican legislators. Segway Boy Jeremy Ryan will not suddenly become a decent human being.
But if Friday night’s debate performance by Burke is any indication, her election as governor would only make the “tone” of Wisconsin politics worse.
Twice in the debate, Burke referred to a donation by Gogebic Taconite to a private organization as a campaign donation. Burke even claimed that the donation influenced the governor’s decision to support changing mining regulations to make possible an iron mine in northern Wisconsin.
This, of course, is a lie. The money was not donated to a campaign but to another organization supportive of policies that would make Gogebic Taconite’s proposed mine possible, the Wisconsin Club for Growth. But Burke stated that the donation caused Walker to support the mine even though he has publicly stated he did not even know about the donation.
Such a baseless attack on Walker’s character is typical of the Obama strategy of claiming to try to change the tone of politics but is really taking politics to a lower level.
Burke took the demagoguery further when she said that a majority of Wisconsinites would support making such a donation illegal. Is Burke endorsing the repeal of the First Amendment right to free speech? In Burke’s Wisconsin, will the excesses of the John Doe investigation, the pre-dawn raids, the gag orders and the attacks on reputations, receive the official support of the governor’s office?
We shouldn’t be surprised that Burke’s campaign would take this turn. The Democratic Party in Madison that constructed her campaign is steeped in Walker-derangement syndrome. Former spokesman Graeme Zielinski is only a consultant now to Democratic politicians like Chris Abele but the other end of the leash, Democratic Party Chairman Mike Tate, is still there. One of her campaign aides, Paula Zellner, was ticketed after a picket at a home in Racine where a fundraiser was held when, according to the police report, Zellner intimidated elderly attendees.
So when the chairman of the Democratic National Committee Debbie Wasserman Schultz used a domestic violence metaphor, that Walker was showing women the back of his hand, of course Burke could not bring herself to condemn Schultz.
How ironic, but how telling, that the only kind words Burke could find Friday night about Walker – after an embarrassing pause – was to praise his work on domestic violence. That her handlers didn’t prepare her for such a common question is an indication of the sulphuric air the Democrats are breathing in their constant demonization of Walker. They couldn’t think of anything nice to insert into the script they wrote for Burke.
If Burke is elected governor, the left will feel that all of their ugly protests, smears and threats were worth it because it helped drive a Republican governor from office. The only new tone, judging from Friday night’s debate, will be Burke endorsing the ugliness from the office of the governor.
Jim Geraghy is writing to you:
You work hard. You pay what you think is more than enough in taxes. The economy hasn’t really felt good since 2008, but you manage to get by. If you’ve got a 401(k), it’s grown in the past few years — but the real-estate bubble burned you, and the dot-com bubble burned you before that. You know that nice sum in your 401(k) could plummet without warning. What you would really like is a better job, so you could feel better about the amount of income coming in every month.
You’re trying to play all of your roles — worker, parent, sibling, child, friend, neighbor, parishioner, and somehow find time to take care of yourself so you don’t keel over from a heart attack. It’s tough. Time is at a premium. Speaking of which, your insurer announced your premiums are going up again. You’ve been thinking of trading in the old car, but you’re not so sure you could handle new car payments and the higher premiums.
But you get up every day and you take care of everything that needs care, because that’s who you are and what you do. You get it done. You take some pride in that. You look at your loved ones, your friends and neighbors, your colleagues, and you know that they know that they can count on you.
You kind of wonder about everybody else, though.
What’s with the Centers for Disease Control? They keep telling you “we’re going to stop Ebola in its tracks here” and then there are new cases. The NIH Director seems to think he’s reassuring us by telling us “the system worked” as we learn about new infections. Then there’s that enterovirus 68 floating around, killing kids. Terrifying, heartbreaking. Hey, guys, maybe a little less time studying gun control and a little more time spent on, you know, disease control? That’s your job.
What’s going on with everybody who’s supposed to be protecting us? First Obama says “We don’t have a strategy yet” — why not? Don’t we spend billions, even trillions, on national-security agencies, intelligence agencies, and a Department of Defense? Isn’t somebody in those vast, expensive organizations supposed to come up with a strategy? Then he said “they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria” — isn’t that their job? Wasn’t anybody watching?
Now they’re saying the airstrikes over in Iraq and Syria aren’t doing enough, and the Islamic State is knocking on the door of Baghdad. Sunday morning, National Security Adviser Susan Rice said we’re not reassessing our strategy. Well, shouldn’t somebody? Just in case? Doesn’t anybody over there believe in having a Plan B? Isn’t that the job of a national-security adviser?
How the hell did the top guys at the Department of Veterans Affairs not know about the waitlists and that veterans were dying, waiting for care? That’s their job.
How the heck did the federal government AND so many state governments manage to spend so much money and not build insurance-exchange web sites that worked? That was their job.
The president keeps insisting that test scores are up and that college attendance is up, when it’s actually been the opposite. Obviously, the public schools aren’t good enough for his kids. He promised the moon when it came to improving schools back in 2008. Wasn’t that his job?
In your life, failure is not an option. If you don’t pick up the kids from school, they’re stuck there. If you don’t go shop for groceries, the kids don’t eat. All around you, every day, you see things that have to get done, and you do them. You don’t tell the kids, ‘well, our intentions were good. We tried. We had some glitches.” You don’t get to blame your predecessor or the opposition party. You don’t get to tell them, or your spouse, or your boss, that the situation is the same, as normal, and that they’re “just noticing now because of social media.”
Where is this “get it done” attitude in Washington? Every time you turn around, it’s some new excuse. Americans do not accept this kind of incompetence and unaccountability in their personal and professional lives. Why should they accept it from Washington?
The number one song today in 1957 was the Everly Brothers’ first number one:
The number one British single today in 1960:
The number one album today in 1967 is about an event that supposedly took place on my birthday:
SB Nation chronicles Sunday’s next-to-last Packer play …
… followed, with five seconds left …
… by the game-winning touchdown.
As a friend (who inexplicably is a Dolphins fan) said, a real quarterback makes all the difference.
Timothy P. Carney must see something in the Wisconsin electoral scene that Wisconsinites don’t:
Republican Gov. Scott Walker is under investigation, and he is reviled by the largest political force in his state. But you’d never guess that by watching him amble through the stalls at a central Wisconsin dairy farm. …
You wouldn’t guess from his demeanor how hated he is. County prosecutors are still investigating him. And the government employee unions — which failed to block his legislation, failed to recall him, and failed to take back the state legislature — still have it in for him.
“Walker speaks with a forked tongue,” Fernando Stokes tells me. Stokes was a state prison guard for 32 years and is now retired. Waiting for his takeout order at Milwaukee’s Water Street Brewery, Stokes couldn’t even name Walker’s opponent. That she was running against Walker was enough for him.
Ron, a bartender at Buck Bradley’s in Milwaukee for more than 20 years, is backing Walker again. He understands the unions’ anger: “If someone yanked away your gravy train, would you be happy?” Ron asks with a laugh.
One state employee, a female parole officer, denied that the free health care and generous pension was a gravy train — state workers had taken lower pay in the past in exchange for those benefits. The benefits drew her into the state workforce when she was in her 40s. “I saw the health care was free, and I thought that was a pretty sweet deal,” the woman tells me at the Capital Tap Haus in Madison. “I had been in the private sector and I felt like half my paycheck was going to insurance.”
That’s exactly what grates on many Wisconsin voters, and it’s why Walker’s support has remained strong in a state that has backed Democrats for U.S. Senate and president in 15 of 16 races going back to 1988.
“They don’t like their safety blanket being taken away,” Chuck Hounsell says of the state employees. Hounsell drives a truck, delivering diesel to farms — including Ruedinger — in the Fond du Lac area. “It’s a safety blanket the rest of us don’t have. We’re out there slogging it out on our own.”
While the anger of the state employees’ union isn’t fading, Walker’s worries are. The two recent polls that have shown Burke leading the race come from the least reliable firms polling the state. We Ask America showed Burke leading 48 percent to 44 percent a month ago, but that was an automated poll, which significantly reduces its reliability. Burke also led 50 to 45 in a Gravis Marketing poll released Sept. 30. That poll hit 908 voters, but it didn’t screen for likely voters — it was a poll of registered voters. Polls of registered voters are less predictive, and they generally tilt toward Democrats.
Weed out the weaker polls, and here’s the picture: Mary Burke had a tiny lead, within the margin of error, in late August. Since the campaign season began in earnest, she has hovered around 45 percent. Walker, meanwhile, has steadily climbed, hitting the crucial 50 percent mark in the latest Marquette University poll of 585 likely voters conducted Sept. 25 through 28.
Marquette’s poll has become the gold standard of Wisconsin polling, outperforming others in the 2010 and 2012 elections. Follow the trend of the Marquette poll and it points to a Walker win. In Marquette’s five polls of registered voters, Burke climbed from 45 percent to 49 percent in late August but she dropped in each of the last two polls and now she’s back down to 45 percent. Walker, meanwhile, has climbed steadily from 46 percent in mid-July to 50 percent in late September.
Here’s another trend to follow: Walker’s ballot box successes keep growing. Walker won the 2010 election by 5.8 points. In the 2012 recall, he won by 6.8 points. In the 2012 state legislative races, Walker’s party took back the state Senate and expanded its majority in the state House of Representatives.
Walker’s people downplay his big recall win, pointing out that many people who weren’t necessarily Walker fans voted for him in 2012 because they were put off by the impetuousness of a midterm recall effort.
But the trend lines point in one direction: Barring a serious misstep, Walker won’t merely win in November, he will win bigger than he has won before.
I’m still predicting Walker will win with 53 percent of the vote. That is a win, not a landslide, and it probably will make people question whether someone who doesn’t win landslides in his own state can credibly run for president.
The number one British album today in 1973 was the Rolling Stones’ “Goats Head Soup,” despite (or perhaps because of) the BBC’s ban of one of its songs, “Star Star”:
Who shares a birthday with my brother (who celebrated his sixth birthday, on a Friday the 13th, by getting chicken pox from me)? Start with Paul Simon:
Robert Lamm plays keyboards — or more accurately, the keytar — for Chicago:
Sammy Hagar:
Craig McGregor of Foghat:
John Ford Coley, formerly a duet with England Dan Seals:
Rob Marche played guitar for the Jo Boxers, who …
One death of note: Ed Sullivan, whose Sunday night CBS-TV show showed off rock and roll (plus Topo Gigio and Senor Wences) to millions, died today in 1974:
We begin with an entry from the It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time Dept.: Today in 1956, Chrysler Corp. launched its 1957 car lineup with a new option: a record player. The record player didn’t play albums or 45s, however; it played only seven-inch discs at 16⅔ rpm. Chrysler sold them until 1961.
Today in 1957, Little Richard was on an Australian tour when he publicly renounced rock and roll and embraced religion and announced he was going to record Gospel music from now on. The conversion was the result of his praying during a flight when one of the plane’s engines caught fire.
Little Richard returned to rock and roll five years later.
The number one song today in 1963:
Britain’s number one song today in 1961:
The number one song today in 1975 (and I remember when it was number one) was credited to Neil Sedaka, with a big assist to Elton John:
The number one album today in 1980 was the Police’s “Zenyattà Mondatta”:
As part of the yearly rotation of non-division opponents, the Packers will host the Rams next season.
The Los Angeles Rams, that is, if this passed-on report from the Epoch Times is correct:
The St. Louis Rams have already made the decision to relocate to Los Angeles, and will make the official announcement after the Super Bowl, according to a new report.
“There’s a strong belief, people that are in–that I believe are in the know–multiple people, have told me that the decision has already been made and that the team is moving,” one of the hosts of 101 ESPN said in a recent show.
“Somebody told you that, really?” sharply questioned another.
“Yes.”
Jason La Confora of CBS Sports said recently that Rams owner Stan Kroenke is expected to make the announcement on February 15, 2015.
Kroenke stoked speculation in January by buying a 60-acre tract of land in Inglewood, California.
“The land is located between the recently renovated Forum and the Hollywood Park racetrack, which was shut down in December, and could potentially serve as the home of a future NFL stadium,” ESPN said.
“Since the Raiders and Rams left Southern California after the 1994 season, Los Angeles has been subjected to enough meaningless artist renderings to fill a museum and more empty promises to encompass two decades worth of failed campaign speeches. There is, however, a big difference if Kroenke truly does have an interest in moving the Rams out of St. Louis and back to Los Angeles. He owns the Rams and now owns enough land in Los Angeles to build a stadium.”
“Every indication that you get, or everything that is not said by Stan Kroenke would lead you to believe that he wants to build a stadium and have a team there,” one of the ESPN Radio hosts said this week.
“This is a guy that lives in L.A., and tried to buy the Dodgers.”
Pro Football Talk started this by reporting earlier this week:
As the 20th anniversary of the NFL’s departure from Los Angeles, the NFL seems closer than ever to returning. Per a league source, the current plan is that the NFL will send one or two teams back to Los Angeles within the next 12 to 24 months.
The timeline would include a team announcing its intention to move in the 2015 or 2016 offseason, with arrangements to play at the Rose Bowl or the L.A. Coliseum pending the construction of a new stadium. Possible sites for a venue in L.A. include the AEG project at L.A. Live in downtown, the land purchased recently by Rams owner Stan Kroenke at Hollywood Park, Chavez Ravine, and a couple of locations that have not yet been publicly disclosed. Ed Roski’s shovel-ready site at City of Industry is not regarded as a viable destination.
Currently, the universe of teams that may relocate consists of three: the Rams, Raiders, and Chargers. The Raiders’ current lease expires after the 2014 season. The Rams can exit without penalty after each season. The Chargers can leave by paying a relocation fee that shrinks every year.
The Rams, who most people don’t know actually started in Cleveland …
… moved from Cleveland to Los Angeles in 1946, playing at the cavernous Los Angeles Coliseum …
… before moving to Anaheim Stadium in 1980 …
… and then St. Louis in 1995:
The Raiders started in Oakland …
… moved to Los Angeles (the Coliseum) in 1982 …
… then moved back to Oakland in 1995:
The Chargers played their first season in Los Angeles before moving down Interstate 5 to San Diego.
Ever since the Rams and Raiders departed L.A. after the 1994 season, NFL-back-to-L.A. rumors have been as prevalent as car magazines’ stories about the next new Chevy Corvette. It is rather ironic that the rumors about the Rams’ and/or Raiders’ and/or Chargers’ moving (back) to L.A. involves two franchises that both moved to and from L.A. It’s also a bit ironic that two of the most recent teams to have moved (the last was the Houston Oilers, which became the Tennessee Titans in 1997, preceded one year earlier by the first Cleveland Browns, which became the Baltimore Ravens) are looking to move back.
Usually, teams that move move because of a combination of on-the-field lack of success and bad stadium situations, with one often affecting the other. (Which is kind of like being excited about buying a car that is a lemon.) The Rams play in the Edward Jones Dome, which opened in 1995. By 2012, the stadium was ranked the seventh worst U.S. sports stadium by Time magazine.
The Raiders are 0–4 and just fired their coach, and the Rams are 1–3 and in last place in the NFC West. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, the Chargers are 4–1. Another team often mentioned in moving discussions, the Jacksonville Jaguars, are 0–4, but their stadium, the former Gator Bowl, just had $63 million in renovation work. The Buffalo Bills were recently sold to the owners of the National Hockey League’s Buffalo Sabres, so they’re probably not going anywhere. (And the Bills are also 3–2 and tied for first in the AFC East.)
Both the Raiders and Chargers are supposedly working on stadium deals where they are now. That makes the Rams’ moving back to L.A. more logical, given the additional fact that since the Rams are in the NFC West, they could move back to L.A. without reconfiguring divisions. The Raiders’ situation is also intertwined with the Oakland Athletics, who share the former Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum with the Raiders in the only remaining baseball/football stadium. (The A’s want out too.)
As for the Chargers, U~T San Diego is worried:
For much of the 12 years the Chargers have been posturing and pestering for a new stadium in San Diego, they were the only team in the NFL with the ability to get out of their current lease with minimal or no penalty. Not so any more.
The St. Louis Rams recently won their freedom and can leave any time, and the Raiders are free to abandon Oakland after this season. Both teams, as do the Chargers, maintain their current stadium situations are unsustainable.
This is not the good news you might think it is. It doesn’t push the Chargers out of the L.A. scene.
What it might actually do is force the Chargers to make a decision — because they can’t let another team (or teams) beat them to Los Angeles.
The Chargers can’t have another NFL team in Southern California – not without getting a new stadium in San Diego.
The team says that 30 percent of its revenue is generated from Los Angeles and Orange County. To have a team in that region siphon that business would, Chargers officials have said several times, have a momentously adverse affect on their bottom line.
(A little refresher: The Chargers are one of a handful of NFL teams whose primary local revenue source is ticket sales. A new stadium would provide a lucrative naming rights deal, which the Chargers do not have now, as well as enhanced signage, among other revenue-generating features.)
If progress toward a new stadium remains stalled – the mayor’s dinner with Chargers President Dean Spanos and lunch with U-T columnist Nick Canepa and a few perfunctory meetings between advisers aside – the Chargers will be cornered if the Rams and Raiders appear headed back to Southern California.
Their two choices will be staking their claim to the region in the form of litigation trying to block any teams from moving to L.A. or moving to L.A. themselves.
So whatever anyone thinks about how L.A. will embrace an NFL team after 20 years or its decades-long inability to get a stadium built, those in the league know there will one day, sooner than later, be at least one team in the nation’s second-largest market.
After reading this, you are bound to ask: Well, if L.A. is such a great market, why isn’t a team there now? The Rams and the Raiders left the same season for similar reasons — the Rams got a sweetheart stadium deal in St. Louis, and the Raiders got a deal to move out of the L.A. Coliseum, which was old, in a bad neighborhood, and lacking in 1990s stadium amenities. Twenty years later, the L.A. Coliseum remains old, in a bad neighborhood, and lacking in 2010s stadium amenities, but the O.co Coliseum is similarly old and lacking in amenities. (Unless you consider sewer backups to be a stadium amenity.)
You can also gue$$ what el$e i$ motivating the new $tadium pu$h, both from the NFL’s perspective and the perspective of owners of teams that might move to L.A. The NFL would love to have Super Bowls back in the SouthLAnd, but that is unlikely without a team and without a better stadium than the Coliseum (which hosted Super Bowls I and VII) or the Rose Bowl.
This is also potentially tied to the NFL’s TV blackout policy. Because of (the importance varies) the cavernous size of the Coliseum, the lack of quality of the Raiders and Rams, and the fact there are so many other things to do, L.A. team games have often been blacked out in L.A. because the stadiums haven’t been sold out. (The situation didn’t change back in Oakland either; the Raiders last season reduced their stadium capacity to avoid blackouts. That might have to do with the fact that through 2011, the Raiders had had more blackouts than locally broadcast games.)
No one is likely to announce a move during the season, because that would result in ugly situations in their soon-to-be-vacated home stadiums, at least until after the teams’ last home games. Watch what happens, though, after Dec. 21, because, interestingly, the Rams’, Raiders’ and Chargers’ last games of this season are on the road. The Chargers’ last two games are on the road, in fact, which could give them a one-week jump start, though whether they would use it might depend on whether or not they remain in playoff contention.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 