Yesterday, as you know, was the 13th anniversary of 9/11.
An event as cataclysmic as 9/11 was understandably could lead to some inappropriate reaction, the result of a trauma with no frame of reference to guide your thoughts or actions.
That bit of psychobabble is as charitable as I can be to describe this bit of ignominious history, from the Examiner:
Not only were the events of that day a change of course for history, but they were also a psychological attack on the hearts and minds of every American; and the effects still resonate to this day. It was scary. People didn’t know to react or wrap their head around what had just happened. The government reacted with immediate military action. Normal citizens reacted by donating any money they could to aid the relief effort. Some even joined the military. Some corporate entities responded with censorship.
In the days following 9/11, Clear Channel Communications, the owner of more than 1,200 radio stations covering every market demographic in the United States at the time issued a ban of around 165 songs from being played on any of their radio stations. I truly think that the Clear Channel memorandum had good intentions by trying to suppress any song about death, fire, tall buildings, or bombs because music moves people emotionally and Clear Channel must have been of the opinion that American minds had been put through enough horror. Clear Channel felt the need to spread only positivity through the power of the airwaves, therefore attempting to keep the public’s heads up by pure psychology. (You see this in bars and restaurants all time. When’s the last time you bought a cheap drink at a bar that was playing classical music? You haven’t)
The reasoning behind the decision was one thing. The list itself is crazy. Songs that personally make me feel inspired and empowered such as “New York, New York” by Frank Sinatra, “What a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong, and “Imagine” by John Lennon were on this list. Any time I hear any of those three songs, I receive a feeling inside that not many songs can dish out. I feel hope in the face of adversity. I see a light at the end of the tunnel. I feel an ability to overcome. And most importantly, I feel inspired to try to make the world a better place with my own two hands.
So the very thought of a song about New York City or a song inspired by a war 30 years prior we as Americans were considered too fragile to hear. If history has taught us anything, it has taught us Americans are resilient and hold a rock-solid resolve. History has also taught us that simply you can’t stop New York City.
Before 9/11 was the 1989 World Series earthquake in San Francisco, which WOLX radio in Madison announced, followed by, I kid you not, Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move Under My Feet.” This is what happens when a radio station creates a playlist who knows how long in advance, and doesn’t have DJs in the building who can make the decision to pull an temporarily inappropriate song. (Or doesn’t give the DJ the ability to do so.)
Clear Channel’s list is indeed crazy, including:
It seems that nearly every grunge rock band from the ’90s was blacked out.
The list includes at least one ironic choice: Paul Simon sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water” at a 9/11 benefit concert. And not playing “New York, New York” defies explanation. Yes, 9/11 took place on a Tuesday, but what reason other than that is there to not play Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Tuesday’s Gone”?
Sept. 11, 2001 started out as a beautiful day, in Wisconsin, New York City and Washington, D.C.
I remember almost everything about the entire day. Sept. 11, 2001 is to my generation what Nov. 22, 1963 was to my parents and Dec. 7, 1941 was to my grandparents.
I had dropped off our oldest son, Michael, at Ripon Children’s Learning Center. As I was coming out, the mother of one of Michael’s group told me to find a good radio station; she had heard as she was getting out with her son that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.
I got in my car and turned it on in time to hear, seemingly live, a plane hit the WTC. But it wasn’t the first plane, it was the second plane hitting the other tower.
As you can imagine, my drive to Fond du Lac took unusually long that day. I tried to call Jannan, who was working at Ripon College, but she didn’t answer because she was in a meeting. I had been at Marian University as their PR director for just a couple months, so I didn’t know for sure who the media might want to talk to, but once I got there I found a couple professors and called KFIZ and WFDL in Fond du Lac and set up live interviews.
The entire day was like reading a novel, except that there was no novel to put down and no nightmare from which to wake up. A third plane hit the Pentagon? A fourth plane crashed somewhere else? The government was grounding every plane in the country and closing every airport?
I had a TV in my office, and later that morning I heard that one of the towers had collapsed. So as I was talking to Jannan on the phone, NBC showed a tower collapsing, and I assumed that was video of the first tower collapse. But it wasn’t; it was the second tower collapse, and that was the second time that replay-but-it’s-not thing had happened that day.
Marian’s president and my boss (a native of a Queens neighborhood who grew up with many firefighter and police officer families, and who by the way had a personality similar to Rudy Giuliani) had a brief discussion about whether or not to cancel afternoon or evening classes, but they decided (correctly) to hold classes as scheduled. The obvious reasons were (1) that we had more than 1,000 students on campus, and what were they going to do if they didn’t have classes, and (2) it was certainly more appropriate to have our professors leading a discussion over what had happened than anything else that could have been done.
I was at Marian until after 7 p.m. I’m sure Marian had a memorial service, but I don’t remember it. While I was in Fond du Lac, our church was having a memorial service with our new rector (who hadn’t officially started yet) and our interim priest. I was in a long line at a gas station, getting gas because the yellow low fuel light on my car was on, not because of panic over gas prices, although I recall that one Fond du Lac gas station had increased their prices that day to the ridiculous $2.299 per gallon. (I think my gas was around $1.50 a gallon that day.)
Two things I remember about that specific day: It was an absolutely spectacular day. But when the sun set, it seemed really, really dark, as if there was no light at all outside, from stars, streetlights or anything else.
For the next few days, since Michael was at the TV-watching age, we would watch the ongoing 9/11 coverage in our kitchen while Michael was watching the 1-year-old-appropriate stuff or videos in our living room. That Sunday, one of the people who was at church was Adrian Karsten of ESPN. He was supposed to be at a football game working for ESPN, of course, but there was no college football Saturday (though high school football was played that Friday night), and there was no NFL football Sunday. Our organist played “God Bless America” after Mass, and I recall Adrian clapping with tears down his face; I believe he knew some people who had died or been injured.
Later that day was Marian’s Heritage Festival of the Arts. We had record attendance since there was nothing going on, it was another beautiful day, and I’m guessing after five consecutive days of nonstop 9/11 coverage, people wanted to get out of their houses.
In the decade since then, a comment of New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has stuck in my head. He was asked a year or so later whether the U.S. was more or less safe since 9/11, and I believe his answer was that we were more safe because we knew more than on Sept. 10, 2001. That and the fact that we haven’t been subject to another major terrorist attack since then is the good news.
Osama bin Laden (who I hope is enjoying Na’ar, Islam’s hell) and others in Al Qaeda apparently thought that the U.S. (despite the fact that citizens from more than 90 countries died on 9/11) would be intimidated by the 9/11 attacks and cower on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, allowing Al Qaeda to operate with impunity in the Middle East and elsewhere. (Bin Laden is no longer available for comment.) If you asked an American who paid even the slightest attention to world affairs where a terrorist attack would be most likely before 9/11, that American would have replied either “New York,” the world’s financial capital, or “Washington,” the center of the government that dominates the free world. A terrorist attack farther into the U.S., even in a much smaller area than New York or Washington, would have delivered a more chilling message, that nowhere in the U.S. was safe. Al Qaeda didn’t think to do that, or couldn’t do that. The rest of the Middle East also did not turn on the U.S. or on Israel (more so than already is the case with Israel), as bin Laden apparently expected.
The bad news is all of the other changes that have taken place that are not for the better. Bloomberg Businessweek asks:
So was it worth it? Has the money spent by the U.S. to protect itself from terrorism been a sound investment? If the benchmark is the absence of another attack on the American homeland, then the answer is indisputably yes. For the first few years after Sept. 11, there was political near-unanimity that this was all that mattered. In 2005, after the bombings of the London subway system, President Bush sought to reassure Americans by declaring that “we’re spending unprecedented resources to protect our nation.” Any expenditure in the name of fighting terrorism was justified.
A decade later, though, it’s clear this approach is no longer sustainable. Even if the U.S. is a safer nation than it was on Sept. 11, it’s a stretch to say that it’s a stronger one. And in retrospect, the threat posed by terrorism may have been significantly less daunting than Western publics and policymakers imagined it to be. …
Politicians and pundits frequently said that al Qaeda posed an “existential threat” to the U.S. But governments can’t defend against existential threats—they can only overspend against them. And national intelligence was very late in understanding al Qaeda’s true capabilities. At its peak, al Qaeda’s ranks of hardened operatives numbered in the low hundreds—and that was before the U.S. and its allies launched a global military campaign to dismantle the network. “We made some bad assumptions right after Sept. 11 that shaped how we approached the war on terror,” says Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism research fellow at the New America Foundation. “We thought al Qaeda would run over the Middle East—they were going to take over governments and control armies. In hindsight, it’s clear that was never going to be the case. Al Qaeda was not as good as we gave them credit for.”
Yet for a decade, the government’s approach to counterterrorism has been premised in part on the idea that not only would al Qaeda attack inside the U.S. again, but its next strike would be even bigger—possibly involving unconventional weapons or even a nuclear bomb. Washington has appropriated tens of billions trying to protect against every conceivable kind of attack, no matter the scale or likelihood. To cite one example, the U.S. spends $1 billion a year to defend against domestic attacks involving improvised-explosive devices, the makeshift bombs favored by insurgents in Afghanistan. “In hindsight, the idea that post-Sept. 11 terrorism was different from pre-9/11 terrorism was wrong,” says Brian A. Jackson, a senior physical scientist at RAND. “If you honestly believed the followup to 9/11 would be a nuclear weapon, then for intellectual consistency you had to say, ‘We’ve got to prevent everything.’ We pushed for perfection, and in counterterrorism, that runs up the tab pretty fast.”
Nowhere has that profligacy been more evident than in the area of homeland security. “Things done in haste are not done particularly well,” says Jackson. As Daveed Gartenstein-Ross writes in his new book, Bin Laden’s Legacy, the creation of a homeland security apparatus has been marked by waste, bureaucracy, and cost overruns. Gartenstein-Ross cites the Transportation Security Agency’s rush to hire 60,000 airport screeners after Sept. 11, which was originally budgeted at $104 million; in the end it cost the government $867 million. The homeland security budget has also proved to be a pork barrel bonanza: In perhaps the most egregious example, the Kentucky Charitable Gaming Dept. received $36,000 to prevent terrorists from raising money at bingo halls. “If you look at the past decade and what it’s cost us, I’d say the rate of return on investment has been poor,” Gartenstein-Ross says.
Of course, much of that analysis has the 20/20 vision of hindsight. It is interesting to note as well that, for all the campaign rhetoric from candidate Barack Obama that we needed to change our foreign policy approach, President Obama has changed almost nothing, including our Afghanistan and Iraq involvements. It is also interesting to note that the supposed change away from President George W. Bush’s us-or-them foreign policy approach hasn’t changed the world’s view, including particularly the Middle East’s view, of the U.S. Someone years from now will have to determine whether homeland security, military and intelligence improvements prevented Al Qaeda from another 9/11 attack, or if Al Qaeda wasn’t capable of more than just one 9/11-style U.S. attack.
Hindsight makes one realize how much of the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented or at least their worst effects lessened. One year after 9/11, the New York Times book 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers points out that eight years after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, New York City firefighters and police officers still could not communicate with each other, which led to most of the police and fire deaths in the WTC collapses. Even worse, the book revealed that the buildings did not meet New York City fire codes when they were designed because they didn’t have to, since they were under the jurisdiction of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. And more than one account shows that, had certain people at the FBI and elsewhere been listened to by their bosses, the 9/11 attacks wouldn’t have caught our intelligence community dumbfounded. (It does not speak well of our government to note that no one appears to have paid any kind of political price for the 9/11 attacks.)
I think, as Bloomberg BusinessWeek argues, our approach to homeland security (a term I loathe) has overdone much and missed other threats. Our approach to airline security — which really seems like the old error of generals’ fighting the previous war — has made air travel worse but not safer. (Unless you truly believe that 84-year-old women and babies are terrorist threats.) The incontrovertible fact is that every 9/11 hijacker fit into one gender, one ethnic group and a similar age range. Only two reasons exist to not profile airline travelers — political correctness and the assumption that anyone is capable of hijacking an airplane, killing the pilots and flying it into a skyscraper or important national building. Meanwhile, while the U.S. spends about $1 billion each year trying to prevent Improvised Explosive Device attacks, what is this country doing about something that would be even more disruptive, yet potentially easier to do — an Electromagnetic Pulse attack, which would fry every computer within the range of the device?
We haven’t taken steps like drilling our own continent’s oil and developing every potential source of electric power, ecofriendly or not, to make us less dependent on Middle East oil. (The Middle East, by the way, supplies only one-fourth of our imported oil. We can become less dependent on Middle East oil; we cannot become less dependent on energy.) And the government’s response to 9/11 has followed like B follows A the approach our culture has taken to risk of any sort, as if covering ourselves in bubblewrap, or even better cowering in our homes, will make the bogeyman go away. Are we really safer because of the Patriot Act?
American politics was quite nasty in the 1990s. For a brief while after 9/11, we had impossible-to-imagine moments like this:
And then within the following year, the political beatings resumed. Bush’s statement, “I ask your continued participation and confidence in the American economy,” was deliberately misconstrued as Bush saying that Americans should go out and shop. Americans were exhorted to sacrifice for a war unlike any war we’ve ever faced by those who wouldn’t have to deal with the sacrifices of, for instance, gas prices far beyond $5 per gallon, or mandatory national service (a bad idea that rears its ugly head in times of anything approaching national crisis), or substantially higher taxes.
Then again, none of this should be a surprise. Other parts of the world hate Americans because we are more economically and politically free than most of the world. We have graduated from using those of different skin color from the majority as slaves, and we have progressed beyond assigning different societal rights to each gender. We tolerate different political views and religions. To the extent the 9/11 masterminds could be considered Muslims at all, they supported — and radical Muslims support — none of the values that are based on our certain inalienable rights. The war between our world, flawed though it is, and a world based on sharia law is a war we had better win.
In one important sense, 9/11 changed us less than it revealed us. America can be both deeply flawed and a special place, because human beings are both deeply flawed and nonetheless special in God’s eyes. Jesus Christ is quoted in Luke 12:48 as saying that “to whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.” As much as Americans don’t want to be the policeman of the world, or the nation most responsible for protecting freedom worldwide, there it is.
Stuart Taylor writes about the John Doe investigation …
Those conservatives say that the long-running criminal investigation has unconstitutionally prevented them and their allies from participating in politics and tilted the political field to favor Democrats, whose campaign practices are almost identical to the Republicans’ but largely ignored by the prosecutors. The probe, conservatives say, has forced them to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills and harassed some of them with pre-dawn raids on their suburban homes that seized cell phones and computers of all family members, including a child’s iPad. Prosecutors imposed “gag orders” to prevent the investigation’s targets from publicly complaining.
Wisconsin Republicans, and some Democrats in Washington, contend that the Democratic district attorney is distorting campaign finance laws to criminalize ordinary politics. …
A “John Doe” is a legal proceeding under Wisconsin law that allows prosecutors, with a judge’s approval, to require complete secrecy from any one involved. This “gag order” provision, almost unique in American law, effectively disables targets or witnesses from publicly defending themselves or responding to damaging leaks.
… and reveals:
Now a longtime Chisholm subordinate reveals for the first time in this article that the district attorney may have had personal motivations for his investigation. Chisholm told him and others that Chisholm’s wife, Colleen, a teacher’s union shop steward at St. Francis High School, a public school near Milwaukee, had been repeatedly moved to tears by Walker’s anti-union policies in 2011, according to the former staff prosecutor in Chisholm’s office. Chisholm said in the presence of the former prosecutor that his wife “frequently cried when discussing the topic of the union disbanding and the effect it would have on the people involved … She took it personally.”
Citing fear of retaliation, the former prosecutor declined to be identified and has not previously talked to reporters.
Chisholm added, according to that prosecutor, that “he felt that it was his personal duty to stop Walker from treating people like this.”
Chisholm was referring to Gov. Walker’s proposal – passed by the legislature in March 2011 – to require public employee unions to contribute to their retirement and health-care plans for the first time and to limit unions’ ability to bargain for non-wage benefits.
Chisholm said his wife had joined teachers union demonstrations against Walker, said the former prosecutor. The 2011 political storm over public unions was unlike any previously seen in Wisconsin. Protestors crowded the State Capitol grounds and roared in the Rotunda. Picketers appeared outside of Walker’s private home. There were threats of boycotts and even death to Walker’s supporters. Two members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court almost came to blows. Political ad spending set new records. Wisconsin was bitterly divided.
Still, Chisholm’s private displays of partisan animus stunned the former prosecutor. “I admired him [Chisholm] greatly up until this whole thing started,” the former prosecutor said. “But once this whole matter came up, it was surprising how almost hyper-partisan he became … It was amazing … to see this complete change.”
The culture in the Milwaukee district attorney’s office was stoutly Democratic, the former prosecutor said, and become more so during Gov. Walker’s battle with the unions. Chisholm “had almost like an anti-Walker cabal of people in his office who were just fanatical about union activities and unionizing. And a lot of them went up and protested. They hung those blue fists on their office walls [to show solidarity with union protestors] … At the same time, if you had some opposing viewpoints that you wished to express, it was absolutely not allowed.”
When I was on Wisconsin Public Radio a few months ago and brought up Chisholm’s political views interfering with his duty, my opponent claimed Chisholm was a man of integrity and so on. My opponent appears to have been mistaken.
The irony here is that Chisholm makes $122,612 per year as district attorney. His wife made, in the 2012–13 school year, $52,384. Their own family income is more than three times this state’s median family income, and yet he feels free to harass those of more conservative views, and she is another union thug.
At minimum, Chisholm has two conflicts of interest, and every member of his staff has one major conflict of interest. Their pay was reduced by Act 10, which was proposed and signed into law by Walker. Chisholm’s wife’s pay was also reduced by Act 10. They have a direct stake in Walker’s actions, therefore by the code of lawyers under no circumstances should they be investigating Walker.
Chisholm and two of his assistant DAs, Bruce Landgraf and David Robles, are defendants in a civil rights lawsuit filed in February by targets of the probe. The conservatives allege the Milwaukee County prosecutors deprived them of their First Amendment rights of speech and association.
The complaint, alleging Chisholm and his office were driven by their political bias against Walker and his controversial collective-bargaining reforms, underlines some partisan perception problems for Chisholm and may support some of the contentions of the former prosecutor:
During the 2011-2012 campaign to recall Walker, at least 43 (and possibly as many as 70) employees within Chisholm’s office signed the recall petition, including at least one deputy district attorney, 19 assistant district attorneys and members of the District Public Integrity Unit. The DA’s office is assisted directly by five deputy DAs and 125 assistant DAs, according to the agency’s website.
Altogether, as of April 2012, employees in Chisholm’s office had donated to Democratic over Republican candidates by roughly a 4-to-1 ratio.
Chisholm, a Democrat, has been supported by labor unions in previous campaigns, including in the most recent race to hold his DA position, during which the received support from, among others, the AFL-CIO, the complaint notes. He also is a donor to Democratic Party candidates and, as of April 2012, had given $2,200 exclusively to Democratic and liberal candidates.
“The revelation by a former Wisconsin prosecutor that the John Doe proceedings against Governor Scott Walker may have been motivated by pro-union political considerations is chilling,” said William A. Jacobson, publisher of Legal Insurrection and Cornell Law School professor, in a statement.
“To date, no one has been able to explain why District Attorney John Chisholm has gone to the lengths he has gone to try to find criminal conduct that could taint Governor Walker. If this new information is accurate, now we know the motivation, and there needs to be an investigation of the investigators.”
There also needs to be an investigation of the priorities of the Milwaukee County DA’s office. Sierra Guyton died because she got in the way of a shootout between one person reportedly arrested 15 times before he turned 18, and another recently released from prison for reckless homicide. Had Chisholm’s DAs done their jobs better, those two would have not been out on the streets. Milwaukee has the worst crime problems in the state, and Chisholm’s failure to use state laws to put the bad guys away are making crime worse. Chisholm apparently believes persecuting non-Democrats is more important than prosecuting criminals.
As I’ve written here before, any Republican or conservative who has the misfortune of becoming a defendant in Milwaukee County is, in the eyes of the Milwaukee County DA’s office, automatically guilty. It’s a good thing Wisconsin doesn’t have the death penalty.
Today in 1956, London police were called to break up a crowd of teenagers after the showing of the film “Rock around the Clock” at the Trocadero Cinema.
That prompted a letter to the editor in the Sept. 12, 1956 London Times:
The hypnotic rhythm and the wild gestures have a maddening effect on a rhythm loving age group and the result of its impact is the relaxing of all self control.
The British demonstrated their lack of First Amendment by banning the film in several cities.
The state news media, as enamored with Mary Burke as the national news media is with Barack Obama, has failed to do actual reporting about Burke’s positions on issues.
Collin Roth has 10 questions the rest of the media isn’t asking:
1.) Do you support the Affordable Care Act? Is there anything you would change? Do you support the single payer option?
2.) Do you support the new EPA regulations recently approved by the Obama administration? Do you support a cap and trade policy to curb greenhouse gas emissions?
3.) What is your position on the Kenosha Casino? How would you deal with the Potawatomi’s power play?
4.) Would you have supported Act 10? And if not, how would you have made up for the $3.6 billion budget hole?
5.) If we were to restore collective bargaining as you propose, how would you make up the nearly $3 billion in savings at the local level attributed to Act 10?
6.) Can you name a school district or local government hurt by Act 10?
7.) Do you support Gov. Walker’s four year tuition freeze at the University of Wisconsin system?
8.) You say property taxes are too high but the caps are “strangling communities,” what is your solution to keeping property taxes down?
9.) Do you support public dollars for a new Bucks arena?
10.) How can you support a $10.10 minimum wage in Wisconsin when your company Trek moved manufacturing jobs to China in order to pay less than $5.00 per hour? Is that not hypocrisy? Wouldn’t your position of a higher minimum wage incentivize more companies to do what Trek did?
The questions to 1, 2 and 9 certainly are yes. Burke would punt on 3, 5, 7 (with the inner thought “gee, I wish I had thought of that”) and 10. Burke’s answer to 6 would be “yes, they are hurting school districts, because school districts no longer have as much money as they want to do whatever they want.” The answer to the first part of 4 would be no, and the answer to the second part of 4, 5 and 8 would be “raise taxes.”
My question comes from this Washington Free Beacon characterization of a story the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel apparently reported grudgingly:
Democratic candidate for Wisconsin governor Mary Burke took a two-year break from her career for a “snowboarding sabbatical” and a decade later expressed doubts that she ever wanted to have a full-time job again.
Burke’s career has come under scrutiny after it was revealed that her résumé includes a two-year gap between positions at Trek Bicycle Corporation, which was founded by her father.
After working in Europe for Trek overseeing operations in multiple countries, Burke decided she “needed some time off,” according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal. Explanations of what Burke was actually doing from July 1993 to September 1995 vary, largely because Burke’s explanations have varied.
Burke at one point said that, feeling burnt out from her job, she and a group of friends went off to a popular Argentinian mountain resort to snowboard for three months. At another point she said that her time spent in Argentina was because she was “going out with this guy.”
Her actual “snowboarding sabbatical” lasted two months in Argentina, though it remains unclear who she was with.
She then headed to the Breckenridge Ski Resort in Colorado, where she says she spent her time “traveling and relaxing” and also teaching snowboarding part time for a couple of months.
She even considered going back to school at the University of Colorado in Boulder but ultimately decided not to, and went back to Trek, putting an end to the two year period of snowboarding, traveling, and relaxing. …
Burke was considered in 2004 after her second stint with Trek to be part of Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle’s cabinet, but she expressed doubt that she would want a full-time job.
“I do not know at this point whether I will want to re-enter the full-time work force,” wrote Burke in a December 2004 email. “ I would appreciate being kept in mind but I don’t want anyone wasting their time.”
Burke was appointed secretary of commerce by Doyle and accepted the position. She resigned in 2007 citing her desire to “spend more time” on “other interests.”
How can Burke claim to know what working families deal with in this state? She is in a family that apparently allows her to enter and leave the family business whenever she wants. (If Burke were a Republican, Democrats would tear her and Trek Bicycle to shreds. To quote her favorite president, she, and they, didn’t build that.)
Moreover, Burke has no children. She’s never had to deal with the effects of long-term unemployment in the Obama economy. She’s never had sick children. She’s never had children in bad schools. (Even though she’s on the Madison school board, in a school district with an increasing number of bad schools.) She’s never had to worry about the safety of her children in an unsafe neighborhood. She’s never had to try to juggle kids’ activities and her own work. Only parents really know what parenting is like.
For that matter, how can Burke claim to know what small businesses deal with in this state? (Yes, that’s now two questions.) As I’ve pointed out before, Trek sells high-end bicycles for serious cyclists. Most Wisconsin families don’t own Trek bikes because they can’t afford bikes with four-digit price tags given all their other financial commitments. And I wonder how she thinks the bike shops that sell Treks will do with a mandated 40-percent increase in wage expenses (her minimum-wage increase proposal) without corresponding added business.
I’ve written here that Republicans have made a mistake in attacking Trek Bicycle. But if Burke were a Republican, the Democrats would be using all the class warfare rhetoric in their How-to-Attack-the-1-Percenters manuals against both Burke and her family’s business. They’d probably call the campaign “Occupy Burke.”
It’s helpful when discussing state finances to be able to share the observations of a Certified Public Accountant — in today’s case Rep. Dale Kooyenga (R–Brookfield), who has six observations:
1.) This budget which extends through June 30, 2015 is still projected to end with a healthy cash balance. The rainy day fund is at an all time high. The “structural deficit” is a state government concept and some states do not even calculate, or calculate using different methods. In this state, LFB assume there are no growths in revenues or expenditures all the way through June 30, 2017.
Revenues tend to grow, and Walker’s team has proven they can manage the expense side of the budget. Many folks (and even legislators) do not understand that we do not tell the Governor (executive branch) what they have to spend – we tell them the maximum they can spend. This means the Governor’s team can find cost savings, and simply spend less than the maximum amounts the legislature stipulated. There are substantial areas expenses can be cut with a $30 Billion plus annual budget. If you look at the audited state financial statements – the general fund had less spending in 2012 than 2011, and the 2013 general funding spending was lower than 2012 and 2011 even though the legislative budget was an increase in GPR spending.
2.) The structural deficit is projecting revenue all the way to June 30, 2017 – a lot will happen between now and then – including the passage of a new budget. No company would forecast a budget 3 years out and not assume any changes in revenues or expenses.
3.) Some of the confusion, and forward projections, are affected by the fact we are returning a portion of the surplus to the taxpayers who put it there in the first place. In the private sector, we would call this a return of equity – not an expense or lost revenue! For example, if GE is predicting a year with zero net income, but still pays out $1 billion in dividends because they have excessive cash, their net income does not become a net loss of $1 billion, their income remains flat. In Madison, the stakeholders do not view it that way, and they call a return of taxpayer dividends an expense. This is an important distinction in the private sector, but not understood in government because it is not in their best interest.
4.) Wisconsin’s businesses and families budgets are what really matters. Since we cut taxes, and the Governor adjusted the withholding tables, budgeting has become less burdensome for families and business. Republicans made a conscious decision to make budgeting easier at the dinner table and main street – that is what really matters. We all know the left, assisted by the media, wants to argue against tax cuts because they want to make it easier to keep your cash in Madison so they can spend it on growing government.
5.) The revenue projections going forward are not Wisconsin specific, they are instead based on national economic trends. There is no doubt that lack of leadership in the White House has created domestic and international concerns which have national economic impacts.
6.) Media bias and ignorance is driving the confusion. I have never seen a Wisconsin paper headline the federal deficit despite Sen. Ron Johnson’s best efforts. Those deficits are real. Wisconsin is in good shape. 54% of voters think Wisconsin is headed in the right direction, compared to 25% of national voters who think the US is headed in the right direction.
This contrasts to the fiscal approach of the Doyle administration, which involved 2009-11 budget deficits of nine digits, structural deficits more than twice this one, a huge GAAP deficit (which is being reduced, but is still too large, “too large” being any number greater than 1), using federal stimulus funds, raiding of the Patients’ Compensation and transportation funds (the former of which was smacked down by the courts), denial that anything was wrong with state finances, and calls to raise taxes.
About which, Sen. Paul Farrow (R-Waukesha) observes:
“These projections by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau are not perfect calculations and should be treated as a learning opportunity. It is time for Wisconsin residents to remember where we as a state have been in the past.
“I am surprised that Senators Shilling, Hansen, Lassa, Lehman, Miller, and Taylor; all of whom served on the 2009-10 Joint Finance Committee that kicked the fiscal can down the road, are now decrying these projected numbers as signs of impending doom. It’s unfortunate that these legislators have forgotten that our charge is to continually analyze the state’s fiscal condition and make adjustments accordingly to our state’s expenses or revenues.
“I find it disingenuous for the same Democrats who drove our state into a truly staggering $3.6 billion deficit, and felt the only way to recover was by instituting the largest tax increase in our state’s history, are now unjustly portraying the work that Republicans have done to reduce the tax burden on all Wisconsinites.
“Rather than help work towards solutions to fix the deficit they created, Senate Democrats ran to Illinois and Assembly Democrats put on Orange Shirts and shook their fists. Now they are clamoring for answers when they have done nothing to find solutions and are using any “bad news” to portray a Wisconsin decline.
“Republicans on the other hand have passed two consecutive balanced budgets and have given the hardworking taxpayers of Wisconsin tax cuts and a sense of optimism. We are a long way from experiencing a full economic recovery; it would be nice to get some help from the other side instead of having them work against Wisconsin’s successes.
The Walker administration has not been perfect on fiscal matters, but its approach is certainly better than what Doyle did or Mary Burke would do as governor. Democrats, as you know, believe all your money belongs to government.
To that end. the aforementioned Shilling — Sen. Jennifer Shilling (D–La Crosse) — issued a news release yesterday claiming the way to fix Walker’s alleged fiscal crisis was to increase the minimum wage (that is, increase unemployment by 40 percent) and to take the federal Medicaid money, because taking money from the unit of government $16 TRILLION in debt and therefore that likely to renege on its funding obligations is good fiscal policy.
As it is, for those who believe in smaller government (as in something fewer than our 3,120 units of government), fiscal shortfalls are not the worst thing. A lack of money allows the adults in the room to say no. It’s also helpful to remember that, back in the Act 10 debate, we learned that then a state employee cost Wisconsin taxpayers $79,000 a year. And state legislators make nearly $50,000 a year, which is nearly $50,000 a year too much. The worse thing, in fact, is when more money comes in than estimated. That’s when every fiscal want becomes a full-blown crisis demanding more money, and the taxpayer gets stuck with the expanding bill. (That is a disease that infects Democrats and Republicans, since they are part of the same party, the Incumbent Party.)
The Republican Party isn’t perfect on fiscal matters either. Except for part of 2012 between spasms of Recallarama, the GOP has controlled both houses of the Legislature, but has failed to move ahead on permanent, as in constitutional, limits on state and local government spending. Readers know that had government spending been limited to the inflation rate plus population growth, government in Wisconsin would be half the size it is now.
Constitutional amendments require passage of consecutive sessions of the Legislature before statewide vote. Had the 2011-12 and 2013-14 Legislatures done their job and approved that referendum, voters could be choosing permanent (or as permanent as is possible in politics) fiscal responsibility soon. That would mean elections would matter less, and legislators would be severely limited in wasting your hard-earned tax dollars.
Today in 1962, the BBC banned playing the newly released “Monster Mash” by Bobby “Boris” Pickett on the grounds that it was offensive. To use today’s vernacular, really?
Eleven years later, the BBC banned the Rolling Stones’ “Star Star,” but if you play the clip you can hear why (really):
Michael Barone compares Barack Obama to Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani:
If you were in a room with Bill Clinton, he would discover the one issue out of 100 on which you agreed; he would probe you with questions, comments, suggestions; and he would tell you that you enabled him to understand it far better than he ever had before.
If you were in a room with Rudy Giuliani, he would discover the one issue out of 100 on which you disagreed; he would ask pointed questions and pepper you with objections; he would tell you that you are wrong on the facts and wrong on the law, and that you needed to admit you were utterly mistaken.
The difference is partly a matter of personality and temperament, and of regional style: Southern affability, New York prickliness.
But there’s also an underlying similarity. Both Clinton and Giuliani are always curious about what others people think, determined to probe beneath the surface to understand what they really care about, sensitive to find areas of both agreement and disagreement.
They’re good at reading people, an essential quality for an executive and especially for a president. Recent presidents have had that quality in varying degrees.
Clinton, as indicated, has an immense desire to win people over. Daniel Halper’s bestselling Clinton, Inc., shows how he went about winning the affection and respect of the Bush family.
The two Presidents George Bush, aware that presidents have the greatest leeway in foreign affairs, both devoted immense psychic energy in establishing relationships with foreign leaders.
George W. Bush admits in his memoir Decision Points that he initially misjudged Vladimir Putin. But he established close personal rapport with leaders from wildly different backgrounds, from British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Brazilian President Lula da Silva.
As for George H.W. Bush, just about everyone now recognizes the brilliance of his diplomacy in response to the invasion of Iraq and the breakup of the Soviet Union. That diplomacy depended on shrewd reading and handling of literally dozens of foreign leaders.
The seemingly aloof Ronald Reagan developed his capacity to understand negotiating partners, as his definitive biographer Lou Cannon made clear, when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild negotiating with studio bosses.
Reagan deployed that ability in establishing productive relations with allies such as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, with whom he was by no means always in agreement, and with adversaries like Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, whose character, strengths, and weaknesses he shrewdly assessed.
The ability to read other people comes more easily if you’re interested in others, curious to learn what makes them tick. It comes harder or not at all if you’re transfixed with your image of yourself.
Which seems to be the case with Barack Obama. Not only is he not much interested in the details of public policy, as Jay Cost argues persuasively in a recent article for the Weekly Standard. He is also, as even his admirers concede, not much inclined to schmooze with other politicians, even his fellow Democrats.
That goes double for Republicans. House Speaker Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, is one of the most transparent and least guileful politicians I’ve encountered. The late Sen. Edward Kennedy and liberal Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., had no difficulty reaching agreement with him on the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act.
But Obama has gotten nowhere with him. The president blew up the 2011 grand bargain negotiations by raising the ante late in the game; later budget agreements were left to Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. Obama has taken to explaining Republican opposition as the result of “fever” or mental delusion.
Obama is also known to have frosty relations with most foreign leaders. He used to claim to be close to Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. That hasn’t prevented ErdoÄ?an from sidling up to the Muslim Brotherhood and exhibiting blatant anti-semitism.
Obama critics have pointed out his fondness for the first person singular. He said “I,” “me,” or “my” 63 times in his 1,631-word eulogy for Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye. He spoke twice as long about his own family experiences as the heroism for which Inouye was awarded the Medal of Honor.
Bill Clinton and Rudy Giuliani succeeded in large part because they were curious about other people different from themselves. Barack Obama prefers to look in the mirror.
The next president, whoever he or she is, will curse Obama, as all Americans should, for the damage he’s done to this country.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 