We started and ended with jazz yesterday, so it’s worth noting that today is the anniversary of the release of the first jazz record, “Darktown Strutters Ball”:
The number eight single today in 1969 …
… the same day John Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded …
A friend of mine said on Facebook Wednesday:
Yeah yeah we got the Mallards. They even have a mascot that endears to me intimately. But they’re a Cape Cod team. There’s no reason we can’t have a Brewers farm team–at the very least an A-team but why not the AAA-team?
We sure would go to a lot more games if it was a Brewers farm team.
Those outside the Madison area may not realize that Madison does have a minor league team, the Mallards, part of the independent (that is, unaffiliated with Major League Baseball) Northwoods League. The Mallards and their other Northwoods brethren use college players, and their season runs from late May through August.
I pointed out (after which he said, “I love how you always break things down to gravel”; I’m not sure what he meant by that) that while there are Class A teams near Madison, the obvious problem is that the Brewers already have a Class A affiliate, the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, based in the Fox Cities. The Midwest League Rattlers, which have only been a Brewers affiliate since 2009, are the former Appleton Foxes, which had a long and distinguished history. The Foxes became the Timber Rattlers in 1995, the year they moved into Fox Cities Stadium, which hosts the WIAA spring baseball championships and the NCAA Division III College World Series.
There have been several minor league teams in Madison, over three eras, the last of which started in 1982. Before that, the Madison Senators played in the Wisconsin-Illinois League from 1907 to 1914, as a Class D (then the lowest level of the minors) team for three years and a Class C team the remaining five years. (The league’s other teams, depending on the year, included the Appleton Papermakers, Eau Claire Tigers, Fond du Lac Webfoots, Green Bay Orphans and Bays, La Crosse Badgers, Marinette-Menominee Twins, Oshkosh Indians, Racine Belles, Wausau Lumberjacks, Aurora (Ill.) Blues, Freeport (Ill.) Pretzels and Rockford Wolverines and Wolves.)
Minor league ball returned to Madison in 1940 when the Blues joined the Class B Illinois-Indiana-Iowa League, with the opponents the Cedar Rapids Raiders, Clinton (Ill.) Giants, Decatur (Ill.) Commodores, Evansville (Ind.) Bees, Moline Plow Boys, Springfield (Ill.) Browns and Waterloo (Iowa) Hawks. The Blues were a Cubs affiliate in their final year, 1942.
Forty years later, the Class A Midwest League’s Madison Muskies arrived and were initially a hit beyond all expectations. The Muskies were an affiliate of the Oakland Athletics, and the Muskies had several players who would end up with the great A’s teams of the late 1980s, including Jose Canseco, Terry Steinbach and Walt Weiss, or with other teams, including outfielder Luis Polonia and pitcher Tim Belcher (who opened the 1988 World Series for the Dodgers against the A’s in what you should know as the Kirk Gibson Game). Warner Park, a high school diamond, underwent in-season expansion projects to accommodate the crush of interest. The Muskies ended up losing the Midwest League championship to Appleton, but were unquestionably the league’s biggest hit, and maybe the biggest hit in all of minor league baseball. (That was in the same year the Brewers got to the World Series, so arguably 1982 was the zenith of baseball in the state of Wisconsin, among the Brewers, Foxes and Muskies.)
Unfortunately for the Muskies, the first year was their best year. As with nearly all minor league teams, sometimes the Muskies were good; sometimes they weren’t. Warner Park was never significantly improved, which posed a problem when the minors became popular and better stadiums started to be built. The Muskies changed owners, and the new owners moved the franchise to Grand Rapids, Mich., to become the West Michigan Whitecaps. The one-season replacement was the Madison Hatters, a Cardinals minor league team formerly located in Springfield, Ill., but they were at Warner Park for just 1994 before they moved to Battle Creek, Mich. (They are now in Midland, Mich., and called the Great Lakes Loons. Really.)
Madison’s first independent minor league team was the Black Wolf, which played in the Northern League at Warner Park from 1996 to 2000. (Jimmy Buffett — yes, that Jimmy Buffett — was a minority owner.) After five seasons, the Black Wolf moved to Lincoln, Neb., to become the Saltdogs.
Exit the Black Wolf, but enter Steve Schmidt, owner of The Shoe Box in Black Earth. Schmidt played baseball at Madison Area Technical College (which has one of the best junior-college baseball programs in the country, though most Madisonians probably don’t know that). Schmidt hit upon the idea of a short-season team, which conveniently eliminated the problem of playing baseball in April and May before tens of fans. The Mallards have been successful on the field (two league titles) and seem to be successful enough off the field.
The question my friend asks, however, is about Madison’s return to what could be called Organized Baseball. The next level up, Class AA, is unlikely due to geography. The closest AA league is the Eastern League, and by “closest” I mean the closest team is in Akron, Ohio. That leaves Class AAA, and Madison sits between its two leagues — the International League has teams in Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio, and the Pacific Coast League has teams in Des Moines and Omaha.
As a Class AAA market, Madison would be on the small side, but with a metro area of half a million people (counting Iowa and Columbia counties) would be comparable to such markets as Durham, N.C., Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, Pa. (home of the Yankees’ top farm club), Syracuse and Toledo.
What about the Brewers on the other end of Interstate 94? As close as they are, that wouldn’t be the shortest distance between parent club and AAA affiliate. The Tacoma Rainiers are 32 minutes south of their Mariners parents, and the Gwinnett Braves are 37 minutes north of their Braves parents. Of course, Seattle and Atlanta are considerably larger than Milwaukee.
The Brewers are much more of a statewide team than they used to be, thanks to the Miller Park roof and Brewers marketing people who actually know something about marketing. (Their predecessors in the Bud and Wendy Selig era didn’t, or didn’t have any money for marketing outside Milwaukee.)
These three dangerous-looking characters are my father (on the left; I look more like my mother, the Miss Wisconsin-USA finalist, though Dad and I have the same body type, and we are the first two generations of trumpet players in the family) and two of his high school friends, from Richland Center, one of whom has season tickets. It is unlikely anyone from Richland Center, unless a diehard baseball fan, would have season tickets at Milwaukee County Stadium, given Milwaukee’s bad spring weather and distance from southwest Wisconsin. The Wednesday afternoon we were there, it was 44 degrees outside. The game drew 24,000 at Miller Park; it probably would have drawn 4,000 at County Stadium.
What obviously is a huge plus to the Brewers is a minus for competitors for the entertainment dollar. If you buy tickets for a Brewers game, wherever you are, you have absolute certainty that the game will be played. The only thing the weather will affect is the comfort level of your pregame tailgate party. To no one’s surprise, the Brewers’ attendance as a percentage of available tickets (capacity times game dates) is substantially higher than it was in the County Stadium days, even when the Brewers had good teams. (The Brewers’ attendance record in County Stadium was in 1983, 2.3 million fans, or 53 percent of capacity. The Brewers so far are averaging 76 percent of capacity, slightly better than in 2013, and the Brewers have exceeded 3 million fans, which is about 90 percent of capacity, three times since moving to Miller Park.)
The stadium question is one of the biggest hurdles. A Class AAA stadium seats about 10,000 to 15,000. There is no obvious place in Madison to put a baseball stadium other than possibly the Dane County Fairgrounds, though Dane County has never expressed interest in building a ballpark. Schmidt has done wonders with Warner Park, but Warner Park will never really meet the standard of a quality minor league ballpark. In a perfect world, a ballpark would be built close to the UW campus so the UW baseball team and the AAA team could share it, but there is no UW varsity baseball anymore. With Madison’s reputation as the City That Won’t where business is concerned, it would almost make more sense for one of Madison’s suburbs to host the team, though that is probably a nine-digit financial commitment.
The other hurdle is ownership of the team. The Brewers’ AAA affiliate is the Nashville Sounds. It’s not that Milwaukee has a historic commitment to Nashville; the Brewers are the Sounds’ sixth parent organization. But to get a team in Madison, you have to put together an ownership group. Since it’s always fun to speculate with other people’s money, some of the names being circulated as potential Milwaukee Bucks minority owners come to mind — Brewers owner Mark Attanasio, who is reportedly interested in having a part of the Bradley Center replacement, and Nashville Predators owner Craig Leipold, a Racine native. Beyond them, though, well, it’s nice to have rich people in your state, and Wisconsin has very few of them.
Some may see the distance between Madison and Milwaukee as a hurdle. Others see the failure of previous minor league teams as a sign that Madison isn’t a baseball town, or that the UW overwhelms everything else sports-wise. The former may more be a commentary on Muskies ownership (the Hatters were never intended to be in Madison more than one season) than on whether Madison would support a higher-level baseball team stocked with players who next year might be playing at Miller Park. The latter ignores the fact that baseball and UW football, basketball and hockey don’t overlap.
The key number is 700,000. That’s 10,000 spectators times 70 home games. In an area of slightly more than a half-million people, could a baseball franchise get that many ticket sales?
ABC-TV broadcasted the Indianapolis 500 race for the 50th year Sunday.
I’m not a big race fan, but the Indy 500 was one of the few races I always tried to watch each year, at least until high school commencements on Sunday afternoons intervened. Somewhere there is a photo of me in a race car in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway museum, and on my one and only UW Marching Band bowl game our buses took a lap on the track. Indy is not considered a very steep track, but even an 11-degree banking is noticeable, particularly in a bus.
The race also was the final time Jim Nabors started the race by singing “Back Home Again in Indiana.” (Nabors’ singing voice is nothing like his “Gomer Pyle” voice. Surprise, surprise, surprise.)
Nabors told a hilarious story about how he started singing the song:
People tend to forget Nabors was actually born in Alabama. He moved to California when he started out in show business, and was performing in Lake Tahoe one day for an audience that included Bill Harrah. The casino magnate happened to be a car aficionado, and he invited Nabors to attend the Indy 500 for the first time.
Nabors was supposed to be there as a fan, but [track owner] Tony Hulman had also seen Nabors perform in Lake Tahoe, and the speedway’s owner asked if he would sing along with the Purdue marching band prior to the race. With that, Nabors picks up the story:
”So to the conductor of the Purdue band, I said, ‘What key do you do this in?’ And he looked at me funny and said, ‘We only have one key.’ I said, ‘No, the ”Star-Spangled Banner” has two keys.’ And he said, ‘You’re not singing that!’ And I said, ‘Well, what the hell am I singing?’ It was only five minutes to race time, too, and there’s 500,000 people here,” Nabors said.
”He says, ‘It’s the traditional song that opens the race, ”Back Home Again in Indiana.”’ I kind of looked at him and go, ‘I’m from Alabama!’ And he started laughing and asked if I knew it. And I said, ‘Well, I know the melody but I don’t know all the lyrics.’ So I’m writing them on my hand. The first time I ever sang it, I wrote it on my hand.”
Racing — animal or vehicular — is one of the events I’ve never had the opportunity to announce. It must be an enormous challenge to announce given that fans have a hard time determining who’s in first place except for the scoreboard since the lead participants often end up lapping slower participants.
There is one more challenge specific to auto racing, though it’s something that could happen in other sporting events. No sports broadcasting program I’m aware of trains you how to cover death during a sporting event.
I have had a couple of instances where games I was announcing were stopped because of player injuries that were serious enough to require ambulance trips for the participants. All three of the games were tape-delayed, so we’d watch for a few minutes and then turn off the camera until play resumed.
One year before ABC started covering the 500, in 1964, drivers Dave MacDonald and Eddie Sachs were killed on the race’s second lap.
The YouTube video merges newsreel footage with the live radio coverage of the event. Radio race coverage is interesting to observe. For races on big tracks such as Indianapolis or the Daytona 500, there are one or two main announcers, and additional announcers in each of the turns. The announcers describe what — more accurately who — is going past them.
Nine years after the 1964 500, ABC’s broadcast of the 1973 500 demonstrated the unpredictability of live sports, even though ABC’s broadcast wasn’t live. In those days ABC tape-delayed the 500 to the evening after the race, which has been run on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend (weather permitting) since 1975. In 1973, the race was still on Memorial Day … or it was supposed to be on Memorial Day.
Those who believe in omens would have been disturbed two weeks before the race was to be held, when driver Art Pollard crashed in qualifying and was killed. But drivers and hardcore race fans have always accepted death as part of what can happen in racing. (I have a high school classmate who was killed in a race car crash in 1997. Ten years before that, I was an intern at WKOW-TV in Madison, sitting in the newsroom watching the 1987 500 when the Associated Press reported the death of a spectator from Wisconsin. A wheel came off of one of the cars, another car hit the wheel — as it happened, during a commercial, as I discovered in trying to find the incident — and launched the wheel and tire the air and hit the spectator, who was sitting in the top row of the grandstand, in the head, killing him instantly.)
ABC’s main announcer was Jim McKay, one of the most versatile announcers in the history of TV sports. There had not been a death during the 500 since McDonald’s and Sachs’ deaths, though there had been deaths during practice or qualifying. (Including, in 1968, a driver who had been added to a team to replace legendary racer Jim Clark, who had died in a race crash one month earlier.) McKay’s on-the-job training for what he’d have to announce was the previous September, when, while covering the 1972 Munich Olympics, he had to announce the kidnapping and then murder of 11 Israeli athletes.
The 1973 500 turned out to be both the shortest (just 133 of 200 laps) and longest (over three days) race in Indy history. The race began three hours late due to rain. That would have made things a little exciting in ABC’s production facilities with the amount of time for pre-broadcast production shrinking dramatically. However …
… ABC carried none of the race Memorial Day. The 11-car crash seven seconds into the race, in which fuel sprayed into the crowd, severely injured driver David “Salt” Walther and at least two spectators. By the time track repairs and cleanup were under way, the rains resumed. and race officials postponed the race until Tuesday, even though ABC said it wouldn’t carry the race Tuesday.
(Having announced a three-day-long baseball game last year, I can relate. For that matter, 25 years ago I was supposed to provide reports from a softball sectional in the same town as a baseball sectional involving the same high school. Thanks to two days of rain not dried out by the third day, I covered exactly none of it, because by the time the games were actually played, I had to be at the state track meet.)
The action Tuesday was off the track, because the rain returned before the race was to restart. ABC reported on a heated meeting between race officials and drivers during which a driver told race officials that if the start wasn’t improved, “you’re going to get us all killed out there.” The problem was a too-slow start (which bunched up the field) combined with drivers’ not staying where they were supposed to stay before the race started, as was pointed out by driver Jackie Stewart, ABC’s analyst.
Stewart had to be back in Europe for a race, so he wasn’t there for the final start. Nor were many of the race team crew, since many had to return to their actual jobs. Nor were most of the fans, for the same reason.
What sportswriters were now calling “the 72 Hours of Indianapolis” got started for good Wednesday. The race got as far as 57 laps until …
… driver David “Swede” Savage crashed and was trapped inside his burning car. A crew member of one of Savage’s teammates started running on pit row toward the crash, was hit by a fire truck responding to the crash, and was killed. Savage survived the crash, but died a month later of complications. His wife was pregnant with their second daughter.
ABC carried the 72 Hours of Indianapolis the night the race finally ended.
One of the unpleasant truths of wars and disasters is that they represent learning opportunities. (Much of current emergency medical practice is based on what was learned in the Korean and Vietnam wars.) Fatal crashes in prominent races usually result in safety improvements. Indy cars were slowed down until chassis and safety technology caught up with engine technology. Emergency equipment was required to be driven the same direction as race cars down pit row. The track was also improved by removing the wall Savage hit and the seats where spectators were burned in Walther’s crash.
For instance, drivers now wear neck protection to avoid the kind of injury that killed racer Dale Earnhardt at Daytona in 2001:
The fact, however, is that the only way to eliminate deaths from racing is to eliminate racing. If a crash in which a car going 60 mph hits something can kill the car’s occupants, a crash at triple-digit speeds will be more lethal. Which doesn’t stop drivers from racing.
Two more Beatles anniversaries today: “Love Me Do” hit number one in 1964 …
… four years before the Beatles started work on their only double album. Perhaps that work was so hard that they couldn’t think of a more original title than: “The Beatles.” You may know it better, however, as “the White Album”:
A new group called the YG Network observes:
Middle-class Americans continue to suffer in the Obama economy. Costs for everyday things like gas and groceries continue to rise, and long-term expenses like tuition continue to take large chunks out of families’ budgets.
And as far as healthcare goes, “more employees are getting hit with higher health insurance premiums and co-payments,” according to the new Aflac WorkForces Report.
It’s not surprising then, that the American people think that the economy is on the decline. According to Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index, a majority of Americans (55 percent) believe that the economy is getting worse, while only 40 percent believe it is getting better.
The liberal agenda isn’t working out for the middle class, because it focuses on pet projects without making any serious attempt to make life work better for hardworking Americans.
How do we know that the economy is taking a downward turn, irrespective of what Washington wants us to believe? Traveling around over the Memorial Day weekend, one observed a large number of campers and boats, along with some motorcycles, for sale. Those are all relatively big-ticket items, but they are paid for with disposable income, and visual evidence says people are disposing of items purchased with disposable income.
How do we know the economy hasn’t been doing well for a long time? Consider this: The financial planners say a family should buy a car whose price is no more than half of its annual income, and buy a house whose price is no more than twice of its annual income. The median income of a Wisconsin household in 2012 was $51,039 (yes, less than the national average.) The average price of a new car in March 2012 was $30,748, which is more than half of said median household income. The median price of a house in Wisconsin in 2012 was $133,900, which is closer to three years of income than two years. Since incomes have grown negligibly but prices have not since 2012, if you go by standards of responsible financial planning most Wisconsin families cannot afford to buy a new car or a house.
One reason the economy is sucking is that by any non-hyperpartisan’s definition, the federal government is not working. Anyone who thinks ObamaCare is just misunderstood and once you try it, you’ll like it should have their beliefs disproven by every new report about VA hospitals. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin observes:
Whether it is the Department of Veterans Affairs, Medicaid, student loans or any other mismanaged and excessively expensive aspect of the liberal welfare state, the left’s answer to any reform proposal is invariably, “No, you’re trying to destroy it!” To try to reform these programs is, in the left’s eyes, an attempt to hurt the poor, sick, disadvantaged and powerless. The recipients in the current system may not get good care or students may be weighed down with huge debt and no useful degree, but liberals are content so long as more and more taxpayer money is poured into failing programs. Likewise, Medicare and Social Security can crowd out all other domestic programs and be on the road to bankruptcy, but reformers who attempt to make it sustainable for the long haul are accused of throwing Granny over the cliff. …
Examples of the problem abound. The VA is close to a European, socialized medicine program as you are going to see in the U.S., and it is killing people. Medicaid is rife with fraud and offers care much worse than non-Medicaid patients receive (in part because the rates don’t attract the best physicians). We’ve spent hundreds of billions on education and our kids do worse in math than do children in Poland and Vietnam. The libertarian would say: “Get rid of it all, and everything will be better!” The reform conservative says, “Let’s see if we can do these things better, or better yet, move more people off Medicaid, for example, and into good-paying jobs.” A good example of the latter mindset is Medicare Part D, a GOP reform that used market forces to keep costs down and make drugs accessible to the elderly. Liberals and libertarians fought it tooth and nail, but it works and people like it.
Liberals hate this sort of conservative talk and would rather spend more money for worse results. Why? We can be cynical and say they have a political dependence on civil servants and want those people to stay employed. Levin instead suggests that it is inherent in their vision of government: “The Left tends to champion public programs that consolidate the application of technical expertise: that try to take on social problems by managing large portions of society as if they were systems in need of better organization and direction. Again, it views government as organizing the interactions of individuals.”
Hand in hand with this go a few liberal habits of mind. First, it’s all about inputs. How many dollars, how many meetings, how many people served. When the dollars in a budget go down (or merely fail to rise), liberals holler that you are hurting the poor, without regard to whether the current programs are doing the job. The outputs — people out of poverty, people in paying jobs – aren’t even measured in many instances. (This isn’t just in domestic policy. Ask a State Department employee what he has “accomplished,” and he’ll reel off a list of memos, meetings and trips.) Second, it imagines that the smartest technocrats can figure it all out and micromanage a vast, diverse and complex country. You get Obamacare, which has federal bureaucrats telling you what an “acceptable” insurance policy is and what is, as the president put it, a “crap” plan that shouldn’t be sold.
The result of all this is a very big liberal welfare state that does a very bad job of addressing people’s problems. Oh, and it drives us into deeper and deeper debt. That is the bad news that contributes to the sense that government doesn’t work for anyone who really needs it. The good news is that the exhaustion of the liberal welfare state, a victim of its own flawed organizing principles, offers the opportunity for a vision of government that is better, more effective and more limited (at least at the federal level).
So what should be done about this? Fox News reports:
In a notable display of GOP unity in this often acrid primary season, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Majority Leader Eric Cantorstood alongside conservative all-star Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Tim Scott, R-S.C. for the release of “Room to Grow,” a 121-page policy manifesto aimed at attracting middle-class voters to the GOP. The book written by the YG Network, a group of prominent conservatives with ties to Cantor, offers proposals on health care, taxes, and education. McConnell praised the work, telling the gathering the GOP needs to combat its elitist image and focus on “Americans whose daily concerns revolve around aging parents, long commutes, shrinking budgets, and obscenely high tuition bills” adding, “these hymns to entrepreneurialism are as a practical matter largely irrelevant.”
Peter Wehner of the Ethics and Public Policy Center outlines the problem …
In an era of rapid economic and demographic change, middle-class Americans express hope and optimism about their ability to climb the economic ladder. Yet two-thirds of Americans believe that it will be harder for them to achieve the American Dream than it was for their parents, and three-quarters believe that it will be harder still for their children and grandchildren to do the same. The chief fear of middle-class Americans is that just as it is getting harder for poor people to climb into the middle class, a stagnant economy is making it all too easy for those who have achieved middle class status to fall out of it.
Middle-class adults are far more inclined to believe that Democrats rather than Republicans favor their interests. But middle-class dissatisfaction with both liberals and conservatives runs deep, and this creates an opportunity for conservative reformers. Conservatives must understand the concerns of the middle class and speak to their aspirations and worries. They must offer a concrete conservative agenda that tackles the barriers to upward mobility, and that renews faith in free enterprise and our constitutional system.
… and National Affairs editor Yuval Levin outlines their solution:
Conservatives must offer an alternative to the fundamentally prescriptive, technocratic approach inherent in the logic of the liberal welfare state. While the Left seeks to impose order on the chaos and complexity of a free society through the use of centralized government programs, the Right seeks to protect, defend, and revitalize the space between individuals and the state. This is the space in which families, communities, civic and religious institutions, and private businesses are constantly finding new solutions to new challenges, and it is the space that is most threatened by the growth of government.
For conservatives, the role of government is to enable and sustain markets and other arenas of common action, ensuring competition, aiding the development of physical infrastructure and human capital, protecting consumers and citizens, and allowing the poor and vulnerable to participate along with everyone else. In practice, this means avoiding centralized programs that impose wholesale solutions from above in favor of those that enable a bottom-up, incremental, continuous learning process.
The conservative reform agenda aims to replace a failing liberal welfare state with a lean and responsive 21st century government worthy of a free, diverse, and innovative society.
National Review adds:
Room to Grow, an essay collection published by YG Network, a conservative group, is the latest evidence that conservatism may be experiencing an intellectual resurgence as well as a political one. The book collects and distills much of the fresh conservative thinking that journals like National Affairs — and, ahem, National Review — have been featuring on health care, financial reform, higher education, and other issues. The conservative authors of the book refuse to concede any of these areas to a Left that has often seen them as its exclusive territory, and refuse as well to adopt the role of defending a dysfunctional status quo from liberals who would make it worse. Instead they argue for conservative reforms: breaking the higher-education cartel, bringing real competition to health care, making anti-poverty programs work-oriented.
As in the late 1970s, ideas rooted in sound conservative principles and an accurate assessment of the American condition offer the opportunity to unify and elevate the Republican party. National Affairs, the American Enterprise Institute, and the YG Network co-hosted the book launch, which included supportive commentary by new tea-party stalwarts Senators Tim Scott (R., S.C.) and Mike Lee (R., Utah) and by established Republican leaders Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell.
There is much work to be done. The good news for the country, and the bad news for liberalism, is that this work is now beginning.
On Friday shortly after 8 a.m., I will be on Wisconsin Public Radio for the Joy Cardin Show Week in Review.
I seem to have this thing now where I am on WPR either just before or just after a holiday. This could be my latest post-holiday appearance, or my latest pre-holiday appearance.
As you know, Wisconsin Public Radio’s Ideas Network can be heard on WHA (970 AM) in Madison, WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at www.wpr.org.
Today is Wisconsin’s 166th birthday as a state.
Wisconsin became a state May 29, 1848. It’s too bad that Wisconsin’s becoming the 30th state couldn’t have waited one day to become official, but apparently Congress was unconcerned with numerical synchronicity.
Apparently Wisconsinites — that is, residents of the Wisconsin Territory — were somewhat hesitant to join the Union, at least according to History.com:
In 1836, after several decades of governance as part of other territories, Wisconsin was made a separate entity, with Madison, located midway between Milwaukee and the western centers of population, marked as the territorial capital. By 1840, population in Wisconsin had risen above 130,000, but the people voted against statehood four times, fearing the higher taxes that would come with a stronger central government. Finally, in 1848, Wisconsin citizens, envious of the prosperity that federal programs brought to neighboring Midwestern states, voted to approve statehood. Wisconsin entered the Union the next May.
That’s a rather ironic paragraph given that Wisconsin has been a donor state to the feds for decades, with no national parks, no Air Force bases, no major federal installations, and, of course, no Upper Peninsula, that having been swiped from Wisconsin and given to Michigan to settle the Toledo War.
Be all that as it may, Estately has found 27 reasons to live here, including …
TOILET PAPER IS AMPLE
The only thing worse than running out of toilet paper is unnecessary hyperbole. Luckily, Green Bay, Wisconsin is the Toilet Paper Capital of the World. So go ahead and wipe like you’re some kind of Charmin Bear because the T.P. is abundant.
IT’S BEERVANAWisconsin could just as easily be called The Beer State. This land of malted hops and barley welcomed German immigrants and their brewing traditions with open arms. A staggering 3.9% of the state’s GDP comes from beer, with over 60,000 people employed in the beer industry. One brewery in Milwaukee alone produces 10 million barrels of beer annually—that’s 10 million barrels of fun! Milwaukee even named their baseball team the Brewers.
YOU CAN FIND OTHER DRINK WISCONSINBLY PRODUCTS AT DRINKWISCONSINBLY.COM
GREEN BAY PACKERS
What team has an NFL record 13 championships, 22 Hall of Famers, and is owned by the fans themselves instead of some local billionaire? The NFL’s greatest franchise—the Green Bay Packers. Being a winner feels good, too.
THE WOMEN OF WISCONSIN
- Can outdrink men from any other state (except Alaska and North Dakota)
- Make denim on denim look good (sorry Canada)
- Wear skirts and heels when it’s 20 below and never complain about the cold
- Are finally over their Brett Favre crushes, except Donna in Oshkosh
- Open their own pickle jars
- Would rather clean a walleye than the kitchen
- Sometimes wear brassieres made of cheese, which is the inspiration behind the Dairy Queen Brazier
- Can throw a snowball 20 yards further than women in Minnesota
- Keep a photo of Donald Driver in their wallets
- Currently have a nice casserole baking in the oven
PHOTO SOURCE: PACKER TIME
THE MEN OF WISCONSIN
- Always oil your chainsaw before returning it
- Wear ponytails way better than guys in Illinois (see Clay Matthews)
- Propose to you while deer hunting
- Are happy to take your mom out for drinks on her birthday
- Buy a round of drinks when they win cash at pull tabs
- Put the toilet seat down because it’s not like they’re from Iowa
- Never, NEVER play the Goo Goo Dolls on a jukebox
- Only sit alone in their truck and cry when the dog dies
- Regret not making friends with Russell Wilson in college
- Never lie about their marathon time, even if they’re running for office
ALWAYS GOT MILKWisconsin earned the title of “Dairy Capital of the World” because it produces more milk than any other state, except for California, which isn’t fair because California is really big. Still, 2nd place isn’t bad, and wholesome Wisconsin doesn’t corrupt it’s milk with exposure to twerking and molly and marijuana cigarettes.
SO MUCH CHEESEPeople say “Where there’s smoke there’s fire,” but nobody ever says “Where there’s milk there’s cheese.” That’s way better, and it’s totally true for Wisconsin, which produces 25% of the nation’s cheese and wears 99% of all cheese hats.
FRIED CHEESE CURDSFor those who like their cheese squeaky and deep fried, Wisconsin is fried cheese curd paradise. These tasty little cheese nuggets are battered and fried, then served up with a cold beer. Wisconsin is like the county fair, except its an entire state and the fair food lasts all year long.
A LAND OF SECOND CHANCESRussell Wilson was an undersized quarterback who transferred from NC State University to Wisconsin for his final year of eligibility. While there, he took the Badgers to the Rose Bowl and now he’s the star quarterback for the resurgent Seattle Seahawks. There are magical powers at work in the Wisconsin, especially when it comes to underrated quarterbacks that other teams didn’t want (see Aaron Rodgers and Brett Favre).
PHOTO SOURCE: COLLEGE SPORTS MADNESS
FATHERS OF ANARCHY
Wisconsin (Milwaukee) is the home of Harley Davidson Motorcycles so maybe you could work for them? Maybe you could invent a remote control that silences a neighbor revving their Harley’s engine for a solid 10 minutes at 5:30 in the morning? You might even win a Nobel Prize for that. Check out Harley Davidson’s job page HERE.
… LOCALLY PRODUCED PEOPLE
These famous folks are all from Wisconsin…
- Harry Houdini, famous magician and escape artist
- Actress Heather Graham
- Frank Lloyd Wright, the country’s most famous architect
- Comedic actor Chris Farley
- Mr. Baseball (announcer Bob Uecker)
- Comedian Frank Caliendo
- Musical performer Liberace
- Musician Steve Miller
- John Matuszak (Sloth from The Goonies)
… MISSISSIPPI RIVER ADVENTUREThe Mississippi River forms part of Wisconsin’s border with Minnesota. It also provides a nice jumping off point for a 1,200-mile aft trip if you want to go all Huckleberry Finn and travel to New Orleans just like ye olde French fur trappers may have once done.
UNEMPLOYMENTThe unemployment rate for Wisconsin is 6.7%, which is better than the national average of 7.3%, and far better than its neighbors Michigan (9.0%) and Illinois (9.2%). Try and ignore neighboring Iowa (4.9%) and Minnesota (5.1%) and just be happy Wisconsin still has manufacturing jobs.
… AMERICA’S BEST MUSTACHES
Mustaches are back en vogue right now, but in Wisconsin they never went out of style. Upper lip bristles are worn by all segments of Wisconsin society, including some the state’s most iconic people. To check the authenticity of a mustache be sure to examine it up close. If there are tiny flecks of cheese curd, beer foam, and/or powdered donut then the mustache is genuine and must be treated with respect.
PHOTO SOURCE: TOTAL PACKERS
… HUMBLE PEOPLEIt’s nice to think that reason so few people in Wisconsin have set any world records is because they’re humble and don’t like to attract much attention. The state is largely free of showboats, discounting this proud Guinness Book of World Records holder, a man who’s has eaten a McDonald’s Big Mac every single day for 37 years.
THEY’RE INTO POLITICSWisconsin ranks number three in overall voter turnout with 61% over the past six elections. The state takes its politics seriously, even if they elect a confusing blend of contradictory political figures. This electoral bi-polar disorder causes the state to elect Democrat Barack Obama as President and conservative Republican Scott Walker as governor. The state has sent both socialists (Rep. Victor Berger) and rabid anti-communists (Sen. Joe McCarthy) to Congress. No matter what your politics, you’ll find someone who agrees with you in Wisconsin.
… THIRD-SHIFT HAPPY HOURHappy hours are great for those who enjoy discount drinks and food, but what if you work nights? Many a Wisconsin bar offers “third-shift” happy hours for nurses, firefighters and assembly-line workers, so they can still get cheap beer at 8:30am.
It’s not clear to me that interest in politics is a positive, and if you can find someone who agrees with your political views, you can also find someone who disagrees with your political views. The pre-statehood Wisconsinites wary of the feds were right.
Even less serious on the subject, with the added bonus of dubious accuracy, is this blog:
#1 Our cheese is simply better than yours.
Wisconsin cheese is amazing. It’s hands down the best in the country. Sure, we are absorbing tons more cholesterol and saturated fat than you, but you only live once!
#2 We have a baseball team called the friggin’ beers.
Yeah that’s right our baseball team is called the Milwaukee Brewers. If you’ve seen the movie baseketball you know they parodied our team, but it’s so true. Our baseball team is pretty much called the beers. It’s awesome.
#3 I eat your weight in brats every year, but i’m still in better shape than you are.
Did you know that brats are a food group? What’s that you say? They’re not? IN WISCONSIN THEY ARE!!
#4 We’re pretty good at football.
Last year the packers won the superbowl, the Badgers played in the Rose Bowl, and UW Whitewater won the division 3 NCAA national championship for the second year in a row. Whitewater has played in every NCAA championship since 2004. Our high school teams aren’t bad either.
#5 We’re pretty much immune to the cold.
Most humans have trouble adjusting to temperatures around twenty below zero fahrenheit. We jump in the water and pretend that we’re polar bears.
#6 We’re the home of the driftless area.
That’s right, at one point in time we had an area of the state that was so bad ass it flipped off a glacier and told it to go flatten some other part of the country… That’s how tough Wisconsin is. …
#8 Do not challenge someone from Wisconsin to a snowball fight.
You will lose. Hands down. Not only do we have experience but miller light numbs pain.
#9 Tip back your glass!
Wisconsin has five major breweries and over 25 microbreweries. Most of them are pretty good! …
#11 Our river will eat you. Do not go swimming.
The Wisconsin river is dangerous. The only two rivers in the world that are more dangerous are the Nile and the Amazon, and they are dangerous because of what lives in them. The Wisconsin river has extremely swift currents and deadly whirl pools. This one is no joke, stay away from the river!
#12 We have a lot of cows. Be jealous.
We have approximately 1,279,000 cows here in Wisconsin. If we equipped our cows with weapons and marched them into Canada we could probably take it over. That’s what i’m talking aboot!
#13 With great cows comes a great deal of milk.
Any day that I don’t drink a gallon of milk is a bad day. I’m pretty much addicted.
#14 Contrary to popular belief cows will not eat you.
Apparently people from urban areas are scared to death of cows. Cows are pretty docile. They are like big dogs and are usually much more afraid of you than you are of them. …
#16 If you are from another state do not… i repeat DO NOT try to out drink someone from Wisconsin.
You may have tipped back a few in your day, but people from Wisconsin are trained professionals. Attempting to out drink someone from Wisconsin can lead to serious injury and or death.
#17 The leading alcohol Consuming Countries in the world are as follows;
#3 Finland, #2 Ireland, and #1 Wisconsin. Yes, Wisconsin actually becomes a country in the category of alcohol consumption. Due to the massive quantities of football, beer, cheese, and brats once a party starts it rarely stops. …
#25 If you don’t like the weather…
Wait five minutes.. it’ll change! Come visit us!
This is more a pop than rock anniversary: One of the two funniest songs Johnny Cash performed, “One Piece at a Time,” hit number 29 today in 1976:
Birthdays start with Gary Brooker of Procol Harum:
According to fans of man-made global climate change that will change the Earth as we know it, all scientists believe their claptrap.
Think again, say Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer:
Last week Secretary of State John Kerry warned graduating students at Boston College of the “crippling consequences” of climate change. “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists,” he added, “tell us this is urgent.”
Where did Mr. Kerry get the 97% figure? Perhaps from his boss, President Obama, who tweeted on May 16 that “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” Or maybe from NASA, which posted (in more measured language) on its website, “Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities.”
Yet the assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is a man-made, urgent problem is a fiction. The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research.
One frequently cited source for the consensus is a 2004 opinion essay published in Science magazine by Naomi Oreskes, a science historian now at Harvard. She claimed to have examined abstracts of 928 articles published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and found that 75% supported the view that human activities are responsible for most of the observed warming over the previous 50 years while none directly dissented.
Ms. Oreskes’s definition of consensus covered “man-made” but left out “dangerous”—and scores of articles by prominent scientists such as Richard Lindzen, John Christy, Sherwood Idso and Patrick Michaels, who question the consensus, were excluded. The methodology is also flawed. A study published earlier this year in Nature noted that abstracts of academic papers often contain claims that aren’t substantiated in the papers.
Another widely cited source for the consensus view is a 2009 article in “Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union” by Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, a student at the University of Illinois, and her master’s thesis adviser Peter Doran. It reported the results of a two-question online survey of selected scientists. Mr. Doran and Ms. Zimmerman claimed “97 percent of climate scientists agree” that global temperatures have risen and that humans are a significant contributing factor.
The survey’s questions don’t reveal much of interest. Most scientists who are skeptical of catastrophic global warming nevertheless would answer “yes” to both questions. The survey was silent on whether the human impact is large enough to constitute a problem. Nor did it include solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists or astronomers, who are the scientists most likely to be aware of natural causes of climate change.
The “97 percent” figure in the Zimmerman/Doran survey represents the views of only 79 respondents who listed climate science as an area of expertise and said they published more than half of their recent peer-reviewed papers on climate change. Seventy-nine scientists—of the 3,146 who responded to the survey—does not a consensus make.
In 2010, William R. Love Anderegg, then a student at Stanford University, used Google Scholar to identify the views of the most prolific writers on climate change. His findingswere published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. Mr. Love Anderegg found that 97% to 98% of the 200 most prolific writers on climate change believe “anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been responsible for ‘most’ of the ‘unequivocal’ warming.” There was no mention of how dangerous this climate change might be; and, of course, 200 researchers out of the thousands who have contributed to the climate science debate is not evidence of consensus.
In 2013, John Cook, an Australia-based blogger, and some of his friends reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011. Mr. Cook reported that 97% of those who stated a position explicitly or implicitly suggest that human activity is responsible for some warming. His findings were published in Environmental Research Letters.
Mr. Cook’s work was quickly debunked. In Science and Education in August 2013, for example, David R. Legates (a professor of geography at the University of Delaware and former director of its Center for Climatic Research) and three coauthors reviewed the same papers as did Mr. Cook and found “only 41 papers—0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent—had been found to endorse” the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming. Elsewhere, climate scientists including Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir J. Shaviv and Nils- Axel Morner, whose research questions the alleged consensus, protested that Mr. Cook ignored or misrepresented their work.
Rigorous international surveys conducted by German scientists Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch —most recently published in Environmental Science & Policy in 2010—have found that most climate scientists disagree with the consensus on key issues such as the reliability of climate data and computer models. They do not believe that climate processes such as cloud formation and precipitation are sufficiently understood to predict future climate change.
Surveys of meteorologists repeatedly find a majority oppose the alleged consensus. Only 39.5% of 1,854 American Meteorological Society members who responded to a survey in 2012 said man-made global warming is dangerous.
Finally, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—which claims to speak for more than 2,500 scientists—is probably the most frequently cited source for the consensus. Its latest report claims that “human interference with the climate system is occurring, and climate change poses risks for human and natural systems.” Yet relatively few have either written on or reviewed research having to do with the key question: How much of the temperature increase and other climate changes observed in the 20th century was caused by man-made greenhouse-gas emissions? The IPCC lists only 41 authors and editors of the relevant chapter of the Fifth Assessment Report addressing “anthropogenic and natural radiative forcing.”
Seemingly each year, the reporters and the editorial writers at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel believe the shooting of a young child, the needless murder of a homeless man, or a large turnout at a candlelight vigil, is the so-called tipping-point on crime. In this scenario, the residents of Milwaukee’s central city or the “hood,” as the area was recently dubbed by the Journal Sentinel, awake from their Rip Van Winkle-type slumber to forge a new reality — that the conduct of the criminal element will no longer be tolerated.
And, each year, it takes all of two weeks to debunk the Journal Sentinel’s theory, as bodies, sadly, begin filling the freezers of Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s office.
Instead of looking to Chief Flynn and his overpriced east coast consultants for answers, the proponents of the futile Rip Van Winkle theory on Milwaukee’s inner-city violence could find solutions at Amazon.com for $10.67, a price substantially more affordable than Chief Flynn’s cabal of advisors.
In February, retired Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) Captain Glenn Frankovis released a new book, Area Saturation Patrol: A Policing Strategy That Works, which spotlights the successful strategy used to suppress crime in MPD Districts Two, Three and Five.
At the request of Glenn’s publisher, I penned the following:
“During the summer of 2001, Milwaukee’s Metcalfe Park neighborhood was a virtual war zone. Fox News 6 reporter Mara MacDonald’s investigation dubbed this troubled area a killing field. In an effort to prevent more bloodshed, Police Chief Arthur Jones called on Captain Glenn Frankovis.
“Glenn had previously served as the Commanding Officer at District Five, where he implemented an Area Saturation Patrol (ASP) strategy that worked wonders. In 2002, overall major crime in District Five declined 8.1 percent, shootings plummeted 42.8 percent, and the number of homicides decreased 48.6 percent. Within 18 months, the near north side policing sectors under Frankovis’ command had witnessed the largest one-year decline in per capita homicides in urban America.
“But could the man with the plan, and his hard-charging foot soldiers, put a lid on the on violence in Milwaukee’s killing field? After all, Metcalfe Park was surrounded by other neighborhoods teetering on the brink. Instead of making excuses, requesting a huge influx of new officers, or whining about budgets, Glenn Frankovis met the challenge head-on. In his first full-year at District Three, the commander’s ASP strategy and no-nonsense policing style resulted in 15.5 percent reduction in violent crime, including a 21.7 percent reduction in robberies.”
With such a track record of success, one would think the editorial writers at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the staffs of local television news outlets, and the political-class at city hall, might take notice of Frankovis’ crime fighting strategy. But alas, the sound of crickets and excuse making are the only concepts being promulgated by the proponents of the Rip Van Winkle theory.
So, each year, as you read the articles in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel regarding the very tragic loss of human life, consider the source. Then, take notice that the newspaper’s editorial board and city leaders seem more concerned with political correctness than fighting crime. And, as time passes, the public can count on one thing: that editorial board and political pontificators will continue to put their collective heads in the sand while waiting—for eternity—for the elusive inner-city Rip Van Winkle to be jostled from his slumber.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 