The number one British single today in 1959:
The number one album today in 1971 was Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s “4 Way Street”:
No comments on Presty the DJ for May 15
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David Blaska honors former Gov. Patrick Lucey, who died Saturday:
No one did more than Patrick Lucey to transform Wisconsin into a two-party state. He died Saturday at age 96, the longest-lived governor in state history.
Mr. Lucey was elected to the State Assembly in 1948, the state’s centennial, the same year as my grandfather John M. and a young Ruth Bachhuber Doyle, wife of Jim Doyle Sr. and mother of a future governor. All were Democrats. Warren Knowles and Mel Laird (still living!) were already veterans of the upper house when Gaylord Nelson joined them that year.
Pat Lucey played hardball in his politics, as did his allies, the Kennedys, who were never shy about lubricating the electorate if it would help them win. My friend John Nichols has written a lovely remembrance of the man, true as far as it goes, but Patrick Lucey was no populist, however much John may wish.
He was the last overtly pro-business Democrat to be elected governor of Wisconsin, elected from the hamlet of Ferryville, in picturesque Crawford County, where he was recently honored.
He was very definitely a one-percenter, like Mary Burke, but oh so much more accomplished. Lucey and his combative wife, Jean, deigned not to move into the governor’s mansion; it would have been a step down from their own Maple Bluff home.
In contrast to Ms. Burke, Lucey made his own money and knew how to encourage others to make wealth. It was he who enacted the Machinery & Equipment exemption from property taxes, which resulted in the Wall Street Journal naming Wisconsin “the [economic] star of the snowbelt.”
Yes, Patrick Lucey was a tax cutter, like his hero JFK. He grew the pie instead of cutting it into ever-thinner slices. The Democrat who chairs the party today, as Patrick Lucey once did in its glory years, calls tax cuts a “gimmick.” As my father (he also served in the Legislature) said near the end of his life, I did not leave the Democratic Party, it left me.”
Lucey did the hard work of getting the Democratic Party back into relevancy in the late 1940s, when Wisconsin’s two parties were the Republicans and the Progressives. For being the nation’s oldest political party, the Democratic Party in Wisconsin was rather irrelevant for a long time, until after World War II.
Tom Still, who covered Lucey as a young Wisconsin State Journal reporter (whose work was read by a young WSJ reader), adds:
Lucey, who died May 10 at 96, was elected governor twice in the 1970s before resigning late in his second term to become ambassador to Mexico. A few years later, disappointed in the Democratic president who appointed him, Lucey ran as independent John Anderson’s vice presidential running mate in an election won by Ronald Reagan.
It was his stint as governor, and his knack for campaign tactics and hard-nosed party politics, that defined Lucey much more than his time in the national limelight.
Along with a handful of other familiar names in Wisconsin politics – John Reynolds, William Proxmire, Gaylord Nelson and James Doyle among them – Lucey was an architect of the state’s modern Democratic Party. It arose in the late 1940s and early 1950s, just as the Progressive Party’s influence was waning, and quickly became a force in an otherwise Republican state.
In part, that was because Lucey took political organizing to a new level. During his years as director and late as chairman of the Democratic Party, Lucey made sure the party fielded candidates in virtually every race for the Wisconsin Legislature. That hard work paid off. When Democrats finally won the Assembly in 1958, it was the party’s first working majority since 1933.
Much of the political capital Lucey earned by working in party vineyards was available to spend during his years as governor. He dusted off the idea of merging the University of Wisconsin in Madison, which also included the UW Extension and campuses in Milwaukee, Green Bay and Racine-Kenosha, with the nine-campus Wisconsin State University System. At the time, both systems had a Board of Regents.
He believed a merger would control costs at a time when “baby boomer” enrollments were taxing most campuses, diminish duplication, improve education and give the combined UW System a larger voice.
The move was initially unpopular with legislators in both parties and many people within academia, particularly those on the Madison campus who believed it would water down the quality of the state’s flagship university.
Lucey cracked heads, cut deals, cajoled and threatened (“I had to be pretty heavy-handed – no merger, no budget,” he said later) and won in October 1971 by the slimmest of margins. In some ways, the “merger wars” of that era wage on, as evidenced a few years ago when a proposal to carve out more autonomy for the UW-Madison was shot down, basically from within the UW System itself.
Lucey rarely shied away from a fight. His push for changes in the state’s shared revenue system – the mechanism by which state tax dollars are redistributed to local governments – and the state aid formula for local schools were among other political rumbles.
And while Democrats were closely identified with labor unions then and now, Lucey was still governor in mid-1977 during events that led to a major state employee strike. He was generally suspicious of the civil service, in general, and not afraid to put political appointees in place within state agencies to make sure his policies were being carried out.
Although a tactician who loved the art of organization, Pat Lucey probably wasn’t a politician who would fit in well today. He joked about his own lack of charisma, wasn’t especially telegenic and often disagreed with his own party on major issues.
Lucey represents a bygone, more personally civil, and more politically independent era in Wisconsin politics, as opposed to what we’ve seen in this state since the Scott Jensen/Chuck Chvala era. For one thing, Lucey was a real estate agent, and no legislator until the 1970s had the words “full-time legislator” appear in his or her Wisconsin Blue Book biography. Lucey was the last governor who could say that Wisconsin’s per capita personal income growth exceeded the national average.
The Machinery & Equipment property tax exemption is a tax cut that would never be supported by Democrats today. The M&E exemption was a huge tax break for Wisconsin’s manufacturers, who obviously have a lot of capital tied up in machines. (Including Georgia-Pacific, owned by the Evil Koch Brothers.) Democrats today see business as a necessary evil at best.
Democrat Mary Burke refuses to support tax cuts, including business tax cuts in a state with one of the highest corporate income tax rates in the entire world. Which is interesting because her family organized Trek Bicycles as a subchapter-S corporation so that the company didn’t have to pay corporate income taxes. There is nothing illegal or inappropriate about that, just hypocritical for someone running for governor based on her business experience. It’s also disingenuous for Burke to claim that Trek never made decisions based on tax impact; if a business isn’t taxed on its income (sub-S shareholders get all the company’s profits and thus pay taxes on those profits), there are no tax decisions to be made. And as a manufacturer, Trek certainly has taken advantage of not only the M&E exemption, but of the later computer equipment exemption.
I’m not sure which is more ironic — the fact that Democrats desperately need more business presence in their party (instead of government employees and career politicians), or the fact that their supposed business candidate doesn’t espouse pro-business policies.
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Matt Walsh has some provocative things to say about Jesus Christ …
If you want to adopt some blasphemous, perverted, fun house mirror reflection of Christianity, you will find a veritable buffet of options. You can sift through all the variants and build your own little pet version of the Faith. It’s Ice Cream Social Christianity: make your own sundae! (Or Sunday, as it were.)
And, of all the heretical choices, probably the most common — and possibly the most damaging — is what I’ve come to call the Nice Doctrine.
The propagators of the Nice Doctrine can be seen and heard from anytime any Christian takes any bold stance on any cultural issue, or uses harsh language of any kind, or condemns any sinful act, or fights against evil with any force or conviction at all. As soon as he or she stands and says ‘This is wrong, and I will not compromise,’ the heretics swoop in with their trusty mantras.
They insist that Jesus was a nice man, and that He never would have done anything to upset people. They say that He came down from Heaven to preach tolerance and acceptance, and He wouldn’t have used words that might lead to hurt feelings. They confidently sermonize about a meek and mild Messiah who was born into this Earthly realm on a mission to spark a constructive dialogue.
The believers in Nice Jesus are usually ignorant of Scripture, but they do know that He was ‘friends with prostitutes,’ and once said something about how, like, we shouldn’t get too ticked off about stuff, or whatever. In their minds, he’s essentially a supernatural Cheech Marin.
Read the comments under my previous post about gay rights militants, and you’ll see this heresy illustrated.
That post prompted an especially noteworthy email from someone concerned that I’m not being ‘Christlike,’ because I ‘call people names.’ He said, in part:
“You aren’t spreading Christianity when you talk like that. The whole message of Jesus was that we should be nice to people because we want them to be nice to us. That’s how we can all be happy. Period. It’s that simple.”
Be nice to me, I’ll be nice to you, and we’ll all be happy. This is the ‘whole message’ of Christianity?
Really?
Jesus Christ preached a Truth no deeper or more complex than a slogan on a poster in a Kindergarten classroom?
Really?
A provocative claim, to say the least. I decided to investigate the matter, and sure enough, I found this excerpt from the Sermon on the Mount:
“We’re best friends like friends should be. With a great big hug, and a kiss from me to you, won’t you say you love me too?”
Actually, wait, sorry, that’s from the original Barney theme song. …
I don’t recognize this Jesus.
This moderate. This pacifist. This nice guy.
He’s not the Jesus I read about in the Bible. I read of a strong, manly, stern, and bold Savior. Compassionate, yes. Forgiving, of course. Loving, always loving. But not particularly nice.
He condemned. He denounced. He caused trouble. He disrupted the established order.
On one occasion — or at least one recorded occasion — He used violence. This Jesus saw the money changers in the temple and how did He respond? He wasn’t polite about it. I’d even say He was downright intolerant. He fashioned a whip (this is what the lawyers would call ‘premeditation’) and physically drove the merchants away. He turned over tables and shouted. He caused a scene. [John 2:15]
Assault with a deadly weapon. Vandalism. Disturbing the peace. Worse still, intolerance.
In two words: not nice.
Not nice at all.
Can you imagine how some moderate, pious, ‘nice’ Christians of today would react to that spectacle in the Temple? Can you envision the proponents of the Nice Doctrine, with their wagging fingers and their passive aggressive sighs? I’m sure they’d send Jesus a patronizing email, perhaps leave a disapproving comment under the news article about the incident, reminding Jesus that Jesus would never do what Jesus just did.
Personally, I’ve studied the New Testament and found not a single instance of Christ calling for a ‘dialogue’ with evil or seeking the middle ground on an issue. I see an absolutist, unafraid of confrontation. I see a man who did not waver or give credence to the other side. I see someone who never once avoided a dispute by saying that He’ll just ‘agree to disagree.’
I see a Christ who calls the Scribes and Pharisees snakes and vipers. He labels them murderers and blind guides, and ridicules them publicly [Matthew 23:33]. He undermines their authority. He insults them. He castigates them. He’s not very nice to them.
Jesus rebukes and condemns. In Matthew 18, He utilizes morbid and violent imagery, saying that it would be better to drown in the sea with a stone around your neck than to harm a child. Had our modern politicians been around two thousand years ago, I’m sure they’d go on the cable news shows and shake their heads and insist that there’s ‘no place for that kind of language.’
No place for the language of God.
Jesus deliberately did and said things that He knew would upset people. He stirred up division and controversy. He provoked. He didn’t have to break from established customs, but He did. He didn’t have to heal that man’s hand on the Sabbath, knowing how it would disturb others and cause them immense irritation, but He did, and He did so with ‘anger’ [Mark 3:5]. He could have gone with the flow a little bit. He could have chilled out and let bygones be bygones, but He didn’t. He could have been diplomatic, but He wasn’t.
He could have told everyone to relax, but instead He made them uncomfortable. He could have put them at ease, but He chose to put them on edge.
He convinced the mob not to stone the adulterer [John 8], and you’ll notice that He then turned to her and told her to stop sinning. Indeed, never once did He encounter sin and corruption and say: “Hey, do your thang, homies. Just have fun. YOLO!”
The followers of Nice Jesus love to quote the ‘throw the first stone’ verse — and for good reason, it’s a beautiful and compelling story — but you rarely hear mention of the exchange that occurs just a few sentences later, in that very same chapter. In John 8:44, Jesus rebukes unbelieving Jews and calls them ‘sons of the Devil.’
Wow.
That wasn’t nice, Jesus.
Didn’t anyone ever tell you that you can catch more flies with honey, Jesus?
Of course, you’d catch even more flies with a mound of garbage, so maybe ‘catching flies’ isn’t the point.
While we’re often reminded that Jesus said, ‘live by the sword, die by the sword,’ we seem to ignore his other sword references. Like when he told his disciples to sell their cloaks and buy a sword [Luke 22], or when He said that He ‘didn’t come to bring peace, but a sword’ [Matthew 10].
Now, It’s true that He is God and we are not. Jesus can say whatever He wants to say. But we are called to be like Christ, which begs the question: what is Christ like?
Well, He is, among other things, uncompromising. He is intolerant of evil. He is disruptive. He is sometimes harsh. He is sometimes impolite. He is sometimes angry.
He is always loving.
Christ was not and is not a cosmic guidance counselor, and He is not mankind’s best friend, nor did He call us to be. He made dogs for that role — our destiny is more substantial, and our path to it is far more challenging and dangerous.
And nice?
Where does nice factor into this? …
Christians in this country sound too similar to the the Golden Girls song, and not enough like the Battle Hymn of the Republic. There’s too much ‘thank you for being a friend,’ and not enough ‘lightening from His terrible swift sword.’
We’re all hugging and singing Kumbaya, when we should be marching and shouting Hallelujah.
We’re nice Christians with our nice Jesus, and we are trampled on without protest.
Enough, already.
I think it’s time that Christianity regain its fighting spirit; the spirit of Christ.
I think it’s time we ask that question: ‘What would Jesus do?’
And I think it’s time we answer it truthfully: Jesus would flip tables and yell.
Maybe we ought to follow suit.
… and about Barack Obama or any president:
Of all the flaccid refrains constantly shrieked by the hordes of Statist sycophants, the worst is probably this:
“Even if you don’t respect Obama, you should still respect the office!”
Respect ‘the office,’ they say.
Definition of respect: to hold in esteem or honor.
Synonyms for respect: deference, awe, reverence.
As you might imagine, I was recently reacquainted with the rather sickening idea that I have a duty to show reverence for a political office, when I wrote a post last week where I merely called the president a liar. Indeed, anytime you criticize the president with an intent more serious than playfully teasing him for picking the wrong team in his March Madness bracket – anytime you attack authority, particularly presidential authority, particularly THIS president’s authority — the ‘respect the office’ propagators will come streaming in, fingers-a-wagging and heads-a-shaking.
‘Respect the office,’ they gush. Noticeably, the folks most concerned with respecting Obama’s office weren’t to be heard from during that certain eight year period where Bush was daily cut down as anything from Hitler Incarnate
to a barely literate monkey
to the subject for a slapstick Comedy Central sitcom.
In any case, Republican or Democrat, Hitler or Secular Messiah, is there anything to be said for this ‘respect the office’ notion?
I don’t think so, but then, the whole concept confuses me. Honestly, I don’t even know what ‘respecting the office’ means in the context of our constitutional republic, where our politicians are supposed to be public servants, and where they don’t do anything to earn the office other than spend a lot of money on political ads.
I know what it means to honor and respect your parents just because they’re your parents. I know what it means for a child to respect his teacher just because she’s his teacher. I know, and have written about, what it means for a woman to respect her husband because he is her husband, and a man to respect his wife because she is his wife. But, as far as I can tell, the responsibility to respect the ‘office’ of a politician falls squarely on the shoulders of the politician who holds it. And, even in that case, his job isn’t to respect the office, so much as to live up to the expectations of the voters who awarded him the position — and, far more important than the feelings of the voters, to uphold the law.
The ‘office’ is, after all, just an office. It isn’t some detached entity that exists on its own somewhere in the dimensions of time and space, and will live on even without being physically occupied.
The office is also not a divine birthright. This is not a monarchy. They are not royalty. Why should I respect the ‘office of the presidency’ anymore than I should respect the office of a plumber or a secretary? If a plumber or a secretary lied all the time, I’d call them a liar.
It’s true that we shouldn’t hurl racial slurs and dishonest ad hominem insults at the president — regardless of who he is — but that isn’t because of his office. That’s just because he’s a person, and we shouldn’t do that to any person. It’s not the dignity of any office that we have a responsibility to uphold, but the dignity of a human being.
Coincidentally, the dignity of the human being is the precise sort of dignity that this president desecrates when he promotes infanticide and wishes ‘God’s blessings’ on a room full of wealthy abortionists, or when he brutally murders hundreds of women and children via drone attacks and then brags that he’s “really good at killing people,” or when he arms terrorists and drug cartels without a thought as to the innocent lives that will be lost as a result.
It’s a sad state of affairs, indeed. We’ve reached a point where a wide swath of the country finds itself more concerned with respect for a political office than for life itself.
Of course, I’m sure there are some people who vehemently disagree with Obama, yet would sing in the ‘respect the office’ choir, and would consistently apply the principle to all presidents, regardless of affiliation. I respect that. I actually respect it. I respect it because I honor it, and I honor it because it is a conviction born of integrity and pure intention. A politician’s job, on the other hand, is born of mere necessity, and I feel indifference towards it, until I’m given a reason to feel disgust or admiration (usually it’s the former, obviously).
These people aren’t necessarily in the Statist horde I mentioned above, but they’ve unwittingly aligned themselves with that mob, and so I’d urge them to reconsider.
The Bible tells us to submit to governing authority, and that such authority comes from God (Romans 13). But nobody in America thinks that this requires us to lie before the Powers that Be like dogs, and follow them blindly into our own slavery. If they did interpret that passage in that way, I imagine they’d already have returned to the British Motherland and said ‘sorry, my bad,’ over that whole unfortunate Revolution misunderstanding.
Besides, here in America, the governing authority is the Constitution. The Constitution — a set of laws, rooted in respect for life and liberty, planted in the soil of Natural Law and watered, as Jefferson said, with the blood of tyrants. The Constitution is our authority. The Constitution is the law. In this nation, the law does not rest with one man, or any collection of men.
In this nation, we prostrate ourselves to no one, other than the Lord.
Let our president bow to royalty if he so desires, but, as free people, that is not our warrant.
Respecting the office, when considered by someone other than a progressive hypocrite, seems well and fine. But I’m afraid that, in application, it makes it difficult for us to hold for our politicians that one feeling that the preservation of Liberty surely requires: skepticism.
Here in the United States, where the power allegedly resides with the people, the one thing that a political office automatically earns from its constituents is a healthy apprehension. The one thing, above everything, that we MUST do with political authority is question it. On this point, you really can’t have your American Pie and eat it too. It’s one or the other. Either our duty as watchful citizens is to doubt our politicians and their offices, or it is to respect them. One protects liberty, the other destroys it.
For a man who respects his wife, or a woman who respects her husband, or a child who respects his mother, it is understood that their apprehensions should be tamed by their respect for the other — respect that isn’t earned, but owed. The loving husband and the dutiful child give their wives and their parents, respectively, the benefit of the doubt.
A citizen, on the other hand, unless he or she is a total fool, knows that politicians should be given the benefit of the doubt about as often as it’s given to sex offenders or kleptomaniacs (especially considering the fact that our presidents have sometimes fallen under all three categories, *cough* Bill Clinton).
There’s a logistical problem with respecting the office, too. Namely, the Office of the Presidency as prescribed in the constitution is one thing, while the Office of the Presidency as currently resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is quite another. If I was at all inclined to respect the office, I could only consider respecting the former, as the former has Constitutional authority, and the Constitution is the law, and a just and righteous law is the Providence of God. But I run into the technical difficult that the former no longer exists, and hasn’t, arguably, since the conclusion of the Civil War.
The Office of the Presidency now possesses powers that stretch far beyond anything ever lawfully granted it, and it wields an authority that has accumulated over the decades through the illegal conquests of power hungry politicians.
When you respect the Office of the Presidency, you are either respecting the president himself, or you’re respecting this bloated perversion of a political station, one that has been used to murder and oppress.
Respect? If anything, the office should be hated. Hated until some respectable person is elected by respectable voters to convert the monstrosity back to the limited, yet important, post that our Founders established.
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The number one British album today in 1983 (with the clock ticking on my high school days) was Spandau Ballet’s “True”:
The number one British album today in 2000 was Tom Jones’ “Reload,” which proved that Jones could sing about anything, and loudly:
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The Wall Street Journal:
The four-year effort by Democratic prosecutors to criminalize political speech in Wisconsin has hit the wall of the U.S. Constitution. In a ruling that could have consequences nationwide, federal judge Rudolph Randa issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday ending the secret John Doe probe of allies of Governor Scott Walker.
We’ve been telling you for months about the secret Wisconsin John Doe, which operates like a grand jury and forces targets to remain silent. The targets are right-of-center groups disliked by Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, his special prosecutor Francis Schmitz, and the left-leaning state Government Accountability Board that regulates campaign finance.
Prosecutors were able to leak details with impunity until one of the targets, Eric O’Keefe, went public to us last November about the abuse of power. He also sought Washington attorney David Rivkin to file a federal civil-rights lawsuit to shut down the probe, and that’s what Judge Randa responded to [last] Tuesday.
Prosecutors had justified their dawn raids and harassment in the name of exposing illegal coordination between the Walker campaign and conservative groups. But Judge Randa ruled that the investigation was based on a mistaken reading of campaign-finance law that violated Mr. O’Keefe’s First Amendment’s rights. “The defendants are pursuing criminal charges through a secret John Doe investigation against the plaintiffs for exercising issue advocacy speech rights that on their face are not subject to the regulations or statutes the defendants seek to enforce,” the judge wrote.
Mr. O’Keefe, director of the Wisconsin Club for Growth, had merely advocated for issues he cares about, which is protected speech. “O’Keefe and the Club obviously agree with Governor Walker’s policies,” the judge added, “but coordinated ads in favor of those policies carry no risk of corruption because the Club’s interests are already aligned with Walker and other conservative politicians.”
It’s worth noting that Judge Randa is the second judge to find that the prosecutors are wrong on the law. In January Wisconsin Judge Gregory Peterson quashed subpoenas that he ruled were based on a misreading of campaign-finance law. Prosecutors are appealing Judge Peterson’s ruling, which we told you about on Jan. 13 though it is under John Doe seal.
It’s worth noting that prosecutors would still be continuing their harassment without legal or political accountability if not for Mr. O’Keefe’s willingness to go public—at considerable personal risk. Mr. Chisholm and his deputy, Bruce Landgraf, are noted Democrat partisans with a vindictive streak.
Whether or not they ever brought charges, they also knew their probe would effectively shut down center-right spending as Mr. Walker and Republicans try to win re-election this year. The Wisconsin Club for Growth spent some $8 million on advertising or grants to other groups in 2012 during the recall campaign against Mr. Walker. In 2013 it spent $1.7 million but has been silent since the John Doe subpoenas hit in October.
Similar damage has been done to conservative groups across the state. According to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce spent some $4 million during the recall campaign in 2012, but aside from a small local radio campaign about an asbestos trust issue this year, the group has been off the air.
Like the IRS targeting of conservative nonprofits, the Wisconsin John Doe shows how campaign-finance laws have become a liberal weapon to silence political opponents. Prosecutors claim to be fighting the risk of corruption from “dark money” in politics. But their enforcement attempts, done in secret and unrestrained by Constitutional guardrails, have become far more politically corrupting.
The prosecutors’ cynical manipulation of Wisconsin’s campaign laws is more than the mere appearance of corruption. Eric O’Keefe’s refusal to be intimidated by lawless law-enforcement officials produced Randa’sremarkably emphatic ruling against an especially egregious example of Democrats using government power to suppress conservatives’ political speech.
Wisconsin’s sordid episode began, appropriately, with a sound of tyranny — fists pounding on the doors of private citizens in pre-dawn raids. While sheriff’s deputies used floodlights to illuminate the citizens’ homes, armed raiders seized documents, computers, cell phones, and other devices.
As a director of Wisconsin Club for Growth, which advocates limited government, O’Keefe had participated in his state’s 2012 debate surrounding attempts by Democrats and state and national government-employee unions to recall Republican governor Scott Walker and some state senators. The recalls were intended as punishment for legislation limiting the unions’ collective-bargaining rights.
Walker prevailed. The Democratic prosecutors, however, seeking to cripple his 2014 reelection campaign and to damage him as a potential 2016 presidential aspirant, have resorted to a sinister Wisconsin process called a “John Doe investigation.” It has focused on the activities of O’Keefe and 28 other conservative individuals or organizations.
In such investigations, prosecutors can promiscuously issue subpoenas and conduct searches. The identities of the targets are kept secret, and the targets are silenced by gag orders, thereby preventing public discussion of the process. Thus John Doe investigations are effective government instruments of disruption and intimidation. …
O’Keefe and the other harassed conservatives had engaged only in issue advocacy, not express advocacy. That is, they had not urged the election of specific candidates. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that government regulation of political speech is permissible only to prevent quid pro quo corruption — money purchasing political favors — resulting from express advocacy. Hence there is no justification for the prosecutors’ punitive investigation of O’Keefe’s and others’ issue advocacy. As Randa said, this hasno “taint of quid pro quo corruption” and thus “is not subject to regulation.”
The Democratic prosecutors must know this. Again, they ignore it because their aim is mayhem, not law enforcement. Their activity is entirely about suffocating conservative activity. Because the prosecutors know Wisconsin law, they are patently disingenuous in arguing that O’Keefe and others illegally “coordinated” their advocacy with Walker and other candidates or campaigns. Randa said “the record seems to validate” O’Keefe’s and the others’ denial of coordination.
Besides, and even more important, Randa said his court “need not make that type of factual finding.” Wisconsin law forbids coordination between third-party groups, such as O’Keefe’s, and candidates only for express advocacy, and Randa said “it is undisputed” that O’Keefe and his group engaged only in issue advocacy. The prosecutors’ indifference to this is their corruption.
Liberals inveighing against “dark money” in politics mean money contributed anonymously to finance political advocacy. Donors’ anonymity thwarts liberals’ efforts to injure the livelihoods of identifiable conservatives by punishing them for their political participation and thereby deterring others from participating.
O’Keefe’s persecution illustrates the problem his lawyer David Rivkin calls “dark power” — government power wielded secretively for vengeance and intimidation. Judge Randa quoted the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens Uniteddecision: The First Amendment is “premised on mistrust of governmental power.” And he noted that “the danger always exists that the high purpose of campaign regulation and its enforcement may conceal self-interest.”
Randa is insufficiently mistrustful. Campaign regulation, although invariably swathed in lofty rhetoric, is designed to disguise regulation’s low purpose, which is to handicap political rivals. If Wisconsin is serious about eliminating political corruption, it can begin by eliminating corrupt prosecutors and processes, and the speech regulations that encourage both.
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The number one British single today in 1957 gave a name to a genre of music between country and rock (even though the song doesn’t sound like the genre):
The number one single today in 1967:
The number one British album today in 1967 promised “More of the Monkees”:
(Interesting aside: “More of the Monkees” was one of only four albums to reach the British number one all year. The other three were the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the soundtrack to “The Sound of Music,” and “The Monkees.”)
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The Heritage Foundation has something to say to you about something they’re starting on my birthday:
We know you’re busy. And we’re quite certain you care deeply about the future of our country.
We care, too. We care about your communities, your families, and how Washington’s decisions are going to impact you.
More and more people are grabbing bites of news from mobile devices on the go – and they need a place where they can find digestible, trusted news on the most important policy debate of the day.
That’s why the Heritage Foundation team is excited to announce that we’re creating a digital-first, multimedia news platform.
After months of planning, on June 3 we will be repositioning and relaunching The Foundry as The Daily Signal. We will provide policy and political news as well as conservative commentary and policy analysis – in a fresh, visually rich, readable format for your desktop, tablet or phone.
We are committed to news coverage that is accurate, fair and trustworthy. As we surveyed the media landscape, it became clear to us that the need for honest, thorough, responsible reporting has never been more critical. That’s a challenge in today’s fast-moving world. And it’s a challenge we’re willing to accept.
We are dedicated to developing a news outlet that cuts straight to the heart of key political and policy arguments – not spin reported as news.
The Daily Signal is supported by the resources and intellectual firepower of Heritage – a dedicated team of experienced journalists to cover the news and more than 100 policy experts who can quickly help put issues in perspective. We believe this combination of news, commentary and policy analysis will establish The Daily Signal as a trusted source on America’s most important issues. …
Why is The Heritage Foundation undertaking this mission? We believe that high-quality, credible news reporting on political and policy issues is of paramount importance to an informed and free society. This is a reflection of that Jeffersonian notion that the greatest defense of liberty is an informed citizenry.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek analyzes:
Now Heritage has a new plan to exert its influence and, its leaders hope, win converts to the cause. On June 3 it will begin publishing the Daily Signal, a new digital news site whose primary focus will be straight reporting. “We came to the realization that the mainstream media had really abdicated the responsibility to do the news and do it well,” says Geoffrey Lysaught, vice president of strategic communications at the Heritage Foundation, who will also serve as publisher. The site aims to rectify the conservative perception that mainstream news slants to the left. “We plan to do political and policy news,” says Lysaught, “not with a conservative bent, but just true, straight-down-the-middle journalism.”
How does this help Heritage? The Daily Signal will also publish an opinion section aimed at a younger audience that isn’t thumbing through the editorial pages of theWall Street Journal. Heritage is betting that these readers, attracted to the Daily Signal’s news, will find themselves persuaded by the conservative commentary and analysis that will draw on the think tank’s scholars and researchers.
The past few years have seen a profusion of conservative media outlets, with titles such as the Daily Caller and Breitbart News joining standbys like National Reviewand the Weekly Standard. Although their content varies from red meat to sober policy analysis, all are aimed at fellow conservatives. “You often sense there’s an element of preaching to the choir,” says Katrina Trinko, a well-regarded political reporter lured away from National Review to manage the Signal’s news team. “What appealed to me was that our goal is not just to reach that audience. Obviously, we hope conservatives will come. But we hope anyone interested in information and public debate will see us as a trusted news source.”
Another way the Daily Signal plans to distinguish itself from its brethren on the right is through the quality of the reading experience. Conservative sites tend to be plagued by annoying pop-under ads and poor design. Heritage hired Atlantic Media Strategies, the digital consultancy behind the elegant financial site Quartz, to design the Daily Signal for phones and tablets. “We thought Heritage could really own the knowledge niche of smart conservatives and designed it with their media habits in mind,” says Ory Rinat, AMS’s director of strategy and partnerships. The site will be organized around what Rinat calls “passion points,” trending topics that will inform the editorial focus as well as reflect the obsessive way in which the target audience of Capitol Hill staffers, policymakers, journalists, and activists ingest political news. Because the Daily Signal is fully underwritten by Heritage, ads won’t clutter the experience.
The Daily Signal’s clean design, mobile-first approach, and claim of journalistic dispassion suggest obvious similarities to Ezra Klein’s new site, Vox, and Nate Silver’s refurbished fivethirtyeight.com. “Like Vox and 538, we’re purposely branding ourselves not as a blog but a standalone site,” says Robert Bluey, who directs Heritage’s Center for Media and Public Policy and will be the Signal’s editor-in-chief. But Lysaught is leery of the comparison. “What Ezra is doing has got a wild liberal bias to it,” he says. “When we talk about the news, we’re just laying out the facts. We think that’s an important educational mission.”
As Lysaught’s derision implies, Heritage rejects the idea that the mainstream media impartially purveys straight news. Yet trying to build a respectable alternative is a recognition of the media’s power and addresses the main flaw of overtly partisan outlets such as Fox News: They’re easily ignored and ridiculed outside conservative circles.
Heritage wants to build a large audience of its own. But with an editorial staff of about a dozen, it can’t reach everyone or supplant the New York Times. Instead it will focus on stories its editors believe the media is neglecting or misconstruing and thereby try to shape mainstream coverage. “A lot of the traditional media, they’re lazy,” says Lysaught. “When they get up in the morning, they’re looking for what’s already working. I think they’ll look to us. We want to be the place where the news gets its news, drive that news narrative by identifying real stories, doing the homework, and let those guys run with the work we’ve already done.”
Heritage staff offer examples including the Internal Revenue Service audits of political groups; the recent Supreme Court case Sebelius vs. Hobby Lobby Stores, which touched on religious liberty issues; and the emerging debate about Common Core academic standards. Bluey notes that Heritage’s current blog, the Foundry, produced a steady stream of negative stories about Debo Adegbile, Obama’s nominee to head the U.S. Department of Justice’s civil rights division, that eventually led to front-page coverage in the Washington Post. Adegbile’s nomination later failed in the Senate. That story is the model for how Heritage, without taking an overtly conservative position, can nonetheless inject its worldview into the mainstream press.
There is, of course, a tension at the heart of any enterprise purporting to offer straight news while also advancing a partisan agenda. Heritage has denounced plans to legalize undocumented immigrants. Will the Daily Signal offer a credible brief for supporters if House Speaker John Boehner summons the nerve to move ahead with immigration reform? Or will its coverage slant toward DeMint’s position?
Given the Heritage Foundation’s conservative mission, achieving mainstream credibility will be a tall order, especially because Heritage has come to be associated with outspoken purists such as Cruz. Trinko promises a strict divide between news and opinion of the kind that’s standard in traditional newspapers. But it will take more than that to win over those who aren’t already in their camp.
Left out of the BusinessWeek story is how this will be funded. Heritage is a nonprofit, but all enterprises, whether or not they pay income taxes, need to bring in more money than they spend. That is why Right Wisconsin charges for access to its web site.
The issue of media bias is complicated. Media people like to claim they have no bias, and no one on the right believes them. (Meanwhile, lefties claim the media is biased in favor of conservatives, which is absurd.) Even those who claim no political bias nonetheless favor incumbent politicians, whatever unit or department of government they cover, or whatever beat they cover. So incumbents get much more ink than their challengers, and news stories rarely ask if some problem brought before government really requires government to fix it. The goal should not be to eliminate bias, because that’s impossible with human beings; the goal should be to be fair and complete, including points of view that contrast with conventional wisdom.
Even on the political right there are more traditional conservatives, neoconservatives, “paleoconservatives” (Pat Buchanan), the tea party movement (however that’s defined) and conservatarians, with web sites of varying quality for each. Free-market conservatives tend to favor immigration and a less hard-line stance on illegal immigration, but that’s probably not a mainstream conservative position now.
The Daily Signal is worth doing simply if it improves the quality of the product. Too many right wing sites have advertisers that fit into favorite conspiracy theories that are far off mainstream. Any newspaper publisher would tell you that an advertiser has the right to advertise whatever legal products or services the advertiser wishes. (Assuming the advertiser pays, that is.) A mainstream audience isn’t likely to be attracted to a publication that advertises converting all your money into gold, or buying canned goods to prepare for Obama’s future invasion of your town, or whatever jumps past the line between possible and paranoid. And let’s hope the Daily Signal looks normal, as opposed to what graphic designers come up with to look “edgy” because they think their audience values illegibility.
Meanwhile, the least surprising news of the day comes from All Access (caps are theirs) which reports that the Federal Communications Commission …
… rejected challenges by liberal activist SUE WILSON and MEDIA ACTION CENTER to the license renewals of JOURNAL Talk WTMJ-A/MILWAUKEE and CLEAR CHANNEL (CAPSTAR TX LLC) Talk WISN-A/MILWAUKEE, based on the stations’ refusal to grant them equal time to respond to comments made on the air in support of Republican WISCONSIN Governor SCOTT WALKER. The decision noted that the complaints went to programming choices rather than First Amendment claims, and that “the Commission cannot exercise any power of censorship over broadcast stations with respect to content-based programming decisions.” The challengers also claimed that the ZAPPLE doctrine requires equal time when a spokesperson for a candidate appeared on the air, but the Commission responded that the ZAPPLE doctrine was dependent on enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine, which is no longer in effect.
This is an old complaint that had virtually no chance of success in a country with the First Amendment in it. The Fairness Doctrine was abolished because instead of encouraging opposing views to be aired, the Fairness Doctrine prevented controversial views from being aired. And in a world with the Internet, even the concept behind the Fairness Doctrine is irrelevant anymore. Don’t like Charlie Sykes and Mark Belling? Start your own website.
The public interest is not served when the government acts as censor.
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Readers could be reminded of the phrase delivered by Paul Harvey when considering the kidnapping and threats of sale into slavery of 276 Nigerian girls: “It is not one world.”
Mark Steyn is reminded of something else:
It is hard not to have total contempt for a political culture that thinks the picture at right is a useful contribution to rescuing 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by jihadist savages in Nigeria. Yet some pajama boy at the White House evidently felt getting the First Lady to pose with this week’s Hashtag of Western Impotence would reflect well upon the Administration. The horrible thing is they may be right: Michelle showed she cared – on social media! – and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?
At right of the lead paragraph is this photo:
Steyn resumes:
Just as the last floppo hashtag, #WeStandWithUkraine, didn’t actually involve standing with Ukraine, so #BringBackOurGirls doesn’t require bringing back our girls. There are only a half-dozen special forces around the planet capable of doing that without getting most or all of the hostages killed: the British, the French, the Americans, Israelis, Germans, Aussies, maybe a couple of others. So, unless something of that nature is being lined up, those schoolgirls are headed into slavery, and the wretched pleading passivity of Mrs Obama’s hashtag is just a form of moral preening. …
There’s something slightly weird about taking a hashtag – which on the Internet at least has a functional purpose – and getting a big black felt marker and writing it on a piece of cardboard and holding it up, as if somehow the comforting props of social media can be extended beyond the computer and out into the real world. Maybe the talismanic hashtag never required a computer in the first place. Maybe way back during the Don Pacifico showdown all Lord Palmerston had to do was tell the Greeks #BringBackOurJew.
As [blogger Daniel] Payne notes, these days progressive “action” just requires “calling on government” to act. But it’s sobering to reflect that the urge to call on someone else to do something is now so reflexive and ingrained that even “the government” – or in this case the wife of “the government” – is now calling on someone else to do something.
Boko Haram, the girls’ kidnappers, don’t strike me as social media types. As I wrote last year:
The other day, members of Boko Haram, a group of (surprise!) Muslim “extremists,” broke into an agricultural college in Nigeria and killed some four dozen students. The dead were themselves mainly Muslim, but had made the fatal mistake of attending a non-Islamic school. “Boko Haram” means more or less “Learning is sinful,” this particular wing of the jihad reveling more than most in the moronic myopia of Islamic imperialism.
Does anyone seriously believe #BringBackOurGirls will actually compel Boko Haram into releasing the girls? Does anyone seriously believe the girls will be released through negotiation? Does anyone seriously believe the Nigerian kidnappers will realize the error of their ways through persistent moral suasion? To quote Steven Tyler, dream on.
George Will added his contempt on Fox News Sunday, as noted by The Daily Caller:
Host Chris Wallace asked Will whether the “Bring Back Our Girls” hashtag, which has been tweeted out over two million times — including by First Lady Michelle Obama — is effective.
“Do you think that this is significant and helpful and can make progress?” he asked. “Or do you think it’s really about helping the people that tweet the hashtag feel better about themselves?”
“Exactly that,” Will responded unreservedly. “It’s an exercise in self-esteem. I don’t know how adults stand there, facing a camera, and say, ‘Bring back our girls.’ Are these barbarians in the wilds of Nigeria supposed to check their Twitter accounts and say ‘Uh-oh, Michelle Obama is very cross with us, we better change our behavior.’”
“Power is the ability to achieve intended effects,” he explained. “And this is not intended to have any effect on the real world. It’s a little bit like environmentalism has become. The incandescent lightbulb becomes the enemy. It has NO effect whatever on the planet, but it makes people feel good about themselves.”
Recall during the 2008 presidential campaign that Barack Obama basically said that if people like us, instead of being afraid of us as was the case in the George W. Bush administration, things will be so much better around the world? Clearly Boko Haram isn’t afraid of the U.S. Nor is Vladimir Putin.
This is where libertarianism and pacifism tends to fall down. Not everyone on this planet has the moral values Americans have. Some people really do believe women, even girls, are nothing but cattle. It is one thing to be judicious in deciding where the U.S. — still the last best hope of democracy — will exert its military might. It is another to refuse to use it at all, believing that every problem that doesn’t occur within our borders is someone else’s concern.
Steyn is absolutely right when he points out that only a few countries can free the girls without getting many of them, or many of themselves, killed in the process. That doesn’t mean if an American Special Forces operation took place, some Americans, and some hostages, might not get killed. That is the price that gets paid when the military gets involved. Economic sanctions ultimately aren’t as effective as guns and bombs, or at least the credible threat of guns and bombs. To expect otherwise is to ignore the lessons of human history, like it or not.
Try this thought exercise: Instead of Nigeria, what if this happened in this country, and what if one of the kidnapped girls was your daughter? Would you Tweet #BringBackOurGirls? Assuming you don’t have enough wealth to hire The Expendables or someone on Mercenary.com, wouldn’t you expect this country to move heaven and earth to rescue your daughter?
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The number one single today in 1958:
Today in 1963, the producers of CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew told Bob Dylan he couldn’t perform his “Talking John Birch Society Blues” because it mocked the U.S. military.
So he didn’t. He walked out of rehearsals and didn’t appear on the show.
The number one album today in 1973 was Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy”:
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The number one British single today in 1958 was a cover of a song written in 1923:
The number one British album today in 1963 was the Beatles’ “Please Please Me,” which was number one for 30 weeks:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 