Today in 1963, Paul McCartney was fined 17 pounds for speeding. I’d suggest that that may have been the inspiration for his Wings song “Hell on Wheels,” except that the correct title is actually “Helen Wheels,” supposedly a song about his Land Rover:
Imagine having tickets to this concert at the Anaheim Civic Center today in 1967:
Today in 1984, John Lennon released “I’m Stepping Out.” The fact that Lennon stepped out of planet Earth at the hands of assassin Mark David Chapman 3½ years before this song was released was immaterial.
Remember Robert Reich, the most leftist of Bill Clinton’s Cabinet appointees?
For those who forgot Reich’s leftist twaddle, James Taranto brings it to us to smash it flat:
Robert Reich, the leftist former labor secretary, has a very confused–or perhaps deliberately confusing–post up at Salon in which he denounces American corporations that move their headquarters overseas for tax reasons. The news peg is Chicago-based Walgreen Co.’s planned merger with Alliance Boots GmbH, a multinational pharmacy chain.
The new company would be headquartered in Switzerland, as Alliance is now.
“Walgreen’s morph into a Swiss corporation will cost you and me and every other American taxpayer about $4 billion over five years,” Reich complains, citing a report by Americans for Tax Fairness, a nonprofit corporation that advocates for higher taxes on corporations and high-income individuals.
“We’ve been hearing for years from CEOs that American corporations are suffering under a larger tax burden than their foreign competitors,” Reich writes:
This is mostly rubbish.
It’s true that the official corporate tax rate of 39.1 percent, including state and local taxes, is the highest among members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
But the effective rate–what corporations actually pay after all deductions, tax credits, and other maneuvers–is far lower.
Last year, the Government Accountability Office, examined corporate tax returns in detail and found that in 2010, profitable corporations headquartered in the United States paid an effective federal tax rate of 13 percent on their worldwide income, 17 percent including state and local taxes. Some pay no taxes at all.
Which raises an obvious question: If it’s “mostly rubbish” that the tax burden is higher on U.S.-based companies than on those headquartered elsewhere, how is it that Walgreen stands to save all those billions by moving to Switzerland? Why are companies moving at all? Surely their accountants know the difference between the statutory and effective tax rates.
There’s an obvious problem with Reich’s argument, which is that he compares the average effective U.S. corporate tax rates only with the statutory rate, not with other countries’ effective rates. That’s a limitation of the GAO study, but the summary notes that U.S. effective tax rates “are high relative to other countries.” The summary also notes–but Reich doesn’t–that the U.S.’s average effective rate is considerably higher, 22.7%, when unprofitable companies are included in the calculation. Reich fails to mention as well that Walgreen’s effective rate is considerably higher than average–31% between 2008 and 2012, according to that Americans for Tax Fairness report.
There’s a less obvious problem, too. What Reich either doesn’t know or chooses not to tell his readers is that the U.S. corporate tax burden is unusually heavy not just because the rate is the highest in the developed world, but also because the U.S. subjects companies to double taxation. MIT’s Michelle Hanlon explained it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last month: “The U.S. has a world-wide tax system under which profits earned abroad face U.S. taxation when brought back to America. The other G-7 countries, however, all have some form of a territorial tax system that imposes little or no tax on repatriated earnings.”
Even worse than Reich’s deceptive analysis of the problem is his idea about how to solve it. The obvious answer would be to reform America’s corporate tax system to make it competitive with other countries’ and do away with the perverse incentives to move to another country. To say Reich rejects this idea out of hand would be giving him too much credit. He doesn’t even mention it.
Reich wants revenge, not rational policy. To his very slight credit, he rejects one awful idea for retaliation: “By treaty, the U.S. government can’t (and shouldn’t) discriminate against foreign corporations offering as good if not better deals than American companies offer.” Thus a Medicare and Medicaid boycott of Walgreen’s pharmacies is off the table.
But here’s what he does want to do:
Even if there’s no way to stop U.S. corporations from shedding their U.S. identities and becoming foreign corporations, there’s no reason they should retain the privileges of U.S. citizenship. . . .
Walgreen should no longer have any say about how the U.S. government does anything. . . .
The Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision may have opened the floodgates to American corporate money in U.S. politics, but not to foreign corporate money in U.S. politics.
The Court didn’t turn foreign corporations into American citizens, entitled to seek to influence U.S. law and regulations.
On one point, Reich is partially correct: The Citizens United decision does not necessarily extend the same protections to foreign-based companies as to U.S.-based ones. The decision, by Justice Anthony Kennedy, left open the possibility “that the Government has a compelling interest in limiting foreign influence over our political process”–which is to say that it did not decide the question either way.
Reich does not make the case that such an interest is compelling. To our mind his argument fails even the considerably less stringent “rational basis” test. As Justice Kennedy observed in Romer v. Evans (1996), a law that is “inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class that it affects . . . lacks a rational relationship to legitimate state interests.” Reich’s conclusion is an expression of pure nativist animus: “[Walgreen] may still be the Main Street druggist, but if it’s no longer American it shouldn’t be considered a citizen on Main Street.”
Further, while it’s true that one sometimes refers colloquially to a corporation as being a “good citizen” or a “bad” one, as a legal matter the concept of American citizenship doesn’t apply. Corporations don’t vote or carry passports, in America or anywhere else. A corporation is a legal person, with legal rights and obligations, but only an individual human being–a “natural person,” in the parlance of the law–can be a citizen (or, for that matter, an alien).
As Citizens United critics typically do, Reich misstates the court’s holding in the case. It did not “open the floodgates” for “corporate money.” Corporations, regardless of where they are headquartered, are still prohibited from donating money to candidates for federal office. (So are noncitizens, except for legal resident aliens.)
What Citizens United affirmed was that corporations have the right to free expression under the First Amendment. Liberals claim to disagree with that principle, but in fact it is uncontroversial in other contexts. We’ve never heard anyone suggest that New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), the landmark defamation decision, should have gone the other way because the defendant was a corporation (or, for that matter, because the expression in question was a political advertisement).
Reich is wrong to imply that free expression is among “the privileges of U.S. citizenship.” It is, instead, a right that belongs to all persons regardless of citizenship. (Perhaps Reich agrees with Justice Clarence Thomas, who has argued for a revival of the 14th Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause–but we very much doubt it.)
If you sue a foreign national, or a foreign publication, for libel in a U.S. court, the defendant will have the full protection of the First Amendment. American government censorship of a foreigner’s book–say, Frenchman Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” which Reich himself has praised–would violate the Constitution as surely as if the author were Mark Twain.
As for foreigners influencing American politics, where has Reich been for the past few elections? If the marketplace of ideas ever observed national boundaries, it no longer does. Commentary from all over the world is widely available on the Internet, and especially in 2004 and 2008, members of Reich’s party frequently cited foreign opinion as a reason to support their presidential nominee.
Many voters rejected the argument, especially in 2004, but we don’t recall anyone suggesting that the U.S. government should prevent the dissemination of viewpoints from outside America’s borders. Even authoritarian regimes find such suppression a challenge; in a free country it would be as futile as it is un-American.
The other thing, of course, is that accepting the first part of Reich’s argument requires you to believe that every cent of a business’ profit belongs to the government, to take away as much of it — or maybe all of it — as the government pleases. To believe that, you also have to believe that the government has a similar right to your money, including, potentially, all of it. Reich probably does believe that. No one with brains and morals believes that.
We start with the first recorded instance of Buddy Holly in Wisconsin: Today in 1958, Holly nearly drowned while swimming across a lake near Rhinelander while on tour.
Holly’s swimming problems may have occurred because he didn’t realize how cold Wisconsin (specifically our bodies of water) can get. He got another lesson in that seven months later.
Today in 1960, Elvis Presley released a song based on the Italian “O Sole Mio”:
Today in 1970, Anne Murray released her first song during an inappropriate time of year:
The number one single today in 1974:
Today in 1999, the New Radicals (which were really just one, uh, Radical) split up after one album, from which came one single:
On July 12, 1914, George Herman “Babe” Ruth played his first Major League baseball game.
Sports Illustrated points out 99 (because this was written last year) facts about Ruth, including …
9. The [International League’s Baltimore] Orioles sold Ruth to the Boston Red Sox on July 9, 1914 along with two other players as part of a fire sale by team owner Jack Dunn, who found himself in financial straits when the presence of a Baltimore franchise in the new Federal League obliterated the Orioles’ attendance. …
14. Ruth was a sidearming power pitcher who made 127 appearances on the mound before appearing at any other position in the field.
15. In Ken Burns’ documentary Baseball, noted journalist and author Dan Okrent said Ruth was “the best lefthanded pitcher of the 1910s, without question, in the American League.” Indeed, among AL lefties with at least 1,000 IP in the decade, Ruth had the lowest ERA (2.19) and highest winning percentage (.659) while ranking fourth in wins, tied for fourth in shutouts and ninth in strikeouts. …
18. In six seasons with Ruth, the Red Sox won three World Series titles. In 107 seasons without him they have won four [actually five, including 2013]. …
22. On June 23, 1917 at Fenway Park, Ruth was ejected by home plate umpire Brick Owens for arguing balls and strikes after walking the first batter of a game against the Senators. Ernie Shore replaced him. The baserunner, Senators second baseman Ray Morgan, was caught stealing, and Shore then retired all 26 men he faced in a 4-0 Red Sox win. Officially, Ruth is credited for participating in a combined no-hitter, but Shore is not credited with pitching a perfect game.
23. Ruth’s first major league home run came against the Yankees at the Polo Grounds on May 6, 1915. Exactly three years later, in the same ballpark, Ruth hit a home run in his first start at a position (1B) other than pitcher.
24. Soon after that first appearance as a position player, Ruth began to refuse to pitch, leading to tension with Red Sox manager Ed Barrow. In early July, Ruth attempted to leave the team and join a shipyard team in Chester, Pa., to avoid a fine from Barrow. Ruth quickly caved to the threat of legal action by Red Sox owner Harry Frazee and rejoined the Red Sox without playing for the shipyard team. …
26. Ruth is the only player since the turn of the 20th century to lead his league in Triple Crown categories as both a hitter and a pitcher and he did it in the span of three years.
27. Ruth held out in spring training in 1919, ultimately landing a three-year contract worth $10,000. He threatened a hold out again after the 1919 season, saying he was worth twice the salary he had agreed to before that season. Frazee, still in debt from his purchase of the Red Sox three years earlier, responded by selling Ruth to the Yankees on Jan. 3, 1920, for $100,000 and a $300,000 loan secured by a mortgage on Fenway Park. …
30. Ruth was one of 17 players Frazee traded or sold to the Yankees between December 1918 and July 1923, when he finally sold the team. On New York’s first World Series title team of 1923, half the regular players and six of the seven pitchers to throw more than a dozen innings were acquired from Frazee. …
43. The Yankees had never been to the World Series before acquiring Ruth from Boston, but they went to seven World Series in his 15 years with the team, winning four of them. Their first pennant came in 1921. Their first championship came in 1923 in the third of three consecutive World Series confrontations with John McGraw’s New York Giants. …
48. After losing a ball in the sun in the Polo Grounds’ leftfield on July 16, 1922, Ruth refused to ever play the sun field again, and he didn’t. His position thereafter was determined by the geographic orientation of the ballpark in which he was playing. For the rest of his career, Ruth played exclusively in rightfield at the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium, as well as in Washington and Cleveland [where right field was in the southwest corner of the diamond; home plate was in the northwest or west corner of the diamond, similar to both Milwaukee County Stadium and Miller Park] but exclusively in leftfield at the other AL cities (Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and St. Louis) [where home plate was in the southwest corner of the diamond]. …
81. Ruth retired as the career record-holder in home runs, RBIs, total bases, walks, strikeouts, on-base percentage and slugging percentage as well as the single-season record-holder in home runs, total bases, walks and slugging, and he was briefly the single-season record-holder in RBIs during his career. …
88. Ruth’s career OPS of 1.164 remains the record, as does his career OPS+ of 206. The latter stat adjusts OPS for a player’s home ballpark and compares it to his league with 100 being league average. Ruth’s career OPS+ is thus more than twice as good as an average mark. By way of comparison, the last player to have a single-season OPS or OPS+ higher than Ruth’s career was Barry Bonds in 2004.
Today is the anniversary of the Rolling Stones’ first public performance, at the Marquee Club in London in 1962. They were known then as the “Rollin’ Stones,” and they had not recorded a song yet.
If you’re going to record just one song that gets on the charts, ending at number one would be preferable, whether in 1969, or in the year 2525:
Today in 1979 was one of the most bizarre moments in baseball history and/or radio station history:
As one might conclude from reading my Presty the DJ posts, my musical tastes can be described as more than anything else what radio calls “classic rock.” (Independent of my unfulfilled career interest in being a rock radio DJ.)
I am one of those music listeners who might tend to confound classic rock radio station programmers. With few exceptions — of course, Chicago — I listen to songs, not bands. My new smartphone therefore has about 400 songs from probably 100 different acts, a few of which aren’t rock acts (for instance, Johnny Cash, the UW Marching Band and the London Symphony Orchestra).
So what is “classic rock”? It is, probably first, a radio station format. Nearly every radio station market has at least one — WKLH in Milwaukee, WAPL in the Fox Cities (which calls itself “mainstream rock”; their playlist tends to get more new at night), WIBA-FM in Madison, WTCX in Fond du Lac, WGLX in Wisconsin Rapids, and Eagle 102 in Dubuque are several I have heard on a semi-regular basis.
As a genre of music … that’s a more interesting question. It seems to start around the Beatles, but not include the Beatles’ more pop early works. It includes all of the Rolling Stones, because the Stones have been harder rocking at least since “Satisfaction,” though good luck finding “Route 66” on the radio. The “classic” part of classic rock seems to refer to a similar timeframe as “classic hits” (WOLX in Madison, Super Hits 106 in Dubuque, The Bug in Wautoma, the Great 98 in Mayville) or the relatively new “classic country” genre.
When I was in college I did a magazine journalism class story about Madison radio station ratings, which had Z104, then and now the pop music station, as number one. For that story I interviewed WIBA-FM’s program director, who said he was uninterested in any radio listener younger than 18. That was in the days when WIBA-FM’s playlist went from the Beatles and Stones to harder rock of those days.
The funny thing about WIBA-FM is that every time I hear it now, it appears to play almost exactly the same music as it did when I listened in high school and college. (With an exception I’ll get to later.) If they go so recently as Pearl Jam and Nirvana, I haven’t heard them on 101.5.
(WIBA-FM is owned by Clear Channel, and Eagle 102 is owned by Cumulus, and those two are the two biggest radio station owners in the U.S. So if their version of classic rock is more homogenized than others, that’s probably why. Both carry Bob and Tom — who are unlistenable for anyone with kids in the car, and really are not appropriate for a music format anyway — instead of an actual local morning show, and WIBA-FM carries Sixx Sense with Nikki Sixx, formerly of Mötley Crüe — who replaced Nights with Alice Cooper — instead of an actual local nighttime show. The evils of satellite radio and voice-tracking is a subject for a different blog, however.)
No one starts a band with the intention of becoming classic rock. It’s just sort of something that happens. Figuring out which genre a band fits into — is it techno or house? — has always been a tricky part of the music business. Identifying what’s classic rock is particularly challenging because it’s a constantly moving target, with very different kinds of music lumped together under the same banner. How the people who choose what music you hear — whether on the radio or an Internet streaming service — go about solving this problem reveals a deep connection between data and music.
To see what the current state of classic rock in the United States looks like, I monitored 25 classic rock radio stations operating in 30 of the country’s largest metropolitan areas for a week in June. The result, after some substantial data cleaning, was a list of 2,230 unique songs by 475 unique artists, with a total record of 37,665 coded song plays across the stations.
I found that classic rock is more than just music from a certain era, and that it changes depending on where you live. What plays in New York — a disproportionate amount of Billy Joel, for example — won’t necessarily fly in San Antonio, which prefers Mötley Crüe. Classic rock is heavily influenced by region, and in ways that are unexpected. For example, Los Angeles is playing Pearl Jam, a band most popular in the 1990s, five times more frequently than the rest of the country. Boston is playing the ’70s-era Allman Brothers six times more frequently.
To put today’s classic rock on a timeline, I pulled the listed release years for songs in the set from the music database SongFacts.com. While I wasn’t able to get complete coverage, I was able to get an accurate release year for 74 percent of the 2,230 songs and 89 percent of the 37,665 song plays. The earliest songs in our set date back to the early 1960s; the vast majority of those are Beatles songs, with a few exceptions from The Kinks and one from Booker T. and the MGs. A large number of songs appeared from the mid-’60s through the early ’70s. Classic rock peaked — by song plays — in 1973. In fairness, that was a huge year — with the release of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”(an album of classic rock staples), Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy” and Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” — but the trend steadily held for the rest of the ’70s and through the mid-’80s. …
But clearly it’s not just when a song was released that makes it classic rock. Popularity matters, as does as a band’s longevity, its sound and a bunch of other factors. To find out why some artists are considered classic rock, I spoke to Eric Wellman, the classic rock brand manager for Clear Channel, which owns nine of the 25 radio stations in our data set. He’s also the programming director at New York’s classic rock station, WAXQ. Wellman said release years have nothing to do with what makes a song “classic rock”; the ability of the genre to grow based on consumers’ tastes is one of the things that’s given it such longevity.
The piece includes these fascinating graphics:
Some of these are, frankly, inexplicable. The Allman Brothers are part of the Southern rock genre, and certainly Boston meets no one’s definition of “Southern.” You’d think either Billy “New York State of Mind” Joel or Bruce Springsteen, from the Jersey swamps, would be number one in New York, but instead Springsteen is number one in Chicago. You’d think Yes’ popularity in Seattle and Pearl Jam’s popularity in L.A. would be reversed. Particularly amusing are the apparently enduring popularity of REO Speedwagon in Tampa, Paul McCartney and Wings (which stopped recording together around 1980) in Houston, and Kiss in Charlotte.
According to classic rock radio, here is your top 15 most played classic rock songs …
… and artists of all time:
Of the first list, I have only these four on my smartphone:
Of the second list, I will eventually have all of them, but not necessarily the songs people would expect from those groups:
What about Chicago? Glad you asked! WIBA-FM used to play a few early Chicago songs, such as “Make Me Smile” (only part 1 of “Ballet for a Girl from Buchannon”) and “25 or 6 to 4.” Since I live on the border of being able to hear them, I don’t know if they still do that. I’m guessing not if their playlist has slid from ’60s through ’80s to ’70s through ’90s rock. Chicago perhaps has been more pop than rock since probably the “Hot Streets” album, but “25 or 6 to 4,” “Questions 67 and 68,” “I’m a Man,” “Free” and “Dialogue” should count as rock.
Then again, one thing that’s always struck me as strange about the definition of classic rock is its emphasis on bands over their music. Classic rock stations play the Eagles’ “Lyin’ Eyes” and “Southern Skies,” even though they really are country songs. (How do you tell? The contraction of “cannot” is pronounced “cain’t,” which is odd for a band based in California. Then again, you’d never guess from their sound that Creedence Clearwater Revival came from California, not a Southern state.) I like Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire,” though I’m not sure that sounds like a classic rock song either; nor does “My Hometown.” Dire Straits gets a lot of classic rock airplay, but do “Sultans of Swing,” “Walk of Life” or “So Far Away” sound like what else is played on classic rock radio?
Classic rock is what used to be called “album rock,” the album (as opposed to single) versions of rock (as opposed to pop) songs. The album version of Chicago’s “Beginnings,” from the band’s first album, “Chicago Transit Authority,” is seven minutes long.
The single version, which was played on AM Top 40 radio stations, is about three minutes long. (And edited so badly as to be almost unrecognizable.)
Radio has gotten more segmented over the years, to the point where there are classic rock stations and there are current rock stations. (Any station that plays current music, of course, is at the mercy of today’s music. Listeners who think today’s music is of poor quality — Britney Spears? One Direction? — won’t listen.) Segmentation was an apparent response to a decrease in listeners (and corresponding drop in ad revenue), and yet listenership to music on the radio continues to drop. It’s not clear to me that this approach is working. Giving listeners less — less variety in music, fewer live and local voices — is not more.
To pick up on what I wrote 1,500 or so words ago, my tastes are more to songs than bands. You might be able to tell from the above-listed songs that I am not a fan of sappy ballads (which takes out a lot of Chicago’s work since “If You Leave Now,” the band’s first number one single), and not really power ballads, and not very many slow songs.
A proper rock band should have at least one guitar, a bass guitar, keyboards and drums. Plus, of course, a trumpet, trombone and saxophone, but you knew that.
The number one single today in 1960 was the first, but not only, example of the caveman music genre:
Today in 1962, Joe Meek wrote “Telstar,” the first song about a satellite:
Today in 1964, the Beatles appeared live on (British) ABC-TV’s “Thank Your Lucky Stars.” The appearance was supposed to be taped, but a strike by studio technicians made that impossible. The band had just appeared at the northern England premiere of their movie “A Hard Day’s Night,” requiring them to get to London via plane and boat.
The Morning Martini spent time (so you don’t have to) reading Imagine Living in a Socialist USA, which brought to his mind Mary Burke:
Two fallacious themes emerge:
First, the American economy is always substituted to mean capitalist. They often defend the efforts made in the Soviet Union and China in the twentieth century and claim that things went wrong because true socialism wasn’t achieved. I’d argue true or pure capitalism isn’t the name of the game in American business, either, on either side of the regulatory coin. For one, the buffet of rules and barriers to entry certainly hinder an unfettered market. On another note, a government overseeing a capitalist economy certainly would not have thrown billions of dollars at failing car companies — nor would it have produced something like the Affordable Care Act, whose influence on the market has been obvious.
Second, the writers are all of the belief that a socialist revolution would bring about a fundamental change in human nature. In place of capital production and the exchange of goods and services for money, individuals would be part of a market of services through which they would trade for whatever they need to be just happy enough — not too much, and not too little. Surpluses produced in factories and plants would be shared in a way decided by committee. In a horrifying and farcical fantasy, one author posits what a Thanksgiving meal would be like in this workers paradise, and it’s a doozey: everyone on a commune calls each other “cousin,” health clinics are called “canadas,” cigars are called “fidels,” but smoking in the house is illegal, and everyone graciously moves outside to smoke tobacco. What isn’t seen, obviously, is the state police kicking down the door and issuing a citation (or arrest warrant?) when someone does light up indoors.
The underlying belief is that the state is just as responsible for the individual as both the individual and his community are. It’s the same thinking coming out of the Burke for Wisconsin campaign, and it’s something to watch carefully.
Certainly Ms. Burke would not want to see her millions disappear for the community’s benefit, doled out by committee or by the government. I’ve applauded before her admirable philanthropy, and at the same time noted how phony her politics seem in light of her history of giving. Yesterday Wisconsin Election Watch reported that she’s still pulling income from Trek, though she doesn’t maintain a day-to-day role there. Getting paid for not doing any work certainly reeks of Democrats’ tired rich-getting-richer platitude. Will she have to apologize for her wealth as Hillary Clinton has since her disastrous book tour launched? And is there a double standard for women of wealth in politics?
It would seem that, as a philanthropist and business woman, Mary Burke makes for the perfect Democrat gubernatorial candidate who can placate the liberal base on social issues and swing fiscal conservatives who, as the loudest liberal voices and media declare, couldn’t give two hoots about gay marriage or abortion anymore. This is theater and a lie. Indeed, this may have been the case had she not been so closely held to typical Democrat standards. The doublespeak and inconsistency has been well-documented here, on issues like minimum wage,charitable giving, the role of government, and unions.
Placation and compromise are not in the Democrat handbook. Their game is one of lies and coercion. If Ms. Burke is little more than a DPW pawn, trotted out because her record looks good on paper and stands the best chance of toppling boogeyman Governor Walker, she will always be subject to the greater mission of Democrats and leftist acolytes, her record be damned. That mission is the elimination of dissent and the conscious establishment of the state as god in personal, cultural, and economic matters.
To paraphrase Leona Lansing, the fictional media executive in “The Newsroom,” Mary Burke is a hairdo.
Her campaign must lose because in the last three years Scott Walker has proven that conservative reforms work — it’s literally brought unionists to tears. But Burke for Wisconsin must fail because Wisconsin can’t afford economic and social regression or a return to the kind of governance that forces one to shoulder the burden of others. There are roles for charity and kindness and giving, but they’re not ones to be assumed by the state, and nor are they roles that must be fulfilled by law. This state and this country are full of truly good people with concern for others who have no interest in the fake high-mindedness and audacious moral superiority relentlessly preached by each and every liberal. It is this belief that makes me conservative.
I want the poor to succeed and for small businesses to thrive. I want freedom to worship and I want freedom of speech, even when it makes others uncomfortable. Comfort comes from healthy human relationships and personal fulfillment which, as hard as the government tries, are qualities it will never — ever! — be able to fill.
I want Mary Burke to lose and Scott Walker to win because I believe in God, the future of this state, and the power of the individual.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 