Today being the Ides (Ide?) of March, let’s begin with the Ides of March …
… an outstanding example of brass rock.
Today in 1955, Elvis Presley signed a management contract with Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, an illegal immigrant from the Netherlands who named himself Colonel Tom Parker.
The number two single that day:
The number one British album today in 1969 was Cream’s “Goodbye,” which was, duh, their last album:
Seeing as how state tournament basketball is on the mind this week …
One thing that will always generate arguments is how any state tournament is arranged. If you have one tournament for all regardless of size, it will be seen as unfair that schools have to compete with schools 10 to 20 times their enrollment. How teams get in will be argued ad infinitum. Should teams be lined up in some random order, or should they be arranged based on record?
The state basketball tournament was just one class for its first nearly 60 years (except just before World War II). The movie “Hoosiers” was about a tiny high school taking on a big urban high school in the Indiana state championship — something that usually didn’t happen because larger schools would knock out the small school on the way to state. That’s why Reedsville and Dodgeville are fondly remembered by long-time Wisconsin high school basketball fans, because they were Wisconsin’s “Hickory.”
If you look at the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association’s state tournament records, you will see some odd team records — that a school was 1-2 at state one particular year. That’s because the state tournament used to include winners’ and losers’ brackets. Every participant apparently was guaranteed two games in some years. It’s not clear when the loser’s bracket was eliminated and the tournament played as a single-elimination format from subregional to state, but that was addition by subtraction, because the won-or-done format makes the postseason so great and so heartbreaking.
The tournament went to two classes in 1973, three classes in 1975, and four divisions in 1991. When classes started to be added, the largest class — first Class A, then Division 1 — had eight teams, whereas the other classes or divisions had four teams each. This changed when Division 5 was added; now, all five divisions have four state participants, after a one-year experiment with Division I “super-sectionals” (a game played between the sectional final and the start of state) an idea that should have been dropped before it was introduced.
The Wisconsin State Journal held a debate between two sportswriters, the Racine Journal–Times’ Gery Woelful and the State Journal’s Rob Hernandez, on the merits of the five-division final four:
First, Woelful:
Once again, WIAA’s inept decision to reduce the number of Division 1 schools in the state tournament from eight to four is rearing its ugly head. Just like last year’s tournament, schools in the basketball-rich Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha area are getting short-changed.
Last year, there were five teams in the Horlick Sectional that were ranked in the Associated Press state poll, including three of the top seven. Only one advanced to state.
This year, it’s even worse. There were four teams among the AP’s top 10 Division 1 teams assigned to the West Allis Central Sectional and two others that received votes. Brookfield Central is No. 1; Milwaukee King is fourth; Case is ninth; Milwaukee Hamilton is 10th, and Park and Milwaukee Riverside each received one point in the voting by a statewide media panel.
It is an absolute farce that either Brookfield Central or Milwaukee King — again, the Nos. 1 and 4 teams in the AP state poll and the Nos. 1 and 2 teams in the WisSports.net state poll — won’t even reach the sectional final as they’ll play each other Thursday night in a sectional semifinal.
Like last year, there isn’t another sectional in the state that remotely boasts so many exceptional teams — and yet just one of them will go to Madison for the state tournament.
If the WIAA truly cared about giving the prep basketball fans throughout the state the best and most entertaining state tournament, it would never have reduced the number of D-1 schools in the state tournament in 2011 just to establish an unnecessary fifth division.
Hernandez counters:
The WIAA’s courageous decision to right a wrong and give what once were small, overmatched Division 1 schools a fighting chance to get to the state boys basketball tournament as newly minted Division 2 schools has restored some excitement to the WIAA’s most-followed tournament. Did you see some of the results of Saturday’s Division 2 regional championships?
Mount Horeb outlasted Monona Grove in two overtimes. Sauk Prairie won a double overtime battle with Reedsburg. La Crosse Central also needed a pair of extra sessions to pull away from Mississippi Valley Conference rival Holmen.
Of the 16 games played in Division 2 on Saturday night, five of them needed at least one overtime to determine a winner. Of the other 11, seven were decided by fewer than 10 points.
More importantly, five of the 16 Division 2 winners Saturday night (Rhinelander, Greendale, Milwaukee Tech, Milwaukee Pius XI and La Crosse Central) were Division 1 teams in 2010 — the final year of the four-division WIAA tournament series, when eight teams comprised the largest division. Two other regional champions (Sauk Prairie and Shawano) had been Division 1 teams at some point during the final years of the four-division format.
Of those seven, only two — Pius in 2005 and Rhinelander in 2001 — ever made trips to state as Division 1 schools after 1995. That tells me the WIAA’s control of enrollment ranges in place the last three years are working. …
In 2010, just three of the eight schools in the Division 1 field were from the fertile hardwood of southeastern Wisconsin. In 2014, it’s quite possible the same number of sectionals in Divisions 1 and 2 could produce six.
That’s SIX out of eight sectionals. Apparently, just not the right six.
And that doesn’t even take into account the star-studded Milwaukee-area teams in Divisions 3, 4 and 5. Like Brown Deer in Division 3. Or Whitefish Bay Dominican or Racine St. Catherine’s in Division 4. Or Burlington Catholic Central or Milwaukee Academy of Science in Division 5.
The same problems that exist in the five-division format — loaded sectionals like the one featuring Brookfield Central and Milwaukee King — existed in the four division format. And back then the WIAA had as many as four sectionals to divide the talent and still struggled to avoid state tourney-worthy battles.
But that’s a problem across all WIAA tournaments, not just basketball, and it does need fixing. I applaud the WIAA and its efforts to preserve geographical representation in its state tournament fields, but not when the qualifiers aren’t representative of a the best teams in a given geographical area.
I’d probably feel differently on this issue if the five-division format were truly depriving us of “best and most entertaining state tournament” but that isn’t remotely the case.
In the three years of five-division play, we’ve been treated to exceptional players from each of the lower divisions.
Guys like Merrill’s Paul Jesperson (Division 2 in 2011), Onalaska’s Matt Thomas (Division 2 in 2012 and ’13), La Crosse Aquinas’ Bronson Koenig (Division 3 in 2011 and ’13) and Marshall’s Cam Ward (Division 3 in 2012). Or Whitefish Bay Dominican’s dynamic duo of Diamond Stone and Duane Wilson (Division 4 in 2012 and ’13). And, of course, Sheboygan Lutheran’s Sam Dekker (Division 5 in 2012), one of the most electrifying players ever to make it to state. …
Of the 15 games played at the Kohl Center a year ago, nine were decided by single-digit margins. Of the six that weren’t, three were Division 1 games.
At the end of the day, the only ones who who could possibly be griping about the 4-year-old format of the WIAA tournament are the coaches who made the most of the four-division format to get into the Kohl Center via the backdoor.
When I started paying attention to high school basketball, Class A consisted of schools of 800 or more in enrollment, with Class B 400 to 800, and Class C smaller than 400. That changed to where Class A was the 128 biggest schools, with B and C splitting the rest. That modification meant that every Class A school would have the same number of games to get to state — regional semifinals and finals, followed by sectional semifinals and finals — because Class A was supposed to represent about half of statewide student enrollment (which is not the same thing as half of the number of high schools). Some Class C schools needed six games — two subregionals, two regionals and two sectionals — jammed into 11 days to go to state.
With any postseason format, of course, there will be schools that benefit and schools that don’t. Twice during the 1980s I saw Monona Grove — the smallest team in what then was the Badger Conference — get routinely hammered in the conference season, only to face schools its own size in the Class B postseason and go farther than one would have expected.
When the four-division format began in 1991, divisions 1 and 2 had roughly the same number of schools each, and divisions 3 and 4 had roughly the same (but more than 1 or 2) number of schools each. That resulted in the oddity that some Division 1 schools could get to state having played just three pre-state games. What fixed that was the inclusion, starting in 2000, of private schools from the former Wisconsin Independent Schools Athletic Association. Letting in the private schools meant that the divisions were increased in size from the bottom, because most private schools are considerably smaller than their public-school neighbors. (More about private schools later.) Interestingly given the trend of decreasing high-school-age population, especially in rural areas, the number of Wisconsin high schools has actually increased. The trend of small school districts merging really hasn’t gone beyond the wave in the ’50s and ’60s. (I can think of three in the past 25 years — two are Blair-Taylor and River Ridge, which was the former West Grant and Bloomington. Ondassagon closed, though they went out with a bang by sending their last girls basketball team to state.) Some religious schools have opened, other religious schools now have sports programs, and the growth of Milwaukee charter schools means nearly every year features at least one team you’ve never heard of in the brackets.
The teams that generally don’t fare well are those at the bottom of their division. Prentice’s girls basketball team won the 1992 Division 4 title, only to be bumped up to Division 3 one year later, to lose to Cuba City. While I was covering the winning Cubans’ festivities, Mrs. Presteblog was listening to Prentice coach Joe Foytek say that “Cuba City doesn’t belong in Division 3, and neither do we.” In contrast, when Ripon won two state football titles in three years, the Tigers’ players, coaches and fans were relieved that they were one of the bigger Division 4 schools instead of one of the smallest Division 3 schools.
In the next to last year before the four-division basketball tournament, I announced a regional final between the top two boys’ basketball teams in Class C, number one ranked Bloomington and number two ranked Iowa–Grant. I–G was about twice the enrollment of Bloomington, and I–G won. (The regional final was in I–G’s gym, which undoubtedly also helped.) Going to four divisions didn’t help Prentice, because enrollments change — not only your schools’ head count, but everyone else’s.
The four-division format was intended to address the complaints of the smallest schools by giving them their own division. At the same time, though, the smallest Division 1 schools complained that they had almost no chance to go to state because they too were playing schools twice their own size in the playoffs. That was dealt with to some extent by going to five divisions, though as you’ve already read, some still don’t think the right teams (read: Milwaukee teams) are getting to state.
The truth is that the more deserving teams, based on their regular season performances, are probably getting to state now than in the past. Seeding teams by regional or half-sectional, with higher seeds hosting through the regional finals, means that tournament upsets are less likely, though certainly not impossible, particularly when conference rivals meet for the third time in the postseason. Going to neutral-site sectional games is also more fair. (Madison La Follette may not have gotten to state had its epic sectional semifinal against crosstown rival Madison West been played at West, or somewhere else.)
Woelful’s comments about not enough Milwaukee teams going to state — despite the presence at state of Whitefish Bay Dominican in Division 4, Brown Deer in Division 3, Wisconsin Lutheran and Greendale in Division 2, and Germantown, Milwaukee King and Mukwonago in Division 1 — bring up a motivation for going from four divisions to five. One reason the WIAA went to five divisions was to stop the trend of decreasing state attendance. You’ll never get a WIAA official to admit this, but Milwaukee teams do not draw well at state. Madison-area schools do draw well at state, but Lodi in Division 3 is the only school remotely close to Madison at state. So if you read about a drop in state attendance, that’s why.
Here’s another potential reason, something I can’t believe the WIAA didn’t consider. The old format featured 16 games — seven (four quarterfinals, two semifinals and one championship game) in Division 1 and three each (two semifinals and one championship) in the other three divisions, in eight sessions — Thursday and Friday morning, afternoon and evening, and Saturday afternoon and evening. Going to five divisions eliminates one game, but more importantly one session (Thursday morning), which means, since tickets are sold for two games per session, one fewer opportunity to sell tickets, concessions and WIAA swag. (The divisions 5 through 3 championships are Saturday during the day, and the division 2 and 1 title games are Saturday night.)
It seems to me that if the WIAA is concerned about revenue, the WIAA needs to re-expand Division 1 to eight teams. That most likely would mean adding two Wednesday sessions, expanding the tournament to four days, and adding four teams’ fans (and their wallets) to the Madison mix. Another possibility would be going, somehow, to three sessions on Wednesday and four sessions on Friday, which probably would mean starting at 8 a.m. and ending around midnight, similar to the night NCAA basketball tournament games held in the Eastern time zone.
The other possibility that comes to mind is a week-long state tournament similar to Iowa, whose state tournament has four eight-team divisions. State started Monday and ends Saturday, with third-place and championship games today and Saturday. (However, only semifinal and final games are live on TV, on a network that could be described as statewide in name only. I’m not sure you could get the WIAA TV network to agree to carry 24 games and dump their prime-time schedules for two entire weeks.)
Meanwhile, the Wisconsin State Journal’s Art Kabelkowsky reports:
A petition to add a multiplier to private school enrollments for the purpose of division classification has been signed on by at least 10 percent of the WIAA membership, setting the stage for a vote on the issue at the April 16 annual meeting — the one time and place where constitutional amendments can be approved.
The Board of Control approved the petition Tuesday to present the proposed constitutional amendment to its membership at the annual meeting.
The petition calls for the actual enrollment number of every WIAA-member private, religious or independent school to be multiplied by 1.65. The resulting number would be considered that school’s official WIAA enrollment for placement into enrollment-based divisions for postseason play.
The enrollment multiplier would shift several private schools into higher divisions (and some public schools into lower divisions) across the entire spectrum of sports — from football to basketball to track and field and more.
For instance, it appears if the 1.65 enrollment multiplier had been applied to this year’s five-division basketball postseason:
• Three Division 2 schools (Milwaukee Pius XI, Green Bay Notre Dame and Wisconsin Lutheran) would move up to Division 1.
• Five schools (Madison Edgewood, Appleton Fox Valley Lutheran, Milwaukee St. Thomas More, Watertown Luther Prep and all-girls Milwaukee St. Joan Antida) would move up from Division 3 to Division 2.
• Fifteen private schools would jump from Division 4 to Division 3, and a similar number would move up from Division 5 to Division 4.
Changes would appear to be even more prevalent in the seven-division football playoff series.
Public- and private-school representatives have been debating the possibility of introducing an enrollment multiplier since the WIAA first began to discuss admitting the members of the former Wisconsin Independent Schools Athletic Association.
WISAA schools first were absorbed into the WIAA membership in the 2000-2001 school year. No enrollment multiplier has been applied — although schools have had the opportunity to “opt up” into a higher enrollment division for particular sports.
Notice that state has seven Milwaukee schools? Well, state has five private schools — Green Bay’s NEW Lutheran and Sheboygan Area Lutheran in Division 5, Whitefish Bay Dominican in Division 4, and Wisconsin Lutheran in Division 2 — and could have three private-school state champions. Once upon a time, about 10 percent of the state’s high schools were private, so having one-fourth of the state field be from private schools offends some observers’ sense of proportionality.
The issue, of course, has to do with the small private schools from large areas — not just NEW Lutheran or Dominican, but Burlington Catholic Central (which draws from a much larger area than Burlington), and schools still in the state girls field heading into Saturday’s sectional finals, including Green Bay Notre Dame and Milwaukee Pius XI in Division 2; Kettle Moraine Lutheran in Division 3; Eau Claire Regis, Onalaska Luther, Fond du Lac Springs (which beat Oshkosh Lourdes Thursday) and Dominican (which beat Racine Prairie Thursday) in Division 4; and Wisconsin Rapids Assumption (which beat Wausau Newman Thursday) and Milwaukee Heritage Christian in Division 5. Each of those schools is from a community with Division 1 or Division 2 schools (Fond du Lac High School and Wisconsin Rapids Lincoln are two of the biggest high schools in the state), and thus a huge potential enrollment base, playing against schools from areas of the state in keeping with their small enrollments. On the other hand, the number of private schools that do well in athletics is considerably smaller than the number of private schools, and trying to handicap the former will result in crushing at least some of the latter when schools that really don’t belong together end up playing each other in an early-round game.
If you notice a similarity between the how-many-schools-at-state argument, the how-big-should-the-divisions-be argument and the public-vs.-private-at-state argument, you are an observant reader. It should bother even the most enthusiastic high school basketball fan that the question of who belongs at state is a question whose answer depends on whom you ask and that person’s definition of the word “fair.” Life is not fair in even a general sense, and there is no way to make a high school sports postseason “fair” because of the obvious mutually exclusive goals.
Obsessing about who should go to state also loses sight of the fact that, as an educational experience (which high school sports is supposed to be), the journey is more important than the destination. Getting to state requires winning four or five consecutive games, with no slip-ups and no bad nights. At the risk of offending my 1979-83 self, who was not happy the two years La Follette missed state and the year La Follette lost in the state semifinal, the objective should be to get to state, regardless of how you decide who goes to state. To win state is a great goal, but if you think your season is a failure because you didn’t win state, you’re probably going to experience a lot of disappointment in your life.
The texting shorthand term “smh” (“shakes my head”) didn’t exist in 1955 because texting didn’t exist in 1955.
But surely “smh” was invented for things like this: Today in 1955, CBS talent scout Arthur Godfrey made a signing decision between Elvis Presley and Pat Boone.
Godfrey chose Boone.
I was going to write about a political topic this morning, after my 6 a.m. (Central Daylight Time) post, as is typical for this blog on days that don’t start with F or S.
That 6 a.m. post — about the 99th anniversary of the WIAA state basketball tournament and the Wisconsin State Journal’s excellent section thereupon — got me thinking about state specifically and school more generally. (Which may be ironic since the schools at state today and Friday probably won’t have school today and Friday.)
The state basketball tournament, as I’ve written here before, was a big deal for our school, including its juniors. I didn’t play on the team (no athletic team that was worth anything would have me, for good reason), but I played in The Band (which was central to my getting into the UW Marching Band), which accompanied the team to state. That was also a good semester to be the high school newspaper’s sports editor.
Those were my two biggest high school involvements. La Follette went to state twice while I was there, but the band that went to state my freshman year didn’t have freshmen in it. I went to a high school of 2,000 students (which now is about 20 percent smaller in enrollment), and I had about 500 people in my class, which is as big as the local high school — all four of its classes. Things like band and the newspaper not only make the high school smaller; they also bring you in contact with those older and younger than yourself. (Girlfriends? I resemble that remark!) Certainly no workplace has employees all of the same age.
You may roll your eyes, sigh and scoff at a suggestion, to the point of storming out and slamming the door, that high school and its assorted hormone- or feeling-driven dramas represent so-called “real life” at all. But unless you somehow find a line of work that includes neither coworkers, bosses nor customers, and you avoid marriage, church, or contact with anyone else, you have to learn how to deal with and work with other people, whether they’re like you or especially if they’re not like you.
None of our kids are in high school yet. They’ve been involved, though — basketball, swimming and baseball, plus school musical groups and school plays and musicals, and a community musical, “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Yesterday morning I went to a concert of fifth-grade musicians, a recruitment tool aimed at future fifth-graders. The principal noted the importance of getting involved in school beyond schoolwork.
That may seem ironic coming from a principal, given that the ramifications of failure to do schoolwork often include being left out of those involvements, particularly athletics. Those outside-the-three-Rs involvements, though, arguably more closely parallel the post-education world than most classrooms (at least those without project-based work) do. He didn’t say this, but I will: Participants in those activities remember more of those activities than anything they do in the classroom.
(Of course, music is an academic subject. As the Children’s Music Workshop puts it, “In music, a mistake is a mistake; the instrument is in tune or not, the notes are well played or not, the entrance is made or not.” In addition to the academic benefits, music builds self-esteem not by dubious self-psychology, but by accomplishment and public performance.)
What do (or should) you learn on a basketball team, or in the band, or in the school play, or in some other activity that gets a page or two in the yearbook? You learn hard work as its own virtue, not just to get a grade. (In most lines of work, your reward for your work is a regularly arriving paycheck; sometimes it’s getting more responsibility or more money, but not always. In some lines of work, the only feedback you get is negative feedback.)
You learn about being something bigger than yourself, and being one part of that thing bigger than yourself. You learn that others may get bigger roles than you, deservedly (in your opinion) or not — a starting spot on the team, a starring role, first chair in your musical section, or a title. You eventually may get that bigger role, or not, and you learn how to deal with disappointment, or the increased responsibility of a bigger part.
Leadership is really not something you learn in a classroom before college. (Some people never learn leadership anywhere, which is OK for non-leaders, but not for those who are supposed to lead.) At some point members of a team, athletic or not, discover that a team is only as strong as its weakest members. A publication may have great writers and editors, but without good people to sell advertising and subscriptions, few people will get to read their work. Conversely, good sales people won’t give their clients much reason to advertise if the editorial content is poor. Everybody has to contribute, including those whose contributions aren’t seen or noticed by the public.
One valuable lesson of a sports season or another activity that produces more than one something (for instance, a school newspaper) is that you’re only as good as the last thing you did. Even if you did well in one game, that doesn’t mean you’ll do well in the next game. Conversely, you also learn that what’s important is not what you just did, it’s what you do next.
Few people who watched the 1982 WIAA Class A boys basketball championship probably realized at the time that Madison La Follette’s Rick Olson had, by his standards, a subpar game for about 29 minutes, shooting just 6 of 21 from the field. Olson got to 24 points by hitting his last four shots, followed by the biggest assist of his life, to teammate Scott Hogan for the game-winning basket with 30 seconds left. To use a pro example, no one remembers, in the 1981 NFC championship game between San Francisco and Dallas, the 49ers’ six turnovers, including three Joe Montana interceptions. They remember Montana’s last pass, to Dwight Clark.
Education isn’t limited to a classroom.
If you have access to the Wisconsin State Journal, I strongly suggest you get one today.
To commemorate the WIAA state boys basketball tournament (which, conveniently, starts this afternoon at the Kohl Center in Madison), today’s State Journal includes “Hometown History,” a chronicle of the 99* previous state tournaments.
(What does the asterisk mean? I put it there because, well, how many state tournaments there have been depends on how you define “state.” The first high school state-ish tournament in the U.S. was held at Lawrence College (now University) in Appleton from 1905 to 1918. The history of what now is the WIAA state tournament dates back to 1916, when the state Normal Schools — then schools to train teachers, now known as UW–______ — held a tournament organized by the normal schools’ athletic directors. The normal schools and Lawrence tournaments were held until 1918. What is now the WIAA took over in 1920, but the WIAA counts the normal schools tournament as the first state tournament.)
Stories include one observer’s list of top moments, Madison’s state champions, fabled teams from the late Milwaukee Lincoln and Dodgeville (Wisconsin’s answer to “Hoosiers”), and The Shot.
There’s also a piece talking about the impact of having the entire state tournament on free TV, by the announcer of many of those state games, Jay Wilson. (Who now is not announcing said state games because he works for a competing station.) Wisconsin apparently is the only state that broadcasts every game of the state boys and girls tournaments on free TV. (And let’s hope that continues despite the logistical headaches of the WIAA’s wrongheaded move to move girls’ state to Green Bay.) And, by the way, you can watch every game today through Saturday, on the air, online and — new! — on a mobile device.
The section includes a story about a certain Madison high school’s state title, written by someone who was there.
The number one single on both sides of the Atlantic today in 1960:
Today in 1965, Eric Clapton quit the Yardbirds because he wanted to continue playing the blues, while the other members wanted to sell records, as in …
The number one single today in 1965:
Today in 1967, the Beatles hired Sounds, Inc. for horn work:
Sen. Baldwin and U.S. Reps. Pocan, Kind and Moore: Your president is a job-killer.
The MacIver Institute reports:
New research from the Heritage Foundation shows that proposed regulations, set to take hold January 2015, would hit Wisconsin’s manufacturing jobs the hardest.
If the new regulations go into effect, Wisconsin would stand to lose 11,702 manufacturing jobs. The state’s congressional districts would lose 1,463 jobs on average by 2023, the largest average in the nation. The sixth congressional district would lose an estimated 2,000 jobs.
The EPA regulations will limit the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for future power plants and will later create new regulations for existing plants.
Newly constructed power plants run by coal will have a limit of 1,100 pounds of CO2 per megawatt hour, a significant cut to the average plant that emits nearly 1,800 CO2 per megawatt hour.
New standards for existing power plants are expected to be released by June of this year.
Manufacturing will be hit particularly hard for several reasons.
- As coal production is reduced, they must find a way to make up for lost supply.
- Fuel switching to natural gas to make up for lost coal will increase the gas prices 28 percent by 2030.
- These regulations will force new plants to install carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology to turn coal into gas, creating a huge cost burden on the industry. …
Here is a breakdown of the total jobs that would be lost in each state:
Wisconsin has eight Congressional districts, three of them represented by Democrats. Broken down by Congressional district, Wisconsin goes from 10th to …
… number one. That’s more than 4,000 jobs that will be lost in Congressional districts represented by Democrats. Milwaukee has, for now, a lot of manufacturing. Even Madison and La Crosse still have manufacturers.
Care to defend that, Democrats?
I got criticized on Madison radio more than one year ago for daring to suggest that Madison and Milwaukee should be jettisoned from Wisconsin.
Think that’s a crazy idea? How about splitting California into six states?
Jeff Jacoby reviews from Massachusetts:
“I love Germany so much that I am glad there are two of them,” the French novelist and Nobel laureate Francois Mauriac commented acerbically during the Cold War. Investor Tim Draper loves California so much that he thinks there should be six of them.
Draper is one of Silicon Valley’s superstar venture capitalists, an early funder of numerous high-tech enterprises, including, most famously, Skype and Hotmail. He is also the prime mover behind the “Six Californias” initiative, a proposal to partition the nation’s most populous state into six smaller states. From north to south, those new states would be: Jefferson, North California, Central California, Silicon Valley (including San Francisco), West California (including Los Angeles), and South California.
With 38 million people spread over such a vast and varied territory, Draper argues, a monolithic California has grown ungovernable. The state’s population is more than six times as large as the average of the other 49 states, and too many Californians feel estranged from a state government in Sacramento that doesn’t understand them or reflect their interests. He is far from the first to say so. Plans to subdivide California have been put forward since the earliest days of statehood in 1850. In an 1859 plebiscite, voters approved by a landslide a proposal to split off Southern California into a separate state. (The measure died in Congress, which was in turmoil over the looming Civil War.)
Can Draper’s six-state plan do better? It moved one step closer to plausibility last month, when California’s secretary of state gave backers the go-ahead to begin collecting the necessary petition signatures to put “Six Californias” on the ballot. If 808,000 signatures are submitted by July 14, the measure could go to voters in November.
Clearly, a six-way Golden State split is the longest of long shots, and critics aplenty have already started blasting Draper’s proposal. But even many of the critics agree that California has become an unwieldy, unmanageable mess.
“No other state contains within it such contradictory interests, cultures, economic and political geography,” writes Keith Naughton at PublicCEO, a website that covers state and local California issues. “It has become impossible to even remotely reconcile the array of opposing forces. The only way to get anything done is to shove laws and regulations down a lot of unwilling throats.” In The Los Angeles Times, business columnist Michael Hiltzik claims the economic fallout from the Six Californias plan would be “horrific” — he’s especially disturbed that the proposed new state of Central California “would instantly become the poorest state in the nation,” while Silicon Valley, where Draper lives, would be one of the wealthiest. Yet Hiltzik concedes that “Californians have lost contact with their government as more budgeting and administration [have] been upstreamed to Sacramento” and as state policies have “taken decision-making for everything from pothole repair to art and music classes out of the hands of the locals.”
It’s been a long time since an existing state was partitioned into smaller states. It last happened in 1863, when 50 northwestern counties of Virginia were renamed West Virginia and admitted as the 35th state. More than 40 years earlier, Maine, which had been part of Massachusetts since the 1650s, voted overwhelmingly for a divorce, and eventually entered the union as a new state in 1820. In both cases, separation was driven, then embraced, by communities and people who had grown alienated from a state government dominated by interests they didn’t share. West Virginia’s mountain people had chafed under Richmond’s rule, and sharply opposed the formation of the Confederacy. Mainers had long complained that the Legislature in Boston — where Maine was underrepresented — was not only too far away, but too willing to sacrifice their interests to those of Massachusetts. …
Conventional wisdom says Draper’s scheme hasn’t got a chance. But venture capitalists have a knack for seeing openings and opportunities that most people miss. Would “Six Californias” be an improvement over the status quo? That’s definitely a debate worth having.
I’d ask the question of whether two Wisconsins would be an improvement over the status quo — and might get some “Yes!” answers north of Wisconsin 29 or U.S. 10 — but the dividing line isn’t so easy to draw in Wisconsin. The rest of Wisconsin rightly views Madison and Milwaukee with suspicion — the former because of its chronically stupid ideas, the latter because most Wisconsinites don’t agree with bad schools and rampant crime and the refusal to do anything about either — but the only things that connect Madison and Milwaukee are Interstate 94, each city’s exaggerated opinion of itself, and their voters’ robotically voting for Democrats.
The number one single today in 1966:
The Beatles had an interesting day today in 1969. Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman …
… while George Harrison and wife Patti Boyd were arrested on charges of possessing 120 marijuana joints.
That variation on the writings of Saul of Tarsus is Charles Krauthammer‘s Washington Post column headline:
Vladimir Putin is a lucky man. And he’s got three more years of luck to come.
He takes Crimea, and President Obama says it’s not in Russia’s interest, not even strategically clever. Indeed, it’s a sign of weakness.
Really? Crimea belonged to Moscow for 200 years. Russia annexed it 20 years before Jefferson acquired Louisiana. Lost it in the humiliation of the 1990s. Putin got it back in about three days without firing a shot.
Now Russia looms over the rest of eastern and southern Ukraine. Putin can take that anytime he wants — if he wants. He has already destabilized the nationalist government in Kiev. Ukraine is now truncated and on the life support of U.S. and European money (much of which — cash for gas — will end up in Putin’s treasury anyway).
Obama says Putin is on the wrong side of history, and Secretary of State John Kerry says Putin’s is “really 19th-century behavior in the 21st century.”
This must mean that seeking national power, territory, dominion — the driving impulse of nations since Thucydides — is obsolete. As if a calendar change caused a revolution in human nature that transformed the international arena from a Hobbesian struggle for power into a gentleman’s club where violations of territorial integrity just don’t happen.
“That is not 21st-century, G-8, major-nation behavior,” says Kerry. Makes invasion sound like a breach of etiquette — like using the wrong fork at a Beacon Hill dinner party.
How to figure out Obama’s foreign policy? In his first U.N. speech, he says: “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.” On what planet? Followed by the assertion that “alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War” — like NATO? — “make no sense in an interconnected world.”
Putin’s more cynical advisers might have thought such adolescent universalism to be a ruse. But Obama coupled these amazing words with even more amazing actions.
(1) Upon coming into office, he initiated the famous “reset” to undo the “drift” in relations that had occurred during the George W. Bush years. But that drift was largely due to the freezing of relations Bush imposed after Russia’s invasion of Georgia. Obama undid that pushback and wiped the slate clean — demanding nothing in return.
(2) Canceled missile-defense agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic. Without even consulting them. A huge concession to Putin’s threats — while again asking nothing in return. And sending a message that, while Eastern Europe may think it achieved post-Cold War independence, in reality it remains in play, subject to Russian influence and interests.
(3) In 2012, Obama assured Dmitry Medvedev that he would be even more flexible with Putin on missile defense as soon as he got past the election.
(4) The Syria debacle. Obama painted himself into a corner on chemical weapons — threatening to bomb and then backing down — and allowed Putin to rescue him with a promise to get rid of Syria’s stockpiles. Obama hailed this as a great win-win, when both knew — or did Obama really not know? — that he had just conferred priceless legitimacy on Bashar al-Assad and made Russia the major regional arbiter for the first time in 40 years.
(5) Obama keeps cutting defense spending. His latest budget will reduce it to 3 percent of GDP by 2016 and cut the army to pre-Pearl Harbor size — just as Russia is rebuilding, as Iran is going nuclear and as China announces yet another 12-plus percent increase in military spending.
Puzzling. There is no U.S. financial emergency, no budgetary collapse. Obama declares an end to austerity — for every government department except the military.
Can Putin be faulted for believing that if he bites off Crimea and threatens Kiev, Obama’s response will be minimal and his ability to lead the Europeans even less so?
Would Putin have lunged for Ukraine if he didn’t have such a clueless adversary? No one can say for sure. But it certainly made Putin’s decision easier.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 