Today in 1963, Ed Sullivan was at Heathrow Airport in London just as the Beatles deplaned to a crowd of screaming fans and a mob of journalists and photographers.
Intrigued, Sullivan decided to investigate getting the Beatles onto his show.
Today in 1964, Ray Charles was arrested at Logan Airport in Boston and charged with heroin. Charles was sentenced to one year probation after he kicked the horse.
The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute excerpts the new book of Gov. Scott Walker, Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge, including what fun it was to be governor during Recallarama:
On Feb. 15, I went to La Crosse for a visit to a manufacturing company. Outside the facility, we were greeted by hundreds of angry protesters, but inside we got an enthusiastic reception from the blue-collar workers. As I recall, they were paying about 25 percent of their health insurance premiums and had to match their employer contributions to their pensions, so they didn’t have a whole lot of sympathy for the folks outside complaining about having to pay 5.6 percent for their pensions and 12.6 percent for their health care. It was a great event.
As we prepared to leave, the state troopers saw that the protesters had physically blocked the entrance we had used to come onto the property. So they turned the squad car around and headed toward the other exit. We watched in disbelief as the throng of people rushed toward the second exit to block our path. As we tried to pull out, they surrounded the car and began beating on the windows and rocking the vehicle. Just as we extricated ourselves from their grip, a truck pulled up and blocked our path, playing a game of chicken with the troopers. They turned the lights and sirens on and warned him to get out of way. Eventually he backed up, and we sped off.
It was a lesson in how much our circumstance had changed in a matter of a few days. We were dealing with people who were so blinded by their anger that they were not in the least bit afraid to storm and shake a police car. We had never seen anything like it in Wisconsin before.
And that was only the beginning. The protests following us around the state grew bigger and louder — and the protesters got more aggressive with each passing day.
After the La Crosse incident, State Patrol Capt. Dave Erwin took me aside and explained that we needed to increase security — not just for me but also for Tonette and the kids. Dave briefed me about the stream of intelligence he was receiving from the state Division of Criminal Investigation. Our whole family was being watched, followed and tracked, he said.
Dave was not prone to exaggeration. He is a former marine who had headed former Gov. Jim Doyle’s security detail. He is the consummate professional.
“Governor, I’ve been at this awhile, and when the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, you have to be concerned,” Dave said. “They know where you go to church; they’ve been to your church. They’re following your children and tracking your children. They know where your children go to school, what time they have class, what time they get out of class. They know when they had football practice. They know where your wife works, they know that she was at the grocery store at this time, they know that she went to visit her father at his residence.”
We talked about some of the additional measures he would take to keep the family safe. Dave increased the size of our detail and assigned troopers to keep an eye on the kids at school. (Both of my sons were attending a public high school, and the Wauwatosa police officers really looked out for Matt and Alex too.) He also explained that we could no longer do simple tasks like going to the curb to pick up the mail, which would now have to be screened.
We soon began to get a steady stream of death threats. Most of these Dave and his team intercepted and kept from Tonette and me. They were often graphic (one threatened to “gut her like a deer”), but for the most part they amounted to little more than angry venting.
But one afternoon, as I prepared to go out to the conference room for my daily press briefing, Dave came into my office and shut the door. “Sir, I don’t show you most of these, but I thought you ought to see this one.” He handed me a letter addressed to Tonette that had been picked up by a police officer at the executive residence in Maple Bluff. It read:
HI TONETTE,
Has Wisconsin ever had a governor assassinated? Scotts heading that way. Or maybe one of your sons getting killed would hurt him more. I want him to feel the pain. I already follow them when they went to school in Wauwatosa, so it won’t be too hard to find them in Mad. Town. Big change from that house by [BLANK] Ave. to what you got now. Just let him know that it’s not right to [EXPLETIVE] over all those people. Or maybe I could find one of the Tarantinos [Tonette’s parents] back here.
Lots of choices for me.
The letter had a Green Bay postmark, but there were no fingerprints or other indications of who had sent it. Dave explained that it raised red flags because, unlike most of the hate mail and death threats we received, it was very specific. The sender talked about following our kids to school, the street where we lived, and threatened not just me but my children and my in-laws. …
One of the reasons for Dave’s increased vigilance was the fact that the protests in Madison came just a month after the shooting of U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords in Tucson, Arizona. In the wake of that tragedy, I was amazed to see how quickly so many on the left jumped at the opportunity to blame conservative political rhetoric for the shooting.New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote, “We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was. … [V]iolent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate. And it’s long past time for the GOP’s leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers.”Well, just a few weeks later, when protesters screamed at elected officials, threatened them and created a “climate of hate” in Madison, their actions were met with silence from these same quarters. Protesters followed us around the state, assaulted police vehicles, harassed Republican legislators and vandalized their homes. One day, someone scattered dozens of .22-caliber bullets across the Capitol grounds.
At the Capitol, they carried signs comparing me to Adolf Hitler, Hosni Mubarak and Osama bin Laden. Those never seemed to make the evening news, so we took pictures to document them. One read “Death to tyrants.” Another had a picture of me in crosshairs with the words, “Don’t retreat, reload.” Another declared, “The only good Republican is a dead Republican.” Another said “Walker = Hitler” and “Repubs = Nazi Party.”
It wasn’t just the protesters who engaged in such shameful rhetoric. Democratic Sen. Lena Taylor also compared me to Hitler, declaring, “The history of Hitler, in 1933, he abolished unions, and that’s what our governor’s doing today.” Her colleague Sen. Spencer Coggs called our plan “legalized slavery.” Jesse Jackson came to Madison and compared me to the late segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace (who was paralyzed in an assassination attempt), declaring we had “the same position” and that I was practicing the politics of the “old South.”
Later, when the Capitol was cleared of protesters, Time magazine reported, “The Wisconsin State Capitol had taken on an eerie quiet by late Friday. … The chalk outlines around fake dead bodies etched with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s name remained in dismembered parts, not yet completely washed away by hoses.”
Krugman and his cohorts never got around to taking “a stand against the hate-mongers” in Madison.
In his moving speech after the Giffords shooting, President Obama declared, “at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized, at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do, it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that — that heals, not in a way that wounds.”
Those words apparently fell on deaf ears in Madison.
Ultimately, the unions took their stand in Wisconsin because of the unprecedented nature of our reforms. We did not simply go after the money — the lavish benefits the unions had extorted from taxpayers over the years. We dismantled the entire system of corruption and cronyism by which the unions perpetuated their political power and dictated spending decisions to state and local government. We took the reins of power from the union bosses and put the taxpayers back in charge.
Normally, they would have succeeded in thwarting our efforts. But two things suggested to me that we had a unique opportunity to do something that might be impossible at any other time: We had the votes, and we had no choice. We were in a fiscal hole with no way out. I didn’t lead our party into this fight when we had a budget surplus. It wasn’t like I was Evel Knievel saying, “I wonder if I can jump this canyon” just for the sake of jumping over a canyon. I did it because we had a $3.6 billion deficit and no practical way to close it.
I wrote during the depths of Recallarama that politics was getting so nasty and spiteful that an assassination of a politician or a campaign worker was likely. Nothing has really changed to change my opinion. It’s not the words being used; read around the Civil War and you’ll find politicians and their supporters have been called far worse things than epithets common today. But in those days government wasn’t nearly as pervasive and powerful as today. Democrats and liberals want Walker out of office, and some might add that phrase from the 1960s, “by any means necessary.” When human turds like the aforementioned Green Bay-postmark-writer feel free to threaten the lives of family members of elected officials, it’s just a matter of when, not if.
The first view about the controversial Common Core Standards comes from state superintendent of public instruction Tony Evers:
Wisconsin is in the midst of legislative hearings on the Common Core State Standards. During the first hearing on Oct. 3 in Madison, I shared an anecdote from a teacher in a small northern Wisconsin school district. She wrote, “Thank you so much for your strong stand on the Common Core. I see how our math classes have changed for the better — really making students think! Keep up the good work.”
This e-mail sums up why I adopted the Common Core State Standards for Wisconsin in June of 2010. The Common Core State Standards are a vast improvement over our prior standards and advanced the work we began on standards revision in 2007. Simply, they move Wisconsin forward. The Common Core State Standards are a set of expectations in English language arts and mathematics for what students should know and be able to do in every grade. Already, these standards are challenging Wisconsin public school students to learn at higher levels in the critical areas of reading, writing, and mathematics. The Common Core State Standards are rigorous, clear, and require a deeper grasp of key subject-area concepts; they are benchmarked to the highest U.S. state and international standards to ensure students are ready to succeed in college and careers; and they are aligned to the expectations of higher education and employers.
Contrary to what some may say, adoption of the Common Core State Standards did not usher in more testing or data collection. We haven’t been forced by or received any more money from the federal government to adopt the Common Core State Standards. And, Wisconsin’s local control is safe. A district’s curriculum, text book adoption, and instructional choices all stay at the local level, just as they’ve always been. Students who need additional support, or children with gifts and special talents, will receive instruction that meets their unique needs, just like before. …
The Common Core State Standards are a pivotal part of the work of hundreds of educators, policy makers, and parents to transform education in Wisconsin, strengthen our public schools, and ensure that every child graduates college and career ready. Without the foundation of strong academic standards, all of our other efforts around improved assessment, better accountability and educator effectiveness, and stronger early literacy will fall apart.
This opinion piece demonstrates first that Evers is not an educator; he is a politician. (And his PR machine is paid for by us taxpayers, by the way.) It also demonstrates why the biggest failure of Wisconsin conservatives is their failure to elect a superintendent of public instruction who is not beholden to the education establishment.
I find it interesting that Evers can quote a teacher (not surprising, since DPI is a bought-and-paid-for subsidiary of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, which unfortunately remains the statewide teacher union), but can’t quote a parent about how great Common Core is. And as for his claim about local control, well, ask a school board member about that.
Anyway, Evers’ view is one view. Here’s another, from Freedom Outpost:
The state of Wisconsin has held three out of four public hearings on Common Core Standards. State Superintendent Tony Evers must be feeling the heat because he offered legislators a veiled threat that any rejection of Common Core Standards may be taken to the Supreme Court. This threat outrages citizens across the state who are trying to protect their right to exercise local control of schools.
Kim Simac, Wisconsin State Director for Concerned Women for America, Chairperson for Northwoods Patriots, and one of the major community organizers in northern Wisconsin, stated, “Superintendent Evers’ threat to jump directly to the Wisconsin Supreme Court should any legislation or decision be made to opt out of CCSS exposes his lack of confidence in the standards themselves. Those supporters of CCSS should have an arsenal of evidence that proves excellence and superiority in the product. Obviously they do not.”
Wisconsinites opposed to Common Core will not allow Superintendent Evers to blame conservative Legislators for the tax dollars to be wasted on any legal action intended to undermine Wisconsin’s statute regarding local control of schools or intended to render irrelevant the concerns expressed by citizens. Sondra Maanum, Chair of the Barron County Republican Party, explained that “our legislators were elected to defend and protect the state constitution and our state laws. If Tony Evers thinks he is going to use our tax dollars to fight us, he better be well prepared for the consequences.” …
“Evers’ threat is predicated on the platform of using the federal government, through the Supreme Court, to force upon a state and its people, a federal mandate in education. This is as totalitarian a prospect as any yet suggested,” stated Mr. Scholl. Scholl, Maanum, and Simac represent many Wisconsinites who believe that the veiled threat made by Superintendent Evers is a blatant abuse of federal power by a state official. Scholl explained that using federal power to force a curriculum that is formulated and shaped precisely to any forced standard leading to dictated outcomes is an intolerable challenge to individual liberty and the sovereignty of states.
It is essential that those who oppose Common Core be willing to provide solutions, to promote funding for those solutions, and to support legislators who are willing to represent what is best for the children of Wisconsin. The solutions most often recommended by citizens include immediate implementation of the standards used in Massachusetts before they adopted Common Core. Massachusetts students had excelled in math, science, English, and reading for years before they adopted Common Core Standards.
“Grassroots will be certain to work hard for legislators who recognize the perilous path Common Core Standards present” promised Kim Simac. “I know I will be spending my efforts engaging hard-working activists who will pound the doors and give 100% for legislators who will stand up to support Wisconsin state rights.”
As President of Advocates for Academic Freedom, I have traveled the state discussing Common Core, our focus has been upon solutions and funding for those solutions. Without exception, my audiences have expressed a willingness to support spending some of our state surplus to purchase math text books that are not aligned with Common Core, sets of grammar books for each English classroom, and reading materials that focus upon decoding skills. These audiences are insulted and angered by the thought of using their tax dollars and the legal system to circumvent local control of schools and to silence the public.
According to Sondra Maanum, “Wisconsinites hope Governor Walker and the legislature will put in place some oversight to prevent the DPI from circumventing local control of schools in the future.”
Wisconsinites are defending their right to control local schools. They have witnessed the challenging fight to prevent federal overreach when a powerful state department of education intervenes. Citizens do not want precedence established that would undermine state statutes which guarantee local control of schools.
Superintendent Evers is abusing his power and ignoring state statutes.
It is also interesting (and mentioned by neither Evers nor Freedom Outpost) that state students have always done well in academic comparisons — for instance, pre-college testing — to other states well before I, Evers, enacted Common Core in 2010.
Truth be told, I’m not sure what to think about Common Core, beyond the fact that reading and math are not the only important academic subjects. This state’s schools are overrated (though certainly not underfunded), so improving student performance for an increasingly competitive world is important. Is Common Core the best way to do that?
The number one album and single today in 1971:
A low, low moment in rock history: Today in 1978, NBC-TV broadcast “Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park”:
(The entire movie, believe it or don’t, can be viewed on YouTube.)
You’ll have to forgive Right Wisconsin for chortling over Democrats’ eating their young:
A day after RightWisconsin reported some of liberal radio host John ‘Sly’ Sylvester’s critical comments comments about Democratic candidate for governor Mary Burke, Sly took to the airwaves to report that Democratic Chairman Mike Tate was unhappy with him.
“I got a text today from the Chairman of the Democratic Party. And it went kind of like this: “Dude, what are you doing here? You’re not helping us win here brother.”
Tate was reacting to the RightWisconsin piece that quoted Sly’s Friday comments on Burke at length. RightWisconsin’s story read in part:
“I’m not getting on this train,” said Sly on Friday. “I couldn’t live with myself.”
“This woman and her brother are responsible for putting people out of work and shipping the jobs to China,” said Sly. “When she went on the snowboard sabbatical do you think she thought about those unemployed people?”
Sly, a stalwart progressive and protectionist who has championed the labor uprising in recent years taps into the serious hypocrisy of the Democratic Party’s choice of Burke and why grassroots progressives are not thrilled.
“She’s Mitt Romney in a red dress,” explains the Monroe radio host. “Look at how much money was spent to paint Mitt Romney as an out-sourcer. The hypocrisy here. I don’t know if I could live with myself.”
Expressing his belief that Mike Tate and the Democrats chose Burke for her personal fortune, Sly called Burke “a wallet.” And as for her promise to not make any promises, particularly on a pledge to repeal Act 10, Sly called Burke a “coward.”
Sly didn’t apologize or retract any of his statements about Burke emphasizing, “when someone does something contrary to my core beliefs, I can’t let it go.”
Give Sly credit for consistency … so far. As Right Wisconsin previously reported:
The liberal blogs have been merciless in their treatment of Burke. And now liberal radio host John ‘Sly’ Sylvester has declared that he would be “the biggest hypocrite in the world” if he endorsed Burke for governor due to her past as an executive for the Trek bicycle company that has moved much of it’s manufacturing facilities overseas.
“I’m not getting on this train,” said Sly on Friday. “I couldn’t live with myself.”
“This woman and her brother are responsible for putting people out of work and shipping the jobs to China,” said Sly. “When she went on the snowboard sabbatical do you think she thought about those unemployed people?”
Sly, a stalwart progressive and protectionist who has championed the labor uprising in recent years taps into the serious hypocrisy of the Democratic Party’s choice of Burke and why grassroots progressives are not thrilled.
“She’s Mitt Romney in a red dress,” explains the Monroe radio host. “Look at how much money was spent to paint Mitt Romney as an out-sourcer. The hypocrisy here. I don’t know if I could live with myself.”
Expressing his belief that Mike Tate and the Democrats chose Burke for her personal fortune, Sly called Burke “a wallet.” And as for her promise to not make any promises, particularly on a pledge to repeal Act 10, Sly called Burke a “coward.”
There is some irony on Sly’s accusing Democrats of choosing Burke for her supposed ability or willingness to self-finance her campaign. The Democrats spent tens of millions of dollars on the 2011 and 2012 Recallarama with nothing beyond temporary effect. Walker is still in office, Republicans still control both houses of the Legislature, and conservatives still have a majority on the state Supreme Court.
One thing this demonstrates is that talk-radio hosts should never align themselves too closely with political parties. The purpose of political parties is to get their members elected and reelected, first and foremost. The Democratic Party would nominate anyone it believes can beat Walker. Conversely, political party heads should never assume that the media is on their side, particularly someone like Sly. Talk show hosts are hired and paid to make money (through attracting advertising revenue) for their employers. That is why WEKZ radio employs Sly — to attract Madison listeners and therefore advertisers — not to shill for politicians or candidates.
Sly doth protest a bit much, since most of Burke’s positions, to the extent she has positions, come from the same Democrat hymnal that’s worked so badly at the state level. It would be refreshing to have a Democrat who actually understood business, and understood what the state needs to do to attract and keep business, other than the usual start-a-new-government-program answer Democrats have.
The number one song today in 1966:
Today in 1983, Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” spent its 491st week on the charts, surpassing the previous record set by Johnny Mathis’ “Johnny’s Greatest Hits.” “Dark Side of the Moon” finally departed the charts in October 1988, after 741 weeks on the charts.
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto:
Our younger readers–those who were born yesterday–may not remember when delayingObamaCare was considered a wild idea, its exponents limited to crazy right-wing terrorists. Times have certainly changed since–oh, the beginning of this week.
“Democrats facing difficult reelection campaigns in 2014–Sens. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Mark Begich of Alaska–came out on Wednesday evening in support of extending the open enrollment period of the law, as first proposed by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, who is also up for reelection in 2014,” Politico reports. All these senators were elected or re-elected in 2008, when Barack Obamatopped the ticket. …
So now Democrats–and even the administration itself, ever so incrementally, are embracing the idea of saving ObamaCare by delaying the individual mandate. But that is unlikely to be sufficient, and could even make matters worse. Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle argues that it “solves a problem for individuals but destabilizes the insurance market as a whole”:
If it’s a tedious pain to buy insurance, the only thing standing between us and a death spiral is the fairly hefty penalty that folks who don’t buy it may have to pay. Delaying the individual mandate makes the problems created by the malfunctioning exchanges worse–which, I reiterate, will ultimately mean more uninsured people, not fewer. This is a terrible idea, which is being seized upon by the administration and Republicans not because it makes any sense, but because it is politically expedient.
The individual mandate tax can indeed be a “fairly hefty penalty.” It isn’t just $95, as that Politico piece asserted, but $95 or 1% of income, whichever is higher. (Both the minimum and the rate are set to rise, reaching $695 or 2.5% in 2016.) McArdle concludes: “If we’re going to delay, then we need to delay the whole thing–guaranteed issue, community rating and so forth. Otherwise, we’re just asking for, well, a quagmire.” Hey, Megan, your lips to Obama’s ears.
Whether not delaying the mandate will be sufficient to avert a quagmire is a different question, and color us skeptical on that one. For one thing, for political reasons the authors of the ObamaCare law made the mandate less than fully enforceable, as Avik Royexplained in an August Forbes piece:
Section 1501(g)(2) of the Affordable Care Act specifies that the IRS cannot subject taxpayers to “any criminal prosecution or penalty” for refusing to pay the mandate fine. Also, in contrast to normal tax levies, the IRS cannot “file notice of lien with respect to any property of a taxpayer by reason of any failure to pay the penalty imposed by this section.”
Basically, the only thing the IRS can do to make you pay the mandate fine is to take it out of your withholding, or withhold it from your tax refund, if you’re due one. So if you don’t participate in the withholding process, the IRS has no way to collect the mandate fine.
To put it another way, if you owe the IRS money when you file your return, you can’t be penalized if you decline to pay any amount of the debt up to the mandate tax. How much of an obstacle this is isn’t clear. Presumably the IRS will develop countermeasures to increase subsequent years’ withholding when a taxpayer avoids the mandate. And perhaps organizing one’s finances so as to avoid the mandate will be too complicated for most taxpayers. Then again, it’s not as if getting insurance from HealthCare.gov is simple.
And therein lies perhaps a greater challenge to the mandate’s viability. If people can’t buy insurance because the government failed to fulfill its promise of making it available, taxing them for lacking insurance violates basic fairness. If the ObamaCare website is nonfunctional in another month, calls to delay the mandate will be much harder to resist–and, as we’ve seen, they already aren’t that easy to resist.
Further, as we’ve written, it seems to us there’s a legal case to be made that the tax is, or soon will be, unconstitutional. A law that taxes individuals for failing to purchase an unavailable product fails even the relatively undemanding “rational basis” test. …
As recently as Monday, the president himself was delivering a “narrative” about the wonders of ObamaCare. Now he’s delaying from behind, bowing ever so slightly to reality. But the gap between the administration’s narrative has continued to widen. It will keep doing so absent a sudden, and in our view wholly unexpected, display of competence.
So senators who face difficult election battles in 2014 suddenly want to take an issue away from their opponents. In other words, keeping your job is now more important than following your party and president. That is the direct result of government that is too large and does too much, and politicians that are paid too much.
As a part-Norwegian, I should head to Winter Park, Minn., today, in keeping with the reasoning Joel Pollak explains:
Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) has asked state authorities to ban the use of the name “Redskins” when the Washington (_blank_) travel to play the Minnesota Vikings on Nov. 7. In the same spirit, and for many of the same reasons, I think it is time for the Minnesota Vikings to drop their offensive name as well.
First of all, the Vikings were the first group of Europeans to attempt to reach and settle the New World. That effort would culminate, centuries later, in the journeys of Columbus and the subsequent extermination of Native Americans. If “Redskins” is offensive, the name of their original would-be oppressors is even more so.
Second, the Vikings symbol is an inaccurate depiction of the people of Minnesota, who are quite diverse–only about one-third are Scandinavian. Furthermore, “Viking” is also a stereotype of Minnesota’s Scandinavians, not all of whom are descended from Vikings, and few of whom are warlike plunderers with primitive weapons.
Finally, it is unfair to describe the game played by the Minnesota team as “football.” They have lost each of the four Super Bowls in which they have appeared, and only have one win this season (over a previously winless team).
The Vikings’ last Super Bowl appearance followed the 1976 season. That would be during the final days of Gerald Ford’s presidency.
The thing, of course, as this brilliant column (the last item) points out, no school or team picks a nickname or mascot with the intended purpose of being ridiculed. Mascots, including the Vikings and all the American Indian names, are picked for their positive qualities. If opposing fans use racial slurs based on their opponents’ nicknames, that’s because they are buttheads.
Today in 1956, Elvis Presley made his second appearance on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Show, with Sullivan presenting Presley a gold record for …
One year later, Presley’s appearance at the Pan Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles prompted police to tell Presley he was not allowed to wiggle his hips onstage. The next night’s performance was filmed by the LAPD vice squad.
One year later, Buddy Holly filmed ABC-TV’s “American Bandstand”:
It would be Holly’s last TV appearance.
Four days before Halloween was the world premiere of the more recognizable version of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain”:
The song was an appropriate theme for the Friday-bad-horror-flick-show “The Inferno” on WMTV in Madison:
Britain’s number one song today in 1957:
The number one song today in 1963 was the Four Tops’ only number one:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 