Today in 1962, the Beatles replaced drummer Pete Best with Ringo Starr. Despite those who claim Starr is the worst Beatle musically, the change worked out reasonably well for the group.
Today in 1975, Peter Gabriel announced he was leaving Genesis. Despite those who claim Genesis was better with Gabriel in the group, the post-Gabriel Genesis outsold the Gabriel Genesis by an order of magnitude:
The Ripon Commonwealth Press reports …
Traffic and incident records from Green Lake County and the city of Ripon are becoming tougher to obtain.
In recent weeks, Ripon police and also the Green Lake County Sheriff’s Department have begun witholding (redacting) certain information that was previously available publicly.
Specifically, it’s information such as names of individuals cited with municipal offenses, or drivers’ information from local crashes.
“I do expect complaints; I would not be surprised if I’m hit with an open-records violation [allegation],” Ripon Police Chief Dave Lukoski said. “… I haven’t gotten any so far, but I certainly expect them.”
It’s a growing tug-of-war between individual privacy protection and open-records laws.
But Green Lake County and Ripon aren’t alone.
Information obtained through Department of Motor Vehicle records is now being blacked-out from police reports in more than 50 departments around the state, according to one of the loudest critics, the Wisconsin Newspaper Association.
… and further editorializes:
If you’re bothered that this newspaper ran a story last month that didn’t give the name of the motorcyclist severely injured after hitting a deer along Highway 23, you can blame the killer of actress Rebecca Schaefer.
A stalker in 1989 shot the 21-year-old in the doorway of her Los Angeles apartment building; he located the address after hiring someone to search California Department of Motor Vehicle (DMV) records.
This led to passage in 1994 of the federal Drivers Privacy Protection Act, which prohibits disclosure of personal records from DMV files.
Now fast forward to April 2012. After getting a $20 parking ticket, motorist Jason Senne in Palatine, Ill., used the law to sue the village, claiming the listing of his name and other personal information on the ticket placed on his windshield violated his right to privacy. After two lower courts dismissed his case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit found in the driver’s favor in August 2012.
This caused insurance companies and government attorneys to warn law-enforcement authorities to be careful how they disseminate DMV information, even though the court’s ruling is not binding in Wisconsin and clearly violates the state’s open records law.
Wisconsin Attorney Gen. J.B. Van Hollen issued an opinion in 2008 that said police don’t violate the Drivers Privacy Protection Act when they release records that reveal drivers’ personal identification. But some agencies, such as the Green Lake County Sheriff’s Department and as of last week, the Ripon Police Department, no longer heed Van Hollen’s opinion. …
In refusing to reveal names, ages and addresses of individuals involved in crashes that have caused injury, yielded citations or in other ways been deemed newsworthy — information they used to routinely make available — the Green Lake County Sheriff’s Department, Ripon Police and other agencies are turning their backs on the long-standing assumption imbedded in Wisconsin’s public records law that requires officials to err on the side of openness.
Privacy is a legitimate concern; the Commonwealth doesn’t report on a motorist’s weight, drivers license number, date-of-birth, phone number and other extraneous, personal information. But rare should be the instance when someone’s privacy trumps your right to open records and accountability by their creators and custodians. These are public officials who wield a tremendous amount of power over our lives. We give them the authority to do so with the understanding that their work products are open and accessible to the public.
When they start deciding that the people who pay their salaries are not able to view information that they legally have a right to access, they impede public oversight of law-enforcement investigations and compromise the public’s confidence in law-enforcement activities. …
When Wisconsin Newspaper Association Executive Director Beth Bennett asked her Illinois counterpart how that state’s media were dealing with the Senne case, she was told it was a non-issue there.
“For whatever reason, the authorities here in Wisconsin are seeing dangers in this case when other states aren’t,” Bennett told a Milwaukee Journal reporter. “It all seems to have started through local associations that represent municipal governments by sending out advisories … That’s how things start, and it’s not uncommon.”
A federal judge or the Supreme Court should further flesh out the Senne decision, the sooner the better, as its misapplication — and Van Hollen’s timidity — are increasingly impeding the people’s right to know.
Interesting, isn’t it, that law enforcement is violating the law. Apparently what must be required is for someone to sue one of those 50 law enforcement agencies for their illegally keeping open records closed from the public, the people who pay for everything they have, including their salaries.
The Wall Street Journal’s Holman W. Jenkins Jr. notes the “war” between Time Warner Cable — which supplies cable TV to Milwaukee, the Fox Cities and Green Bay, among other places — and TV station owners, including Journal Communications, which owns WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee and WGBA-TV in Green Bay:
The two sides are locked in one of those “retransmission” showdowns that Congress ordained in the 1992 Cable Act, when it gave local broadcast stations the option of demanding that cable operators pay them for the same signal the broadcast operators put out free over the public airwaves.
But here we struggle to find the right metaphor. These battles are like Burger King and McDonald’s fiercely battling over a prime corner in Atlantis 15 minutes before the city sinks beneath the waves.
One doesn’t normally look to cable executives to give voice to ontological ironies. But Time Warner’s Glenn Britt did so when he suggested that if CBS wasn’t happy with what Time Warner was willing to pay to carry its channels, CBS could offer those channels directly to consumers on an a la carte basis. …
But in another sense, nothing is stopping CBS right now from cutting out the middleman and selling its programming directly to anybody with a web connection. CBS doesn’t need a retrans agreement. It just needs to put up an app in the app store.
The real question is whether cable’s channel-bundling middleman role will go away quickly or slowly. We already know what business model will replace it for the cable guys—net neutrality turned on its head.
This is especially true for the great revival that we forecast is coming for ad-supported video, though nothing like the ad-supported business models of the Big Three TV networks of yore. …
As video engulfs the Web, the Internet is becoming less a two-way medium and more a one-way. Secondly, in such a world usage-based pricing, in some form, is inevitable. Light users need to be able to pay less than heavy users—or light users won’t be customers at all and won’t contribute anything to covering the network’s overhead. (Don’t buy the guff you read on the Web about how cable operators are imposing metered pricing to “make up” for lost TV profits. Broadband wasn’t previously a charity.) …
The value proposition of broadband is changing as it becomes the main carrier of our entertainment. The same logic that leads to bizarre pricing permutations in the airline business—designed to bring more customers into the air—is a sign of a grownup and more competitive broadband industry.
But something even more interesting is happening. Charlie Ergen of satellite broadcaster Dish Network has been trying to link up with a wireless company to answer the question “How do you put communications inside and outside the home together?”
Verizon Wireless is pursuing research with a consortium of cable companies toward the same end—seamless connectivity in and out of the home.
All of this is the reason Packer fans who are Time Warner subscribers in the eastern half of the state didn’t get to watch last Friday’s Packers–Cardinals preseason game, and won’t get to watch Saturday’s Packers–Rams preseason game either.
For those who are interested in their corporate spin, Time Warner’s is here, and Journal’s is here.
We begin with an interesting non-musical anniversary: Today in 1945, Major League Baseball sold the advertising rights for the World Series to Gillette for $150,000. Gillette for years afterward got to decide who the announcers for the World Series (typically one per World Series team in the days before color commentators) would be on first radio and then TV.
Is 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton being funny, or is she this clueless? From the Washington Times:
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday that she will soon tour the nation and deliver a series of speeches to promote more trust in government. She made her remarks at an annual American Bar Association meeting in San Francisco.
More specifically, Mrs. Clinton said she was launching a series of speeches on foreign policy. And as part of those addresses, she planned to speak about the need to restore faith in government, Breitbart reported.
I look forward to hearing her ideas, since her party and her husband’s administration (Bill and Hillary are still married, right? How can you tell?) have done so much to erode people’s trust in government (which they should never have in the first place). For starters, pick your favorite scandal.
But what about now? Let’s hear Hillary defend this, reported by the Washington Amazon.com Post:
The Internal Revenue Service has sent letters to thousands of small business owners questioning whether they shorted the coffers this past year, sparking criticism from some lawmakers who believe the agency is bullying mom-and-pop companies.
Under the heading “Notification of Possible Income Underreporting,” the letters started going out to small employers this summer demanding they review and confirm that they accurately reported their income on last year’s tax returns. …
“This gives the impression that the IRS is looking for more than just additional information,” House Small Business Committee Chairman Sam Graves (R-Mo.) wrote in a letter to the agency officials, noting that the first line states “your gross receipts may have been underreported,” which he says “implies that this is a serious matter that could lead to assessments of additional tax, penalties and interest.” …
The agency’s audit screening process has been under the microscope since officials admitted to unfairly targeting conservative groups earlier this summer. In response, Graves has started digging deeper into the methods the agency uses to select which small business tax returns are given a second look.
During a congressional hearing last month, IRS Acting Commissioner Daniel Werfel assured lawmakers that “we don’t have any particular evidence at this time” that the political criteria used to screen nonprofits was ever used for private companies.
At the time, however, Werfel said the agency also does not take into account a company’s location or industry for review — yet the new letter states that employers who received them stood out from “businesses of your type in comparable locations.”
I eagerly await Hillary’s comments on this from her home state senator, as the Chicago Tribune reports:
Free speech isn’t always free. It gets downright cumbersome when Dick Durbin has you on his enemies list. Consider:
We were surprised in the early days of this spring’s Internal Revenue Service scandal to see Durbin voice indignation with the IRS for apparently behaving just as he had urged it to: In an Oct. 12, 2010, letter to then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman — we have Durbin’s press release, including his letter — the senator urged an investigation of “several 501(c)(4) organizations that appear to be in violation of the law.” But Durbin’s letter only cited one group by name: Crossroads GPS, a conservative group that has spent heavily on advertising to promote fiscal responsibility, limits to government regulation and national security.
Durbin said this year on Fox News that he hadn’t sicced the IRS on any liberal groups because … an investigation of Crossroads would put them, too, on notice. Crossroads says it scrupulously obeys the federal laws that regulate all such groups. We’ve seen no evidence that Durbin’s accusation of crimes was accurate, but he surely achieved one goal: He made potential donors think twice about contributing to a group a U.S. senator had publicly named as an illegal operation.
Now, though, Durbin has changed tactics. Rather than accusing political enemies of flouting federal law, he’s suggesting that he may publicly expose them to public outrage over the killing of Trayvon Martin. The editorial page of Thursday’s Wall Street Journal reported that the senator has sent letters to corporate and nonprofit supporters of the American Legislative Exchange Council, asking them to disclose their positions on “stand-your-ground” legislation that ALEC supported in Florida in 2005. …
Durbin’s communications director, Max Gleischman, told us Thursday afternoon that the senator’s goal isn’t to silence groups he opposes, but “to find out if groups that support (ALEC) financially agree with (ALEC’s) position on ‘stand your ground’ laws. Simple as that.”
If only thinly coded letters from senators with as much clout as Durbin were that benign. Because it would be more than wrong for a U.S. senator to use the power of his high federal office as a cudgel against his enemies. We’ll give the last word on that to Durbin himself:
“It is absolutely unacceptable to single out any political group — right, left or center — and say we’re going to target them. That is unthinkable. That goes back to some of the worst days of the Richard Nixon administration.”
The Nixon administration and its Watergate scandal brought Hillary Clinton to Washington. At the time, a popular anti-Nixon question was: “Would you buy a used car from this man?” Would you buy anything Hillary Clinton says?
I will be on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin show Thursday at 7 a.m. to discuss Gov. Scott Walker’s trial balloon, if not actual proposal, to eliminate state income taxes.
Wisconsin Public Radio’s Ideas Network can be heard on WHA (970 AM) in Madison, WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at www.wpr.org.
I’m told Joy will be taking calls. My prediction now is that not a single caller will say eliminating state income taxes is a good idea. (And I’m not sure it is either, at least as I type this.) But perhaps readers will surprise me.
The number one song today in 1965:
Three years later, the singer of the number one song in Britain announced …
Today in 1976, Chicago released what would become its first number one single, to the regret of all true brass rock fans:
Rich Lowry has interesting observations about what is derisively called the “prison–industrial complex”:
Prison is one of the most important institutions in American life. About a quarter of all the world’s prisoners are behind bars in the United States, a total of roughly 2 million people. It costs about $60 billion a year to imprison them.
This vast prison-industrial complex has succeeded in reducing crime but is a blunt instrument. Prison stays often constitute a graduate seminar in crime, and at the very least, the system does a poor job preparing prisoners to return to the real world. Since 95 percent of prisoners will eventually be released, this is not a minor problem. …
In an essay in the journal National Affairs, Eli Lehrer sets out an agenda for reform geared toward rehabilitation, and the conservative group Right on Crime, a project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, advocates a similar program.
Most fundamentally, prisoners should be required to do what many of them have never done before, namely an honest day’s work. Fewer than a third of offenders hold full-time jobs at the time of their arrest, according to Lehrer. They won’t acquire a work ethic in prison. University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Stephanos Bibas notes that only about 8 percent of prisoners work in prison industries, and about 4 percent on prison farms.
Labor unions and businesses have long supported restrictions on productive work by prisoners for fear of cheap competition, but their self-interested concerns shouldn’t obstruct attempts to instill the most basic American norm in people desperately in need of it. Prisoners should be made to work, but be paid for it and rewarded if they are particularly diligent and skilled. As Bibas argues, some of the proceeds can go to restitution for victims, to paying for their own upkeep, and to support for their families.
Prison should align itself with other norms. Inmates with drug and alcohol addictions should be forced to get treatment. There should be maximum openness to faith-based programs, such as those run by the splendid Christian organization Prison Fellowship. Prisoners should be encouraged to keep in contact with their families rather than cut off from them through what Bibas calls “cumbersome visiting policies and extortionate telephone rates.”
Once offenders get out, there’s a good chance that they are going back. Lehrer notes that about 40 percent of ex-prisoners are rearrested within three years. The goal should be to reduce recidivism as much as possible. Offenders shouldn’t be discharged directly from solitary confinement, or discharged without a photo ID. In the job market, they shouldn’t be denied occupational licenses when the job in question has nothing to do with their crime. They should, if their crime wasn’t too serious, eventually have it expunged from the records for most purposes. …
We have proved in the past several decades that we can lock a lot of people up. The challenge now is if we can do it more humanely and intelligently and, ultimately, create less work for the prison-industrial complex.
The number one issue that comes up when claiming that too many people are in prison is the drug war, as one commenter notes:
Stop treating drug abuse as a law-enforcement problem.
We should have learned that lesson from alcohol Prohibition.
Over the years, hundreds of thousands of young men, particularly young black men, have ended up in prison on nonviolent drug offenses. Caught by the “three strikes and you’re out” laws, all it takes is three drug offenses and it’s prison for years.
Rand Paul is right about this. The “three strikes and you’re out” laws should be amended to deal with violent crime, NOT drug offenses.
Our drug laws don’t take into account anything that scientists have learned about the effects and addictive potential of various drugs. Instead, they are a cultural statement about society’s moral disapproval of certain drugs (marijuana) more than others (alcohol).
Regarding occupational licenses, one commenter points out …
Only the potential employer has the right to decide if a criminal’s crime “has nothing to do with” the qualifications of a job or that the crime in question “wasn’t too serious.”
People tempted to commit crimes need to know that not only do they end up in prison but that they are forever restricting their options for the future to jobs that involve no handling of money, no being trusted with any responsibility, and no working without direct supervision. You do the crime, the consequences are your own fault and no one is obligated to hide the fact that you CHOSE to put yourself into the situation that you’re in.
… followed up by:
Why would anyone want to hire a convict?
Would YOU?
Stealing costs businesses a lot of money. Would you hire a known thief?
It is not the employer’s responsibility to provide employment for a convict. If you are worried about their job prospects, then instead of manipulating employers into hiring them, why don’t you start a business or nonprofit and YOU hire them?
The office of state Rep. Howard Marklein (R–Spring Green) passes on this news from the state Department of Transportation:
1. What is license plate reissuance?
Reissuance is the replacement of a complete series of license plates that have exceeded their life cycle. Once a license plate series has been identified for reissuance, it occurs automatically at renewal, and is done at no cost to the motorist.2. What license plates will be reissued?
DMV will reissue all sesquicentennial plates and all remaining auto plates that have red letters. Auto plates with black letters are not being replaced at this time. Both plate types will be replaced with a standard, black-letter auto plate of the current “sailing farmer” design. …6. Why are we doing this?
Both the sesquicentennial and red letter series of plates are beyond their projected life cycles. As license plates age their reflectivity decreases and they fade. Reduced reflectivity means the plate is less visible to other motorists at night and faded license plates become difficult for law enforcement to read.The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators provides standards for license plate design. AAMVA recommends that license plates be designed with white backgrounds and black letters in order to provide the best contrast and visibility to law enforcement. Red letters are the least desirable as recommended by AAMVA.
This requires some history, which serves as a demonstration of how government and politicians can screw up the simplest things.
Before Wisconsin’s current license plate design, this is how Wisconsin license plates looked:
These are actually the three previous license plate designs. The black-on-yellow plates were replaced by the red-on-white plates, which in turn were replaced by the black-on-yellow plates. The white plates served as Wisconsin’s Bicentennial plates in 1976, instead of other states’ more patriotic designs:
The white places were replaced with the yellow plates, perhaps because police said they liked the visibility of the yellow plates. No one with any sense of aesthetics liked the yellow plates, however, including state Sen. John Plewa (D–Milwaukee), who was quoted in, of all places, the New York Times as saying, ”Ugly and boring license plates should not be accepted as a fact of life.”
The Times further reported about the statewide contest held for a new plate design:
Among the rejected offerings were a design shaped like a milk can and one shaped like a piece of swiss cheese with the slogan ”State of Udder Beauty.”
Governor [Anthony] Earl chose the five finalists, which were published in ballot form in newspapers around the state last month.
The offerings are these:
* ”We Like it Here” in white letters on a red background.
* A blue, green and red design of a sailboat and barn on a white background, with no slogan.
* The slogan ”America’s Dairyland” on white background with red stripe on top and bottom and an outline of the state in upper left corner.
* ”America’s Northern Escape” in white letters on a green background
* ”America’s Dairyland” on white background with red stripe on top and bottom and a design of sailboat and barn.
The sailboat/barn design won to represent, I suppose, agriculture and tourism. (Which demonstrates the pervasive anti-business attitude of this state, since smokestacks to represent manufacturing didn’t get included.) The problem with the first new plates, however …
… was that the blue numbers (upper right) were judged to look like neighboring states’ plates with similar blue numbers, so they were changed a year later to red.
But red was judged to fade too quickly …
… so black replaced red in 2000.
It is interesting to note that, unlike, say, Iowa, the listing of what county the vehicle is registered in doesn’t appear on Wisconsin plates. (I assume that counties get a cut of vehicle registration fees in some states, hence the county listing. Apparently not here.) Unlike in Minnesota, an opportunity to show off the state’s shape in place of a plain, boring dash was wasted here.
The one time that the state actually got it right was when the state rolled out the license plates in honors of the state’s 150th anniversary …
… which (hence the headline) are being retired in favor of the generic miniature farm design because of the same fading-red problem …
… thus throwing away only the best license plate in the history of this design-challenged state.
Are there other license plate choices? Too many to list here, in fact, but that’s not the point. The bucolic scene from a wetland somewhere is fading away to be replaced by the looks-like-any-state-anywhere license plate.
The number one song in Britain today in 1964 was brought back to popularity almost two decades later by the movie “Stripes”:
That same day, the Kinks hit the British charts for the first time with …
This was, of course, the number one song in the U.S. today in 1966:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 