Today in 1964, the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” went to number one and stayed there for longer than a hard day’s night — two weeks:
If you are of my age, this was a big moment in 1981:
1 comment on Presty the DJ for Aug. 1
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There is news on the Wisconsin controlled substances front.
First: The National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws reports:
Legislation is pending in the Senate and Assembly that seeks to allow municipalities to penalize marijuana possession offenders in instances where the District Attorney has refused to prosecute.
Under state law, local governments prosecute first-time marijuana possession offenses involving 25 grams or fewer. Repeat offenses, or any offense involving a quantity of marijuana over 25 grams, is prosecuted in state court at the discretion of the District Attorney. Senate Bill 150 and its companion bill (AB 164) would allow local jurisdictions to enact ordinances allowing for municipal courts to prosecute repeat cannabis possession offenders and/or those charged with possession more than 25 grams of cannabis in cases where the District Attorney has explicitly declined to do so.
SB 150 is sponsored by Sens. Joe Leibham (R–Elkhart Lake) and Rick Gudex (R–Fond du Lac); five Republicans are the sponsors of AB 164. I guess none of those seven must belong in the conservatarian camp.
These bills seem to be an argument about local control — the ability of a city, village or town to enact stiffer penalties for a crime than state law. District attorneys prosecute violations of state law and county ordinances; municipal attorneys prosecute violations of municipal law, although in most communities county ordinances and state laws are codified in the municipal code. While this apparently is about district attorneys and marijuana, the spirit applies to, say, circuit judges who are seen as lenient on, say, underage drinking in college towns. And either opposes the concept of equal protection under law — that something that is illegal in Abbotsford is illegal in Zittau, and the penalty for the crime in Zittau is the same as the penalty for the crime in Abbotsford.
The other issue here is the public’s lack of enthusiasm for the drug war, which hasn’t reduced illegal drug use, but has sucked up government resources. Politicians may lack the guts to propose reducing marijuana-related penalties, but that’s being done in effect by police’s disinterest in pursuing recreational marijuana users, who are, after all, guilty (once proven so in a court of law) of breaking the law. Regular readers know that I am skeptical of marijuana’s supposed benefits, but I am also skeptical of marijuana’s overstated harm. Not enforcing the law, and passing laws that are unenforceable, creates disrespect for the law.
Sort of related is the push by state Sen. Alberta Darling (R–River Hills) and Rep. Jim Ott (R–Mequon) to stiffen drunk driving penalties. One bill (there are Senate and Assembly versions for all of these) would set a mandatory minimum sentence of six months in jail to three years in prison for a drunk driver who injures someone, depending on the severity of the injury. Another would set a mandatory 10-year prison sentence for a drunk-driving death. Another would make a first-offense drunk driving charge where the driver exceeds 0.15 in blood alcohol level a misdemeanor, not a traffic ticket. Another would make third-offense drunk driving a felony. Another would allow the seizure of a car driven by someone arrested for third-offense drunk driving.
Some of these seem to make more sense than others — increasing penalties for killing or injuring someone while driving drunk. I oppose the 0.15 standard because I oppose the 0.08 standard and before that the 0.10 standard. Evidence of drunk driving should be based on evidence of actual impairment, not on the results of a blood test.
With all of these, however, there is the problem the Wisconsin State Journal brought up in April:
Measures that would boost penalties for drunken driving would cost $250 million a year and send thousands more people to jail or prison, according to estimates provided by state agencies that would be charged with implementing the proposals.
The state also would need to spend $236 million to build 17 300-bed facilities to house the expected increase in people serving time for drunken driving, the Department of Corrections estimates.
Those estimates don’t include the extra costs to counties whose jails would house offenders serving sentences of a year or less.
So where will that money — $236 million or more in jail construction and expansion, and $250 million every year — come from? This is a state with a correctly measured (as in by Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) deficit nearing $300 million. (Yes, the state budget is legally, not factually, balanced, which puts Gov. Scott Walker in the same place as all of his predecessors, since GAAP-balanced budgets are not required by state law). Republicans correctly blast Democrats for proposing things with total disregard for their cost. Well, this looks like the shoe on the other foot.
The biggest drunk driving problem, based on my years of covering those who get arrested for drunk driving, is repeat offenders, who apparently must be physically separated from their ability to drive. (Not merely from their own vehicle, because it is safe to assume the proposal to seize cars from drunk drivers won’t prevent them from getting another one somehow.) It is remarkable to me that we have so many repeat offenders of not just drunk driving, but operating after driver’s licenses are suspended or revoked. That seems to indicate that the punishment and the chance of getting arrested aren’t much deterrent. (In fact, one school of thought says that increasing penalties serves to encourage those who are driving drunk to try to evade police, with, as you can imagine, potentially disastrous consequences.) Further evidence is in the high failure rate of substance-abuse programs.
As a society we appear in some cases to have the wrong people in jail (for instance, those guilty of what could be called “victimless crimes”), which means we don’t have room for people who do belong in jail and aren’t in jail. Answering the drunk driving problem in a fiscally responsible way seems to require dealing with that conundrum.
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Rich Galen went to lunch (and we’re in favor of lunch here), and …
The part of the conversation I did get was this: The two parties no longer consider each other to be political opponents – each aiming for the same goal but choosing differing paths to get there.
Each of the two parties now considers the other to be not just a political enemy, but an enemy of everything the other believes in.
We have traded political ideology for political religiosity.
We no longer have to defend our position with statistics and logic. We now defend out position as being correct because we believe it to be correct. …
When I was on Bill Maher last year, we got into a discussion about global warming. The largely youngish crowd was poised to boo and hiss as I talked about the lack of scientific evidence or whatever.
What I said was: We’re having the wrong discussion. What we should be discussing isn’t whether global warming is real or man-made or whatever; what we should be discussing is: Is it better to put more garbage into the atmosphere or less garbage into the atmosphere?
This type of discussion takes global warming out of the realm of sacred doctrine and makes each of us look at the real world as it really is.
Same goes for the economy.
We are stuck in a medieval crusade between those who believe we should spend more to generate jobs and those who believe we should cut more to reduce the deficit.
This, too, is the wrong discussion because most of us never took more than the minimum three-hour course: Econ 113 and we only know how to spell Keynes because we think it’s cool to know how to spell Keynes and the only other person we ever knew named “Maynard” was Maynard G. Krebs from the Dobie Gillis show. …
The fight-to-the-death should not a choice between spending and austerity – that hasn’t worked in Greece or Spain and it won’t work here.
The discussion should be this: Can we find a way to spend the money we are already spending in more productive ways? And how what can we do to raise the largest possible number of Americans who are at or below the poverty line into the middle class?
We have to stop blindly defending our position and start looking for solutions – some of which may lie in the other guy’s beliefs.
Idealistic, to say the least. The zero-sum-game nature of politics today, the fact that too many politicians make politics their career, and the fact that government does too much and taxes too much makes Galen’s wish a dream. Add to the fact that the parties have a particular brand of economics imbedded into them since the 1980s — smaller government (at least that’s what they claim) Republicans and big-government Democrats — and never the twain shall meet.
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Today in 1964, a Rolling Stones concert in Ireland was stopped due to a riot, 12 minutes after the concert began.
Today in 1966, Alabamans burned Beatles products in protest of John Lennon’s remark that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus.” The irony was that several years earlier, Lennon met Paul McCartney at a church dinner.
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Rev. James V. Schaal, a priest of the same order as Pope Francis:
An amusing citation from Margaret Thatcher reads: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” The socialists, however, were not the only ones who would run out of other people’s money. Democracies are quite capable of duplicating this feat. The question is this: What entitles us to acquire other people’s money in the first place? Do other people have any money that is not ours if we “need” it? Taxation, with or without representation, is about this issue. Who decides what we need? Who gets what is taken from us? On what grounds do they deserve it?
C. S. Lewis said that no one has a right to happiness. Our Declaration only says that we have a right to pursue it. Whether we attain it is not something that falls under the perplexing language of “rights.” If someone else guarantees my right to be happy, what am I? Surely not a human being, whose happiness, as Aristotle said, includes his own activity, not someone else’s.
In a world of rights, no one can give anything to anybody else. Everything is owed to me if I do not already have it. If I am not happy, I am a victim of someone else’s negligence. A “rights society” is litigious. If I am unhappy, it has nothing to do with me; my unhappiness is caused by someone else who has violated my rights. Unhappy people witness the violation of their rights by someone else; their unhappiness does not involve them. Their mode is not, “What can I do for others?” but, “What must they do for me to make me happy?” In his Ethics, Aristotle remarked that, if happiness were a gift of the gods, surely they would give it to us. No Christian can read such a line without pause. Is not the whole essence of our faith that we have no “right” either to existence itself or to a happy existence? Some things must first be given to us, no doubt—including our very selves, which we do not cause.
Indeed, the whole essence of revelation is that we do not have a right to the eternal life that God has promised to us. We cannot achieve it by ourselves, because it is not a product of our own making or thinking. God does not violate our “rights” by not giving us either existence or happiness; creation is not an act of justice. The doctrine of grace opposes the notion that we have a right to happiness. It is not even something that we deserve or can work for. …
Much of the world is filled with what I call “gapism.” The so-called gap between the rich and poor, the haves and the have-nots, is a sign, not of the natural order in which some know more and work more, but of a dire conspiracy to deprive me of what is my right. So the purpose of “rights” is to correct the world’s “wrongs.” A divine mission flashes in the eyes of those who would presume to make us happy by giving us our “rights.” People lacking the “right” justify the takers.
So we do not have a right to be happy. The assumption that we do lies behind the utopian turmoil of our times. The attempt to guarantee our right to be happy invariably leads to economic bankruptcy and societal coercion. By misunderstanding happiness and its gift-response condition, we impose on the political order a mission it cannot fulfill. We undermine that limited temporal happiness we might achieve if we are virtuous, prudent, and sensible in this finite world.
Schaal should have added “flawed” and “sin-filled” to “finite world.” Of course, the concept of sin isn’t in these days.
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I don’t eat much at McDonald’s. I prefer other fast food options (namely a Wisconsin-based company whose products are superior except for their French fries). And we do buy food from the local farmer’s market.
That having been said, I think Kyle Smith brings up valid points while being amusing:
What is “the cheapest, most nutritious and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history” Hint: It has 390 calories. It contains 23g, or half a daily serving, of protein, plus 7% of daily fiber, 20% of daily calcium and so on.
Also, you can get it in 14,000 locations in the US and it usually costs $1. Presenting one of the unsung wonders of modern life, the McDonald’s McDouble cheeseburger.
The argument above was made by a commenter on the Freakonomics blog run by economics writer Stephen Dubner and professor Steven Levitt, who co-wrote the million-selling books on the hidden side of everything.
Dubner mischievously built an episode of his highly amusing weekly podcast around the debate. Many huffy back-to-the-earth types wrote in to suggest the alternative meal of boiled lentils. Great idea. Now go open a restaurant called McBoiled Lentils and see how many customers line up.
But we all know fast food makes us fat, right? Not necessarily. People who eat out tend to eat less at home that day in partial compensation; the net gain, according to a 2008 study out of Berkeley and Northwestern, is only about 24 calories a day.
The outraged replies to the notion of McDouble supremacy — if it’s not the cheapest, most nutritious and most bountiful food in human history, it has to be pretty close — comes from the usual coalition of class snobs, locavore foodies and militant anti-corporate types. I say usual because these people are forever proclaiming their support for the poor and for higher minimum wages that would supposedly benefit McDonald’s workers. But they’re completely heartless when it comes to the other side of the equation: cost.
Driving up McDonald’s wage costs would drive up the price of burgers for millions of poor people. “So what?” say activists. Maybe that’ll drive people to farmers markets. …
Junk food costs as little as $1.76 per 1,000 calories, whereas fresh veggies and the like cost more than 10 times as much, found a 2007 University of Washington survey for the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. A 2,000-calorie day of meals would, if you stuck strictly to the good-for-you stuff, cost $36.32, said the study’s lead author, Adam Drewnowski.
“Not only are the empty calories cheaper,” he reported, “but the healthy foods are becoming more and more expensive. Vegetables and fruits are rapidly becoming luxury goods.” Where else but McDonald’s can poor people obtain so many calories per dollar?
And as for organic — the Abercrombie and Fitch jeans of food — if you have to check the price, you can’t afford it. (Not that it has any health benefits, as last year’s huge Stanford meta-study showed.)
Moreover, produce takes more time to prepare and spoils quickly, two more factors that effectively drive up the cost. Any time you’re spending peeling vegetables is time you aren’t spending on the job. …
Fuel prices, like food prices, disproportionately hit the poor, so do-gooders do everything they can to raise energy costs by blocking new fuel sources like the Keystone XL pipelines and fracking. And they are always up for higher gasoline taxes and regulating coal-burning energy plants to death.
If the macrobiotic Marxists had their way, of course, there’d be no McDonald’s, Walmart or Exxon, because they have visions of an ideal world in which everybody bikes to work with a handwoven backpack from Etsy that contains a lunch grown in the neighborhood collective.
That’s not going to work for the average person, but who cares if they go hungry because they can’t afford a burger anymore? Let them eat kale!
There is one problem with Smith’s thesis: The McDouble doesn’t include bacon. (Sold separately.)
The point here is not the McDonald’s Double is superior to all other food. The point is consumer choice, something that liberals seem to oppose when those choices disagree with theirs. (See Bloomberg, Michael, Soda Size Regulations.)
If this makes you hungry, I believe lunch doesn’t start at McDonald’s until 10:30 a.m.
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Today in 1966, the Beatles’ “Yesterday and Today” album reached number one and stayed there for five weeks:
Today’s brief list of birthdays begin with Buddy Guy:
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A couple of weeks ago, I read that only 47 percent of American adults have a full-time job. I thought at the time that was the most damning legacy of the Obama (mis)administration I could find.
Then I read this, from the Associated Press:
Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.
Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.
The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration’s emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to “rebuild ladders of opportunity” and reverse income inequality.
As nonwhites approach a numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to lift the disadvantaged should be best focused — on the affirmative action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race.
Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families’ economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy “poor.” …
While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in the government’s poverty data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.
The gauge defines “economic insecurity” as a year or more of periodic joblessness, reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent. …
Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their futures, according to the General Social Survey, a biannual survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Just 45 percent say their family will have a good chance of improving their economic position based on the way things are in America.
I read this, and I conclude that we are screwed. The economy cannot be fixed or made better anymore. Like where we are now? Good, because this is as good as it will ever get.
The Wall Street Journal pointed out last week that the median American family income has dropped 5 percent since Barack Obama took office. Seems that after five years of confusing publicly traded companies with business (the former comprises exactly 0.1 percent of the latter), and after attacking job creators and wealth, the economy is worse off. And as Timothy P. Carney points out:
“Even though our businesses are creating new jobs and have broken record profits,” President Obama said in his economics address last week, “nearly all the income gains of the past 10 years have continued to flow to the top 1 percent.”
It’s odd that Obama touts these facts, because the facts indict his policies. …
Obama’s first term, with all its tax hikes, regulations, mandates, subsidies and bailouts, saw stock markets rise, corporate earnings break records and the rich get richer, while median income stagnated and unemployment remained stubbornly high.
Obama rightly calls the last few years “a winner-take-all economy where a few are doing better and better and better, while everybody else just treads water.” …
Median household income has fallen by 5 percent since 2009 — when the recession ended and Obama came into office — as the Wall Street Journal pointed out after Obama’s speech. But corporate profits and the stock market keep hitting record highs.
How does Obama think these are points in his favor?
If he’s using this data to prove he’s no Marxist, fine. Point granted. But Obama seems to think that middle-class and working-class stagnation under Obamanomics somehow calls for more Obamanomics.
The unstated premise is this: More government means more equality, while the free market favors the rich and tramples on the rest. …
Government grows, the wealthy, the big, and the well-connected pull away, and the rest of us struggle.
One reason: Obamanomics leans heavily on trickle-down economics. How does Obama promise to create jobs? With more loan guarantees to sell jumbo jets and more subsidies to make solar panels — taxpayer transfers to the big companies with the best lobbyists, with some crumbs hopefully falling to the working class.
Also, Obama’s regulations crush small businesses, protecting the big guys from competition. This hurts Mom & Pop and would-be entrepreneurs, but it also hurts the working class. New businesses are the engine of job growth, but new business formation has accelerated its decline in the last few years, hitting record lows.
Given how well Obama focused on the economy before now, his most recent pivot to paying attention to the economy will accomplish nothing. You cannot take away enough from the 1 percent to make the 99 percent’s economic lives better. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out last week:
For four and a half years, Mr. Obama has focused his policies on reducing inequality rather than increasing growth. The predictable result has been more inequality and less growth.
The top half of the income inequality issue is the least important. Rich people are always able to prosper despite political attempts to make them prosper less. Simple math says the gap between rich and poor will always increase. The issue, therefore, is the less-than-rich, and Obama has made them, and us, more less-than-rich.
We’ve already seen before it’s implemented that ObamaCare has resulted in American workers’ losing their full-time jobs. And the U6 measure of unemployment and underemployment has never been higher under any presidential administration than it is right now.
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The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports (boldface its):
With the help of a top Democratic Party official, Madison millionaire Mary Burke is meeting and talking with Democrats around the state about whether she should challenge Republican Gov. Scott Walker in next year’s election. …
Setting up the meetings and acting as her political adviser was Jacob Hajdu, political director of the state Democratic Party. Last month, state Republicans filed a complaint over a poll testing the political viability of Burke, a former state commerce secretary and former Trek Bicycle Corp. executive. …
On July 17, Burke and Hajdu held court at Wilson’s Coffee & Tea, meeting face to face with state Rep. Cory Mason (D-Racine), John Lehman (D-Racine) and Mayor John Dickert to discuss next year’s governor’s race. While at the coffee shop, Lehman introduced Burke to a local alderman and young GOP operative.
The operative, Sam Wahlen — a 20-year-old Marquette University student and Racine County Republican Party board member — said Burke was described as “running for governor,” with no qualifications.
“I was very surprised because I didn’t hear she announced,” Wahlen said in an interview this week.
Burke and Lehman disputed the student’s account. Burke emphasized that she has yet to make a decision.
First: When a party tries to clear the decks for one candidate, that doesn’t necessarily mean the candidate will win. The Democratic Party did the same for recall gubernatorial candidate Tom Barrett. That didn’t work out, to say the least. In 2006, Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Walker dropped out to allow U.S. Rep. Mark Green (R–Green Bay) to run by himself against Gov. James Doyle. Not only did Green not win, but he was replaced in Congress by Rep. Steve Kagen, the D in “D–Appleton” standing for “dense.”
Second: When a party chooses a candidate based on his or her ability to self-finance his or her campaign, that says volumes about the state of the party. The Democratic names you’ve heard of — Barrett, Russ Feingold, former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk, Sen. Kathleen Vinehout (D–Alma), U.S. Rep. Ron Kind (D–La Crosse) — have all declined to run for governor, at least so far. Burke’s running as a supposedly “self-financed” candidate means the Democratic Party doesn’t have to spend money (or as much money) on a race the Democrats are probably going to lose. And that’s despite the fact that there is no U.S. Senate race in 2014, which should give the Democrats more money to spend on all other races.
As for Burke herself: I heard her talk once. I don’t remember anything about the talk. A business person running as a Democrat would be a good thing for the state, but only if Burke espoused pro-business policies, such as cuts in taxes and regulation, instead of merely parroting the Democratic bible. It would be interesting to hear Burke’s take on economic development, given that she ran the Department of Commerce just before the state’s economy started to crater under the person who appointed her. That, however, will require taking positions beyond platitudes like “the state should help businesses.”
The Democratic president has suddenly decided the middle class isn’t doing well. That statement requires proposals on how to fix that, and that requires getting out of the usual Democratic claptrap of taking money from those with jobs and shifting it into the government to primarily benefit government employees. I eagerly await the Democratic reform proposals on, for instance, education beyond the phrase “give them more money.” Indeed (not that the Democratic Party ever takes my advice), the Democrats really need to get off the usual menu of abortion rights, teacher unions, the environment (that is, catering to the Earth First! types), public employees and unions. None of those groups represent or support the middle class.
It will be interesting to see if the Democrats run as something other than Not Scott Walker next year. When a majority of state residents, based on the most recent poll, think the state is going in the right direction, that suggests a need for a new playbook, to use a football metaphor. (Start, Mary, by firing your state party chair.) Recallarama blew through a lot of money, but resulted in no change in Madison — we still have a Republican governor, and both houses of the Legislature are still in GOP hands, which was the case after the November 2010 elections, and remained the case after the November 2012 elections. Democrats need to do something substantially different if they are going to earn the vote of the nonaligned voter in 2014.
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Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 