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Forty-five years ago this season, the Chicago White Sox moved some of their games northward along Interstate 94.
Understanding why requires some history. Recall that the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee in 1953, and were a hit for several seasons, winning the 1957 World Series and the 1958 National League pennant.
And then interest dwindled, ownership changed, and the Braves moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta.
Two seasons later, the White Sox were drawing poorly at Comiskey Park. And that’s where Hardball Times picks up the story:
The franchise shift was especially hard on one minority owner, a car dealer by the name of Bud Selig. A longtime fan of the minor league Brewers, he was a frequent visitor to old Borchert Field, where the locals had witnessed baseball since 1888. He had also followed the White Sox and Cubs via radio. The arrival of the Braves when he was 18 years old had been a dream come true. Their departure (when he was 31) was his worst nightmare. But if Milwaukee had once been a great baseball town, it could be again. Of course, to prove it, the city needed another team.
When it first appeared that the Braves were Atlanta-bound, Selig started recruiting local movers and shakers (such as the CEO of Schlitz and a local federal judge) and organized the opposition. He kept his organization intact after the Braves’ move was a done deal. On July 30, 1965, with two months left in Milwaukee Braves history, he named his group Milwaukee Brewers Baseball Club, Inc. Whether he was paying tribute to the minor league team of his youth or indulging in prophecy is open to debate. But Selig’s group needed to work fast because in 1967, both major leagues voted to expand.
On July 24, 1967, Selig’s group staged a Monday night exhibition game between the first-place (53-40) White Sox and the Twins. More than 51,000 fans turned out. Since County Stadium held 43,768 in those days, that was an achievement—especially for a game that didn’t count. It’s fair to say that most of the fans were local, as the White Sox and Twins fans had ample opportunities to see their own clubs play. Why would they bother to drive to Milwaukee to see an exhibition game? …
Selig also managed to persuade the White Sox to stage nine “home” games—not exhibition games—in Milwaukee in 1968. The White Sox were coming off a competitive year in 1967, having finished just three games behind the Red Sox in a four-team showdown that went into the final season of the weekend. The attendance, however, was 985,634, not exactly overwhelming for a pennant contender, so White Sox President Arthur Allyn agreed to the Selig plan.
Savvy baseball fans in Chicago might have remembered that the Dodgers had played “home” games in Jersey City in 1956 and 1957 right before they vacated Brooklyn. To the hard-core White Sox fan, the Milwaukee games must have been a worrisome development.
Also, during the late 1960s the Cubs were emerging from the doldrums and were getting more attention in the Chicago sports pages. In 1967, they drew 977,226, not too far behind the White Sox. In 1968 they surpassed the million mark (by just 43,409) for the first time since 1952. The trend continued in subsequent years. The Friendly Confines got more and more crowded; White Sox Park, “the Baseball Palace of the World” when it opened in 1910, now offered an overabundance of seats at popular prices.
The Milwaukee games served as a reminder to MLB that County Stadium was only 15 years old and ready and waiting for an expansion team. One can imagine Selig’s heartbreak on May 27, 1968, when the National League announced that Montreal and San Diego would join the league the following season. In the American League, Kansas City was pretty much a given since Charlie Finley’s move to Oakland had raised political hackles in Missouri. The other American League franchise was awarded to Seattle, but Selig would never have guessed then the key role the fledgling Pilots would play in his quest to land a team.
The 1968 White Sox won just one of their 10 Milwaukee games. That was on the field, though; in the seats, the Milwaukee games averaged three times what the White Sox were drawing at Comiskey Park. The difference was down to almost three times in 1969, but the ’69 Sox had a winning record in Milwaukee.
Selig’s group made an offer to purchase the White Sox. American League owners, however, didn’t want to repeat the National League experience of having no team in one of the two largest markets in the nation. New York had no National League team from 1958, the year the Brooklyn Dodgers went to Los Angeles and the New York Giants went to San Francisco, until 1961, the year before the expansion Mets opened their doors (and fell flat on their faces, but that’s another story). White Sox owner Arthyr Allyn sold the franchise to his brother, John, and more mediocrity ensued, until Bill Veeck purchased the Sox and entertaining mediocrity followed.
However, the story doesn’t end there, as you know:
The Seattle Pilots were in deep financial trouble after just one year of play. During spring training 1970, the courts were hashing out the team’s fate. The clincher came when the team filed for bankruptcy in federal court, thus rendering moot a lot of local maneuvering. Selig’s offer to buy the team and move it to Milwaukee was obviously in the best interests of the debtors.
On March 31, 1970 at 10:15 p.m., Selig got the phone call he’d been waiting for. The bankruptcy judge had approved of his purchase of the Pilots. The team equipment truck had left Arizona and gone only as far north as Utah. Now the driver knew to go east rather than west. Selig had one week to get ready for Opening Day in Milwaukee. In 1953, the Braves, lucky stiffs, had all of four weeks to get ready!
So from that point on, the possibility of the Chicago White Sox moving to Milwaukee shrank to zero. Had the team moved, it would have been interesting to see if it would have remained the White Sox or would have been changed to Brewers, as happened to the Pilots in 1970. The name “Pilots” was a good one for Seattle, as it incorporated the area’s links to aviation and seafaring. In fact, the team logo combined a pair of wings and a ship’s helm. Pilots wouldn’t have been totally inappropriate for Milwaukee, perched on the banks of Lake Michigan, but a more appropriate option was at hand. Brewers was as apt in 1970 as it was in 1901 and as it is today.
In a sense, the city of Milwaukee had come full circle. In 1902, after one year of operations, Milwaukee lost the Brewers to St. Louis; 68 years later, after one year of operations, Seattle lost the Pilots to Milwaukee.
Given the 1969 end-of-season rosters of the White Sox and the Pilots (they were, of course, the team Jim Bouton wrote about in Ball Four), it wouldn’t have made much difference, talent-wise, which team went to Milwaukee. The White Sox were fifth in the American League West at 68-94, and the Pilots were right behind them at 64-98.
In the short term, the difference in attendance at County Stadium and White Sox Park continued. With only a week to get ready, the Brewers still managed to pull in 37,237 for a Tuesday afternoon Opening Day on April 7, 1970. On the same day, the White Sox drew 11,473 for their opener against the Twins. That’s pitiful for Opening Day, but it looked positively robust compared to the crowd of 1,036 who witnessed the Brewers’ first game at White Sox Park a few days later.
For the 1970 season, the Sox drew a mere 495,355, their lowest total since 1942. The Brewers, meanwhile, drew 933,690 for the season. The Brewers tied with Kansas City for fourth place in the American League West with a 65-97 record. The White Sox were mired in the cellar with a 56-106 record.
As it turned out, that June 16, 1969 game between the Pilots and White Sox in Milwaukee provided a preview of Milwaukee’s home team the following season. With all signs indicating the White Sox would be heading north, it must have been quite a surprise to find deliverance via the Pilots flying east.
It is interesting to contemplate how things might have been different in Milwaukee in the early ’70s. The early- and mid-’70s Brewers teams were bad, filled with has-beens, never-would-bes, and players too young to be stars, such as shortstop Robin Yount, thrown into the lineup at 18. As Hardball Times pointed out, the 1970 Brewers looked a lot like the 1969 Pilots, and that wasn’t good. The Pilots had a handful of barely recognizable players, and then only years later:
- First baseman Mike Hegan, a second-generation big leaguer who played on the Oakland A’s teams that won three consecutive World Series, then went on to call Brewers games on TV for years.
- Pitcher Gene Brabender, only because he was the Brewers’ first Wisconsinite, a native of Black Earth. (Whose high school fight song, according to Bouton, started with “Black Earth, we love you, hurrah for the rocks and the dirt …”)
- Pitcher Marty Pattin, whose last few seasons were with the Kansas City Royals, including a World Series appearance in his last season. (If you’ve read Ball Four, you know the other reason Pattin was famous. Two words: Donald Duck.)
- Pitcher Mike Marshall, who went on to become one of the first closers. Marshall went 15–12 with 21 saves and a 2.42 ERA for the 1974 Dodgers, pitching 208 innings in relief, and saved 32 games for the 1979 Minnesota Twins.
- Catcher Larry Haney, who went on to become the Brewers’ bullpen coach.
The White Sox became a brief contender later in the ’70s when Veeck purchased them and signed good players to one-year deals, all he could afford, under his so-called “rent-a-superstar” program. Veeck promoted the hell out of the White Sox, including the famous exploding scoreboard, and hired Harry Caray to be his announcer. None of that would have happened without Veeck. (Then again, Disco Demolition Night wouldn’t have happened either.)
The Brewers didn’t become a contender until 1978, when they hired general manager Harry Dalton, who acquired actual players (Cecil Cooper, Sal Bando, Larry Hisle, Ben Oglivie and Mike Caldwell all arrived via trade or free-agent signing, followed later by Rollie Fingers, Ted Simmons, Pete Vuckovich and Don Sutton) and hired manager George Bamberger. The Brewers have always been a small-market franchise, but they weren’t any good at finding talent anyway for most of their first decade of existence. The Brewers were horrible at marketing during the entire time the Seligs owned the franchise. If they didn’t have good seasons on the field, they didn’t draw well.
One wonders whether Milwaukee would have baseball today were it not for the Pilots. It is inconceivable today that any major league would award an expansion franchise — or, for that matter, approve a sale — to an ownership group as grossly undercapitalized as the Pilots’ owners must have been to go into bankruptcy one year after getting the franchise. (The Pilots were one of four 1969 expansion teams, and one of two — Montreal is the other — not in their original home anymore.) Then again, as baseball team owner Charles O. Finley once said he’d “never seen so many damned idiots as the owners in sport.”
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The New York Times reports the Eighth Wonder of the World may not be long for this earth:
The Eighth Wonder of the World, as the Astrodome was nicknamed, with its 200-foot-tall roof and nine-acre footprint, became the most important, distinctive and influential stadium ever built in the United States.
It gave us domed, all-purpose stadiums and artificial turf and expansive scoreboards. It gave us seminal respect for women’s sports when Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs at tennis in 1973. It gave us the inventor of the end zone dance in 1969, Elmo Wright of the University of Houston. It gave us the first prime-time national television audience for a regular-season college basketball game, with the famed 1968 meeting between Houston and U.C.L.A.
So it was despairing to hear that the vacant Astrodome might be torn down and its site paved over as Houston prepares to host the 2017 Super Bowl. Demolition would be a failure of civic imagination, a betrayal of Houston’s greatness as a city of swaggering ambition, of dreamers who dispensed with zoning laws and any restraint on possibility. …
James Glassman, a Houston preservationist, calls the Astrodome the city’s Eiffel Tower and the “physical manifestation of Houston’s soul.” New York could afford to tear down old Yankee Stadium, Glassman said, because the city had hundreds of other signature landmarks. Not Houston. Along with oil, NASA and the pioneering heart surgeons Michael E. DeBakey and Denton A. Cooley, the technological marvel of the Astrodome put a young, yearning city on the global map. …
The Astrodome was built to solve a vexing conundrum: How to bring major league baseball to a city where the temperature could match the league leaders in runs batted in? …
The Astrodome was the brainchild of Roy Hofheinz, a Barnumesque former mayor of Houston and county judge. He kept a stadium apartment that featured a putting green, a shooting gallery, a puppet theater and a bowling alley. A tour guide once described the décor to Sports Illustrated as “early whorehouse.” In Hofheinz’s view, invention was nothing without flamboyance.
Mickey Mantle hit the first home run at the Astrodome in an exhibition game, causing the scoreboard to flash “Tilt.” Judy Garland, the Supremes, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson played concerts there. Muhammad Ali retained his heavyweight title. Evel Knievel jumped 13 cars on his motorcycle.
The Republicans nominated President George H. W. Bush for re-election there in 1992. Robert Altman directed a movie called “Brewster McCloud” in the Astrodome. In 1986, the Mets and the Astros played 16 marathon innings in what was then the longest postseason baseball game. In 2005, a magnanimous civic gesture provided shelter for thousands of evacuees after Hurricane Katrina. …
Demolition “would symbolize that we’ve just decided to quit,” said Ryan Slattery, whose master’s thesis in architecture at the University of Houston offers a different alternative.
Slattery’s plan, which has gained traction, involves a vision of green space. He would strip the Astrodome to its steel skeleton, evoking the Eiffel Tower of sport, and install a park. It could be used for football tailgating, livestock exhibitions, recreational sports. Other ideas have been floated through the years, some more realistic than others: music pavilion, casino, movie studio, hotel, museum, shopping mall, indoor ski resort, amusement park.
All private proposals for the Astrodome are due by June 10 to the Harris County Sports and Convention Corporation, which oversees the stadium.
The Astrodome was the first of its kind domed football/baseball stadium. It was also among the first of its kind as a multipurpose stadium. Previously football teams that didn’t have their own stadiums played in baseball stadiums — among others, the Detroit Lions in Tiger Stadium, the New York Giants in the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium, the Chicago Bears in Wrigley Field (really), and, of course, the Green Bay Packers part of the season in Milwaukee County Stadium. About half of football fans in such stadium arrangements had good seats; the rest did not. The multipurpose stadium — usually round, but sometimes square, like Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia — at least had football fans facing the right places, although their seats were well away from the field, since a baseball field is nearly twice the size of a football field.
The Astrodome led the world in ostentatious home-team celebrations:
It was also, most regrettably, the place where artificial turf reared its ugly head. The Astrodome originally had glass panels so grass could grow. However, baseball players kept missing the ball against the roof, so the glass was painted over, and the grass died.
The Astrodome was indeed the site of some amazing events …
… though the Astrodome never hosted a World Series (which was the Astros’ fault) or a Super Bowl, the latter because the Astrodome seated only 50,000.
It’s a bit ironic that the Astrodome was replaced by two stadiums, Minute Maid Park for the Astros and Reliant Stadium for the Texans after the Oilers moved to Tennessee. Both stadiums feature retractable roofs, so that fans can experience the outdoors on nice days, but be protected from the bad days. The retractable roof saved baseball in Milwaukee, because the Brewers (and the Diamondbacks and Marlins) no longer lose money on days where games are called off. They can also market games to farther-away fans, who are guaranteed that if they buy tickets, the game will be played that night.
In retrospect, the Astrodome perhaps should have been refitted for basketball when the NBA’s Rockets tired of The Summit. (It was replaced by the Toyota Center, while the Summit is now … a megachurch.) Given the fact that arena footprints have ballooned over the decades, you’d think they could have reconfigured the Astrodome for basketball within its dimensions.
On the one hand, a building’s lifespan is defined by its utility. When a building can’t be used anymore, it’s time for it to go. Still, the Astrodome’s eventual demise won’t be a happy event.
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The Rolling Stones had a big day today in 1963: They made their first TV appearance and released their first single:
The number one song today in 1975 (pictured with the official tractor of Roesch Farms):
Five years later, Gary Numan drove his way to number nine:
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James Pethokoukis sees an economic Recovery In Name Only too:
America makes a grievous error if it dismisses the weak economic expansion — this month marks the fourth anniversary of the end of the Great Recession – as nothing more than the expected aftermath of a deep downturn and financial crisis. Sluggish GDP growth and yet another “jobless” recovery point to a secular problem rather than merely cyclical forces at work.
The US entrepreneurial spirit may be faltering. Check out these data points from The Wall Street Journal: a) In 1982, new companies made up roughly half of all US businesses, according to census data. By 2011, they accounted for just over a third; b) from 1982 through 2011, the share of the labor force working at new companies fell to 11% from more than 20%; c) Total venture capital invested in the US fell nearly 10% last year and is still below its prerecession peak, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.
New companies are best at creating what business guru Clayton Christensen has termed “empowering innovation” (creating new consumer goods and services) as opposed to process innovation (creating cheaper, more efficient ways to make existing consumer goods and services). Empowering innovation produces new jobs, while efficiency innovation eliminates them, often through automation. …
Not only do we need a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem so startups can flourish and generate disruptive innovation, these new entrants raise the competitive intensity for established players to become more innovative. In other words, explains banker and entrepreneur Ashwin Parameswaran, “unless incumbent firms face the threat of failure due to the entry of new firms, product innovation is unlikely to be robust. The role of failure in fostering product innovation has sometimes been called the ‘invisible foot’ of capitalism.” Big business must be subject to maximum competitive intensity. …
US workers need America to be as entrepreneurial and innovative as possible. So does the global economy. But right now we are taxing capital, educating kids, regulating banks, and managing cities in ways that are crippling America’s greatest economic asset.
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I did not engage in schadenfreude yesterday over the one-year anniversary of Gov. Scott Walker’s winning the (illegitimate) recall election.
Others did. For instance, David Blaska:
I’m trying to decide whom I miss most: Pink Slip Guy, Crying Man (“Democracy ended tonight.”), Segway Boy, Ms. Hippie Bongstocking, Michael Moore, Jesse and the Teamsters, the Assembly Democrats in their shocking orange T-shirts, the drum circle ashram in the rotunda, or the Flee-baggers. I’ve decided it’s Comrade John Nichols and Mr. Ed on the MSNBC set election night on Monona Terrace. They looked like they’d just swallowed a package of Ex-Lax when the network called the recall for Scott Walker less than an hour after polls closed. A cherished memory. It’s no small irony that state Democrats are meeting for annual convention this Friday and Saturday, still nursing their recall hangover — minus Graeme Zielinski, poster boy for Tourette Syndrome, the Baghdad Bob of babble.
Right Wisconsin passed on this ridiculous montage from MSNBC one year and one day ago:
Christian Schneider recounted some of the stranger things you may have forgotten about, including …
Walker, a preacher’s son, has always given off a wholesome vibe – which is why his opponents were always willing to jump on any rumor that made him appear to be a hypocrite. (See: the last minute smear some Democrats tried to push leading up to the recall election.)
That is why, incredibly, it became news that Walker’s spokeswoman, Ciara Matthews, had once worked at a Hooters restaurant in college. This revelation led to unseemly comments about Matthews’ “unnatural sexiness,” and led one local blogger to deem it “Hootergate.” Some claimed that working at Hooters is somehow incompatible with being pro-life.
How did Matthews reply?
“What is the connection between my being pro-life and working at Hooters?” she retorted. “Is there a hypocritical angle here that I’m not aware of? Is Hooters performing abortions?”
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We begin with a song that was set on this date (listen to the first line):
The number one song today in 1955 was probably played around the clock by the first top 40 radio stations:
Anniversary greetings to David Bowie and Iman, married today in 1992:
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One year ago, our long statewide nightmare ended when Gov. Scott Walker won his recall election.
Except that it really didn’t end, because even after the 2011 Supreme Court election, the first two waves of recall elections and the gubernatorial recall, we Wisconsinites had to endure another five months of politics before the November 2012 election ended elections for 2012. And then we had to hold our nose for another Supreme Court election held April 2.
I was asked by Right Wisconsin for my thoughts on what I called Recallarama and it calls the “permaprotests.” Consider this a longer version of the 100 or so words I was asked to contribute (without foul language).
One question I was asked was whether I’d be celebrating the one-year anniversary. No, I’m not. I didn’t celebrate Walker’s winning. I went to work the next day. I’m going to work today. Politics is a game that never ends, therefore there are no permanent winners. (Although voters and taxpayers could be said to be permanent losers.)
My first thought is that I am honestly surprised no one — protester accidentally, or elected official deliberately — was killed during Recallarama. I actually predicted someone would be killed, partly because of the depths to which political discourse has been degraded in this country, and in part because, well, that’s the People’s Republic of Madison for you. The protests were at an unprecedented (for this state, anyway) level of nastiness, exceeded only by the UW–Madison Vietnam War protests.
First question: What did we learn, before and since?
We learned that Gov. Gaylord Nelson made a stupid decision in 1958 when he granted state employees collective bargaining. (Collective bargaining basically means (1) you cannot stand up for yourself in dealing with your employer and (2) you are an interchangeable part.)
We learned which Wisconsin journalists didn’t know that the open records law applies to signing recall petitions. (Ditto circuit judges and assistant district attorneys, whose impartiality is forever in question.)
We also learned that there are some Wisconsinites who lack the manners to keep their mouths shut. Where I live, based on yard signs you would have thought Walker had no chance of winning. And yet, Walker did. A lot of the 54 percent of voters who voted for Walker fit into two possibly overlapping categories — people who prefer their votes to speak for them, and people who didn’t necessarily like Walker, but believed that legislation with which they disagreed was not grounds for a recall.
There is no question that the public opinion of government employees dropped considerably in the past two years. Not every public employee is a union stooge — some even vote for Walker and other Republicans once in a while — but since stereotyping is a human tendency, it is largely their own fault if voters and taxpayers look at their work more critically and skeptically. Many voters perceived a holier-than-thou attitude that public employees are more important than mere voters and taxpayers. That came from their union puppeteers, but again, guilt by association is a human trait.
Newspapers lost subscriptions because the newspaper dared to take an editorial stand. (Which says more about those who can’t views contrary to theirs enter their brains than those newspapers.) Friendships were strained, and in some cases ended, particularly online friendships. (Which should call into question how strong the friendship was in the first place.) Even family relationships were stressed, which makes you wonder how many people realize what’s truly important in life. If politics is one of the top five most important things in your life, you need to get an actual life.
We witnessed the absolute contempt liberals have for conservatives in this state. Conservatives, not liberals, were bullied into silence in everyday conversations that dared veer toward political topics. Businesses were harassed for their owners’ and employees’ daring to exercise their First Amendment rights. (On the other hand, Kwik Trip, Johnsonville Sausage and Menards have more customers now.)
Some would argue that the sturm und drang was the logical result of government’s taking money out of public employees’ pockets through Act 10. Which means that public employees now are required to pay less of their salaries for their benefits than the people whose taxes pay those salaries and for those benefits. As for the alleged tradeoff of lower salaries for better benefits: The average yearly personal income in Wisconsin, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2011 was $27,915. How many government employees do you know who make that little?
Some would also argue the lack of job creation in this state is the direct result of Act 10. To believe that, you have to believe that this state’s economy is powered solely on discretionary spending of government employees. (Remember: No government employee was laid off as a result of Act 10.) The state’s economy is what it is because of what Barack Obama has done to the national economy, and because the GOP has done nothing to undo decades of bad policy, particularly in state and local taxes. (More on that later.)
Second question: How did this work out for the Democrats?
After the November 2010 elections, Wisconsin had a Republican governor, Republicans controlled both houses of the state Legislature, the state had one Democratic senator and one Republican senator (elect), and five of the state’s House of Representatives were held by Republicans.
After Recallarama’s 2011 and 2012 editions, including the recall election one year ago today, and the November 2012 elections, Wisconsin had a Republican governor, Republicans controlled both houses of the state Legislature, the state had one Democratic senator (elect) and one Republican senator, and five of the state’s House of Representatives were held by Republicans.
So what was accomplished? Democrats got rid of two Republican state senators, Dan Kapanke of La Crosse and Randy Hopper of Fond du Lac. (Hopper’s loss was more an example of political suicide.) Hopper was replaced by Democrat Jessica King of Oshkosh, who was in office long enough to lose to Republican Rick Gudex of Fond du Lac. Republicans, meanwhile, replaced the retiring Sen. James Holperin (D–Conover) with Sen. Tom Tiffany (R–Hazelhurst). Net gain: Zero, a good description as well of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin’s “leadership.”
Democrats would claim that Recallarama energized the party and got people politically involved, blah blah blah. They still lost. They deserved to lose. They were 100 percent in the wrong.
Third question: How did this work out for those of a conservative political orientation?
Legislatively, not much beyond Act 10 and causing a dramatic drop in public employee union membership, along with the separate issue of finally allowing concealed-carry, as 48 other states allowed before Wisconsin. Of course, politics is not only about accomplishing what you want to do, but preventing your opponents from accomplishing what they want to do. (Read this if you think the November 2010 and recall elections didn’t matter at all.)
The $2.2 billion in tax increases enacted by the Doyle administration are largely all still in place. The state budget is legally, not factually (as in by Generally Accepted Accounting Principles), balanced. Government is still far, far too large and does far, far too much. School choice is still limited to Milwaukee. The state still is spending tens of millions of dollars every year to take land off the tax rolls, generating billions of dollars in debt. The process has not begun (which means it won’t) to enact permanent (as in constitutional) controls on taxes and government spending. At least some Republicans are starting to notice.
The fact that should have been clear well before now is that politicians are interested principally in their own careers. I’m not sure when after Nov. 6 Walker and Republicans lost their nerve, but all the people who worked for Walker’s win in the recall election and for Republicans in 2010 and 2012 have the right to be more than a little disappointed.
Final question: Now what?
I predict that the way political campaigns are conducted in this state is permanently scarred, but not just because of Recallarama. We’ll know that after the November 2014 elections, except that the nastiness will ramp up again merely because Walker will be running for reelection. Walker has now reached the level of George W. Bush and before him Ronald Reagan in the unique ability of the mild-mannered Walker (unlike his haters, I have actually met him) to drive liberals to states of frothing rage. I do not think Walker or any other Wisconsinite will ever become president, but I enjoy talking about Walker’s presidential prospects because it makes Democrats absolutely unhinged.
I conclude with this brilliant observation I made one year ago: I am under no illusions that the vast divide of our state’s politics will magically fill itself and that we go back to a previous day of not particularly caring about what the politicians do. That is the fault of both parties, which have inserted themselves into our lives in areas government does not belong. Government takes too much of my money, and regulates things of my life that it should not be regulating. (For instance, whether I wear a seat belt while driving.) Everything wrong with campaigns today traces back to this: the stakes in elections are too high because government does too much regardless of which party is in power.
Republicans maintained what they had, Democrats failed to gain anything between the legitimate 2010 and 2012 elections, and Wisconsinites with sense learned to hate politics and politicians. If you ever wondered if government and politics play an outsized role in our lives, Recallarama proved it.
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Not that my parents were paying attention, but the number one song two days into my life was:
Twenty-eight years later, the number one song was by a group that sang about aging nearly two decades earlier:
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Former UW System student (like myself) Kevin Binversie on the United Council of UW Student Governments:
Never before have I been more proud to be a BluGold (UW-Eau Claire, Class of 2002), than I was last week Thursday.
It was the request of my alma mater’s student council that led to the Joint Finance Committee’s vote to cut the “mandatory refundable fee” the UW System charges to finance United Council. UC is the so-called nonpartisan lobbying group for UW System students which has been around since 1960.
The move now forces United Council to personally appeal to students at its 10 schools where students currently pay membership dues of $3 per semester. In the past, the money to finance the organization was automatically charged to students as a line-item to their tuition costs. Students not wanting to pay the fee would have to personally request refunds. …
To label United Council as “pointless” and “incompetent” is almost an insult to the definition of both of those words. The organization continually says its primary goal is to lobby for cuts in tuition costs and increasing in financial aid. While typically getting the aid (in the form of more government-subsidized student loans), tuition continually skyrocketed as the group often laid down to the will of the UW Regents. Over the past decade alone, tuition rates have taken off at UW-System schools. In 2001-02, average undergraduate tuition was $3,568 at Madison, $3,462 at Milwaukee and $2,776 at the other four-year schools. By 2011-12 it was $8,592 for Madison, $7,669 for Milwaukee and $5,970 at places like Eau Claire, Green Bay and La Crosse.
Those figures do not include room and board costs.
At the same time, United Council must have felt they had to keep with the rise in tuition costs. In 2001-02, per student per semester membership was only $1.25, or $2.50 a school year. As mentioned above, today it$3 per student per semester, or $6 a school year.
With tuition up over 120 percent over the last decade, why exactly would the chief lobbying organization committed to keeping it under control “reward itself” by increasing membership dues by 140 percent during the same time frame?
No wonder students have wised up to United Council’s empty promises are asking for a refund and for the group to justify its existence to them. They’re not getting their money’s worth and it is likely they never have.
So if UC has failed miserably at keeping tuition under control, what exactly does the group do?
Why help advance the liberal agenda of course.
State Democrats have relied on United Council for years as aready-made group of protesters for anything from Voter ID to staging a zombie protests at Special Olympics events in 2011 (United Council officially disavowed the activity, but they were at Rep. Robin Vos’ office only hours before the main event).
Glancing at its staff bios gives you plenty of empty platitudes about “social justice” and “student empowerment.”Stay on Google long enough and you’ll wonder if a prerequisite for employment is activism in liberal causes or Democratic campaigns.
Now that United Council has lost its subsidy of confiscated money from students it barely represents, are now more than free to seek out newway ways to fund raise. If push comes to shove, hold a bake sale. …
The Joint Committee on Finance has now given students the same freedom they gave public employees in 2011. They have the option to join whatever group they’d like, and the dues will be voluntarily submitted, not taken.
It is a concept so simple even a zombie could understand.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 