The number one British album today in 1965 was “The Rolling Stones No. 2”:
The number one single today in 1965:
Today in 1970, an album was released to pay for the defense in a California murder trial.
You didn’t know Charles Manson was a recording “artist,” did you?
Marc Eisen on the Madison Metropolitan School District, from whose La Follette High School I graduated:
This has been a dreadful few weeks for the Madison public schools.
Under attack from both the left and the right, and hobbled by self-inflicted wounds, the district finds itself in a weakened if not a precarious political position. What’s the worst of it?
How about the flawed school superintendent search that yielded only one viable candidate? Or Gov. Scott Walker’s sneak attack to push school vouchers and privatized schools in Madison? Both worthy contenders, but for me, the capper was the shenanigans surrounding the Madison school board primary.
Has Madison politics ever seen such high-handed, self-absorbed behavior as that of leading vote-getter Sarah Manski?
Backed by key political players in town, Manski ran a profoundly irresponsible and deceitful campaign. By dropping out within 48 hours of winning the primary, she betrayed the voters, subverted the election and undermined confidence in school governance. …
Simply put, there isn’t a tougher public office in Dane County than a seat on the Madison school board. Somebody is always mad at you, money is tight, and educational issues are devilishly complex. And this just in! There is no magic wand to wave our school problems away. All we know for sure is that more of the same won’t cut it.
The schools are failing to educate the district’s growing population of minority kids. Note that in 1991, 21% of students were non-white; 20 years later, the figure was 53%. Only about half of black and Latino youth graduate. The percentage deemed to be college-ready is embarrassingly small.
The district’s problems are not new. Almost a decade ago, John Wiley, then chancellor of UW-Madison, convened a meeting to discuss how the Madison schools, once a draw for faculty recruitment, were becoming a hindrance. Among the complainants, Wiley recounts, were top black UW faculty and staff who did not like how their children were treated in the Madison schools.
Those concerns, of course, echo loudly today in the efforts of the Urban League’s Kaleem Caire to address the problems of minority students in the Madison schools. For that effort, Caire has been ostracized by progressive leaders. My opinion is very different. I belong to the Urban League, and I think that Caire is uncommonly brave in facing unpleasant facts.
Like it or not, we’re in an era of change and choice in education. Extending public vouchers to private schools in Madison may be wild overreach by the governor, but Madison parents already have choices for schooling.
If they don’t like their neighborhood school, parents can open-enroll their child in any Madison school or even in a suburban district. They can pack up and move to a suburban district. They can enroll their kid in a public charter school like Nuestro Mundo. They can send their child to a private school. They can home-school. They can sign their kid up for one of the many online schools.
This is a good thing. As long as academic programs address state educational standards and meaningful accountability is in place, why shouldn’t parents be able to pick a school setting they feel best suits their child’s needs? More to the point, why shouldn’t the district’s response to the painful achievement gap demonstrate this flexibility?
Progressives struggle with this. In the face of the Walker ascendancy, they’re basically fighting a rearguard and probably losing action. They want to restore the old model that standardized education, tightly controlled alternatives, and protected teachers with an industrial-style union contract — and sadly also did a wretched job of educating black children. African American leaders like Caire are still expected to fall in line, despite the old system’s manifest failure.
Because he hasn’t, Caire is shunned. The latest instance is the upcoming ED Talks Wisconsin, a progress-minded education-reform conference sponsored by the UW School of Education, the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, the mayor’s office and other groups. Discussion of “a community-wide K-12 agenda” to address the achievement gap is a featured event. A fine panel has been assembled, including Mayor Paul Soglin, but Caire is conspicuously absent.
How can progressives not bring the Urban League to the table? Agree or disagree with its failed plan for the single-sex Madison Prep charter school, the Urban League has worked the hardest of any community group to bridge the achievement gap. This includes launching a scholars academy, the South Madison Promise Zone, ACT test-taking classes and periodic events honoring young minority students.
But Caire is branded as an apostate because he worked with conservative school-choice funders in Washington, D.C. So in Madison he’s dismissed as a hapless black tool of powerful white plutocrats. Progressives can’t get their head around the idea that the black-empowerment agenda might coincide with a conservative agenda on education, but then clash on a dozen other issues.
A. David Dahmer, who appears to also not be a conservative, adds about Manski’s former candidacy:
The unfortunate consequence of this was the silencing and the marginalization of a woman of color — Ananda Mirilli — in a city that frequently and consistently silences its people of color. Ananda, an extremely passionate, smart, hard-working, experienced, and knowledgeable woman who spends a tremendous amount of time with young people in her community, is left on the outside looking in. Campaign over. Hours and days and weeks of very hard work all down the drain because another one of Madison’s liberal power elites treated her school board race as a back-up plan. That’s a special kind of entitlement. It’s the manifestation of blatant white privilege. …
And so the MMSD School Board race that came crashing down pretty much typifies the status of race relations we see every day and the tremendous racial divide we have in Madison right now. White elite liberals dictating to, condescending to, and manipulating Madison’s communities of color. This is when they are kind enough to not completely ignore them which, unfortunately, is most of the time. As the Editor in Chief of The Madison Times Weekly Newspaper and the Vice President of the Board of Directors for Centro Hispano of Dane County, I have attended just about every major minority event, forum, scholarship fund-raiser, reading day, conference, gala, educational awards ceremony, and more over the last decade. And most of the minor ones. Not once have I ever seen Mrs. Manski or Mr. Mertz at any of them.
Not once.
In over a decade. …
This is the same white liberal elite that had no idea that blacks and Latinos graduated at horrific rates in Madison until Kaleem Caire came to town and shouted it over and over a few years ago.
And then proceeded to make him public enemy no. 1. …As white liberals, we get excited to point out Republican racism. It makes us feel good about ourselves. It puts us in a safe spot to ignore our own racism, our own faults, and our own segregated city. Look at what Sen. Glenn Grothman said! What a racist! Yet somehow we’re not particularly appalled at own almost completely white Common Council year after year and our liberal elite white power structure. Somehow we’re not really appalled that people of color come to this town from New York, California, Texas, and Latin America for school and immediately leave when they get done because Madison has nothing to offer them culturally and because Madison’s treatment of minorities depresses them.
That’s because there are two Madisons. At our own fun, liberal, near-eastside extravaganzas — La Fete de Marquette, Willy Street Fair, Marquette Waterfront Fest, Orton Fest, etc. — there’s nary a brown face or a black face in the crowd. Slightly less than you’d find at a Republican Convention. In the same vein, at all of the fantastic minority events that I go to in Madison, I am almost always the only white person in the room (except for Mr. Jon Gramling).
I often hear conversations among my white liberal friends talking smack about and making fun of Milwaukee and its hyper-segregation, its tremendous white flight, its subtle and overt racism. I want to shout at them. “WE ARE MILWAUKEE JR.”
In short, our white-dominated liberal events and organizations in Madison never come close to resembling our growing diverse population and never include multiple voices, styles, and cultural norms. While our discussion of the horrendous achievement gap that has existed in Madison for 40-plus years was finally started by a black guy, it’s only allowed to be discussed and solved by a small group of whites who have no feel for, connection to, or dialogue with the minority communities they want to save.
Derrel Connor, who is not white:
In my last column, I wrote that Madison’s communities of color needed to become involved and engaged. They need to get off the sidelines and get in the game.
What I failed to add to that was it’s also hard to become a part of the game when it’s rigged against you.
If these had been two Republicans placing first and second in this primary with a Democrat finishing third under the same circumstances, progressives would be storming the Capitol right now. There would be hard-hitting editorials in progressive newspapers accusing conservatives of rigging elections, not the fluff pieces that we’ve been reading.
Madison’s communities of color are constantly told by white progressives that people like Governor Scott Walker, radio talk show host Vicki McKenna and blogger Dave Blaska are the enemy. While some may agree, they haven’t been the ones silencing, patronizing and marginalizing folks of color in Madison. That distinction belongs to the liberal establishment in this community.
You have consistently done the most harm to us, and it stinks. We’re tired of it.
As a former Urban League board member and chair, I am also disgusted by the way this organization has been treated by some of Madison’s political establishment. The Urban League has been at the forefront of many issues concerning the disenfranchised and people of color in this community, in particular, education. Yet over the past couple of years they have been treated like garbage. …
I understand that it’s not fair to paint all white liberal progressives in Madison with a broad brush. Many are just as outraged by what’s been happening to folks of color in this community as we are.
If you sit by and watch while it happens and fail to stand up for what’s right, you become just as complicit as the ones who are doing it.
My hometown has changed. And not for the better.
Today in 1955, Elvis Presley made his TV debut, on “Louisiana Hayride” on KWKH-TV in Shreveport, La.
The number one album today in 1966 was Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’ “Going Places”:
The number one single today in 1966:
I was at the Wisconsin Newspaper Association convention Friday. (More about that later this week.)
My guess is this Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story about the Act 10 fight and Recallarama will get an award at next year’s WNA convention:
Behind the scenes, there was more to the Republican governor’s fight with public employee unions than just Walker’s speeches and the massive protests of union supporters. An in-depth review reveals a rich backstory, including the undisclosed visit to Wisconsin by President Barack Obama’s campaign manager just before the effort to recall Walker; the role played by a conservative Milwaukee foundation in pushing labor legislation in Wisconsin and elsewhere; and the tension between Walker’s office and law enforcement over handling the demonstrations that greeted the governor’s proposal.
Walker emerged from the legislative fight and the subsequent recall election with a majority of support among Wisconsin voters, deep opposition from Democrats, and a hero’s status among conservatives nationally. Public worker unions lost fundamental powers and in some cases their official status altogether.
But both sides managed to surprise the other with their dogged opposition, from Feb. 11, 2011 – the day the governor announced his legislation – to June 5, 2012, the date Walker became the first governor in U.S. history to survive a recall election. …
The least surprising news is that this was not just a Wisconsin fight:
During the three weeks Democrats stayed in Illinois, then-Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller (D-Monona) spent thousands of dollars in personal funds on meeting spaces, food and hotel rooms for himself and others. Then and later, Miller was adamant that Democrats made their own decisions to go to Illinois and stay there, but he welcomed the free use of meeting space from the sympathetic Illinois teachers union.
Labor leaders made their own use of the space. Seeking to persuade the Democratic senators to stay out of Wisconsin, three union officials traveled to Libertyville to meet with them: Rich Abelson, executive director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees local that represents county and municipal workers in Milwaukee County; an unidentified person; and John Stocks, the incoming executive director of the National Education Association, which with 3 million members was the largest union in the country.
Stocks wasn’t an outsider – he knew most of the Democrats from his 14 years as a former top official and lobbyist with the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the in-state affiliate of the national teachers union. A New Orleans native and former Idaho state senator, Stocks still had a home in the Madison area and was among the union officials who had been consulting with Miller.
Stocks registered with Wisconsin ethics officials as a lobbyist for the NEA on Feb. 22, 2011 – five days after the Democratic senators left the state and four days before the meeting in Libertyville. He turned in his lobbyist’s license several months later. Stocks, who didn’t respond to interview requests, was the NEA’s only registered lobbyist in Wisconsin and the only one for any national union office turning up in state records during that time.
The NEA reported that Stocks and other NEA staff spent more than 200 hours on lobbying and related activities on the bill for a cost of $67,600 in total – small change compared to the millions of dollars spent by labor and business groups on the labor legislation but significant because of the national profile of both Stocks and the union.
Not all of those hours would have been with Democrats. Stocks also reached out to some Republicans he knew from his time with WEAC.
Sen. Bob Jauch (D-Poplar) had been among those talking to Stocks individually, but he skipped the Libertyville meeting with union officials because he considered it inappropriate for the caucus to meet privately with any interest group and thought it would eventually come out and reflect badly on the Democrats.
Other Democrats said they saw no problem in meeting with the unions because it is common for lawmakers to talk to people directly affected by legislation. Sen. Julie Lassa (D-Stevens Point), who as caucus chairwoman led the meeting, said listening to the unions did not mean Democrats did whatever they asked.
Unlike Jauch, Sen. Tim Cullen (D-Janesville) decided to stay in the meeting despite his own concerns about it. “I was interested in one question and my question was, ‘How long are you expecting us to stay and what’s your strategy for us coming home?’ ” Cullen said of the union leaders. “I wanted to hear their answers. And I got no answers from them.”
If you ever needed evidence that the Madison Police Department is every bit as political as the rest of the People’s Republic of Madison, here it is:
There were also tensions behind the scenes as police and Walker’s aides sought to deal with the massive protests back in Madison against the governor’s bill. For instance, on Feb. 17, 2011 – the day that Senate Democrats left the state – the Walker administration said in a statement that the Capitol police had estimated the number of demonstrators at 5,000 inside the statehouse and 20,000 outside it.
But Susan Riseling, the chief of the University of Wisconsin-Madison police and the officer responsible for the Capitol’s interior during the protests, estimated the crowd inside the building that midafternoon at nearly 25,000, or five times the Walker administration’s count. Riseling, who developed her expertise in estimating crowds over years of overseeing UW football games, made her estimate based on the crowd’s density and the amount of floor space it covered.
“Whoever the officer was who reported the information (the 5,000 figure) – well – I can’t imagine how they got their numbers. Way, way low. Now, crowds did ebb and flow. My kindest interpretation would be these numbers come from a real ebb,” she said.
Tension rose even higher on March 9, 2011, when Republicans on a conference committee of the Legislature’s two houses abruptly convened and amended Walker’s legislation so it could be passed without Senate Democrats present. In part because Republican lawmakers hadn’t told Capitol police of their plan, not enough officers were on hand to handle the thousands of demonstrators who rushed to the Capitol.
When Deputy Chief Dan Blackdeer of the Capitol police telephoned the Madison Police Department urgently requesting help, the city police refused, according to several sources directly familiar with the events of that night.
More unsurprising news: The Obama administration was paying close attention:
In October 2011 at a three-hour private meeting at the Madison headquarters of the state teachers union, Jim Messina and Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Obama’s campaign manager and deputy campaign manager, met with a half-dozen Wisconsin Democrats and union leaders and discussed the looming recall attempt against Walker.
Messina was skeptical of the recall. Correctly predicting Walker’s coming fundraising success, Messina warned the group that a Republican had told him Walker’s side could raise $60 million to $80 million. That would hurt Democrats in the recall and could hurt Obama’s re-election effort in a battleground state.
According to participants, the Wisconsin group told Messina and his deputy that the recall would happen no matter what.
“The basic message to (Messina) was ‘We have no way to stop this,’ ” one participant said. “He came to appreciate this train was leaving whether we liked it or not.”
In June 2012, Walker became the first governor in the nation’s history to win a recall election. But Obama, who steered clear of the recalls, ultimately won the state and his own re-election later that year, proving in the process that Wisconsin was the nation’s consummate political battleground.
Interesting additional observations come from reporters Jason Stein and Patrick Marley:
Q.Biggest winner of the whole chapter in Wisconsin history?
Marley. I think you’d have to say Scott Walker. He did become the first governor to win a recall election. Won by a bigger margin than he had in 2010 and launched him on to a national stage where he was welcomed as a hero at the Republican National Convention and is now named as a potential candidate for 2016.Q.Who were the biggest losers?
Marley. Public sector unions in Wisconsin. Act 10 did not completely eliminate them, but it reduced their power dramatically. Their role in lives of people of Wisconsin is already dramatically diminished.
Stein. And though they have won a few small victories in the legal battles over Act 10 that continue to this day, largely the courts at state and federal level have left that law in place.
Q.What’s the main take-away people locally and nationally should have of Gov. Scott Walker through this entire episode?
Stein. There was an incredible amount of pressure on everyone who was involved in that struggle from lowly reporters up to lawmakers and on no one was that pressure more intense than on the governor. One thing you could see from him is that he was able to remain extremely cool, to keep his rhetoric very focused and disciplined even in the midst of incredible pressure. So, as you think about somebody who could deal with the rigors of a presidential campaign, that’s something that people ought to take into account.
Well, this is embarrassing: One of my readers (who I got to meet after many years at said WNA convention) points out that my premise is wrong because the Journal Sentinel no longer enters the Better Newspaper Contest because the Journal Sentinel feels itself above the Wisconsin newspaper fray. (That’s my paraphrase of his description. I can do that as an unwillingly former Journal Communications employee.)
The Grammy Awards premiered today in 1959. The Record of the Year came from a TV series:
Today in 1966, John Lennon demonstrated the ability to get publicity, if not positive publicity, when the London Evening Standard printed a story in which Lennon said:
Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first — rock and roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.
Lennon’s comment prompted Bible Belt protests, including burning Beatles records. Of course, as the band pointed out, to burn Beatles records requires purchasing them first.
The number one single today in 1967:
Today in 1973, Pink Floyd began its 19-date North American tour at the Dane County Coliseum in Madison.
Today in 1966, Neil Young, Stephen Stills and Richie Furay formed the Buffalo Springfield.
The number one British single today in 1967:
Today in 1971, the South African Broadcasting Corp. lifted its ban on broadcasting the Beatles.
Perhaps SABC felt safe given that the Beatles had broken up one year earlier.
The number one British single today in 1961:
The number one single today in 1963:
Today in 1964, the Beatles began filming “A Hard Day’s Night,” and George Harrison met Patti Boyd, who became Harrison’s wife.
Boyd later would become the subject of an Eric Clapton song (in fast and slow versions), and then Clapton’s wife, and then Clapton’s ex-wife.
This post is not about one of my favorite Bruce Springsteen songs as the title might suggest.
However, Springsteen is an example of what this blog discusses:
I was let into a Facebook group, Cover Me Baby, which features, as you can guess, cover songs — songs recorded by an act different from the first act that performed the song.
Readers of my Presty the DJ blogs know that I posted covers on occasion.
The irony of the first cover here is that the Pointer Sisters and other artists recorded Springsteen songs while Springsteen was in a dispute with his first manager that kept him out of recording two years after “Born to Run” was released.
One of the more famous — or infamous, depending on your perspective — early cover artists was Pat Boone, who recorded songs first recorded by black artists:
But Boone wasn’t the only one to do that:
In fact, nearly every rock band sings, and often records, cover songs until they generate enough of their own material. Or they record someone’s song they like.
There are some songs that are so old that no one really knows the original artist …
… and some songs you probably never realized were recorded more than once (which might make you ask why they were recorded more than once):
Linda Ronstadt has made an entire career of cover songs, in her pop and her Big Band iterations:
More often than not, the covering artist is best advised to do something different from the original …
… although that’s not easy if you’re covering, well, yourself:
More often than not, but not always, the covered song is not as good as the original.
And there is the rare instance of taking two different songs of the same title …
… and putting them together:
This is a topic that could go on indefinitely, choking bandwidth until the Internet grinds to a stop.
Anyone who watched the original (and superior) iteration of “Star Trek” knows that if someone is going to die on a mission to a planet, he or she is likely to be wearing a red uniform shirt.
True, or not? Something called Significance Magazine begs to differ:
The idea of red-shirted characters being frequently killed in Star Trek: The Original Series has become a pop culture cliché. But is wearing a redshirt in Star Trek as hazardous as it is thought to be? To find out, casualty figures for the Starship Enterprise were compiled using the casualty list provided by Memory Alpha.
Using what is known about Enterprise crew and casualty figures, suppose an Enterprise crew member has been killed. Discarding the 15 unknown casualties, redshirts consist of 60.0% of all fatalities where the uniform color is known; blue and gold uniforms are the remaining 40.0% of casualties. Redshirts are only 52.0% of the entire crew, but 60.0% of casualties, so what is the probability that the latest casualty was wearing a redshirt? The Enterprise often visits Starbases and takes on new crew members, so we assume sampling with replacement. Otherwise, the population size would change every time a crew member is killed.
Significance Magazine uses something called Bayes’ Theorem (of which I am unfamiliar because journalism is the opposite of math) to conclude:
There is a 61.9% chance that any given casualty is wearing a redshirt. This really does not help the insurance premiums of operations, engineering and security personnel. Three departments wear redshirts so it may be worthwhile to take a deeper look at the data to determine if a wearing a redshirt is as hazardous as it appears to be. …
There is a 64.5% chance that any given casualty in a redshirt is a member of security. We can also conclude there is only a 35.5% chance that any casualty in a redshirt is not a member of security. This is in spite of security being only 37.7% of the entire population of redshirts. So what does this mean for red-shirted crew members not in security? Remember, security, operations and engineering wear redshirts. The 15 unknown crew members are not included in this calculation. …
Although Enterprise crew members in redshirts suffer many more casualties than crew members in other uniforms, they suffer fewer casualties than crew members in gold uniforms when the entire population size is considered. Only 10% of the entire redshirt population was lost during the three year run of Star Trek. This is less than the 13.4% of goldshirts, but more than the 5.1% of blueshirts. What is truly hazardous is not wearing a redshirt, but being a member of the security department. The red-shirted members of security were only 20.9% of the entire crew, but there is a 61.9% chance that the next casualty is in a redshirt and 64.5% chance this red-shirted victim is a member of the security department. The remaining redshirts, operations and engineering make up the largest single population, but only have an 8.6% chance of being a casualty.
If I were being an ingrate here I would point out that two Star Trek redshirts, Chief Engineer Scott and communications Lt. Uhura, survived the entire three years, because they were regular cast members. A security guard was not a regular cast member (see? They were expendable!) until “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Of course, the whole thing falls apart there because red shirts and gold shirts (or “chartreuse” as described by Significance Magazine) were switched in ST:TNG, presumably for aesthetic reasons. The second series certainly didn’t kill red-shirted Captain Picard and Commander Riker. Worf and Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge were switched from red shirts to gold shirts in the second season.
The more pedestrian explanation might be an observation by David Gerrold, who wrote the funniest episode of the first series, “The Trouble with Tribbles.” Gerrold’s The World of Star Trek noted the difference between format and formula, and had a list of the number of episodes, particularly in the third season, that were rewarmed (or “repurposed” in today’s lingo) earlier episodes, or reused plot points thereof. Format: Explore an unexplored planet, where unexpected dangers arise: Formula: Beam down to a strange planet, have the scary being on the planet kill one of the redshirts. Or as one of the comments puts it:
To echo others, but maybe be a little more specific: the set of shirts we should be examining are the ones on landing parties. The general rule/joke is: “Four people beam down in a landing party: Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and some redshirt. Guess who’s not coming back?”
By the third season, creator Gene Roddenberry’s attention was wandering since it was obvious that “Star Trek,” which nearly didn’t survive to season three, wasn’t going to survive season four. (And in many instances, a cancellation of the third season might have been considered a mercy killing.) The series had lost some of its creative and producing talent, and it had run out of original story ideas, at least in Gerrold’s view.
And as proof some people have, or did have, too much time on their hands, another comment:
Here’s the thing … Because they were experimenting with things in [“Where No Man Has Gone Before,” TOS’ second pilot that became its third episode], both Mitchell and Kelso [who both died] are wearing beige operations shirts as Helm and Navigation, positions which were previously and subsequently “gold” command positions (at least in TOS). As a result, both were technically “red-shirts”, not gold (since these were not the old style chartreuse-colored uniforms). They also wear assignment patches used for operations in this episode. So the final count of gold and red shirts would be modified depending on whether you assign these deaths by color of shirt only, or whether you take into account their actual duties.
So the redshirt body count undercounts, according to this comment. If you find that illogical, you have company.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 