The number one song today in 1991:
Today in 1998, the members of Oasis were banned for life from Cathay Pacific Airways for their “abusive and disgusting behavior.”
Apparently Cathay Pacific knew it was doing, because one year to the day later, Oasis guitarist Paul Arthurs was arrested outside a Tommy Hilfiger store in London for drunk and disorderly conduct.
The high school boys basketball playoffs start this week. (Weather permitting in some places.) That means the NCAA college basketball tournaments are imminent.
Grantland has a story about college basketball’s tempo, or increasingly, lack thereof (which I wrote about a year ago):
It has become fashionable, of course, to assert that Division I college basketball is “in trouble,” that it has become so slow and staid and overcontrolled it might ultimately wither into irrelevance. Some of this is hyperbole, since there’s an obvious upside to the parity that low scoring engenders, and since the NCAA tournament is still a financial windfall, and since a team like Wisconsin, under Bo Ryan, can drag games into the 30s and still win games and fill seats. But it is impossible not to notice that something is happening, that the balance has been thrown off, and it is silly not to acknowledge that the overarching trend is impacting how people view college basketball. “I’m not a guy who’s too concerned about whether the game is popular or not,” says Ken Pomeroy, who pioneered the notion of advanced college basketball statistics at his website, “but it certainly hurts the perception of it.”
Here is what the numbers confirm: Overall scoring, at slightly less than 68 points per game, is at its lowest level in three decades, and possessions are growing longer and longer. The game, as a whole, is slower and less free-flowing than it used to be. There are distinct lulls, and transition baskets are more and more difficult to come by. Ask why this is happening, and it becomes a Rorschach test: You will hear a dozen hypotheses from a dozen different sources, ranging from the length of the shot clock to the increased physicality on the perimeter to poor shot selection to the lack of competent post players to the profusion of timeouts to the NBA’s one-and-done rule to the spike in coaches’ salaries, all of which are entirely speculative, and any of which might be at least somewhat viable.
The last of Michael Weinreb’s hypotheses leads to another that may or may not be tied to coach salaries, because it applies to high school coaches too, most of whom are paid in no more than four figures. Weinreb interviewed former Oklahoma coach Billy Tubbs, whose Sooner teams were among the nation’s scoring leaders:
Toward the end of his Oklahoma tenure, Tubbs says, he could feel the culture changing, veering toward the conservatism he both embraces outside of the game and despises within it. (In 1991, a few years before Tubbs left Oklahoma for TCU, overall scoring peaked at 77 points per game, and it’s been trailing downward ever since.) Tubbs brought up the shadow of “political correctness” with me several times, which seems like a bit of an oblique connection, but I think what he was trying to say is that the coaches who should be willing to gamble — coaches, like Tubbs, who are blessed with superior talent — simply don’t think it’s worth the risk anymore. And so they take command of everything that’s happening on the floor. They slow the game down to call offensive sets, and they play it safe on defense rather than risk giving up easy layups in transition. And the very notion of running wild like Tubbs’s teams did, or of throwing caution to the wind like Paul Westhead’s Loyola Marymount teams did, or of raising hell like Nolan Richardson’s Arkansas teams did, becomes a concept too fraught with potential danger to even consider implementing. The favorites now play at the underdog’s pace. And this, one coach told me, is how a team like Kansas loses to an obvious inferior like TCU.
“To take command of everything that’s happening on the floor” happens to blunt one of the supposed benefits of athletics. Players of team sports learn to work as a team, to realize the greater good is more important than the individual, and how to deal with success and failure. They also should learn decision-making on the fly, because in life sometimes you have to make important decisions quickly. Student–athletes do not learn when their coach does all the thinking and makes all the decisions. Employers do not want automatons working for them.
Of course, any story about slow-tempo basketball has obligatory shots at Wisconsin. Tubbs was not known for caring about others’ opinions when he coached, and that apparently hasn’t changed:
“The thing you’ve got to look at is if the stands are empty in the arena. I’m seeing a lot of empty seats. You can play really conservative if you fill the gym. At Wisconsin, they don’t know any better, do they?”
Tubbs’ rude comment about Wisconsin aside, he’s right about the financial issues, which, as I’ve argued before, apply to football as well. Division I college coaches of revenue sports (primarily football and men’s basketball, plus men’s hockey at Wisconsin) are judged not merely on wins and losses, but on whether they fill their stadiums. The revenue sports at D-I schools fund all the other sports. When Bret Bielema left Wisconsin for Arkansas, I argued then (and believe now) that it was a stupid move because he was in no danger of losing his UW job because the Badgers filled Camp Randall Stadium, whether or not fans were always pleased with what they were seeing, or paying.
Whether UW fans like games in the 40s or not, Bo Ryan is similarly in no danger of losing his Wisconsin job. The aforementioned Pomeroy ranks Wisconsin fifth best in Division I and second best in the Big Ten, despite its 19–8 record. Ryan’s accomplishments at UW — Big Ten regular-season and tournament titles, something UW never did under Dick Bennett, and an Elite Eight team, the only area in which Bennett did better — make Ryan arguably the best coach UW has ever had. (It is interesting to note, though, that the UW Athletic Department was pushing season tickets into the regular season.)
Ryan is an example of the value of old sportswriters. Sports commentators working today assume that Wisconsin has always played a glacially slow style of basketball, dating back before Ryan to Bennett. Few probably realize that when Ryan was the coach at UW–Platteville, his teams tried to run and press their opponents out of the gym; in fact, UWP once led Division III in scoring under Ryan. Today’s sportswriters are too dense to realize that maybe Ryan’s offensive style is based on Ryan’s conclusions based on available talent within the state of Wisconsin.
Adding more hate, if you want to call it that, is Awful Announcing:
Tuesday night CBS Sports Network Debbie Antonelli went the extra mile to try and help viewers at home watching Rutgers-Syracuse. The score at the half was 19-15 Rutgers as both teams combined to shoot 22.2% from the field. Antonelli left the booth and went to the scorers table to try and select a new game ball and change the offensive luck of both teams. …
If only we could get whoever’s calling the next Wisconsin game to try this …
I’ve watched, covered and announced games of every conceivable tempo. I admit to preferring a faster pace, having covered the fastest-paced team of all, Grinnell College. It’s not that every game needs to be played at Grinnell’s insane pace, though. There are high-quality deliberate-paced games. There are also deliberate-paced games that are boring to watch, and there seem to be an increasing number of those kinds of games.
We know how the most successful sport, pro football, would handle this. The National Football League will tinker with its rules whenever the league feels it’s necessary to stoke fan interest, usually toward more offense. Today’s NFL game ties back to 1978, when the league liberalized what offensive linemen could do and restricted what defensive backs could do. The NFL realizes that sports is entertainment, and non-entertained fans don’t buy tickets and don’t spend money at the stadium.
College sports is entertainment too, whether or not the NCAA wants to admit that. Sportswriter complaints shouldn’t be the impetus for NCAA rule changes. Dropping TV ratings and diminishing attendance should be the impetus for NCAA rule changes. Fewer eyeballs watching games, in person or on TV, will ultimately mean less financial windfall for the NCAA.
Perhaps the most effective way (as the excellent sports editor of The Platteville Journal pointed out) to improve scoring has nothing to do with, as has been suggested elsewhere, the distance of the three-point line or the length of the shot clock. (Scoring now is below where it was in the days before the three-point shot and the shot clock, which demonstrates that coaches and players adjust to rules changes.) It doesn’t have to do with the lane, either, even though I’ve previously proposed the international lane, which trapezoid shape might make camping in the lane more difficult for offensive players.
It has to do with the officials’ calling the game as it is meant to be played, as opposed to how it’s played now.
What does watching old NCAA basketball demonstrate? It demonstrates how the game is supposed to be officiated. Playing inside shouldn’t reach contact levels consistent with charges for battery. Touching the player with the ball should be a foul. Contact should mean fouls. Not only would calling fouls mean more points directly (assuming players started practicing free throws again), it would mean changes in defensive approaches away from today’s no-autopsy no-foul strategy.
Coaches are not dumb. If officials called the correct fouls, coaches who played excessively physical styles would lose games. (This means you, Tom Izzo!) They would either adjust or get fired (because their teams lost and fans stopped showing up) and would have to find jobs as football defensive assistant coaches.
This blog is not about past Corvette design proposals that did not come to fruition.
This is about how Chevrolet could have done a better job with the C7 Corvette, premiering later this year.
The outstanding Art and Colour Cars blog, which contributed to my popular (as in more than 2,800 views) Cadillac piece, improved the rear view of the C7.
First …
The Split-Window is Back! For my take on the new C7 Corvette Stingray I went backwards in time a bit. To begin with I restored its traditional four round taillights. I gave it a much more traditional greenhouse rather than the new car’s first time and rather forced rear quarter windows. I also added a thin central paint-colored spine to the hatchglass, following the existing indented roof panel. I also edited the side vents so they’d fit better with the last several generations. Detail changes include moving the new Stingray logo to the B pillar and flattened out the new “winged” crossed flags
It’s not clear to me why rear quarter windows are a good idea on a two-seat car. I understand why the ’63 split-window C2 is so popular, because it was found only on the ’63 Vettes. Of course, there’s a reason only the ’63 Vettes had a split rear window — drivers couldn’t see out the back. Now, though, with the ability to use opaque-on-the-outside tinted-from-the-inside window coverings, this might make sense.
For my second take on the C7, I decided to keep the idea of a rear quarter window, but I reshaped it into a much simpler graphic. By bringing this new side window to a point, I referenced the Corvette supercar prototype from the 1970s, the mid-engined 4-Rotor.At the back I created a set of aluminum-ringed quad circular taillight and replaced the new “V” crossed flags emblem with a “proper” set of flags from ’72 ‘Vette. I cut down on the visual height of the bodysides by using another ’70s styling trick: Argent colored rocker panels. The cool new Stingray logo has been moved to the B pillar when it’s noticeable every time you open the door.
The aforementioned rear quarter window is a clever tribute for the AstroVette. Either of these is an improvement from what Chevy is introducing, although I do have to give Chevy credit for one C7 feature:
What, you ask? A green Corvette? (To be precise, Lime Rock Green.) Aren’t all Corvettes red (as the book on the creation of the C5 claimed)?
No, there are green Corvettes:
Those are all Corvettes in the standard-for-that-year green color. Most green Corvettes were dark green (for instance, “Glen Green” in 1965, “Fathom Green” in 1969, “Donnybrooke Green” one year later in the first Corvette I recall seeing down the street). Variations of lime started intruding in the early ’70s, but went the way of polyester disco outfits.
Some people decided to choose green after buying their cars, and some, unable to choose one shade of green, decided upon “all of the above”:
The number one single today in 1960:
Its remake 16 years later — which I had never heard of before writing this blog — finished 12 places below the original:
The number one British single today in 1962:
The Republican Party, controlling half of Congress, appears to have no theme and no guiding principles besides opposing Barack Obama.
Robert Zubrin suggests some guiding principles for the GOP:
It should be clear by now that merely waging guerrilla warfare against the Obama administration on a miscellaneous set of peripheral issues won’t do. Rather, what is needed is an independent agenda organized around a central theme that is readily comprehensible to the American people and designed to deal with the critical problems facing the nation. That agenda can only be economic growth.
Economic growth must be the central issue because it is only through growth that the devastating threat of national bankruptcy can be averted. Furthermore, it is only by reviving American economic growth that the West’s global predominance can be sustained, and peace and freedom kept secure around the world. Finally, it is only through economic growth that we can provide the millions of jobs for which Americans are crying out.
The choice that must be set before the body politic is between a set of policies that offer the prospect of real economic growth and a set that is inimical to that end. These can be laid out in a number of areas.
1. Stop red-tape strangulation. The proliferation of bureaucracy, regulations, and red tape at every level of government has been a problem for some time. But it has become especially onerous during President Obama’s tenure, to the extent that it has crippled the administration’s own efforts to build anything through its stimulus bill’s public-works projects. For companies and individuals, the impositions have been even worse, with the worst culprit being the EPA. It has denied or delayed millions of construction permits, on pretexts ranging from preserving imaginary rest-stops for migratory wildlife to halting suburban sprawl. It has prevented innumerable individuals from improving their own property, even when improvements — such as draining disease-spreading swamps — are necessary for public health and safety. It has created mountains of unjustifiable, indecipherable, and fundamentally unknowable regulations and imposed trillions of dollars in cumulative compliance and litigation costs on businesses of every description, thereby preventing their expansion or even driving them into bankruptcy.
2. Make energy plentiful and cheap. Energy powers our economy, both literally and figuratively. The more that energy costs, the less economic activity there can be. This is shown dramatically in the figure below, which compares U.S. unemployment rates with oil prices over the past four decades. Notice that every time the price of oil rises, American unemployment rates shoot up shortly thereafter.
The policy of the Obama administration is to employ regulatory strangulation to drive up the price of energy. This must be exposed and opposed for what it is: a policy of forced economic contraction. Items to be identified as part of this policy include:
- Efforts to impede the development of oil resources by impeding exploration, discouraging drilling, or holding up the building of infrastructure required for transport. The U.S. is the world’s leading oil importer; our adversaries are the world’s leading exporters. Any policy that restricts our oil production and thereby protects the ability of the Islamist-led OPEC cartel to rig high oil prices hurts the U.S. and helps our adversaries.
- Efforts to impede the development of natural gas by creating regulatory obstacles to fracking and other technologies.
- Efforts to constrict the nuclear industry. …
- Efforts to kill coal-fired power generation. Nuclear power accounts for 20 percent of American electricity, while coal produces 40 percent. Obama’s EPA recently set forth new regulations that will, at a minimum, vastly increase the price of coal-generated power, and that will most likely, as is their clear intent, wipe the industry out altogether. …
Beyond opposing the destructive efforts of the Obama administration to constrict our energy production, the GOP needs to take the lead in forcing open the transportation-fuel market to non-petroleum resources. In particular, this means methanol, a very clean-burning liquid fuel that can be cheaply made from coal or natural gas — both resources that the U.S. possesses in abundance. Methanol is currently selling for $1.30 per gallon, without any subsidy. Nearly all cars sold in America for the past five years have flex-fuel capabilities that can be enabled by a properly skilled mechanic at little expense, and that would allow them to be driven with equal facility on gasoline, methanol, ethanol, or any mixture of the three, thereby opening the fuel market to free-market competition that would drive prices down across the board. Unfortunately, the EPA currently bans the commercial marketing of such conversions, as well as the sale of motor-vehicle methanol fuel in concentrations above 5.4 percent. These artificial regulatory obstacles to making full use of our own fuel resources are causing immense economic harm to America and need to be removed.
3. Defeat the war on carbon. This is closely related to the energy issue, but it has a broader aspect as well. President Obama has declared that a central goal of his second term will be to reduce humanity’s use of carbon. Yet as can be seen in figure 2, below, which graphs the advance in human well-being over the past 200 years (as measured by average global per capita GDP, in inflation-adjusted 2010 dollars), a sizable portion of the world’s population has managed an almost miraculous escape from poverty over the past two centuries.
As the graph shows, this has been driven largely by carbon use. But with the average human being still surviving on less than $9,000 per year, it is clear that we still have a long way to go. If the bulk of the human race is to have the opportunity for a decent life, it is clear that the world needs to use a lot more carbon. …
4. Hold the line on taxes. Given the massive federal deficits, there is little prospect for any tax cuts that might contribute significantly to economic recovery. Even if there were, such a program would likely not be comprehensible to the public. Consequently, the emphasis must be on deregulation as the key strategy for enabling economic growth. At the same time, however, economy-depressing tax increases must be avoided. In particular, now that the issue of general income-tax rates has been settled, ideologues associated with the Democratic party are advancing proposals for collecting new government revenue through carbon taxes. These need to be opposed not just as efforts to continue to fund the cancerous growth of economy-strangling government bureaucracy (which they are) but as ultra-regressive measures that place a disproportionate burden on the poor, the working class, the middle class, and businesses that produce real things. Carbon taxes are much more regressive even than sales taxes, because high-priced prestige items, such as high-fashion dresses, generally involve no more carbon in their production than their low-priced counterparts. Furthermore, while sellers of junk stock or real-estate derivatives need use no carbon, those who make their money producing steel, food, plastics, paper, fabrics, cars, airplanes, buildings, or energy — in short, nearly everything making up the material basis of society — do indeed use carbon. In short, there could be no worse taxes than carbon taxes, nor any better means conceivable by which to harm the economy and the average American. …
In any case, the central issue is … the freedom to use technology — new or old — to create wealth. At every turn, the administration’s policy is to restrict such freedom, thereby constricting the nation’s potential for economic growth. Such a “limits to growth” strategy is not just an attack on enterprising businessmen. It is a betrayal of the hopes of all, but most particularly the poor, who counted on Obama to lead them to the Promised Land.
I’ve written before here about how economic growth is dependent on energy. Suggesting that economic growth can take place while less energy is produced is completely wrong. If generating more energy also means the destruction of OPEC, well, that’s what you call positive unintended consequences.
The budget deficit is simply too large to cut or tax away. We will never achieve anything in this country if we do not substantially increase economic growth far beyond this Recovery In Name Only (until the feds figure out we’re actually in a recession, which will be later this spring). We need to increase business profits (all businesses, not merely those on the S&P 500) and family incomes.
That growth theme is something that Gov. Scott Walker should have made a central theme of his State of the State speech last night. Wisconsin’s unemployment rate is less than the state average, but not enough jobs are being created. That is because Walker and the Legislature haven’t done nearly enough to undo the Doyle administration, beginning with the $2.1 billion tax increase and excessive regulators (both in number and what they do). It’s not enough to get elected; you have to actually do something once in office, like tax cuts you’d actually notice.
The number one British album today in 1970 for the first of eight times on top of the British charts:
The number one British single today in 1976 was about a supposed event 12 years earlier:
The number one single today in 1981:
Anyone who works in the news media should be repelled by this admission from Politico:
President Barack Obama is a master at limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House.
Not for the reason that conservatives suspect: namely, that a liberal press willingly and eagerly allows itself to get manipulated. Instead, the mastery mostly flows from a White House that has taken old tricks for shaping coverage (staged leaks, friendly interviews) and put them on steroids using new ones (social media, content creation, precision targeting). And it’s an equal opportunity strategy: Media across the ideological spectrum are left scrambling for access.
The results are transformational. With more technology, and fewer resources at many media companies, the balance of power between the White House and press has tipped unmistakably toward the government. This is an arguably dangerous development, and one that the Obama White House — fluent in digital media and no fan of the mainstream press — has exploited cleverly and ruthlessly. And future presidents from both parties will undoubtedly copy and expand on this approach. …
The frustrated Obama press corps neared rebellion this past holiday weekend when reporters and photographers were not even allowed onto the Floridian National GolfClub, where Obama was golfing. That breached the tradition of the pool “holding” in the clubhouse and often covering — and even questioning — the president on the first and last holes.
Obama boasted Thursday during a Google+ Hangout from the White House: “This is the most transparent administration in history.” The people who cover him day to day see it very differently.
“The way the president’s availability to the press has shrunk in the last two years is a disgrace,” said ABC News White House reporter Ann Compton, who has covered every president back to Gerald R. Ford. “The president’s day-to-day policy development — on immigration, on guns — is almost totally opaque to the reporters trying to do a responsible job of covering it. There are no readouts from big meetings he has with people from the outside, and many of them aren’t even on his schedule. This is different from every president I covered. This White House goes to extreme lengths to keep the press away.”
One authentically new technique pioneered by the Obama White House is extensive government creation of content (photos of the president, videos of White House officials, blog posts written by Obama aides), which can then be instantly released to the masses through social media. They often include footage unavailable to the press.
This may produce a yawn from those who are not in the news media. It shouldn’t. If the news media was doing its proper job and following its historic role, people in the media would be doing the old-fashioned work of journalism — pestering politicians, and when they refuse to talk, cultivating sources — instead of whining about how the Obama administration won’t play fair with them.
The default position for the news media should be suspicion of every elected official, and the more power they have, the more suspicious the media should be. The past 100 years of this country, and probably before that, demonstrate that politicians will do anything to keep power once they get it. Remember that phrase about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable? Politicians are the most comfortable of all.
For those in the media too young to remember, this is what the media should be doing:
ABC-TV reporter Sam Donaldson was famously known for walking right past the line of rudeness to presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Donaldson’s best line probably was: “As a political reporter questioning public officials, I say only half facetiously that the only way to avoid being seen as a partisan is to be equally vicious to everyone.”
This paragraph, however, is precious:
Conservatives assume a cozy relationship between this White House and the reporters who cover it. Wrong. Many reporters find Obama himself strangely fearful of talking with them and often aloof and cocky when he does. They find his staff needlessly stingy with information and thin-skinned about any tough coverage. He gets more-favorable-than-not coverage because many staffers are fearful of talking to reporters, even anonymously, and some reporters inevitably worry access or the chance of a presidential interview will decrease if they get in the face of this White House.
So what? The media has been in the tank for Obama since well before he became the least qualified person to become president in this nation’s history. The media generally is in the tank for Democrats because they agree with them, particularly in Democrats’ antipathy toward business. (Reporters have a low opinion of two groups of their coworkers — (1) their bosses, and (2) people on the business side, including account representatives.) The media hasn’t been reporting about the crappy state of the economy, as demonstrated by historically high unemployment numbers (which are only half the actual number of unemployed and underemployed). The media was in the tank for Bill Clinton throughout the ’90s for different reasons — because Clinton reminded them of themselves.
Why are we not hearing, every single day, from every single media outlet that covers Obama, how Obama is ducking the news media? Breitbart’s John Nolte explains:
As we all know, the media are far from helpless; Politico is far from helpless; VandeAllen is far from helpless. Apparently, though, something brought on a wave of shame, and as a response to all this self-revulsion, VendeAllen has decided to craft a public excuse for the media that claims the institution is a victim, not an accomplice.
The truth, however, is that when it really wants something, there’s nothing the media can’t get. All that’s required is coordinated Narrative pressure that says, “Do this, or you will pay a political price.” The media do this all the time … to Republicans. The recipe is simple and startlingly effective:
1. The media decide they want something, like for Mitt Romney to stop criticizing Obama about Libya.
2. The media as a whole coordinate a Narrative that mercilessly whack-a-moles Mitt Romney every time he brings up Libya.
3. Mitt Romney shuts up about Libya.
Another example:
1. The media decide they want something, like to help Obama win re-election.
2. At the very same time the media choose to ignore the scandals around high-profile Democrat Jesse Jackson Jr., they decide to hang around Mitt Romney’s neck one stupid statement about abortion made by some nobody-Republican in Missouri.
3. Using this statement, the media as a whole coordinate a months-long War-On-Women Narrative that mercilessly punishes Romney and the GOP for something they didn’t say and immediately repudiated.
Through the power of a coordinated Narrative, time and again, we’ve seen the media get what they want, when they want. What we never see, though, is this Narrative turned against Obama. But I can’t begin to count how many times this Narrative has been used to protect Obama. …
The thing is this, though, it’s all a ruse, a scam, a hustle, a racket. If the media admit they are part of the Democratic Party, that’s the day they begin to lose power. The shield of objectivity must be protected at all costs, even if it means having VandeAllen hold the media up for ridicule as a weak, helpless victim. But all you need do is look around to see the truth. …
Millions are suffering in Obama’s failed economy, but the media are talking instead about the divisive social issues Obama wants to talk about (gun control, immigration).
Four Americans died in Libya; the unanswered questions are legion. But it’s those who demand answers that feel the power of the media, not those who refuse to answer.
The media have plenty of power to get what it wants from Obama. But what the media want is to protect their lover; even a lover who treats them like the prostitutes they are.
Once upon a time, reporters internally rated themselves by how much politicians hated them. That was before journalists wanted to be liked. If you want to be liked, get a dog.
The Beatles had quite a schedule today in 1963. They drove from Liverpool to London through the night to appear on the BBC’s “Parade of the Pops,” which was on live at noon.
After their two songs, they drove back north another three hours to get to their evening performance at the Swimming Baths in Doncaster.
The number one song today in 1965:
The polls are now open statewide for today’s state Supreme Court primary election. (And a very few other local races.)
The Supreme Court choice is easy. To view Vince Megna on the Supreme Court may cause a possibly fatal attack of laughter. Marquette University Prof. Ed Fallone could serve on the Supreme Court (one need not be a judge to serve, as Justice David Prosser demonstrates).
Fallone’s disqualifications begin with his friends, as listed by Right Wisconsin:
Rep. Gwen Moore – On Friday, the Fallone campaign announced the endorsement of Congresswoman Gwen Moore. Just citing the most recent antics from Rep. Moore include an incoherent rant that a 2nd Amendment without limits would lead to citizens acquiring submarines, she told MSNBC that abortion “affirms motherhood,” and just last year she declared efforts to curb welfare fraud at strip clubs and liquor stores to be “mean spirited.” …
Kathleen Falk – Fallone’s campaign to be an “independent” justice on the Supreme Court includes the endorsement of the Big Labor’s failed recall candidate. The Dane County liberal allegedly signed a blood pledge with labor bosses during the 2012 recall primary stating that she would veto the state budget unless collective bargaining rights were restored. Falk embarrassingly lost to Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett by 24 points, who went on to lose to Gov. Scott Walker by 7 points. Yikes.
United Wisconsin – Ed Fallone signed a recall petition for Governor Scott Walker. In fact, Fallone was so brazen in his recall fever that he wrote he saw no issue with judges signing the recall, even writing they should not have to recuse themselves from cases involving Gov. Scott Walker. So, naturally the group that organized the recall effort against Gov. Walker endorsed Fallone’s candidacy. How did that whole recall thing turnout anyway?
Madison Teachers Inc. – The Madison teachers union was quick to endorse Ed Fallone’s candidacy, but this might be one that he would like to stay hidden. MTI of course were early organizers of the February 2011 protests at the Capitol and earned the disgust and ire of many Wisconsinites when teacher absences forced Madison schools to close for 4 days.
Former Rep. Dave Obey – The former congressman and current lobbyist also endorsed the campaign of Ed Fallone. … Obey was the epitome of big government liberalism.
Since I gave up my political idealism many years ago, I’m going to spell out what’s at stake today and April 2 — correct Supreme Court decisions. Government’s gobbling up power generally, and the courts’ assuming for themselves the role of a superlegislature, mean that the highest courts in the state and the country are merely, to paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, the continuation of politics by other means.
The state Supreme Court is controlled by four conservative justices, including incumbent Pat Roggensack. Not every decision is a 4–3 decision, but unless you’re OK with public employee collective bargaining reforms being overturned, or a “right” to a certain amount of school spending being discovered, or the gutting of our Second Amendment rights and our right to hunting and fishing — both of which are part of the state Constitution, not that that matters to the court’s liberal minority — Roggensack needs to remain on the Supreme Court.
Much has been written about the court’s discord. I really could not care less if Prosser and Justice Ann Walsh Bradley are having knife fights. I would not care if Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson has voodoo dolls of her four conservative colleagues. The court system is simply another level of politics, and politics is a zero-sum game — one side wins, the other side loses. Vote accordingly today, and expect more on this subject in six weeks or so.
It is refreshing, though rare, to see a liberal publication like The New Republic take Barack Obama to task for the right reasons:
Last summer, President Barack Obama expressed the hope that, if he won the upcoming election, “the fever may break”—a reference, of course, to Republican obstructionism in Congress, the House in particular. Obama won the election; the fever did not break. Why not? In an interview with The New Republic last month, Obama argued that gerrymandering was to blame:
The House Republican majority is made up mostly of members who are in sharply gerrymandered districts that are very safely Republican and may not feel compelled to pay attention to broad-based public opinion, because what they’re really concerned about is the opinions of their specific Republican constituencies.
It’s not surprising that Obama holds this view, since much of the mainstream media does, too. But the president is wrong: Republicans aren’t in safe districts because of gerrymandering; increasing the number of competitive districts wouldn’t necessarily make Republicans more likely to support the president’s agenda; and it’s even possible that the number of moderate Republicans has been inflated by gerrymandering in blue states.
Republicans reside in safely conservative districts for a simple reason: It’s difficult to draw competitive districts in a deeply polarized country. Americans are geographically segregated along a variety of demographic lines, and most demographic groups side decidedly with one party or the other. African Americans, for instance, are heavily concentrated in urban areas, while white evangelical Christians dominate the Southern countryside. Since “fair” congressional districts preserve geographic integrity and tend to promote homogeneous districts, even a fair redistricting process would leave Republicans in deeply conservative districts.
Consider Texas, where every Republican is nestled in a safe district. While one might be tempted to blame gerrymandering, even a Democratic-led gerrymander wouldn’t yield competitive districts there. …
And Texas is not the extreme example you might think; it’s actually representative of the South. The combination of de facto segregation, extreme racial polarization, and the Voting Rights Act (which requires the creation of minority-majority districts) ensure that Republicans preside over extraordinarily red districts in the former Confederacy. …
Further north, similar but weaker forces reduce the number of competitive districts. Northern suburbs are more politically diverse, so there’s room for more competitive districts than in the South. But northern cities are just as Democratic and the white hinterlands are more than conservative enough to be safely Republican. …
Even if a gerrymander created a modest number of artificially balanced districts, it might not moderate the House Republican caucus. In a useful if underreported piece, John Sides used data from political scientists Simon Jackman and Nolan McCarty to show that there is only a weak relationship between the partisanship of a district and the partisanship of its representative. Put differently: The Republicans from blue states just aren’t much more moderate than their peers from blood-red districts. Don’t be surprised: Recall that the GOP was all but entirely unified in its opposition to the Affordable Care Act and the Recovery Act. Since even Republicans from competitive districts opposed most of the president’s agenda, it’s difficult to argue, as Obama has, that general-election pressures are responsible for polarization. …
Could fairer districts moderate Republicans? Perhaps. The House leadership might be more inclined to compromise if they believed their control was at stake—as it would be without gerrymandering. On the other hand, the loss of moderate northern Republicans would make the House GOP caucus even more conservative. But this isn’t the rationale advanced by Obama, or others who blame the Hill’s polarization on safe, gerrymandered districts, rather than fingering the real (and simpler) culprit: the wide ideological divide between conservatives and liberals. Maybe that’s why the president hasn’t been able to break the fever: He’s misdiagnosed its cause.
Alternative diagnosis: The gap between conservatives and liberals is Obama’s fault, for failing to govern as a moderate in a divided nation.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 