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The number one album today in 1968:
Today in 1969, the Supremes made their last TV appearance together on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew, with a somewhat ironic selection:
Today in 1970, Army veteran Elvis Presley volunteered himself as a soldier in the war on drugs, delivering a letter to the White House. Earlier that day, the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had declined Presley’s request to volunteer, saying that only the president could overrule him.
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The number one British album today in 1969 was the Rolling Stones’ “Let It Bleed”:
The number one British single today in 1980 came 12 days after its singer’s death:
The number one song today in 1986:
The number one album today in 1975 was “Chicago IX,” which was actually “Chicago’s Greatest Hits” (to that point):
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Dane County Republican Party chair Brandon Maly:
Are Wisconsin Republicans going to condemn themselves to perpetually losing elections?
The midterms were not a red wave, conservatives lost the Supreme Court in a landslide, and the 2023 elections were not good for Republicans nationwide. The 2024 election is no longer on the horizon; it is here.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. Republicans are guilty of this. How will there ever be a different result if we do not shred the old political playbook to pieces?
Let’s do the math. In the 2020 election, the difference in votes between Biden and Trump in Wisconsin was 20,682 votes. Republicans must make up that margin to win at the Presidential and Senate levels.
Republicans are condemning themselves to perpetually losing elections if they ignore Wisconsin’s blue cities. Milwaukee and Dane can produce votes for Republicans, and there are not enough votes to win solely by running up the margins in Wisconsin’s rural areas.
Milwaukee voters are moving to the WOW counties and bringing their Democrat voting habits with them. Milwaukee County has lost more than 20,000 residents since early 2020, many of whom have moved to the WOW counties. There is an opportunity for Republicans to fill the void in Milwaukee, the second largest deposit of Republican votes in Wisconsin, as the Democrats transfer their resources to the suburbs.
Are Republicans filling the void? No.
The Republican Party of Milwaukee is moving things in the right direction, but they cannot make the difference alone. Our poor results in Milwaukee should be a 5-alarm fire in the party on all levels. The question arises: can the Republican Party even respond to such urgent and time-sensitive political needs anymore?
Follow the stereotypes.
Milwaukee is another corrupt blue city. The vote drop happens at 3 am, and then we lose statewide elections. Republicans will not win Milwaukee outright, so focus on the suburbs.
Now, let’s follow the numbers.
As recently as 2014, Governor Scott Walker received 36% of the vote in Milwaukee. Republicans are now down to 28-29% of the vote.
Milwaukee will showcase the Republican National Convention next July. While the convention will serve as a significant economic boost to the area, its strategic location alone will not yield enough needed new votes to win. Republicans must target the low-turnout wards in Milwaukee.
On the other hand, Dane County is one of Wisconsin’s fastest-growing counties, taking on increased electoral importance every election.
Follow the stereotypes. Dane County doesn’t have Republicans. Madison is the Berkeley of the Midwest. My vote doesn’t matter in Dane County.
Now, let’s follow the numbers.
Waukesha Republicans, the center of the Wisconsin political universe on the right, are in shock and awe when I tell them that Dane County has the third-largest deposit of Republican votes in Wisconsin. I hear the same thing all across the state. This “wow factor” hurts the party’s ability to galvanize meaningful resources into get-out-the-vote efforts.
Senator Ron Johnson got 23% of the vote in Dane County in 2022, carrying the state by 1%. Michels received 21% of the vote in the gubernatorial election and lost. Kelly received 18% of the vote in this year’s Supreme Court election and lost in a landslide. The loss was so bad that 20% of progressive judge Janet Protasiewicz’s votes came from Dane County.
For reference, Dane County makes up 10% of Wisconsin’s population. Dane County also had more total votes in the Supreme Court election than any other county.
Dane County has seen a population growth of 80,000 residents since 2010, and the party has not turned out a single additional Republican voter. Dane County alone can and has sunk statewide election efforts.
Dane County residents have not heard from a prominent Republican candidate who seriously invested time and resources there since the days of Tommy Thompson. Republicans must fill the void to beat back demoralization and turn out voters.
Every vote in a blue area counts just as much as a red area in a statewide election. Are there enough new votes Republicans can win in Milwaukee and Dane to make up the 20,000 Presidential election year vote deficit? Yes, lose by less in blue areas.
In the Trump era, the playbook has been to run up the vote tally in the rural areas to offset Democrat margins in our major cities. This strategy works better in some states and relies heavily on favorable demographic trends. If Trump had done as well with the white, working-class against Biden as he had done against Clinton, he would have won. Our rural areas are not getting much redder.
Follow the stereotypes.
Rural voters come out from the hills to vote for Trump. Trump reengaged rural voters in the political process. The reality is that the peak of rural Wisconsin Republican turnout is when Donald Trump is on the ballot, and we are still at a deficit.
Now, let’s follow the numbers.
If the Republican nominee for President in 2024 were to do better in Wisconsin’s rural areas alone, would they win? If the nominee does 5% better in these areas, that would be a massive swing in just one presidential cycle. But let’s just say that there is a 5% swing in Republican’s favor.
Wisconsin’s 45 least populated counties comprised 364,174 votes of 1,610,184 President
Trump’s received in 2020. If the nominee were to do 5% better in the 45 least populated counties in Wisconsin, Republicans still would not make up the roughly 20,000 vote deficit.Republicans cannot rely on running up the margins in rural areas alone.
This column did not address the WOW counties on their own because leftists are spilling out from Milwaukee. Get to the root of the problem and recognize that the WOW counties are slowly moving to the left and are already politically oversaturated. Relying on an improvement there alone will not get Republicans statewide victories. Republicans, stop losing. Fill the void in Wisconsin’s blue areas.
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The biggest thing that happened today wasn’t in music, it was in movies, today in 1968:
The number one British single today in 1958:
Today in 1961, Elvis Presley got a dubious Christmas gift in the mail — his draft notice:
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The UW Board of Regents mess produced some clear winners and losers against a chaotic backdrop of flip-flopping votes and a feeble governor.
The Regents astonishingly voted on Saturday, 9-8, to thumb their noses at $800 million in funding for the University of Wisconsin, a new engineering building, other needed capital projects, raises for 34,000 employees and support for guaranteed admission for top-ranked Wisconsin high school students… all because they didn’t want to freeze DEI and shift some DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) folks to work with all students. The horrors!
Then, on Wednesday, in a sudden about-face, three Regents – Amy Bogost, Karen Walsh and Jennifer Staton, all Evers’ appointees – switched their votes, passing the compromise plan, which was crafted by Republicans in the state Legislature (namely Speaker Robin Vos) and UW System President Jay Rothman.
Let’s start with the losers.
Tony Evers
Wisconsin’s governor has never looked weaker. First, he became the object of mockery for appropriating the name of a dead baseball legend. Now, he swings at the Regents’ ball and whiffs. Evers never got on the right side of the compromise plan. He made the crucial mistake of coming out loud and clear in support of the Regents’ Saturday vote to kill the plan.
That means the supposed education governor just gave Republicans a pile of ads, reminding people who and what he was willing to sacrifice at the altar of DEI. Caught apparently flat-footed when his own appointed Regents started to flip, Evers issued not one, but two, word salad press releases (Britt was working hard that night) that gaslit Republicans in the Legislature.
If you sorted through all of the obfuscating nastiness, it became clear the governor was still on the wrong side of it all, disagreeing with a plan that even some of his OWN APPOINTEES eventually embraced.
It’s unclear what Evers was doing behind the scenes, but he’s never been more flat-footed in his public response. Seriously, governor, you really wanted to position AGAINST 34,000 working and middle-class state workers getting raises during an era of inflation and AGAINST top Wisconsin kids being guaranteed a seat in state schools??
And don’t get us started on that engineering building…
Either narrative is bad for Evers. Either he was trying to whip votes to kill the plan behind the scenes, and he failed to do so (we were told by a well-placed source that two of the “no vote” Regents were believed to be initially for the plan until they took a five-minute break on Saturday and came back against it….) Or, he didn’t try to exercise any influence, rendering him a bit player on an important debate. It’s hard to imagine a Tommy Thompson-style governor losing this one.
Jill Underly
Underly never got on the right side of this either. First, she missed the Saturday vote. It later turned out she was on a European vacation. The Regents’ meetings were by Zoom. She couldn’t find a hotel lobby in Europe to dial in? Then, bizarrely, on Wednesday, she arrogantly asked the entire state to wait for an answer until she could come back to vote. Again, she couldn’t find a hotel lobby in Europe that had working Internet.
Her office wouldn’t say which country she was visiting, claiming she had inconsistent internet. Again, they don’t have working Internet in Europe? What? The ridiculousness of it all was exposed when Regent Amy Bogost dialed in from… Thailand.
Was the Underly caper a last-ditch effort by Evers to scrounge up another vote to kill the plan? Or was it just an attempt by her to look like she wasn’t eschewing an important vote by lollygagging around Europe? We will never know.
DEI
Those bureaucrats with their six-figure salaries are going to still be getting their six-figure salaries, and some of them just have to help all students. The horrors! But the fact is that the ideology of division in the name of inclusion took a big hit.
We obviously support helping more underrepresented folks of all backgrounds, including racial minorities, get into the UW System and succeed there and in the workforce. However, this plan will help do that more than some DEI administrator with a corner office. The difference is how you get there. Expanding school choice, strengthening families, a strong economy, lowering the costs of higher education – these are all things that will help boost more people into college.
Shifting the UW more toward workforce development will help them succeed in the workforce and get something for all that debt. In other words, there are practical ways to boost underrepresented folks without acronym-filled titles that no one can fully define.
DEI was exposed as, in some cases, window dressing. Workforce development won the arm wrestle.
Political Appointees Decrying Politics
Regents John W. Miller and Dana Wachs get the hypocrisy prize. Both had the nerve to whine about the fact the situation was so politicized when both are … political appointees of Evers.
In fact, Miller is one of the state’s largest Democratic political donors and Wachs is a former…politician. So spare us your lectures on politics, guys. Miller actually accused the Legislature of bringing forth the plan to make a political statement in a statement that bashed the Legislature.
While some of the Regents’ opposition seemed heartfelt, these guys seemed like they were just trying to score against the GOP, at the expense of the state’s universities. Both are Tony Evers’ donors and appointees by the way. But they hate politics! Spare us.
Crazy Democratic Legislators
Crazy Democratic legislators rushed over each other to gloat and applaud their organizing efforts and initial success at getting Regents to reject $800 million to help students. One even called the plan “racist” (5,200 of the staff members initially denied raises are people of color, by the way).
In the end, they were left standing alone in the rain, shrieking to a party that had already moved on.
Mixed
The Regents Who Flipped
Unlike Evers and Underly, the Flipping Three eventually got on the right side of it all, but why didn’t they figure it out on Saturday? The explanations of Amy Bogost and Karen Walsh – something about needing more time to deliberate or understand the topic – were silly. Why are Regents taking votes if they don’t feel they’ve been properly briefed on them? The third Regent, a student, switched and voted for the plan after trashing Robin Vos in over-the-top tones.
Winners
Robin Vos
Masterful play, Speaker Vos. The Assembly Speaker out-maneuvered Evers and managed to get a bunch of Evers’ appointees to freeze DEI. No small feat.
We repeat. Robin Vos got a bunch of Evers’ appointees to freeze DEI.
He didn’t blink. They did. Vos doesn’t get enough credit for his master chess-playing among some corners of the right. It’s about time he did.
Vos managed to say he wasn’t eliminating DEI while eliminating DEI… he just did it over time by freezing DEI, including vacancies. So it will happen by attrition.
Some would have preferred if he took a sledgehammer to the bureaucracy and administrative bloat instead of a scalpel, but the fact is he has to deal with a divided government.
The Regents Who Got it Right the First Time
The Regents who got it right the first time, including some Evers’ appointees, deserve kudos.
They are three Scott Walker appointees among them: Bob Atwell, Mike Jones, and Cris Peterson. Perhaps more notable – because it takes more courage to buck your own side’s governor – Evers’ appointees Ashok Rai, Kyle Weatherly, Héctor Colón, and Jim Kreuser, as well as Wisconsin Technical College System Board President Mark Tyler, were supporters of the plan.
The Chancellors
Three chancellors, including Mark Mone at UWM, argued for the compromise plan saying it was needed for the future health of their institutions. In so doing, they showed pragmatic leadership, putting the needs of students and their campuses before ideology. Good job.
Jay Rothman
Along with Vos, he helped engineer this deal and he took a lot of unfair heat over it. The guy isn’t a radical flame-thrower, and that’s a good thing. He arguably got more than he gave. People need to give Rothman a break (he didn’t say what the Daily Cardinal said he said a couple weeks ago, either).
The Students
High-performing Wisconsin high school students will likely now be guaranteed acceptance into UW schools, which have increasingly turned to out-of-state and out-of-country students as cash cows to plug their budget holes.
Students will get a new engineering building and $32 million will go to help prepare them for the workforce. These things will help students of all races.
UW Staff
The 34,000 state workers were the hackeysack in this game among politicians and their appointees. And that sucks. However, in the end, they’re getting the raise. Many are NOT highly paid, and they’ve had years of meager and sometimes no raises.
UW Student Journalists
Student journalists at the Daily Cardinal and Badger Herald did a great job keeping the public informed in their news coverage. They had some of the most thorough coverage.
UW Donors
As reported by the Biztimes, UW donors applied pressure to get the deal done. As quoted in the article, “A lot of donors are going to take their money elsewhere if this isn’t turned around. I know a number of them. They said, ‘well, then we’re going to have to go somewhere else, because that’s an indication that they don’t want the building or want our money.’ It’s a big problem. A very big problem.”
Money talks when money walks.
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The Wall Street Journal:
Too many Republicans these days have lost their economic bearings. Look no further than a GOP Senate bill that would enact a carbon tariff—i.e., a new tax. In the name of punishing China, the legislation would punish American consumers and businesses.
The Foreign Pollution Fee Act, sponsored by Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, could well have been written by the Sierra Club and AFL-CIO. Among the carbon tariff’s biggest advocates is Donald Trump’s former trade adviser Robert Lighthizer, who favors tariffs in principle. So it’s worth deconstructing the misleading arguments that Mr. Cassidy and others are making for climate protectionism.
The bill would impose tariffs on 16 categories of goods produced in countries with higher CO2 emissions than the U.S. They include steel, aluminum, critical minerals, solar panels, wind turbines, crude oil, gasoline, petrochemicals, plastics, paper and lithium-ion batteries. Companies could lobby to have products added to the list, and you can bet they will.
Tariffs would be based on a foreign good’s relative “carbon intensity,” as calculated by a new National Laboratory Advisory Board on Global Pollution Challenges. The bill would expand the administrative state by creating a new bureaucracy with sweeping powers that would be hard for future Congresses to rein in.
U.S. production of most goods on the tariff list doesn’t come close to meeting domestic demand. Yet tariffs could be reduced only in limited circumstances—namely, for national security needs or if U.S. companies produce less than 5% of domestic demand. That means importing businesses won’t have an alternative to paying the tariffs, which would be filtered through supply chains and passed to consumers.
Though the U.S. is a net petroleum exporter, many refineries were built to process heavier foreign grades of crude and can’t easily switch to lighter shale blends. That means Americans would pay higher gasoline prices no matter how much domestic oil production increases.
Mr. Cassidy claims in a recent article in Foreign Affairs that “the fee is not a domestic carbon price,” by which he apparently means it isn’t imposed directly on U.S. companies and consumers. But he knows—or at least should know—that it will be absorbed by American businesses, workers and consumers, as all tariffs are.
The Louisiana Senator is also selling the bill with a misdirection worthy of Al Gore. He argues that “the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and other foreign governments have ignored international norms and agreements regarding environmental protection and pollute the world without consequence,” and the bill would hold these “polluters” accountable.
In Foreign Affairs he conflates hazardous air pollutants such as sulfates with carbon emissions, as the climate lobby also does. As a physician, Mr. Cassidy knows the difference. Particulates harm public health. Carbon emissions are ubiquitous, and if he really thinks they’re dangerous pollutants he should be honest and try to eliminate his state’s oil industry.
Yet the bill defines “pollution” as “greenhouse gas emissions.” This is a gift to Democrats who have been trying to codify the Supreme Court’s misconceived Massachusetts v. EPA (2007) ruling that let the Environmental Protection Agency regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants. This is the Administration’s legal justification for its back-door ban on gas-powered cars.
A carbon border tax would almost certainly prompt retaliatory duties from foreign governments, as Mr. Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs have done. These would also harm U.S. consumers. The bill also wouldn’t shield U.S. businesses from carbon tariffs that Europe might impose because the U.S hasn’t enacted a domestic carbon-pricing scheme.
The bill’s unstated purpose is to protect American businesses from foreign competition as they face rising energy costs at home owing to the government’s force-fed green-energy transition. Mr. Cassidy says China’s lax environmental standards have rendered U.S. manufacturers less globally competitive and destroyed American jobs.
He’s right that rising energy prices could discourage U.S. manufacturing investment and undercut Washington’s industrial policy. But layering a carbon tax on top of sundry green-energy subsidies would raise U.S. manufacturers’ costs and create a Rube Goldberg contraption of economic distortions.
The Senate’s leading wind producer, Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, is praising the Cassidy-Graham bill, which he says “creates the negotiating space to try to come with a bipartisan agreement.” Senate Democrats last Congress introduced two carbon tariff bills, which have the added virtue for progressives of raising revenue they can spend.
Some of the GOP’s strongest supporters of free trade and markets have recently retired, and the party’s protectionist wing is on the rise. But the GOP won’t be worth a dime’s worth of economic difference from Democrats if it embraces an idea that expands the administrative state, raises taxes, and increases prices amid damaging inflation.
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We begin with an entry from Great Business Decisions in Rock Music History: Today in 1961, EMI Records decided it wasn’t interested in signing the Beatles to a contract.
The number one single over here today in 1961:
Today in 1966, a friend of Rolling Stones Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, Tara Browne, was killed when his Lotus Elan crashed into a parked truck. John Lennon used Browne’s death as motivation for “A Day in the Life”:
The number one album today in 1971 was Sly and the Family Stone’s “There’s a Riot Going On”:
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Today in 1963, Carroll James of WWDC radio in Washington broadcast a Beatles song:
James, whose station played the song once an hour, got the 45 from his girlfriend, a flight attendant. Capitol Records considered going to court, but chose to release the 45 early instead.
(This blog has reported for years that James was the first U.S. DJ to play a Beatles song. It turns out that’s not correct — WLS radio in Chicago played “Please Please Me” in February 1963.)
Today in 1969, 50 million people watched NBC-TV’s “Tonight” because of a wedding:
The number one British single today in 1973:
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The number one British single today in 1965 wasn’t just one song:
Today in 1970, five Creedence Clearwater Revival singles were certified gold, along with the albums “Cosmo’s Factory,” “Willy and the Poor Boys,” “Green River,” “Bayou Country” and “Creedence Clearwater Revival”:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 