After a one-year absence, I will be announcing high school playoff football tonight when Lodi plays Platteville at UW–Platteville. If you’re in Grant County, you can tune in to 1280 or 1590 AM. If you’re online, you can go to wglr.com and select the appropriate Sports Stream.
As I pointed out a year ago on this blog and mentioned this week, I have some postseason history not with Platteville, but with Lodi, which played Ripon in consecutive seasons last decade. The 2005 Division 4 Level 4 game between Ripon and Lodi at Beaver Dam was a classic with a strange finish. After a pair of fourth-down holds by each team, Lodi took over at its own 1-yard line inside the last two minutes, with the score tied 14–14. You wonder at that point whether a team would try to move the ball or just hold and take its chances in overtime, but I never got that thought out because Lodi chose the worst possible time to fumble. Three plays later, Ripon scored to take a 21–14 lead.
Then came the weird part. Before the kickoff my partner suggested, in jest, an onside kick. We laughed. The ensuing kickoff spun out of bounds. The Lodi coach made Ripon rekick. The rekick went up in the air, looked as if it hit something on the air (winds from the south hit 35 mph), came back and landed in front of a Ripon player, who decided this was a good time to pounce on the ball. So instead of a series with the wind to try to tie the game, Lodi got one play, a Hail Mary pass that was swatted down. Ripon went on the following Thursday to win its second state title in three years.
One year later, Ripon was back in the playoffs, but unseeded, at undefeated and number-one-seeded … Lodi. The Blue Devils figured to be highly motivated after how the previous season had ended, and indeed the Blue Devils led at one point 20–7, seemingly unconcerned that two drives ended in field goals instead of touchdowns.
Ripon, however, got its offensive act together and scored the next 21 points to take a 28–20 lead. Lodi scored but failed on a two-point conversion to pull to within 28–26. When the Blue Devils got the ball back, they marched into position for the game-winning field goal, which ended in … “BLOCKED! RIPON WINS!!!”
So I’m looking forward to tonight. The high school postseason is great because of its finality. One bad game — for that matter, one bad quarter or even moment — and boom goes your season and, if you’re a senior not skilled enough to play on Saturdays, your career. The pressure from the finality of that is great to watch, unless you’re a player or, I suppose, a parent.
There have been plenty of really terrible colors in the automotive world, and many more that, like bellbottoms, seemed fashionable at the time. But don’t take this list the wrong way. We’d never want to see these colors on a car of our own, but it would be a tragedy if car companies didn’t offer weird, unexpected and, yes, ugly colors.
10.) 1970s Green
We’re not exactly sure what to call this pea soup of a color, but it has aged about as well as fondue parties and Cher.
9.) Pale Yellow
A nice strong killer bee yellow looks good on everything from Dodge Chargers to Lamborghinis, but the limp-wristed pale hues like Subaru offered for a while just look sad.
8.) Prius C Orange
Again, orange is a fantastic color for cars, and we love to see it on anything from old Porsches to the new Boss 302 Mustang. The new Prius C’s bluish tangerine is just too weak and too flat to look good, though.
7.) Kia Sorento White Sand Beige
Some colors pick up the lines of a car ad make them really stand out. Kia’s discontinued off-white did the exact opposite, making the whole car look flat and dull.
6.) 1990s Teal
This cheap, thin teal used to be on everything, especially if it came out of a Hyundai or Ford (it was called “calypso green”) plant. No matter how many Power Rangers posters you have on the wall, or how many times you’ve thrown “I Love The ‘90s” parties, this color still sucks donkey balls.
Excuse me? Green is my favorite color. I’ve had one greenish car, a 1991 Ford Escort GT in Cayman Green Metallic, what Jalopnik and others call “teal.”
4.) Mary Kay Pink
Maybe it’s because we see this color almost exclusively on bloated front-wheel-drive Cadillacs in South Beach (like the one above), but man is Mary Kay pink a bad color. Pink can be fun and bold (think big 1950s cruisers), but Mary Kay’s giveaway metallic always looks weak and sad.
3.) Baby Puke Yellow
The beloved E46 M3 (and apparently this BMW M Coupe) came in this fantastic shade of expelled gastric content called “phoenix yellow.” Amazingly, there are dedicated phoenix yellow enthusiasts.
2.) Morning Piss Gold
PT cruisers and Toyota Yarises were done up in this metallic bronze for a few years, again looking every bit like some form of human waste.
1.) Beige
Most bad colors are at least distinctive and in some way interesting. The champagne beige that you find on cars like the Camry is so unbelievably boring, so oppressively inoffensive that we can’t stand to see it on another car.
No less than 70% of new cars sold in North America last year were white, black, grey or silver. Jalopnik readers know that’s a shame. They picked ten awesome alternatives to boring old grayscale.
10.) Lime Green
Lime green is surprisingly good at bringing out the best in a small car. It makes the new Mazda 2, for instance, look like an adorable little tree frog and it turns something like a Lamborghini just into something from another planet.
9.) Brown
People have hated brown for being the color of choice for big, boring old family sedans in the ‘70s (not the highest accolade), but the color is coming back into fashion. If you still aren’t sure it’s one of the finest car colors out there, look at it on Steve McQueen’s classic Ferrari and eat your words.
8.) Dolphin Blue
Silver is played out. Get your car in a light metallic grey/blue and it will look a thousand times better.
7.) Arena Red
There are many more fantastic takes on red than the usual flat shade you find on 1990s Dodges. We like a dark metallic candy apple best.
6.) Metallic Green
We have already professed our love for British Racing Green, so we will also mention a deep metallic green with a bit of blue looks great on just about any car. Even a Camry looks good in it. …
3.) Inka Orange
These days, you only see a good orange on Lamborghinis. That’s a shame. Let the common folk enjoy a good, electrified orange, like the kind you get on McLarens or old BMWs.
The shifting purple/green you find on TVRs and Mustangs is a love it or hate it color. And we can’t support that enough. More people should take these kinds of risks with their cars, and not doom us to an endless sea of silver and grey
Brown can be OK depending on the car and, more importantly, the shade of brown. We had a 1973 AMC Javelin in Cordoba Brown Metallic with a gold stripe, which began cracking approximately 27 minutes after the car got into our driveway.
The dark red car was our 1975 Chevrolet Caprice:
The predecessor to the Caprice was our 1969 Chevy Nomad wagon in LeMans Blue:
The number one British album today in 1967 was not the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”; it was the soundtrack to “The Sound of Music,” two years after the movie was released, on the soundtracks’ 137th week on the charts:
Up to a point, American politics reflects abiding philosophical divisions. But people who follow politics closely — whether voters, activists or pundits — are often partisans first and ideologues second. Instead of assessing every policy on the merits, we tend to reverse-engineer the arguments required to justify whatever our own side happens to be doing. Our ideological convictions may be real enough, but our deepest conviction is often that the other guys can’t be trusted.
How potent is the psychology of partisanship? Potent enough to influence not only policy views, but our perception of broader realities as well. A majority of Democrats spent the late 1980s convinced that inflation had risen under Ronald Reagan, when it had really dropped precipitously. In 1996, a majority of Republicans claimed that the deficit had increased under Bill Clinton, when it had steadily shrunk instead. Late in the Bush presidency, Republicans were twice as likely as similarly situated Democrats to tell pollsters that the economy was performing well. In every case, the external facts mattered less than how the person being polled felt about the party in power. …
In 2006, Gallup asked the public whether the government posed an “immediate threat” to Americans. Only 21 percent of Republicans agreed, versus 57 percent of Democrats. In 2010, they asked again. This time, 21 percent of Democrats said yes, compared with 66 percent of Republicans.
In other words, millions of liberals can live with indefinite detention for accused terrorists and intimate body scans for everyone else, so long as a Democrat is overseeing them. And millions of conservatives find wartime security measures vastly more frightening when they’re pushed by Janet “Big Sis” Napolitano (as the Drudge Report calls her) rather than a Republican like Tom Ridge.
Is there anything good to be said about the partisan mindset? On an individual level, no. It corrupts the intellect and poisons the wells of human sympathy. Honor belongs to the people who resist partisanship’s pull, instead of rowing with it.
But for the country as a whole, partisanship does have one modest virtue. It guarantees that even when there’s an elite consensus behind whatever the ruling party wants to do (whether it’s invading Iraq or passing Obamacare), there will always be a reasonably passionate opposition as well. Given how much authority is concentrated in Washington, especially in the executive branch, even a hypocritical and inconsistent opposition is better than no opposition at all.
Last thing first: Expecting consistency and uprightness from human beings is an exercise in futility, if not silly naïveté. Douthat also ignored the reality that the first purpose of political parties once they’re created is not to espouse a particular political philosophy, it’s to win elections.
I’m not a Republican for several reasons, beginning with my line of work. Journalists have biases because human beings have biases. A journalist needs, however, to express his or her opinions in appropriate places, which include clearly marked opinion columns and the polling place, not signing publicly accessiblepoliticalpetitions. If those journalists who signed petitions in support of the recall of Gov. Scott Walker find their careers hampered because they are now publicly viewed as biased, it’s their own damn fault.
Republicans are also complicit with Democrats (and, frankly, the news media) in the conspiracy to keep incumbents in office, and to continually grow the size and scope of government. Democrats deserve one or two points for honesty (if such a thing is possible in politics) in that since Franklin Roosevelt’s day they have never been for smaller government. Republicans say they are, and then grow government, just in different areas from Democrats.
When you claim to be a member of a political party, that puts you in the situation, it seems to me, of having to defend the dumber or ineffective things the party does or its elected officials or candidates do. I am unwilling to defend the novel biological theories of U.S. Rep. Todd Akin (R–Missouri) or the stupid statement of state Rep. Roger Rivard (R–Rice Lake). Other conservative bloggers may not feel that way, but if I feel like criticizing Gov. Scott Walker, I do. On the other hand, Democrats defend Barack Obama for performance in office that would get a Republican pilloried. (I’d like to read Democrats’ defense of this.)
Which brings to mind my next reason from the shrinking idealist within me: If we are a nation of laws, not men, then we should be a nation of ideas, not politicians and not political parties. The thing I find truly disgusting about today’s Democratic Party is its god-like worship of Barack Obama. (Perhaps it’s because more atheists are Democrats than Republicans.) You’d expect brainless idolatry from Michelle Obama; you should not expect it of people who rip Republicans for being too religious.
The Wisconsin State Journal’s Chris Rickert passed on one good point in an otherwise vapid column:
Arguably at the forefront of efforts to understand what fuels political stance-taking in Wisconsin is UW-Madison associate political science professor Kathy Cramer Walsh, who spent more than a year gathering the opinions of regular folk in face-to-face interviews around the state.
In a guest column in this newspaper in June she noted that “politics is often … about us versus them” and candidates “often make claims about the ‘type’ of people they are battling on behalf of.”
Better to see “members of the opposing side” as “individuals,” she writes, and to hear them out “so we see the humanity in them.” …
In politics, somebody’s always got to lose.
It will be a lot better for democracy — not to mention one’s mental health — if the winners at least realize the losers share the same species.
Rickert appears to believe that politics is nothing more than a game. (Which makes him even more cynical than I am.) The Founding Fathers must be spinning in their graves at the idea that, you know, King George III and the Royalists were people too. For that matter, Confederate sympathizers, members of the Ku Klux Klan, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, the Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden were and are individuals, and we need to see the humanity in them too.
The bigger issue, though, is that the GOP doesn’t represent all my views, because it’s nearly impossible for either party to completely represent anyone’s views. For one thing, the two parties have managed to eliminate the outliers, at least in Wisconsin, in their misguided quest for ideological purity and party discipline. Wisconsin used to have anti-abortion Democrats; good luck finding them now. (Or, for that matter, anyone comparable to the late U.S. Sen. William Proxmire (D–Wisconsin) in caring about taxpayer dollars.) Wisconsin also used to have Republicans in the Legislature who went from the late Progressive Party to the GOP.
Gary Johnson on 85 percent of “economic, domestic policy, healthcare, and immigration issues.”
Mitt Romney on 78 percent of “foreign policy, economic, and domestic policy issues.”
Barack Obama on 63 percent of “foreign policy, science, and immigration issues.”
50 percent of Wisconsin voters on “foreign policy, domestic policy, immigration, science, and healthcare issues.”
52 percent of American voters on “foreign policy, domestic policy, immigration, science, and healthcare issues.”
This site also concluded my views are 84 percent Republican, 79 percent Libertarian, 52 percent Democrat and 17 percent Green. I could say that the last two numbers are an order of magnitude too high, but that would obscure the point that almost no one sides 100 percent with any party.
My vote is based on a calculus that balances the candidates whose views most agree with mine with how electable that candidate is. Even if I have conservatarian views and agree with Johnson 9 percent more than I agree with Romney, the chances of Johnson’s getting elected Nov. 6 are, rounded off, zero. Therefore, every vote for someone not named Romney serves as a vote for Obama. And readers know how I feel about the body of work of Barack Obama.
Whenever I’m asked what party I belong to, I give the correct answer — either “none” or “independent.”
The supposed actions of an unnamed CEO are supposed to be unethical, maybe even illegal.
This may have been in response to this, passed on by the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner:
It seems appropriate that in the same week that Atlas Shrugged premiered at the movies, Westgate Resorts CEO David Siegel sent a letter to his 6,500 employees warning them that the burden of taxes and the constant demonization of successful businessmen is reaching the point where he may decide it is no longer worth it to continue the hard work that he put in, building his company from the ground up over the past 42 years.
Siegel recounted the years of sacrifice, long hours, and hard work that went into making his business a success. Now he finds himself attacked for that success and is being crushed under a growing burden of taxes and regulation. “State taxes, federal taxes, property taxes, sales and use taxes, payroll taxes, workers compensation taxes, and unemployment taxes” take half of everything he earns. And President Obama is threatening to impose even higher taxes on him and his business. If that happens, Siegel warns, “I will have no choice but to reduce the size of this company. Rather than grow this company, I will be forced to cut back. That means fewer jobs, less benefits, and certainly less opportunity for everyone.”
He isn’t quite ready to head to Galt’s Gulch, but Siegel pointed out that he doesn’t need to continue putting in 60-hour weeks to keep a business running. If government continues to punish his success, he told his employees, “My motivation to work and provide jobs will be destroyed, and with it, so will your opportunities. If that happens, you can find me in the Caribbean sitting on the beach, under a palm tree, retired, and with no employees to worry about.”
At about the same time, Arthur Allen, president of ASG Software Solutions, sent a similar letter to his 1,300 employees, saying that the increasing burden of taxes and regulations could force him to sell his business, and that such a sale would almost certainly result in the loss of hundreds of jobs. Allen said that he had been fighting off takeover attempts for years, but that he didn’t know if he could continue to do so in the face of the current administration’s policies.
Some businesses are not waiting. For example, the restaurant chains Olive Garden and Red Lobster announced last week that they were going to move many of their workers from full-time to part-time because they cannot afford to provide the health insurance mandated under Obamacare.
Elsewhere, nonfinancial businesses are reportedly sitting on more than $1.7 trillion in liquid assets that they are not investing. There is a reason why so many businesses are, in effect, choosing to shrug rather than to put their resources to work building new plants and hiring new workers.
Here’s my question: Why is what these CEOs did wrong? Exactly what is unethical about a business owner’s telling his or her employees about the consequences of elections and the political decisions that are made by those who win elections?
This may date back to Recallarama, when those opposed to Gov. Scott Walker tried to boycott businesses whose employees contributed to Walker, including Kwik Trip, Johnsonville and Menards. It is unclear to me why an employer’s seeking to educate his or her employees is a negative. Education is better than ignorance, right?
I’ll try to explain for the economically illiterate. (Such as: What is the “Dow Jones 500”? And, by the way, unless you’re using single letters, plurals do not use apostrophes.) Businesses employ people based on the amount of business that individual business has. (Which is why the stock price performance of the “Dow Jones 500,” whatever that’s supposed to be, is irrelevant.) The more business they have, the more people they employ, and the less business they have, the fewer people they employ. This is because the most important thing for a business to do is to make a profit — revenues more than expenses. Nothing good happens in any organization — yes, even government — unless it brings in more money than it pays out.
This graphic was created for the express purpose of inciting those who read it against “CEOs,” the “1 percent,” the “Dow Jones 500,” etc., etc., etc. There’s another word for this bunch: Employers. Those who want to stick it to “the man” endanger their own employment, because these evil corporate types make, or sign off on, hiring and firing decisions, which are based on the business climate generally and how their business is doing specifically.
Readers of this blog know that the U.S. has about 15,000 publicly traded companies, with another 7,000 companies whose stock can be purchased by anyone with enough money to do so. That is 22,000 publicly traded companies out of, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 6 million businesses with employees, and nearly 22 million businesses without employees (the owner gets all the profits but is not paid, and neither is anyone else). But most of those 6 million businesses and many of those 22 million businesses are organized as corporations for the legal protections the corporate form gives shareholders. Keep that in mind the next time you read some idiot trashing corporations.
Anyone who thinks that government actions do not affect business, which means business’ employees, is really too ignorant to be able to function as an adult. The Obama administration has opposed business since it took office, not merely with “You didn’t build that” rhetoric, but with piles and piles of new regulations, new and higher taxes and fees, and, as of Jan. 1, “Taxmageddon,” the death of the early-2000s tax cuts, which will increase taxes by nearly half a billion dollars, more than $4,100 per family. (That $4,100 represents, by the way, about $1,000 more than the average family income drop during the Obama presidency.) Anyone who thinks that taking another $4,100 out of family incomes won’t be reflected in lower consumer spending is, apparently, an Obama supporter.
Remember that the cost of fuels is reflected in the cost of everything we buy. So do you think $4-per-gallon gas and diesel fuel benefits business? ObamaCare is going to increase, not decrease, health insurance premiums. Who will taking money out of both employers’ and employees’ pockets benefit?
There is one additional problem. Votes remain secret. I could blog all I want about how great Romney and Republicans are, and then in the privacy of the polling place cast a straight Democratic ballot, and no one will know that except me … and anyone I choose to tell. If you lack the courage of your convictions to the extent you feel intimidated to vote a specific way on an absolutely secret ballot, that is no one’s problem except yours.
Of course, anyone who disagrees with his or her employer’s views about the role of government and business is free to seek employment elsewhere. Of course, the Obama administration has made that more difficult to do, with 14.7 percent of Americans either unemployed or underemployed. Votes have consequences.
Politicians are always tempted to hike taxes to fix deficits, but the US has reached the point where this is not possible. To fix this mess, spending must be reduced. The US has never balanced its budget when spending was more than 19.5% of GDP. Big government undermines economic growth.
But, the fiscal cliff is looming and our tax code is a morass of deductions, one-year fixes, and temporary rate structures. It is clear that President Obama wants to lift taxes on the wealthy and the only question is what that may look like.
Governor Romney wants to make some big changes to the US tax code: extending all the tax cuts that go back to 2001/03, ending the alternative minimum tax, getting rid of the extra income taxes in Obamacare, and then cutting regular income tax rates an additional 20%. Tax rates on regular income that now go from 10% up to 35% would range from 8% up to 28%.
The Romney campaign says his tax cuts are “revenue neutral” if we limit deductions (broaden the tax base) and count the positive effect on revenue of some extra economic growth due to better incentives. But, candidate Romney has been silent on what deductions he will choose to eliminate.
Using 2009 data, we can estimate that in 2015 taxpayers would have about $1.7 trillion in itemized deductions. In 2015, we estimate that the big deductions would be; Medical ($170 billion), State and Local taxes ($333 bil), Real Estate tax deduction ($237 bil), Mortgage Interest deduction ($592 bil), and Charitable Contributions ($223 bil).
Applying an average tax rate of 25% to the total of these deductions suggests getting rid of all of them would generate an additional $425 billion – approximately 30% of all income tax revenue. If we include traditional (and cautious) models of positive revenue feedback effects, revenues would likely be boosted by another $120 billion from better economic growth.
The total increase in revenues from excluding all deductions and a positive revenue feedback loop would be $545 billion, more than offsetting the cut in tax rates and allowing the code to maintain some popular middle class deductions.
Lobbyists in Washington have a long-standing opposition to ending any deductions and many politicians on both sides stand ready to defend all of them. But these deductions distort the economy by redirecting resources toward areas in a way that does not accurately reflect the most optimum allocation of resources. We hope that the election provides a mandate for this type of reform, it would be very positive.
That all assumes one big if, and it’s not just Romney’s election:
… the only way to get Romney’s tax cuts passed is to get 60 votes in the Senate. But that’s highly unlikely. Instead, if elected, Romney would have to make his plan temporary using the same special budget process Bush used back in 2001/03, so he could pass them with only 50 Senators.
Bottom line, we like the plan, but don’t expect full passage on a permanent basis. Compromises will have to be made.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
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