Today in 1964, a Rolling Stones concert in Ireland was stopped due to a riot, 12 minutes after the concert began.
Today in 1966, Alabamans burned Beatles products in protest of John Lennon’s remark that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus.” The irony was that several years earlier, Lennon met Paul McCartney at a church dinner.
Other than my mother (who was a singer, but never recorded any records, unlike my father’s band, which released a couple of them), birthdays today include Kent Lavoie, better known as Lobo:
Bob Welch, who before his solo career was in Fleetwood Mac before they became big:
Karl Greene of Herman’s Hermits:
Hugh McDowell played cello for Electric Light Orchestra:
Mayor Paul Soglin says state leaders should be looking toward the city as an example of how to build a 21st century economy rather than blaming it for Wisconsin’s current problems.
Sporting a two-tone bowling shirt a la Charlie Sheen, the Mayor on Wednesday launched into a blistering attack on the Republican-controlled Legislature and Gov. Scott Walker for crafting a tax system Soglin claims penalizes Madison for its success. …
Soglin said Dane County has only 8.5 percent of the state’s population yet delivers nearly 12 percent of the income and sales tax revenue collected in Wisconsin.
But because of the state’s complicated shared revenue formula, Soglin says Madison gets less back in state aid and ends up sending money off to wealthy Milwaukee suburbs. …
Soglin blamed both his predecessor, Dave Cieslewicz, and the state for failing to make investments in infrastructure that could have helped ease the impact of the recession — although he didn’t specifically mention the $810 million Madison-to-Milwaukee passenger rail project that Walker scuttled. …
“I’m a big believer in stimulating the economy,” Soglin said, ticking off a list of government-driven infrastructure improvements throughout history: the Erie Canal; the western U.S. dams, the rural electrification program and the interstate highway system.
(I’m a big believer, Paul, that politicians are like baby diapers. They need to be changed. Often.)
Mayor-for-Life Soglin is whining because the city is about $10 million short of revenue to fund everything Soglin wants to fund, “and no way to close it other than with spending cuts.”
Meanwhile, Madison’s schools are starting to suck, and crime is on the increase, but nary a word about either from Soglin. Instead, His Petulance blames his predecessor and those who fail to give him enough money to waste and/or worship at the altar of Mad City. (Metaphorically speaking, since Madison is officially atheist.)
Madison these days best fits Ann Richards’ claim about George H.W. Bush — Madison was born on third base and officially thinks it hit a triple. You would have to be at the very nadir of competence if you did not have a growing economy in a city that is the state capital and has the flagship state university campus.
I love this comment about Soglin’s screed:
Paul, what do you know about stimulating the private sector? You have tried the private sector a couple times; failed because you have to produce results in the private sector. You end up crawling back to the voters of Madison to put you back on the government teat. The only reason Madison is successful is because of the state. If the state did not have all of its offices in Madison you would be a ghost town. With all of the regulations put on businesses, by people who have never worked outside of government much less run a business, you have managed to run off most business that do not cater to the state. Just say thank you and move along to supporting some city ordinance wishing Hugo Chavez a speedy recovery.
This one too:
Best cut of the entire story:
“We are not allowed to share in the bounty we have created,” he says.
Pardon me, but when you progressive geniuses want to spread MY wealth around, everything is butterflies and rainbows. When it’s your own wealth…not so much?
Hypocrisy much?
And …
Soglin’s statement is profoundly moronic and does not reflect the ground realities. Must be the bad weed!
Soglin single handedly droves businesses out of town and continues to do so. He is unqualified to be a mayor in 2012. His allegiances are to people who continue to blame and vilify businesses and corporations. He is in bed with them.
This guy is not even player in economic development game. Don’t confuse blowing tax payer money with business development.
Perhaps Soglin’s foil, Walker, can alleviate Madison’s revenue problems by moving as much of state government as possible out of Madison. Fewer people, fewer government services to have to provide.
I am reminded yet again how happy I am to not live in Madison. I wouldn’t drive through or around Madison if I could avoid the left-wing suckhole in the middle of Dane County.
Today is the official start of the Olympics, because today is when NBC carries the Olympics opening ceremonies, even though events began Wednesday.
One could say the official start of the Olympics is the first official blasting of “Bugler’s Dream,” the name of which you may not know, but the music of which you do:
This, however, is the official Olympic theme song:
The best thing about the Olympics may be that, for sports fans, TV-watching improves tremendously. The Olympics are now all over the cable or satellite dial, with CNBC, MSNBC, Bravo, the NBC Sports Network and Telemundo all carrying events. And, for those of us without a working TV in our houses, it’s all available online.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that NBC’s Olympics coverage is not really geared for sports fans; in fact, event coverage degenerates into soap opera, a trend that began with ABC-TV’s “Up Close and Personal” vignettes during their coverage. (Speaking of up close and personal: my wife was a translator — Spanish and, unexpectedly, Portugese — for Olympic volleyball in the old Omni for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. One night, I was idly watching late-night coverage back in Wisconsin when it was suddenly interrupted for news of the Centennial Olympic Parkbombing. That caught my immediate attention because the Omni wasn’t far from the bombing site, and I wasn’t sure if she might not have been in that area at the time. She wasn’t, I found out after one after-midnight phone call to the house where she was staying.)
It would be nice if the Olympic movement was only about athletic achievement. For that matter, it would be nice if the Olympic movement was motivated only by athletic achievement. It would also be nice if the Olympics was a place where international disagreements could be set aside for a couple of weeks. None are the case, of course; in fact, anyone who says the Olympics should be free from politics doesn’t know much about the Olympics, of which USA Today’s Richard Benedetto said, “Sports and politics are running mates.”
The Olympic movement has been the poster child for political intrigue for almost its entire existence, dating back to the days when Baron Pierre de Coubertin resurrected the Olympic movement in the 1890s. Coubertin believed that professional athletes soiled sports, so, when Jim Thorpe was discovered to have played “professional” baseball ($2 a game), he was stripped of his medals even though his losing his medals was against Olympic rules. Adolf Hitler viewed the 1936 Berlin Olympics as a chance to show off the superiority of his master race. Several Arab countries boycotted the 1956 Melbourne Olympics to protest Israel, and 20 years later many African countries boycotted over South Africa. The 1968 Mexico City Olympics was marred by the Mexican government’s massacre of more than 200 protestors.
Four years ago, the Weekly Standard‘s Dean Barnett wrote that “Unwholesome Olympics politics are more the rule than the exception,” including the 1936 Olympics and boycotts by the U.S. in 1980 and then of the U.S. by Soviet bloc countries four years later. In a completely different category would be the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists in the 1972 Munich Olympics, an obscenity basically blown off by International Olympic Committee head Avery Brundage, a truly loathsome figure in sports history. (As for now, same thing.)
Beyond boycotts, each of the winter and summer Olympics between 1948 and 1988 was an athletic attempt for the U.S. and the Soviet Union to show off its superiority against the other. This was a rather stacked race given that the U.S.S.R.’s “amateurs” were not amateurs at all. Some viewers see NBC’s coverage of the Olympics as excessively pro-American to the point of being jingoistic. And we haven’t even discussed various medical scandals tied to the effort of outdoing the competition.
Commercialism has been a recent complaint, and yet the three U.S. Olympics held in the past 25 years — Los Angeles in 1984, Atlanta in 1996, and Salt Lake City in 2002 (run by some guy named Romney) — all were profitable. (I was in Salt Lake City three years before the Olympics, and one business group that benefitted from the Olympics before the Olympics were road builders.) The Athens Olympics in 2004, the Turin Winter Olympics in 2006, and the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010 ran deficits. We’ll never know how much money the 2008 Olympics in China lost, since China lacks, you know, freedom.
This has all made me a bit cynical of the Olympic movement, a feeling expressed by Mary Riddell of London’s Telegraph:
What voters want from these Olympics is a chance to forget about politics. In bleak times, when people lose faith in their leaders and their gods, they seek saviours from other spheres. The rise of comic book superheroes, such as Superman and Wonder Woman, coincided with the collapse of the American dream after the Great Depression. It is not an accident, in an age when many of the super-rich have been exposed as charlatans and politicians can offer no escape from crisis, that Spiderman and Batman are back, over-riding political incompetence and corporate greed, to rescue the world from the forces of evil. …
Great events, lauded as founts of bravery and revival, are always invested with more significance they can bear. So keep it simple. In an age warped by unfairness and inequality, ordinary Britons must be willing and able to reclaim the Games. The biggest jamboree of the recession was devised as the people’s Olympics. It will live or die on that criterion.
Still, the Olympics can generate stunning achievement, including gold medals by athletes you’ve never heard of, such as American Billy Mills in the 1964 10,000-meter run, or Nadia Comaneci in 1976 gymnastics, or Cathy Freeman in the 2000 400-meter run. And, of course, there was that hockey team in 1980. (1960, too.) The Olympic Games is worthwhile watching, as long as you don’t watch too closely.
Today in 1977, John Lennon did not get instant karma, but he did get a green card to become a permanent resident, five years after the federal government (that is, Richard Nixon) sought to deport him. So can you imagine who played mind games on whom?
State Sen. Tim Cullen, a moderate Democrat from Janesville, broke with his party’s caucus Tuesday, saying he may become an independent over what he felt were political “insults” by the Senate majority leader.
Cullen said he made his decision, announced to the rest of the caucus by email, after Sen. Mark Miller, D-Monona, slighted him with committee assignments. Every senator in the caucus was given at least two committee leadership positions. Cullen has none. …
Cullen said he did not know why he was ignored for leadership positions that appealed to him, but imagined it had to do with his independent nature and track record of working with Republicans on certain issues. …
Cullen said Miller initially offered him what he considered a token committee chairmanship — tourism and small business. He rejected the position and was negotiating with Miller for a more important role when he said the majority leader essentially told him to “take it or leave it.”
“This was not an accident,” Cullen said. “I was not accidentally overlooked. It was blatantly, intentionally, intending to insult me and the people of the 15th (Senate District).”
Cullen said that during his last discussion with Miller, the Democratic leader hung up on him.
Cullen’s possible defection (notice of which you can read here) is more significant than Senate Democrats’ futile gesture of taking over (complete with the waste of taxpayer resources that moving offices takes) a chamber that isn’t scheduled to meet until after the Nov. 6 elections, when there is at least a 50–50 chance control of the Senate will go back to the Republican Party.
Perhaps Cullen thinks he’s going to end up back in the minority party given that the 16 Senate districts (along with, if scheduled in November, the 33rd Senate District, whose Sen. Rich Zipperer (R–Pewaukee) is leaving to become Gov. Scott Walker’s deputy chief of staff) voters will decide upon were created by the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2011. Perhaps Cullen can’t figure out why Miller doesn’t want the former secretary of the state Department of Health and Social Services on Senate health committees. Perhaps Cullen realizes the Democratic Party’s stance on tourism and small business — tax and regulate the hell out of both — and decided he was part of temporary Majority Leader Miller’s ideological purge.
But what it does show is just how ideologically-minded the new Democratic Senate Majority is. For all the talk about “reaching across the aisle” after getting the majority last week, Miller shows in one swift action that he will punish those who do not bow to the party line he is keeping.
For better or worse, Cullen is to Democrats what Dale Schultz is to Republicans, the bridge-maker who annoys the party faithful, but is needed nonetheless.
Miller just threw his bridge-maker out. For all the screaming and name-calling at Schultz, no one in the GOP caucus has ever considered doing that.
What does that say about the new Democratic Majority? Volumes.
First of all, Miller’s full of garbage. Small business is notoriously one of the worst committee assignments in the Legislature because everything important to small business can (and will be) routed to another committee with overlapping jurisdiction. Health care? To Health. Health insurance? To Insurance or Health. Job training? To workforce development. Tax policy? To Finance. …
Second, could Miller really not keep Cullen happy? As I talked about last week, every Senate committee is like a church potluck of random, unrelated goodies. How hard is it for Miller to say “you know what, let’s work with your interests and see what we can do?” If Miller couldn’t fix this situation it’s because he was choosing not to fix it.
There used to be more variety among the Wisconsin Democratic and Republican parties in past decades. Both parties as late as the early 1980s had former members of the Progressive Party in them — Sens. Clifford “Tiny” Krueger (R–Merrill), Gerald Lorge (R–Bear Creek) and Carl Thompson (D–Stoughton), to name three. This state used to have anti-abortion Democrats. U.S. Sen. William Proxmire (D–Wisconsin) would fit in neither party today. The last libertarian Republican in the Legislature was Sen. Dave Zien (R–Eau Claire); I’m not sure Sen. Frank Lasee (R–De Pere) would fit into that category today, and no one besides Lasee would.
The parties started to narrow in the 1990s, because of then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Chvala (D–Madison) and then-Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen (R–Brookfield) and their efforts to reinforce party discipline in an era when control of the Legislature shifted back and forth more than once. (Whether that had anything to do with the caucus scandal that saw Chvala and Jensen serve jail time is up for the reader to decide.)
The point of serving in the Legislature is to serve the state generally and your district’s constituents specifically. The interests of your party, as in your party doing better than the other party, should come in third at the highest. Perhaps more Wisconsinites would vote Democrat if their party were not being run by the Madison–Milwaukee axis, since nothing that happens on either end of Interstate 94 benefits the state as a whole these days. (Or arguably any day in the case of the People’s Republic of Madison.)
I hope Cullen does decide to replace the D after his name with an I, and not because I am not a fan of the Ds. I think the plurality of voters who are not hardcore Ds and Rs probably think the Ds and Rs don’t represent them very well. It’s regrettable that Rep. Bob Ziegelbauer (I–Manitowoc) is leaving the Assembly. Republicans haven’t been fans of the work of Sen. Dale Schultz (RINO-Richland Center), but perhaps his 17th Senate District constituents would be better served with an independent Schultz instead of a Republican (In Name Only) Schultz.
I will be on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin program Friday doing the 8 a.m. Week in Review segment. (Which will be replayed at 9 p.m., hence the headline.)
Wisconsin Public Radio’s Ideas Network can be heard on WHA (970 AM) in Madison, WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at www.wpr.org.
Again, before I say anything on the air or online, I should attach the disclaimer that the views you’ll hear Friday are mine only, and not the views of any past, present or potential future employer of mine, or even anyone else who knows me.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 