Republicans like to think that their political worldview is based on time-honored concepts like natural law, freedom and individual rights, and not on craven political considerations.
Unfortunately for the GOP, their presidential race suggests the latter, not the former. How bizarre is it that Newt Gingrich decries Mitt Romney, whose Bain Capital actually created jobs, as a “vulture” capitalist? Whatever happened to rewarding risk and initiative, and praising, not condemning, those who drive the American economy? (And how bizarre is it that Romney can’t put away Gingrich, who got $600,000 from Fannie Mae, the Government Sponsored Enterprise whose fingerprints are all over the late 2000s recession?)
Unfortunately for Romney, he’s not helping his own cause by veering between stereotypical right-wing hardened hearts (he claimed “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” which sounds bad, although I’d be more concerned about the middle class, as he then said he was) and unintelligent liberal ideas (indexing the minimum wage to inflation).
The GOP better figure this out since Romney appears to be on the way to the GOP nomination, lest the GOP blows what follows:
The map is a Washington Examiner extrapolation of the most recent Gallup Poll presidential approval/disapproval numbers. Obama has more negatives than positives in the red states, and if the vote in the presidential election followed those trends, well, Obama better be making plans for his life after Jan. 20.
But the GOP is certainly capable of screwing it up. Despite the fact that the economy is practically guaranteed to not be noticeably better by Election Day (and may become much worse), and despite the fact that Obamacare is tremendously unpopular (for good reason), and despite the fact that Obama’s greatest successes are what he was not able to do (i.e. raise taxes beyond the dozen or so tax increases we’re enjoying now), none of the remaining GOP presidential candidates are able to cross the spot where party popularity translates into electability.
It would help if presidential candidates didn’t demonize one of their core constituencies, the people who will have to pull the economy out of its apparent doldrums. Jim Pethokoukis passes on Ed Yardeni, an economist who attended something called the Distressed Investing Summit and Turnaround Awards Gala:
No one said, “Greed is good.” I did hear one investment banker say that Chapter 11 is good. Bankruptcy is better than liquidation. He observed that in America the legal system is sensibly designed to restructure distressed companies rather than to shut them down. I heard lots of heart-warming stories about how these fearless capitalists took lots of risks to turn companies around by replacing incompetent or corrupt managers with their own management pros.
Yes, in some instances, these fine folks had to fire other fine folks to boost the productivity and competitiveness of their acquired companies. That’s the heartless part of these heart-warming stories. However, in most cases, there were happy endings, which averted both the total liquidation of the enterprises and the termination of all their workers. The remaining employees certainly benefitted when their restructured companies were revived.
When these turnaround artists succeed, they can get very rich by taking their companies public or by selling them to other companies. Again, some workers may lose their jobs in the process, but it beats the alternative. That’s just one important example of how the 1% really do help the 99%. At the end of last year, Wilbur Ross, who is a private-equity billionaire, observed that entrepreneurship and capitalism didn’t cause the financial crisis: He added, “Tearing down the rich does not help those less well-off. If you favor employment, you need employers whose businesses are flourishing.”
… Today, one of the main sources of the economy’s resilience is the availability of so much private equity to purchase and revive distressed companies. Too bad Mitt Romney, who made his fortune as a private equity investor, hasn’t figured out yet how to explain this to the public.
Pethokoukis adds: “Mitt Romney might want to memorize this.” And not just Romney.
First: I have been asked to say that it’s a great day for groundhogs. Thus, a decades-long tradition is not only maintained, but expanded online.
(By the way: If a groundhog near you predicts six more weeks of winter, you are authorized to kill the groundhog to prevent that prediction from ever happening again. The fact that winter in Wisconsin lasts more like 12 weeks from now regardless of groundhog predictions is beside the point.)
Today in 1959, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper all appeared at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa.
That would be their final concert appearance because of what happened after the concert.
Today in 1973, a bad thing to happen to a piano player happened — Keith Emerson of Emerson Lake & Palmer injured his hands when a piano, rigged to explode during a concert, exploded prematurely. That would not make him a …
That same day, or night, was the premiere of NBC-TV’s “The Midnight Special”:
The number one British album today 1974 was the Carpenters’ “The Singles 1969–1973”:
The number one single on both sides of the Atlantic today in 1985:
Today in 2004, CBS-TV apologized for the previous day’s Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show, which featured …
Singer Justin Timberlake also apologized, saying, “I am sorry that anyone was offended by the wardrobe malfunction during the half-time performance of the Super Bowl,” thus adding the phrase “wardrobe malfunction” to our cultural lexicon.
Birthdays begin with Alan Caddy, guitarist for the Tornadoes:
Graham Nash played for the Hollies and Crosby Stills and Nash (and occasionally Young):
Ronnie Goodson of John Fred and His Playboy Band:
Howard Bellamy was one of the Bellamy Brothers:
Peter Lucia of Tommy James and the Shondells:
Alan McKay played guitar for Earth Wind & Fire:
Ross Valory played bass for the Steve Miller Band and Journey:
Robert Deleo of the Stone Temple Pilots:
Ben Mize played drums for the Counting Crows:
One death of note, today in 2007: Billy Henderson of the Spinners:
This Ripon Commonwealth Press photo of the singing of Ripon's Alma Mater proves that (1) I was at Founders Day and (2) I don't sing in public.
I spent Tuesday morning at Ripon College’s Founders Day.
Our family is associated with two of the oldest institutions in Ripon. Jannan is a graduate and former employee of Ripon College, for which I announce football and basketball. (Including Friday night’s men’s basketball game against 113-point-per-game Grinnell at 7 Central time; click here to be highly entertained.) One of the founders of both Ripon and Ripon College, Alvan Bovay, also was a founder of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church. (Bovay also was a founder of the Republican Party, as a reader reminded me, in a building here in Ripon, but this post is not about partisan politics.)
It’s rather ironic that we live here. I think I was the first to visit Ripon, having spent a week at the college in June 1982 for Badger Boys State. I don’t think Jannan planned to come back to Ripon other than for reunions once she graduated in 1987 and headed off to the Peace Corps. But 11 years after her graduation, Jannan started working at her alma mater, and a year later we moved here from Appleton. Neither of us expected to raise not only “townies,” but cradle Episcopalians. (As with many small towns, no one who moves here really is a Riponite, supposedly.)
For a college whose enrollment has never exceeded 1,000 or so, Ripon College has some famous alumni, including actors Harrison Ford, Spencer Tracy and Frances Lee McCain (Marty McFly’s mother), singer Al Jarreau, and recently deceased CBS-TV reporter Richard Threlkeld. An early scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” makes a reference to a “Dr. Tyree,” the same last name as a longtime Ripon philosophy professor. Jarreau’s Wisconsin concerts have featured him singing Ripon’s Alma Mater. (Which has the same melody as Kellerman’s resort.) I have Threlkeld’s book, Dispatches from the Former Evil Empire, which he signed “From one ink-stained wretch to another.”
I find living in a small college town full of appeal. I walked to the college for Founders Day. Were it not for all the stuff I have to bring along (headsets, spotter board, clipboards, etc.), I could walk to Ingalls Field (where football has been played since the 1880s) to announce Red Hawk and Tiger games. Before our three townies arrived, one summer a professor hosted an independent film series that included some great movies, including the original “Insomnia,” “The Opposite of Sex” (featuring this quote that must be seen, not merely read, to be appreciated) and “Kissed.” The college brings in the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra every year. Being a college town, Ripon also features businesses that would not be seen in towns of the same size without a college. (Unfortunately, that does not yet include a microbrewery.)
People associated with the college participate in all sorts of ways in community life. One professor is on the Ripon Board of Education. Another professor is our Fond du Lac County supervisor. (Which reminds me: About that county sales tax, Marty …) An assistant dean (who appears to have approximately 387 titles at Ripon) serves on the board of Ripon Medical Center. The former president of the college served with me on our sons’ charter school board. Professors and college employees do a lot elsewhere throughout Ripon.
Even though there are 13 UW four-year universities and 20 private colleges in this state, Ripon is arguably one of the few real college towns in this state. Fond du Lac has not only Marian University but UW–Fond du Lac and Moraine Park Technical College, yet no one thinks of Fond du Lac as a college town. UW–Oshkosh is the third largest campus in the UW System, but no one thinks of Oshkosh as a college town either. La Crosse has both UW–La Crosse and Viterbo University, but is not a college town. Neither Appleton, home of Lawrence University, nor De Pere, home of St. Norbert College, nor Beloit, home of Beloit College, feel like college towns either. Platteville and Whitewater are college towns.
The definition of “college town” is not merely a town with a college in it, but a town whose college is most, not just some, of the town’s identity. (So is Madison a college town? That depends on what you think is most dominant about Madison, state government or the UW. Milwaukee, despite having what should be called the University of Milwaukee, Marquette University, Alverno College, the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Milwaukee School of Engineering and Mount Mary College, is definitely not a college town.) One could, I suppose, divide the college’s enrollment by its total population to determine the college’s effect on where it’s located. I prefer to use the test Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart used to define obscenity — you know it when you see it.
The relationship between a college and the community it’s located in is described as “town–gown relations.” Founders Day is the college’s way of honoring Ripon-area institutions or individuals — this year, Ripon Medical Center. (Which is kind of amusing given that RMC now is part of Agnesian Health Care, which is sponsored by the Congregation of Sisters of St. Agnes, which also sponsors … Marian University.)
Town–gown relations are never perfect. Anytime Ripon College wants to do something development-wise, it must get the approval of the city’s Plan Commission, on which I served for four years. Two controversial issues I voted for were the college’s request to close two city streets going through campus, in order to make that part of campus more pedestrian-friendly, and the construction of a new dorm. The first proposal was opposed by one longtime city resident who asserted that once a street goes on the official city map, it can, or should, never be taken off. (You may not know that there is a bypass of Ripon, which exists only on the official city map.)
As for the second issue, I don’t live close enough to campus to notice, but neighbors probably would tell you that college students don’t always act in a respectful manner toward their neighbors who are not part of the campus. That, however, is part of living across the street from an institution that has been there since 1851, an institution whose presence should be obvious to would-be property owners across the street. (Moreover, upon complaints of students speeding down one street, the Ripon police observed the street long enough to discover that the speeders were not students, but residents.) That’s also part of being between 18 and 22 years old, a period sometimes noted for poor personal judgment, as those who survived that age sometimes don’t want to admit.
The residents of a college town take particular interest in the college. That can sometimes be a challenge for college administration. I wonder, for instance, why the college doesn’t promote itself more actively nationally, or for that matter even in Ripon. I notice that since the college started charging admission for football and basketball games, attendance has dropped at football and basketball games. I suspect the college has even more events beyond sports that many Riponites don’t even know are taking place at the college. (On the other hand, I speak from experience that it’s difficult to communicate with those who don’t want to be communicated with.)
Ripon College is a residential undergraduate-only liberal arts college. It has few commuter students, almost no adult students, and no advanced-degree students. Looking at trends in higher education, one has to wonder how long places like Ripon College will remain viable given increasing complaints about higher education costs, not to mention the increasing belief that the purpose of a college education (or equivalent) is getting the first post-college job. (And let’s face it, one motivation of the conservative critique of higher education is the conservative belief that higher education isn’t friendly to conservatives or conservative ideas — a belief created by personal experience in many cases.)
Indeed, the concept of the liberal arts, which I’ve heard described as “learning how to learn,” seems not very popular these days, which is too bad. Degrees do not equal wisdom or common sense. But we need a more, not less, educated citizenry, and educated in areas beyond their vocation. (What purpose is a college education in a vocation if people are going to change their careers several times in their lifetimes?)
After Founders Day, I ate (and ate and ate and ate) lunch with Ripon’s mayor and city administrator and an alderman, where some of what’s in this blog came up. My hope is that Ripon College can serve to attract Ripon College students to stay in Ripon beyond their graduation — to, as we ended up doing, come to Ripon more often than for class reunions. Ripon needs more “townies” who realize how important Ripon College is to Ripon.
If you conclude that all the non-national political news of the nation, or at least the Midwest, is being generated in Wisconsin these days, well, that’s not entirely correct.
To the south, Illinois, one of the few states whose finances were worse than Wisconsin’s, took the raise-taxes-and-bend-over-to-the-public-employee-unions approach. And, the Chicago Tribune reports:
Think back to 1/11/11, the night Democrats in the General Assembly raised personal and corporate income taxes by 67 and 46 percent. That legislation didn’t cut spending by one dime. Never forget the assurances, though, that these tax increases would pay the state’s debts and prevent future budget deficits …
One year later, though, stand back with us and look at all their carnage:
• Earlier this month, Moody’s Investors Service cited “weak management practices” when it awarded Illinois the nation’s lowest credit rating. Standard & Poor’s added insult to injury: “If Illinois does not make meaningful changes to further align revenue and spending and address its accumulated deficit (accounts payable and general fund liabilities) for fiscal years 2012 and 2013, we could lower the rating this year. … A downgrade could also be triggered if pension funding levels continue to deteriorate or debt levels increase significantly …”
• As [state budget director] David Vaught unwittingly attests, lawmakers continue to spend too much of other people’s money. [Gov. Pat] Quinn’s office now expects this fiscal year’s supposedly balanced budget to finish $507 million in the red. That’s right, even with $7 billion a year in new revenue from their tax hikes, this crowd still can’t balance a budget.
• Let alone pay those old bills. A new report from Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka carries the headline, “Backlog persists despite new revenue.” Deadbeat Illinois owes some $8.5 billion in old bills, tax refunds, employee health insurance and interfund borrowing debts. That’s roughly one-fourth of the state’s spending this year from its general funds. …
So Vaught is more right than he may want to admit: Until Illinois lowers its overhead (pension and Medicaid costs, that’s you), even tax hikes can’t, in truth, relieve “a squeeze for everything else.“
That probably won’t change until lawmakers cut their spending on that unaffordable overhead and deploy more tax hike revenue to pay old bills. Remember, the only reason Illinois has any old bills is that Springfield spent more money, and promised public employees far more in retirement perks, than revenues justified.
Worst of all, perhaps, the Democrats’ tax increases are stifling the economic growth that would boost those revenues. With their votes, they made Illinois an even higher-cost state for job creators.
After the fiscal disaster area left by Gov. James Doyle and the 2009–10 Legislature, Wisconsin’s state budget is now legally, if not actually, balanced. Illinois’ budget appears to be neither legally nor actually balanced. More than one Wisconsinites has asked why Gov. Scott Walker is being recalled and not Quinn.
If there’s anything Bill Schuette has established in his first year as Michigan’s attorney general — besides an appetite for media attention rivaling that of Sarah Palin or Geoffrey Fieger — it’s that he won’t stand for the federal government to trample on the rights of the people of Michigan.
Unless, or course, the right in question is one that Michigan’s top law enforcement official never cared for in the first place. In which caseany pretext for ignoring, circumventing or violating the state law that guarantees it is welcome.
I speak, of course, of Schuette’s maniacal campaign to single-handedly repeal the Medical Marijuana Act that Michigan voters adopted in 2008 — by a considerably wider margin (63%-37%), it should be noted, than Schuette enjoyed in his own victory (53%-42%) over a weak Democratic opponent two years later. …
But the AG has also exploited his office to target medical marijuana users and providers — precisely the people Michigan voters sought to protect from criminal prosecution when they adopted the MMA. That’s a flagrant abuse of authority — one that undermines respect for the law in general, not just the statute Schuette seeks to subvert.
In his latest initiative, Schuette has opined that police have a legal obligation not to return pot seized from licensed medical marijuana patients because possession of marijuana is still prohibited under federal law. (Never mind that the U.S. Justice Department, which has bigger fish to fry, especially in Detroit, has made clear its lack of interest in prosecuting patients in Michigan and other states that have authorized medical marijuana.)
In fact, the AG warned in an opinion issued late last week, officers who return illegally confiscated marijuana (in seeming compliance with a provision of the MMA that specifically bars its seizure from medical users licensed by the state) are themselves risking criminal prosecution as drug dealers.
Really? And what sort of prosecutor would file charges against a police officer for that? Even Schuette isn’t that deranged. …
But more than 3 million Michigan residents have made it clear they want licensed patients to be able to use marijuana for medicinal purposes. That’s almost twice as many as voted for Schuette in 2010.
So Schuette’s campaign to emasculate the MMA isn’t just unprincipled; it’s an affront to democratic rule — and to the rule of law he took an oath to uphold.
Nothing that Walker has done as governor justifies Recallarama. An attorney general’s willful flouting of the law probably justifies a recall, since attorneys general are supposed to enforce all laws, not just the ones they like, and not just the ones floating between their ears. As for Quinn, does mere grotesque incompetence justify a recall? If it does, then since a majority of Illinois voters were stupid enough to vote for Quinn (who took office after Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s corruption conviction), perhaps Illinois voters should recall themselves.
I was elected (as the only candidate, the only elections I can win) senior warden of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church. God help us all.
The funniest comments therefrom include:
Did you get all the other candidates thrown off the ballot by opening sealed documents and such?
You have come a long way from milk monitor….
Altar wine for everyone!
Give it a year, and they’ll be passing a recall petition around. This is Wisconsin, you know.
(The third comment, from a UW alum of my era, brings to mind an old saw: “Where there are four Episcopalians, there’s a fifth.” To the last I replied that depending on how things go, I might sign the recall-the-senior-warden petition myself.)
We’ve been members of our church for 12½ years, since our oldest son was a month old and his parents (one raised Catholic, the other raised Congregationalist) decided they needed to attend church more regularly than a single-digit number of times a year. The irony is that I had grandparents who were Episcopalians though I never discussed religion with them; my first Episcopalian experience was picking up a Book of Common Prayer at their house while idly watching TV, and my second was attending my grandfather’s funeral. Never could I have predicted then that less than two decades later our family would be as involved in our church as we are.
The Episcopal Church in the United States of America, spun off from the Church of England at the same time the 13 American colonies spun off themselves from Great Britain, is structured comparably to the federal government. (The Church of England and all Protestant churches are spinoffs from the Roman Catholic Church, of course; some describe ECUSA as “Protestant, Yet Catholic,” and we had a rector who described us as neither Catholic nor Protestant.) Churches choose their rectors or vicars; a diocese’s priests and laity representatives choose their bishops. The national church has a lay House of Deputies and a House of Bishops (made up of, yes, the church’s bishops), analogous to the House of Representatives and Senate. With my election as senior warden for the second time, I have something in common with Franklin Roosevelt, who was also senior warden of St. James Episcopal Church in Hyde Park, N.Y., through his entire presidency. (Neither the U.S. nor St. James had term limits at the time.)
The way that the Episcopal Church chooses its leaders appeals to me, rather than having priests and bishops selected and assigned in a process over which you have absolutely no say. If God approved of dictatorships, He would not have given us free will. Another appeal is ECUSA’s three-sided foundation of Scripture, tradition and reason. (Our rector — think “pastor,” except that in this church the pastor is Jesus Christ — compares Scripture to the big wheel on a tricycle.) In contrast to some denominations inside and outside Christianity, women have full roles in this church, including as priests and the current Presiding Bishop.
I don’t discuss politics at church except with those who wish to discuss it. (It’s a variation of Jesus Christ’s admonition to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s.) I find interesting the number of Episcopalians I know who are political liberals yet theological conservatives. (Since I’m about to interject politics, those who object should move on to the 8 a.m. post.)
The Episcopal Church has been doing a curious dance around Occupy Wall Street. It’s safe to say church leadership is generally supportive of the Occupy ends, but not for one of Occupy’s means — occupying, literally, church property near the church known as Trinity Wall Street.
Religious supporters of the Occupy ________ movement(s) are, I think, misguided, not merely for secular political reasons. (No, I am not suggesting that only political conservatives can be Christians. I do notice, though, that most atheists are lefties; as someone on Facebook put it, conservative atheists don’t go to church, while “progressive” atheists want religion to go away entirely.)
I am not a theologian, but my reading of the Bible finds no mandate that the best way to care for the poor is to steal from those who are not poor, even those who are “rich.” In fact, I see no Biblical requirement that government or even society care for the poor; the responsibility of caring for the poor is on individuals. (Who can act collectively, but only by their own choice.) It would be grossly inappropriate for government to decide that the best way to respond to Christ’s admonition in Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25 and Luke 18:25 about rich men getting into heaven by making everyone poor. Economic equality is not only impossible (as proven in the worker’s paradises in the late Soviet Union and today’s China — countries that were and are officially atheist), it is immoral, as Rabbi Aryeh Spiro observes in the Wall Street Journal:
More than any other nation, the United States was founded on broad themes of morality rooted in a specific religious perspective. We call this the Judeo-Christian ethos, and within it resides a ringing endorsement of capitalism as a moral endeavor. …
The Bible’s proclamation that “Six days shall ye work” is its recognition that on a day-to-day basis work is the engine that brings about man’s inner state of personal responsibility. Work develops the qualities of accountability and urgency, including the need for comity with others as a means for the accomplishment of tasks. With work, he becomes imbued with the knowledge that he is to be productive and that his well-being is not an entitlement. And work keeps him away from the idleness that Proverbs warns leads inevitably to actions and attitudes injurious to himself and those around him.
Yet capitalism is not content with people only being laborers and holders of jobs, indistinguishable members of the masses punching in and out of mammoth factories or functioning as service employees in government agencies. Nor is the Bible. Unlike socialism, mired as it is in the static reproduction of things already invented, capitalism is dynamic and energetic. It cheerfully fosters and encourages creativity, unspoken possibilities, and dreams of the individual. Because the Hebrew Bible sees us not simply as “workers” and members of the masses but, rather, as individuals, it heralds that characteristic which endows us with individuality: our creativity. …
The Bible speaks positively of payment and profit: “For why else should a man so labor but to receive reward?” Thus do laborers get paid wages for their hours of work and investors receive profit for their investment and risk.
The Bible is not a business-school manual. While it is comfortable with wealth creation and the need for speculation in economic markets, it has nothing to say about financial instruments and models such as private equity, hedge funds or other forms of monetary capitalization. What it does demand is honesty, fair weights and measures, respect for a borrower’s collateral, timely payments of wages, resisting usury, and empathy for those injured by life’s misfortunes and charity. …
No country has achieved such broad-based prosperity as has America, or invented as many useful things, or seen as many people achieve personal promise. This is not an accident. It is the direct result of centuries lived by the free-market ethos embodied in the Judeo-Christian outlook.
Many on the religious left criticize capitalism because all do not end up monetarily equal—or, as Churchill quipped, “all equally miserable.” But the Bible’s prescription of equality means equality under the law, as in Deuteronomy’s saying that “Judges and officers … shall judge the people with a just judgment: Do not … favor one over the other.” Nowhere does the Bible refer to a utopian equality that is contrary to human nature and has never been achieved. …
God begins the Ten Commandments with “I am the Lord your God” and concludes with “Thou shalt not envy your neighbor, not for his wife, nor his house, nor for any of his holdings.” Envy is corrosive to the individual and to those societies that embrace it. Nations that throw over capitalism for socialism have made an immoral choice.
Parallels to Spiro’s Old Testament points can be found in the New Testament, of course. (A pastor friend of ours points out that every verse in the Bible, including the aforementioned parable of the talents, is repeated elsewhere in the Bible at least once, except for John 3:16.) Matthew 25 brings readers the parable of the talents. Jesus Christ said in Matthew 5:17, “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill,” which is how His two Great Commandments summarize the Ten Commandments.
This is not to apply secular politics to God. Religious people of all faiths and political worldviews should remember Abraham Lincoln’s counsel: “In every conflict between human beings both sides claim God is on their side. One side must be, and both sides may be wrong. I only pray we are on his side.”
Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as doing the same thing and expecting different results.
Janet Daley of London’s Telegraph sees Barack Obama similarly emulating the train wreck in progress that is the European Union (British spelling included):
What was it everybody used to say about the United States? Look at what’s happening over there and you will see our future. …
Well, so much for that. Barack Obama is now putting the United States squarely a decade behind Britain. Listening to the President’s State of the Union message last week was like a surreal visit to our own recent past: there were, almost word for word, all those interminable Gordon Brown Budgets that preached “fairness” while listing endless new ways in which central government would intervene in every form of economic activity.
Later, in a television interview, Mr Obama described his programme of using higher taxes on the wealthy to bankroll new government spending as “a recipe for a fair, sound approach to deficit reduction and rebuilding this country”. To which we who come from the future can only shout, “No‑o-o, go back! Don’t come down this road!”
As we try desperately to extricate ourselves from the consequences of that philosophy, which sounds so eminently reasonable (“giving everybody a fair share”, the President called it), we could tell America a thing or two – if it would only listen. Human beings are so much more complicated than this childlike conception of fairness assumes. When government takes away an ever larger proportion of the wealth which entrepreneurial activity creates and attempts to distribute it “fairly” (that is to say, evenly) throughout society in the form of welfare programmes and public spending projects, the effects are much, much more complex and perverse than a simple financial equation would suggest.
The assumption that all the wealth that individuals create belongs, by moral right, to the state, to spend on benefits or phoney job creation schemes (sorry, public infrastructure projects), is proving phenomenally difficult to expunge in Britain, so ineradicably has it embedded itself in the public consciousness.
In the US, it has had only odd historical moments of favour (Roosevelt’s New Deal, Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”), which have been beaten back consistently by the dynamism of a country that sees its existential purpose as being to foster and promote individual achievement and self-belief. It is bizarre that Obama should be regarded (or should regard himself) as a kind-of European who is trying to bring a sophisticated kind-of socialism to American economic life, complete with government-run health care and “fair” (high) taxes on the wealthy. If his European credentials were up to date, he would know that this was precisely the social model that is causing the EU to implode, and whose hopeless contradictions the best economic minds on the Continent are attempting, unsuccessfully, to resolve. …
What is needed here and in the US are tax cuts for the many, not the few, to adapt Mr Brown, and less demonising of the sorts of people who are able to invest and create the real wealth that will be our only chance for economic salvation.
Obama is clearly living the Left-liberal dream, which still survives in small pockets of American life. He wants to import the democratic socialism that Europe embraced after the war, which was, for European cultural reasons, imbued with aristocratic paternalism and Marxist notions of bourgeois guilt. But neither of these things are part of the American historical experience. The Left-wing intellectuals, including Obama himself, who adopt this language are talking dangerously uninformed rubbish: if democratic socialism was ever a solution to Europe’s problems (and the present crisis is making that seem less and less likely), it is certainly not an answer to any question that Americans are likely to ask.
U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D–Madison), Wisconsin’s Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, continues to not admit that she is a member of Democratic Socialists for America. When I brought that up on my last Wisconsin Public Radio appearance, my opponent, head of the Price County Democratic Party, suggested that we selfish, backward Americans need to learn from the enlightened European socialists. (I refrained from suggesting that he move to Europe if he thinks Eurosocialism is so superior.)
The problem with socialism is not merely that, as Margaret Thatcher noted, socialists eventually run out of other people’s money. Socialism’s outshoots from Karl Marx became Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism (20 million dead, including 400,000 Americans who died during World War II), the Soviet Union (60 million dead between 1917 and 1983), China (76 million dead between 1949 and 1987), Vietnam (50,000 U.S. dead during the Vietnam War) and Cambodia (2 million dead after the war).
Mature people learn from others’ mistakes. What does that say about Obama?
This past weekend, the University of North Dakota hosted the University of Wisconsin in men’s hockey.
This is the next to last season of their league, the Western Collegiate Hockey Association, with members of the Big Ten — Wisconsin and Minnesota — in the league. The Big Ten is sponsoring hockey beginning in 2013–14, with the WCHA’s Minnesota and Wisconsin, the Central Collegiate Hockey Association’s Michigan, Michigan State and Ohio State, and the new Penn State hockey program.
Today is the 30th anniversary of one of the more infamous yet amusing moments in college hockey — the North Dakota–Wisconsin Water Bottle Fight. On a Saturday night in January 1982 at the Dane County Coliseum in Madison, the Badgers were leading the Fighting Sioux 3–0 in the third period.
The Grand Forks Herald picks up what happened next from the perspective of Sioux co-captain Cary Eades:
Eades skated past the Wisconsin bench on his way to make a line change. Wisconsin’s John Newberry squirted Eades in the face with a water bottle — for the second time during the game.
“Their door was open, so I went in to have a talk with him,” Eades said.
Eades proceeded to put his stick up near Newberry’s throat and ask the Badger forward what he was going to do now. Wisconsin defenseman Pat Ethier saw this exchange, ran down the bench and landed a punch on Eades that set off everything.
Watch the Wisconsin and North Dakota versions of “everything” that followed:
This was neither the first nor the last time the Badgers and Fighting Sioux (the nickname was natural) had squared off on the ice. One year earlier in Grand Forks, the two teams got into a fight during pregame warmups. This was, however, the event that prompted the largest number of suspensions from the WCHA.
A member of the UW Band was in the beer garden (behind the two teams’ benches, which were divided by the tunnel into the beer garden) when a Badger and a Fighting Sioux (based on the Herald story, I’m guessing it was Jim Archibald, UND’s — surprise! — all-time penalty leader) rolled into the beer garden. The band member took one look at the Fighting Sioux and one look at his beer, and deposited the beer into the Boy Named Sioux’s facemask.
The 30-years-later comments from Eades, now an assistant coach for the (literally) Fighting Sioux, fit into the maybe-you-should-have-thought-of-that-at-the-time category:
While everyone remembers the brawl, Eades prefers to think about and talk about the other aspects of the rivalry that season. …
“From my personal standpoint, (the brawl) kind of overshadows a lot of good things I accomplished in my college career,” Eades said. “I was very fortunate to have a lot of good teammates and good seasons, but that’s the only thing anyone wants to talk about. I’d rather talk about the four goals in one period, but there’s no video of that. The fights and controversy and uproar are what people talk about at the hockey games and the beverage places afterward.
“Hopefully, with the 30 years, we can put it in a casket and bury it.”
The other aspects of the rivalry were epic in a different way. Wisconsin finished second to North Dakota in the WCHA regular season, but swept North Dakota in the WCHA finals in Grand Forks. The Fighting Sioux had 1982’s last laugh, though, beating Wisconsin 5–2 to win the NCAA title in Badger coach Bob Johnson’s final game before he headed to the NHL.
One year later, the WCHA semifinals (in the pre-Final Four/Five days) pitted, once again, Wisconsin against North Dakota in another two-game total-goal series. After a first-night tie, the Badgers tied the second game in the last minute of the third period, sending the game into overtime. And then another overtime. And then a third overtime. And then it got weird.
The Badgers’ Ted Pearson scored to win the game in the third overtime. Or so it seemed, until North Dakota challenged the curvature of Pearson’s stick. (Stick curvature is limited by hockey rule.) The stick was found to be illegal, so the goal was taken off the scoreboard and Pearson was sent to the penalty box. Not to be denied, however, the Badgers’ Paul Houck scored a short-handed goal about 30 seconds later, this time with a legal stick, ending the Fighting Sioux’s season.
The NCAA Frozen Four was held that year in … Grand Forks. Two WCHA teams were there — Wisconsin and Minnesota, a bigger rival for North Dakota than Wisconsin. So UND fans wore buttons with Wisconsin Ws that said “This Sioux’s for You.” Wisconsin never got to play Minnesota (unlike in 1981, when the Badgers beat the Gophers to win the NCAA title), but defeated Providence 2–0 and Harvard 6–2 to win the third of Wisconsin’s five NCAA titles.
That occurred the year before I went to UW. My last year at UW coincided with the first year of the WCHA Final Four, in St. Paul in 1988. Wisconsin beat North Dakota 2–1 in the Sunday afternoon semifinal, advancing the Badgers to the Monday night championship game against the Sunday night semifinal winner, Minnesota.
Monday afternoon was the third-place game between North Dakota and Minnesota–Duluth. Having nothing better to do, a group of us in the UW Band went to the third-place game and sat in with the North Dakota band during the second intermission. We borrowed their trumpets and, instead of their playing whatever they’d play to start the third period, we played “On Wisconsin.” The boos reverberated through the half-empty St. Paul Civic Center. It was great.
The Herald reports that North Dakota and Wisconsin have agreed to continue playing nonconference series after the Badgers head for the Big Ten in 2013–14. Which is good news. It would be a shame to lose a rivalry in which the two teams occasionally hate each other.
Today in 1917, the first jazz record was recorded:
The number one British single today in 1959:
The number one single today in 1961 was the first number one for a girl group:
Today in 1969, the Beatles held their last concert, on the roof of their Apple Records building:
The number one British single today in 1970:
The number one single today in 1982:
Today in 1988, testimony in a court case involving Frankie Goes to Hollywood lead singer Holly Johnson claimed that when you thought you heard the band in its two biggest hits, you really didn’t:
Birthdays begin with one-instrumental-hit wonder Horst Jankowski:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 