Today in 1972, Creedence Clearwater Revival split up:
The number one single today in 1999:
Today in 2006, CBGB, the New York rock club that launched many rock acts, closed:
Birthdays begin with C. Fred Turner, who sang and played bass for Bachman–Turner Overdrive:
Bob Weir plays guitar for the Grateful Dead:
Tony Carey of Rainbow and the Planet P Project:
Who is Michael Balzary? You know him better as Flea, bass player of the Red Hot Chili Peppers:
The number one single today in 1966:
Today in 1971, Rick Nelson was booed at Madison Square Garden in New York when he dared to sing new material at a concert. That prompted him to write …
If I told you the number one British album today in 1983 was “Genesis,” I would have given you the artist and the title:
The number one album today in 1994 was REM’s “Monster”:
Who shares a birthday with my wife? One-hit-wonder Barry McGuire:
Richard Carpenter, the surviving half of the Carpenters:
Chris DeBurgh:
Since it’s my wife’s birthday, here are her two favorite rock songs:
On a non-sports note, because she was in Guatemala with the Peace Corps, she missed this:
Tonight is the final night of regular-season high school football in Wisconsin.
It is the first time the season has ended on a Friday in many years. (I may have announced the last Friday night season-finale game in the state, in fact, between winless Fennimore and winless Dodgeville in 1989.) Over the past couple of decades, teams have been playing their final regular-season games on Thursday or even Wednesday in anticipation of the first playoff game the following Tuesday.
Coaches didn’t like the Thursday–Tuesday–Saturday cycle of putting three football games within 10 days at the end of the season. This has become more of an issue since the playoffs were expanded to 224 out of the state’s 400 or so high school teams (including co-op or tri-op teams). The WIAA has eliminated that issue by moving the season back, which means that the regular season now starts two weeks before Labor Day and ends in mid-October, which means that more of the football season is played (and more importantly preseason practice begins) in what is traditionally hot weather. The 2012 season will feature just eight regular-season games lest preseason practice start Aug. 1 to get the nine regular-season games and five rounds of playoffs in before gun deer hunting begins the Saturday before Thanksgiving.
You might have figured out by that previous paragraph that high school football is an example of either Sir Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion — for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction — or the Law of Unintended Consequences, or a game of Whackamole — fix one thing and something else comes up.
High school football playoffs are 35 years old in Wisconsin. (But some states have no statewide football playoffs.) And for at least that long the WIAA has been fiddling with the football playoff format at the behest of coaches, school administrators and others. The playoffs started with four classes in 1976, went to five divisions in 1978, six in 1981, and seven in 2002, two years after the Wisconsin Independent Schools Athletic Association was swallowed up by the WIAA. The playoffs started with four teams per class in 1976, went to eight teams per division in 1981, then 16 per division in 1987, and 32 per division in 1996.
And yet, football is the only WIAA-sanctioned high school sport in Wisconsin where not every team plays in the playoffs. I have yet to get a satisfactory answer as to why football is singled out other than some variation of “because it’s football.” (Which is kind of an after-the-fact justification of my not playing high school football … that and my lack of athletic ability and my disinterest in spending much of my sacrosanct summer getting my brains beaten in by someone bigger and meaner than me.)
One objection to letting everyone into the playoffs is what happens when a number one seed plays a winless team in the first round. (One athletic director from whom I heard this coached a team that went from a state championship one season to a winless season three years later.) Of course, the same thing happens now when teams on top of their conferences play their bottom brethren.
Football is the 800-pound gorilla in the room whenever conference arrangements are discussed. Conferences are arranged based on three criteria, the third being the sports offered among the schools. Criterion 1A is the size of the schools; criterion 1B is the distance between the schools. Whether 1A or 1B is more important depends on the decade; we appear to be in an era where 1A trumps 1B, which is odd in an era of gas prices approaching $4 per gallon and diesel approaching $5 per gallon and, by the way, a lousy economy. On the other hand, the sport in which the disparity of school size has the biggest impact is football; generally, the bigger the school, the more players you have available.
The WIAA proposed a radical change in high school football two years ago when it created a plan to replace conference affiliation for football with eight-team football-only districts. Teams that finished first through fourth would advance to the playoffs; teams that finished fifth through eighth would have one more game against a team that finished in its same position in another district. I still like the so-called district proposal, because it would allow conferences to be realigned based on geography while football districts would be based on enrollment, but apparently few others did.
The newest proposal leaves conferences where they are, but changes things more radically in other senses. The traditional formula of nonconference game(s) followed by conference games followed by playoffs would be rearranged. Each team would play seven conference games, followed by a playoff game. Playoff winners would move on, while playoff losers would go into an “extended season” of two more games (along with the losers of second-round games), so that every school would play at least 10 games. The “extended season” would be similar to today’s nonconference game(s) except that teams that lose their playoff game wouldn’t know who they would be playing in their final two games.
One advantage of the new proposal is that it treats football the same as all other WIAA-sanctioned sports. Another is that it would, I think, improve the lot of perennial non-playoff teams not because every team would get into the playoffs, but because seasons would be longer. One reason the same teams end up in the playoffs every season, I believe, is that playoff teams get more practice than non-playoff teams, since their seasons are longer. (Unlike in some football-crazy states, teams do not practice after their seasons end.) That’s helpful for the non-seniors, this season’s backups who become next season’s key performers.
My example is the Ripon football team between 2003 and 2006, when the Tigers won two state titles and advanced to the third round in two other seasons. Over those four seasons of nine regular-season games, the Tigers played 52 football games, which means they had (under the aforementioned three-games-in-10-days schedule) 12 more weeks of practice than non-playoff teams of that era.
The downside is that it would eliminate some of the great nonconference rivalries, such as tonight’s annual China Bull game between Omro and Winneconne. In the aforementioned 2003-to-2006 period, Ripon played Sheboygan Falls in each team’s last game before their conference seasons. The first three seasons, Ripon won 56–36, 15–8 and 12–6 in three tremendous games. Playing two games at the end of the season with not much at stake is not likely to generate much fan interest.
My suggestion is to move one of those “extended season” games from the end to the beginning — to give each team, as in the district proposal, one nonconference game followed by seven conference games followed by a playoff game, with the playoff losers then playing one more game, instead of two. That gives everyone 10 games and, more importantly, 10 weeks of practice when the season begins. The top two teams in each division would be back to 14 games instead of 13 in the current proposal, but that affects just 14 of the state’s more than 400 football teams. This isn’t a perfect plan, but I think it deals with the major downsides of the current playoff system and the current alternatives.
High school sports is supposed to be about the benefits of participating — learning how to work together for common goals, placing the team over the individual, learning how to prepare, the importance of doing well whether you’re recognized or not, and learning how to deal with adversity. It is also about working and preparing to win, even if you don’t win. I don’t believe any of that would be lost by letting all teams into the football playoffs, since every other team (and every varsity individual) in every other sport gets to participate in the postseason. And it might improve the state of football overall because teams would practice and play more.
The number one song today in 1957 was the Everly Brothers’ first number one:
The number one British single today in 1960:
The number one album today in 1967 is about an event that supposedly took place on my birthday:
Today in 1971, Arco Industries filed suit against John Fogerty because it claimed that Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Travelin’ Band” …
… “contained substantial material copied” from Little Richard’s “Good Golly Miss Molly”:
The suit was later dropped.
The number one song today in 1972 was perhaps the first song ever written about a carnivorous rat:
The number one album today in 1989:
Birthdays begin with Cliff Richard, a much bigger star on the other side of the Atlantic than here:
Colin Hodgkinson of Whitesnake:
Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues:
Dan McCafferty of Nazareth:
Thomas Dolby:
One death of note: Composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, today in 1989:
On Friday, the oldest high school football rivalry in the state resumes as Berlin plays at Ripon.
It may be the last meeting between the Berlin Indians and the Ripon Tigers. That is because by this time next year, Berlin will have to have another nickname besides “Indians,” thanks to the state Department of Public Instruction, which ruled that Berlin’s “Indians” is derogatory.
Or perhaps not. The Mukwonago school district won in Waukesha County Circuit Court when a judge declared the Indian mascot law unconstitutional under the provision in which a DPI examiner decides whether the mascot is permissible. The judge ruled that having a DPI examiner, attorney Paul Sherman, decide was a conflict of interest. Sherman also decided that Berlin can’t be the Indians anymore, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Kevin Binversie describes how we got to this silliness:
Under Wisconsin law, school districts are placed under a quasi-judicial procedure before the state’s Department of Public Instruction, or DPI, if any complaint from a district resident is filed against the school. It would then be up to a DPI bureaucrat to decide if the mascot “promotes stereotyping, pupil harassment, and discrimination.”
Each of the four schools — Osseo–Fairchild, Kewaunee, Mukwonago and Berlin — hit with complaints violated the law. Since these rulings came down, Kewaunee changed its name from Indians to Storm before a hearing took place, and according to the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association, Osseo–Fairchild has yet to determine a replacement for its old nickname, Chieftains.
Four other school districts — Gale–Ettrick–Trempealeau, Menominee, Poynette and Wonewoc–Center — switched their nicknames in the past four years. Menominee School District officials told WEAU-TV in Eau Claire in September the reason for their switch was out of fear that they may be the next target of a complaint to DPI.
This law likely was intended as the start of a second attempt to purge Native American mascots in Wisconsin. In the early 1990s, under fear and threat of costly lawsuits, many school districts backed away from their original nicknames. Sheboygan South’s Redmen became the Redwings, and the Indians of Seymour became the Thunder. Meanwhile, dozens of schools known as either the Raiders or Warriors found themselves in binds over whether their logo would lead to costly litigation.
The law stipulates that only one complaint from one school district resident is required to start the nickname-erasure process. (And it certainly demonstrates the times we live in when governmental bodies make decisions because of fear of what a higher level of government will do to them.) Read the Save the Berlin High School Mascot! group on Facebook, and you will conclude that the complainant in Berlin’s case did it out of spite to his neighbors.
Additional controversy in Berlin’s case comes from the Berlin High School Homecoming parade, where three students carried this sign:
My wife, who is part American Indian (which means our kids are too), grew up on a farm between Lancaster (Flying Arrows) and Potosi (Chieftains). Northeast of Lancaster is the Riverdale (Chieftains) and Seneca (Indians) school districts. Potosi is in the same athletic conference as Belmont (Braves) and Black Hawk (Warriors). South of Ripon is Waupun (Warriors), and west of Ripon is Wisconsin Dells (Chiefs).
This is not limited to high schools. After I announce the Tigers and Indians Friday, I’ll be announcing Ripon College against Beloit College Saturday afternoon. Ripon used to be known as the Redmen, reportedly (though this is not clear) to honor 1920s Ripon football player and coach Donald “Red” Martin. The Redmen became the Red Hawks in the 1990s. Two weeks ago, Ripon played Knox College, which changed its nickname from the Siwash (formerly a local tribe) to the Prairie Fire for the same reasons.
The Democratic-controlled Legislature passed and Gov. James Doyle signed the anti-Indian-mascot bill (which included no state aid for the expenses of replacing a mascot, making it yet another unfunded mandate) after major lobbying by the Wisconsin Indian Education Association, which claims that “Indians are people — not mascots.” So, you ask, where is the effort to extend this people-not-mascots initiative to places like Stoughton (Vikings), Freedom (Irish), Sparta (Spartans) or Oostburg (Flying Dutchmen)? Why are, in order, Norwegians, Irish, Greeks or Dutch Wisconsinites not fighting to eliminate those nicknames? (For that matter, one would think given Ireland’s history with Great Britain that the Irish would be trying to eliminate the nickname of my alma mater, Madison La Follette — the Lancers and our English logos.)
There are two reasons. The first is that the WIEA claims to have education on its side. It has an entire page of the supposedly pernicious effects of Indian mascots on American Indian children. Read through, and you’ll get an idea of the progressivism at its worst, tyranny of the experts, psychobabble, political correctness and, to borrow George W. Bush’s phrase, soft bigotry of low expectations inherent in educational research today.
Binversie brings up the other reason:
With the Mukwonago decision now out there, it may be the opportune time to repeal the current flawed law or simply correct it. State Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, has been working on repeal legislation for a year and said last week’s decision could spark enough action inside the Legislature for his bill to move out of the Assembly’s Homeland Security and State Affairs Committee.
Nass is cautious about its chances for success though, blaming backroom dealing among committee chairman Karl Van Roy, R-Green Bay, Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald, R-Horicon, and moneyed interests fueled by tribal casinos.
“From the beginning, Chairman Van Roy has refused to allow this bill to move forward in the committee process,” Nass said. “Chairman Van Roy’s decision has previously been backed by Speaker Fitzgerald based on the strong opposition of the state’s Indian Tribes, especially the Potawatomi Tribe.”
Van Roy was one of two Republicans to vote for the original legislation in 2010.
Thanks to Indian tribal gaming, the tribes are big political players in this state. Given tribes’ support of Democrats ever since the federal court ruling that allowed tribal gaming as long as the state allows such gaming as a lottery and bingo (which was in part paid off by Doyle’s indefinitely extending tribal gaming compacts a decade ago), Van Roy and Fitzgerald are mistaken if they think they’re going to get more tribal money or votes by burying the bill in committee. The spurious accusations of racism against Republicans haven’t gone away in the two years since this legislation became law, have they?
There are some interesting local ironies. The 14th Senate District is represented by Sen. Luther Olsen (R–Ripon), a Berlin High School graduate. The 14th also includes the Weyauwega–Fremont School District, which shares Berlin’s nickname. Yet Olsen has not publicly (as far as I know) come out to support repealing the bill. Olsen’s Recallarama opponent, Rep. Fred Clark (D–Baraboo), who voted for the bill when the Democrats controlled the Assembly, never bothered to explain where Berlin, Weyauwega–Fremont and other Indian-nicknamed school districts should get the money to change athletic and band uniforms, insignia on athletic facility walls, and other uses of the logos.
The other irony is in the circuit court decision, as Mike Nichols notes:
As he said during his deposition in the lawsuit against him and [Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony] Evers, he works for DPI, whose leadership is on record as saying it wants to get rid of all race-based nicknames. The way the law and DPI are structured, it would probably be impossible for Sherman to be fair to school districts and keep his job.
The process, in other words, is biased against districts that happen to have harmless nicknames tied to the American Indian history of their communities.
The districts are getting railroaded because, under a state law [Circuit Judge Donald] Hassin said he finds “uncommonly silly,” a single complaint filed with DPI against a school district will almost certainly result in the district having to find a new nickname.
The district gets a hearing in front of someone such as Sherman — but the result is essentially predetermined because the burden is not on those who complain to prove the districts are discriminating with their nicknames. The burden is on the districts to prove they are not.
This, it turns out, is about as easy as proving you’ve never swallowed a salamander or worn pink underwear. You can argue all you want that you find salamanders unappetizing and much prefer lavender, but how do you prove it?
Patrick Gasper, spokesman for DPI, said the department is required to uphold the law and hasn’t decided whether to appeal Hassin’s decision.
Maybe they should make a different sort of appeal: one to the Legislature to get rid of the officially silly law once and for all.
Until then, there are dozens of school districts in Wisconsin where a citizen could file a complaint and, without proving anything, get DPI to aid and abet in labeling the district discriminatory — no matter what the facts are.
Too bad the folks who fight so hard against bias don’t recognize it in themselves.
The final irony is that no one chooses an athletic mascot for the purpose of self-derogation. Most athletic logos are chosen because of the kinds of qualities inherent in the symbol — strength, bravery, endurance, cleverness, and so on. (Berlin’s “Indians” are named for the Mascoutin tribe, which formerly lived in the area.)
If there is any derogatory intent, it’s found not in the athletic teams, but in their opponents should they, for instance, call to “Scalp the Indians” or “Sink the Vikings” or whatever. That is covered in the WIAA’s and Midwest Conference’s admonitions, announced before games, against derogatory cheers. But if that weren’t the case, so what? (Neither the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution nor the Wisconsin Constitution give you the right to not have your feelings hurt or to not be offended.) Binversie points out:
But is it racist to have a mascot of just “Indians” or something like “Blackhawks,” the second-most common Native American mascot name in Wisconsin?
Hardly.
Mascots are not meant by design to be divisive entities in their communities, but instead they are rallying point, something the community can get behind and join. This may be why those committed to the extinction of all Native American mascots in Wisconsin also are opposed to letting communities decide these matters on their own through local referendums.
They know the votes aren’t there to get the outcome they would prefer, so they are left with resorting to using the governmental cudgel of DPI to get what they want.
The law needs to be changed to give, at minimum, communities a voice in their own defense, if not just a voice before their own state government. If it can’t be changed for the betterment of that principle, then it needs to be repealed outright.
What happens next in Berlin is an interesting question, because it gives the school district the unappealing choice of spending thousands of dollars defending itself in court, or spending thousands of dollars getting rid of all the logos, particularly given the unpopularity of the latter choice. The Berlin School District’s administrator told WFRV-TV that the school district wouldn’t appeal. On the other hand, a public meeting about the mascot will be held Monday evening. (And given the Waukesha County decision and the similarity to the Berlin case, one wonders if the law now can be legally enforced, since the constitutional flaw was in how the law was written.)
I’m surprised no one has yet brought up the R-word — recall — against any Berlin school board member who supports eliminating the Indian mascot. Unlike the recalls over public employee collective bargaining, eliminating the Berlin Indian will cost the school district significant money. If I lived in the Berlin school district and the mascot was changed against my wishes, I would certainly feel free to never again vote for any referendum the school district sought, whether for a new school building or to exceed revenue caps.
This is the sort of thing that makes people hate government. To assuage a special interest group, state government mandates spending millions of dollars (the collective cost of erasing Indian mascots from Wisconsin) and/or otherwise depriving us of our liberties and our traditions in the name of trendy social change. Who benefits from getting rid of Indian mascots? No one.
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto thinks Democrats and liberals are bracing for the de-election of President Obama in 13 months:
[HotAir.com’s Howard] Portnoy observes: “What I believe is happening is that the left is reading the handwriting on the wall and resigning itself to the harsh reality [that] the man they trusted to ‘fundamentally transform America’ is on the verge of being unelected.”
We’d go a step further. Not only does Obama’s re-election look to be in serious jeopardy, but his presidency has been an almost unmitigated disaster for progressive liberalism, nearly every tenet of which has been revealed to be untenable either practically, politically or both.
Stimulus Sr. discredited Keynesian demand-side economics–the notion that the way to produce employment and growth is through massive government spending. The real tragedy is that even after blowing hundreds of billions of dollars, Obama and many other Democrats failed to learn the lesson.
ObamaCare proved a political fiasco, showing that there are limits to Americans’ willingness to tolerate the expansion of the welfare state. Because most provisions have not yet taken effect, the policy disaster is delayed and may be averted if either Congress repeals it in 2013 or the Supreme Court strikes it down as unconstitutional next year. The latter case would mark a huge legal defeat for liberalism. It would be the first time since the New Deal that the court has recognized a serious limitation on Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce.
Even something as small as Bank of America’s recently announced $5-a-month debit-card fee is liberal policy failure. The fee is intended to recoup money lost by price controls on merchant fees included in last year’s Dodd-Frank law.
The power of unions has diminished, with Wisconsin, the first state to establish so-called collective bargaining for government employees, having abolished it. “Card check,” which would have enabled unions to take over workplaces without approval by secret ballot, couldn’t even get past a Democratic Congress. Neither could “cap and trade,” the administration’s plan to combat global warming–a phenomenon increasingly many Americans suspect is a hoax.
The administration’s only major success has been in the area of terrorism. Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki are dead, and long may they rot. But their deaths were not the result of progressive liberal policies. Except in the area of interrogation, the current administration has largely kept its predecessor’s antiterror policies, albeit often reluctantly. …
The left got what it wanted in 2008: a liberal president with a sweeping agenda and big Democratic majorities capable of enacting it. The result has been a great and failed experiment in progressive politics and governance. In due course, one hopes, the left will absorb some lessons–but for now, they seem to be suffering a nervous breakdown.
This is similar to the strange narrative that suggests that Obama is clinically depressed, reported a month ago by Gawker:
We hear the New York Times is looking into whether it’s all starting to get to him—like, clinically.
We’re told by a source inside the Times that the paper is preparing a story arguing that Obama no longer finds joy in the political back-and-forth, has seemed increasingly listless to associates, and is generally exhibiting the litany of signs that late-night cable commercials will tell you add up to depression. Or maybe Low T.
Either way, the investigation was described to us as taking seriously the notion that Obama may be suffering from a depressive episode. Of course, absent a telltale Wellbutrin prescription or testimony from the man himself, it’s really impossible to achieve a reliable diagnosis. And a story like “Obama Appears to Suffer From Depression” can be easily downgraded to “Political Travails Begin to Take Personal Toll on Obama.” So the story in question, if it ever comes out, may not end up supporting the depression thesis. But rest assured: There are people at the Times who, based on the paper’s reporting, believe Obama is depressed—the kind of depression where, if he weren’t the president of the United States, he wouldn’t be getting out of bed in the morning.
Given what Obama and his minions have been doing to the country, if Obama is indeed depressed, this could be considered karmic payback, except that said payback doesn’t help the country at all. (As I’ve pointed out before, we do not want Joe Biden as president either.) It also could be the result of unrealized optimism that Obama, who has never lacked for ego, could indeed transform the country — you know, “care for the sick and good jobs for the jobless,” “when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” etc., etc., etc.
George Will once wrote that “The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised,” which is why he claimed that pessimists are happier than optimists. I assume, for instance, that despite the continued efforts of Obama and his apparatchiks (see Occupy Wall Street) to ruin our lives and destroy this country, the Republicans will screw up and we’ll be stuck with the audacity of hype for another four years. Obama should remember the words of his favorite failed economist, John Maynard Keynes: “In the long run we are all dead.”
The number one British album today in 1973 was the Rolling Stones’ “Goats Head Soup,” despite (or perhaps because of) the BBC’s ban of one of its songs, “Star Star”:
Who shares a birthday with my brother (who celebrated his sixth birthday, on a Friday the 13th, by getting chicken pox from me)? Start with Paul Simon:
Robert Lamm plays keyboards — or more accurately, the keytar — for Chicago:
Sammy Hagar:
Craig McGregor of Foghat:
John Ford Coley, formerly a duet with England Dan Seals:
Rob Marche played guitar for the Jo Boxers, who …
One death of note: Ed Sullivan, whose Sunday night CBS-TV show showed off rock and roll (plus Topo Gigio and Senor Wences) to millions, died today in 1974:
I have spent time on Twitter and Facebook making fun of our vice president, Joe Biden, the possessor of a two-digit IQ but a mile-wide mouth.
I’ve written that Biden makes Dan Quayle look like a Phi Beta Kappa in comparison. Biden is Barack Obama’s impeachment insurance. Biden is to national politics what former U.S. Rep. Steve Kagen (D–Appleton) was to Wisconsin politics — someone whose ego was in inverse proportion to his intelligence.
But to prove that a stopped (digital) clock is right once a day, Biden has one commendable attribute: He owns a Corvette, as he bragged in an interview with Car and Driver:
C/D: Which cars do you most recall?
JB: I bought a ’51 Studebaker. My dad thought it was nice and calm, but it had that overdrive, and it was fast. Then I bought a 1952 Plymouth convertible, candy-apple red with a split windshield. I think that was my favorite. I had a ’56 Chevy, then in college I bought a 100,000-mile Mercedes 190SL with those Solex carburetors that never functioned. And I still have my 1967 Goodwood-green Corvette, 327, 350-horse, with a rear-axle ratio that really gets up and goes. The Secret Service won’t let me drive it. I’m not allowed to drive anything. It’s the one thing I hate about this job. I’m serious.
Well, we can all hope that Biden gets the chance to drive the Corvette after Jan. 20, 2013. I’m serious.
Not surprisingly, Biden touts the government bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler:
C/D: It must be gratifying to see Chrysler pay off its government loans six years early. Where is GM in its payback schedule?
JB: GM is on schedule. They’ve paid back a significant portion. We still hold 33.3 percent of GM common equity, but the point is that 33.3 percent is worth something. So taxpayers have an asset. But the best news is GM is talking about hiring back essentially the last of the laid-off workers by year’s end. No one ever thought we’d get there.
C/D: You said the loss of GM and Chrysler would’ve killed a million jobs?
JB: One million, absolutely. The critics talk about, “Oh, the market would have balanced things out.” But that’s like saying, “In the long run, we’ll all be dead.” Had we not forced the car companies to reorganize, then given them help, well, the failure of the suppliers then could have caused Ford to fail as well. So this has exceeded everyone’s expectations.
That’s Biden’s (which means Obama’s) view. Now here’s reality, as observed by Megan McArdle of The Atlantic:
What lesson, exactly, are we supposed to learn from this “success”? What question did it answer? “Can the government keep companies operating if it is willing to give them a virtually interest free loan of $50 billion, and a tax-free gift of $20 billion or so?” I don’t think that this was really in dispute. When all is said and done, we will probably have given them a sum equal to its 2007 market cap and roughly four times GM’s 2008 market capitalization.No, the question was not whether GM could make a profit after a bankruptcy that stiffed most of its creditors and shed the most grotesque burdens of its legacy costs, nor whether giving companies money will make them more profitable. The question is whether it was worth it to the taxpayer to burn $10-20 billion in order to give the company another shot at life. To put that in perspective, GM had about 75,000 hourly workers before the bankruptcy. We could have given each of them a cool $250,000 and still come out well ahead compared to the ultimate cost of the bailout including the tax breaks–and over $100,000 a piece if we just wanted to break even against our losses on the common stock.And if we’d done that, we’d have saved ourselves in other ways. We would have reduced some of the overcapacity that plagues the global industry. We would not have seen the government throwing its weight into a bankruptcy proceeding in order to redistribute money from creditors to pensioners, which isn’t a good precedent.But even if you still think that the bailout was a good idea, there’s something you should consider before we start celebrating the administration’s Solomonic wisdom: the Obama administration’s rush to dispose of its GM stake before the 2012 election is probably costing us billions. No one I interviewed for my piece on GM was exactly enthusiastic about an early IPO; doing it so quickly meant that the company had very little to show in the way of earnings and stability.
Car and Driver didn’t bother to ask Biden why the Obama administration is working hard to make sure that no one will be able to buy the 2000s equivalent of Biden’s Corvette. Fuel economy regulations the administration is jamming down our throats and pollution regulations Obama is trying to jam down our throats mean that cars will get smaller and less capable but more expensive. (Particularly pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles, which GM was able to build and sell at a profit before 2008 happened. GM also makes money on Corvettes.) But that’s OK because given what the Obama administration is doing to the economy and specifically to the dollar (not to mention Obama’s plans for carbon taxes), neither you nor I will be able to afford a new vehicle from GM or any other carmaker anyway. (Which appears to be what the administration wants given the money it is wasting on “high-speed” rail.)
This is the kind of “industrial policy” that a majority of voters decided they wanted in November 2008. That includes the infamous Cash for Clunkers, explained in this comment:
You had people with 15 year old Ford Explorers that were paid off that still ran perfectly fine. Sure their mpgs went from 18mpg to 28. However, their monthly payments went from $0 to $400. In the course of a 5 year loan that’s $24,000. That much money buys you 6,000 gallons of gas (at $4/gal) which allows you to drive a bit over 100K miles. You’d have to drive for a decade just to break even. I’m also willing to bet that an Explorer can run another 10 years before going to the scrap yard over your brand new Chevy Cruze.
The question car enthusiasts ask is what car-buyers will get in exchange for the tens of billions of our tax dollars. And based on this Motor Trend interview with GM’s Mark Reuss, you should not be optimistic:
With CAFE regulations only expected to tighten, Reuss sees the truck market evolving into more specialized vehicles. Referencing his time abroad living in countries with much higher fuel prices, Reuss noted that people tended to use the best vehicle for their needs rather than a catch-all pickup truck like you find in America today. He gave the example of a flower shop making deliveries with a full-size [Ford] E-Series van when a Transit Connect would work fine. Where today he sees American craftsman buying a pickup truck that can do anything from hauling the family to hauling a horse trailer, in the future he sees them buying fewer all-purpose trucks and more vehicles that fit their specific needs.
You may have seen Chevrolet’s incredibly annoying Volt commercials. If you have, you know that the Volt is a gas/electric car that can be plugged in. Chevy’s goal was to sell 10,000 Volts in 2011, at about $32,500, including a $7,500 federal tax rebate. According to Jalopnik.com, through the end of September, Chevy had shipped to dealers (sales plus those sitting on car lots) 3,895 Volts, with more than 2,600 of them for sale. Do the math, and in nine months Chevy has sold around 1,200 Volts, about 130 of them per month, including 723 in September. In contrast, Chevy sold 5,246 Suburbans in September.
The financial experts say that families should spend no more than one-third to one-half their annual income on a vehicle. (As of 2009, the average car cost 22.1 weeks of family income.) When you consider all the things that families do — commuting to work, transporting kids to their various activities, or pulling a trailer, camper or boat — the idea that a family will buy one vehicle per family need is absurd, not to mention unaffordable. Between costs and the fact that vehicles last longer, families will be looking for more, not less, out of their vehicles. If GM can’t figure that out, then all that taxpayer money was wasted, because GM will not be long for this world. (Nor, one thinks, will be activities that require further carbon emissions, such as boating or snowmobiling.)
Alfred Sloan, the long-time chairman of GM, was fond of a term called “planned obsolescence,” which would prompt new car sales when cars wore out or their owners got tired of them. That seems to be what the carmakers seem to be refoisting on consumers with such technologies as cylinder deactivation and start–stop, where cars’ engines shut off at stop lights to allegedly save fuel and emissions.
The latter came to mind Monday when I dropped off our oldest son at his soccer match, went back home to pick up our daughter from Girl Scouts, and returned to the other side of Ripon to pick up our other son (his school is across the street from the park where the soccer field is located), and watch said soccer match. Between our house and the school and soccer field, route alternative one includes three stoplights, one four-way stop sign and two additional stop signs; alternative two replaces the two stoplights with one more four-way stop and two more stop signs. One trip means a dozen opportunities for your start–stop-equipped car to shut off its engine. It is impossible for me to imagine that such a system will not decrease the life of the vehicle on which it is equipped. That may represent an opportunity to sell another car for GM; for me, it’s a reason to not buy a car so equipped.
GM’s recent government-fueled (see McArdle’s explanation) profits notwithstanding, the thing automakers appear to have not grasped yet is that their future includes fewer, not more, vehicle sales. Businesses make profits in an era of reduced sales by increasing profits on each sale. If cars last longer, over time automakers will sell fewer of them, and at some point carmakers will run out of new markets. (China, for instance, which appears to be taking a 180-degree turn away from freedom.) A company increases profits by some combination of increasing revenues and reducing expenses. (See United Auto Workers.)
This is the time of year where automakers used to roll out their new cars and car enthusiasts would be excited about said new cars. Automakers now roll them out all year, but even independent of that, there’s nothing particularly exciting or, more importantly, useful coming from the automakers these days that could be considered affordable. I will believe in the value of hybrids or all-electric vehicles as soon as our family of five and all their stuff can fit in one and be transported to our three-digit-mileage destination without making their parents bankrupt paying for said vehicle. That’s not happening anytime soon.
We begin with an entry from the It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time Dept.: Today in 1956, Chrysler Corp. launched its 1957 car lineup with a new option: a record player. The record player didn’t play albums or 45s, however; it played only seven-inch discs at 16⅔ rpm. Chrysler sold them until 1961.
Today in 1957, Little Richard was on an Australian tour when he publicly renounced rock and roll and embraced religion and announced he was going to record Gospel music from now on. The conversion was the result of his praying during a flight when one of the plane’s engines caught fire.
Little Richard returned to rock and roll five years later.
The number one song today in 1963:
The number one album today in 1968 was Big Brother and the Holding Company’s “Cheap Thrills”:
The short list of birthdays starts with a British composer familiar to high school band members everywhere: Ralph Vaughan Williams:
Sam Moore, half of Sam and Dave:
The deep-voiced Melvin Franklin was one of the original Temptations:
Pat Dinizio sang for the Smithereens:
Two deaths of note: Gene Vincent died of a perforated ulcer at 36 today in 1971:
Ricky Wilson, who played guitar for the B-52s, died of AIDS today in 1985:
One of the unpleasant aspects of the two-party system is how people decide to run for an office then, after they don’t win but their primary competitor does, you never hear from them until the winner loses or decides to leave office.
Consider, for instance, Nancy Nusbaum, who ran against U.S. Rep. Toby Roth (R–Appleton) in 1994, then ran against Steve Kagen, who mistakenly won the Eighth Congressional District Democratic primary in 2006. Regardless of whether you agree with Nusbaum politically, anyone who knows her knows that Nusbaum clearly had more political experience and more going on upstairs than Kagen. So why didn’t Nusbaum ran against Kagen, who embarrassed the Eighth Congressional District every time he opened his mouth, in 2008 or 2010?
Another candidate against Kagen was Jamie Wall, the Green Bay business consultant and former state Department of Commerce administrator who ran against Kagen in 2006 (but not 2008 or 2010), and now wants to run against the man who mercifully ended (for now) Kagen’s political career, U.S. Rep. Reid Ribble (R–Sherwood).
The Green Bay Press–Gazette reports that Wall is “Frustrated with what he sees as a ‘mess’ in Washington,” as if this is a new development:
“Congress is broken,” Wall said. “It’s time for members of Congress to act like adults instead of squabbling children (and) focus on the issues that matter more than anything to the people who sent them to Washington, which is the economy and jobs.” …
Wall cast himself as a problem solver who would approach the nation’s challenges in a pragmatic, bipartisan spirit.
“We have a serious, serious problem with the job situation here,” Wall said. “We really need people who will make this their priority and are willing to work in a practical manner to get things done for the citizens of the country and state. We don’t have that right now.”
“In the business world,” Wall continued, “what you do when you’re faced with a problem is you get all the facts together and you think about what they mean. You talk to people who know something about the problem and you come to a solution in a practical way and execute it. That’s certainly not what the pattern of behavior has been in Congress lately. You have people with ideological lines drawn in the sand (who) won’t work well with others, won’t play with others.”
Problem-solver Wall quickly morphed into Democratic attack dog Wall:
“I’ve never met Congressman Ribble, but I do think that he’s part of a broken system which is not serving the American people or the people in Northeast Wisconsin well.”
When pressed to identify specific areas of disagreement with Ribble on policy, Wall noted Ribble’s support for a federal budget plan closely associated with U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Janesville, who chairs the House Budget Committee that also includes Ribble.
Wall claims the plan would “end Medicare as we know it,” a recurring Democratic line of attack Republicans have pilloried as a cynical ploy to scare seniors. …
To help kick-start the nation’s sputtering economy, Wall voiced support for portions of President Barack Obama’s $447 billion jobs plan, known as the American Jobs Act.
In addition to applauding the president’s proposed extension of a payroll tax cut as “something people of both parties should be able to agree on,” Wall said he favored new infrastructure spending to boost the economy, especially at a time when federal borrowing rates are hovering around 2 percent.
“Right now, we have literally thousands of people who used to work in the construction industry right here in Northeast Wisconsin,” Wall said. “We have decaying infrastructure … That all adds up to me to a case for targeted spending in infrastructure to put people back to work to and — over the long term — make the economy more productive. I’d start with those ideas.”
To review: Wall thinks absolutely nothing should be changed about a program created in the 1960s in a country with substantially different demographics (as in a shrinking ratio of workers to recipients) than 2011 America. Wall believes that, since the $787 billion stimulus bill didn’t delivered the promised less-than-8-percent unemployment, a stimulus bill with a different price tag will. And Wall apparently has nothing to suggest to revitalize the economy after all the jobs from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (to wit, the U.S. 41 project jobs) go away. Great problem-solving skills, there, Jamie.
My advice to Democrats running or planning to run in 2012: You need to find a new hymnal. The approval ratings for President Obama continue to plunge downward. The approval ratings for Congress are worse, but the latter set of approval ratings include congressmen of both parties. Voters who don’t like John Boehner get Nancy Pelosi instead. You think that’s progress?
If the tea party contributed only one thing to American politics, it was to focus attention on the deficit and our $14 trillion debt. Independent of what the money-for-nothing Occupy _______ people think, financial responsibility is now the order of the day. (If for no other reason than the fact that financial irresponsibility on numerous levels helped cause the mess we’re in today.)
Democrats need to convince voters that they can be trusted to, you know, do better than run some of the largest state deficits in the nation, as Gov. James Doyle and majority Democrats did in 2009–10. Want to complain about Republican wasteful spending? Fine. (There are numerous GOP targets from which to choose.) But replacing a president and party that generated record deficits in the first eight years of the 2000s with a president and party that exceeded even that in the last two years of the 2000s’ first decade did not strike voters as progress, as Nov. 2’s election results demonstrated.
The political narrative is that Republicans are for tax breaks regardless of what they do to the deficit, and Democrats are for increasing government spending regardless of what it does to the deficit. Demographics (all the 2006 Democratic U.S. Senate winners get to stand for reelection) and history (the House of Representatives hasn’t swung from one party to the other and back since the 195os), and an economy that is not likely to be perceived as better one year from now, make 2012 likely to be a bad year for Democrats. If Democrats want to change that, they need to change themselves.
If Wall thinks Eighth Congressional District Democrats are as stupidly liberal as the Occupy _______ types are, he’s going to lose the 2012 race too.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 