Are We Really All Arizonans?

Reaction to the new immigration law in Arizona was quick, predictable, and superficial. The left wailed about profiling; Saturday Night Live did a cheap-shot skit portraying Arizona cops as Nazis; and the blogosphere boiled with anger.

But in southern Arizona, most folks welcomed the new law.

Actually, it’s only one step farther than what law enforcement in Dane County does: here, they’ll check your immigration status if you’ve been arrested and wind up in the cooler; there, they’ll check your immigration status for reasonable suspicion.

And that’s what a lot of folks call profiling.

It’s not likely a lot of Irish or Polish or Italians will have their papers checked.

Back in the reign of Mayor Swoozie, I owned a home on Sequoia Trail in Burr Oaks. Several blocks away, along the Park Street corridor, there was serious trouble with open-air drug sales, prostitution, and all manner of troublesome behavior. Boss Bruer, the alder, wanted a loitering ordinance so the cops could more effectively clean things up. The neighborhood supported it, and I mean both white folks and people of color.

But the downtown and west side crowd cried “profiling” – so the ordinance never really happened.

Funny how that changed a couple years ago when the downtown condo crowd started getting roused from their heedless slumber at bar time by noisy drunks.

My point is this: defending the borders is a federal obligation, and decade after decade, the feds have sat on their hands. Now, the people of Arizona are fed up with it, and essentially said it was well past time for something to be done.

What they did is probably the wrong thing. But many people believe it was better than doing nothing, and it may actually prod the feds into upholding their responsibility.

Neither the proposed Madison ordinance years ago nor the new Arizona law solve the problem. They’re reflections of people who are fed up with crime. Many figures are bandied about, but most say 400 thousand foreign nationals are in Arizona unlawfully.

That’s wrong.

It is a federal obligation to clean up our immigration policy, to patrol and defend our borders, and to make sure we know who’s coming into our nation. We can and should welcome people of all nations to our country. And, if they like it here, we should invite them to be citizens of our nation.

But we need to know who they are.

Just like in 1844, when the Morrisseys came here, from Ireland.

The Liar And His Lying TV Ad

Who does he think he’s kidding? The CEO of GM, Ed Whitacre, strolling through one of our (and I say our, because as taypayers we own a fair chunk of GM) car plants and telling us how he’s paid back the government loans with interest, ahead of schedule.

Back in the day, if you ran an ad like that, and held a broadcast license, the Federal Trade Commission would call the Federal Communications Commission and have you shut down for running an ad you knew was false and misleading.

The Whitacre ad, which saturated the TV airwaves for the past several days, is more than misleading. It’s a downright, bold-faced lie.

Whitacre’s company got $52 billion in taxpayer aid. Whitacre’s minions sent a check to the U. S. Treasury for $6.7 billion. They got that money from dipping into another TARP (Toxic Assets Relief Program) pot of money made available to GM courtesy of the U.S. Taxpayer.

So, while Whitacre would have us believe he’s “paid up in advance”, his company still owes the taxpayers all $52 billion. Only in the fantasyland of GM finance can you use money borrowed from the taxpayers to “pay them back”.

Pressed to the point, some GM PR staffer said “OK, it was government money, but nobody thought we’d be able to pay it back”.

GM’s “earnings” (losses) certainly don’t support a payback of any sort. But, as public relations executives have known for decades, if you tell a lie often enough, a substantial percentage of people will come to believe it’s the truth.

The GM ad is a lie.

Lee Iacocca must be mad as hell. For those of us old enough to remember the government bailout of Chrysler back in 1979, the same thing happened. Chrysler was effectively bankrupt when it got the “assistance”, and Iacocca a few months later did the same thing Whitacre did…claimed the money was “all paid back”.

All Iacocca got was a $1.2 billion loan guarantee package that included sweeteners to allow the company to renegotiate bank loans, vendor contracts, and the other things that are typically done in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. GM got $52 billion!

But the lies told and myths surrounding Chrysler’s “recovery” in 1979, 1980, and 1981 are the same stuff we’re beginning to hear all over again.

We just don’t learn. The media banks the ad money and moves on.

Toxic Timmy and The Veep In Cheesetopia

Early this afternoon, the Treasury Secretary and the Vice President will make a stop at UW-Milwaukee to sell the President’s financial reform package. And boy, do we need reform.

In many ways, though, it’s politics as usual, with one side lined up against the other, and the last thing we need is politics as usual. Tim Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, is a highly tainted public figure. First, he’s incompetent; second, he’s apparently not very bright; and third, he’s been a “big bank” guy all his life.

Vice-President Biden is pretty much along for the ride.

The proposed reforms, though still very much in-the-making, include a mechanism for liquidating large banks/investment houses that get themselves into trouble; there’d be an entirely new bureaucracy to police lending practices from a consumer standpoint; and a plan to require those insanely risky derivative investments to be traded on open exchanges.

Most of this stuff is through the House, and the Senate is still tinkering.

Predictably, the Republicans are lined up against the plan, particularly the part that requires the investment houses to spin off their derivates trading operations. And the Republicans pretty much had their way in getting rid of that stupid 50-billion-dollar bailout fund, which I think was put in the legislation simply so the Democrats could “give” on something.

Most people’s eyes glaze over when you start talking about credit default swaps on collateralized debt obligations, but that’s the monkey wrench that brought the giant financial houses to their knees. If you believe what people like author Michael Lewis (“The Big Short”) say about it, the top echelon of executives in the big financial outfits really didn’t understand the tremendous risks their derivatives traders were taking.

In common parlance, these traders had their companies on the hook for billions and billions and billions of dollars of risk, which the top execs had no idea about. And so much of it was done “off the books” that it’s hard to get a clear picture of the staggering amounts of money involved.

Pretty much all we know for sure is that you and me, and our grandchildren’s children are on the hook for bailing them out, with no reasonable expectation right now that it won’t happen again. After the meltdown and the bailout, the big banks and investment houses simply went back to doing what they were doing, because there were no strings attached to the bailout money, and no regulations in place to stop them or even effectively monitor them.

We need better regulation and better regulators, and don’t come at me with “free market” arguments, or we’ll have to talk about “too big to fail”, and that’s a conversation you do NOT want to have if you’re opposed to more stringent regulation and more competent regulators.

And, just between you and me, it would be OK with me if Greenspan, Geithner, Bernanke, and the whole lot of them simply disappeared.

I don’t think we could possibly do worse.

Highly Addictive; Extremely Dangerous (...again)

What if the headline in the State Journal Friday had read “Big beer brewing operation busted; 2 men charged”…instead of “Big marijuana growing operation busted; 2 men charged.” Such a headline might have been possible during the prohibition era, another failed “great experiment” in forcing the beliefs and morals of a tiny minority on the majority.

It’s still news when the cops bust a dope-growing operation, particularly one of pretty good size, being run out of a home in a residential neighborhood. (Clue: the electric power bill for the home was $913 a month.) Cops seized 628 marijuana plants, each, they said, capable of producing a pound of pot apiece with a street value of 1 to 3 thousand bucks.

As Mel Gibson’s character Dale McCussic said in the movie “Tequila Sunrise”: what street is THAT?

Or, as one of the local TV stations reported, each plant producing about a pound of pot, with a street value of 1 to 3 million dollars. Easy mistake to make, but if a pound of pot could bring a million bucks, there’d be a lot more billionaires in this world.

We struggle in Cheesetopia to decide whether we should legalize “medicinal” marijuana. The cops keep yammering at us that it’s a highly addictive and extremely dangerous gateway drug, which leads to heroin addiction and death; that even allowing a wedge in the door by legalizing pot for medicine would inevitably result in greater availability of the illicit weed.

As the cops know all too well, marijuana is already easily available.

So why do we still play these games? For one thing, because people lie when being surveyed. “Are you in favor of legalizing marijuana?” “Oh, heavens no.” And then the cops and politicians trot out these “surveys” to support their position.

Perhaps the “oh, heavens no” people “experimented” with marijuana in their late teens or early 20’s. Perhaps they share a joint at a party once every few months. Perhaps, as a few choice politicians have said, they never inhaled.

Hypocrites.

Friday Media Rant: Talk Shows are NOT the NEWS!

I had some fun stirring the local media pot again this week. On Wednesday, the State Journal printed my letter to the editor about the difference between talk shows and news. And again, I heard from a lot of my friends in the media, but this time, unlike my rant against the extremes of the local weather mavens a week ago, they were unanimous.

People just don’t know the difference between news and opinion any more.

In the Saturday State Journal, there was a letter to the editor from a Verona man who was annoyed that Sly was loudly heckling Tommy Thompson’s speech at the tea party event, and the man wrote “how can we trust his reporting?”

Sly’s “REPORTING”??????

My old pal Sly is many things…rabble-rouser extraordinaire; bad-boy; road-rager; and the most enduring talk-show host this market has ever known. But I know Sly well enough, after having sat across the glass from him in an adjoining studio for over a decade, to know that not even Sly would call himself a “reporter”.

So I wrote a letter to the editor of the State Journal pointing out that there used to be a fairly bright line between talk show content and news content, but blowhards like that braying ass Limbaugh, who egomaniacally calls himself “America’s Anchorman”, have dimmed the line. There’s a big difference between talk shows…which are entertainment and opinion….and news, which is fact-checked journalism.

Before you call me a hypocrite, please bear in mind that for all the years I was on WTDY, I was careful to label every one of my newscasts “news and comment”. And the newscasts I did for decades on Q-106, Magic 98, The Lake (rest in peace), and other Mid-West stations, were straight-down-the-middle reporting: no slant, no comment, nothing but facts, written and delivered in what I’d like to think was a lively and conversational fashion, but totally free of opinion and comment. Even when I would pinch-hit on JJO, doing news for Johnny and Greg, it was lighter stuff appropriate to the audience, but not commentary or opinion.

After the paper ran the letter Wednesday morning, my e-mail in-box started to fill up with comments from many of my friends in the local radio and TV news biz, agreeing heartily with what I’d said, and decrying the corruption of “news” by outfits like Fox. Some writer pals of mine on Linked-In sent messages commenting positively on my letter, and some Facebook friends sent messages saying, in essence, “Amen”.

Is there a liberal bias on network TV news? I think so. Dumb Dan Rather did a lot to drag down the credibility of network TV news in his tenure at the anchor desk.

But to think that Sly, Vicki McKenna, or Mitch Henck, all of them friends of long-standing, are doing “reporting” or “news” – please. Every one of them clearly shows their bias day after day on the air, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s ENTERTAINMENT. And every one of them is really good at it. Vicki and Mitch both have a solid background in news, and they’ll be quick to identify the difference between what they’re doing now, and what they used to do.

It’s just that so many people are so lazy, or just plain stupid, that they don’t know the difference.

That’s why we have the kind of politicians we deserve.

Earth Day - Should I Ride My Bike To Work?

Wouldn't be much of a ride...since I work at home.

But one of the many tiny things you could do on Earth Day is curtail your pollution by driving less, and since the weather favors it, you might even bike to work. I know this will come as a shock to many people who know me, but in a distant past, I actually did bike to work quite frequently.

Me on a bike. What a picture that would be, now. I don’t think they build one strong enough to hold me.

My friend Glen Gardner is up on his bike all the time, maintaining that trim and muscular body he worked so hard to attain a couple years back. In fact, he bikes so much that he actually wore out a bike last year. Like me, his office is in his home, so he doesn’t have to “ride to work”.

For a while, not too long after the first earth day, I was in “California trim” (or ‘sconnie slim, if you prefer) and I lived about six blocks from the radio station where I worked in Oshkosh, and if the weather permitted, I jumped aboard my bike for the quick commute. It was more a matter of economics than defending the earth. My car was a pavement-ripping, modified, high-horsepower Mustang, and it was just too unkind to it to start it and run it six blocks and shut it off.

In my New Orleans days in the early 80’s, I biked a lot, just for exercise and pleasure. I was in the process of losing a hundred pounds at one of the most expensive fat-farms in America (Thompson Clinic) after having spent the better part of a year eating my way through every famous restaurant in N’Awlins, and getting ready to move back to Los Angeles, where fat people are not allowed. Biking helped burn off calories.

I have no idea what happened to that bike. I dragged it from Louisiana to California to Wisconsin, and lost track of it.

Mayor Cieslewicz made some very interesting observations in his blog Tuesday, pointing out that the dominant bike in America is the ten-speed road racer, which does not exactly lend itself to the “commute to work”. On his recent visit to Europe (the volcanic ash plume has diminished to the point that he and County Exec Falk finally caught a flight back to Madison) he noted that Europeans ride sturdy bikes with upright handlebars, low crossbars, and chain guards, so they can ride to work in “work clothes”.

With one of those ten-speed racers and the low-down handlebars that make you lean forward, you have to wear your Lycra to ride to work and pack your “business clothes” to change into. The mayor says “it’s as if we’re all driving sports cars when what most of us need is a reliable mini-van.” (And you thought he hates cars.)

He claims in the European cities he visited, one of every three trips is made by bike, while in Madison it’s about 4 in a hundred. He suggests that if we’re ever going to improve that ratio, we may have to, among other things, rethink the basic American bike.

Not a bad idea to contemplate, on Earth Day today, or any other day.

The three-speed Raleigh bikes that I owned as a kid in the 50’s and early 60’s might be just the ticket for the 21st century.

Or that Schwinn Black Phantom that I coveted back then…and couldn’t afford!

The Un-Mavericking of John McCain

It used to be if you looked up “maverick” in the political dictionary, there was a picture of John McCain along with his biography. Now, he says he’s not a maverick and never was one. He’s a “partisan”.

Must be running for re-election.

I had a good deal of respect for McCain years ago, when he seemed to be functioning as a United States Senator – crossing the aisle to do deals to help people and advance beneficial legislation; standing on his own two feet, following his own political instincts.

I lost a good deal of respect for McCain during the Presidential campaign, when it seemed at times he was clueless about what was really going on in America, when he didn’t even know how many houses he and his very wealthy wife owned, and when he parroted the line from another old fart about how the “fundamentals of the economy are strong” as the world was collapsing around Wall Street.

I regained a good deal of respect for McCain late in the campaign when, one warm late-fall afternoon in Minnesota, he took the microphone away from an elderly woman who said “Obama is an ay-rab” and said “no, he’s not. He’s a decent man”. It was, to me, the mark of a man who knew it was over for him, and he wanted to salvage some remnant of his reputation.

Now, with his latest assertion that he never was a maverick, and his complete 180 on immigration policy, and his adoption of any position that he thinks will gain him votes, I think John McCain is more to be pitied than ridiculed. What is it about the U-S Senate that causes old men who should have retired from public life years ago to attempt to go on and on? Can the perfume of perceived power be that alluring?

Anyone who’s read the book “Game Change” and believes the reporters who wrote it (Mark Halperin and John Heilemann) understands that he had no idea who Sarah Palin was when he chose her as running mate. The book says he thought the campaign managers were talking about Tim Pawlenty, the Governor of Minnesota, and that McCain was stunned at Palin’s ignorance.

Now, he calls on her to come and campaign for him, in his re-election bid in Arizona.

He’s in his mid-70’s, he’s an authentic American hero, he’s married to a beautiful and intelligent woman who happens to be extremely wealthy, and many of his homes, including his principal residence, are in Arizona, land of the high-angle sun and predictably gorgeous weather. What on earth would cause such a man to want to spend any more of his life in that swampy bed of snakes on the Potomac?

Whatever it is, it must be awfully powerful. Perhaps addictive would be a better word.

It’s time for the voters of Arizona to call John McCain home, to help him retire from public life, to play golf in the Arizona sun, and write his memoirs.

Maybe he’ll admit that he once was a maverick.