Marketplace of Ideas

Today, and tomorrow, and beyond

2008-06-05T08:33:00.007-05:00

There is something bracing about being awakened in the middle of the night by your weather radio ... unless, of course, your weather radio doesn't wake you up. (The storm that went through half an hour after said tornado watch was issued did, however.)

At any rate, though there were no tornadoes in this half of the tornado watch issued at 5 this morning, the National Weather Service has issued quite a busy severe weather forecast through Saturday (see maps for today, Friday and Saturday).

My guess is that the NBC 26 Precision Forecast Team and the Today's TMJ4 Weather Plus team (which, like this magazine and Web site, are part of Journal Communications) will be busy for the rest of this week. (Note the county that NBC 26's Weather Wisdom map identifies as number one in Northeast Wisconsin for tornadoes — it's the county I live in. But you knew that already.)

Just what we need

2008-06-11T13:34:00.005-05:00

The National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center says another round of severe weather could be headed our way Thursday.

Depending on which forecast you read, we could get up to 1 to 3 inches of rain Thursday, in addition to the severe weather accouterments of hail and high winds. You’ll note that the southeast quarter of Wisconsin is in the sky-blue-hatched area indicating “10 percent or greater probability of significant severe weather within 25 miles of a point.”

Last week, of course, parts of this area were under tornado watches for three consecutive days and under severe weather watches (tornado or severe thunderstorm watches) for four consecutive days, which I can’t remember happening before this year. Unless you’re trying to build a lake, tomorrow’s forecast is not good news for those who live in Brown, Calumet, Fond du Lac, Green Lake, Kewaunee, Manitowoc, Marquette, Outagamie, Sheboygan, Waupaca and Waushara counties, all of which got a lot of rain last weekend, and all of which are under a flash flood watch through Thursday night or Friday morning.

America’s sports car

2008-06-13T08:00:00.003-05:00

My birthday earlier this month dawned without a Chevrolet Corvette in front of my house. (The Corvette you see to the right was featured at the 2007 Greater Milwaukee Auto Show. The copilot is my oldest son, Michael.)

Which isn’t surprising. I have three children eight and younger, and I have a house with a one-car garage. (Then again, this would be more practical, though a blatant pluck-your-eyes-out violation of the Corvette ethos. Of course, so was this.) I already had to purchase a car earlier this year (replacing a car with 228,000 miles and a cracked engine block, plus several other issues), and we try to limit our vehicle purchases to one per year. The reality is that I’m likely to be able to own a Corvette only if I get a visit from the Corvette Fairy, whose office is next door to the Easter Bunny.

(I hope this isn’t foreshadowing: When I interviewed Dave Richter of Valley Corvette for this month’s car enthusiast story, he said that the most popular Corvette in most fans’ minds was a Corvette built during their days in high school. This would be a problem for me in that I graduated from high school in 1983, when no Corvette was built.)

The Corvette is one of those cars whose existence may be difficult to understand within General Motors Corp. The Corvette is what is known as a “halo car,” a car that drives people into showrooms, even if the potential buyer is looking for something less expensive and more practical and useful than a Corvette. (Chrysler Corp.’s counterpart is the Dodge Viper, which reportedly may be on its way out in the next couple of years.) It is an oddity within Chevrolet, which has made most of its reputation on practical, though, dull cars, at least until the Corvette arrived in 1953 and the Chevrolet V-8 hit showrooms two years later. And yet, the 35 years the Corvette has been in existence, in good and bad economic times, has generated its own cult, with millions of fans backed by businesses geared toward preserving and restoring them.

The Corvette, in its first, second, third, fourth, fifth and now sixth iterations, started as GM’s response to the British and Italian sports cars, usually two-seat convertibles, that soldiers coming home from World War II were bringing with them. Over the years, Corvettes became stuffed with more power than their steering, brakes and handling could handle, adopted the most out-there styling perhaps in American automotive history, were nearly strangled by emissions regulations (the standard engine on the 1975 Corvette had just 165 horsepower), had killed and then brought back the convertible, and, by now, have the best combination of power and refinement for the price in the world — truly a world-class car, but not at world-class prices.

The first Corvette I remember seeing belonged to a neighbor down the street — a dark green 1970 coupe with the base engine, automatic transmission and AM/FM radio. It was, frankly, a scary looking car, sitting incredibly low to the ground and, to a six-year-old, looking as though it was going to bite you. I got a couple of rides in it, with my brother sitting in the passenger seat with me and the younger son of the car’s owner sitting on top of the console. (Can’t do that anymore.)

The first Corvette I drove was a 1969 coupe, but with a (conservatively rated) 435-horsepower V-8 that ran on racing or aviation gas and a four-speed transmission known by car buffs as the “rock-crusher.” It was a beast, particularly due to its lack of power steering and brakes and its ability to transfer prodigious amounts of engine heat into the cockpit. My ride in this car reached (I believe I can say this since the statute of limitations has passed) speedometer-indicated speeds that are multiples of existing speed limits. (During this ride, it occurred to me, as the scenery was going by at a really rapid rate, that I wasn’t wearing a seat belt. A moment later, it occurred to me that my lack of seat belt didn’t matter because if we hit anything at that speed, the authorities would be scraping up whatever was left of me from whatever we hit with a putty knife.)

The current and previous generations of Corvettes appear to be the best of the various worlds the Corvette has represented over the years. Styling is always an arguable point (I prefer the C5, built between 1997 and 2004, to the C6, which has been built since 2005; then again, if you really like a modern version of the C1 or C2, companies can now accommodate your wishes), but today’s Corvettes can go as fast as any that have been built before now. The difference is they handle and stop much better than any that have been built before now, and the obvious creature comforts — air conditioning, upper-end sound system, power leather seats, air bags — are either standard or, in the case of a navigation system, optional. With more than 5,000 Chevrolet dealers in the U.S., if something breaks, parts are much easier to find than for such brands as Porsche or Ferrari. (That’s not to say I don’t like Porsches or Ferraris — different strokes for different folks.)

For those who haven’t driven a Corvette, when you’re my height (6-foot-4), the overall effect is something like what driving a luge must be like. The first two generations were more conventional in design, but every Corvette since the C3 (based on the Mako Shark show car) has kind of wrapped around the occupants, which was initially criticized because that prevented the traditional American driver position of resting your left arm on top of the door (with window rolled down, of course), unless you’re tall enough. In every C5 or C6 convertible I’ve sat in at car shows, I look straight at the driver’s-side sun visor, so evidently I have to move the power seat to its lowest possible position to be able to drive the car. The result of that is that getting out requires what I had to do with my mother’s 1985 Chevy Camaro (which she owned when I was half my present age) — put my hand on the ground to brace myself to exit — or do a 90-degree left turn, stick my legs out and then get out legs first, with a limbo motion to clear the roof and stand up. (The current Corvette is about two-thirds of my height, and the seats are a long way down.) Clearly the Corvette is not a car in which to run errands.

If you like driving, this is it. It’s unquestionably a stiff-riding car, but much better than the older versions, and, as noted before, while it flies down the road like few other cars, it also will stop like few other cars. This is hyperbole to say this, but I wonder if anyone really can have a bad day if it begins and ends with a Corvette drive from your home to your office.

The Corvette hangs around GM in large part because it makes money and positive attention for GM. (Not until 1958, five years after it was introduced, did the Corvette make money for GM; in fact, Chevrolet made just 700 Corvettes in 1955.) The Corvette V-8s are found in several other GM cars, including the Pontiac G8 GT, plus several Australian Holdens (also available from Vauxhall in Britain and in the Middle East) and the upcoming Cadillac CTS-V (based on the CTS, a sedan that may be coming out in two-door and station wagon versions) and Chevrolet Camaro, assuming they actually build the Camaro. The Cadillac XLS is a Corvette under the body, although with the Cadillac Northstar engine instead of the Corvette’s.

Part of the reason for the Corvette’s popularity is the V-8 engine found in all but the first two model years. (V-8s sound much like V-twins, which is, I think, one reason for the popularity of the Harley–Davidson motorcycle over its Japanese and European competition.) Even though the first two years of Corvettes had a six-cylinder engine instead of a V-8, it’s almost impossible to imagine a Corvette without a V-8. The Corvette V-8 isn’t even the state of the art in V-8 technology (without getting too technical for non-gearheads), and yet the standard Corvette engine is rated at The 2009 Corvette ZR1, with 638 horsepower, is EPA-rated at 26 highway miles per gallon, 2 miles per gallon better than the 2008 Corvette ZO6, whose owners must make do with a mere 505 horsepower. (You can also save yourself $25,000 and purchase the base model Corvette, which, at 430 horsepower, costs $109.19 per horsepower, a better bargain than the ZO6’s $142.82 per horsepower.)

The ZR1 is supercharged, which is how you can get 638 horsepower and yet 26 mpg if you keep your foot out of it some of the time. (Remember: The most gas is used in acceleration, not at speed.) Future Corvette V-8s are likely to have more advanced engine technology and lower horsepower, but if the next-generation Vettes are lighter, they’ll have the same power-to-weight ratio, and possibly even better gas mileage. (As it is, the base Corvette gets better fuel economy than the four-cylinder Honda S2000 and the six-cylinder Nissan 350Z.) That makes it hard to imagine that any Corvette in the foreseeable future won’t have a V-8.

The Corvette generates interest that far exceeds its annual sales. In its biggest production year, 1979, Chevrolet sold 53,807 Corvettes, and in 2007 Chevy sold 40,561 Corvettes. Motor Trend magazine has a history of Corvette “scoops” (for instance, the breathless late 1973 announcement that there would be two Corvettes, both with rotary engines) that turn out to be way off base, but sell tons of issues on the newsstands anyway. Motor Trend predicted late in 2007 that the next-generation Corvette will arrive in the 2013 model year, one month after it predicted that the next-generation Corvette will arrive in the 2012 model year.

A substantial component of Corvette fans want Vettes to be more exotic, with, for instance, a mid-engine layout. (Most cars are, of course, front-engine, while a few, including the old Volkswagen Beetle and Porsche 911, are rear-engine; a mid-engine car has the engine mounted generally between the axles, usually in front of the rear axle.) A mid-engine layout seems unlikely because, for one thing, that would take the Corvette’s price well beyond $100,000, which doesn’t really fit into GM’s product portfolio. What’s more likely is that, as now, Chevy will make two versions — a “mainstream” version and a more exotic version with, for instance, lightweight materials and all-wheel drive, for perhaps twice the price of the base model.

Not everyone understands the appeal of Corvettes. (John McCain does; his first new car was a new 1958 Corvette. Former presidential candidate Joe Biden got a 1967 Corvette as a graduation present, and he still has it.) Think of Corvettes as a demonstration of what American free enterprise can do, even with federal government regulations, pressures from rising oil prices, and those nags who can't grasp why someone might need more horsepower than the nag thinks you need. The Corvette's overseas competition costs significantly more money, and that was even before the recent sinking dollar. American business has put together the best performing car for the money on the planet, and that's something worth celebrating — say, on National Corvette Day June 30, celebrating the day the first Corvette drove off the assembly line in St. Louis. That would be three days after June 27, Drive Your Corvette to Work Day.

(And for those of you who think after Thursday's weather that arks might be a better idea than Corvettes: You can buy a Corvette boat — specifically, a Malibu Corvette Sport-V Limited Edition, a boat with a Corvette engine and many Corvette trim parts. The reverse was the case in the early 1990s, when Mercury Marine's Mercruiser division produced the LT-5 V-8 for the Corvette ZR1.)

Jones, McKay and Russert

2008-06-16T08:00:00.002-05:00

A group of classic broadcasters died last week.

The probably least known of the three was Charlie Jones, a sports announcer for most of his career with NBC-TV. Jones, who died at 77 June 12, came to NBC from ABC when the American Football League switched networks to NBC in the mid-1960s.

Jones was a versatile announcer, covering, while at NBC, the NFL (he called the famous Packers–Steelers Yancey Thigpen game at the end of the 1995 season, the Packers’ first division title team with Brett Favre at the controls), a college football national championship game, baseball (he also was the first announcer for the Colorado Rockies), college basketball, Olympic track and field, golf, tennis, figure skating and other sports, including the 1970s oddity "Almost Anything Goes."

If you didn’t know who Jones was from his face, you knew him from his voice. Jones came from the generation whose voices were shaped by smoking and adult beverages. (The most notable example of this may have been the gravel-voiced Boston Celtics announcer Johnny Most, who smoked so much that he once set his own pants on fire during a Celtics game he was announcing.)

Despite that, if you’ve ever wondered why so many sports announcers lasted long into their 70s, or why there are so many second- and even third-generation sports announcers, it probably has to do with Jones’ quote: “I never felt like I ever went to work. I’ve got the best seat in the house.”

A memorial service is being held for him Wednesday at the La Jolla, Calif., Beach and Tennis Club, where, his will states, ties on men are banned.

The other, better known, sports announcer, was Jim McKay, who made the words “The thrill of victory … and the agony of defeat” a household phrase while hosting ABC-TV’s “Wide World of Sports.”

McKay, who died at 86 on June 7, introduced a lot of different sports (more than 100 in 40 countries, according to ESPN) to a lot of households. When “Wide World of Sports” debuted in 1961, sports on TV was basically limited to college or pro football, pro basketball and baseball, with a rare pro hockey game thrown in. “Wide World of Sports” introduced viewers to sports now shown on TV all the time, including golf (he announced each of the four majors, including the Masters for CBS, where he worked before he went to ABC), track and field, gymnastics, horse racing and auto racing, plus the Harlem Globetrotters, jumping various large objects with motorcycles, Irish hurling, lumberjack sports in northern Wisconsin, snowmobile races in northern Wisconsin, Mexican cliff diving, and Little League baseball. (He also announced perhaps the two most improbable U.S. Open golf wins of all time, both won by Wisconsinite Andy North. The two U.S. Opens were two of the three golf tournaments North won in his career.)

McKay also brought the Olympics to millions of TV viewers as the host of ABC winter and summer Olympics coverage. The worst, from anyone’s perspective, would be the 1972 kidnapping and murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists. McKay covered the entire 15-hour crisis and had the duty of announcing that all 11 had been killed — “They’re all gone,” he said.

The best, besides introducing U.S. viewers to gymnastics dynamos Olga Korbut, Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton, would have been hosting the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y. This story has been told before, but the medal-round game between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was broadcast on tape delay, so McKay introduced that evening’s broadcast and the two intermissions while he must have been ready to explode inside, sitting on what might have been the greatest team sports upset of all time until the third period could be unfurled on tape.

McKay was one of a seemingly dwindling number of sports announcers who never, ever thought that he was bigger than whatever event he was covering. He never spoke down to viewers (unlike his ABC colleague Howard Cosell), but he also never treated whatever sport he was covering, however obscure, as being beneath him. To quote Sports Illustrated, he was “preironic,” someone who thought of sports as “fun than funny.”

The saddest media death of the past week was Tim Russert, host of NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press,” who died at NBC’s Washington studio Friday. Russert, 58, was the longest serving host of TV’s longest continuously running program (“Meet the Press” premiered in 1947).

Russert came to the media from politics, where he worked for New York Gov. Mario Cuomo and U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. For that matter, he came to the media as an executive, not an on-air face, but his position included running NBC’s Washington bureau, with which came “Meet the Press.” When Russert took over “Meet the Press” at 41, the program had been on the air three years longer than Russert had been alive.

Cuomo and Moynihan were Democrats, yet Russert was rarely accused of liberal bias, although some of his interview subjects confused tough questioning for bias. Russert was famous for reading back, or playing back, quotes from whatever politician was on the hot seat that week when they were directly opposite whatever said politician was arguing at that moment. “Meet the Press” became known as the “Russert primary,” although, as with McKay, you never got the feeling he felt he was bigger than the story he was covering — in other words, he earned his status because he did the work, not because he was famous.

Russert’s most famous single moment came during NBC’s 2000 election night coverage, when he figured out that the key to the presidential election was going to be Florida. He grabbed a whiteboard at one point and wrote “FLORIDA FLORIDA FLORIDA” to emphasize his point. From that point on, we all got to learn about how presidential elections are really state elections and not national elections, butterfly ballots, hanging chads, people who lacked the sense of shame to not go on TV and admit they may have voted for Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore, what happens when state Supreme Court races are partisan races, etc., etc., etc.

Russert obviously loved politics, but not to the exclusion of everything else. He wrote a best-selling book, Big Russ and Me: Father and Son: Lessons of Life, about his father, from whom he got his blue-collar work ethic and values. He was married for 25 years and had one son, Luke, with whom he had recently vacationed in Italy. Luke Russert said “Meet the Press” was Tim’s “second son,” though not his first-born son. An MSNBC tribute to Russert Saturday told the story of how he and Boston newspaper columnist Mike Barnacle had visited former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw and his wife in their home in Montana. Barnacle talked about Russert’s delight in discovering a bar known as the “Roadkill Café” (motto: “From your grille to our grill”) that had Russert’s preferred Rolling Rock beer.

As the Associated Press put it Sunday, “The abrupt void Russert leaves is unprecedented in network TV news. … There was no immediate word on who would host "Meet the Press" next week, or in the weeks after that.”

Just what people in disaster areas want to see

2008-06-25T07:29:00.009-05:00

Notice the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center's severe weather forecasts for today, Thursday and Friday. You may have observed they have an annoying tendency to be accurate these days.

The line from the Milwaukee/Sullivan weather office’s Hazardous Weather Outlook gives one pause: “Spotter activation may be needed through Friday evening.”

I look outside my office window, and I see …

2008-07-16T14:29:00.007-05:00

… rotating clouds. (Photos by our Erica Dakins.) Things are starting to look suspiciously similar to June 12, when, you’ll recall, some areas received a couple of months of rain in one afternoon.

Thursday 11:45 a.m. update: A Flash Flood Watch is now in effect for Brown, Calumet, Kewaunee, Manitowoc, Outagamie, Shawano, Waupaca, Waushara and Winnebago counties through Friday morning, and for Fond du Lac, Green Lake, Marquette and Sheboygan counties through Saturday evening. The quote from the latter warning: “Another very dangerous flooding situation may be developing for southern Wisconsin. It has many similarities to the weather pattern and subsequent flooding experienced back in early June.”

Another advisory has this news: “Several inches of rain are likely in some areas by Sunday night.”

“Global” warming?

2008-07-22T07:00:00.002-05:00

There is a consensus, according to the Al Gore crowd, that man-made global warming is occurring. Those more skeptical would argue that, while global warming may be occurring, humans aren’t contributing significantly to global warming — that global warming is being caused by natural processes, including activity on the surface of the

But go back to the first half of that last sentence. What if global warming isn’t occurring at all?

GlobalWarming.org first notes that the average temperature in 1979 and the average temperature in June 2008 is the same. This graph shows that temperatures have generally ranged from 0.5 degrees cooler than normal to 0.6 degrees warmer than normal in the past 19 years, with notable cooling around the eruption of the Mount Pinatubo volcano in late 1992 and notable warming during an El Niño event in early 1998.

The next map, from NASA, shows the change in surface temperatures in 2007 and 2008 compared with average surface temperatures between 1995 and 2000. The blues on the map show cooling, and the yellows and oranges show warming.

Note that the northern U.S. and Canada have cooled, while the southern U.S. is warmer. Note also that the northern and central Atlantic Ocean and northern and southeastern Pacific Ocean have cooled, but the rest of the Pacific, along with the Indian Ocean have cooled.

Not convinced? OK, let’s compare 2000 to 2008 against 1900 to 2000. Note that the U.S. from the Plains east has warmed some, but not from the Plains west. The southern half of South America and northern Europe have cooled, while the southwestern half of Europe and eastern Asia have warmed. The Arctic has warmed, while the Antarctic has both warmed and cooled. The Atlantic and southeastern Pacific oceans have warmed, but not the western Pacific. (Click here to comparisons of your own using a variety of variables.)

This isn’t proof of global warming. It may be proof of warming within regions of the globe, but it may also be proof of cooling within other regions of the globe. That suggests that solutions to global warming are solutions to what is not a global problem, and may actually have negative effects in some parts of the planet. (Free market solutions are better anyway.)

It’s interesting to note that the global warming true believers not only entertain no doubt about their belief in global warming, but they actively attack the more skeptical. Heidi Cullen, host of “Forecast Earth” on The Weather Channel, has gone so far as to advocate that meteorologists who dare question global warming have their American Meteorological Society certifications revoked. Apparently science is no longer interested in testing theories.

The former pride of Kenosha

2008-07-25T07:00:00.011-05:00

Hot Rod magazine, a publication for car enthusiasts, committed one of the great April Fool’s jokes in the history of magazine publishing when it breathlessly reported in its April issue that a group of private investors were working to bring back the late American Motors Corp. (The disclaimer at the beginning of the Web page didn’t appear until the last paragraph of the printed version.)

As with any successful practical joke, this one worked because of the appearance of plausibility. Given that the 2008 Ford Mustang looks like the 1967–68 Mustang, and given that Chrysler is resurrecting the Dodge Challenger and General Motors Corp. is bringing back the Chevrolet Camaro, is it possible that someone might want to resurrect the AMC Pacer (top photo) or, even better, the Javelin (right photo)?

AMC, created by the merger of the former Nash and Hudson brands, was the smallest member of the Big Four automakers, until Chrysler purchased it in 1987 to get the Jeep brand into the Chrysler fold. AMC first had a reputation for building compact cars, such as the Rambler, in an era in which compact cars were only sporadically popular. One of AMC’s presidents was Gerald Romney, a later governor of Michigan and Republican presidential candidate, and father of 2008 presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Having much less capital than its bigger three competitors, AMC nonetheless built some cars that were ahead of their time, thanks in large part to the work of chief stylist Richard Teague. The company first took its sporty Javelin, chopped off the rear end, and created the two-seat AMX, a cult car among collectors today. A couple years later, AMC took its compact Hornet, similarly sliced off the rear end, and created the subcompact Gremlin (an unfortunate name for anything motorized), a car you could buy with a Levi’s interior. Whoever thought of adding four-wheel-drive to the compact Concord (born as the aforementioned Hornet 10 years earlier) created the Eagle (right photo), America’s first crossover sport utility (car with four-wheel-drive-truck-like capabilities), predating the Subaru Outback and other all-wheel-drive-equipped cars by 15 years. Then, in 1983, came the downsized Jeep Cherokee, the first compact sport utility. An AMC subsidiary, AM General, began work in the late 1970s on something the U.S. Army called the “High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle” — which, two owners and a marketing agreement with General Motors later, the world came to know as the Hummer.

Other AMC cars were not great cars, but at least they stood out on the street, such as the Marlin (which arguably looked better as the Tarpon show car, based on a smaller model than the Marlin ended up being), the Gremlin, and the final two-door (right photo) and four-door versions of the Matador. Like the Pacer, the Matador coupe was in a class of one, while the last four-door Matador was referred to as “coffin-nose.”

One unusual AMC niche was in police cars. Anyone who watched “Adam-12,” “The Rockford Files” or “The Dukes of Hazzard” (I plead guilty to all three — any series with cool cars got my attention) might remember that those series all featured Matador police cars. Many law enforcement agencies used Matadors because they probably were less expensive than their Big Three competition. (I once saw a sign in a National Guard armory that reminded everyone that all of their equipment was produced by the lowest bidder.) I don’t remember seeing Matador police cars in Wisconsin, but for several years in the early ’70s the Wisconsin State Patrol used Ambassador squad cars (this photo). So did a few sheriff’s departments, including Dane County, at least until a well-publicized spat between either AMC or the Madison AMC dealer and the sheriff over sheriff’s deputies’ habit of crashing said Ambassadors. (The dealership, from which we purchased a 1973 Javelin (read further), is still in business today, though it sells used cars now.)

There are conflicting schools of thought as to why AMC finally folded with its purchase by Chrysler. Patrick Foster, author of American Motors: The Last Independent, argues that AMC did fairly well in the 1960s, offering economical (for the day), sturdily built, stolid cars (similar to Mercedes-Benz in the day), until AMC management decided it needed to offer what the other members of the Big Four were offering — sporty cars (although the Javelin was quite successful in the Trans Am series) and big cars, products where AMC lacked the ability to compete with GM, Ford and Chrysler.

I maintain that the reason AMC doesn’t exist today as an independent manufacturer has to do with a decision the company made during the early 1970s to discontinue building its Javelin “pony car.” Chevrolet built many more Camaros and Ford built many more Mustangs than AMC built Javelins, but the Javelin and its AMX two-seat cousin developed a reputation as race cars whose performance exceeded their reputation. (My first car was my father’s brown 1973 Javelin, a cool-looking car from the front seats forward, with a back seat suitable only for dolls.) The last year of the Javelin was 1974, just before the pony car market exploded and General Motors sold as many Camaros and Pontiac Firebirds as they could build.

Instead of the Javelin (and the luxury Ambassador, killed at the same time), AMC built the Pacer (right photo), a car that was small in length, but wider and thus roomier (or so AMC wanted the consumer to believe) than the average small car. It was, however, heavy for its length due to big windows and slow yet fuel-inefficient even for that time, and, as the New York Times put it, it “looked like nothing else on the road,” a plus perhaps only in the minds of Wayne and Garth.

With AMC lacking money, 25 percent of AMC was sold to Renault (leading to the AMC Alliance and Fuego) before Chrysler purchased all of AMC in 1987. Chrysler closed the Kenosha manufacturing plant, originally built by Nash in 1902, in 1988. Chrysler’s Kenosha engine plant and General Motors’ Janesville plant are the only plants building cars in Wisconsin today, and the Janesville plant will be closing within the next two years. (My family must be a curse upon carmakers, since our family’s garage simultaneously housed a Kenosha-built Javelin and a Janesville-built Chevrolet Caprice. My parents also owned two of the last Oldsmobiles, and my father owned a Studebaker Hawk many years ago. Someone should warn Cadillac, Subaru and Honda of this.)

Given how things for the remaining Big Three automakers today, it’s hard to imagine how AMC could have made it to today had the sale to Chrysler not occurred. It is fun to contemplate, though, what could have happened had the “group of like-minded venture capitalists pooling billions of dollars to create the ultimate U.S. car company, and without the hindrance that comes with being a public company” been more than the figment of a creative writer’s imagination.

“Reform” and reform

2008-07-28T07:00:00.006-05:00

This is shaping up to be a somewhat dull election year in Wisconsin. There are no statewide races and only a couple of compelling open-seat legislative races, and at this point the only drama seems to be whether the Republicans can hang on to one house of the Legislature, or if the Democrats will control both the Assembly and the Senate.

That’s not the case with our neighbors to the north, Michigan. On Election Day Michigan voters will decide (assuming the referendum isn't thrown off the ballot in the court system) the fate of a constitutional referendum that would reduce the number, salaries and benefits of elected officials, legislators and judges, reconfigure the state’s judicial system, and change election law.

On the face of the proposal, this incredibly lengthy proposal includes many seemingly worthy initiatives. The Michigan Senate would lose 10 of its 38 senators, and the Michigan House would lose 28 of its 110 representatives. Two Supreme Court justice positions and seven Court of Appeals positions would be eliminated. Pay for Michigan’s governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and secretary of state would be cut 25 percent, judicial pay would be cut by 15 percent, and pay for legislators would be cut by the 38 percent they voted for themselves in 2002. Elected officials would have to disclose their income and assets annually. The benefits of all elected officials would be reduced to the same that Michigan state employees get (which evidently are not as luxurious as the benefits of Wisconsin state employees). Elected officials would be banned from lobbying for two years. Redistricting of legislative districts would be taken out of the legislature’s hands to an independent commission.

This seems to be working with Michigan voters, 70 percent of whom favor the proposal, including 73 percent of Republican voters and 67 percent of Democratic voters, according to its sponsor, Reform Michigan Government Now.

Michigan voters clearly want something done because their state is, well, the Edsel (for younger readers: replace "Edsel" with "Yugo") of state economies. Michigan has lost 300,000 manufacturing jobs since 1999. Michigan was the only state to lose net jobs during 2007. The state's June unemployment rate was 8.5 percent (Wisconsin's was 4.9 percent), and a forecast earlier this year that Michigan's unemployment rate would hit 8.9 percent in 2009 now looks optimistic. Michigan also has one of the worst housing markets in the U.S., with, as of earlier this year, one out of every 20 mortgages either in or near foreclosure.

In such an environment, consider this: If you think Wisconsin elected officials are overpaid, consider that Michigan’s governor makes 30 percent more than Wisconsin’s, Michigan’s lieutenant governor makes 72 percent more than Wisconsin’s, Michigan legislators (who are full-time, and there are 16 more of them) make 68 percent more than Wisconsin’s (who are considered 60-percent full-time-equivalent), and Michigan’s Supreme Court makes 20 percent more than Wisconsin’s.

There is, however, a complication worthy of a potboiler novel. An intern for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank, discovered, on a United Auto Workers union Web site, a PowerPoint presentation, “Governmental Reform Proposal: Changing the rules of politics in Michigan to help Democrats.” (I think this intern has just assured himself lifetime political employment.) Reading the first few slides shows that the authors of the PowerPoint basically believe Michigan’s system is broken because it didn’t produce the results the authors wanted, and is likely to produce results the authors do not want: “Labor and tort ‘reform,’ erosion of civil rights and environmental protections, budget cuts, [and] privatization.”

The PowerPoint punchline is on page 11: “In 2008, use the public’s very negative mood and high level of discouragement about state government (the worst in 25 years) to enact a ballot proposal which comprehensively reforms state government, including changing the structural obstacles to Democratic control of state government in 2012–2021.” What follows is almost exactly the Reform Michigan Government Now proposal.

This part is unintentionally amusing: The estimated $4.911 million of the campaign is estimated at “less than half the cost of trying to beat an incumbent GOP Supreme Court Justice,” more than what is “spent every four years trying to win the House and Senate, usually unsuccessfully,” and less than half of the cost of a presidential-election-year “coordinated campaign.” If Michigan voters pass this, “it will reduce the cost and increase the prospects of winning the State Legislature every cycle.”

The point about the Supreme Court bears noting. Michigan's Supreme Court ranked dead last in a University of Chicago Law School study, based on "judicial independence from political or outside influences, its numbers of published opinions, and how often the court's decisions are referenced in rulings by other courts." The Public News Service noted that Michigan's Supreme Court "seems to be especially supportive of businesses, based on how it has split on many business-related decisions." (Wisconsin's Supreme Court ranked eighth in the University of Chicago study, and 24th in a U.S. Chamber of Commerce study, where Michigan ranked 33rd.)

Not surprisingly, the Mackinac Center opposes the proposal, having discerned that the PowerPoint "leaves little doubt that the Reform Michigan Government Now ballot initiative is a partisan power play. The most important features of the scheme are the redistricting commission and the removal of two Republicans from the Michigan Supreme Court. Nearly everything else in the proposal seems to be calculated to make the entire package more attractive to voters. ... While we have no objections to partisan politics as such, it is essential to call attention to partisan ploys that are presented as neutral good-government reforms."

The proposal's motives become more transparent when one notices that the proposal to reduce the size of Michigan's top two court levels is designed to weed out Republican judges. Then again, suddenly Michigan liberals have some hesitation about the proposal, one of whom is concerned that controversy over the proposal might actually affect the presidential race, as well as, interestingly, Michigan's Washington Democrats. Also noteworthy is that the PowerPoint author(s) mention the unpopularity of Michigan's Democratic governor, Jennifer Granholm, particularly after she got a tax increase passed one year ago, and yet also mention the lack of obvious Democratic successors for Granholm.

The final irony: Legal challenges have been raised to the vote (there is apparently a reference to a nonexistent part of Michigan's Constitution), which places Michigan’s judges in the strange position of having to decide whether a referendum that would reduce their own numbers and salaries is legal.

There is a more central issue here. It came to me when I was watching "All the King's Men," the Academy Award-winning 1949 movie based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Robert Penn Warren novel about a Huey Long-like politician whose interest in reform metastasizes into an interest in driving the state's political machine. Reform is never successful if reform is centered around "who," as in whom to replace. Newt Gingrich engineered the Contract with America, which gave Democrats their worst congressional defeats in 50 years. Republican control of Congress lasted just 12 years, due in large part to Republicans' emulating most of the worst abuses of Democrats during their half-century controlling Congress.

Some would argue that voters shouldn't decide to reduce their representation. I don't buy that, particularly if the voters feel they're not being represented by their elected officials. (A friend of mine who has worked extensively in politics thinks Wisconsin should go to a one-house legislature, like Nebraska.) There are some good provisions, such as reducing pay and benefits of elected officials, and an independent redistricting body, as long as it was truly independent. But merely getting rid of the bums, whether by vote (the preferred route) or by term limits (which Michigan has, and which some commentators believe are part of the problem), won't change very much. Even though Michigan's elected officials are clearly overpaid, it's not who they are or how many there are, it's what they are or are not doing. An economy in recession, which Michigan obviously is, needs tax increases like flooded land needs a rainstorm. (The simile of 2008.)

As Mackinac Center president Lawrence Reed puts it, "Ask any resident what ails Michigan, and 'we have too many judges and legislators' probably wouldn't make anybody's top-50 list. Few people are foolish enough to think that simply reducing those numbers would transform Michigan. Most people would say our taxes need cutting, the bureaucracy needs trimming, the schools need mending, the business climate needs improving, or Detroit needs reforming. But RMGN does none of that, which makes it a huge distraction from fixing the state's fundamentals."

Reform is not about replacing one politician with another, or not replacing one politician; it's about replacing bad policies with good policies. That's the case in Michigan and in Wisconsin.

A day at the EAA

2008-08-01T07:00:00.004-05:00

I spent Thursday at the EAA AirVenture.

To answer your first question, no, I did not witness the fatal plane crash that occurred Thursday morning short of the east end of Wittman Regional Airport's east–west runway.

That is the second time I've missed a plane incident in the three times I've attended EAA. One other time, I came home from Oshkosh to find out that an emergency landing had occurred while I was on the flight line (and a Green Bay TV station had caught it on tape). And this had happened without my noticing that either.

That's easier than those who have not been to Oshkosh might think. The AirVenture is so spread out that, as EAA's Web site notes, "Just truckin’ around the grounds can add up to several miles over the course of one day. ... Although many have tried, it is literally impossible to see everything in one day, much less a week."

Someone with an interest in mechanical things but no interest in flying things would still find the AirVenture fascinating. There were torn-down engines everywhere so that would-be owners could see for themselves how the planes run. There were interior and cockpit mockups for pilots to try. It's not quite as expansive as the Iola Old Car Show, which seems to have enough parts with which to assemble an entire car on-site, but then again airplanes are more expensive than cars. (For that matter, there were several manufacturers offering car engines that could be installed in airplanes. The newest trend in engines appears to be plane engines that can run on diesel or kerosene.) And, for those really not interested in airplanes (why such a person would go to EAA is a good question), Ford, a major AirVenture sponsor, had cars and trucks, including its new F-150 pickup and several Mustangs (matching all the P-51 Mustangs in the Warbird section), and Oshkosh had, of course, airport fire engines.

The difference between car construction and airplane construction is apparent if you look hard enough. Planes have exposed rivets and screws on their outside, and that doesn't cut it in the automobile marketplace. On the other hand, there is certainly a higher standard for engines in aviation than in automobiles; if you car's engine quits while you're driving, you're stranded; if your plane's engine quits while you're flying, that's an order of magnitude more serious. Many planes also have pressurized cockpits, and if the air's thin enough to need a pressurized cockpit, then that's pretty thin air for the plane's engines too.

The difference between Iola, which I attend almost every year, and Oshkosh is that the only car demonstrations at Iola are cars entering and leaving the grounds. So many planes take off and land that, not only is Wittman the busiest airport in the world this week, another plane taking off gets almost blasé after a while — that is, until your teeth rattle with an F-16 or F-18 military jet lighting up the afterburners.

The spirit of AirVenture is that all planes are cool, whether they're to your taste or not. The V-22 Osprey pictured at the top combines facets of helicopters and propeller planes. The fact that the Osprey is rather controversial in military and political circles wasn't mentioned, and what would be the point of mentioning that at an air show?

The craziest thing there was unquestionably the Martin Jetpack, billed as "the world's first practical jetpack." I wasn't there for its debut Tuesday, but I am so far failing to imagine the circumstances under which I would strap on something that can, according to its creators, hover up to 8,000 feet, even if it includes a ballistic parachute. (It is considered, believe it or not, an ultralight airplane. I've been in an ultralight before, and it was a great experience. That ultralight, however, had wings.)

Perhaps the most interesting facet for a business person is the promotion of business travel without depending on airline schedules and getting frisked in a very personal way in airports. There were displays for more business jets that I ever knew existed. Two of the more interesting ones were the Eclipse 400 and 500, jets that are supposed to be less expensive and easier to operate than their competition. (The National Business Aviation Association will tell you that the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 not only provides tax benefits for companies that buy airplanes this year, but may provide tax benefits as well for companies that upgrade existing aircraft or buy fractional shares in airplanes.)

I spent a lot of time in the Warbirds section. I am interested in World War II history, and the aforementioned Mustangs were plentiful, along with trainers, cargo planes, and even bombers, with B-17s and B-25s lumbering overhead. There were even old jet fighters, although, of course, the federal government is working hard to eliminate vintage jets from air shows due to noise regulations.

I had seen my favorite World War II aircraft, the Chance Vought F4U Corsair, before today, but I'd never seen it fly before today. The Corsair is an enormous plane that appears to be an engine (initially of 1,850 horsepower) with (bent) wings at first blush. Walk up to one, and you realize how interesting taking off and landing one of these things must be when you can't see anything, including the runway, underneath you. That was why the Corsair, designed for aircraft-carrier operation, didn't see action on aircraft carriers initially. The Marines, however, took one look and decided that the Corsair suited their island-based fighter operations just fine.

The U.S. Navy determined that Corsair pilots shot down 11 Japanese opponents for every Corsair shot down. When you are a fighter pilot, it is a good thing for your plane to be called by your opponent "Whistling Death," as Corsairs were called by the Japanese.

All you have to do is look at those vintage planes to realize that their pilots and crew were made of sterner stuff than us 21st-century wimps. Creature comforts were nonexistent on the C-47, the military counterpart of the ubiquitous-at-the-time DC-3. The B-17 looked in the air as if a car could outrace it down a runway, and these were, remember, the targets of the best fighter pilots Nazi Germany had. Rides were offered in a slightly older plane, a Ford Tri-Motor; I saw that plane once on a windy day, and it looked as if it wasn't moving at all in the air. Rides also were offered on a Korean War-vintage Bell 47 helicopter, built in the days when it was perfectly natural for a helicopter to have all of its parts visible to all.

The only thing that bugs me about EAA is the fact that my exit to and from U.S. 41, the Wisconsin 44 exit, has been closed all week, and the alternate interchange, Ninth Avenue, is, to put it charitably, a mess. I'm not sure who's responsible for that (I'm guessing more law enforcement than EAA specifically), but it is somewhat aggravating. Yes, people who live in the Lambeau Field neighborhood are inconvenienced too on game days, but not for an entire week.

Nevertheless, the AirVenture is a huge benefit for this area. Even if you don't actually go to the show, the planes roaring overhead (or, in the case of Friday, rocketing overhead) are quite a visual and aural show by themselves.

Marketplace of Ideas is moving

2008-08-21T23:59:00.003-05:00

You may recall when this blog began in April that I said this was the Marketplace of Ideas blog’s temporary location.

Well, this is the last Marketplace of Ideas blog item you’ll read here. Beginning today, Marketplace of Ideas can now be found at the Marketplace Web site, www.marketplacemagazine.com, and, for those who want to bookmark, http://www.marketplacemagazine.com/blogs/blog2.php.

Along with Marketplace of Ideas, Marketplace Today, our breaking news site, is also moving to www.marketplacemagazine.com, and, for those who want to bookmark, http://www.marketplacemagazine.com/blogs/blog1.php.

Go over there now, and you won’t miss a thing.

Analysis of the (Sun)day

2008-08-21T07:00:00.004-05:00

Sunday's New York Times Magazine will include this in-depth exploration of Barack Obama's economic beliefs. Writer David Leonhardt has "spent much of this year trying to get a handle on what is sometimes called Obamanomics and have come away thinking that Obama does have an economic ideology. It’s just not a completely familiar one. Depending on how you look at it, he is both more left-wing and more right-wing than many people realize."

The piece begins with what it calls the Democratic Party's, and Bill Clinton's, "two Bobs" — Robert Rubin, Clinton's secretary of the treasury, who focused on reducing the budget deficit, and Robert Rubin, Clinton's secretary of labor, who "argued that the government should invest in roads, bridges, worker training and the like to stimulate the economy and help the middle class." Put the two together, and what do you come up with?

Obama’s agenda starts not with raising taxes to reduce the deficit, as Clinton’s ended up doing, but with changing the tax code so that families making more than $250,000 a year pay more taxes and nearly everyone else pays less. That would begin to address inequality. Then there would be Reich-like investments in alternative energy, physical infrastructure and such, meant both to create middle-class jobs and to address long-term problems like global warming.

Nothing about that paragraph will assuage those who believe the budget deficit is the biggest problem we face. And if that seems like a disjointed set of proposals to you, there's more:

Labor unions, in particular, would prefer more trade barriers than many other Democrats. During the primaries Obama nodded, and at times pandered, in this direction. Since then, he has disavowed that rhetoric, to almost no one’s surprise. Yet his zig-zagging on the issue did highlight the biggest weak spot in his, and his party’s, economic agenda. He still hasn’t quite figured out how to sell it. For all his skills as a storyteller and a speaker, he has not settled on a compelling message about how to put the economy on the right path.
The lack of such a message has contributed to several of his worst moments over the last year. Most recently, the campaign has come out with a series of small-bore, populist energy plans — a windfall-profits tax on oil companies, a crackdown on speculators, a partial opening of the strategic oil reserve — that seem more political than economic. The most glaring misstep on this score was his comment this spring about bitter rural voters clinging to guns and religion. It was, in effect, an admission that his own message about the economy hadn’t yet broken through.

Leonhardt claims that Obama's economic thinking has been influenced by the University of Chicago school of economic thinking, but there's not much evidence that Obama actually believes in free markets (he is, however, a veteran of the Chicago school of corrupt politics); he only seems more market-friendly compared with, for instance, his primary opponent Hillary Clinton:

“The market is the best mechanism ever invented for efficiently allocating resources to maximize production,” Obama told me. “And I also think that there is a connection between the freedom of the marketplace and freedom more generally.” But, he continued, “there are certain things the market doesn’t automatically do.” In other words, free-market policy isn’t likely to dominate his agenda; his project would be fixing the market.

No New Democrat there. And, by the way, Barack, markets generally resist getting "fixed" to meet political priorities; his "fixes," whatever they are (for instance, his desire to reduce the gap between "rich" and poor by sticking higher taxes on the right) are likely to lead to Obama's lesson number one in the Law of Unintended Consequences.

There's also another spot where Leonhardt is just plain wrong:

The Tax Policy Center, a research group run by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, has done the most detailed analysis of the Obama and McCain tax plans, and it has published a series of fascinating tables. For the bottom 80 percent of the population — those households making $118,000 or less — McCain’s various tax cuts would mean a net savings of about $200 a year on average. Obama’s proposals would bring $900 a year in savings. So for most people, Obama is the tax cutter in this campaign. ...
All told, Obama would not only cut taxes for most people more than McCain would. He would cut them more than Bill Clinton did and more than Hillary Clinton proposed doing. These tax cuts are really the essence of his market-oriented redistributionist philosophy (though he made it clear that he doesn’t like the word “redistributionist”). They are an attempt to address the middle-class squeeze by giving people a chunk of money to spend as they see fit.

What's wrong with this analysis? How about this: Poor people do not own businesses, poor people do not employ other people, and poor people do not drive the economy. Business owners, most of whom live in households that bring in more than $118,000 a year because they are successful — do. And business owners will get a big fat tax increase out of Obamanomics, not because it will bring in more tax revenue (less than they think, of course), but because Obama and his minions believe in "fairness":

He would then pay for the cuts, at least in part, by raising taxes on the affluent to a point where they would eventually be slightly higher than they were under Clinton. For these upper-income families, the Tax Policy Center’s comparisons with McCain are even starker. McCain, by continuing the basic thrust of Bush’s tax policies and adding a few new wrinkles, would cut taxes for the top 0.1 percent of earners — those making an average of $9.1 million — by another $190,000 a year, on top of the Bush reductions. Obama would raise taxes on this top 0.1 percent by an average of $800,000 a year.

I don't believe that Obama actually will cut taxes on the non-"rich." You may recall that Clinton proposed a middle-class tax cut during his first campaign, only to throw it away when he let Rubin talk him into increasing everyone's taxes instead. The result was that taxes reached a record 20 percent of Gross Domestic Product by 2000, helping push the economy into the 2001 recession, even though no one noticed it at the time. Since most Democrats seem to believe that government can spend your money better than you can, Obama will have to convince congressional Democrats to do something they seem constitutionally incapable of doing.

There's a bigger issue here, and one that Leonhardt doesn't address. What exactly can you believe in what Obama says? His well publicized flip-flops on trade, capital gains taxes and other, smaller issues make you wonder what exactly he does believe in, other than getting elected. And this, remember, is someone who, as Leonhardt's otherwise fawning piece admits, has "never run any government entity — no state, no city, not even a municipal agency — and he may not prove to be good at doing so."

The fact that Obama's economic mishmash may sound good, and probably is in fact better than other Democrats of the tax-and-regulate-everything-that-moves school of politics, is not a compelling reason to vote for him.

“Citius, Altius, Fortius”*

2008-08-08T08:00:00.000-05:00

Today is what might as well be the official start of the Olympics, because today is when NBC carries the Olympics opening ceremonies, even though events began Wednesday. (One could say the official start of the Olympics is the first official blasting of “Bugler’s Dream,” the name of which you may not know, but the music of which you do.)

The best thing about the Olympics may be that, for sports fans, TV-watching improves tremendously. Journal Communications’ own WTMJ-TV (channel 4) in Milwaukee and WGBA-TV (channel 26) in Green Bay will carry the Games weekdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., from 7 to 11 p.m., and from 11:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. (Ask for me the next couple of weeks, and you will find me a yawning man.) USA Network’s daily schedule is from 1 to 11 a.m., MSNBC has the Olympics from 4 a.m. to 4 p.m., CNBC gets the Olympics from 4 to 7 p.m. and from 11 p.m. to 3:30 a.m., and even Oxygen gets into the act with gymnastics starting Monday. If you’d like to listen in Spanish, Telemundo also has Olympic coverage.

The multiple cable options are a big improvement for sports fans, because they allow more focused sports coverage — USA Network will have basketball, soccer, tennis, water polo and volleyball; MSNBC will feature softball, beach volleyball, wrestling, volleyball and weightlifting; CNBC will focus on boxing; and Oxygen will also feature equestrian and tennis. The biggest problem with NBC's Olympics coverage is that it's not really geared for sports fans; in fact, event coverage degenerates into soap opera, a trend that began with ABC-TV's "Up Close and Personal" vignettes during their coverage.

(Speaking of up close and personal: my wife was a translator — Spanish and, unexpectedly, Portugese — for Olympic volleyball in the old Omni for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. One night, I was idly watching late-night coverage back in Wisconsin when it was suddenly interrupted for news of the Centennial Olympic Park bombing. That caught my immediate attention because the Omni wasn’t far from the bombing site, and I wasn’t sure if she might not have been in that area at the time. She wasn’t, I found out after one after-midnight phone call to the house where she was staying.)

It would be nice if the Olympic movement was only about athletic achievement. For that matter, it would be nice if the Olympic movement was motivated only by athletic achievement. It would also be nice if the Olympics was a place where international disagreements could be set aside for a couple of weeks. None are the case, of course; in fact, anyone who says the Olympics should be free from politics doesn't know much about the Olympics, of which USA Today's Richard Benedetto said, "Sports and politics are running mates."

The Olympic movement has been the poster child for political intrigue for almost its entire existence, dating back to the days when Baron Pierre de Coubertin resurrected the Olympic movement in the 1890s. Coubertin believed that professional athletes soiled sports, so, when Jim Thorpe was discovered to have played "professional" baseball ($2 a game), he was stripped of his medals even though his losing his medals was against Olympic rules. Adolf Hitler viewed the 1936 Berlin Olympics as a chance to show off the superiority of his master race. Several Arab countries boycotted the 1956 Melbourne Olympics to protest Israel, and 20 years later many African countries boycotted over South Africa. The 1968 Mexico City Olympics was marred by the Mexican government's massacre of more than 200 protestors.

The Weekly Standard is not the first to have discerned similarities between China's being selected to host this summer's Olympics and Nazi Germany's hosting the 1936 summer Olympics, what with Darfur, Tibet, arrest and imprisonment of political dissidents and Tiananmen Square on China's civil rights résumé. As Weekly Standard writer Dean Barnett puts it, "Unwholesome Olympics politics are more the rule than the exception," including the 1936 Olympics and boycotts by the U.S. in 1980 and then of the U.S. by Soviet bloc countries four years later. In a completely different category would be the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists in the 1972 Munich Olympics, an obscenity basically blown off by International Olympic Committee head Avery Brundage, a truly loathsome figure in sports history.

Beyond boycotts, each of the winter and summer Olympics between 1948 and 1988 was an athletic attempt for the U.S. and the Soviet Union to show off its superiority against the other. This was a rather stacked race given that the U.S.S.R.'s "amateurs" were not amateurs at all. Some viewers see NBC's coverage of the Olympics as excessively pro-American to the point of being jingoistic. And we haven't even discussed various medical scandals tied to the effort of outdoing the competition.

Commercialism has been a recent complaint (I wonder how much it would cost to be designated "the official conservative/libertarian online political column of the Olympic Games"), and yet the three U.S. Olympics held in the past 25 years — Los Angeles in 1984, Atlanta in 1996, and Salt Lake City in 2002 — all were profitable. (I was in Salt Lake City three years before the Olympics, and one business group that benefitted from the Olympics before the Olympics were road builders.) The Athens Olympics in 2004 and the Turin Winter Olympics in 2006 ran deficits.

Still, the Olympics can generate stunning achievement, including gold medals by athletes you've never heard of, such as American Billy Mills in the 1964 10,000-meter run, or Nadia Comaneci in 1976 gymnastics, or Cathy Freeman in the 2000 400-meter run. And, of course, there was that hockey team in 1980. (1960, too.) The Olympic Games is worthwhile watching, as long as you don't watch too closely.

* “Swifter, higher, stronger” in Latin.

18 reasons

2008-08-20T07:00:00.004-05:00

At last, reality has made a tardy appearance into the debate about the role of drinking in our society.

A group of college presidents has signed on to the Amethyst Initiative, a public statement that “the 21-year-old drinking age is not working, and, specifically, that it has created a culture of dangerous binge drinking on their campuses. ”

Why? As the presidents’ statement notes, “Alcohol education that mandates abstinence as the only legal option has not resulted in significant constructive behavioral change among our students. Adults under 21 are deemed capable of voting, signing contracts, serving on juries and enlisting in the military, but are told they are not mature enough to have a beer. By choosing to use fake IDs, students make ethical compromises that erode respect for the law.”

The presidents call upon elected officials to “support an informed and dispassionate public debate over the effects of the 21-year-old drinking age,” including “whether the 10% highway fund ‘incentive’ encourages or inhibits that debate,” while seeking “new ideas about the best ways to prepare young adults to make responsible decisions about alcohol.”

The 21-year-old drinking age requirement — tied to federal government blackmail that takes 10 percent of highway funds away from states that don’t have a 21-year-old drinking age — is ineffective in reducing underage drinking, in colleges and in the places where it was supposed to inhibit underage drinking, high schools. When college freshmen arrive in their dorm, either they have no experience with alcohol if they’ve been following the law, or they’re used to breaking the law. Away from home for an extended period for the first time in their adult lives, in most cases, with no parents telling them not to drink, they start drinking, sometimes to excess and sometimes with tragic results.

Advocates of the 21-year-old drinking age claim that 1,000 lives have been saved each year by the higher drinking age, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. The Amethyst Initiative quotes Choose Responsibility as noting that more than 1,000 18- to 24-year-olds “die each year of alcohol-related causes other than traffic accidents," and that the 21-year-old drinking age has not prevented deaths, but delayed them — “every claim of an 18-, 19-, or 20-year-old life ‘saved’ as a result of Legal Age 21 is offset by the number of 21-, 22-, or 23-year-old lives lost.” If that is true, then the 21-year-old drinking age is an abysmal failure for that reason alone. Choose Responsibility also points out that “Four factors have combined powerfully (and dramatically more than Legal Age 21) to the decline of driving fatalities associated with alcohol: safer cars, higher awareness by drivers of all ages, greater utilization of a ‘designated driver,’ and more vigorous law enforcement.”

What’s more, as Choose Responsibility notes, “Legal Age 21 has created an environment of excess consumption and goal-oriented drinking. While fewer individuals aged 18–20 are drinking, those who choose to drink are doing so at dangerous and alarming rates. … Brain development is complete around age 25; therefore, 21 is not a magic number. What puts individuals at greater cognitive risk is binge drinking, whose rates have only climbed.”

To no one’s surprise, suggesting that the drinking age may be too high is tantamount to mandating drinking until you’re comatose to such anti-alcohol types as Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The PR NewsWire headline for MADD’s news release: “Some University Presidents Shirk Responsibility to Protect Students from Dangers of Underage Drinking.”

“It’s very clear the 21-year-old drinking age will not be enforced at those campuses,” said Laura Dean-Mooney, national president of MADD, which, according to the Associated Press, is “even urging parents to think carefully about the safety of colleges whose presidents have signed on.”

That’s an interesting statement (not to mention a neat bit of character assassination), given that every one of the 157 college-age people, 18 to 23, who drank themselves to death from 1999 through 2005, according to an Associated Press study, died in a state with a drinking age of 21. Actually, it’s very clear the 21-year-old drinking age is not enforceable at any campus except where there’s almost as many security personnel as students. So much for the “informed and dispassionate debate.”

Then again, there is no such thing as an “informed and dispassionate debate” when it comes to the issue of alcohol generally and drunk driving specifically. (See the aforementioned PR Newswire headline.) We as a society lose all proportion whenever the subject of drunk driving comes up, as the show of police force called “Drunk Driving. Over the Limit. Under Arrest” under way until Sept. 1 with $50 million of your tax dollars, demonstrates. (On Sunday I noticed within a one-mile stretch of U.S. 18–151 that goes through a village of 1,100 people west of Madison, one Wisconsin State Patrol squad car, one county sheriff car, and one village police car. None appeared to be doing anything other than sitting on the side of the road trolling for potential drunk drivers, around 6 p.m. On Tuesday, two state troopers were similarly trolling for drunk drivers on Calumet Street in Appleton at 3 p.m.)

Driving under the influence of alcohol means your senses are partially impaired from your ability to give full attention to driving. That also occurs with drivers on some kinds of medication, drivers who notice their car interior is too warm or too cold, cellphones, car audio systems, car navigation systems, cars that flash instrument panel warning lights, passengers, other cars, and drivers who are thinking about anything else besides driving. Some impairments are more serious than others, obviously, but to assert that, as a Colorado MADD chapter president, Penny Wagner, said, “Once you’ve consumed your first drink, you’ve lost that ability to make a sound judgment,” calls into serious question the credibility of the organization sponsoring that point of view. (Then again, MADD supports an absolute sobriety standard for all drivers.)

How serious is drunk driving? The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that the number of drinking drivers involved in fatal crashes totals 0.127 percent of all drivers. Note the word “drinking,” not “drunk,” because the NHTSA counts every driver with any blood alcohol content in that percentage. (If you drink one beer and then are killed in a car crash in which the other driver was sober, then you died in an alcohol-related crash, according to the federal and state DOTs.) That is how the state Department of Transportation can propagandize that “alcohol-related crashes in Wisconsin killed 337 people and injured 5,552” without saying how many of the dead and injured were in fact legally or factually intoxicated. (And about that last point, “legally or factually intoxicated,” few people notice that a legal intoxication level creates a crime based on a state of being, rather than a state of doing, or, put another way, a state of mind instead of an action — in this case, bad driving.)

Like other laws created to make politicians look good or constituents feel good without producing actual results, the 21-year-old drinking age serves to encourage disrespect for the law. I’m still waiting for someone to give an actual logical rationale countering the presidents’ observation about how people are legally considered adults at 18 except when it comes to alcohol use. (Recall the words of Benjamin Franklin: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”) It is also another example of how laws can serve to deter personal responsibility. The 21-year-old drinking age is also an example of power triumphing over reason — why can’t you drink before you’re 21? Because we said so!

MADD and its allies will not tell you this, but the vast majority of people who used alcohol before their state said they legally could are not drunks and in fact use alcohol responsibly after they reach the legal drinking age. If that were not the case, the drunk driving and drunk-driving death rates would be an order of magnitude higher than they are. (Then again, MADD is well known for playing fast and loose with the facts, liberally using junk science, or generating all kinds of inaccuracies.)

To date, in Wisconsin only the president of Ripon College has signed on to the initiative. Northeast Wisconsin’s other college presidents and chancellors should too. So should the proponents of the 21-year-old drinking age agree to engage in “an informed and dispassionate public debate over the effects of the 21-year-old drinking age.” Don’t hold your breath.

Today's sign of your advancing age

2008-08-19T09:00:00.001-05:00

Beloit College released its annual Mindset List today, reminding all of us who have already graduated from college about the lives of today's college freshmen:

The class of 2012 has grown up in an era where computers and rapid communication are the norm, and colleges no longer trumpet the fact that residence halls are “wired” and equipped with the latest hardware. These students will hardly recognize the availability of telephones in their rooms since they have seldom utilized landlines during their adolescence. They will continue to live on their cell phones and communicate via texting. Roommates, few of whom have ever shared a bedroom, have already checked out each other on Facebook where they have shared their most personal thoughts with the whole world.

It is a multicultural, politically correct and “green” generation that has hardly noticed the threats to their privacy and has never feared the Russians and the Warsaw Pact.

Some of the more amusing ones (well, you may find them amusing; then again, you may not, particularly the last one):

Gas stations have never fixed flats, but most serve cappuccino.
As a precursor to “whatever,” they have recognized that some people “just don’t get it.”
WWW has never stood for World Wide Wrestling.
IBM has never made typewriters.
Roseanne Barr has never been invited to sing the National Anthem again.
Caller ID has always been available on phones.
Soft drink refills have always been free.
They have never known life without Seinfeld references from a show about “nothing.”
The Green Bay Packers (almost) always had the same starting quarterback.

Analysis of the Day

2008-08-19T08:00:00.003-05:00

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Patrick McIlhearn notes that his car's driver has never gone on strike, unlike Racine bus drivers and (back in the late '70s, I remember) Madison bus drivers. Nor, I would add, do they race through the first half of their route and then sit for several minutes, making some passengers miss their bus and others late, as Madison drivers have been known to do.

Gas prices and Madison

2008-08-19T07:00:00.003-05:00

Democrats such as U.S. Rep. Steve Kagen (D–Appleton) must be breathing sighs of relief now that gas prices have slipped around 40 cents a gallon from their record highs of earlier this year. (Must be that nasty antitrust lawsuit against OPEC.)

Which does not mean that gas prices are no longer an issue for voters. That is what Randy Melchert, a Republican candidate in the 24th Assembly District in southeast Wisconsin, believes.

Melchert has a three-pronged way to reduce gas prices in the Milwaukee metropolitan area by 10 percent, and to reduce gas prices in the rest of Wisconsin as well:

Eliminate the state’s minimum markup law.
Reduce the state gas tax to the national average.
Eliminate the federal mandate requiring use of reformulated gas in the Milwaukee area.

Melchert’s Web site, themelchertplan.com, has an interactive calculator that shows how much money his would-be constituents would save if his plan became law. Northeast Wisconsin residents, who are not subject to the reformulated gas mandate (yet), would not save the estimated 14 cents per gallon cost of RFG, but they would still save the 24 to 36 cents per gallon the minimum markup law requires and the 4 cents per gallon above the national average at which the state gas tax is set.

The gas tax is no longer indexed to inflation, so at least it's not automatically increasing every spring. Then again, the transportation fund is decreasing thanks to Gov. James Doyle's repeated raiding of the fund to balance the state budget. The transportation fund seems to be, in the words of another observer, the payday loan store of state government.

As for Doyle’s position on the minimum markup law, he seems to emulate the death penalty dance of former Gov. Tommy Thompson. Thompson said publicly that he would sign a bill reestablishing the death penalty if it reached his desk. However, a death penalty bill never reached his desk because, despite the repeated efforts of state Sen. Alan Lasee (R–Rockland), Republican legislative leaders prevented it from coming to a vote since they didn’t support the death penalty.

Similarly, Doyle has said publicly that he would sign a bill ending the minimum markup law if it reached his desk. No such bill has reached his desk, in part due to strange votes of people like Sen. Glenn Grothman (R–West Bend), who in 2005 voted in committee against ending the law over concerns that gas stations wouldn’t be able to cover the cost of credit card transactions. It’s not clear what part of the state Constitution stipulates that legislators’ duties include monitoring gas station credit card transaction fees.

For that matter, setting (or effectively setting) gas prices is not the role of government, period. Many Republicans wrongly favor the minimum markup law on the premise that eliminating it would eliminate smaller gas stations in favor of the behemoths of Big Oil. As stated here before, evidence of predatory gas pricing is nonexistent, and as it is, consumers don't usually know or ever care about the source of their gas (with the exception of Citgo, owned by Venezuela and its vile "president," Hugo Chavez).

On the other side of the aisle, do not assume that the drop in gas prices is a success of the Democratic Party. It may well be that gas prices aren't going to drop to the levels (about $2.30 a gallon) that preceded Democratic control of Congress. It is a 100 percent guarantee that, next spring at the latest, they will increase with a President Obama and Democratic-controlled Congress, since Obama and most Democrats believe that oil companies should be saddled with windfall profits taxes and, anyway, we need to be weaned from our cars and "cheap" energy. (I'll believe that the next time I see any Democratic member of Congress on a Washington, D.C., bus.)

Then again, perhaps there's less urgency about gas prices in Madison because ... gas prices are (as of today) lower in Madison than in other metro areas of Wisconsin.

Prince Charles: “Let them eat cake”

2008-08-18T07:00:00.004-05:00

Why, one might ask, did our Founding Fathers fight for independence from Great Britain?

One reason is so that we would not be the subjects of twits like His Royal Highness Charles Philip Arthur George, Prince of Wales, Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, Prince and Great Steward of Scotland, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. As he waits … and waits … and waits to succeed Queen Elizabeth atop the United Kingdom, he feels free to enlighten us commoners about the dangers of genetically modified foods, as reported in the London Daily Telegraph:

In his most outspoken intervention on the issue of GM food, the Prince said that multi-national companies were conducting an experiment with nature which had gone “seriously wrong.”

The Prince, in an exclusive interview with the Daily Telegraph, also expressed the fear that food would run out because of the damage being wreaked on the earth’s soil by scientists’ research.

He accused firms of conducting a “gigantic experiment I think with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong.

“Why else are we facing all these challenges, climate change and everything?”
Relying on “gigantic corporations” for food, he said, would result in “absolute disaster.
“That would be the absolute destruction of everything … and the classic way of ensuring there is no food in the future,” he said.
“What we should be talking about is food security not food production — that is what matters and that is what people will not understand.
“And if they think its somehow going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another then again count me out, because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time.” …
In the interview the Prince, who has an organic farm on his Highgrove estate, held out the hope of the British agricultural system encouraging more and more family run co-operative farms.
When challenged over whether he was trying to turn back the clock, he said: “I think not. I’m terribly sorry. It’s not going backwards. It is actually recognising that we are with nature, not against it. We have gone working against nature for too long.”

Let’s see here. Our planet, whose population is growing (except in Europe), has starving people. There is also an effort to replace oil imported from the Middle East with ethanol from corn or other plant sources. Genetically modified plants have never been proven to harm nature or people. (Our sample size: 8.5 million farmers on more than 100 million acres of cropland in 21 countries, as of 2006.) In fact their genetic modifications can eliminate or reduce the need for pesticides and herbicides. Modifications can increase cold and drought resistance. Modifications can also increase the nutritional value of crops.

I’d be curious about what Charles considers to be “working against nature.” Irrigation? Fertilizer? Insecticides and herbicides? Hybrid crops? Use of tractors and combines? Metal silos? Lights? Electricity?

It’s not clear if Charles is really as ignorant or as insensitive to the problems of the world outside Clarence House as this makes him appear, or if he’s been listening to Jeremy Rifkin too much. (Bonnie Prince Charlie says we have, as of now, 15 months to reverse global climate change, assuming global warming is actually occurring.) It’s pathetic to see one of the world’s (alleged) leaders succumbing to superstition over science, similar to opponents of nuclear power. It’s also pathetic to see the next leader of the country and kingdom that produced Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, William Wilberforce, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher become vaguely socialist. That, or he’s channeling his inner Marie Antoinette.

Fun at the Weather Service?

2008-08-17T21:42:00.002-05:00

A regular reader caught this on the National Weather Service's forecast page for Rosendale Saturday night:

Overnight: Cloudy.

Sunday: Cloudy.

Sunday Night: Cloudy.

Monday: Cloudy.

Monday Night: Cloudy.

Tuesday: Partly sunny. Strong and damaging winds, with a east wind between 70 and 80 mph.

Tuesday Night: Cloudy. Strong and damaging winds, with a east wind 90 to 95 mph increasing to between 110 and 115 mph.

Wednesday: Cloudy. Strong and damaging winds, with a east wind 115 to 120 mph increasing to between 155 and 160 mph.

Wednesday Night: Cloudy. Strong and damaging winds.

Thursday: Cloudy.

Thursday Night: Cloudy.

Friday: Cloudy.

America 2008

2008-07-04T08:00:00.012-05:00

Other than Christmas, Independence Day is my favorite holiday. One doesn’t usually get or give presents on Independence Day, but then again one doesn’t have to shovel and risk frostbite to get to Independence Day celebrations.

What’s not to like about Independence Day, from a secular perspective? Parades. Picnics. Nice weather. Baseball (seven of today’s 15 major league games have daytime starts). And, of course, fireworks so loud you can feel them. (Whatever your weekend plans are, don’t do this.) Constitution Day, Sept. 17, is poorly scheduled because it occurs after the real end of summer (which runs from Memorial Day weekend to Labor Day weekend), and so we don’t celebrate the Constitution as much as we celebrate independence. (For that matter, we don’t celebrate the resolution declaring independence; we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence in its finished form.)

Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein, two economists who write the Monday Morning Outlook, sum up nicely what today should be about:

This nation is blessed with abundant natural resources, ports and an agreeable climate. But, the number one attribute of economic success is freedom, which allows people to find and exploit their own God-given talents. This freedom creates a sense of adventurism and entrepreneurship that many other societies strive to emulate. It also breeds optimism, which has been consistently reinforced by more than two centuries of success.

The Declaration of Independence, signed 232 years ago today, is a remarkable document, a document that didn’t just change America and Great Britain, but changed the entire world. The signers, giants of the day (my personal favorite is Ben Franklin, printer, publisher, inventor, fire chief and musician), were all men of relative comfort who nonetheless pledged “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor” with no guarantee of success. The Continental Congress was offered a deal to become a dominion similar to Canada, but the Congress refused, because they didn’t believe that their self-evident truths of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” could be realized under a king from across the Atlantic Ocean whose people may have had representation, but didn’t (and still don’t) have rights over government.

In addition to being about individual political rights, the Declaration of Independence is about economic rights, specifically “cutting off our Trade with all Parts of the World” and “imposing Taxes on us without our Consent,” along with substituting royal whim for the rule of law. (Yes, Congress was not the first institution to refuse to follow laws it created.) The Founding Fathers may not have been the first to discover the link between political freedom and economic freedom, but they may have been the most influential.

Contrasting the American Revolution with the French Revolution, which began as the American Revolution successfully ended, is an interesting exercise. As University of Hawaii emeritus professor R.J. Rummel noted, the American Revolution “was an explicit attempt to establish the greatest possible common freedom” as an alternative to “monarchical and aristocratic power.” The American Revolution is an ironic descendant of “the English tradition of common law and rights” as spelled out by John Locke and others, with the addition of the realization that defeating the British Empire would only lead to a government as large as the Empire unless that government was restricted and individual rights were emphasized. Rummel sees the American Revolution based on three principles — “A conception of Freedom as an outcome of contending interests, each guaranteed inalienable Rights … checks and balances, and limited government” — that, more than 200 years later, works today, though not perfectly.

In contrast, the French Revolution, which began on Bastille Day, July 14, 1789, was based on three different principles — the community’s interests take precedence over the individual’s, government must not be subject to checks and balances since “in the hands of the people, government can only serve the people’s ends,” and, in the pursuit of social justice, “As the State's implement of Reason working on behalf of the Community, government should not be limited.”

“Paul Johnson said of the French Revolution that it was the ‘classic demonstration of the capacity of words to kill,’” wrote National Review’s Jonah Goldberg. “Robespierre and his merry band of murderers brought on the era of total politicization. No aspect of human life was beyond the touch of politics after the French Revolution. The state was granted a right to destroy institutions and traditions which protected the family and the individual from the violence of the state. Throughout the world, the French Revolution became an inspiration for men and women to rationalize their actions in terms of their purported ends. As Johnson puts it ‘every would-be plunderer or ambitious bandit now called himself a “liberator”; murderers killed for freedom, thieves stole for the people.’”

Goldberg identified these “liberators” as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot — “all admired the French Revolution and found within it precedents for their own contributions to world history (though most of them found the American Revolution utterly useless).” The death toll from acts of that gang of four (in which France was twice a victim) ranges from, depending on how you count, between 47 million and 114 million.

The battle between the forces Rummel identified continues today: “It is happiness and justice as an outcome of a free balance of opposing interests, each guaranteed inalienable Rights, versus justice to be sought by reason using the State. The principles are those of individual rights versus a collective benefit; of checks and balances versus government as an unchecked instrument; of limited government and common law versus reason using government to create new law to further justice.”

It’s pretty obvious which approach has worked best to maximize not just freedom, but prosperity. The Declaration of Independence is not perfect (Thomas Jefferson’s original draft included harsh criticism of King George III’s “suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce” of slavery), the Constitution is not perfect (though it does contain ways to improve it by, for instance, implementing Milton Friedman’s proposed Economic Bill of Rights), and this country is not perfect, because all manmade institutions in which people are involved are and will always be imperfect. (It would be nice, for instance, if Wisconsin had one U.S. senator, let alone the two we're supposed to have.)

The United States of America is, however, the best thing going on the planet, “not only the wealthiest and most powerful country on earth now, but in all of history,” as historian Thomas F. Madden said in the Wall Street Journal Thursday — the most complete combination of economic and political freedom, as well as security and stability, the world has ever known. Others would do well to emulate our Declaration of Independence.

Today is, however, a day where people on the left and right who don't like how things are going ask whether the U.S. can survive. (What a great country — liberals and conservatives can think things are going in the wrong direction for completely different reasons.) Other than calendar convenience, this is because, as Madden pointed out, “Prosperity and security are boring. Nobody wants to read about them.” And, to repeat what I said last week, some people have lost their perspective on, or knowledge or memory of, what bad times really are. Some people, I would argue, also have lost their perspective on what's really important.

Happy Independence Day to you, and to the United States of America.

Skål

2008-08-15T07:00:00.011-05:00

I’ve been the editor of Marketplace on and off since the end of January 1994. If I had to point at one thing that points at quality of life in the preceding 14 years, it would be …

… the growth of breweries and wineries in Northeast Wisconsin.

The former of those two facts makes sense, given our heritage as a brewing state. The latter is less self-evident, since no one thinks of Wisconsin as having a good grape-growing climate. Some snobs claim that apple or cherry wines aren't really wines at all. But one of the great facets of free enterprise is the opportunity to make your own choice of what food and drink to drink. (At least for now, though some wish to restrict our food and drink choices.)

(This has nothing to do with the latest Department of Transportation anti-drunk driving campaign, “Drunk Driving. Over the Limit. Under Arrest” campaign that starts today and runs through Sept. 1. Anyone with an ounce of responsibility should know that impaired driving — to the point where you can’t safely operate a vehicle, not based on a legislatively determined number — is indefensible. It might have more to do with the Wall Street Journal’s weekend “Tastings” and “How’s Your Drink?” columns, the only problem with which is that if you followed their purchase advice, half of your house would be your liquor cabinet and your wine cellar.)

Wisconsin’s historically predominant ethnic group is German. Our German ancestors did unfortunately bring large government and high taxes with them, but they also brought beer. (An interesting tradeoff.) Other Europeans brought wine with them, since they came from countries with poor-quality drinking water. Within 50 years of a wave of mid-19th-century German immigration, brewing had become the fifth largest industry in the U.S., according to Maureen Ogle, author of Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer.

Beer and wine have been more durable than government, having survived “progressive” and anti-alcohol efforts to wipe it out during Prohibition. (One anti-alcohol type wrapped temperance and World War I anti-German sentiment by proclaiming, "The worst of all our German enemies are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz and Miller.") Beer and wine are also more durable than newspapers, specifically the Gannett efforts to shame all of us into stopping drinking. (And, yes, that is exactly the goal of the Gannett series, any denials of theirs notwithstanding; had they wanted to focus exclusively on drunk driving, they certainly could have.)

One of the more interesting classes I took at the University of Wisconsin was a class in UW’s Botany department, “Plants and Man.” Besides being one of the first users of multimedia presentations (he used two slide projectors during lectures), the professor, Tim Allen, talked about, of all things, brewing and winemaking:

“You learn about biological processes, you learn about infections, you learn about being careful, being clean—all things that are crucial to science,” says Allen. “As well as learning a useful skill. Brewing is legal and a wholesome activity.”

One thing he said that stuck in my mind during the adult-beverage lectures was to look for quality over quantity — that two bottles of a really good beer are preferable to a six-pack of lesser beer. (That’s also the reason I don’t drink light beer.) I meet no one’s definition of a beer or wine snob, but I avoid the more common beer labels (i.e. Miller Genuine Draft over Miller Lite, and Michelob over anything with “Bud” in its name), particularly Old Style beer (the most common contents of the college party quarter-barrels I attended), of which I drank enough to resolve to never drink it again after graduation. (I also vastly prefer bottles to cans.)

Old Style, of course, was brewed by the late G. Heileman Brewing Co. of La Crosse, which also brewed my first favorite beer, Special Export. (Both Old Style and Special Export are now brewed by Miller for Pabst, the labels’ owner. Pabst also owns Blatz, Colt 45 Malt Liquor, Lone Star, Old Milwaukee, Olympia, Pearl, Rainier, Schaefer, Schlitz and Stroh’s.) Special Export was the beer of choice at home when I reached legal drinking age, so I drank it until the formula changed sometime around 1990.

(Interesting side fact: Several beer Web sites actually “card” users — if you’re not 21, you can’t get into their Web site, I suppose because of the national 21-year-old drinking age. At 18, you can vote, marry, sign legally binding contracts and die for your country, but until you’re 21 you can neither drink nor access beer Web sites.)

I come from a long line of brandy drinkers, which shouldn’t be a surprise in Wisconsin. My grandfather drank brandy and cola. My father drinks brandy and seltzer. My Polish Minnesota relatives were shot-and-a-beer types, although the shot was brandy and not whiskey. I drink the official mixed drink of Wisconsin, the brandy old fashioned made with sweet vermouth. (Except during my in-laws’ large Christmas celebration, where the order of the day is their brandy slush.) The black sheep of the family are my aunt and uncle, who make the world’s greatest Bloody Marys.

My alcohol choices are influenced heavily by my sweet tooth. (Call me a philistine, but my wine preferences lean toward sweet whites.) As I’m finishing this column, for instance, I’m drinking a Leinenkugel Summer Shandy, beer with a lemonade taste. (I’ll pause to wait for the snickering among some of you to stop.) I also like wheat beers, red beers, and even dark beers when I’m feeling, well, brilliant. I was going to replace the Summer Shandy with Leinie’s Apple Spice this fall, but Leinie decided to discontinue Apple Spice and replace it with Fireside Nut Brown. (We’ll see.) I have yet to delve into the world of home brewing, because I have enough to do in my life as it is. (More power to those who brew at home.)

There is great irony in the purchase of Anheuser–Busch, brewers of Budweiser, by InBev of Belgium. Some argue that Budweiser helped wipe out dozens of regional brands; others argue that Budweiser helped wipe out dozens of regional brands that were almost indistinguishable from Budweiser. Ogle (who has a beer blog) points out that, after Prohibition, per capita beer consumption didn't reach pre-Prohibition levels until the mid-1970s. Edward McClelland wrote on Salon.com that, while in 1960 this country had 175 traditional (not micro) breweries, within 45 years (45 years of beer on the wall?) there were just 21 breweries.

Anyone 10 years or older than I am can regale you with interesting stories as the answer to this question: What is the worst beer you’ve ever had? McClelland points out that Anheuser–Busch’s attaching itself to television and sports took it from number four to number one among U.S. breweries, wiping out smaller competition in the process. An honest appraisal, though, might make one think that the survivors were those who didn’t just have more financial, distribution or marketing horsepower, but made a better, or at least more consistent, product than many smaller labels. (You walk into any McDonald’s restaurant in the U.S., and you will get the same Quarter Pounder as at the next McDonald’s, or a McDonald’s 1,000 miles away.) A good tipoff is when a beer is known not for its quality, but its lack thereof.

The trend in the reduction of traditional breweries has been countered by the rise of the microbrewery, or “craft brewery,” including, in Northeast Wisconsin, Fratellos and Fox River Brewing Co., Hinterland, Stone Cellar, Titletown and others. (McClelland notes that the U.S. had eight microbreweries in 1980; 25 years later, the number had jumped to more than 1,300.) The parallel trend is the rise of the small winery, including, in Northeast Wisconsin, Captain’s Walk, Door Peninsula, Kerrigan Brothers, LedgeStone, Orchard Country, Parallel 44, Red Oak, Simon Creek, Stone’s Throw, Trout Springs, von Stiehl, Woodland Trail and others. (The winery list, incidentally, has doubled since I did a story about Northeast Wisconsin’s wineries in June 2001.)

At this point, those readers who don’t drink (and you are perfectly within your rights to abstain) might look at this as an exercise justifying drinking, as if those of us who enjoy the taste of alcoholic beverages or enjoy the stress-relieving effects of adult beverages are less moral or less pure of heart. That belies the reality that stress-relieving activities, of which drinking is one, have existed as long as stress has existed.

Washington Post columnist George Will, not a writer noted for humor, wrote perhaps the second funniest thing he has ever written (the first was his suggestion that football combines the two worst features of American culture — violence and committee meetings) when commenting on Investors Business Daily’s report on InBev’s purchase of Anheuser–Busch:

The story asserted: “The [alcoholic beverage] industry’s continued growth, however slight, has been a surprise to those who figured that when the economy turned south, consumers would cut back on nonessential items like beer.”
“Non what”? Do not try to peddle that proposition in the bleachers or at the beaches in July. It is closer to the truth to say: No beer, no civilization.

That’s not columnist hyperbole. Will refers to Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, about a cholera epidemic traced to the drinking water in a particular London neighborhood:

“The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol.”

Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol — in beer and, later, wine — which has antibacterial properties. Sure, alcohol has its hazards, but as Johnson breezily observes, “Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties.” Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison, and an addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a species-strengthening selection process.

Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter–gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of, say, beer. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic advantage that not everyone had — what Johnson describes as the body's ability to respond to the intake of alcohol by increasing the production of particular enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases. This ability is controlled by certain genes on chromosome four in human DNA, genes not evenly distributed to everyone. Those who lacked this trait could not, as the saying goes, “hold their liquor.” So, many died early and childless, either of alcohol’s toxicity or from waterborne diseases.

The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors — by those genetically disposed to, well, drink beer. “Most of the world’s population today,” Johnson writes, “is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.”

So the next time you order beer, just tell your companions that nature wants you to drink beer. (I drink gin — always Tanqueray — and tonics in the summer due to my fear of scurvy and malaria. A bartender once told me that Tanqueray doesn’t cause hangovers, and so far, he’s been right.) Or repeat this quote attributed to John Ciardi: “Fermentation and civilization are inseparable.”

There is something viscerally satisfying about a good wine accompanying a good meal, or a bottle of beer in the company of friends. Taverns, after all, were where much of the business of the beginnings of this nation were conducted. And if you’re a parent, it is absolutely essential that your children see you and your spouse enjoying adult beverages responsibly.

Benjamin Franklin has been quoted as approving of both beer and wine as “proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” The actual quote is: “We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana as a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.” Then again, he certainly enjoyed ale from time to time.

Another Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, pointed out, “Beer, if drank in moderation, softens the temper, cheers the spirit, and promotes health.”

Cheers. (Or perhaps, for our German ancestors, “prost.”)

The correct corporate tax rate

2008-08-14T07:00:00.007-05:00

National Democrats are in high dudgeon over a General Accounting Office report that two-thirds of U.S. corporations do not pay income taxes — that is, do not have income tax liability at the end of their fiscal year.

“It’s shameful that so many corporations make big profits and pay nothing to support our country,” harrumphed U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D–North Dakota), who requested the GAO report with U.S. Sen. Carl Levin (D–Michigan), who you might think has better things to worry about, such as the deteriorating state of the state he represents. “The tax system that allows this wholesale tax avoidance is an embarrassment and unfair to hardworking Americans who pay their fair share of taxes. We need to plug these tax loopholes and put these corporations back on the tax rolls.”

Well, there’s (at least) one problem with Dorgan’s spleen-venting. As page 13 of the report points out:

… The overwhelming majority, about 79 to 80 percent of both large [foreign-controlled corporations] and [U.S.-controlled corporations] that reported zero tax liability in 2005, established it on line 28 where they reported zero taxable income before net operating losses. This means that their reported current-year deductions more than offset the positive current-year total income reported on line 11.

In other words, in order to pay income tax, corporations have to have net income, as defined by federal tax law. Dorgan therefore is venting about the wrong thing — instead of venting about companies paying no taxes, perhaps he should be bold enough to support, instead of a corporate income tax, a corporate gross receipts tax, where taxes are based on revenue, not income (revenue minus expenses). Dorgan then will have to explain why it will be a good thing when corporations reduce employment and R&D spending, dividends to shareholders (which, by the way, comprise half of Americans), and such niceties as donations to nonprofits once they have tax liability they don’t currently have.

The dudgeon fades further when you read this from the Associated Press:

An outside tax expert, Chris Edwards of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, said increasing numbers of limited liability corporations and so-called “S” corporations pay taxes under individual tax codes.
“Half of all business income in the United States now ends up going through the individual tax code,” Edwards said.

The fact is that, contrary to what Dorgan thinks, no business escapes from taxes. Every employee, including those allegedly excessively paid CEOs, pays income taxes, Social Security taxes, capital gains taxes if they own stock, state and local sales taxes, and so on. Corporations also pay taxes covering their share of the Social Security taxes of their employees, unemployment and Worker Compensation taxes, property taxes on their properties and sales taxes (to excess, in many cases) on business-related items that aren’t exempt from the sales tax. The only way a corporation can escape taxes is to have no employees, facilities, equipment or purchases.

I’m going to repeat myself and point out that businesses should not have to pay taxes other than what funds strictly property-based services. In addition to the savings for companies in the cost of complying with our tax system, the savings from not paying corporate income or personal property taxes could go in one or more of three directions — more investment in the company, more pay for employees, or more dividends for shareholders. Any combination of those three is preferable to giving state government and our elected officials, including Dorgan, more money to waste. The benefits any business provides the areas they’re in, beginning with providing jobs, far exceeds whatever taxes a company pays. And every dollar a business is taxed is one more dollar in the price of a product, one less dollar that can be spent on the company (including employee pay), or one less dollar that can be passed on to shareholders.

I’ve also said this before, but it too bears repeating: In addition to ferreting out hidden taxes — since, as we all know, businesses don’t pay taxes, they pass them on to customers or their shareholders — ending corporate taxes other than strictly property-based services would have the additional effect of removing a lot of money and lobbying from our political system. If you have no corporate taxes, you have no corporate tax breaks, you have no lobbying for tax breaks, and you have no contributions to political candidates business hopes will favor tax breaks. (Then again, that’s probably a big reason why Dorgan and Levin wouldn’t favor ending corporate taxes.)

What’s the correct corporate tax rate? Zero.

Be on the lookout …

2008-08-13T14:35:00.001-05:00

From the National Weather Service in Sullivan:

...FUNNEL CLOUDS POSSIBLE TODAY...

FUNNEL CLOUDS HAVE BEEN REPORTED TODAY NEAR WATERTOWN AND NEAR WESTFIELD IN MARQUETTE COUNTY. THE FUNNELS CLOUDS OCCURRED WITH SCATTERED SHOWERS AND ISOLATED THUNDERSTORMS THAT ARE MOVING ACROSS SOUTHERN WISCONSIN. NO TORNADOES HAVE BEEN REPORTED.

THE MOIST ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS TODAY AND RELATIVELY COLD AIR ALOFT ARE SUPPORTIVE OF BRIEF FUNNEL CLOUDS. THE THREAT OF SEVERE WEATHER IS VERY LOW. IF ANY FUNNEL CLOUDS TOUCHDOWN...THEY ARE EXPECTED TO BE VERY BRIEF AND WEAK WITH VERY LIMITED THREAT TO THE PUBLIC. SCATTERED SHOWERS AND ISOLATED THUNDERSTORMS ARE EXPECTED TO CONTINUE THROUGH THE AFTERNOON WITH FUNNEL CLOUDS POSSIBLE.

From the National Weather Service in Ashwaubenon:

...FUNNEL CLOUDS POSSIBLE TODAY...

AN UPPER LEVEL DISTURBANCE WILL PRODUCE WEATHER CONDITIONS THAT ARE FAVORABLE FOR FUNNEL CLOUDS THIS AFTERNOON. IN FACT...A FUNNEL CLOUD HAS ALREADY BEEN REPORTED NEAR NEW HOLSTEIN...IN SOUTHEAST CALUMET COUNTY.

THESE RELATIVELY WEAK FUNNELS TYPICALLY FORM FROM A SMALL SHOWER OR THUNDERSTORM...AND RARELY TOUCH THE GROUND. THEY NORMALLY EXTEND A FEW HUNDRED FEET DOWNWARD FROM THE BASE OF THE CLOUD...AND LAST A FEW MINUTES BEFORE DISSIPATING.

ON OCCASION...THESE FUNNELS CAN TOUCH THE GROUND AS A TORNADO...BUT THEY ARE USUALLY QUITE WEAK. THESE TYPE OF TORNADOES ARE MUCH LESS VIOLENT THAN TORNADOES THAT FORM WITH STRONG THUNDERSTORMS OR SUPERCELL THUNDERSTORMS.

IF YOU SEE A FUNNEL CLOUD APPROACHING YOUR LOCATION...SEEK SHELTER INDOORS.

The baseballogue

2008-08-12T07:00:00.005-05:00

I spent part of last week on a 1,350-mile six-state five-day four-game 41-inning baseball trip — Los Angeles Dodgers at St. Louis, Houston at Cincinnati, Boston at Chicago White Sox, and Washington at Milwaukee.

I went on the trip with my father and a high school friend of his. Those two originated the epic baseball trip almost 20 years ago, but this was the first time I got to go along. Their most epic trip was a six-games-in-six-days marathon starting with two games in Chicago, a trip to Detroit, games in Cleveland and Cincinnati, and then back to where the trips usually end, in Milwaukee. (The trips have been shorter since then, either due to the age of the participants or the fact that that’s a really long itinerary for anyone.)

It was entertaining to hear the two of them talk about their younger days, although it gave me the feeling most sons probably feel about their fathers, something along the lines of: If I had done one-eighth of what he did, he would have killed me. My father turns 70 in December, and although he's in good health, you never know how much time you're allotted.

The trip was, frankly, just about perfect. The weather was not so obscenely hot (as it was the first time I visited St. Louis — in sequence, 80 degrees and rain, 95 and 97, and it wasn’t dry heat) as it often is in the Midwest this time of year. All of the games, featuring five contenders for playoff berths, were at least entertaining (Dodgers 4, Cardinals 1; Astros 9, Reds 5 in 10 innings; Red Sox 6, White Sox 2; and Brewers 5, Nationals 4 in 13 innings) with memorable moments in all.

The Dodgers now have former Red Sox outfielder Manny Ramirez, who seems to be this generation’s answer to Reggie Jackson, judging from the boos that rained down in each of his at-bats. Like Jackson, known as “Mr. October” during his playing days, Ramirez, dreadlocks and all, rose to the occasion with a two-run home run that proved to be the winning runs in the Dodgers’ win.

Ramirez was part of a funny coincidence. Just before the trip, the Red Sox (who we saw Saturday) traded Ramirez to the Dodgers (who we saw Thursday), and the Reds (who we saw Friday) traded Ken Griffey Jr. to the White Sox (who we saw Saturday). Griffey didn’t play, though. (Then, on Monday, the Reds traded outfielder Adam Dunn to Arizona.)

St. Louis might have the best baseball atmosphere of any city I’ve been to. (I have not been to Fenway Park in Boston, though my wife has. Not that I’m jealous of that or anything.) Busc h Stadium — which opened two years ago to replace Busch Stadium, which replaced Busch Stadium in 1966 — is a wonderful place to watch baseball in an area where the Cardinals are clearly front and center. The neighborhood is very industrial, but bars are jammed in between the ballpark and two freeways and a railroad track, and it’s a very festive environment, with people dressed in red whether they went to the game or not.

After an all-day drive through Indiana and Kentucky to Cincinnati, game two featured a similarly nice ballpark, Great American Ball Park, but in a less exciting atmosphere. It’s in a great location, with the skyscrapers of downtown Cincinnati to the north and the Ohio River immediately south, but there is one sports bar in the area, and the fans are not nearly as interested in the Reds as the Cardinals’ fans were. (Then again, the Cardinals are in the hunt for a playoff spot, and the Reds haven’t been a contender since their new park opened in 2003.) Friday’s highlight was a bit of schadenfreude for 2½ fans (my father’s character flaw is that he is a Cubs fan) who witnessed former Brewers closer Francisco Cordero, who signed with the Reds as a free agent for $46 million, give up four 10th-inning runs in the Reds’ loss.

Great American Ball Park (right photo) had two things in common with Busch besides prominent use of red — attendance far higher than what one’s eyes saw. Friday’s attendance was allegedly 25,652, which looked about 10,000 optimistic to me. Thursday’s attendance was 40,500, but it appeared as though at least 5,000 fans were dressed as empty seats. In both cases, the reported attendance figures were probably tickets sold. I must say, though, that at up to $72 in Cincinnati and $120 in St. Louis, it’s hard for me to imagine that many people buying tickets to a game and then not attending.

Both Great American and the newest Busch are replacements for older stadiums (even down to the same round shape and old-style artificial turf) that were used for baseball and football, with the retro touches, such as irregular distances from home plate to the walls, of the stadiums replaced by the multiple-use stadiums. (And fans pay for the new ballparks in more ways than one: Beer at Busch was $8.50.) There are now identical square craters where both old stadiums stood; Great American was built east of the old Riverfront Stadium, and Busch was built across the street from the previous (middle-aged?) Busch. The former Busch crater is to be replaced by Ballpark Village, a “first-class entertainment and business center,” in time for the 2009 All-Star Game.

Cardinals games used to be on KMOX in St. Louis, a station that could be heard throughout the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. at night when the venerable Jack Buck (whose bust is next to me in the first photo) was their announcer. (Listening to Cardinals games was such a great experience that it almost made up for the fact that the Cardinals beat the Brewers in the 1982 World Series.) Reds games are still on WLW (700 AM) in Cincinnati, a station that can be heard throughout the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. at night, with the legendary Marty Brennaman as their announcer. Brennaman got to announce two World Series wins within two years of his 1974 hiring, but other than the Reds’ surprise World Series win in 1990, he has announced more bad teams than good in recent seasons. He does, however, now get to work with his son, Thom (who also does baseball for Fox), who chose to come to Cincinnati to work with his father. Joe Buck, Fox’s main football and baseball announcer, got to work with his father with the Cardinals. Chip Caray, son of late Braves announcer Skip Caray, worked with his dad in Atlanta and was going to work with his grandfather, Harry Caray, in Chicago before the oldest Caray died before the 1998 season.

Chicago wins the award for having the best ballpark in the worst neighborhood. The first thing we saw before we got to U.S. Cellular Field (known locally as “the Cell”) was, believe it or not, a rat walking across the street. What originally was called Comiskey Park (which replaced the older Comiskey Park across the street) was designed before the wave of retro-design parks began with Baltimore’s Oriole P ark at Camden Yards. The new Comiskey, in a primarily industrial and lower-class residential neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, was immediately criticized for its liberal use of concrete and its vertigo-inducing steep upper deck (which is where we sat, and yes, it is quite steep). Renovations made the park look better, although it’s still quite a haul to the 500-level seats.

The surprising thing about the White Sox game was how many Red Sox fans were there — upwards of 10,000, I’d guess. (A few of them sat behind us for their second game of the day, having paid $140 a seat to see the Cardinals defeat the Chicago Cubs that afternoon.) Then again, like Packers fans on the road, given that Fenway Park is perennially sold out, it’s probably easier to see the Red Sox on the road than at home. The Red Sox fans were the happy ones after David Ortiz (a former Wisconsin Timber Rattler) hit a bases-loaded double to propel the Red Sox to their win, which knocked the White Sox out of first place for one-half day. (The game also knocked out White Sox starting pitcher Jose Contreras for the season and possibly his career after his Achilles tendon snapped on a play at first base.)

Our baseballathon ended at Miller Park for the 13-inning game between the Brewers and the Nationals. I’ve argued before that the best $100 million southeast Wisconsin taxpayers ever spent was the roof at Miller Park, which, of course, was open Sunday. It benefits the Brewers immensely, nevertheless, for fans to be able to have assurance, beyond an act of God (one game in Miller Park’s first year was postponed because of a power failure), that, if they buy tickets for a game, that game will be played, regardless of weather. I predict that the Minnesota Twins, who are replacing the unloved Metrodome with a new roofless park, will rue the day they decided against a roof when their attendance drops into four digits for cold early-season games a couple years after the newness of their as-yet-unnamed new stadium fades.

I heard two of the funnier lines I've ever heard at a baseball game:

After a disputed strike call: "Hey ump! The eye doctor called! Your contacts are in!"
To Brewer Bill Hall in the 11th inning: "Let's go, Billy! They stopped selling beer four innings ago!"

Sunday’s game featured two Brewers/Klements Racing Sausages races, one in the usual sixth inning (the funny touch was that the five big sausages relayed to five smaller sausages, paying their own tribute to the Olympics), and a bonus race in the 12th inning (last photo). Sunday also featured an eighth-inning three-run double by (reserve) catcher Mike Rivera to tie the game, and then a 13th-inning home run by (reserve) outfielder Gabe Kapler to win the game.

Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver believed that every baseball team wins 60 games, and every baseball team loses 60 games; the remaining 42 games of the 162-game season determines the success, or lack thereof, of the season. Sunday’s Brewers win (happily followed by Monday’s win) was in the 42-game category, and a perfect way to end a grand slam of a trip.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Barack

2008-08-13T07:00:00.004-05:00

You may have heard, or heard about, this Barack Obama ad criticizing John McCain for McCain’s opposition to requiring government to buy American products.

Interesting, isn’t it, that Obama is criticizing McCain for his position against mandating buying American products when there’s one American product Obama refuses to purchase — American oil. Obama’s (and his congressional predecessors’) stubborn refusal to drill for oil in this country has helped make gas prices higher than they otherwise would be, helping lead to the demise of GM’s Janesville plant. (The more supply, the lower the price. You know that, but this and other Obama assertions make me wonder if Obama skipped economics in college, particularly, in this case, the class that discussed competitive advantage.)

As it is, the concept of buying American is a patriotic-sounding canard. (I’d be curious about what Obama’s well-heeled supporters drive.) Apparently Obama drives a Chrysler 300, which is manufactured in Brampton, Ont., which, last time I checked, is not in our 50 states. (Perhaps Ontario is in Obama’s 57 states.)

Buy-American government mandates pose a problem for governments given that the American option may be more expensive, assuming an American option actually exists. The police car following you is likely to be a Ford Crown Victoria, which is built in St. Thomas, Ont., or a Chevrolet Impala, which is built in Oshawa, Ont., or a Dodge Charger, which is built alongside Obama’s 300 in Brampton. Your favorite municipality could purchase a Chevy Suburban or Tahoe, but GM is closing its Janesville plant, leaving Suburban and Tahoe production in Arlington, Texas, and Silao, Mexico. If a police department wants to buy American by all definitions, the department’s choices are a Ford Explorer, built in Louisville and St. Louis, or Ford Expedition, built in Wayne, Mich.; neither, however, are rated for pursuits.

Our driveway features the flip side of this issue. (Not because of police cars parked in it, of course.) My Subaru Outback, as well as its predecessor, was built in Lafayette, Ind. Our Honda Odyssey was built in Alliston, Ont. (Odysseys are now also built in Lincoln, Ala.)

What about police motorcycles, the subject of this pseudocontroversy? Kawasaki used to build police motorcycles in Lincoln, Neb., but stopped in 2005, leaving Harley–Davidson (and, now, its Buell brand) as the only manufacturer to build police motorcycles in the U.S. Some police agencies have determined that Harleys are too large for urban police operations. Moreover, the police motorcycle market is a pretty small market, at least up here in the land of the 14-month-long winter.

So which is it? Is my Outback an American car because a Japanese manufacturer pays Americans to build it? Is Obama’s 300 an American car because a U.S.-based manufacturer pays Canadians to build it? Moreover, is it more important to buy American, or buy what the government agency needs, regardless of which company produced it or where it was built?

As with many other issues, Obama hasn’t been consistent on trade during this campaign. He pledged to reopen negotiations on the North American Free Trade Agreement, but now has backed off.

McCain has consistently supported free trade. During a Senate debate in 2005, he said, “I firmly object to all ‘Buy America’ restrictions, as they represent gross examples of protectionist trade policy. From a philosophical point of view, I oppose such policies because free trade is an important element in improving relations among all nations, which then improves the security of our nation. Furthermore, as a fiscal conservative, I want to ensure our government gets the best deal for taxpayers and with a ‘Buy American’ restriction, that cannot be guaranteed.”

Few reputable economists (or, if you like, only economists employed by unions) oppose free trade. In addition to the obvious benefits of choice and price competition to consumers, free trade benefits workers too. Not only does protectionism not benefit consumers; it doesn’t benefit presidential candidates either; the main protectionist candidates of the primary season, Democrat Hillary Clinton (whose husband was much better on trade) and Republican Mike Huckabee, aren’t running anymore, are they? The candidacies of Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Pat Buchanan, H. Ross Perot and John Kerry similarly failed.

One other oddity about Obama’s ad, as WTMJ radio’s Charlie Sykes pointed out Tuesday: The ad repeats one of McCain’s best lines from his campaign so far: “Not long ago a couple hundred thousand Berliners made a lot of noise for my opponent. I’ll take the roar of 50,000 Harleys any day.”