Not to beat a dead (frozen) horse, but seriously… Anyone else sick of winter yet? It’s only the middle of December and I have to admit that after a month of below average temperatures, it’s getting a bit old.
On the bright side: if a foot of snow is going to hit, at least hit on a Friday and make it a three day weekend!
A happy ending in the odyssey of trying to purchase a new car I’ve been talking about for the past three weeks. In brief, I replaced a Z with an A and a 3 with a 4.
I’d like to note a few things.
First off, for the life of me I couldn’t get anyone from the Milwaukee based Audi dealerships to work with me. I talked to three different sales guys over the course of a week here in town, and when they weren’t busy not returning my calls, they were busy trying to upsell me to an Audi A6 which I had expressed zero interest in. We knew what we wanted in terms of a product, had the means to purchase it, and for some reason couldn’t get a “sales” person in Milwaukee to “sell” it to us. There are only two Audi dealers in Milwaukee, both owned by the same group for anyone who’s curious and wants to know where not to buy a foreign car in Milwaukee.
So after talking to some dealers in Chicago and taking a good serious look at a Nissan Altima to complement the xTerra we’ve been very happy with, I was able to find a great deal on a new A4 at the Zimbrick Audi dealership in Madison.
You may be wondering why would someone with the will and the means to purchase an Audi in Milwaukee have to drive to Madison to do so. Exactly.
So far I’ve been very happy with the new car. It’s going to make a world of difference for us in the Cody household to have two cars in which we can move our children around town in, instead of just one. It’s a good balance between safety (crash tests, airbag, all wheel drive), performance (turbo) with a bit of fun and style still in the mix. I have a strong feeling we’re going to be very happy with the new car.
The other half of this little story is about what I left behind in Madison. 
I had my Z3 for nearly 9 years. I bought it when I was 24 years old and it had 5 miles on the odometer. While I put 30,000 miles on it in the first year (Me and Jenny were courting between Oshkosh and Milwaukee at the time) alone, it settled into a more sedentary life as time wore on. There were some very memorable times and trips had in that car over the years, some of you are reading now were a part of them.
From outdoor music festivals in South Dakota to downtown Toronto and everything in between, it’s been a wonderful ride. While I was a little melancholy on the ride to Madison today knowing that I’d be leaving behind the car that so many memories had been made in, I also realized the time had come to turn the page and get something a little more practical for this chapter in my life.
I’ve always made the joke that you get a red two seater convertible sportscar either when you’re 24 or 54. I was happy to get that experience in on the former.
Erf. I haven’t really been able to sum up anything more insightful than that so far about the incident today where President Bush was on the receiving end of a pair of wing tips.
Nice reaction time though, I’ll give him that.
It may have taken a while but the folks from the County finally got the detailed results of the November 4th election up on the Milwaukee County website.
While the results have been known for some time based on municipality, I have been eager to see the results on a more detailed ward by ward level so I could see two things: how effective the planning and targeting I did for the Quality of Life Alliance was and to see how my own neighborhood voted on the issue.
Here’s a screen shot of a spreadsheet I put together to tabulate the results based off the County data for the wards in my neighborhood, the Washington Heights. (Ward #, total votes cast, YES, NO, % YES, % NO)
I personally live in ward 278 which voted in favor of the November 4th sales tax referendum, 58% in favor to 42% opposed. As you can see though, the referendum passed by a landslide in the Washington Heights; at worst it passed by 9% and at best by 19%.
Either way, a big show of support in the Washington Heights neighborhood for the sales tax referendum.
Ideology once again trumps the consequences of hundreds of thousands of workers in the auto industry lossing their jobs as Senate Republicans seem hell bent on bringing the entire economy to it’s knees in order to kill one of America’s largest unions.
Once again, the differences between this “bailout” and the one last month for Wall Street are shocking and have much broader implications for the overall health of the national and global economy.
As I pointed out yesterday, this isn’t just about the jobs of thousands of union workers who design and sell the cars in Detriot. It’s also about the hundreds of thousands of workers across the Country who sell and repair those cars who Senate Republicans decided to punish in their zeal to get at the autoworker unions.
I predicted exactly what’s described in the article below in this post from last Wednesday.
The auto industry is a complex food chain. The failure to provide some sort of help to the Big 3 will inevitably affect other businesses and workers in the auto industry ecosystem.
Kentucky automobile dealers were surprised, confused and saddened Thursday by Sen. Mitch McConnell’s opposition to a financial bailout of the Big Three automakers.
“I have never been as disappointed as I am today,” said Versailles Ford dealer Jack Kain, who was chairman of the National Association of Automobile Dealers Association in 2005.
Kain said he and other industry representatives met with Kentucky’s congressional delegation on Tuesday in Washington and came away feeling that McConnell wouldn’t oppose the bailout.
The collapse of even one of the Big Three would be “devastating to this state” and its auto dealers, who are independent business people. They would be left without a product to sell.
Thousands of jobs could be lost at dealerships and at auto assembly and parts plants around the state, Jackson said. The surviving auto makers would be hurt.
“I don’t think anybody in the industry thinks they (automakers) should be given a blank check,” he said. “I think there have got to be requirements … that will make them wake up to what the current situation is.”- Lexington News
I’ve expressed my dissatisfaction several times over the past several months regarding the size, scope and consequences of the bailout of big business due to their poor decisions.
One thing I just cannot wrap my head around however is the reluctance to now give the remaining large car companies in this Country the same considerations we gave financial companies like Lehman Brothers, AIG and Citi Group just a month ago.
We didn’t ask for plans on how the financial companies we bailed out would spend their money, but we’re demanding that from the Big Three automakers (I’m not against a plan.. quite the opposite, just pointing out the difference).
We didn’t require Wall Street executives who were on the receiving end of our taxpayer dollars to moderate their bonuses or sell their private jets, yet those are two preconditions for the Detroit automakers.
So while I see and have talked about the downsides of a bailout, it’s important to realize that the consequences of just letting them fail will affect millions and millions of jobs, much more than the failure of a Wall Street brokerage firm.
It’s not just about the union members who design and build the cars either. It’s about people who insure and sell them too. Take into account one small cog in the engine of the car industry: those who work at car dealerships.
Dealers across the region are cutting jobs because of slowing sales, said Don Hansen, president of the Auto Dealers Association of Mega-Milwaukee.
Hansen said dealers selling brands of the Detroit carmakers employ at least 4,000 people in the region.
“But that number has been going down very quickly because the dealers have had to adjust to the current conditions, where far fewer cars are being sold,” he said. “The first thing they look to is the cost of labor. I’m guessing that’s dropped quite a bit.”
So while I don’t care for the idea of an all out bailout, it’s just irresponsible to kill off the auto industry in this Country through inaction. Allowing that to happen will kill off hundreds of thousands of jobs in America and tens of thousands here in Wisconsin.
While the kind of blank check we gave the financial industry is by no means the answer, there is middle ground that Congress can take to ensure the record job losses in this Country aren’t exacerbated by adding hundreds of thousands of auto industry workers to the unemployment line.
I became a fan of C.C. Sabathia this year.
It wasn’t only his incredible performances on the mound, or at times at the plate, throughout the second half of last years baseball season that earned him my respect as a baseball player. It was the way he carried himself on the field and off.
The guy has a boatload of talent and class to match. Hard not to like someone like that, especially when they come in and basically save your team from another year of obscurity and Cub fanesque “We’ll get em next year!” bellowing.
One of my biggest problems with baseball is situations just like this. No one can compete with the Yankees when it comes to money, and as a result, the players like Sabathia who can dominate the game tend to gravitate there lured by long contracts and sure money.
Final thought: Two of Wisconsin’s biggest sports stars have left for New York in the last six months.
The light is a bit weird in these pictures, but I thought some friends and family would enjoy seeing Emerson and Carter getting in to the Christmas spirit!
The arrest of our neighbors to the south Governor this morning is certainly big news, and as expected the right wing talk shows are just a twitter with delight. As a result, our friend on WISN 1130 this morning even going so far as to say this whole thing was “fantastic”.
Mr. Weber could barely hide his glee when speculating on this mornings show, saying, “Wouldn’t it be great if Obama’s name popped up on this somehow?”. I guess my question is why that would be “great” about that or why the pleasure apparently being had here is so great on their part?
For what it’s worth, a crooked politician is a crooked politician, and if Gov. Blagojevich was brazen enough to try to flat out sell the bidding right’s to Barack Obama’s Senate seat, he deserves what’s coming to him. Maybe he can bunk up with his predecessor who is in Wisconsin serving time in a Federal prison?
At any rate, it doesn’t look like the RWTR hosts are going to get their early Christmas present. Barack Obama apparently did the right thing and refused to “play ball”. From the indictment:
In a conversation with Harris on November 11, the charges state, Blagojevich said he knew that the President-elect wanted Senate Candidate 1 for the open seat but “they’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation. [Expletive] them.”
There are a lot of details to be shaken out about this whole story obviously, but I’m glad to see that the person we just elected to be President has shown he was unwilling to be involved in a scheme like this.
Across the Country a record number of people used mass transit in the third quarter of this year:
Americans rode subways, buses and commuter railroads in record numbers in the third quarter of this year, even as gas prices dropped and unemployment rose. The 6.5 percent jump in transit ridership over the same period last year marks the largest quarterly increase in public transportation ridership in 25 years, according to a survey to be released today by the American Public Transportation Association.
Instead, ridership has gone up across the board nationwide. More than 2.8 billion trips were taken from July through September, rising 8.5 percent on light rail (streetcars), 7.2 percent on buses, 6.3 percent on commuter rail and 5.2 percent on subways. – Washington Post
A 6.5% increase in ridership across the board is absolutely huge. To me it’s unsurprising that the largest increase – 8.5% – came from light rail. When given the option between a cheap, efficient and convenient mode of transportation and the option of stressful, expensive and tediousness of driving it’s an easy call for millions of people in this Country.
So the next time you hear right wing radio hosts or their sycophants on the third floor of the County Courthouse screaming that “NO ONE WILL RIDE RAIL!#!@” in Milwaukee at the top of their lungs, remember that the facts prove otherwise time and time again.
I live in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Milwaukee, WI with my wife Jen, our daughter Emerson, and son Carter.
I'm the President of The Park People of Milwaukee County, an elected official of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, a union leader, community organizer and transit advocate who is working to make Milwaukee great again. I've been writing this weblog for nearly ten years ... read more...
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