Most Read Blogs of ’24

We’re just finishing up our fourth full year of producing YSDA. Readership has grown steadily since we began and so, this year, we exceeded all three previous years for traffic on the site. It’s not spectacular growth and we have not gone viral, but it’s steady progress — which is appropriate enough for a site dedicated to moderation in all things.

By the way, we have 250 subscribers. That doesn’t cost anything. It just means that, if you sign up, you’ll get the blog emailed to you automatically each morning. To sign up, just scroll down to the bottom of the Blog page.

As is our end of the year custom, we will report herewith on the 10 most popular blogs of the past 12 months. As is always the case, even though we write plenty of liberal stuff, it’s the man-bites-dog, once-liberal-Madison Mayor-criticizes-Madison-liberals pieces, that get the most reads. Here they are.

10. A Quick Take on Candidates for Madison Schools Chief. Published January 30, 2024. The Madison School Board wasted a bunch of money hiring an executive search firm to produce candidates to be the new superintendent. In its three finalists, the firm produced one awful candidate, one so-so candidate and one who was the clear choice. The Board did pick that candidate, Joe Gothard. But in his first school year on the job he has not been impressive.

9. Don’t Say This. Published December 27, 2023. This was our annual list (for 2023, we’ll have our 2024 list posted in the next few days) of words and phrases that have worn out their welcome. I like to finish that post by trying to use them all in one paragraph, as in: “I know it’s early days, but we need to reduce our use of pretentious language and let’s not do that offline or even in real time. C’mon, we have the bandwidth for this, people, and if we centered it, it would be a game changer. Let’s not just say it is what it is. My three priorities are one, to root out puffed up phrases. Two, to root out puffed up phrases. And three? To root out puffed up phrases. That’s all I have from the writers’ room. Hard stop.”

8. More Bad Management From Madison Schools. Published September 18, 2024. This one’s hard to get your head around. The Madison school district had a relatively modest $3 million deficit in its school meals program. So, it developed a plan to get into the black — over a decade. A decade to fix a problem that is a fraction of the overall budget. And how did the Board President react? She lamented that the money that would have to be diverted was money that the Board could no longer “dream with.” Me? I dream of a day when we have a School Board that has just a little bit of concern for the people paying the bills.

7. The Arrogance of MMSD. Published October 1, 2024. The Madison school district wanted voters to approve the largest spending and taxing referendums in district history, yet they refused to so much as consider spending cuts or even to explain how they were going to use $100 million of the money. No matter. In November, Madison voters approved the profligate spending — and by overwhelming margins. When that shows up in property tax bills with full force in a couple of years we’ll see if there’s any buyer’s remorse.

6. Scrap Police Board. Published March 5, 2024. Amid the hysteria following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Madison over-reacted by creating a Civilian Police Oversight Board and an Office of the Police Monitor. It was both unnecessary and a waste of money from the start, but its execution was a circus. The Board turned out to be a clown car of incompetents and when they finally got around to hiring a monitor that person fit right in. Even Madison’s Mayor and City Council now recognize this. In the city budget passed this fall they nipped the budget for this program by a hefty sum. They should have eliminated it altogether, but it’s still progress.

5. Save the Planet, Support Line 5. Published April 22, 2024. Our Earth Day blog questioned environmental orthodoxy and it did seem to hit a nerve. What’s going on here simply makes no sense. Line 5 is a 645-mile long natural gas and oil pipeline running across Northern Wisconsin and the U.P. The local tribe south of Ashland wants the 12 miles of the line that crosses its reservation to be removed. So, Enbridge, the Canadian company that owns the line, obliged with a 41-mile reroute. But the tribe and its environmental activist group partners oppose that too. Their goal is to shut down the entire 645-mile line over that 12-mile dispute. That won’t happen. Instead, 12 miles of pipeline risk will be replaced by 41 miles of risk. It’s madness, unless you calculate the fundraising angle that the activist groups are working around this issue.

4. Who Was Gow’s Deep Throat? Published January 2, 2024. It’s our view that former UW La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow got a raw deal. Gow was the UW System’s longest serving chancellor and one of the few who had a balanced budget. But it turned out that he had an odd hobby — he made racy films and wrote books about sex. But that was on his own time and using his own resources. It didn’t have anything to do with how he had performed at his job. He wasn’t sexually harassing anybody. He was just having sex. But UW President Jay Rothman and the Board of Regents reacted (actually, over-reacted) like the Church Lady. They fired Gow as chancellor even though he was set to retire in a few months anyway. Worse, they stripped him of his tenure as a prof. But here’s the curious thing. Gow had been pursuing his hobby for years, so my question in this blog was who tipped off the powers that be now? Maybe, Gow himself?

3. Why Are White Liberals So Obsessed With Race? Published October 19, 2021. Readers seem obsessed with this one. It’s our most read piece ever. I think it’s because it tries to answer a question that’s on everyone’s mind, but that most people in polite society — especially in polite liberal societies, like Madison — don’t dare to ask out loud. The answer, I suggest, is that the real source of “privilege” isn’t really race. It’s education. By emphasizing race, college-educated liberals don’t have to confront the source of their own advantages. Better yet, they can lay off the blame on all those racist folks without a college degree.

2. Defund Bail Providers. Published June 23, 2024. A hobby of the Madison hard-left is to bail out those accused of crimes, no matter the seriousness of the charges against them or their violent criminal records. According to affluent liberals who live in crime free neighborhoods, everybody’s a political prisoner. In this blog I called out the organizations that were doing this and shouted into the wind about how local governments should defund them, instead of the police. And good luck with that.

1. Showtime Messes With Moscow. Published April 23, 2024. I loved Amor Towles’ “A Gentlemen in Moscow.” Read the book. Listened to it as read by the great Jim Flemming on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Chapter a Day. And I eagerly anticipated the Showtime streaming series. And it didn’t disappoint… mostly. The producers went to incredible extremes to get the details of early and mid-century Moscow just right, right down to the flatware. And then they tossed in a bunch of Black people, just to be politically correct. The producers tripped all over themselves — and all over the story as well as the history — to signal their virtue. I called it, “an unnecessary and jarringly out of place piece of performative nonsense.” It sure was.

Much of the fun of writing this blog comes from the opportunity to irritate the hard-left and to mock affluent liberals — all while maintaining my generally center-left views, which would be considered liberal over about 95% of the landmass of the United States. This year I’d say I had a lot of fun. I hope you did too. Thanks for reading.