Talk Radio Not Up to Jena Challenge

The racist prosecution of six black youths in Jena, Louisiana was the subject of one of the most successful civil rights protests in years last week, focusing the national and international spotlight on an unfortunate but all too frequent misuse of the criminal justice system. Naturally, Milwaukee’s own race-baiting wing-nuts were right out front, attacking the leaders of the protests and blaming the victims.

Over on right-wing radio station WTMJ, supposedly legitimate public-policy egghead (so christened recently by Marquette University) Charlie Sykes was playing his usual smear-the-messengers-so-we-don’t-have-to-deal-with-the-issues game. Jim Rowan noticed that Sykes called two historic figures who, unlike Sykes, have actually done something positive with their lives – civil rights leaders Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton – "race pimps" for daring to challenge the Jena outrage. Nothing new here – I caught Sykes calling Sharpton a pimp back during the Imus imbroglio and my post was widely ignored. So, I guess this is something that the mainstream outrage-spotters are willing to let go, if only to protect their spots on Sykes’ TV panels. Besides, at least Sykes was familiar with the subject of his comments, having pimped for the GOP for years.

Over on WISN, Mark Belling was in full I-don’t-care-if-you-call-me-a-racist mode, calling the Jena kids "thugs" (like he knows) and blaming the struggle for justice in Jena as the "pathetic" result of nostalgic longing by "idiots" who missed the ‘60s. In one of the more outlandishly stupid examples of wishful thinking in recent years, know-it-all Belling offered this: "By the mid-1970s, all the legal racism in America was pretty much done-away with." Wow, really? This completely insupportable claim ignores the treatment of crack cocaine (used by blacks) more severely than powder (favored by whites, who can afford it); the disproportionate use of the death penalty on black defendants; high percentage of blacks in prison; the fact that blacks are still far more likely than whites to get stopped just driving down the street, etc. The criminal justice system has been regularly used to accomplish what cannot be done by Jim Crow or Bull Conner wannabes, especially in racist backwaters like Jena.

Not satisfied to pretend well-established racial problems in the criminal justice system don’t exist, Belling decided – as he often does at the mere suggestion of African-American temerity – to add racist insult to injury. Belling suggested that, rather than marching for justice in Jena like a bunch of ingrates, blacks should turn on people in their own community. "Why not do something gutsy like march in front of the homes of some of these mothers who have eight kids by eight different fathers and aren’t paying attention to any of them," said the exaggerating, ignorant Belling. "...whose notion of a family is to simply pop out a bunch of kids and turn them to the streets and allow the gang members to raise them?" Why not, indeed? Thus the classic racist notion of poor black women "popping out" children is introduced into a discussion of justice in Jena. "Dealing with the pathologies of urban America is hard; Jena is easy," he said. Well, Jena isn’t that easy for him. He can’t deal with any subject involving black Americans without promoting racist canards that would only be welcome in the coffee shops of white Jena.

While taking friendly calls from places like Oshkosh, Brookfield and the South Side – "How can we look at members of the black community as equals?" wondered the chump from Oshkosh – Belling, obviously on a roll, wouldn’t (perhaps couldn’t) stop there. He also had the nerve to speak on behalf of Martin Luther King, Jr. MLK "would not have rallied behind a bunch of guilty kids", claims Belling, forgetting that King himself was a frequent victim of the criminal justice system, "guilty" as he was of being uppity. "Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application," he famously wrote from the Birmingham jail. While his focus was on the civil rights denied in the South, King’s world view was not limited to that issue. He would have recognized the injustice in Jena – and, certainly, its relation to the deep South’s historic racism – just like he recognized the futility of the Vietnam war just before his death.

As if twisting the King legacy beyond recognition wasn’t enough, Belling couldn’t help but draw attention to King’s "problems in his personal life", just in case you were thinking of throwing some King back in his face. "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity," King said. Now, run tell that.

Paul Soglin had a brief moment of attention last week when he said on his blog that "the problem with Milwaukee is talk radio. So long as Charlie Sykes, Mark Belling and Jay Weber dominate the discussion on crime and poverty, there is little hope for Wisconsin's most important city to work its way out of its troubles." He’s right, of course, and the "discussion" of the issues presented by the Jena prosecutions are the perfect example. Sykes, Belling and their ilk are comedians, entertainers. They don’t give a damn about crime in the city, blathering on about it only to patronize their angry-white-man demographic by talking about how bad and irresponsible blacks and their leaders are.

In Jena, Louisiana, we see the legacy of historic racism, now filtered, however clumsily, through the heavy-handed use of the criminal justice system. Milwaukee’s legacy of racism also survives, no longer through the vehicles of segregated schools and Harold Breier, but now through loud-mouths on the radio, who continue to poison the environment with racist tripe. It’s not helpful, to say the least, but as long as they are offered forums at Marquette, columns in local newspapers and TV shows, it is those who facilitate their poison and advertise on their shows who really bear the responsibility for the lack of progress in a city that needs unity while Belling and Sykes promote division.

Viewer Mail

I've been really proud of the activity on my comments section lately. Some people who disagree with me have been using the comments section to challenge me on various issues for some time now and I’ve enjoyed engaging with them in a way the right-wing usually doesn’t in the Real World. Sometimes, two commenters just go at it for a couple of days while I stand off to the sidelines and watch. I know I’ve posted something interesting if, two or three days later, people are still posting, still arguing, still engaging in the comments.

My last post about "Peace" and "The Law" drew some of the usual suspects. I find that, the more I answer all of their (they think) trick questions, the more the right-wingers eventually raise the volume beyond 11 – all the way to shrill.

For instance, here’s some love from a regular commenter who regularly hides behind the Anonymous tag. It’s sometimes hard to tell one Anony from another, but this guy has a familiar aroma that I can smell a mile away:

Mike, why do you hate the military so much? Did they kick you out on a section 8 (a la Corp. Klingar)? My guess is that you successfully dodged the draft or else you wouldn't have the vitriol that you do. Please tell me a situation where our military action is warranted. You seem to be against all forms of intervention, attack, etc.

Here we see several characteristics of the right-winger with his back to the wall, desperate to score points. Note the groundless assertion that I "hate the military" and that I’m "against all forms of intervention". This is a regular game in all of wing-nuttydom – imputing to me words I’d never use and thoughts I never had. And, no comment thread (especially with this guy) is complete without the unwarranted the personal attack (how does he know I wear dresses? Sometimes, it’s just a lucky guess...).

Regardless of the fact that some of these folks do not approach the arguments in good faith and just want to do damage, I still ignore the personal asides and actually answer the factually-challenged questions. I wrote this in response, posting it here instead of on the comment thread:

In 1970, when I was 15, I wrote to Sen. Proxmeier and told him I would go to jail rather than submit to the draft. He wrote back and told me to calm down, the draft would be over by then. He was right. When I was 18, it was the first year of no-lottery and before mandatory registration, so I missed the whole thing. I know and respect people who went to Vietnam, went to Canada, went to jail. I also know all of the chicken hawks so bravely sending our sons and daughters to their deaths – from Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld to the media enablers Limbaugh, Kristol and the pathetic Newt Gingrich – never served a day during Vietnam or any other shooting war.

I don't hate the military. I love every soldier that has died or been maimed in this Stupid War. I want to prevent more such deaths. Why you want them to stay in harm's way for the neo-cons' grand designs is beyond me. If I were playing the same games, I would say: why do you "hate" them so much that you will allow 1,000 deaths and countless injuries for another year of this shit? I don't really think you hate them, Anony, but why so indifferent to the danger Bush has put – and kept – them in? I think the burden is on you, at this point.

Not that I have to anything to prove, but I wrote a song last year called "Shake a Hand, Make a Friend". Here's the last verse:

He takes off into the setting sun
Young soldier holding to his gun
Called to duty and he does it well
Free-fire in a living hell
In the airport I smile and wave
I give a shout out to the brave
I'll do my part I'll do my share
To beat the bastards that put him there.

There are lots of legitimate uses of the greatest military in the world, but one person's defense – especially this ridiculous "pre-emption" notion – is another person's imperialism. Are there threatening armies amassed at the Canadian or Mexican border (I mean soldiers, not immigrants)? That's easy. We have commitments to NATO, Israel, South Korea, whatever – if they are invaded, we honor our commitments.

It is quite another thing to say, if we don't like a country or its leaders, that we have the right to invade and depose just because they are blustering or because they don't have our version of "freedom". That this is madness – especially in the volatile Middle East – has been proven in spades in Iraq. But it’s nothing that anyone with any sense didn’t know ahead of time.

Another semi-regular is patrick, who can also be seen commenting on many of the right-wing blogs. This was a long one you can check out for yourself, but here are some excerpts:

Mike, As far as revisionist history goes, you're amazing. Look through all the statements of your democratic officials--the Clintons, Pelosi, all of them. Examine the UN record. Note the invasion of Kuwait, the use of poison gas on the Kurds, the mass graves discovered in Iraq in the first months of the war. That's not crap.

Those on the right like to pretend that, just because some Dems saw Hussein as a potential problem that they also advocated the same "solution". But it is one thing to identify problems and crimes in another country, as Clinton and others did with Hussein, and quite another to invade-and-depose. The goal for some was "regime change" but no Democrat (except Lieberman) ever advocated that. And they were right – now look at the mess we've gotten ourselves into in Iraq.

Whatever happened to the left I once celebrated--one that wanted to stand up for the terrified masses?...

Yeah, sure you did, patrick....that's what they all say. And they all lie.

As for Iran, consider the way they treat those who descent, the beatings of women who fail to cover themselves. the treatment of women in general. ...Consider their material support for the insurgents in Iraq today...Consider their pursuit of nuclear weapons and their holocaust denyer president....Finally, note how our cultures are opposed: we love freedom, debate, vicious debate, even; they value slavish conformity to brutal and repressive, patriarchal and fanatic religion. ...Maybe you need to read a little more about Iran. I'd recommend Michael Ledeen as found at NRO. Either way, Iran embodies everything we in the west find disgusting and low.

Now you want to invade "disgusting and low" Iran. Please.

One of the primary reasons the neo-cons invaded Iraq – although they won't admit it – was because Hussein was such a weak pushover. Iran and Syria are the real targets of the neo-cons, but they were (just barely) smart enough to know that both countries have the broad support of enough of its populace to put up a fierce resistance if the Bushies were foolish enough to try this stunt in either of those places.

So they knocked over Hussein, the paper tiger, immediately moved bin Laden’s hated military bases from Saudi Arabia and tried to occupy the Arab version of the Wild West. We have already ruined our relations with the Arab world for generations by invading Iraq. The dirty secret, despite our blustering, is that invading Iran is absolutely out of the question. It falls to neo-con Michael Ledeen to pollute the Iran bogey-man stories with the same sort of breathless hyperbole that gets Republican candidates saying stupid things and, not coincidentally, sells books for him. The rule of thumb should be: Don’t believe anything about Iran that comes from the administration or the National Review. No two institutions have ever been more consistently wrong. About everything.

So keep those comments coming, campers! The more we engage, the more we learn from each other. The comments section can be like a crowbar to create the open mind. Or, as another famous Clinton (George, he of Parliment/Funkadelic) once proclaimed: Free your mind, and your ass will follow!

Wing-Nuts: "Peace" and "The Law" is for Suckers

Two talk-radio-driven campaigns this past week – one national, one local – show the continuing power of the right-wing echo-chamber. By all of their surrogates saying the same thing – and saying it loudly – the GOP was able to get its twisted messages wedged into the MSM, whether it was newsworthy or made any sense or not. The result, as usual, was the continued poisoning of the political well; the result of the twisted message without a sufficiently-funded or radio-distributed answer.

The first example was the theatrically hyperventilated "reaction" to a full-page ad MoveOn.org bought in the New York Times and that ran on the first day of Bush-apologist David Petraeus’s "report" before Congress. MoveOn had the gall to rhyme "Petraeus" with "Betray Us", and the race to smear the messenger – and, more important, the messenger’s perceived friends – was on. From the halls of Congress to the "golden" microphones owned by inflated egos across the country, there was wailing and gnashing of teeth of this infamous slander against "our general in the middle of a war".

How dare they say he betrayed us?! Are you calling him a traitor? Well, no, MoveOn wasn’t – just saying Petraeus betrayed any trust the general populace may have had in him to come and tell the truth about the continuing disaster in Iraq. Instead, the ad accurately predicted that he would pump the propaganda of his masters in Washington. Other than the rhyming name-calling, the supporting text of the ad is uncontroversial and fully supported by the facts. Knowing not the meaning of irony, the noise came from the same chicken hawks who impugned the good, heroic names of John Kerry, Max Cleland and anyone else when it suited their purposes.

But, never mind what MoveOn was really saying or whether they were right. It wasn’t about them anyway. The whole phony controversy was used to drive the GOP talking-point that the leading Democrats running for president are beholden to the "fringe" of the party. Demands were made for Hillary Clinton and others to condemn the ad with the same heavy breathing employed by the purveyors of the fraud – bait which, to their credit, was not taken by any of the targets of the demands.

One of the fake controversies within the controversy (the best of these sideshows have cleverly false sub-plots) was the lie that the Times had given MoveOn an over-friendly $100,000 discount on the full-pager. Never one to pass up an opportunity to turn death and tragedy (be it 9/11 or Iraq) into political hay, Rudy Giuliani cynically put together an ad attacking Clinton for her excellent "suspension of disbelief" comment to Petraeus and her failure to condemn the red-herring MoveOn ad. He also bravely demanded the same rate for his ad. He got it, of course, on the same terms MoveOn did (you get the discount if you don’t ask that it run on a specific day). And, of course, Rudy’s ad was not so much a defense of Petraeus as it was his first major political broadside at Clinton. Who used Petraeus more – the organization trying to point out the truth to end a disastrous war or the politician who jumped on a bandwagon populated by the usual Bush-enabling yahoos to pump up his venal campaign for president?

There was indeed offensive language used last week surrounding the Petraeus/9-11 circus. House Minority Leader John Boehner used the occasion to opine that the American soldiers dead and soon-to-be was "a small price to pay" for whatever the hell we are doing over there. Not to be outdone, professional blowhard Bill O’Reilly put a number on it and announced that he is happy to provide Petraeus another year and, even if it means (and it does) another 1,000 dead GIs. In terms of offensiveness, this makes MoveOn’s perhaps impolitic name-calling look like a schoolboy’s speaking in class out of turn while his classmates are out tagging the outside of the school with obscene graffiti.

Meanwhile, back at home, the radio and blog wing-nuts were in full lather about a judge in Sheboygan who tossed a jury verdict in a child enticement case because the alleged slug chatting up the poor girl wasn’t trying to get her to a "secluded" place, as required under the law. The judge, who, we presume, after all, did take an oath to uphold the law no matter what the wing-nuts think, took all manner of abuse from big-city out-of-town demagogues Sykes, Belling and various of their third-rate counterparts, who pretended not to know how the obviously liberal judge could do such a thing. True to form, the Journal Sentinel, its weak ear ever to the radio while looking for a clue, ran front-pagers in the Metro section two days in a row (with more to come, no doubt) about the "outraged" citizens and the hot-to-appeal DA.

The dirty little secret is that all of them know why the judge did what he did. Even if they are not lawyers, they know he was faced with a law that required enticement to a secluded place and that the park shelter (a roof with four legs) was not secluded. But they decided to fudge the facts and the law, pretending that the judge had done something outrageous, calling for his defeat in the next election, using the case as a wedge to eliminate the judicial substitution law, etc.

Their loud squawking has nothing to do with what is right and wrong and everything to do with creating distrust of the criminal justice system and generally stirring up the woe-is-me victimhood of those who are vulnerable to this kind of blather. The criminals have all the rights and we have none and blah de blah blah. You’d think, if they want to cast aspersions on the judiciary, they’d just look across the dining room in their country club at their buddy, Annette Zeigler. But, no.

Even their fellow traveler, attorney Rick Esenberg, admits to knowing better and ever-so-gently says so. But they didn’t need to call him to get the legal scoop. They know what is right and pretend not to in order to enrage the townsfolk to head for the courthouse with pitchforks and torches. In the middle is the family of the poor girl, another victim of an over-charging prosecutor and a bunch of agenda-driven wing-nuts who don’t care who gets hurt in the process.

The Lies of McBride – Bin Laden and the Dems

Has is really only been four months since WTMJ barged in and ripped their microphones from the Bucher-McBride household? One day, McBride was basking in the unearned glory of her non-sports night wing-nut spot on Wisconsin’s only powerhouse AM station. The next day, after a childish piece of ridicule aimed at Journal-Sentinel columnist Eugene Kane, McBride’s home-schooled mic was silenced and they changed the locks on Capitol Drive, just in case she decided to darken the corridors of Radio City.

After whining about the loss of her radio entitlement for a week or so, McBride settled in to her new diminished life as a UWM "lecturer" for (gasp!) journalism and the occasional column in the Waukesha Freeman, which apparently will run nonsense from any wing-nut, anywhere. But you can tell McBride misses the high profile that can only be achieved from three hours of free airtime to read GOP talking-points in her own inimitable style on a mainstream right-wing radio station. She has made several attempts to throw bombs on the very thin vanity blog that she converted to after TMJ took down her page, but no one noticed because, hey, who was that again?

But, over the weekend, McBride posted her most outrageous post yet, throwing herself on the sacrificial altar of the Republican campaign to impugn the integrity of anyone who disagrees with them. Declaring that, on the new bin Laden tape, the terrorist leader "sounds like so many of [the Democrats] do", McBride proudly plays her tiresome role as surrogate for the GOP, saying the worst so Bush doesn’t have to. "[T]he liberal abuse blogs will write, frothing at the mouth..." she predicts in her post on Saturday night (always a productive time for Jess), deliberately mistaking honest criticism for "abuse" and "frothing" for, well, saying anything, I guess.

Like all wing-nuts, McBride hopes that her readers won’t actually look at the source material that she provides a link to – a transcript of the bin Laden video – letting her deliberately deceptive description of it stand as the basis to make her phony points. In fact, the bin Laden screed is an appallingly obtuse mash of gibberish – about what you’d expect from a religious fanatic with a megalomaniacal streak. It reads much more like Pat Robertson than any Democrat I know of. "Don't blame me. I'm only repeating what bin Laden said," claims McBride, except that she’s not – there is not one direct quote of more than a single word in the whole post. As usual, the wing-nuts won’t let the facts get in the way of a good political hatchet job.

In the video, bin Laden offers laughable moral-equivalence justifications for his own criminal behavior on 9/11 – pointing out that the Holocaust did not happen in the Middle East but in mid-Europe, and "we" aren’t like that because "burning living things is forbidden in our religion". And how did too many of those poor souls in the Twin Towers die, again? He also praises himself for leaving millions of Christians alone in Egypt and elsewhere, "whom we have not incinerated and will not incinerate". For this lack of incineration, we are duly thankful, you murderous asshole.

McBride claims that he "expresses disappointment that Democrats" haven’t ended the war in Iraq. But bin Laden doesn't do any such thing. In fact, he can’t express disappointment in a result he fully expects. He offers a garden-variety, college sophomore version of how capitalism distorts democracy. "Those with the real power and influence are those with the most capital," he says, sounding like a student on a deadline for a Chomsky book report. "Democracy" is a fraud, a front for the corporate state, and blah de blah blah – he cites Chomsky, but could just as easily have chosen Nader. But he doesn’t say anywhere that he was glad Democrats won in ‘06 and is now so sad they haven’t succeeded in ending the war. He considers our entire system a sham and doesn’t see a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties. McBride claims: "He clearly was happy they won, but is growing disappointed." This is simply not true, and she can’t point to any thing in the transcript to back it up. Like much of what she writes, just because it’s nonsense doesn’t mean she won’t say it.

In fact, her entire premise is ridiculous. There isn’t one phrase or one idea (to the extent you can figure out what he’s talking about) in the bin Laden speech that any mainstream Democrat, anywhere, would agree with. "Or are you secretly thinking," says under-employed mind-reader McBride, "‘you know, I can't admit it, but in a lot of ways he makes sense.’" Um, no, Jess, we’re really not. Oh, and she says, since we "hate" Bush and bin Laden does, too... Again, sorry to disappoint. As I have explained before, Bush isn’t personally involved in anything enough to "hate" him. We do hate what he does in our name. I would say it is more likely that we "hate" bin Laden personally, for what he actually did and still does. Get it straight: don’t hate Bush personally; hate bin Laden. Now, go spin that, McBride.

The GOP sends willing lackeys like McBride out to spout this junk for two reasons. First, it is a classic smear to say that Democrats and bin Laden want the same thing. But second and, more importantly, with bin Laden popping up just before the 6th anniversary, it distracts from the fact that the bastard is still at large, his stature unduly enhanced in the rest of the world by his very survival. In his wildest dreams, bin Laden could not have envisioned the impact of the 9/11 attacks; not so much in the unspeakable violence of that day itself, but in the reckless, destructive reaction of the Bush administration, who have managed to take the weeks of international unity after the attacks and turn the whole world against us by their arrogance and stupidity.

History will show that the 9/11 attacks were a turning point, all right. It will forever mark the time when American influence and respect in the world took a perhaps permanent turn for the worst, due not to any outside threat, but to the disastrous mistakes of our "leaders" after the fact. In the end, bin Laden is just a murderous religious punk who got lucky with a series of brutal criminal acts. But the vast majority of damage from 9/11 in not due to bin Laden. It is self-imposed.

Pampered No More...

After I posted a link to my short attempted intervention with Charlie Sykes on a blog-talk-radio show last week, my comments page lit up with all manner of accusers who were outraged by my inability to see the simple "truths" of the Sykes permanent campaign against too-tolerant teachers, indulgent parents and pampered children.

After avoiding my inquiries with a bemused "that’s not what I meant" to everything I brought up that he said he meant, I even got a grudging nod on Sykes’ vanity blog (which never seems to hold on to items very long these days, although I'm sure exceptions are made for the usual love letters from Scott Walker and David Clarke). Without mentioning me by name (Wing-nut Rule Number 1: Never acknowledge possibly worthy adversaries by name. Rule Number 2: Play up all lefty nutbags by name and proclaim them the "mainstream" of lefty thought), he proclaimed victory on behalf of himself and the gullible hosts of the show, one of whom, at least, claims personal knowledge of such injurious coddling by inferior parental units. Sykes claims to have taken particular pride in his comment that I "just wasn’t getting it".

So that's it, is it? If you don’t agree with Sykes or deign to challenge the phony premises of his sloppily-constructed "arguments", then you "don’t get it". Well, that’s easier than actually having to defend the nonsense that’s in the book. Among other things I "don’t get": the Iraq war, warrantless surveillance, wing-nut radio, etc. When I wondered out loud where, exactly, teachers were letting kids off with not knowing the value of pi, as alleged one Rule of his small, thin book, Sykes said he wasn’t saying teachers did this (although this is supposedly one of the rules "kids won’t learn in school" – I mean, it’s right there in the title of the book) and seemed to be saying that I shouldn’t take so seriously all this stuff he pretends to take so seriously when he’s not being directly challenged, which he never is.

Anyway, one of the hosts of the Dr. Blogstein show was so outraged about my lack of outrage about the daily damage to our poor coddled children, he splayed our whole conversation in my comments section on his blog and his comment page was thus lit up with helpful "I saw this happen" anecdotes and a side conversation about the ridiculousness of the No Child Left Behind "standards". The Blogstein crew made sure I was aware of a news item from just this week about a school in Colorado that was banning the game of tag on its playground. Right-wing sites across the internet made a point to play up the tag-banning as yet another example of the Coddle and the Damage Done.

Given this universally-accepted evidence of self-esteem and safety concerns run amok, what are we to make of this item in the paper on Sunday? It seems there is a growing movement – there must be, or else why would it be on the wires? – to raise the diaperless baby. Talk about not Pampering... Apparently taking Sykes and other scolds at their word, a new generation of parents is prepared to impose a Tough and Smelly Love regime on the pre-toddler set, from birth on. This can only lead to other you-figure-it-out practices later in life. Soft baby food? Hah! Suck on this carrot until you get some teeth in your head, you wimp. Toys? Here’s some sharp tools, blocks of wood and lead-based paint – make your own, you big baby. No reading books to these kids – they’ll have the books, alright, but they have to figure out what all those squiggly lines mean on their own.

I expect praise for the poopy-pants movement on the wing-nut blogs – until, that is, they figure out that the no-diaper experiments are probably being conducted by some back-to-the-land cult with a misplaced concern for disposable diapers that survive 3,000 years in landfills, or some other nutty notion like that. It is only a matter of time before they are rejected as reckless parents with a secret agenda to destroy Huggie Capitalism.

Well, you have your anecdotes and I have mine – that’s why they are called "anecdotes". Because Sykes can’t point to any studies, teacher training, or school board pronouncements that would, in the real world, establish a "trend", he pulls isolated incidents from various places on the planet, delcares the trend and dares anyone not to "get it". This campaign is like nothing so much as the phony "War on Christmas" that has become a holiday staple of the wing-nut talk shows. You take a banned Santa from a public park, mix in some lie about kids being banned from wearing red-and-green clothing in school and – voila! – you have another way that the secret leftist agenda is trying to Destroy You and the Way You Live.

Forget the Facts...it's the Fear that you'll remember...

Sykes’ Free Ride

UPDATED BELOW

The free ride for Charlie Sykes continued this past Sunday in the Journal Sentinel, where book editor Geeta Sharma Jensen treated the small, thin book like a legitimate piece of homey literature. "And so, we have his rules," she gushes, "spawned by common sense, aimed at parents, and designed to give teens a dose of reality."

Golly, even I might want to read that. Too bad the book itself is a mean-spirited continuation of Sykes’ radio poison, having little of the "common sense" or "reality" proclaimed by Jensen. Sykes has created a world of his own manipulative design, featuring the usual straw-men, phoney assumptions and false "solutions" for problems that either don’t exist or that have since the beginning of time.

But, I guess, if you are a local high-profile media "personality", you get to put out a book and do the media tour without really being challenged for the substance of the product itself. It’s like coddling the local rock-n’-roller who really isn’t that great, but, hey, he’s our guy. Apparently, as long as Sykes shows up with the book, smiles and doesn’t get too smarmy like he does on his radio show, hey, a couple of books will be sold.

The 50 Rules, Sykes’ says, began with 10, then 14, then, whatever. At 50, the book is stretched as thin as the book’s 161 white-spaced pages. "Don’t forget to say thank you" and "look people in the eye" reads more like Miss Manners than the sanctimonious societal scold Sykes pretends to be. My favorite throw-away Rule is "learn to deal with hypocrisy". I think this means Sykes is not going away and we will have to learn to deal with him.

The most-discussed Rule is the one about that great wing-nut canard, dodgeball, which, according to Sykes, is more like life "than your gym teacher thinks". Leaving aside the cheap shot at teachers that Sykes knows nothing about – again, the premise of the book is based on a lie about schools in the first place – this idea that "dodgeball is life" is ludicrous. The kids who succeed in dodgeball are the same who succeed in sports generally – good hands, quick response, good arm. Combine the good athlete with a bully, and you have a pretty obnoxious situation in dodgeball, but those guys are out there acting like jerks anyway.

If you want to say "life is dodgeball", you might as well say "life is sports" (even more so with the dedication, practice and skill development in regular sports), and we know that’s not true. Some athletes succeed off the field and some don’t. Many athletes off the field are not on top of life, as much as they need to get one.

Because Sykes holds himself as some sort of get-over-it tough guy, I’m guessing what he is getting at with the whole dodgeball nonsense is that kids need to deal with over-powering, bullies. Well, sure, and so what? Dealing with bullies is only a part of life, not life itself. Bullies also will need to learn to deal with other types of people, eventually – even the corporate world trains for and demands teamwork and will get rid of punks, no matter how talented. Maybe Sykes, the radio bully with the government-regulated megaphone, thinks that everyone needs to get over his own mostly un-earned media position. "You are offended, so what," goes one of the Rules. But that’s what you’d expect to hear from a bully, isn’t it?

On the polite media tour, Sykes is able to spout the nonsense about dodgeball, coddling teachers and parents and all of the historical sins of youth without being challenged. The questioners nod their heads and take it all in, as if Sykes is only stating the obvious. He walks out of every media studio he enters unscathed, as if his wisdom has been received and acknowledged. Legitimacy is therefore brought for the price of a vanity book, and the rest of the media just plays along.

For his part, Sykes takes his enhanced intellectual heft to the microphone and continues to influence local elections and parrot daily talking points on behalf of Republicans everywhere. Mission accomplished.

UPDATE: In a comment on Tuesday, one Dr. Blogstein invited me to call in to his talk-blog when he was having a discussion with Sykes that night. I did, and here is the audio link. (Push the "play" icon next to Sykes; I start at 35:35). They kept me on for about 15 minutes. Any attempts I made to engage Sykes were rebuffed by Sykes and the hosts (I don't know where they were from -- out East, maybe) by claiming I was taking his words too seriously, apparently. Sykes talks and writes, like all wing-nuts, to reach the level of guys in a bar, and the Blogstein crew was more than willing to play along. Sykes' issues were "apolitical", according to Blogstein. I argued that Sykes sets up straw-men by pointing out anecdotes and extrapolating out to the whole teaching profession. They were having none of it -- they know what they know and, if they think kids are being coddled ("bubblewrapped", according to Sykes), well, that's what they think. It is (or should be) Sykes' motto: Never let the facts get in the way of a good argument. Anyway, I was basically advised to lighten up.

Anyway, this is the kind of free ride Sykes gets on his book tours. He knows that he is poisoning the well for future attacks on public education, but he poses like just some gentle soul commenting on known truths. When you challenge any of his false premises, hey, lighten up. The Blogstein crew couldn't put this in the context of his radio antics, but he knows what he's doing.

Interesting moment: early on, Sykes invited me to write my own book. I said I would, if I had the same kind of corporate support he gets from groups like the Bradley Foundation and the Wisconsin Public Policy Institute. Later, Sykes seemed to plead poverty as a reason to write the books. Ha.

The free ride continues, even on blog-talk-radio.

Sykes' 50 Rules: Small, Thin and Wrong

It has been said that I provide a particular service to the blog-reader community: I listen to talk-radio so you don’t have to. It is an ugly job, but someone has to do it.

As an extension of that, I also like to keep track of the wing-nuts away from the microphone. This includes attending debates that they have with people opposing their radical views in public forums. Hah! Gotcha! The right-wing-nuts wouldn’t be caught dead in a real debate that they don’t control in their sheltered studios with those expertly-timed mute and hang-up buttons for any caller who might manage to challenge the "arguments" of the self-righteous and happily-unchallenged radio "hosts".

Sometimes, wing-nuts choosing to pose as educated or erudite will get so full of themselves that they will actually commit to a book-writing exercise. So it is with local king-of-all-media Charlie Sykes, who we all know has written a book deceptively-titled 50 Rules Kinds Won’t Learn in School. "We all know" this because Sykes has been yapping about it on his show and everywhere else he can self-promote for the past month. I have always been amazed how WTMJ and other stations let themselves be used for un-paid Republican propaganda day-in-and-day-out without getting paid or at least reporting in-kind contributions. It’s the same thing when Sykes does something like write a book. Is Sykes’ publisher (St. Martin’s Press) being billed for all this free advertising? Shouldn’t TMJ management do something about this rampant hucksterism by its middle-age Boy Wonder?

Anyway, although I could have waited until 50 Rules hits the cut-out bins in time for Xmas, I felt it was my duty to seek it out, buy it and review it. So you don’t have to, see? I thought long and hard about this course of action – after all, it is indeed possible that $5 of my money will land in Sykes bank account. For instance, I refused to buy Christopher Hitchens’ interesting-looking God is Not Great screed because he is such a vicious idiot on the Iraq war. (Instead, I bought The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, which is a particularly horrible bit of writing.) So, to slightly assuage my (yes) liberal guilt about the Sykes purchase this morning, I made sure I went to a locally-owned bookstore with a humanitarian give-back program (Schwartz). I also bought a new book by someone who, unlike Sykes, really does know something about what is and isn’t going on in the schools, Jonathan Kozol’s Letters to a Young Teacher.

Sykes’ 50 Rules is a remarkably thin and small book – in more ways than one. It is almost a pamphlet at 161 pages, including what is known in the trade as a generous use of white space. Like most of what Sykes does on the air everyday, the book purports to knock down a straw-man of his own creation. In this case, the pretend-villain is a fictitious school system, which he claims, based on deliberately sloppy inuendo and falsehoods, somehow coddles our young and protects them from the realities of life. Never mind the inconvenient fact that many of Sykes’ supposed rules actually are discussed – often – in schools throughout the country.

Despite the hysterical title and the attempted demonizing of unstated and non-existent schools, Sykes seems just as concerned with what he sees as indulgent parenting, again creating parental anecdotes out of whole cloth to show how we got to this supposed nadir of teen-age existence.
Mostly, though, Sykes seems to hate the kids – how they behave, how they dress, how they insist on their dog-gone individuality and independence. In this, Sykes is just like any other parental scold through the ages, complaining about the tough adult life they have inherited and howling in jealousy about the indulgent sins of the young and the failed authorities who enable them.

The Rules themselves are tediously crafted and sloppily presented. Smug asides like "get used to it" and "stop whining" are tacked to the end of several, as if the Rule itself and its implications are not obvious enough. "Life is not fair" says Rule 1, and it’s all downhill from there. Claiming that "the average teenager uses the phase ‘It’s not fair’ 8.6 times a day", Sykes does not really say what is exactly new about this, even if it were true. Oh, "they got it from their parents", he says. In one of his longer Rule explanations (a whole 3-and-a-half pages), he goes off about Stephen Hawking, the severely-disabled physicist, who, apparently, has declined to utter the scurrilous phrase. That may be, but perhaps a certain level of brilliance and world-wide acclaim count for something.

Even in the very first Rule, Sykes fails to explain what the schools have to do with any of this and he certainly doesn’t admit in any of the Rules that teachers in the schools do, in fact, counsel about the fairness or lack thereof of the Cold Cruel World that Sykes embraces. Self-esteem, he proclaims in Rule 2, has become "an obsessive fixation", leading to – gasp! – a substitution of purple for red correction pens in some school somewhere. For this proposition, he includes a footnote to – wait for it – himself! (A dead link no less.)

Like most of the selective, isolated anecdotes masquerading as a trends in the Sykes oeuvre, if it happened somewhere, it is happening and charactorizes the teaching profession everywhere. Rule 30 informs us that "Zero tolerance = zero common sense" and relates as typical various fluky rule enforcement efforts, such as a 3rd grader suspended for having a butter knife in his lunch-box. Let’s see...5 incidents, over 100,000 schools in the U.S....yep, that’s a problem, alright.

I’ll write more about 50 Rules in the next couple of days, but, even for a quick lunch-time read (after you are done with the Onion, of course), it is disappointingly thin gruel. Sykes just goes off on various rants about the Sins of the Young and, in most of the pamphlet – er, book – doesn’t even bother to link any of this to the schools and what they supposedly are or are not teaching in the classroom. Sykes knows little and cares less about what actually happens in America’s schools. His phony stories and sanctimonious lecturing, like so much of wing-nut posturing, is simply designed to tear down institutions that are designed to give rich and poor alike a fair chance at the basic skills needed in a complex society. True equal opportunity is a threat to those feeding the wing-nuts their talking points. And Charlie Sykes is here to do his part to make sure that never happens.

Rove and Tommy: Don’t Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out

On a short trip to Washington D.C. this past week, we happened to come in on the same day that Karl Rove and Junior gave each other a goodbye man-hug on the White House lawn. As we tried to get within sight of the mansion that afternoon, there was little indication of any earth-shattering development earlier in the day – just a soulless, barricaded monument, still occupied (when not on vacation) by the same losers who have spent the last seven years taking us down, ever further. Rove the Architect left behind a political house of cards and toothpicks, a thin veneer of lies, poison and personal destruction that wobbled in the wind of ‘06 and will soon find itself well downstream when the GOP levee breaks in ‘08.

Like all Rove-ian schemes such as the gay-marriage hysteria of ‘06, the racist appeal to quash "illegal" immigrants of ‘08 will serve only to stem some of the damage and will ultimately further marginalize Republicans into a box of their own making. The anti-immigrant talking-point is Rove’s failed victory lap; a last, desperate effort to fire-up a base that can’t carry the party anymore. Let the increasingly-comical Mitt Romney run on a pandering platform of anti-immigrant, no stem-cell research, anti-evolution, pro-Gitmo and continued Iraq-quagmire. Does he even carry Utah with a program like that?

As they will before a storm, the dogs are howling and the rats are seeking higher ground. Even dim bulbs like former Delay-puppet Dennis Hastert know better than to stick around while the Democrats solidify their majority, bring sense and dignity back to the White House and start cleaning up the mess the elephants left in their disastrous wake. If toiling in the dark tunnels of a new permanent minority is not enough to send former power-mad congressmen on their way (are you listening, Jim Sensenbrenner?), there has never been a better time for Republicans to try to parlay their Washington connections into better paychecks. Well, I mean a better time post-Abramoff, that is – I mean, that was just too much fun, was it not?

Speaking of cashing in, our own (well, your own) Tommy Thompson was doing very well in the cashing in on his public experience in private sector before he decided to make a ridiculous run for president. I’m sure my friends in WPEC, the state-employee union I worked for in the ‘90s that represented the state’s IT workers, noticed that last year Thompson took in more than $1 million from Deloitte & Touche – the firm to which he farmed out much of the state computer work to during his mid-‘90s privatization push. No coincidence, I’m sure. Many of Thompson’s private connections involve medical companies, something he certainly had no connection with before he sat on Bush’s cabinet regulating just those companies. People like Tony Snow can complain all they want about the supposed poverty wages of government work, but they all get paid – and better – eventually.

Thompson continued to add clients and corporate board responsibilities during his quixotic run, making some wonder whether he was really a serious about running for president as he collected more potential conflicts along the way. Even former-chief-Tommy-handler Jim Klauser groused early in the so-called campaign that Thompson could not be considered serious as long as continued to carry six different cell phones to keep track of his business interests. Thompson learned the meaning of the word "loyalty" with Klauser, who had already signed up with Romney by the time he "got serious" in Iowa and didn’t give Tommy a dime for a phone call.

But run Tommy did, spinning his wheels in the gravel of all 99 counties in Iowa for months before his entirely predictable denouement last weekend at the Iowa pay-to-play circus, er, Republican straw poll. Thompson put all his eggs in this dubious basket and ended up coming in behind even anti-war protest candidate Ron Paul. It was a well-earned and just result for Wisconsin’s would-be "favorite son", who never belonged and showed himself to be clearly in over his head, even with this inept and doomed bunch of Republican candidates.

One week after the straw-poll, Journal Sentinel reporter Katherine Skiba, who was stuck on the Tommy-in-Iowa beat for most of the time, issued the obligatory obituary on the campaign, continuing the J-S’s oh-so-serious treatment of Thompson’s efforts. Amazingly declaring the straw-poll result "not predictable" (although I did), Skiba blames Thompson’s failure as a result of "too little money...too many gaffes". So, let me get this straight: if he had managed to get money out of someone other than Gerry Boyle and Mequon gas-station magnate Darshan Dhaliwal and not been such a buffoon during debate appearances, then we’d all be celebrating the Tommy Juggernaut, and he would be the one earning the privilege of being annihilated by a Democrat in November next year?

Um, no. I think it was a little more that money and gaffes that doomed Thompson to the dustbin of historical trivia answers (Q: Who is the former governor of a neighboring state that finished a humiliating 6th in the Iowa straw-poll in 2007?). For one thing, Thompson’s record as governor of Wisconsin was nothing to be proud of and never would have withstood the scrutiny of a national campaign. His time in office was rife with cronyism and pay-for-play rewards. His version of "welfare reform" was a miserable failure, serving only to create more poor people. Likewise, "school choice", which has not improved the education of inner-city kids in Milwaukee one bit and has only enriched private vendors like the Catholic Church, the Edison Company and various other charlatans. Like Ronald Reagan, he has benefitted by home-state affiliation, collective amnesia and revisionist history, treated in the newspapers like his years in office were sunshine, roses and fairness for all. No, no and no.

Also, it hasn’t really been mentioned (and I’m sure some will pull this out as the main point of this post, which it isn’t), but Tommy Thompson was the most physically unattractive candidate since Steve Forbes. He seems to have had some things buffed and tweaked – badly – since he was governor and still speaks like it’s all he can do to call up the words from somewhere below his diaphragm. His smile is pained and forced. Better that, perhaps, than the phony perfection of Robot Romney, but you still have to be able to look at the guy to take him seriously. I predict this same problem will ultimately doom the other Thompson, Fred, who looks like the kind of guy who your boss would assign you to work with only if he/she wanted to punish you.

I doubt the Journal Sentinel will be apologizing any time soon for dragging us through almost 40 articles in the past year, trying to convince us how oh-so-serious a candidate Tommy Thompson was. I’m still waiting for the inevitable editorial about how "proud" they are about his run and how the nation is worse off to reject the generous offer of his services. Despite hundreds of inches of free validation from the paper, Thompson actually had the nerve to complain just before the poll that "negative stories" in the J-S had "dried up the money". I don’t know what he was reading – every damn article in the newspaper during the campaign was excruciatingly deferential and blind to the doomed nature of his campaign.

Tommy Thompson will recover easily enough – there are more corporate boards to join, more money to be made. But it will take time for the Journal Sentinel to recover from this misplaced bit of homer-ism. Its editorial and political judgement has shown itself to be, shall we say, seriously wanting. Again.

Plaisted Blogs Baltimore

My son and I have gone out looking for America again this summer, as we do every year, through the prism of baseball parks and the cities that host them. This year, a couple of games in Baltimore this weekend and, maybe, a game Tuesday night in Washington, D.C., where "hardball" has a different meaning.

As I write on Sunday morning, we are trying to put off as long as possible the 95-degree sauna that awaits us outside the hotel walls. Rooms in Baltimore this weekend are at a premium, as Red Sox fans have descended on the city to catch a glimpse of their beloved team. Our (relatively) moderately-priced breakfast-in-the-morning site is filled with people in "B" hats and red jerseys of all varieties.

Like Packer fans following their team on the road, the Sox faithful are friendly, fun-loving, sometimes drunk and enthusiastic. Although certainly male-centric, spouses and kids are often along for the ride. Like the Cubs visiting Miller Park, they have overwhelmed Orioles fans in number and volume in the stadium this weekend. Saturday morning brought much grousing in the breakfast bar about a blown opportunity (the Os won in the bottom of the ninth) and grousing about late-season addition Eric Gagne, the new set-up guy, who set up nothing by giving up most of a 4-run lead in the 8th. Relief of a different kind was evident last night after the Sox prevailed against the vastly over-matched Orioles.

A scarcity of tickets at Fenway and a huge market that includes all of New England compels them to make the 6-to-8 hour trip for a weekend series in the nearest American League city (New York doesn’t count, of course) with a beautiful newer-but-aging ballpark. Except when they are in the stadium, the Boston faithful swarm the restaurants and shops of Baltimore’s impressive Inner Harbor. Natives here tell me that it is the same when the Yankees come to town.

The Inner Harbor is a blessing and a curse for the out-of-towner, it being the only obvious place to hang out and everybody knows about it. Lines form everywhere – you can walk or swim anywhere faster than it takes to get on the usually-fun Water Taxis – and the broad walkways are often impassable.

Out here in Airport Land, we are imprisoned by a lack of amenities and dependence on the shuttle and light-rail that gets us from this Nowheresville to Somewhere. The non-Hilton or Marriott version of hotels around here are remarkably free of non-breakfast food and newspapers. Convenience stores – heck, convenience itself – appears to have been zoned out of the area.

At the airport light-rail station, hundreds of hotel-dwellers, plopped there by their respective shuttles (ours is the only one with a little Orioles hat on the top) line up to buy train passes at only two terminals – cash-only and exact-change required. On our first trip to the ballpark on Friday, this technological impasse caused everyone in line, even the law-abiding, to just get on the train when it came by. Conflict was avoided when no one checked for tickets after we got on. A clear conscious (and a murky lesson in situational ethics for my son) was achieved by buying a round-trip ticket once we got downtown. Nobody checked on the way back, either.

At Oriole Park at Camden Yards, the now-15-year-old stadium – the earliest entry in the recent trend of ballpark construction – the park is showing its age. The bright green paint that covers metal throughout the park has faded a bit and the concrete on the ramps is starting to crack and discolor. Electronically, fans of County Stadium will recognize the yellow-on-black lettering on the main scoreboard and the not-quite-Diamond-ness of the video screen. The park is also wonderfully bereft of the video "ribbon" that runs under the upper-decks of most stadiums these days. The park maintains my favorite area in and ballyard anywhere – the concourse of concessions that runs under the warehouse along the outfield wall. It is also the best-smelling ballpark in the Major Leagues, depending on how you feel about pork products.

Tomorrow, it’s off to our nation’s capitol. Junior Bush made a point of fleeing from the city last week, on another one of his record-setting vacations. I think he knew we were coming. Wimp.

Tommy Plays the Empty Room

Tommy Thompson walks into the conference room of the Super 8 off I-29 in Onawa, Iowa like a man astride the world.

As Wisconsin’s Favorite Governor™ bounds to the podium, his ear is trained to one of many cell phones he carries to keep track of his many real-world business interests. "OK, no. When that item comes to a vote, I’ll vote no, right? What? The majority of the board will support it? Yes, then. Certainly yes!" He flips the phone closed with the authority of a confident executive slamming the black dial phone into its cradle.

His volunteer advance man pulls him aside. "Listen, sorry about the turnout. We made all the calls and even promised cupcakes, but..." Thompson brushes him aside with the unworried look of a ship captain. "Relax, Skippy," he says. "This is fine, just fine."

After taking a swig of bottled water (oh, for the beer of the endless Wisconsin campaigns of yore...), the Man From Elroy steps up to the podium and takes his first good look at the banquet hall that will play host to the long-anticipated Hoffman-Meyers reception later this weekend. Looking up from his notes, he sees rows of empty seats and just one occupant in the front row, smiling, reporter’s notepad at the ready.

"Uh, hi there," he says sheepishly.

"Hi, Governor," says the reporter, with a gleeful, hey-he-knows-me tone. "How’s the campaign going?"

"Great. It’s going remarkably well. But this isn’t a press conference, so..." The reporter breaks out in peels of laughter. "Right, right," he says, still stifling the chuckles. "Go ahead, don’t mind me." More laughs.

"Well, we have a busy schedule, so I’ll get started," he announces to the otherwise empty room. "You know, this reminds me of the time when I bought an old Ford for my first campaign, so rusted out, you could see the road under the floorboards." The reporter scribbles furiously. "Back then, if I saw a wedding, I stopped in, kissed the bride and got in the picture."

"Really?" says the reporter, clearly inspired.

"Well, yeah," says Thompson. "I mean, we were all over the place and, sure, we’d see a crowd and we’d go in there..."

"No, but, really, you’d kiss the bride?"

"Well, depends on the bride."

More guffaws and scribbled notes. "Hey, do me a favor, will ya? Could you not write that down?"

"Gothcha, guv," says the reporter, with a sly smile. In the corner of the room, the C-Span cameramen roll their eyes.

Thompson continues, undaunted by the lack of attendance on an obviously busy Tuesday night in Monona County. He runs through his experience as a chief executive, cabinet secretary and, now, successful board-member-for-hire. Late in the speech, he finds hope in a older man in work clothes who stands in the back of the room, apparently paying rapt attention. After the speech, Thompson invites him up to get his picture taken with him. "No thanks," says the man. "Just waitin’ to clean up."

As he takes another drink of water and gathers his notes, Thompson winks knowingly at the reporter from the largest newspaper in his home state. "Runnin’ something on Sunday?" he asks. "Yes, sir, of course. Good luck, sir!"

---

It was to be at least the 38th article committed to the Thompson campaign by the Journal Sentinel; almost one article for each committed Thompson voter in Iowa – or anywhere, really. One wonders, for instance, if the Arkansas papers are going quite that ga-ga over the only-slightly more legitimate bid of their former governor, Mike Huckabee. With Thompson’s self-appointed run-in with reality in the form of the straw poll in a couple of days, the Journal Sentinel will have to find another way to work out its ludicrous Tommy obsession. Coming next week: What’s Next For Tommy?, featuring speculation about running for Senate, Governor, blah-de-blah-de-blah-blah.

This Sunday, Thompson appeared with other Republican candidates at a "debate" on ABC television. Thompson, who previously had to apologize for saying making money was a "Jewish tradition" and for supporting workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation, decided to play doctor. According to the J-S (and only the J-S bothered to report anything Thompson had to say in the televised cattle-call), Thompson promised "right now to end breast cancer by the year 2015 for all the women in America". Quite a claim. Does he know something we don’t know?

The fact is that the Tommy Thompson campaign had legitimacy in only one place in the world – on the pages of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The J-S’s fealty to all things Thompson is a mystery, and Thompson’s performance on the small, brief national stage was an unqualified embarrassment.

Milwaukee’s Parking Meters...Not Fade Away

Technology is advancing all over downtown Milwaukee these days, stomping the old and stodgy like so much forgotten sausage. Bright blue steel undergirds the new long ramps of the Marquette Interchange 2.0, replacing the crumbling grey concrete of a more dangerous era. The outside of City Hall is covered head to foot with a cloak of scaffold, as the old bricks of the historic building are replaced with newer and, we assume, better bricks. All over town, more and more public places are under the steady gaze of silent video sentinels, watching our every move like mysterious owls, ready to sweep down the moment lines are crossed or improper proposals are made.

And, on the main and side streets of downtown, where the rubber meets the road and the commuter/visitor looks for a wayside to enable his/her temporary stay, not-so-old digital parking meters are being replaced by numbered signs. The signs – caste in a classic font, as if your car is not so much in a parking space as in a temporary address – bear no explanation of how to rent the formerly-metered space. But with a glance left or right on the adjoining sidewalk you will find a kiosk of hope; an enabling receptacle for your coins, bills or, god help us, credit cards.

This is progress, or so they say. Parking meters existed at the head of your car. If there was time left from the last parker, it said so. Upon successful insertion, the meter provided the instant gratification of time (precious time!) added in increments of 3, 6 or 15 minutes (6, 12 or 30 west of the freeway) for your hard-earned nickel, dimes and quarters, respectively. Just the tactile sensation of the light button on the side of the slot and the coin falling through brought a sense of accomplishment with the real reward of civic contribution and guaranteed ticket-free stop-time.

Trips to downtown – especially around the Courthouse, my regular haunt every morning – seem stressful enough for those who are, sadly, not as familiar as some of us with the ins-and-outs of downtown living. The precious parking spot next to the library on 9th Street secured, the Courthouse visitor can usually be found at the head of the car, searching through pockets for change (no pennies!) and discovering, like a cheap-ticket customer at Miller Park reeling at concession prices, that a quarter only gets you 15 minutes. You pay what you have, you hope, you pray.

Now the irregular visitor will have to deal with the radically-changed paradigm of mysterious number signs. What to do, what to do?

I had my first experience this week with my soon-to-be meterless world. Although usually confident at doing the Downtown Park, I pulled into my first numbered rental space like a novice – somehow, I even had trouble with what is otherwise a fairly routine parallel-park. After three tries, I was in and strangely unsteady.

The first thing I realized is that I had no idea if I had to give the City any money at all for what would be a fairly brief stay in space 1146. At a meter in the middle of the day, it was a better than 50% chance that I would be able to ride the coattails of the previous parker – who has not felt the heart-lifting feeling of "time on the meter"? No more. Even though the previous parker may have paid for two hours and left after 10 minutes, there was no way of knowing that. I approached the ATM-like pay station several spaces over and got ready for the New Way.

The box consisted of a small digital screen and a keypad. Nothing seemed to be activated. A sign on the box advised me to "touch any key to start". Decisions, decisions. I chose the 3 key, hoping for the best. Sure enough, the screen lurched to life and what I’m sure was a lovely panorama of the City appeared on the digital screen for about 5 seconds as the machine got its bearings. I couldn’t really see it, since it was hardly my eye level – the machines are meant to be accommodating, as they should be, and the height accommodated appears to be 4'6" ("Daddy, Daddy, let me do it!"). Anyway, after the unnecessary advertisement for the City (like ads running on the monitors at Target – hey, I’m here already!), I was asked for my space number. OK, easy enough for me, but I worry about those possibly forgetful people at the end of the block – do we have to take notes coming out of the car now? Is it a defense to a ticket that I got the number wrong and rented a space somewhere ten blocks away?

The space number successfully entered (I hope), the robot box has a question: do I want to add time to whatever is there already or buy fresh time? Well, how would I know? Is there time already on the damn thing (see above)? Maybe there was an answer available, but I didn’t feel like looking for it. I chose "new time" and fed the box the same quarter I would have jammed into the meter 5 minutes ago.

It recognized the coins just fine and I pushed "end" or whatever I had to do to get out of this digital transaction. "Receive receipt below", except there was no receipt forthcoming. Ooops, must be out of paper. I left having no idea whether I had accomplished anything of value at the kiosk. I tried to imagine how these probably fragile machines will do in the dead of winter. I came back in ten minutes fully expecting to see a ticket on the car.

Look, I’ve seen those guys who run around emptying the meters once a week. I know it is cheaper for the city to have those (no doubt fewer) workers have to hit only 2 machines on a block rather than 50. I’m sure the machine has some sort of wireless read-out so the ticket-writers don’t even have to squint at the meters to see if it’s expired. Efficiency in city services is a wonderful thing and I’m sure the company who pitched this to the city will be patted on the back by someone somewhere for a job well done.

But, sometimes, progress ain’t worth it. We lose something of the city’s soul when we lose the parking meter to the supposedly better angels of effectiveness and cost-saving. Would it kill us to hang on to the individual meters and all the inefficiencies that surround them for the sake of a few more jobs and a more human downtown experience? When a meter fails or doesn’t take the coins, you can kick it and hammer on it until it works (not that I’d ever do that or anything...). Kick one of the new pay stations, and you’ve just wiped out the parking memory for hundreds.

Bob Dylan famously wrote: Don’t follow leaders/Watch the parking meters. Well, too late for that. What do we do now?

Gonzo Goes to Congress

Really. How much of a dick is Alberto Gonzales?

I’m serious. There has been no one in United States history who has dared to stick a finger in the eye of members of both parties in Congress on a regular basis quite like Gonzales. His "performance" before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday was an incredible display of smug arrogance and contemptuous, carefully-designed stonewalling. Gonzales represents everything wrong with the Bush administration, all delivered behind a sly, uncaring smile and the false confidence of unilateral power that could only exist in the rarified air of the Bush/Cheney White House.

Like all the functionaries of the Imperial Bush presidency, Gonzales does not think that anyone – much less members of Congress – has any business digging into the activities of this most disastrous of administrations. Those who dare to question are considered bugs to be swatted, pests to be eradicated, obstacles to be overcome. After several appearances since the U.S. Attorney scandal erupted earlier this year, Gonzales has staked out a unique sort of useful personna for the process and for the Senators and Congressmen involved. He doesn’t care because he doesn’t have to. Oversight is for suckers. Get over it.

Hell, his very existence in the job is a giant middle-finger to the self-respecting senators on the panel (a group that does not include die-hard Bush-excusers like the reprehensible Orin Hatch). Senators of both parties decided long ago that the sooner his White House-directed running of the Justice Department ended, the better. But Bush decided to keep him there, and what are you going to do about it, bub? While every other president in the history of the republic has at least tried to appear accessible and responsive, these guys see such pre-9/11 thinking as a sign of weakness. They "get to", so they do. Next question.

In the quaint pre-Bush era, the game for executive branch officials with something to hide was to play the game of "ask the right question". Like well-trained defendants in a legal deposition, they would answer only the question asked and not volunteer anything of substance that could be used against him. But, when the going got tough, even Nixon’s (then-former) AG John Mitchell had to answer the questions put to him in the Watergate hearings that glorious, democracy-affirming summer 31 years ago. By contrast, Gonzales appears with a script and will not let silly things like good questions get him off track.

And it’s not like it's hard to put together important questions for Gonzales. A simple question like "how many U.S. attorneys were fired" in the political purge caused Gonzo to claim not to know. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the Bushies fired five more U.S. attorneys tomorrow and came to Congress with the same "what’s your problem" attitude. Far from being chagrined that his hospital-bed sandbagging of John Ashcroft was exposed, Gonzales professed pride in the outrageous behavior, lied about what surveillance program they were trying to get approved, and blamed the whole thing on the Gang of Eight senators. How bad can you be if you make John Ashcroft look good?

Gonzales pretended to listen to the questions and then gave whatever damn answer he wanted to, responsive or not. What does he care? While his manner was mild-mannered and almost polite – except for that smug half-smile on his face – the substance of his answers dripped with designed contempt for the senators and the process.

After the Nixon debacle, it became far less likely that we would end up with the same kind of psychological nutbag as president, who would be able to use his office to punish his enemies, real or imagined. Such a person may try, but he would find himself without the enablers Nixon had to carry out his nefarious designs. Now, we have a different kind of "let’s not do it again" presidency; a power-mad secret society that uses crimes and tragedies like 9/11 to declare a phony "war" so that they can claim to operate in an extra-Constitutional nether world, where they can’t be touched and can’t be bothered with checks, balances and other niceties of government that they choose to declare obsolete.

Once the Bushies hit the door, that will be the end of that. Anyone who tries to recreate this kind of poison atmosphere will be sent packing to the same political hell Gonzales and his ilk will be resigned to, starting in January, 2009.

Mark Green: Let Him Wait

Sen. John Kerry is standing up against rank cronyism and political payback by temporarily blocking soundly-thumped GOP gubernatorial candidate Mark Green from being an ambassador to Tanzania. His action putting a senatorial hold on the nomination has blocked the reward-for-running action for now, but Junior Bush, whose handlers never really cared much for advice-and-consent, will just appoint him during the August recess anyway. Although the Green appointment has somehow won the support of the entire Wisconsin congressional delegation (in a typical display of Democrat-only bipartisanship), Green presided over the most negative campaign in Wisconsin history and hardly deserves to be rewarded for his down-and-dirty efforts. But Kerry’s courageous use of his senatorial privilege at least delays the Greening of Tanzania for a couple of weeks, after which Green can return to Wisconsin, with extra unearned credentials, to poison our political environment again.

Having written that temporarily abandoned paragraph this weekend, it was interesting to see John Nichols coming out four-square for Green's nomination in the Cap Times Monday morning. Nichols is one of the most effective and important progressive voices, not only in Wisconsin, but nationally through frequent columns in The Nation and elsewhere and his service as a too-little-used talking head on cable TV shows. I can’t remember ever disagreeing with anything he has written and I’ll assume that he has some cocktail-circuit contact or knowledge about Green personally that somehow overcomes his appalling public record. But Nichols is still wrong about this. Mark Green is an empty suit who should remain in the closet.

Mark Green’s public career has consisted of being a useful idiot for others with actual (bad) ideas. He was Felon (yet, still free) Scooter Jensen’s lapdog in the State Assembly. He was Bush and Delay’s lapdog while in Congress for eight years. And, finally, he was the willing shill for the WMC and the state GOP as the figurehead for most negative campaign for governor in Wisconsin history.

Green, according to Nichols, "got very serious when the discussion turned to issues relating to Africa". So what? If he was really serious about African issues before or coming out of law school, there were numerous areas of legal and other work that he could have gone into to put that supposed commitment to work instead of being a useful political stooge for people like Jensen and Delay. According to Nichols, Green is graciously passing up a chance to take his House seat back in ‘08. I don’t know why Nichols thinks that return to Washington is such a sure thing, but I can’t think of anyone who would pass up a cushy resume-enhancer like "ambassador" to anywhere over the much-harder work and schedule of a congressman – especially a cipher like Green, who was a do-nothing boot-licker last time he was there and would return with the GOP in the minority and a Democrat in the White House.

Amazingly, Nichols thinks Green would actually have some impact on Bush administration policies not in Tanzania, but in Darfur, Sudan. Wha? Bush has done nothing about the crisis for years and now Ambassador Green is going to charge in to save the day? Even if he wanted to (which he might) or he was capable of it (doubtful), what ambassador in the history of the top-down Bush administration has even had a significant impact on any policy, anywhere? Nichols knows better than most how the Bush administration works. Why he thinks anything would be different with Mark Green in Tanzania is beyond me.

Let’s assume that Mark Green is a wonderful guy on the subject of Africa. Fine. But the role he has played as a partisan hack should disqualify him from anything "diplomatic", much less a politically-rewarded ambassadorship. If Mark Green wants to work in the foreign service, he can get the training and pay his dues like the many other talented, dedicated people in that field.

John Nichols supporting Green’s appointment is sort of like Cal Thomas praising a Democratic president for nominating, oh, say, Howard Dean as ambassador to...anywhere. The difference is that Thomas would never do it and a progressive like Nichols would and did. Like Al Gore graciously acceding to the theft of the Florida vote in 2000, we sometimes give Republicans more credit than they deserve. In Green’s case, he has done nothing publicly to deserve the sort of bipartisan support he has received.

He’ll get his damned ambassadorship when Bush once again flaunts the will of Congress and does the recess appointment. Let him wait.

Bonds, Ruth and Aaron

I love Hank Aaron.

When I was very young and my family was living in Wauwatosa, I was convinced that he lived in the same neighborhood as my baby-sitter when he was with the Braves. I remember watching him hit 715 on a small TV in my first college dorm room. I went to Opening Day in 1975 to see his return to Milwaukee. I am glad my son will get a chance to meet him someday during one of his many dignified appearances around town. On our way into every game at Miller Park, we touch the front foot of his statue for luck.

I also will enjoy seeing Barry Bonds break his record in this week.

Bond’s has issues, to be sure, that Aaron never had. While Aaron was Mr. Clean, Bonds, for about five years there, was certainly Riding Dirty. Bonds grew up in a decidedly different baseball era, where even gifted players were made, not born. Conditioning, weights, diet, supplements – athletes are now evaluated for basic makeup almost at birth and then designed for speed, for power, for strength. Bonds was born with exceptional skills, but much of him was built and designed by experts. Aaron just sort of happened.

Aaron was likewise of a different generation than Babe Ruth. Where Ruth was often slothful, Aaron was disciplined. Ruth could sit in the dugout, eating hot dogs and smoking cigarettes. Aaron, as a Negro League veteran, had to be perfectly behaved. Ruth also played in an all-white league and therefore avoided facing some of his era’s best players.

Bonds breaking Hank’s record won’t diminish Aaron’s accomplishments any more than Aaron diminished Ruth’s. Baseball will then have three different home run kings for three different eras. Ruth will always be the king of white-era baseball. Aaron will be the king of the middle passage, when baseball integrated and became big business. Until A-Rod passes him in six or seven years, Bonds will be the king of the designed ballplayer era, where skills are still taught but bodies, for good and ill, are sculpted and built for maximum impact (and income). Bonds, like an offensive line with an average weight of 350 lbs., is the epitome of cynical manipulation. Aaron may have been our last vestige of spontaneous magic.

Ken and I are going out to the Park today, and I won’t boo him (Ken will). Bonds is a Hame-of-Famer who also would have been one of the great players in Aaron’s era, even (especially) if he left his body alone. I hope the Brewers get ahead early and then I hope he pops one, maybe two. I’ll watch history on TV from San Francisco this week, and I hope he gets his due. Bonds did it dirty and ugly. But that’s the athletic entertainment world he (and we) are living in. He shouldn’t be punished just because he gave us the artificial fireworks we demanded.

Fred Thompson To the Rescue

My favorite Fred Thompson moment is in his most recent movie gig. In Albert Brooks’ mildly-subversive movie, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, Thompson plays himself as the head of a commission that sends Brooks to India and Pakistan to find out what makes Muslims laugh. "Are you back in politics?" asks Brooks. "I thought you were acting now." Thompson slumps over the conference table and pronounces "Once you’re back in politics, you never really escape." The other flunkies on the fake "commission" chuckle in deference to the chair, as Thompson works his substantial charms on the out-of-work Brooks character, eventually convincing him to take on the effort, supposedly dreamed up by W. himself who, Thompson claims, "has a pretty darn good sense of humor". Yeah. Funny like a heart attack, or a suicide bomb in Falusia.

After years of pretending to be a tough guy, dropping F-bombs and drinking brown liquor in the movies and on TV, Thompson is bizarrely being held out as the last remaining hope of a desperate Republican party. Saddled with a dreadful president and an out-of-touch agenda that includes the continued slog in Iraq, racist immigrant bashing and anti-science denial from evolution to stem cells, the GOP is facing the stark reality of its own irrelevance, if not its pending extinction. Staring blankly at a Law and Order rerun some months ago, someone in Rove’s office got the bright idea: Why not Thompson?

No less than ten "candidates" have stepped forward to offer their services as the Republican presidential offering for 2008, resulting in a wave of indifference and yawns throughout the land. Giuliani? The self-declared Mr. 9/11 has some, er, personal issues and his positions on social issues are at odds with the nut-right base. Oh, and, by the way, some firefighters would like to talk about what he did or didn’t do on and around 9/11, if you have the time. Romney? A little anxious to please, don’t you think? His perfect hair and teeth (talk about your Breck girls) lurch ahead of his face as he enters each room, pander-ready. OK for GOPers who want to love themselves, but he will have the smell of death in ‘08 (not to mention the rancid stench of his desired doubling of the population at Guantanamo) as he tries to find those in the enraged general populace to love him while he’s wrong on every issue imaginable – at least this week. A minor player like Tommy Thompson? What do you do with someone who is only taken seriously by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel? Run him for county executive, perhaps? John McCain? Sounds familiar...who was that, again?

And so, as America struggles to build a new start after the disastrous and corrupt Bush/Cheney years, the Grand Old Party reaches into its past to find its future. Once again, a decidedly B-actor steps forward to read the script. A typical character played by Fred Thompson in one of his movies would look dourly at the proposed candidacy outline on his cherry-maple desk while clinking the ice cubes in his ever-present glass of scotch, chuckling mildly as he turns the page. Eventually, he’d take the Rove-written proposal, crumple it up and throw it into a wastebasket across the room. "That’s a three-pointer," he would say, to no one in particular, about his waste-shooting skill. "F*#k that."

But, like Ronald Reagan, the phony hero, the real Fred Thompson is not made of such strong stuff. If you want to love him, he will make himself available to be loved. In fact, if the money is right, Thompson the lobbyist will tell you anything you want to hear and lean on the rope-line to receive your hugs. Reagan, his supposed brother-in-bullshit, had his price to carry the water of the moneyed interests and I’m sure Thompson has his. Maybe he’ll just charge them at his going rate of $500 per hour. Let’s see, this president thing is a 24/7 job...365 times 4 years, paid in advance, of course...hey, he’s yours – phony red pick-up truck and all. Oh, and by the way, his sons would like to talk to you about commerce in Uzbekistan...

Although he and those around him will spend untold hours and millions of dollars trying to define him in a glowing, aw-shucks light, Thompson will not be able to hide from how he first came to national attention – as the 30-year-old chief Republican counsel on the Senate Watergate Committee during the hearings that gripped the country’s imagination 34 summers ago. While Sam Ervin and even his then-boss Howard Baker were tying to find out what the hell was going on in the cesspool otherwise known as the Nixon White House, young Fred was sneaking behind their backs, leaking all kinds of inside information about the investigation to Nixon’s henchmen. Not that it did them any good. But it says something about the desperation of the 2008 GOP that they would turn to a veteran of secret Nixonian intrigue to help them recover from these somehow even darker years of secret Bushian nonsense.

Thompson’s other "issues" are nothing compared to him plotting with Nixon to subvert the historic work of the Watergate Committee. He has the kind of issues that would be death to any Democrat, but that just cause knowing nudges in a well-connected Republican. Lymphoma in remission? Hey, has anyone seen Cheney’s medical charts lately (Treated as Secret/SCI)? Divorce and second marriage to a 24 years younger trophy wife? A mere piffle – Rudy’s got one marriage on him, not to mention the Rage of the Second Wife, and he’s in the lead. Active in the Scooter defense fund; no doubt the successful lobbyist for that particular subversion of justice? Well, the whole thing was silly and, besides, juries are for suckers. Asbestos and abortion-rights lobbyist? Hey, a guy’s gotta eat.

In the end, Fred Thompson is stuck in a no-win situation. If he runs, he’ll be the doomed front-man for a miserable Republican party that has itself boxed-in and wrong on so many issues, from Iraq to health care to immigration to stem cell research. Somebody has to have an "R" next to their name as the loser in the history books, so it might as well be a mediocre actor in a dumpy brown business suit. If he doesn’t run, he will be the Man Who Wouldn’t Come, someone the GOP can blame their many failures on as they lose 30 more seats in the House, 5 more in the Senate and 100 more votes in the electoral college. They’ll need someone to blame – looking in the mirror after imposing the Bush Regime on the world will just be a bit too painful.

Laments and Laurels

A weekly parody of a weekly editorial.

This Scooter Libby fellow seems to have made quite an impression on President Bush. Although he was convicted by a federal jury of lying to investigators and a federal grand jury, the President stepped up to correct a slight flaw in the judge’s sentencing structure. It seems the judge got a bit carried away with this inconvenient "following the law" business we’ve all heard so much about and threw the federal sentencing guideline book right at poor Scooter’s solar plexus. Like a soccer goalie reaching to the corner of the net, our athletic president reached high and saved the country from seeing one of its finest public servants eating bad food in drab housing for several years. The score remains: U.S.A. - 5; Injustice - 0!

Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame played Summerfest this week and rocked the Amphitheater with tales of Time, Money, Dark Sides of Moons and Bricks in Walls. We hear he also had some choice things to say about the president, Dick Cheney and some guy named Stalin. We are all in favor of artistic expression, as far as it goes. But some of Waters’ diatribes came at the expense of our suburban sensibilities and our desire to listen to meaningful songs from our past, devoid of uncomfortable meaning. Sure, the lyrics have always said "Money/It’s a crime". But now that we have some, we would rather not be flogged with the actual words of that "groovy" tune, thank you very much. The British singer also seems to have some issues with America and it role in the world. If he is giving out breaks, we wish he would give us one.

Forward-thinking members of the Milwaukee Common Council are considering covering much of the city in a blanket of security by putting video surveillance cameras on many street corners. Bravo! That which makes us feel safer certainly does. No-do-gooders will now think twice before taking their crimes out of their homes and into the streets, where we can see them. The Council should also consider putting video cameras in every home – where, after all, most crime is committed. Perhaps such a system could have two-way capability, so that the city could let its citizens know about important events and remind them of the Way of Right Thinking. Why not a separate two-way video screen installed in the corner of every living room, a watchful eye for you on the community – and of the community on you? Cranky "civil" "libertarians" may "complain" about the "invasion" of "privacy". But, remember – even though He might be Big, He’s still your Brother.

And Don’t Come Back

The Waukesha Freeman has published an outrageous attack on Milwaukee in the form of an opinion column by a former editor. Has it really gotten this bad that people in the suburbs think they can just throw bombs at the City and still expect to benefit from all the good things the City does and can bring to them?

Pete Kennedy is the apparently otherwise undistinguished former editor. Given the (lack of) quality in Kennedy's work -- at least in this example -- maybe it’s not that big a deal to be an editor at the Freeman. After all, how hard can it be to edit literary heavyweights like Mark Belling and Jessica McBride?

Anyway, Kennedy of Waukesha has decided that "Milwaukee sucks". You can tell he thinks it – the clever phrase both opens and closes his column. Proclaiming himself a former defender of the city, a battery of exaggerated bad news having nothing to do with him has led him to this dire conclusion. Let us bow our heads in reverence as the suburbanite casts his final judgment. My god, how could we have gone this far astray?

In doing so, Kennedy joins the ranks of Sykes, McBride and other adult suburban brats with a media forum to bash the City. I wonder – is this going on amidst a significant portion of the (relatively) young adult suburban population that don't have a column, a blog or a radio show? Have they really gone south on the city that some of them grew up in and most of them come into every week to drink, eat, recreate and shop, if not work? Are they really going to hole up in their subdivisions and shut out the rest of the world?

I hope not. I hope these sentiments are limited to the small-minded media dim-bulbs like Kennedy, Sykes, etc. They must know that, without Milwaukee, Waukesha is Wausau. Without Milwaukee, they’d have to go a long way to get any big-city culture – theater, music, restaurants. Hey, when is Waukesha Night at the Brewers this year? Can we expect anyone to come? Anyone at all? Does Kennedy have his playoff tickets lined up? Should we let him?

You would think, given this drastic verdict, that something horrible has happened to Pete Kennedy in the City. But, no. A family member or friend, perhaps, put in mortal danger while waiting at a stoplight? No. Hell, there must have at least have been an uncomfortable moment in the company of black teenagers on the second floor at Mayfair. No, again.

Instead, Kennedy says he has been persuaded by things he knows nothing about, but about which he has read and heard a lot. From what he has heard about various well-reported and over-hyped incidents in the City, he extrapolates like crazy. "How many people visit Milwaukee to take in a game or have dinner, only to have their cars broken into?" he asks, I’m guessing rhetorically, although it’s hard to tell. "How many people work in Milwaukee and suffer the same fate?".

Those answers are not hard to come by, if he really wants to know. A couple of clicks on the Milwaukee Police web page gets you to a fairly comprehensive crime data compilation, the last available from 2004. Let’s see: in 2004, motor vehicle thefts were down from the year before – all property crimes down an impressive 15.2%. I am in the criminal courts everyday and I haven’t seen any sort of increase in vehicle theft cases – what is he talking about? Like all wing-nuts, Kennedy believes what he wants to believe, facts be damned. He says right-wing media hound Sheriff David Clarke has advised people "not to leave anything of value at park and rides heading into Summerfest". Good advice, anyway, but at the park-and-rides? Is the problem in Milwaukee or Goerke’s Corner in Kennedy’s own Waukesha County?

Kennedy is outraged, apparently, by 46 murders in the City this year so far, about on a pace for 2004's 88 and certainly less than 122 a decade ago. "And that doesn’t count the mob beating, or the gang rape, or the break-ins or the sewage," he exclaims. Well, no. Let’s see – one mob beating, one gang rape...hardly seems like a trend to me. Problems, yes. But Milwaukee as "ground zero of the apocalypse"? "A rotten excuse for a city"? Is he more likely to be the victim of a "mob beating" "than any other place in the United States"? This is crazy talk.

Kennedy says he’s done with Milwaukee, and that’s fine. Although we appreciate the diversity that a vibrant city brings, we can probably do without another smug suburbanite in an alligator shirt talking loudly at LaFuente about how miserable we are.

But, for all his righteous lecturing to the city he knows nothing about, Kennedy and his fellow Waukesha County residents will be back. It’s a long way to get around Milwaukee to get to that beautiful Lake Michigan water. And that smug white enclave in Waukesha does need the water. And, whether they know it or not, they also need the vibrant, imperfect city that lies just to the east.

UPDATE: I was so incensed by this ridiculous column, I missed Xoff's more expert and economically-based response.

What If A Democrat Did It: The Home Version

Junior Bush had his moment to show what he’s really made of, and came through for his puppeteers in grand fashion on Monday afternoon. His hand no doubt forced by his primary handler, Dick Cheney, Bush took a break from his boat party with Putin to commute Scooter Libby’s sentence, meaning that one of the driving forces of his disastrous regime has been spared the petty indignities and bad bedding of prison life. Libby’s outright lies to a federal grand jury are as good as forgiven. The only thing left to do is the complete pardon on Bush’s way out the door and, what the heck, how about a Medal of Freedom?

Despite the latest outrage and the threat to our democracy, not to mention law and order, by the always imaginative Bushies, the timing of this could not be better for me personally. Some of you don’t know that I am at heart an entrepreneur. I have in development a board-game that should be ready in time for the holiday season. It will be called: What If A Democrat Did It? WIADDI will be a revolutionary board-game – more educational than Trivial Pursuit, more tricky than Jenga, more mysterious than Clue. There are no wrong answers in WIADDI. The only limit is your – imagination!

As you play WIADDI, you progress through four levels: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced and Expert. As a Beginner, you are presented with simple, easily-managed problems. At this level, you should be able to determine what would happen If A Democrat Did It without too much trouble. For instance, Bush selected a losing Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate and political hack who presided over the most negative campaign in Wisconsin history to an ambassadorship in Tanzania. Now – altogether – What If A Democrat Did It?!? (This phase is meant to be shouted by everyone in the room and everyone has to take a drink.) Points are given for each keyword hit, for which the moderator rings a bell. The obvious answer: Radio wingnuts (ding!) would accuse Democrats of blatant cronyism (ding!) and political payback (ding!). Three bells means a perfect score. See? It’s easy – and fun!

Higher levels present more challenging facts to really get your Cranium cranking. Let’s say a wealthy Democratic contributor and lobbyist for mining interests is put in charge of the Mine Safety Administration. The fox watching the chicken coop! Kickbacks no doubt expected! Contributor probably sleeping his way to the top! Can the head of EPA be far behind? You get the idea.

Here is a secret tip for success at all levels of WIADDI: All you have to do is think of everything that the mainstream media hasn’t done in response the Bush Outrages and assume they would do what they should have been doing all these years If A Democrat Did It. Given everything the lapdog media has failed to do in the Bush Years, you have thousands of options to choose from.

At the higher levels, the stakes get greater for the Hypothetical Democrat. Imagine a Democratic Vice President locks all his routine daily work in a man-sized safe every night, scrubs the Secret Service records of who has visited his mansion and, ultimately, declares himself a member of the legislative branch, untethered by executive branch requirements. WIADDI? Public flogging? Impeachment, surely, but that would be too good for him.

At the Expert level, the mind reels over what would happen If A Democrat Did It. The first problem at that level is a classic – the shutting down of the recount in Florida in 2000. This answer requires a thousand-page essay not about whether, but how the Republicans and the media would prevent the Democrat from taking office. What if a Democrat, after 9/11, used the tragedy as a bludgeon to grab power for himself, start a phony war in the fragile Middle East, wiretap phones without a warrant, and even hold people in a sun-baked prison, incommunicado for more than five years, complete with torture and secret renditions to countries who really know how to "get the job done"? You can almost hear the reporter outside the White House: "A delegation of Democratic congressional leaders went to the White House today to tell the President that the time has come to step down..."

At this level, it will be tempting for you to leap immediately to impeachment for such a lawless regime. But, remember, points are given for creativity. You have to let go of your disbelief about what Bush has managed to get away with. Forget also that a Democrat would never even think of pulling stunts like any of the Bush Horrors. Remember that, whoever the Democratic nominee and eventual president will be in ‘08 and ‘09, they will be run through the personal and professional wringer and held to a higher standard than the Republican, as they always are. Mountains will be made out of molehills, and, no matter who it is, you will feel icky marking the ballot for them. But, in WIADDI, you get to imagine what would happen if the Democrats really did elect a lawless dolt. The ultimate WIADDI challenge: What if it was the Democrats who nominated George W. Bush? Talk about an ass-kicking!

After the board-game takes hold, I plan to syndicate the game on the comics page, like the old There Oughta Be a Law or Sudoku, with problems ripped from the day’s headlines.

Today’s WIADDI: What if a Democratic president commuted the sentence of a key aide who was convicted of lying to investigators and a federal grand jury about his involvement in a political smear job that resulted in the outing of a CIA operative?

Answer: What, are you kidding me? Maybe we should just take bets on how long it would take an administration like that to be run out of town on a rail.

Lament & Laurels

A weekly parody of a weekly editorial.

The Washington Post had an interesting four-part series this week about the role that Vice President Cheney has played in the Bush administration. While the Vice President has taken heat from some on the left for his megalomaniacal style, paranoid secrecy, power-grabbing legal obfuscation, his role as puppet-master to Bush the sock-puppet, helping Scooter Libby out Plame and obstruct justice, shooting an old man in the face and his hypocritical proud-grandfather gay-bashing, we think he might be getting a bad rap. With the world changing after 9/11, we think Cheney may have been just the person to help President Bush guide the ship of state in uncharted waters. Or not.

Ann Coulter, the leggy agent-provocateur of the conservative movement, may want to take a step back from her tough language when discussing the sexual proclivities of a certain Democratic presidential candidate. Although she often entertains us with her colorful challenges to the political status quo, she may have crossed a line when she said on a cable show this week that John Edwards and his ailing wife, Elizabeth, hosted weekly meetings of a satanic swingers club in their palatial home. She did not make things better when – after Mrs. Edwards called the show to complain that the couple’s weekly bridge club was, at least, misunderstood – Coulter accused the Edwards of using the memory of their tragically dead son to distract the other bridge players for unfair advantage. We can only hope that Coulter would take better advantage of her still-unexplained media access in the future to poison the national political debate with, perhaps, a little less vinegar.

Alderman Michael McGee Jr. had the bail on his state criminal charges reduced and eventually posted by community supporters this week. This is good. After being transferred to federal court, it was determined that he would be held without bail. This is good. He is being held in the same place (the Milwaukee County Jail) that he was before his state bail was posted. It is hard to argue with this, as it is with the fact that he made bail on the state case. The bottom line is that he will be held, or not held, as appropriate. It seems this would go without saying, but it doesn’t, since we just said it. We wish both McGee and his prosecutors the best, and we’re sure each of them knows what that is. The wheels of justice turn, well-oiled by the citizenry that has greased the gears with the blood of patriots. We wish both sides well, except the side that is eventually proven wrong. Shame on them.

Summerfest celebrates its 40th anniversary this week with another fun-filled 11 days of music on the lakefront. Since this paper has spent an incredible amount of (multi-colored) ink and killed thousands of trees promoting it and has sponsored the event every year since it’s inception, we don’t have to tell you that we think the festival is just peachy. In fact, we have decided to mail this one in. Knowing that many of our readers doze off at about this point in this editorial every Saturday morning, we will pad the rest of this paragraph with phrases from other L&Ls...Again, the music unites us...Good things do come to those who wait...They all merit applause...Good show, [insert name of current or former Summerfest director here]...Sounds as though they deserve a plaque...And the rest, as they say, is history.