A new president comes into office in eight months . . .

All talk of bitterness and lapel pins will be put aside, in the interest of getting to the ISSUES:

o Gasoline costs four dollars a gallon.

o Airlines--most of them--are in the tank. Airports barely functioning for lack of landing fee revenue.

o Recession that was supposed to end in June has gotten worse in the last 6 months. When the numbers are released at the end of January it will probably be 4 straight down quarters. Unemployment surging with the collapse of retail. Service industry workers hardest hit. Many of the shops (including anchors) in shopping malls are shuttered.

o Detroit on life support. They mostly don't have the cars Americans need. Americans mostly don't have the money to buy anything with four wheels. Nobody can get a loan. Countryside littered with parked SUVs and big honkin' F250s, because the costs of repo are hardly justified by value of the carcass. (Tiny bright spot: bike sales and repair are brisk.)

o The housing/mortgage/banking nexus worsens as hints of the full enormity of the losses in the financial sector continue to dribble out.

o Families doubling and tripling up in suburbia.

o Corn/ethanol bubble is losing air fast. Farmers are back in the hole.

These are the minor problems that will take a back seat to . . .

The Biggies:

o Ending the war in Iraq.

o Universal Health Care.

A new President must do these two things, or the voters will turn against him/her, just as they did against G.W. Bush. Iraq is first on the list.

Closing out the Iraq fiasco will be a nightmare for American troops, nearly as bad as continuing. Look at the detail of a map of Iraq and the Persian Gulf. The only way out is the north/south route, down the narrowing terrain of that cinder of a country, toward the seaport where the tip of Iraq meets the tip of the Persian Gulf. The retreating Americans will either leave behind hundreds of billions in war materiel and equipment, or try to load the stuff on thousands of ships--all trying to maneuver in that bottleneck-within-a-bottleneck, the Straits of Hormuz.

Even with all the training that gets done by the Army, I get a feeling nobody has been practicing the art of orderly retreat. Actually, there's no such thing. Think Dunkirk, or--even worse--Bonaparte's Moscow disappointment.

A retreat, at the beginning of the end of an empire.

The Grande Armée Crossing the Berezina

Napoleon and a remnant of the Grand Armée trudged west, in retreat, out of Moscow and across Russia and Poland during the winter of 1812-13. Even though his army had been reduced from 422,000 to 150,000 by the time Bonaparte reached Moscow--only to find it empty (nothing to pillage; nothing to eat)--the worst part was the retreat. Imagine the heartbreaking scene on the banks of the River Berezina. Fifty thousand men waded into into an insignificant (but freezing) river in Poland; twenty eight thousand made it to the opposite bank. Where another eight thousand were killed by the Cossacks. Thousands of camp-followers presumably died as well, but nobody kept track of inconsequential collateral losses of the "comfort women" of Nap's officers' Corps.


"Probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn, this map by Charles Joseph Minard portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon's army in the Russian campaign of 1812. Beginning at the Polish-Russian border, the thick band shows the size of the army at each position. The path of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in the bitterly cold winter is depicted by the dark lower band, which is tied to temperature and time scales".
Edward Tufte.

Compact compromise. Hold the rejoicing over this "victory'.

I'd call it a diversionary tactic.

I fully expect the compromise to convey about the Waukesha Water Utility the impression that they are in support of all the provisions of the Compact.

1. They will immediately press the issue with DNR, (watchers of this agency should be warned that DNR is not above secret conniving with development interests around the subject of water resources).

2. They will attempt to get a diversion approved under existing WRDA standards. Part of their argument will be that they stand foursquare behind the Compact--especially because they will not have to meet the standards, since the Compact is still "in-process".

The return flow and conservation elements of the Compact clearly worry the commissioners (and they should scare the daylights our of the rate-payers). But, this current "progress" on the Compact--what the late, great Ed Jackamonis used to call "dynamics-without-change"-- will serve to divert (that word again) attention from the real consequences, as everyone gets excited and congratulatory about this "victory".

If Waukesha gets access to Lake Michigan water, the existing rate-payers and tax-payers will bear the full and enormous cost of the infrastructure to get the water out here. We should assume the Utility will not plan for return flow; they'll assume they can finagle a way of putting partially treated sewage into the Rock and Fox rivers--a little bit back to the lake and a whole lot out of the basin forever.

They are aiming to divert 22 million gallons per day (mgd) from the lake. That is a lot more than the current 8mgd that Waukesha uses. That much additional water will eventually require upgrading and expansion of the Waukesha sewage treatment plant.

The payoff, according Water Utility Commissioner (also Mayor) Larry Nelson, will be all of the new , not-yet-built, mostly hallucinated, subdivisions and tacky strip malls annexed to the city. That's a lot of new taxes for infrastructure: new schools, roads, police, fire, sewer, trash collection, new SCHOOLS, library, parks, forestry, paramedics, leaf pick-up... (did I mention NEW SCHOOLS?).

And, what if those subdivisions don't materialize? What if we have a long and painful economic downturn/depression? What if the increase in tax base doesn't cover all of the costs?

Tough luck. It will merely be a minor miscalculation by developers and land speculators... and a huge on-going cost for the rate-payer/tax-payer.

This compromise is already beginning to stink.

Barbara Fischer, Ed.D., A.B.D., Pimentel's certified no-brainer, is back on the Journal Sentinel Opinion page...

I just randomly grabbed this little chunk of it. You really must go to the source to fully appreciate the stream of (un)consciousness style of the person who sat at a keyboard and pecked away, the Chairman of the Department of Business and Economics at Cardinal Stritch University.

I have news for many of you: The monopolist cannot hide from the laws of supply and demand.

Consider We Energies. If it charged $50,000 per month for energy use, we would have millions of frozen Wisconsinites and/or we'd find alternative sources of energy and/or move. In any event, We Energies would find itself with no customers, which would be cutting off its nose to spite its face. This obviously is an extreme example; however, it makes my point.

As Truman Capote said of Kerouac: "That is not writing. That's typing."

Ricardo Pimentel is the Editor of the Editorial and Opinion pages. The repeated appearances of this clownish nonsense reflects on him and the other editors. The lines of editorial control appear to reach down through the Editorial Board and Pimentel to an assistant editor for commentary.

I'm guessing that would be Mabel Wong, Perspectives Editor. If there is indeed an editor, why is there no editing in evidence?

Can this rag, the Journal Sentinel, sink any lower?

The power of a letter to a member of the WMC Board...

...I believe it is important to share with you that, for personal and philosophical reasons, I have resigned my seat as a member of the WMC Board of Directors.

David Wittwer,
President and CEO

Two weeks ago I wrote in this blog that I was ready to dump a long and happy business relationship with TDS Metrocom (phone and DSL internet connection) because I choose not to do business with a member of the board of Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce.

Here's the response from TDS President and Chief Executive Officer, David Wittwer. Click to enlarge


I am sticking with TDS. Wittwer's resignation and plea to retain my business speak eloquently of the influence we have with our consumer choices.

I'm really happy to remain a customer, in touch with the TDS staff and professionals who have provided great service over the years. And my opinion of Wittwer is up more than a few notches--he operates a good business that provides really good service and he is personally pragmatic.

One thing I always love about going to Cleveland for a few days is the Pee Dee

D'arcy, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, 3.28.08

Luck of the Irish...

Any time I hear those word--mostly sentimental nonsense from bogus Irish--I think about the luck of my grandmother. Let me tell the you the story of Annie Stanton, born 1876, at Inishgowla, wading-distance from Westport, County Mayo. Inish is Irish for island. One either sloshed in to shore in one's Wellies at low tide, or rowed in when it was high.

By the time of her birth, thirty years after the famine, it was clear that Irish society had collapsed. As had the population of Ireland. Between 1845 when the potatoes began to rot in the ground, and 1995 the Irish population declined from 8 million to 3.9 million. As much as it was hunger, it seemed more like the pervasive desperation that drove those numbers down, drove the Irish mostly to America and England and Australia.

There was little to keep a young person--no work, no vitality--little but neglect, garnished with swagger stick contempt, from the the Brits.

So Annie Stanton said goodbye in 1892, at 16, a schoolgirl who would never again see a classroom, never again see her parents, nor most of her siblings. Steerage from Liverpool, then Ellis Island. She traveled to Cleveland, Ohio. There, she worked for the swells in Bratenahl, a domestic, in service at the sumptuous residence of some captain of industry (Mark Hanna and William Gwinn Mather, and their ilk--iron ore, shipping and steel barons--were all in Bratenahl). The swells.

In 1904, likely at St. Malachi's, she met Peter Noonan, several years younger than herself, a structural iron worker who had also emigrated alone in his teens. Must have been a surprise to learn that she and Peter had been born and grew up six miles apart, she in Westport, he in Newport, but had to "cross the ocean wild and wide" to meet, to marry and to raise a family.

In a tiny rented house on Eve Avenue in the working class neighborhood of the near west side, in St. Colman Parish, (an offshoot of St Patrick Parish, which had been an outgrowth of St Malachi Parish. Did I mention it was an Irish neighborhood?).

Two beautiful boys, Francis and Thomas, born in '06 and '08, have lain for a century, side-by-side in Calvary cemetery. They died twelve days apart, in early April, 1910, both of pneumonia contracted when a fire swept through the the house, drove the whole family into the rain in the middle of the night.

Brought low with grief and loss, they endured and were blessed with four more children in the next, seven years. But, the "luck" of the Irish touched them once again. Days before my mother's seventh birthday her father, Peter Noonan, after a struggle of four days, died at age 38. It was the height of the influenza pandemic of 1919, but it was pneumonia, not the flu.

The next ten years were difficult for a frightened and reclusive widow and her four children under the age of ten. Annie, taking in washing and ironing, the older kids delivering 100 newspapers before school, and twice a month, filled with shame, pulling a wagon to the office that distributed outside relief.

Then, 1929; things got even more difficult. Annie Stanton Noonan, endured the Great Depression pretty much as everyone else of that generation did--stoically, with the support of family and the parish. Half way through that decade, a widow's pension, the initiation in 1935 of Social Security lightened the burden. But the times still demanded a superhuman level of endurance.

She died in the Spring of 1940. She had outlived her husband, two of her children and three of her own siblings who also had emigrated to Cleveland. But her relative longevity certainly included so little of that fabled Irish luck.

Forty-eight years in America. Never saw her parents again. Never, but in her dreams, saw Inishgowla. Only briefly held and sang to her first grandchild Never knew that her children's children would number 24, and their children almost 70.

The luck of the Irish, the sweet elusive luck of the Irish.

A bit like the luck of the Mexicans, the Hmong, the Dominicans, Tibetans, Hondurans, Bangladeshi, Nicaraguans, Libyans, Jamaicans. In this our nation of immigrants, I hear all manner of shrieking contempt for the new immigrants, driven by poverty to seek a life in America--a life always accompanied by enormous sacrifice--particularly by that first generation.

I'm a lucky Irishman, thanks entirely to the courage and endurance of my immigrant grandparents from the rocky and isolated coast of County Mayo in the West of Ireland. Not to diminish similarly hardy and hardworking forbears on the paternal side of the genealogy--Dutch and East Prussian ancestors who had fled the bloody insanity of post-Napoleanic war and glory--arriving earlier than the Stantons and Noonans.

But the tears, the loss, the alienation and the longing they endured and overcame doesn't look anything like that hokey leprechaun-with-a-pot-of-gold luck so prevalent on the tacky St Patrick's decorations in all the bars and stores and restaurants today.

It wasn't luck that saw them through; it was courage, endurance and sacrifice...and, of course, the music.

Use economic clout to hammer the arrogant Directors of WMC

Jim Rowen at Political Environment as well as the Illusory Tenant and Plaisted Writes have been focused on the bizarre Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC) efforts to insure the election of a strange right wing bird to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Good work. This utterly cluesess waterboy for the fat cats, Michael Gableman, is an talentless, undistinguished lackluster, lightweight leaker being promoted by a collection of extraordinarily lackluster, lightweight leakers from the big bux lobby for Wisconsin Business and Industry.

In the midst of a Political Environment comments discussion of WMC on 3.11.08, a poster provided a list of the directors of WMC. I should have looked them up months ago. I found the President of TDS Telecommunications listed there--David Wittwer.

Hey, I send Wittwer $70 a month.

I wrote him a letter. I told him that I had nothing but appreciation for the superb service received from people in his employ over the past five years, as they helped me with Internet DSL service and occasional problems, telephone service, billing questions.

Then, I told Wittwer I was dumping his company ASAP. The Reason? HIS involvement as a member of the decision-making body of the WMC.

I gave him the details:

1. The WMC involvement in mindless sabotage of the Great Lakes Compact.

2. The WMC backing of ethically-challenged Annette Ziegler for Supreme Court.

3. The backing by WMC of the useful idiot, Michael Gableman for Supreme Court.

I may or may not hear from Wittwer. But--and I'm speculating, here--IF a significant number of his Wisconsin customers tell him directly that his backing of retrograde candidates and policies in Wisconsin political life will be met with a revenue and public relations hit for him and his company, he might begin to get a message.

Anyone out there using TDS?

Consider the possibilities in sending Wittwer a cancellation notice that connects directly to his WMC activities. Let's begin to use our consumer clout to counter the big bux arrogance of WMC.

If you do not have a TDS connection, look for other WMC Board members—bankers, publishers, etc., anyone who wants to sell you a product or service—who may be susceptible to economic leverage from customers who will cancel orders and services in the face of WMC actions that show contempt for environment , justice, working class incomes, savings and investment, etc. You can also get the list of WMC Directors in the comments after the Political Environment post on March 11.

P.S. My personal regrets to all of the really great TDS employees who have labored to give me an outstanding level of service for the past five years. This is entirely due to the stupid, backward-looking, dishonest meddling in Wisconsin's political life by the TDS President and CEO, their employer, David Wittwer, elected member of the Board of Directors of Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce.

You may not like the kind of chicken that comes from Pilgrim's...you may not like the way they feed and process them for market, BUT....

Pilgrim's Pride to close N.C. facility
No. 1 poultry processor blames ethanol push for driving up feed cost
CHOY LENG YEONG
Bloomberg News

Pilgrim's Pride Corp., the world's biggest poultry processor, will close an N.C. chicken-processing plant and six distribution centers and cut 1,100 jobs, blaming U.S. ethanol policies for pushing the industry into "crisis."

The company is considering closing other production facilities, citing oversupply and a "crisis facing the U.S. chicken industry" because of rising feed costs. Costs have surged along with the price of corn, which reached a record $5.795 a bushel Tuesday in Chicago. U.S. mandates promoting ethanol use led to record demand for fuel derived from crops.

"Our company and industry are struggling to cope with unprecedented increases in feed-ingredient costs this year due largely to the U.S. government's ill-advised policy of providing generous federal subsidies to corn-based ethanol blenders," chief executive Clint Rivers said in the statement.

"Based on current commodity futures markets, our company's total costs for corn and soybean meal to feed our flocks in fiscal 2008 would be more than $1.3 billion higher than what they were two years ago," Rivers said.

The company's plant in Siler City, about 100 miles northeast of Charlotte, employs about 830 people. Pilgrim's Pride will shut distribution centers in Oskaloosa, Iowa; Plant City and Pompano Beach, Fla.; Jackson, Miss.; Nashville, Tenn; and Cincinnati.

The Siler City facility represents 1.5 percent of the company's processing capacity and 0.4 percent of the industry's, Credit Suisse analysts led by Robert Moskow said in a note Wednesday. "While the move won't do much to choke chicken supply, this is a step in the right direction for the industry."

Ethanol subsidy--inducing farmers to plant more corn, then turn that extra food (and often a lot more that the extra)--into fuel for SUVs and monster trucks that get horrifically bad mpg ratings, not to mention all the latest vroom-vroom muscle cars for NASCAR idiots has devastating consequences। Huge layoffs of workers barely on the bottom rung of the economic ladder, devastation of one-company towns, higher food prices।. And, of course, the financial sector sees throwing thousand of workers out of jobs as a "step in the right direction".

Anything, absolutely anything, aimed at keeping the cars and trucks running in "happy motoring" mode, will be seen as salvation of the American way of life. This is sick and twisted.

You damn well better submit to our tender mercies...

March 11, 2008 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Waukesha Edition
Man shocked after confrontation

A Waukesha man who was shocked with a Taser gun after police went to his home to check on his welfare late Sunday was charged Monday with obstructing an officer. Randall L. Spenner, 44, was charged with the misdemeanor after a friend in Arkansas called police just before midnight Sunday after she had been unable to reach him on the phone. The woman, who met Spenner when they both worked for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, was concerned about his serious diabetic condition.

Police went to the 2600 block of Pebble Valley Road, but he wouldn't answer the door. The apartment building manager opened the door for police. Officers entered the dark apartment announcing repeatedly that police were there. When they opened Spenner's bedroom door, he was in the bed and pointing a handgun at the officers, the complaint says.

The officers exited the apartment and returned with shields, demanding that Spenner come out of the apartment.

The police demanded five or six times that he come out and show his hands. Spenner came out, but was yelling profanities. He refused to go to the ground and when he quickly approached one of the officers, he was struck with a Taser, the complaint says.

Spenner was taken into custody and later told investigators that he took an Ambien to help him sleep and never heard the police announcing themselves. An unloaded Smith & Wesson Magnum revolver was found underneath Spenner's pillow. Ammunition was found in a nearby closet, the complaint says.

I don't know Mr. Spenner, but--if he approves, and if the Waukesha Police persist in pushing this charge--I will work to have a few, or perhaps a dozen, maybe a score of citizens to provide moral, financial, and political support/pressure on the Police Chief, The Mayor, The City Council and the Fire and Police Commission to end this kind of out-of-control police behavior.

I'm not going to encourage this victim of police over-reach and excess to "Sue them". But that's only because I and my neighbors are the "them," who will pay the financial damages. But I promise to certainly push to have the whole use of and supervision of the use of Tasers made much more accountable.

Overload the police with victimless crimes and other minutiae and eventually only creeps and bullies remain cops. -- Rick Gaber

From the "highlight reel" of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel...

Please don't get me wrong. I liked athlete Brett Favre as much as the next fan. But the non-stop "news" both on the tube and in the paper have seemed...well, disproportionate.

This photo in the morning MJS caught the quarterback at an emotional moment. And the emotion that induced the tears is, no doubt, genuine.

But, does anybody else get the suspicion that there might have been some MJS photoshopping at work. There's something about the highlights in this photo that doesn't seem right.

Real estate collapse.... close to home.

When our family moved to a nice older (platted in 1924) neighborhood on the edge of Waukesha's central / downtown area, we were struck by the desafinado ambiance of a tiny cottage on the lot next door. It was non-conforming as to setbacks, both from the street and from the neighboring (our) lot. It was owned by the family who sold us our new house. I was offered the cottage along with the house we wanted to move into. $56 Thousand. It was touted as having reasonably good tenants and a good rental that would have easily covered PITI with some left over--and the possibility of appreciation.

Nah!

Landlording always seemed to me a pain in the butt. But there was the possible upside of being able to have some control over who lived that close to my lot line. And, while the cottage was tiny, the lot was normal size with four healthy towering shade trees and a yard that was nicely fenced. I occasionally worried someone who lived there might think it'd be cool to have three Doberman Pinschers and a Pit Bull.

Still... Nah!


Sixteen years later...

Two utterly gentle and quiet (whew!) Chocolate Labradors later.

Three owners later, including an unprincipled flipster who introduced himself as a Christian investor.

Two foreclosures later.

A 2007 City of Waukesha tax bill of $3,064, based on assesed value of $126,000.

The foreclosure paperwork published in late summer, 2007 by Abby O'Dess, Esq.--apparently the go-to law firm for dispossessing the foreclosed-upon (If you ever get a letter from the office of Ms. O'Dess and her Associates start packing up), indicated that the bankers had been stiffed to the tune of $112 thousand. At the auction on the courthouse steps on Feb. 4, 2008, the sheriff announced that the lienholder wished the bidding to start at $93 thousand.

Not a peep from the assembled dozens of bottom-feeders.

Today I called the real estate agent who has now been given the property to dispose of.

Asking price: $59,900.

Nah!

It is in better shape than it was in 1992. It has a new roof. The twenties era, never-
properly-dismantled septic tank has been dug up and taken away (at considerable cost). It has miraculously morphed into a substantial residence with 953 square ft. of living space, this in spite of the clearly observable fact that the footprint is identical to what it was in 1992 when it was described, listed, appraised and assessed as a cottage with about 840 sq ft. of living space. Perhaps this was the work of the pliant and eager-to-please appraiser who worshiped alongside flippo-man at the altar of greed and mendacity.

But, it has a basement. A basement dug some twenty years after the house was built in 1930. They carried the dirt up the "basement" stairs in buckets, I'm told. It is a basement that has sometimes been full of enough water to let the homeowner paddle a kayak down there.

Nah!


Did the bank price this shack knowing it would kill them if they have to hold on to it until the housing market begins to recover?

Yep!

Ralph Nader

As one who has never been a member--or even a hanger-on--of the Democratic Party, I cringe recalling the very first presidential vote I cast--six weeks after my 21st birthday, in a voting booth in Austin, Texas--for Elbie Jay. I didn't vote for another Democrat until 2004. And that makes me cringe anew. The very first as well as the most recent ballot I marked for U.S. President were for candidates who never should have had the job.

And I part company with people I most often find agreeable, sensible and mostly rational over votes for Ralph Nader in 1996 and 2000. I am not, I repeat: not responsible for G.W. Bush being in the Presidency.

Albert A. Gore was for 32 years elected to the US Congress, the last 18 of those years as the senior Senator from Tennessee. His son, Al Gore served four terms in the U. S. House of Representatives, then was an 8-year incumbent as the Senator from Tennessee, followed by 8 years as Vice President of the United States.

Yet, Al Gore couldn't win the electoral votes from his own state. What he did win was the popular vote in Florida. Then, he folded his tent and refused to fight for what was his. He handed the office to Bush. Does anyone remember who he chose to be a heartbeat from the presidency, his VP running mate? That would be Joe Lieberman. Joe and I have only one thing in common. Neither one of us has a shred of connectedness to the Democratic Party.

I long ago resolved I wouldn't vote for people who pass muster only as the least-worst of a bad lot.

I don't apologize for voting for Ralph. In all his life in politics and leadership of citizen action/activism he has done astonishing service to his county and for ordinary people. I like him best for what he has never done. He wouldn't think of doing what every Democratic Party standard-bearer for the past thirty years has done--make the pilgrimage to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to swear that he/she will never deviate from the political program demanded by that organization in exchange for votes and campaign contributions.

As long as powerful quasi-external actors like AIPAC and CANF (Cuban American National Foundation) and their lobbying and their threats to use vilification routines continue to hold sway over all candidates in our presidential elections, I'm sticking with Ralph and Dennis, the most recent in a line of candidates I've liked: Dick Gregory, Benjamin Spock, Frank Zeidler, David McReynolds, Jack (not Jackie) Gleason, Ron Daniels, Ralph (twice).

Read Barack Obama's AIPAC speech one year ago today. Listen to what he has promised to do.

Change? Obama's mantra is "Change"? Not on Middle East policy. As long as AIPAC has him on a leash there will be no change, just more of the same. And Obama's position follows Hillary Clinton's policy promises, practically word-for-word.

Here's a trenchant analysis from AlterNet of the stranglehold of AIPAC on the entire Democratic Party:

"...during the 2004 campaign Howard Dean called on the United States to be an "evenhanded" broker in the Middle East. That position enraged party leaders such as House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, who signed a letter attacking his remarks. 'It was designed to send a message: No one ever does this again,' says M.J. Rosenberg of the center-left Israel Policy Forum. 'And no one has. The only safe thing to say is: I support Israel.' In April a representative from AIPAC called Congresswoman Betty McCollum's vote against a draconian bill severely curtailing aid to the Palestinian Authority 'support for terrorists.' "

I believe--and there is good evidence--that AIPAC represents only a small-- but emboldened and too-often-catered-to--minority of Jewish-Americans, as well as a bunch of fundamentalist christian-zionists from outer space. The mystery is why American politicians continually tailor their foreign policy in the Middle East to such a fringe group. AIPAC exercises its members' constitutionally-blessed and incredibly skilled rights to lobby the Congress and the Executive. It gets ugly when anyone else who advocates for a peaceful two-state solution, advocated by enormous numbers of Israelis, Palestinians and Jewish-Americans gets smeared by the hard-liners as "Israel-haters".

One need only read the comments in Haaretz after any columnist writes on American presidential politics to get a feel for the polarization.

Words to live by:
The only vote wasted is the vote cast for someone who should not have the job.

Ralph Nader is a great American. I'm going to vote for him. Again.

The Next Slum

Think twice before heading west to realize your dream home... and perhaps read this interesting take on the future of suburbia in this month's Atlantic.

Thirteen sq. miles of land--farmland (mostly fallow), woodland, and marshland on the southern and western borders of the City of Waukesha are going to be within the city limits in the next two decades, according to planning documents and the pipe dreams of developers and City Administrators who see that development as a new source of revenue for running a growing city.

The Mayor, the Planning Commission and the Water Utility want badly to see all of this developed as "upscale," housing for high income new residents. They definitely do not want any "downscale" houses built.

But, Slum?

I'm so hungry I could eat a horse...

The Donner Party has always induced a grisly fascination around here. The lineage of my wife's family goes back centuries in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch Country. Her family name is close to Donner, but not exactly.

Her father did a good deal of research and satisfied himself that there was a distant familial connection. He also gave thanks that his immediate ancestors apparently declined the opportunity to go west with the others.

So...even though this particular item on the bill of fare is to adults what fart jokes are to six year olds, I've decided to serve it up on Water Blogged.

Check out Randall Munroe at xkcd Don't let the stick figures fool you. You may get to liking them more than you'll believe.

Col. Patrick Lang, U.S. Army, Ret.

This Washington Post Op-Ed was written over two years ago.

It was written--according to Lang--at a time that John McCain brought a proposal to the Senate which would have forbid the use of torture in interrogations by intelligence personnel. Cheney opposed this. McCain wanted the "limit" in what can be done to prisoners to be the US Army Field Manual on the subject.

Col. Lang has been described as a "soldier's soldier". His resume is beyond impressive. He's a Virginian with a long career and even longer devotion to the Army.

As a pacifist, I make a point of reading his blog regularly. His thinking and rationale for writings such as this keep me grounded in a world in which--I concede--it is unlikely that I will persuade many to embrace a principle position against war in any form. I admire his fundamental humanity and steadfastness in keeping his principles alive and intact.

He uses the last paragraph of this to praise Senator John McCain USAF, Ret. But, remember, this was written at a different (flip) time under different (flop) circumstances .

Cheney and the "Tormenters"
People often ask me at public events if I think it is "all right" to torture prisoners if that is necessary in order to obtain information needed to prosecute the "Global War on Terror." (GWOT)
I routinely tell them that it is NOT "all right" to torture people for any reason. The assembly expects that result from the question and they also expect that I will then give them the standard lecture which holds (correctly) that the tortured will tell you anything that they think you want to hear in order to get you to stop what you are doing. Therefore, information obtained through torture is logically suspect and worthless. Intelligence interrogators are supposed to be skilled at their trade. Their trade is about applied psychology, not about beating confessions out of people.
The audience is usually a little more surprised to have me tell them that "torture" is a dishonorable and immoral thing to do and that a decent person, especially a decent soldier, will have nothing to do with such things and will not allow it to happen around him or her. (At this point I can expect to hear from someone whose PTSD induced fantasy life will have encouraged a great story)
With the conversation having progressed to this point, a look of dramatic, and cynical world-weariness comes over some members of the audience and someone (often a woman) asks me what I would do if the "authorities" had captured "Fulaan Abu Shuismuh" (so and so, the father of what's his name) and this creep has the secret information needed to prevent a terrorist outrage, and won't talk. "Isn't it right to do whatever it takes....." That is the question that is always asked, often with a kind of dreamy, far off look in the eyes. I have gotten tired of this Sado-Masochistic day-dreaming, so, in response I ask them how far they would go in "whatever it takes?"
"All the way," is what these usually liberal, often academic, middle class Americans normally say. "OK," says I. "Let's say he is really obdurate and the clock is ticking on said 'terrorist outrage,' so we bring him in here and you and you will hold him down while I take his fingers and toes off one at a time with garden shears until he talks? Are you "in" for that?" Shocked silence follows. "Ah, I get it," says I. " You mean that it would be 'all right' for people like me to do these things." At that point it can be seen from the faces that this is the case.
Ah," says I as a "follow up," "then how far are you willing to go in 'immunizing' the tormentors from prosecution once the GWOT is a memory?" This does not get an answer. So, this is all BS, a fantasy for everyman and everywoman (complete with guilty frisson of titillation).
The danger is that Cheney and all the other political obsessives on this subject in and out of government encourage those among us who are quite capable of any bestiality that their furtive imaginations contrive. They hold out to the "dark ones" the possibility of accomplishing their dreams of power and domination. There are such people in any society, among any people, anywhere, and at any time. By creating a climate of permissiveness toward abuse of prisoners "for interrogation" the Cheney/Rumsfeld crowd have enabled a release of the demonic forces that, to some extent, lurk in all of us.
Now the Congress is deliberating a proposal by Senator John McCain of Arizona (who knows something about torture) which would forbid the use of torture in interrogations by intelligence personnel Cheney opposes this.
McCain wants the "limit" in what can be done to prisoners to be the US Army Field Manual on the subject. I think that would be most appropriate.

Pat Lang
Washington Post, Nov 7, 2005

Read Lang at his Blog: Sic Semper Tyrannis

Colonel W. Patrick Lang is a retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces (The Green Berets). He served in the Department of Defense both as a serving officer and then as a member of the Defense Senior Executive Service for many years. He is a highly decorated veteran of several of America’s overseas conflicts including the war in Vietnam. He was trained and educated as a specialist in the Middle East by the U.S. Army and served in that region for many years. He was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. In the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) he was the “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism,” and later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service.”

Notes on urban rail transit in Bangkok...

 

Three weeks in Thailand--visiting with family living there and enjoying a bit of urban exploration mixed with episodes of trekking/eating/swimming/snorkeling/eating/ laying around on the beach/eating--ended this morning with this cold wintry slap in the face.

Bangkok is a city alive and bustling and full of immigrants. Three "Lonely Planet" guidebooks (dated '04, '05 and '06) serially estimated population 7.7 million, then 9 million and finally 10.5 million). The Thai and lots of immigrants all seem to be getting along quite peacefully. As you can see, even the immigrant redhead above has adopted a low-key approach to hustling burgers and fries.

And they have a marvelous, brand new, beautiful, air-conditioned subway. It needs 300,000 riders a day to cover costs, including amortization of construction debt. After three years the ridership is only at 190,000, barely covering operating costs.

What can they do about this horrific financial disaster? Why didn't they get some of the mass transit analysts of Milwaukee instead of "environmental goofs" to advise them against this yawning maw of tax-devouring stupidity?

They are in the process of doing what needs to be done:
1. Expand the existing routes.
2. Add new routes.

It is still a new and relatively small system, a work in progress. The trains were often full when we rode them, indicating that those who had access--that is, lived within a quick walk or cab ride--used it. Those in different regions of the sprawling (you ain't seen sprawl 'til you've seen Bangkok sprawl) city will use it when it arrives in their area. As it expands, every user will have a larger range of options on the list of destinations. That's the way mass transit works. It doesn't pay for itself on day one, or even in decade one.

The planners have done a good job of phasing construction and planning for the considerable capital expenditures. Thai people in Bangkok presently have a semi-functioning transportation system: almost two million motor scooters, thousands and thousands of cabs, Tuk-tuks (three wheeled, noisy, open-air vehicles, less costly than cabs, but useful for someone with a lot of groceries to carry home), buses and private cars.

And they are choking on the air pollution as they sit and wait in traffic.

They are also seeing an astonishing rise in the cost of fuel. Eighteen months ago diesel fuel and gasoline cost 7 Baht per liter; today it is 32 Baht per liter. That is about $4 per gallon when you do the currency exchange--thirty Thai Baht to the dollar.

Thai working people typically put in 11 hours a day and usually work a six- or seven-day week. Typical wages for a maintenance worker or cook is about 4,500 Baht/month; 12,500/month for a skilled office worker.

So there is not a lot of money for transportation. Yet, the Thai economy grows and grows. Political leadership and professional planners know that growth, control of pollution and congestion will be achieved only with good, fast, efficient and inexpensive transportation. (I never waited longer than four minutes for a subway train.

Will somebody please send Mark Belling and Scott Walker over there on a fact-finding mission. If they don't like what they see, maybe they'll take it as an opportunity and decide to stay there to fire up the Thai people (as well as all the refugees they seem to allow in) with some blasts of anti-mass transit rhetorical flame-throwing.

IMHO, nobody can quite nail it like Jim Kunstler at CFN. Is there anyone in Milwaukee who could shut him up?

Beyond 'Coming Together'

The Iowa caucus set into motion a curious self-reinforcing feedback loop of inspiration -- that an African-American political leader could win an important primary contest in a Wonder Bread state, and that all Americans (especially white Americans) could "feel good" about living in a country where such a thing is possible. This is an understandable sentiment. Whatever else Americans have been conditioned to be lately -- blubbery, debt-crushed, tattoo-etched, Jesus-haunted, multiply-addicted TV zombies -- a residual kernel of fairness seems to persist underneath all that cellulite and avarice....(the rest)

JHK writes a blog article like this one, and posts it every Monday morning. He's been tub-thumping on familiar themes, and his weekly riffs expand his outrageous takes on a familiar topic--the inevitable coming apart of the sub- and ex-urban land o' tract mansions-- when fossil fuels grow really scarce and costly.

Which makes me think about a useful and enlightening community event we ought to cobble together: let's bring Kunstler to town for a debate. A genuine, give-and-take argument of the affirmative and the negative positions on a Well defined topic:

The Crisis in Energy. Can the United States Live with an Insatiable Thirst for More Fossil fuels?

This topic was recently vetted, carefully briefed, and is being weighed as a potential topic for the world of interscholastic/intercollegiate debate in the US for the coming season. The wording of the topic is carefully drawn to permit sufficient ground for both negation and affirmation.

The coming ten months will be full of trash "debates,"--the sort of nonsense talking points and "gotcha" lines that mock the ancient art of argument in American Presidential election years. It will be great entertainment, more dignified (by a hair) than mud-wrestling, and a chance for a fearless and acidic local partisan--whom I now nominate to make the affirmative case--to think on his feet.

Are you up for it, Mr. McIlheran?

A letter to the editor of the MJS editorial page....(copy to Jack Norman)

Editor:

Your editorial page, and the extent to which it has become amateur hour, is simply one more reason to no longer pay for a subscription. I read parts of the paper on line, but that's as far as I am willing to go.

Your community columnist, Barbara Fischer, self-described as a conservative economics teacher at a liberal arts college, doesn't warrant her "case". She has a seriously bent notion of what constitutes profit in a business.

She describes her faux-Socratic method of inducing truth and wisdom through cagey construction of questions posed to students. She also describes how she morphs into a dogmatist --answering the question before the students get a chance to be drawn out with further useful, clarifying questions. In the end she appears to have them chanting the same answer to every question. I'm not certain what she's describing; but it isn't education. Sounds like a madrassa. Here's her quote on how she gets it rolling:

"And how does the company have the means with which to pay you?"

The student replies, "I guess from their profits."

I respond, "That is correct."

That is, quite clearly, not correct. Employee wages are part of the cost of goods sold. That is deemed an expense. It is not derived from "profit". It is not taxed. Don't talk to me about payroll taxes. I'm almost certain that your perfesser hates them, too. But that's not what she is asserting with "That is correct". She's saying that employers/companies pay their employees out of profits.

A college level economics teacher (and Department Chairperson of the the Business/Economics Dept. at Cardinal Stritch University, according to information I googled up) who proudly displays that level of definitional and practical ignorance about what constitutes the portion of corporate revenue subject (if you happen to be one of the "little people" in the world of profits) to taxation ought to pack it in--as economist, as columnist, as animal rationis capax.

I actually believe I could make a good and workable case for completely abolishing corporate income taxes, though I wouldn't expect Fischer to second the motion As it stands now this class of taxation is so subject to the construction of backdoor finagling, and bizarre exemptions purchased from compliant legislators, it is indeed an immensely unfair system. Worse, it creates all manner of distortions of business practices that are designed not for any genuine business objective or efficiency, but merely as ways of shielding corporate profits from taxation.

Throughout the rest of the industrial world, a Value Added Tax (VAT) works well and with quintessential simplicity, not to mention even-handedness. That is the kind of thing that a bright and well-informed business economist could be writing on you page. So, why not recruit a well informed economist to write for your page instead of this bizarrely misinformed scribbler, who describes herself in the Cardinal Stritch Faculty list as having a Ph.D.,A.B.D.* degree.

Ph.D. A.B.D., for the untutored, describes an utterly laughable reification. Someone who lists "Ph.D., A.B.D." as a credential will try to persuade you to buy a "Semi-boneless Ham" or a pint of "Fat-Free Half and Half". It is either a ham with a bone in it, or it is boneless. Try to suss out from which half have they leached the butterfat to create something that is not good, not even half-good, not to mention impossible..

Either your columnist has a Ph.D. or she doesn't. That alphabet soup tacked on to the Ph.D. she claims to have, but doesn't have, says that she took a lot of courses, but still can't think straight, nor write with the cogency required to be called, to be a genuine academic, a professor, a Doctor of Philosophy.

Sad to say, this page has gotten increasingly ragged since your arrival; and seems to be getting even worse, now that they bought you a hotshot deputy from the outside -- one who looks to be getting vetted for a takeover. Back when Jean Otto had Op-Ed, she talked of how the schemers and bean counters often finagled to steal a quarter of the Op-Ed page for ads, how she had to fight for the turf. It's worse for you; my guess is that the ad people don't think there's currently enough readership. Or their clients who want good placement (next to Brett) aren't interested in the demographics of the editorial page and op ed, won't pay for readers who don't move their lips. Thus, you get lots of space to fill up with community columnists. It's like reality TV--you don't have to pay the "talent".

Just some pushback from a forty-year watcher of (used to be one who looked forward to the arrival of) the Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel. It has become way less than the sum of its parts.

This isn't for the paper, it's for the editor. (And Jack--who should have turned out the lights when he left 4th and State--because B.F., PhD., A.B.D. clearly had his recent work in mind as she scribbled that nonsense).

* A.B.D.= All But Dissertation

Oscar Peterson 1924-2007

 

I only heard/saw Oscar Peterson live once. Norman Granz brought Jazz at the Philharmonic to the cavernous barn called the the Cleveland Auditorium in the spring of 1967, the first (and, ultimately, last in the U.S.) JATP tour since 1957. I had a student in sophomore English whose father had been one of the DJ heirs to Alan Freed, when he left WJW Radio in 1958 for New York City. (Oooohhh, the loss: No more Moondog late at night, listened to in bed with a tiny transistor radio).

The kid had picked up that I was into jazz; he told me that he could get me one of his dad's comps. It wasn't all that hard a ticket to get; the hall wasn't full. But I was in the third row. The lineup was incredible: Duke, Ella, Oscar, Clark Terry, Joe Pass, Cootie Williams, Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Sims...on and on. Ellington introduced Oscar with that sobriquet he clearly loved to deliver: "The ever cool and aloof, Oscar Peterson".

I have never been to a rock concert. I've only been to one great concert. Oscar played two numbers solo that night, then accompanied Ella Fitzgerald's set, including an extraordinary "conversation"-- Ella laying down her sass in scat, he pressing the issue with that incomparable playing.

Sublime.

Thanks again to that sophomore and his dad.

Thanks, many thanks, to Oscar Peterson--the greatest jazz pianist of the 20th Century.

Yes, last post I referred to him as a clown. But, he's pitch-perfect in analyzing the GOP Main Line.....

A campaign bus interview with the Christian Broadcast Network yields this:

Huckabee:
There is a level of elitism that has existed, the chattering class if you will who lives in that corridor between Washington and Wall Street and they sort of live in their protected world, and frankly for a number of years many of them thought of people like me - whether it was because we were evangelicals or because maybe we were out from the middle of America. They were polite to us. They were more than happy for us to come to the rallies and stand in lines for hours to cheer on the candidates, appreciated us putting up the yard signs, going out and putting out the cards on peoples doors and making phone calls to the phone banks and - really appreciated all of our votes.
But when they got elected, behind closed doors, they would laugh at us and speak with scorn and derision that we were, as one article I think once said "the easily led." So there's been almost this sort of, it's okay if you guys get a seat on the bus, but don't ever think about telling us where the bus is going to go.

Pat Robertson is the founder of this network. He climbed on the Giuliani bandwagon just before Rudy's campaign dove headfirst off the cliff. CBN began running this stone cold disclaimer on a highly visible sidebar every day since the Nov. 9 Robertson endorsement of shagmaster Rudy.

CBN Statement
Pat Robertson as a private citizen has recently endorsed a candidate for public office. As a private citizen he has the right to participate in the political process, and is entitled to express his personal views. CBN, as a public charity, does not support or oppose any candidate for public office, and as a result will not address or comment further on this matter.

Good thing, too. It may not be an endorsement, but the Brody interview and lots of other coverage in this vein will cement the support of "easily-led" evangelicals for the Huckabee line.
* * *

Spare us from This clown after election day. But his record as a Governor will make for good debate material...

Joe Conason has dug a bit into how Huck-a Huck-a Hunk-a Burnin' Mercy had a thing for granting selective forgiveness played out when he was Governor:

Record Number of Commutations and Pardons...

Influenced by his fellow pastors, as well as by friends and relatives of inmates, Huckabee appears to have practiced what might be called "Christian cronyism."

[Crony]...prisoners seemed to have a special claim on Huckabee's attention, including those who labored as trusty servants at the Governor's Mansion, relatives of Huckabee's friends and employees and, in at least one case, a drunken driver who happened to be a wealthy real estate developer. (In 2003, he began serving a six-year sentence for repeated drunken driving offenses, but Huckabee let the man go after about six months. In 2006, he nearly killed a police officer in yet another drunken driving incident.)

Mercy is a wonderful quality, whether religious or secular. What seems far less wonderful is the dispensation of political favors disguised as religiosity—and that is exactly what the nation's founders meant to forbid.

Read it all here in the Shepherd

"Umbrance" and arrogance....

On Nov.14th, at the last meeting of the Waukesha Water Utility Commission, two citizens attended (For me it required getting up before dawn--6:30am--to be there in time to speak up as a ratepayer and resident).

I spoke up. I asked the Commission to stop holding meetings from which the public is excluded on the subject of "water supply options", just as I have asked several times in the past.

The Commission President, Daniel Warren, whose day job is "Development Manager" of Pabst Farms--just in case you're wondering whether the leader of the Utility is somebody who knows a good plan when he sees it--did get a little hot under the collar when it came time to discuss the motion to close the session. He claimed to "feel umbrance" over my questioning his integrity.

The time for public comment was over; I had no standing to speak. So I said nothing.

But, if I'd had the opportunity to speak I would have said this:

"Only one person in this room has ever been cited by the District Attorney of Waukesha for violation of Wisconsin's Open Meetings Law. Cited and FINED in July, 2006, for the offense.
That person is Daniel Warren, President of this Water Utility Commission"

"Umbrance" indeed.

* * *

The Business of the Waukesha Water Utility is the Public’s Business.

Mayor Larry Nelson, in the 19 months he has had the power to appoint four of the five members of the Water Utility Commission (as well as one seat at the table for himself), has been consistent in his replies to questions about what the Commission was planning on the subject of diverting Lake Michigan Water to the City of Waukesha: “No decision has been made. We are exploring all the options. When a direction is chosen it will have to be discussed by the City Council and is subject to their power to approve any plan. That will be the time for public input.”

On Nov. 14th, the Commission met at 7:00 am, a time when most Waukesha adults are either brushing and flossing or heading to work. On the agenda were about twenty items, large and small. Two appeared to be critically important to the public:
1. Approval of the 2008 Water Utility Budget.
2. A plan to evict the public from the room and go into a closed session, “Pursuant to Sec 19.85 (1) (e) & (g), Wisconsin Statutes, to discuss strategy relative to our long term water options, as well as radium compliance, with legal counsel”.

And, indeed, they did vote unanimously to exclude the citizens/ratepayers and meet in secret. Commissioner Greg Zinda: "Aye". Commissioner Alderman Peggy Bull: "Aye". Commissioner Mayor Larry Nelson: "Aye". Commission President Daniel Warren: "Aye". Commissioner Gerald Couri: Absent (again).

So they met. And the public still doesn't know what they're up to. Except, they gave us a hint. More than a hint. Their downtown lawyer from Reinhart Boerner, Don Gallo, hadn't arrived by the time the closed meeting agenda item came up. So, they skipped ahead to a review of budgetary stuff—pages of spreadsheets and detailed budgets for each Utility Department.

Perhaps inadvertently, tucked into seventy pages of figures we found, under a heading called "2008 Significant Budget Items," part of an executive summary provided by the Commission's accountant, Peggy Steeno:

“New Water Supply Investigation/Plan:
Included in this item are the consulting services to continue to assist the Utility with its investigation into a new water supply. The assumptions with this item are that an application for Great Lakes water will be submitted for review in early 2008. This item includes the support necessary to achieve development and approval of the application and initiate the negotiations with a wholesale provider. The current estimate for these services in 2008 is $300,000.”

Diversion of water from Lake Michigan is not something that the public has any information on, nor do the time-lines imply that we will have much to say about it.

It is a done deal. And it appears that it became a done deal through a two-year series of closed meetings: first, among the members of the Water Utility Commission and continuing in a parallel series of closed meeting of the Commission with the City Council.

Citizens of Waukesha are encouraged to come to the meeting of the Waukesha Water Utility Commission scheduled for Thursday, Dec. 20 at 5:30 pm. At the Water Utility Building, next to City Hall. Address the Commission, as is your right. City residents and customers need to be present at the start of the meeting. The first order of business is public comment. Make clear to the Commissioners that the public’s business is to be done IN PUBLIC.

Oh! About the budget. Remember the 17% increase in water rates that Mayor Nelson and his Water Utility Commission just put in place several months ago? Well, they are already planning another double digit increase which they discussed at the November meeting. The request for another big bite out of the ratepayers—probably in the area of 19%--will come at the end of 2008. Somebody has to pay the tab for the $300,000 for all those consultants they are going to hire beginning in two weeks.

Insist on an open discussion of these important matters. Make your opinion known.

The Public’s business must be done in public, not in secret.

Nothing like a little Christmas music to get you into the spirit of the season...

I've heard it three years running. All three times at Boston Store:

He sees you when you're sleeping

He knows when you're awake

He knows if you've been bad or good....

So...

So... who is this, warbling to our children in their jammies about who is naughty and who is nice, and what's in store for them in this season of giving? And why would Boston Store choose this as an element of their annual enticements designed to get us to light those little candles of desire and guilt and debt-be-damned buying that have become the essence of Christmas in America?

Peace on Earth.

Click here for the answer

* * *

Nov. 22, 1963. Where were you when Kennedy was shot?

 I was walking down Woodward Avenue toward Congress, The capitol's main drag, thirty blocks from downtown Austin, Texas, on a shirtsleeve late Fall day. It was close to 1:00 p.m. I was cutting class--something I had never done before--because I was on my way to see the President. The Austin American had reported the route of the President for the day: Dallas in the a.m.,a major speech at the Trade Center, then a flight from Love Field to Bergstrom Air Force (SAC) Base on the outskirts of Austin. The motorcade into the then-sleepy State U./State Capitol town.
 I had about twenty minutes to walk twenty blocks and hunker down at the intersection of 6th Street and Lavaca. I'd watch Jack Kennedy and his Camelot entourage go by, then head back to campus.
 While many were hearing Walter Cronkite's emotional report of the assassination on TV, I was out on the street, walking past a maroon Ford sedan. It was an unmarked law enforcement vehicle--oversize blackwall tires, a big whip antenna, and a hatless Texas Ranger standing outside the passenger door, actually leaning--no, more like collapsing--against the side of the vehicle. The police radio was on and the static and frantic words came out to this passer-by.
 Kennedy was shot in the head, rushed to a Dallas hospital….
 What to make of the short life and Presidency of John F. Kennedy? Four months earlier he had given an astonishing--and to many, profoundly disturbing--speech at the commencement of American University in DC. He was clearly staking out a roadmap to de-escalation of the arms race, a proposal to initiate negotiation of a nuclear test ban with the Soviet Union.
 The missile gap that had been a fundamentally dishonest centerpiece of his hawkish presidential campaign a thousand days before looked different after the Cuban missile crisis of October, '62. His eloquence evident in the speech--(Sorenson was the wordsmith, he was the orator) and the importance of his bold assertions were masterful. He was beginning his campaign for re-election in '64 in Washington, DC, perhaps the only place in America such a speech could be given and followed by applause.
 That sunny central Texas day, just a few months later, a counterpoint to the American University  address was the speech that Kennedy had in his pocket at the moment he was assassinated. It had been prepared for delivery at a luncheon that day to the Dallas Citizen's Council at the Trade Mart.
 Had Oswald not sighted his target and fired three times, Kennedy's motorcade would have pulled up to the Mart and JFK would have delivered a speech that rattled the nuclear saber--boasting of his expansions of both strategic and tactical nuclear weaponry.  It was a speech that intensified the rhetoric of the domino theory, and insisted that we needed to increase our arming and training of client states on the borders of the Soviet Union and Red China. He was, on the last day of his life, fine-tuning the hawkish theme of his campaign for re-election in '64--in Texas, where such a speech had to be given.
 I was 20 years old, stunned, stopped in my tracks; I'm still stunned. From there--in that chaotic and frightening moment-- this benighted nation spiraled downward.
Downward through a decade of assassinations and escalations and cities-in-flames and profound alienation, then went on to decades of self-indulgent, self-congratulatory excess and hubris, to today's sorry state of the American nation, it's leadership and its prospects.
 The day the President was assassinated a lot more than just one eloquently two-faced politician died.

Wolcott: Imus comeback is OK with me....

I've never heard Imus on-air. But James does make two really fine points supporting the case for Laissez les bontemps roulez:

I get the feeling that most of the bloggers recapping Imus's slurs and outrages at the microphone (and those of his former producer Bernard McGuirk) never actually listened to the program, except for a few bites here and there picked up online. Instead, they avail themselves of the Media Matters files or other Googly sites and trot out the same litany of low points, without mentioning the more ennobled sentiments Imus has expressed, such as muttering "war criminal" whenever Dick Cheney was mentioned.
....

As for whether or not politicians, pundits, and book authors should appear with the post-"nappy ho" disgraced-chastened-contrite Imus, my feeling is, Let grownups make up their own grownup decisions without flapping our hands in the air and acting scandalized, as if some invisible picket line has been crossed.
....

I've had nothing to listen to in the morning. Once I finish my meditation, I turn on the radio and soon turn it off again, one disappointed little cowpoke. The New York morning shows--nothing but sleet and drivel. I try listening to NPR but I'm just not a good enough person to be the receptacle for all that homogenized reasonableness lightly sugared with whimsy and vitamin-enriched with valuable life lessons. I'd rather hear Imus complain about a dead gnat floating in his herbal tea, or something equally earth-shattering.

George Bush or America? A Primer...

This is a link to an array of eight linked sets of photos. Each set has one of George Bush paired with one simply labeled "America". You need to scroll down through several of his Nov. 15 posts to get to the beginning.... No words necessary. Pictures tell it all.

TBogg - "...a somewhat popular blogger"
(Can't do a permalink. Go to archives and scroll down to Nov. 14. Worth the trip.)

No matter how many secret meetings get called, there's always a slip up....

The Waukesha Water Utility Commission held a meeting really early this morning that required anyone who wanted to see what was going on to get up before dawn.

After some criticism last year--that they they appeared to take to heart--the Commission began holding their meetings during the supper hour, as opposed to their practice of having them before breakfast. Was it just a coincidence that the day they want to have a secret session they go back to the old practice of meeting when most people are brushing & flossing or commuting to work?

Item # 5 on the agenda was a secret meeting. Item #1 was an opportunity for residents and customers to make public comments. So, your blogger requested that the four (out of five) members in attendance--seldom-seen Gerald Couri, Commission Secretary, was missing AGAIN--to defeat the motion to go into secret session. Mayor Nelson, it should be noted has in the past gotten quite irritated by my calling them "secret sessions". But, when I ask him to tell me what they talked about, he refuses. Why? Well, it's a secret.

So the Commission voted unanimously to kick out the spectators and meet in secret. Commissioner Zinda: "Aye". Commissioner Bull: "Aye". Commissioner Mayor Nelson: "Aye". Commission President Warren: "Aye".

State Law requires a pro forma notation in the motion to close a meeting that invokes one or more of the permissible exemptions from the Open Meetings Law.

Today's motion:

Pursuant to Sec 19.85 (1) (e) & (g), Wisconsin Statutes, to discuss strategy relative to our long term water options, as well as radium compliance, with legal counsel.

So they met. And the public doesn't get to find out what they're up to.

But, they gave us a hint. More than a hint. Here's how it happened: Their downtown lawyer from Reinhart Boerner, Mr Gallo, hadn't arrived by the time agenda item #5 came up. So, they skipped ahead to a truly mind-numbing review of budgetary stuff. Spread sheets full of abstruse although occasionally interesting stuff about how things look for the future. For example, the Utility had budgeted for the placement of around 300 new meters (new houses, new customers) in 2007. The number, six weeks from the end of the year is closer to 150. That'll put a small nick in revenue. But we're guessing that the Commission sees this as a minor glitch--real estate development should be going full tilt by next year.

But here's the biggie, conveniently tucked into dozens of pages of figures: Under a heading called "2008 Significant Budget Items," part of an executive summary provided by the Commission's accountant, Peggy Steeno, we read:

New Water Supply Investigation/Plan:
Included in this item are the consulting services to continue to assist the Utility with its investigation into a new water supply. The assumptions with this item are that an application for Great Lakes water will be submitted for review in early 2008. This item includes the support necessary to achieve development and approval of the application and initiate the negotiations with a wholesale provider. The current estimate for these services in 2008 is $300,000.

Looks like a done deal. They'll be assuming that the Great Lakes Compact is forever dead, and that the Water Resources Development Act is toothless. They'll probably sue on grounds that that the WRDA--which has been the only deterrent to wholesale diversions from the Great Lakes for the past several decades is subject to challenge on constitutional grounds. Then, they'll make a claim that Chicago's diversions of Lake Michigan water, with no requirement that diverted water be returned to the Lakes (virtually all of it goes down local rivers to the Mississippi), is a precedent that will allow Waukesha to tap Lake Michigan and send the water down the Fox, also to the Mississippi.

Last week, Jim Rowen at Political Environment talked about how John Norquist viewed the process of getting public input into the "work" of planning agencies. The public wants to know when there will be opportunity to see--and react to--the planners' "work".

The planners' answer involves a series of responses: Not yet....not yet....not yet....not yet...............Oops, Too Late.

Hallucinated nonsense....and some reality.

The nonsense:
Given the level of accurate assessment of our "enemies" in the US--and I'm referring specifically to the nearly 41% in late 2005, down from 64% a year earlier, who continued to believe, against all evidence, that Saddam Hussein had a ready arsenal of Weapons of Mass Destruction--one wonders what the man-in-the-street imagines about the size and military capability of Iran.

There has been a lot of exaggerated talk over what Iran may be capable of in three or five years. Note the hysteria that came from President Bush earlier this week as he raised the specter of "World War III" in talking about Iran's hallucinated future capability to produce even one thermonuclear device sometime in the future:

"If you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."

A small dose of reality:
An excerpt from Fareed Zakaria’s latest analytical column in Newsweek. Zakaria knows more about the Middle East than any other major columnist I know of. AND, he's widely acknowledged as a conservative observer:

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

Almost 60 years later: Still no National Health, and--sad to say--no repeat World Series

The same month my dad bought this pennant for me, Harry Truman was hammering the "Damn do-nothing 80th Congress" for their failure to enact his National Health Plan (among other things).

As a kid, with this on my wall, I recall liking this portrayal of an American Indian--said to be based on Mohawk images-- and there was something authentic about the crude stitching on the baseball in the background. I never liked the switch that introduced the "Chief Wahoo" mascot.

Maybe changing their name and ditching the chief would change our luck.

And--maybe, just maybe--changing presidents (the sooner the better; impeachment can work wonders) will change our luck on National Health.

You may just hate The NY Times for their "slant". But this is the simple reportage of FACTS.

Dollar Hits a New Low, Oil Hits a New High...

The New York Times

CARTER DOUGHERTY

Published: October 19, 2007

FRANKFURT, Oct. 18 — The dollar sank to a new low against the Euro Thursday as fresh evidence of losses in the mortgage industry stoked fears of a sharper-than-expected economic slowdown in the United States and crude oil rose to another record.

In late afternoon trading in New York, the euro traded at $1.4294, up from $1.4186 on Wednesday. Crude oil for November delivery rose $2.07, or 2.4 percent, to $89.47 a barrel. In after-hours electronic trading, the price rose slightly above $90.

Today I put twenty gallons of unleaded regular in my 1994 Ford pickup (small block V-6, 2wd, stick, no air)-- at the Kwik Trip on Grandview Blvd. in Waukesha, just off I-94.

$2.78 a gallon.

I might get this price a few more times, but by the time the oil--purchased at $90/bbl today--goes through a refinery in late November and appears on the market in Dec., I think the price will be up, WAY UP.

The paired trajectories of fuel prices (up) and the value of the USD (in free fall) are indisputable. Crunch time is upon us. A significant piece of the recent dip in gasoline prices is attributed to a one-time event: Third world countries that had been able to buy fuel when oil was $30/bbl to $60/bbl are simply dropping out of the market. What they do not buy appears as a temporary augmentation of supply.

The world's poor--those whose recent food source has been the energy-intensive Green Revolution--know that the intense energy inputs (fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation water pumped from ever-deeper wells) will be there no more. Here, we may feel the pinch--and, for some, more than just a pinch. In other parts of the world, people will starve.

Having this truck is pure fortuitous luck. I bought it for what a 12 year old truck would cost a few years ago. I keep it in good, safe condition--brakes, shocks, belts, leaf springs, oil, tune-up and tires (dents and rust matter little). I earn retiree-money by doing tree work, which makes the truck indispensible; but it is my everyday transportation, with a cost-per-mile that is way low.

For someone with a newish car or truck, with big payments and big insurance premiums, the coming uptick (should we call it a leap?) in gas prices is going to pinch.

But, if you are a mother in Honduras or Congo or Bangladesh, prepare to mourn your children.

A letter to the columnist, Laurel Walker...

Dear Ms. Walker

From today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial:

At the same time, the city and the county need to consider transportation options to get workers from other parts of the region to Pabst Farms. To its credit, the county already has started to raise those issues. We supported redevelopment of the I-94 interchange at Sawyer Road, but with a scaled down development, that could be done later. The state should give a higher priority to a western bypass around the city of Waukesha.

Whew! I was afraid that the editorial page would have to take you to the woodshed over some of your skepticism on PF. But, they've apparently decided that one little column from you--with its whiff of Emperor's-new-clothes--now makes big policy sense. During Summer, a big interchange was crucial. Just a few weeks later it can wait. And wait it will--perhaps, until something freezes over.

Now it's time to question their assertion that the Stepford wives and former real estate developers/agents luxuriating in the Pabst Farms experience will not want to--much less need to--work in the check-out lines of Ikea, or waiting on tables at one of the dozen upscale watering holes envisioned by the developers.

The masterminds of PF need to face the looming likelihood that they are about to join Francis Jay Schroedel in the fourth ring of the Developers Inferno.

Fourth Circle. (Canto VII) Those whose concern for material goods deviated from the desired mean are punished in this circle. They include the avaricious or miserly, who hoarded possessions, and the prodigal, who squandered them. Guarded by Plutus, each group pushes a great weight against the heavy weight of the other group. After the weights crash together the process starts over again. (In Gustave Doré's illustrations for this scene, the damned push huge money bags).

Nice work. Why don't you try to do some interviews with the Pabst Farms homesteaders and developers--that would make another good column. Then, maybe the editorial board will have to think about begging Whitney to come back onboard their little foundering ship. Just one withering look from her gimlet eye would likely give Patrick intermittent bouts of palpitations and mysterious itching rashes.

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Blogger poses a question. Decider snaps a response.

Kevin Drum, at Political Animal, has a beguiling way of pulling it all together in a few pithy sentences:

AROUND THE WORLD IN 90 SECONDS....

Turkey has warned us that if Congress passes a resolution calling the 1915 Armenian genocide a genocide, "military ties with the U.S. will never be the same again." Russia and the other states surrounding the Caspian Sea are cozying up to Iran and warning us not to even think about launching an attack against Iran's nuclear facilities. China is "furious" because President Bush is meeting with the Dalai Lama. India is having "certain difficulties" approving its nuclear deal with the U.S. Britain is pulling out of Iraq. The Iraqis are pissed off at us over Blackwater. Afghan leaders are angry over our poppy spraying program, and Pakistan continues to provide a safe haven for the Taliban.

Other than that, though, how are things going for us?

Because he occasionally stumbles over mere words and gets tripped up on syntactical minutia, George W. Bush reaches into his magician's silk hat and pull out a one-eared wascally wabbit--his version of high speed communication in the digital age.

Felipe Perez Roque, addressing the United Nations General Assembly, representing the Non-aligned Nations

Mr. President:

...Inequality among and within the countries is on the rise.

Drinking water is not accessible to 1.1 billion people; 2.6 billion lack hygienic and bathing facilities; over 800 million are illiterate and 115 million children do not attend primary school; 850 million starve every day. And 1% of the world's richest people own 40% of the wealth, while 50% of the world's population merely has 10%. All this is happening in a world that spends a trillion dollars on weapons and another trillion on advertising.

The nearly 1 billion people living in developed countries consume approximately half of all the energy, while 2 billion poor people are still not acquainted with electricity.

Is that the world that they want us to accept? Is that, by any chance, the future that we should settle for? Are we entitled or not to fight in order to change that state of things? Should we or should we not fight so that a better world can be possible?
Read the entire speech

It is this kind of talk that has induced the US to declare that Cuba is a pariah, a "sponsor of international terrorism".

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