Paul Soglin: Waxing America

Kathleen Falk. For Attorney General. Enthusiastically.

Clearly, Democrat, Kathleen Falk is the candidate qualified to be Attorney General. Her public record shows:

• She knows the job. The AG does more than criminal prosecutions.  The Department of Justice must also handle regulatory matters, and either negotiate settlements or prosecute corporate offenders.
• She knows how to manage and administer. Her record as Dane County Executive demonstrates she can budget, deal with sensitive personnel matters, and look out for the taxpayers.
• She is balanced. The state needs an AG who values business growth and development along with the preservation of the environment. Her opponent is one-sided and owned by WMC.
• When you think of law enforcement, the phrases 'public safety' and 'to serve and protect' come to mind. Falk has demonstrated she understands the pubic responsibility that comes with the job, particularly in combating gangs.  Her opponent is curiously silent on the subject. If Wisconsin is to grow and prosper in the next decade, we need effective tools for stopping gangs.

To make Wisconsin great we need to save money and to stop crime. It is best done by stopping gangs before they wreak havoc rather than after the damage is done. Falk knows that and will act accordingly. She will save us money and make us safer.

I have had my differences with Kathleen Falk.  They are relevant as to differences within the progressive community. My views on her negotiations with Governor Thompson on the future of regional planning and certain land use issues were important within the Democratic Party primary.  When I look at her opponent's values on these matters, the contest isn't close. Van Hollen does not care about land use.  His views on drug enforcement indicate he cares little about reducing drug use, only about incarceration which is expensive to Wisconsin taxpayers. J.B., why not save money and stop the crime before it occurs?

Happy Halloween from Madison

From Anew Magazine, October, 2006. Paul and Sara as Gomez and Morticia. Costumes from Mallatt's.

Halloween: Glad To Be Wrong

Congratulations to Mayor Dave, Chief Wray, and the thousands of peaceful Freakfest participants. You did it!  Friday night's rehearsal and Saturday's performance broke a string of drunken violence and official overreaction.

With the exception of relatively few idiots arrested for throwing bottles and cans or otherwise endangering others, and the few hundred hard-core "dunderheads" (George Hesselberg's yearly take on this event is sorely missed.) yelling sports chants and refusing to disperse at the end, the combination of police restraint and careful preparation made a fun night for most.

Several factors helped make it work:

• The switch to Standard Time early Sunday let the bars stay open longer, which kept the flow of drunks on the street steady, rather than one enormous flood.
• Many kids from outstate campuses stayed away; the UW seriously enforcing its "no guests" policy for the dorms for the second year in a row had a real impact.
• The coincidental scheduling of UW football and hockey games packed the Isthmus with fans who were too drained by the football game's early start time and comeback win, and the hockey team's loss, to make trouble at 1 am.
• The closing to guests of the University Inn on State Street, so that impromptu striptease acts did not incite the drunks.

Of course, the amount collected from admissions, about $150,000, is a drop in the bucket of the actual costs, which include the many police from various jurisdictions, the ticket sellers from the Parks Department, the street cleaners, the private security folks, and the many support people from various city departments and other public agencies, including detox. Someone should do a serious cost-benefit analysis, adding up the real costs and balancing them against the profits of bars, liquor stores, hotels, and restaurants. Don't forget to include the enormous amounts of time and energy expended by elected and other officials in planning and logistics, and the social costs of so much underage drinking.

Nina Camic checked out the controlled fun on State Street ('kickass"), then ran into the sad aftermath a few blocks away, where an underage party was hesitant to call police to help someone passed out in the street with a gash in his head. If you read one capsule photo/essay of this year's event, this says it all: "Blood on faces looks a lot better when it’s fake."

A hat tip is due to Kristian Knutsen of The Daily Page, who liveblogged the event with multiple sources, and showed the media how it should be done online.  But most of all, everyone's thanks are due to the many police from state and local jurisdictions who pulled the lousy duty of two long nights of crowd control, and did it with good humor and restraint. The Capital Times reported that, at the tense moment when the hard core of the drunk crowd was goading the police into gassing them, two mounted Capitol Police officers, Joseph Volz and Penny Lepak, "visibly mellowed" the crowd by allowing revelers to pet their horses, "Susie" and "Montana," accepting strings of beads thrown by Mardi Gras pretenders, and passing out cards with pictures of their horses. That classic "community policing" move could have made all the difference between success and failure for the entire event.  Hats off to officers Volz and Lepak.

OK, enough Halloween discussion for a while; tomorrow is the real thing - the one for kids. Let's all enjoy the sight of little kids in costumes pretending to be bigger, and bigger kids in costumes reliving the fun they had as little kids. 

- Barry Orton

Halloween 2006: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

As the stale beer passed into the night, Madisonians, led by their mayor, thanked the Great Pumpkin for a relatively peaceful night.

The Good:

• Arrests were significantly down, compared to the last four years, and more importantly, so was the damage to property and persons.
• Clearly the massive police presence contributed to the tranquility.
• While not intended to reduce crowds, the plan to sell tickets assisted in two ways:
  • The cost of admission reduced the numbers of goblins.
  • The controversy surrounding the charges, contributed to the greater dialog with the campus community, which in turn brought more people over to the side of 'peace.'
• The city, particularly the mayor and the police department, spent a considerable amount of time withe students. The old question, "What would you do if you were in my shoes?" paid off.
• The police department became serious in months prior to the event, making it clear that over the top partying with excessive quantities of alcohol would not be tolerated, at any time. Let's see if they keep it up.

The Bad:

• The financial cost to the city was not pretty.  Preparations were in excess of $400,000. And with the tickets sales down considerably, the fiscal picture does not improve.

The Ugly

• Madison, the city formerly know as The Most Progressive City in America, and that Includes You, Berkeley, achieved peace at an enormous cost. It charged $5 to walk down a public street. I wonder how much they will charge for the next peace demonstration?

Last Pre-Halloween Post, For Now

The low pre-event sale of Halloween tickets is eerie.  There may be a large crowd demanding admission causing significant chaos, making State Street a powder keg.

Or, no one will show up.  The latter is a possibility as the chilling effect of charging admission to a public street takes its own toll, not a financial one, but a democratic one.

The city focused on being the most progressive in America keeps people from gathering by imposing a monetary obstacle. The irony should not be lost.  The $5 tax on the First Amendment will result in  a loss of revenue for area merchants, a loss of income for the city, and a loss of liberty.

Stephanie Miller and Keith Olbermann: "Whatever"

Connecting the dots:

• Stephanie Miller regularly plays the short clip of 'Whatever,' which according to the show's cultural maven, Executive Producer Chris Lavoie, comes from the film, Clueless,
• Stephanie Miller maintains a list of prospective husbands which includes noted brilliant, talented, and handsome Keith Olbermann.
• At the opening of his Thursday night show, Olbermann played the beguiling, 'Whatever.'

Whatever. :)

Rumsfeld Loses Cool: Admits Fallibility

...it's difficult. We're looking out into the future. No one can predict the future with absolute certainty...You ought to just back off, take a look at it, relax, understand that it's complicated, it's difficult.

Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld October 26, 2006

Additional quotes:

The terrorists seem to recognize that they are losing in Iraq. I believe that history will show that to be the case.   March 19, 2006. What We Gained in Three Years in Iraq

And in this war, some of the most critical battles may not be fought in the mountains of Afghanistan or the streets of Iraq, but in the newsrooms in places like New York and London and Cairo and elsewhere.  February 17, 2006. Council on Foreign Relations

And we're going to go back down to our (troop levels) baseline of about one hundred and thirty-seven, thirty-eight thousand, after the (Iraqi) elections. I'm sure of that. December 8, 2005. Jim Leherer interview author's note: Troop levels are over 140,000.

I don't do quagmires.  July, 2003. Right Wing News

We’re going to create a secure environment; we’re going to provide humanitarian assistance for the people of Iraq, medicine, food, water.  And we’re going to create an environment that they can fashion a new government.  It will be an Iraqi government that has been fashioned by Iraqi people and it will not be a government that is imposed by the United States. ..

...My hope is it takes a relatively short time, but if we wanted to decide how long it would take, we could go do it, but then it wouldn’t be an Iraqi government.  One would hope it would be relatively short.  April 29, 2003.Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with Middle East Broadcasting.

Halloween: So Far, Not So Good

Ticket sales so far are a joke.  At noon on Thursday no one was going near the ticket window on Lake and State.  That's right, at lunchtime, two days before the "spontaneous event" that the City of Madison is selling $5 tickets for underage drinkers to attend, sales were nil.  Nada, nicht, nein, zip. In the ten minutes that WaxingAmerica watched the ticket trailer, not one ticket was sold. Two windows open; no customers.

The City is now working on "flexibility" in its approach to ticket sales on Saturday, with alcohol policy coordinator Joel Plant suggesting that there could be  "...ticket agents in aprons, selling tickets as they circulate the crowd."  The Capital Times reports that:

Aside from how the night ends, one of the foremost concerns among those running the city's Halloween party is whether they can sell tickets quickly enough to avoid a pileup at the gates.

With only a few thousand advance tickets sold, organizers now anticipate a huge crush of demand as the party gets started Saturday on State Street.

That worries some, including City Council President Austin King, because if crowds are forced to wait long for tickets, they could become unruly or simply give up and take the party elsewhere.

"I'm not very happy," King said Wednesday. "Whenever you create lines of drunk people, you get fights. I've seen it happen too many times to not share safety concerns."

This is starting to look like a recipe for drunken mobs at the few entry gates and on Langdon Street.

WaxingAmerica has shared its concerns and experiences regarding Halloween often. It's an obsession of Paul's, given his history with unruly crowds on both sides of the barricades.

There is a promising development: CRASH Madison is a local attempt to use modern technology to inform participants as the event "spontaneously" develops. Using cell phone text messaging to "keep people safe and happy on Halloween weekend by providing instant text message updates during the festivities," the CRASH folks hope to "facilitate sousveillance, not surveillance - help participants record the experience and share it, both for the fun and amusement, and also to discourage dangerous crowd and police behavior."  Sousveillance depends on cell cameras and relatively sober text messengers to work.

Another promising development is Dane101.com's decision to make Halloween a specialty of the site. While the local professional media have making Halloween a big part of their online thing, with Channel3000 and the dailypage particularly informative, Dane101's Jesse Russell has been all over the issues, plans and ephemera of the 'spontaneous event" for weeks, even to the point of sponsoring a kickoff party at the High Noon Wednesday night.

Not so promising: Mayor Dave's latest strategy for keeping the peace:

...as a final precaution, the mayor in his speech today at the Wisconsin Education Association Council convention encouraged teachers to come to the Halloween bash.

"If UW students see their eighth-grade teacher walking down the street, hopefully it will encourage them to behave," (spokesman) Twigg said.

It doesn't inspire confidence.

- Barry Orton

Comment from Paul: Pray for rain, sleet, and frigid temperatures.

From The Republican House to the Big House

Stephanie Miller commented Wednesday morning on the viciousness of this year's Republican attacks. Since the 1980's elections have become angrier and meaner. If it is a year when a political party in endanger of losing the White House or a house of Congress, it becomes even despicable.

The 2006 election is especially nasty, more malicious than ever.  There is a reason.

These guys are fighting for more than their seats, they are fighting to stay out of prison. After serving as George Bush's bitch, it seems incongruous that these guys would fear becoming the bitch of some dude named "Tiny."

A number of Republicans undoubtedly fear not just the loss of their power but the prospects of jail. With a majority in either house of Congress, the Democrats will conduct hearings and investigations. While Congressional hearings do not lead to criminal charges or indictments, they can open sealed records of graft, embezzlement and blackmail. Up until now, prosecutors have been thwarted in efforts to investigate the millions billions  of dollars siphoned from the Iraqi debacle. Next year everything becomes fair game.

Wisconsin Sports Heroes Make Political Endorsements

No election would be complete without notice of the involvement of sports stars.  Here in Wisconsin we've enjoyed two of our icons getting involved in the race for Governor.

By now, you know that Milwaukee Braves legend Hank Aaron appeared with Governor Jim Doyle in Wausau, Milwaukee and Eau Claire. Doyle's family managed to unearth his fourth-grade notebook, into which the hero-worshipping Doyle had scratched "Hank Aaron."  Fawning media coverage flowed like rainwater and sewage going through Milwaukee's "deep tunnel" into Lake Michigan.

Not to be outdone, Representative Mark Green's campaign announced that Green Bay Packers legend Bart Starr will appear with the Republican outside Lambeau Field this Sunday morning. "Having a champion like Bart Starr on your sideline can be a frightening thought for your opponent. Just ask the 1967 Dallas Cowboys," Green said in a statement. Think Starr will toss a short rainbow to Green for the TV cameras?  Of course.

So Doyle's got the hero of the 1950's on his side, and Green's got the late 1960's covered.

But wait: there's more.  Bart Starr is also supporting Republican secretary of state candidate Sandy Sullivan, calling her "a reliable, as well as remarkable candidate..."  Better yet, Sullivan's self-published book claims that she had an early 1960's affair with Packers great Paul Hornung. The book's forward has Hornung stating Sullivan was a "carefree, fun-loving girl who fit right in with me and the rest of the 'Pack.' " Sullivan's book also claims a 60's-era relationship with Packer linebacker Dan Currie. This juicy stuff has gotten Sullivan on CNN, Fox News, ESPN, MSNBC, and all over the Wisconsin media. But the best is her blog, which she clearly writes herself.  The account of her campaign swing through Rice Lake, Haugen, Spooner, Shell Lake, Cumberland, and Turtle Lake with Packers giant Fuzzy Thurston has convinced WaxingAmerica to make its first GOP endorsement.

Sorry, Doug LaF.  Sandy Sullivan for Wisconsin Secretary of State.  Fuzzy Thurston can't be wrong.

- Barry Orton