Paul Soglin: Waxing America

WMC Tells A Gableman Joke With a Straight Face

Here is the exact quote from the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC) advertisement touting the crime fighting abilities of their candidate for Justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court:

As a prosecutor, Judge Michael Gableman tackled arson, sexual assault,  domestic violence and white collar crime.

Here are the facts:

• Gableman prosecuted only one arson case. The defendant was acquitted. That is correct, Gableman failed to get a single arson conviction in his entire career as a prosecutor.
• Gablemean participated in 19 felony child abuse cases. There was one, count it on one finger, one case, that resulted in a prison sentence.

And WMC wants us to believe them on complicated public policy issues, taxation policy, and the education of children.

Here is the link to the companies that make up the WMC board of directors who approved the advertisement:

WMC Board of Directors

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.

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.

Halloween Madison Style: Advice from the Grave

William H Whyte, best known for The Organization Man, wrote City: Rediscovering the Center in 1988. When the news appeared last night with another update on Halloween, I thought of some of Whyte's more cogent points.

From Chapter 2, The Social Life of the Street

• What attracts people most is other people.
• People 'self-congest'.
• Schmoozers are fairly consistent in choosing locations. They show a liking for well-defined places - the edge of the curb.
• Probably the finest street entertainer of our time is Philippe Petit...The prop that he was to use best was a policeman.

Whyte died in 1999. I wonder if anyone is listening.

Madison Halloween 2006. Party At Your Own Risk

The following is from the back of the Admission Ticket to State Street for Halloween, 2006

You figure out what it means. And if you want to shop at any store on State Street, tough. You are in the land of the perpetually progressive perfect where we decry the Bush Administration's Patriot Act but will not allow you, without the payment of $5.00, to walk a city street.

Mallatt's Sidesteps Walgreens and Wal-Mart

On Saturday, The Capital Times ran a story, Walgreens won't match Wal-Mart's $4:

..."We are not going to match the prices," Tiffani Bruce, spokeswoman for Walgreens, said Friday from the company's Illinois headquarters.

Neither will Community Pharmacy, a worker-managed cooperative in downtown Madison...

...it costs his shop about $8.50 in labor and overhead costs just to fill a prescription. That does not even take into account the cost of the drug itself, Kilmer added.

Kilmer said Wal-Mart's move devalues the important role pharmacists play in evaluating and dispensing medication.

"They are basically getting paid nothing for their time or expertise," he said.

David Kreling, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Pharmacy School and a pharmacist himself, said his research has found that it costs pharmacies $9 to $10 on average to dispense a prescription.

Mallatt's (technically Mallatt Home Care Pharmacy) on Monroe Street fills our prescriptions. It is real simple: we want the profits to go to someone local, they know everyone in our family, and they are a great neighbor.

I want lower drug prices, especially as I get older. There is a solution to the cost of healthcare in this country, and it is not Wal-Mart driving local pharmacies out of buisness with loss-leaders on generic drugs and it is not Wal-Mart destroying the neighborhood-based pharmacist.

Anyway, where would we get those great costumes for Halloween? No matter what Wal-Mart does, their plastic packaged gear will never match the orginal customes, the make up, and the charming blood and gore that Mallatt's brings to Halloween.

Madison Halloween 2006: The Nightmare on State Street

Herein is the sad tale of debauchery, shenanigans, and lechery in which scores of young people get real stupid and ruin Halloween for thousands...

Each Halloween after the sacking, pillaging and looting is reviewed, the professional hand wringers look over the Nightmare on State Street and vow it will never happen again.  And after each Halloween, Waxingamerica reminds the authorities that preparation has to begin immediately, not the following summer.

The starting point is the out of control, over the top house parties. These parties rival campus area taverns for booze consumption, but do not have the licensing responsibilities.

Factoid: It is estimated that Halloween revelers total in excess of 60,000 and perhaps exceed 80,000. The combined population of all of the patrons in campus saloons and taverns is 5-6000, downtown brings the number to 10,000.

No less an authority than the University of Wisconsin Alumni publication, On Wisconsin, in its Fall, 2006 edition, informs us with a point well taken:

"I don't care if people have parties," says (Madison Police Officer) Fiore, who has worked the campus area neighborhood for two years. "It just can't get out of hand..."

The view of Police Chief Nobel Wray is reasonable:

The goal is not to extinguish parties, but to keep them manageable..."We try to prevent out of control situations."

But there is a real life and death challenge:

"The problem with house parties is that they are operating as unlicensed taverns," says Susan Crowley, PACE's director. "They do not have the trained managers to control situations."

And therein lies the rub.  Each weekend, the dozen or so students taken to detox or to have their stomachs pumped  are more likely to be consumers at house parties than licensed taverns.

Halloween will be no different.

If Halloween is to be a reasonable event without the mayhem, year-round control of the house parties goes to the top of the list.