Paul Soglin: Waxing America

Three Views of New York and Two of Madison

I traveled to New York for the weekend to attend a gathering at the Brecht Forum of University of Wisconsin graduates who were students of Harvey Goldberg.  There was an excellent but unsettling presentation on our involvement in Iraq.

There is no question about the sinister intentions of the Bush administration. The tragedy is that all of the evidence was available in 2003 for intelligent people to see the nature of our interest in Iraq, oil not humanitarian. Yet the American people and the Congress were bullied and intimidated into supporting this adventure.

Glenn Silber presented a few excerpts from the The War at Home.

It was great to see so many old classmates and catch up.

The next day I settled in to watch the Badgers play Michigan State in my hotel room. Impulsively, I changed my mind and headed to the Upper East Side. I had no problem finding the Mad River Bar and Grill. It was the saloon with the inflatable Bucky Badger on the sidewalk on Third Avenue. Once I was inside, I was back in Madison. No question about it.

There were a few others over the age of 40, but as I learned from the Badgers there, most of them attended the UW in the 1990's. They were a mixture of native New Yorkers, a few transplants, and more than several who grew up in Madison. It was fun, and I did not mind their innocent reminders as they told me their stories, that I was the same age as their parents. Go Bucky.

When commercials aired, rock from campus days was played with the entire patronage joining in. They sing pretty good.

I left with Wisconsin leading 34-24 and headed to Times Square to join a classmate to see Spring Awakening.  Again, I was overpowered by the spirit of youth. If you missed the sweetness, the bitterness, and the exhilaration of growing up, you will be wasting your time. All others get in line to see this great award-winning play.

The play's value lies not only in its content and the quality of the production, but also how it was developed. The Atlantic Theater Company strives to open the world of the theater to creative people, with important stories to tell, who use their gifts, not gimmicks.

Cubs Win; Brewers Lose

Final Waxing America reader poll had Cubs @ 36.8% and Brewers @ 36.0%, proving the accuracy of online polling once again.

- Barry Orton

Wisconsin Policy Research Institute: Milwaukee Can Tolerate More Black Murders Part II

The Shark and Shepard, Rick Esenberg is unhappy with Wisconsin Policy Research Institute: Milwaukee Can Tolerate More Black Murders, my take on a report by John McAdams, entitled: Does Wisconsin Lock Up Too Many Blacks? Do not forget the title.

McAdams answer is "No."

Rick pushes me: Let's not confuse ourselves with facts:

Rick:  Professor McAdams does not say that the number of homicides in Milwaukee is what we would expect or that it is acceptable. In fact, strictly speaking (always a good thing), the study says nothing about the homicide rate.

Paul: True.

Rick: What he was looking at is disparities in what happens to blacks and whites after a crime has been committed.

Paul: True, but Rick, you miss the point. McAdams posed a question, "Does Wisconsin Lock up Too Many Blacks?" in challenging the premise of Governor Jim Doyle's Commission that is looking into the question of racial disparity in Wisconsin's prisons. I did not pose the problem; McAdams posed the question in order to fleece some research money.

McAdams tells us that if blacks commit crimes at a higher rate than whites and then they should be locked up at a higher rate.

It might seem, on first glance, that “racial disparity”—and here the issue is that blacks are jailed and imprisoned at a much higher rate than whites—is a bad thing.

But what if the disparity is the result of the fact that blacks commit more crimes than whites? Looking back at the Governor’s charge to the Commission, if it’s not established that the disparities are the result of discrimination, how do we know we want to eliminate them? And what if incarceration in fact serves highly desirable goals of deterring crime and incapacitating the criminals?

McAdams asks, "So is the Wisconsin Commission on Reducing Racial Disparities in the Wisconsin Justice System on a fool’s errand?" McAdams is on the fool's errand.

The report never examines the question which, hopefully the Governor's Commission will examine:

If we know that poor blacks in the inner city commit more crimes than other groups (say rural blacks, rich blacks, rich whites, radio commentators) then tell us something we need to know: Why and what can be done to change that?

McAdams uses his preconditioned prejudices and right-wing social theories to dictate the outcome. Any person with a brain in their body would look at the data and conclude that Wisconsin does lock up too many blacks and try to figure out how to solve that problem.

Homicides?

Yes, Rick, I was being tongue-in-cheek. If we approached the question of Milwaukee's high homicide rate with the same approach that McAdams used, we could come to the same conclusion: Given the level of poverty, the number of blacks and Milwaukee's urban setting, we should take comfort that the rate is so 'low.'  McAdams' methodology suggests we should not be concerned until the numbers double.

The only conclusion I get from McAdams report is that it is necessary to reduce the number of poor blacks if we want to lower either the homicide rates or the incarceration rates.

I vote for eliminating the poverty.

Wisconsin Policy Research Institute: Milwaukee Can Tolerate More Black Murders

The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute published a new study,  Does Wisconsin Lock Up Too Many Blacks?  The report is authored by John McAdams, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Marquette University.

The implications are astounding. It means that Mark Belling, Charlie Sykes, and Jessica McBride will have to find another rant.

The McAdams report suggests that Milwuakee homicide numbers are within reasonable expectations. In fact, more murders can be tolerated. McAdams's methodology  changes the way we analyze all crime data including homicides.

Based on his model, McAdams finds that the incarceration rate of Wisconsin blacks is within reasonable expectations.

Traditional studies rate Wisconsin among the top states in terms of incarcerating blacks compared to whites.

...Wisconsin ranks near the top in terms of racial disparity. Human Rights Watch shows Wisconsin in fourth place, and The Sentencing Project shows Wisconsin in fifth place, with a disparity ratio of 10.6, right behind Iowa, Vermont, New Jersey, and Connecticut.[v]

Undaunted, McAdams notes:

...But before one gets too upset about the disparity in Wisconsin, one has to ask whether it is actually out of line...(Emphasis added)

McAdams suggest he has a better way of evaluating the subject: Look at the number of blacks in an urban setting, the rate of poverty, and then calculate the expected incarceration rates.*

The conclusion is rich with implications:

So how did Wisconsin fare in this model? Our model predicted a racial disparity of 12.13 in Wisconsin. But the actual figure was 11.58. In other words, Wisconsin has a bit less racial disparity than one would expect. (Emphasis added)

In other words, compared to what we might expect given the concentration of poverty and the number of blacks in urban Wisconsin communities (Milwaukee, etc.), we really do not lock up too many blacks.

The implications are rich with ways of changing our views of Milwaukee murders. The murder rate per 100,000, for New York City in 2005 was 6.6. Milwaukee was 20, Detroit 39, Los Angeles 12.6, and Chicago 15.6.

Using traditional models based on homicides per 100,000 New York looks good, so does L.A.  Those were numbers, we were told, that Milwaukee should emulate.

But with the McAdams approach, we look at poverty, the number of urban blacks, and we can set higher expectations.

Even though we might be approaching Detroit style numbers, not to worry. You are looking at them incorrectly. Using the McAdams Index, we could expect the 2005 homicides to soar to 300 and still be within acceptable limits.

Sykes, Belling, McBride---stop your whining. Given the levels of poverty and number of blacks in Milwaukee, our homicide are well within tolerable rates.

Someone paid for that crap.

*So we created a statistical model of racial disparity, including each state and the District of Columbia. In order to predict the disparity of each state, we simply used the proportion of blacks in the state who live in a central city of a Metropolitan Statistical Area.[vi] It turned out that there is a strong relationship: states with relatively few blacks in the central cities of metropolitan areas had low disparity scores, and those with a heavily urban central city black population showed high ratios. A ten percent increase in the percentage of blacks living in central cities increased the disparity index by about one, and a 30 percent increase kicked it up by about three. We then added, for each state, the percentage of the black population below the poverty level, and the percentage of the white population below the poverty level. We found, as expected, that black poverty drove up the disparity ratio, and white poverty drove it down (as more whites were imprisoned).[vii]

Author's note:  here is my second post on subject responding to Shark and Shepard: Wisconsin Policy Research Institute: Milwaukee Can Tolerate More Black Murders Part II

Cieslewicz follows in Footsteps of Mayor Daley, Ronald Reagan and Tommy Thompson

Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley wrote the book on how to beat the civil service system. He knew that to maintain his style of political control he needed to place his people in more than the department head or cabinet level positions. The key was to control the civil service system. Rig it so that his people would get the jobs.

Ronald Reagan realized that he could not enforce his brand of conservatism on the federal government simply by passing laws and controlling the cabinet and deputy cabinet positions. He had to control the career civil service appointments and get young conservatives into these government posts. Tommy Thompson did the same when he became Governor of Wisconsin.

Now Mayor Dave Cieslewicz brings this boss-style politics to Madison. This pattern is well documented.

This week he appointed a friend of mine, someone I long supported in his campaigns for public office, Bill Clingan. As Marc Eisen notes in Isthmus, Mark Bugher and Tom Still resign from Madison Economic Development Commission:

It was surprising to learn he declined to accept the recommendations of the screening committee, especially when there was a candidate who truly fit the profile," Still said.

Both he and Bugher said they knew Clingan and liked him personally, but they questioned the appropriateness of his background. They said a screening committee had voted 4-1 to recommend Matthew Wagner for the job.

But the greatest insult to the integrity of government, the progressive tradition, and Bob La Follete came from mayoral mouthpiece, George Twigg:

Mayoral spokesman George Twigg defended Clingan's hiring, noting that Clingan was among three candidates the review committee certified as qualified for the post.

The ranking that put Wagner first was "for informational purposes," Twigg said, and that the selection of the new director was "not a majority vote kind of thing" but a mayoral decision.

Informational purposes???!! Are George Bush's White House speech writers turning this crap out? This administration has no regard for the intent and the purpose of personnel processes. This is some kind of psycho-babble, rendering the personnel process meaningless.

It has long been documented by Brenda Konkel, in her own repeated posts. Her latest is this one, City Commitee Resignations:

This was a trainwreck anyone paying attention probably could have seen coming. Just like trying to hire a Clerk/Treasurer, it's very difficult to find someone who has the skills in both areas. I even asked the question at the time and I was told "don't worry." And of course, the Mayor pretty much promised the business community an "Economic Development Czar" position, forgetting about the second half of the job which was the "Community Development Czar" part of the position.

I gotta say, this Mayor just doesn't care who he alienates. Didn't he learn anything from Sue Bauman?

When Mark Bugher, Tom Still, Brenda Konkel, and Paul Soglin all agree that the civil service process is abused, someone on the city council and in the city attorney's office had better take heed.

Culturally Deprived Bill O'Reilly: Clearly Missing the Fried Chicken and Watermelon

Bill O'Reilly provided the most racist restaurant review in modern times.  O'Reilly is surprised "there was no difference" between Harlem restaurants and other New York restaurants:

There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, 'M-Fer, I want more iced tea.' You know, I mean, everybody was -- it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn't any kind of craziness at all."

The only thing missing was his take on the fried chicken and watermelon.

The beauty of the review was that it was heart-felt and unsolicited. O'Reilly did not understand the stereotype his innate bigotry provided last week.

In the spirit of furthering stereotypes about the dinning conditions in white restaurants I provide the following:

• Mobsters gunning down enemies in Brooklyn Italian restaurants as portrayed by Michael Corleone in The Godfather. A murder or two never hurts sales and food never suffers unless the chef is shot.
• Hunny Bunny and Pumpkin holding up the patrons in every Denny's or Perkins in Los Angeles. Pulp Fiction proving once again that poor white trash have no table manners.
• Young white women with their sexual displays and no regard for the feelings of adjacent diners in When Harry Met Sally.
• Never think that dining in the City by the Bay is tranquil and serene if some rogue Irish cop in Sudden Impact finds that it is time to "Make my day."
• And we won't even go into Alice's Restaurant, least the health officials shut it down.

O'Reilly is close to sixty years old. The average age of his viewers and listeners is seventy-one. What is so stunning is that a man his age with his experience could go so far in life and be so ignorant. He is a fool. 

It is refreshing to see the man naked and honest. I am sad for him.

I am more saddened for a nation that welcomes his ignorance into its homes. Capable of such profound stupidity on the nature of black culinary habits, one must realize how he comes to his preposterous conclusions on matters of war, public education, global warming, and violence.

Update: 10:33am. Charlie Sykes in a full court defense on behalf of O'Reilly. He is challenging critics that they have not heard the entire statement and it was taken out of context. MediaMatters has it all.

Sykes, like O'Reilly does not get it. There is no question that O'Reilly was trying, in his own way, to pay a compliment and make the point that all people aspire to the same high standards. Fine.

But it was done in a condescending, race-based manner. In context, what he might as well have said was, "When blacks want to, they can dine in a civilized polite manner like white people. And some do and I commend them for it"

Update 2:45 pm Shark and Shepard weighs in:

Locally, Paul Soglin and Eugene Kane repeated the point.

I doubt that either of our local friends actually listened to the segment, It was apparently part of an extended commentary on racial stereotypes and the way in which people respond to the legacy of racial expression.

Rick, I did listen to the entire discussion and provided a link to it earlier this morning when Charlie Sykes also accused the critics of taking the matter out of context.

The point is that Bill O'Reilly tragically falls into a stereotype himself..old white man who claim not to have a prejudice bone in their body or thought in their head, but because of their own limited experiences, usually self-imposed, do not understand, that when comparing characteristics or behavior by race, it is implicitly racist to commend one race for meeting a standard of another race:

• He is as honest as a white man
• He is as fast as a black.
• She is as smart at accumulating money as a Jew.
• He is doing so well with those Stop and Go's that you would think he was an Arab.
• She dresses like a.................. you fill in the blank.

Brewers' Unrequited Love For Umpires

The Wisconsin State Journal has splurged most of this year's travel budget to send Vic Feuerherd on the road to cover what became the Milwaukee Brewers' slide out of contention. As a result, Feuerherd was there for Sunday's meltdown in Atlanta that resulted in a 7-4 loss and manager Ned Yost's ejection over arguing a play at the plate.

Today Feuerherd provides a sidebar that sheds some light on last night's multiple Brewers-umpires confrontations, in which Yost, batting coach Jim Skaalen, and catcher Damian Miller all got tossed.

Yost didn't want to rehash Sunday's events.

But he spoke about how he has tried in five years as manager of the Brewers to promote relationships between his players and the umpires. The team puts pictures of that night 's four umpires on a bulletin board in the clubhouse and the arrangement includes biographical information and what base they are covering.

"We try to treat people like people, with class and professionalism,' ' Yost said. "All we ask is that (the umpires) have the same respect for us."

So, despite the bulletin board love complete with photos and cutout pink hearts, the email requests for dates, and the Myspace messages, the umpires haven't reciprocated. That's how it always is: the nice guys who treat the objects of their affection with class get shot down, while the bad boys with three days of stubble get all the girls.

- Barry Orton

Sex at University of Wisconsin Football Game: Easier to sneak in than out

We have some rules here at Waxing America.

Strive to increase reader hits, but never do so with tawdry sex or gossip that is demeaning to our readers or that undermines our purpose of bringing insightful political analysis to the readers, with one exception: sex associated with sporting events, such as, Carolina Panther Cheerleaders Challenge Intelligent Design.

The Mike Miller article from The Capital Times, Sex in Camp Randall stall nets disorderly conduct charges was too good to pass up. I was fully engrossed in this lurid tale of depravity and shame, having once engaged in a similar folly in my youth.

While the Badgers were scoring frequently in the second quarter of their victory over Washington State on Sept. 1, a young couple was scoring on their own in a stall in the women's restroom in the upper deck...

Let me warn all of you foolish enough to attempt this silliness of one thing.

...when she returned she reported she asked the couple to stop, but they didn't and told (UW Police Officer) Pehler the restroom was cleared and he could enter.

It is easier for a couple to sneak into a bathroom undetected than it is to sneak out. And in a similar instance at the Kohl Center:

...officers were about to interview them separately, Burke recalled, "and the guy says (to the girl), 'By the way, what is your name?' "

Obviously, I knew her name*---the woman who joined me, not the one was was arrested at Camp Randall or the Kohl Center. This occurred when I was single and the identity of the woman who conspired with me shall remain secret, since I am a gentleman.

*and unlike some of the more lurid adventures described in the news articles, my tryst occured in a private home, not a public place.

Mark Belling: Left-Wing Infiltrator of Reactionary Right

I listened to Mark Belling for ten minutes yesterday as I drove around Madison between meetings. I admit it.

Here is what Belling said:

• He called for a purge within the Republican Party --those are his words, not mine.
• He estimated that the purge might involve twenty percent of all Republicans.

I wish him luck. If even five per cent of the Republicans are driven from the GOP, that will assure Democrats a solid working majority for another generation.

A word to the left: Go slow with the new Dems. They will need a period of adjustment to become comfortable with long-haired hippies and those who believe the literal words of the Constitution. Their exile from the Republican Party does not mean that they will be instantly comfortable with us. I suggest exposing them to Ed Schultz before they spend any time with Stephanie Miller.

A word to Mark Belling: Keep it up; you are doing a better job than I ever imagined in expanding the base of the Democratic Party.  But do try to stay under the radar. A few more broadcasts like yesterday and Rush Limbaugh might figure you are our tool and never allow you back on his show.

Columbia University: Thank You For Exposing Ahmadinejad

Columbia University did what is expected of a  great institution. In providing Iranian President Ahmadinejad a place to speak on its campus, that university allowed him to tell his own story, a story of deceit, lies, and treachery.

That speech accompanied by Sunday's 60 Minutes interview exposed a world leader who is not to be trusted. He speaks of peace and refuses to answer questions about his own nation's involvement in furthering war in the Middle East.

He was given amble opportunity to deny that Iran was providing armaments to insurgents in Iraq and never did so. He made it clear that his version of peace will never come to the Middle East until Israel no longer exists as a state.

Columbia University, its students and faulty are to be commended for opening its stage to this dictator, and for the dignity afforded him. Free speech ensures the advocate a platform. It ensures the rest of us that he is exposed.

Recognition goes to John H. Coatsworth, Professor of International and Public Affairs and of History and acting dean of the School of International and Public Affairs. Coatsworth resolutely stood by the decision to have the  Iranian leader speak.

We are all the wiser and more knowledgeable about the dangers of Ahmadinejad's regime because of Coatworth's firm belief in free speech.