folkbum's rambles and rants

by folkbum



Amy LaVere, who slaps a mean bass.

Possibly related: Jim Morrison returns to soothe a woman from the bottom of her iron.

Labels: Music

by folkbum

Number five on the list of top Republican distortions, anyway.

Although I would argue he should also be number three, since he was caught using that fake statistic just two weeks ago.

Labels: Paul Ryan

by folkbum

So far so good. Although later I may go out to dinner at a locally-owned eatery.

by folkbum

You betcha. Happy day, all.

by folkbum

People want comment? Sure. In the form of a deep thought:

Deep Thought
Apparently climate-change deniers who have hacked access to fifteen years' worth of scientists' emails can't find a smoking gun more powerful than one scientist admitting that he substituted actual thermometer readings in place of proxy measures for temperature in one of his papers.

Happy?

Labels: Global Warming

by folkbum

If there is any flaw in the Classic Slice business model, it's that the slices are so big that the crust is cold by the time you get to it. Still, thankful for that.

Labels: Food

--George W. Bush, June 16, 2003

"We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term."
--Dana Perino, former Bush spokeswoman, November 24, 2009

Labels: George W. Bush, Terrorism

by folkbum

But just in case they aren't ...

... and, sadly, nowhere to write in anyone.

Labels: 2010 Elections

by folkbum

There's an ugly internet rumor going around that Sarah Palin's poll numbers are as good as Barack Obama's. It's not true. (Graphs below are as of 11/24; click on them to be magically transported to pollster for current data.)



(And for kicks, you can play with the graphs to remove the outlier Rassmussen, watch the two get farther apart.)

Labels: Barack Obama, Sarah Palin

By Keith R. Schmitz

by folkbum

A moth or so ago--at the current pace of things, it may as well have been last century--then-current (now former) White House Communications Director Anita Dunn was flogged across the wingnutoverse because, in a speech that included quotes from the likes of Mother Teresa, she quoted a line from Mao Tse Tung that meant, roughly, "choose your battles wisely." Not a jarring sentiment in and of itself, but the context, we were told--after all, Mao was a Communist Bastard responsible for Countless Deaths and other Crimes Against Humanity And Decency--that context mattered, and Dunn's repetition of that quotation, however banal, crossed a significant line.

This week, those same futzes are all super-duper amused with themselves passing on the latest dimwit internet meme: "Pray for Obama," they say, citing a Bible verse, Psalms 109:8. That verse, if you haven't seen it, is "May his days be few; may another take his office" (depending on the translation). That's an ambiguous enough sentiment by itself to be not terrible. However, the context--reading the rest of the Psalm excerpted--makes it clear that this is one of a series of consequences imagined by the Psalmist after an enemy of his dies. The very next verse, for example, is "May his wife be widowed and his children be orphans." The whole thing is a prayer for death, not just a wish for a short term in charge.

So which is it, wingnuts? Does context matter, as in the Dunn case? Or does context not matter, as in your wish for Obama's assassination?

None of this should come as a surprise, by the way. Even just tracking the local hate-typists, you can see that in addition to thinking Obama's death a la Psalms is great, they think killing any Democrat is a hoot.

Labels: Blogging, Republicans

By 3rd Way

The genius of the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee's decision to exclude the Islamic members of their group on a trip to the Mideast made me think of the lyrics to Regina Spektor's* "Laughing With".

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God
When they’re starving or freezing or so very poor

No one laughs at God
When the doctor calls after some routine tests
No one’s laughing at God
When it’s gotten real late
And their kid’s not back from the party yet

No one laughs at God
When their airplane start to uncontrollably shake
No one’s laughing at God
When they see the one they love, hand in hand with someone else
And they hope that they’re mistaken

...

*Chorus*
But God can be funny
At a cocktail party when listening to a good God-themed joke, or
Or when the crazies say He hates us
And they get so red in the head you think they’re ‘bout to choke
God can be funny,
When told he’ll give you money if you just pray the right way
And when presented like a genie who does magic like Houdini
Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus
God can be so hilarious
Ha ha
Ha ha

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God
When they’ve lost all they’ve got
And they don’t know what for

...

No one’s laughing at God
No one’s laughing at God
No one’s laughing at God
We’re all laughing with God

I like the idea of a jocular God, but I don't think God would be laughing with this interfaith group.

*apologies to Jay for featuring an anti-folk artist

Labels: Jerks, Lyrical Love

by folkbum

It's Superman! He'll save us!

(stolen from)

Labels: Health Care

by folkbum

They've started the campaign, it seems.



UPDATED to add, to the naysayers who think I would not be qualified: I believe that I am because I have common sense, and I have, I believe, the values that are reflective of so many other Wisconsin values. And I believe that what Wisconsinites are seeking is not the elitism, the kind of a spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite Ivy League education and a fact resume that's based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Wisconsinites could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership. I'm not saying that has to be me.

Labels: 2010 Elections

by folkbum

A preview of tonight's entertainment:

Labels: Music

by folkbum

If I'm an Outpost owner--and I am--can I ban this guy from the store?

Alternately, going after the comments: I did a google search [on] organic vs. nonorganic and all the articles I read will tout organic farming methods, manure vs other fertilizer, non use of pesticides, some even claim organic vegetables have a higher content of a certain nutrient. What I find interesting is that every article I read is very careful to explain (usually somewhere near the bottom) that organic is not healthier for you.

Because ingesting and inhaling and living in a world full of chemical fertilizers and pesticides is the healthiest thing ever!

By Keith R. Schmitz

The terror trials are coming to New York City and there is a possibility that a prison in North Illinois (with the lusty urging of the locals) will take some of the Gitmo inmates. And like clockwork the exploitation begins.

This morning Politico.com tells us that in predictable fashion and like dogs salivating to Pavlov's bell, the GOP will look to exploit the ginned up concern in next year's midterms. And why not. They have little else to offer us and how can they when they hate government. Several GOP members in Congress have already jumped in on the panic.

So no surprise mistress-marrying, criminal crony promoter, 9/11 parrot Rudy Guiliani is whipping this issue like a rented mule. Locally one TV station did a 10:00 news promo the other night with the alarmist statement "are terrorists coming to Illinois near the Wisconsin border?"

The question is if we are the strongest nation on earth, how come those who spout that statement the most are acting like it the least?

Labels: 9/11, alarmist, Gitmo, GOP, Guiliani, Terrorism, trials

by folkbum

Days, that is.

Paninis, coffee, soup, CD-release fever (less contagious than swine flu, and without the runny nose), and two hours of quality original music. Starts at 7:30 Saturday, at St. Francis's best strip-mall coffee house.

Labels: Music

By Keith R. Schmitz

Health insurance companies.

Some tip of the iceberg stories about small business' struggles with health insurance coverage from the AHIP protests in Chicago today.

Labels: Health insurance companies, killing jobs, small business

by folkbum

Not a lot of time this morning, but a quick comment about Grigsby-Coggs: It offers the mayor a strong hand in helping to set the direction for the Milwaukee Public Schools (some budget, superintendent-selection powers), but retains the democratically elected Board. It's a compromise position, really, between status quo and the the "TEACH" Act from Taylor, et al.

However, as with the other proposals, this is mostly about shuffling the cards at the top of the deck a little bit, and generally not focused on where the rubber meets the road, if you'll permit me to mix metaphors. Seems to be some in there about better school-level leadership and better early math and reading curricula, but still mostly nothing that will fundamentally change the daily interactions between students and their learning environments--or change facts about students' home environments to make learning easier, more appealing, and better-supported within stable, healthy families.

But anyway. Time to go put my rubber to the road.

Labels: Milwaukee Public Schools

by folkbum



I hope people are clicking on the ads.

Labels: Blogging

by folkbum

Steven Walters, writing today about moves by various politicos to take over or otherwise mangle the Milwaukee Public Schools:

Hamlet's Act 3 "to be or not to be" soliloquy includes this lament: "Thus conscience does make cowards of us all..."

Labels: Milwaukee Public Schools

By Keith R. Schmitz

Labels: Football, fun at Sarah Palin's expense, hockey

or, maybe Soglin should file papers after all

by folkbum

As noted here previously, Tom Barrett has spent much of the last few months--and any number of Democrats have on his behalf--dumping on Milwaukee by slandering and demanding control of the Milwaukee Public Schools.

No candidate from Milwaukee can be elected governor, you see, without making certain that they are not viewed as being of Milwaukee. At least, that's as reasonable an explanation as one can draw from Wisconsin's history of not having elected candidates from Milwaukee to statewide office since forever. (Someone who has lived here longer than I have--I started college here in 1992 and stuck around--can probably tell me the last time that happened. But if the Wikipedia can be believed, Lee Dreyfus was the last Milwaukeean elected governor, though he hadn't lived in Milwaukee for years at the time.)

So here's what we're going to end up with: three major-party candidates (Barrett plus Republicans Scott Walker and Mark Nuemann), none of whom will stick up for the state's major urban center, none of whom will advocate for the state's minority population, none of whom will argue that unless we reignite the fires of Milwaukee's economic engine, its idling could drag this state's recovery out for years. (Wisconsin's second major urban area, Madison, has an economy that just keeps racing along, it seems.) Walker will not run a pro-Milwaukee campaign, because he, too, is from here. And Neumann won't because it will not earn him a single vote in a Republican primary.

Sp who's going to challenge Barrett from the left? Who's going to run a progressive, pro-Milwaukee, pro-public education, pro-urban renewal campaign that will force Barrett (and, I would hope, by extension the Republican candidates) to pay attention to progressive issues and stay honest about the needs of Milwaukee's largest city and most desperate economic disaster-in-waiting?

If there is any lesson to be learned from the election two weeks ago in Virginia, it's that running away from the people and the issues that mobilized and energized Barack Obama's voters is a losing proposition. Creigh Deeds was the least progressive candidate from Virginia's Dem primary and he ran hard away from Obama's signature issues like health care reform. Obama voters stayed home, and Deeds lost miserably.

Barrett needs a serious opponent in this primary who can make sure that doesn't happen. Barb Lawton could have been that candidate (though she also had a reasonable chance to beat Barrett--I doubt any other candidate now does). Kevin Conroy is not that person. Kathleen Falk maybe is, but she might not have another statewide run in her. Tammy Baldwin is saving up to replace Herb Kohl in 2012. So that leaves ... who? Paul, are you listening?

Updated to add, from Thomas J. Mertz in the comments, this:
I think there is a larger issue here about who among the Democratic Party of Wisconsin's state elected officials is willing to act on "progressive, pro-Milwaukee, pro-public education, pro-urban renewal..." principles. You could add tax reform and many other things to this list. [. . .] We are at the point where the far right is defining the GOP agenda, the GOP agenda is defining the moderate Democratic agenda and the moderate Democratic agenda is being pushed or defended by "Progressive" elected officials. This isn't good.

What he said.

Labels: 2010 Elections, Paul Soglin, Tom Barrett

by folkbum

If we wear out the whole "The world's gonna end in December 2012" meme now, what are we going to talk about for the next three years?

by folkbum

I generally like My State Senator, Tim Carpenter. But he, along with Sen. Lena Taylor and Rep. Pedro Colón, have an op-ed in the paper this morning defending their Milwaukee Public Schools takeover bill, and he's just wrong here.

The title of the op-ed is a compound imperative, and both parts are at least somewhat wrong: "MPS must improve; change in governance is necessary." First, I agree that MPS's results must improve; there is no question about that. I spend eight (sometimes ten or twelve) hours a day trying from my little corner of the district to make that happen. And while there are things that he district can and should be doing differently, there is nothing--as I have argued time and time again--that we can do inside the schools to produce large-scale, system-wide changes to the problems created by factors outside the schools. At best, tinkering inside the schools will provide small results at the margins, something shown over and over again by urban districts all across the country facing exactly the same issues MPS is.

Second, simply changing the governance of MPS--at least, changing it as proposed, which includes handing over vast power to the mayor of Milwaukee and weakening the elected board to the point of irrelevance--is not the solution. This is true for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that no proponent of a governance change has offered a single specific idea of how MPS would be different under new leadership, except to say that the leadership would be different. There's also the sad-but-true fact that districts under mayoral control generally do not see vast improvement, and the not sad but devastatingly true fact that voters in this city and this state roundly rejected municipal control of MPS at the ballot box last spring by defeating the candidate who endorsed it.

But what gets me about the argument here presented by Carpenter, Taylor, and Colón is that they blame MPS's failures on a lot of things that they, as legislators, have the power to change immediately without interfering in the governance structure of MPS.

For starters, I'll suggest the one thing they don't name, which is what I noted above and overandoverandoveragain on this blog: MPS students spend the vast majority of their lives outside of the system (between birth and the time she graduates at 18, a student spends just 15% of her life in school). As state legislators from the city of Milwaukee, these three have considerable power and authority to affect the other 85% of our students' lives. All of the things that correlate strongly to poor achievement, from poverty and homelessness to poor health care and transience, are things a legislature could be working on. These are not problems that will be solved by MPS.

However, here's the really galling part:

Additionally, for the past several years, MPS has had to rely on a one-time state budget amendment, one-time federal stimulus funds and even state borrowing from other funds just to remain afloat. This patchwork funding pattern cannot continue while outcomes are not improving. Due to the downturn in the economy, we have seen the state pull back on its commitment to fund two-thirds of educational costs.

To further complicate matters, the Milwaukee school choice funding flaw has burdened property taxpayers in Milwaukee, as has the open enrollment policy. According to the non-partisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau, the net aid reduction for MPS in 2009-'10 will be $44.4 million and in 2008-'09, the net aid transfer out of MPS under the open enrollment program was $21.7 million.

These are consecutive paragraphs of the op-ed, unedited and unaltered. They really did just go there: They slammed MPS's budget situation and then fingered two state programs as being significantly responsible for MPS's loss of funds. These state programs, designed, approved, implemented, and maintained by the state legislature, suck funds out of MPS that then these legislators have the nerve to complain about needing to replace.

While yes, there have been some demographic changes in the city that have decreased enrollment, the primary culprits have been state legislators who say to students and parents, "We're not concerned with making sure MPS and the city it serves have what they need to succeed, so we'll just make it easier for you to go somewhere else." It's as if the state handed out coupons to Subway and then blamed Cousins for its declining sales.

If the legislature were serious about wanting to shore up MPS finances, they should stop handing out those coupons. End those programs. Stop offering incentives for the most-involved parents and the highest-achieving students to leave, and the financial (not to mention academic) picture looks better. We are, for example, supporting retirees from a 120,000-student district on revenues from 80,000 students--in large part because the state has facilitated declining enrollment. School climates have changed for the same reason. Special education enrollment ratios have ballooned. Buildings now stand half-empty that were once bustling hubs of neighborhood activity.

And, after this year's talk of dismantling the democratic leadership of MPS, the city is ready to blow apart at the seams.

There's a lot a legislature could do to help MPS, and, as Carpenter, Taylor, and Colón write, "show the federal government that we are serious about education reform and that Wisconsin is worthy of Race to the Top funds." Standing up to Arne Duncan, who is wrong about mayoral control, may not be the easiest way to do it. It would, however, be the best thing for Milwaukee and its children.

Labels: Education, Lena Taylor, Milwaukee Public Schools, Pedro Colón, Tim Carpenter

by folkbum

Here's one for everyone celebrating National Novel Writing Month by actually, you know, writing their novels.

Labels: Music

by folkbum

Asking Sarah Palin for advice on how to be governor is like asking David Lee Roth for advice on how to lead a rock band.

Labels: Sarah Palin, Scott Walker