BlogFest 06!!!!!

The exclamation points may be overstating the case, but there is still time to register for the first annual WisPolitics Blog Summit, where yours truly (star of little and littler screen) will be on a panel about . . . blogging. The shindig is this Saturday afternoon out in Waukesha somewhere--check the link for details.

Happy Pi Day

How are you celebrating? With pie, I hope!

Feingold, Censure, and the WTMJ interview

Update II: WTMJ's story, in words and video, is here. Use that link instead of Patrick's. Update: Patrick from Badger Blogger has the video here. Be kind to his bandwidth.

Update III: Don't forget, Owen and I will be on a panel togther at BlogFest 06!

Like Owen, I was invited down to the WTMJ studios to do an interview about blogs and their reactions to Russ Feingold's call for a censure of President Bush. I was expecting more of a hard-hitting, issues-oriented interview, so in the car on my way to the studio, I practiced my answers to all the questions I thought I would get (yes, the warrantless spying program broke the law; no, this was not just the naked ambition of a presidential candidate). I didn't get any of those questions.

The interview was good, though; Charles Benson, who did the thing, asked me about blogs, blogging, and bloggers in general. He did get into my own political perspective, and my thoughts on Feingold and the call for censure. Mostly, he seemed interested in what reactions I saw across the Cheddarsphere and on national blogs to the story.

Benson asked me some more background kind of questions while the cameraman shot some footage of me "blogging" and of my trusty laptop in action. (Maybe I should set up a fund to raise money towards a new MacBook Pro, eh?) In all, it was a positive experience; though Benson didn't seem to know a ton about blogging, he took me seriously and took the idea of blogging seriously, too. On the way out, we had a nice chat about what the freshmen at Marquette University High School are reading these days (ugh, The Odyssey!) and he mentioned that as election season nears, he'll be calling more on bloggers for their perspectives.

Cool.

But I wanted to make a couple of the points I rehearsed in my head before it gets too late. There is, of course, the criticism that Feingold is facing that this move to censure Bush for his lawbreaking is just the motions of a presidential candidate-to-be, that this is all ambition's ugly mug. It is most certainly not: Consider that when Senator after Senator took to the microphone in 1998 to declare that the president is never above the law, Feingold was among them. To ask that Feingold now abandon the principles he's held for eight years and two presidents--that the executive is not above the law--because some people will see it as "ambition" is disgusting. It's offensive.

There's also the criticism levied against Feingold today by the likes of Dick Cheney and Scott McClellan, that Feingold wants to stop us from spying on al Qaida. This is, of course, a complete lie; no one is asking anyone to stop spying on al Qaida, or at all. All we are asking for is that the surveillance be carried out under the law. Again, I will note, the fact that Republicans are introducing legislation to make the warrantless spying program legal after the fact shows that even they know the law was broken.

Finally, there's the argument advanced by my new sparring partner Rick Esenberg: "What this is," he writes, "is a hard left politician positioning himself to garner the support of the drum circle left." As a cymbal-wielding leader of the drum-circle left, I reject this. The right of late (well, since 2000) has made cheese with the notion that any position that challenges whatever the Republican orthodoxy of the day may be is immediately labeled the "looney left," as are any people who advance those positions. See, for example, the very very moderate Howard Dean who, because he questioned the wisdom of the war in Iraq, was marginalized by the press and Republicans as being off his rocker. They're doing it now to Russ, who is, like Dean, too moderate and too complicated to be pigeon-holed as liberal. More on this later, I'm sure.

Jensen's Jail Time and the Spice Boys

The Amtal Rule points out how Spivak and Bice failed in their attempt at "balance" today. You know the kind of "balance" I'm talking about--one from one side, one from the other, and it's even! They write,

What does it take to make a bunch of bloggers from the right sound like a group of liberal defense lawyers from the left, praising a defendant and whining about a judge's unfair rulings?

That's easy, simply convict one of their own [. . .]. Then watch the the lefty bloggers do their own about-face, calling for a tough jail sentence and praising the prosecution, which was led by Brian Blanchard, who just so happens to be a politically ambitious Democrat.

Then the Spice Boys go on to cite some in the right half of the Cheddarsphere who did, indeed, bemoan Scott Jensen's conviction. (They did this, I would guess, without checking what those same conservatives said about, say, Chvala's or Burke's convictions.) Hypocrisy proved! they gloat.

And, to provide "balance," they almost echo Jensen himslef in trying to prove that "everyone did it." They pull out a few liberals who were harsh on Jensen (and his Republican supporters) without bothering to check if they were simlarly harsh to the convicted Democrats. The Amtal Rule finds this disheartening:

They don't mention that we've had the same standard for Democrats found guilty in the caucus scandal. The Amtal Rule chimed in here and here.

Spivak and Bice don't see a reason to do their jobs and back up what they write. Instead they trot out hackneyed stereotypes (conservatives are for "law and order" and liberals are for "defending criminals") and masquerade it insightful journalism.

It's a good thing the Spice Boys didn't try to use me as an example, either, since there's no hypocrisy here.

Remember, these are the big-shot political investigative reporters down to the daily paper . . .

Watch the Channel 4 news at 10 tonight

Just do.

Things there is still time to do

1. Your taxes.

2. Vote for me in the preliminary round of Koufax Award voting for "Best State or Local Blogger." Click that link, scroll (waaaaaay) down, and type folkbum's rambles and rants in the comment box. I'm losing pretty badly to people from more populous places. I bet even my conservative readers would be happy to see some Badger State representation among the finalists, right? So go vote! Thanks to all who voted! I don't think I was last place, exactly, but I'm not hopeful I'll make the finals.

3. Register for the WisOpinion/ WisPolitics First Annual Blog Summit. Your humble folkbum will be among the panelists. (An aside: What does one wear to a conference about blogging? Assuming no pajamas, of course . . .)

Censure

It's a startling thought to realize that more presidents have been impeached (2) in this country than have been censured (1), given that censure is, comparatively speaking, the lesser of the two things Congress can do to show disapproval.

That's why it will be interesting over the next week to see how the Congress reacts to Russ Feingold's proposed censure of President Bush for breaking the law. Everyone knows--even Bush, who has repeatedly admitted it--that he and his administration were outside the bounds of the law when he authorized warrantless wiretaps of American citizens and others on US soil. Those actions run afoul of the plain language of the FISA statute which governs this kind of surveillance, even the langauge of the statute as amended after 9/11 as part of the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act. Period. The rationales offered after the program came to light have had a loserish "after-the-fact quality" to them, according to a former Justice official.

So, he did it. We all know he did it. Feingold, as Democrats should have done months ago, is asking for the Congress to recognize this criminal behavior for what it is. Good for Russ.

Republicans, on the other hand, are hard at work trying to cover up the illegality by making the program, post facto, legal. That would be roughly the equivalent of Democrats offering legislation in 1998 that would make it legal for presidents to lie under oath. (Had that happened, maybe Bush would have testified under oath to the 9/11 commission, eh?) In bills proposed by Senators DeWine and Specter, all would be forgiven, and the currently illegal program would be given the veneer of Congressional approval, though it runs directly counter to what Congress demanded of intelligence agencies in 1978. (Those last two links, by the way, are to Gleen Greenwald, who also has agreat perspective on Feingold's proposed censure.)

So, to sum up:
1. Bush breaks law, admits to it
2. Democrats (Feingold, at least) demand censure and accountability
3. Republicans push to make the illegal activity legal

This is America in 2006. Congressional Republicans here are showing obligation not to law or the people who elected them, but to their party. (See, for example, Bill Frist's response to Feingold, which stopped just short of accusing Russ of treason.)

Jensen, Schultz Convicted

The Jensen trial is over:

After 17 hours of deliberations over three days, a Dane County jury today convicted former Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen of three felonies and one misdemeanor for directing legislative staffers to campaign on state time. [. . .] Jensen would be the fourth lawmaker in the state's 158-year history to be forced out of office by a criminal conviction.

The jury also convicted former Assembly aid Sherry Schultz, who, like Jensen, was not smart enough to know that admitting to the crime before trial is contraindicated in most circulmstances. Jensen had hoped, first, that the "everybody did it" defense would fly (it didn't). Then he tried to use the "I was such a bad boss I didn't know what they were doing" defense (which also apparently didn't work).

I doubt Scooter will do all 16 years of the maximum sentence, but his bad, bad decision to go to trial means he'll almost certainly do more time than any of the other now-convicted former legislators caught up in the scandals. It will also certainly cause--well, shouldcause, if state media follow the leads--some repercussions for Mark Green and Scott Walker, who were in the Assembly at the same time and were implicated in testimony at trial.

WI-06: Vic Spadaro's real website

In comments to my post from the other day, John Curry, Spadaro's campaign manager, noted the the correct Spadaro for Congress website is housed at http://www.spadaro4congress.com. I still recommend turning off or down your speakers when you get there.

Small High Schools Trouble in MPS

I expended a whole lot of electrons last spring writing about the small-high schools phenomenon, particularly as it was being implemented, badly, I thought, here in the Milwaukee Public Schools. With the (not-small-school) changes coming in my own high school, I've been thinking and worrying about how those changes will affect me and my colleagues, and not really focusing on what has been happening at the small high schools around the city. The grapevine gave me rumors, of course; today's news, though, brings confirmation of that poor implementation and follow-through:

In a sign of troubles at Milwaukee's Washington High School, the organization overseeing a multimillion-dollar grant to the city's schools has yanked its support and funding from two of the new, small schools located there. The move also speaks to the challenges in breaking apart existing, large high schools.

The Technical Assistance & Leadership Center, the organization charged with monitoring a $17.25 million grant Milwaukee Public Schools received from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support small high schools in the city, decided recently to deny continued funds to the Washington High School of Expeditionary Learning and the Washington High School of Information Technology. A third school located in the Washington multiplex, the Washington High School of Law, Education and Public Service, will continue to receive support from the Gates grant and from the center. [. . .] The two schools will lose coaching from the Technical Assistance & Leadership Center and will also have the remaining balances of implementation grants of $150,000 each revoked.

[The] Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent [. . .] said he told leaders of the two small schools that "they needed to keep forging forward and putting in the necessary changes to be successful as small high schools" and they could have their grants reinstated.

Washington is one of the traditional high schools to be phased out and replaced by a "multiplex," a process that was foisted upon the teachers and students from above. Decades of research and documentation show that small schools can be and are often successful when the reform is bottom-up, community based. The reforms of the MPS high school redesign have generally not been: Teachers and staffs (not to mention students and parents) have been told, "Here is what you're doing," with no buy-in from any of the stakeholders except the superintendent. This, as you can imagine, is problematic. As I wrote a year ago,

the successful small schools are bottom-up and designed not in pursuit of money but in pursuit of community goals not otherwise being met. And in this kind of top-down enforced reform, teachers are left powerless, but with a myriad of questions that administrators would prefer not to answer.

The answer, apparently, is "keep forging ahead." Once again, the superintendent is trying to lead by pushing from behind--which is nothing like leadership at all.

In the meantime, we have yet another year of lost education for the students in these schools.

Friday Random Ten

The Self-Contradictory Edition

1. "I Am Not" Melissa Ferrick from Willing to Wait
2. "Yes I Am" Melissa Etheridge from Yes I Am
3. "Only the Truth" Don Conoscenti from Paradox of Grace
4. "Lie to Me" Vance Gilbert from Unfamiliar Moon
5. "Never" Jon Svetkey from yeahyeahyeah
6. "Always" John Gorka from Old Futures Gone
7. "Glow" Willy Porter from Dog Eared Dream
8. "Fade to Black" The Nields from Live at the Iron Horse
9. "Highrise" Vance Gilbert from One thru Fourteen
10. "Basement Apartment" Sarah Harmer from Live at the World Cafe

This is not why music piracy is wrong

Apparently a Milwaukeean is among the first people to be prosecuted for posting music for download before it is released commercially:

A federal indictment in Nashville, Tenn., accuses [this guy] of posting four songs by alt-country artist Ryan Adams last summer, a month before their official release. If convicted of three charges, he could face up to 11 years in prison under a year-old law aimed at protecting copyrighted music and movies.

[This guy and another guy] were indicted Wednesday in Tennessee on a charge of conspiracy and two counts of copyright infringement. The two were part of a chain of people to copy songs illegally from an advance copy of Adams' CD "Jacksonville City Nights," the FBI alleges. [. . .] The songs were posted on the Web in August 2005, about a month before the album's scheduled release, according to the indictment.

The threat of prosecution is not what makes music piracy wrong. Piracy is wrong because using someone else's intellectual property without permission, and in a way that (at least potentially) costs them money, is theft.

Period.

Yeah, yeah, I know that Ryan Adams didn't go broke because of this one guy. And the more people who do it, the greater the eventual cost to the artists.

I've known too many songwriters in my day whose ability to eat or drive to the next gig depends on legitimate sales of their music to excuse theft from people who might be able to afford it. So, don't. Peace out.

Feingold's National Listening Session

You probably have already heard, but I thought I'd pass it on anyway:

Milwaukee, WI. - U.S. Senator Russ Feingold’s Progressive Patriots Fund announced today that Senator Feingold will hold the first ever nationwide online Listening Session this Friday March 10, 2006 at 10:30am EST.

“When I first ran for the U.S. Senate in 1992, I promised to hold an open, town hall style meeting, or Listening Session, in each of Wisconsin's 72 counties, every single year.” Feingold said. “These meetings are one of my favorite things about being a U.S. Senator. They give me the opportunity to hear first hand what people are concerned about and, more importantly, they help me do my job better.”

In addition to the over 950 Listening Sessions he has held in Wisconsin, Feingold has held similar Listening Sessions in Alabama, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

Feingold’s first ever online Listening Session will give people from around the country the opportunity to ask questions, say what's on their minds, or just see what others are talking about.

People interested in participating in Feingold’s online Listening Session can sign up at: www.progressivepatriotsfund.com.

For further information contact George Aldrich at (414) 727-5682

My work schedule precludes my participation, but don't let that stop all of you!

No Bajingo talk at Marquette

If we don't talk about women's sexuality, then we can keeep pretending that it doesn't exist, right? I'm not sure if that's exactly the rationale behind Marquette University's decision not to allow a student group to produce The Vagina Monologues, but it certainly gives the impression of head-in-the-sandism. This is especially true once you start looking at the shifting official statements:

Father Andy Thon, the vice president of student affairs [. . .] said he did not prohibit "The Vagina Monologues" because of concerns that it wasn't Catholic. Instead, he told a student group in February that it could not perform the play because the short time frame raised questions about the production's quality. He said there were better ways to address issues of violence that were not "distractive," according to a statement given to the group. [. . .]

President Father Robert Wild's office, however, has offered a more definite answer [. . .]. "Our Division of Student Affairs recently denied approval to a student who wanted to stage a reading of the play, and, as has been the case here, is not prepared to give anyone approval to do so in the future," Frieder said in a letter.

There's not enough time, they said. It's distracting, they said. (Yeah, sexual abuse often is.) Then they said, talk of the v-word will never be welcome. Good luck being a woman at Marquette.

Several times this week I've looked at a calendar--it's 2006!--and had to shake my head. Marquette is telling women that they (or at least mention of their hoohas) are not welcome there, and South Dakota has passed a most draconian anti-woman law. These are both moves along the same continuum, a continuum comprising people determined to deny women their autonomy, their humanity.

For more on this general topic, I recommend, as I often do, Barbara O'Brien.

Sorry for the slow day

But there was work, a trip to the credit union, and then Drinking Liberally . . . Kept me busy.

It was good to get out to DL again, and I got to see the gang and a bunch of candidates for stuff. Here's one for you: Drinking Liberally is the new MeetUp. Discuss.

McIlheran Watch: Old Faithful

Even when writing about the Republican primary for Wisconsin governor, Patrick McIlheran somehow is still able to slam both teachers unions and MoveOn.org. Right on schedule . . .

Scott has intercepted an important message

It's about where I'll be Wednesday evening. And where you should be, too.

You don't even need a decoder ring.

Finally, a challenger in WI-06

Via this Daily Kos diary, I found this news report of a challenger to Tom Petri in Wisconsin's sixth district.

The guy is Vic Spadaro--turn off your volume before you visit his website--a veteran and a successful businessman. He ran an unsuccessful campaign for Assembly in 2004, sure, but, you know, in this season of overwhelming pro-Democratic sentiment . . .

His website is ugly and two years out of date, but his platform is sound. He won't have the kind of national appeal that other "Fighting Dems" will have, but he will draw some support, I'm sure.

More importantly, this means we're four for four in challenging Republican incumbents this year. Go, team!

Tierney at it Again

The "School Zone" blog from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel notes today that John Tierney's newest column is again about Milwaukee's voucher program. You may remember Tierney from these very pages last week.

Today, the hard work has already been done for me, on Tierney's column. The "School Zone" quotes and paraphrases extensively:

Tierney cites research that concluded that the voucher program was having a positive effect on Milwaukee Public Schools, and he quotes MPS school board president Ken Johnson--who supports vouchers--saying that school choice had helped lead to a system in which people at individual MPS schools select new teachers, which reduced "the dance of the lemons" in which bad teachers transferred from school to school.

Tierney writes, "While critics complain that there still isn't definitive evidence that voucher students are doing better overall in their new schools, the results so far in Milwaukee and other cities are more than enough to declare vouchers a success."

He points out that spending per student on voucher students is much less than on MPS students and quotes Denise Pitchford, principal of CEO Leadership Academy, a high school in the program, saying that she accepted lower pay to work at the school than she was previously making in MPS. "It represented less money but a better opportunity," Pitchford said. Tierney used that phrase to summarize the whole voucher program.

Then Media Matters for America debunks a big chunk of the Tierney's argument:

New York Times columnist John Tierney, in his March 7 column (subscription required), misrepresented the findings of a study conducted by Harvard researcher Rajashri Chakrabarti on school vouchers in Milwaukee, claiming that Chakrabarti's study showed "that as the voucher program expanded in Milwaukee, there was a marked improvement in test scores at the public schools most threatened by the program." In fact, Chakrabarti's 2005 study, which compared school voucher programs in Milwaukee and Florida, questioned whether the Milwaukee voucher program actually had an effect on public schools. [. . .]

Chakrabarti's study, however, found that the Milwaukee program was deficient to voucher programs in Florida, and that "the results in Milwaukee are mixed" in terms of improving performance in nearby public schools. Chakrabarti concluded:

The Milwaukee program, on the other hand, is a "voucher shock" program with a sudden government announcement that all low income public school students would be eligible for vouchers. In the context of an equilibrium theory of public school and household behavior, this paper argues that the Florida-type program should bring about an unambiguous improvement in public school performance and this improvement should exceed the improvement (if any) in the Milwaukee-type program.

And then Greg Anrig at TPM Café finishes the debunking by citing a number of things that readers of this blog will already be familiar with. These include Tierney's canard that voucher schools are easier to close (Anrig must read me, since he notes that the "schools closed in Milwaukee [. . .] were the result of outside intervention or financial malfeasance, not parents voting by their feet"). And with the lack of real results reporting that comes with the new compromise bill, expect more outside intervention and less "market" action by parents, who should be doing the real work of choice.

Once again, non-Milwaukeean Tierney ignores what is actually going on in Milwaukee--including looking at the Journal Sentinel's own even handed reporting on the voucher program--in favor of retyped press releases and pablum from Ken Johnson, who seems more interested in making vouchers succeed than in doing his job on the school board.

McIlheran Watch: He only sees out of his right eye

The bad thing about Patrick McIlheran's having a blog is that now there's daily wingnuttery to combat (though still no Saturdays! and his posts are less than 700 words, which either makes it easy for me or just means it's higly conentrated wingnuttery). Today, he takes another swipe at those radical 1960s (live in the past, much?) in discussing the Supreme Court decision yesterday that said, basically, if a university accepts federal money, it can't bar military recruiters.

Academic opposition to the recruiters was about more than the "don't ask, don't tell" policy on homosexuals in the barracks. It was about the 1960s. [. . .] The lawsuit began--in trying to overturn the discreet deliberate ignorance of service members' sex habits--by trying to make an active acceptance of homosexuality in the military part of the normalization of homosexuality in American culture. It ended up, instead, by putting in doubt the ability of colleges to maintain their Vietnam-era disdain for ROTC.

It continues to amaze me that the right-wing media's message hasn't changed in 35 years.

It does not surprise me that P-Mac then approvingly links to three conservative bloggers' takes on the case, making it seem--at least to those familiar with the idea that the blogsphere might have two sides--that the conservatives feel smugly victorious in their triumph over liberal academe. He neglects to mention (or fails to notice) that the decidedly liberal Daily Kos--the biggest blog on the planet--had a front-page post called SCOTUS Gets it Right on Military Recruiting . . .