POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

Professor Cronon, DisIngenue

I've written about UW-Madison's Professor Cronon a number of times, but most particularly here, here, here and here, with Chancellor Biddy Martin's follow-up, here.

I mention it because the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's Patrick McIlheran took a cudgel to the professor today, agreeing with me pretty much point for point on the issues. But here's some background of which I wasn't aware:

The Cap Times piece also checked into whether the GOP’s trawl through Cronon’s in-box was untoward. Answer: No.

“It was a little more than a year ago, for example, that the liberal advocacy group One Wisconsin Now used information gleaned through an open records request to question the credibility of a polling project led by UW-Madison political science professor Ken Goldstein.

“Donald Downs, a UW-Madison political science professor, echoes the thought that such requests are far from an isolated matter.

“ ‘Open records requests appear to have been taken to a new level, making some of them tools of partisan political combat,’ Downs says. ‘Over the past year, there have been other cases beyond Cronon’s. … And some liberal bloggers are now calling for open records requests against (UW-Madison Law School professor and conservative blogger) Ann Althouse in retaliation for Cronon. So Cronon’s situation is sadly not alone.’ ”

Presumably it shouldn’t have seemed so to Cronon, either. He could not have been so disconnected as to know nothing of these other cases. More to the point, he could not be so naïve as to think that when, as a state employee with access to state computers specifically off-limits to politicking, he decided to be political player, his use of equipment would go unquestioned. And surely he did not imagine that calling the governor McCarthy-like in the national press was mere academic inquiry.

I’m not enamored of the Republicans’ use of the open records law in this case – if they weren’t meaning to vex Cronon, they were indifferent to the request’s vexatious nature – but neither do I think it’s a singular outrage. The law is legitimate, and it doesn’t contain an exemption for professors with proper viewpoints. The object of the Republicans’ hunt – to see whether taxpayer resources got commandeered into air cover for the unions – was less trivial than the demand by a Madison newspaper and the Associated Press for emails to Walker so they could prove him wrong (at which they failed).

Donald Downs, for those who aren't aware, is among other things an advocate for campus free speech. It was his advocacy, among other things, that got the squealer speech-code violation drop boxes removed from the campus. Yes, they had them, and some lunatics probably deemed them as important as those assault light, siren and speaker boxes that they have all over campus, because they are unable to recognize the difference between a figure of speech and an act of physical violence, so sophisticated have they become.

Goodness knows, Professor Cronon's another such victim, if you listen to him tell the tale. McIlheran is having none of it:

He most likely knew just what he was doing, overestimating only the traditional conservative willingness to lie down and take it.

What he wrote, though, was brave, very brave.

By the way . . .

Now that Wisconsin’s recent judicial election has at long last been settled in Prosser’s favor, there is no doubt who is really to blame for the problems that resulted in erroneous reporting which gave a narrow lead for the defeated liberal candidate. In the only truly non-partisan, non-ideological study of its kind, a special task force of the Milwaukee Police Department concluded that massive fraud and incompetence existed in Wisconsin’s election system. Republicans were eager to reform the system, but most Democrats refused to even discuss it. Despite the Democrats’ failure to act, no Democrat or liberal ever refuted the substance of the study, nor did they make any effort even to address the incompetence issue.

Why would the Democrats want to allow the incompetence in the system to stand? A cynic would say it would allow fraud to continue. In the police study, the police task force found that 16 staffers for the Democrat presidential campaign and a liberal allied group committed felony vote fraud and engaged in an “illegal organized attempt to influence the outcome of an election in the state of Wisconsin.”

Yet not one was prosecuted.

Prosecutors concluded that prosecution was impossible because

[b]ased on the investigation to date, the task force has found widespread record keeping failures and separate areas of voter fraud. These findings impact each other. Simply put: it is hard to prove a bank embezzlement if the bank cannot tell how much money was there in the first place. Without accurate records, the task force will have difficulty proving criminal conduct beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

In essence, because of the high level of incompetence in Wisconsin’s election administration, prosecuting those who committed “multiple felonies” of vote fraud was impossible.

Wisconsin Democrats could have joined with Republicans to ensure that elections are more open, fair, and honest, but Democrats opposed transparency and favored systems that encourage fraud like “Same Day Registration,” which employs tactics like vouching for votes. This encourages incompetence, making record keeping difficult and committing fraud easy. If Democrats had worked with Republicans to reform the system, then the April 5 Supreme Court election would have undoubtedly been over on election night.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

Website - More Posts

Charlie Manson Is a Bad Man Who Doesn’t Want the World to End

I didn't actually get this from Stacy, but nowadays one can't be too careful about attribution.

Charlie's always been into apocalypse. The Tate-Bianco murders were fueled by acid-induced psychosis and Manson's vision of an American race war that would reconstitute society in such a way that the haves and have nots would effectively trade places, much, I suppose, as happened in Haiti, with such salutary benefits. Except that in Haiti, of course, there really were rigid class and racial social barriers, and slavery, and all the rest.

Paco calls it Melter Skelter that now, 40 years after being sentenced for leading his creepy little cult on their murder spree, and after 20 years of self-imposed silence, he's opened his demented maw to Vanity Fair Spain to warn about the imminent liquidation of the polar ice caps.

Charlie's apparent belief in this hockey-sticked hooey doesn't, in and of itself, discredit global warmism or climacaust changiness. Their cult is much bigger and more successful than his ever was. However, Frances Fox Piven and other leftists have kept alive the idea of class war, always best when it's tinged with racial strife, and are deeply disappointed that Americans are so much wimpier than their European counterparts when it comes to protecting their "rights" to the benefits bestowed on them by the Leviathan state, which is the apotheosis of The People. Speaking behind closed doors at a fundraising dinner a few nights ago, Obama could barely contain his disgust at those Qataris whose high standard of living makes them uninterested in rising up and striking a blow for democracy. Democracy Obama likes, so long as it's highly regulated in conformity with the Right Principles (which, luckily, are his); Constitutional Democracy, as practiced in the United States, he finds appallingly cumbersome.

Mind you, Bill Ayers' bride thought it was very groovy and far out that Manson's followers inserted cutlery into the distended belly of the pregnant Sharon Tate, though Ayers himself never meant to kill anyone, really, with his bombs and all that, and feels that when you get right down to it they didn't do enough.

Of course, that swastika Manson carved into his forehead was nothing but an affectation of badness, the memory of the Nazi nightmare having been so much more vivid back then. It had nothing at all to do with fascism, though as I say, it's possible that even Charlie Manson could be right about something.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

Website - More Posts

For your consideration: Jenny’s Holy Week playlist

A youtube link dump of what I'm listening to this week.

I would also appreciate prayers for my uncle Bill who is in the hospital recovering from a stroke. We're amazed he even survived, but I guess they messed up his catheter and hurt his kidneys, which is making him very uncomfortable and unable to rest. He's my dad's little brother, and I hate the thought of him being in extra pain.

Kill Truck

KillTruck is a wife, mother, blogger and native midwesterner now living in Eastern Washington state. She writes about politics, pop culture, parenting, wifing and a few other subjects she has no authority to write about. She has macabre fascinations with prostitution and/or cannibalism. In her free time she enjoys eating and/or drinking her feelings, liveblogging Lifetime movies, thinking about Scott Brown and mocking things she doesn’t understand.

Website - More Posts

More On Beck Piracy

Dan Riehl, Jeff Dunetz and Jerry Wilson stake out the territory pretty well.

Yeah, I understand that Beck's a big fish and that there are a lot of other folks with big platforms who hijack other people's ideas without accrediting them. I'm inclined to think that it's a problem. I mean, it's one thing if you're paid to write jokes for David Lecherman or to invent "Diary" entries for Katie Couric, because you're well paid. If you're a blogger doing the investigation that your better-paid counterparts in the media aren't doing, it seems only fair that people who use your information ought to credit you for it. It seems only a matter of decency, really, to me.

Some of the biggest names in the blogosphere are the most fastidious about crediting their sources. If you have many followers, you are in a particularly good position to capitalize on the work that sources do for you. As a general rule, they're happy enough to have their ideas disseminated, but it's bad form not to praise or thank or merely mention them.

That said, some of the vitriol directed toward Beck in Dan Riehl's thread seems to me very overblown. Seldom is a person's character so unalloyed as either his ardent admirers or fierce detractors would have us believe.

Roger Ailes came in for some abuse at Gawker, and Stacy has related thoughts on that matter.

UPDATE: If Stacy really is going to take this topic up in its own context, he might want to take a look at what Breitbart says about Beck in his final bit of this DailyBeast interview.

UPDATEx2: Well, Stacy did write about it, briefly, and linked to Jimmie Bise on the subject, which is worth your while.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

Website - More Posts

Senator Kohl Raised No Campaign Money in Q1

Interesting.

Prosser finally declared victory in Wisconsin, as well, his campaign stating that there was no reason for Kloppenburg to pursue a recount. We shall see.

Reflecting on Sarah Palin's visit to Madison, Lee Stranahan wonders why liberals would cheer the behavior of the crowd that tried to drown out the Tax Day speakers at the Capitol. Related, at Memeorandum.

At Ace's:

PJM Scoop: DoJ Scuttling High-Level Terrorism Prosecutions For Sake of Muslim Outreach

Assholes.

Related would be the revelation that the State Department was involved with the ATF in supplying weapons to Mexico that would end up in the hands of narcoterrorists, in order to influence domestic policy regarding guns:

The fact that the State Department is involved in this horrific scandal, along with the Department of Justice and its Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, is a most serious revelation. As reported in previous articles, the end-game of the guns-to-Mexico scheme was to 'prove' that U.S. firearms are fueling the drug cartels and its consequential violence along the southern border, even creeping across the border into the southwestern states. The Obama Administration, according to ATF agents who blew the whistle on the illegal plot, intended to use statistics concerning U.S. guns in Mexico to call for more stringent gun control.

Meanwhile, the Department of the Interior has forbidden Border Patrol agents to interdict drug smugglers along their most used corridors.

America in sad decline.

That the US is loaning Colombia $2.4 billion to build refineries is also a sad commentary, given the illegal moratorium and all the rest, but at least Colombia has been a loyal ally to the US in South America, as opposed to other beneficiaries.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

Website - More Posts

ACORN Convicted, MSM Honey Badgers It

Matthew Vadum:

If a radical group closely associated with the president of the United States and known for its efforts to undermine American democracy were convicted in a massive voter fraud conspiracy you’d expect to hear something about it from the mainstream media, wouldn’t you? Wrong. Except for the odd FoxNews.com report and a few local reports there has been a media blackout.

On April 6 the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), that is, the organization itself as opposed to its employees, was convicted in Las Vegas of felony “compensation” for registration of voters. Sentencing is scheduled for August 10. Nevada forbids compensating voter registration canvassers because it creates a financial incentive for fraudulent or sloppy registrations.

Significantly, this is the first time ACORN itself has been convicted of a crime. The fact that the nonprofit entity was found guilty strongly suggests that ACORN’s ambitious voter-fraud schemes were sanctioned at the highest levels.

The conviction came after the 2008 election cycle during which Las Vegas ACORN officials emptied the local jails to fill voter registration canvasser slots and even put individuals convicted of identity theft in charge of the registration drive. At least they hired experts, some locals quipped, according to John Fund of the Wall Street Journal.

Mickey Mouse, Mary Poppins and celebrities living and dead have been registered to vote over and over again precisely because ACORN has been allowed to get away with polluting the nation’s voter rolls for so long.

But this is not the first time that ACORN has found itself in legal hot water.

So, read the whole thing.

Checked Rick Hasen's Election Law Blog and . . . nothing there. Huh.

Because . . . Civility NOW!!!

Also MIA, Obama's war in Libya, for which he needs no Congressional authorization at all.

By the way, in Nigeria Muslims are reacting to a political setback the way Frances Piven wishes American liberals would. Problem with Qataris is they're too fat and sassy. They're not like the authentic Muslims that the left likes to identify with. The Obamas, meanwhile, are getting a $12,500 refund on income of $1.7 million this last year, because they're not taxed enough.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

Website - More Posts

Fitzgerald v Blago, Revisited

Back when Blago was on trial the first time, I wasn't shy about questioning Fitzgerald's prosecutorial zeal. It's not that he didn't want to get Blago dead to rights, and the defense got a huge assist from one of the jury members who happened to have been a retired former City of Chicago employee, but it was what Fitzgerald didn't do to establish his case and whom he didn't call to the stand that clearly gave Blago a chance. He was trying to limit the scope of the evidence to take down Blago and perhaps a couple of his close confidants, without having the ripples extend beyond the instant parties, and this surgery was very exacting and, in the end, too difficult to pull off.

Tom Bennett earlier today alerted me to an excellent piece on the subject by Barbara Hollingsworth in The Examiner, which focuses on the very pointed question, why did Fitzgerald go so far as to jail a journalist to discover a leaker in the Plame matter, yet seem to show so little interest in who in his office might have leaked to The Chicago Tribune that his people had wiretapped Blago, short-circuiting the possibility of recording Blago dead to rights soliciting a concrete deal for Obama's vacated Senate seat.

Back at that time, in 2008, Michelle Malkin noted that in 2004, backed by then State Senator Barack Obama, Blago brokered a deal to award the last Illinois casino license to a corporation suspected of being snuggly with mobsters. To deal with the fallout, he arranged to have Eric Holder investigate the matter, and Holder found nothing untoward. Holder then somehow managed conveniently to forget his involvement when filing his background papers preparatory to his vetting in Congress for the position of Attorney General.

Of course, none of this "Small World" stuff has anything to do with why the United States is seeing its credit rating devalued, even as Soros, who has our best interests in mind as always, pooh-poohs the idea that we've taken on too much debt. At the moment, the National Review is pretty much dedicated to this one issue, which is reasonable, but here is the best place to start.

Here’s the thing to watch: Nobody really knows what interest rate the bond market is going to demand to finance U.S. debt in the future. Right now, the Fed is buying most of the bonds Treasury puts up for sale, and simply printing money to do that. This “quantitative easing” is scheduled to end this summer, at which point Washington will find out what it is really going to cost to finance its debt. In FY2010, we spent $164 billion just on interest payments on the debt — up 18 percent from the year before. And that’s at historically low interest rates. If rates should go back up to their 1970s or 1980s levels, we could easily end up spending more on debt service than we spend today on big-ticket items like Medicare or national defense. That’s the hidden landmine on our national balance sheet: We don’t have to be worried only about the trillions of dollars in new debt that Obama proposed to load upon our backs, but also about what that proposal is going to do to the cost of paying interest on the debt we already have. We already know that we cannot afford the new debt that Obama would have us endure, but the real crisis will come when we find out that we cannot afford the debt we already have.

I suppose it would be another non-sequitir to note that Rory Reid's PAC scheme was run out of his gubernatorial campaign office.

Just so we're clear what this post is about, this photo shows a Sasquatch on a Vermont hiking trail whose name in his tribal language is Two Dogs F*cking. And what I mean to say by that is, although Dr. Arie Oren's behavior towards his patients was clearly very wrong, both criminal and unprofessional, at least he was not lying to them when he stated that they could burn calories by having sex with him. As far as I know, he didn't state that they would burn more calories having sex with him than anyone else.

So, if you get my drift, go visit Little Miss Attila (h/t Richard McEnroe).

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

Website - More Posts

Catching up on a wild weekend

Lots of things happened while I was busy being sore.

For starters, the incredible outbreak of tornadoes in the Southeast that meep wrote about yesterday made Wisconsin's earlier visitation seem mild:

The violent weather began Thursday in Oklahoma, where two people died, before cutting across the Deep South on Friday and hitting North Carolina and Virginia on Saturday. Authorities said seven people died in Arkansas; seven in Alabama; seven in Virginia; and one in Mississippi.

More than 240 tornadoes were reported from the storm system, including 62 in North Carolina, but the National Weather Service's final numbers could be lower because some tornadoes may have been reported more than once.

The state emergency management agency said it had reports of 23 fatalities from Saturday's storms, but local officials confirmed only 21 deaths to The Associated Press.

The conditions that allowed for the storm occur on the Great Plains maybe twice a year, but they almost never happen in North Carolina, according to Scott Sharp, a weather service meteorologist in Raleigh.

Prayers.

The Daily Caller leads today with accusations that Beck's operation neglects to credit stories, and even goes so far as to obscure sources. I have friends there, so I hope they'll apologize and show more fastidiousness. I think The Blaze is pretty good at crediting sources.

A Freeper caught CBS using March or April footage of liberal throngs besieging Wisconsin's Capitol to make it appear that there were huge numbers of counter-TEA Party demonstrators at the Palin rally in Madison, and Gateway Pundit has the story.

Recall petitions for Wisconsin State Senator Dave Hansen (D) were apparently stolen from a campaign office in Green Bay. Democracy for me, but not for thee.

Three Cups of Tea author and philanthropist Greg Mortenson has some 'splainin' to do.

Flashback: Bill Daley was another Chicago pol helped along by Fannie Mae.

Monetary Contingency Operations, otherwise known as . . .

In his campaign speech last Wednesday, when he offered a new budget plan just one month after he offered a budget plan, President Obama spoke of an ObamaCare offspring called the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), which will "look at the evidence and recommend the best ways to reduce unnecessary spending while protecting access to the services seniors need."

This is called rationing.

You'd think that the NYT would understand the concept of "broke," wouldn't you? Well, they're really butthurt about Paul Ryan's plan, because it's totally, like, un-American. Elsewhere in the US, this is called balancing the budget:

Walker has played long ball, however, and his economic policies got a major boost yesterday from the state’s budget office. His new budget will keep property taxes from rising more than 1% each of the next two years, and his proposal has all but eliminated the state’s deficit:

The property tax bill on the typical Wisconsin home would rise by less than 1% annually over the next two years under Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed budget, the Legislature’s nonpartisan budget office reported Friday.

The Legislative Fiscal Bureau also said Walker’s plan would put the state’s finances in the best shape they’ve been in for more than 15 years.

It found the so-called structural deficit – the imbalance between spending and tax revenue as laid out in state law – for the 2013-’15 budget would be $31 million. That assumes Walker’s budget passes the Legislature without new spending increases or tax cuts that would add to the deficit.

Under its existing form, Walker’s budget leaves the state with a fraction of the structural deficits seen in the past eight budget cycles. The next lowest structural deficit in recent years was $1.5 billion, or 48 times as much as what Walker’s proposing.

Wisconsin voters sent Republicans to Madison to fix the state’s finances. Democrats controlled state politics for decades and left a legacy of overspending and debt, and Republicans were given an opportunity to fix it. It looks as though they’ve succeeded, and that’s very bad news indeed for unions and their Democratic allies.

Nothing that the NYT says should astonish me anymore (I haven't even bothered to bother with Krugman for a long time, for example), but I don't understand how they seem to have no problem with Obama moving the de facto financial headquarters of the US to Washington, DC (which, I'd argue, is bad for the country), but get bent out of shape when a Congressman proposes a means of dealing with the insane national debt, after the Congressional Dems never proposed a budget, and Obama proposed a fantasy one, then gave us another that consists in rhetoric, and a probably illegal signing statement preserving his gaggle of unaccountable Czars. Maybe they hope he'll bail out their pensions.

The Times:

The mania for blindly cutting has also spread to statehouses, many with new Republican governors and legislatures. Several states have cut their unemployment benefits below the standard 26 weeks. Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona has proposed removing 138,000 people from Medicaid. Many recession-battered states, including some led by Democrats, have been forced to cut other services because Republicans have made it so politically difficult to raise taxes. Education, mental health and juvenile justice funds have been particular targets.

In Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Maine and Florida, Republican governors have used the smokescreen of a poor economy to pursue a long-held conservative goal of destroying public and private unions. This has nothing to do with creating jobs, of course, and it has shocked many blue-collar voters who are suddenly second-guessing their support for Republicans last November. Several states are also adopting Arizona-style anti-immigrant laws.

The poor economy is a fact, not a smokescreen, and when public unions, colluding with their private counterparts (and the separation is not at all clear) can induce the entire Democrat cadre of State Senators to flee the state rather than vote on a measure they do not like, there is a problem. The unions and the Democrats can talk as much as they like about Republicans not being willing to bargain, but the correspondence between the fled Wisconsin Senators and their Republican colleagues demonstrates that it was the Democrats who would not bargain, and the Sauk County treachery of unions toward their supposed constituents make it clear that the issue that concerned them above all others was to have the state continue collecting their dues.

As far as immigration goes, perhaps the Obama administration ought to look into enforcing the laws already on the books. Some would regard this as a duty.

Hey, did you know that the US gave Fisker over a half billion dollars to develop a $95k automobile? True story. It's a regular Volks'-Wagen. And, hey! Al Gore's a big investor, just in case you'd forgotten. Related would be Die Welt's claim that CFLs emit carcinogenic toxins even when they're not broken. Fortunately for Democrats, this boondoggle could spur a whole new generation of class action suits to fill their coffers.

Truly, the eco-warriors and their legislative pals are stupid.

Enough about pork: BACON!

Also, soft core porn goddess Veronika Zemanova.

Not everyone's blessed with that much natural . . . talent.

There's plenty more where that came from, here, and while you're feeling bad about your concupiscence, you should probably follow Father Z's advice and get thee to a confessional.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

Website - More Posts