I’m so confused.

The Republicans tell me that we must not increase the tax burden on the job creators. Who are these job creators? Are they the ones who get the tax break for corporate jets? Because as far as I know, those folks ain’t hiring. They’ve discovered increased profitability through downsizing, and the jobs they downsized aren’t coming back regardless of what happens with tax rates.

We’ve been told the real job creators are the small businesses of America. A fellow just up the road from me owns a roofing company. After the big April hail storm a few years ago, he and his workers put a new roof on my house. Right now, he’s not creating any jobs because Dane County housing starts are the lowest in years, people are deferring maintenance on their homes when the new roof comes out of their pocket, and we haven’t had a good hailstorm in a while.

Another thing that confuses me is the report a few days ago that said only 18 thousand jobs had been created in America in the past month. These reports don’t go into much detail about who created these jobs, but sometimes they throw in a word or two about “seasonal labor force adjustments”. Everyone bemoaned the low number of new jobs created, so, are these “job creators” who must not be taxed just sort of waiting to see what happens with taxes before they create all these jobs?

Certainly, the jobs creators aren’t rich guys. My friend Bill Wineke pointed out in a recent column that Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the world, is certainly not a “job creator”. I believe it’s fair to say that Buffet has probably caused the elimination of far more jobs than his acquisitions have ever created.

Could it be that “job creators” is just another one of those cynical, poll-tested political catch-phrases?

Like the phrase “working families” the other party loves to use?

Friday Media Rant: T M I

Too much information? I think so. Last night the local TV stations named the three Dane County Sheriff’s Deputies (often referred to by weekend talent as “Sheriffs”, as though each county had several Sheriffs) involved in the shootout at a west-side motel earlier this week.

Two of the local TV stations still insist on calling this sort of thing an “officer-involved shooting”, as though it were the job of the news writer to attempt to use every bit of police jargon possible; but, that’s another rant for another day.

This morning, the State Journal ran a small item, also identifying the three deputies by name.

Is this news? I don’t think so.

Is the fact that the three deputies were involved in a shooting incident sufficient reason to identify them by name? The media don’t generally identify firefighters by name, when they respond to a fatal fire, unless they’re getting an on-camera (or, in the case of print, on-the-record) comment from the Captain or Battalion Chief on the scene.

I think the reason the local media identify the deputies by name is that the Sheriff’s Department put out a news release with the names. So, perhaps, the larger question is, if so, why would the Sheriff’s Department do so?

Do you care who the three deputies are? Didn’t think so. They are highly-trained professionals who do a job that often puts them in mortal danger. And, as most people know, when officers of the law are involved in an incident where another person is shot or killed, the officers are placed on temporary leave, presumably to spend time recuperating from the mental shock of having to shoot someone.

I’m not sure for what reason the deputies were identified, not sure what, if anything, it adds to the story; and I’m pretty sure it’s not really “news”. Perhaps someone better versed in this than I can explain it to me.

Quintessentially Madison

Late this morning (11:30), if all goes to schedule, there will be one of the more unique protests at the State Capitol, followed by a parade (procession?) to the City-County Building a few blocks away, where the assemblage will rail against our (new/old) Mayor, for not stopping the slaughter.

The protest will begin as a memorial service for the hundreds of geese recently killed in our city’s parks, presumably now being served as goose-burgers to the homeless.

The protest is sponsored by the Alliance for Animals, a Madison group which noted in an e-mail to the media “We will stand together as a tribute to the wild Canada geese and goslings that were rounded up and slaughtered.”

At least they didn’t refer to them as “Canadian geese”, as so many local media outlets incorrectly have. They’re not Canadians. They’re Canada geese.

They’re also the “fallen fowl”, victims of a “bird bloodbath”, the object of countless puns unleashed by the aforesaid local media while reporting on the latest round of goose eliminations. The geese living near the runways at the airport were dispatched some time ago, after considerable ado about whether or not they really did pose a risk to aviation. In the end, fearing a “Miracle on Monona” scenario, local authorities did away with the geese.

More recently, a couple hundred of the critters, which insisted on unmitigated bowel-fowling in the parks, were rounded up (caged)in Brittingham, Vilas, and Olin-Turville Parks late in June and taken to a meat processor to be turned into gooseburgers for local food pantries. It is for these most recent victims that today’s memorial service/protest is being held.

It brings to mind a line credited to W. C. Fields: “If you birds can’t learn to sh#t green, get off my lawn!”

Vote Early; Vote Often

Today is the official beginning of the summer of the recall in Wisconsin.  I suspect turnout will be light, and in the races where “plant” Democrats (Republican operatives) are running against “real” Democrats, victory will be claimed by both sides.  The “plant” Democrats can already claim a measure of success, in that they’ve forced this recall primary election.

The state’s largest newspaper (The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel) has editorialized against the recalls, saying the intention of the recall election was not to express dissatisfaction with legislation passed or sponsored by any candidate, but rather should be used only for extreme moral turpitude, in an instance so heinous that it seems prudent to attempt to remove the offender from office before the next regularly-scheduled election.

However, our laws are all subject to interpretation, and what constitutes moral turpitude to one person may constitute vision and courage to another.

Personally, I don’t have a horse in this race; I don’t live in a district where a state legislator is being recalled.  And, I live in a part of Dane County not formerly represented by Joe Parisi, so I don’t even have a “regular” election to deal with.

I’ll just have to wait and see if the organizers of the Walker recall maintain enough steam to actually get enough signatures to force his recall, after he’s been in office for a year.

So, in the meantime, my only counsel to those of you who have a recall or a recall primary election to deal with, is to vote every time you’re given the chance. 

Your simple act of voting sends a message far stronger than just determining which candidate will win.  Voting scares the hell out of a lot of politicians, whose job security depends on hordes of voters not caring enough to vote.

(The Washington Post holds the copyright on the photo above.)

Cleansing the Gene Pool

There seems little doubt that the gene pool needs a little cleansing now and again.  This assertion can be affirmed countless times as we traverse life’s roads and observe the idiots among us.

On my appointed rounds Friday, I observed what I believe to be one of the better examples of how some people should not breed, lest their substandard genes be transmitted to another generation.

I was headed south on Seminole Highway, which is more of a street than a highway, and has no real connection that I can determine with the native American tribe which originated in Florida and now mainly resides in Oklahoma.

Several hundred feet ahead of me in the oncoming lane was a young man on a motorcycle.  I don’t know a lot about cycles, but I could tell it was smaller than the Harley-Davidson machines I know a bit about, but larger than the scooters that one encounters frequently in the campus area.

I could see the young man did not have on a helmet; his choice; I’m not here to preach about wearing helmets.  I could see the cycle drifting slowly toward the center line.  As we closed to within a few hundred feet of each other, I could see the young man had no hands on the handlebars and seemed to be concentrating on something he held in his hands.

Frequent readers of this blog know that my daily-driver is a huge, foreign-made, gas-sucking SUV, not at all a fair match for a cycle.  My behemoth tips the scales at 4,960 pounds with half a talk of gas and nobody aboard, so I’m at least two-and-a-half tons, approaching approximately 500 pounds (guessing 350 for the bike and 150 for the rider) at a closing rate of around 60 mph.  So, I slowed and steered right as the bike, now less than a hundred feet away, continued to drift toward me.

I got far enough to my right to insure there would be no experiment in the physics of the collision of inelastic objects, and as cycle-boy passed me, with his head still down, I could clearly see that he was texting.

It won’t be long and this moron will be cleansed from the gene pool.

...beyond a Reasonable Doubt.

My friend, Tom Bier, Station Manager at Channel 3 in Madison, gives a compelling presentation regarding broadcast news to various civic groups and assemblies. Every time there’s a trial like the recently-concluded Casey Anthony trial, I think of Tom’s presentation, when he’s talking about covering high-profile trials, and after some exposition, asks “so….do you think we should have a law that forbids all media from covering trials until after the verdict is rendered, and then only if the accused is found guilty – show of hands?”

Without fail, just about everyone’s hand goes up. (Tom is great at setting this up, talking about things like “media bias” and “affecting the jury pool”.)

Then, he says, “so, you would have been OK with not seeing or hearing anything about the O. J. Simpson trial – he was found not guilty, you know?”

So it is with the Casey Anthony trial. Somebody killed that darling little girl. And somehow duct tape got on her little face. And her body got wrapped in a garbage bag and tossed into the woods. But all we know for sure is that Casey Anthony’s family defines “dysfunctional”.

There are thousands of murders and murder trials every year in our country. The heinous death of the two little boys in Madison, whose bodies were discovered Wednesday morning,  will not likely be the kind of case that garners national attention, like the case of the “disappearance” of Audrey Seiler a few years back.

A pretty young girl is one of the crucial elements that rockets a case to Nancy Grace level; Anthony’s case also involved an incredibly cute and defenseless little girl; and it had the crucial undertone of sex, with the notorious photos of Casey in a “hot body” contest at a bar and the photos of her partying with her young friends.

It’s not likely we’ll ever know what really happened. Because of the intense coverage for the past three years, we saw and heard things that the jurors may not have. And we did not have to sit in judgment of her, with the literal power of life and death over the troubled young woman.

Somebody killed that little girl. The prosecution’s case wavered; the expert testimony was not the kind of stuff you see on CSI; and, to the jury, it was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Casey did it.

And in America, that’s all that counts.

Uncivil Discourse

What sort of horse’s ass goes on national TV and calls the President of the U.S. a “dick”?  Mark Halperin does.  Now, for a few weeks, Mr. Halperin will have to take his views somewhere other than MSNBC, which almost immediately suspended him for what he said, and moments later issued an apology to the President.

There’s nothing at all unlawful about calling the President of the U.S. or anybody else a dick.  Our Bill of Rights pretty much guarantees that.  But it’s tasteless, disrespectful to the office, and while it’s the kind of thing people say in every-day conversation, it’s still wrong to do it in/on the forum Halperin had at the time.

And please, don’t tell me “oh, sure, he gets suspended for calling Obama a dick, but if he’d called George Bush a dick, nothing would have been done.”  That would be an infantile false-choice comparison.

Nationally-syndicated radio talk show host Neal  Boortz told the folks in Atlanta a couple weeks  ago essentially to start shooting thugs and piling up dead bodies to take back the city; this is the sort of thing you hear up and down the AM radio dial these days,  from nationally-syndicated programs carried on hundreds of stations, to local talk-show hosts on puny stations that only cover a few hundred square miles.

Not too much is capable of shocking us any more, particularly if the name-calling is connected in any way to what passes for political discourse these days.  It seems to be a contest of who can say the most shocking or boorish thing, in what my friend Holland Cooke, the number-one AM radio station consultant in the nation calls “living a consequence-free existence.” 

The most discouraging thing to me is that we continue to reward these dweebs with our attention.

(Copyright owner of the image above is The Ohio State University Alumni Association.)