Today, near Lodi, Wisconsin.
April 2, 2011
"TV Ad Spending By Special Interest Groups Tops $1 Million in Wisconsin Judicial Election."
According to the Brennan Center, as of March 29th. This means that only 18% of the spending has come from the candidates.
UPDATE: The Brennan Center's numbers as of March 31st show 4 special interest groups spending more than $2.16 million. Greater Wisconsin Committee has now spent more than $993,000 on TV ads for Kloppenburg. Three groups supporting Prosser have spent more than $1.16 million.
Through Sunday, March 27th, three special interest groups had spent more than $1.14 million on TV... Leading the pack is the liberal Greater Wisconsin Committee, which, beginning March 18th, has spent more than $575,000 on blistering attack ads targeting Justice Prosser.... [T]he conservative groups Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturer & Commerce’s WMC Issues Mobilization Council, Inc. have also poured money into the race on pro-Prosser TV ads. Through Sunday, March 27th, the Club for Growth had spent approximately $415,000, and the WMC Issues Mobilization Council about $150,000. These numbers are expected to rise substantially in the final week before Election Day: According to the Brennan Center, 42 percent of all judicial election TV spending in 2010 occurred in the last week of the election season.Consider that in this race, the candidates both opted into a public financing scheme that capped them each at $300,000.
UPDATE: The Brennan Center's numbers as of March 31st show 4 special interest groups spending more than $2.16 million. Greater Wisconsin Committee has now spent more than $993,000 on TV ads for Kloppenburg. Three groups supporting Prosser have spent more than $1.16 million.
"KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Violent protests over the burning of a Koran in Florida..."
"... flared for a second straight day, with young men rampaging through the streets of this southern capital, flying Taliban flags and wielding sticks. Nine people were killed and 81 injured in the disturbances... [S]everal thousand young men, shouting slogans calling for death to Americans and to the Karzai government, were still rioting after several hours on Saturday, setting tires aflame throughout the city, burning cars and attacking journalists trying to cover the disorder...."
The NYT reports.
The NYT reports.
"My students are out of control... They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners."
"They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire, and are just generally annoying."
I dug up that longer version of what a teacher wrote on her Facebook page after reading about it in this story about another teacher who wrote, in Facebook, about her first graders as future criminals and said she felt like "a warden." Both teachers were suspended. Also:
I dug up that longer version of what a teacher wrote on her Facebook page after reading about it in this story about another teacher who wrote, in Facebook, about her first graders as future criminals and said she felt like "a warden." Both teachers were suspended. Also:
And Chicago Public Schools officials are investigating a teacher who apparently posted a photo on her Facebook page of a student who wore Jolly Rancher candies in her hair. The 7-year-old girl's mother complained to school officials after she saw negative comments written about her daughter's picture on the page.There's a big difference between writing in general about the discipline problems in your school and posting a photograph of an individual child. I don't think schools should cover up for their own discipline problems by attacking the livelihood of a teacher who dares to describe them in public.
April 1, 2011
Andrew Sullivan: "King Barack I."
Oh! The disillusionment!
Many of us supported this president because he promised to bring back the constitutional balance after the theories of Yoo, Delahunty, et al put the president on a par with emperors and kings in wartime. And yet in this Libya move, what difference is there between Bush and Obama? In some ways, Bush was more respectful of the Congress, waiting for a vote of support before launching us like an angry bird into the desert.
2 new anti-Prosser/pro-Kloppenburg ads... presented for discussion purposes here.
In these last few days before the April 5th Wisconsin Supreme Court election, third party ads dominate. Here are 2 that were put up on YouTube today by a group called GreaterWisComm. I got to the first one via Dave Weigel, who doesn't express any opinion other than that the ad uses video of "Prosser looking like Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon." The ad exploits the incident, which we talked about here, in which Prosser, in private, called Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson a "bitch." The video looks like it comes from long ago when Prosser was a state legislature.
It's up to the viewer to figure out what the context of that is, but obviously, it plants doubts and stirs up emotions.
The next one I discovered after clicking through to the YouTube user's page. It's quite long and begins with cheerful music and happy images of the recent protests here in Madison. Purported misdeeds of the Republicans are cited, Prosser is linked to the Republicans, and his opponent JoAnne Kloppenburg is presented as a political solution:
Again, it's a confusing ad. It does a good job of putting a happy face on the protests. Where's the corresponding ad that makes the protests look nightmarish and portrays the protesters as intent on overturning the results of the last election by installing Kloppenburg on the court?
Ads like this are deplorable, but they probably work, and with third parties putting them up, the candidate has deniability.
It's up to the viewer to figure out what the context of that is, but obviously, it plants doubts and stirs up emotions.
The next one I discovered after clicking through to the YouTube user's page. It's quite long and begins with cheerful music and happy images of the recent protests here in Madison. Purported misdeeds of the Republicans are cited, Prosser is linked to the Republicans, and his opponent JoAnne Kloppenburg is presented as a political solution:
Again, it's a confusing ad. It does a good job of putting a happy face on the protests. Where's the corresponding ad that makes the protests look nightmarish and portrays the protesters as intent on overturning the results of the last election by installing Kloppenburg on the court?
Ads like this are deplorable, but they probably work, and with third parties putting them up, the candidate has deniability.
A million nights in Vegas?
A screen-grab from yesterday's CNN.com has us distracted by the number 319:
UW Chancellor Biddy Martin's message about professors' "zone of privacy" in email communication.
This is the general policy, stated on the occasion of the Wisconsin Republican Party's effort to delve into Prof. William Cronon's email related to the recent protests:
We are excluding exchanges that fall outside the realm of the faculty member's job responsibilities and that could be considered personal pursuant to Wisconsin Supreme Court case law. We are also excluding what we consider to be the private email exchanges among scholars that fall within the orbit of academic freedom and all that is entailed by it....
Scholars and scientists pursue knowledge by way of open intellectual exchange. Without a zone of privacy within which to conduct and protect their work, scholars would not be able to produce new knowledge or make life-enhancing discoveries....
When faculty members use email or any other medium to develop and share their thoughts with one another, they must be able to assume a right to the privacy of those exchanges, barring violations of state law or university policy....
This does not mean that scholars can be irresponsible in the use of state and university resources or the exercise of academic freedom. We have dutifully reviewed Professor Cronon's records for any legal or policy violations, such as improper uses of state or university resources for partisan political activity. There are none.
U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights is investigating Yale "for its failure to eliminate a hostile sexual environment."
Apparently, the problem is male students:
One ... incident took pace in October last year when a group of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity pledges were surrounded by brothers from the same fraternity who chanted: 'No means yes! Yes means anal' at them in an area where most female freshman live.
In another incident, in September 2009, the so-called 'pre-season scouting report' was issued via email in which a group of male students circulated a list of 53 female students ranking them in order of how many beers they would have to have before they slept with them....
And on January 2008, a group of pledges from the Zeta Psi fraternity surrounded the entrance to the Yale Women's Centre at midnight holding signs saying, 'We Love Yale Sluts'.
It is argued that this behaviour limited women's equal access to educational opportunities at the university and that there were 'inadequate responses' to the sexual misconduct.Yeah, "behaviour." It's the British press reporting this. The Daily Mail... where, by the way, the sidebar is sexually harassing me.
"He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops."
"Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers that connected to nothing he’d ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never went down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind’s own devices."
A vision of hell — quoted in the NYT review — found in "The Pale King," the book that was pieced together out of the unfinished pages and notes left by the self-murdered David Foster Wallace.
A vision of hell — quoted in the NYT review — found in "The Pale King," the book that was pieced together out of the unfinished pages and notes left by the self-murdered David Foster Wallace.
It’s impossible to know whether Wallace, had he finished the book, might have decided to pare away such passages, or whether he truly wanted to test the reader’s tolerance for tedium...What the reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, does not say is that, in addition to wondering whether this section would have been edited down or rewritten, the reader must wonder whether this is the expression — or the cause — of suicidal despair. Reading long tedious passages — deliberately tedious passages? — how can one escape from the nagging thought that the author himself escaped from this tedium?
The big clash in the novel pits old-school I.R.S. employees, “driven by self-righteousness,” against newer ones with a corporate desire “to maximize revenue.” We have to slog through stultifying technical talk about “the distinctions between §162 and §212(2) deductions related to rental properties,” and inside-baseball accounts of obscure battles within the I.R.S. hierarchy. There is even one chapter that consists of little but a series of I.R.S. workers turning page after page after page.
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