Are holds a necessary Senate tactic? Or do they impede progress?

(published 15-Mar-2010, Appleton Post-Crescent)

Anything that impedes legislation gets my support.  Gridlock is good.  Filibusters are fine.  Holds are wholesome.  Super-majorities are sublime.  This 51-49 stuff is for the birds.  I never thought I'd say this, but California has the right idea, at least for its budget: a 2/3 super-majority is required to pass it.  Especially if it's a vote on "progressive" legislation to extend government control over yet another aspect of our over-regulated lives.  "Progress" has come to mean "some bureaucrat who thinks he knows better than you is going to make your decisions for your own good because you really aren't capable, you poor thin ... Read More »

A semi on its side. A fully-loaded semi overturned at the corner of Bell St. and Brooks St. in Neenah at about 8:15am, Thursday, March 4th, 2010. I drove by just moments after it happened and went back home (about 2-1/2 miles) to get Janet's camera.

Should parents remove books from libraries?

(published 1-Mar-2010, Appleton Post-Crescent online)

It isn't so much the books in the library that bother me, it's the textbooks.  I've sustained three waves of elementary school social studies, math, and science books for my three kids (now 23, 19, and 11).  Social studies books have to top some sort of list of vapid, insipid, and gormless works intended to instruct schoolchildren.  The explicit political cant, moral equivalency, and cultural superiority are maddening.  Math books are just about as bad, though for different reasons.  My favorite -- that is to say LEAST favorite -- math book folly was the double page color photograph showing half a dozen multi-cultural children playing with a huge model city and roadway as the introduction to a chapter on geometric shapes.  Just the pi ... Read More »

What's the best thing we can do to grow jobs?

(published 15-Feb-2010, Appleton Post-Crescent)

The self-help book by James Newman provides a clue: "Release Your Brakes!"  With respect to growing jobs the "brakes" are: government regulation, high taxes, and anti-business legislation.  It's trivial to suggest that we reduce or eliminate them; how easy it is to accomplish is another matter.  I'll bet some Reader Reaction Forum posts echo economist Paul Krugman's declaration that Washington should spend more stimulus money than it already has to "create" jobs.  There's a pertinent scene in "Live Free or Die Hard".  The country's infrastructure is imploding because of hacker infiltration.  Justin Long knows the score but Bruce Willis can't ... Read More »

Should Wisconsin legalize sobriety road checks?

(published 4-Jan-2010, Appleton Post-Crescent)

How about this instead?  A new federal subsidy for all bars, restaurants, and nightclubs that serve alcohol to hire sobriety testers.  These people would sit at all the exits and observe patrons as they leave.  They would spot anyone exhibiting signs of drunkenness.  Each drunk would be pulled aside and asked a battery of confusing questions.  The tester would then use one of those newfangled passive alcohol sensors.  Now here's the beauty part of my idea:  If the drunk flunks, the tester would call a cab...and the cab fare would be subsidized, too!  At a much reduced rate, of course, like Medicare payments to doctors.  Isn't that brilliant?  We'd probably pay as much for sobriety testers in bars as we ... Read More »

I attended both of the Girl Choir concerts last Saturday, December 12th.  Both concerts were very fine. There weren't the spectacular highs in these performances as there were in the 2008 concerts, but the performances overall were on a higher plane.  I think that the choir directors and the muscial director of the Girl Choir were striving for a more consistently thematic performance.  They achieved it, in my opinion.

The theme of the concert was "To Music".  All of the songs expressed love of music and appreciation for what it brings to the performers as well as to the listeners.

I told the director of the Intermezzo Choir, Amber Evey Schmidt, ... Read More »

The extent of sea ice over the past 8 years:

Nothing much to see here...which is the point. Seasonal sea ice isn't doing anything surprising, such as shrinking down to nothing as erstwhile Vice President Gore would have us believe.

Should Wisconsin legalize marijuana for medical use?

(published 23-Nov-2009, Appleton Post-Crescent)

What's curious about this question is what about the Feds?  There are a dozen states that have medical marijuana laws that permit its use in various scenarios; but federal anti-narcotics laws still hold sway.  Federal agents can still bust a little home-grown pot patch in those states.  The feds do recognize, however, that the enforcement issue is very real. The Marijuana Policy Project pretty much recommends that people living in those states where medical marijuana is legal not worry about arrest because, they say, only 1% of marijuana arrests nationwide are made by the feds. The odds are pretty good that you won't get busted if you're following state law. However, the feds do target medical marijuana "dispensaries", especially in California. I don't mind if Wisconsin passes ... Read More »

Remember after Hurricane Katrina how much talk there was from the global warming johnnies that we could look forward to much more devastating hurricanes from now on?  That Katrina was only a taste of what was in store for us?

This is the most up-to-date graph of activity for the present hurricane season from WeatherStreet.com:

That's two hurricanes as of Nov 1st.  To be fair, there's still a chance for another one before the end of the hurricane season on Dec 1st.  But you ... Read More »

How far have we come in the past year?

(published 2-Nov-2009, Appleton Post-Crescent)

Most folks that voted for "Hope and Change" were simply happy that a Democrat became President.  The fact that he's African-American is just icing on the cake.  It doesn't matter what he accomplishes; his most endearing feature is that he isn't George W. Bush.  But the government has horned in on the financial services industry, the automobile industry, and is trying its darnedest to horn in on the health insurance industry.  Some people aren't too happy that we're not out of Iraq or Afghanistan yet, unemployment still hovers near 10%, and inflation will kick in from the huge amounts of money pumped into the economy from government printing presses.  Looks like SSDD to me: Same Stuff, Different Day.  Dennis Miller put it very succinctly, as usual: it isn't that Empe ... Read More »

One of my family's favorite movies is "How to Steal a Million" with Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole.  It centers around the theft of a valuable statuette from a highly secure museum.  O'Toole is the thief and Hepburn is his willing accomplice.  The theft is pulled off in large part because of what O'Toole's character refers to as "normal human reaction".

For example:

• If a highly valuable statuette is guarded by a seemingly impenetrable alarm system, watch what happens when the alarm is set off: the guards all leave their guard room and go scurrying about trying to catch the thief. 
• If a very important political person calls the head guard to complain about the noise the alarm makes, then the head guard becomes more concerned for his job if the ... Read More »
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  The Town Crank

What are our area's economic strengths?

(published 5-Oct-2009, Appleton Post-Crescent on-line)

No volcanos, typhoons, or global warming. No mountains, canyons, or deserts either. We DO deal with tornados, flooding, humidity in the summer, lake flies, mosquitoes, snow shoveling, salted streets, potholes, plow damage, and ice storms...and snow. Yeah, we get snow sometimes.

We don't go in too much for ostentation. About the biggest extravagances we indulge in are sports stadiums. We don't got no steenking Picasso Plazas in Wisconsin ... though we DO have that Hadzi ... thing ... monument ... sculpture ... whatchamacallit in Appleton.

Local and state governments can be as bone-headed here as anyplace else, and businesses can find friendlier tax rates in many other states, too. As a result, some businesses have moved their headquarters elsewhere. K-C comes to mind. ... Read More »

Today's xkcd.com cartoon reminded me of an old one by Bizarro (Dan Piraro).  Here's the xkcd.com cartoon for today, October 1st:

Then there's this old Bizarro cartoon:

Brett Favre is featured in a banner ad for the "Sears Blue Electronics Crew" on the Drudge Report today:

If you follow the link you can find an extended version of the recent Sears TV ad:

How safe do you think we are from another terrorist attack?

(published 28-Sep-2009, Appleton Post-Crescent)

Weakening the economy by injecting a trillion dollars of a sadly debased currency; dismantling portions of the counter-terrorism apparatus; releasing prisoners from Guantanamo; changing security signals with our allies in Europe and the Middle East; the monomaniacal push for national health insurance; taking over a huge portion of the auto, banking, and insurance industries ... any kind of policy focus has been lost by trying to do everything at once. It all adds up to being less secure than we were under President Bush.  In addition, the conciliatory and apologetic attitude in overseas visits to Arab magnat ... Read More »