Bourgeois Blues

Jeremiah Wright: Enough already

Enough with the Jeremiah Wright already. Why is this guy even news? He's a preacher. What do you expect from preachers? Crazy ass mofo shit.

Besides, Wright hasn't said anything mo fo' sho crazier than the wacky knuckleheads John McCain chillz wit'. Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment on America because some gay people were planning on having a parade in New Orleans?

I thought that's what you did in New Orleans.

Compared to a blunt assessment of the occasional effects of U.S. foreign policy, that's not just crazy, that's bat-shittery. Yet I don't see Anderson Cooper convening a nightly tribunal of nine to endlessly dissect the inanities of John Hagee and the rest of the megachurch televangelizers, any of whom on any given day will come up with something ten times stupider than anything Jeremiah Wright ever said in his life, in Barack Obama's presence or otherwise.

Dr. Glenn P. Hastedt is a professor of political science at James Madison University in Virginia. Hastedt wrote a book, now in its seventh edition, called American Foreign Policy: Past, Present, Future. It's one of the definitive surveys and a "required text." After conducting an exhaustive review of U.S. foreign policy drawing on a myriad of sources reflecting every conceivable perspective, Dr. Hastedt provides a conclusion summarizing a number of the dominant views of U.S. hegemony — in other words, the "common wisdom." He calls one of them the 'America as Balancer' view:

[T]he United States must learn to live with uncertainty. Absolute security is an unattainable objective and one that produces only imperial overstretch. In sum, the America as Balancer perspective holds that ... the primary national security threats to the United States are self-inflicted. They take the form of a proliferation of security commitments designed to protect America's economic interests.

Now, tell me how that isn't just a rigorously academic way of saying, "the chickens may come home to roost"? Al-Qaeda hit the WTC for a reason. Remember bin Laden's ghoulish disavowal of the innocence of the WTC victims, because they were U.S. taxpayers? Not because they needed converting to Islam.

It's a blinding glimpse of the obvious that U.S. foreign policy may have detrimental consequences for the U.S. itself. How could it not, given America's preeminent global position. America will be seen by many people on the other side of the world as oppressors for that reason alone, even before it sets up military bases within a stone's throw of the Kaaba.

Is that to say that America shouldn't establish a military presence in the Middle East? Not necessarily; only that there will be consequences, and those consequences may include retaliations in the form of 9/11. How is that even controversial? Those are standard considerations for the average competent actor in international relations, especially these days.

Jeremiah Wright is a preacher and it's his job to detect the Hand of God in everything and then tell anyone within bellowing distance all about it. Never mind that he can't prove there even is a "God," he just assumes it and furthermore assumes its constant involvement in the affairs of humans. That's what preachers do.

Sometimes they even relate the details of personal conversations they've had with God (preachers may waive the deity-preacher privilege; God may not, which is one of the reasons why you never hear from Him). And if I'm not mistaken, God has been communicating his displeasure with various warring tribes at least since the World was created 6,000 years ago.

So why does it come as any surprise to anyone that Jeremiah Wright would presume to articulate God's displeasure with certain aspects of U.S. foreign policy? And why are the surprised the same ones that venerate Ronald Reagan, who, much like John Hagee, consulted an ergot-poisoning-fueled nightmare called the Book of Revelation to fire his own End Times hallucinations? And whose necromancing First Lady consulted with astrologers.

Whereas John Hagee's "god damn Americas" come in the form of otherwise rationally explainable tropical weather disturbances that cripple half the country, Pastor Wright's candid observations on foreign policy have nothing on Hagee's demented fantasies.

Wright is playing to an audience and his main purpose is as a motivational speaker. It's a black schtick, which is cool, but his delivery is lame-on-arrival. That 'white people ain't got no rhythm' bit got old a long time ago. And I ask again, then how come Miles Davis got up at five in the morning to go round up Gerry Mulligan and Gil Evans when they were recording Birth Of The Cool? Because Miles wanted soulless cats who couldn't dance?

But that's just my opinion. Who am I to say that Barack Obama may have enjoyed the hell out of Wright's act, but that he shouldn't have? Personally I prefer Chris Rock or Richard Pryor, but hey.

Wright surely has a right to get up there and defend himself against the stunningly irresponsible manipulations of his larger context by the working press. But it seems to me he's doing few people any favors by adopting that old-timey strutting preacher stance, as he did in "taking" questions (gee, thanks) at the National Press Club the other day. That schtick is just straight up passé. As is this whole preacher business in its entirety, if you ask me. Perhaps recent developments will convince politicians to avoid them completely in future.

eta: Mike Mathias is thinking along similar lines this morning.

"Christian Science"

When we don’t have faith we need the doctor and it’s obvious that most want-to-be Christians need the doctors because they have no faith in God; their faith is in man. God created good and evil. Witchcraft can heal also. Should Christians also seek witches? — Pastor Bob, Spirit 1 Broadcasting

There's a wee hubbub amongst the internets over a couple of potential affirmative criminal defenses the Neumanns of Marathon County, WI, may deploy against their twin second-degree reckless homicide charges.

The first is presented incorrectly at a website dedicated to the Neumanns' defense, a mostly incoherent morass of god bothering gibberish. Obviously religion doesn't affect everybody the way it affects Pastor Bob and David Eells or the Neumanns, but it's made these people quite. in. sane.

Anyway, there is no Wisconsin Statute § 948.04(6); it's § 948.03(6) and it says this:

Treatment through prayer. A person is not guilty of an offense under this section solely because he or she provides a child with treatment by spiritual means through prayer alone for healing in accordance with the religious method of healing permitted under s. 48.981 (3) (c) 4. or 448.03 (6) in lieu of medical or surgical treatment.

Except the Neumanns are not charged under "this section" (Crimes Against Children), they're charged with § 940.06(1), which is a crime against humans generally, young and old alike.

That statute is bad enough without the cross referenced ones, and it should be gotten rid of ASAP. But get a load of § 448.03(6):

Practice of Christian Science. No law of this state regulating the practice of medicine and surgery may be construed to interfere with the practice of Christian Science. A person who elects Christian Science treatment in lieu of medical or surgical treatment for the cure of disease may not be compelled to submit to medical or surgical treatment.

Pastor Eells likes this one because he thinks that (1) If "Christian Science," means only a particular sect or denomination, then the statute is unconstitutional because the government can't favor one particular sect or denomination (2) Because the statute cannot be unconstitutional, then "Christian Science" means any sort of witchcraft we favor over modern medical techniques, therefore you simply cannot prosecute us witch doctors. Abracadabra, biotch.

Well, it's unconstitutional because witchcraft can't be official government policy, because there is no compelling anything why witchcraft should protect the causers of death from criminal proceedings. The "practice of Christian Science" provision above actually refers to civil, not criminal, liability. Moreover it very specifically is referring to a particular sect or denomination, because the broader subject of Chapter 448 is medical and related licensing.

The Mary Baker Eddy crowd. Perhaps the Neumanns, who elsewhere are said to be Pentecostals, are planning an ex post facto conversion.

I don't like Pastor Eells's defenses much. If the free exercise of religion doesn't include the inhaling of Rastafari herb, then it sure can't include committing second-degree reckless homicide.

Nothing fails like prayer

From a Weston, WI police department case activity report:

Randall Wormgoor ... became involved in what he described as a bible study group with the Neumanns which was held at the Monkey Mo Coffee Shop on Monday evenings. Mr. Wormgoor said that along with he and his wife were approximately five other people along with the Neumanns involved in this bible study group.

Randall Wormgoor said that one of the things that did concern him that was mentioned at the bible studies by Dale Neumann who led those bible studies is that Mr. Neumann stated that physical illness in an individual was due to sin and the only way to cure that illness was to ask for forgiveness and to pray that God would cure you from that illness.

Both Randall and Althea Wormgoor said that it was obvious that the Neumanns had no intention of seeking medical help for their daughter and that this was a test of faith for the Neumanns and that through prayer Kara would be healed.

Rather than seek medical attention, the Neumanns solicited, via e-mail, additional prayers from the god fearing individuals at an online "ministry" called AmericasLastDays.com. Those prayers, intoned via return e-mail, also failed spectacularly. And tragically.

Kara Neumann, age 11, died March 23 after slipping into a diabetic coma following her noticeably suffering from the affliction for at least three weeks. Kara's parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, are charged with second-degree reckless homicide, party to a crime.

AmericasLastDays.com calls these penultimate Last Days the Neumanns' "time of persecution by the world."

For now, its only their time of prosecution by Marathon County.

"Like some ghoul in a late night horror movie ..."

Prof. Rick Hasen on Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, today's U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding Indiana's voter ID law:

Justice Souter's opinion in dissent is the one I would have hoped the Court would have written; rather than accepting the state's interests at face value, it probed to see if the evidence actually supported it. Because the state failed to do so, the Court should have struck down the law entirely, not relegated future challenges to "as applied" litigation. Justice Breyer, taking a somewhat more moderate approach to the state's interest, finds fault in the details of the Indiana plan — there is no justification, he says, for [its] more severe aspects.

It is amazing to me how allergic all the Justices of the Court are to Bush v. Gore. ... Nary a word from any Justice on what their own handiwork may have caused in this country.

Nary a churlish, 'Get over it, Sore Loserman' from Justice Scalia.

Election Law Blog.

Plug-a-blog

Say hello to my conservative Catholic evil twin, Tom Joe. He's delurked and lurks again, as far afield as Super Id, who offers this well informed and therefore perfectly cynical commentary here.

T.J. is some kind of a scientist, so that's why his blog is all sciency and stuff, but it looks pretty good anyway:

Bio-Fuel!

Ye gods there's a post called, "I agree with Glenn Beck." That alone took enormous courage.

Google search term poetry

God damn European cantatas

CNN devoted quite a bit of airtime last night to broadcasting a speech to the NAACP in Detroit by "Obama's pastor," Jeremiah Wright. The dude is one hell of an entertaining speaker, and it's easy to see why he'd be beloved both within his Chicago congregation and beyond.

Except his views about music are wildly archaic, misinformed, and prone to stereotyping, which is a lot ironic, considering the theme of his speech and its obvious purpose of PR damage repair.

Wright's main point was that it's about time humans stopped looking at other members of the species as somehow deficient on account of their physical and ethnic characteristics, and he used a number of musical examples by analogy to demonstrate, claiming that aficionados of "European cantatas" find those of black American gospel singing "deficient." How ridiculous.

As a general matter, musicians are about the worst comparative example to use in Wright's context because — and I say this from decades of personal experience — musicians are, as a group, the least concerned about "race" than any humans you can find.

Ask Benny Goodman who, in the 1930s, hired Fletcher Henderson, Lionel Hampton, and Charlie Christian. Goodman willingly endured the grief of touring the States in those days with black band members because they were first and foremost brilliant and innovative musicians who happened to have dark skin.

And Goodman, who also recorded Mozart clarinet concertos, was obviously an admirer of both "European cantatas" and gospel shouting. In equal admiration, I bet. Like any musician would.

During his speech, Wright referred to a number of prominent European composers in vaguely mocking terms, claiming that the term "classical music" excludes music from traditions other than the European one. That's simply not true.

Of course we differentiate among Western classical music and other traditions. And Western classical composers have been admiring and incorporating those traditions at least since the time of Mozart, who wrote an entire Singspiel, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, based in Middle Eastern themes.

Wright tried to get a bit more technical, discussing various time signatures and the emphasis different cultures place on different beats within each measure, invoking Beethoven, of all people, as an example of a non-hip rhythmatist. Wright can't have heard much Beethoven, the hue of whose own skin was such that he bore the contemporary nickname, der Spagnol ("the Spaniard").

One needn't get too deep into the Ludwig van catalog to determine that he was a master of manipulating rhythm. Listen to the third movement scherzo of the Eroica Symphony, one of Beethoven's best known masterpieces. Ostensibly in three-four time, Beethoven shifts the emphasis away from the first beat of the measure so severely it could be in eleven-four time for all you know.

Never mind the ingenious rhythmically manipulative use Beethoven put to another time signature invoked by Jeremiah Wright, six-eight, in his piano sonatas and string quartets.

As for myself, I'm about the last person for Wright to present his silly analogies to, since any random sequence of tunes on my iPod's shuffle songs function will involve J.S. Bach, Ornette Coleman, Liz Phair, Bob Marley, and Jim Liban* (those were the last five tracks). I couldn't care less what color any of them are. They made great records.

Right now it's playing Wynton Marsalis's big band jazz oratorio Blood On The Fields, which I had the fortuitous opportunity to see performed live in Toronto in the early 90s. It was one of the greatest concerts I've ever heard. (Cassandra Wilson is smokin', incidentally; I'm sure Pastor Wright agrees on that account.)

And I doubt the magnificent African American pianist Keith Jarrett would share in Wright's mockery of G.F. Handel, given Jarrett's superb ECM (a venerable European jazz label showcasing the occasional "cantata") recording of Handel's keyboard suites.

The other somewhat annoying feature of Wright's speech was his constant reference to "people of faith." Jeremiah Wright and other religious leaders need to acknowledge that there are plenty of folks out here who don't rely on "faith" to formulate the (self-evident) concepts of human dignity and equality that are the same goals as those of Wright and the NAACP. The religious have no monopoly on those ideals, and as a matter of fact it's often the religious who've thwarted — and continue to thwart — efforts to realize those ideals.

In his public relations role as a now-nationwide Christian pastor, Jeremiah Wright ought to check out a 1964 film by the Italian auteur Pier Paolo Pasolini called The Gospel According to St. Matthew. It's without doubt the most reverent cinematic treatment ever of the life of Christ, and it was realized by a communist, homosexual atheist.

The best Über-Katholik Mel Gibson could do was a snuff movie. **

The soundtrack also features everything, often in immediate juxtaposition, from J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion to Blind Willie Johnson, an itinerant singer of sacred songs who performed on — and was recorded on — street corners in Texas in the 1920s.

Either that or Wright needs to come up with some better "race" analogies than his musical ones. Because they suck. However, I'm not about to blame Barack Obama for them. I'm not a Republican.

Thank god.

* There's an entire album from the legendary Milwaukee bluesman Jim Liban at that link, Hot Tongue and Cold Shoulder. Check it oot. Liban is white, but he's almost black, as James Siegfried would say.

** Full disclosure: I haven't actually seen The Passion of the Christ (but I have seen "The Christ Nail" episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm a couple of times as well as the NASCAR product placement). Personally I can't justify spending two-and-a-half hours watching a guy from Skagit County, WA, getting whipped. Unless it was Glenn Beck.

How do you make a hormone*

Neil Noeson is an alleged pharmacist that refused to fill a prescription for oral contraceptives in a K-Mart at Menomonie, WI, in 2002.

Noesen additionally refused to tell the patient where she could get her prescription filled. When the patient went and found a Menomonie Wal-Mart, Noesen even refused to provide the information that would have allowed the latter's druggist to fill the prescription. By the time the patient was able to fill her prescription two days later, she had missed the first prescribed dose.

All because Neil Noeson is a self-righteous, self-appointed religious crusader, a "conscientious objector" contra contraception. Of course the initial mistake was committed by the patient, whom Noeson asked for what purpose the medication was prescribed, because it has physiological uses other than preventing pregnancy. Rather than answering the pharmacist honestly, as she did, she should have told him to mind his own goddamn business and just do his job.

In so many words, of course.

The patient justly filed a complaint with the appropriate State executive agency and Noesen was properly reprimanded and disciplined. Noesen appealed the ruling of the adminstrative tribunal, and was unequivocally smacked down once more late last month by the District III Court of Appeals in Noesen v. Wisconsin Dept. of Regulation and Licensing (.pdf, 16 pgs.).

Wrote the court:

In short, Noesen abandoned even the steps necessary to perform in a “minimally competent” manner under any standard of care. He prevented all efforts [the patient] made to obtain her medication elsewhere when he refused to complete the transfer and gave her no options for obtaining her legally prescribed medication elsewhere. The [licensing] Board could therefore properly conclude he violated a standard of care applicable to pharmacists: it does not matter which standard, because Noesen’s behavior “substantially departs” from all of them [lol!].

Last week Noeson appealed again, to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. This will be a good test case for Mike Gableman to apply his famously vacuous "fair reading of the plain language of the law" mantra or else perhaps he'll be able to miraculously divine a constitutional right for Neil Noesen to have deliberately and intentionally interfered with the health and safety of the woman in question on "religious" grounds.

* Don't pay her.

UPDATE: Talkin' Neil Noeson Birth Control Pill Blues — J-S Online

"I'm part of the problem," he said.

I bet he's a real effective contraceptive at parties.

Worst of the local rags

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel runs a feature every weekend called the Best of the Wisconsin Blogs. It's in the hard copy paper too. This week the Best of the Blogs is represented by an incoherent two-paragraph diatribe inspired by the "genius" of Rush Limbaugh, some nonsense about "the Hildabeast" and "Shrillary" and Republicans disingenuously masquerading as registered Democrats.

High calibre stuff, clearly. And so original.

J-S editorial board member Patrick McIlheran, a chooser of the "Best" blogs, once actually compared the substanceless rant's author to H.L. Mencken, one of the finest writers in the American language ever.

Its inclusion is practically an insult. But fortunately most of us don't have to depend on the J-S to tell us who's doing the best writing out here and are likely even pleased not to be included with the allegedly representative samples. Mencken himself would be as pleased.

Blogger Cavett moderates comments

Petraeus, Custer and You.

At least one of your readers last week suggested that General Petraeus had no choice in wearing the uniform with all that fruit-salad on it. Bull. If he can order the deaths of thousands, he can wear a tee-shirt and shorts to a congressional hearing.

— richard k

Last week.

Atheist sues foxhole

It eventually came out in Iraq in 2007, when he was in a firefight. Hall was a gunner on a Humvee, which took several bullets in its protective shield. Afterward, his commander asked whether he believed in God.

"No, but I believe in Plexiglas."

Atheist = immoral Devil worshipper — CNN.com

A is for poisoned Appling

This is old news, but I just came across it at Wisconsin Public Television's WisconsinVote.org, which appears to be on hiatus. There is a March 31 link to something called the "State of America's Families blog," and you know you have to check it out because all of them there outfits with "Family" in the name are the real beacons of God's Own Truth and Honesty in America today.

The link gets you to some sort of press release by a gibbering nutcake called Julaine Appling, "president of Wisconsin Family Action." (These "families" are self-referentially incestuous.)

And what you will find is horrifying:

Fair Wisconsin has good reason to believe that Butler will side against traditional marriage as Butler spoke at the Wisconsin LGBT PAC Garden Party in August of 2007. This group subsequently endorsed Butler, noting on its web site that he “spoke in support of LGBT equality.”

First of all I don't quite get how you can accuse somebody of siding against traditional marriage who has been married for 25 years and has grandchildren as opposed to another that's been a lifelong bachelor for going on four-and-a-half decades.

And yes, I know it's damn near unpossible for the "family" units to believe, but somebody actually spoke in support of equality — in America! I can almost hear Jefferson rotating in his grave.

It's getting like Iran around here these days, I tell ya.

Constructive perverts like Julaine Appling and her neurotically prurient ilk spend too much time fixated on the mechanical details of sexual coupling and not enough addressing the larger questions of gender. They're like people who hate porn so much they have to watch it over and over again to make sure it really does offend them.

Does Julaine Appling think, for example, that persons born with ambiguous genitalia "chose that lifestyle"? Not only is sexuality defined with considerable fluidity throughout humanity, so too is our very gender: female, male, and not so clear-cut.

It's little different from what people call "race," which is really only a set of physical distinctions evolved over several hundred thousand years and exactly what you'd expect to find in individual populations within any species. Even the creationists have a word for it: "microevolution." And there's no arguing with them.

In other words, because my parents weren't descended from any of the populations that emigrated eastward across Asia 70,000 years ago, I couldn't choose to look like Akira Kurosawa. Or Miles Davis.

By a similar token, just because somebody's not a raging stud heterosexual in full speed-rut like the "reverend" Ted Haggard doesn't make them exempt from fundamental U.S. freedoms.

"I think we've been extremely tolerant in allowing them to live wherever they choose," Julaine Appling has been reported as saying about gay people. Well that's mighty white of you, Ms. Appling (if that really is your real gender).

I Live Off You

ACLU sides with creationists 60% of the time

Scientific American's editor-in-chief interviews Mark Mathis, the jackanapes in charge of judger of top models Ben Stein's latest rickety "intelligent design" (translation: creationism in a cheap tuxedo) vehicle, Expelled.

I'm not in the mood to wallow in creationist idiocy at the moment, especially with the Schubert string quintet occupying the sound system; maybe later. In the meantime, the footnote at the SCIAM webpage is good for a laugh.

Demonstrating yet again how creationists never weary of regurgitating the same old viscous and thoroughly debunked drivel, Mathis mumbles that Kitzmiller v. Dover Area Sch. Dist., the currently definitive Establishment of Religion Clause manhandling* of intelligent design "theory," is comprised of 92% ACLU memoranda, briefs, and "findings of facts," as we say.

Even if it were true — which it isn't — it's not much of a criticism but rather a tribute to the ACLU's stellar efforts. What in the hell does Mathis think plaintiffs file facts and arguments with the court for? So the judge can paper his archaeopteryxcage with them?

Mathis. Just admit it, you're peddling religion. Which is fine. Peddle and lie away. It's a free country. But we would like to keep at least one area of human enquiry and endeavor free from your hobgoblins and leprechauns, and that is science. You can have everything else.

Now go ye and get a real job.

* The fine product of a conservative Republican, Dubya-installed judge named John E. Jones, III, which memorably added "breathtaking inanity" to the lexicon of perfect descriptions both for creationists and their -ism, and contains the strong suggestion that several Bible-fearing creationist witnesses at trial, er, bore false witness under oath.

Patron saint of shitty looking Nativity scenes*

[* Batteries not included — animals not to scale — void in U.S.]

Win a ten dollar Mexican food gift certificate (or cash).

Alas pore Fradette, I knew him, Horatio.

A measly 15 DIWITTYs

Back in 2005, I used to talk to Renato Umali quite a bit. I was working at a music store where Renato teaches piano so I was seeing him three or four days a week, I guess, and talked to him on the phone when he had to make some adjustment to his schedule or whatever. I don't remember exactly.

It's not that I don't remember exactly because Renato isn't an interesting guy and a heck of a personable and funny one at that. Aside from being a pretty decent pianist and from all accounts a beloved music teacher, he's a knowledgeable cinéaste who teaches a few courses in film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is engaged to a lawyer, is an avid cyclist and a rabid hockey fan, is a nationally-ranked Scrabble player, and is fairly well known in the community for his activities as a conceptual artist.

Of Renato's February 8 performance at the Bremen Café in Riverwest, learned counsel, talented singer/songwriter, and independent recording artist Mike Plaisted had this to say:

Renato did one of the most amazing things I ever saw — singing a book about British colonialism in India, in character with the English guy. Incredible.

Besides, you don't have to remember when or how often you talk to Renato because he keeps track of all of that, since he's also a remarkably fastidious diarist. So that's how I know I talked to Renato on 86 separate occasions in 2005. He could give you the dates and the exact times.

In fact it was so many times I actually won an award for it, an Umali Award commemorating my 86 DIWITTYs, which means, "day in which I talk to you." Eighty-six DIWITTYs put me in fourth place for 2005, if I recall correctly, and the award was presented at an elaborate ceremony at a very cool Riverwest loft attended by a formally dressed cast of hundreds.

I even got to make an acceptance speech, so I could express how honored and humbled I was to help facilitate Renato's obsessive-compulsive disorder, or something like that. Whatever it was it got a big laugh. I still see Renato fairly often but I haven't attended an Umali Awards since then. Until tomorrow night, which is when Renato celebrates the seventh annual Umali Awards and I get to present one this time.

Except the Umali Awards aren't in Riverwest anymore, as Renato has eschewed the trappings of his Bohemian roots and moved Uptown to the UWM Peck School of the Arts' posh and high-tech INOVA/Kenilworth Square (because, Renato claims, it's closer to Izumi Japanese restaurant on Prospect Ave.).

And, as depicted above, for the Umali Awards trophies themselves, Renato has upgraded from hand printed certificates to fancy golden statuettes. Next year Joan Rivers will be outside on a red carpet. In other words, Renato has SOLD OUT. Just kidding. Tomorrow's big night is guaranteed to be the most elaborate and successful yet.

DIWITTYs aren't the only thing Renato keeps track of; he also logs practically each minutiae of his daily life, including the details of each meal he takes, and then he even plots the results on spreadsheets which he analyzes and draws global inferences from and determines wider trends. For example, this year's snazzy full color seventh annual Umali Awards lobby card bears a bar chart/graph comparing y axis = eggs with x axis = known vegans.

I have no idea what that means, or if that includes both full bore vegans and lacto-ovo vegans, or even if there is such a thing as a lacto-ovo vegan, but it looks to me like the eggs are beating the vegans for a change. Some of this year's Umali Awards categories are similarly cryptic: "Come root for Anna Oxygen, Egg Fried With Rice, New Glarus's Spotted Cow, Classic Slice, February 12 2007, and a whole bunch of other nominees!" it says here.

I've been reviewing my speech, which Renato has written, and is almost like a television script because the prefatory remarks are accompanied by a tightly coordinated PowerPoint/video presentation. Actually it looks like I'm presenting three Umali Awards, for the tenth, ninth, and eighth place 2007 DIWITTYs. And I notice I'm also being forced to admit to the ignominy of following my 86-DIWITTY triumph of 2005 with a woeful 15 in 2006.

Oh well. I guess it was one of those records that will never be equaled, like Chicago Blackhawk Bill Mosienko's three goals in 21 seconds against the Rangers on March 23, 1952. I can't say what Bill Mosienko had to eat that day, but I wouldn't be surprised if Renato can. And he probably has a chart comparing Bill Mosienko hat tricks with the incidence of lacto-ovo vegans. If he doesn't I bet you he thinks that would be a good idea.

And so once again I'm honored and humbled to be involved with the Umali Awards, especially in what promises to be the fanciest, conceptualiest see-and-be-seen-at gala event of the social season. See you there.

Blasphemy Nation

Mike Mathias has a good one here:

Life of Edward

And check this guy out:

Conservative State politician enjoys the R&B stations when he's not out commemorating Hitler's birthday — in front of a portrait of Hitler

Haha. Only in Upper Silesia (pre-1918 boundaries).

eta: Mathias caught a comment from a real-live American Nazi.

Taliban inadvertently does something worthwhile

Although caves decorated with precious murals from 5th to 9th century A.D. also suffered from Taliban attacks on this World Heritage Site, they have since become the focus of a major discovery, revealing Buddhist oil paintings that predate those in Renaissance Europe by hundreds of years.

One of my favorite blogs as lovingly prepared by one of my favorite people has the further scoop over yonder:

The first oil paintings were made in Asia, not Europe

X-posting: Poor netiquette?

Eh, who the hell cares.

Republicrat, I wasn't being sarcastic. And the primary strawman was that I think I know better than the general public (for lack of a better term).

I don't believe for a minute that I know better. The general public is at least as capable as I am of knowing the score.

I learned it, and there's absolutely no reason why anybody else couldn't (especially if I can).

But unfortunately the loudest speakers in this particular election were clowns and liars (jokers to the right), and that goes for all of the 3rd party advertising — although even Butler's 3rd party supporters were several orders of magnitude more honest than Gableman's. Or, the worst of the worst, Gableman's own.

I've never even implied that I think I know better than the general public, only that the general public may not follow these things as closely as some of us do.

And the some of us who do that followed this one especially closely found it pretty easy to separate the bereshite from the bullsh*t (pardon the uncharacteristically timid asterisk; I heard this was a family blog).

But hardly anybody was listening to us, or else they would have listened if they even knew we existed. We don't have 50k watts and the public airwaves [insert Fairness Doctrine joke here] over which to howl like a stuck primate every morning.

That's all I'm sayin'.

How strong is your assertion on Sam Sarver's blog? How incompetent must a "liberal" be for you to vote for a meritorious "conservative"?

I mean it. As for the hypothetical, let's just say that if the roles were reversed, I'd have had a Gableman sign on my lawn. H*ll, I'd have sewn a Gableman patch on my suit jacket, like the WMC one he has on his robe.

And the reason I said I'd changed my mind about electing vs. appointing Supreme Court judges is not because I don't think the voters can handle it. It's because the nominee couldn't handle it.

He has a responsibility — indeed, an obligation — to at least treat the office he seeks with respect. And he failed on that account. Miserably.

So it's no fault of the general public. It's the fault of people who want to abuse the court's function because they have enough money to do it and they need to protect that investment so they're more than willing to say anything in service of that money.

[Seriously, have you ever heard anyone refer to the United States Constitution as a "needless technicality" — in fact, the very provision that none other than Justice Antonin Scalia was vigorously defending the other day (on precisely the same grounds as Justice Louis Butler)?]

And putting a stop to that is worth the price of removing the selection process from the relatively small number of people who bother to exercise it anyway. I'm only talking about the Supreme Court, incidentally.

A competent Supreme Court comprised of our best legal minds is surely the least we can expect for this great State. We have an abundance of those minds here, and we shouldn't settle for less.

An appointment process can at least ensure that only the most talented are considered to begin with and the general public can continue to participate in whatever "liberal" vs. "conservative" controversy erupts then. But the debate will necessarily be of a higher quality. Anything would be of better quality than the recent unpleasantness.

Surely the general public would appreciate a more heightened debate as opposed to getting taken for and treated as suckers by third-party special interest groups, most of whom do not have the public's own special interests at heart whatsoever.

Whom did you vote for in the Sykes-Butler campaign?

Dude I didn't even know who either of them were until about six years later.

And I wouldn't tell you who I voted for anyway. You're not supposed to do that, are you? It's a sacred trust. But the statute of limitations has run on at least one of my secret ballots, and I can now reveal that I voted for Sheila Copps in 1986.

I think that was the year Brian Mulroney's Conservatives (yes, that's actually the name of the party — there's no "Democrat," "Republican" euphemisms up there) went from 275 seats in the House of Commons to three. Know what that was? Reagan fatigue. It penetrated even the icy fjords of Bay and King Sts. Those were the days my friend.

Gasp chamber

Immigrant bashing: Yay!

CNN bests Illy-T in headline derby

I thought I had a hit with "Mormon sex farm," but I hereby doff my quasi-editorial cap to "Polygamy ranch kids." Selah.

Patrick McIlheran's Supreme arrogance

A couple of days before the April 1 State election, Patrick McIlheran of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel printed an exceptionally silly — even for him — bit of absurdist fluff mocking Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler for a comparison that had arisen between Butler and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

In a textbook demonstration of Proverbs 16:18, McIlheran wrote that one need only be "minimally sentient" to understand that the comparison is "towering nonsense."

The ironic truth is that McIlheran's manifestly supercilious pronouncement applies perfectly to his own ill-informed scribblings.

As I pointed out to McIlheran at the time,

Butler's approach in [State v.] Jensen is very similar to that of the most conservative members of the U.S. Supreme Court. It's a near-classic example of a very narrow reading of the text supported by an analysis of the original intent behind the Confrontation Clause.

In fact, that is one of the reasons why SCOTUS will very likely rule for the defendant/appellant in Giles v. California, a case that presents the identical question of constitutional construction that Butler addresses in his Jensen dissent.

I directed McIlheran to my own discussions of State v. Jensen posted here and then offered to bet McIlheran that Justice Scalia would adopt precisely the same approach in Giles as had Justice Butler in Jensen.

That Giles presents the identical constitutional question Justice Butler had addressed in his lone dissent in Jensen:

Does a criminal defendant “forfeit” his or her Sixth Amendment Confrontation Clause claims upon a mere showing that the defendant has caused the unavailability of a witness, as some courts have held, or must there also be an additional showing that the defendant’s actions were undertaken for the purpose of preventing the witness from testifying, as other courts have held?

The Jensen of Jensen, it may be recalled, is Mark Jensen, who was convicted of first-degree intentional homicide for the murder of his wife, whom he poisoned with antifreeze.

McIlheran declined the wager, perhaps realizing that his March 28 blog post was nearly as foolish as his earlier celebrated uncritical acceptance of this laughable characterization of Jensen:

[Justice Butler] wanted looser standard than other justices on allowing hearsay; standard preferred by Jensen's attorney

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Giles v. California. As Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog — who has forgotten more about the law than Patrick McIlheran and the demonstrable liar who wrote the ungrammatical nonsense indented directly above will ever know put together — reports,

Justice Antonin Scalia was the most fervent champion of Giles’ cause, suggesting that the Court in [an earlier SCOTUS decision] had interpreted “the meaning of the Confrontation Clause” as it was understood “when the people adopted it.”

And the meaning of the Confrontation Clause "when the people adopted it" is exactly at the core of Justice Butler's reasoning in State v. Jensen. The complete transcript of the SCOTUS oral arguments is archived here (.pdf; 60 pgs.).

During the oral presentations, Justice Scalia takes pains to distinguish an exception to a hearsay rule of evidence known as the "dying declaration" from the requirements of the Confrontation Clause, which he calls "a totally different situation," precisely as Justice Butler had done. Throughout the oral arguments, in classic Scalia fashion, Scalia helps along the lawyer arguing for the defendant, Giles, and gives the attorney representing the State of California an extremely hard time ("siding with criminals"?).

Even Patrick McIlheran should be able to see this, since he claims to have been "minimally sentient during some portion of Scalia's years on the bench." I beg to differ, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt in this case. Of course McIlheran himself may be "minimally sentient," but the said minimal sentience has little to do with understanding comparative jurisprudence generally or in particular the close parallels between Justice Butler and Justice Scalia's reasoning pursuant to the meaning of the Confrontation Clause.

McIlheran's fatuous yet arrogant commentary is a perfect example of the mis- and disinformation spread by a number of undeservedly prominent and irresponsible Wisconsin media chumps and other alleged "journalists" during the State Supreme Court election campaign — not to mention by Mike Gableman and his direct handlers and enablers themselves — and we have them all to thank for that "stellar example of democracy in action" whereby roughly 9.6% of the State's registered voters rid the other 90.4% of one of the smartest appellate court judges in the country. As smart as the beatified (and not in the Jack Kerouac sense) Antonin Scalia, it would appear.

And they're actually "proud" of it, evidently in the Proverbial sense.

eta: It looks as though April 24, 2008, is Let Us Now Celebrate the Wisdom of Patrick McIlheran Day in the Wisconsin blogosphere:

Taking Pro-Life to the X-Treem

Patrick McIlheran loves DDT

McIlheran v. People of Earth

And even a wistfully touching defense:

We can't all be Nino [Scalia]

McIlheran interviewed a hand-selected conservative GOP hackette named Kellyanne Conway? Oh well, then; I take it all back. :rolleyes:

Reductio ad Hitlerum

Godwin's Law is a rule of the internets which states that during online debates, the earlier a participant brings up Adolf Hitler or Nazi Germany, the less likely fruitful arguments will then obtain.

Godwin's Law has disastrous real life consequences as well, as indicated by the shooting to death of a Milwaukee man in federal prison "during a melee that erupted when a white-supremacist prison gang taunted African-American prisoners on Adolf Hitler's birthday."

"[Colorado State Rep. Buffie] McFadyen said there needs to be an analysis of what caused the riot." I can save her the expense of at least one legislative subcommittee and tell her right now: Stupidity and ignorance, evidently regular features of the human condition.

Now all that remains is for judger of top models Ben Stein and his buffoonish "intelligent design" supporters to tell us that the white supremacists had just come from their prison book club, where they were discussing Charles Darwin's On the Origin Of Species.

They might also explain why white supremacists are apparently exempt from the theoretical bases for "intelligent design."

And I thought I was cynical

But I got nothing on these characters. WisOpinion.com doesn't like me anymore, but they sure link to some ridiculous junk commentary in the meantime. Here's another dazzling gem from the geniuses at the Republican "think tank," the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute:

Judges are part of an industry, the legal industry. It is set up by lawyers, for lawyers, and to benefit only lawyers.

That's intriguing, because I read this somewhere:

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.

And I recall this uncannily similar provision:

The judicial power of this state shall be vested in a unified court system consisting of one supreme court, a court of appeals, a circuit court, such trial courts of general uniform statewide jurisdiction as the legislature may create by law, and a municipal court if authorized by the legislature.

Now I'm sure many of the Framers of both the United States and Wisconsin constitutions were lawyers, but not all of them. Nor do constitutions protect only lawyers. Mark well also that in each document, the judicial power is assumed to be preexisting.

Nobody "set it up," although plenty of other conservative Republicans will tell you that God did, and not lawyers, whom God dislikes.

Apparently our profoundly cynical masters at the WPRI and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce don't see things quite the way the Framers did. The latter thinks the U.S. Constitution is a "needless technicality" and now the former claims both "benefit only lawyers."

While they may harbor a deep and abiding respect for their corporate self-interests, they obviously have little for their country's or their State's foundational premises and documents.

That takes a Canadian, evidently.

"Our" Lord? Oy, vey iz mir.

Last Tuesday, the sheriff of Burnett County, Dean Roland, issued a letter on government stationery trumpeting a two-hour prayer breakfast at a restaurant in the county seat, Siren, on May 1. The featured speaker is none other than Mike Gableman. Sheriff Roland writes:

Judge Gableman is a man who is deeply committed to our Lord, his religion and his profession.

Excuse me? Assuming Sheriff Roland is referring to Jesus Christ (or Allah, for that matter), that is not "our Lord," nor especially is Jesus Christ the "Lord" of Burnett, Milwaukee, or even Ashland County.

He's certainly not my "Lord," and I don't believe he's the Lord of any of my Jewish friends either. Why in the Sam Hill would Sheriff Roland use official government stationery to declare such a thing?

None too bright, that's for sure. Needless to say, Madison's Freedom From Religion Foundation has lodged a complaint. I'm not sure I'd go so far as the FFRF's wholesale condemnation of the prayer breakfast, but it's hardly appropriate — to say the least — for the expression "our Lord" to appear on official government stationery.

Quality not quantity measures blog readership

Justice Scalia must be in the market for a new law clerk but I don't have the heart to tell him he probably can't afford me.

Our corporate activist protectors

A welcome addition to the ranks of Milwaukee blogulators has sprung up here, in the persona of Super Id (Favorite Books: Atlas Shrugged and The Grapes of Wrath ... very clever and endearingly ambiguous).

A recent Super Id post observes that — hang on to your René Magritte bowler hats — the conservative "think tank" Wisconsin Policy Research Institute completely misrepresented a decision of the State Supreme Court. Shocking, I know.

Some character called Deb Jordahl, writes Super Id, "is extremely mistaken in her facts" in assessing a recent decision of the court, Stuart v. Weisflog.

More troubling is her citation to Justice Roggensack's dissent, which would have effectively invalidated the legislature's home improvement practice act by applying the judicially created created economic loss doctrine. That's the real judicial activism in Stuart.

But when your mission is to hack apart a competent judge, the facts do not even matter. Congrats WMC, you won your puppet, now can you live with him?

The puppet in question being, of course, Mike Gableman who, while squeaking out a 51-49 electoral win among a whopping 19% of Wisconsin's registered voters, nevertheless managed to lose his home field, Ashland County, and he toils yet until through the end of July, "presiding over" thousands of uncontested traffic tickets.

For Super Id, "judicial activism" better describes Justice Roggensack's proposed course of action, which is to supplant duly enacted legislation with judge-made rules. Compare that more definitively empirical approach with Marquette Law professor Rick Esenberg's recent shining example of "judicial activism."

Last week in a case called Baze v. Rees, the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the three-drug procedure that several States use to commit premeditated, intentional homicide on selected American citizens.

Justice John Paul Stevens, concurring in the majority's decision to affirm the the lethal injection protocol, wrote separately to discuss the controversial future of the practice among the States and citing the conservative former Justice Byron White's own personal observations on the death penalty itself.

Prof. Esenberg calls this "judicial activism," even though Justice Stevens joined in the judgment of the Court to continue the practice of capital punishment.

Talk about grasping for straws and strawmen. Perhaps Esenberg was inspired by Justice Antonin Scalia's own concurring opinion, written expressly to criticize Justice White's view (via Justice Stevens) that capital punishment, as a general matter of penology, makes but "marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes."

Scalia doesn't care for this observation because he thinks social or public purposes are better discerned by the legislatures of the States. Ultimately, Scalia's objection is based in a differing interpretation of the Constitution's Eighth Amendment, which bans the infliction of cruel and unusual punishments. Scalia, like Prof. Esenberg, never mentions that Stevens joined the judgment of the Court, in holding that the three-drug protocol passes Eighth Amendment muster.

And Scalia has never relied on his own personal views in a Supreme Court opinion? Give me a large break and supersize it.

Scalia at least allows that the death penalty's value is "eminently debatable and the subject of deeply, indeed passionately held, views." He just doesn't like Justice Stevens expressing them or, at least, echoing those of Justice White. And this is "judicial activism," according to Prof. Esenberg, despite Stevens joining the six other Justices who voted to affirm the practice of lethal injection as currently practiced. Anything to slam a so-called "liberal judge," apparently, no matter how tenuous to the point of non-existence.

Meanwhile, closer to home, yet more absurdity proceeds from the disingenuous observations of another conservative "think tank" genius, this time hailing from Chicago's Heartland Institute, in the person of one Maureen Martin and a bit of partisan gibberish published the other day in the Wisconsin State Journal.

Referring to the recent State Supreme Court election as "a stellar example of democracy in action" and proof positive "that Wisconsinites care about judicial rulings," Martin goes on to wail predictably and tediously about "liberal elitists."

What Martin doesn't tell you is that only 19% of registered voters cared to participate in this stellar example of democracy and, more importantly, the rulings Wisconsinites supposedly do care about were portrayed by Mike Gableman and his enablers and supporters almost entirely by lying about them.

I wonder who's paying Maureen Martin to fabricate this transparently partisan rubbish, and why the Wisconsin State Journal is publishing it (Chicago, if I'm not mistaken, is in Illinois). Those are not unreasonable questions, because the Heartland Institute is in the business of, for example, denying the health effects of second-hand smoke on behalf of generous stipends gotten from Philip Morris USA, Inc. and lobbying for the oil industry thanks to nearly a million Exxon dollars received over the last ten years.

Of course that's not reflective of "elitism" at all, that's jes' plain folks conservative Republican grass roots populism. Salt of the earth.

How singularly unsurprising that another paid corporate shill would support the empty-suit candidacy of Mike Gableman. Corporate shills were Mike Gableman's biggest supporters throughout the campaign and corporate shills were largely responsible for lying to Wisconsin voters about sitting Justice Louis Butler's record, going so far even to refer to the U.S. Constitution as a "needless technicality."

But, yeah, a stellar example of democracy in action. Right.

Happy birthday, James Siegfried of Milwaukee

James Chance, a.k.a. James White and long before that as James Siegfried of Milwaukee, WI, is 55 today.

Happy birthday, James.

James is a legend in New York — where he moved in 1976 after dropping out of the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music — and beyond. Just not in Milwaukee. He came back to town five years ago and played a gig at what used to be the Onopa Brewery in Riverwest. I hadn't seen him play for nearly ten years, so I was pretty excited about it, and asked a bunch of my musician friends if they were going. None of them had ever heard of him, and declined the invitation. Their loss!

At the Onopa, they hadn't heard of him either. When James showed up for the gig carrying his alto saxophone, the doorman asked him to pay the cover charge. "Dude, that's the headliner," I told him.

Two people who did know James were his parents. They were at the show and considering James's act, it was pretty cool to find a couple of 70-ish folks grooving to James's edgy funk-punk-free jazz stylings and slightly menacing stage persona. I talked to them afterwards and they were positively beaming, and told me how proud they were of James. They should be; James has put on some of the best live shows ever.

And as usual, James had a wicked band. He's always hooked up with some great musicians. For example, two of James's albums recorded as James White and the Blacks, Off White and Sax Maniac, feature trombonist Joe Bowie, the younger brother of trumpeter Lester Bowie. Joe Bowie has performed with Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Sam Rivers, and a host of other avant-jazz geniuses, as well as being the founder of Defunkt.

I used to go catch James playing in Toronto whenever he came there. One of the best shows I've ever seen was James's gig at the Bamboo Club on Queen St. in the late 80s. What a band. Everybody was screaming for encores but James came back out to say they'd already played all the songs they knew. Another time I saw James in around 1983. About a week later I saw Ornette Coleman, and Ornette was with the same guitarist as James had had in his ensemble.

Unfortunately I never had the opportunity to see James's first band, the Contortions, whose live shows featured the bandleader getting into fights with audience members including, apparently, the Village Voice's music critic Robert Christgau. Even so, Christgau gave Off White a B minus and Buy the Contortions a B plus, despite calling James an "ambitious neurotic" beset by "obnoxious afflictions."

(Lou Reed has some amusing advice for Robert Christgau and his sophomoric ratings system on Take No Prisoners.)

Marquette University has a special collection of CDs by Milwaukee and Milwaukee-related artists, so I did a search the other day to see if James Siegfried was in there. Nope. Shocked and appalled, I called the library and spoke to somebody there, told her a bit about James, hooked her up with his Wikipedia entry and suggested that the collection should at least acquire Off White and Sax Maniac.

Then a friendly library archivist named Bruce Cole called me back to talk about James Chance. Bruce, a drummer, said he remembered James Siegfried from before he moved to New York. And he vowed that pretty soon James Chance will be represented in the Marquette collection, and more than deservedly so, I say.

Here's a clip of James speaking to a French journalist in a bar a couple of years ago, about his musical influences and what he's been up to recently:

James Chance interview (6:34)

And here's a home video of an early Contortions performance, from 30 years ago:

I Can't Stand Myself (4:17)

Finally, the title track from 1982's Sax Maniac. Crank it up for James's 55th birthday and check out the bass player, Colin Wade:



There are a few more tracks from Off White at this MySpace page, including the dance floor classic Contort Yourself, Almost Black, and the strangely disturbing "duet" with Lydia Lunch, Stained Sheets.

Many happy returns, James. Thanks for all the great music and entertainment and come back home to play a gig soon. I'll try to drag a few more people out to the show this time. Physically, if necessary.

New Values

Great guitar solo by James Williamson. One time I made a mix tape that had this song on it ten times in a row. (Not my idea; some disk jockey played I Saw Her Standing There ten times in a row in 1964.)

Thought I was dreaming

Earthquake rocks illusory tenement

Vince Taylor — Shakin' All Over

Vince Taylor used to live here
Nobody's ever heard of him ...
Ain't that a shame

— Van Morrison, Goin' Down Geneva

Report of the anonymous committee

Speaking of "anonymous," I found this comment at Prof. Rick Esenberg's blog this morning:

Regarding "it" [that's me!], he's in full support of our courts being filled with liberal judges that have given us abortion, Everson and so on. He actually thinks that no one can speak as a Christian in public places.

Like most libs he doesn't care about the founding or history of this nation, he only cares that liberal and aethiest [sic] actions are somehow made law. That means if you cannot get it done through legislation, that you must have judges that get it done for you.

That is what has been happening since Everson and what they want to continue by trying to get judicial appointments in the State.

Here's a quote for you from the Senate Judiciary Committee 1853-1854 report regarding the founding fathers' intent for the judiciary: "they did not intend to spread over all the nation the dead and revolting spectacle of atheistical apathy."

That is what "it" represents by his babbling.

Of course there's plenty to mock in that litany of completely made-up bullshit, but the best is anonymous's citation to a Senate committee report in the context of deriding liberal judges (including Hugo Black, apparently, the textualist's textualist who wrote the majority opinion in Everson v. Board of Education [which the apathetic clique of revolting atheists known as the Catholic Church won, incidentally]).

Here's what Justice Antonin Scalia — who, whatever he may be, probably wouldn't be mistaken for a liberal judge — said of the Supreme Court's use of committee reports in Blanchard v. Bergeron:

That the Court should refer to the citation of three District Court cases in a document issued by a single committee of a single house as the action of Congress displays the level of unreality that our unrestrained use of legislative history has attained. ... As anyone familiar with modern-day drafting of congressional committee reports is well aware, the references to the cases were inserted, at best by a committee staff member on his or her own initiative, and at worst by a committee staff member at the suggestion of a lawyer-lobbyist.

What a heady feeling it must be for a young staffer to know that his or her citation of obscure district court cases can transform them into the law of the land, thereafter dutifully to be observed by the Supreme Court itself.

I decline to participate in this process.

In other words, making use of a Senate committee report for the purpose of supporting an argument (if that's what it's supposed to be) in favor of more Antonin Scalias is, well, a little odd.

By the incompetent, for the competent

I got this comment from the ubiquitous "anonymous" in alleged response to my post here the other day:

"Rather than accept the will of the people you now want to deprive the people of their right to vote."

Where did I say I didn't accept the "will of the people"? Of course I accept the "will of the people." That's the whole problem.

One of the provisions of the Wisconsin constitution reads, "Laws may be enacted excluding from the right of suffrage persons adjudged by a court to be incompetent or partially incompetent."

All we need to do is adjust the definition of incompetence somewhat. And even then, we don't have to adjust it all that much, because such persons would be excluded from voting based on a showing of mere partial incompetence.

It needs only be adjusted enough to exclude, for example, persons who actually believe that Charlie Sykes is telling the truth. Because if you don't have the wherewithall to make that simple determination, then you're practically within the purview of the legal definition of competence as it stands, which refers to the ability to tell right from wrong.

Determinations of incompetence, in the legal sense, seek to adduce some degree of mental infirmity or incapacity. Years ago I helped a friend of mine coach a hockey team of so-called incompetents. They were a bunch of young men with Down Syndrome and other forms of what we used to call mental retardation. Incompetent? I think not. For one thing, they were about the sunniest, most carefree gang of human beings you ever met. Until they got on the ice, when they became as like one of those multi-elbowed subcontinental deities but with the head of Gordie Howe.

I can't say whether they knew the difference between right and wrong, according to the legal sense of competence, but they knew the difference between hockey and not-hockey. And for Canadians at least, that's far more important.

For plenty of Wisconsinites, too. The laws of statistics dictate that of the 100% of attendees at Milwaukee Admirals or Wisconsin Badgers games, only 19% of them voted on April 1. Less if they drove up from Illinois, where they're forced to endure the Chicago Blackhawks.

Besides, you want incompetent? Check out this column by another of Milwaukee's medium wave chuckleheads:

Butler, a former public defender, is such an extremist on the rights of criminals that he has been dubbed "Loophole Louie" in reference to his willingness to overturn convictions.

Mark Belling should be excluded from suffrage on the strength of that slice of rampantly fallacious idiocy alone. And anybody who reads that while nodding blithely in agreement clearly doesn't know the difference between right and wrong either. That's incompetence.

What's that you say? The legal definition of competence embodying the ability to distinguish between right and wrong is a reference to morality and not the competence to make factual determinations? Well, sorry about your luck, but you're probably the same people who criticized a Butler teevee ad depicting Justice Butler as "doing what's right," so you can't have it both ways. Furthermore, the objections to that ad were misplaced as a matter of the philosophy of law, but that's a subject for another day and another post.

Moreover, how does one get to portray as an indication of the "will of the people" only 19% of them bothering to exercise their right to suffrage? It seems to me that the "will of the people" is better expressed by the 81% who didn't vote because they didn't care, or didn't even know there was an election on April 1. If 81% of registered voters don't care enough to vote in the first place, then how could they possibly object to an effort to ensure only the best and smartest judges sit on the State's highest court of appeals?

Chances are good they wouldn't care about that either anyway.

Anonymous goes on, quoting the Gettysburg Address of all things, which was uttered by a U.S. president who represents near-anathema to proponents of so-called "States' rights," to jabber some nonsense about "liberals." Even as things stand, elections to the Wisconsin Supreme Court are supposed to be non-partisan. Last I checked, the Wisconsin Supreme Court Rules are part and parcel of the Wisconsin statutes, which are themselves a direct expression of the "will of the people," enacted as they are by the popularly elected legislature.

I regret to say that even anonymous her-/him-/itself would be swept within my proposed adjusted definition of competence, if not the existing one. This is the reason I moderate comments here, to generously protect persons adjudged to be embarrassing themselves publicly. But occasionally I slip up and let one through.

Eschew obfuscation

Dick Cavett — Memo to Petraeus and Crocker.

h/t Margaret.

Yeah, I'm an elitist. So what?

Marquette Law School Prof. Rick Esenberg did not deliver his best work to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's Crossroads section yesterday. "Half-hearted," is how I'd charitably describe it.

If I were allowed to read between the lines, I'd say that Prof. Esenberg is nearly as revolted at the most recent State Supreme Court election as I am. The only reason I say "nearly" is because he received the reward he sought: the replacement of one of the smartest and most highly regarded judges in the country with a de facto and de jure Homer Simpson.

I also have to wonder if Esenberg actually voted for Mike Gableman or, like my piano student James, did the right thing but held his breath for the wrong outcome. At least, that's what I told James he'd done. (He laughed; James also has a sense of humor.)

It's impossible to take seriously Esenberg's portrayal of the two candidates as "reasonable lawyers with deep philosophical differences," as if there were comparable records from which to draw this implied equivalence of competence. Was Esenberg even paying attention? The only thing we ever heard from Gableman was the same old tired, empty GOP namecalling, of himself as a "textualist" (all judges are textualists — what, do you think the law is written in ham sandwiches?) and Justice Louis Butler an "activist" who decides cases in advance based on personal whims.

In other words, meaningless and — more to the point — baseless and indefensible rubbish. If Gableman has a philosophy, or is capable of enunciating one, or even knows what a judicial philosophy is or what it means to have a judicial philosophy, then maybe Prof. Esenberg can fill us in. But he certainly wouldn't be getting any of his impressions from Gableman himself. All Esenberg would be able to do is criticize Justice Butler's extensively documented jurisprudence and then claim Gableman represents his opposite number. Which is essentially all Esenberg has been able to muster in the first place.

Esenberg's anecdotal allusion to Ted Kennedy's goofball performances at Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on federal court nominees is every bit as unconvincing. Hardly anybody takes Kennedy seriously in that context. More the norm — or at least the ideal — is Arlen Specter's justly celebrated grilling of Robert Bork, which Ronald Dworkin described as one of the most compelling examples of American democracy in action.

And contrary to popular Republican "wisdom," Bork borked himself; it wasn't Ted Kennedy who borked Bork. That pesky Indiana law review.

Or how about the repugnantly obsequious tongue-bathings of GOP committee members like Orrin Hatch or — the worst of the worst — Jeff Sessions, whose inquiries of G.W. Bush judicial nominees elicit about as much probative intellectual content as asking the prospective Article III judges for their favorite brownie recipes, and then to comment approvingly on their own magical deliciousness.

As a newly minted supporter of a Wisconsin Supreme Court appointment process, even I'm willing to put up with those sorts of vacuous charades.

American democracy, let us recall, is decidedly not of the direct variety. The only body the Framers of the Constitution allowed for direct election was the House of Representatives, and even then only for two-year terms, because the Framers understood that the mob's inflamed passions would compel it to turf its representative yahoos out of office almost as quickly as it had installed them. And inflamed passions are the antithesis to the rule and the process of law.

The power of incumbency (a.k.a. hockey socks full of cash contributions stuffed in exchange for obeying moneyed interest groups) has changed all that for the most part, of course.

The call for the appointment rather than the popular election of judges inevitably invites catchy GOP charges of "elitism" from those who would prefer appellate courts empaneled with Homer Simpsons and Fred Flintstones. Bring on such charges, I say. Of course it smacks of elitism. Our highest appellate courts are supposed to be comprised of the elite. They are the elite. Anybody from Plato to Thomas Aquinas to James Madison and Alexander Hamilton (the poster boy for American political elitism) can tell you that.

Or Thomas Frank, whose What's The Matter With Kansas? Esenberg also disparages yesterday (without explaining why). Frank shows exactly how conservative caterwauling about "liberal elitism" is a fatuous joke and in fact a ridiculously embarrassing false pretense to political and cultural victimhood on the part of conservatives.

By close analogy, witness the disingenuous howls of persecution by American Christians, 85% of the population, driven back into their caves like the Essenes by a handful of atheists, many of whom are reluctant to identify themselves as such for fear of being scorned and shunned to the detriment of their very careers.

Ultimately, Prof. Esenberg's vaguely Churchillian thesis appears to be that popularly electing our State Supreme Court is the least worst option available. He can't possibly be serious, especially while at the same time declaring that he loves the law (which I don't doubt for one instant).

For one thing, an appointment process will have the meritorious effect of excluding the Mike Gablemans from our highest courts of appeal. That alone is enough to commend such a process. The strange case of Harriet Miers aside, does anybody seriously think the likes of Mike Gableman would be mentioned in the same breaths as the likes of John Roberts or Samuel Alito, even by Karl Rove?

Obviously a method of appointing — as opposed to the popular election of — judges will not erase the political content of the selection process. Who ever said it would? And what isn't political in this country? One of the reasons I got a law degree was so I could better understand the daily newspaper. Everything is political here, and all politics ultimately rests on some legal question.

And conservative Republicans needn't be concerned they'll be forbidden from engaging in precisely the same lobbying of a judicial selection committee with which they're able to insult the public's intelligence now. Happily, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce will still retain its ability to micturate all over the Bill of Rights.

I have no idea what success State Rep. Frederick Kessler's proposed constitutional amendment will enjoy, if any. But, given the experience of Wisconsin's latest Supreme Court election, I wouldn't be able to bring myself to not support it.

Speaking as someone who also loves the law, the election was a shameful affair, and one can only pray it never happens again. Even I will pray, to Saint Thomas Aquinas, if that's what it takes.

I Will Dare

Civility? We don't need no stinking civility.*

Over at folkbum's rambles 'n' rants, Jay and capper have been addressing this question of "civility" in the blogosphere. I have to wonder of some of these people (not Jay or capper) who thrive on shedding crocodile tears over so-called civility: Is this your first day on the internets, or what?

Because it most definitely ain't mine, and much of what I do here is certainly both a product and reflection of internet culture, which is unique. And if you don't appreciate it, then don't read it. More to the point, if you don't read it, then don't make absurd generalizations about it. The latter is generous advice, in that those who do only make themselves look foolish.

Case in point.

What amazes me the most is that a few apparently humorless and (unsurprisingly) conservative bloggers seem to believe that my subtitle, "The Champagne of Hate Blogs," is actually a serious advertisement for myself. I assumed such people knew about Bill O'Reilly. Anybody who's observed that clown performing knows that one of his favorite schticks is raving about the so-called "hate left" and their internets bloggers, whom he calls Nazis and so forth. Nazis!

Full disclosure: Bill O'Reilly is a determinedly fatuous buffoon and "The Champagne of Hate Blogs" is a facetious, self-deprecating acknowledgment of his tremendous idiocy and, as should be blindingly obvious to just about any self-respecting Wisconsinite (and beyond), it's a nod to the advertising slogan of a very famous and legendary Milwaukee brand.

Milwaukee is my adopted home and I happen to love it here, and I'm grateful for all the wonderful friends I've made, "hate bloggers" and otherwise. And there isn't a "hater" in the lot, I should add. Quite the opposite. They're fine people.

Which reminds me — as do many things — of a joke told to me decades ago by a late and beloved uncle of mine. It seems the Mudhens and the Athletics were engaged in an epic Triple A struggle upon the verdant sward, and the Mudhens were down three runs in the bottom of the ninth with two out and the bases loaded.

The Athletics' manager signaled to Mel Famey, ace reliever, to get in the game and save the day. Unfortunately that day had been mighty warm and Mel Famey had a powerful thirst, and he'd spent the afternoon slaking it by drinking beer in the dugout and tossing the empty cans over his shoulder onto the ground outside the park.

Having therefore some considerable difficulty negotiating the strike zone, Mel Famey proceeded to walk the next four batters in a row, and the Mudhens prevailed by a run. Later, as the Mudhens were leaving the ballpark, one of the last four batters noticed the pile of beercans behind the Athletics' dugout. "Hey, look," he notified his colleagues, "That's the beer that made Mel Famey walk us."

Yes, yes, I know. That was terrible. Fortunately my uncle — whose unquestionable awesomeness was cemented in the 1950s when he drove to Buffalo, NY to hear Charlie Parker play in a nightclub — had a million more better ones. My uncle, who was also a scratch golfer, taught me how to swing a club and took me 'round to all the local links when I was a kid.

One time we were playing with my older brother, just a threesome. There was a foursome in front of us, playing very slowly, and nobody in front of the foursome for several holes. The laws of golf etiquette dictate that they let us play through, because we were playing much, much faster than they were. You shouldn't have to ask them.

Being patient and civil fellows ourselves, we let this go on for a few holes until finally, it being obvious that this quartet of weekend turf hackers was etiquette-averse, my uncle approached them on one of the tees: "Say, fellas, would you mind very much if we played through? I have to be at my wife's funeral in 45 minutes."

I thought that was the funniest thing I ever heard in my life and is likely the root source of both my lifelong appreciation for golf jokes as well as my unrepentant misogyny. (In fact you have to be an unrepentant misogynist to appreciate golf jokes, e.g., "Hey, I got a nice set of Taylor Made irons for the wife." "Good trade!")

* The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was my uncle's favorite movie.

Blogging while white

One of the funniest guys on the Milwaukee internets is John McAdams, who is apparently a professor of political science at Marquette University. McAdams tells the tale of a philosophy student being "forced" to apologize by his instructor for comments made during a class discussion on law enforcement and ethnicity.

Personally, I don't think university instructors should "force" students to apologize for comments made during class discussions, if that is really what happened.

I remember a discussion in one of my own political science classes at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee a few years ago during which a student insisted that gay people were really heterosexual, and that homosexuality was a deliberate and conscious choice on their part. I remarked that if that were true, then I would have chosen it back when I was about 15, because I would have gotten laid a hell of a lot more (since anything is more than none).

When the laughter had died down (which was what I was after, obviously, humor being often the best means to the end of making a point), the instructor chastised me mildly for implying that gay people were more promiscuous than any other group, and that I was reinforcing an invidious stereotype. Of course I was aware of that already, and that was indeed part of the joke. And I'm sure those laughing the heartiest were the gay students in the class.

Anyway, the hapless McAdams can barely get through three paragraphs without contradicting himself. First the "forced" apology becomes a "suggested" one. Then McAdams gives away the game by revealing a little agenda of his own, in that his central defense of the student in question turns on the McAdams-endorsed truism that the "truculent attitudes of many minorities are part of the problem."

Quips McAdams parenthetically:

Two of the blacks in class complained about how they had been stopped because of their race (although they had not been asked to get out of their cars, had not been ticketed and their cars had not been searched).

Well, hey, ain't nothing wrong with getting pinched for driving while black, so long as the cops don't shoot 'em, eh Perfesser?

Why anybody takes this character seriously is a complete mystery to me. One who does, predictably, is local vocal yokel and obnoxious crusader for (almost) all things "politically incorrect," Charlie Sykes, who this morning labels McAdams's poorly disguised tribute to our munificent Caucasian overlords as today's "hot read."

It's a hot read alright — for the yuks.

Why the Pulitzer special citation?

For stuff like this:

Sweetheart Like You

New penis in Journal-Sentinel controversy

Recently, we endured the unseemly spectacle of a cadre of self-righteous conservatives, trolling the internets looking for ways to be religiously offended and finding one in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's banner advertisements touting an antipodean variety show called "Puppetry of the Penis."

The penis, according to reliable sources, is a popular and versatile body part with a mind of its own, found on slightly less than half of all humans (and occasionally in the other half, or so I've been told).

Notorious Milwaukee Marxist-Leninist Jay Bullock provides more details in the course of his strenuous defense of the free market rights of the venerable Miramar Theatre in this here blog post. (Sixty-two comments and counting, some of which are [unintentionally] hilarious.)

Then, this morning, as I conducted my daily consultation with the J-S's weather page — because it's easier than unbolting the opaque, bulletproof shutters behind which I ply my grisly trade — I found not just an advert for a theater production but an actual penis: the walking, talking, top model-judging prepuce Ben Stein, who's reportedly lent his considerable gravitas and scientific expertise to the forthcoming documentary exposé, Expelled.

You might have to refresh the page a few times to view the penis but if it takes more than three hours to produce the penis, consult a population geneticist.

Coincidentally, my good friend Michael Mathias of Pundit Nation fame sent me this link, according to which even the reviewers at Faux News pronounce Expelled an unmitigated piece of crap.*

For much, much more on Expelled, please visit Prof. PZ Myers's wildly successful blog, Pharyngula. Myers, along with his friend and Oxford don Richard Dawkins, are in the "film" but Myers was physically barred from attending its premiere. Just as comically, Prof. Dawkins, the militant atheist's militant atheist, was granted entry unscathed.

* "[Ben Stein] is either completely nuts or so avaricious that he’s abandoned all good sense to make a buck." — Roger Friedman.

"Teach the (penis) controversy."

See also Expelled Exposed.

Demonstration at Marquette today

I'm shocked and appalled at Marquette Law School Prof. Rick Esenberg's implication that judges, in their written opinions, should not engage in public debates questioning the constitutionality or general wisdom of certain laws while at the same time voting to uphold those laws. Prof. Esenberg refers to these debates as "occasional indulgences,"* but they are often better known as "concurring opinions" and sometimes "dissents."

Careful readers may have noticed that one of my favorite books is Freedom and the Court: Civil Rights and Liberties in the United States, by Henry J. Abraham and Barbara A. Perry. FATC is a marvelous work, although I have thus far resisted purchasing it. The reason for that is there is always a copy of the 8th edition on hand at the Milwaukee Public Library. As a matter of fact, if you take a look at it in MPL's central branch (342.085 A158 2003), you will find about eleventeen date stamps going back more than three years on the white strip affixed to the back jacket. Those are all me.

And if you also find the $100 (CDN) bill that I use as a bookmark, kindly leave it where it is. I'll be back for it.

A large portion of FATC deals with the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, and the question of whether the Due Process Clause of that Amendment has the effect of making the first eight Amendments (a.k.a. the Bill of Rights) applicable to the States. As everyone knows (I hope), the First Amendment begins with the words, "Congress shall make no law." Congress, of course, being the federal government and not the States. Beginning at least as far back as 1833, the debate has raged over whether the Bill of Rights is a restriction not only on the powers of Congress but also on those of the States.

In 1833, the legendary Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court John Marshall determined that it restricted the federal government only. After the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868, a number of attempts were made to obtain a ruling from the Court affirming that the 14th Amendment did indeed "incorporate" the provisions of the Bill of Rights against the States, but no clear success was realized until 1925, when the Court declared that freedom of speech, as guaranteed by the First Amendment, was also something that the States could not abridge.

Since then, nearly every provision of the Bill of Rights has been incorporated one at a time, a practice known as "selective incorporation." The debate over incorporation has involved some of the greatest Justices of the Supreme Court, including Hugo Black, who was something of an absolutist when it came to reading the text of the Constitution. Justice Black argued, in a series of "occasional indulgences" which ultimately failed to produce a majority among his colleagues, that the entire Bill of Rights should be incorporated all at once, in what is known as "total incorporation."

The debate over incorporation is arguably the most fascinating aspect of constitutional law — not to mention American history generally — and it rages until this day. Recently, Justice Clarence Thomas, in an "occasional indulgence" of his own, suggested that the First Amendment's Establishment of Religion Clause, which is among those Bill of Rights provisions that have been incorporated, should not restrict the States from establishing their own religions, or at least that the restriction against the States should be relaxed to some extent.

I don't know why; probably so Governor Jim Doyle can finally convert you to Islam or something, further to the Democrat playbook.

This brings to mind the gifted historian and constitutional scholar Leonard Levy, in contemplating an Establishment Clause opinion by the late Chief Justice and graduate of Shorewood High School William H. Rehnquist, who wondered aloud how exactly the Chief got from "No Law" to "Some Laws." Many of us wonder still.

In any event, Prof. Esenberg's outlandish insinuations call for a strong action of radical protest, and I intend to demonstrate in his Marquette Law School office in the form of a sit-in (chair permitting) sometime this afternoon. The length of the demonstration will depend on how busy he is and whether I make the proper selection from Dunkin' Donuts, where I need to pass by anyway, because the Milwaukee Public Library just alerted me to the fact that I have finally made it to the front of the queue for Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season Three, and Dunkin' Donuts is right across the street.

While I'm there, maybe I will add another date stamp to Freedom and the Court, and direct Prof. Esenberg's attention to the "occasional indulgences" of Justices Black, Frankfurter, Harlan, et al.

I also intend to determine whether he really does have a halo.

* I thought Martin Luther did away with those at Wittenberg.

Who's your fundie daddy?

It's hard to tell, according to news reports of the government raids on a Mormon splinter group in Texas at the "Yearning For Zion" ranch, where DNA testing may be required to sort out who's who.

The raids came after a 16-year-old girl called a family violence center from the ranch to report sexual assault, beatings, and being forced to become the seventh wife of a man more than three times her age.

The girl has an eight-month-old child and another on the way.

Since then authorities have removed hundreds of children and described practices at the Mormon sex farm whereby teenagers were groomed for and arranged to have intercourse with one another.

The girl said she was warned by churchers that if she left the ranch, she'd be coerced by "outsiders" to have sex with lots of men.

Some choice.

CFAF "deemed" criminally inept: Part 11

As promised — or, depending on one's perspective, threatened — the next entry in that which has now become what singer/songwriter Paul Simon, in his most severe bowl-haircut days, might have called "a simple desultory philippic." We last left off at the Coalition for America's Families [sic] (CFAF) case 60., State v. Stuart.

I'm going to skip the next case, State v. Richard A. Brown, just because. I figure if CFAF can simply arbitrarily and capriciously exclude it from "its" list of cases, which it did, then so can I.

Unlike CFAF, however, I will get back to it.

If there is any justice or truth, then CFAF these days is hiding its collective head in abject shame. Not so, incidentally, for CFAF's leading cheerleader, chief helper-elf in legal analysis and statistics, and alleged "journalist," who has lately taken to not just lying, but lying through her teeth, rather than check up on a handful of easily verifiable facts. And this is apparently what they're teaching in university Reporting 101 classes nowadays. Given the choice, I'm inclined to humor, but that's just sad. Profoundly so.

So evidently in certain quarters, there not only exists neither justice nor truth, there exists in their stead a willful, deliberate, and determined effort to avoid both at any costs.

On a less serious but equally pathetic note, the next case, State v. Hale, is the final case on the list of 62 Wisconsin Supreme Court decisions that CFAF appropriated from the Butler campaign upon which to perform its extravagant litany of nefarious hijinks.

I quote directly from the CFAF document in my possession:

There are 6 cases missing from [the Butler campaign's] analysis, a yes is where CFAF deems Butler w/ the criminal.

Thereupon follows, I kid you not, the names of seven cases. How manifestly not surprising and what a classic examplar of CFAF's relentlessly desperate fumbling and bumbling. As I've observed previously, you simply cannot make this stuff up.

62. State v. Hale 2003AP417-CR

Rick Esenberg of Marquette Law School wrote recently, "[She] says that she has the 'against' and 'for' numbers. Let's take her at her word." The statement is by turns astonishing and laughable. State v. Hale is yet another fine example of why.

Hale contains five separate opinions: the majority opinion by Justice Bradley, and concurring opinions by Chief Justice Abrahamson, Justice Wilcox (joined by Justices Crooks and Prosser), Justice Prosser (joined by Justices Wilcox and Roggensack), and Justice Butler.

When judges write concurring opinions, it means they join the majority opinion's central ruling, which in this case was the unanimous affirming of Hale's three criminal convictions, but they would have reached that result through different reasoning, based on their interpretation of the underlying numerous and varied legal questions that lead to the result.

I don't mind admitting that it would probably take me at least two days of close analysis, research, and writing to tease out each separate legal question from Hale (and there are many other multi-opinion examples like Hale) and assign each judge's disposition on each question as either "pro-defendant" or "pro-State." And, even then, such assignments would be subject to reasonable review and objection from the likes of Rick Esenberg. Moreover, he would still need to present his own analysis as to why any such assignment was misapplied by your humble reviewer. And then rebuttal and so forth.

At the same time as imploring us all to take a demonstrable prevaricator "at her word," Esenberg has himself suggested a number of alternative denominators — other than the criminal convictions themselves — by which "for" or "against" the constitutional rights of criminal defendants might be assessed. Some of these suggestions certainly have merit.

But if somebody imagines that the prevaricator in question — or anybody — could have performed a similar task on 70 decisions in two days, well, then that somebody needs their head examined, not to put too fine a point on it (or on the examined head).

To be fair, Esenberg did at least distance himself from the term "pro-criminal" at one point during his series of discursive academic vacations before allowing, "I think someone tried very hard to get a very low number and may have allowed that desire to get in the way of his or her better judgment."

One might accept this as the Understatement of the Millennium with respect to both CFAF and its helpful elf's now-thoroughly debunked projects, but Esenberg was referring to the Butler campaign(!).

It's abundantly clear now that the Butler campaign did not "cook" any number. The cooking, frying, baking, basting, broiling, barbecuing, and sauce-reductioning occurred entirely in the comedy kitchens of CFAF and its prevaricating elf.

If the Butler campaign committed any misstep at all, it issued from Justice Butler himself during his interview with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel editorial board when he said, "I voted to uphold the convictions 75% of the time." I recall immediately thinking, on hearing this, 'Wait until Esenberg gets a hold of that one, he'll be on it like a dog with a bone.' Which is exactly what happened.

What Butler should have said — and I'm fairly certain, without even asking him, what he meant to say — was that in 75% of the cases involving criminal convictions, his vote did not disturb the existing conviction, which remained completely intact. And that is correct to within less than two percentage points, as I've shown, through my laborious presentation of each individual case to which Butler was making reference.

"Laborious," incidentally, is a reference to the impositions made on the kind reader, and not to those happily engaged by the writer.

Nevertheless, CFAF didn't "deem" State v. Hale "w/ Criminal," but rather passes it by without comment.

Thus ends the list of cases that not only couldn't CFAF produce itself, instead relying on material produced by the Butler campaign, it manipulated and twisted and otherwise transparently schemed and scammed the cases into confirming beyond a shadow of any doubt its own sleazy machinations informed by profound incompetence: its own and, as it turns out, that of its helpful prevaricating elf.

Considered separately, sleazy machinations and profound incompetence are bad enough. But profoundly incompetent, sleazy machinations are a quite remarkable addition to the panoply of preexisting "family values." A remarkable and singularly unwelcome addition, in my own considered estimation.

I'll get to CFAF's remaining seven (or is it six? Math hurts!) cases after State v. Richard A. Brown.

ttfn

The cable guy

Long ago in a land far away I worked for a few years in the power transformer division of Westinghouse, a U.S. company doing business in Canada. My job was winding the insulated copper wire into the coils that are installed over the series of laminated steel sheets that form each transformer's core. Some of them were big buggers, bigger than a house; the coils themselves were anywhere from two to nine feet in diameter, and most of the transformers contained three coils.

One time one of them fell off a train car and made a dude into a pancake. They shipped the transformer back to the plant for repair and the guy's blood and guts were still all over the side of it.

Winding was a fairly complex job because you're winding about 20 separate flat copper wires at the same time onto a cylindrical mold, and by the time the coil is done, each wire has to be the same length, so you're doing a lot of measuring and cutting and bending and welding and hammering along the way to ensure that. Licensed electricians were, if I recall correctly, labor grade 12 and us winders were grade 10, so it was as close as you could get to being an actual tradesman. And I was making as much per hour then as I make at one of my part-time jobs today.

In retrospect, it amazes me still because normally I'm doing well to successfully replace a flat tire or a light bulb.

Each transformer coil was a custom job, so it came with its own work order containing detailed technical instructions and, it being a union shop, the required "quota" per eight-hour shift of turns on the coil. In other words, each job was rated by agreement between the union and management and the coil, which was installed on either a gigantic horizontal or a gigantic vertical lathe, had to turn so many times, with completed windings on it, during the shift.

At my first day on the job the union steward, who was called Art, introduced himself and informed me that these quotas were very important, and even though in many cases it wouldn't take a lot of extra effort to exceed them, one mustn't — ever — because to do so would clearly identify me as a go-getting running lackey dog of the corporate plutocracy, and then the local members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers would make life very difficult for me.

That isn't exactly what Art said, but that was the obvious gist of it. Most of the quotas were pretty fair anyway, and in any event, because of the complex nature of the tasks and the high cost of the product, you had to be careful and take your time regardless. But there were a couple of go-getters and they were shunned. Not by me though, I figured it was all a bit silly. I always made the quota to within a tiny bit either more or less. More importantly I made a lot of great friends down there among both labor and management although one of the latter used to refer to me as "Lover," which I found a bit disconcerting.

On a few rare occasions, we got a "cable job." 95% of the coils were produced by winding individual strands of copper fed from individual spools at the same time, hence the skillz requirement in making sure all the strands were the same length by the time the finished coil was removed from the lathe and sent on to the next step in the transformer manufacturing process. But a cable was a thick, insulated bundle of individual strands which were already pre-transitioned so that each individual strand was already the same length from one end of the cable to the other.

The first time I saw the quota of turns on the "cable job" work order, I thought it had to be a typographical error. Because you only had to do about ten turns per eight-hour shift on a cable job, and that amount of work could be completed in about 30 minutes, tops. Because with a cable job, all you had to do was set up the spool of cable in a metal rack, stand in front of the lathe with your rubber mallet, and step on the pedal that turned the lathe. That's it.

The "cable job" meant that I spent a lot of time wandering around the plant, shooting the shit with the other workers, hiding, or researching that week's NFL pool picks with a couple of newspapers in the washroom. I don't think I ever actually went and found a comfortable spot to nap for a few hours, but some of the other guys did, especially when they had a "cable job." Then they could get a good night's sleep and make the quota. Hard to beat, or resist, that.

So one time very early on in my transformer coil winding days, I found myself working at the lathe next to Sanjeet, who had been winding coils for about ten years. Sanjeet, who, like most of the IBEW sisters and brothers would only ever do slightly less than the required quotas, was a very easy going guy, and a character. He would always joke with Benny, the company shift supervisor, about how Westinghouse was a slave driver, and how it was cruel and unusual to make us do so much work.

Benny got the joke — but would never acknowledge it — because he was one of the few management supervisors who was recruited from the same department where he worked on the production floor for 15 years himself, because coil winding was so complicated, the company needed bosses who knew the job intimately. But one day Benny had to haul a bunch of us, including me and Sanjeet, into his office and tell us to shape up on the cable jobs. He was going to tell us we needed to do more work than the quotas called for.

I don't know who was more nervous, me or Benny, Benny because he had to ream some of his old union buddies a new one or me because, being a callow youth unfamiliar with such delicate negotiations, I thought I was going to get fired or something. The one guy who wasn't nervous was Sanjeet, who slouched in a chair in front of Benny's desk and with deliberately unconcealed mirth assured Benny, "I'm so sorry, Benny, and we will all try to do our very best in the future, we really, really will."

For his part Benny chain smoked incessantly, clearly uncomfortable with his role in conflict resolution. Me, I was just happy I wasn't getting fired and never wanted another "cable job" again, since they placed us in a really contentious spot at the nexus between management and labor relations, which was a place I didn't want to be in those days.

Another place I didn't want to be was commenting on global politics, but I found myself there one time too. I had noticed that dozens and dozens of transformer coil work orders were tagged with the word "Libya," which I at least knew was a country in North Africa. I asked Benny about that one time, and he said that Westinghouse had just received a substantial order from the government of that country, and that was one of the reasons we had just gone on three shifts, cranking the suckers out 24 hours a day.

Coincidentally, and probably because I had already read the sports section in the washroom about seven times while hiding out from a "cable job," I noticed a story on the front page of the Toronto Globe and Mail about how the U.S. government — this was during the early days of the first Reagan administration — had imposed a complete trade embargo against Libya, thanks to the shenanigans of its military dictator, Moammar Gaddafi (I think that spelling was the Globe and Mail style, which it most likely took a special editorial board meeting to establish, given the wide range of variants).

Also coincidentally, a top kahuna from Westinghouse was visiting that week to give the boys a little pep talk. This wasn't a Westinghouse Canada big wig, this was one of the ones from corporate HQ in Pittsburgh. I don't remember whether he was the top dog corporate exec or not, but he was definitely way, way up in the hierarchy. A heavy hitter.

After his little speech to the gathered laborers, the said corporate honcho fielded a few questions from the floor, which mostly involved details of the collective bargaining agreement, potential changes to benefit packages, and so forth. At one point, abandoning caution to the wind, your humble and intrepid nascent political observer raised his hand and posed the following question:

"Sir, I recently learned that the U.S. government, in retaliation to the aggressive posturings of the dictator of Libya, has imposed a complete trade embargo against that country, according to which all American corporations are ordered to cease shipping manufactured goods there.

"Our product is not simply destined for private companies operating in Libya, these power transformers are an integral part of Libya's civil and potentially military infrastructure, and the product is shipping directly to the Gaddafi regime. How is it, then, that Westinghouse can manufacture and ship these products under the circumstances? Isn't it a flagrant violation of the trade embargo?"

Came the terse reply: "Westinghouse will build and ship power transformers to anyone, anywhere in the world. Next question."

I think that was the last attention I paid to Ronald Reagan until the Ramones put out a single called Bonzo Goes To Bitburg.

Miles Beyond

h/t Brazen Maverick for the newfangled gramophone.

An Esenbergian interlude

Would you forsake your house and home,
Would you forsake your baby?
Would you forsake your husband too,
To go with Blackjack Davey?
Ride off with Blackjack Davey?

Well I'll forsake my house and home,
And I'll forsake my baby.
I'll forsake my husband too,
For the love of Blackjack Davey,
Ride off with Blackjack Davey.

— Blackjack Davey — Traditional (a.k.a. Child Ballad #200).

Now, I don't know whether Blackjack Davey was a lawyer or not, but he sure as hell did some pretty effective persuasive arguing, judging from the way things turned out betwixt he and the lady of the house.

I'm going to get back to my series on the Coalition for America's Families' hatchet job against Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler, but since there's no longer any sense of urgency, I'm going to take a little bit more time over it, and hopefully the individual posts won't be so long.

But first I want to say something about my friend Prof. Richard Esenberg of Marquette Law School, who I've mentioned throughout this series, and who I'm going to be mentioning some more. Anyone who's been following over the past several weeks knows that Prof. Esenberg has also spilled a lot of virtual ink on questions related to the recent State Supreme Court election campaign. He's done so not only in response to many of the things I've written here but also to raise and argue a number of other points, many of which have considerable merit. Not necessarily definitive, but considerable.

But ultimately I've been focused only on one or two central themes, and a lot of what Esenberg has written doesn't engage those themes as directly as I have. That's not a criticism, or even a suggestion that Esenberg would prefer not to directly engage those themes. Of course he's free to write about what he wants, or what he considers more important, and he often does so quite compellingly.

Nevertheless, let's just say that there are several things upon which Prof. Esenberg and I fundamentally, and perhaps even irreconcilably, disagree. And not only do we disagree on a number of conclusions, I occasionally object strongly to the methods of reasoning he uses to reach those conclusions. And furthermore, I think some of the premises he puts to use in furtherance of that reasoning in order to reach those conclusions are deeply flawed. Deeply.

And I believe strongly that, given the time and the opportunity, I could convince Prof. Esenberg on a number of those questions, or at least show him why some of his conclusions, in the end, cannot be legitimately defended.

Prof. Esenberg knows what I think; he's no dummy. More importantly, Prof. Esenberg welcomes criticism like mine. In fact he invites it, and he enjoys engaging it, if only for the enervating intellectual exercise. Much like Justice Butler, as a matter of fact, who continually invited Mike Gableman to engage the substantial elements of Butler's opinions for the Supreme Court. Except Gableman wouldn't — and, I'm practically convinced, is unable to — engage that debate.

More recently, Prof. Esenberg — who I trust I can fairly call Rick now — and I have exchanged a small volume of private correspondence. And I'm not going to go into the details of that, because much of it involves stuff that's nobody else's business but ours.

I have no idea how many thousands of people I've met during my life. It's been lots. And I've met, conversed with, fought with, partied with, worked with, people from every station in life. From homeless women in the streets of Soho and beggars in Tangier to the CEOs of companies doing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business every year. And just about everyone in between. I don't exaggerate.

I've also spent a lot of time thinking about ethics, and morality, and religion. The latter is another subject upon which Prof. Esenberg and I disagree fundamentally, but I certainly don't presume to persuade him on that account. I wouldn't even try and I totally respect his personal views within that particular bailiwick of inquiry.

The haiku version is, I think that by this point in my life I know what I'm talking about when I say the following.

I want to say now, as clearly as I can — and I hope Esenberg forgives me for employing the traditional vernacular of my former incarnation as a construction manager — that Rick Esenberg is a fucking mensch, of the highest order, and he has justly earned my unequivocal respect as a person. Absolute and unequivocal.

Now back to the hardball presently.

The swan songs of Andreas Delfs

Last night and this evening at Uihlein Hall, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra undertakes Igor Stravinsky's 1913 masterpiece, Le Sacre de Printemps (The Rite of Spring), together with Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 in F Major, the "Pastoral." The concerts are among the final ones in conductor Andreas Delfs's series of Beethoven's nine symphonies before he leaves us for Hawaii and is replaced by Edo De Waart.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's superb classical music critic, Tom Strini, talks about Beethoven's Sixth here.

The MSO's performance of both works — together with George Antheil's 1955 A Jazz Symphony — was outstanding. If there are tickets available for tonight's performance, snap them up. Mr. Delfs's departure will be a huge loss to the community although, fortunately, Mr. De Waart is equally accomplished.

Stravinsky's jarringly dissonant and rhythmically complex, groundbreaking masterwork notoriously inspired a riot at its Paris premiere in 1913, a far cry from last night's enthusastic reception and ovations. I've heard it performed before on a couple of occasions, including by the London Symphony Orchestra at Royal Albert Hall. For my money, Delfs and the MSO's brilliant and sonically perfect reading was the best yet.

Stravinsky hadn't intended to cause a riot, but many of his contemporaries and mutual admirers did, and several years ago during a course in music history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, I submitted a written assignment to another Milwaukee institution, Dr. Timothy Noonan, which is reproduced below.

Dr. Noonan is almost literally a walking encyclopedia of music. Among many, many memorable anecdotes proceeding from the two courses I took with Dr. Noonan, one is especially so. A classmate was asking Dr. Noonan in somewhat vague terms about a particular theme from a particular string quartet of Franz Joseph Haydn, the now-underperformed Austrian genius and one of Beethoven's most profound formal and stylistic influences.

Haydn wrote nearly 70 string quartets (he practically invented and perfected the form), nearly all of which contain four separate movements, and each movement contains a number of different musical themes. In other words, Dr. Noonan was being asked to specify a theme from among hundreds, but only those hundreds contained in the works of one specific composer writing in one particular form, the string quartet.

Dr. Noonan thought for a minute and then walked over to the piano and proceeded to play a theme from one of the Haydn quartets. "Is that the one?" Dr. Noonan asked. "That's it!" said the student.* I've never seen anything like it in my life. While Dr. Noonan's scholarly specialty is the 18th century composer Luigi Boccherini, his prodigious expertise extends from the birth of Western music in ancient Greece through the most contemporary of contemporary musicians. His knowledge truly is phenomenal.

In addition, Dr. Noonan is one of the most self-effacing, generous, and kind gentlemen I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. I need to drop by UWM and see him again one of these days.

* It wasn't the German national anthem, either. It was something considerably, considerably less familiar.

You can read about some of Igor Stravinsky's precursors, friends, and inheritors right here:

Part 1
Part 2

eta: Strini's review of last night's performances, including of

the ferocious, relentlessly focused reading of "The Rite." The rhythmic bite and drive of the allegros overwhelmed, and the dark mystery of the static moments crackled with suspense. They didn't really feel like pauses; they felt ominous, as if massive energy were being restrained. This was shocking music in 1913 and it's shocking music today. The enormous orchestra played with monumental force and total discipline, for a conductor who knew exactly what he wanted.

Whew. I'm glad he agrees with this here amateur.

Music v. Noise Part 1

The idea that composers would produce music expressly to irritate and annoy audiences is generally a 20th century one. Whether consisting of the production of organized or disorganized noise, pure silence, or something in between, the plain objective of several practitioners was to aggravate and irritate. Many celebrated early 20th century works have had the effect of annoying audiences. The twelve-tone compositions of Arnold Schoenberg, for example, likely continue to irritate concert-going audiences to this day. The notorious riot at the Paris premiere of Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre de Printemps (The Rite of Spring) in 1913 is probably the most celebrated example of widespread annoyance with a large-scale musical work.

But it was not Stravinsky's express intent to cause such a ruckus; indeed, he was rather pained at the reaction, and in fact within a week of the premiere was hospitalized with typhoid fever. Nor was Schoenberg's motivation that of intentionally alienating listeners, but rather to discover a new tonal landscape with which to express deep emotional content.

Yet the notion of a composer writing music to intentionally irritate his listeners may be traced at least to the late 18th century. As the story goes, Joseph Haydn wrote the opening movement of his Symphony No. 94 in G major, the "Surprise" Symphony, and its abrupt, unheralded dominant chord fortissimo, with the intention of waking the easily distracted among the powdered wig set that might be caught napping during his concerts.

But no one really began systematically attempting to irritate listeners until just prior to World War I and the emergence in Italy of what was primarily an artistic and literary movement called Futurism. However, unlike another European artistic movement often invoked to describe contemporary musical endeavors, Impressionism, the Futurists did in fact include among their ranks actual composers.

Italian Futurism essentially arose amid the culmination of a century of heavy industrial development, a European social revolution by turns despotic, socialist, and anarchic, and several decades of Italian military adventurism in Africa. Also, the latest discoveries in theoretical physics, by Max Planck, Albert Einstein, and Niels Bohr, among others, were proving to have a profound effect on previously Newtonian conceptions of the universe, which contemplated stability and mechanical order.

The founder of the Futurist movement, the wealthy poet and sometime resident of Paris, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, had evidently also been considerably influenced by the 1896 performances in that city of the play Ubu Roi, by the poet and cycling enthusiast Alfred Jarry. The first ten minutes of the play consisted of Jarry, in white face, sipping from a glass, and eventually announcing, "The action … takes place in Poland, that is to say, nowhere." Finally the actor playing the title character appears and intones the opening dialogue of the play: "Merdre." Despite the coy addition of an additional "r," pandemonium and violence immediately ensued.

Marinetti had authored "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism." Marinetti's Manifesto, which appeared on the front page of the French newspaper Le Figaro on February 20, 1909, included a paean to "the anarchist's destructive gesture" and "the fine ideas that kill."

"There is no more beauty except in strife," wrote Marinetti. "No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces to reduce and prostrate them before men."

The earliest of the Futurist composers was Francesco Balilla Pratella, an associate of Marinetti's. Pratella, a formally trained and award-winning composer born in 1880, penned several manifestos of his own, in which he railed against "the academicism of the conservatories, the impotence of Italian composers in the face of symphonic form, and their banal belief in the virtues of bel canto." Pratella directed his most withering criticism at the Italian opera establishment, "that heavy and suffocating crop of our nation," which he alleged was nourished by a publishing mafia, and was responsible for the "base, rickety and vulgar operas of Giacomo Puccini and Umberto Giordano."

Yet Pratella's musical career was less successful than his Futurist polemics, and the most celebrated, and perhaps most disappointing event of his career occurred at the premiere of his Musica futura for orchestra, an otherwise unremarkable, repetitive assemblage of whole-tones. While achieving the desired restlessness among the patrons at Rome's Teatro Costanzi in February, 1913, it is recorded that Pratella, in the midst of the tumult, rushed backstage to tell Marinetti that "half the orchestra had disappeared," only to be informed that the piece had in fact ended five minutes earlier.

A more successful and influential Futurist "composer" (although he was primarily a painter) was Luigi Russolo. Inspired by Pratella's Teatro Costanzi debacle, Russolo penned his own Manifesto, The Art of Noises. In it, Russolo explained that throughout the development of industrial machinery in the 19th century, "noise was born," and that noise had come to "reign supreme over the sensibility of men."

Dissatisfied with what he considered the limited arsenal of traditional instruments, Russolo set about designing and building a series of "noise intoners," rectangular wooden boxes containing various motors, operated by cranking handles and amplified by cone-shaped metal speakers fitted to one side. Russolo organized his instruments based on four basic categories of noise: "Exploders, Cracklers, Buzzers, and Scrapers," and set about preparing for the first public performance of three original compositions, The Awakening of a City, Luncheon on the Kursaal Terrace, and Meeting of Automobiles and Airplanes, on April 21, 1914, in Milan.

Marinetti staged a dry run at his Milan estate the preceding August, which was attended by various luminaries, among them Igor Stravinsky, who was said to have "leapt from the divan like an exploding bedspring with a whistle of overjoyed excitement" at the sound of one of Russolo's "Cracklers."

At the rehearsal for the premiere, the police arrived and attempted to cancel the festivities on the grounds that it would create a disturbance, which undoubtedly was Russolo's primary intention. But the concert went ahead as scheduled thanks to the intervention of two Italian parliamentarians with whom Marinetti was acquainted. During the concert, Russolo was arrested for punching an unsympathetic journalist.

Marinetti, satisfied with the general outrage engendered by the cacophonous premiere, likened the demonstration of the new instruments to an incredulous public to "showing the first steam engine to a herd of cows." Afterwards, Russolo and company prepared to take London by storm, and a series of concerts were scheduled for June of 1914. The Times reviewed the English premiere in typically understated fashion: "Weird funnel shaped instruments … resembled the sounds heard in the rigging of a channel-steamer during a bad crossing, and it was perhaps unwise of the players — or should we call them 'noisicians'? — to proceed with their second piece … after the pathetic cries of 'no more' which greeted them from all the excited quarters of the auditorium."

However, the subsequent concerts in the series were greeted with increasing levels of enthusiasm, and even warm applause. This eventual public acceptance may have partially accounted for the demise of Russolo's musical career, after which he returned to painting and philosophy. A disciple of Russolo, Franco Casavola, staged several concerts during the 1920s in Paris using Russolo's machines, which, although inspiring the requisite controversy, nonetheless impressed several leading composers of the day, including Maurice Ravel, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, and Edgard Varese, who attempted to fit the noise intoners with a keyboard.

Part 2 ...

Music v. Noise Part 2

The first Futurist opera, Victory Over the Sun, was presented in St. Petersburg in October, 1913, with music by the Russian composer Mikhail Matyushin, and with sets and costumes designed by the Constructionist artist Kasimir Malevich. Essentially a collection of incomprehensible nonsense, the opera concerned a group of "Futurecountrymen" attempting to conquer the sun. The librettist, Alexei Kruchenykh, demanded that the performers, attracted by a casting call that stated, "Actors, do not bother to come, please," pronounce the words with pauses between each syllable: "The cam-el-like fac-to-ries al-read-y threat-en us …" which had the effect of "getting on everyone's nerves."

While the premiere was generally a success attended by like-minded artists and students and guarded by large numbers of policemen, the critics were uniformly unkind, causing the composer Matyushin to deride their "herd mentality." However, Victory Over the Sun is notable for representing a "comprehensive collaboration by the poet, the musician and the artist, setting a precedent for the years to come."

Nor was ballet immune from the assault of the merry pranksters. A new group of iconoclasts had arisen after the First World War that called itself the Dadaists, a loosely knit assembly of poets, painters, amateur boxers and hangers-on that included the Frenchman Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp had first gained notoriety with his 1911 painting Nude Descending a Staircase, a work very much influenced by the Italian Futurist painters. Duchamp's general irreverence and nuttiness were to have a profound effect on 20th century art. (In fact many years later Duchamp and his wife Teeny were to participate in a composition by the American composer John Cage, in which the production of tones was linked to a chess game played by Cage and Duchamp.)

In 1917 Duchamp submitted to an art exhibition in New York a porcelain urinal, which he had purchased from a plumbing shop, laid on its back, signed in black pen, "R. Mutt 1917," and titled, "Fountain." Although it was rejected by the selection committee, its status as a "found object" is legendary, and represents the first instance of an everyday object ostensibly elevated to the status of art merely by the act of it having been selected by the artist.

On December 4, 1924, the Dadaists presented their ballet Relâche — which means both "relaxation" and is the theatrical expression for "no performance tonight" — based on a scenario instigated by Duchamp's accomplice in hijinks, Francis Picabia. Relâche had been commissioned by Rolf de Maré, director of the Parisian Ballets Suédois. The production began with a man dressed in firefighter's gear, chain smoking in direct contravention of the theatre's building code, who continued shifting a quantity of water between two buckets throughout the evening.

The ballet is in two parts, with a film, Entr'acte, projected between "acts." The film begins with shots from various angles of a bearded man dressed in a ballerina's costume jumping up and down on a glass pane, and ends with a grinning corpse emerging from a coffin that had been dropped on the ground, and features music by the eccentric French composer Erik Satie: "Satie's exasperatingly minimalist music, whose repetitions recall nothing so much as a needle stuck in the groove of a phonograph record … was claimed as the first music written expressly for a film."

The second act continues the absurdist provocation, and includes the prominent display of a large sign that reads, "Satie is the greatest musician in the world." The production concluded with its authors, including Satie, driving onto the stage in a tiny five horsepower Citroën. "They were greeted with catcalls, and the Ballet Suédois was dissolved forever." As de Maré put it: "Relâche was too much for all of us." The 58-year-old Satie was savaged in the press. "Adieu, Satie," read the headlines, and the scandal was attached to his name until his death less than a year later.

Satie was no stranger to balletic shenanigans. In 1917, he had been involved in another production in Paris, Parade, with a text by Jean Cocteau and sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso. Satie worked for an entire year on the score, which incorporated many of Cocteau's suggestions for instrumentation, such as "typewriters, sirens, aeroplane propellers, Morse tappers, and lottery wheels." Parade, which features characters dressed as ten-foot-high skyscrapers and teams of acrobats performing to frenetic waltzes played on xylophones, predictably attracted widespread derision. Satie was denounced, and replied to one conservative critic, "Vous n'êtes qu'un cul, mais un cul sans musique," which translates roughly as, "You are only an ass, but an ass without music." Satie was actually fined heavily for making this remark.

All of this cacophony and calculated outrage inevitably led to, of all things, silence, and John Cage's 1952 composition 4'33". Yet Cage was perfectly aware that complete silence was physically unachievable, which he had proven to himself the year before by sequestering himself in an anechoic chamber at Harvard University. There he became aware of two remaining sounds: those of his own nervous and circulatory systems. 4'33" is comprised of three sections, each of which was demarcated by its original performer, the pianist David Tudor, by successive opening and closing of the keyboard lid.

Although one might expect Cage's watershed composition to mark, in some sense, the end of music and the beginning of postmodern sensibility, the idea of non-music involving instruments never played was extended by the American composer LaMonte Young, who in the early 1960s wrote a number of pieces that reflect both Cage's ideas and those of his Dadaist precursors. The "score" for Young's Piano Piece for David Tudor #1 reads as follows: "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to."

Or Young's Composition 1960 #7, which consists simply of the simultaneous sounding of a B and an F#, with the direction, "to be held for a long time."

But the record for the most demonstrably irritating piece of music ever written must go to Terry Riley's In C, a relentlessly minimalist piano piece composed in 1964. The piece consists of nothing more than various permutations of a C major scale, repeated over 15 hours.

Of its New York premiere, a contemporary reviewer observed that halfway through the piece most of the audience had long since disappeared. Near the end of the performance, there was nobody left in the auditorium save for a handful of masochists, and when the piece finally ended, one sado-masochist rose to his feet and shouted, "Encore!"

On a personal note

I've been around the block more than a few times over a fairly long period of time and I've made more than my share of poor judgments, some excessively poor. I've overcome a lot of obstacles, including many that I've ill-advisedly placed in my own way. I've also accepted complete responsibility for every bad judgment I've made and in all cases invited and accepted and paid the punishment along with the suffering, and I continue to suffer for many of my mistakes.

I don't expect that suffering to ever go away, because it's a necessary part of accepting responsibility and I, naturally, can never abdicate from that responsibility. But I tend not to dwell on the past.

I have no idea what James Wigderson is trying to prove, but if it's an attempt to make me suffer some more, he's by definition doomed to failure, because it can't be done. And if he gets a kick out of it, then more power to him. After all, we could all use some things to brighten our lives on occasion. I suppose that even Wigderson needs something too, and simply wants to express his satisfaction.

Maybe he isn't perfect, either. If not, then he's just like me. But I'm grateful he reads my blog, and I'm glad he enjoyed Jane Hampden's interview with me so much that he had to listen to it twice.

I can't blame him for that. I've listened to it twice too. At least.

She's that good.

Strict construction, huh; what is it good for

I'm done with strict construction. When lawyers and judges and legal academics talk about strict construction, they're talking about giving the words that appear in the law narrower meanings, as opposed to broad ones.

It's about how strictly a reader 'construes' those words. The narrower, or stricter, the interpretation of those words, the better, so our conservative friends tell us. I respectfully dissent.

A good friend of mine had the idea to set up a limited liability company (LLC). He'd already reviewed his other options with his accountant, and the accountant, being also a good and wise man, suggested that my friend have a lawyer prepare the required documents.

Of course, anybody can prepare the documents; there's not much to it. And you can even prepare them online, using the forms helpfully provided by the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions. But there are at least two good reasons why it's sensible to have a lawyer do it: (1) because the applicant has to affirm that the LLC is organized under Wisconsin Statutes Chapter 183, which presumes the applicant has at least read Chap. 183, and nobody except a lawyer wants to do that and (2) I was nearly out of Kraft Dinner, and was grateful to be able to lay in another week's supply. Just in time.

The heart of the LLC is the articles of organization. These are the six required items, a couple of which may not be applicable, depending on a number of other considerations. Chap. 183 is very specific about this: "The articles of organization shall contain all of and only the following information." I've emphasized the operative language for the would-be strict constructionists scoring along at home.

Then the six required items are described, each numbered in sequential order. Now, another lawyer would have whipped this job off in about ten minutes. But I wanted to learn a bit more about LLCs anyway, so I read Chap. 183 two or three times, and went down to the law library where I consulted the annotated statutes, reviewed a number of practitioner's guides, and even read a few of the Wisconsin Supreme Court cases dealing with some disputed LLCs. Naturally I didn't bill my client for any of this time, only the time it took to actually prepare the documents, which amounted to about a case of Kraft Dinner.

Among several other considerations, I thought about using the forms helpfully provided by the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions. In fact I specifically looked at whether or not I must use them, as opposed to preparing my own articles of organization, building on a blank sheet of paper. Not only did I bear in mind the 'all of and only' language noted above, I paid particular attention to Wis. Stat. § 183.0109, which is entitled, "Forms."

I noted that for some other aspects of documenting activities related to LLCs, and also for other types of LLCs that weren't the type of LLC my friend wanted to be, the preparer must use the forms mandated by the statute. So, I knew that the document bearing the articles of organization was not among those other things, therefore use of a government form was not required. I also knew this because the statute goes on to say, "The department [of Financial Institutions] may prescribe, and furnish on request, forms for other documents required or permitted to be filed under this chapter, but use of these forms is not mandatory."

Score two for the strict constructionists. So, bearing all of this in mind, I prepared the articles of organization myself. I did take one liberty with the statute, in that I placed a nice bold title at the top of the document, "Articles of Organization — Limited Liability Company," and a brief affirmation that the document was "Executed by the undersigned for the purposes of forming a limited liability company under Chapter 183 of the Wisconsin statutes."

Indeed, the latter statement is not a liberty taken with Chap. 183, but rather a requirement of Chap. 182, which refers to documents executed in the State of Wisconsin generally.

Finally, in accordance with yet another provision of Chap. 183, I included an optional name for the LLC, just in case the preferred name for the LLC was deemed conflicting with another preexisting, or pending, LLC (which, in my opinion, it didn't, since I had researched this question too). But I placed this optional name at the bottom of the page, beneath a line drawn across it, and preceded by the word "optional" in italics.

'A fine looking document,' I said to myself upon its completion, and in strict accordance with the requirements of Chap. 183, which I personally was certifying the documents were prepared in accordance with. Then I presented it, along with a set of copies and a stamped envelope addressed to the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions, to my friend. "Thanks," he said, "Looks great!" "Darn tootin'," said I.

About a week later, I ran into my friend again. "I don't suppose you've heard back about the LLC yet, have you?" I asked him. He grinned a little sheepishly, because he is a really nice guy and he really didn't want to tell me what had happened. "Actually," he said, "they sent everything back and told me to transfer all the information to their own form."

"They what?!" said I. And, it turns out, not only did the department mandate its own expressly non-mandated form, but because the six items comprising the articles of organization appear in different numerical order on the non-mandated form than they do in the mandatory statute, my friend had to adjust for that as well. "That's insane," I said to my friend. "No biggie," he said, "It only took me a few minutes and cost me another stamp." "Yabbut," said I, "You were inconvenienced and delayed and not only that but I put my name on that document, and if anybody wasn't in conformance with Chap. 183, it was the Department of Financial Institutions. And that was the whole point of my being involved in this exercise, to certify that your LLC was organized in accordance with Chap. 183!"

So he is going to bring me a copy of the letter he received from the department, because I really want to see that. I mentioned all of this to another lawyer friend of mine and he shrugged and said, "Fuggedaboutit." Well, I don't know about that, speaking as a sometime dedicated strict constructionist and a devotee of the constitutional separation of powers who objects to the implication by the executive branch that he made an error in following the clear instructions of the people of this Great State of Wisconsin as expressed through their elected representatives in the legislature.

And that even includes Glenn Grothman. And I bet you he is a strict constructionist. Oh yes indeed.

We'll see how much longer I remain a strict constructionist, at least with respect to the foregoing narrow question of statutory interpretation, albeit one with dire constitutional consequences.

Today's top headline

Extremist left wing hate blogger outs self

Please don't tell any of my pre-teen piano students, lest they get all a-skeered of my horrific, true self. On the other hand, maybe
The Fear would get them to practice more! Hmm ...

Jane Hampden, I must say, absolutely rules. Big, big ups, Jane.

Creationism's "powerful new weapon"

And soon to be dramatically revealed as comedian and judge of top fashion models* Ben Stein. It's hard to tell whether the quoted description is serious or not, let alone obtain a confirmable measurement of monogenic resistance betwixt cheek and tongue.

* In one segment, the dumbest model proved smarter than Ben Stein.

WUWMJD?

I was on my way to Linens 'n Things this morning to pick up some doilies and a tea cosy when I ran into my good friend, the lovely and talented Jane Hampden. Sure hope the mic wasn't on.

Where they know them best

JSOnline:

Gableman, who was criticized widely for an ad attacking Butler's work as a public defender, said he was "very proud of the fact we ran a positive [sic] campaign."

Truly, a campaign of which one can be justly proud.

"You don't get a more stark contrast or clear contrast than that between a prosecutor and criminal defense attorney," Gableman said. "Therefore, I don't view it as a negative ad. I view it as an ad that illustrates the real differences of our professional backgrounds."

Gableman was the district attorney in Ashland County, which he lost last night, and Butler practiced in Milwaukee County, where he won.

I had the great pleasure of meeting and speaking with Erin Celello, Jay Blakeley, and Sachin Chheda, the three principals who ran Justice Butler's campaign. Not once did they ever stoop to the disgraceful netherworld where Gableman and his enablers descended.

Shame on the local press for repeatedly suggesting that they did.

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