State Street and A Summer Dream

Somebody get me an accordion.

The Farmer's Market is in full swing here in downtown Madison, and I had a sudden urge to get out an instrument and do some busking once again.  Cheese and zucchini bread made a nice breakfast in the perfect weather as the crowds circled the Square to sounds of fiddlers, washboard, drums, and bluegrass.

It's been one languorous summer dream here in Madison for the past two days.  Gentle breezes, warmth without humidity, and a parade of wonderful surprise encounters with old friends, neighbors, classmates, and relatives amidst backyard barbecues, pitchers on the Terrace, and fireworks.  A classic chance meetup at the Plaza made for quite the Kodak moment in the back pool room - bloggers, politicos, old classmates, and veteran newspapermen, a surprise barback, and some strangers who, to my bewilderment, recognized me as "Ryan Servais' cousin."  There were former co-workers and dorm floormates from Memorial Union to the Comeback Inn, from under the old diamond pattern ceiling at Mickie's Dairy Bar to here at the computer station at Michaelangelo's Coffeeshop atop State Street.

The places and patterns of life in Madison remain largely familiar and the same.  Although a few things have changed - the venerable Mellow Yellow house in the Greenbush has been razed.  The high water has Brittingham Bay looking completely weed/algae free for the first time ever since I've known of it.  And new shops are trickling onto the State Street corner of the Capitol Square.

What a relaxing, rejuvenating weekend in a beautiful summery town.

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The State Bird of Wisconsin

The mosquito infestation here in Wisconsin this summer is the worst I've ever experienced.

And there's even cold hard data to buttress my gripe:

Monitoring efforts by Public Health Madison and Dane County and the University of Wisconsin Medical Entomology Department show a dramatic increase in mosquito populations.

Mosquito monitoring traps were catching less than 50 mosquitoes per trap per night before this spike. The monitoring done this past Monday and Tuesday(June 24th- 25th) yielded 3,750 mosquitoes per trap. After last fall's flooding, the traps were averaging about 200 mosquitoes per trap per night.

That's ridiculous.

Fortunately...

These monitoring efforts also revealed that most of these mosquitoes are classified as floodwater mosquitoes (Aedes vexans). While this type of mosquito does bite humans, the good news is that it is not generally considered a carrier of West Nile Virus (WNV).

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How High's the Water?

Quite.

In fact, I've never seen it this high and rapid at this time of year.

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Live from SheVegas

Or Sheboygan, if that's how you know the fair city of my birth, the city by the lake.

It's been a crazy day.  I rescued/fought with a giant snapping turtle on a highway, visited the elderly, rummage saled, ate lunch at a luxury resort for mom's birthday, and now I'm here in glitzy SheVegas with my brother and a friend/relative/accomplice.  

Lovely Michigan Avenue.  

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Return to the Land of Milk and Honey Weiss

I'm back in The Little City that Does Big Things.

It's all here: Hard roll buns.  Order.  Upper midwest vowels.

And the Kiel Public Library, stepping forward from the dark barbaric gloom, has acquired what appears to be the first publicly available wireless hot spot in the city.  Sweet.

I took a few interesting photos on my flight last night, which I hope to share.  Former Wisconsin Attorney General candidate Paul Bucher also happened to be on my flight into Milwaukee last night, although I didn't get to talk to him, as I first realized who he was toward the end of the flight, and he didn't show up at the baggage claim carousel.

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The Flooding Up North

Here's one of the most captivating shots: Pretty poignant, pretty powerful.

My thoughts go out to everyone back in Wisconsin.

It's looking and sounding awfully rough.

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Lake Delton Flooding Aftermath Photos

Firsthand photos here of the mudflat remnants of Wisconsin's Lake Delton courtesy of the intrepid B.Scott.

Quite a few folks out traipsing through the muck...

The Tommy Bartlett dock looking rather forlorn.

The blowout channel (I believe) through which the lake escaped into the Wisconsin River.

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Lagniappe

- An erudite anonymous fellow waltzes into the isthmusphere back in Madison.

- The electoral map speaks.

- Looking for work in NOLA this weekend? Go shuck some oysters. Looking for fun? Go to one of the three festivals in town (seafood, zydeco, and - hmmm - tomato).

- For the second time since I departed for New Orleans, major flooding hits Wisconsin - especially Lake Delton, recreating the proglacial formation of the Dells in miniature. It's difficult to believe the sizable lake where I once watched the Tommy Bartlett water show has vanished.

- I've found we hear quite a few Admiralty cases down at the courthouse - Maritime Law, what an intriguing area of law.

- Ooh - Ron Paul prepares to raise a ruckus in the Twin Cities during the GOP convention - with a convention of his own. Not quite Rage Against the Machine outside the Democratic Convention in 2000, but it's going to be fun to watch.

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It's a bad day for Janesville

I saw on CNN that GM plant in Janesville is closing. The company is closing four factories in North America that make SUV's and trucks. The one in Janesville produces Tahoes, Surburbans, and Yukons. It'll have a large local impact in a city of 60,000 when 2,390 jobs at the factory will be lost. The articles say that GM isn't expecting the demand of those large vehicles to revive.

According to the business cycle, during boom times, demand rises so producers produce more. Over time, demand becomes satisfied and unsold products start to build up in stores and warehouses, causing the producers to decrease production. Once the excess production has been consumed then production picks up and it's back to a boom cycle.

It doesn't seem like we've hit the inflection point of the current downturn yet. With cars and houses, prices are still decreasing, indicating there's excess supply, not to mention all the supply that has yet to go on the market--people are trying to get rid of their big cars and there are still many houses that will be foreclosed on. On this chart of mortgage schedules, we're only at month 18.

Things started to look slightly less gloomy recently when the news reported that the economy grew by less than 1% the last two quarters, avoiding the unpleasantness of a real recession literally by the skin of the economy's teeth. However, if true inflation were taken into account, which is nearly three times (fourth graph here) as much as the government reports, the economy has actually not grown positively.

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Critiquing the NYT's Feature on Electing State Judges

The New York Times makes an attempt to question judicial elections at the state level in a rather slanted feature article focusing on the recent race for Wisconsin Supreme Court between challenger Judge Gableman and incumbent Judge Butler.

Clearly, the reporter who crafted the piece is not a fan of American exceptionalism. And apparently not very familiar with comparative international law and government. Specifically, he doesn't seem to realize how different the U.S. truly is when it comes to contrasting our overall legal and governmental structures with the rest of the world. He finds the prevalent state-level election of judges in the U.S. lacking because he compares our processes to judicial selection processes operating in completely different legal environments around the globe - places like France, for example, the home of the Code Napoleon.

What about the breakdown between Common Law and Civil Law systems globally? He barely touches on the fact that there are different overall legal systems at all on the second page. Many of the countries with rigorous test or civil service arrangements that he admires are Civil Law nations (last column). There's room for significant differences in judicial qualities necessary in a code-based system versus a one based on state legislation and common law principles. Judges have much more mechanical roles in Civil Law jurisdictions, and precedent is less of a factor.

What about the rather unique American system of parallel state and federal courts? The state courts are different creatures than the federal courts - where judges are appointed by the President with U.S. Senate approval. Having a set of courts immune from some of the excesses of the state elected judiciary - and the chance for review of the elected judiciary's decisions by an appointed Supreme Court - tempers the concerns raised. And, what's more, can a change in selection process really totally remove political influence anyway?

What about the fact that we don't have unitary national or state governments to do the appointing, unlike many countries, even the other Common Law countries, such as the UK? (And Scotland, for several centuries, has a Civil Law tradition rooted in French code-based law - like Louisiana* - so it is not a common law jurisdiction as the article would have readers believe when arguing a certain non-election method of judge selection should be applied).

The singular dangers of an elected state judiciary raised by the article seem far less nettlesome when taken in full context of the long tradition of American states' electors choosing judges and the knowledge that our legal system is not directly analogous to any other system internationally.

* [Louisiana, even though based in the Civil Law tradition from its early Spanish and French influence, elects its state judges.]
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In the end, the article emits a "shame-on-us, America" aura and doesn't address the issue up for study in full or proper context. It goes halfway in comparing our state elected judiciaries with international counterparts, and it seems to have a very decided bias toward eliminating the election of judges.

It seems interesting that the national media care so much about Wisconsin judicial elections. The Wall Street Journal, with a Wisconsin connection on the Editorial Board, wrote opinions supporting the conservative candidate or critiquing the Wisconsin legal liability climate is now being answered by the New York Times with this critique of the conservative candidate and the entire judicial selection system.

ht/OOTM

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LaCrosse river deaths part of a nationwide serial killing scheme?

That's the hypothesis of detectives after an alleged "smiley face" killer, according to this CNN piece.

The FBI sounds quite skeptical, however.

I've heard numerous projections over the years about a serial murderer in LaCrosse (with nine tragic river deaths, including one man from my hometown of Kiel, it seems the possibility shouldn't be ruled out entirely). Still, I've never heard of a theory positing national level organization to the crimes.

Reading this list of the Wisconsin and Minnesota victims supposedly linked in this scheme, it seems rather far-fetched, in my mind, to suppose a serial killer on a larger scale. The time and geographic distance between locations seems prohibitive to any idea of a concerted effort. To expand this randomness and supposedly linkage to a multi-state interstate corridor seems far-fetched - some in the Wisconsin/Minnesota list are not close to I-94 (like the Herr incident in Sheboygan).

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William E. Borah, The Lion of Idaho

Over the weekend, AP did a story on the sudden revival of interest in the late Idaho Senator, William E. Borah, "The Lion of Idaho".

President Bush referenced a Borah quote before the Knesset about "if only I could have talked to Hitler...", employing it as an example of unwise appeasement mindset - "foolish delusion."

The furor has been about Obama - who wasn't specifically referenced. Borah, however, was directly quoted.

As some have noted, taking Borah as an example of a wimpy, naive, internationalist appeaser based on the quote taken in a vacuum is absolutely absurd.

Borah is the same man who led the "Irreconcilables" in the U.S. Senate and in speaking tours around the nation to defeat confirmation of the Treaty of Versailles. Having read Ralph Stone's book "The Irreconcilables" - which outlines the machinations that led to the rebuke of Wilson over the treaty - in my free time a few years back, I've always found Borah a fascinating, almost romantic figure.

He was incredibly eloquent (see his classic 1919 speech opposing Versailles), he was very close to an isolationist, and, above all, he was complex. In 1929, he ended up supporting the foolhardy Kellog-Briand Pact. I don't believe his comprehensive outlook aligns with any given American politician, ideology, or movement today.

In 1936, one of the worst years ever for the Republican Party, Borah ran for president. Which lone state's delegates did he manage to secure? Wisconsin.

Here's TIME Magazine's vintage account of his visit to Milwaukee in 1936 (note the somewhat punchy, odd journalistic writing style of the time). He spoke in the brand new Eagle's Ballroom, now home to the Rave. Allegedly, enough Badgers found him reminiscent of Fightin' Bob to get him through (or, as the article intimates, they were foolish or inattentive enough in their voting). Interestingly, in a more apt parallel to the 2008 election, he was 71 years old at the time.

To put a little air in the vacuum, if you will, here are a few additional Borah quotes:

No more fatuous chimera has ever infested the brain than that you can control opinions by law or direct belief by statute, and no more pernicious sentiment ever tormented the heart than the barbarous desire to do so. The field of inquiry should remain open, and the right of debate must be regarded as a sacred right. - 1917

"America has arisen to a position where she is respected and admired by the entire world. She did it by minding her own business ... the European and American systems do not agree." —1919 speech in Brooklyn opposing the League of Nations.

"The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments."

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Bizarro

A disturbing incident - on multiple levels - as reported by Tulane Public Safety:

Off-Campus Obscenity
Saturday, May 10, 2008 at 6:15 A.M.,
Intersection of Freret And Audubon Streets

The victim was followed by an unknown white male suspect while walking east bound on Freret Street. The suspect approached her at the intersection of Freret and Audubon Streets where he pulled down his pants and began to masturbate. The victim fled the area.

Suspect’s Description
White male, 25-30 years old, approximately 5’8”-5’10” in height, 190 pounds, with black hair that was long in the back and short in the front and had a goatee style beard. The suspect was wearing eyeglasses and a red t-shirt with Wisconsin written in white on the front.

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Worth an early return: SCOTUS Upholds Voter ID

I have one exam under my belt, I'm feeling a bit better, and I think the Court's conclusion to uphold a Voter ID requirement is great.

However, I'd probably align with the concurrence's rationale - getting state voter ID is not a burden on a citizen beyond those normally entailed in voting. Because a different triumvirate made up the plurality court opinion...

“The court specifically left open the possibility of lawsuits against ID laws that burden specific groups of citizens like older voters, poor voters and students,” Professor Weiser said, “and all the legislation we have seen to date do, in fact, burden those groups.”

But, she added, in putting virtually all the burden of proof on plaintiffs seeking to argue that laws illegally restrict their voting rights, the decision makes it much tougher for voting rights groups to prevail in court.

Wisconsin's Voter ID proposals - especially given their usual inclusion of a provision for a free state ID to those in need, which would seem to alleviate some of Stevens' balancing concerns - seem to have some legal backing, as some have pointed out.

Acute concern for the poor seems to be the central justification for both dissents in the case. For example, Breyer's:

[A]n Indiana nondriver, most likely to be poor, elderly, or disabled, will find it difficult and expensive to travel to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, particularly if he or she resides in one of the many Indiana counties lacking a public transportation system. For another, many of these individuals may be uncertain about how to obtain the underlying documentation, usually a passport or a birth certificate, upon which the statute insists. And some may find the costs associated with these documents unduly burdensome (up to $12 for a copy of a birth certificate; up to $100 for a passport). By way of comparison, this Court previously found unconstitutionally burdensome a poll tax of $1.50 (less than $10 today, inflation-adjusted).

I don't buy that. Twelve dollars and a trip to the DMV is not too much to ask. The benefit to all citizens of fair elections - and the duty of states to provide them - provide more than enough justification for requiring that an individual show an ID. It's not even a federal ID, but merely a state ID.

The requirement is distinguishable from a poll tax. First, a poll tax doesn't promote fundamental fairness of elections directly as a voter ID requirement does. It may have promoted adequate administration and funding for a voting system, but it did not inherently ensure that an individual vote anywhere in the election is being protected from cancellation by illicit means. Second, a poll tax may have represented the vestiges of direct discrimination against the poor and other associated classes, but the voter ID laws n play today protect the legitimate votes of both the poor and wealthy alike.

Souter's dissent references the apparent lack of actual fraud to counter. That's not great logic to undergird a refusal to improve the electoral system.

I find most any criticism of voter ID laws in legal terms I've encountered over the years is simply raw political sentiment swaddled in constitutional silk.

Four days was long enough. :)

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Earthquakes and Midwest geology

By now you've probably heard of the earthquake from yesterday.

Though California is the earthquakey part of the country, they aren't that rare in the Midwest. I remember back in 2004, one happened southwest of Chicago in the middle of the night and it was reported that people in my county, just north of the state line, felt it. And who could forget this winter's icequake?

I slept through both earthquakes and was not by the lake, however I can imagine what a Midwest quake would feel like when a heavy truck occasionally rolls down the street and shakes the house.

On campus, the Geology Building felt it:

Science doesn't know much about Midwest siesmic activity because events are rare and we have an entirely different situation than the west coast.

"Our bedrock here is old, really rigid and sends those waves a long way," said Bob Bauer, a geologist with the Illinois State Geological Survey who works in Champaign.

He compared the underground rock, which in much of the Midwest lies anywhere from a few thousand feet to just a few feet below the earth's surface, to a bell that very efficiently transmits seismic waves like sound.

Whereas in California, the energy is dissipated on all the faults and the earthquakes are more local events.

I was looking to see if there was anything interesting about the Richter Scale, which is logarithmic, and found that a 12.0 earthquake would release as much energy as the sun shines on the Earth in a day, but the biggest one recorded so far was a 9.5'er in Chile.

Talking about Midwest geology, have you heard about the Niagara Escarpment?

It's the pink area and there's a bit of a cliff at the red line running from NY through Fond du Lac; it's what Niagara Falls is falling across. It's not a fault line, rather it's a layer of rock that happens to erode less than the surrounding rock. It's shaped like a shallow bowl centered on Michigan and was formed from the sediment of an ancient sea hundreds of millions of years ago.

Having recently come across that, the ridge along Lake Michigan in Racine, Kenosha, and northern Illinois as well as the fact that all the hills and geography in southeast Wisconsin run primarily north-south and why the lake's watershed only extends less than five miles inland makes sense since in SE Wisconsin, the north-south direction is tangent to the edge of the bowl. The layer also acts like the lip of a levee keeping the lake from naturally draining out through Chicago to the Mississippi.

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Mike Wallace & Frank Lloyd Wright

I only have been past his place west of Madison (Brad visited about a year ago) and knew general things about him, but there's a neat Mike Wallace interview of him. It's about an hour long. He's actually really cool. He makes some very interesting points about government, society, and religion that are still relevant today.

I think the most interesting thing he said was that Jefferson and the Founders tried to set up the country to be an aristocracy determined by virtue and wisdom of people striving to be their best. However over time regular people got jealous of great people so now we've ended up with basically a big common mob.

And there's a whole site of Wallace interviews.

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This Website Ain't Big Enough For the Both of Us

The Capital Times of Madison slams its sister publication, The Wisconsin State Journal.

In a rather embarassing - and typically overzealous, Cap Timesy - move, the smaller dying paper's editorial board laced into the larger Capital Newspaper publication for failing to endorse a candidate in today's Wisconsin Supreme Court race (results pending).

Aaaawwwwkkkkwwaaaarrrrddddd...

The WSJ editorial board refused to endorse because it believes state judges should not be elected.

I haven't commented on the race because I 1) haven't been able to devote time and attention to it in full as I would have liked, and 2) was continually disturbed to hear reports of the base campaign tactics and dumbed down topics of debate.

Unlike some parties, I don't necessarily believe the statewide election procedure needs to be amended. I think candidates need to run who eschew the low road, especially given the nature of the position. An elected judicial position, in particular, should necessarily entail a display of personal decorum. If no candidate presents himself or herself in what a voter considers an acceptable manner, than neither candidate will earn that voter's support.

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Dixie Beer is Brewed in Wisconsin?

Yep, another frothy connection between Wisco and NOLA.

It seems the old Huber Brewery is currently helping to "rebeer New Orleans," as Dixie's label characterizes its mission. While I knew about this last fall, it keeps coming up in conversation, so it seems worthy of a post.

















Largely debilitated by Katrina and subsequent looting - looters made off with the copper brew kettles themselves - century-old Dixie Brewery here in New Orleans is still on a long and winding road to recovery. At present, all of Dixie's brewing is being done under contract with Minhas Craft Brewing at the Huber Brewery in Monroe.


















While it's ingrained in local culture - and seems to be the favorite local "ancient bar sign" brand - Dixie no longer constitutes a sizable portion of the local beer market. The head of Abita Brewing, speaking to our Tulane Business Law Society at his modern brewery on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, dismissed my question about Dixie as if I had mentioned an aged gnat that almost had his sympathy.















For anyone familiar with the Wisconsin beer market, Abita is a bit like New Glarus and Dixie is like Rhinelander or perhaps a Kingsbury that managed to survive.

Abita clearly holds sway in southern Louisiana - and there's not much else here beer-wise, besides the Crescent City Brew Pub, as far as locally produced beverages go.

Commentary on the quality of Dixie ranges all over the place. But for some, the fact that it was brewed in cypress kegs trumped all - and I have to admit it's a pretty cool local touch.

The ravaged Dixie brewery itself is in a tough part of town, and it looks like it might take quite some time before it's back up to snuff. The gigantic old brick building looms over Tulane Avenue, plants growing out of the nooks and crannies of the facade beneath the tarnished, silver-topped tower, the curlicues of the wrought iron gate imposing to passersby.

For now, the beer of the south, however, calls a little spot up north...


















...its home.

Order some here.

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Lance Armstrong Butts In

Tour de France legend Lance Armstrong is working hand in hand with Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle to support enactment of a statewide smoking ban.

While I don't smoke, I must say, by advocating government intrusion into the lives of citizens and businesses, he's making the Yellow Jersey signify sentiments one might expect from a blackshirt. Or brownshirt.

Not to mention, he's clearly betraying the very spirit of the Tour de France.

Exhibit A - "Smoking In the Peloton"

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The Economist Takes A Glimpse, Nay A Swipe At Wisconsin

And finds it lacking:

All in all, a pleasant but dull place it would seem.

Dull? There's a litany of reasons why that's inaccurate. I'll chalk the miconception up to the current hibernation-inducing Greenlandic conditions I've heard so much about.

But beyond the whiff of a slur, the article paints a rather nice little vignette of "the perfectly purple state.”

It makes me very content - and just a bit proud - to call the microcosm of America my home.

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