Apparently we haven't given it enough thought, says Eric Sundquist, a member of the Madison Planning Commission appointed by Mayor Dave Cieslewicz. Sundquist has proposed the plan in response to the opening of a new Starbucks, as well as the suggestions being thrown around about it including a drive thru coffee lane. Apparently the time spent idling in the lane is another example of excessive carbon emissions -- so why not ban it? People over at the Whizbang give the typical response about the Nanny State etc. and they even invoke the big bad wolf on the other side of the Atlantic -- EUROPE! I assume the conservatives are worried that the ban of drive thru coffee may be accompanied by a European-style rise in the quality of coffee as well, allowing Americans to forfeit the tablespoons of sweet and low that have for decades defined so many of our morning joes. If for no better reason, the proposal might be worthless because of the lack of environmental implications. Don't we use more gas starting up our engines again than idling for a couple minutes. Of course, if there is one chain I could confidently say would garner a half hour line, it's probably Starbucks.

That embittered battle cry of many a frustrated marital rendez-vous has become the guiding philosophy of the UW Foundation when encountering similar hesitation from its supposed partner, the state Legislature. Last week, the UW Foundation unveiled its shiny new fundraising initiative, titled "Great Place, Great People." The objective is to raise $40 million dollars to ameliorate the damage done by chronically low professor salaries and rising tuition. Or, if the donor is a person of truly discerning character, more disposed towards superficialities than any improvement of genuine substance, he or she can funnel money down the figurative toilet of campus renovation. However, for convenience's sake, one must assume a semblance of reasonability on the part of the University's potential benefactors. Perhaps the most striking feature of the initiative -- and its most appealing one -- is its resemblance to an earlier proposition brought forth by state Representatives Joe Parisi and Spencer Black, which, if passed, would have matched any increase in student tuition dollar for dollar, essentially freezing tuition rates at their current level. The bill was considered dead since the announcement of a cataclysmic $652 million dollar budget deficit and the spree of relative fiscal conservatism that followed. But in this resurrection of a form of that bill, there is unique brand of "if you can't do it, I will" sort of practicality that bodes ill for a Legislature already so close to being effectively divorced from well nigh 40,000 of its constituents -- in Madison alone. If the Legislature can not or will not provide the funds for cash strapped students and dissatisfied professors, the university will engage in an unfortunate but necessary act of monetary Darwinism, seeking ever larger private sources of funding while scaling back its reliance on an inconsistent state government. And so, like an inept lover spurned for his inability to perform when the heat was on, the Wisconsin Legislature has unwittingly taken another step in the short path to watching from the sidelines. Whether our politician friends will deliver in the future through a volatile mix of higher taxes and decreased spending is irrelevant. The UW foundation is starting the long process of spelling out the writing on the wall, and its conclusions for the legislature and its halfhearted love affair with the university are ugly: you have to pay to play.

I was closing up shop the other day at the Daily Scoop (unless you really like ice cream it's not worth the inevitable wait) when Herald Managing Editor Jason Smathers stopped by. He told me he was there "to make fun of my shirt" -- a green and white "Russ Feingold for President" T-shirt I had found at Goodwill in October. Although the slights against our ultra-liberal favorite son were in some way expected, what was quite unexpected was Smather's reference to the maker of the shirts, a man named Dennis Denure. I googled Denure later the next day and quickly discovered why I found the shirt at Goodwill and not in the "historical section" of the Democratic Party website. Anyway, if any of you are in for some enlightenment, or maybe just a good laugh, you should read about Feingold's number one supporter here. Some highlights -- -- Denure was actually born "John Michael Denure" until he changed his name to "Dennis Amadeus Denure." -- He spent time in a maximum security prison in Iowa for DUI and plans to sell his art, prison clothes, and "unopened mail" (?) to help Feingold become president. -- He has run for mayor of Madison on several occassions, and has a great photo of himself with Joe Sensenbrenner.

A new report on the justice department made the front page of the New York Times today, as the department has been accused of using "political and ideological factors" to award and/or discriminate in the hiring process. The inspector-general, who conducted the study, concluded: "Many qualified candidates" were rejected for the department's honors program because of what was perceived as a liberal bias, the report found. Those practices, the report concluded, "constituted misconduct and also violated the department's policies and civil service law that prohibit discrimination in hiring based on political or ideological affiliations."

The New York Times, perhaps the ultimate authority of liberal intellectualism, delivered a rather stinging criticism of Barack Obama's decision to forgo public financing in the upcoming presidential election. (Article here) In the editorial, the Times quotes Russ Feingold as saying Obama's move was "not a good decision."

Great survey question from the good people at Fox News. Apparently 64% of Americans believe that John McCain "loves America a great deal," while only 48% believe the same of Barack Obama.

Apparently so. Milwaukee, so recently the subject of a scathing report by the Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch on the racial disparities in its prison system, seems to be making a haphazard but encouraging move towards ameliorating its inner-city woes. Following other urban centers around the country, Milwaukee is in the process of creating a drug treatment court, one that functions by bringing offenders, prosecutors, treatment specialists and judges under the same roof. Together, they formulate an individualized approach to drug crimes that rewards compliance- while holding the ominous specter of hard time in prison over the heads of those who refuse to cooperate. As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, the court is in its infant phase - only two offenders are currently being treated - but there is a sense that the scope of the court may expand to target an entire demographic of drug users whose biggest impediment is not violent crime, but themselves. The next step? That depends on whether the city's police and courts can relinquish some of that tough-on-crime fa�ade that earned it one of the highest drug arrest disparities between blacks and whites in the nation. Granted, part of that disparity is justified by the evidence. But any opportunity to ameliorate said disparity, however small, is something to be seized upon. It will be up to the legal establishment of Milwaukee to expand the scope of the treatment court - a move that seems to shout "progressive," but whose fine print reads "practical" -in order to cut down on her abundant stock of unnecessary jail inmates. If the court can rehabilitate its first two "patients" and create some semblance of feasibility for the skeptics, the state will go a long way to putting the ugly conclusions of the Sentencing Project report to rest.

I distinctly remember the irritation of answering my dorm room phone freshman year to either talk to my roommate's great-uncle or a local charity.

Hence, it made sense to me when I read on the Lost Albatross that UW has finally put the nail in the coffin for landline telephones in university housing and decided to cut over $400,000 of annual spending used to maintain those antiquated remnants of 20th century technology.

Emily at Albatross worries however that the move could affect 911 calls. Any thoughts?

A customer at the Daily Scoop yesterday made me aware of the new Wiscards when he brandished a sleek and shiny photo ID that resembled only faintly my faded, grey version (with a distinct line through the photo).

Something Verbose has the details. The highlight for me is that it is going to cost $25 to replace the new ones if lost.

And if it is, should we mourn or celebrate?

Paul Soglin seems to believe the former. Soglin makes a point that I don't think Barack Obama should quote on the campaign trail, but is intriguing nonetheless.

Soglin, connecting the war to a weakened dollar, contends that a Belgian beer conglomerate's bid to buy Anheuser-Busch would never have been possible without George W. Bush's military adventurism.

Call me unpatriotic, but couldn't the people in St. Louis learn a thing or two about brewing beer from the Belgians (or from Wisconsinites)?

One commenter on the post makes the point succinctly: "Not to worry about the loss of Budweiser, it is just a cheap imitation of the real thing. If you want good Budweiser, you will find it in any grocery store in Prague."

That's right, the original Bud is Czech.

Bay View, a neighborhood in Milwaukee, is discussing adding a new "solar village," the first in Milwaukee.

Soldiers Grove, a town in southwestern Wisconsin, claims to be the first solar village in the state.

Essentially what some people in Bay View want to do is use 7 acres of undeveloped land to build appartment complexes that will be solar powered. The investment would be relatively high at first, which is probably why the alderman in favor of the measure is insisting that the rentals be "high end...costing at least $900 a month."

The Critical Badger documents some of the recent web debate about the right to carry a concealed weapon on college campuses.

The CB himself comments at the end, saying "Guns not allowed, guess we'll have to resort to shanks and mase instead."

Although it was probably said in jest, the comment likely rings true to many Madison students. Would you feel safer if your classmates had mase or guns?

Given the recent squabbling over its very right to exist, the fact that ASM has been unable to fill a handful of positions on the all-powerful Student Services Finance Committee may seem like an almost negligible pin drop amidst an earthquake of bureaucratic failure.
However, as always with the wild-eyed, blundering pinnacle of incompetence that is our student government, there is more to every failure than meets the eye. SSFC, of all the various committees on ASM - both the necessary and irrelevant - has been a veritable breeding ground for budding student leaders. Alex Gallagher, leader of an internal reform movement, was a former chair of SSFC, while Gerald Cox, a Herald columnist and former communications chair for the College Dems, served as a committee member.

As Fearless Sifting notes in an earlier post, there is a myriad of positions that have remained unfilled, forcing the College Autocrats in the Memorial Union to accept applications on a rolling basis.

But what is so disastrous about a failure to fill SSFC in particular is that the relative panache associated with the position - control over a budget worth millions - is no longer enough to keep SSFC fully staffed. To be sure, failure to fill positions on ASM's Constitutional Committee or its Press Office are troubling signals, but with six positions of various import unfilled on SSFC, ASM will either have to consider diminishing the size of its most important committee from its current size of 18 in order to compensate for the shortfall or continue into the fall semester horrifically understaffed.
This, more so even than Alex Gallagher's resignation, may be the shot not heard round UW that signals the end of ASM as an effective organization. As Gerald Cox pointed out earlier in the year, perhaps the calls for disbandment, many of which admittedly came from this author, were premature. Perhaps ASM will die as a result of apathy as opposed to activism.
Or perhaps ASM, in the words of another make-believe autocrat, may never truly die. Instead, this bloated example of all that is wrong with student government might just fade away into the annals of irrelevance.

Posted by Sam Clegg

Apparently State Rep Frank Lasee (R-Green Bay) thinks so.

Reasoning: People in Alaska pay lower taxes.

By the way, Frank Lasee is walking proof that most voters do NOT read blogs. A quick google search returns nothing but derision from the blogosphere. Paul Soglin described him as "making Steve Nass look like Albert Einstein walking among the cast of Scooby Doo."

Go to Fearless Sifting to find the most recent spat between Rep. Steve Nass and our newly selected chancellor, Biddy Martin.

The post is interesting in that it presents the ongoing fight between the right wing and academia. Nass and co. have already begun circulating innuendoes about Martin's ability to take a "practical" position as a university leader when she has spent her career doing such "impractical" things such as discussion of sexuality, women's rights, etc.

Most of us are somewhat sympathetic to the view that academics tend to be politically correct, self-indulging, and elitist. What is peculiar about the conservatives at the National Review who wrote the article, however, is that they seem to genuinely believe that the selection of an openly lesbian woman to a position of relative power is actually threatening to the rest of us.

Considering that Martin represents the first openly gay leader of a large university (ever), I can comfortably say that threat is still very small. Calm down right wingers, your children, and possibly even your grandchildren will still be able to go to college, join frats, drink beer, and study business without having to worry about conforming to the whims of the gargantuan army of homosexual academics.

As far as the doldrums of quiet summer go, last week has had all the elements of high drama that would have undoubtedly developed into a major political conflict, had the university been in session. An open letter was recently issued, calling for Eli Judge's resignation from his position of District 8 alderman due to his continued absences from the Communications Center Board, a committee that deals in part with 911 emergency calls. And after the botched response to a phone call by Brittany Zimmerman, who was later found murdered, the heat has been turned up to find scapegoats. The letter questioned Eli's failure to attend the meetings - a valid point - but took a turn to the brutal when its author, Lydia Barbash-Riley, mused if Eli's absences constituted irresponsibility that may have allowed Zimmerman's death to occur. But what makes this letter even more suspect is its connection with Ashok Kumar, a fervent political enemy of Judge's whose behind the scene campaign tactics some years ago led to allegations of race baiting and mudslinging that have not been seen since in student politics. In an interview last week, Kumar claimed that he did not sign the letter because he did not want to politicize the issue. The glaring problem with his statements is that Kumar admitted to editing the letter! When pressed he grew indignant and claimed that there was nothing wrong with constituents asking that their representatives be held accountable. Kumar went on to say he did not sign the letter because he found it "harsh," but edited it as a favor to some friends. If Kumar - whose name will live in alternate infamy and renown for some time in the city of Madison - did not want to politicize the issue, why in God's name would he edit it? Kumar seemed shocked that I had phoned him to ask about the letter, and wassomewhat offended by my implication that he was involved with it. "However, it is difficult to see why Barbash-Riley absolutely had to turn to Ashok Kumar - possibly the most divisive figure on campus - to edit the letter. It's just as hard to understand why he accepted. As for Judge, it seems as though the reservoir of respect he has accumulated on campus will hold him through this one. And as Eli did make multiple requests to be removed from the committee - all of which were ignored by the mayor's office - in addition to making a full apology on his blog, there is little reason to believe that this letter, whether a dirty political attack or a legitimate concern in the eyes of sincere constituents, will have any implications for Judge's future. Indeed, the only ugly residue from the letter that will reside in Madison's collective memory may well be a good dose of political common sense: Using somebody's death to make a political point is about as dirty as it is ineffective.