Posted on Thu, Jul 29th 2010 at 06:07 PM by Patrick Dorwin

Tonight, in Middleton, Tom Barrett is holding a fund raiser with Wisconsin environmentalists. I wonder if any of them will question Barrett about the more than 2.74 BILLION gallons of untreated sewage he has pumped into Lake Michigan and other Milwaukee area waterways in the month of July? I sorta doubt it, they wouldn’t let facts get in the way of their feel-good time.

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Posted on Wed, Jul 28th 2010 at 10:07 PM by Roland_Melnick

In this year’s governor’s race, Wisconsin Democrats are really digging down into the Deep Tunnel that is their talking points.  All their echo chambers are working overtime to get the BS out to the people.

You’ve got the suddenly outspoken Milwaukee County Supervisor Chris Larson, who is running for State office, who somehow thinks he’ll help his own chances by digging on Scott Walker despite their running in two different races.  Larson wants to blame Walker for the crumbling O’Donnell Park parking garage…a structure built way before Walker took the Milwaukee County Executive seat.  A structure the city, under Tom Barrett, was actually responsible for inspecting…not Walker.  Watching Larson squawk away on TV…the Jackson Browne tune kept coming to mind.

Larson, joined by fellow nitwits John “Paycuts & Furloughs Are For Suckers, Not For Me“  Weishan and Marina Dimitrijevic, led an event of political grandstanding in the form of a march from the local SEIU HQ to O’Donnell Park.  No doubt the thug outfit SEIU folks drummed up some character actors in t-shirts for the march.  One might ask, as I did, what does the SEIU have to do with any of this?  Well…in Larson’s bid for higher office, he’s apparently doing all he can to spin things not only against Scott Walker, but also to tow the union line of bringing back laid off union workers.  Larson provided evidence of this position by huffing and puffing up a total non-story into a “The county is falling apart and it’s all Scott Walker’s fault” talking point.

Larson isn’t alone in his desperation.  We’ve got the thoroughly debunked “Walker gave himself a pay raise” talking point offered by a leftist talking point generator AKA Cory Liebmann.  A talking point so dishonest, even fellow lefty bloggers had to admit I was right about it.

When it comes to dishonest smearing of Scott Walker, the grand-daddy of them all is the whole “Scott Walker raised taxes” meme.  I suppose that if you contorted your brain to the extent typical of Liebmann and his brethren at One Wisconsin Now and the Shepherd Express, you would believe the meme.  But they don’t really.  They know Walker is strongest on taxes.  They know his position on taxes will be the popular one this year…so they have to come up with something…anything…to smear him.

With Walker being the fiscal conservative that he is, he started out holding the line on taxes.  The county board being controlled by Democrat taxers, they would add millions over and above Walker’s proposed budgets.  Walker would veto them.  The board would override the veto…and Whallah!!…spending goes up.  The next budget cycle rolls around and Walker submits the same budget the board forced upon him in the previous cycle…i.e. a zero increase budget.  He figures, rightly so, that maybe this time the county board will allow him to hold the line.  Nope…as becomes the routine…the board adds spending, Walker vetoes it, the board overrides the veto.  Yet, utterly dishonest folks like Scot Ross (from the group with the fascist name) and his sock-puppet, Lisa Kaiser (from the Shepherd Express), run their Jedi Mind Trick on the citizenry by saying…hey, Walker’s submitted budgets are going up…he’s a taxer after all!  You see how dumb they expect people to be?

Seriously…Walker is the proverbial man on the beach with a broom trying to hold back the wave of taxation whipped up by the blowing winds that are the county board.  He can’t even get the board to accept a zero increase, yet his critics blame him for not submitting a budget with massive cuts in one breath, then want to label what he does submit as “unrealistically stringent.” Lisa Kaiser tips her hand in the midst of echoing the script given to her by One Wisconsin Now when she writes “The county board then has no choice but to add spending and tax increases to keep up with inflation and other increased costs of doing business.” That says it in a nutshell…they have no choice but to raise taxes…there is no alternative in their mind.

Ahh…but there is my friends…vote Scott Walker for Wisconsin governor.

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Posted on Wed, Jul 28th 2010 at 04:07 PM by Patrick Dorwin

I caught a segment of Mark Belling’s show and he made an outstanding point showing the hypocrisy of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Editorial Board. The JS is lecturing Harley-Davidson because they may have to cut staff at two Wisconsin manufacturing plants, to retain their profitability. But the Journal Sentinel its self has been downsizing for years. They have cut at all levels, but they lecture others to do as they say, not as they do.

Another thing we have to remember, the Journal Sentinel Editorial Board supports all the laws & regulations (like Combined Reporting) that force businesses like Harley to look for cheaper options than continuing manufacturing in Wisconsin.

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Posted on Tue, Jul 27th 2010 at 08:07 PM by Patrick Dorwin

MMSD has released it’s estimates for sewage dumping after last weeks storm. But included in those numbers is an interesting bit of information. We all know Milwaukee liberals always try to place blame on what they claim are leaky pipes allowing water into the system from the suburbs. We all know this is an attempt to get the suburbs to help pay for fixing the real problem, Milwaukee and Shorewood’s socialist disaster, the combined sewer system.

More than 2 billion gallons overflowed sewers
More than 2 billion gallons of untreated sewage and storm water spilled out of urban sewers into local waterways after last Thursday’s torrential rain storm but even those overflows could not adequately relieve the sewers and prevent basement backups, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District says in a report to state environmental officials.

You have to skip down a few paragraphs to find the money quote:

Combined sanitary and storm sewers in central Milwaukee and eastern Shorewood spilled a total of 1.985 billion gallons of a sewage and storm water mix to rivers and Lake Michigan, the report says. District-controlled separate sanitary sewers spilled an additional 171 million gallons.

By their own numbers, the separated sanitary sewer system – which is the vast majority of the entire system – only introduced 171 million gallons of water, but the much smaller combined system, which combines all storm water and household waste water, made up the vast majority, 1.985 Billion gallons.

But, as you can see, MMSD is going to continue putting a band-aid on this massive hemorrhage.

Shafer has proposed a 5-year, $31 million initiative to help communities find and fix leaks in privately owned lateral pipes between residences and street sewers.

They refuse to admit that the Deep Tunnel was a $4 Billion boondoggle, and that money should have been used to do the only thing that will stop our every summer sewage dumping, and separate the sewer system.

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Posted on Tue, Jul 27th 2010 at 03:07 PM by J. Rawson Schaller

Take your team to a Super Bowl victory in Madden 2011 and enjoy a visit to the White House, complete with handshakes and high-fives with President Cool.

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Posted on Tue, Jul 27th 2010 at 06:07 AM by Patrick Dorwin

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Posted on Mon, Jul 26th 2010 at 06:07 PM by Roland_Melnick

The City of Milwaukee closed down the Clybourn Street drawbridge today for repairs.  The project is supposed to take a year and cost $3.96 million.  Local talk radio host, Mark Belling, predicted this project will run into an “unexpected problem” along the way which will justify a cost overrun and delays.  Not exactly going out on a limb given that the Kilbourn Street and Humboldt Avenue bridges were “worse than expected” causing them to run long and over budget.  How long was Humboldt closed?  Like 4 years?  Making a note of it here…we’ll see what happens.

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Posted on Mon, Jul 26th 2010 at 01:07 PM by J. Rawson Schaller

Wow. America Ferrera, 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg and Barack Obama, all in one week? Pinch me, I must be dreaming. What a remarkably classy president we have.

Hasselbeck: “Mr. President, which is higher? Your approval rating, or your three-point shooting percentage?”

Before this man is dragged kicking and screaming from office, he will guest host “Saturday Night Live.” (With musical guest Miley Cyrus, for optimum gaudiness.)

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Posted on Sun, Jul 25th 2010 at 08:07 AM by Patrick Dorwin

Ryan Haggerty of the Journal Sentinel has an outstanding piece looking into the crime numbers that the Milwaukee Police Department has been putting out under Chief Ed Flynn. Calls for police have increased drastically, yet fewer officers are actually dispatched.

As crime rate drops, calls for police soar
Some residents question department responsiveness
When a man stole items from her yard and the yards of several neighbors on Milwaukee’s north side in May, Tracy Duer became a crime victim.

She also contributed to a tide of calls for service received by Milwaukee police that began rising sharply last year and is on pace to increase again this year to more than 900,000, even as the city’s crime statistics continue to plummet.

That would be well above the roughly 817,000 calls received last year, which itself was a 23% increase over the average for the previous four years, which all fell between 646,000 and 678,000 calls, according to information obtained from the department through an open records request.

Despite the jump in calls, officers were dispatched to fewer calls in 2009 than in any of the previous four years, according to the data. Dispatched calls also are down through the first three months of this year.

With the increase in calls for service, complaints about response time are on the rise – from residents such as Duer to more than 520 representatives of city businesses who signed a petition this spring.

You might remember that a few months ago, I had someone prowling around my home, a neighbor scared the thug away as his girlfriend called police. The operator told her to check around the house herself, because they wouldn’t dispatch an officer unless she could say that someone actually got into the house. No officer was dispatched, and there seems to have never even been a report generated. Officers I have talked to, including another neighbor, and an Alderman (not my own) were all surprised by the reaction from the MPD operator. We learned that calls not made to 911 do not necessarily have a report generated.

“If you catch somebody stealing stuff out of your yard and your neighbor’s yard and you see him going up and down the street stealing stuff from your other neighbors’ yards and you call the police and they don’t come, what are you supposed to do?” Duer asked.

I would like to point out that this is not questioning the fine officers that work to keep us safe, they do an awesome job. We are calling to question the statistics and how these crime numbers are being reported by MPD’s administration. Flynn trying to deflect the question of an increase in calls vs. dispatched officers as “attributed to previous problems with the computer system that monitors the calls” doesn’t stand well with me, and apparently with many others that have seen actual police response eliminated or cut back, with our own eyes.

Along with operators/dispatchers not sending squads on many calls that they once would have, under Flynn, officers are also tasked with doing more investigating that was once done by specialized detectives as I understand it.

Still, some officers have had to shoulder the demands of responding to calls for service while also taking on an increased responsibility for some felony investigations, partly because of a reorganization of the department’s detective bureau, said Michael Crivello, president of the Milwaukee Police Association.

He argues that responsibility is stretching some officers too thin.

“The chief has said that he wants his uniformed officers to be more visible and to be out there,” Crivello said. “But then on the other hand, he’s tasking these same overworked officers with felony investigations.”

This story has brought to light many great questions, it’s going to be interesting to keep following these numbers, and to see the reaction from those in the media (will anyone else cover this?) and from inside law enforcement.

As crime rate drops, calls for police soar

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Posted on Sun, Jul 25th 2010 at 07:07 AM by J. Rawson Schaller

So asks the Denver Post Editorial Board, while declaring this the “summer of malaise,” (wait, wasn’t this supposed to be ‘recovery summer?’) and attempting to explain to Mr. Obama why “the public tide has turned against him”:

“His health care plan, approved only after the type of backroom, sleazy deal-making he crusaded against during his campaign, does little to bring down exorbitant costs and could bankrupt states once higher Medicaid costs are passed down.

The $1 trillion stimulus provided only a blip of a recovery, while saddling the nation with an unsustainable debt load. And the federal government’s reach into business and the financial world, for better or worse, is now deeper than ever.

We endorsed Obama in 2008, believing his plans for the fragile economy and frozen financial markets were superior to John McCain’s erratic ideas. But we also hoped he would restore the nation’s reputation with the rest of the world. But instead of being vilified, as we were under Bush, the United States is now suddenly bordering on being irrelevant.”

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